A Miscellany of Projects - Gaming, SCA Combat, Arts & Sciences, and Travel

Attack is the ability to hit a designated target with sufficient force to cause an impact.  In SCA fighting, that impact is literal, as without sufficient impact, a combatant will not acknowledge the blow.  In historical fighting, the impact varies between a touch - "a hit, a most palpable hit," according to Hamlet - and a severing of body parts, depending on circumstance and weapon type.  In all cases, though, the fundamental mechanics remain the same, and we shall mostly confine ourselves to SCA combat in this blog, supported wherever possible by historical sources but acknowledging that there are certain game-isms associated with this. The first of those game-isms is what counts as a hit.  First, armor in the SCA serves its historical purpose of injury prevention, not its historical purpose of "there's no point in hitting me there;" contact to any legal target area has the potential to count.  This is why both mail, which does little to prevent blunt force t...

 After we arrived in Carlsbad, we learned that accessing the Caverns would be trickier than originally anticipated.  We succeeded, but that is a separate post and the adventure of the Caverns deserves to be told separately and in full, so instead, I will relate what we did in the meantime. We went to Tatooine and had a lightsaber fight, of course.  What else would you do under the circumstances? Okay, we went to White Sands National Park , which is about three hours west of Carlsbad by way of Artesia and Cloudcroft.  US 82, which runs between Artesia and Alamogordo, proved to be one of the unexpected delights of this trip.  As soon as it rises out of the scrub country into the mountains, the view changes from scrublands to surprisingly rich, well-forested farming country.  By the time it reaches Cloudcroft, it has transitioned still further into arboreal mountains.  In Cloudcroft itself, we found there was still snow on the ground.  The views are ...

Footwork is the skill that allows movement from one position to another; in a narrow sense it is strictly the movement of the feet, but in a broader sense it is all maneuvering and positioning on the field. Like stance, footwork is a subject not thoroughly developed in the period manuals that serve as the historical basis for SCA heavy combat.  The best sources we have, therefore, are the practices of modern martial arts and a handful of references from period manuals.  Fiore, for instance, mentions three turning movements, a "pass," where one foot advances past the other, and an accressere , which is a movement where the feet maintain their relative position.  Passes can be conducted forward or back, and the three turns mentioned are "stable," "part," and "full," based on the number of feet that moved.  I.33 doesn't have any  direct references to how to maneuver, but the illustrations make clear that footwork is meant to be highly dynamic, a...

 After the Davis Mountains Death March, we drove to Carlsbad.  Our dinner in between was drive-through Dairy Queen, which is much the same throughout the world, and therefore deserves little comment, and we spent the next five days, prior to returning home, in the Carlsbad area at the Home2 Suites there.  West Texas and eastern New Mexico are both in the throes of the Permian Shale oil boom - there are "company towns" scattered throughout the region made of trailers and RVs with no reason to be there other than drill rigs - and the towns of the region are no exception, Carlsbad included.  On the south side of town are a number of new-construction chain hotels, including where we stayed.  The facilities were clean and sufficiently spacious for all six of us to stretch out, and their COVID protocols were solid, with masks being mandatory in public spaces, no hot breakfast, social distancing enforced, and rigorous wipe-down protocols.  As usual for a Hilton c...

  This year, for spring break, we decided to focus on areas that were unlikely to be swarmed with people - the more fools us.  It turns out that, in the Plague Times, after a year of being restrained, everything is swarmed.  Our trip began in Fort Davis, a postage stamp of a town located in west Texas, on the edge of the Davis Mountains.  Fort Davis has a wealth of small hotels and tourist amenities, but Sunday is perhaps not the best day to enjoy them.  We found, in the entire town, one open restaurant and one deli or shop - and the restaurant was so overwhelmed that they were warning customers that the wait was an hour or more for food and tables were not to be had at any price.  The deli was nice enough, and prices were reasonable, so we got our food there and ate in our room. Our room was at the Stone Village Tourist Camp , an old-style motel that might, under other circumstances, remind one of the Bates Motel.  Fortunately, the staff there was fri...

Stance is the foundation from which all movement, attack, and defense must proceed.  Therefore, while it is easy to overlook specific training in it, stance and body position should be built into every lesson. What points do we have available for stance from period sources? First, we need to recognize that most illustrated historical texts do not have dedicated "stances" in the sense of which foot goes forward as a matter of principle, they tend to illustrate what is best in that moment of the fight.  For instance, in the figure below from MS I.33, the priest (tonsured) is fighting shield foot forward, while the scholar (hooded) is fighting sword foot forward.  Elsewhere in I.33, the priest commonly fights sword foot forward. Similarly, foot position changes regularly throughout Fiore and Talhoffer; Fiore is especially significant because he demonstrates that foot position is secondary to him to weight distribution in the first two panels of 22r - note that the master i...

Having discussed the skills that every branch of fighting engages with, I am narrowing my discussion to the specifics of SCA heavy combat and its rule set.  For the purposes of this discussion, I am assuming that sword-and-shield combat will be the standard; however, great weapon and two-weapon work will likely get their own attention in the fullness of time.  Wherever possible, where terms that may not be obvious to a newcomer are used, I will use an example, not because I expect any newcomers are reading this, but because the goal of this project is to build a lesson plan. From the ground up, the basic skills of SCA heavy combat are: Stance Footwork Attack Defense Conditioning Mental Preparation Each of these deserves its own in-depth post about sub-skill identification and development, but identifying them is a sufficient starting point.  Ideally, any given lesson or drill should reinforce all of these in some form or another for all participants, with a specific focus...