Medieval Weapons

So, I've mentioned Sceletus a few times.

It's not doing too badly, but not surprosingly, interest has dropped off now that Erin and I are charging for supplements. So now it's a case of making sure those supplements are cool and interesting. It's been my previous experience that each supplement for a game gets a bit of interest, then adds a residual kick to the previous games in the line, and this might overflow to other games on my shopfront.

Which lead me to two of the current booklets I'm aiming for. 

1. A map of the setting. 
2. A guide of arms and armour.

The first booklet is pretty easy. I've got plenty of maps that I haven't used over the years, including a bunch of maps for a mysterious ruined city that could easily be substituted into the Necropolis. All that really needs is a couple of random exploration tables to show some of the interesting things that might be found there (Erin's offered to help populate these tables).

The second book will take a bit more work, but thankfully the DURF framework that Sceletus sits on handles weapons in a relatively abstract manner. A weapon is assigned a flat value indicating the damage it does with a hit. Some weapons have a special advantage, many don't. It often comes down to the wielder of the weapon as to what advantages they get in combat. If they have some kind of combat trait or advantage that utilises the weapon, they get the quirky thing while their using the weapon. So, the special benefits attach to the character, and not to the weapon. 

At the simplest level, I could draw twenty different types of weapon, and just give them a number to indicate the damage they do. The game is designed to be fast and accessible for new players. 

The most complicated option I'd consider would be something like D&D where every weapon has its damage, a couple of interesting traits that interact with character abilities, and a few one off elements that are often repeated across the various weapons.

I'm thinking of something halfway between these.

Maybe a few clustered types of weapons with a range of sizes and damage numbers in them.  

• Blades (everything from daggers to claymores, tanto to no-dachi, maybe even those Aztec obsidian blades... but I'm thinking this might work better if split into short blades and long blades.)
• Hafted (including axes, hammers and picks...basically weapons with a long handle and a short bit on the end that does damage)
• Polearms (including spears, tridents, poleaxes, glaives, maybe scythes... anything with decent reach that can do damage at a distance that prevents others closing in one you) 
• Blunt (including staves, clubs, shillelagh, batons, and maces... which basically add leverage to thumping attacks) 
• Segmented Weapons (including morning-stars, nunchaku, and weighted chains... not easy to master, but unpredictable and hard to avoid if you have mastered them)  
• Thrown Weapons (including shuriken, throwing knives, chakram, maybe even boomerangs and slings... attacking from afar, and you don't need anything but the weapon to make an attack.)
• Archery Ranged Weapons (including shortbows, hunting bows, longbows, crossbows, and slingshots... which you can hold ready to shoot as you aim the projectile)
• Black Powder Weapons (including pistols, muskets, arquebus, and blunderbuss... which file a protile with explosive powder of some sort)
• Exotic Weapons (including whips, fighting claws, nets, punch daggers, brass knuckles and anything else that doesn't neatly fit into another category)

A page for each weapon type with a bunch of pictures, numbers for each of them, and an advantage that applies to all the weapons in the group ("parrying" for shorter swords, "reach" for polearms, etc.) We're basically looking at 9 pages here, so with the obligatory title page, table of contents and intro page, that leaves 4 more pages to maybe look at some weapon oriented abilities, or maybe look at some armour options to make a self-contained guide to battle equipment in the game. 

Whatever we do here will probably end up being a template for a similar book used for Familiar and Walkabout.