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Signature Weapons

So, I don’t think anyone will argue with me when I say that a lot of Fantasy stuff draws pretty heavily from Tolkien’s work. Like, Elves, Dwarves, Orcs, Humans… regardless of your particular brand of Fantasy thing, odds are they’re gonna follow a lot of the same rules and tropes as established by J.R.R. But one thing that I rarely see emulated/copied/whatever is the idea of a Signature Weapon.

‘Cause, like, if you think about the LotR books or the Hobbit (admittedly the only 4 Tolkien books I’ve read, but I feel like most people fall into that category), the gang doesn’t really swap out their kit too much. Like, once Bilbo gets Sting, he kinda sticks with it, and then once it gets passed to Frodo, that’s just what Frodo uses from then on (until he gets kidnapped by a spider and it becomes Sam’s for a bit but that’s not really important). Aragorn maybe swaps swords while he’s in Ranger mode, but then once he gets his Legendary Family Weapon, that is his. I mean, hell, in the books he straight-up calls Sauron out by using one of the Palantir and, rather than showing himself, he shows the sword. That sword is the symbol of him and his office as future-king. That sword is him. There’s a running theme that the weapons used by these characters are, in a sense, extensions of themselves, a part of who they are, and not something to just be swapped out on the fly.

But nothing really follows that trope. More specifically (for the sake of my personal interests), no games follow that trope. Like, unless you are very high level (in whatever system/game you’re playing), odds are you’ll be constantly swapping out your weapons. Every time you beat a boss/encounter/whatever, you’ll check the weapons you got vs what you had and, if there’s something better, surprise, time to swap.

And, like, I get it. Of course that makes sense. Obviously you want the best stats and whatever, but also, like, it feels inherently wrong to me whenever I (or one of my players) is like “Well, I used this +2 Longsword to kill that dragon and that was cool but, hey, here’s a +3 Longsword so time to throw out the old blade!” Again, I understand it from a mechanical perspective, but it kills me from a narrative perspective.

Because, like, (and let’s talk Pathfinder here for a moment) yeah, you can upgrade that +2 Longsword to be better than the +3 one. Or just equal! But like, to do so requires the proper feats (either for yourself, a party member, or an NPC ally/shopkeeper), a fair amount of downtime (1 day per 1k gp of cost), and a fair amount of money. Getting that +2 Longsword to a +3 would cost 10k at a vendor (or 5k if you can do it yourself), which would also take 10 days, which is often a lot in Fantasy Time. Whereas, hey, when you killed that dragon, it had as part of its loot a +3 Longsword for free (which, by the way, only sells for 9k gp so even if you sell it that doesn’t cover the cost of upgrading your old sword).

Like, maybe it’s different for other systems, but I know in most RPG video games, I’m constantly swapping out my kit for better shit (Diablo and Diablo-like games are notorious for this, actually). But I almost always feel bad for doing so. ‘Cause I really like the idea of the Tolkien-style Signature Weapon. “Ah yes, this is my blade, DudeSlayer, that I have used to slay a thousand dudes!” (we can’t all be Tolkien-tier wordsmiths but you get my point, I hope). And, like, a lot of the time I try to do that in games, even when you’re clearly not supposed to. Like, in Elder Scrolls games, even if I don’t keep with the same weapon for a long time, I often have weapon racks and display cases in my home that I store my old swords and stuff in. Because, like, think about it. Even if it is just, like, a random sword that you found in a ditch somewhere, that is a sword that the Dragonborn used, and in a hundred years that sword will be Legendary.

I don’t really know if there’s a good solution to this. I mean, for most games/parties I don’t think this is even really a problem that needs solving. It’s just always been a thing that’s kind of rubbed me the wrong way. I’ve homebrewed a few rules in my own games (though I don’t think they’ve really come up yet), but nothing’s really clicked in a way that seems right. I know that Matt Mercer has done a lot with the Vestiges in Critical Role, which as a kind of leveling-up weapons/armors/misc can kind of fix this issue. 

Useful Writing Resources

This is an extensive list of resources for every problem you could come across while writing/planning/editing your novel. Use it well;)

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Planning/outlining Your Work

How To Outline ***

Zigzag Method : Creating Plots

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The Big Book Of Writing Sex ***

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7 Rules of Picking Names

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Writing Antagonists, Antiheroes and Villains

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Grammar and Punctuation ***

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Where Chapter #2 Should Start

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