The Weekly Warfare   Musings martial from across the SCA

The event season rolls on, 5 down, 9-12 to go, and I need to sleep and heal.  But, I’m told that 30 is the new 25, which means I can keep bouncing along assured of my invincibility until such time as I realize that 30 is not the new 25 and is, in fact, the new “Your genes stopped bothering to maintain your body five years ago since they expect you to have reproduced by now”.  But until then, balls to that, for I am invincible, INVINCIBLE YOU HEAR?!?!

Blacksword Tournament

wherein my invincibility is not 100%

As is the way of the Blacksword, which exists for bragging rights, it started with much smack talk.  Like me saying “Yeah, Raph, I was going to pit you against me in the first round, but I figured you’d like to actually see what the second round looks like.”  We had 18 fighters including 2 provosts and 4 free scholars, so the field was pretty good.

My first round went with a one-shot, and I was feeling pretty happy about that.

My second round was against Lucien de la Rochelle.  We played at range, I threw some lunges that came up just short as he scooted out.  Then I tried an off-line lunge on his inside.  He greeted me with a rising shot into the gut, and I was done for the day.

He then said, “This is what the third round looks like.”  Hoist on my own petard.

But if you have to lose, at least you hope to lose to the guy who wins.  And I did.  Lucien took out Iain in the next round, and then took the finals.  The guy he beat reminded me a lot of myself, four years ago, with many of the same tricks (case fighter relying on aggression and athleticism to deliver off-line attacks with large sweeping parries).  Lucien, though, had taught him a lot of those tricks, and so had it fairly quickly.

Ship Battles

The MiC, Takeda, had a grand idea for the next part of the day: they’d laid out two ships, and two gangplanks between them, on the field, and Takeda decided that the provosts and free scholars should defend one, and the scholars should attack.  That put the numbers at 6 vs. 10 (a couple of the FS/WS contingent had gone off to guard the vigil of Baroness Etain, Free Scholar, who was elevated to Laurel).

The scholars advanced up the two gangplanks two-wide, and the four scholars in the front rank faced six opponents, who mowed them down, and then the next four, and then the last two.  Kinda as expected.  I had a brief moment of self-entertainment in this fight by, as the scholars advanced, yelling “Single combat?”  As planned, they stopped advancing long enough to answer “No”, which gave Jehan-Franc and his RBG a clear shot on one in the front rank

The second round, the scholars were given two rezzes, and they pretty much charged straight in, knowing they could rez if it didn’t go well.  They punched their way in with very little loss and, I think, nobody actually rezzing and coming back to the fight.  The difference in strategy and outcome, based solely on a rule change that they didn’t even need, was very interesting, and I continue to think over it and how it might be exploited.

We repeated this, with roughly similar results, three more times, and then called the end of formal fighting.  Overall, my fighting in the melee wasn’t as effective as I’m used to.  I was slow to take advantage of openings, which got me killed a couple times.  When we move back to the park (first week in April) we shall resume major melee practice, and it shall be beautiful.

The Rest of the Day

After that, Raph ran some melee training, working on breaking killing cups and line fighting, and we ran lots of pickups, including a double bearpit that lasted a good half hour.  I fought decently in these, enough that I put down my longsword and switched to 30 and buckler after a while to force my brain to think through my fighting more.

Then I got in some C&T with Elphin and with Kirk, and managed to injure the latter, at which point I was done fighting.

After all this, though, I had to cancel Sunday’s drills.  My leg is still bothering me from the injury at Ymir, and it needs to heal before I can do much more on it.

And 106