[MUD-Dev] Git out the boar spear, Martha!

[Nathan Yospe]

On Fri, 20 Jun 1997, Chris Gray wrote:

:This is completely off topic, but I can't resist sharing it with you.

:The evening news tonight reports that we have a pair of wild boars in
:our river valley. That's a first for us. We have deer, coyotes and often
:a couple of spring moose that get lost, but these are a first. It seems
:that you are allowed to raise them on farms, and some got away.

:I can see it now - some bozo gets trampled, wearing only his loincloth,
:armed with a wooden "spear", out to do it "like in the storybooks"!

Boar hunting is real big in these parts. Our boars are a crossbreed of
feral pigs - small, black, with hair like spun steel wire, and four inch
tusks - and massive domestic pigs. The result is something that can kill a
pit bull 9 times out of ten. In spite of this, many people pride
themselves in hunting them with bows, or spears... or, on occasion, ten
inch blade hunting knives and a pair of dogs. Its kind of a cultural icon,
in spite of the fact that the ancesteral Hawai'ians were hunting MUCH
smaller critters, using spears, and hunting in larger numbers. Shows how
stupid modern man can be. In any case, to the point... oh, right. What
started as an overblown live action role play group ended up... well, the
point is, my chosen weapon to take after a boar was a seven foot
quarterstaff with steel caps, and a half dozen diamond-blade steel
throwing knives. I killed one of the beasties, too. No thanks to the
knives, in spite of the fact that I sank five of the six out of sight into
the thing's meat. Not all that much thanks to the quarterstaff, either.
That kept it off my back when I got it mad with the knives. I killed it
with a broken branch off a mountain apple tree.

I don't do live-action role play anymore.

I do want to make a similar scenatrio work in my mud. If someone breaks a
branch off a tree, they should be able to use it as a club, and if the
tree was of the right type of wood, as a spear. Just my thoughts on the
matter, and CG's boar thing reminded me of one of the reasons.

Oh, and it turned out that my pig was 115 lbs. I was 180 lbs at the time,
so I really had the poor sucker outmassed. And outbrained. But those tusks
looked sharp. And so did those hooves.

 - Nathan