Joerg

Bad wording for your criticals - "Rolls of 10, 30, 50, 70 and 90 are criticals" would have been clear, and in about the same number of characters. Agreed, that gives a 1 in 20 chance, and at the same steps. The visual system does provide the same overall probabilities for a very large sample or rolls at every skill level up to 100%. It totally fails for skills above 100%, but given the slow progression once you reach this region, I am cool with having every roll under effective skill minus 100% a special, and every fifth such roll a critical, using the non-visual system, in addition to the benefits from the visual system. I still say that divorcing the roll that determines specials or criticals from the success dice is the easier option for skills under 100%. In RQ and derived systems, crits are specials, so basically you don't have a 20% of you skill percentage chance for non-critical specials, but a 15% chance. How do you model that? Criticals that don't get the effect of specials?

I want them to have a separate oxidation mechanism using stored peroxide esters, so just a dismutase wouldn't help here. Also, generating nascent oxygen doesn't reduce radical stress. Their respiratory system is adapted to extreme oxygen levels - in fact, I wonder whether Terran organisms might be combustible under such conditions. Compare the death of Arkadi in Red Mars, when Earth-sponsored saboteurs increase oxygen partial pressure inside the tent habitat held by the separatists. I intend the Blue Ones to move about with breath masks, spreading the stench of xerox machines (ozone) and mouthwash. Them having a rather low life expectancy might actually make them an interesting culture, and the offer of prolonging their life expectancy might split their society in a similar way that my setting's humanity has been split into various incompatible fore-runner and retrograde cultures. I note that I need to define the procreation and the family life of both my alien species. I think I am going for a hermaphrodite species and one with boring two sexes. Both species are gregarious. The Kurus live under an emergency government focussing all their energy to the task of species survival. The Blue Ones' home system Gate (all of these are human names, unwilling to twist their vocal organs around the native language of the Blue Ones) occupies one of the major jump beacons for advanced, long range traffic which means there is a presence of one of the (mainly human) major players among the technological fore-runners, but they profit from the availability of wares from distant sectors and the unusual opportunity to provide organics in-system at a blue giant binary. I need to read up on the life expectancy of blue giants, but I suspect that the planets of the binary system are older than their main sun, with life re-emerging after an extreme mass extinction event (during their capture by the new star system) creating the new flora and fauna of both Gateland and Gatesea.

My statement is correct. Look what a 5% shift does to a skill of 55% and what it does to a skill of 65%. In one case it is fairly dramatic (10% more positive and 10% less negative "critical" outcomes), in the other case no effect. Criticals ought to occur 1 time in 10, not half of the time.

I am in the process of creating a space-opera-like setting for use with M-Space, but with my own twists that lead away from that Traveller-like setting assumption. At the moment, I have a couple of vague ideas for some of my aliens, remnants of cool concepts I laid down some 35 years ago as a teenager who hadn't even heard of roleplaying games (in Germany...) but did his world building and solo-roleplaying nonetheless. At the time, Lego produced models for a hard-SF line I couldn't afford, and they published a booklet with models suggesting at integrating a more space-opera setting. A couple of panels with Lego manikins whose heads or body parts were replaced with some of the less regular building blocks, possibly adding a few extras. I looked at those, and was sold, and started to develop the setting on paper rather than with building blocks. It was the time of Star Wars, so of course my setting then was about rebels against an imperium that I never really defined but that had vast military resources, and significantly more scruples than the Star Wars one. German TV also offered Space 1999 with its underground Lunar base, so that was another influence at the time. Over time, I added what insights I gathered in scientific facts and impossibilities to reduce the amounts of handwavium and unobtainium in my setting. So there was this militaristic human culture suppressing free traders and nonhumans with the trappings of armor and elaborate helmets, aided and abetted by a profit oriented Galactic Mining mega corporation operating both inside and outside of the empire, which sometimes proved a neutral ground, imperial citizens or corporations trading at neutral or empire-associated nonhuman spaceports, and of course the “us”, the human rebels and their nonhuman sidekicks and allies. I never really dropped that concept, but upon receiving the German translation of Classic Traveller about 8 years later I couldn’t really get warm with that system and its basically incompetent, one trick characters. (Nobody told or showed me how to use that system as a narrative though crunchy game rather than a simulationist one until decades later.) So, there are these concepts of two humanoid alien races that I need to stat out. Help and advice appreciated, and somebody might be interested in using them in a different setting. “Blue Ones” One of the allies was a minor multi-planetary species of humanoids inhabiting oxygen- and water-rich planets in the Goldilocks zone of blue giants – one distant binary, and at least another smaller one in the same region. The species had inhabited those different planets for long enough to develop speciation. I never came to define their own name for their people, or the official catalogue name, I simply called them Blue Ones. The inhabitants of Gatesea and Gateland (two captured rocky planets with very active biosphere, surface gravities of 0.95 and 0.89, 90% and 50% of the surface covered by liquid water, high humidity, about 30% diatomic oxygen and 2% ozone in the atmosphere at surface levels, and carbon dioxide levels varying between 0.01 and 3% depending on the day/night cycle) were native to Gateland, had colonized and bioformed Gatesea with organisms from their homeworld’s land mass and part of the seas (retaining some of the non-sapient, mostly compatible biosphere there) with slowships, and had established another slowship colony (out of focus of my main activities) around that other blue giant star, the Exos with significantly different appearance, and adaptation to a gravity of 1.1 and somewhat lower ozone and less humid atmosphere. These guys could work in human environment using breath masks, and vice versa, although humans needed a lot extra protection from ultraviolet radiation and the bleaching effects of ozone. Blue Ones and Exos ended up as endo-skeleton bipeds with two multi-jointed arms each ending in two opposed sets of four likewise multy-jointed fingers, ellipsoid heads with a ring of sensory organs, including four eyes – one to each side with 190 degrees coverage, and a pair to the front with 120 degrees coverage mostly overlapping to the front. Orifices are located at the lower slope of the skull – two sets of somewhat extendable teethed mouths between the forward and sideward eyes, and venting slits beneath the eyes. Their skeleton is based on two multi-jointed interior columns extending plate-like ribs enclosing the upper and lower torso, leaving the center of the torso open for a belly similar to the human belly. A central channel is framed by bone plates providing hinges between these two columns, sheltering three separate strings of neural tissue regulating motor functions, vegetative functions, and communication with the neural tissue inside the basket of bone plates forming the skull. This basic architecture obviously needs to be reflected in the native endoskeletal animals of Gateland (and those that colonized Gatesea and the Exo planets in an interstellar variant of the Columbian exchange, brought along by the Blue Ones). Metabolic rates of the lifeforms on these three homeworld planets (and in their lesser colonies established more recently) are high. Their circulatory system is driven by two separate hearts very similar to mammalian ones. Their blood transports the oxygenating agents in form of complex bound oxygen and as small organic peroxide esters. The peroxide mechanism is used for peak activities, with peroxide esters deposited in cellular caches during low activity periods, while the complex bound oxygen provides the background level of body maintenance. Cellular membranes must deal with this constant onslaughts of peroxides and radicals. That either means modifications to the phospholipids used by all Terran organisms with a very high regeneration rate or a different, more resilient approach to forming a flexible and extendible cell membrane. Whichever nature these changes have, Terran-descended organisms can consume Gateland-descended organisms (they will need to deal with any stored peroxides, which will be consumed internally if those cells are subject to stress), and vice versa. On a cellular level, organisms from Gateland and Gatesea are compatible. Outside of the cells, both plant and animal life use cellulose, hemicellulose and proteins for their connective tissue, and what we would call modified starch alongside with starch for fast access fuel storage. Vegetation on Gateland is very active, compared to Terran vegetation. Most plants recede their sunlight collectors (usually frondy leaves) at night and reduce their area during the most intense radiation of noon, or they have permanent hard photosynthetic organs that can activate protective chromophores to shield the cells from too intensive irradiation. Plants collect peroxide esters synthesized from ozone, too, and power their motive processes with this metabolism. Blue Ones and other endoskeletal lifeforms native to Gateland maintain a rather constant body temperature in the range between 30 and 40 degrees Celsius (303 to 313 K). At rest, they tend to remain at the lower range, while activity can bring up their motive apparatus up to 50°C (about 320K), which needs to be dissipated quickly. Evaporation is their preferred cooling method, somewhat hindered by the high humidity, but boosted by adding low boiling esters from special glands in phases of high activity (the by-product of using up the stored peroxide esters). Sweating Blue Ones smell of mouthwash and cheap perfume, laced with pheromones similar to those in human sweat. The quadruped life-forms of Gateland share the multi-jointed extremities of the sapients, and their somewhat disk-shaped sensory skulls above their orifices, which display huge variations between different dietary requirements, and generally are larger than those of the bipedal sapients. A lot of the animals move in semi-upright stance, with the forelimbs providing ground contact only in very slow or very fast gaits. Their jointed spines support dorsal flexibility like that of small cats or weasels, allowing for some fast gaits where the body appears to contract and elongate. They don’t have tails but rather flat dorsal extensions, some with rigid bone plants supporting a muscular counterweight quasi-limb capable of vertical movement adding momentum to jumps and buffering momentum on landings, developed from a flat dorsal fin of distant aquatic forebears, and re-used for that function by amphibious variants returning to the wet element. The truly bipedal Blue Ones retain this as a rather atrophied remnant that receives much of their weight when sitting in a rather curled stance. Variants with atrophied limbs have evolved adapted to water, but usually land dwellers returning to a watery habitat revert to enlarged hind digits supporting muscular flippers. Aerial fauna exists on Gateland and marine subspecies successfully adapted to Gatesea as well. The endoskeletal variants come in several variants: The dominant aerial variant adapted half of their digits on all four limbs to chiroptera-like (batlike) wings, employing the remaining digits for grabbing prey or food; one variant using both sets of digits on their forelimbs to support frondy hollow scales that can be rotated individually along both sides of the digits, creating a feather-like extension of the elongated digits, allowing for a fluttering hovering flight with both stationary and dashing modes; and finally one variant with elongated hollow rib-bones extending out, supporting skins attached to both fore- and hind-limbs allowing gliding flight. Herbivores are divided among browsers snatching bits from the frondy green during daytime, whether long-necked, flying, or climbing, the more destructive cracker and diggers going after the sheaths the fronds retreat into, and seed and fruit gatherers. Due to the high metabolism rates of the autotrophs, the calcium hydrogen carbonate concentrations in the water drop to extremely low levels, leading to an absence of calcite exoskeletons for invertebrates. Silicacious shells or polsaccharid take ths role, as do ligament proteins. They too sport paired orifices, inherited form primitive worms which employed paired sets of cutting tools which developed into separate orifices rather than a single one, and which continued as the motive structure of these worms, and of subsequent arthropods, most of which resemble two-ridged centipedes or crabs. Aerial arthropods don’t use wings but webs of silk spun around a few pairs of elongated legs. Technology: Blue Ones prefer disk-shaped spaceship design with a vertical acceleration vector for constant acceleration and sidewards dashing using lateral thrusters for quick maneuvers. This design was inherited from the gondolas of their slower-than-light solar sailing vessels that carried their colonists. These ships use weak warp drive for intra-system mobility, but rely on the classical jump drive for interstellar travel. Due to their dependance on hard radiation stars for their atmosphere and their plant lifeforms, they usually don’t use reefs or mobile slowlife platforms. In multi-species parties, Blue Ones are valued for their keen perception abilities – not so much the quality of their optical and acoustic apparatus as their cognitive system evaluating that information. They value perception highly and produce some of the most advanced telemetry systems available. Other specialities include surveillance, quality testing and fault detection. Kurus Kurus are another bipedal species from my early attempts at designing aliens, inspired by the same sources as the Blue Ones and Exos. The Kuru homeworld and their planetary colonies were devastated by a giant supernova about 1500 standard years ago, but they managed to use the few decades of warning their FTL ability gave them to evacuate their population and significant amounts of samples of their planetary biota before the catastrophe struck, thanks to their natural ability to hibernate, which they augmented with their technology. They have since led a nomadic life, collecting resources from interstellar space, uninhabited systems, and trading with planetary races. The loss of their homeworlds has caused a species-wide trauma. Kurus feel trapped on planets and require their habitats to be FTL capable. They do maintain more or less permanent outposts in the systems they claim for resource collection and they maintain trading outposts with extraterritorial status at major trading nexi. The Kuru homeworld was a rock planet captured as the distant satellite of a gas giant during an inward shift in an otherwise unremarkable K-primary system. The capturing by the gas giant caused a major extinction event on the planet due to the tidal forces bringing increased tectonic activity, but the atmosphere and a sufficient sample of the biosphere survived these changes and managed to adapt to the rather eccentric orbit of the gas giant which carried the planet beween the extremes of a rather comfortable warm Goldilocks distance to their primary to the coldest extremes of said Goldilocks zone, where only the exothermal qualities of the gas giant prevented the atmosphere from freezing out. The Kuru culture huddled around volcanic vents during the coldest phases, or went into hibernation. Kuru biochemistry is remarkably similar to Terran biochemistry, but has much higher salinity and requires a slightly different spectrum of trace minerals. Physically, the Kurus are most notable for their antlers bearing a variety of sensory organs on a broad head dominated by two huge nasal ridges, each reminiscent of the snouts of saiga antelopes. A pair of eyes on a protruding muscular mass is situated above the nose ridge, allowing bifocal front sight and good peripheral coverage. Their beaked orifice holds several arrays of specialized dentition embedded directly in muscle tissue. The sensory stalks on the antlers carry a range of chemical and acoustic receptors. They have an endo-skeleton of lightweight hollow bones, surrounded by a regular muscular apparatus and a second layer of musular tissue supporting a quasi-exoskeleton of cartilagenous scales and a down-covered dermis which they can extend over these scales or retreat into a compact fold between the scales. Another well (durchblutet) dermis can be unfolded above this downy dermis and the scales, providing efficient cooling despite the thick double layer of muscle tissue. Their hands have three opposed pairs of digits in 90 degree opposition, with a claw-like protrusion on their third segment of the fingers. On their feet, these act similar to hooves. The biological ancestors of the Kurus were opportunistic scavengers, able to dig out hibernating prey out of frozen dirt or ice, but also taking advantage of the rich plant life that exploded regularly when the planet returned into the pleasant regions of the Goldilocks zone. Inhabiting a K-star system, the Kurus took to the slowlife reefs (one of my setting premises, possibly a leftover from a precursor civilization) with a vengeance as soon as they managed to overcome their gravity well. With habitats of their highly productive plant life available during the cold seasons of the gas giant, their population exploded, and their domesticated biosphere adapted to microgravity. Those organisms that had adapted too well to the massive climate change required hibernation periods, too, which led to the Kurus towing reefs into more eccentric orbits, or equipping mobile slowlife as agricultural platforms. Kuru plant life’s atmospheric requirements have an optimal range of 30 millibar carbon dioxide, 5 millibar methane, 1 millibar N2O, 170 millibar oxygen and at least 300 millibar nitrogen partial pressure, with a total pressure of 700 millibar or higher preferred. This corresponds to the spring conditions of their lost homeworld, when the great melt would start plant life going into overdrive. Fruit bearing season would see a massive depletion of carbon in the atmosphere and a higher oxygen level. Coincidentally, this is the preferred atmospheric composition for Kuru habitat sections. Kuru society is very conservative. This is due to the fact that a huge portion of their population still spends a lot of time in suspended hibernation. At any time you will find a few first generation evacuees among the Kuru crews, taking terms to get up to date with current technology and society before returning to hibernation. A few hibernation fleets are known to park at distant Oort cloud objects, producing batches of returnees regularly while receiving returnees to take their turns in hibernation. Since hibernation has a natural rejuvenating effect, there is a steady stream of volunteers taking their turns in cold sleep. It isn’t known how many such hibernation vessels exist, or how many Kuru fleets operate outside of human or other civilizations’ radar. The portion of non-hibernating Kurus is slowly growing as the Kurus work on creating self-sufficient habitat fleets for all of their species. While the Kurus don’t operate reef and slowlife agriculture any more, they still provide seeding and initialization of reef colonies, and are welcome trading partners and development contractors for the human reefer culture, willing to join in their barter and favor economy. They are interested in buying biomass, and in contracting seed production.

Your seem to have swapped the frequency of specials and criticals - your criticals crop up half of the time, and for only marginally developed skills usually as critical failures. The probability to avoid a critical failure changes in a very erratic way, too, with plateaus of 11 percentiles between rapid rises of 10 steps in between (counting the last step double with the plateau). Chances for critical failure obviously move in the opposite direction, which means that there are narrow brackets where every circumstantial percentile will effect the outcome in a significant way half of all dice rolls, and then there will be brackets where modifiers of 10 percent might not matter much at all. A nightmare for estimating outcome probabilities, and a case where successful supporting actions that hinder opponents may be a great deal-changer or just pointless fluff. Having an additional D2 (odds on any even-numbered die) in the toss yields much better predictability than your method.

When I tried to look up myths where the primeval bull would be castrated, I stumbled across the fact that any bovine used as a draught animal would be called oxen (not just in English, but also in German), regardless of the functionality or even gender of its genitals. In this light, Rimbert's derogatory comment about the Meroving kings plowing a field with a pair of oxen doesn't mean that these beasts would have been castrated, but most likely they would have been fully functional bulls as part of a fertility rite. I wasn't thinking about Genert's Garden here, but rather about the sons of (Kef)Tawar for instance. If you look at the sons of Vadrus, the sons of the great bull could be similar in their infighting. We don't know much about the Enjorali except for the fact that they were riding their bulls. The presence of (proto-) urban centers in Fronela doesn't mean that they did till their fields using plows. The Akemite Malkioni did bring agriculture, and probably did use plows of some kind. Which plow to use and with what success will depend on the soil you are tilling. Given the bad ice age and the subsequent retreat of the Glacier, you can expect good loess soil in parts of the Pelorian bowl, which will take quite well to the lighter plows, whereas the riverine bottoms will require a stronger plow and stronger draught beasts or better harnesses. But as the product of Storm (both as the agent scraping up the frozen soils of the far north and as the carrier of the fine soil into the grasses of the southern Pelorian grasslands during the receding Ice Age) and Earth (both as the donor in the north and as the catcher in the grasslands), this soil is unlikely to benefit the Dara Happans, but will be the main factor for fertility in Saird. The Barntar plow will be sufficient to till this soil. The Pelorian bowl has mostly riverine valleys with heavy soils, with fertile mud stolen by the rivers from the upland loess deposited during the Sea Season floodings. More on this below. We don't learn much about Seshnegi agriculture, except that pairs of oxen or water buffaloes are used for plowing. Major veggy foods are wheat, rice and beans, plus whatever other vegetables are grown. Major other plants include flax (for linen), cotton, tea (originally from Jrustela), wine, fruits, and Kafi leaf (a tobacco-like soft drug). If we are to trust the mythical maps of Glorantha, Jrustela and its vegetation are some of the few dry remainders of Danmalastan. While Somelz, the ancient square dwarf land covering the southeast corner of the Lozenge, may have been effectively denuded of most if not all native vegetation, the lands east and north of Curustus Mountain (old Thakarn) may have retained some Old Danmalastan (pre-Ice Age, pre-Somalz) vegetation. despite Mostali presence nearby. If you look at the dynastic names of the bull shahs, Bisos is very present. Bisos is one of the two war gods mentioned for Carmania, the other being (wasp-headed) Humakt (as known from the Lives of Sedenya). For the Heortlings, Barntar is the firstborn son of Orlanth and Ernalda, and the nephew of the Bull through Orlanth (and kin to the sons of the Storm Bull through Ernalda and Eiritha, too). The lod plow was the tool to plow the heavier riverine lowland soils. I am not exactly certain when the Lodilites started using an ox-drawn plow. If we look at Murharzarm's Perfect Empire, we find gazzam as the main domestic beasts responsible to provide muscle power. They don't appear to have found space on Anaxial's Ark, though, and Anaxial's empire along the Oslir may have had to look for other beasts. On the other side, we find Buserian (the sacrificer of cattle, compare Busenari, mother of cattle) as one of the sons of Yelm, indicating the presence of cattle already back in Murharzarm's realm. Another of those Godtime "anachronisms", if one takes the God Learner mythic maps and sequences too serious, as those clearly state that mammals show up only after Yelm's Death. Yeah. Dara Happa proper has rice-growing agriculture, practicing irrigation. Plowing the wet river mud should be less arduous than plowing the heavy soil on dry ground. They also have dry farming in these regions, and probably the slight slopes and hills surrounding the river valley bottoms, with unknown quantities of irrigation from higher reservoirs. Lodrilite upland farming (and plowing) should be specialized for volcanic soils, really, and not that nasty irrigation or mud-wading business they have been tasked with since the taming of Oslira.

This extra level would apply mostly in the low skill bracket, or with heavy negative modifiers. Just like a special success disappears when you have sufficiently low skill, a special failure or mishap will much sooner become indistinguishable from a fumble once you get into rune level/100% skill areas, unless you give it more than a 20% of all failures chance. (If you give a 40% of all failures chance being a mishap, with very high skills this would occur on a roll of 99% where a roll of 100% would be a fumble, and rolls of 96-98% a normal failure.) The mishap chance would have to be re-calculated (or looked up) every time you modify the skill by a few percent. For modified skills of 95% or less you could separate the determination of success or failure (the d100 skill roll) from the success level, which could be rolled with a d20 where a 1 would indicate a critical (success or failure), a 2-4 a special, a 5-10 an above average, a 17-20 a marginal success or failure, or whatever success levels you want to inflict on your players. (If you don't trust a d20, you can multiply by 5 and roll another d100.) Unfortunately this breaks down when your modified skill exceeds 95%, as criticals and specials continue to rise while failures remain the same probability. Another case where this breaks down are rules which limit say an attack skill to the riding (or climbing, or sailing) skill of the character, saving the roll on the conditional skill but capping the effective skill. I seem to recall such a rule for mounted combat, and a similar case could be made for swashbuckler attacks from swinging chandeliers, archers or gunners firing from a ship in heavy waters and the like using an appropriate conditional skill. High skill characters would be better off rolling for the conditional skill and then rolling for their high skill when it comes to reaping specials and crits.

spielmaterial.de offers round plastic bases for cardboard pieces just like you describe - suitable for 25 mm and probably 15 mm, although not for 6mm, and if you want a hex base, they have hex-shaped cardboard counters in various sizes, too. They have an English language version of their website and do international delivery. I suppose other companies across the pond offer similar material. As far as I am concerned, the hardest part in this process would be to get the picture of my adventurer, but I guess that's what software like Poser is for. But when we're talking this kind of preparation, why not have the character 3D color-printed in the scale you want?

For one thing, credit where credit is due, and I must the old Midkemia Press publications as major influence on my GMing and storytelling. Secondly, I really am rooted deeply in their city of Karse. Creating content for a well-known and respected setting creates a customer base. While Chaosium doesn't own the Lovecraft et.al. estate for the Cthulhu mythos, its publications have contributed to the commonly accepted canon to an extent that it is getting hard to do a mythos-related game without referring to material published by Chaosium. How many such settings and games are there out there? For me, Glorantha has been an obsession of a few decades. While I am perfectly able to create my own fantasy background, with a mythology and deep history that leads up to the situation I describe in the setting, this is hard and most of all time-consuming work, taking time off my time for creating game-related content. And I will have to provide a setting description that will attract a customer base. I need to fascinate a crowd of people into financing my fancy, and to provide art direction and other such details which will take further time off my productive time. Paying a license fee to inherit a fan base could be a boost to my productivity. Producing content for Chaosium to publish probably is still easier.

I think that a device to aid overcoming the gravity well is the hallmark of a civilized planet. Of course there will be ships or at least shuttles able to climb out of a planet's gravity well unaided, but only with some sacrifice either in storage capacity or in faster-than-light ability. A linear accelerator might be an alternative to a space lift or space wheel/bola installation, especially on low gravity bodies like our moon. A hyperloop might be used to build up velocity while inside the gravity well without being pressed to mush if shot up like out of a gauss rifle. There might be cargo deliveries for high-g-tolerating cargo like e.g. ore or basic chemicals that would use such a mode of transport. There might be laser-pushed solar sails involved accelerating vessels out of the gravity well, and the classical reaction drive might see more use than I would be happy about. Counter-gravity devices or inertial dampeners might take care of the worst effects of the gravity well challenge. A focussed tractor beam might aid a slower vessel take-off.

Castrating a sacred bull, now that is a feat probably more dangerous than having a plow team of bulls rather than oxen. Is this a variant of a tauromachy or tauroctony? I tried to find a real-world myth where a (grown-up) bull gets castrated, but the usual result is the killing of the bull rather than castrating it. Not that castrating an adult bull would make it more docile. The usual way to create an oxen is to castrate a bull calf, which also results in different development while growing up. The myth would attack children of the bull god rather than the bull god himself. It might be a rivalry of the bull descendants of the primary bull which leads them to castrate their inferior brothers, rather than human interaction. The bull shahs of Carmania are well known for their unpleasant traits, and this might be rooted in such a mythic heritage. I'm undecided whether Barntar would be that well known in hill barbarian Fronela, or whether they would rather have their own primeval bull taming hero/deity. The Plowman usually is the son of the earth and a kinsman of the bull or oxen, although the latter probably not on Brithos. Neither does the Taming of the Bull feel appropriate for the farmer caste Brithini. This sounds more like a hand-me-down bestial servant from either the warrior or the wizard, although the castration of the bull calf may very well be Dromal's/Dronar's contribution.

The point of a Dyson Sphere isn't really to create a contiguous giant area, but to collect most of the energy (and mass) output of the primary. This can be done by swarms of unconnected platforms or sails rather than a solid construction made from unobtainium. You could keep (possibly artificial) planetary bodies in the inner portion of that shell. They needn't be massive, earth size objects either, but could be huge containers of reserve matter (e.g. collected solar wind captured for future fusion plants once the sun peters out). On the outside, you do want an active guard to capture incoming pieces of stellar matter (providing extra material for platforms, planetoids etc), so you will likely have a couple of electromagnetic bands remaining active rather than the whole spectrum of your primary. Depending on your galactic neighborhood, you might want to have an outward-looking shell actively collecting energy from neighboring suns and distant strong radiation sources, too. For energy collection to be maximally effective, most of the inner surface would have to be black, possibly a glossy black to reflect some light in order to keep the areas from falling inward. Such a closed system would collect lots of heat (both potential energy of vibrating and rotating molecules and the low energy electromagnetic radiation emitted by these) - possibly this could be fed back into the sun, enabling fusion processes creating more energetic light, possibly focussed on bodies heated to black radiation in the visible and ultraviolet spectrum, possibly this would be leaked out to the outside of the dome, powering heat-force engines. If I were to construct a Dyson Sphere as a habitat, I would probably build separate domed areas under crystal domes just like our forebears proposed, each one big enough to hold a continent or so. This swarm of separate units might be tethered together in loops or as a mesh if we want to rely on centripetal force for gravity. Alternatively, one could use planetoids for gravity environments and zero gravity energy collectors in between. I don't see a significant advantage over an array of donut habitats like in Iain Banks' Culture novels, though. Ringworld addressed the major drawback of a dyson sphere by hanging an array of shades/PV panels between the surface and its star, thereby creating a semblance of night those sapients from non-tidally locked planets would prefer. Assuming you do build a huge spindle around a primary, with an artificial surface, how thick would you build it? Ringworld suffered from the absence of geology and tectonics after a few millennia of habitation. The artificial elevations of the underlying unobtainium (called Scrith) held maybe a few hundred meters of rock towards the surface, which became subject to erosion from the weather patterns created by the shading panels. The Culture novels by Iain Banks imply a lithosphere inside their donut habitats that rests on molten rock, possibly even allowing volcanism and plate tectonics, at least after temporary heating to the melting point of the minerals. Raw materials for industry are a problem once all the good matter has been used up to construct the dyson sphere. Even if that civilisation manages an ideal recycling rate, it would still use up some of its matter if it maintains an outside presence. On the other hand that outside presence may bring in replacement or additional resources. There is nothing wrong with moving your dyson sphere away from potential supernovae. Niven's Ringworld setting also has the Puppeteer home system - a Klemperer rosetta of five planets around a fast moving primary fleeing the expanding black hole in the center of the galaxy. While rather wasteful in terms of energy usage, this kind of interstellar architecture would be an alternative to dyson spheres. The sphere or at least ring aspect could be added on an outer orbit, also acting as a shield against incoming objects (which would be a decidedly welcome feature for the paranoid puppeteer society).

That's about the scale of Ringworld, which admittedly is an evacuation vessel for a commonwealth of inhabited worlds conforming to the Pak norm, only to run wild when the Pak began to specialize to fill ecological niches the majority of Ringworld has no animal life for (excepting the ocean with the planetary maps, access to which appears to have been lost when this development evolved, and which appear to have become accessible again to the builders of the floating cities only after the development had been well on its way and the almost-all-humanoid higher animal life was well established, obviating the re-introduction of such potentially uncontrollable invasive species. Part of the reason for this size was the need of Pak protectors to keep to themselves and their descendants rather than mingle with those Pak protectors from different genetic lines. There are different models for sustainable human population density - I recall one (called the lone tiger or similar) advocating oodles of square kilometers per individual. If you have a society that has beaten old age, with each individual a lord over their own domain, this amount of area might be realistic. Owning such a demesne doesn't mean that humans won't still gather in bigger social entities than their lonesome manor, but in this hyper-advanced technological civilisation you might well expect the comforts of an absolutist ruler for each citizen. There might be significant elements of non-citizen inhabitants on such a construct, too - lower castes, servitor races, AI drones, pick your choice. In fact, a society quite similar to the original Pak protector society of Ringworld when it started evacuating the galactic core region. I found that if I want to have earth-analogous cultures, it is best to have humans involved in with extremes of transhumanism. I am still not quite decided which organisation would provide control and shelter for these reservates, though - there are contact interfaces where well-briefed visitors may interact with well-briefed border-walkers from within the reservate. For the overarching organisation I am imagining a couple of very advanced but thoroughly different cultures cooperating to maintain security and I like to create different sets of values for my alien sapients, very much depending on their roles in their original habitat. An apex predator species might resemble the Kzinti, or the Gloranthan Uz. I like to saddle even oxygen-breathing, M-class-world colonizing species to bring their own atmospheric preferences along. One of my earliest ventures into designing planetary species (dating back before my discovery of roleplaying games) included a species inhabiting planets that ended up in stable orbits around a blue giant, with an significant percentage of ozone in the atmosphere due to the high level of ultraviolet radiation reaching down to the bottom of the atmosphere. I don't recall defining much more about these folks other than their general shape (roughly humanoid (bipedal, two arms), endo-skeleton, wide ellipsoid heads with roughly equidistant eyes and other perception organs around the rim) and the kinds of ships they used, or their alliances and conflicts with various groups of humans in the region, but that's ok for a teenage stab at thinking up an alien race. I'm still planning on using these, one of these days.

Elsewhere on the internet @scott-martin mentioned Syranthir Forefront's influence on the lands he invaded during his March of the 10,000 (or whatever this Anabasis variant is called). Talking about the Western improvements on Pelanda, I am actually a bit astonished that Syranthir made that much of a difference. Not so much in the Barbarian Belt area conquered by the Carmanians, which remained apart from Pelandan craft influences across cultural borders much of the time, even though there were bull folk both in the lowlands (introduced by Bisos and Kereus). I would have expected cultural exchange between the various bull folk along the Janube and into Oroninela. I wonder whether the heavy western plow was a Danmalastan/Brithos influence, or rather an Enjoralini achievement due to their mastery over bulls while at the same time adopting Western craft. Brithini farming methods are really rather under-described. If not for the cold climate, I would have assumed an olive-tree cultivation for the Westerners rather than a grain economy, and possibly that was what they had before Valind's glacier encroached their lands, and why their colony in Jrustela was so successful as they finally returned to lands where the agriculture methods from scripture encountered the climatic conditions that would support them.

There is an effect inverting this - exposure to solar wind will cause sulfides to release H2S into the atmosphere, and blow outward. The effect is negligible on Venus and Earth, but should be observable on Mars, and is significant on asteroids. If the collision theory for the formation of our moon is correct, it didn't take meteorite impacts to vaporize the sulfur from our planet, but that single huge event which turned the clock back for it when all the other rock planets were already cooling down. Acid rain would only be a problem on an "M-class planet" anyway - in the original reducing atmosphere of our planet, anaerobic processes reduced the sulphates to sulphides, depositing them as blackish heavy-metal-enriched sludge. This happened already before the cyanobacteria invented photosynthesis, so basically the presence of sulphates is the necessary oxidizing agent for anaerobic organisms. Sulphates and methane react to sulphides, carbon dioxide, and water under the influence of archean and bacterial microorganisms (as are active in e.g. biogas plants or our intestines). Biofilms would resist the stronger acids, which would instead consume all calcite exposed. I don't expect to find many habitable planets. A majority may be stuck in the Star Trek L-class, resembling our own planet before the cyanobacteria (and other photosynthetic organisms) poisoned it with oxygen. If we find many marginally M-class planets, that would cry out for a precursor civilisation with roughly our atmospheric chemistry seeding such planets with microbial packages to make them such. They might have used von Neumann probes rather than coming there in person, in which case there would also be a significant depletion of certain elements at least in part of the system. If sulfur is a problem for the kind of seeds planted by such von Neumann probes, I suggest that the probes themselves might mine it for e.g. ablative shielding or reaction mass. This could be a major export of a hypothetical Venus colony floating in its upper atmosphere, too. Half of the stories about von Neumann probes have them started by a civilisation like ours. And even if we don't give them the ability to replicate and travel on, serious thought is given to terraforming machines sent before human colonists. When looking for a "new Earth" to expand to, I fully expect there to be generations of terraforming efforts required to arrive at something moderately analogous to earth. Time which might be spent to adapt the colonists to the conditions expected at their arrival, too.

Note that the Vadeli get their immortality benefits only from eating their own babies. Not that this will stop them from eating other people,,,

Funny how this thread is straying from a creature design question through challenge to discussion of the environment, but still enjoyable (at least to me). I missed this before - there is no "liquid" or "gaseous" state on "gas-planets", only a fluid, supracritical phase with properties of both, so anything living in this environment would be moving like through a low friction liquid or a high friction gas. The recent craze of discovery of planets, and especially of super-earths (rocky planets with more than 1.25 g) has spawned the discussion whether these would be anything like rock planets or rather variants of neptune. Before putting a whale-like filterer into the atmosphere of a gas giant, I would be interested in what kind of autotrophs (algae-analogon) or small predator (krill-analogon) these beasts are supposed to feed upon. In a reducing atmosphere, the "food" would have to be the oxygenating agent while the reducing agent would be part of the atmosphere. Likewise, a metabolic waste would have to be "airborne" or to be precipitated down into the gravity well. If you make such a nekton floater a potential autotroph itself, by what means? Electro-magnetism, using the atmospheric currents for passive movement through field gradients allowing induction? After all, function dictates form. Whale (or fish) shape is optimized for autonomous movement through a dense medium, in pursuit of food.

Part of the problem are the Orlanthi possession laws that tie all but the most personal items to the clan, not even the household or the bloodline. Your average clansperson will wear clothing belonging to the household, as a result of a grant of material or even the finished product from the clan. Their personal weapon will be on loan from the household, etc. I suppose that possession laws are even worse in Dara Happa, where it is likely that the possessions of entire villages to the last physical item are considered property of their lord. The people themselves may or may not be exempt from this. The concept of personal possession comes to bear mainly in cities where people without too many personal connections to the majority of the inhabitants live. Adventurers in Pavis are one such group - basically clan and therefore lawless, they may apply for citizenship (through membership in the Pavis Cult), and gain at least some marginal legal backing. Note that more personal ownership doesn't necessarily mean a better hold on one's property. A big factor in the popularity of the Katharians in the Pyrenees appears to have been their lack of claim on the tithe - shepherds were obliged to tithe one tenth of all the lambs born in their herds by the Catholic church, causing a drain that the normal reproduction rate of the beasts couldnt't really sustain. (Source - Montaillou)

Not quite correct. While we never see this expressis verbis in Star Trek, a Class M planet could have artificial heating and lighting (or shading), if only from mirror arrays in the L1 and L2 positions. But then neither do we see space lifts, despite the fact that transporters were developed only several decades into the post contact civilisation. Most of the "class M moons" in the series shouldn't be able to maintain an oxygen atmosphere for lack of photosynthesis, hydrology, and magnetism to protect the atmosphere. Mars used to be Class M, judging from the surface composition (high oxygen minerals), but all oxygen was used up in the lithosphere or bonded to carbon. Star Trek is very much science fantasy in this regard. It is almost its own genre, and definitely not Space Opera the way M-Space supports. I would expect to find more planets like Komarr from the Vorkosigan saga - planets that require significant effort in order to become at least marginally habitable in the equatorial zone outside of the planetary domes. I am a big fan of Kim Stanley Robinson's Red, Green and Blue Mars trilogy. Not necessarily the effortless immortality created on the colony, but the terraforming disputes and efforts. These ought to make for as many interesting encounters as alien biotopes.

The factions need a major re-definition, and their relations to the various groups of supporters of Argrath do so, too. Then you need all those lieutenants and deputies of Argrath, both for when he is around and when not. Something like the Sartar High Council 1628 might be useful to have in order to get to know Argrath's current set of companions, not just for Pavis, but for the entire campaign.

Social combat is a bit harder to generalize. Who do you score points with? Your direct opponent, or the crowd of onlookers, or the judge/king/whoever overseeing the exchange? In combat, you score against the character you target. In an appeal before court, you need to score points with the jury, as does the opposing barrister. On the other hand, if you want to convince or befuddle your opposition, you need to get to change their intention.

I am a RuneQuester at heart, and I see ways to play this with RQ. Orlanthi farmers don't own their farms - their clans do. There are only a few clans or tribes that have been destroyed or chased away by the Lunars. The Maboder were already in tatters from Telmori attacks when Jomes Wulf received their lands, the clans are basically lost, even though the survivors worked as thralls on Jomes' lands. The Dundealos were replaced by the Enstalos, with some clans remaining intact while the rest fled to Barbarian Town. They would drive the Enstalos clan from their lands, and might give any captured Enstalos as slaves to their Pol Joni allies. There is that strange new Colymar clan which might be a problem. Other than that, clan authority over their lands has gone unchallenged. Sartar has experienced a significant population loss during the Fimbulwinter, leaving arable land untended in its aftermath. The problem isn't so much Argrath, but his Praxian allies who regard the Zola Fel valley as one of their traditional grazing grounds. Unless your successor at Ronegarth is willing to become the leader of an oasis folk settlement of slightly different background, it will take significant effort with the Praxians to be accepted as something else. The Sun Domers managed, your settlement would be in the first stages of getting there. Ronegarth is close enough to Sun County to undergo annexion. I wonder whether Corflu might be a rallying point for other Grantlanders, with a small agricultural belt around the delta. In both cases, the settlements would have to offer the Praxians something in exchange for being left alone. What do they have to offer?

First upside - you get to use those epic battles from the White Bear Red Moon / Dragon Pass boardgame as backdrop for your games (and heroquesting). You don't have to participate in these directly, but could do special missions. Basically, become like the Assassin units in the game. True, the old classics aren't up to date any more. Re-arranging Pavis to the same level of detail would be a major overhaul. But there would be interesting consequences, too. How would Argrath "tax" adventuring in the Rubble? As an Orlanthi king, he might well declare the rubble as his tribal area, and require an oath of fealty for everyone entering. Any proceeds would have to be laid out before him (or his representative), and while a generous king will give most of the findings to the finder, he will certainly keep some of them for himself, maybe offering other rewards for this. Including unwanted rewards like promotion to an official role in his court. The Rubble doesn't need that much attention, really. The Zebra pens work like they are supposed to do, the Real City gets rebuilt a little more, the trolls still occupy most of the far end of the Rubble. Nomads are allowed in. Troll Pak isn't affected much, either. The Wooden Sword folk aren't around any more, so maybe the Sazdorf episode is about as dated as is Apple Lane. The rest still is pretty much up to date. In Sartar, clan history will have a few new entries - what we tell about how we survived the Fimbulwinter, and what we don't tell about how we survived the Fimbulwinter, how and when we joined Kallyr's uprising. More upsides - as the war pushes Argrath around, so may your campaign hit some or all of the hot spots. All manner of exotic magic becoming "legal" to admit to having. Tricksters galore. EWFish stuff, sorcerers and western mercenaries. New, imaginative uses of magic (yet unreported - you find and explore them, build them). Do stuff in the Otherworlds and gawp at the consequences.

Which side is Rurik on?

There is this delightful passage in Njal's saga, though, where the friends Njal and Gunnar don't even empty the bag of silver when exchanging the weregeld in the conflict sponsored by their wives.