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Thank you all very much, a lot of excellent ideas. I will do that, it should not be difficult to find something by, for example, some German noble visiting Paris. In fact, I think there is even something in Grimmelshausen's novel Simplicissimus from and about the time of the Thirty Years War. A good point, the sewers could indeed become important. Thank you very much for this overview. This is something I did not think of, but you are of course right. Taverns were meeting places of political "factions", and therefore had a political bent. A very good idea, thank you for it. As for the system, I am not yet sure whether I will use Flashing Blades or convert it to either BRP or Hollow Earth Expedition - the latter would be easier, and the setting is similar enough to pulp to use that system. On the other hand, Flashing Blades has so many excellent ideas that might get lost in a conversion ... I think I will complete a "generic" version of the setting and a few very short adventures and then test which system covers the intended "feel" of the setting best.

I am currently designing a 17th century French city for a swashbuckling setting based upon the Flashing Blades RPG by Fantasy Games Unlimited. Since this city will be the focus of the setting, I would like to describe it in some detail, including the important buildings (city hall, cathedral, guards barracks, etc.), the important organizations (church, guilds, etc.) and the influential personalities, as well as the villages of the surrounding area ruled by the city. In short, it will be a typical roleplaying game city description. However, it may well be that this kind of description could be improved, and therefore I would very much like to know whether there are any elements of such descriptions that normally tend to be neglected. In other words: Is there anything you usually miss in such descriptions, and which I should in- clude in my little project ? Thank you.

Just like the normal "copy & paste" with a PDF: I open the PDF with Adobe Reader, mark the entire page with the mouse and click on "Copy", then open Open Office and click on "Paste", and there it is, as a normal Open Office text I can edit. However, as mentioned, tables and thelike lose the formatting and have to be re-formatted afterwards - unless one is as lazy as I am, and just cuts them out with the Snipping Tool as pictures and inserts them into the text after altering them with Paint.NET if necessary.

When I want to edit something published as a PDF, I usually just copy it with Open Office and can then work with it as I please. The only problem are tables and thelike, which have to be re-formatted, but it is usually still less effort than working from scratch.

Yep, based on real world data my choice for "everyday adventuring" and duels would most pro- bably be a rapier (fast, precise, good reach) and a main-gauche (for parrying and disarming).

Most of the players use Open Office to create the character sheets, and sometimes Paint.NET to "spice them up" with backgrounds, illustrations and thelike. They use different fonts for their character sheets, but our "standard" for the "official" material for our settings and campaigns is Georgia.

Many shields could be carried on one's back, for transport as well as protection during a hasty retreat - some crossbowmen even used to turn around during reloading, with the shield on the back towards the enemy to protect them from missiles while reloading. However, to keep the shield on the back during a melee would require to have another weapon for the off hand, because otherwise one would be at a serious disadvantage against an oppo- nent with two weapons (e.g. sword and shield), and it would have to be more than a dagger, because such a small weapon could not parry a sword or a shield. This leads to a weight problem. More than a few battles were lost because the troops of one side arrived at the battlefield exhausted because of their heavy gear (armour, weapons, etc.). So, if one had to carry a shield because of the enemy archers or crossbowmen, one usually used it as the secondary weapon in combat, instead of wasting energy by carrying yet another weapon. And if one had to use it, it was a good idea to have some skill with it ... Edit.: This is an illustration of a crossbowman with a shield on his back. For reloading he would turn around and kneel down, fully protected against enemy missiles by the shield.

There are other advantages of a shield than just the protection against missile fire. In a single combat or a melee the shield is a secondary weapon (that's why real world shields had shield spikes and thelike), mostly used to unbalance an opponent and force him into a de- fensive stance or into retreat. In a formation combat the shield is part of an interlocking shield wall, a kind of mobile fortifica- tion, that is very difficult to break. Ancient armies, for example the Roman legions, used diffe- rent shield wall formations for devastating effect. A minor version of this is the co-operation of two fighters, where one concentrates on the use of the shield to protect both of them, while the other concentrates on his weapon to do dama- ge. Such teamwork can give an important adventage over opponents who do not co-operate with each other. The problem is how to model this realistically. I think that BRP covers the the protection against missiles well and the use as a secondary weapon at least somewhat, but not really the co-ope- ration of fighters and the shield wall.

Think of those pesky archers and crossbowmen. A halberd is a very nice weapon, but not really a good protection against arrows and crossbow bolts. There are situations where a shield comes handy, for example when trying to get close to an enemy position that is de- fended by archers, like a castle or something similar.

From The Green: "THE GREEN is copyright © 2009 as a whole by Chaosium Inc. The text is copyright © 2009 by Scott Heiney, all rights reserved." ... whatever that does mean.

Thank you.

When trying to use the link to Alephtar Games on the Links page I am asked for a keyword and then get an Access Denied message. I know that Alephtar Games is working on its website, but this seems strange - or did I miss something ? Edit.: The problem has disappeared now.

Well, since Chaosium does not publish character sheets in German, and since I insist that I am responsible for the setting only while the players are responsible for their characters, they had no choice but to design their own character sheets.

Well, since the players are the ones who have to like their character sheets and to work with them, I usually leave it to the players to design whatever they want. I only give them the ne- cessary informations about the campaign, and they usually come up with something nice crea- ted with, for example, Open Office and Paint Net.

I will definitely not use anything with "Savage" in it ...

Meanwhile I have re-written the setting for the late 1920s / early 1930s, and it really looks much more interesting and playable now - without modern technology and modern politics the situation in the remote Himalaya region seems a lot more challenging. While waiting for Tian Xia, I will make a little experiment. Since the setting is currently writ- ten in a "generic" way, without any game stats, and since it is now right in the middle of the Pulp Era, I will try to use it for a short campaign with the Hollow Earth Expedition RPG, a Pulp Genre game that has been recommended to me. The activities of the characters of this short campaign could then become a part of the back- ground events of the BRP campaign started once Tian Xia has been published, and I hope that they will also allow me to test and improve the setting before the start of the BRP campaign.

Rest assured I am eagerly waiting for it. There should be no problem, the setting does hardly change much between 1911 and 1920 (or even 1940). While some new technologies are invented and introduced in the "West", it takes some time before they appear in British India, and even longer before they make it to a remote mountain kingdom in the Himalaya. The one major difference I see are airplanes, there may well be something like a DH-4 on an airfield near Bhonta's capital to make travelling to and from India easier for the British political agent or members of the royal family of Bhonta, perhaps even for a first aerial photographic survey of the small nation (a nice way to discover an adventure location). Otherwise the technology, and therefore the culture and the skills and all that, seem unlikely to be significantly different from those of several decades before.

I had put the setting aside for a while, and when I took a close look at it yesterday, it turned out to be the most boring setting I have written so far - an epic fail. Meanwhile I have decided to rewrite almost all of it, and to move it from the present to either the classical Cthulhu era or the Pulp era, and to put the focus on the early contacts between the technological, "modern" Western culture and the late medieval "religious" culture of the Bhoti, the inhabitants of the remote mountain kingdom that has now been renamed as Bhonta. With an isolationist Tibet, an ongoing civil war and a Japanese invasion in China, uprisings in India and the Great Powers preparing for war in East Asia the history of the region and the po- tential adventure hooks look a lot more promising than in a modern setting, and the limited in- formations about the region and the reduced "power" of the available technology could also make it more interesting. A somewhat unexpected problem is the game system. I am not yet sure what exactly the prob- lem is, but the Call of Cthulhu system's skills somehow do not fit the "feeling" of the intended campaign, and my attempts to make BRP do what I imagine also do not look well. I suspect the difficulties are caused by the cultural and technological differences between the "Westerners" and the Bhoti, which would almost require different skill sets and subsystems for the two cultures, or otherwise create a kind of "skill creep" with a frighteningly long list of dif- ferent skills from both cultures. While tinkering with this I have also made a sketch for a new map of Bhonta, one that looks a bit more interesting (well, at least to me):

I think this is how language works. Take the "genre Bird" and ask people what it means to them. Over here the majority describe a creature that looks suspiciously like a sparrow. If you want them to think of something more heroic, like a falcon or eagle, you have to use the "sub-genre Bird of Prey".

I think this article could be quite interesting, it attempts to define the borders between the va- rious science fiction sub-genres: http://www.kheper.net/topics/scifi/grading.html

We may well mean different debates, the one I was thinking of may well have been a "local" one that happened here in Germany only. The most prominent contributors probably were Alpers, Fuchs and Hahn: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Joachim_Alpers http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_M._Hahn The leading academic among them was Werner Fuchs, who is not mentioned in the English Wikipedia.

Thank you, this is very good news.

I think it was a "genre debate", because the people involved in it attempted to categorize scien- ce fiction into distinct genres (e.g. "Imperialist SF" versus "Progressive SF" and thelike). These genres were based upon ideological / political considerations, not on those of scientific accura- cy (like "Hard SF" and "Soft SF"), but in my view they still were attempts to define genres. However, this was of course more or less a fringe debate, and it only became somewhat well known over here because it was the only theoretical debate about science fiction at this time at all. Science Fiction otherwise was still considered as "bad literature", and established academic figures would have seriously endangered their careers by writing about it.

Does this mean physical versions of Alephtar Games books without having to pay the high US postage ?

This is only possible if you and the other person(s) have agreed upon exactly the same terminology, and then it does not matter much whether you use an agreed upon genre name ("hard sf") or any other word ("brrblmuth") to get the idea across.