Spend your Loot on a Sickle

 

A Common, Simple Weapon, The sickle is a viable choice for a starting weapon for your character. As a simple weapon, sickles are available to all character classes, and as farm implements, it makes sense for anyone in Memory to have access to a sickle. If your Dexterity outpaces your Strength ability, the Sickle’s Finesse Trait can improve your ability to defend yourself at melee range.

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Sickle

Agile

Finesse

Trip

Source Core Rulebook pg. 280 4.0

Price 2 sp; Damage 1d4 S; Bulk L

Hands 1

Category Simple

Group Knife

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Originally a farming tool used for reaping grain, this one-handed weapon has a short wooden handle ending in a curved blade, sometimes sharpened on both sides.

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Traits

• Agile: The multiple attack penalty you take with this weapon on the second attack on your turn is –4 instead of –5, and –8 instead of –10 on the third and subsequent attacks in the turn.

• Finesse: You can use your Dexterity modifier instead of your Strength modifier on attack rolls using this melee weapon. You still use your Strength modifier when calculating damage.

• Trip: You can use this weapon to Trip with the Athletics skill even if you don't have a free hand. This uses the weapon's reach (if different from your own) and adds the weapon's item bonus to attack rolls as an item bonus to the Athletics check. If you critically fail a check to Trip using the weapon, you can drop the weapon to take the effects of a failure instead of a critical failure.

Critical Specialization Effects

Certain feats, class features, weapon runes, and other effects can grant you additional benefits when you make a Strike with certain weapons and get a critical success. This is called a critical specialization effect. The exact effect depends on which weapon group your weapon belongs to, as listed below. You can always decide not to add the critical specialization effect of your weapon.

• Knife: The target takes 1d6 persistent bleed damage. You gain an item bonus to this bleed damage equal to the weapon's item bonus to attack rolls.

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Materials

Sickles Can be Crafted from the parts of a creature that possess a Slashing Natural Weapon Attack. Typically the sickle's humble origin would prevent them from being crafted from particularly valuable materials unless they were crafted by a group that attributed a significant symbolic value to a sickle.

Tactics

Provided that you are not facing a foe particularly resistant to it, your fist attack action when wielding a sickle should be to use its trip trait. By putting your opponent prone, you make them increasingly vulnerable to melee attacks. A Prone opponent is susceptible to sneak attack damage and the AC penalty cuts the sickle’s multiple attack penalty in half. A wily sickle wielder could be very difficult to engage in melee combat. By Tripping and spending at least one action to stride away from their opponent, that character has forced their opponent to spend at least 2 out of their three actions to close their distance back into melee range.