Ya has disfrutado la sensación de volar, sin levantarte de tu cama. ahora te ofrezco el poder controlar toda tu vida en un segundo. este es el botón, presionalo. Deja tus miedos , metidos en tu armario, recorre el camino el paraíso perdido, sin...
everyone on replies is terrified of this fact but i just think it's so sweet and heartwarming. she's holding our hand and leading us somewhere secret and we're both giggling like kids. i love her
We're just taking a stroll around the block. And by block I mean the galaxy. The sun orbits the center of our galaxy, just like we orbit him. Just way way way slower.
Adventure Hook: The party are hired to put a stop to the undead rising from the old cemetary, and to determine whether it is some forboding sign or a curse brought down by some graverobber, as the town authorities are split on the matter. While investigating they will discover signs of dark rituals taking place, though they will have to be very clever to realize that the infact not at all humanoid.
Background: While most crows are content with petty mischief (and three occasional murder), these three arcane avians have no respect for mortal or godly law, and spend their days sowing curses and petty blasphemies wherever their dark wings take them.
The three carry with them an unrotting eye, the last remnant of a witch by the name of Hemani Lokryn, who used the birds as familiars for years and nurtured them to sentiance with a diet of dead men's brains. When the magehunters finally caught up to Hemani, the three were unable to save her from her cell or execution, so she commanded them to gore out her eye and carry it with them that her spirit might escape her body's fate.
Further Adventures:
When challenged or interrupted the crows make to scatter , as any one of them that survives an encounter and makes it back to where they've hidden Hemani's eye they'll be able to resummon the other two. Generally they always keep one in reserve, but this limits the force of magic they're able to bring to bear in any confrontation. If the party is clever, they'll poof two of the familiars to smoke and feathers and then track the straggler back to their roost.
If they weren't discovered in their earlier capers, the trio may try to bait the party into exploring some obviously haunted dungeon in the hopes of having them dig up some important artifact necessary for their latest scheme. This "bait" might come in the form of one of the crows pretending to be some kind of omen, or a barely legible letter pleading for help delivered in the dead of night. They might even try a breadcrumb trail of golden coins if they get desperate.
A girl has disapeared from her home after a series of strange occurrences, leaving her parents in a state of absolute panic and in need of the adventurers' aid. Always a little odd and shunned by other children for her morbid fancies, Cordelia was overjoyed when a trio of spooky birds decended on her usual sulking spot and told her that she had a great destiny ahead of her. Her new friends weren't exactly lying: Cordelia has a spark of sorcery about her, being the distant scion of the now forgotten Lokryn line after the family moved and changed their name to avoid their then infamous reputation. This makes her the perfect vessel for Hemani's resurrection ritual, as she aims to possess her descendant's body in a twisted "inheritence" ritual. The party will need to act fast to find Cordelia's motivations and trail, the crows have been gaining her trust for weeks with games and magic lessons, and now they lead her to a place of power where they'll take her eye and place their mistress's in its stead.
The story will not end should the party be too late and find the witch ascendant or completely gone. Hemani or "Cordelia Lokryn" as she now calls herself seeks to reclaim the power and influence she once wielded as not all of it fit into the childish body she's stolen. Vaults must be plundered, old servants called up from their resting places, a lair established, all of which may provide the party opportunities to challenge her once again and save Cordelia from her awful "destiny".
All this mucking about with eyes and resurrection has given Hemani a connection to the god of whispered secrets, who now drives the witch to seek out his own long-hidden eye of power. Cordelia's soul barely survived the first grisly grafting, and may be forever lost should she suffer another.
A strong-backed dragon. He carries heavy weights upon his shoulders, with words and images of importance often carved in the stone resting atop his shell.
@hereticcryptid i'm late responding to this prompt, but have a continuation on baxia and hensheng wanting more cuddles than one would normally expect from a spiritual sword!
I love my bloodthirsty princess of a cursed blade, and in my heart of hearts i am nothing but a sword nerd, so i've been extremely fascinated by Baxia and how we know frustratingly little about what she actually looks like!
I mean, look at bichen, right?
Bichen in the donghua:
Bichen in the drama:
They're clearly not exactly the same. The scabbards are different, and the guards have a different shape. But these are recognizably different iterations on one theme, right? Thin jian with a white grip silver guard, light blue tassel and silver mounting accents on the scabbard.
Now this is baxia in the donghua:
And baxia in the drama:
????????
THAT'S A COMPLTELY DIFFERENT WEAPON
it doesn't stop there either, the audio drama is kind enough to give us ANOTHER COMPLETELY DIFFERENT BAXIA
pretty! But how is that he same sword??
And when we go back to the novel, we get very little information on her appearance other than the fact that her blade is tinted red with all the blood she's absorbed. Which none of these designs incorporate.
This is not a dig on the designs itself, they're all quite gorgeous in their own right and i'm going to spend a while discussing all of them! Because isn't it fascinating how, since we know little about novel baxia beyond "saber" all of these designs ended up so different? What kinds of sabers are these, anyway?
So, a chinese aber, aka a "dao" (刀) just means a sword that has only one cutting side. As opposed to a jian, which has two.
You can see how that leaves a LOT of room for variaton.
I've actually seen some people get confused because Huaisang's saber in the untsmed is thin and quite straight, making it superficially resemble the jian more than drama!baxia, but it is still clearly a saber!
See? only one cutting blade!
This, to me looks a lot like a tang dynasty hengdao
credit to this blog for providing his image and being a great source for all this going forward.
TANGENT: during all this I found out the english wikipedia page for dao is WRONG! Ths is what they about the tang hengdao!
So that sounds like the hengdao was called that during the sui dynasty, but then, after that, started being called a peidao, right?
WRONG
I LOOKED AT THE SOURCE THEY USED AND IT SAYS THIS:
IT WAS CALLED THE PEIDOU UNTIL THE SUI DYNASTY, AT WHICH POINT IT WAS CALLED A HENGDAO. Which would carry over to the Tang dynasty. This was the source wikipedia linked! and it says something else than they say it does!
Anyone know how to edit a wikipedia article?
ANYWAY
BACK TO BAXIA
Since we're already at the drama, let's look at drama baxia: She's also straight! the general term for straight-backed saber is Zhibeidao, but that's a modern collector's term, and doesn't really say anything about which historical kind of saber baxia could be based on. Another meta i found on the drama nie sabers already went on some detail here.
I'm gonna expand on that a little: The kinds of historical straight-backed sabers we see resemble the hengdao a lot more than they do baxia. They don't go to their point as harsly as she does (she's basically a cleaver!) and they're all way skinnier.
No, my personal theory is that instead of being based on any kind of historical sword, drama!baxia is based on a Nandao.
I mean, come on, look at it!
Baxia!
The Nandao... isn't actually a historical sword. It was invented for Wushu forms. There's a really fascinating article about its conception, but that's why the swords in the images look a little thin and flimsy. Wushu swords are very flexible and light, they're dance props, not weapons to fight with. There are actual steel versions of Nandao, but they're recreations of the prop, not the other way around.
So That's one way in which Baxia differes from the Nandao: she's actually a real weapon. The other is that, as you can see above, the nandao has an S-shaped guard. Baxia doesn't. She's also much more elaborately decorated, of course. Because she's a princess.
Now: audio drama baxia!
This is much easier. with that flare at the tip?
Oh baby that's a niuweidao, all the way!
There are more sabers with that kind of curved handle, but the broad tip is really charcteristic of the niuweidao. The Niuweidao is also incredibly poplar in modern media, often portrayed as a historical sword, but it originated i nthe 19th century! And it was actually never used by the military!
That's right, the Niuweidao was pretty much exclusively a civilian weapon! That makes its use here anachronistic, but so is the nandao, and considering that the origin story of the Nie is that they use Dao intead of Jian because their ancestors were butchers, portraying them with a weapon historically reserved for rebels and common people instead of the imperial military is actually very on theme!
Finally, Donghua/Manhua baxia. These two designs are so similar I'm going to treat them as one and the same for now.
Unlike both previous baxias, The long handle makes it clear this baxia is a two-handed weapon, though Nie Mingjue is absolutely strong enough to wield her with one hand anyway. Normal rules don't count for cultivators.
Now, this is where things get tricky, because there are a lot of words for long two-handed sabers. And a lot of them are interchangable! This youtube video about the zhanmadao, one of the possible sabers this baxia could be based on, goes a little into just how confusing this can get. This kind of blade WAS actually in military use for many centuries, making it the most historically accurate of all the baxias. But because of that it also has several names and all of those names can also refer to different kinds of blades depending on what century we're in.
So here's our options: i'm going to dismiss the wodao and miandao, because these were explicitly based on japanese sword design, and as we can see manhua baxia has that very broad tip, so that won't work
(Example of a wodao. According to my sources Miaodao is really just the modern common term for the wodao, and the changdao, and certain kinds of zhanmadao... do you see how quickly this gets confusing?)
Next option: Zhanmadao.
Zhanmadao stands for "horse chopping saber" so... yeah they were anti-cavalry weapons. meant to be able to cut the legs and/or necks of horses. That definitely sounds like a weapon Nie Mingjue would wield. But if you watched that youtube video i linked above, you'll know the standardized Qing dinasty Zhanmadao looked very different from earlier versions. It was inspired by the japanese odachi, and more resembles the miandao than its ealrier heftier counteprarts.
Earlier Ming dynasty Zhanmadao on the other hand were... basically polearms. the great ming military blog spot, another wonderful source, says these are essentially a kind of podao/pudao (朴刀) which looked like this
Now that blade looks a lot like baxia, but the handle is honestly too long. Donghua!baxia straddles the line between sword an polearm a little, but while zhanmadao have been used to refer to both long-handled swords and polerarms, this was undeniably a polearm, not a sword.
If you want to know what researching this was like, I found a picture of this blade on pinterest-- labeled as a "two-handed scimitar"-- and the comment section was filled with people arguing about whether this was a Pudao, Wudao, Zhanmadao, Dadao, Guandao, or a japanese Nagita.
So... that's how it was going. This has kept me up until 2 AM multiple times.
However! Thanks to this article on the great ming military blog I found out there have historically been pudao blades with shorter handles!
Specifically, Ming dynasty military writer Cheng Ziyi created a modified version of the pudao to work with the Dan Fao Fa Xuan technixues-- aka technqiues for a two-handed saber, which would alter heavily influence Miaodao swordmanship-- thereby, as the article points out, essentially merging the cleaver-polearm type Zhanmadao with the later two-handed japanese-inspired design.
This is the illustration for the Wu Bei Yao Lue (武備要略) a Ming dynasty military manual
This blade shape in the illustration doesn't match Baxia exactly, but since it's a lengthened Pudao-like blade and we've seen above that those can match Donghua Baxia's shape, i'm gonna say that calling Baxia a Zhanmadao with a two-handed grip isn't all that innacurate!
However, because all of these terms are so intertwined, there are a dozen other things you could call her that would be about equally correct.
To show that, here's a lightning round of other potential Baxia candidates:
Dadao (大刀)
Which are generally one-handed and too short. However!
Another youtube video i found of someone training with a Zhanmadao that resembles baxia a little also calls it a "shuangshoudai dao" (雙手带 刀) shuangshou means two-handed, and while 雙手带 seems to refer to a longer handled weapon, when looking for a shuangshou dao or shuangshou dadao (双手大刀) we find a lot more baxia-resembling blades like here and here
I also found that, while the cleaver-like Dadao is strictly a product of the 20th centuy, since dadao just means big sword or big knife, it has been used to refer to loads of different weapons! Some people could've called the zhanmadao and pudao "dadao" during the Ming dynasty as well.
Another potential baxia candidate that mandarin mansion classifies as similar to the later dadao (though longer, as seen in the illustration below) is the "Kuanren Piandao"
Which piqued my interest because this diagram classifying different tpye of Dao:
Claims that a Kuanrenbiandao (diferent spelling, same sword) is the same as a modern day Zhanmadao.
(So once again, all of these terms are interchangable)
Another opton Is the Chuanmeidao/Chuanweidao (船尾刀) below you can see a diagram, based on the Qing dynasty green standard army regulation, of blades all officially classified as types of "pudao"
The top middle is the Kuanren Piandao, and bottom left is the Chuanweidao.
Both of these have a lot of baxia-like qualities.
So there you go! live action baxia is based on a Nandao, audio drama baxia is based on a Niuweidao, and Manhua/donghua baxia is some kind of two-handed Zhanmadao/Pudao/Dadao depending on how you want to look at it.
I'm honestly surprised no one has made the creative decision to portray Baxia as a Jiuhuandao, aka 9 ringed broadsword yet.
I mean look at it! Incredibly imposing. Would make for a great Baxia imo. (@ upcoming mdzs manga and mobile game: take notes!)
