Markdoc

Sure, where do you think the whole fraternity thing comes from? We do know that the Greeks sometimes fought prearranged battles to settle issues with minimal bloodshed (it must have sucked to be the team that had to play "skins"), but we also know that ambushes, random encounters and mass backstabbing frequently occurred, so battles could happen literally anywhere. As an aside - and only peripherally related - you learn a lot about history by simply visiting the site. Last year, while in Rome, I visited the Golden House, where Julius Caesar was murdered. The spot where it occurred was indicated ... right outside the toilets. They don't tell you that in history class, but looking at the place, I'm left with the very strong suspicion that the conspirators murdered him when he came out of the toilet - probably still adjusting his toga! cheers, Mark

No, he was an excellent, highly-skilled GM: one of the best that I've ever played with. In this case, we were playing with "heroic" characters 75 points+75 disads - but the flexible nature of Mind Control meant that the player could focus on that one power - which is perfectly doable at that level, even without access to power frameworks. It's simply that mind control, in a universe (like that of most Fantasy Hero games) where mental defences and special powers like mental awareness are not staples can be hugely effective ... in the hands of a skilled player. A player who uses mental powers like a club - something to throw around in combat - is usually not so powerful. I agree completely that if you want a fireball, build a fireball: don't try to persuade people that you are throwing fireballs. But a player who uses mental powers to persuade, mislead and co-opt can go through a lot of scenarios like a wrecking ball. A little telepathy can go a long, long way just by itself. Most scenarios are based on the assumption that PCs will go mano a mano with monsters or humanoid foes. They are often not written to handle a PC who scans ahead for minds, and then uses mind control or illusions to send the strong-but-stupid monster against other foes. In many cases - with regard to this specific PC - we crushed the opposition without ever actually coming face to face with them (which is why that PC got retired: not much fun for the other players). I agree that mental powers can be hard to deal with as a GM: I've had my own share of problems.Telepathy is one of my pet hates, but Mind Control can be pretty awful, too. Alas, too many GMs deal with the problem poorly, by simply declaring that everything is an EGO+30 effect or on occasion arbitrarily declaring that "You can't mind control him" or "He refuses to believe your illusion" rather than following the guidelines/rules. The potential for better than all-or-nothing outcome of mental powers makes them problematic in any gaming system: killing a powerful opponent is good. Bringing a powerful opponent onto your team - even briefly - is better than good. I think that Hero does a better job at handling the nuances than any other game system I have seen, but it can be problematic sometimes, that's just how it is. cheers, Mark

Ummm ... having visited plenty of ancient battlegrounds, I'm under no illusion that the ground was perfectly flat, or that ancient battles were anything but chaotic. My point is that shields in general are crap weapons, and that the hoplon in particular is grossly unsuited as a weapon. So far as we know, the shield bash was simply not a technique that was widely used (or even known) - depictions in 300 apart. I have no doubt that at some point a hoplite bashed a foe with his shield - and I have no doubt it was a desperation measure. I'm pretty sure that from time to time, rocks and sticks were used as weapons as well. If you have nothing better, you use what you have. But that's a world away from training to use a technique. Actually I'll let you into another secret: unlike in 300, Greek Hoplites almost never dealt with charging cavalry by springing 4 metres into the air and stabbing the cavalrymen as they rode underneath. Both are cinematic/heroic moves that I'd be perfectly happy with in one of my games, but they're not in any way reflective of reality. cheers, Mark

I'd just add to the chorus that EGO+30 to get a guard to go to sleep is way overkill. Historically, sentries - even trained ones - had a tendency to go to sleep, if they could possibly get away with it, which is why checking and rotating sentries has always been such a big deal. I'd also note that a mental illusion capable of generating a physically damaging fireball is worth way more than an actual fireball, because it could very easily become a physical Icespear or Lightning Bolt or whatever that particular monster's Kryptonite was. At the very least, it should cost the same as an equivalently-sized EB with advantages to cover the LOS, DMCV, invisibility, and variable special effects advantages. Note that invisibility to normal sight is not a "special freebie": as per the rules on 6E1, page 155 "As discussed on 6E1 126, Mental Powers are Invisible to characters who do not have Mental Awareness" Mental Powers can be hard to handle for a GM, because an illusionist basically only needs one power: Mental illusion, while a Cerebromancer needs only Mind Control. With either of those two powers, you can do an awful lot. You can of course, gussy it up with lots of extra powers - cumulative plus the +1/2 version of Invisible Power Effects lets you generate some insidious but exceedingly powerful effects, with a little patience. Instead of making the guard sleep, at EGO+30, you can just set him to murdering his sleeping comrades I think possibly the most powerful Fantasy Hero character I have ever played was built around Mind Control: he backed up his mental might with the physical prowess of dominated monsters, but by and large he preferred not to engage in direct confrontation. On occasion, he soloed challenges that the the GM had built for the whole team, and the GM - with good reason - hated him. Eventually I retired him because we agreed that he was a "no fun" character for the rest of the players. Cheers, Mark

Actually, off-hand, I might allow it. In my experience, defensive maneuver is not a frequently bought talent, which suggests that it is hardly overpowered, and for 5 points you could buy +2 DCV in melee with shields, which would usually be more useful. Cheers, Mark

That's why I suggested a language map based on proximity, so that a "German" speaker from the Rhineland, would be able to speak with a "French" speaker from just over the border as easily as with a "German" speaker from - say - Swabia. In reality, there were lots of factors that could alter language apart from distance - culture, religion, etc. In Copenhagen, I live in a district called Amager, settled by Dutch immigrants about 400 years ago. Even though literally located right next to the heart of Danish affairs and the location that formed modern Danish, they maintained a distinct dialect filled with Dutch for nearly 300 years. But while the GM can add that kind of thing in when they want to, it is hard to adjudicate on the fly - so distance makes a reasonable proxy. cheers, Mark

It gets better - the English Varangians fought the Normans - the people who had forced them to flee - in Italy, Sicily and the Balkans for the Byzantines. Still if you want medieval novel stuff, read the history of Harold Hardraade - a Varangian guardsman who became king of Norway and died trying to take the throne of England as well. Cheers, Mark

By 1100, Aramaic languages (Aramaic is a group of related languages, not one language) were long past their heyday. During the height of the Byzantine and Persian empires, when they ruled much of what is now the middle east and Iran, Aramaic languages were common and we know they were used by traders in the region alongside Greek. But with the Arab conquest and the gradual islamisation of the region, both Greek and Aramaic started to die out. By around 1200, they were largely confined to smaller or isolated communities. Aramaic never entirely vanished though - the liturgical language of the Syriac church is Aramaic, much the same way that latin survived in catholic liturgy. And there are still a few hundred thousand aramaic speakers of various types around. In Europe, Aramaic persisted alongside Hebrew for a long time - medieval hebrew documents (especially from Iberia) are found in both languages and there is a great degree of overlap. But for those communities, their common use language would have been what the people around them spoke. Cheers, Mark

As an aside, we used Hero system rules for skirmish-gaming without any problem at all. That wasn't "players against monsters" (PvM) but Player against Player (PVP). And it was a hoot. These were one-off games, not a campaign, but the concept is eminently doable. I've also used Hero system rules for large scale battles, again without any real problem. You don't need any additional rules for character creation for this kind of game: just some setup and advancement rules, plus - since you mention wanting a GM-free game - a way to generate fights. This is just off the top of my head, but here's how I'd do it. 1. Generate a bunch of monsters of varying degrees of toughness, and a bunch of unique boss-monsters and mini-boss monsters. (as a note you can cheat with Boss monsters, by taking superheroes and just fiddling with the description ) You can also generate traps of various sorts if you like. Monsters don't need motivation or much in the way of skills, just an attack or two and some defences. 2. Generate a whole mess of map tiles (Coastline, Desert, Forest, Cavern, Swamp, Ruins, Mountains, Dungeon, Crypt, Rocky plains, etc). I'd make a whole bunch of each of these with differing layouts, so that they can be put together in different combinations to make a big map of that terrain type. Ideally each tile will have usable paths through it, so that the players will be faced with a choice of routes and the occasional dead-end. 3. Generate a random loot table, keyed to monster difficulty. 4. Sketch a rough map of your "game world" - players start here, and Boss of Bosses lives there, etc. You can define terrain by how many maps wide it it (ie,: it takes three maps to cross the Desert of Moaning Souls, etc) 5. Play! The sequence of a game would go like this. A. Work out where your players currently are in the game world B. Generate a map of the appropriate terrain type by drawing a number of map sections (tiles) to fill your gaming table. You can then sketch the map out on your battle map, or (even better, if you have it) set it up with wargaming terrain. Indicate on the map where the PCs start and where they need to exit to move to the next map. C. As the PCs enter each "tile" lay it down contiguous with the one they are on, and roll to see what's there - type of monster, size of monster mob, chance for more than one mob, and chance for a unique min-boss monster. As the PCs conquer each mob or mobs, they get to roll on the loot table and see what they find. When the whole table is cleared (or crossed), everyone gets - say - 10 Xp, and moves onto the next map. If a PC dies, they can turn up again next game, but they get no Xp. You don't need any rules for why the PC doesn't stay dead: that's just a default of the setting. D. Certain specific maps have a tough boss monster - place these maps on your game world in defined locations, so that everyone knows where they are, and you don't end up with a bunch of dead PCs because they randomly rolled the Lich-King while everyone is on 100 total points. cheers, Mark

Also, there's the little detail that you would have to somehow get the virus, and then inject somebody without infecting yourself or your friends: not a risk most people would want to take. A jihadi might be willing to accept glorious death blowing themselves up in the middle of a crowd of enemies: dying slowly by internally dissolving while knowing that your friends and family were going to go the same way, not so much. Biological warfare is a bit like juggling chainsaws while they are running: it's a cool trick if you can pull it off, but the risk of a messy accident is always high. cheers, Mark

As an interesting aside, by 1100, the Varangian guard hired by the Byzantines was no longer dominated by Rus but by .... English! After the Norman conquest a large number of English Thanes and Huscarls lost their jobs. Others later had to flee the country after two unsuccessful uprisings against the Norman occupiers. Many of these men found work as mercenaries. They took jobs in Italy, and Spain, but the largest group went to the Byzantine Empire, where the Varangians already used their style of fighting, and shared cultural values (like the Varangians, Huscarls were also elite mercenary warriors who served the ruler as a personal bodyguard). At the same time, the supply of Rus and Scandinavian warriors was drying up, because the various lords of those regions were fighting it out as small independent holding were being absorbed into the growing kingdoms/principalities. That fighting not only disrupted the old trade routes, but also meant that there was plenty of work for fighting men closer to home. In Jarvardar saga, it was recorded that the English and some Danes from the north of England sailed to Constantinople in 350 ships - this is corroborated by a Greek manuscript (Chronicon universale anonymi Laudunensis) which records that the English arrived in 235 ships in 1075, and that nearly 4500 of them took service in the capital. The rest sailed into the Black sea and reconquered some lands from the Turkish invaders and founded a settlement called Nova Anglia. Thse two groups presumably not only provided soldiers for the guard on their arrival, but their sons also apparently enlisted at later dates, so that by the 12th century court chroniclers noted that the language of the Varangian guard was English. It's worth noting that the Byzantines also raised an elite unit of Frankish (mostly Norman) mercenary knights in the 11th century called the Latinikon, who served on similar terms to the Varangians. cheers, Mark

To come back to the original post, with regard to a language chart, a very simple (and yet, potentially more realistic) idea might be to simply use a "language map" (for example: http://mapsof.net/uploads/static-maps/europe_map_1100.jpg). The reason I suggest this is that langages were not formalised in 1100 to the extent that they are today. What that means in practice is that (for example) two English speakers of the day from, say, Wessex and Yorkshire, would have had considerable difficulty holding a detailed conversation - while the Wessex man could probably have held a simple conversation with someone from Normandy, who - in theory - spoke French, and the same would be true for a Yorkshireman talking with a Dane. So as a rule of thumb, I'd say From the same province/general area within a language group: Use language skill as is. From a neighbouring province/area within a language group: use language skill -1 From a distant province/area (ie: not adjacent) within a language group: use language skill -2 Crossing a national boundary: add an additional -1 Crossing a language group barrier: add an additional -1 That should pretty much cover things, I think. cheers, Mark

It's always hard to put a precise timeframe on when linguistic changes happened, because they occur over longish periods: but the generally accepted view is that Old English arose out of the fusion between the language of Northern England (which was heavily influenced by Danish/West scandinavian ) and Southern England (which was heavily influenced by Low German/Franconian). This process had started in the late 800's and the unification of England by military conquest in the 900's both accelerated the process and also put Saxon/Franconian in the driving seat, since that was the language of the ruling dynasty. So Old English is generally thought to date from around that time, and is marked by the decline of purely Scandinavian words and forms. Another conquest (the Normans in 1066) brought another linguistic change - not just a ruling dynasty with a different language, but access to French literature - and through that broader European literature. That had already started before the Normans, but the political change accelerated things. Middle English is therefore thought to have developed though from about 1100 - 1200 as these changes worked their way into common language. As for the Hebrew question, we can be pretty sure that Hebrew was in common use by medieval Jewish communities, because the communities in question developed their own forms of Hebrew influenced by the local languages - Sephardi, Yiddish, Mizrahi, etc. It would have been pretty weird for them to develop a Hebrew-based language for everyday speech if they were not actually using Hebrew in everyday speech. In many ways, the process was not unlike what happened in Spain, or in Italy, where the languages are very clearly derived from Latin, but over time diverged, while "pure latin" remained as a religious language, which was freely spoken only by an educated minority. Sephardi more or less died out after the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, as the Sephardic communities that had birthed it fragmented, and it remained a Hebrew variant. Yiddish, however, remained in common use, right up into the 21st century, diverging further and further from its origin over time, and becoming a language in its own right. What might confuse the issue though is that these Hebrew-derived languages were considered degenerate. In the 18th and 19th centuries, with the development of a Jewish/Zionist political consciousness, there was a deliberate effort to purge them in favour of a pure form of Hebrew, which had been retained as a religious language. That change might be what you are thinking of. That had the effect for example that Yiddish nearly died out in Germany and neighbouring countries, where it originated*, so that today we tend to think of it in association with Eastern Europe. cheers, Mark Edit: *When you get a sentence like this, it's always tempting to blame the Nazis, but we know that the shift happened long before them, in this case: they just gave Yiddish in Germany the final shove. Edit2: With regard to "living language" I guess it also pays to define your definition. Hebrew was clearly more than just a language for religious instruction in medieval times - the high middle ages were considered a golden age for Hebrew literature in Spain and middle Europe, with translations of Arabic texts being made and a great deal of (non-religious) poetry being written. At the same time, translations of texts on engineering and medicine, or books of poetry were clearly aimed at the educated classes, who were obviously assumed to be fluent in the language. It doesn't mean of course that butchers and bricklayers were.

Nice of you to say, but actually it's true. To a European, the European language groups are easy to distinguish: I can usually identify them pretty easily simply by ear, and the written forms are even easier. I was in Central Asia on holiday recently and crossed fair bit of ground, so travelled through areas with quite distinct cultures. You can tell that by dress and by food (and to some extent by attitude). But even though I know (for example) that Turkish falls into two major groups (Kipchak and Oghuz) I'm damned if I can tell them apart. They sound similar to me, and since they use a script I can't read, I can't even tell the written forms apart. Likewise Arabic/Persian, which are even more distinct. That shouldn't make a difference - I can still read histories of the area, after all - but somehow it seems to make everything a bit harder to put into place. cheers, Mark

This is quite a messy area - but an important one. We know, for example, that the religious orders housed and organised their knights by language, because usually they could not understand each other. If we ignore dialects, the major European groupings around 1100 would have been: Latin. The language of the church: any cultured gentleman would have been expected to be at least vaguely competent in it, making it a basic tool of communication: even if that was not very sophisticated communication, most of the time. French (Langue d'Oil) This was a group of quite closely-related languages dominant in Northern France, the English nobility and much of what's now Belgium and western Germany. Occitan (Langue d'Oc). This was the Language of Southern France. Just to complicate things, it was actually three not-very-closely related languages - Gascon (from South-western France - influenced by Spanish and Basque), Provencal (from South Western France, related to Italian) and Northern Provencal or Occitan (close to Provencal, but still considered a different language). You could cut it down to two - Gascon and Provencal, if you wanted, I guess. English (this is about the time what we would call middle English was evolving out of old English). By this stage, English had shed most of its scandinavian nature, being increasingly influenced by French and Latin. Low German (also called Franconian or West German) - this is a group of related languages spoken in the Northern and western part of Germany, what's now Holland and parts of Belgium. It was heavily influenced by scandinavian languages, and in turn influenced English. High German (also called Alemannic or Gothic) - this is a group of related languages spoken in Southern Germany, what's now Austria and Northern Italy, and parts of Switzerland. This was the official language of the Hoy Roman Empire, so most nobles would be expected to be able to speak it. Spanish (Old Castillian) was widely spoken in Iberia. Although you still had local languages (Portugese/Galician, Catalan, Navarrese, Aragonese, etc) from the notes and glosses written in medieval spain, there seemed to be far more in common between these languages then between their northern cousins. They are all derived from Latin and remained relatively close to it. Italian. Like Spanish, heavily influenced by Latin. There were a multitude of different languages in Italy around 1100: Genoese and Venetian were common outside their respective areas, as trading languages, while Northern Italy was also strongly influenced by Occitan. As far as I can tell, though, like modern Spanish and Italian, a speaker of one form of Italian at the time could converse with another italian speaker - albeit with some difficulty. Greek. The language of the Byzantine empire. Latin was also spoken there, but primarily by scholars and courtiers. Greek seems to have been used everywhere, but in the West, people also spoke their local languages - Albanian, Serbian, etc, while in the East, Armenian was also common. I'll skip the northern slavic languages, since people from there played a limited role in the crusades. On the muslim side, Arabic functioned in some ways like latin - it was the language of a shared religion and any cultured person was expected to read and speak it. It was also the administrative language in pretty much all muslim countries. So educated people all spoke and wrote at least some Arabic. It was, however, more widespread than Latin was in the west. But in the Almohravid caliphate, people also spoke berber languages (a family of six related languages common to north Africa, but not really related to any other languages), while in Egypt (the Fatimid caliphate) at the time, coptic was still relatively common (it uses the greek alphabet, but is not Greek). In Anatolia, Ohguz Turkish was the common tongue, while westwards, in the Abbassid caliphate Persian was common. But in both the Turkish and Persian areas, there are other related tongues: Azeri, Kirghiz, etc. We're getting a bit out of my area of expertise here This is a pretty sketchy overview, and plenty of people would disagree with parts of it. I'm sure Catalan or Walloon nationalists would be horrified that I lump Catalan carelessly in with Spanish, or Flemish in with Saxonian, but for game purposes, it's probably close enough. cheers, Mark Edit: oh, and just to correct a couple of points. Hebrew was by no means a dead language in the middle ages. Anyone who wanted to read Torah (which means basically any well-educated Jew) would have been able to read and speak Hebrew. But in the middle ages, there were no jewish countries. Jews were dispersed in different countries so they spoke of necessity the languages of the people around them and also - internally - a language derived from Hebrew but influenced by the surrounding culture. Yiddish, for example, is hebrew-derived, but also heavily influenced by the German languages of the time. Likewise, both Finnish and Hungarian long predate the mongol invasions. Finnish is related to Sami - they are both Uralic languages - and have been spoken in the area for at least a couple of thousand years. We know from Swedish accounts that Finnish had long been the common language by the early middle ages (because they tried to suppress its use!) Likewise, Hungarian had been use already by the early middle ages: the first surviving documents we have written in Hungarian date from about 1050 - a century or so before Ghenghis Khan's birth.

We have 5 women in our group (not all of them play in all games, though). And of those 5 ,,, 4 prefer playing hard-hitting warriors and like plenty of combat. In my experience, women gamers are as diverse as men, and the only thing I think that's gender-specific is a dislike of the chainmail bikini. cheers, Mark

Actually professional artists often provide (or more accurately, are often required to provide) several drafts for different approaches. Not fully finished versions, but complete enough that the art director can see what they are getting. As far as the cover itself goes, I did not want to just post a negative comment, but my feelings match most of the comments here. Technically, it's fine, but the fact that everyone - dragon included - seem to be sharing a joke, struck me as pretty odd, when I first saw the cover. Cheers, Mark

I've been to Visby and visited the museum where many of the skeletons of the losers are presented. There is clear evidence that many of the dead did suffer injuries to the lower leg. Obviously, while they were hefting their heavy slow moving shield for an unwieldy shield bash, they got their legs cut out from under them ... More seriously, that kind of injury has been reported by many archaeological sites. It's the result of a standard move, which you could expect to be particularly successful against part-time soldiers. The move is simple: you feint at the head. When you opponent lifts his shield to counter - momentarily blocking his sight-line - you cut at his leg. When he falls, you finish him off with a thrust into his back or side. The other thing that is very clear on the skeletons is how many of them died or were seriously wounded by crossbow bolts. A lot of them were in the back, so the Swedes were shot down as they were fleeing, but a fair number had crossbow bolts in the front as well, and the assessment of the archeology team is that the Danes closed up on the Swedish defenders and not only went at it hand to hand, but that their crossbows provided supporting fire from essentially point blank range. Probably the Swedes, being mostly militia didn't have much in the way of missile weapons to retaliate. That they were poorly armoured is also indicated by the number of head wounds (and the fact that over a 3rd of them were 15 or 16 - even back then considered too young for military duty - tells you the rest of the story) Edit: I should note that the remains from the Visby and Uppsala battle graves have both been the subject of quite large studies over the last decade: so the data does not rest entirely on the old Bendt publications from the 1930's. All together, if I recall correctly, well over 70% of the wounds on the bodies from grave pit 1 (which is where the first part of the battle was) were to either the legs or head. Compare that to grave pits at Towton, where heavy armour (including leg armour) was used by front line troops - only 30% of the injuries there were below the head. That strongly implies that the Danish professional soldiers went at the poor militia, and simply hacked off or shot the bits that were most accessible around the shield. I doubt anybody in the battle was doing any shield bashing: it was too important for protection. And this is the point. Movies like 300 aside, as far as the shield bash goes, it's a highly inefficient way to deal damage. A shield's a crap weapon. The shield bash is a trick - the sort of thing an experienced fighter might spring, but it's a risky move, because you are losing your protection for an instant. It's not a tactic that was trained (with the exception of later renaissance shield and buckler duelling: that's a different question entirely). And it's not some thing that was used frequently on the battlefield, as far as we can tell by osteoarcheology. cheers, Mark

Driving with your legs isn't going to help when you have difficulty holding your shield higher than knee-height. cheers, Mark

You have lots of options - not just pure damage, which even in D&D, was only a minor player with regard to battlefield control. Barriers still work - yes, teleport, flight and tunneling can sometimes bypass them, but you are still controlling movement. Bricks can smash through them, but a turn where they are getting rid of your barrier, is a turn where they are not hitting you. Exotic attacks (such as movement usable as an attack) can really alter game dynamics - though these are stop-signed and with good reason. Attacks that generate conditions work well - a Flash does not have to be very big to inflict short-term blindness, Darkness works well on many enemies, an Entangle does not have to be very big to slow down opponents for a phase or two, change environment might not stop enemies, but it can slow or debuff them, a SPD drain does not have to have huge active points to be effective ... and so on. Battlefield control is quite feasible and effective - I played a teleporter once who had that as his major shtick in combat, and he was a lot of fun to play. What you don't really have is the equivalent of "save or lose" spells which can trap most opponents or inflict very severe debuffs. cheers, Mark

It's very much a matter of question of "touch" - ie. how the GM handles it. My own feeling is that most players just hate to lose (after, they are generally playing bigger-than-life heroes), and they particularly hate being taken prisoner because that is "losing" stretched out over multiple sessions. At least if your PCs all die, you get it over with. In addition, being captured "takes away control" of the PC to a great extent and players - justifiably, IMO - hate that. After all, the PC is their only direct link into the game world. Remove player control of the PC, and they are just watching the GM tell a story about NPCs. Few GMs are good enough to make that entertaining. If you accept that point of view, you can make capturing the PCs not only a bit more palatable, but actually the basis for some good adventures. I've done it in the past, adapting the old Slave Lord's module (the PCs are captured, escape in their under-roos and have to fight their way out without all their usual crutches in the form of gear, focuses, etc). That series of adventures was a great success - but the players showed how much they enjoyed being captured when they caught the NPC they held responsible for their fate. Despite being mostly good-guy heroes, they flayed him alive, nailed him to a raft and set him adrift in the deep ocean I've also used the "One PC is captured and the others must rescue him/her/it)" several times without problems, most recently in the last game I ran. Again, the series of adventures was a success, and everyone - including the player of the captured PC - enjoyed it ... but man, the Player/PC subsequently had a major grudge against her captors. The trick to making these things work was: First, the actual capture was not forced: none of this "You are all captured, no matter what you do, so just roll with the adventure, already" stuff. It flowed naturally out of the course of the adventure. In some cases, the PCs actually surrendered rather than face certain death. Players won't do that if they mistrust the GM Second, capture was not used as a way to humiliate the PC or PCs. I just glossed over the time elapsed and general grossness endured in a few short sentences (and really players, already hate capture enough that you don't need to belabour the point: just hinting at what went on after capture is enough to set their blood to boiling). Third, it was implicit that something would pop up and that the PCs would at least get a chance to richly revenge themselves for the indignities being heaped upon them. This is where player trust of the GM is important - the players assumed (correctly) that as GM, I would not use capture to humiliate/mutilate their PCs unnecessarily. So, it can work, but it's a sensitive issue and needs to be handled carefully. The situation you outline "You are all captives and must plot to escape together" is not really comparable, because you are already starting at point #3 above: the capture has already happened off-screen. cheers, Mark

The reconstructed shield was made at the Danish national museum, so it's as close to a state of the art as we we can easily get. It was certainly a lot heavier than a reconstructed viking shield (smaller as well, of course). It was however about the same weight as some iron shields from iron age Germany/southern Denmark. Obviously warriors from back then had pretty muscular forearms! Cheers, Mark

The Hoplon was a metal skin over a solid wooden frame - it was bloody heavy. Unlike the smaller shields used by the Macedonian phalanx, I think you'd have to use a grip to maintain any sort of control over it at all. The use of a shoulder strap with the hoplon was probably simply to help take some of the weight. I've hefted a reconstructed hoplon, and I admit that my initial reaction was "Oh, you have got to be ****ing kidding me." cheers, Mark

His domination fantasy has come true at last.

Well a buckler is also better for punching with ... but there's a reason that close order infantry have traditionally gone with the biggest shields they could carry As for the Aspis/Hoplon, it's not just a question of weight: with the grip near the edge and a strap at the elbow you can't easily lift your arm more than about 45 degrees without hitting yourself with the edge of the shield, unless you twist your forearm to hold the shield vertical (in which case, it's bloody hard to put any force behind it). Given the weight and the way the shield is built, I doubt the idea of using it as a weapon (except a straight push forward) ever occurred to people at the time. cheers, Mark