"different weapons?" Topic

Do weapons provide different abilities in SBH?

I only have the splintered light book, and it seems like weapons are just abstracted as a pip on the combat die.

For the most part they're just abstracted into combat. IN some of the stand-alone games based on the SOBH engine though, there are weapon profiles. Check out Deepwars and Fear and Faith. I know there are expansions that are gonna add more weapons though. The next one coming out will focus on dwarfs and already I see "heavy weapon" as one of the "weapons" you can have as a special rule.

Yes weapons are abstracted. Sort of the idea that a guy with a knife and a guy with a club are going to be equally dangerous if they know what they are doing.

However, there are some special rules that can be used to represent the effects of certain weapons.
Free Disengage, Tail Slap, Jouster, Lethal, Poison, spring to mind as examples of this.

In general, the lack of Weapon special rules and stats is one of the things that makes SBH so streamlined and it's fast-play nature is part of what makes it so much fun.

ordinarybass hit the nail right on the head. With a little imagination.. once you know all the special rules.. you can use a combination of them to represent whatever you want. Don't let the name of the special abilities stop you from using them to present weapons or racial abilities. One example of this is how orcs have essentially the same stats as humans, but lower quality. I've always been a fan of orcs being physically stronger than orcs, but not as disciplined. The way I countered the fact that they have the same combat stat is by giving all my basic orcs the "savage" special ability to show their brutality in combat. Coincidently.. I found out later that the SOBH already has a list for "Savage Orcs" that do exactly this.