Any Sourcebooks On Mythical Weapons?

[Cleomedes]

A little Google work turned up this brief snippet, though I can't guarentee its authenticity:

The 'two men' who came from the mountains in the Dreamtime. They are lizard-men and the iguana is their totem (and are therefore also called Men Iguana). They made many cult-objects (tjurunga) and gave them to the Aboriginals. On their travels they created trees, plants, physiographic features, and ceremonial objects. Ceremonies now depict events in these travels. A particular myth tells of when the man in the moon (Kidili) attempted to rape the first woman, Wati-kutjara threw a magical boomerang which severed the rapist's genitals. The woman disappeared in the heavens and formed the constellation of the Pleiades. They are known to the tribes of central-western Australia in the Great Western Desert.

http://www.pantheon.org/articles/w/wati-kutjara.html

 

[Voadam]

Interesting. Does that mean you can order hard copies or does that mean that you download the files and print them out yourself?

Downloading the files and self printing is the normal option. Print on demand means they will print a copy and mail it to you. I'm not sure about bindings but the info should be on www.rpgnow.com

 

[Zander]

Thanks, Voadam and RangerWickett.

 

[Eternalknight]

Seeing something that references Australian Aborignal mythology woul dbe cool. It is a very under utilized resource; in fact I can't think of many RPG books off the top of my head that uses it (except for one Rifts book, I think).

 

[Voadam]

Seeing something that references Australian Aborignal mythology woul dbe cool. It is a very under utilized resource; in fact I can't think of many RPG books off the top of my head that uses it (except for one Rifts book, I think).

Bane ledger has australian monsters. It is a pdf monster book on www.rpgnow.com

 

[Alzrius]

In the aforementioned manuscript I covered the artefacts listed below, of which only Kusanagi is Japanese, and a few others (Blue Blade, Sharur, Sun Wukong's staff, the Sudarsana Chakra) are from Asia. I was considering writing an entry about Muramasa's blades, since the supernatural tales surrounding them make them suitably mythical. However, I couldn't find a decent source about the properties of his swords - mostly because of my unfamiliarity with Japanese historical literature, no doubt, which made tracking one down a little problematic.

I found that the real problem with writing about blades forged by Masamune and Muramasa were that, for the most part, there weren't stories about specific swords. Since these swordsmiths were so legendary, all of their swords were ascribed similar qualities...as such, there really weren't specific tales about individual swords. The most I could find was that Ieyasu Tokugawa was largely responsible for the "modern" mythology of those blades, as his shogunate was symbolized by a Masamune sword; likewise, he had been injured (and lost friends and family) to a Muramasa sword, and so was quick to speak against them (and, from what I read, outlaw them).

I was somewhat anal, and tried to only include monsters and artefacts for which I would cite some decent sources, and offer these to the reader at the end of each entry. For example, at the end of the entry on Achilles' armour I provide references to bits of Homer and Quintus of Smyrna, and at the end of the entry on Sun Wukong's staff I cite passages in Journey to the West. I wanted the work to have a pseudo-scholarly feel, since I was presenting the monsters and weapons as if they were real. However, for the purposes of an RPG sourcebook I guess that wouldn't be necessary.

Did you find a lot of good material in your research on Japanese swords?

Largely, the material I received was from works on the lives and influence of those two men; this was somewhat hard to do, as I couldn't seem to find any books (that I could get, anyway) about them personally...the closest I could find was text on them in books detailing history or weapons of Japan in a larger context. Wikipedia was a help in this regard, but I don't know how fulfilling you'd find that as a citable source. Again, this is largely (IMHO) due to the fact that neither of them had a specific blade that had any legends woven around it...the closest thing to a legend I could find was the story of a sword by each swordsmith being put in a stream and a leaf running to each of them in the current - the leaf was smoothly cut in two by the Masamune sword, but the other leaf flowed around the Muramasa sword.

 

[Tuzenbach]

Hey, interesting thread..........keep it up!

 

[Cleomedes]

Alzrius - Thanks for the info. That's the same sort of stuff I found when I searched a while back. I likewise wasn't able to get hold of anything deeper or more detailed.


I've just rewritten the background information on the artefacts I listed above. I didn't want to just copy and paste my existing material, since I still hope to get The Monster Hunter's Handbook published at some point, and wanted to avoid issues of clashing and the text counting as already having been published.

The document comes to 7,000 words at the moment, though that's without any of the actual rules information which I'll need to add. I'm not too familiar with how to design rules/items, but I'll see what I can come up with. I will probably also add some more entries.

Is there a good ballpark figure I should be aiming for in terms of final word count? I'm not sure how long or short a publisher would expect this kind of supplement to be.

 

[RangerWickett]

It really depends. For instance, most magic items shouldn't take more than 200 words to explain what they do, unless the item has tons of different abilities, but the history of an item could perhaps take two or three pages on its own. It depends on whether you just want to have a book with stats for mythic items, or if you want a book that captures the feel of these mythic items.

I personally would, if I were writing such a book, probably give each item two or three pages (1000 to 1500 words). One page would be the real item's myth, including some prominent re-imaginings that have cropped up in pop culture. One page would be other twists on the myth to make the item fit into different styles of games, and to just be cool. Then the last page would be stats for different power levels of the item, and possibly an adventure hook or two.

Honestly, I think it's too cool of a topic to short change. While it'd be possible to simply have 30 items with two-paragraph write-ups, it wouldn't feel right.

 

[ColonelHardisson]

i know Dragon had an article of real-world artifacts around the same time the Epic Handbook came out.

That was issue 297. It had stats for a number of real-world artifacts - the ones I remember off the top of my head were Excalibur and the Great Sphinx. Excellent article.

Green Ronin's "Mythic Vistas" books have stats for many mythical items. The Trojan War book has stats for Achilles' armor, by the way. Testament details many Biblical (Old Testament) items (Ark of the Covenant, notably). Eternal Rome even has stats for legion standards.