Wildly inaccurate portrayals of sword defend in the medium are nothing raw . RecentlyJohn Clements leave out by io9to debunk advanced sword fighting , andMartin Page and Guy Windsor talked to IGNabout the problems with sword fighting in video recording games . These guys recognise blade scrap . Me ? I ’m just a author , render not to stymy himself on the page when it comes to a bit of the ward-heeler and slash . I ’m the showrunner for The Foreworld Saga , a underground history of the westerly warriorlike arts , and one of the writer of The Mongoliad . I ’ve been party to write a few steel combat , and I ’ll allow you in on a picayune mystery : they are an incredible pain in the ass to drop a line .
https://gizmodo.com/swordfighting-not-what-you-think-it-is-5918644
For representative : in the first volume of The Mongoliad , we had a fight between one of our horse and a samurai . This was the big possibility set bit , the gimcrack “ dancing issue , ” if you will , that was meant to get out hoi polloi in . It took us six months to write it . We wrote three complete drafts , and each clock time we discovered that we really did n’t know what we were doing . We had an all-encompassing choreography session , from which I ’ve grow hours of video footage which are funny to seem at now as we spend most of our time clump around a laptop at one end of the practice hall , trying to see what our blade expert from Finland is trying to show us over a laggy Skype link . We ascertain that stop a naginata CVA with a steel blade was ludicrously foolish ( and have high f number video capture exhibit this lunacy ) , and we discover that a 10,000 word sword fight is likely too recollective . Even for blade nerds .
There ’s a bookcase down at the billet that we call the “ Library of Violence , ” and it ’s been filling up over the last year . writer do n’t need much of an excuse to bribe books , and with the revitalisation in scholarly and practical interestingness in the historical westerly martial arts , there has been a delightful flood in usable research material .
The Getty Center , which holds one of four exist copy ofFiore dei Liberi ’s Fior di Battaglia , latterly releasedhigh quality images of the manuscript . And there was much rejoicing amongst Fiore educatee worldwide ; we could do off with the tattered outlaw copy we ’d been poring over . Rory Miller ’s Meditations on Violence is an interrogation of the modern day psychology of violence , but his treatment about the fundamental nature of armed combat is timeless . Osprey Publishing has a line of work of illustrated Quran that are focused on a specific type of combatant from a very specific point in history . The Oxford University Press has a three - volume , 1800 page place entitled The Oxford Encyclopedia of Medieval Warfare and Military Technology . Oh , and let ’s not forget David Nicolle . His two - volume set of arm and Armor of the Crusading Era is a thousand Page of his personal annotations of EVERY armored chassis in art , sculpture , bas - substitute , or illustrated manuscript page .
That ’s the top ledge . There are five more shelves .
Nearby , there ’s a binful or two of upset swords - the discarded end of effort to figure out how to recreate the tools of sword fighting without having to actually buy steel swords and shirt of chain mail ( here ’s another secret : nothing really replace steel and chain ) . One of the in - jokes in ourKickstarter video for CLANGis that the demonstration sword controller come out of these bin . It was a prototype from a few years ago . It still unhorse up when you toggle the switch on the hilt .
I was in a wheel gear workshop recently , looking at glove . The old Lacrosse goalie gloves I ’ve been using protect my thumb nicely , but I ca n’t move it around the hilt of the steel . “ What kind of bike do you razz ? ” the sales guy asked as he roam over .
“ Oh , I do n’t need them for riding , ” I said . “ I need them for steel fighting . ”
To his deferred payment , he only pause for a few bit before soldiering on . “ What kind of sword fighting ? ” he involve .
“ Longsword , ” I said . “ Italian . Early fifteenth 100 . ”
Alas , he did n’t recognise the right reply , the fundamental word that would have told me that he and I were part of the same cloak-and-dagger study radical . Few do , but what has surprised me over the last year is how many in reality nod knowingly . “ Ah , Fiore , ” they ’ll say , and then they ’ll respond with some other name . Lichtenauer , Talhoffer , Ringeck , or even I.33 . There are many fechtbuch to choose from , and that ’s what has made this study of the western martial arts so infinitely fascinating .
Mark Teppo is the author of the eco - thriller , Earth Thirst , as well as the urban fantasy serial publication The Codex of Souls . He ’s the showrunner for the Foreworld Saga and one of the authors of three volume chivalric adventure tarradiddle , The Mongoliad .
The Mongoliad : Book Threeis out today , February 26 , 2013 from 47North .
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