D&D: Polewarned is Polearmed – Five Great Polearms
Polearms are one of the best weapons in D&D, but with the fewest options. Why not try one of these five blasts from the D&D polearm past?
Polearm Master is hands down one of the best feats in 5th Edition. If you want to do the most damage, you use Sharpshooter and Crossbow Master. But if you want to play a melee character, you use a polearm master with a dash of great weapon master too. Which is great, because Polearms are one of D&D’s most varied and delicious weapons. At least they were at one point.
In 5e you have the glaive, halberd, pike, quarterstaff, or spear. But in the glory days of D&D past, there were confusing tables FULL of polearms you could use! Sure, they all boiled down to more-or-less four archetypes. But why not bring some of that 2nd Edition D&D flavor back? Let’s take a look at D&D’s love affair with weird polearms. Here are five of our favorites.
Guisarme-Voulge
This Guisarme-Voulge is what happens when you take a poleaxe and put an extra spike on it. Only then you decide that your weapon doesn’t have enough weapons on it. So you add a curved hook. You know, for taking mounted enemies off their horses.
The Guisarme-Voulge reminds us that D&D got its start as a medieval wargame. And goes to show just how weapon-nerdy Gygax and Arneson were back in the day. They studied the blade. And the hook. And the bill.
Bill-Guisarme
Is your curved hook not covered in enough spikes? The Bill-Guisarme is here to fix that. How many spikes do you count? You’d think some of them would be unnecessary, but they all are intended to serve a specific purpose.
Glaive-Guisarme
The Glaive-Guisarme is what happens when you take a glaive and then put a bayonet on it so that you can charge your enemies when you run out of ammunition for your polearm. Which, if you’re playing Destiny, that can theoretically happen.
And as you can see on the right there, sometimes you can add an extra armor-piercing spike to the glaive so you can deal with heavy armor.
Bec-De-Corbin
A highly specialized weapon, the bec-de-corbin is designed to deal with enemy knights, specifically by hitting them with a hammer, driving a pick through their armor, and it has a blade on the end so that you can also slash at foes and deal all three kinds of damage in D&D.
Lucerne Hammer
This highly specialized weapon, named for a city in Switzerland, combines a hammer, a pick… and wait-a-minute.
Partizan
This weapon is fancy enough to be mentioned in Shakespeare and carried by the Queen of England’s actual royal guard to this very day, the Partizan is a broad, flatheaded spear with protrusions on the side to parry other weapons. For whatever reason, it’s always the fanciest of polearms, and should raise the bar for what your characters are wielding.
Anyway, what we’re saying is, don’t settle for the same old options when there are plenty of ambiguously similar ones just a few editions away.
Happy Adventuring!
