Making: witchknives

During a game of Maskwitches, one thing players might decide to have their witches do is create witchknives.

At the climax of any story there’s a battle against the spirit threatening the community. The Witches most often use their amulets to defeat the spirit, but they can gain an advantage by also having witchknives in their possession.

Witchknives are hard to make, and are governed by the rules for the “craft” witch activity, although it’s very likely there will be “gather” and “consult” elements too.

From the text of Maskwitches of Forgotten Doggerland:

“Create a witchknife

Witchknives are a powerful weapon against spirits. The Maskwitches know some of the secrets of transforming metal found in bogs, in curious rocks, and in fallen star-metal, into ritual weapons which can help defeat a spirit.

To work on a specific design might need the assistance of far flung witches, or Elderwitches, and will certainly require the gathering of materials.

The places where a witchknife might be forged are rare and secret, and usually far from the rhythmic passage of normal people. Whether they’re in a claustrophobic hanging cliff-cave, where the fumes of creation provide wonderful insights, or on a far flung hillside where mighty boulders funnel air into the witchknife hearth, breathing the metal into liquid, a knife forge will always be an unusual place.

The making of a witchknife may require several days, and the work of several people. It will need constant fuel as well as other more esoteric ingredients.”

The entirety of a session of play might easily be taken up telling the story of how your witches gather the ingredients and knowledge required to make a witchknife.

Witchknives are clearly an important thing in the world of Forgotten Doggerland, and they’re one of several setting elements that are anachronisms: in our historical knowledge, working with metal if any kind isn’t something people do 8000 years ago. Scattered through the setting are “historically unusual” activities, which point to the witches having supernatural or at least very unusual knowledge which they keep secret and hold sacred. It’s a reminder that Maskwitches is a fantasy: hopefully a well-researched one, where such anachronisms serve a specific narrative purpose, but a fantasy nonetheless.

There are a couple of elements within the setting which deepen the tragedy for the Maskwitches of the arrival of agriculture, which will be central to the as-yet unnamed sequel game. Things the Maskwitches keep secret and sacred will be thrown into a different light by their latterly arising enemies, milk drinkers and grain eaters. This future game currently has the imaginative working title “Maskwitches 2”.

But back to Maskwitches Redux!

With each piece of art for the new book, I have a choice between making something from digital painting, from photomontage, or making models. Most images will feature some degree of a combination of techniques.

As the project has progressed I’ve increasingly found I prefer to work with models. I think that will really make the game something special and different. So for the Witchknives I needed to make props/models.

Aside: I wish I had more photos to share with you in this article. I took some. I wish I had taken more.

I realised fairly quickly that these didn’t need to actually function as knives - or anything close. They just needed to carry the appearance of “ur-metal work” - indeed be actually look very much pre-bronze age, and quite crude. But dressed as important sacred objects. They needed to withstand their intended use as photographic props, but no more. There’s a kind of magic in that, which I enjoy. And if I’m honest I’m slightly wary of revealing, in case it spoils anything for you should you eventually get a copy of the Redux book. But let’s assume you’re a curious soul who can still enjoy a magic trick when you know how it’s done.

Significantly, witchknives are not artefacts of a warrior culture: war is yet to be invented (again, that’s something we’ll see in Maskwitches 2: agriculture changes many things about human existence, one thing being the invention of war).

I wanted these things to have a different appearance to Bronze Age “weapons”

They’re almost more like “wands” - although I deeply dislike that word and connotation for this purpose, so I use it with caution. They’re a ritual object, crafted to direct “spiritual force”.  Perhaps more like a “ghost piton” than a wand?

I wanted them to have some precursors of later weapon designs, for those that might recognise them, but in an extremely crude form. That gives us the “pommel” details, a pre-echo or ancestor of the anthropomorphic designs of later Bronze Age swords. In thinking about that, I realised I wanted there to be only a small difference between the different parts of the knives, and for them to flow into one another - the blade, the handle and the pommel are all one thing, with no clear division.

I’d like to make some more witchknives to build further on this. I have some more ideas, and it’s likely we’ll want another couple at least for the book.

For these first two witchknives, I began with a core of thick but flexible wire. This is the same stuff that forms the core of many of the models in the project.

Around this core I built up air-drying clay. The wire will prevent the clay from cracking too much as it dries - without it they’d probably just fall apart, and certainly be very fragile. There’s a reason real knives aren’t made from clay!

I knew I wanted the end results to not have the thin, shiny qualities of knives we’re more used to, and I wanted quite a thick, rough feel, with the edges hammered into some kind of crude edge.

I came up with a couple of approaches to the overall shape - one with a thicker ridge running down the centre of the blade. I spent some time wondering about how designs might be communicated, and how special that makes the Maskwitches “organisation” within the setting. It also felt quite odd to be actually making a witchknife myself, when it’s something characters in the game do. Even if it was only in clay!

Once the shapes were about right, I had to be patient and let the air-drying clay dry out and harden. However I have absolutely no patience, and this process can take days. Who has that kind of time, when they’re in the zone? So the knives when onto the stove to hurry things along.

Eventually they were thoroughly dry. It actually took about three days, and the stove really only helped get them leather hard. I just had to suffer and wait.

At this point I decided to move them away from the hand modelled look of clay by some cautious use of the Dremel, grinding the edges down and reshaping them to give a sharper appearance. The dust kicked up by grinding air drying clay seems 100% awful. Do not reccomend. It was an extremely fine powder that went EVERYWHERE. I was glad to have breathing and eye protection in place ahead of time. Seemed like a great way to get a 19th century industrial disease if one isn’t very careful.

Next up I painted them. Firstly priming them a deep red with spray paint for speed and nice fast coverage.

I had a bit of a think about metallic colour at this point. There’s the suggestion in the text of bog iron, star iron, or unusual mineral deposits. I knew the final result wouldn’t be especially shiny all over, but I decided to go for something other than iron in appearance. Maybe I’ll do some iron ones in the next batch.

It’s not entirely inconceivable that bog iron could be crudely worked in a charcoal fire, if the vessel was made the right way, and there was some form of bellows involved.

We have evidence of some pretty ancient iron beads from modern-day Iran and iron working in 4000BCE in Egypt, both massively predating “the Iron Age”, but I was a little shy of that silvery grey finish for these first two. Now I’ve said that “out loud” I feel a bit more confident about an iron finish - with lots of oxidisation, crude hammering on metal that isn’t quite hot enough and so on.

But these first two were painted a gold/bronze colour. Coward!

Next up I had a strong need to absolutely mess up the nice gold finish. These were looking far too close to crude models of something from Mycenae, rather than Forgotten Doggerland - even as willing anachronisms. So I hit them with PVA glue and a load of miniature basing materials. I’m using Krautcover earth here for sheer convenience. These are unfortunately names little tubs of modelling supplies for jazzing up your wargaming scenery and miniature bases. It’s all mini rocks, dust, dirt and grass flock. Nice textures to add in.

Then I went in with some acrylic ink washes to further bring out the texture and give them a nice weathered, earthy look. I could imagine a lot of additional materials being added to the crude forging process - perhaps something like raku pottery? These might give the knives a form of crust and additional colour.

On top of this I added some special effect paint to give the impression of verdigris - at the risk of heading back to Mycenae! (The word verdigris comes from “the green of Greece”) it’s a good visual shorthand to indicate age/weathering, and add to that “not a shiny knife like the ones you’re used to” feel.

Once that was all dry, I dry brushed on some patches of gold again, just to bring up the texture one last time.

One of the knives has some details which suggest a bone, wood, or antler grip, so I picked that out in paint.

At this stage I felt they looked a little bare and not quite up to the task. So it was time to drag out the materials box, and see what I could add to them to really bring them to life.

Beads was an obvious addition. The people of Forgotten Doggerland record story/song-like maps and histories in beads, so it seemed fitting to add some to the witchknives. Various bits of fake fur, fibrous string and leather thongs were added.  A real highlight were some horribly realistic plastic teeth. Always a winner.

I should confess at this point I’m not entirely happy with the blades of these first two, and there’s things I’ve learned that I want to bring to the next generation. Happily I was able to gloss over the parts I’m less keen on in the photography.

Here’s the first shoot in action.

I wanted them to have something of that “museum artefact” air, so I set up a neutral backdrop. You can see I’ve fixed the knives in place with some clamps, with the relatively delicate props protected with some kitchen paper. Most unglamorous!

And once they were photographed, photoshop helps polish up the results. These days I shoot everything in RAW format which gives me access to all possible settings - basically I get to play with the raw information the camera sensors have collected.

Alongside that I record what I’m doing on my iPhone, which does have a pretty good camera these days!

And that’s it for the first round of witchknives!