On my obsession with things

Because I am a bit of a wanker I mentioned these weapons in my last post, knowing full well that both of the people who look at my blog probably have had better things to do than accrue such knowledge.

This is a wurfkreuz. Anyone who has every tried their hand at throwing an axe would know that a significant percentage of the time they just bump their handles into whatever unsuspecting tree or work colleague you throw them at. You've actually got to space yourself away from the target a specific distance to allow for one or more spins of the weapon so that the blade is just coming round when it meets the target. Not so with a wurfkreuz, these babies are designed to bite satisyingly every time they're thrown. I imagine them as being perfect assasination weapons, like the shuriken to which they are analogous, but still capable of standing up to melee in a pinch.

Unlike the wurfkreuz which is an antique, this hurlbat is a modern reproduction but it closely emulates its historical predecessors. I guess it is essentially the same weapon, just handier for splitting firewood. There are a wide variety of African weapons with similar qualities but a more fiendishly imaginative outlandish quality about them.

The Bohemian earspoon is infamous from its passing mention in one of the sacred texts of the Gygaxian Canon and is like the morning star, goedentag and holy water sprinkler, an unpleasant weapons with a jolly ironical name. Really it's just a winged spear, one of the more basic polearms and related to the ranseur/spetum family. But I cannot deny the pleasure of saying earspoon. Incidentally it's like the Lochaber axe and Lucerne hammer in having a real-world geographic reference as part of its name which I would drop but replace with something more fantasticated.

I loves me a good Doloire, also called a waggoner's axe. It's more a utilitarian thing than a dedicated battle-axe. I was an enthusastic axe wielder as a re-enactor and my axes were always tiny little things, which was historically accurate (look up this climate-change denying, bad cardigan wearing, but reasonably astute otherwise prat on youtube for independent confirmation). But the Doloire was a big scary chunkily useful chomper used when absolutely necessary. And it is a thing of such profound rugged beauty I cannot help but want one.

As is often the case with historical reality, similar business ends are applied to different lengths of wood for different purposes. The doloire seems to have found use as an axe with a very short handle and as a big long polearm-y thing.

Here's a Pole or Lithuanian at Grunwald murderizing Teutonic Knights.

Old matey in the green tabard's in some strife

Anyway, the point to all this, other that to ogle voyeuristically at objects designed to deprive people of life and bodily function, is to begin to demonstrate the vast range of objects in the category of things which can be in your D&D game, and especially to investigate the possibility that there might be things around more engaging to the senses and to the imagination than magic swords of generic conventionality. I would be very interested to see more varied equipment lists and more varied accoutrements in rpg illustrations.