Forum

Do you think all types of axes should be allowed for collecting wood? Or just the timber axe?

If you gather a few logs or branches to last a night, I’d allow for PC to use wathever axe they want, or even shortsword, daggers or any other they could argue/describe how they would use.
For a forrester to gather wood to a village/stronghold, I’d say a proper wood kutting axe is required.

My players want to do some woodcutting so they can build some functions, would you rule just a timber axe then?

Depends on the purpose. For stronghold functions, they’ll want a saw or lumber axe. If they’re just trying to put some torches together or make a shelter I’d say a hand axe is good. Fighting axes aren’t made for that purpose and could be used but I’d say with risk of damaging the weapon.

Depends on the purpose. For stronghold functions, they’ll want a saw or lumber axe. If they’re just trying to put some torches together or make a shelter I’d say a hand axe is good. Fighting axes aren’t made for that purpose and could be used but I’d say with risk of damaging the weapon.

Yeah that's what I thought, but not sure how it would be ruled seeing as they add no gear dice to the activity or anything, so no risk of breaking in that way.

I mean, for harvesting any significant amount of wood as far as building goes, they'd be damaged. You could make it as simple as each quarter day spent harvesting is 1 gear bonus worth of damage.

Depends on the purpose. For stronghold functions, they’ll want a saw or lumber axe. If they’re just trying to put some torches together or make a shelter I’d say a hand axe is good. Fighting axes aren’t made for that purpose and could be used but I’d say with risk of damaging the weapon.

Interestingly, saws were not available during the medieval period (which I'm assuming we roughly approximate in the forgotten lands), at least not to common people. Axes were the main tool all the way through the early modern period. I don't know exactly why, but I suspect making steel at a high enough quality for saws was impossible or at least too expensive to the medieval blacksmith. Not that you have to be "historically" accurate or any gatekeeping crap like that, just fyi if you are interested.

Yeh that's interesting. Saws aren't listed to be able to help you cut trees though either lmao, just for certain building projects. Seems like despite having this great innovation the people of the Forbidden Lands aren't too keen on using it 

It all depends on the size of the saw. You will need a big saw to take down a tree. The saw in the game isn't that big. So perhaps the people just haven't come up with the idea to make this very useful tool bigger yet.

That’s awesome, I didn’t know that. Saws in FbL are imitated relics from some precursor civilization! The story hooks write themselves!