Markdoc

Re: How to get swords on your starship Oh well, in that case, you have your answer right there: a galactic civilisation fell, for whatever reason: for example, a computer virus designed for military use, that damaged cyberbrains, not only shutting down all cities and machines but also turning most citizens into vegetables - only the young (who hadn't been fitted yet) the very poorest and the odd philosophical holdout who didn't have a cyberbrain were left. In that situation, all that would be left would be hardscrabble survival and if the technology was as advanced as one might expect, duplicating it and learning from it might be almost impossible: especially given the nature of the survivors left in a scenario like the one above (the young, the marginalised and the wacko). With most of the population gone and the survivors having to survive on what they could scavenge, in a couple of generations, it'd incomprehensible. Many generations later when society had grown from the few survivors, it'd be magic. Give a cave man a bronze sword and he could figure out how to use it and even with time, maybe his tribe could learn to recreate it. Give him an iPod and he'd be totally lost. Even if over the years he figured out how to use it, he would not have the faintest idea of how to begin to create something of the kind. He couldn't even take it apart to examine it, because the internals would mean nothing. There you go: swords, sandals and starships. cheers, Mark

Re: How to get swords on your starship

Re: Who plays: Jack of all trades, master of none

Re: Shields

Re: Fantasy Travel Question No - that's why people *use* vehicles. Because they don't get tired. In real life, a fit walker can cover several miles at 4 MPH, but if he tries to hold that pace, by the end of the day, he's likely to be doing 2 MPH or less. Try it for several days on end and he'll be lucky to be doing 1 MPH by the end of the second day. If you look at the modern marching tables on the last link Lord Ghee gave you can see this: in real life, a unit force-marching covers progressively less distance each day as their reserves shrink. A more realistic walking speed is 3 MPH, and at that speed you'll cover a day's march in bit less than 7 hours of solid walking. Throw in time to get pack up your gear, prepare and eat food, then pack your gear out again and you're looking at 8-9 hours solid activity. That's a pretty full day. Push it out to a full 12 hours - say 10 hours solid walking - and you might make 30 miles, but now you're exhausted. Keep it up for 16 hours (18 hours total exertion) and you can cover nearly 50 miles - but that's the kind of exertion that historically destroyed armies if they kept it up, due to loss from exhaustion, men who can no longer walk because they have no skin left on their feet, men who simply desert rather than put up with the pain and so on. It's why ships were the main method of travel where practical, because their average speed is less than that of a cantering horse, but they can keep it up all day and all night if the wind blows, allowing them to outpace anything on its own legs. cheers, Mark

Re: Fantasy Travel Question

Re: Hero (and Villain) Poseurs... In the first champions game we played in the Gm had "Dr Evil" who had a flashy costume and a lttle zap gun. He was just a standard crook who had worked out that people would freak out far more and do what he said if they thought he had super-powers,than if he was just some guy with a gat. Alas, one day he encountered Shadowfist, our team's overly violent and totally humourless martial artist, who *also* throught he was a supervillian and promptly smeared him in one hit. My character got Dr. Evil to hospital in time to save his life, but it was a near run thing. In the same game, there was a pair of low-powered villians who would take credit for any crime where the perpetrators were not clearly identified, as a way of building up their street cred. They were called "Milli Villainy" cheers, Mark

Re: Fantasy Travel Question Cool find, indeed! Repped! It pretty much confirms what we have been saying here, which is nice - standard marching for the 10,000 was a bit less than 20 miles a day, with frequent rest days, forced marching with suppplies laid in ahead of time can kick that up by about 50% to around 25 miles per day. And at the time it was considered a wonder - not surprising, since the author cites the standard movement for a greek army of the time at about half that: less than 10 miles a day - which funnily enough is not that different from the 8 miles a day for the medieval polish army. These figures haven't changed much over the millenia - both the romans and mongols defined a full day's march for an army as 20 miles a day and they were both considered very mobile compared to their foes. Indeed, the global security site says the same thing - the absolute maximum march for dismounted troops there is listed as a bit over 30 miles in 24 hours - or about the same as the forced marches of ancient history. It's an important point: The global security site notes "Commanders of heavy forces often overestimate (or simply fail to recognize) the speed with which dismounted elements can move. " I see it all the time in roleplaying discussions, but it has more important real-life consequences: the the failure of the the Schlieffen Plan in WWI crippled the German chances of victory. A contributing factor to that was Molke's insistence that the troops could march at 4 km/h. Of course, they could - for a while - but nobody could keep that pace day after day, loaded down with weapons, ammo and clothing. Worse, no provison was made for delays, so once the offensive fell behind schedule it could never catch up. cheers, Mark

Re: Fantasy Travel Question

Re: The Hero Forum's Fattest Man in Comics! I'd vote for Two Ton Tony Tubbs (from 2000 AD). The world's fattest man. Utterly immobile and has no powers apart from eating food - but boy, can he pack it away! cheers, Mark

Re: Imperium Romanum - A fantasy campaign Consider it derailed! The knowledge had not been "forgotten" as such, but even when there were settlements in Greenland, there were hardly any voyages to North America and no "official" ones. That meant no record keeping, no effort to establish a direct route, etc with the result that even at the *time* most people had no idea such voyages had been made, even in the scandinavian cultures. From scattered notes in various books, we know some scandinavian people were aware that there was "something" out there, but even Iceland, which was continously settled, was very rarely visited and almost nothing was known about it. That went double for Greenland and Vinland once the settlements died out. The vikings didn't draw maps, and relied on verbal descriptions and dead reckoning - sailing across the north Atlantic like that was fraught with danger. So, even in the northern cultures almost nothing was known about these places and Vinland was assumed to be an island like Greenland and Iceland. Even if the information leaked southwards (pretty damned unlikely, since even the Scandinavians' British neighbours were ignorant of their existence in the medieval period - outside medieval scandinavia, only the Irish and the Scottish islesmen, who kept a scandinavian cultural link, even knew these northern islands existed) all it would have said was "there are islands in the North Atlantic - but they are pretty rubbish places" So no, I know of no evidence that he knew of the viking settlements - but even if he had, I doubt he would have cared. As an interesting side note, in the 1700's - by which time America had been well and truly placed on the map - a british syndicate attempted to reach China "the short way" by sailing north and east above scandinavia - ie: around the top of what's now Russia. You can guess how well that worked (a few survivors did eventually make it back to England) but it gives you an idea of exactly how little was known about that part of the world. cheers, Mark

Re: Fantasy Travel Question Damn straight, it's a hard pace: anyone who can walk 8 miles an hour should be competing professionally, because they'd easily blow past all world records. Here's the actual numbers: http://www.iaaf.org/statistics/records/gender=W/allrecords/discipline=10KW/index.html The world record is 6.2 miles in 42 minutes - for an average speed of 6.8 miles an hour. That's the world's fastest walker on a perfect surface, carrying nothing but ultra-thin clothing. Of course, no human can *walk* 8 miles an hour - that's a fairly fast jog. People do go faster than that of course - world-class runners can manage better speeds than that even over a full marathon. but now you are talking about running - and not carrying anything. As I said, people consistently overestimate the distance it's possible to cover on foot (or byhorse or even by car, for that matter). For all those "Of course you could walk 50 miles in a day" posts I'd merely point out the world record for long distance running is 62 miles in 6 and a quarter hours or about 10 MPH http://www.iaaf.org/statistics/records/gender=M/allrecords/discipline=100K/index.html That's the world's fastest human over long distances, after years of training, in perfect conditions, carrying nothing and getting carefully-tailored food and water provided to him at regular intervals. And he sometimes has to be carried away in a stretcher afterwards.... Now, there *are* records of people on foot, carrying equipment doing those kinds of distances, running for a half hour, walking for a half hour, etc. But those records all emphasise the suffering involved - they also record strong men dying from the exertion of forced marches, so it's not something one does casually. It's most certainly not something anyone does on a regular basis. As a good rule of thumb, a fit, healthy human, not carrying too much gear, can manage about 5 KPH or about 3 miles an hour on reasonable ground. 4 miles per hour is a brisk walk and 6 MPH is a steady jog. Humans pretty much can't go much faster than that with any sort of load over long distances unless they are in really, really great shape. It's important to remember that carrying much weight really degrades your speed very quickly. To put that in perspective, for a horse, a walk is considered 3-4 MPH (about the same as a human) a trot is roughly 8-10 MPH (equivalent to a running human), a canter is 10-17 MPH (this is reaching or surpassing the peak of human running speeds, but a horse can keep it up for an hour or more with a rider: this is the speed of all those post-riders we talked about) and a gallop is generally reckoned at 20-30 MPH - although the fastest thoroughbreds have been clocked in excess of 50 MPH (though like a human sprinting, they can't maintain that for any period of time). cheers, Mark

Re: Fantasy Travel Question Oh - OK, I was looking at the wrong table - I simply looked at the standard encmbrance table to see when movement penalties kick in - and there, that's at the next level up. As I commented, many of the tables in FH are a bit suspect: if I were you, I'd simply redo them. One simple suggestion would be to kick the suggested movement penalties up one category so that they matched the movement penalties in the standard encumbrance table. Without much baggage a horse and rider should not be a great deal faster than a man on foot (at least for sustained travel), but in reasonable going they certainly should NOT be slower. cheers, Mark

Re: Fantasy Travel Question Sure - we've already discussed post systems and several of them claimed speeds in excess of 200 miles a day - using multiple riders and dozens of horses and riding through the night. I don't think anyone seriously doubts that number.

Re: Imperium Romanum - A fantasy campaign

Re: Fantasy Travel Question

Re: Fantasy Travel Question

Re: Some advice Doc Democracy is right, but with FH there's a couple of things to consider. The upper limit for most people is 20, so if your "standard soldier" has a DEX of 11 and a STR of 15, all of your players who don't have an elderly or weak character in mind will be at least at that level and probably higher. A Gondorian guardsman will be presumably be higher than this guy and that's likely to be the benchmark for your combat-oriented characters: which means now you are looking at DEX and STR clustering up around 20 to start with. Where all of these stats sit, is of course up to the GM, but as a rule of thumb, if I am not aiming for a very cinematic feel, I set a relatively poorly trained soldier/guard at 10 points (background skills plus weapon FAM and maybe 1 CSL, with stats at the 10 line) a trained soldier is 25+ (now you start to see some military skills and improved stat.s) and regular, well-trained/veteran soldiers at the 50+ level (military-related skills, multiple weapons FAMs, and CSLs). I don't start kicking things like martial arts into play until we get to elite level soldiers at 100+ points. That means that your players don't have to spend a lot of points on combat simply to be able to deal with a town watchman, and although it might seem like very few points, a squad of 25 point soldiers with armour, shields and weapons will go through a mob of armed peasants like a knife through butter, so it's not like they "weak". Well-played, they can even be counted on to kill a few weaker player characters in the 150 point range if they have a significant advantage in numbers. Of course, for a one-off game you may wish to play at a higher point level with more experienced, fellowship-level heroes, in which case this is not so relevant. cheers, Mark

Re: Fantasy Travel Question Which is reasonable, but that 100 miles a day is towards the upper limit for a good rider, changing horses every hour or so, and carrying nothing but the bare necessities. The pony express, known for the toughness of its riders and the quality of its horses, considered 75 miles about the upper limit for a rider, though they changed horses every 10 miles or so (their record is in fact about 100 miles, though the post as a whole travelled more than 200 miles a day, carried by multiple riders over 24 hours). So it's certainly possible, but no way could it be considered "normal travel". I suspect, since your friend's estimate is about half what the pony express considered the maximum for an experienced rider with several changes of top quality horses, that he is over-estimating. People to tend to do that when estimating how far they have travelled. It's certainly not impossible, but 40 miles by horseback is a hard, hard haul - it's about double what people managed historically and would almost certainly blow out your horse. cheers, Mark

Re: Imperium Romanum - A fantasy campaign A couple of teeny-tiny nitpicks - though a fort every 50 miles is reasonable, you're probably going to want more regular way stations. A courier who tried to flog his horse 50 miles in a day would kill or founder it - and it's two to three days travel for most people (to put it in perspective, from Londinium to York on the roman road was considered a week's to 10 days' travel in good weather: that's about 200 miles). The real life Imperium Romanum was supposed to have a a mutatio ("a changing" or changeover station) every 5 miles where a courier could get a bite to eat, a drink and a change of mounts. Typically they had a stable (and presumably a guard or two) and a small tavern/foodstall. Every 15 miles (which was considered a typical day's journey) was a mansio ("a rest" or stopping place) which usually had a small garrison/police force, a tavern and or inn, stables, foodstalls and in at least some cases a bathhouse and several restaurants. From what you had written so far, I assumed your Imperium was older and more cosmopolitan than the original - so I'd expect at least a similar level of service With the shipping I suspect you have the opposite problem - ships moved much faster than land transport and in good weather a trip from Bari (in southern Italy) to Alexandria in Egypt might take as little as 4 days. However, the same passenger who exulted on his 4 day trip to Alexandria took two months to come home via the turkish and greek coasts, with unfavourable winds enforcing stays of many days in some ports. It wasn't that the ship travelled slowly - but that if the wind was bad (meaning a head wind or a lee wind) the ship didn't travel at all, and you sat around drinking and playing dice (or getting into trouble if you are a PC) Otherwise, excellent stuff. cheers, Mark

Re: Fantasy Travel Question Well, buses don't run to most places that adventurers go to. When was the last time you saw a number 95 to the Lair of the Lich-king? cheers, Mark

Re: Tu Whiu; A Whip martial art. My only comment is that the damge is perhaps a bit rough - it does as much killing damage as a broadsword - maybe make it reduced penetartion, so that it's still lethal to an unarmoured man, but not such a threat to a guy in full armour. cheers, Mark

Re: Character: Captain Jiranee Jenvirava

Re: [Video] Nazi Robot Attack Oh, c'mon - what's not to like about partially exploded scenery being stomped by giant metal feet? cheers, Mark

Re: How to get swords on your starship