[HOE] Relic: The Slugger

[Robert Holland <robert@macauley.com>]

Samantha Rayne was a all-star baseball player for the Arizona Diamondbacks
before the war. After the bombs fell, she found her bat was just as good at
busting outlaw heads as home runs. She wandered the wastes as an adventurer and
hero for a while before being noticed by the now-legendary Templar Jo, who took
her on as a squire and taught her the ways of Simon's order. Down the years
since then, as the blood of abominations has soaked into her trademark
Louisville Slugger, it's gained arcane powers darkly reminiscent of its original
function.

The Slugger is a barbed-wire-wrapped wooden baseball bat marred with nicks and
dark stains. Used as a weapon, it has DB +2 and does 2d6 damage. Belying its
wooden construction, it's as tough as a finely crafted blade. The arcane power
it's absorbed allows it to knock away arrows, bullets, grenades, and even
supernatural blasts as easily as it would baseballs. When the wielder is the
target of a projectile attack, she can roll Fightin': Baseball Bat versus TN 9
as a vamoose and attempt to knock it into the stands.

It gets better. If the deflection roll is successful, she can attempt to send
the projectile in the direction of any target within 90 degrees of the original
attacker. This attack has a range increment of 10 (even if the original attack
was lower) and a -4 penalty to hit, but don't forget to check for blast
deviation and/or make innocent bystander checks for the target's buddies if it
misses. If it's a weapon that does Strength damage, roll the bat-wielder's
Strength with a +4 bonus.

The Slugger works perfectly well even against weapons that would normally be
destroyed or detonated by the impact, like arrows or explosives. It's magic,
baby. It does have limitations, the most important of which is that it can only
strike one projectile at a time--if someone unloads an assault rifle at you, you
can only deflect one round, and you might as well forget about broad attacks
like shotguns or flamethrowers. It also can't stop really big projectiles, like
rockets or cannon shells--40mm grenades are pretty much the upper limit--and
attacks with a burst radius have to be ones that would have landed within a
couple of yards of the wielder, or else they're out of striking range. On the
other hand, it can deflect any arcane strike that requires an attack roll (even
invisible ones like Arcane Blast--the swing is guided by magic, not by the
batter's eyes). Thus, it wouldn't work against, say, Arson, but it would against
a Nuke that an enemy radpriest was stupid enough to drop right on top of the
bat-wielder (that ought to surprise the Hell out of the Doombringer that's been
pestering you). And, yes, the Slugger can be used to bank a buddy's shot around
a corner for him, although this is a pretty risky proposition. Don't say we
didn't warn you.

The Slugger has one other cute trick: if it manages to inflict a maiming wound
to a target's head, the aforementioned cranium is knocked clean off its
shoulders to hurtle off into the sunset, and can be aimed like a projectile as
described above. While it doesn't make much of a weapon (Strength wind damage
like a punch, *unless* it happens to be a Black Hat's head, in which case the
headbanger chip doesn't go off until impact--ain't magic great?) it does a fine
job of freaking out the victim's buddies (Guts checks required at the Marshal's
discretion).

That's that. The rules ran considerably longer than I'd intended, but hopefully
should be fairly clear. Tell me what you think.

--Robert Holland