The Gory Details (Gross)

Gory Details #28 "Beyond Hit Points'"

Gory details is a monthly article dedicated to helping horror writers improve their writing by looking at some of the "real" places and things that often find their way into horror stories. This edition is about weapons damage.

Anybody remember Dungeons and Dragons? The game with the swords and the funky shaped dice? In DnD you had hit points, how much damage you could take. Dagger attack? 3hp. Dragon fire? 30hp. You just subtracted the points. No one ever asked, "Was that my hand or my eyeball?" Yawn. As sentimental as The Gore Monger is for gelatinous cubes and bugbears, there's got to be more fun for horror writers to have with weapons. Let's start with the basics.

Blunt trauma - Blunt trauma, is any impact to the body that doesn't pierce the skin. On a small scale, blunt trauma causes bruises and soreness. Bruises usually turn blue or black in spite of the fact that they are made of blood because the blood is behind the skin. If the skin itself is damaged the wound may bleed or have a "hickey" sort of red splotchyness. Bruises turn green or yellow as they age because the hemoglobin in the blood breaks down.

More serious trauma, getting hit by say a bat or crowbar will cause bruising, in addition it may break bone.

Really big blunt injury trauma. Getting hit by a truck or falling from a plane, will cause multiple fractures, and will often dislocate or break joints. Sudden impact can cause a tear or bleeding anywhere in the body, especially the torso.

Any time the head is involved in the injury the risks are greatly magnified. The brain literally floats in cerebro/spinal fluid. Large forces will knock the cranium into the brain. This can damage the point of impact or transfer force to other parts of the brain. Many times head trauma causes damage deep in the brain as the brain tries to pivot on the brain stem. This can cause blackouts and bleeding (stroke) at the time. Lasting damage can range from severe physical disability to bizarre changes in personality.

Bladed weapons - At their largest, Irish Claymores and the like, bladed weapons are blunt instruments with an edge. A blade is nothing more than a device to focus force. The narrower the edge, the greater the concentration of force. A big sword will hit with the force of a club but only along a thin line where it will sheer though skin and maybe even bone. Deep cuts from bladed weapons are not generally fatal. All of the major arteries in the body, except in the neck, run along the inside of the bones they are near, so a serious, gaping gash to the arm is painful and disabling, but probably not fatal. Large cuts like this are very hard to heal. Flesh is designed to be cut and heal and, so long as you can get the two sides together, it'll do all right. Muscles on the other hand, will regenerate with scar tissue that does not flex or stretch. If there is damage to tendons, who receive very little oxygen. The wound may never heal properly.

Piercing weapons - If you look at the history of swords in medieval Europe, you'll notice that swords get small as time goes forward. There's a very good reason for that. Speed. While Vidar is pulling back to give a slash with his great sword, the foppish Javier will poke him three times with his rapier. While a rapier has a blade, and can give a nasty slash, its real use is to stab. A stabbing wound can be more dangerous than a slash. A dueling sword has better access to the torso. A quick shot to the torso is almost certain to give a wound that will be fatal if not treated. The stomach is wide open and the ribs, so good for so many things, will let a flat blade slide right between them. Lungs to bowels, a sword will slide right through, cutting a sinister path. Look for people with stab wounds to their torsos to carry on for a while (Remember that guy in Romeo and Juliet?) But to show signs of serious internal injury; intense pain, bleeding at the mouth etc.. They are likely to bleed to death before the effected organ kills them.

Guns - Guns take the whole piercing weapon thing to a whole new level. They take the densest non-radioactive substance lead, accelerate it a few hundred or thousand feet per second and crash it into somebody.

A human body is about seventy percent water. If you factor the bones out, the percent is even higher. This means that one of these projectiles hits soft tissue about like it would hit a balloon filled with finger jello. The truth is that the sissyist gun you can find, say a .22 caliber pistol firing short rounds, would go through your entrails left to right, without too much problem.

There is a lot of information online about guns, so I'm going to restrict myself to a few unpleasant details.

Bones deflect gunfire. Our .22 mentioned above would not be particularly dangerous if it hit a bone. It would probably glance off without breaking the bone. Some weapons are designed to overcome this with brute force. Others, take advantage of this. The U.S. Army M-16 fires a slug only slightly larger than a .22 but it has three or four times as much gun powder. The result is that an M-16 round, meeting a bone, is likely to be deflected and keep right on going. There's a lot of damage to be done by a slug that enters the arm, cuts a hole up to the shoulder, tears up the joint there and then glances off your head.

Exit wounds are nastier than entrance wounds. It's the natural tendency of a slug to distribute force as it passes through your body, this means that while it made a small hole going in, it may have distributed enough force that a pretty good chunk of your flesh is ready to jump out with it when it leaves.

Maybe my old cleric Leria was better off not asking where she'd been hit. Now get out there and write.

If you've enjoyed this article, please consider supporting me on Patreon.