Without having more than 'a story from 2016' to go by, it's hard to tell what might have been going on.My bad. My mid was drawing a blank, it was Molly's first mission from the anthology "Shadowed Souls."
Reading that story I had assumed it was due to the nature of the Warden Swords that can cut (and so presumably block) magic directly. But in terms of the RAW, it should be allowed in general, as Taran said, but as GM Id want some IC explanation for it. A vanilla mortal should not be able to deflect immaterial magic with a random trashcan lid; but by contrast any physical object should able to block physical evocation as the normal energy and material dictate (ie any metal object might block/ground a lightning attack; anything can block fire unless the fire overpowe4rs and burns/melts it).Yeah, I was thinking Warden sword as well; I just wanted to know what/how the community thought of the idea. I freely confess I rather treated such attacks as similar to Guns attacks (only defended with Athletics).
I agree, Jim probably doesn't have a copyu of the rules nearby when he's writing. It's just the idea of using the Warden's sword in such a manner caught my interest and I wanted to bounce the idea off the community (and see if anybody else had tried it, to be honest).
That aside, I don't think it's the best idea to use the stories as a guide to the game mechanics. I'm pretty confident that Jim doesn't use the RPG in his writing process, and I doubt he'll ever avoid writing something for fear of contradicting what Evil Hat said in 2010.