I hate sci-fi generally.
Magic and swords are cooler than guns and science.
what if we had both?
I'm a big fan of shit like that. Hell, the game Paladins got my attention because it had an elf with a wrist mounted gun in a modern spandex outfit, and i was like "oh hey someone found my second life avatar and put it int heir game. neat."
Basically the problem I am running into with trying to build a fantasy setting is I have to choose one of three things:
1. Design a highly derivative setting relying on an extensive amount of archetypes, touchstones, tropes, and pre-existing cultural notions.
2. Not give a shit and hand-wave away alot of the details or deliberately leave them as blank space for the player to fill in and only make a minimal setting to go alongside the system I'm designing.
3. Put an enormous amount of work into making a cohesive, bespoke original setting that the overwhelming majority of people who are not me will never ever give a shit about and will actively opt to ignore.
I chose option 4: No.
I'm not running anything at the moment so I just compile notes of ideas I want to steal or think would be neat in a fantasy world. By the time I need it I'll be able to at least flesh out a starting location or a few cities within a region before the players go exploring - and if the whole campaign stays around a city, even better. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1u32Mjojk7k6qx9Ukkg-R4l3LiRLKHa0FZIQh_20DuUg
Dwarf Fortress is one of the only things in recent years that I feel does a decent "standard" fantasy setting
the elves have a neat feel, dwarfs are at the center of the game - not humans
and goblins has a super unique feel
it's definitely inspired any future D&D-type campaigns I run
i don't like its elves very much, but then i am the person who will use elves as the standard and put humans in the typical orc role of roaming savages.
we all have our biases.
hey, elves don't waste ANY of their kills
that's laudable behavior
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I find that fantasy settings are easier for me to handwave shit and run an effective adventure. Sci-Fi gets tangled in the beaureaucracy of it way too quickly with my group of players. Fantasy I can just shrug off and say "magic, yo." That way I get to spend more of my DM time making animal noises at people and less time worrying about how the villains are hiding their web presence and avoiding cameras.
I hate sci-fi generally.
Magic and swords are cooler than guns and science.
I feel like a lot of sci-fi deals with hypothetical future-problems, which gets clumsy (at best) when one tries to comment on present day issues. It also makes it harder for me to care; there are enough extant problems that I find it tricky to even pretend to care about imaginary upcoming ones.
Fantasy, with its inherent backwards gaze, allows for better reflections of things that lead to or reflect on current-day issues. IMO, of course
Cyberpunk's cool, but cyberpunk's also basically the present, so
i am now thinking about the towns and villages near Stableeposion Swamp, They'd be a people who watch the cycle of the moon very carefully, have a very specific fear of skeletons, might see the Giant Laser wielding crabs as some kind of deliverance from the boney bastards.
Or would some willingly offer their enfeebled, rivals, recently deceased and criminals every dread harvest. attempting to buy the skeletons off, maybe hoping to harbour trade, after all they seem to have unlimited scimitars, what if we could sell some?
Warrior of some sort who was exposed to a powerful necromantic effect, from a trap or a cursed item or an evil wizard's miscast or something, that instantly flayed all the flesh from their body, leaving them as an animated skeleton. But they kept their mind and will intact and can still speak, like some kind of pseudo-lich. They hide their condition by wearing a heavy full suit of plate armor with a closed helmet at all times, if pressed on this eccentricity they play it off as simply embarrassment over terrible disfigurement from battle scars. Main goal is to find a way to get their body back to normal, perhaps they have a family to return to, or an inheritance or noble lineage they can only claim as not a monster, or perhaps they just want to not be a freak on the run from necromancers and holy men and van helsings and be physically able to eat and drink and sleep again.
Story ideas:
-They are being actively searched for by a necromancer who wants to take them apart to figure out how to attain lichdom themselves.
-They have taken a job as a guard captain for a shady noble or mayor, blackmailed into it because they found out the skeleton secret or lured with promises of leads on a cure that never quite seem to materialize, because the noble or mayor is really stringing them along to keep them on retainer.
I was having a conversation the other day with a couple friends (including @DE?AD) about medieval society, and how it just isn't represented in fantasy
it's always some weird version of monarchy tooled from modern perspectives
fantasy would be a LOT more interesting if writers researched feudal and tribal cultures, as well as mythology and stories from the times
an attempt to do something different than science-fiction, and look towards the past rather than the future
also, folk need to stop aping Tolkien ad nauseam
Have you read any of Katherine Kerr's Westlands Cycle? It's a bunch of Celtic fantasy that hits on a lot more of the historical culture than I tend to see in Celtic fiction.
Guy Gavriel Kay is also an author I'd highly recommend, though his stuff is along the fine line betweeen historical fiction and historical fantasy.
I was having a conversation the other day with a couple friends (including @DE?AD) about medieval society, and how it just isn't represented in fantasy
it's always some weird version of monarchy tooled from modern perspectives
fantasy would be a LOT more interesting if writers researched feudal and tribal cultures, as well as mythology and stories from the times
an attempt to do something different than science-fiction, and look towards the past rather than the future
also, folk need to stop aping Tolkien ad nauseam
Honestly I think I'd like to explore a dark ages/feudalism settings with much more detail than Magic Renaissance Steampunk Castles. The magical possibilities of fantasy with the grim darkness of medieval history.
I was having a conversation the other day with a couple friends (including @DE?AD) about medieval society, and how it just isn't represented in fantasy
it's always some weird version of monarchy tooled from modern perspectives
fantasy would be a LOT more interesting if writers researched feudal and tribal cultures, as well as mythology and stories from the times
an attempt to do something different than science-fiction, and look towards the past rather than the future
also, folk need to stop aping Tolkien ad nauseam
Honestly I think I'd like to explore a dark ages/feudalism settings with much more detail than Magic Renaissance Steampunk Castles. The magical possibilities of fantasy with the grim darkness of medieval history.
I'm a little late jumping into this conversation about representation in tabletop games, but I've found the last few pages very interesting. I agree that a lot of fantasy settings default into really uncomfortable tropes about race that players and GMs need to think about.
I ran into a similar problem running a Lady Blackbird campaign over the summer. The game takes place in a pseudo-Victorian steampunk setting, so colonialism is an implied (but not a highlighted) issue. Goblins exist in the setting and have inherent shapeshifting abilities. After a few unexpected player decisions led to goblins playing a big role in the story, we had to have some conversations about the role goblins played in this society. Some of the things we talked about:
- While goblins were a subjugated group in our setting, we wanted to avoid a reductive and offensive "Humans as Imperial Britain and Goblins as Colonized PoC" analogy. The solution we settled on was to include human-populated planets among the colonies of the Empire. This way goblins were one of many groups colonized, rather than a stand-in for every colonized society.
- Using pronouns for the goblins characters was difficult. We all agreed that a species that could shapeshift at will would see gender differently than humans, but I didn't feel knowledgeable enough to render that culture as fully as it deserved. And again, we wanted to avoid a reductive and offensive "goblins as trans people" analogy. In the end we decided that each goblin chooses pronouns for themselves when they have to deal with humans - basically acknowledging that we wouldn't be able to fully address the issue while trying to make sure that, within the world of the story, the goblins had agency over their own gender expression.
While I'm not 100% satisfied with any of the solutions we came up with, I'm glad the group was interested in having these conversations As much as tabletop games are supposed to be fun, I feel like its important to discuss the assumptions and values that come baked into the setting.
I was having a conversation the other day with a couple friends (including @DE?AD) about medieval society, and how it just isn't represented in fantasy
it's always some weird version of monarchy tooled from modern perspectives
fantasy would be a LOT more interesting if writers researched feudal and tribal cultures, as well as mythology and stories from the times
an attempt to do something different than science-fiction, and look towards the past rather than the future
also, folk need to stop aping Tolkien ad nauseam
Honestly I think I'd like to explore a dark ages/feudalism settings with much more detail than Magic Renaissance Steampunk Castles. The magical possibilities of fantasy with the grim darkness of medieval history.
*Slides Ars Magica across the table*
:P
They really do have a game for everything.
I've played sessions where the primary conflict was discussing the terms of our lease with the local abbey, and deciding whether to be hospitable to travelling barons. There are two separate skills for legal knowledge depending on whether you are in mainland Europe or in England.
I was having a conversation the other day with a couple friends (including @DE?AD) about medieval society, and how it just isn't represented in fantasy
it's always some weird version of monarchy tooled from modern perspectives
fantasy would be a LOT more interesting if writers researched feudal and tribal cultures, as well as mythology and stories from the times
an attempt to do something different than science-fiction, and look towards the past rather than the future
also, folk need to stop aping Tolkien ad nauseam
Have you read any of Katherine Kerr's Westlands Cycle? It's a bunch of Celtic fantasy that hits on a lot more of the historical culture than I tend to see in Celtic fiction.
Guy Gavriel Kay is also an author I'd highly recommend, though his stuff is along the fine line betweeen historical fiction and historical fantasy.
I'll write the names down, I'm not much of a reader these days
but there's always a chance that will change
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- Using pronouns for the goblins characters was difficult. We all agreed that a species that could shapeshift at will would see gender differently than humans, but I didn't feel knowledgeable enough to render that culture as fully as it deserved. And again, we wanted to avoid a reductive and offensive "goblins as trans people" analogy. In the end we decided that each goblin chooses pronouns for themselves when they have to deal with humans - basically acknowledging that we wouldn't be able to fully address the issue while trying to make sure that, within the world of the story, the goblins had agency over their own gender expression.
I have the same thoughts on Changelings and try to include them in my settings or games somehow because of that. It's new and complicated for me, but for that segment of the fantasy population it's how they live every day. Hmm.
I imagine that changelings tend to adopt the gender roles of whatever culture they grew up in, albeit with extra fluidity
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admanbunionize your workplaceSeattle, WARegistered Userregular
Adding trans and gender-neutral NPCs to my games is something I make a conscious effort to do (and I have players who will also do so when I ask them to describe an NPC) if only because I think it helps "normalize" it in everyone's minds.
Of course, just making sure that your NPCs aren't Default Male is a pretty important step.
within a larger group, yeah assimilation makes the most amount of sense for the majority, though outside of that, it becomes a more complicated things. I would say should figure out if changelings have an assigned sex at birth or not. if they do, you can build out ideas from there, does it affect forms they take? if it does that mean they take to generalized gender roles of other cultures? if not, then does it matter outside of their base form?
And so on in such a matter. If their sex is completely fluid then yo instead get a people whose sex and gender are probably closely linked, or maybe it's just a flight of fancy at all times.
In short, Changelings are complicated. And you should never let them believe they are the real version of someone they are impersonating.
I imagine that changelings tend to adopt the gender roles of whatever culture they grew up in, albeit with extra fluidity
To me the only time anything is fairly static is while pregnant, but if they were in a safe changeling community (if such a thing exists) instead of their surrounding region, they could look like anything as long as that section of the anatomy is correct and viable. So if you were in a hidden changeling village you could see pregnant male orcs or female humans.
Even if a changeling grew up in a solid-state society there would be incentives to have a few identities instead of just one in case your regular life is having a bad day. Your friend in your town that you enjoy spending time with but only see and hear from now and then? Changeling.
The tall, elegant, gorgeous elven dreamwhispercrafter with freckled skin that brings to mind a starlit sky on a partially cloudy evening introduces themselves as M'alé D'fáült.
I imagine that changelings tend to adopt the gender roles of whatever culture they grew up in, albeit with extra fluidity
To me the only time anything is fairly static is while pregnant, but if they were in a safe changeling community (if such a thing exists) instead of their surrounding region, they could look like anything as long as that section of the anatomy is correct and viable. So if you were in a hidden changeling village you could see pregnant male orcs or female humans.
Even if a changeling grew up in a solid-state society there would be incentives to have a few identities instead of just one in case your regular life is having a bad day. Your friend in your town that you enjoy spending time with but only see and hear from now and then? Changeling.
there's not many of 'em, but some trans dudes do choose to have children
makes sense that a few changelings out in the wider world choose not to hide it
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I haven't done much in my Dungeon World game with this kind of thing, but I did make an executive decision that female dwarves have beards, and did my damndest to take it as far from "Haha a feminine person with a beard" as possible
Etchwarts on
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StraightziHere we may reign secure, and in my choice,To reign is worth ambition though in HellRegistered Userregular
First play of Widow's Walk gave us Internal Conflict, where the house turns into a corporate headquarters and all of the players become murder junkie interns of a Wolfram & Hart style organization, delivering coffee to the employees and trying to take out the competition for a promotion
In high adventure and investigative games prejudice doesn't fit the vibe they are going for. It's feel-good action packed narratives
in horror games like Call of Cthulhu or Eclipse Phase I subscribe to the school of 'half your sanity loss is from outer darkness horrors, other half is from humanity being shitty'. Either a space vampire is invisibly draining your friends of their internal fluids, or you are trying to infiltrate the Nine Lives cartel for some future soul slavery.
what weapons do you think would be best for fighting man sized crabs? trying to keep it to weapons that existed before the 1700s. i can't imagine swords would be much use. Axes seem to be effective even against some plate armour, is a crab's exoskeleton as durable as steel? i wouldn't imagine it would be.
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Lord Palingtonhe.him.hisHistory-loving pal!Registered Userregular
what weapons do you think would be best for fighting man sized crabs? trying to keep it to weapons that existed before the 1700s. i can't imagine swords would be much use. Axes seem to be effective even against some plate armour, is a crab's exoskeleton as durable as steel? i wouldn't imagine it would be.
Either bludgeoning weapons that create an impact over a large area, or weapons with a concentrated point to focus all the energy in a small area.
So like, either warhammers or spears.
Maybe have a wheeled rig that's like a catapult but instead has giant pincers, made to grab and crush legs?
i'm not sure. Granted, i'm not a marine biologist, but does simply cracking the shell hurt the crab? so a hammer would put holes into the shell, but it's going ot be surface level wounds, i imagine they could recover from that. Where as an axe if they are punching through the chitin thent hey can be used for draw cuts shredding the armour.
Basically what i am saying is we need to find the toughest type of crab, and do some tests.
what weapons do you think would be best for fighting man sized crabs? trying to keep it to weapons that existed before the 1700s. i can't imagine swords would be much use. Axes seem to be effective even against some plate armour, is a crab's exoskeleton as durable as steel? i wouldn't imagine it would be.
Youtube videos make crabs look rather fragile in most cases They lose legs pretty easily, though they can regenerate them given time. The shells are tough, but if you aim at for the bendy bits, you should be able to take a leg out of commission pretty easily.
I think polearms/axes would be my first choice if we're limited to melee. Preferably long enough to keep me out of reach of the claws. Could probably do a lot of damage bringing a spike down when it's on the end of a 8 foot staff, that should be enough to penetrate a shell or knock off a leg.
Maybe something like a weaponized agricultural flail could work. Keep it low and go for the knees. Take out enough legs, and it goes down.
A boar spear might be nice, maybe instead of a blade there was just a hardened spike suitable for piercing armor, while the crossbar keeps it from going too deep so the spear doesn't get lost.
Ideally, I'd be well back from the crab with a heavy crossbow, plinking shots at the eye stalks or any flexible looking bits, or aiming for holes in the armor that were placed there by people with large hammers and a death wish.
Swords probably wouldn't be ideal since you'd have to get close, but they'd still be effective, especially if you were able to target flexible bits. Make them bend the wrong way, and that legs as good as gone. A good swing would deliver a lot of kinetic energy to a very small contact point.
Just curious, when you say man sized crab, do you mean a crab that's as tall as a man? Or one that has roughly the same mass?
Just asking if we're facing a 6' tall crab, or one that's 6' wide?
what weapons do you think would be best for fighting man sized crabs? trying to keep it to weapons that existed before the 1700s. i can't imagine swords would be much use. Axes seem to be effective even against some plate armour, is a crab's exoskeleton as durable as steel? i wouldn't imagine it would be.
Youtube videos make crabs look rather fragile in most cases They lose legs pretty easily, though they can regenerate them given time. The shells are tough, but if you aim at for the bendy bits, you should be able to take a leg out of commission pretty easily.
I think polearms/axes would be my first choice if we're limited to melee. Preferably long enough to keep me out of reach of the claws. Could probably do a lot of damage bringing a spike down when it's on the end of a 8 foot staff, that should be enough to penetrate a shell or knock off a leg.
Maybe something like a weaponized agricultural flail could work. Keep it low and go for the knees. Take out enough legs, and it goes down.
A boar spear might be nice, maybe instead of a blade there was just a hardened spike suitable for piercing armor, while the crossbar keeps it from going too deep so the spear doesn't get lost.
Ideally, I'd be well back from the crab with a heavy crossbow, plinking shots at the eye stalks or any flexible looking bits, or aiming for holes in the armor that were placed there by people with large hammers and a death wish.
Swords probably wouldn't be ideal since you'd have to get close, but they'd still be effective, especially if you were able to target flexible bits. Make them bend the wrong way, and that legs as good as gone. A good swing would deliver a lot of kinetic energy to a very small contact point.
Just curious, when you say man sized crab, do you mean a crab that's as tall as a man? Or one that has roughly the same mass?
Just asking if we're facing a 6' tall crab, or one that's 6' wide?
I'm thinking the crabs wouldn't be much taller than 4 feet on average,for the more, humanized crabs. there are of course larger crabs, but i figure they'd probably have some kind of hierarchy likely based on size then intelligence, so crab commanders would probably be roughly the size of a horse and able to write poetry.
the agriculture flail is actually a real interesting idea since the impact point is fairly large but properly modified it could ding some big holes, larger than most hammers anyway. My original thought was something akin to a dane axe with an edge on the under side hoping to get through the shell and then pull leaving large gashes. Which thinking might not have much effect on crabs.
It is also worth noting that fire arms do exist, but they're probably not going to be something most coastal towns would be affording. but for richer cities they'd provide good defence.
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Magic and swords are cooler than guns and science.
Squires Errant will also give automatic rank and pay increases to Squires that make it all the way to The Accolade and join Knight Errant
what if we had both?
I'm a big fan of shit like that. Hell, the game Paladins got my attention because it had an elf with a wrist mounted gun in a modern spandex outfit, and i was like "oh hey someone found my second life avatar and put it int heir game. neat."
I'm not running anything at the moment so I just compile notes of ideas I want to steal or think would be neat in a fantasy world. By the time I need it I'll be able to at least flesh out a starting location or a few cities within a region before the players go exploring - and if the whole campaign stays around a city, even better.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1u32Mjojk7k6qx9Ukkg-R4l3LiRLKHa0FZIQh_20DuUg
I disagree!
X gets the square.
hey, elves don't waste ANY of their kills
that's laudable behavior
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I feel like a lot of sci-fi deals with hypothetical future-problems, which gets clumsy (at best) when one tries to comment on present day issues. It also makes it harder for me to care; there are enough extant problems that I find it tricky to even pretend to care about imaginary upcoming ones.
Fantasy, with its inherent backwards gaze, allows for better reflections of things that lead to or reflect on current-day issues. IMO, of course
Cyberpunk's cool, but cyberpunk's also basically the present, so
Or would some willingly offer their enfeebled, rivals, recently deceased and criminals every dread harvest. attempting to buy the skeletons off, maybe hoping to harbour trade, after all they seem to have unlimited scimitars, what if we could sell some?
which is why I love it so much
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So that has to be a thing. moonthly public executions (dragged off by skeletons)
I like sci fantasy.
Like Destiny and Warframe.
what is your opinion on the wizardry series?
As much as I tried with the earlier games 8 was the only one I was really able to get into but those were fun, silly settings.
Also pre-ubisoft Might and Magic.
The game starts with you getting on a stealth bomber looking space shit and then getting attacked b darth vader it's the best.
Warrior of some sort who was exposed to a powerful necromantic effect, from a trap or a cursed item or an evil wizard's miscast or something, that instantly flayed all the flesh from their body, leaving them as an animated skeleton. But they kept their mind and will intact and can still speak, like some kind of pseudo-lich. They hide their condition by wearing a heavy full suit of plate armor with a closed helmet at all times, if pressed on this eccentricity they play it off as simply embarrassment over terrible disfigurement from battle scars. Main goal is to find a way to get their body back to normal, perhaps they have a family to return to, or an inheritance or noble lineage they can only claim as not a monster, or perhaps they just want to not be a freak on the run from necromancers and holy men and van helsings and be physically able to eat and drink and sleep again.
Story ideas:
-They are being actively searched for by a necromancer who wants to take them apart to figure out how to attain lichdom themselves.
-They have taken a job as a guard captain for a shady noble or mayor, blackmailed into it because they found out the skeleton secret or lured with promises of leads on a cure that never quite seem to materialize, because the noble or mayor is really stringing them along to keep them on retainer.
Have you read any of Katherine Kerr's Westlands Cycle? It's a bunch of Celtic fantasy that hits on a lot more of the historical culture than I tend to see in Celtic fiction.
Guy Gavriel Kay is also an author I'd highly recommend, though his stuff is along the fine line betweeen historical fiction and historical fantasy.
I... I think @TheRoadVirus actually did this once?
*Slides Ars Magica across the table*
:P
They really do have a game for everything.
I ran into a similar problem running a Lady Blackbird campaign over the summer. The game takes place in a pseudo-Victorian steampunk setting, so colonialism is an implied (but not a highlighted) issue. Goblins exist in the setting and have inherent shapeshifting abilities. After a few unexpected player decisions led to goblins playing a big role in the story, we had to have some conversations about the role goblins played in this society. Some of the things we talked about:
- While goblins were a subjugated group in our setting, we wanted to avoid a reductive and offensive "Humans as Imperial Britain and Goblins as Colonized PoC" analogy. The solution we settled on was to include human-populated planets among the colonies of the Empire. This way goblins were one of many groups colonized, rather than a stand-in for every colonized society.
- Using pronouns for the goblins characters was difficult. We all agreed that a species that could shapeshift at will would see gender differently than humans, but I didn't feel knowledgeable enough to render that culture as fully as it deserved. And again, we wanted to avoid a reductive and offensive "goblins as trans people" analogy. In the end we decided that each goblin chooses pronouns for themselves when they have to deal with humans - basically acknowledging that we wouldn't be able to fully address the issue while trying to make sure that, within the world of the story, the goblins had agency over their own gender expression.
While I'm not 100% satisfied with any of the solutions we came up with, I'm glad the group was interested in having these conversations As much as tabletop games are supposed to be fun, I feel like its important to discuss the assumptions and values that come baked into the setting.
I've played sessions where the primary conflict was discussing the terms of our lease with the local abbey, and deciding whether to be hospitable to travelling barons. There are two separate skills for legal knowledge depending on whether you are in mainland Europe or in England.
but was it so the skeeltons could bring the prisoners back to the skeleton spawning pits to welcome new life into the world?
I'll write the names down, I'm not much of a reader these days
but there's always a chance that will change
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I have the same thoughts on Changelings and try to include them in my settings or games somehow because of that. It's new and complicated for me, but for that segment of the fantasy population it's how they live every day. Hmm.
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Of course, just making sure that your NPCs aren't Default Male is a pretty important step.
And so on in such a matter. If their sex is completely fluid then yo instead get a people whose sex and gender are probably closely linked, or maybe it's just a flight of fancy at all times.
In short, Changelings are complicated. And you should never let them believe they are the real version of someone they are impersonating.
To me the only time anything is fairly static is while pregnant, but if they were in a safe changeling community (if such a thing exists) instead of their surrounding region, they could look like anything as long as that section of the anatomy is correct and viable. So if you were in a hidden changeling village you could see pregnant male orcs or female humans.
Even if a changeling grew up in a solid-state society there would be incentives to have a few identities instead of just one in case your regular life is having a bad day. Your friend in your town that you enjoy spending time with but only see and hear from now and then? Changeling.
there's not many of 'em, but some trans dudes do choose to have children
makes sense that a few changelings out in the wider world choose not to hide it
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I haven't done much in my Dungeon World game with this kind of thing, but I did make an executive decision that female dwarves have beards, and did my damndest to take it as far from "Haha a feminine person with a beard" as possible
It was excellent
in horror games like Call of Cthulhu or Eclipse Phase I subscribe to the school of 'half your sanity loss is from outer darkness horrors, other half is from humanity being shitty'. Either a space vampire is invisibly draining your friends of their internal fluids, or you are trying to infiltrate the Nine Lives cartel for some future soul slavery.
Either bludgeoning weapons that create an impact over a large area, or weapons with a concentrated point to focus all the energy in a small area.
So like, either warhammers or spears.
Maybe have a wheeled rig that's like a catapult but instead has giant pincers, made to grab and crush legs?
Basically what i am saying is we need to find the toughest type of crab, and do some tests.
I think polearms/axes would be my first choice if we're limited to melee. Preferably long enough to keep me out of reach of the claws. Could probably do a lot of damage bringing a spike down when it's on the end of a 8 foot staff, that should be enough to penetrate a shell or knock off a leg.
Maybe something like a weaponized agricultural flail could work. Keep it low and go for the knees. Take out enough legs, and it goes down.
A boar spear might be nice, maybe instead of a blade there was just a hardened spike suitable for piercing armor, while the crossbar keeps it from going too deep so the spear doesn't get lost.
Ideally, I'd be well back from the crab with a heavy crossbow, plinking shots at the eye stalks or any flexible looking bits, or aiming for holes in the armor that were placed there by people with large hammers and a death wish.
Swords probably wouldn't be ideal since you'd have to get close, but they'd still be effective, especially if you were able to target flexible bits. Make them bend the wrong way, and that legs as good as gone. A good swing would deliver a lot of kinetic energy to a very small contact point.
Just curious, when you say man sized crab, do you mean a crab that's as tall as a man? Or one that has roughly the same mass?
Just asking if we're facing a 6' tall crab, or one that's 6' wide?
I'm thinking the crabs wouldn't be much taller than 4 feet on average,for the more, humanized crabs. there are of course larger crabs, but i figure they'd probably have some kind of hierarchy likely based on size then intelligence, so crab commanders would probably be roughly the size of a horse and able to write poetry.
the agriculture flail is actually a real interesting idea since the impact point is fairly large but properly modified it could ding some big holes, larger than most hammers anyway. My original thought was something akin to a dane axe with an edge on the under side hoping to get through the shell and then pull leaving large gashes. Which thinking might not have much effect on crabs.
It is also worth noting that fire arms do exist, but they're probably not going to be something most coastal towns would be affording. but for richer cities they'd provide good defence.