Category: News

New and improved, what every modern druid must have! With its length of 6 feet or two big steps it will hold your enemies at bay.

Impress your followers with light up stems and sickle. Put fear in the hearts of your enemies with a dazzling light display. And with the handy flashlight feature, find the most elusive of herbs in the densest of forests.

Pieter’s technical notes:

I have used some 3mm ultra bright clear led’s (red, blue, green and white)

Red, blue and green are used in the inside of the sickle. Green is also used in the stem of each leaf and whites are use in the bottom of the staff and serve a flash light function. All the led’s are controlled by some micro switches housed in a wooden handle. This handle also holds 3 triple A batteries the power source for the led’s. The stems and the in side of the sickle are made of clear pvc tubing usually use in aquaria. This tubing is made more stiff an less clear by filling it with hot glue.

Led’s are inserted in the bottom of the stems and in the side of the sickle by drilling a small holes. For protecting the led’s in the sickle and because this type of pvc doesn’t take glue very well. I covered the pvc tubing on one side with cloth. With is glued and stitched to the tubing and this provides a good base for sticking the foam on.

Pieter van der Beek from Arcana sends us more great builds: An elegant combat stick:

And a 7cm deep birdwing shield. Don’t let your old Raptor wings go to waste, enchant them with plastidip and go to battle with them:

Built by Pieter, painted by his daughter! The shield measures 70cm. It is lined with 5mm of foam, 1 cm at the edge, and has two sheets of floor boarding as core.

 

Pieter from Arcana in the Netherlands presents his luminescent arrows. Since Arcana sometimes hosts for 48 hours straight, there’s combat at night and arrows can get lost. It’s much easier to find these arrows on the ground, because they have light-up nocks.

The light in the arrow is courtesy of a light-up-nock, commercially available, luckily not too expensive ($2 – $5). There’s a very simple LED and battery configuration in a clear plastic nock. There are several types of light-up-nocks most of them are usually bow string operated.  The one thing you should pay special attention to is size, most light-up-nocks are 6.2 mm in diameter and arrows come in different cross-sections. Luckily most arrow shafts that have a insert to accommodate the changing of the arrow head are of this size.

The arrow head, is a commercial available prefab foam arrowhead for archery tag ($3 – $5). It screws in the arrow shaft via the insert. And can be made extra safe with some glue. The arrow is a carbon fiber 31 inch compound hunting bow arrow and comes complete with a changeable arrow head and real feathers($2 – $3).

The build is very simple, replace the arrowhead and replace the nock. The one thing that isn’t in the picture that I have bound the feathers with a string (white) so it looks just a bit better.

One arrow costs Pieter something between $7 – $13 and looks a lot better than the commercial rubber feathered larp arrows that will cost something like $16.

Pieter from Arcana shares a bark-inspired punch shield with a yin-yang rune in the knot. It is totally badass, especially borne by Darius the woodland druid.

What’s better than a round wooden shield? How about a tree trunk cut, single origin, artisan-made plastidip round punch shield? Pieter from Arcana shared it.

There’s a funny story from Pieter on this one:

“Okay – about a year ago, my friend who plays as Darius, with whom I started in this game about 20 years ago, sat next to me and started a conversation.

He thought that he should make a bigger club and that he should favor a shield but…  It wasn’t in his skill set to make one as good as he would like.

And he that it was sad that his character would not look as nice as Darius deserved . So I caved in and said I would build him something, but what should it look like?

So he asked for a wooden shield like the one Thorin Oakenshield uses in The Hobbit.

This year I also decided to try my hand at Airbrushing Latex. (Which I might add works very well.) To make a practice piece, and to trick my friend, I made a practice piece of exactly what he didn’t ask for.

And this is what came out: a tree trunk cut, single origin, round punch shield. When we assembled for that game I presented this shield to him and to my big surprise he absolutely liked it!

Luckily for me when I gave him the shield that was intended for him loved It. Also, the club is his.

Thanks, Pieter and Darius!

Pieter from Arcana shares a shield inspired by an ivy leaf, perfect for a druid. He includes a couple of pictures of the planning process as well.

There are a few more druidic shields yet to come, stay tuned!

You may have heard that a +1 club is just a baseball bat, but Pieter from Arcana has built a nice one. It’s about 80 cm long, here are some pics!

 

 

Well, here we hit a wall – the German speaking world has its own foamsmithing resources, and this “25+ build instructions for Larp Weapons” page seems to be its new hotness:

http://larp-waffen.net/larp-waffen-bauen/