25 September 2026

10 Magical Weapons

 Just dump 'em in your setting. Careful: A magical weapon is both a curse and a boon. And a pretty great one of each.


1. The Original Weapon

What it looks like:

A rock, flint, a bit larger than a fist. One side is rounded. The other side has been chipped into a basic sharp edge. There is blood on it that never seems to wash off or dry out.

How it was made:

It was the first weapon crafted with the intent to murder another human being. Kain slew Abel with it. Romulus his brother Remus. It is murder incarnate.

What it wants:

It wants to murder. Not kill, it is not a weapon for combat. It is a tool for murdering. Those who trust you. Those who won't fight back.

What it does:

Any attack on a trusting target will always hit and will always kill. If you were to wield it in battle, you could only use it to hit your friends in the back of the head, not the enemy. For such purposes, it is absolutely deadly though. The only way to make sure this weapon cannot kill you is to never really trust anyone.


2. The Great Khan's Blood Blade

What it looks like:

A sabre of the type that the nomad warriors of the steppe wield as side weapons when riding into battle. The grip is made from human bone, wrapped in human leather. The blade is dark steel.

How it was made:

The Great Khan wanted to make a weapon from the pain of all who opposed him. It took the blood of nearly a quarter million people to extract enough iron for the weapon. In the end, it killed him.

What it wants:

Vengeance and pain are what it revels in. The anguish off all those who died in the process of making it will never rest and the blade wants to spread their misery.

What it does:

Hit a living thing and it will utterly desintegrate. Any small cut will suffice to turn an enemy into red mist. The weapon is also as sharp as a blade made from steel can get and remains indestructible to a degree that also prevents it from ever blunting.


3. The Chaos Flayer

What it looks like:

A Macuahuitl but grotesquely alive: There is an eye on the side near the tip, the whole thing is made from bone and the grip has living skin. Along the edges, human-looking teeth are gnashing.

How it was made:

The famous chaos wizard Tristram prayed to the Beings Beyond for his son to be the deadliest warrior to have ever lived. When the child was born, it looked normal but upon puberty, the boy developed a hunchback. In the end, a teratome or devoured twin grew out of his back, separating, killing the boy. This was the Chaos Flayer, a living weapon.

What it wants:

It wants to kill more people than anyone ever did. That's a lot (see the Great Khan's Blood Blade) but the weapon is alive and immortal and has all the time in the world. Also, as it needs human blood for nourishment, it needs to kill at least one person per day.

What it does:

It quadruples the strength of its wearer and will easily rip through anything that isn't harder than human teeth. Also, the effect of its cutting is identical to that of a chainsaw, ripping, rending, being generally very messy.


4. Natnarin's Boomerang

What it looks like:

A boomerang, carved from a material that is light as wood but harder than most ceramics while being slightly flexible. There is text etched into its surface besinging the Great Huntress of the North.

How it was made:

A craftsman who was in love with the legendary huntress got a hold of the tooth of a wyrm she had slain. For twenty years he toiled, grinding the material into the perfect throwing weapon. When he presented it to her, both of them old and worn by years, she granted him a kiss on the cheek as a token of gratitude. He commited suicide immedeatly afterwards as he didn't want to lose the feeling of her lips on his skin.

What it wants:

It wants to hunt, preferably rare monsters that are difficult to kill and are a threat not only to the hunter but to people in general.

What it does:

When thrown by a skilled hunter, this weapon will always return to them, even after hitting. It is effectively indestructable and the sharpened edge can slice through anything softer than wyrm enamel, which includes steel. It doesn't miss unless there is a good reason for it to want to miss.


5. Saint Helena's Hammer

What it looks like:

A full steel warhammer that culminates in a hand that holds a stake, all made from steel. It contains the actual bones of the right forearm and hand of Saint Helena, the patron saint of those who hunt witches, undead, demons and unholy monsters.

How it was made:

After Saint Helena died, the weapon was forged by the church as both a relinquiary and a weapon. While the rest of her body was interred in a cathedral in the Holy Capital, this weapon was made to continue her mission to cleanse the world from supernatural evil.

What it wants:

To cleanse the world from supernatural evil. In fact, the wielder won't be able to do anything else with it and it would probably punish them for attempting to do so.

What it does:

It starts to shiver whenever supernatural evil is around. It gives off a faint, silvery glow in the darkness - enough to use as a low-end light source. It will destroy any evil it hits, whether that be corporeal or incorporeal. If the metal stake is slammed through something and into a surface, it can be used to hold to question even incorporeal demons. You can perform an exorcism with it, by staking the victim through the hand, driving the demon from the body whilst trapping it.


6. Shiftblade

What it looks like:

It comes in a variety of shapes and forms but all in all it is always fully made out of silver- or mercury-looking metal. It has a total Mass of three pounds, which doesn't change. Other than that in between a rapier, a spear, a thin but strong metal shield, a flail or whatever you can think of, the weapon can be whatever the wearer wants it to be.

How it was made:

The soul of an innocent child that was murdered by his own mother was captured and bound into a vial of mercury by an evil alchaemist. This is how a shiftblade is created – after the first wielder forces their will unto that poor, tortured soul.

What it wants:

Actually it wants its suffering to end. If the wielder ever slips in their dominance of the blade, the Shiftblade will betray them, hoping for a release when their tormentor dies. It is, after all, an innocent soul held hostage by a violent individual.

What it does:

When someone picks up the Shiftblade, they must assert mental dominance over it in order to use it. Once that is done, it can be used in battle - taking any shape that the wielder wants in a flow that takes less time than the blink of an eye. Of course, blocking a blow with a shield that then becomes a spear to stab with and then a blade to deflect a counter attack is extremely effective - if you know what you're doing. Thus this weapon multiplies the base fighting ability of its wielder, making a skilled warrior profit far more than a clumsy beginner.


7. Twin Succubus Daggers

What it looks like:

Two curved daggers, the handles, made out of a light and smooth stone, carved into naked women. Surprisingly ergonomic though. The two weapons are connected by their pommels with a length of indestructible chain about one meter long so they must always be wielded together.

How it was made:

Someone sacrificed their soul to bind two succubi into an ordinary pair of weapons, which could have started out as something as mundane as butter knives. Then a blacksmith forged them into these weapons while the succubi were still bound, which must have taken some more sacrifices of human souls to accomplish.

What it wants:

Sex and murder, preferrably a combination of both. This is a weapon to bind and rape and kill someone with. Yet all parties involved will feel pleasure from whatever combination of sexual debauchery, sex crime and violence/combat is had with the weapon. Do involve the chain for some breath-play.

What it does:

It makes the wielder into a sexual combatant with lightning-quick reflexes and an appetite for both slaughter and sex. Effectively tripling the speed at which you can act. In anything like sex or combat it makes you a terrible monster to encounter. You will only remember things as a haze of red but at that point your soul is probably already on its way to hell.


8. Meteoric Khriss

What it looks like:

A snaking blade made from a dark steel. The grip is wooden and has a finely decorated pommel. It comes with a wooden sheath that has a protective metal bar by its opening and doubles as a smallish war hammer if you need a secondary weapon. The blade is about a foot long. It is of the hardest conceivable steel.

How it was made:

A prince of the island kingdoms long a go witnessed the fall of a meteor. As it was in an age before the advent of steel, the gift from the gods was forged into this very weapon with the express purpose of being able to combat not only human enemies but also supernatural beings.

What it wants:

It wants to help bring balance to the universe. Whenever evil is in the advantage, it will want to slice that to bits. But once the tide of a battle is turning, so will its loyalties.

What it does:

Cuts anything - even souls. If two people are bound by a link of souls it can slice through that if you can guesstimate where their connection runs through the aether. Cuts made by the curved blade will also heal very slowly.


9. Leech Dagger

What it looks like:

A roundish, hollow tube with a sharp point like a very large but a bit stubby hypodermic needle. It appears to be made from silvery copper. From the base of the blade, there are six curved metal pipes about the thickness of straws that wind around and end in sharpened points where the wielder will have their hand and wrist. The grip is spiralled with orichalcum, mythril and amber.

How it was made:

The Master Alchaemist's second apprentice, the one who turned evil, forged this weapon in order to give it to his lover, Shireigh the Assassin. He had hoped that the infused essences would keep her as beautiful and deadly as in her prime. In the end, it would be the blade that killed him and, much later, her as well.

What it wants:

Drink blood and infuse its wearer with it.

What it does:

Equipping it will immedeatly hurt you. Stab someone with it and it sucks out far more of their blood than they would normally lose and infuses it into you, whilst magically cleansing it and making it compatible with your body. It steals life force but that also contains parts of your victim's soul. Do it often and you will lose yourself in a sea of inner voices.


10. Rock Bian of Heavenly Justice

What it looks like:

A ridged, straight rod with a grip, all carved from a bone-coloured stone. It is ridged to look a bit like a human spine. Between the lowest ridge and the grip there is a ring of symbols that can be rotated around the shaft, although it was made from the same rock. Spinning it emits a very high pitched whine as long as it keeps turning, which can be up to half a minute.

How it was made:

It was carved out of bedrock from mount meru by a demon tasked to do so by a long forgotten emperor. Said emperor wanted a weapon that could smash but not cut as he had been prophesied to die by beheading with his own blade. The legend has it that it is one of the very rare intances where fate was actually averted: The emperor died of a stroke in his bath.

What it wants:

Smash the forces of chaos and disorder in the world. It does not care if you are good or bad, only if you obey a very hierarchical world view and know your place in it.

What it does:

While the lowest ring segment is spinning, hitting hard things with this will break and shatter them: The bone in your arm will break much easier than normally, it rips open armour and splits rocks. Swords connecting with it will splinter into pieces.

11 September 2026

I made a sentinel

 Warhammer-stuff is notoriously expensive. As my son has grown into the hobby, I've tried to help him conserve his pocket money: Taught him to work with OnePageRules as they're free and more liberal in statting things and crossing army-boundaries. Started us out with skirmishes, six or eight fighters per side. And he taught his friends. Some of the boys spend more than my son does on miniatures. That's okay. But I've constanly been looking for ways to make more out of what we have.

My son has two squadrons of Tau soldiers, a Kroot warband (which was made for 40k skirmishes as a box, I believe) and some Kroot hounds. He needed more fire power against tough enemies. And he had spare parts: The limit GW imposes on how many fighters you can put together with a single box is basically in torsos. But you do get spare heads and arms and sometimes even legs and weaponry.

On Kleinanzeigen I saw a dude who sold a Kroot-captured sentinel he had kitbashed. I liked the Idea. A lot. So I got to work with plastic packaging from cottage cheese, the injection-mold-frame from some Tau soldiers, some Kroot bits, cardboard and Fimo Air:


The lascannon is magnetically attached so I can, at some later point, make alternative weapon loads. This walker was captured by the Kroot and is now used for fire support, much like a Krootox would be. They, of course, krootified it a bit:

Yes, I know I misspelled "KROOT" in the Tau glyphs but Tau infantry will get the point.
I felt that hanging some dried enemy hands as trophys or war fetishes was a good idea. The machine needed to look more savage. So savage indeed that...

Yes, I gave it truck-balls.

16 March 2026

MAC Attack army

 So, I've finished crafting my 200 points army for MAC Attack:


It's been a pleasure making this. I have the following units in my roster:


Auxiliary ground forces: Four squads of exotrooper infantry and six assault gun battletanks. The tanks are plastic (from food packaging) and beads and tooth picks. The infantry is the same except for the heads which are tiny balls I formed with FIMO air.


Auxiliary air forces: Three attack helicopters and two armored transport helicopters (for getting that infantry to their area of operations. The attack choppers have central bodies made of cardboard, the rest is all plastic from food packaging and some beads for cockpits and rocket pods.


Three class 1 MACs: The ST-7 combat body can be equipped with different weaponry. One is a sniper, one has two plasma pistols and one has jump jets and swords. They are made mostly from plastic packaging and beads and wire.


Three class 2 MACs: The War Stomper in the back is the commander's vehicle of choice. The artillery spider (on the right) offers long range fire support. The Landsword mech is a general purpose combat unit designed to solo through almost any scenario. The spider is mostly plastic packaging and wire and beads, the other two MACs mix in cardboard and there are also some toothpicks involved. Especially proud of the landsword.


My single Class 3 MAC: The Heavy Gatwalker. Can blow away hostile MACs with single shots but only carries limited ammunition. Mostly cardboard and, once again, food packaging and beads.

I plan on doing a league of MAC with some friends and my son. The first games will be 50 points only, so only a fraction of these. But I'm ready now.

Also, for those who wonder what these things look like before painting:



15 February 2026

Exploration in weird worlds

 This is a genre. If nobody else has made it into one, I hereby do. I just played some hours of Babbdi. I've had nightmares pretty much exactly like this: Brutalist architecture, hostile to humans within. Deep shadows. You got to find a way out but there may be none. The game populates the place with depressed potatohead-people you can talk to but won't get much out of.

This makes the city look prettier than it is from the inside.

It doesn't look like it but mechanically this is a parcours-game with a bit of metroidvania sprinkled into it. There are well hidden places you can only reach with specific items. Some of them make you feel like you're on the cusp of getting something about the mystery of this place but never quite get there. It's like a book by Jeff Vandermeer. It teases you. It will not reveal its secrets to you.

If you've ever dreamt of exploring brutalist architecture and post-soviet decay, this (free!) game is awesome. The dreary atmosphere has the greyness of the city, its sickly-looking people (even the sewer-rave looks desperate) and the inscrutable world that you can only leave with a train ticket that is no longer being sold. It's all a bit Kafka. I love it.

To prove that this is actually a bit of a niche genre, I will show at least one more game like this soon.

02 January 2026

2025 Recap

 What did I watch/read/play? No particular order, as usual. Not a definite list, but whatever comes tom mind because it stuck there over the year. Go time.

TV Shows & Movies

Arcane was good. I re-watched season 1 with my son and then we watched season 2 together. As I've mentioned on this blog, it's a political show but a good one - and the visual style is impeccable (and, appearently, very expensive to make).

Squid Games as a cultural phenomenon has entered the phase where it can't go anywhere without besmirching its legacy. We even watched the reality TV show that Netflix made (in the same sets as the fictional programme?) as a family. My wife remarked that a format like that only works in a place with little to no social security because it heightens the tensions and drama when everyone is all-in. All in all it got me somewhat jaded.

K-Pop Demon Hunters sucked. There, I said it. It's just another Netflix action piece that posits a moral question in the first half and then just forgets about it because fuck it, violence is fun. And only romantic interests deserve an attempt at rescue. Whoever churns out these scripts must have sociopathic tendencies.

Books

It was a good year of reading for me, especially with regards to the output that my book-club had. I can only recommend everyone form a book club with some friends, it's a great thing to do. What really stood out:

Rogue Male may be a staple read for men in the Anglosphere, it's virtually unknown here in Germany. Fucking awesome book though. The hero being a posh Mac Guyver type fighting Nazis and yet being an incredibly decent human being throughout. Loved every page of it.

Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow was a re-read I dreaded a little because I had previously read it in my early twenties and was afraid I'd dislike it now. That fear was unfounded - it's still one of my favourite books of all time. Main character is amazing and I have a thing for her type of woman I can't fully explain.

The Lord of the Rings is still awesome. Re-read it with my son. You still discover new details and things about it. Tolkien was a man whose heart was in the right place, if you pay attention to the real hero of the story (Samwise, of course).

Video Games

Boy did I have something big in the end of the year. Before that it was the usual mix of my comfort foods: Streets of Rogue, FTL, Into the Breach. Got back into Crossout for a bit, killing Russian bots and being killed by Russian players with premium paid-rigs.

Then I went and installed Blue Prince. It might be the best video game I've ever played. I now understand why our fathers played Myst and this might be a hyper-evolved version of that type of game. It's got the replayability of a roguelike with the emphasis on exactly the aspect of that genre I love: Exploration. It has old-world cozy-wealth environments of the kind I love and mechanical riddles that feel haptical and all sorts of clues that make you feel so clever when you figured them out (especially when there are multiple ways of solving something). And then there is the ever-deepening lore behind it. I'm now in hour 50 of playing it and the end isn't close. If there is one.

Board Games

Played mostly family games with my family. Classics. Goose Game. Ladders. Chess (won our family-internal tournament, to my own surprise).

Crafting

Did a lot of tabletop-crafting this year. Made a rat-ogre-cyborg for One Page Rules. Made mechs and monstrosities for MAC Attack. It's fun and I'm happy to be able to make entire fighting forces from scratch without spending more than a few Euros for FIMO and glue.

Podcasts and Music

I still listen to Role Playing Public Radio and Bad Books for Bad People. I also discovered Librivox as a source of free audiobooks. When it comes to music I heard a lot of Lost Souls and saw Nanowar of Steel live.

The Rest

No Idea what else to review here. The year kind of blasted past me. Here's to 2026, I guess.

30 December 2025

MAC Attack

 People who know me know that I like to do hobby stuff on the cheap and that I like to craft things. When my friend Niels gifted me MAC Attack for my birthday, it hit that very sweet spot only a low-mini-count tabletop game made for making your own miniatures can hit. And mechs (MACs) are easier to make than soldiers or even wheeled vehicles (in my opinion). So as my final post for 2025 I shall show to you the force I'm working on:


You're looking at 55 points of horrible alien monsters. As it stands, this is not a legal force to play. There are only two MACs finished (the big creatures) and the game requires at least three. Also, there is currently three formations of auxiliary units (regular army-stuff that isn't a huge MAC) and you can only have as many of these as you have MACs. I will make two or three more MACs in order to make it a 100 points force and then we shall see what it can do.

In the back row to the left you have the Hatchetbug. It's a class 1 MAC that is optimized for jumping at the enemy and attacking with scythes. The phases of the game turn mean that it will often have no chance of actually attacking an enemy as they may move away before the attack phase - but the trick is in the other MAC in the back, the Range Spitter. That one is an artillery unit, supported by younger versions of itself which are auxiliary units which are also artillery. The Hatchetbug will provide target coordinates and these guys will rain hell from afar.

The two beetles in the front right are Carrier Beetles, heavily armored auxiliary units that can transport infantry. That comes in the shape of four squads of Leeches, which have close combat weaponry and hooks. I believe that once these hook onto an enemy MAC, they will deal damage every turn and they could also fight enemy infantry if they get in range.

The other MACs will need to be more focused on the medium range. Maybe some kind of armored slug that sprays fire and armour piercing spines or something keeping with the theme.

Not painted: My first MACs, my growing human force:


Much more mecha-conventional. I will show more of those once they're all made up to look as good as my aliens.

With that I shall be back in January with some yearly reviews.

Have a good or even great new year.

09 October 2025

Antifascism in fantasy Media

 No, this isn't about the political situation in the USA because, let's face it, I have other problems. I just finished watching the excellent Arcane with my older son. And besides all the themes on family, love, loyalty and all that jazz I noticed that the second season towards the end pivots into three sides battling for the future of Piltover and mankind (including all those other races shown on screen, I assume) in general. You have the scrappy alliance of Piltover and Zhaun representing freedom (more or less). You have Viktor and his posthumanism. And then you have the fascist menace: Might makes right, strength is all that matters, also our goons wear masks to you don't see them as people but as a highly trained and unified fighting force. Which is probably what they see themselves as, the way they act.

It is a good story, with an immense amount of details and emotional depth. It doesn't hammer its points home. And that is probably what makes it effective. It never mentions fascism. It just shows thing being done. Has characters explain what they do. And you feel it's wrong.

I believe that is where antifascist media that don't come from _the left_ succeed. Of course, in a polarized society, there are those who will call anyone left of them radical and anyone right of them fascists. I'm not talking about online-shouty-people. I'm talking about the silent majority, the actual mid of society.

Coming from a farely left-leaning family I always felt that authors from the very left make for very bad storytellers, at least when and if they try to push an agenda. China Mieville may be the exception to the rule – although he doesn't really push an agenda so I don't know if he counts.

Good antifascism comes from the middle of society. Why? Because that's who you need in order to defeat fascism. You can have your crew of scrappy activists but if you speak that language of discourse, you're already losing the middle. What is good antifascist literature? One that respects what the middle has to loose. Three examples:

Krabat by Ottfried Preußler - a book taking place sometime in the 17th century, long before fascism was even invented. But it was written by that author as a way to deal with his own youth in Nazi-Germany. It's about the temptation of the easy way to power by evil means. And that love can and will conquer hate if given the chance. Excellent YA book.

Harry Potter - Rowling is by now a hated figure among a lot of people and I won't go into that debate here. The Harry Potter series is, however, starkly anti-fascist. The evil wizards always want to rule over those they deem inferior. You have bureaucrats who will gleefully support their cause once they gain power. It's these people who made fascism in Germany possible. Umbridge is the small public servant who uses a new system for evil and is probably more despicable than Voldemort ever was.

Lord of the Rings - while a lot of nerds kind of misread the text (yeah, the author has some racist ideas. Doesn't mean he was one of your kind), this epic has exactly three important messages to tell: Fascism is bad. Environmental destruction is bad. Friendship is the best damn thing we have to face horrible circumstances that fate and the times we live in may drop us in.

I would put Arcane in that list. Yeah you can go all-realistic, show the horrors of, say, Nazi-Germany. But that makes it very concrete and easy to mentally avoid. "That's Germany. In the 1930s. Not my place and time." If it's about teaching values that go beyond specific locales, I think fairytales and fantasy stories may be the better choice. And don't hammer the point home. Subtext is, after all, not just for cowards.