Monowire Whip Styles

[jeff_wilson]

Originally Posted by Genesis

Yeah, Walter from Hellsing is evidently able to turn his monowire whips into normal whips on command - sometimes they slice through people like butter, but he's shown choking people and restraining them too... maybe he's just really careful? Of course, you need non-monowire whips to do swinging or use it as a climbing line too.

Some sort of special gear? A perk (you can treat your monowire whip as not monowire when you want)? Clearly cinematic...

Not necessarily any more cinematic than the molecule-thick whips to begin with. The whips might have less-sharp aglets, or possibly some extensible graphene sheathing.

When I made some ultra-tech ninjas for the Black Ops to take on, I decided plain monowire was either too lethal (invisible, cuts you in half before you feel it) or not lethal enough (adds +1d and (10) to cutting weapons IIRC), so I borrowed the SPFX from JOHNNY MNEMONIC and required monowire to become agitated electrically and visible to be truly dangerous. (Otherwise, it cut through, but the unagitated cut was too thin to prevent adhesion from reuniting most materials almost instantly, unless followed by the wedge of a blade weapon.)

If the agitation can be fine-tuned, it can justify being able to crudely animate the wire and let you whip around corners, very quickly set up traps acrosss corridors, or otherwise loop around projections and other features with the blunted features mentioned above, or possibly a tiny spiderbot that rides the end. Some kind of small spiderbot should not be a problem at cinematic TL10; it might even have surveilance or manipulation functions, so that Monowhip Guy can do cool things out of combat as well.