Tag Archives: Ballista

All out ballista

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Gus and Ethelred spend evenings, before the sun sets, working on making a miniature ballista. The old cross bow from Telosh is where they start. Studying how it work, how wood bolts are best made. Once some form of mastery of the machine is in hand they take it apart. Study each piece, how it is formed, shaped and what it’s purpose is. Then they put it back together. This is repeated again.

Then they take it apart one more time. This time they work to replicate the parts, but twice the size. Fashioning the part from wood, rope and sinew.

After a week Ethelred feels like it will be possible, but still difficult to make a much larger ballista.

One arm, two arms, three arms, dead!

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After the failure of his small scale ballista Ethelred talks to the group.

“Building this ballista is going to be a bit more work than I had expected. The materials and the actual building should be trivial to work with. The part I am struggling with is how to make the weaponry work right.

To start with I will need a bow that I can take apart and rebuild for a simple test. Better yet finding someone else that knows how to make bows or maybe even weapons in general would help. If I am unable to build a small scale ballista with confidence we should have another plan.

The giant presents some problems. If we attempt to replicate and attack like we did on the dragon I think we could have success. But we don’t have the sturdy chain, nor something sturdy to attach it to. Tree a abound, but we also know the giant can uproot those with little challenge.

The key to the dragon attack was not to deal one killer blow, but to hold the creature in place while we wore it down. We should try and do the same with the giant.

What are other options besides the ballista that we could achieve in the woods?”