A low-grade armor and weapon material for a Fantasy setting

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by ericthered

you could have "Serf" be an archaic term that doesn't get used anymore, I suppose. I'll have to see if anything else along those linguistic lines pops into my head in the future.

It could be that the original term has evolved to have a new meaning. An aspect of the setting is that dungeons (which form on their own and spawn monsters) tend to crop up near places where a decent number of people live, such as a village, and the monsters raid such a location. If we posit that a lord's grounds full of serfs living there are sufficient to cause a dungeon to crop up nearby, the fact that such areas would be harder to defend than a proper village might make the lord inclined to have most of their serfs live instead in a nearby village and commute to work, taking the wondervine roads/paths. That could certainly lend itself to the material becoming known as Serfwood (in addition to the fact that serfs would probably be inclined to make wicker baskets and the like out of it, and use these to transport whatever supplies, tools, etc they need to bring with instead of being supplied at the site).

I'm not certain how feasible that is, however. First off, that implies a fairly low population density can spawn a dungeon - or it means that it's just based on the total number of people living in a human-defined area (the noble's holdings) without considering population density. The latter could be justified by the dungeons being more magical than mundane, but honestly I don't think I like either of those for worldbuilding purposes. Secondly, changing to "serfs now commute to work" reeks of manipulating the dungeons, and there are some very strong superstitions against doing just that (and for good reason - polities that have implemented policies to do so, or to greatly exploit the dungeon's resources beyond what relatively-independent delvers can achieve, have found themselves swarmed by an untenable number of monsters pouring forth from a high concentration of dungeons in the area, and have been summarily annihilated; all those instances are distant enough in the past to be unverifiable, but nobody is really willing to risk assuming they're nonsense legends). And all that's not even considering how much time and energy would be lost having the serfs actually commute rather than living on the land they're working.

Originally Posted by ericthered

Normal wood will work for that, though, right? someone takes a tier 1+ blade, cuts you a pole, and whittles the end sharp. If you want it especially tier 0, just don't make it all that strait.

A shaft made of normal wood that can stand up to the rigors of combat would be better suited to making a tier 1 polearm, quarterstaff, spear, etc. In GURPS terms, a sub-par shaft of normal wood would be Cheap in materials and/or balance, but tier 0 is actually below even that - my current thoughts are that tier 0 weapons tend to cause reduced injury compared to normal tier 1 ones (tier 2+ generally just get a little bonus damage against mundane foes and make armor less effective, but many foes have traits that let them divide injury by some value, and tier 2+ weapons can downgrade or outright bypass this protection).