Holy Improvised Weapons! - Mad Skills and Door Traps

I'm currently reading Mad Skills by Walter Greatshell.

Basic plot - young girl has an accident that causes severe brain damage. Parents sign her up for an experimental treatment that turns her into a super genius. Unfortunately, the group that offered the treatment is super shady(surprise!). They can use her implant to hack her brain and use her as an assassin. She figures out that something is wrong and escapes.

That is as far as I've gotten. It's an okay read but it is getting to a level of weird that I'm not enjoying. One thing that is really interesting is how the author shows her struggle to reconcile the memories and personalities of the three different people she has been; the Maddy before the accident, damaged Maddy and the Maddy after treatment who doesn't fully realize she's now a genius, just that something is different.

Another cool thing about the book is how the main character uses her super brain to create improvised weapons. Some of these could be really awesome to use in a modern game.

The first one she makes is a trap for a door.

"She yanked open the medicine cabinet... - then grabbed a toenail clipper. As heavy boots squish-squashed toward her across the wet carpet, Maddy used the clipper to strip the wires from a curling wand, then twined the bare wires around the brass doorknob and plugged it in. Someone grabbed the knob. There was a bright blue spark and a loud snap, then a scream and a bone-jarring crash."

Plastic Gun

I just finished reading Trickster's Girl by Hilari Bell and it had a very interesting weapon in it that I wanted to share.

Plastic Gun

 

 

 

The plastic gun is completely made of plastic, including the ammunition. It is undetectable by most scanning devices. Because the gun is made of plastic, every time the weapon is fired the barrel deforms. The benefit of this is it changes the ballistic marks, which makes the weapon untraceable but it also effects the reliability of the weapon. The first shot is completely accurate and the second is almost as good. The third through sixth shots are alright at close range but any further shots will be completely inaccurate. On the ninth shot, there is a 1 in 40 chance that the gun will explode and 1 in 6 odds on the 10th shot. There is no way of telling how many times a plastic gun has been fired.

 

The plastic bullets are capable of killing a person but cannot pierce metal. The stats would be the same as the non-plastic version of the weapon minus any hardness negating properties.

Khepesh

In Swords and Sabres, I raved about the Illustrated Encyclopedia of Swords and Sabres and I though I would share some of the weapons found in the book.

The Khepesh is a weapon designed to be thrown but can also be used like a traditional sword. It was a favored weapon of Pharaohs.

In D20 terms, I was thinking it should be a light martial melee weapon; 30ft range, d6 damage, x3 critical (because of the sickle sword design), 2lbs, slashing, 15gp.



Swords and Sabres

Who doesn't love sharp pointies?

As part of the complete customizability goal for my game I started looking up different kinds of weapons. I never found a source that really suited what I was looking for until one day when I was browsing through the bargain books at Borders.

The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Swords and Sabres by Harvey JS Withers is awesome.

It provides a description of the weapons, an explanation of how they were used, and variations of design. On top of all that, there is fun historical information and lots of cool pictures.

I was able to find interesting new weapons to add to the list I got from open source materials and I also have plans to include weapon modifications that have function as well as fluff.



I don't have Knives, Daggers and Bayonets yet but I took a peek at it while I was killing some time at Half Price Books and it looks like it will be just as useful.