Sword
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Swords are probably the most commonly used weapon in Fantasy, especially by main characters. While certain fantasy races have certain specific weapons associated with them (Dwarves and Axes, Elves and Bows), all of them will make use of swords at least on the sidelines.
Going by the conventions your basic fantasy setting, the following races in general make use of specific types of swords.
- Humans will make use of whatever sword associated with their real world cultural counterpart. Medieval European analogs will make use of longswords and arming swords, with rapiers and suchlike for bandits and rogues (especially if they have a Spanish streak to them). If it is a Middle Eastern analog, expect scimitars and variations on that theme. Are you on the high seas with pirates? It's cutlasses all round. If it's an East Asian analog, you will definitely see some katanas as well as other Japanese blades, with dao and jian coming up as well.
- Dwarves will make use of a variety of heavy broadswords to accompany their more traditional axes. More reasonable Tolkienian dwarves would arm their main troops with an arming sword and shield combo, like Roman style as the gladius is built to stab so you don't need to swing it, since it is really the only reasonable way to fight in a caves and dungeons, while only nobles and highly trained elite warriors carrying axes (since without that training you'd have higher chances of hurting your allies rather than enemies as you swinging the axe in a tight formation).
- Elvish Swords for the most part come in two flavors: Leaf shaped swords and curved swords to the effect of katanas and scimitars. Either way they usually come with a lot of fancy pants ornamentation, usually calligraphy and natural patterns.
- Orcish swords vary a bit. Tolkien sometimes said that his orcs carried "scimitars," though what that means is up for debate. As a rule heavy single edged weapons of fairly crude construction and ornamentation are the most common type of orc made swords. Orcs (along with evil individuals in general) also have a tendency to use black swords. Black indicates a very high carbon content, it is in fact possible to blacken normal steel with motor oil which is just carbon. High carbon steels are strong but brittle, and can be more easily broken, though more resistant to corrosion. Elder Scrolls orcs have the racial hat of being craftsmen and so have their own style of weapons and armor.
- That said, any race will also use a lot of stolen weapons from other races as well.
Alongside the usual racial variants, many fantasy universes has some kinds of sword you wouldn't see in the real world.
Busters
Named after the "Buster Sword" from Final Fantasy VII: these "swords" are basically what happens when a human finds a giant's dropped dagger. In reality these weapons would be downright stupid to wield, as their heft and size would make them impossible to move properly, and, if you got to move it at all, your enemy would be done with your gut already. In fantasy, however, all bets are off and the lore can make up a proper explanation for why that particular universe need these fuckheug weapons; the previously mentioned Final Fantasy VII, for example, bullshits us that the sword is "not as heavy as it looks," and is an almost entirely ceremonial weapon that Cloud is fucking stupid enough to wield with regularity. (It does, in a brief flirtation with sanity, have some weight-saving cutouts... that are then stuffed with magic rocks.)
Examples could be the Iron Kingdoms, who have a type of sword called "Caspian Battleblades", very heavy, dull swords with a head that spikes out to either side broader than the blade, made crucial for warfare because of all the heavy armour walking about, and tend to have lots of cut-outs in the blade's center to reduce its weight. Berserk's Guts also wields an ordinary Buster Sword, though he's super-humanly strong, has a mechanical arm, and regularly battles giants and demons.
Gunblades/Pistol Swords
As mentioned before, were an idea that started in Ye Olden Times of the 16th century, where a flintcock or revolver pistol was given a blade or bayonet attachment to so that the user could get the benefits of two weapons in one system. It evolved from the idea of mounting daggers on pistols, which had a bit more practical sense in comparison (with daggers being as short as they are, it was highly feasible for you to fire a shot and use it as a stabbing weapon if your opponent is still alive with ease).
Ultimately the idea of a pistol sword was just a fad, it never caught on with everyone as the concept made the sword too bottom-heavy, making it unwieldy to have when you fought a person with an actual sword and hard to aim as a pistol, due to the fore-end of the weapon being too heavy to accurately aim. All in all, it failed in every regard where the rifle+bayonet combo succeeded since its inception.
Final Fantasy VIII, however, took it a step further and made a sword with a fucking pistol-grip for a handle, a revolver's chamber built into the hilt, and a long, rifle-like barrel welded to the flat side of its one-edged blade. Though, this is offset by the fact that the weapon isn't meant to be fired in the traditional sense at all; all bullets fired by a gunblade are blanks, intended to set the blade oscillating such that it cuts through monsters and other opponents better, like a chainsaw.
Oscillating blades
Also known as: "vibraknives," "high-frequency blades," et cetera, these are blades made so that they vibrate at such extreme speeds that they weaken the molecular bonds of the material being slashed, translating into the blade being able to cut things that a normal sword would snap against and making them nearly indestructible in the process. Completely relegated to sci-fi stories and vidya. One of the most famous examples thus far is Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance, featuring a psychopathic weeaboo cyborg with a high-frequency katana against the world. The HF blade is depicted as being capable of slicing through everything, except materials capable of withstanding HF weapons. Against these, they have to be weakened enough that the HF blade can chop it into mincemeat.
The science SEEMS sound, but they don't ever explain how the extreme vibration needed to electrically sever molecular bonds doesn't shake apart the human wielder's skeleton or the sword itself. We could simply chalk the wielder part down to cyborgs being cyborgs, since as far as we've seen in the game, only cyborgs who replaced their entire bodies with a mechanical one use HF weapons (and even then, this argument gets falls flat on its face the moment you realize Raiden was able to wield an HF blade as an unaugmented human in MGS2) and as for the sword part, we can pretty much assume that HF blades are made of the same material put into cyborgs, which prevent them from breaking down. They also state that the power of an HF blade is determined on how the original blade was forged before being modified, meaning that higher-quality blades yield better HF blades, as the HF technology only augments the properties sword. The game however, never really elaborates how this works in the first place.
Notably, Jetstream Sam, a Brazilian samurai in the game, wields his own master forged high frequency blade, which is so good that it could slice pretty much anything. His blade is apparently made from a well-forged katana that has been passed down in Sam's family; they don't ever really elaborate on how the blade's quality affects the transition into an HF blade, especially when Raiden's modern-forged blade is of lesser quality than a genuine Japanese katana made of low-quality steel folded in forging to work out the heavy impurities.
Mechanically-powered weapon
This basically means that the sword is powered by an external power source, like motors. The chainsword, for example, is common in sci-fi worlds that have close combat, as it's basically a chainsaw in sword form and the motor helps the sword do more then if it was just a sharp chunk of steel. Realistically speaking, power weapons would be bottom heavy, making them awkward to use, and if it goes the chainsaw route, then it would be hilariously impractical to use at all in combat situations; things softer than wood or ice tend to get caught in and gum up the teeth of a chainsaw, flesh being one such material. So, your custom chainsword would be rendered useless almost immediately, and in fact would be rendered less useful than an ordinary sword against whatever you were trying to RIP AND TEAR at the time.
One could argue that the chainswords in 40K are made differently from actual chainsaws in that they're designed for cutting people in mind; the teeth are mono-molecular and are shaped like knives rather than the thick, axe-like notched blades of real chainsaws (which are designed to chew away at thicker and harder materials, like wood); allowing them to nick through flesh more cleanly than your everyday chainsaw. The motor would have to be more powerful than a car's engine, yet light enough to be carried in one hand, allowing it to run the blade at speeds that it the teeth won't get caught, while still making it as maneuverable as a standard sword. But that's technology in the grim future, as trying to make a chainsword with today's technology and engineering would make for a very impractical weapon.
Magical materials
In folk lore you can make weapons, typically swords since they are the weapon most associated with nobles in most cultures, out of any of a number of different types of special materials that have properties that grant it magical properties. A few of the more common examples are:
- Thunderbolt Iron, which is a fancy term for weapons made from meteorites. In fantasy space iron swords tend to have magical properties or are treated as some kind of super steel: in D&D they are the source of adamantine. In real life, this was for many civilizations their first experience with iron and for some civilizations, a lump of iron-rich meteorite could be many times purer than what they could naturally forge and smith. That is if they could even make iron at all: the otherwise Bronze Age Egyptians manged to get a meteoric iron dagger into King Tutankhamun's tomb. The problem of course is the term "iron-rich" and many meteorites are either very small or made of rock or nickel that can't actually be forged; there is a good reason why Tutankhamun had a dagger and not a sword. Additionally, many meteorites have impurities that weaken the blade. Still, bad iron is better than no iron and we do get plenty of big meteors to make swords out of. The late Terry Pratchett famously forged his own sword out of a meteorite when he was knighted.
- Cold Iron, On the other hand, just being made out of iron by itself was enough to grant magical properties, as Rudyard Kipling said, "But Iron — Cold Iron — is master of them all." Iron, and by extension steel, have strong folklore traditions perhaps because that blood smells and taste metallic due to its iron content, or perhaps the "mystical" attraction of a lodestone to iron. In folklore, you could use iron scissors to ward off changelings, nail an iron horseshoe to your door to give luck, while an iron knife buried under the entrance to your home would keep witches away. In perhaps the ultimate example of the mythology of iron, in the Book of Judges, (Book seven of the freaken Bible!) God could not give the men of Judah victory because the other side had "iron chariots." In the modern "sci-fi approach," fantasy iron weapon's "magical" abilities are sometimes explained by its magnetic properties that can disrupt "magical" being's senses and abilities based on electromagnetism, and in some instances can cause them great pain or even instant death just from a physical contact or even being near. "All well and good," I hear you say "but what does this mean for swords?", well honestly not much. It does mean your best weapon against things not weak to some other magical material like silver, such as fairies or demons, is a steel sword, but you were going to use that anyway since steel is better than any material not from the future. The importance of iron as an anti magic weapon only becomes important in settings where iron as a weapon is rare. The "cold" part is often a point of contention and it can mean that the iron has to be cold forged, i.e. never heated, or that it's just not hot now, or sometimes it's just a poetic term for any iron. (Room-temperature metals feel cool to the touch because, when held, they conduct heat out of the skin more readily than air does.)
- Silver, unlike iron and meteoric Iron, doesn't work as weapon material in real life. Cost aside, silver is softer, heavier, and dulls much easier than a steel blade, but silver's tradition of magic goes further back than iron and in settings with werewolves a silver sword may be your best friend. Silver's magical tradition goes back further then iron (at this rate may as well make a page for magical metals) thanks to a unique property of silver, water in silver pitcher takes a lot longer for it to get scummy. This led to it having reputation for healing and since healing is good (duh), for being holy. This trait of silver is also why we get the reputation for why vampires can't cast a reflection: old timey mirrors used a silver backing to get a clear reflection, and since vampires are unholy, they wouldn't cast a reflection in the holy silver. In fantasy settings, silver weapons often do less base damage but deal more damage against, or are the only thing that can hurt, unholy monsters like ghosts.
Super Sword
Super Swords are a broad category of fictional weapons includes weapons made with advanced technology (Lightsabers, Necron Phase swords), Magic (Shardblades from Words of Radiance), divine origins or just are the product of super duper swordsmithing abilities (your memetic Katana). What they have in common is the fact that they can cut through basically anything with minimal resistance. They'll cut through armor and steel like nothing. Generally another super sword can resist them and maybe a few special items, but they'll go through a boulder like nothing.