Markdoc

Re: Real Locations that should be fantasy The photo above is at Ayutthaya in Thailand. I've been there a few years back and it's pretty cool. It used to be the capital of the old siamese kingdom (it's the place Tony Jaa goes to attempt his revenge in Ong Bak 2) but was trashed by the invading Burmese. Today, it's several square kilometers of ruins. The "Buddha head in the fig tree" is the most famous sight, but some of the old temple remains are IMO much more interesting - if you google "Ayutthaya" you will get more interesting images than you can shake a beheaded buddha at. It's also easy to reach by train from Bangkok - if you start early in the day, it makes a great day trip. Here's an example: You can walk up the steps on the central penis-shaped building and go inside, then investigate the small dark shrines inside: you can wander pretty much wherever you like on the site. cheers, Mark

Re: Bloodmäter

Re: Real Locations that should be fantasy I'm going there in 3 weeks First time, for me. cheers, Mark

Re: Batman meets Doc Savage It made Kath laugh last night and she doesn't even like Full Frontal Nerdity. OTOH, isn't Doc Savage the one who used to lobotomise his captured foes to make them "more useful to society"? I'm not seeing Big Blue getting down with that. Heck, given Batman's spazz out over the JLA messing with their enemies' memories, I'm not even seeing Bats getting down with that. cheers, Mark

Re: Real Locations that should be fantasy

Re: "Rolling a Critical" I agree completely with the posts that critical hits are bad for PCs - I have never understood why players want them. But they do. What I have done is a simple rule - an 18 is always a crit., an 3 a fumble (we use roll-high to hit) if it would normally be a hit or a miss. It not, it's just a normal hit or a miss, respectively. Fumbles are "whatever seems good to the GM at the time" but are (obviously) always bad. Recent fumbles that spring to mind are a character fast-drawing and attacking. His fumble meant he flung his sword into the undergrowth. Another is the archer character firing at a foe: her fumble meant she got to plant an arrow into the back of friend in the same combat. For a critical, since we use hit locations, the player can choose either maximum damage or hit location. That gives a nice bonus but a) it's not outright lethal and it occurs rarely. I used to use the "5 better/worse than you need to hit" rule, but that amps the lethality up dramatically (it means that critical hits become an expected part of many fights) and also encouraged players to buy lots and lots of combat levels as a way of ramping up their chances of a crit. In a supers game, that might not be a big deal, but in heroic level games it increases your chances of dead characters appreciably. cheers, Mark

Re: What Have You Watched Recently? Pete "yo momma" Dean? You know, that doesn't actually surprise me at all. cheers, Mark

Re: What Have You Watched Recently? Actually, my "worst date movie ever" was Dead Ringers (Blødbrodre). I actually took a girl to see that since I knew she liked Jeremy Irons. I didn't know that in this movie, Jeremy Irons plays a pair of twin psychotic gynæcologists who go off the deep end. The scene where he displays his "tools for operating on mutant women ...." Hoo boy. When we came out of the theatre my date was silent for a bit and then said "I really need a drink". And not in a romantic way cheers, Mark

Re: What Have You Watched Recently?

Re: battle Wear vs. Town Wear Right. This is the flip side of what we have been talking about: my players were initially a little bit shocked in the current game when they found how open and friendly local society was - if they played nice. I pointed out "One of you is a genuine noble. One's landed gentry. Another a priest. You've got a member of the respected warrior class, who looks like a bodyguard and two guys who look like servants. As far as the local nobility is concerned, you are exactly the kind of small noble traveling party they would put together themselves if they were going somewhere. Add that to the reputation you acquired for saving the Harvest Festival and the warrants you have from the Local shiplords and of course the local nobility will open their doors for you - as long as you don't look like a party of roaming thugs. It's what they'd expect if they were traveling themselves". This sort of thing is - for me - integral to running city games. It's not all about slaying giant monsters that come rampaging up out of the sewers. Hell, half the cities in the Seven Kingdoms don't have sewers! The reputation of the PCs as good citizens gets them invite to the Shiplord's party, where the nobles at least get to dance with his nubile daughter - and the less noble get to snoop after the neighbouring Lord's activities ... Seriously, can anyone envisage going to the ball in full armour and dancing with the Lord's daughter with a backpack, two handed sword and crossbow dangling from your shoulders? cheers, Mark

Re: battle Wear vs. Town Wear I don't find anything "unrealistic" about that! cheers, Mark

Re: battle Wear vs. Town Wear Sure: you could certainly play in a world like that (Sky galleons of Mars!) but one of the reasons many GM's avoid that is that the more you change, the less logical a "medieval society" like the one we are familiar with becomes. If powerful magic is so ubiquitous that heavily armed men don't register as a significant threat, how is law and order maintained. What do law enforcement agents look like? They'd have to be pretty powerful chaps! Why do castles exist? They'd likely be as redundant as they are in modern warfare (unless they are magic, of course). Same for walled cities. Traditional city and local government systems like feudalism are not going to survive if security is based on wandering groups of adventurers. This isn't to say you couldn't do it, or even shouldn't do it. Just that it's a lot of work: look at Vondy's threads on his post-apocalyptic Antarctica. Lots of work, but a really cool result. And if your reaction is "Who cares about logically constructed systems of government! The game isn't about tax policy!" - that's cool. But there are groups for whom logical construction of society is important. That's what many of these GM's are about: not "screwing the players". cheers, Mark

Re: battle Wear vs. Town Wear Actually vikings did have cities - in 8-10th century Denmark, Hedeby was a major trading city for the Danes - who were pretty definitely also vikings. It not only was fortified, but had an extensive series of walls and dykes protecting the adjacent countryside, plus a largish canal built to improve shipping access. It was a focal point for trading along the North Sea coast and down into Germany. It was important enough that the Carolingian kings made alliances with its rulers. Danish scholars - presumably from that area - such as Notkhar, travelled to France, where their names and tales were recorded. By the height of the viking era, there were substantial fortified viking cities at Dubh Linn (modern Dublin), Jorvik (modern York - at the time second only to London in size and commercial importance), Roskilde, Aros, Hedeby, Ribe, Lund, Kiev, Holmgard (Modern Novgorod), etc, etc. These were not giant cities, but they had populations that were in the low thousands (Novogorod for example, at its viking peak is estimated to have had a population in excess of 15,000 and a trading empire that stretched from Denmark to Persia: it's why you can find coins from India in Danish hoards). Here's a photo of a reconstruction of 10th century Aros (modern Aarhus) from the aarhus museum, showing the city walls in scale with some longships: and giving an idea of what we think the larger viking towns looked like - rather suburban, actually The houses shown would tend to house an extended family of owner plus servants, plus servant's families - anywhere from 4 to 20 people. cheers, Mark

Re: battle Wear vs. Town Wear

Re: battle Wear vs. Town Wear

Re: battle Wear vs. Town Wear I should not have given the impression that you are way off base: it is fair to say that viking culture (especially on the periphery of scandinavia: places like Denmark were more tightly controlled) was an extremely violent one, where combat was not infrequent and men were expected to own and know how to use weapons. However there's a big difference between "always have access to weapons" and "always be armed". You're also right that the sagas are not unimpeachable truth - for a start, they're actually post-viking, written down as the viking era was coming to a close. Still, they are the best evidence we have for how people around that time thought and acted. The image we get from the sagas is that violence was always lurking in the background and that men were prepared for it - but as far as we can tell, they didn't go round prepared to fight at an instant's notice. As I noted there are many examples, where violence appears to catch people off guard and without their weapons close by. It's worth remembering too that the sags were stories. In many - maybe most -cases, stories with a historical basis: you can see many of the places mentioned in them, still today and we have other evidence that many of the people described were real people. But still, they are stories about famous people, conflict and battles. Erlsson the sheep herder who never got in a fight and never killed anyone doesn't get a saga. If the people who were famous for their fights and feuds spent a lot of time unarmed,we can guess pretty safely that people in general did that. There's a difference though - the sagas make it plain that many men had shields at home along with their weapons. But when they go on a trip, they might take a weapon with them, but they don't seem to take shields unless they are going out specifically for a fight. Armour's a bit different - very few people mentioned in the sagas seem to own it, since it is very rarely mentioned, even when people are gearing up for a fight - except when real battles are involved. The reason I mentioned it is that if you really were concerned about your safety - enough to tote weapons everywhere you went - and you had a shield, wouldn't you take that too? Only the very largest seaxes are a similar size to a shortsword - the sagas (and some of the few genuine viking texts we have) distinguish between knives and shortswords, using different words for them. It's not clear of course, exactly where they draw the line (a small seax would probably be called a knife while a really big one might be called a sword, for example: I'm guessing here), but they do draw a line. More importantly, whatever sort of knife men carried about with them they clearly didn't regard it as a weapon, since there are multiple instances of men being "unarmed" and multiple instances where men who are attacked using a walking staff, stick or even stones to defend themselves with. I'm thinking that if they had a "tungr knivur" with a 15" blade on them, they'd be using that instead. Well that much is true - feuds tended to be between groups, not just individuals. It wasn't just women - harming children was frowned on, as well. And it wasn't just families - feuds could spread to involve patrons and clients (ie: a warleader and his men, a rich farmer and his tenants, etc). However most of the blood feuds we know about tended not to last very long - the rule was you could only take vengeance before a case was bought up for judgement. Once that happened, any killing apart from legal duels was potentially considered murder, not legal vengeance. As a result, as far as we know people didn't go around constantly on edge that someone was going to burst onto their property. In the sagas, at least, people usually had a pretty good idea of when they should be on their guard. Viking society, as I said was extremely violent, but I doubt any society could exist at more than the tribal level if you had to be constantly, on your guard. Actually, looking back at what I wrote, I should apologize, not you - it comes across as far pissier than I had intended. Sorry about that. It was surprise rather than anything else, since I've written a lot on these boards over the years about my interest in viking history and culture: indeed, I posted just a couple of days ago about the reconstructed longship Havhingsten and a friend who sailed in it to Ireland last year. Of course it occurs to me now, that there was no reason to assume you had read all that: my bad! Cheers, Mark

Re: Altered Life Death Cycle Effects There aren't any polar bears in antarctica - in fact there aren't any native land mammals at all, which is precisely why large, slow tasty* birds survive on land there. *Given that all but the smallest penguins have been rapidly driven to extinction or near extinction whenever mammals turned up where they lived, I think we can assume they are tasty. cheers, Mark

Re: battle Wear vs. Town Wear My wife and I took hundreds Here's 4: #1 is a street running through what used to be a palace hall. #2 is a street running through what used to be the actual wall around the palace grounds #3 is the catacombs underneath the town - (actually built as storage, not catacombs for bodies). Did I mention the palace was built on a huge scale? That's a regular-sized door in the picture. #4 is looking up beside the cathedral showing how the old roman ruins are kind of integrated into modern (well, medieval, so "more modern") buildings cheers, Mark

Re: Altered Life Death Cycle Effects Plus, they're tasty! cheers, Mark

Re: Altered Life Death Cycle Effects Yeah, I noted that you would need to keep the torporia warm. I'm not sure that entrusting flesh - even cool flesh - to a hungry wolverine is a good idea though - you'll need bears to keep 'em under control. And to keep the bears under control, you'll need .... cheers, Mark

Re: Altered Life Death Cycle Effects I doubt it. Torpid or not, I doubt that being frozen through would be good for you. More likely stack 'em in the cheapest section of the public torporium - begging and borrowing money to cover the cost if necessary. It wouldn't be the first culture where people beggar themselves to provide for appropriate burial for the departed. cheers, Mark

Re: Altered Life Death Cycle Effects Snakes. Not only do they like rats, but they are not good at gnawing so they are unlikely to chew on torpid Aunty Ugluk's nose, and they don't need huge amounts of food. In addition, they shed their skin, being "reborn" and often become torpid, indicating a clear link to the Dream World. The only catch is that you would need to keep them relatively warm, which suggests that Torporia need to be well-insulated. So to "funerary cult, the bone sisters, and the "Ghosts," you get to add ... snake cults! Honestly, this just keeps getting better cheers, Mark

Re: Chaos, Order and Balance - Help Wanted Another spin on the same concept is in Sergey Lukyanenko's novels Night Watch, Day watch, etc. There the axes are essentially "how you obtain power". Dark creatures, such as vampires and werewolves can only ever be Dark, simply because of what they are: they must feed on people to survive. A magician, however can choose to be either Light or Dark. Dark magicians draw on people's negative emotions for power. In doing so, they cause those emotions to become more intense - perhaps, for example driving a man from anger at his boss to homicide. Light magicians, draw their power from positive emotions - but in doing so, end them. So a Light magician can take power from a couple of lovers - but risks leaving them less in love. The Light believes that positive emotions - ie happiness - should be maximised. This, in theory makes them "good". However, they adopt some pretty ruthless methods in attempts to maximise people's happiness: they belive in the "the greatest good of the greatest number". The Dark, in turn believes that happiness can only ever be personal - that the individual is what matters, and in turn that if a powerful person takes from those around him to maximise his own happiness, that is as it should be. This approach has something of the good/law, evil/chaos approach to it, but is more flexible. Thus in this context good/law, evil/chaos are philosophical concepts that people argue about - but Light and Dark are also real, physical concepts that affect how people interact with the world and cast magic. They have real physical consequences too - if you declare for the Light, committing Dark acts is likely to be swiftly fatal (if your own team don't get to you first) and vice versa. It is possible to balance between the two - declaring for neither Light or Dark, and attracting the suspicion of both sides - but it's not easy. It's also possible to cooperate across lines. For example Kostagyin the Vampire is definitely of the Dark, but he's basically a nice guy: he's never killed any one, his best friend is a Light Magician and he worries about the prejudice that attaches to vampires. He just thinks the Light is full of BS. The Lucent Gesar, on the other hand is a powerful light magician, and his aims are good - or so he says - but he's a ruthless SOB, that even his associates fear. And the Inquisition, which tries to prevent war between Light and Dark, is composed of creatures of both Light and Dark. cheers, Mark

Re: battle Wear vs. Town Wear It's also not true - the sagas include multiple instances of men being surprised and killed while unarmed. For example, in Grettir's saga, the men of Wick and the men of Coldback fight over a beached whale. It is specifically stated that most of them were unarmed, so that they fought with the tools they had been using to cut up the whale and also with strips of blubber. "At Rib-skerries, I hear folk tell, A hard and dreadful fray befell, For men unarmed upon that day With strips of whale-fat made good play. Fierce steel-gods these in turn did meet With blubber-slices nowise sweet; Certes a wretched thing it is To tell of squabbles such as this." In the text it states: "few men there had weapons except the axes wherewith they were cutting up the whale, and some choppers." In chapter 17, Grettir is without weapons when he sets out on his journey - it's because he didn't own any. In the same saga when Ogmund and Thorir vist Thorfinn's household at Jule they are asked to lay aside their weapons before coming into the house to eat and drink - this they do. Interestingly, when they turn up, Grettir and his friends are apparently also unarmed - he has to go to Thorfinn's wife to ask for the weapons which are stored. Even the housecarls are unarmed - when Grettir proposes to kill Ogmund and Thorir, the housecarls rush out to go and get their weapons. They clearly weren't carrying them - in the time it takes them to go and get weapons, Thorgrim and Ogmund and their men have time to puzzle over Grettir's absence, find out the door is locked, try the door and walls for weak spots, improvise a battering ram, and break out of the building. Grettir has to fight them alone until the armed housecarls get back. He survives, since Thorgrim's wife has lent him her husband's weapons and - as the saga states: "Grettir set on each one of them, and in turn hewed with the sword, or thrust with the spear; but they defended themselves with logs that lay on the green, and whatso thing they could lay hands on, therefore the greatest danger it was to deal with them, because of their strength, even though they were weaponless." Again, much later, when Grettir fights Odd, they fight with sticks and fists since neither man is armed. It specifically states that Kormak's folk and the men of Biarg, who are watching, run to get their weapons - because apparently they aren't armed either, but by the time they get back the fight is over. In Njal's saga when Hauskald is killed, Skarphedin counsels revenge, telling his fellows, "Let us take our weapons, and have them with us." They then go to Njal's house to get their weapons. Mord Valgard's son turns up later the same night, also collects his weapons and then rides off with them - pretty clearly none of them were armed at the time. Actually in Njal's sage there are many many instances of men telling their friends or followers to go and get their weapons, so it's pretty clear that when not expecting a fight they weren't carrying them around. Almost nobody has a shield with them unless they are at home or set out expecting a fight, or armour (though this might reflect the fact that most of these guys were not professional warriors, so most of them probably didn't own armour)

Re: Samurai-esque world Yep. http://www.amazon.com/Kouga-Ninja-Scrolls-Futaro-Yamada/dp/0345495101 cheers, Mark