rust

Congratulations, a well deserved award.

My PDF has some nice greyscale maps, but no colour map.

I always had a weak spot for Mozenrath (Disney's Aladdin), mostly because of his flying eel Xerxes ...

On the other hand, a respected guy with a castle should have little problems to get some girls ...

In my view the main advantage RQ6 has compared to BRP is the presentation. While BRP can be quite confusing for someone new to the game, RQ6 is orga- nized and written in a very clear way, and therefore rather easy to compre- hend and "get into". Otherwise I would agree that the two systems are just different, without one being "better" than the other in any way.

A few seconds ago it was no problem to reach Rpg.net.

I suspect that my settings are not cinematic enough for that, once a villain has the means to throw mass produced robots at the characters, their only way to survive usually is to flee ...

In my campaigns robots are tools used by others for various purposes. There is no specific "robot species", the properties of each robot depend on what it was designed to be used for, so any foe who uses robots against the player charac- ters can use many very different types of robots, depending on the environment, the tactical situation, and so on.

I think I will use the east coast of the Pale Sea. Secrets of the Steppes describes the region south of where I intend to locate Asornok quite well, and Talons of Winter with even more informations about this region will probably be published in the near future. My main reason to move the Asor to the Young Kingdoms is that the cultures there are not just stereotypes of historical real world cultures. It is a bit too much work for me to design a complete world around the small part I am really interested in, so I tend to adapt published worlds for my games. Unfortunately in most such published worlds the North is inevitably the home region of some kind of "vikings", and the other cultures are also just versions of already too well known cultures - it tends to become a little boring. The Young Kingdoms are a more original creation, which makes it possible to give my Asor setting a new, different "feel". My main problem with the Young Kingdoms is that they are a rather High Fantasy world, while I prefer a more Low Fantasy, pseudo-realistic approach with more distant deities, fewer demons and similar powerful entities and also less powerful magic. Fortunately the Young Kingdoms seem flexible enough for a modification to "tone down" their feel some- what, especially when the focus of the setting is on a remote region which is of little in- terest to the "superpowers".

I am currently planning to move my Asornok setting to another background universe with a geography that fits the setting concept of a remote culture of arctic hunters. Looking at a map of the Young Kingdoms, the Stormbringer universe could be a good choice, and by converting the available material into a description of a slightly diffe- rent plane of existence I could eliminate the original plotline and some elements I dis- like and replace them with what I need for my setting. However, before I start any serious work on this I would like to collect the already available informations about the northern parts of the Stormbringer world, especially the region of the northern Pale Sea: Tarkesh, Ilmiora and whatever is north of them. I already have MRQII Elric of Melnibone, MRQII/Legend Secrets of the Steppes and the Atlas of the Young Kingdoms I, and I would love to hear about other material which describes the lands and societies along the coasts of the northern Pale Sea in more detail. Thank you very much for any comment or information.

Cthulhu Now (at least the German edition, I do not know the English one) has many modern professions and the related modern skills. As for cultures, I think this would mostly be a mat- ter of "fluff" instead of game mechanics. I am working with colleagues from Ghana, Korea and Russia, and while they are certainly different from my German colleagues, I could not model these differences in game mechanics without creating silly stereotypes, I could only express them in the narrative material.

The player characters of my fantasy campaigns usually are members of a community, and the players normally learn soon that their characters can use the accumulated experience of their community ("How did others deal with that kind of problem?") and that their characters are vital survival assets of their community ("We need you, co- me back alive and well."). As a result stupid "heroism" is very rare, in most cases the characters plan well and use all means available to them, like ranged weapons, terrain, prepared positions, traps, fire, poison or whatever else gives them the necessary ad- vantage to survive the encounter. And they usually realize that a fight to the death is not always necessary, that it is often sufficient to be able to make life so unpleasant for the "problem" that it decides to behave (e.g. leave the community alone) or to go away.

The historical records in East and West seem to agree that the maximum effective range for a bow handled by a professional archer is somewhere near 200 meters. For example, in England under Henry VIII an archery practice range had to be at least 220 yards long. Therefore I think that 200 meters should be the upper limit for any bow's effective ran- ge in realistic rules. One could call it the extreme range for longbows and composite bows. The most common long range for traditional archery contests seems to be somewhere around 120 meters, so this is probably the range at which a trained archer can be expec- ted to hit a target at least as often as he misses it. In my view this could make a good long range for longbows and composite bows and an acceptable extreme range for less efficient types of bows. The short range for any kind of bow could probably be about 60 meters. This is much for an amateur archer, but the characters in a roleplaying game could be considered more skilled than that. This would lead to a medium range between about 60 meters and about 120 meters for longbows and composite bows, and perhaps 60 meters and about 90 me- ters for less efficient types of bows. So my idea would be 60 m / 120 m / 200 m for longbows and composite bows, and per- haps 60 m / 90 m / 120 m for "lesser" bows. This could be the ranges for all "average" bows, bows custom made for their users of average size and strength. I am not sure that a high strength automatically translates into a high damage, because most of the damage is determined by the size and shape of the arrow head, and by fea- tures like arrow heads fixed to the arrow shaft or only loosely connected with the arrow shaft (which cannot be removed by pulling out the arrow, etc.). As I see it, the historical attempts to design stronger bows aimed at the bows' range, while the historical attempts to increase the damage concentrated on the arrow heads. Well, just a few thoughts ...

Not really, asymmetrical long horse bows seem to have been quite common in early Central Asia and East Asia, one example are early Hunnish bows. What makes Ja- pan unique is that this type of bow was used there long after it had been replaced by smaller bows elsewhere.

A nice example of a composite reflex bow in its unstrung state, which probably gives an impression of the power stored in the bow even without a draw when it is strung: File:Gak gung.jpg - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Most games do this for crossbows, although there are just as many different types of crossbows (e.g. material of the bow, material of the bowstring, etc.) as there are ty- pes of bow, and in my opinion this works perfectly well and avoids a lot of discussions about more or less irrelevant construction details which do not really influence the per- formance of the weapon that much.

This is a point that is indeed often ignored. Take 1,000 skilled archers and each one's best 1,000 arrows, and even feats with a probability of 1 : 1,000,000 become likely. And these are the exceptional events which get recorded, not the other less impres- sive 999,999 shots.

In my experience it was a bit like artillery methods when it came to longer ranges: The first arrow usually went too far, the second arrow usually went too short, and from the third arrow onwards the target was in serious dan- ger of being hit - until the wind changed ... In other words, I am willing to believe that Yesüngge hit a target at a distan- ce of 530 meters, but I am not willing to believe that he did so with his first arrow. Or his second. Probably not even his third.

This problem can often be solved by "intelligent design". Where I used to live the wind ten- ded to come from the southwest, so most archery ranges were designed with the targets in the northeast ...

Cylons and Daleks obviously operate on planetary surfaces, and X-Wings often have their bases there. Planets have a tendency to produce rain and fog, and if one has to protect the expensive pieces of equipment from these sources of water anyway, one can just as well go a little further and make all the vital parts completely water- tight. Operations in great depth would require some additional preparations because of the pressure there, but a basic protection from water should be easy for an ad- vanced technology.

MRQII, which is identical with Legend, is a modified version of MRQI, but the differences are minor, and it takes little effort to use characters or adventures from one game in the other. RQ6 is an improved version of MRQII, but the differences are still fairly minor, and characters or adventures can easily be adapted to one of the earlier versions of the ga- me. Overall, the authors of MRQI first improved the system into MRQII, which became re- named into Legend, and then again improved and expanded the system into RQ6, which is now the most complete and best playtested version of what is basically the same sy- stem.

True, but our culture has lost much of its knowledge about and skill in archery. If you take a look at cultures where archery never came out of use as much as in Europe, you will find that 80 yards would be considered a ridiculous distance. As mentioned in a previous post, in traditional Korean archery the standard dis- tance is 145 meters, in Bhutan the standard distance is 130 meters (with a tar- get 90 cm high and 28 cm wide). To these people the distances and precisions mentioned in historical texts do not seem outrageous, they have seen similar feats in their lifetime. Edit.: By the way, there are reliable data about many types of historical bows. For ex- ample, Ingo Simon (a former archery world record holder) tested and demonstra- ted several old bows, including a Turkish composite bow of 99 lbs draw weight, with it he shot an arrow over a distance of 434 meters.

I seem to remember that the modern world record of a successfully used draw weight was about 180 lbs, which is almost the same draw weight as that of the strongest long- bow found in the wreck of the Mary Rose.

I did read somewhere that a Mongolian archer typically had four bows for different uses, like using them on foot or from horseback, for hunting or for war, and also a variety of different arrows for the different bows and tasks. I could well imagine that this is true, it would make sense.

An inscription on a stone stele was found near Nerchinsk in Siberia: "While Chinggis Khan was holding an assembly of Mongolian dignita- ries, after his conquest of Sartaul, Yesüngge shot a target at 335 alds." These 335 alds were approximately 530 meters. According to other sources of the time this was an exceptional, but not unique shot, and an experienced Mongolian archer was expected to reliab- ly hit a person at a distance of about 200 meters. These guys were professionals who started at an age when they were strong enough to hold their first bow, practiced daily and of- ten for hours, and continued that for decades. It would be most un- fair to compare them with today's hobby archers. For example, the Korean traditional archery now uses a standard target at a standard distance of about 145 meters - this would hardly have impressed a historical Mongolian archer.