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The Crusaders' Challenges The first task of the knights will be to establish themselves as the new rulers of Merasan. Their subjects are sceptical, but in the end most likely to accept them, since they have no real alternatives to these foreigners' rule. Unless the characters fumble their diplomacy badly, the transition of power should be a smooth one. The next and most important task will be to protect their subjects, which will require the construction of at least basic fortifications of the peninsula's settlements and a successful defense against the bedouins' and pirates' first attempts to test the strength of these fortifications and the resolve of the defenders. Since the materials for basic fortifications are readily available, and the knights hopefully remembered to bring an experienced engineer with them to Merasan, it should not be too difficult to repel the rai- ders and use the success to win the trust of the Merasani. Afterwards it will get more difficult, because repairing and expanding the peninsula's economy will take more than stone walls, arquebuses and swords. AD&D Birthright and Runequest Empires offer a lot of op- tions for new constructions and other measures to develop the eco- nomy, but they all require lots of silver to start with. This money has to come from trade, and the Portuguese control the trade routes and will hesitate to allow any competition, or at least will demand a major share of all profits. Some clever diplomacy and trade will be necessary to handle this. This will be especially true for the major projects. For example, there is the option to resettle the east coast of Merasan in order to gain additional fertile land. A dam could separate the Marhab Bay from the Arabian Sea, and over time the former bay would again become the freshwater lake it once had been. However, a dam of the necessary length and stability would be a real engineering challenge, and also a most expensive project. And then there also are the cultural and political challenges. The or- ders' grand master will want the knights to convert their subjects to the One True Faith, but any such attempt would be likely to end the Merasanis' sympathy for their new rulers. The Portuguese will see the knights as servants of the Crown of Portugal, and will grow suspicious of the peninsula's development into an autonomous fortified realm in- side their domain. Besides, the bedouin raiders and the pirates will still be there, the Per- sians on the other side of the Straits of Hormuz may have their own doubts about a strong Christian realm of Merasan, and the Arabs of Oman are most likely to rebel against the Portuguese in order to re- conquer their lands ...

Thank you. The Order of Arcon The Knightly Order of Arcon was founded during the early years of Spain's Reconquista by Basque knights from the Kingdom of Navarra. Financed with the income from some small bequested fiefs in the Py- renees, it never had the means required for major campaigns of its own, and its few knights therefore usually served with the forces of other, more rich and powerful orders. With the fall of Granada in 1492 the order lost its purpose, and a de- cision to disband it had already been made. However, a letter from the Grand Master of Portugal's influential Order of Christ with the in- vitation to take over and rule the Merasan Peninsula in Arabia gave the Order of Arcon a new aim, the decision to disband was revoked, and the expedition to Merasan was planned and organized. The means of the order are sufficient to pay for the equipment and upkeep of the dozen knights sent to Merasan and of the foot soldiers under their command, and the order will probably be able to send so- me additional money to Merasan now and then, but all expenses be- yond the knights' and soldiers' basic costs of living will have to be paid with the income from Merasan's economy.

The Rules As mentioned, the core rules used for this pseudohistorical setting are those of Call of Cthulhu, specifically those of the German "Mittelalter" (= Middle Ages) supplement, with a few of the BRP options added, but without all of the Mythos - my usual homebrew system. Since neither Call of Cthulhu nor BRP covers Renaissance technology well, I will also use material from GURPS Low Tech and the three excellent supplements for it, especially the one about the everyday life with its rules for crafts and con- structions. For ships and seafaring I intend to use the Runequest Pirates supplement. It co- vers a somewhat later time period, but it should not be difficult to modify it for the years around 1510. To make ruling and developing Merasan interesting, I also plan to use Runequest Empires with its material on the economy, on the various yearly events and on the outcome of diplomatic and other missions of the characters. Well, that much for a first overview.

The Crusaders The player characters are members of a small, unimportant and comparative- ly poor Iberian knightly order, sent to Merasan with other knights of their or- der and a company of veteran soldiers of the order to rule and to protect the peninsula in the name of the King of Portugal. They will have to win the trust of the Merasani by organizing a new and effi- cient government of Merasan and by protecting their quite sceptical subjects from the raids of the desert bedouins and the pirates. They will also have to restore enough of the peninsula's economy to enable it to pay for their activi- ties with taxes low enough to avoid a tax revolt, and they will have to develop their new realm under the watchful eyes of a Portuguese governor at Muscat, who is unsure whether he wants them to succeed or to fail, and whether he should allow them to avoid Portugal's sea trade monopoly by sending diplomats and traders to Persia and the Mughal Empire.

The People of Merasan It is unknown who originally inhabited Merasan. The first recorded settlers on the peninsula were Greeks of Alexander's time, followed by Persians from beyond the Straits of Hormuz and then Arabs from the interior of the Arabian Peninsula. Today there are three settlements on the west coast of the peninsula, the small town Ber Mera with several hundred inhabitants in the south, the village Deicera further north and the village Qasar on the tip of the peninsula. The Merasani are farmers, herders and fishermen, in Qasar there are also some pearl divers, and until the Portuguese conquest of the region there was some sea trade with the Persians on the other side of the Straits of Hormuz and even with the Mughal Empire, further east on the northern coast of the Arabian Sea. Portu- guese warships now control the seas around Merasan, and allow only their own seafarers to trade. Surprisingly the majority of the Merasani are Nestorian Christians, with their own archbishop who had never heard of the Pope in Rome until the Portuguese arrived, but there are also Jewish, Muslim and even Zoroastrian minorities among the Mera- sani. When the Portuguese conquered the Oman, Merasan had been under the control of a tribe of desert bedouins from the south for several decades. They had exploi- ted and thereby almost ruined the peninsula, the settlements and the roads con- necting them were no longer sufficiently maintained, and the lack of any protection from pirate attacks had led to a decline of the population and to the destruction of much of the peninsula's small fishing fleet.

The Merasan Peninsula Merasan, the northernmost part of Oman, is a peninsula in the Straits of Hormuz, between the Persian Gulf in the west, the Arabian Sea in the east and the desert of the Rub al Khali in the south. A high mountain chain runs along the middle of the arid peninsula. The west coast has some fertile and sparsely settled lands, while the once also fertile east coast became a desert like wasteland several centuries ago, when a series of powerful storms turned the freshwater lake of Marhab into a bay and washed away the fer- tile soil on the coast of Rahel. Only the ruins of Thibba prove that this coast once also was inhabited. North of the peninsula, but considered a part of it, is the Yousera Island, covered by low hills and rocky desert.

This is a short description of one of my old pet projects, a Renaissance roleplaying setting which uses modified Call of Cthulhu rules as well as material from other sour- ces, including the old Birthright setting for AD&D. The Background History In 1312 the order of the Knights Templar was disbanded in most of Europe, only in Portugal it managed to survive under another name, now known as the new Order of Christ. Its most famous leader, Prince Henry the Navigator, turned this order into an organization of seafaring explorers, and with the order's cross on their ships' sails the order's famous members like Vasco da Gama set out to explore the world and to con- quer it in the name of Christ. The Templars had not lost their crusading spirit, they had only changed the name of their order and improved their methods and techno- logy. In 1508, only ten years after Vasco da Gama had found the sea way to the riches of India, the Portuguese conquered and occupied the Oman on the coast of the Ara- bian Peninsula. They took Muscat as their capital and controlled the richest parts of the land from there, but they did not have enough men to rule the more remote and poorer regions. Therefore their leaders, members of the Order of Christ, asked for the help of other, minor knightly orders, and one of them agreed to rule the desolate nor- thern peninsula of Merasan in their name.

Google and Wikipedia refuse to tell me what a "Guinea Spider" is.

So did I, little did I know about Raft Spiders ... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:D.plantarius_on_water_surface.jpg

Judging from the creature which walked in from the garden yesterday evening, looked around for a while and then left in disgust, probably because there was no small pet as suitable prey for it, I am not at all convinced that this is about speculative evolution.

There are stats of a Giant Spider in the Basic Bestiary in the forum's download section. Although there is only one size of the creature, it would be easy to come up with smal- ler or bigger versions,

Does this one work ? http://rpg-creatures.blogspot.com/2011/08/bestiary-i-book-is-here.html

Yes, indeed. As far as I remember it, Dreyse's paper cartridge breech loading rife, Prussia's "secret weapon" which enabled it to win the wars of Germany's reunification, was the first mass produced and reliable breech loading rifle, although several gunsmiths from as many countries had already produced similar weapons in small numbers before that. Prussian riflemen were expected to fire at least 10 shots per minute with this single shot ri- fle, a devastating rate of fire compared to the muzzle loading rifles used by most of their opponents, especially the rather "leisurely" Austrians. Moreover, the Prussian soldier did not have to stand up and expose himself to enemy fire to reload his rifle. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreyse_needle_gun

Single shot breech loading rifles are not much different from single barrel shotguns, the rate of fire should be the same. Looking at the shotgun stats on page 255 of BRP, the shotgun with Ammo 2 (two barrels, probably) has an Attack of "1 or 2" (with "2" firing both barrels at once, probably). Therefore an Attack of 1 for a single shot breech loa- ding rifle seems about right - and a combat round of 12 seconds is indeed long enough to load, aim and fire such a rifle. By the way, breech loading rifles became common only around 1850+ in Europe, so I would be surprised if many of them would have been around in North America before the Civil War.

Well, since it was good enough for the Scipiones, it should be good enough for the characters ... As an alternative, you can always burn the supplement's pages dealing with the one or two wars you dislike the most, and play only the rest.

Since the average INT is 2D6+6 = 13 and BRP's generic Knight has an INT of only 11, do you assume that noble lords intentionally pick followers with below average intelli- gence to knight and train them ? In my view both the Herder's high CHA and the Knight's low INT are caused by the game mechanics, but have nothing at all to do with the internal logic of a setting - in any remotely plausible setting the herders are not a bunch of supermodels who happen to like goats and sheep, and the noble warriors do not all suffer from mild cases of inherited debility.

Yep, there are only the original, not exactly well edited Chaosium version by Kerie Campbell-Robson and the later Mongoose version, but not your monograph.

It is even worse for the poor Primitive (BRP page 365), with his INT 8 he is only one single point more intelligent than a "grotesque blob of slimy protoplasmic matter", the Blob (BRP page 358) with an INT of 7 ...

Again, yes and no. For example, the aquafarmer with the setting's minimum EDU of 12 has a total of 240 skill points for his professional skills. He is expected to put at least 60 of them into his Craft (Aquafarming) skill, which leaves him up to 180 skill points for the more "adven- turing" professional skills like Pilot (Watercraft) or Sonic Spear. The scientist with his minimum EDU of 21 has a total of 420 professional skill points, a lot more than the aquafarmer, but he is expected to put 75 of them into his primary science, at least 60 each into his two secon- dary sciences and another at least 60 into his Research skill, which leaves him with only 165 skill points for any "adventuring" professional skills - usually 15 less than the aquafarmer has. The scientist's most important advantage from his high EDU is his excellent Knowledge roll, he has a very good chance to know at least a little about virtually every plausible field of know- ledge, but the price he pays for this is that his core skills, research and sciences, as well as his other professional skills usually are less often important during an adventure than the pro- fessional skills of other characters with a lower EDU score.

In a way, yes. However, in this setting someone with a doctorate is expected to have a very high skill level in one primary field (e.g. marine biology) and high skill levels in at least two secondary fields (e.g. ecology and genetics), so the advantage is balanced by the fact that the character can spend less skill points on the "adventuring" skills.

Well, Fantasy is a different world ... - for example, according to Chaosium an average Orc (BRP page 346) with its INT of 3D6 / 10 - 11 is normally slightly more intelligent than an average Dragon (BRP page 341) with its INT of 10 and almost as intelligent as the generic Knight (BRP page 363/363) with is INT of 11 ... Tolkien (and others) obviously got it com- pletely wrong, Orcs are clever and Dragons dumb ...

Welcome to all the newcomers.

In German a tryst is called a "Schäferstündchen" (= "shepherd's hour"), borrowed from a French word of the same meaning, because the aristocrats of France's Ancien Regime loved to "play shepherds". I guess that "hot herder" would have been most welcome to take part.

As mentioned, these are minimum scores. An aquafarmer could of course have an EDU of 20+, but a doctor could not have an EDU below 21 - otherwise he would not have passed the test and would not have made it to the colony.

In my setting mentioned above EDU depends on the character's profession. The minimum for all characters is 12, the equivalent of a BA or BSc degree is 15, the equivalent of a MA or MSc de- gree is 18, and the equivalent of a doctorate is 21. Therefore an engineer has a minimum EDU of 18, and a medical doctor has a minimum EDU of 21.