SUMMER OF HOLLOWS: WEEK TWO

Despite a power cut and Chris’ lingering illness and the demands of capital-B Business getting in the way of me being able to spend hours fidgeting away on top of a keyboard, we spent this week working on the fluff for the Weapons.

WHAT IS A WEAPON?

A lot of things!

It’s the class for the character that wields it; the rifle is slow and patient, the bludgeon is frantic and cruel, the knife never sits still, and so on.

It’s an excuse for Chris, and to a lesser extent me, to read pages and pages of information on one of our shared special interests: Weird Things That Hurt People. I can go on about different kinds of polearm at length; your becs-de-corbin, your halberds, your pikes, your Bohemian earspoons, etc. Chris’ main fascination is guns that work in stupid ways.

It’s a magic item; each of the Weapons is a channel to something greater than its bearers, some loosely-defined etheric realm of malice, which can be focused though their point (or powder, or words, or what have you). The higher up you go with abilities, the more uncanny and strange they become.

It’s a form of toxic masculinity. This is the fun part (or I guess one of the fun parts) for me - their appeal and magic comes wrapped in a form of harmful masculine behaviour. I’m not 100% attached to the phrase “toxic masculinity” because, like “social justice warrior,” it’s become a buzzword for the people on the right who want to discount our ideas out of hand. But it’s describing what I’m talking about.

TOXIC

I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with being of any (or no!) gender. I think that we encourage behaviours in men that are actively harmful to themselves and others, and I think that when these behaviours are displayed by people who aren’t men we chastise them for it. It’s backward and damaging and it only helps the pricks in charge.

But it works! And that’s the thing; toxic masculinity wouldn’t be a problem if it was useless. But it’s an easy way to get ahead for men, and so - speaking for everyone here, but certainly from lived experience - we find ourselves tempted towards it.

Which is a common theme with magic, right? So we wanted to tap into that. We took the ideas of these abusive patterns and exaggerated them, spun them up into their ultimate forms, and attached them to these iconic Weapons which form a sort of lightning rod for cruelty.

FORMAT

Each Weapon is divided up into three sections: Outlook, Lies, and Fears. Outlook lets us lay out a brief sketch of what the Weapon is (if we need to explain it) as well as its place in the cultural zeitgeist of the Isles - each of these things is important enough to be an iconic touchstone for something greater than itself, so they matter.

Lies focuses on what the Weapon tells its users to get them to engage in bloodshed. (By “tell,” we aren’t sure and we’re not going to say outright whether or not the Weapons talk out loud. That’s up to each table.) The Spear says: you are supposed to be here, so drive away those who aren’t. The Bludgeon says: you were born perfect and you should destroy anyone who tells you different. The Knife says: you are a victim and your every action is revenge.

Fears undercut the Lies, and - in a way - power them. For all the Bludgeon’s confident bluster, it is angry because it believes people think it’s stupid, and it’s scared because people might be right. It refuses to change, adapt or accept new ideas. It holds itself up as the ideal specimen. What happens when a worldview so blinkered is challenged? Violence, probably.

AXED

Fuck me but it’s tricky to write these things. I said last week that the Weapon abilities were the hardest part, and I was correct, but the level of needle-threading required to put this stuff together in a way that is a) sensitive, b) challenging, c) engaging and and d) that lines up with the established mechanics is a tall order. The Staff is an abusive gaslighter, for god’s sake, and it’s one of the tools you use to fight monsters. Trying to get that down on paper without being unreadably edgy about it is bloody difficult.

But it forces us to think critically about what we’re doing, and how all of our mechanics and fluff intermesh, and it throws some stuff into perspective.

To that extent, we’ve cut the Greataxe from the game.

I know, I know: don’t cry, no tears. Dry those eyes. No-one used the bloody thing, anyway. It was confusing and awkward and didn’t kick out enough damage to justify the difficulty of swinging it properly. It never quite worked out what it was doing on the battlefield (tank? DPS? debuffer?) and, most importantly, the name was wrong.

Swords are iconic. Daggers are iconic. My mum doesn’t know what a bloody greataxe is. (I mean: she could piece it together from context, I’m sure, she’s a smart lady. But it wouldn’t resonate with her.) Plus, it had to encompass every other Big Weapon, blunt or sharp, and crumbs if we couldn’t make it work. So it’s gone, and Big Weapons are now hanging out everywhere else in the list, and if you want a big axe take a Bludgeon and describe it as being sharp along one edge. If you want a big sword, take a Sword and declare that it’s big. Easy.

COMING SOON

Not sure what we’re doing next week; might try and do some Entities, or talk about the Isles a bit. But work continues, and we’ll get there, and I’m very excited to wrestle this out of our addled minds into a document.

Yours in Violence,

- G