bad at backpacking

Your talking about a morningstar, which is actually a weapon type separate from the mace. You can use fantasy author Ciarra Ballantine’s handy chart for distinguishing your bludgeoning weapons if you like, it may help you when it comes to telling the mace, flail, and morningstar apart.

As for why the spikes? All the better to bludgeon you with, my dear.

The primary use for these weapons in combat was against knights and other armored foes (though some priest orders in the Catholic church were famous for carrying them and wielding them against unarmored peasants, this is where the Cleric in DnD comes from). The basic idea is you crack the plate like a tin can, the point of a mace is to just drive force through the armor until it hits the person inside, or crushes them. The spikes add to the benefits you get off the mace. They’re for punching through the armor and into the body.

A sword can’t beat someone through their armor, it’ll damage the edge. You can pierce the armor by holding the blade of the sword in your hands and driving it in, which is the point of the estoc. Or you take the hilt and start beating on their armor with that.

A mace cuts out that middleman, allowing you to hammer someone to death and force your way through their armor. The morningstar adds spikes to that equation. So, if the mace is a hammer then the morningstar is you wanting to put a nail into someone so you’ve soldered the nail onto it to put the nails into them.

If it helps, think about it like going after someone with a baseball bat. Baseball bat is good, nails in the baseball bat is better.

The flail is the same way. You put a spiked ball on a chain and swing it about to hit people with it to bust up their armor, because you get more force from a steel ball spinning on a chain than you generate with your arm.

As for the benefits? It’s really a question of how badly do you want to fuck that other guy up, and how viciously do you want to go about it.

You can go into combat wielding a flail in one hand and a shield in the other against a knight with their sword and gain a significant advantage because it moves in directions that are difficult to counter. It generates enough force to damage both the plate and person inside.

I mean, there are other reasons why someone might choose to carry these weapons but those are some of the big ones. As a function of its design, the morningstar has a greater reach than the mace.

It’s a club, it doesn’t take that much finesse to wield in comparison to a sword and its highly effective at what it is designed to do. The bludgeoning weapons are fairly uncomplicated, though they make a big mess.

From a writing standpoint in your fiction, the maces and morningstars tend to carry some stigma in comparison to swords. They’re in the same family as the club. Basically, they’re treated as thuggish weapons. As opposed to the blade, which is a noble, elegant weapon based in skill and finesse. Its treated as less legitimate. Or, it belongs to the Crusaders and used by religious groups only.

Take these preconceptions into account when using the mace, but don’t hitch your cart to them. A character can be defined by their weapon choice, but don’t put too much stock in the conventional fictional definitions. A character who uses a mace is not necessarily a brute, just as a character who uses a sword is not necessarily a noble warrior or someone wielding a rapier having a rapier wit. Fiction and cultural motifs often have little to do with the reality of what the weapons were actually for, and end up getting it wrong more often than they’re right.

Axes also fall under another category. They’re the weapon of the savage, brutish, primal warrior, but they’re not. They’re just another weapon type.It’s a choice, a combat approach.

The sword is the weapon of kings, a symbol of civilization and nobility. The weapon of the hero. A hero who wields a sword is more noble than one who wields another “lesser” weapon type. It’s not. It’s just another approach to combat, a tool.

Understanding these stereotypes is important because they will follow you and influence you, whether you realize it or not. They’ll also influence your reader. By understanding that they’re there, you can account for them and combat them in your narrative. In ignorance, you’re at their mercy. Countless other storytellers have already laid this groundwork for you, but you do get to decide what you’ll do with it.

-Michi

Yes but, like Olympic gymnasts, you’re going to have to give up on the concept of them having a social life. They’ll also be well outside the range of what most “normal” teens can relate to. It’s a very specific lifestyle choice that will chew up the entirety of their life until they’re done.

Olympic level training is all day, every day. You eat, sleep, and breathe it.

A realistic version of the “ridiculously skilled teen” trope basically requires sacrificing everything that is not directly related to the skills they are acquiring. A lot of kids when in training for the Olympics are home schooled or taught by a tutor in the off hours. They don’t go to public school.

Most of the time, in fiction, when you’re looking at the ‘ridiculously skilled teen’ the author doesn’t pay their dues. They don’t take into account the sacrifices made by these children, their parents, and their instructors to reach this pinnacle of excellence. They look at the intensity of the hard work involved and often assume that it was forced. That the child was actively denied life experiences by the evil adults in their lives. That they’ll turn around and change their tune if they just have a chance to experience real life, friends, or normal experiences like the ones the author had.

Their ridiculously skilled teen got where they are because they were the winner of the genetic lottery and in possession of great talent.

They don’t take into account the defining factor of the champion: personal drive.

The problem with this approach is that talent is only one part of the equation. You can have a child who is so talented as to make the angels weep in joy but if their talent is not backed up by a personal desire to excel then they are destined for the halls of mediocrity.

Even if you put a child through the training you suggested in your ask, a ridiculously skilled teen is not a guarantee. They’ll be more skilled than the average, and certainly better than one who never went through the training at all but they won’t be in the champion ranks.

To get a ridiculously skilled teen in real life, you need a mix of talent and drive. The child to choose their training. They love it so much they don’t suffer burn out. It’s what they want to do. They are the ones who push themselves and strive for it. Their authority figures are the ones aiding the child in their drive.

They. Have. To. Want. It.

You can have a kid who has been training for fourteen years who is simply mediocre. The amount of time involved is not a guarantee for excellence. It’s a gamble. Not just on proficiency, but on desire.

If the prodigy wants out, then the prodigy falls behind. To be the best is not a guarantee, it is the goal we strive for. It is a spot for which there is intense competition. They earn those skills and earn that spot. They fight for their training’s pace. And it can be very hard for people who’ve never been in the rat race to be the toughest, the smartest, the strongest, or the best to contemplate or understand.

These are kids who when given the choice between going to a birthday party or bowling with their friends and training chose training. All the sacrifices they make are sacrifices they chose to make. No one is forcing them to do anything. You can’t reach that level of excellence without that desire and drive, that willingness to make sacrifices, that choice.

Often, the “ridiculously skilled teen” trope is paired with “but they forced me to do it” trope.

Bullshit.

You don’t get to be that good without intent and the desire to be that good.

Kids that want a normal life quit and, when they’ve quit in their minds, it’s over. An authority figure can force them to show up, can use whatever outside motivation they think will work, but if the kid doesn’t want it then they won’t do it. They’ll still be “good enough” and that’s most martial artists/soldiers. They may end up “slightly better than average” but they’re not going to be at the top of their game, much less the game itself.

This is the child who when given the option between more training and an hour of television, chose training.

This is the child who when given the option to socialize with friends, chose their training.

This is the child when given the chance to go on vacation, chose training.

This is the child who made the other children nervous because they were obsessive. Still doing their thing when their differences stopped being cool and the other kids ran off to play somewhere else.

They love it. They have goals. They want to be the best.

If you want to write children or teens who fit this mold, the best media for you to turn to are sports movies. This includes the really schlocky movies like Mighty Ducks or ones based on real life champions like Olympian Gabby Douglas. Basically, most of the cliche feel good pick me ups that are often scoffed at when we hit our teenage years. Situations change, but your ‘ridiculously skilled teen’ will have more in common with the characters of Center Stage than they will Buffy. And in a comparison of slayers, Kendra still fits this trope better.

So, with a character who is ridiculously skilled, you make sacrifices. They make sacrifices. And maybe they’ll hit the point where their body starts falling apart in their late twenties/early thirties where they start having regrets, but it won’t be in this moment.

The thing to remember when crafting these characters is that the level of skill they possess isn’t easy to reach. They aren’t actually any different from your average mortal except that they want to be this way.

This, whatever it is, is what they love to do. More than friends, more than relationships, more than love shared with other humans. This is who they are in their bones and in their soul.

To get a teen ridiculously skilled in martial combat, you need a character who is in love with the art of war.

-Michi

Tumblr friends, please keep in mind that most of us here are 15 to 20 years old.  Even if you’re 25 and married, you’re still a kid.  That’s how the news would describe you if you ended up there.  I’ve barely just turned 30 and my mom still thinks I’m a baby.  That’s the straight-up truth; let’s not deny that.

So if you’re asking for Life-Altering Advice or seeking the Answers to the Universe through an Ask Box, please consider that even the wisest-sounding person on Tumblr doesn’t know everything.  Most of us have hardly been through much of anything. 

I would actually propose that most “advice"  here is just flowery, modified, spur-of-the-moment, this-is-what-I-would-do fluff that the blogger hardly even follows, and would not work in the gritty reality of an upside-down life.  Most bloggers here don’t care about your well-being, but care about getting reblogs and followers and a fanclub. 

This isn’t to take away from some wonderful, awesome blogs out there.  But use caution.  Don’t be intimidated by some high-dollar vocabulary and think, “This blogger knows the way, so I better ask him or I’m getting it wrong.“ 

I don’t usually nitpick the way a question’s phrased, but inthis case, “The heroine didn’t know she was the Big Bad,” is an ambiguous wayto phrase it. This could mean either that your protagonist didn’t know who thevillain was, or that she didn’t realize that she was in fact the antagonist allalong. Of the options, the latter is more of a head trip, so I’ll hit that tooon the way out.

When it comes to structuring a story, where the villain is ambiguous,identifying them will be a persistent thread through the story up to thatpoint. It may be the entire focus. A very loose structure these kinds ofstories work with is that your protagonists spend their first act working toidentify their foe, the second act learning about them and formulating plans togo after them, and the final act putting their plans into motion, andscrambling to pull out a victory.

I say, “very loose,” because you can step back and reallymess with the structure. Such as having your characters know who they’re goingafter from the beginning but working to prove it, or learning a lot about whotheir foe is without actually putting a name or face to them (which is what you’redescribing).

If you want to look at this in an overly mechanical way;your characters are going to be spending the story trying to collectinformation. That’s the currency that drives their story. They need pieces ofit to put together who is responsible. Missing even a few pieces along the waycan critically undermine their ability to accurately anticipate who they’reworking against. This has a knock-on effect of further distorting theirexpectations and perceptions of what’s to come. One mistaken assumption ormissed clue can lead to erroneous assumptions that form the basis for theoriesthat are further removed from the truth.

Most good mysteries operate off a very careful formula: Theauthor drops the evidence about what really happened in front of theprotagonists and the readers, mixed into a larger collection of red herrings,and relevant information that the characters do seize upon initially.

Bad mysteries will usually withhold the information necessaryto contextualize the rest, and then pull it out in an effort to keep theaudience off balance. Often with the intent of making the protagonist seempreternaturally intelligent. Really, all the author did was lie to theaudience, and then stick their pet in the spotlight.

In case it’s unclear: Please, do not do this. Having youraudience get ahead of your biggest reveal is not the end of the world. Sure,some will be smug about it, but realizing the author was, in fact, playing fairwith their puzzles can make the material infinitely more interesting on areturn trip.

Also, it’s basically impossible to hide anything from youraudience. If you have a character who’s secretly the villain, a savvy readerwill realize it due to Ebert’s Law of Conservation of Characters (assuming you’rewriting with that in mind). The easiest way around this is to make sure thatyour secret villain is actually pulling double duty, and not just there to bethe antagonist, but we’ll come back to that in a second.

Roger Ebert’s Law on Conservation of Characters holds thatevery character in a film (or any media, really) needs to serve a purpose, soby eliminating each character who serves a necessary narrative function, youcan immediately identify the killer/traitor/secret santa/whoever you’re tryingto hide from the audience.

The thing about this is, it is really good advice. Good writing is, usually, concise, clear, andeasy to understand. You’re communicating with people, and presenting as little unnecessaryinformation as possible is a strength. (The red herrings in mysteries are anexception to this, but you should still strive to deliver them as quickly andconcisely as you can.) It’s worth remembering, some of the texture for yourmaterial is necessary for selling thescene. But, you need to be asking yourself, “do I really need this line?”

The same is true of characters. If a character doesn’t needto be in your story, they probably shouldn’t be there. This is more pronouncedwith films, where each character indicates that they were important enough toinclude in the story and pay anactor to stand there and deliver the lines. It’s one of the reasons why you’lloften see minor characters excised from adaptations, while their only criticaldialog is migrated to one of the more important characters. With this in mind,Ebert would run through the cast and simply look for someone who wasn’t doinganything useful. Thing is, this does work in writing as well.

This is what I meant about the antagonist pulling doubleduty. It’s not enough to show that they’re the villain, if you really want tohide it from the audience, they also need to be the mentor, love interest,perky sidekick, CGI “comic relief” atrocity, or the protagonist.

Once you know what their role in the story is, and the factthat they’re also secretly the villain, you have a lot of room to work with, and you can set up some fantastic subtexttension for your villain, that is only obvious on a second reading.

For example: if your protagonist is being mentored by thevillain, and the villain genuinely cares about the protagonist’s growth as anindividual. They have an immediate conflict of interest. They may honestly wantthe protagonist to grow, learn, and have a better ability to understand whatthey’re looking at, while still advancing their own agenda that the protagonistopposes.

When you’re working with something like this, it’s importantto remember that people can want two separate things, and due to the actions ofothers, those goals can come into conflict with each other. It doesn’t meanthat you immediately pick a side, but it will put some hard decisions in frontof you. Or, your characters in this case.

If you’re still wondering how to tie your characterstogether, it’s the connections like this that you’re probably looking for. At avery simple level, “how do you show a connection between two character?” Youput those characters in a room and have them interact. You let them show theirrelationship with each other. Whether that’s romantic, platonic, mentor/pupil,patron/client, or just shared history. But, you show that.

The other option is, of course, that your heroine is alsothe villainess. There’s a lot of ways you can run with this idea, that rangefrom cheesy to profound. The cheesy end includes things like a character whoswaps between two separate persona. Without something to justify it, thisspecific approach tends to undermine the whole, “I didn’t know I was the villainall along,” thing. There are ways to pull it off, where someone ends upinvestigating their own under the table operations, without realizing it,because they’ve insulated themselves from that level of their criminalenterprise. For instance, you could have a corrupt cop, who knows they’re acorrupt cop, but doesn’t realize that the drug dealers they’re investigatingactually work for their proxies. A situation like that wouldn’t, usually, lastlong, because one of their minions would ask them what they’re doing.

Another classic option is the doppelganger. This may simplybe a copy of the character from somewhere else, a supernatural simulacra, analternate version from the future, whatever. There are uses for stuff likethis, but it’s tricky to work with. I’d scratch it off the list entirely if thingslike mirror universes didn’t also allow you to play around with a radicallydifferent interpretation of your characters. In traditional folklore the doppelgangerwas a sign of one’s impending death (though not at the hands of the doppelgangeritself). Make of that what you will.

Finally, you can have a protagonist who is, in fact, thevillain, as a result of their actions. Heroes and villains exist on a very fineline. The actions of the hero are sanctioned based on the context of thoseactions. When you start to strip that context, or reveal it as a lie, itbecomes very possible to present someone as the hero only to realize, at theend, that they really were a villain all along.

There’s two ways to approach this. The first is that yourcharacter comes to their villainy over the course of the story. By abandoningtheir principles in pursuit of victory. The cliché is, “the road to hell ispaved with good intentions,” though I much prefer Buckminster Fuller’s, “Thosewho play with the devil’s toys will be brought by degrees to wield his sword.” Howeveryou want to abstract this, the arc is that your character grows from a herointo the new villain. It’s one hell of a third act revelation, when they canstep back and in a moment of introspection, realize they’d become what theyfought against.

The other approach is that your character was always thevillain. This may be that your noble freedom fighter was, in fact, a ruthlessterrorist, who distorted the facts to soothe their own conscience. They mayhave viewed their actions as justified, when they actually violentlyoverreacted at every turn. Their casual cruelty may have been the very thingthat fed the movement they were working against, justifying the group they perceivedas the villains.

To quote Michael Douglas’ Bill Foster in Falling Down (1993), “I’m the bad guy?” “How’dthat happen?”

-Starke

The best place to get a lot of blood when you need it fresh is from someone else.

Here’s the thing, blood magic is a form of human sacrifice. The idea is a life is more powerful than drawing on or channeling the ambient energy which surrounds us in the universe at large. That is the actual magical theory. It’s sacrificial magic. You’re sacrificing your (in this case, literal) life energy in order to empower or gain the power to cast your spells. The logical choice from a survival and concentration standpoint is to use someone else’s life, especially if the spell calls for a lot of blood.

You don’t want to be losing blood in vast quantities, but you can pretty much cut anywhere to get blood. Your body is full of veins. If just a dash will do, these mages can cut pretty much anywhere so long as they don’t nick a major artery.

The problem, however, with using your own blood for spell casting is that blood loss causes dizziness and a loss of concentration. This is pretty much the perfect storm of terrible ideas when it comes to attempting to fundamentally alter reality. Reality bending is definitely the best time to lose concentration and, possibly, pass out in a dizzy haze of confusion.

In most magical systems, the magic will just keep taking if the mage leaves the spell open ended. Without safeguards, even a potentially minor spell can be deadly and cause a bleed out. That’s the problem. It’s magic, you could just bleed indefinitely in a spell gone wrong until you die. The bigger and more complex the spell, the more likely this is. If the injury won’t clot because the spell is drawing on blood inside the mage’s body, they will eventually bleed to death. It doesn’t matter where. If the volume lost exceeds the volume generated then they will die.

So, consider the operational costs. Sacrifice someone else.

That’s what cultists are for.

-Michi

(And never cut across the palm of the hand. It’s not deadly in a blood loss sense, but it does suck and involves your character giving up their hand for a few weeks. The back of the hand is better, the top of the forearm, etc.)