Markdoc

Re: Herophile Fantasy art Yep, me too. Only to find that mastering 3D art is not as easy as it seems... I am making some progress though. Right now, I'm working on my Mad Photoshop Skillz. These are not characters, but a picture I did last Sunday entitled "Lancelot's Rose". Cheers,Mark

Re: Weapons as Perks

Re: Evolution and Magic.

Re: Class in Fantasy The variation in the status at the bottom of the heap varied widely too. Michael Hopcroft is right about the status of the serfs in Eastern Europe (especially in Poland, which back in the day was much larger than it now is) - they had very few legal rights and almost no way to enforce them since the courts were composed entirely of landowners who were related to each other. A major complaint in the 13th and 14th centuries was about serfs who escaped onto lands owned by the religious orders: although their rules for treatment of serfs have survived and seem incredibly brutal today, they did grant some basic protections - making the orders look like a good deal to many serfs. In contrast, although the peasants' revolt failed in England, continuous minor revolts led to the rapid decline in villeinage around that time anyway - and serfdom was already obsolete. So by the high middle ages, there were very few people who fell into the category of serfs/villeins in England. That's why the bulk of their armies were made up of free yeomen. And as noted, many countries never had serfdom - while in Denmark, sefdom was finally abolished only about 200 years ago (no, I'm not kidding!) In my game, the possibility for powerful individual figures to arise has made social mobility much easier in all cultures: the idea of "social rise based on merit" is always there. Lord Knobbyknees is likely to be happier about the idea of his daughter marrying Dorf the sturdy peasant lad, if Dorf and two of his mates have just reduced the army of his rival Lord Nochin to so much compost. In that regard, it's different from medieval "real world" cultures. cheers, Mark

Re: Class in Fantasy

Re: Evolution and Magic. Hey, go right ahead I've had a lot of fun with these guys/gals. In my game, the mages form an overclass - the whole city runs at their whims and they are decadence personified. Not only do they experiment on making new creatures, but they also experiment on each other and themselves. To do what they do, of course they have to be comfortable in slave trading, which is another reason to dislike them. In my world science and magic are pretty much interchangeable, so anyone who studies one messes with the other - it's all arcane knowledge. So to these mages, everything they do is just a kind of breeding. Instead of marriages, they make contracts for one or more babies with each other or suitable external people, choosing their mate on the basis of desired characteristics, the same way they would make a monster. One female mage in the game had mutated herself with a lot of cat-like features but was still mostly human (and fertile). She wanted to make a baby with one of the PCs who was big and strong and good-looking and to her surprise, he was really, really negative about the whole thing The creatures they make are fun too - at one point the players had a run-in with one of the Lords of Chance (a crimelord from another small city-state) and ambushed him in his boudoir, away (so they thought) from all his guards. He had a half-dozen dancing girls/pleasure-slaves who had been magically crossed with big cats - women's bodies, with short, soft bluish grey fur and cat's heads (made by the same female mage). The players had seen them before, performing a sword-dance at a feast. What they didn't know was that Balthar's slaves had also been bred for fighting prowess and extensively trained, so that he had his bodyguard with him all the time. They were really fast, telepathic and had retractile claws and kewl martial arts skillz... Oh, and they always landed on their feet if you dropped them The look on the players faces as they got their butts kicked by the "dancing girls" was priceless... cheers, Mark

Re: clone spell + 1 to summon a specific being is a nice addition - but fanatically loyal is not, since when the duplicate turns up 1) there is no-one around to give any commands and the duplicate has the same psych lim.s and background as the original so it will probably behave in a pretty similar fashion (and if it didn't, who could tell? It's not like the original is around to argue the point). Inherent is a good idea. If you add that to what Stef posted, it ends up costing 11 points, which is not too bad. I would add "charge does not recover, -2" to bring the cost to 9 points - otherwise he could cast the spell repeatedly. cheers, Mark

Re: Evolution and Magic. My approach to this has been to distinguish between "monsters" and "animals". Animals I tend to run in an at least semi-reasonable fashion. In area where you have dragons, they are top predator. You don't find much in the way of other large predators about. In areas where Skereagh (a big nasty, more or less wolf-like creature) are found, you don't have ordinary wolves. They just can't compete (actually there are no ordinary wolves in my game - they've been competed to extinction). Animals breed, compete and behave in an animal-like fashion. Some species exist which have obviously been magically altered at some stage in the past - or else extensively bred for certain traits - but it's hard to tell the difference, because if you alter an animal too much (whether by magic or cross-breeding), it can't interbreed with normal animals. In short, you have made a monster. Monsters are created by magic. They are one-of-kind, never seen before, never seen again (unless the Mage who made them likes them so much, he decides to make more of the same sort...). In my game, monsters by definition are not natural, don't breed and don't, therefore, compete in an evolutionary fashion. That allows me to deploy nasty, magical beasties when I want without worrying about why they don't overrun the local countryside. As an aside, I have a largish city-state run by mages in my game called "The Minglers of the Blood" whose economy is based on making magical creatures for sale. They buy up slaves or animals and then alter them to their customers specifications. Such creatures are, of course, very expensive, but The Minglers of the Blood make good patrons for adventurers who want to earn some cash by capturing dangerous creatures or acquiring rare magics to infuse into their creations. They also make a good source (though only one such source) of magical hybrid thingies for me to torment players with. cheers, Mark

Re: Class in Fantasy The other possibility, if you wnat to keep the familiar feudal structure is to realise that things *weren't* as cut and dried as laid out in all places and at all times. Class did not really settle into a fixed pattern until the later middle ages in most places and in the countries marginal to Europe (Scandinavia, Ireland, the Baltic) not until much later. In many areas such a pattern never really gelled at all. You could easily choose one of these areas as a model. If you choose the frontier model In both Ireland and the Baltic, you had a small feudal elite who were unable to hold down the country by themselves. They relied on alliances with tribal leaders from the provinces whose followers were as haughty as any noble - and who didn't necessarily get there by right of birth. They also relied on support from quite large urban populations who were distinct from the tribal groups (Norse-Irish in Ireland, Germans in the baltic) AND from the nobles. Intermarriage wasn't common in the upper levels of such societies, but it did happen, suggesting some social mobility. The townsmen demonstrated significant political power on occasions. And there were no serfs. In Medieval Germany (at least the Rhineland, Saxony and the Palatinate) not only were there no serfs, but there was whole group of knights and landowners who were NOT nobles, but of common birth (the ministerales). Some of these became as powerful as noble lords and intermarried with them (though again, this was rare). Essentially you have a militarised "middle class" alongside the townsmen. In the Low Counties - and in Switzerland - you have feudal nobles owning the countryside (or at least some of it) but the real power lay in the hands of an elected council with all major issues being settled by participatory democracy (at least, if you're a guy) in Switzerland or by an elected town council in Flanders and the Netherlands, which could include Nobles but which was normally made up of middle class townsmen. Not only did townsmen fight en masse on foot (for a while, they they were much in demand as mercenaries), but they fielded contingents of "knightly" horse made up of commoners and hired their own companies of mercenaries. Over the top of these different social structures you can lay religious orders - as noted a number of royal advisors were drawn from men of humble birth who rose though the church. There are others who rose to political power through guild structures. That's not to say that class is unimportant - people seemed to have been aware of it all the time, in every way. I'm just pointing out that it is no barrier to social mobility, in a medieval setting. In the real world, Robert Guiscard came to Italy a poverty-stricken adventurer - and 30 years later he dictated policy to the Pope and proposed marrying his son to the daughter of the Emperor of Constantinople, the most prestigious house in Europe - and they took the offer seriously enough to consider it. They were all too well aware of the *impropriety* of a daughter porphyrogenitus marrying a jumped-up near-commoner: but politics dictated they didn't reject the idea out of hand. cheers, Mark

Re: Herophile Fantasy art Hey be thankful - it's hot in Pavis, so he's naked under the robe Just kidding. Cheers, Mark

Re: Herophile Fantasy art One of the nice things about rendered art is the possibility (depending on your modelling ability) to put your characters in a setting: here's Whitehair - her somewhat feline features are not an accident, but a clue to her weretiger-ness. Cheers, Mark

Re: Encounter Penguins

Re: clone spell The last option is to use: Summon exact duplicate, with Trigger (character's death). That way, the character dies and a duplicate pops up wherever it was he cast the spell (which if he's smart will be somewhere safe). cheers, Mark

Re: Turakian Populations Oh - and a general comment. I do find it very helpful for my own games to work out a general population schema, even if you don't need to know how many shoemakers there are in Tarsh. It's one of the first things I do when setting up a new country and does several things: tells me how many cities I should have, how big they are and also tells me about the tech level they need. How I put these things together automatically generates game-useful stuff - political relationships, how easy it is for the players to find an armourer, how easy it is to hide from the authorities, etc. Here's what I normally do: 1. Decide what I WANT the country to be be (feudal, mageocratic, theocratic, republic, etc). 2. Decide the tech level 3. Decide the total population All of these are to some extent decided by the neighbouring countries/areas I have already detailed and by the geography. Then I place the cities where I want them, taking into account logical placements (Cities tend to be on rivers, good agricultural land or trade routes, unless placed deliberately as settlements to subdue or defend an area). Why a city is where it is, often generates an automatic basic history and thus decides its character, especially when combined with the three first decisions. Finally, I usually choose a "real-life" city as a loose model. Here's an example. I placed two city-states in my game. I wanted both to be big, high-tech trading cities, with populations in the hundreds of thousands. The first city - Lacramar is the capital of a trading state, with a population in the millions. It's on the coast, in a tropical region and has a late medieval/Early renaissance tech level. The real life model is classical Athens. Athens in the classical era had a population of about 200,000 and it is though to have held almost HALF the population of Attica, so it in no way resembles the medieval models we discussed - instead you get one big city surrounded by estates and small farms with almost no villages/small towns. To mak ethat model work, you need good trade routes to bring in the needed food and a strong military to enure they run smoothly. I replaced the Greek poltical model with one based on medival guilds and wards and ended up with a swarming anthill of a city, with a population of around a million, that sprawls along the coast and sits at the middle of a vast trade network - that means a big dock area and also a traders' quarter: I drew in the network, noted down a few major political players and drew a map. Pnume I placed in the middle of a big swamp with the idea that it was where a group of Mages had withdrawn to work in isolation and security and then grown over time. The model was planted cities like Carcassone. Swampland doesn't offer much in the way of possibilities for expansion or cropland, so the city itself is built like a huge pyramid, with buildings piled high on each other and twisty narrow streets. The surrounding swampland is covered with fish farms and rice paddies, but that's not enough. So the lords of Pnume built a fleet of flying ships to ferry food from farms on the arable land at the edge of the great rift - terraced farms and strongholds tied together by the flying ships. Once you have the flying ships, then trading further afield becomes plausible - hence the trading network and so on. I drew in a second trade network overlapping partially with the one from Lacaramar - flying traders deal in different goods and different places from Lacramar's seaborne traders. Pnume ended up a much more cramped place than Lacaramar even though it has about 200,000 inhabitants Thinking about these things a little in advance makes it easy to run adventures on the fly and plan out your world in a logical fashion - and I find it generates ideas for further play easily. It also avoids "generic fantasy city" syndrome. cheers, Mark

Re: Turakian Populations

Re: Turakian Populations

Re: Is this ok for a classic Backstab? With one caveat, the addition that there are different way to handle the problem (as you noted - find weakness, levels, etc. I agree. The caveat is that there are simply times when a player wants to consistently do more damage, and I have no problem with them buying a limited HKA/RKA to reflect that. But I have a big problem with deadly blow, which as you note, was a clumsy and badly thought-out to simply graft a D and D metarule onto Hero system. I never permit it in my games. cheers, Mark

Re: Herophile Fantasy art And another RQ character - a sword sage from Lhankor Mhy. This guy was a sort of "shared PC". He started out as an NPC, but when one of the players was unable to participate because their character was too badly wounded to go off adventuring - and they didn't have a backup, due to a nasty incident involving a chaos beastie in a previous adventure - they played this guy. Eventually he became the "fill-in". Whenever someone couldn't play their regular character/backup because they were off training or recovering from wounds or visiting their family, or in jail, or something, then they could play the Sword Sage, who was always hanging about looking for excuses to dig up lost knowledge and/or kill things. cheers, Mark

Re: Herophile Fantasy art OK since the thread isn't dead yet Here's Raarl - a half-troll pit fighter turned adventurer from a PBEM game that recently died (sigh). Cheers, Mark

Re: How do you Ignore Armor? Indirect ain't gonna work. It lets you attack from a different direction ofr place. It does not let you bypass defences - apart from walls, real or Force. What you want is AVLD or NND, does body. Yep, it's expensive. It should be - in fantasy settings, it lets you bypass the most common defence and inflict lethal damage. It SHOULD be expensive. cheers, Mark And if you want to be a total bastard, it already has a big advantage on ot, so it doesn't increase the price so much (relatively) to add more. Make it area effect, selective, and then whack on unranged to bring the price back down. Eww.

Re: Herophile Fantasy art And here's his replacement - Uhklor. Driss was an honour-bound barbarian swordsman who lived by a strict code of honor and was always first into combat. Uhklor was a smarmy, sophisticated priest from the decadent city who was always first to leave the area of combat cheers, Mark

Re: Herophile Fantasy art And on another note here's another character - Driss Wolfhead, a two-sword fighting Death Cultist (specialised in hunting down undead and granting the peace that comes from being cut into a hundred wiggling pieces). Unfortunately, he got crippled beyond repair fighting a troll shaman and the Thing From Beyond she summoned up. cheers, Mark

Re: Herophile Fantasy art

Re: Your "2005" Pet Gaming Projects My pet projects right now are: Get my Victorian-era game together (think 1890's dashing adventures, crossed with Tim Power's Declare and The Stress of Her Regard and you are halfway there). So far all I have done is a backstory timeline, two adventures written up and a couple more fleshed out and the story arc sketched out in a couple of pages. I still need to write up another half dozen adventures (that'll give me enough to get started - I can write the others as we progress), the NPCs, the maps, a player's intro and some maps, and then do the necessary artwork Second on the list is to update and expand my fantasy hero game world, which has been kind of stalled after a burst of enthusiam a few years back. I have two realy big boxes of hand-drawn and handwritten stuff that needs to be digitized as a first step :( cheers, Mark

Re: Herophile Fantasy art Since we are doing Fantasy art, here's something I whipped up a while ago - the Grandmaster of the warguild "Fall of Princes" - one of the important NPCs from my game cheers, Mark