Old Game Notebook: Ice Axe (AD&D)
Following is a fairly detailed 1st Edition Dungeons & Dragons/AD&D writeup I did for the Ice Axe, which I interpreted as both a weapon and a piece of equipment. I believe I wrote this up a few months after I moved to Denver, probably in December 1984, and drew upon my first experiences with an item of this sort from three years earlier, when I scaled the glacier Blaueis in the Berchtesgaden Alps of Germany. In the course of the expedition I used an ice axe successively as an aid while climbing the glacier, to help guide my descent while body-sledding down it, and the next day — after I shattered two bones in my right foot while bouldering — as a crutch while painfully hobbling off the mountain.
Following is a fairly detailed 1st Edition Dungeons & Dragons/AD&D writeup I did for the Ice Axe, which I interpreted as both a weapon and a piece of equipment. I discovered it on two sheets of yellow 8.5 x 14 legal pad paper in with a bunch of other old game material. I believe I wrote this up a few months after I moved to Denver, probably in December 1984, and drew upon my first experiences with an item of this sort from three years earlier, when I scaled the glacier Blaueis in the Berchtesgaden Alps of Germany. In the course of that expedition I used an ice axe successively as an aid while climbing the glacier, to help guide my descent while body-sledding down it, and the next day — after I shattered two bones in my right foot while bouldering — as a crutch while painfully hobbling off the mountain.
Weight: 60 gp
Length: c. 4'
Space: 4' (any weapon function other than the butt spike, which is 1')
Speed Factor: 7 (any weapon function)
Descent from a glacier or ice field may be attempted with the use of an ice axe. This can be initiated by sitting down on the ice and bending the knees so that the heels rest on the ice. The head of the tool is then grasped in the primary hand and the haft held in the middle by teh secondary hand and the tool held across the body, the spike resting on the ice on the secondary-hand side of the body. The character may then slide down, steering with [the] axe (to avoid rocks), and slowing descent using his heels and by traversing from side-to-side.