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VonKatzen

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Everything posted by VonKatzen

  1. As everyone here has said 'what kind of stone?' is the main question. The follow-up is 'how thick?' since a very thick wall will (depending on stone type) actually be able to compress and vibrate to distribute the force of the impact throughout its smoothly integrated mass, rather than breaking. Putting a spike through 1" of concrete is doable in a couple swings, getting a spike 1" into SOLID, 2' thick concrete is a lot more work. The actual distribution of mass and amount of mass are going to have mechanical effects on its durability which are, however, very hard to model in a role-playing game and thus end up being represented more by the variation in dice rolls than by particular rules (even GURPS doesn't try to incorporate that much engineering into its rules).
  2. In actual game terms, magic is technology. It has repeatable, predictable effects and can be employed by sufficient resources, wealth and intellectual merit. It's basically an imaginary form of technology. And, in fact, I think that's how magic was conceived of by many ancients, i.e. a means-ends relation based on conceptual rather than mechanical relationships. The idea of magic as non-rational is really a modern invention, to distinguish it from science and engineering. Likewise, alchemy was philosophy and fake chemistry, not theosophical mystery religion. Magic was false science, not anti-science. And in game words, it is real science, because it has statistics and calculable ratios. Whether or not that's what's intended, that's the case. The whole idea of magic as a non-rational force is completely useless in a game with rules, even if it's in the fluff, it's objectively not true. If your players have any kind of ability to plan and strategize, they will treat it exactly like science, too. Means/ends cannot be eliminated. Talking about 'non-rational worlds' is literally meaningless, in that it's not just 'unexplained', it is instead a non-sentence with zero content. Whether anyone likes it or not coherence is a property of everything that exists, and if fictional worlds deny that they're just wrong, even on their own terms. Even chaos has rules. I can show you the chart. All this talk of anti-reason/non-reason/formlessness is just aesthetic gibberish, not actual sentences with meaning or import. The supernatural, defined as something undelimited and without causal relationships, is a non-definition, a non-concept, a non-statement. I don't regard such utterances as being anything other than the sort of meaningless noise that comes out of an air conditioner. Anything which is not logical, in the strict sense, does not exist, and it doesn't matter what you call it or how it works. If it works at all, if it exists at all, it is logical and therefor a science and a technology. I reject the premises of supernaturalism, which is not a premise, but gum-flapping disguised as speech. If magic exists, in reality or in fiction, it is logical and it is technical. I basically refuse to not take things literally.
  3. I don't necessarily disagree, but Praxians are far worse at summoning eldritch demons and shooting white hot fire, which is a much bigger advantage in a set-piece battle. Praxian magic is focused on stuff civilized people compensate for with for with organization and technology. The Lunars don't need to - they have organization and technology - so their magic is used for stuff that is impossible without magic. Camouflage and tracking magic is really useful as a barbarian, but in an open battle the Crimson Bat trumps every time. Civilized people have a huge edge IRL, because although they lack a lot of skills barbarians have they don't usually need them; and they can instead focus on how to shoot people from half a mile away with a ballista. What's true of technology and personal skills is also true of magical skills. Barbarians might do better on their own, in the ass-end of nowhere, but since civilized people will just bring in an army of artisans and baggage it doesn't really matter. The Romans were not as good as Gauls at scavenging and herblore, probably, but they didn't need it. Meanwhile, the Gauls knew jack-all about siege warfare and formation fighting. Contrary to Robert E. Howard (one of my favorite authors) civilization is a trump card in conflicts. Every barbarian that's ever managed to defeat a decadent civilized empire has been conquered by his conquest. In literal, economic terms stuff like organization, trade, rationalization is objectively superior in almost all circumstances. Instinct is a garbage guide created by evolutionary mishaps, and usually falters against even very stupid plans guided by reason and technique. All societies are not created equal.
  4. Magic can of course turn a baby into a battle monster with the right spells. But since everyone uses magic, and civilized people are better at it, it washes out at best, and is more realistically overpowered by the sorcery of the Lunar Empire or even the rather more sophisticated 'barbarians' like the Orlanthi. In the case of someone who is sub-100lbs, v. people who average at least 50% more, a huge difference. It would be like me (6', 190lbs) fighting an 11yo boy. Yeah, he could kill me, but chances are it would go the other way. And if we're fighting in groups of roughly equally skilled men the sheer inertia of the heavier/stronger group would allow them to break the ranks of the enemy force, not to mention the larger ones could strike outside the range of their enemies. This is something that I've discussed in other contexts regarding a Makedonian phalanx v. medieval knights, despite the huge reach of the phalanx the massive weight and body armor of an unmounted knight would allow them to wade into the phalanx and push it back, assuming roughly equal numbers, in a way that an ancient army facing the phalangites simply couldn't. The same would be true of primitive, very small warriors fighting heavily equipped iron-age armies; in fact the impetus of the charge and splitting enemy ranks was one of the main tactics of Roman infantry, and their sheer amount of body armor (for the time) was very useful in this. These ostrichriders fighting anyone who isn't a Prax nomad or the like are going to be facing much bigger, stronger, faster opponents with better equipment and more of it. Again, they could make it work - with organization, mercenary help to fill roles, but even so I think they would be inferior missile cavalry to perfectly normal missile cavalry. As far as ranged weapons these ostrichriders should use crossbows to compensate for their physical weakness. But they almost certainly lack the metallurgy and mechanical prowess to produce them, so they'd have to import them in mass - a very expensive prospect for dirt-poor primitives.
  5. That would solve the draw length problem, but not the strength problem. The poundage of normal human bows would be too much for them to fully draw, even a short little Hunnic bow. I would agree with you if we were talking dwarves - who are little bodybuilder tree stumps, and could make excellent use of extremely heavy composite bows to compensate for a short draw. But in the case of a very small human that's just not true. From what I have read and based on the size of their mass we're talking about jockeys here, people who would almost be considered midgets (or whatever the PC term is for people with congenital growth limits) rather than simply small people. Yes, Romans were smaller than Germans on average, but Romans were not jockeys. Jockeys often weight under 100lbs and are very short. This would be necessary to ride very light animals like ostriches over long distances without hurting the animal, and matches the illustrations I've seen. A typical Roman soldier, on the other hand, would be around 5' and a few inches, maybe 140lbs or so with an additional 20+lbs of kit and armor. That is much less of a difference compared to your average north European. Also, Romans were technologically and militarily sophisticated in the extreme for their time, and used tons and tons of armor compared to their competition; ostrich riders are dirt-poor primitives who barely wear body armor and have almost no organized social structure. If the Ostrich riders had large numbers and had the social and technical sophistication to train and equip a variety of troops (or hire mercenaries) to complement their light cavalry role I don't deny that they could be effective in battlefield conditions. But alone, without cataphracted charge cavalry, infantry, etc. to back them up? They could annoy people, but any organized fighting force would probably do to them what Caesar did to Gaul. Only here, the Gauls are 4' tall and have mounts that are slower than an ordinary horse (Gauls used full size horses just like the Romans, and loved cavalry just as much as the ostrichriders do). As I mentioned above, actually successful, historical steppe nomads and their kin (Huns, Gothic horsemen, Sarmatians, Turco-Mongols) used not only light harassment cavalry but fully armored shock cavalry. They also made use of infantry whenever they gained control of sedentary regions. Also while Mongols might seem rather small to an Englishman of the 13th century they were not jockey-sized or midgets. They were simply ordinary sized for people from east-Asia, comparable to the Romans and maybe a little bit lighter. In the other cases - Goths, Sarmatians, Parthians, some parts of the Hunnic coalition - these people are in fact described as tall and well-built, and were bigger than most of the people they were fighting. In fact one of the awesome things about horses is that you can take a very large man, cover him in metal and he'll still have as much stamina as light infantry thanks to his strong, sturdy mount while being even more mobile. Harassment cavalry by itself is not very effective in battlefield conditions, and because these people are even smaller and weaker than normal humans and can't move as fast or as far as a full sized horse they're in a worse position vis-a-vis enemy cavalry than the light archers of Hungary. Also, note that the Magyars (after conquering the Hungarian basin) immediately started mass-importing European-style heavy cavalry to compliment their own elite (which remained light cavalry). Now they may remain unsubdued, as many poor 'barbarian' societies did for long periods, simply because conquering them would be too much of a hassle and not enough return. But if they actually did have a standup fight against even ordinary light cavalry they would just plain lose, barring tactical genius, etc. The lance would be a good choice in melee for them, because it allows them to use momentum rather than physical strength. Problem? The mount and the rider are both very light and have much less armor on than typical charge cavalry. This means they won't hit nearly as hard. Which means you could take a direct hit in good armor and still be OK, whereas a similar charge by Sarmatian heavy cavalry would quite possibly punch through plate armor. And because any enemy lancer can more easily use a longer lance than them the enemy could charge them head on and would still hit them first, thus 'winning' the collision without even being touched by the enemy's lances. Being that tiny and that primitive basically makes them very poorly suited to fight any kind of troop of normal sized humans, much less something like a Gloranthan Ogre which can already tear a powerful human apart with their bare hands. Methinks the Ostrichriders would very quickly find themselves under the yoke of foreigners. On the upside the forced crossbreeding might turn them into more reasonably sized people, in which case they could learn to ride real horses and shoot composite bows effectively. Everything I said here would be just as true for D&D halflings, or Gloranthan Ducks, although Tolkien's hobbits are explicitly described as preternaturally tough and nimble, they are not merely small humans but are, for their size, actually much sturdier than humans.
  6. Giants would also have better eyesight, because of their large eyes. And it depends on your giants. D&D Fire Giants clearly wear full plate, use missile and heavy melee weapons, in addition to giant scale siege weapons and fight in disciplined regiments. They're martial professionals to a man. They also crush humans like bugs unless they're faced by high sorcery, as they quite properly ought to. Only their preference for living in volcanoes (lack of conflict) and small numbers (lack of need to expand) has prevented them from basically overrunning the human lands and becoming at least its martial aristocracy, if not annihilating them altogether.
  7. But they would also suck at missile combat. Shorter limbs, less physical strength, less draw length on bows, less leverage for swinging a sling (a sling is a flail that comes apart on command), lighter arrows, shorter arrows, etc. By the same token giant archers and slingers would annihilate humans long before the humans were in range, and do far more damage per shot. Mongols were also an extremely organized and professional fighting force using a wide variety of tactics and troop types, siege equipment, etc. They were not bronze age simple nomads, they were highly sophisticated warriors from a culture with thousands of years experience fighting with and conquering everything around them. The Liao Dynasty in China itself was a Mongol empire, before Chinggiz Khan was ever born. They had silk and steel body armor, cataphracted charge cavalry using large normal horses at a 4/10 ratio of their Turco-Mongol troops. Mongols were not harassment cavalry, they were both light and shock cavalry. Without that shock component and the aggression it allowed in their tactics (Mongols hit hard and won battles very quickly) they could not have done what they did. Genghis Khan himself fought as a heavy lancer. If Praxian warfare is not organized they are very shortly going to become a province of the Lunar Empire or someone else who is organized. Technology and civilization has clearly steamrolled or converted all competition, and has basically done so since day one. Even when the 'barbarians' invade Rome they're sophisticated border cultures which copy the civilized people and adopt their methods when they take over.
  8. Nah, I don't buy it, they would get plastered in melee. Also, smaller mounts may be more nimble but they're also slower and have less power as impact cavalry, compounding the problem of an already weak and tiny rider with tiny, short weapons. In fact, a tiny version of a normal animal could well be slower than a normal human on foot, due to stride length. Humans can easily outrun most small animals traveling in a straight line, and a giant plateau (where these nomads live) is not exactly good terrain for avoiding direct, heavy cavalry/infantry. Mongols had this problem: their horses would be easily outrun if they got too close to enemy cavalry with European or near Eastern style war mounts. And the mongols and their ponies are only short compared to their opponents in this case, not tiny child-men. Being half the size of your opponent (all other things being equal) is pretty close to a death sentence in organized warfare. Being a smaller target is basically a non-issue, too. A decent archer can easily hit their mount, if not the rider, and a dismounted midget would be stomped into the dirt by a warhorse without the input of its rider at all. And given that good armor stops direct hits from arrows most of the time (especially the fairly crappy simple bows used by the ancient world) and that these mounted midgets would have even weaker bows than their opponents and weaker arms to draw them with and shorter limbs to draw them along they would be at a huge disadvantage in range and penetration when it comes to missile combat. I do not believe there is any way a tiny human being could realistically compete in an actual running battle with normal people, any more than a normal person could sword-fight or out-shoot a giant. You basically have to introduce powers like faeries (flight, supernatural maneuverability, magical powers) or dwarves (superhuman strength and toughness, plus being the same mass if not height as their opponents) to get something that can fight back. Otherwise it's basically like fighting little kids. It's a big disadvantage in individual melee, in mass melee it would get you ground like hamburger. The enemy would literally kick you to death if they had sabattons on. Skill and nimbleness only go so far - if you'll notice basically every warrior in history has preferred heavier armor and weapons if available over this Hollywood ninja-fencing BS, with the exception of specialty troops and the post-gunpowder era. That is because size and mass are basically the best simple physical advantages you can have when you are trying to kill people with your hands.
  9. The inspiration for this comes from a post over on Facebook about real ostrich riders, where someone mentioned that the Praxian ostrichriders are in fact very small people. I can see where the idea comes from - jockeys - but this is in fact a terrible idea. In fact, very small people in melee combat is almost always a terrible idea, unless they have superhuman powers to offset their obvious size, reach, mass, leverage and power disadvantages. And, in fact, this would actually be reflected somewhat in the rules: they should have a smaller SIZ and realistically STR, and thus should be easier to knock off their horse, do inferior damage, use weaker bows, etc. Depending on how detailed the reach rules being used are, the same is true here: someone with the SIZ of a typical child (as some real people are) would have a terrible native reach and would be forced to use smaller scale weapons, or they simply could not control them. This means they would be at a disadvantage in Strike Ranks, etc. Most games do not bother to deal with this, but the fact is that a weapon must be properly scaled to the limbs, hands and strength of its user or it will not be effective. A shortsword is not a dagger to a giant, it's a toy. A giant's longsword is not a greatsword to a human, it's a novelty Bearing Sword that no human could actually use in serious melee. Thus not only would these ostrichriders have garbage reach in the first place, even their lances would have garbage reach against normal human-sized lances. And a footman with a pike could hit them without being endangered by these pygmies. And the comparison to giants is pretty much spot on. Your typical smaller-scale fantasy giant (~2x human height) has the same ratio of size and mass to me that I do to an aboriginal pygmie. This is not to say a pygmie could not kill me - it does not take a lot of power to stab someone with a sharp spear - but if we were both equally trained and equipped for our size I would be at a massive advantage in every imaginable way except balance, and even then since small humans do not have the super-strength of dwarves even if he knocked me over I could just sit on his chest to win the grapple. Tiny people are a staple of fantasy fiction, but they are realistically pretty much screwed in organized warfare, at least unless they have guns and armored vehicles. The fact that the ostrichriders are primitive nomads makes things even worse. Training, organization and technology can help to offset inferior size and strength, allowing tiny little Roman manlets defeat the 'giant'* Celtic and Germanic people. But if they don't have massive, well-trained, professional armies they are probably going to get stomped all over: it would be as though the Romans were not only massively superior in equipment and professionalism, but also were twice the height of the Gallic people. *i.e., typical among north European men, really not a size that would even be considered noteworthy in America - almost every male I know is over six feet tall, and most of the rest are close
  10. I haven't checked out my RD/C&C books in a while so perhaps there is something like this, but what about a quasi-magical clockwork war engine with a pilot riding it, and a handful of guys with crossbows to keep light soldiers from targeting its weaknesses (like the Howdah of an elephant)? Not so much a tank as I imagine it but like a gigantic version of a cuckoo clock soldier, complete with a thrusting pike and trip warhammers. A whole regiment of oversized mechanical men bound together with a tower-chariot behind them. The Swiss Phalanx!
  11. About a year ago a friend of mine was planning to run an Age of Shadows campaign but he ended up having some health problems and hasn't been able to work on it since. I have the game and a couple supplements for it, and it seems pretty straightforward in terms of the rules. I am wondering if anyone out there has much play experience with it? As a rather Alter-Middle-earth setting how does it compare in feel with other games - actual Middle-earth properties like MERP and TOR - or Burning Wheel? Obviously the rules are way different between all of these, but would you say it gets the Middle-earth vibe better than MERP? What kind of campaigns does it play best to? Standard scenario-based adventuring, more organized campaigns, short games? Or does it, like OpenQuest, lend itself fairly equally to any of these styles?
  12. If you think horse archers are effective in warfare they're better in small-group fighting! A man with a bow on a horse can basically annihilate two-legged enemies at will and evade retaliation with ease. A party with an armored archer on a horse would have a big advantage, unless they were underground lol or some similar fantasy setup. Of course this can be done already with the right combat style, but in Mythic Persia you finally have an excuse to have your entire party be nomadic aristocrats with composite bows, lances, sabers and full body mail, who show no respect for authority and loot anything they can carry off. Historical murder hobos.
  13. Just out of curiosity how much work would it take to create a portable version of this? Not necessarily an independent program, but something like a complete web archive that could be used from a jump drive or something?
  14. Of all the campaigns I have pitched so far my Thennla game seems to be getting the most interest on Roll20. Unfortunately I do not have the Taskan militia campaign arc from Age of Treason, as that could be a perfect excuse, but in the current game I intend to tie in to certain military operations taking place in the north of the Taskan Empire. Assuming the players are the 'adventurer' type, what is a good way to get them at least marginally involved in a battle? Being 'adventurers', though essentially small-time mercenaries, means they're probably not interested in spending the next six months in Kitan eating dried mutton and collecting a feeble stipend. What's true of merc life is doubly true of military enlistment! Related to how to bring it into the campaign, what is a good way to set up battles so that players are invested in (rather than mere stuck in the middle of) its outcome? Something that comes to mind would be drawing on their Passions, with some object or objective related to a Passion being threatened either by the opposing force or perhaps being held hostage in order to secure cooperation! I do not intend to run a mercenary or military campaign by any means (that's for my Burning Wheel game set in medieval France) but I do like throwing in elements of martial panoply and formation that have no real role in the small-unit tactics of most adventuring bands.
  15. Interesting. I would love to get those adventures for Mythras when they're released. Summoning would be interesting. As it is Animism is the closest to Stormbringer! magic.
  16. Cyberpunk has become filled with cliche fodder, much like fantasy. It is not written as much by people who were into early internet subculture and 80s overwrought projections of economic disaster; it is instead written by people who played Shadowrun in their teens. Likewise with most fantasy: it's a bad pastiche on Tolkien written by people who don't know or care much about actual ancient or medieval societies, or comparative mythology, or anglo-Saxon lore. It's written by people who read Tolkien.
  17. TBH I rarely pay attention to RPG book art, so if you're going to do a new version may as well revise it.
  18. That sounds much like the combat system in Hackmaster '5th edition'. I actually quite like it, though Hackmaster is a rather strange beast overall.
  19. In the introduction to Shores of Korantia the author says that he repeats as little as possible from the Legend/Age of Treason supplements. What exactly would I find in the Age of Treason books for Legend that wouldn't be in SoK or The Taskan Empire?
  20. I read this last month but I forgot about it until now. I would definitely be interested in a Mythic Greece book. The combat style and equipment I was most interested in in Mythic Rome was the Makedonian phalangites and the city hoplites. I really like the idea of a fantasy empire which uses all sorts of variant ancient infantry and cavalry in some kind of rube goldberg combined arms method. The Greek city-state politics and minor kingdoms are pretty neat. The innumerable permutations of Greek myths and cults are great for a fantasy setting, too; which is why I think fantasy games tend to tend toward ancient pagan models rather than monotheistic or non-deistic traditions (Daoism, etc.). If I were to do anything myself in this it would be Mythic Persia. I love horse archers and cataphracts. Ancient heavy infantry (Immortals) would be interesting, too. Aside from the tin soldiers, ancient Persia and the nearby steppe/desert/mountain areas were more fertile, wetter and their climate more forgiving in the ancient past. I like the idea of combining stuff from the Persian/Parthian/Sassanid period under one umbrella, as the example of Mythic Greece and Rome above.
  21. I own a majority of the games made on the BRP model, from RuneQuest to OpenQuest2, with the exception of MRQ1 and some versions of Pendragon. I have not done a detailed comparison of their magical and combat rules side-by-side (I haven't even played a few of them) but I do notice a lot of similarities: characteristics, the general skill system, the use of funky dice for damage. Mythras' Animism is not far off from the later editions of Stormbringer!/Elric when the emphasis was shifted to summoning and binding magic. It's not too hard to tell which systems are close to each other; MRQ2/Legend/RQ6/Mythras probably being the most similar to one another, for obvious reasons. Call of Cthulhu and RQ2/3 have very different rules for many things (though CoC spells aren't too far from RQ common magic). Which systems do you think are the most distinct from each other, or the most unique in themselves, among the BRP-related family?
  22. Glorantha dragons, Wakboth, the Crimson Bat and some others I am forgetting pretty well dwarf the monsters in most RPG settings.
  23. Or in the case of a Roman tenement, dry wood with thatch roofing, walls filled with wood dust and soaked with the body oils of occupants and their meals. Combine that with the warm, dry conditions of the 1st c. BC-AD and you've got a lucrative money making scheme for your fire brigades.
  24. Yes, in order to get to big proportions it would have to be a sustained flame or a really dry area - or a lot of it would probably disperse from water evaporation and so forth. However, starting a fire in an ancient/medieval city would probably be easier, since the timbers in buildings are already dry. Although some cities use quite a bit of stone the roofing is usually wood.
  25. Crosspost from TDM forums about magical fire and how crazy they could potentially get. The devastating and deadly wildfires that have yet again hit California made me think about the fact that characters in fantasy games will often be in grasslands, wooden villages and forests. They're carrying around lamp oil, have flaming swords, etc. In a fantasy world where D&D or RuneQuest-style magic is commonly available it seems like there would be some pretty intense wildfires started by a handful of idiots fighting over gold dubloons and resorting to lava bolts in the struggle. As a GM I occasionally bring this up, but only now did I consider the scale to which an ultra-hot flame (of the sort used by sorcery to inflict instant and deadly wounds) would probably also turn an oak tree into so much lit kindling if the person it was shot at happened to be near one. In one instance (this was OSRIC) my players got into a fight in a bar (with some local thugs) and the party wizard used a flaming hands spell and almost burned the bar down. They managed to get a room in the inn because the innkeeper was terrified of them, but they got little love in that town. Now just imagine if Tim the Enchanter goes a bit overboard when he's dispatching the Jabberwocky and sets the whole of the Ruritanian Royal Forest on fire? Not only would this devastate the people of the region and the ecosystem generally (arguablly, it would be good farmland afterward) but there would probably be some pretty serious law enforcement/wizard guild pressure bearing down on people who toss white-hot bolts around like arrows. Mythras has rules for setting people on fire (it wouldn't be a fantasy game if it didn't!) but what about burning down buildings, forests? It seems to me that in order to do as much damage as a sword in a similar amount of time a magical flame would have to be pretty freakin' hot, which means whatever it heated up would probably be hot enough to get ordinary flammable materials going, the exception being if it was like a hot laser where it burnt so fast that it snuffed itself out by oxygen consumption. I know that in D&D the fireball spell and Dragon's breath are hot enough to instantly liquify gold, which would turn a green forest into a campfire just as fast.
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