The Fireman’s Guide to the Katana

Now here’s a topic that’s probably about as contentious as late term abortion. The legendary Japanese Katana, made kewl in the eyes of twinks by Highlander, loathed by Storytellers who can’t get over their elitists cramps, and a constant source of frustration to the few people out there who actually understand what a Katana really is. Ahhh, the whining of morons who wouldn’t know a Japanese blade from a lawn mower blade when I tell them “NO!” warms my little Storyteller heart. The problem is that about 9 out of 10 people who want one in the game are completely ignorant of what they are really asking for and go bumbling any good reason or use… kind of like our presidents do.

There’s several sides to this little debate, so let me start with a brief and highly simplified explanation of a couple of things.

1. A Katana is made only in Japan from steel that only comes from the black sandy iron from a single region of the country, and it’s only made using VERY precise processes and blessings used by Japanese black smiths and Shinto priests.

2. A Katana is NOT the stainless steel 25-dollar piece of shit hanging on the wall that you got off Ebay – that is merely a katana-shaped chunk of Chinese crap.

3. a PROPER high carbon steel practice weapon with a real edge and differential temper that can be disassembled and cleaned and properly cared for and maintained, while *technically* not a katana, is a LOT different than the 25-dollar Chinese crap that looks pretty but is worthless, however, it’s also not cheap, usually a couple hundred bucks.

4. A wakizashi follows these same principles in construction – they are made the same way, and if you got one for twenty five bucks you have Chinese crap. The same rule applies for the Tanto and the Tachi. (If you don’t know what the difference between a Katana, a Wakizashi, and a Tachi is and you have ever asked an ST for a Katana I want you to slap yourself in the face right now, hard, for being a twink.)

The reason I make these points is simple: twinks. Twinks always act the damn fool as soon as they ask for a katana, they whine and cry and their pussies get to hurting and bleeding when a storyteller goes “no, your antique dealer who grew up in France can’t have an original Muramasa Katana.” To make matters worse, the player is usually some white-bread idiot who’s never been out of his home town and gets his education on Japanese culture from reading Super Taboo and watching bad Anime. They have a character named “Connor Yamaguchi” or “Maia McCleod” who’s half Scottish, half Japanese asking if they can have a Daisho at creation and they know JUST enough to understand that a Daisho is a Katana and Wakizashi. (I swear to God, I have seen precisely that character concept.) Side note: if you have ever wanted to create a PC based on a video game wherein some insane weapon is wielded, you were twinking, knock it the hell off.

Guys, if you do ask for this katana, the ST is going to immediately tag you in their mind as a flaming fucking moron and the other players are going to groan inwardly (or maybe even outwardly at their computer screens...). Hell, a few may go so far as to tell you that it’s a shallow, stupid, facile idea. They would be right. I once had a table top player who actually presented me with a six-foot-four, red haired, green eyed Japanese princess for a PC. I almost laughed until I realized he was serious, then I really DID laugh at him… laughed him right out of my game is what I did. (Of course, this was only one tiny part of this particular players ass hattery and flamboyant twinkery, I promise, you will hear more about him in time.)

Usually these same PC’s want to hide their kewl(!) sword in a trench coat, or worse, carry them in the open. Highlander was not fucking realistic! Get a go damned trench coat, try to hide a 3 foot walking stick under there… everyone KNOWS you have something. Don’t be fooled and don’t be stupid, you don’t hide fucking swords readily, and if you do conceal it, you wind up looking to everyone like you’re hiding *something*. My personal favorite is the twink who wants to wear a motorcycle jacket and still hide the katana. Yeah, where? Between your lungs and your prostate? How do you talk with the handle of that thing in the back of your throat? True, just about everyone who has ever had a sword in their role-playing inventory has tried to hide it somewhere at some point, sometimes they even have a reasonable understanding of the difficulties of doing so and the better among our numbers doesn’t just kind of ignore this facet of the game, but if your character concept revolves around a katana under a trench coat, then you’re doing it wrong, and you totally missed the point of creating your OWN character! I’ll talk about the character whose got more weapons hidden on his person than the average gun store even holds in a later post…

A real Katana’s strength comes from the way it’s made. The back of the blade is soft, flexible steel. Incredibly resilient and with spring like qualities, it absorbs impacts very well. The edge of the blade is hard as hell on the other hand, more brittle but VERY sharp and carrying exceptional edge-holding properties. For these reasons the real weapons, when you watch a REAL martial artist practice, are used in some VERY specific ways (which – by the way – are NOT how the props were wielded on the Highlander movies and television program episodes). The sharp leading edge of a katana blade is almost *NEVER* used to parry a blow, to do so risks deeply notching the harder steel, and that rapidly becomes irreparable damage. Blows are parried by knocking them aside and deflecting them with the softer spine of the blade.

The reason I spell this out is because your Chinese made Stainless Steel wall art does NOT carry this differential temper – it is a single chunk of solid stainless that will notch and bend and break regardless of HOW it’s used to parry, and I’m not even getting into Stainless Steel’s work hardening properties! It is inferior in every way, it has a rat tail tang, a piece of long threaded rod with a simple nut on the end used to hold the handle in place, where as a real katana has a full tang that’s secured with wooden pins. The rat tail is a point of weakness on that Chinese crap, so you might go to hit something and *WHOOSH!* the blade goes flying off into the wild blue yonder! Now, if you’re actually swinging that crap around in your backyard in the REAL world and not the game… STOP! You fucking idiot, you’re going to break that fucking thing or kill grandma or impale the neighbors Bichon Frise! Actually, I encourage you to shut the neighbor’s yip-yap Bichon Frise up, I just don’t recommend using the severed business end of a piss poor Chinese made piece of crap as a makeshift javelin in order to do so.

So why the fuck all these history lessons? For you, my dear reader, if you have a Katana on a sheet, or if you have ever ASKED for one for a PC, and you don’t know what the difference between a Hamon and a Tsuba is, I want you to first apologize to your storyteller and thank them for putting up with your lame ass. Then I want you to have the Katana removed; erase it from the sheet, put in the characters thread that you lost it, whatever. Then, go stick your dominant hand in a running blender so you never do that again you poser.

NOW: let me address the other side of the coin. ST ass hattery. THIS gentle loving is directed at the elitist, ST snobs from around the web who have a stick up their ass about Katanas. There’s some jack asses out there who will flat refuse ANYONE a request for a katana. It’s one thing to heavily restrict an item, but the Katana DOES exist in the real world, and so does Kendo and Kenjutsu and Tamishigiri and martial arts for which the Katana IS a central focus… so denying EVERY PC who comes along because many of them are idiots is frankly both insulting, frustrating, and it’s ASSHOLE behavior as bad as the twinks with the trench coat because it tells the few decent folks out there who understand shit that you equate them to twinks.

My personal litmus test (and solution) is this: if a player asks for a Katana, ask them where they got it. If they say “You can get one on Ebay for like, twenty five bucks!” Sure. Let them have that piece of crap. The first time they try to use it in combat have it fail, dramatically, and let them find out the hard way the stats are NOTHING like in the book for the legendary weapon. Fail to do your research and let it bite ya in the ass. That being said, a Storyteller who flat refuses a katana to a player who DOES know what they are talking about, who has done their research and knows the difference and is not trying to twink the game, who’s character has practiced martial arts and who does NOT revolve around the stupid weapon and a bad Scottish accent… well, sorry buddy, but you’re being a piece of shit storyteller because your letting your personal hang-up’s fuck up a players game just because there’s some idiots out there. Build a bridge and get over yourself.

Twinks: that still doesn’t mean you should get a fucking Katana because if not it’ll fuck up your game. Twinks don’t have a game, that’s why they are twinks, all they have is stolen ideas from someone else that they think are kewl(!) and until they get an original idea they’re not going to have a GOOD game.

NOW, let me clarify something. In my real life, in my home, I DO own a $25 piece of Chinese crap. It’s craptastic. It sucks. It’s nothing worth carrying into a fight. But it does look real pretty on the wall! I also, however, own a $750 Paul Cheng that’s really folded steel, it really does have a razor edge, it really will cut through a person like hot butter, but it is not on the wall, it requires regular cleaning and oiling and would rust on the wall, and there’s NO WAY in hell I would hide that sucker in a trench coat. Neither one of them is a *real* katana, because neither one of them actually was made in the traditional method. For the record, I have never taken out a Bichon Frise with one. Or any other Yip-yap dog. Or a cat. Okay, I did once use the cheapie in its sheath to kill a spider on the roof. The Paul Cheng, if I was to put it on a sheet, I would list as a Katana, because it is just as hard, strong, sharp, and durable as the original antique would be… it’s just not as old or made by hand using 1000 year old processes.

A REAL katana costs tens of thousands of dollars – they are always, always works of art, unique, timeless, requiring either a hell of a lot of money or a hell of a lot of hard work to acquire, so forget having it without a damn good reason and a damn good story. You might be able to con some table top storyteller into it, especially if he’s your buddy and you’re both living in some backwater in Alabama and the closest to Asia you’ll ever get is the local Panda Express, but in an online game where people might very well be playing who live in Japan? Guess again, white boy. I say white boy, but girls are included, I’m not a sexist smack talker.

On a related note – NO character concept for whom you have a mental image of a Scottish Highlander wielding an Asian weapon is EVER a good character concept unless you wrote the ORIGINAL story! Everyone else is like the sequel, and as we know those sequels sucked. So grow up and come up with an original concept.

-The Fireman.