FH: Afeera - Jan 27

 Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks, so let us talk about something else. The latest FH character – the Afeera. No, I do not know what meaning this term/label/name has in RL – from what I have seen, this is a fully Ubisoft invention – and it shows.

How so? Let me be straightforward here: the Afeera is generic. And it shows.

Let us start again. Throughout the game’s existence, the PC characters of FH had flavors – knights, Vikings, samurai, and so on. Lately, however, this state of affairs began to change with the appearance of the ‘Outlanders’; until now, there were only two of them: the Pirate, (think 17^th-18^th century here than anything more modern), and the Medjai. The latter was clearly inspired by the characters in the Mummy franchise, the non-Tom-Cruise one, that is.

…For their part, the Medjai were based on the Western depictions of Ancient Egypt, and while that is neither here nor there, what matters is that while the Pirate was more modern, (proportionally), than the rest of FH heroes, the Medjai was more ancient instead, even moreso than the Gladiator and the Centurion were. This could be gleamed from the appearances of the two characters alone. The Afeera on the other hand, is different.

Officially, this character hails from ‘the kingdom of Arabia’, which is self-explanatory, but otherwise, there are few details that make them specific; even their weapon – a heavy mace – is generic, there’s nothing about it that is associated with an ‘Arabia’ of any kind.

A brief aside: as a weapon, (there are various meanings behind this word), a mace is a club, that has a big iron head with spines, or flanges, or so on, and a tough, stout handle, also made from iron, or from wood, with which to swing the head. Unlike a Morningstar or a flail, there are no chains to connect the two pieces; they are connected directly to each other.

Also, a mace is a weapon that a) inflicts mass damage – a direct or a glancing blow can easily rupture organs and break bones if there’s enough force behind the strike, even if you have armor on you. And b), a mace is not a precision weapon; while you certainly need to train with it, it is a different training from training to fight with a sword: to kill with a sword, you need to land a blow/strike at just the right place, (and if you don’t, your opponent just might survive…at least long enough to kill you), while with a mace or a club – not so much. It is proportionally easy to kill a person with a mace (club), than with a sword; as such, at least during WWI there were trench clubs as weapons… where were we?

Ah, yes, alongside the sword and the spear the mace is a standard RPG weapon these days, whether it is a LARP or a tabletop game – you can be certain that one of the less monstrous foes will use a mace or a club against you. Put otherwise, there is nothing special about a mace, and while, yes, one can argue that there is nothing special about the other weapons in the FH game, well… Somehow, the FH staff managed to make swords, axes and the other weapons unique and individual in the past, each PC had something unique and unusual, even the Pirate and the Medjai have… the Afeera doesn’t. Ah well, this is how the cookie crumbles, and also, you can always count on your family to make everything worse – but that is another story.

For now though, this is it. See you all soon!