Fixing the Weapons Table, Part 2: Swords, Swords, Swords!

Quick! Think of the last D&D campaign you played where no one used a sword! I'm going to guess that, except for a few of you who have been in an all-wizard campaign or a party of greatclub enthusiasts, you all just went "huh?"  Because swords are damn-near ubiquitous in campaign worlds, just as they were in real life.  There are tons of different kinds of swords, and both D&D and Pathfinder do a fairly good job of representing them.  Fairly good, but not good enough.  That's why I'm here.

Now, I won't go into how later splatbooks tend to start raiding the thesaurus for new swords to stat up just to fill pages.

Actually, yes, I will go into that...

Fleshing Out The Campaign World

As a GM, you always have to keep in mind that your players won't necessarily do what you plan on them doing - especially in a city, which lacks the GM-friendly constraints of your average dungeon.  In such cases, you will have to improvise.  It can be tricky to come up with something at the spur of the moment, but having a fully-realized and fleshed-out game world really helps out with that sort of thing.  If you have established the history and culture of your city, not only will it feel very real for your players, but it will be so real for you that you will have very little trouble improvising within it.

For example: