rust

I would have no problem with your rule. It is rather difficult to hit a specific location during a combat, because the opponent usually does his best not to cooperate with such an attempt, and the head is the one hit location a normal opponent tries to protect by any means - to hit it should therefore be very difficult, I think.

Two questions about details of the setting, just to make sure that I did understand it right: Both crossbow and long spear (or any similar kind of polearm) were not used by the natives of the Amber Coast ? This could become important for my Thule setting, because I think these would be the weapons best suited for hunting a walrus, which could make a very difficult prey when only light bows or smaller hand weapons are available. The peasants under the rule of one of the German knightly orders were usually allowed to have weapons and practice with them, because they often served as auxiliaries ? This is also a question for the Thule setting, to determine whether the peasants moved to Thu- le can be expected to have any weapon skills at all, useful both for hunting and perhaps for ho- stile encounters with Thule's natives (or during revolts against the knights ...). Thank you.

As for the game system, I think I will base it upon the modification of the Call of Cthulhu rules from the German Call of Cthulhu supplement "Mittelalter" ("Middle Ages"). Some parts of these rules feel a bit ... clumsy, perhaps, and I will probably have to modify the modifications somewhat and introduce some concepts from BRP, but all in all it should work. I will of course not use the Cthulhu Mythos skill, it will be replaced by a new Knowledge (Thule) skill that includes knowledge about the colony and the land as well as basic survival skill and be- gins at 0 %, improving both through living on Thule (a certain percentage per year, up to a li- mit of perhaps 75 % after some years on Thule) and through experience checks related to ex- ploration and thelike. "Mittelalter" has an interesting way to treat the science skills. It distinguishes between "Quadri- vium" (the four traditional natural, mathematical sciences), "Trivium" (the three traditional lan- guage sciences), "Law", "Medicine" and "Theology". I think I will use this unchanged, it has a nice medieval feel to it.

Thank you very much for these ideas. This could be another one of the points where I will probably have to "Go Hollywood" with the real world history, although it seems that I could use the situation after Hermann von Salza's death in 1239 and make the Landmeister of Prussia instead of the Großmeister of the Order my campaign's chief villain. Since the Papal Inquisition was established after 1230, this could be at least somewhat pseudo-historical. Hmmm ... I originally intended to use no magic in this setting, or at least only a very low magic, but this is a very fascinating idea, another interesting challenge for the player characters - es- pecially if one of the players decides to play a monk or priest, but also for the knightly leaders of the colony. I could at least have both sides, pagans and members of the order, believe that the pagan ma- gic is real, and leave it open whether it really does work, with just enough strange events to keep the players and their characters in doubt. The knights will of course want to suppress the pagan faith, and especially the magic, but at the same time they cannot afford any harsh measures, because they urgently need the peasants to keep their colony going - and some of the pagan magic or traditional knowledge considered as magic might turn out to be most useful (e.g. healing). This would call for slow, prudent missionary work, "re-defining" pagan ideas as Christian ones wherever possible, and so on - a good roleplaying opportunity. Plus, it could create an internal conflict within the colony whenever I have the impression that life has become too easy for the player characters and the threat of a peasant revolt would help to bring the characters back into trouble ...

A campaign usually needs a powerful "villain" as the characters' opponent, and in this case the Teutonic Order will have that role. The Teutonic Order is behind the Papal Inquisition's "interest" in the Pruthenic Order, because it wants to assimilate the smaller order. Of course, the Teutonic Order does not want a few dozen more and potentially unruly knights, what it really wants is the Pruthenic Order's proper- ty, especially the nine large and profitable holdings on the Amber Coast. However, Grand Master Wenzel von Taube of the Pruthenic Order has other plans. He has al- ready begun to sell some of his order's assets to finance his Thule plans, and the ship that will bring the first settlers to Thule will also carry a significant part of the order's treasure to the future colony. And while the Grand Master cannot sell the order's holdings, because they are fiefs, he still can bleed them dry, for example by offering freedom and land to all of the suitable serfs for joining the Thule colony, thus removing the best and most skilled workers from the nine holdings. When the Pope finally decides to dissolve the Pruthenic Order, there will be not much of its pro- perty left on the Amber Coast. The Teutonic Order will not like this. Moreover, it will consider the colony on Thule as part of its own rightful property, "stolen" by the Pruthenic Order. And while the Teutonic Order will hardly be angry enough to spend the resources for an expe- dition to Thule to conquer the colony, the Teutonic Knights will otherwise do whatever they can to make life miserable for the "fugitive thieves and heretics" on Thule ...

Of course. My point was just that when looking for the "real Arthur" or the background of this legendary personality it would be useful to take a look at writers like Beda and Gildas, whose works are somewhat less "tainted" by an attempt to show off a hero and therefore are probably a little closer to the real history behind the legend.

Yes and no. There are also the rather non-heroic accounts written by people like Beda and Gildas.

I do not think so. According to the few existing sources, there was a very successful Celtic mi- litary leader who managed to defeat the Saxons in a series of battles that stopped the Saxon conquest of Britain for many years. Whatever the name of this military leader - probably a ca- valry leader - might have been, Arthur / Artus or not, he doubtless was one of the most impor- tant and influential personalities of that time, able to convince the various regional rulers to support him and his force during the campaign against the Saxons.

Thank you very much for these informations, they solve one of my major remaining problems with this setting. I very much like this one, because it offers a nice opportunity for a different kind of adventure: This would mean to sneak back to the Amber Coast, avoiding the Papal Inquisition and the Teu- tonic Order, finding some suitable and hopefully at least somewhat willing "victims" and ship- ping them off to Thule before anyone can decide to prevent this "kidnapping operation". Plus, it includes the option for future "domestic problems" with women who come to the con- clusion that this is not the life they hoped for, or who discover that they would very much have preferred to become the wife of another one of the knights ...

Thank you very much. I am currently working on some ideas to make life challenging for the player characters. The first one is the Papal Inquisition, which will try to frame the order because of its support for the "heretic" Franciscans, with the aim to enforce a dissolution of the order and the transfer of its property to the Teutonic Order. There is no doubt that the Papal Inquisition and the Teutonic Order will finally succeed, and the characters will have not much time to move as much as possible of the order's followers and property to Thule before the inquisition's hammer falls - a desperate race against time, with on- ly one ship that cannot sail the North Atlantic during the stormy winter months, and with the ad- ditional problem that the colony on Thule will fail if the characters do not manage to move all the required equipment to the island before the order is abolished. The second one is more of a moral problem. The characters and the other knights of the order have made the usual vow of chastity, and chastity is a very nasty disadvantage for people who intend to found a colony - without children the order and its colony on Thule would be rather short lived. Moreover, even if the knights decide to start their version of the Reformation very early and to marry and raise families, they still need women to do so, preferably noble women. It will not be easy to convince a sufficient number of noble born maidens to join a colony of heretics on some remote and uncivilized island, but without such women the colony is bound to fail. Oh, by the way, the order's coat of arms:

I was thinking of the supplement GURPS Celtic Myth: http://www.sjgames.com/gurps/books/celtic/ While I do not know the subject well enough to comment on the content of this supplement, it is written with the usual high quality of GURPS sourcebooks. If you do not know it, I think it could well be worth the money for the PDF (I think the print edition is no longer available).

Yep, these and another series of three books written by another female author (I do not re- member the name), describing the Arthurian legend from the point of view of Gawain. Edit.: Gillian Bradshaw is the author's name.

It seems that it would not be too difficult to turn the various Celtic legends into an RPG supple- ment, GURPS did it with a rather interesting result. In my view the main problem would be to research the real, historical background of such a setting, because both historians and archae- ologists obviously still find it very difficult to agree on any comprehensive picture of the time. So, if one only wants a BRP supplement dealing with the legendary side of the period, a pure "Celtic Heroic Fantasy" supplement, it should not be too difficult to write one, while an at least partially historically accurate one could well take several years of research - especially if the Anglo-Saxons and the people of Cornwall and Brittany should also be covered. And then there are those Picts, with lots of theories and almost no sources ...

Thank you for the offer, but this is not one of my favourite historical periods. In fact, I am more of a science fiction guy, with occasional excursions into the times between the late middle ages and today.

Thank you.

Welcome, Bleddyn. Y Gododdin looks Welsh, but I have no idea what it is and where to put it ?

Yes, they are the model for my Pruthenic Order. I thought that it would be too implausible that all members of an order would accept their Grand Master's plan to relocate to some far away land, so only the "heretic" minority of the knights will go to Thule, while the majority will decide to join the Teutonic Order. However, I had to change history quite a bit for this setting idea, combining events that in our real world took place in different centuries, for example the Portuguese exploration of the North Atlantic, the end of the Norse settlements on Greenland (the model for my Thule) and the con- flict between the Franciscan Spirituals and the church require some "historical handwaving" to bring them together - with this setting I am closer to "Hollywood History" than usual, and I see it more as low fantasy than as historical. This will become even more obvious later in the campaign, because I intend to borrow heavily from Puck's supplement The Green for the natives of the "Forest Coast" (my equivalent for La- brador), where the settlers on Thule will have to go to aquire the wood that does not grow on Thule and would be too expensive to import from Norway or the British Isles. While I could try to research the Innu who actually inhabited Labrador at the time, there are only extremely few reliable informations on them, so I think I can just as well use some of Puck's well designed fantasy tribes, minus their magic (almost no magic in this setting). Well, and the roles Denmark and Norway and the Hanse will have in my setting will also be ra- ther unhistorical, I think. I doubt that the Danes and / or Norwegians would have allowed some- one else to settle on Thule / Greenland, and the Hanse would probably not have agreed to es- tablish a trade route from Bergen to Thule / Greenland (something the characters could achieve with some clever trading and diplomacy, if the players think of it). Thank you for the link.

It depends a lot on how advantages and disadvantages are handled by the system, they do not automatically lead to min/maxing or - worst case - munchkinism. One example could be Hollow Earth Expedition, where each character can choose one advanta- ge, one disadvantage and one resource. This helps to make characters different, to give them some individuality, but since a character can (normally) only have one of each kind, and they have no point values or thelike, there is a strict limit for min/maxing. Even with systems like GURPS with its fat catalogue of advantages and disadvantages it basical- ly depends on the players (I am tempted to write "their maturity" ...) whether the system is a way to create exactly the plausible, unique character of a player's character concept or some monster based solely on an opportunistic use of the game mechanics. In the end advantages, disadvantages, feats and all that are just tools, and like all tools they can be misused - but this misuse is not a problem of the tools, only of the users.

I think the best way to go would be to contact Chaosium and ask them whether they would have any problem with your project.

Over the last few months I have been working on a series of "alternate earth island settings", experimenting with different approaches to the same basic idea, but without the result I was hoping for. Last week we fled to Crete for a few days to get out of the rain (we had the worst May in recorded history, and we have a lot of recorded history here ...), and there I described my problem with the settings to my lady, and also mentioned Crusaders of the Amber Coast as a fine alternative to my own settings. Somehow the settings got mixed up, and at the end we had outlined yet another one of those island settings ... This one starts with a small fictional knightly order, the Pruthenic Order, somewhere on the Bal- tic Coast. The order is in serious trouble, under pressure both from the much bigger and po- werful Teutonic Order, which wants to take over the order's few holdings, and from the church, because the order has connections to the Franciscan Spirituals, recently condemned as heretics by the Pope and now hunted by the inquisition. It seems highly unlikely that the order will be able to survive the next few years on the Amber Coast. Grand Master Wenzel von Taube, now a desperate man, therefore developed a desperate plan: The Pruthenic Order needs a sanctuary, its own land as far and as safe from the hostile powers as possible, and it has to be possible to aquire and hold this land with the order's very limited manpower and financial means. After some research, Wenzel von Taube has come to the con- clusion that the best place to relocate the order to would be Thule in the far north. Thule is a big island in the far west, beyond Iceland. It once was settled by Norsemen from Nor- way, but their settlements failed for unknown reasons, and the land is now uninhabited again (except for some natives, of course ...). A Portuguese ship visited the coast of Thule and the abandoned settlements a few decades ago, and the Grand Master managed to buy a copy of the rutter of that ship's pilot. The Grand Master now plans to send the order's only seagoing ship, the cog "Wolf von Tukums" under the command of Captain Gottfried von Ascheberg and a Portuguese pilot hired for this vo- yage to help with the Portuguese rutter, via Bergen and Iceland to Thule to explore the sea rou- te and to find out whether the old Norse settlements really are abandoned and whether it would be possible to found a colony of the order there. If so, Wenzel von Taube intends to send some knights of the order, a Franciscan priest, some craftsmen and a few dozen commoners from the order's Baltic holdings to Thule during the fol- lowing year, with the task to establish a base that can serve as the core of the order's future sanctuary colony. The order would then send more of its members, the Franciscan Spirituals and the commoners of its holdings to Thule each year. This campaign would have three "locations", the order's lands on the Amber Coast, the new co- lony on the west coast of Thule, and the sea route via Bergen and Iceland in between. The Am- ber Coast would be perfect for politics and intrigue (Teutonic Order, Papal Inquisition ...), the Thule colony for exploration and thelike (think natives and polar bears ...), and the sea route for adventures like combat against pirates, sea trade and thelike. The characters would be knights of the order. They would take part in the first sea voyage to Thule to protect the ship, explore the coast of Thule and report to the Grand Master, and they would then be sent to Thule the next year to help to establish and organize the first settlement. The system for this campaign would be my usual "BRP-enriched Call of Cthulhu", with some ad- ditional material (especially seafaring rules, price lists, etc.) from Harnmaster and probably Ru- nequest II Empires as "metagame rules" for the development of the colony on Thule. Well, that's it for the moment ...

I have to admit that I am very surprised. On the other hand, this is of course ... ;t)

Alephtar Games has a tendency to make my roleplaying life more and more complicated, be- cause first Rome and now the Crusaders of the Amber Coast are so good that I have to write settings using that excellent material ...

A good idea, but for this setting it would be "overkill" to introduce more than one or two such species, the island is simply too small to keep this plausible.

In this case it would be an extremely polite description. The plot starts with a Persian king adopting a street urchin and making him his heir in order to prevent his two sons from fighting each other over the right to become king, and from then on it becomes more and more implausible, with daggers enabling people to travel back in time, ma- gical sandstorms that can destroy the world and similar stuff.

I do not know the video game, but the film has nothing at all to do with the real world history.