#plumbata

Recently I’ve been looking at late-Roman models produced by Wargames Atlantic. I don’t like the look of their spears, I don’t like how they decided to cut the arms (they’ll be more difficult than they IMO need to be to look good, as-is), and the shields are rounder than I’d like them to be. The main selling-point for me is that they’re sculpted with one of my favourite weapons of all time: the Roman lead-weighted war-dart that replaced the pilum-style javelins in the final centuries of the Roman Empire, the plumbata.

And that got me thinking, a lot. On my LotR sideblog I finally got what Tolkien might have been aiming for when he has 1st Age elf Eöl try to murder his son with a “poisoned dart” that he smuggles into a secret city, and that sparked the idea... what if IC elves used thrown weapons of some variety?

IRL I think the reason they faded out of common use has to do with more, better and more thickly padded armour becoming more common as the technology developed, but that wouldn’t necessarily be a concern for the elves. As strong as they are I think they would definitely still have a place in the elvish armoury - if Arya can impale multiple fully-armoured Imperials by throwing a normal spear (IE not designed to be thrown), what exactly would an elf do with a sling? A javelin? Or, as it happens, a war-dart? Particularly a weighted one? I don’t know if they’d use lead, considering how toxic it is, but copper and silver are also quite dense heavy metals, quite soft metals, and depending where you live, moderately common - especially for elves, who can trade for it or just suck it out of the ground/water with a handy spell. Same applies for gold honestly, though gold is considerably denser heavier than even lead. I don’t think an elf would have issues with ridiculous throws even with gold-weighted darts, though.

Just... Imagine charging an elvish ramshackle “army”, more a mob really since they don’t march or even fight in formation and everyone seems to rock up with whatever kit they’ve got like ancient Greek or Italian citystates did it, and then there’s just... an absolute hail of supersonic balls of lead, copper and so on whizzing through multiple men if they’re enchanted against deforming, or absolutely exploding the guy they hit if they’re not (since soft metals deform easily, they’d mushroom in the body...). They’d be quick to reload as well, since you just put another ball in the sling and spin it a few times before letting go - absolutely broken, in elvish hands.

As for the darts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EfgMfSZiQSU This guy has another video where he remade them with longer shafts, but even the short ones punch right through though bits of pork and have no problem lodging into wood.

As I’m agonising over whether or not to get a box of Wargames Atlantic late Roman infantry, the thought occurs to me that they used lead-weighted darts instead of the pilum javelin of earlier centuries. Eöl’s use of a “dart” to kill Aredhel is something a lot of people thing is weird, especially since he couldn’t very easily have smuggled even a shortish javelin into Gondolin*, but this solves it rather neatly.**

* I guess he could have created a collapsible, foldable, 2-part or telescopic javelin and used THAT to kill Aredhel, but that’s much more of a stretch, I think.

Custom LEGO Weapon of the Week - Plumbata

https://www.brickwarriors.com/blog/custom-lego-weapon-of-the-week-plumbata-209c3f/