Post by Stix on Mar 30, 2008 13:33:46 GMT -5
"For the Glory of the Mighty and Omnipotent Tectuktitlay, Father of Life and Master of the Two Moons! To-day, these slaves have been chosen to fight for their lives! Let the games begin!"
The nobles and citizens cheer the announcer's clarion call -- the stadium, full of all the city's social strata, teems with excitement at the prospect of bloodsport. Templars sit in the front rows, suspicious gazes flitting from one to the next, their every comfort attended by small cadres of servant-slaves. On a high balcony of the palace overlooking the arena and stadium sits a distant but imposing figure: the god-king Tectuktitlay himself.
But you are undaunted, for you have left bleeding foes to bake in the hot sands of the arena before. You have felt the weight of all eyes upon you as you have held a fellow competitor's life in your hands. For a gladiatorial slave owned by the city-state of Draj, it is nothing glorious, only survival.
Yours is a morning fight: a small mercy, to spare you the midday heat. You enter the ring unarmed -- barely even dressed. No opponent lies in wait. A small heap of discarded weapons lies between the two tallest plinths in the center of the arena. What the arena managers have in store for you is anybody's guess.
(The arena is 90 feet in diameter and roughly circular. Eight irregularly-placed stone plinths jut out of the ground, each ten to fifteen feet high and three to five feet across. There is an entrance to the city pens on either side, and at the rear is the entryway from the private stables, through which you came.)
The nobles and citizens cheer the announcer's clarion call -- the stadium, full of all the city's social strata, teems with excitement at the prospect of bloodsport. Templars sit in the front rows, suspicious gazes flitting from one to the next, their every comfort attended by small cadres of servant-slaves. On a high balcony of the palace overlooking the arena and stadium sits a distant but imposing figure: the god-king Tectuktitlay himself.
But you are undaunted, for you have left bleeding foes to bake in the hot sands of the arena before. You have felt the weight of all eyes upon you as you have held a fellow competitor's life in your hands. For a gladiatorial slave owned by the city-state of Draj, it is nothing glorious, only survival.
Yours is a morning fight: a small mercy, to spare you the midday heat. You enter the ring unarmed -- barely even dressed. No opponent lies in wait. A small heap of discarded weapons lies between the two tallest plinths in the center of the arena. What the arena managers have in store for you is anybody's guess.
- obsidian cahulaks (a rope with a head at either end like a bladed grappling hook)
- bone carrikal (an axe-like weapon, its head made from a sharpened jawbone)
- bone impaler (a pick-like weapon, made from a sharpened shank of bone jutting out from either side of a four-foot haft in a T shape)
- obsidian puchik (a punching dagger with a long, tapered blade)
- stone forearm axe (a buckler-like object strapped to the arm with an axe head on either side)
- bone alhulak (a rope weapon -- a wooden haft attached to a length of rope with a cahulak-head at one end)
- bone gouge (a polearm used by the Nibenese slave army; like a one-man battering ram with a broad blade at the head, worn with a shoulder harness)
- stone tortoise blade (a small shield strapped on at the hand and elbow, made of a reptilian shell with a long spike mounted in the center)
(The arena is 90 feet in diameter and roughly circular. Eight irregularly-placed stone plinths jut out of the ground, each ten to fifteen feet high and three to five feet across. There is an entrance to the city pens on either side, and at the rear is the entryway from the private stables, through which you came.)