rust

With that being said...some backworld colonies can see it as a religious or mystical thing, but in truth it is just science. Thoughts?

You could take a look at how psionics and religion are treated in the Babylon 5 universe, in my

view this approach is far more interesting and plausible as the ones used in Star Trek and Star

Wars: Different people of different societies hold different views, there is no monolithic picture,

only as much diversity as we have here in our world.

Most has already been said.

What I would like to add is that a "bottom up" approach to the design of your setting may work

better than a "top down" approach. Start small, with only those elements you want to include

that do fit together well and keep the setting consistent and free of contradictions.

Then expand the setting from there, adding other elements over time, when and where they

can be introduced without creating implausibilities or other problems. This way the setting will

be growing in a more organic way, and you can avoid many of the difficulties that are part of

an attempt to create the "big picture" in one go, especially if the various elements of that big

picture are as diverse as you intend them to be.

You are aware that to change the combat system this way also requires a new system for first aid,

medicine, healing spells, healing potions and all that ?

Hi, im Alex ...

Welcome to the forum, Alex.

Sounds historically reasonable to me.

Well, at least it does not seem completely impossible, I hope.

There is the "witchhunt problem", but from what I have found this would not necessarily be the

case (Wikipedia):

The Council of Paderborn in 785 explicitly outlawed the very belief in witches, and Charlemag-

ne later confirmed the law. The Council of Frankfurt in 794, called by Charlemagne, was also

very explicit in condemning "the persecution of alleged witches and wizards", calling the belief

in witchcraft "superstitious", and ordering the death penalty for those who presume to burn

witches.

Nonetheless, Pope John XXII formalized the persecution of witchcraft in 1320 when he autho-

rized the Inquisition to prosecute sorcerors.

So, in 1240 people did not have to believe in witches and the necessity to destroy them, although

many doubtless did. They could at least pretend to consider witchcraft as superstitious nonsen-

se that does no harm, except to the poor silly pagans who did not know better - and to anger

them by persecuting their "witches" would not be worth the trouble and not help to turn them

into Christians ...

GURPS Swashbucklers has some nice information for this time period. It might be worth picking up.

Thank you for the tip, I have it.

After reading BRP Witchcraft, I have now added "Ragana" ("baltic witch") to the setting's list of

professions.

It seems this profession fits my idea of "subtle magic" quite well, and the "Old Religion" back-

ground from the supplement does also. Moreover, this type of "wise woman" could serve as

the colony's accepted healer and midwife, tolerated even by the Christian knights and priests

because there is no one else with comparable knowledge and skills on Thule. The Christians

would just pretend to look the other way when the Ragana performs pagan rituals at one of

the few small stands of trees near the settlement, both because she is most useful for the en-

tire colony and to avoid a serious conflict with the still at least partially pagan Baltic settlers.

Thank you very much for the links, Agentorange and Trifletraxor.

You use a harpoon to kill walruses, just as Paolo said.

Thank you very much for the information.

It seems I will have to re-arrange some adventures and to put the encounter with the

natives of Thule first, because the knights and peasants of the colony probably have no

idea of harpoons, and will need to learn the concept from the natives.

I just downloaded BRP Witchcraft, looking for some ideas for my Thule setting, and got more

than I had hoped for - your supplement will help me to add a lot more colour and detail to the

setting, and the Old Religion approach fits perfectly well.

Thank you very much.

I found this at Noble knight games, I have no idea if it's of any use to you but thought you might be interested.

Thank you very much, it is definitely worth a closer look.

The monastic life may not be an especially attractive option for PCs, but the missionary aspect, especially in a wild and hostile environment with pagan druidic types opposing you, might lend itself to a good adventure or two.

It seems to me that the monks - perhaps also the less often mentioned nuns - of the Celtic tra-

dition had a lot more freedom to move around and to make their own decisions than the monks

and nuns of the Roman tradition, so I could well imagine a monk or nun as a player character

- after all, someone has to deal in a professional way with demons, devils and all that other na-

sty stuff.

I confess that in my head I think of this setting not so much as "Age of Arthur" but as "Time of Taliesin".

The same with me, which is why in my list above Taliesin is in bold letters, and Arthur is not.

My birthday is today (20th)

Happy Birthday, and thank you for a lot of very good material.

The climate was warmer than it is today - look at the Medieval Warm Period for more information. Thule might not be as warm and hospitable as, say, Europe, but you could grow crops around the coast, for some of the year at least. Livestock would survive there, too, especially hardy northern types.

Sure, it wouldn't support the whole community, but there again neither would hunting.

Indeed, some farming should be possible, although a Norwegian source from the 13th century

reports that only the richest settlers could afford to grow crops, while most of the Greenlanders

did not even know what bread was (an obvious exaggeration, because archaeologists found a

number of handmills).

As for hunting, the archaeologists claim that about 60 % of the meat used by the Greenlanders

came from hunting (45 % seal, 10 % caribou, 5 % other animals) and 40 % from herding. So,

while hunting surely was not the only source of food, it seems to have been a very important

one.

But my real interest in hunting is of course that it is suitable for a number of small adventures,

both for the hunting itself and for the events that can be connected with it (e.g. encounters with

natives, discoveries of resources, etc.), while farming, fishing and herding are much less play-

able.

Bookkeeping Day ...

The Thule colony will need about five years to become able to sustain itself, and until then the

order will have paid approximately 70,000 d (silver pennies) for livestock, equipment, materials,

provisions and so on. This does not include wages, because knights of the order have that vow

of poverty and do not get paid, but a nice sum put aside for ... ah ... non-public financial contri-

butions to the personal economies of certain influential officials.

These 70,000 d are just the basic expected expenses, whatever the characters or NPCs decide

to buy beyond that will have to be added. There is some money left for such additional purcha-

ses, the order will still have about 35,000 d in precious metals and gems after the basics have

been paid for. This may seem a lot of money, but in fact it is approximately 140 d per colonist,

while a horse costs 360 d (without sea transport) and a sword 500 d.

The nice part is, when the Teutonic Order takes over the order's property in 1246, they will dis-

cover that the order's chests are empty and its holdings have lost everything that could be use-

ful on Thule and could be transported there - including craftsmen and the most skilled married

peasants.

While this will enable the Thule colony to sustain itself, the Teutonic Order will have to invest a

lot of money to rebuild its new holdings to the point where they will again create any profit. I

suspect this will be sufficient to turn the Teutonic Order into the Thule colony's worst enemy on

the continent, with good opportunities for sideline adventures whenever the characters visit Eu-

rope for diplomacy or trade.

Mind you it gives the colonists a cracking good reason to build their own ship and sail back in the other direction......

Unfortunately it will take quite a while before I will see what the characters will come up with

to deal with the problem. The campaign will not start before late summer, and with a first ad-

venture in the game year 1240 AD and about two adventures per game year the loss of the

ship in the game year 1249 AD is still distant future ...

Bad luck! This was sounding like a great game -- too bad the colony died. What are you going to do for your next campaign?

You know, there is this small tribe of primitive arctic hunters the last surviving women among

the colonists fled to and married into, and ...

Well, at least the other background event rolls were a little more kind to the characters.

In 1244 the characters will get an opportunity to solve the mystery of the disappeared Norse

settlers during a voyage to the Forest Coast, where a little successful diplomacy could convin-

ce some of the native Naskapi to lead the characters to the ruins of the last Norse settlement.

The Pope will dissolve the Pruthenic Order in 1246 and give all of its remaining property to the

Teutonic Order, but Grand Master Wenzel von Taube and his few remaining followers will es-

cape with the rest of the order's treasure to Norway and wait for the colony's ship there, while

the majority of the order's knights will decide to stay in Prussia and become Teutonic Knights.

Otherwise nothing spectacular, only minor events - no plague, no invasion, no natural desaster.

And if the characters manage to convice the King of Norway or the Hanseatic League in 1246 to

sign a treaty with the colony and to send one trade ship per year from Bergen via Iceland to

Thule, the loss of the colony's ship in 1249 will at least become no "total colony kill".

... that means I have to look all of them up. LOL

Ah, I am a most cruel taskmaster ...

Just add the people you want to include, and delete the ones you do not want.

Can you give me more input for your reason for wanting BRP Skills.

I think familiarity could be a reason. Most of the people who will use the supplement will know BRP, only few

of them will know Stormbringer. Those who do not know Stormbringer would have to "translate" the skills

into their BRP equivalents, which is some effort and can be confusing if one does not know the skill defini-

tions of Stormbringer: Is Leadership the same as Command, which Characteristic does it use, what is the

Base Chance ... ?

The way I see hunting in a game is that it's either important enough to play out fully, using the whole range of spotting, tracking, hiding and shooting (or spearing) activities including miniatures and tree models, or it doesn't really matter to the game and just becomes an abstract background event.

This is my usual approach, too.

However, on Thule farming is hardly possible because of the climate, so herding, fishing and

hunting remain as the only reliable sources of food (and trade goods) and the most important

everyday activities of the colonists.

Therefore I would like to make it an important part of the characters' activities, too, and since

herding and fishing do not offer that many adventuring opportunities, and the characters will be

among the few "professional weapon users" of the colony, it will be hunting for them.

I intend to start with some detailed hunting expeditions, allowing the characters to develop the

new hunting methods required to hunt the local animals, then to move to the simplified system

for a while, and finally to treat hunting as a background event once the characters have deve-

loped some routine.

Never really had to use it, but you could make it into a roll (either a new skill or based on an average of related skills, or maybe just an Idea roll), with the degree of success determining how much game is bagged. A fumble means nothing, or maybe an injury or other mishap; a failure means nothing or not enough to make up for the effort; a success means enough to keep the group fed or make a profit on hides/ivory/etc.; a special means more than enough - they could skip the next hunt if they wished, or treat the excess as profit; and a critical means something unusual - they managed to bag a large quantity of meat (and will be busy butchering and preserving for a while) or a rare and valuable beast (maybe they even captured it alive, if the intent is to sell it rather than eat it).

Thank you very much for a good idea.

Together with notes on terrain, region and season to modify the difficulty and give an idea of

what can be hunted, this is just the simplified system I need: The players still have to make de-

cisions for their characters, and there is the opportunity for events to make things a bit more

interesting ("You have overhunted that part of the coast, the seals have moved ..."), but the ac-

tual hunting does not take much time, just a single die roll.

Oops, while rolling for the background events of the colony my dice just sank the colony's only

seagoing ship, killing eleven of the sailors, just nine years after the colony was founded.

I hope the characters have managed to convince someone to establish a sea route to Thule un-

til then, because otherwise the colony will have a serious problem: To get the wood required

to build a new ship, they would need a ship for a woodcutting trip to the Forest Coast ...

On the other hand, having the colonists waiting and hoping for someone to visit and help them

could make for an interesting situation, with the stores of vital imports shrinking, tensions con-

cerning the distribution of what is left rising, and all that.

Excommunication is no big deal.

It depends a lot on the stability of a realm and the loyalty of a ruler's subjects. For Henry IV the

excommunication proved to be a desaster, it ripped apart his realm in revolt and forced him to

go to Canossa and beg on his knees for the Pope's mercy - probably the most humiliating situa-

tion any of the emperors ever suffered.

For a Grand Master of a knightly order an excommunication could damage the religious base of

his position and authority, and with a newly founded colony inhabited by people of different cul-

tures the stability of his realm and the loyalty of his subjects are somewhat uncertain.

Of course, he could take the risk, but I think he would prefer to avoid any additional trouble with

an organization as powerful as the church while the colony is still in its early years, and would

therefore take the other path and declare himself a princely ruler.

I would think in this situation, the Grand Master might need a little more legitimacy. So, he might declare himself Bishop.

It would be an option, although a dangerous one, because the Grand Master is not even a

priest, and at this time in history the Popes had already begun their conflict with the world-

ly powers to gain the sole right to invest bishops.

A layman declaring himself bishop could be a way to make the Pope and all of his followers

very, very angry and to become excommunicated very quickly, and the subjects of an excom-

municated ruler do no longer have to obey him, even deposing and killing him outright would

be considered a very minor sin by the Pope's church.

With this background, I think declaring himself a Prince would be less dangerous, especially

if he then tries to become a vassal of some far away king, for example that of Norway, who

would be pleased to have some more subjects and get a little tribute each year, but who does

not have the means to meddle in the affairs of the colony.