Equipment: Weapons

Equipment is a fun building block of a RPG. Just a glance can tell you a lot about what’s important in a specific game. I’m a big fan of more abstract weapon lists. A lot of lists will have a lot of different options, but very little practical difference between them. If a long sword and a battle ax have the same stats and the game doesn’t do anything do differentiate between them (like special moves or damage types), then you don’t need to fill up your list with both. A “1-handed slashing weapon” or something similar takes care of those cases.

This is even more important depending on the genre. In Stars Without Number, where it is assumed you are mostly using laser rifles and such, the melee weapon list is generic and sparse. But in Worlds, it’s a lot more detailed because it’s assumed you are mixing it up in melee more often.

So for our frontier hack, what are our assumptions? Guns, mostly. Revolvers and rifles and cannons and the like should play a prominent part. But as I’ve said before, it’s a transition period from the past to the present, so both should be represented. As the original project was intended to cover the 18th and 19th centuries, melee weapons do play their part. So I decided to get a little more specific for melee weapons. Plus it’s fun to stat these things up.

Fortunately, between WWN, CWN, AWN, and the Atlas of Latter Earth, there’s quite an extensive list of XWN equipment out there. It would be relatively easy to just copy what I wanted. Never one to do it the easy way though, I more or less built my list from scratch, though the aforementioned games where very useful in using as reference.

One of the most important things to keep in mind is that every weapon needs a purpose. Sometimes that purpose is balance, sometimes it’s just because it’s something I want there. Like it’s not probable that anyone is going to be using a great sword, but I have a mental image of someone running around with a macuahuitl (big stick lined with obsidian), so in it goes. Other times the purpose is even less important; my equipment list has a “club” because having an extra line there makes the formatting better.

With that in mind, I started with a list of weapons I wanted, stuff that is iconic in the genre. The Bowie knife. Calvary saber and rapier, for Zorro-esque adventures. Native American weapons like the tomahawk and gunstock club. Then I started statting them out. You can think of doing so as a simple point buy system. Weapons start at d4 with no traits. Each bump in damage or positive trait costs a point, a negative trait refunds a point. It’s not a perfectly balanced system, but the intention is just to get the weapons in the same ballpark, powerwise, while keeping some uniqueness. XWN has the advantage of also having Shock damage, with gives us another lever to pull for balance and individuality.

This leads to some initial ideas not making the cut. In a game without damage types, there’s really not enough difference between a calvary saber and a rapier for them to have separate listing, especially considering how rare actually using them would be. The same goes for larger weapons. While a character might want to use a giant ax or sledgehammer, it’s not going to be common enough to fill up the table with every possible large weapon, so those get grouped under “Work Tools.”

But if I could give a weapon a unique trait to put on there, I did. The Sword Cane is a Subtle sword that does less damage. The War Club, Tomahawk, and Large Knife are all d6 weapons, but have unique traits or different Shock values. I think weapons are fun, so I tried to add as many as feasible.

Apologies for formatting issues with the table, still trying to figure WordPress out.