A Sundered World: Weapons & Materials

In addition to the various regions, steadings, locations, races, classes, monsters, fronts, etc, A Sundered World also has a chapter on new weapons, armor, dungeon gear, ships, vehicles (like enthollows), services, magic items, and maybe some other stuff I'm forgetting.

This article is going to focus on the weapons, or rather since Dungeon World is pretty general when it comes to weapon—and armor—stats, what you can make a weapon out of and/or customize it with.

By default weapons are assumed to be made out of metal and/or wood, or out of similarly durable substances that don't affect the weapon's mechanics: when you buy a sword, it's going to do what you'd expect a sword to do.

But, if you've got the coin and connections, you can go with something a little more...exotic. To give you a good idea of what I mean, here's a shot of the weapon table in it's current state (because I keep adding stuff):

Want a cold iron longsword? Okay, pay an extra 100 coins, up the weight by 1, and add the cold iron tag. If you want an earth spirit, then you spend 100 coins and get the forceful tag. Maybe you want an ironwood spear with a wind spirit? In that case it's going to run you 200 coins, and weigh nothing at all (wind also adds the precise tag for melee weapons, or increases the range for ranged weapons).

Of course these new tags are all explained (cold iron means more than just "it's made of cold iron"), so it's not all left to you to sort it out. You also can't mix and match all the tags (astral is astral, and you can't go with both ironwood and cold iron), and some tags might have unexpected effects, like binding a spirit to a weapon made of madiron or sinsteel.

This also has the benefit of addressing an issue I have with the game: what to do with all the cash you amass over time. We ran into this problem in a previous campaign where I played Mouse: near the end I had over 6k in coins, but really nothing to spend it on. We didn't need anything at all, but I suppose I could have bought a couple of houses?

Anywho, let me know what you think about this, and I'll leave you with some more drawings of some weapons I did to try and pin down a common look (the ones in the bottom left are types of channeling rods).