Not much going on wargaming wise, so a more whimisical post today.

I was listening to Daughter #2 playing Dungeons & Dragons over Zoom last night, and the party of adventurers was deep underground in a traditional dungeon crawl setting. They were cautiously feeling their way through a section of the complex they were in, wary of traps, so using a 10ft pole to check the flagstones and ceiling in front of them. It brought back happy memories of doing the same thing when I used to roleplay on a regular basis: sometimes the whole party would have a 10ft pole tucked away somewhere on their equipment list.

This actually made me chuckle to myself because I now actually have a 10ft pole…well, it’s actually a 9½ foot long dragon staff for my wing chun kung fu. Although not part of the original wing chun system, as the eponymous nun apparently never learnt it, it was re-introduced at a later date. As with a lot of martial arts history, things are a bit murky as to how and why. Some say it is part of the Shaolin armoury (although they tend to use a shorter, 6ft, more flexible staff: what the Japanese would call a bo and what westerners would call a quarterstaff), some say that it comes from the poles used by boatmen on the rivers of southern China. Likewise, it’s either a weapon of awesome length, or something more designed to build up strength in the wrist, arms, core and posture.

Why did I laugh? Well, you have to understand that this thing is long: 9½ foot long to be exact. As you can see in the photo, the only place in the house that it can come close to standing upright is in the stairwell. Manouevring it from the stairwell to the front or back door to use the thing in the garden (as it doesn’t fit anywhere else) is a nightmare: you clatter off this wall or that, knock the lightshades all over the place, and generally make a right nuisance of yourself. It’s made worse if you happen to also have your hands full of other equipment e.g. a set of ‘chucks or butterfly swords.

So the chuckling comes from the thought of a party of 5 or 6 adventurers, all with a 10ft pole stuffed somewhere in their luggage, moving quietly through a dungeon. To bring things back to wargaming, it would be like trying to manouevre an entire phalanx through a tube train tunnel! Not only would everyone be bashing into everyone else, but the noise would attract every wandering monster for miles around.

Mind you, a friend of mine does have a naginata that breaks down into three separate pieces…