Inspiration

Ugh, it took me a while to start writing again. So in the previous post I described my instant death rules for Shadowdark.
Long story short, I made all basic weapons deal d6 damage and instant kill on 6s.

When i began to write down weapons for the hack I realised that they will become very similar to each other, they would be simply thrown, ranged melee etc. I wanted the choice to be more meaningful. 2024 5e rules introduced weapon masteries, for better or worse, and SD being essentially a 5e hack I thought there might be something here. But the 5e properties tend to inflate the number of rolls for martial characters and further bog down the game and I really wanted to avoid such a thing.

Weapons of the bronze age

I don’t plan Gleaming Bronze to be historically accurate, just adjacent. To keep the feel of the bronze age I trimmed the Shadowdark weapon list to swords, daggers, bows (two types rolled into one), spears, staffs, clubs, axes, greataxes, javelins and maces. I added cestuses (to enable a pugilist/monk characters for one of my players), mauls, slings and tridents to further accentuate the theme.

Special properties

First, I made graze and topple properties. The first one simply does damage on failed to hit rolls and is on axe weapons. The topple works differently. It activates on 6, just like instant kill, but instead of a killing blow knocks a target prone. This adds an interesting choice for the player, a guaranteed knockdown vs a chance for a killing blow. I decided to give it to a more wide selection of weapons: mauls, staffs and tridents.

Bludgeon and Pierce weapons build on killing blows in a different way, they provide bonuses vs certain targets or situations. Weapons such as clubs, mauls and maces have a bonus to instant killing armored targets and pierce weapons to lightly armored targets and prone characters.

Lastly, I added a reach property to the spear. To add flexibility to the trusty dagger on a stick.

So here we have it, Gleaming Bronze weapons. Hopefully the next post will soon follow. Probably about backgrounds and classes.

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