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Atgxtg

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Everything posted by Atgxtg

  1. Yes, you did, and deserve full credit for it. Please take a bow. Indeed. Especially when most old RPG designers used the aforementioned inaccurate interpretations for their armor types. Even today RPGs come out that use terms like "ringmail" "chainmail" and "platemail", as those are the terms they are familiar with. "Ring armor" probably didn't exist, "chainmail" is just mail, and "Platemail" could be just plate armor (i.e. what we think of knights wearing),, plated mail (a form of mail armor with small pieces of plate attached, but usually of lower quality that standard 4-in-1 mail so it's probably a wash), or "Plate & Mail" (a combination armor consisting of mail with various bits upgraded to or overlapped with plate, that something of a transtional armor as smiths figured out how to make full plate). While we're on the topic "studded leather" probably didn't exist either, but instead was a misinterpretation of brigadine (which has bits of plate riveted to layers of cloth or leather). RQ's "Bezainted" armor is also in a grey area but it seems there is some evidence to support it's existence, plus flat coin-like disks would be more effective than studs.
  2. Until recently the two terms meant different things in English. Some time back when scholars looked into a classified armor, they made some assumptions that later were suspect. One of which was interpreting drawings of rings in period artwork as rings of metal atttached to a leather or cloth backing. Hence the term "ring armor". The same scholars also tended to use the term mail with every sort of armor, hence terms like ring mail, plate mail, and chain mail, which are so common in RPGs. Modern scholars doubt ring armor ever existed, and instead believe the artwork is actually representative of mail armor. It only rather recently in English speaking countries that we've started using mail (or maille) correctly to refer exclusively to what most people know as "chain mail".
  3. Yes, in Glorantha. ON some other world it might be different. They could have hollow, but somehow very strong bones (perhaps some sort of honeycomb structure?) and be extremely muscular, like birds.But a scientific explanation doesn't really work in Glorantha where everything is magical in some way, and Storm Lords can fly with no scientific basis whatsoever. Besides. Hypogriff and similar beasts seem to be able to just leap into the air and fly rather than build up speed to take off.
  4. That's probably how it works in Glorantha. Hippogriffs have some sort of air rune association that lets them fly, rather than generating lift to overcome the force of gravity (does gravity even exist in Gloantha?).I think it has to work that way. With what I know of aircraft and horses, I doubt a hippogriff could run fast enough for it's wings to provide enough lift to make it airborne, plus I doubt the wings could take the wingloading (around 125kg per wing) if it could. So probably magic is providing most of the lift.
  5. No, not really. It sort of depends on the game I'm running and can vary from campaign to campaign. For instance in Pendragon I noted the advantages spears should get, but ignored them to keep the game focused around knights. Otherwise units of warbowmen screened by pikemen would dominate the battlefield within a decade. When running the James Bond RPG, I try to model the reality of the books and films, especially the early films, something that the game rules are already designed to do. If running Superworld I'd probably try for the feel of four color comics. But it all comes down to what I want for a given campaign. What might work for one campaign, might not work in another, even if both are set in the same time and place. A modern day military campaign, modern day horror campaign, and modern day superhero campaign could all be set in the same time and place, but play very differently and have different themes and tone. Of course a GM can use thing in multiple ways, too. For instance a good way to make a horror campaign more scary is to start off running it like it's not a horror game, but some other type of game. That way the horror stuff has more impact. And vice versa. One of the biggest "out of left field" moments in a Call of Cthulhu campaign I played in was when the Keeper ran was was essentially a Gangster adventure. He we were looking for Mythos nasties, evil cultist, etc. and we were completely blided by (and unprepared for) a simple group of mobsters.
  6. Nothing funny about that. The idea of a RPG is that it lets us play in the sorts of stories we enjoy, and models the setting of those stories. If someone wants to play in a cinematic setting of a particular movie, then they will want rules that help to model that setting.
  7. It probably depends on how strong the given leader's supporters are composed to any rivals, how fast it would take to move troops (and spread the word), the advantages of being in charge, how much of an impact the leader has on the people (i.e. does it make any different to someone 1000 light years away what goes on at the capital?), as well as what else is going on to distract people or make them pay attention to their leader (famines, wars, economic boom, etc.) Just look at the Roman Empire. At times there were a string of coups, it's just that the winners always kept the same trappings of power so that Empire seemed to go on the same, just with a different leader, multiple claimants at the same time, etc. And the late Roman republic might have been ever worse, as anybody who could raise and army could take over the Republic to some extent. But also per the Romans, whoever is in charge probably would want things to look better and more stable than they really are. You might even have some people revising history to remove certian rulers who were undesirable for some reason. So you could wind up with only ten Emperors in a timeline where they were really fifty!
  8. No the four rolls do not. In KAP you currently get ONE roll of 1d6+1 points (comparable to 10-35% points in RQ) to improve existing skills, providing you keep within the cap of 15 (75%), or one point (5%) increase to a skill in the 15-19 (75-95%) range. However back when KAP was being published by Green Knight they altered training and practice to give three rolls (not four) but they had to go to different skills. Just pointing out the source. I don't see anything wrong with borrowing good ideas from other games, especially games from the same people. Many good RPG ideas came from the mind of Greg Stafford.
  9. I think they borrowed that from Pendragon. Pendragon has a "Winter Phase" where people mostly stay a home, and can get training and practice in some skills. RQG's pacing is like Pendragon's only with one adventure per season instead of per year.
  10. The old (RQ2) solution was to have weapon skills cross over to related weapons at half ability. So someone who knew how to use an ax at 80%, could use a mace at 40%, instead of the starting percentage, and so forth.
  11. Okay. THe PCs were agents sent to Novaya Zemlya to make contact with a Russian major who crashed there during a storm after alerting MI6 that something was going on and he had to come in right away. The PCs got dropped on on the iland and reached the crashed site, where the airplane was half buried in a ravine. One of the PCs climbed down to the door and got inside, only to find said polar bear already inside, siffing around the cockpit, where the body of the Russian Major was. The player hoped to get the bear to chase him outside the airplane, and literally poked the bear before jumping out the door to grab onto the rope he climbed down on. Meanwhile, one of the other PCs went around to the opposite site of the airplane and found the cargo door came open during the crash (which was how the bear got inside). Sadly for the bear, one of the agents shot it in order to get access to the (unknown to them) dead Major. LOL! Sounds like a classic B monster movie. Ursula, Terror of the North. The Hunters caught more than they bargained for. Un-bearable carnage, un-bearable tradegy, un-bearable puns.
  12. Sort of/not really. What I mean by that is styles do chance and every advances at an accelerated rate in Pendragon, so sort of. On the other hand, it would take a lot of time and resources to build or rebuild a castle, fort, or cathedral, and little incentive to do so with a function design other than to keep up with the latest styles, so probably not. What I expect happens in that different areas probably upgrade in fits and spurts depending upon the situation and economics. If a lord does well in battle, harvest or whatever, he might put some of his extra income to updating buildings and fortifications. When a lord has to rebuild stuff that got damaged in siege or raid, he probably replaces it with newer stronger designs. So the land is probably a Hodge Podge of styles and eras, being more uniform or either extremes of the income scale. THe ultra rich can afford the latest and greatest, while the poor have a hard enough time just maintaining what they already have. I think everything sort of radiates out from Arthur. The closer you are to one of his favorite cities (Camelot, Caerlon, etc.) the richer and more advanced you'll tend to be. The further away you are, the more historically accurate you'll be - and this reaches out further than Logres. You can get a feel for this by looking at the gear knights have. While the overall tech advances, a knight in Norman mail riding a charger wouldn't be all that out of place in the 550s.
  13. It's nice for explain the weird "customs" and behaviors seen in some of the Quests, but that's just one specialized aspect of the Arthurian setting. Most of the Quests turn out to by some sort of symbolic representation of some spiritual concept or virtue, and are by the nature somewhat surreal- even to the knightly heroes of the story -most those adventures tend to dip into Faerie a bit.
  14. Kinda. Most sceanios tend to have a short synopsis of the adventure that functions similarly to a outline. Mostly individualized, although as adventures are a form of story telling, each typically has themese common to all stories, such as a introduction and ending. But since not all stories are the same, all outlines cannot be. If fact, I'd say that if two adventures had the same outline they'd pretty much be the same adventure. That said, certian styles and layouts were common to several adventures written for a particular game during a particula era. RQ2 stuff has it's own "flavor", as does early Stormbinger and CoC. Yes, some BRP games use one or more story formats at times, and do reuse the same story ideas and swap out different elements to keep it fresh.Prince Valiant in particular probably comes the closes to having a standardized outline, followed by Pendragon, but in both cases the advture outlines are really just frameworks that a GM can start with to help create their own adventures, and both play upon common tropes of their setting: damosel in distress; challenge knight at a bridge; a evil knight who mistreats his serfs; a monster terrifying the land; the quest. Very different for each game and setting. Pendragon, for instance, is very different form CoC, in almost every aspect. Mechanically it wouldn't be hard to cross pollinate stuff from one RPG to the other, as all BRP games share many common characteristics, (although Pendragon uses very different game mechanics that most other versions of BRP), but thematically CoC would radically alter (some would say ruin) Pendragon.
  15. For CoC I could see something like an eight pointed start of Chaos with every option pointing to death. Maybe Ian should run a campaign where all the PCs start off dead and are trying to become alive. Just to break up the monotony. BTW, is the flowchart what the designed & intented path of the story should be, or should it include all the detours, sidetracks and dead ends the PCs add to the adventure? For instance I recently had a player who decided to play tag with a polar bear. That wasn't something I had planned on when I wrote the adventure.
  16. The introduction on pages 7-8 of the KAP 5.2 core rulebook comes close. With a little cutting & pasting it could easily fit onto one page. Of course, that just gives a rough overview, but that can't be helped.
  17. Yes you can. To what depth depends upon your prefernces and how much more detail you want to add to combat. I watched Lindybeige's video on Spear vs. Sword and wondered how to model it in Pendragon (a variant of BRP), and figured out that applying the +5/-5 reflexive modifier (or even a +10/-10, and Pendragon uses D20s not D100s) , combined with another modifier for a shield wall, would come pretty close and still remain simple. In the end I didn't implement the idea because, although it may be more realistic, it isn't more Arthurian, and would lessen the importance of knights. If I were running in a different setting, I might have done it. I've also allowed long weapons to attack from the second rank, leading to situations where someone can get double or triple teamed yet only attack one of those people. Most of that could port over to BRP fairly painlessly. In fact, RQ2/3 had Phalanx rules that could help as far as the overlapping shield coverage and attacking from the back ranks goes.
  18. Yes, I'll second that. A unit that see's it's not being effective and withdraws to try something different later isn't suffering form a loss of morale. A unit that throws down it's weapons and scatters in every direction to try and get out of dodge as quickly as possible probably is.
  19. Yeah, although as written the character is "busy" all night. But in general "Lustful" for Pagans if off. The idea is that Pagans acknowledge and appreciate the power of fertility, not that their all sex maniacs.
  20. Okay. Or even making it a POW based skill would work for me. My major point here is that a unit that has it's morale break and turns and runs isn't rationally reworking their strategy, but panicking and fleeing for their lives. BTW, in real life morale tends to get shaken a lot quicker than in most RPGs. Most people don't really want to fight for their life, and it doesn't take much to make then want to give up and run away.
  21. And it might be worth noting that medieval manors tend to be small plain buildings, not the elaborate mansions we think of as manor houses today. I believe I posted a plan for one awhile back and it's pretty much two levels and five or so rooms (Hall, Parlor, Kitchen Buttery, Bedroom, and maybe a Solar). Most manor houses you see in RPGs tend to be laid out a bit too modern with multiple bedrooms, libraries, chimneys and such. Something like... this:
  22. And British Christians get Energetic, too. Maybe an opposed roll of sorts. Ideally any sort of "temptation" on a quest would be opposed by some virtue or passion. But as written the adventure is easier for most Christians than for most Pagans.
  23. Not surprising as it was written over 30 years ago. Yes, the Pagan "virtues" are all played off as negative traits that must be overcome to succeed. It's practically paganism as viewed by Christians, who would have an easier time of it. I think this is part of a bigger problem with fitting Paganism into the Pendragon setting.
  24. I'd say you have a mix of Celtic (native pre-Roman designs), Roman (mostly the cities and villas), and Medieval (the age of knighthood), architecture. One thing worth noting is that with the accelerated technological advances, the "Medieval" architecture would actually cover nearly a thousand years, from post-Roman Britain to 16th century Gothic. If you got the old Lordly Domains supplement or older Nobles Book, you can see some of the evolution in terms of castles, with castles becoming more complex, and multilayered, towers become more rounded and so forth. As castles represent the dwelling places of the ruling classes similar characteristics will trickle down to manor houses of knights, churches and so on. As times goes on the Celtic and Roman building should be upgraded to latter designs. For resorces, I suggest you look up any famous buildings and look at the year they were constructed. St. Paul's, Notre Dame, the Tower of London, the old Roman villas near Grateley and Tisbury, Celtic round houses. All this should help to give you an idea of what was available and when.
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