Markdoc

Re: Altered Life Death Cycle Effects An awesomely interesting concept. Instead of rehashing what the others have said, I'll just make a few minor comments. 1. In many practical/legal ways, it would not change things too much. You have a more or less normal human lifespan with "death" at the end of it allowing orderly transition of possessions and rights. 2. It's going to have a profound effect, obviously on worldview and religion. In roman times, the families of the deceased would visit the catacombs (where such things were used) and take a festive meal among the dead. Catacombs have rooms with built-in couches and tables precisely for such feasts, which also accompanied the burial. I always figured the generous sized amphora of wine which traditionally accompanied such meals got more use than the food, given the likely smell of the place. However given the universal presence of torpor, I suspect that such places would be far more elaborate and comfortable and also involve more economic input: at the very least you are going to want small boys to chase rats away - it'd be no fun arising from torpor to find rats had gnawed your nose and fingers off. Probably we are talking about a whole trade of necropolitans responsible for burial, guarding the torpid and possibly even helping them integrate back into society when (if) they awake. I suspect, much like the egyptians, that the wealthy might spend a great deal of time and thought on designing their torporium and having it ready "just in case" 3. I think it might be interesting to consider what does happen to the re-awakened from a social aspect. They'd be in a uniquely vulnerable position in some ways, emerging as adults without the support mechanism that grow up around most children as they age. How do the live? Do they form a separate caste, as Lord Liaden suggested? Are they re-adopted into their families as respected elders, or regarded as prized retainers or advisors? 4. Last of all, how do they interact magically, while in torpor? You discussed communication via lucid dreaming. If this is reliable or semi-reliable, I'd expect the families might keep the torpid close by - in effect, they remain part of the family. The merchant could always contact dearly departed dad for advice on a tricky customer, or the ironworker on the treatment needed to make long-lasting gate hinges. In this case, family houses might include shrines for the torpid and separate burial ceremonies for the finally dead, rather than shared necropoli and the necropolitans I mentioned would be unneeded. For me at least the family shine idea has a slightly chinese feeling, while the necropoli gives amore roman/egyptian feel. cheers, Mark

Re: battle Wear vs. Town Wear If people aren't fighting, who are the PCs assisting against? Do you PCs have a big sign above their heads saying "Player characters, do not disturb?" If not, how do the guards tell them apart from any other armoured thugs who roll up to the gate? More to the point, if the city guard isn't up to enforcing law and order without assistance, how do they cope when the PCs are not around? "Let's hope that some strangers turn up and pitch in" is not a terribly viable security strategy. If the city guard is up to enforcing law and order, why do they magically exempt the PCs? Note - I stress - for the fourth or fifth time, I'm not saying you shouldn't run your game like this is you and your players want - just that if the players and GM want a bit more depth and realism to their gaming world, it's pretty hard to justify logically.

Re: Samurai-esque world Interesting tidbit - did you know that both of those are drawn from different novels by the same author? cheers, Mark

Re: battle Wear vs. Town Wear

Re: battle Wear vs. Town Wear

Re: Some basics of trade and the town/city of Saltmarsh

Re: battle Wear vs. Town Wear "But sir, I am just a simple trader in trinkets..." "Yer not comin' in and that's final!" http://fc06.deviantart.net/fs70/f/2010/046/6/c/6cd2f77a2afed33675b3a8aa4253e8dd.jpg cheers, Mark

Re: battle Wear vs. Town Wear I think what you are describing "dump your gear at the inn" is actually pretty close to how most of the more "restrictive" GM's run things. It's certainly how I do it. cheers, Mark

Re: battle Wear vs. Town Wear Umm, it's considered more appropriate to just call them "player characters" cheers, Mark

Re: battle Wear vs. Town Wear

Re: Some basics of trade and the town/city of Saltmarsh Yeah, definately.

Re: Some basics of trade and the town/city of Saltmarsh It doesn't take a year to make a suit of mail - even with riveted rings - more on the order of a month or two. It could be longer, depending on how ornate decoration was- according to medieval German guild books, we can see that a mail-maker’s masterpiece was a shirt that would take him 6 months - but that was a masterpiece where the links were engraved and the shirt damascened - as much artwork as protection. However making mail was a specialist task. The problem is not the time spent putting the rings together - like any task requiring fine manipulation, this can be learned and you can get very fast at it. The problem was drawing wire that you could use for mail and then generating those rings in large quantities. Few blacksmiths and even relatively few whitesmiths had either the tools or the expertise needed to do that. A skilled smith, using period tools can join and rivet about 2-3 links a minute. Given your average hauberk has 20-30,000 rings, you are talking about roughly 16 work days to join all the rings into a hauberk. A master smith might be faster, but probably not too much. On the other hand, the very finest mail has rings only 5 mm in diameter - this can contain many times as many links (and is probably where the 6 month masterpiece armour comes in). However, it takes much longer to make the rivets and links. It's been estimated (by the mail research society) that the finer suits contained over a year's work time (this is where the mistaken idea that it took a year to make a mail suit comes from, probably). But that doesn't mean it takes a year to make such a hauberk - much of the work is in making rings, which isn't especially skilled work and multiple people could do that: if you have a workshop with 6 people, you could probably turn out 2-3 mail shirts a month - or one every couple of months of the very highest quality. That also depends on how much automation was involved - I know we think of the smith hunched over his anvil pottering away, but by 1400 in Europe mail making included many specialized, mass-production businesses, using water power extensively. cheers, Mark edit: Oh, I should mention that closing and riveting the links was considered the most skilled part of the work - that was the master smith's job. Ring-making itself was for apprentices and case-hardening and preparing the rings for joining was journeyman's work. Interestingly, when AJ Arkell was Commissioner for Archaeology and Anthropology in the Sudan (back in the days when it was still a british protectorate) he asked Hamid Idris, an elderly craftsman who had made mail for the Mahdi's army to make him a set of mail. It took 6 of them 12 days to make a full suit of mail though as Arkell notes ("probably not working all day") including making the rings. And they were many years out of practice. However, the mail was butted, not riveted. Still, it gives you an idea - a week or so to make rings, another few days to harden and prepare them and then another few days to assemble the whole - gives you a time of two weeks for a workshop to produce a suit of mail - roughly what the medieval guildbooks suggest.

Re: Generation starships and their internal society structure The association of Darwin with slavery is a lie you find some creationists and "Intelligent design" wackos spreading to try and smear the author since they are unable to find any science to refute his work. It's useful primarily as an example of a) how low some people can go and how profound is their historical ignorance: slavery had been outlawed in Darwin's England and it was widely regarded in his own society as cruel and unjust. However, even by this standard Darwin was himself an abolitionist and outspoken critic of slavery. You can find some of his own writings on the topic here Not of course, that this has anything to do with G-ships or benevolent dictatorships - just sayin' cheers, Mark

Re: battle Wear vs. Town Wear

Re: Samurai-esque world Dang! I had forgotten about that! I'd rep you if I hadn't done it too recently! cheers, Mark

Re: (Equipment) Axe vs. Sword My approach is pretty simple and consistent. 1. I want weapons to reflect (roughly) their historical usage. If you are tackling heavily armoured opponents, I want people to prefer large or AP weapons, in general. However (as noted in another ongoing thread) such weapon are not generally considered appropriate townwear. When Sir Kumfrance the Round rides off to slay the dragon, he should take a lance, a sword or an axe - not a singlestick, knife or sharpened spoon, IMO. Thus, ordinary weapons weapons have different damage ratings encouraging (generally) their historical usage. So two handed sword guy does more damage, right out of the box, but has to contend with the fact that in many cases he won't necessarily have his two-handed sword with him. He'd be foolish to specialize too much. Dagger guy does less damage, but can usually count on having a dagger most of the time - and thus can afford to spend more points on it (such as CSLs for his weapon). Result #1: the characters are balanced but distinct: they each have advantages in some settings, disadvantages in others. 2. I want to allow "extraordinary skill". After you have been playing for a while, the basic "free" weapons start to become a hindrance. You start to max out your damage (I'm keeping the 2x base damage cap - and in 6E that's suggested as standard for anything with STR Min). In this case I allow the purchase of straight up powers. A 2d6 HKA can be defined as "two handed sword" or "great skill with daggers" but it's a) not free equipment since it reflects "character prowess" and so must be bought and costs the same regardless of special effect. Again, dagger guy and two handed sword guy are balanced: they are simply buying a power and they pay the same cost. This seems to cover the bases for me and my players, is balanced, simple and consistent. cheers, Mark

Re: Some basics of trade and the town/city of Saltmarsh

Re: Samurai-esque world I ran a chanbara game, where the players were all members of a samurai household caught up in a war, which was quasi-historical - but with weird elements (over-the-top martial arts, the odd ghost, evil Dragon cultists, etc) thrown into the mix. It was much lower scale - 125 total points at start, no cap on active points - but as the game ran for several years, playing twice a month, we had characters topping out at in the 250+ points range. My old website with the game and background is defunct, now that the hoster has closed up shop, but at some point I should get the whole thing reformatted and up on my own site. In the meantime I can send you the NPC and adventures, if you are interested. It's all 5th ed. but not difficult to update. cheers, Mark

Re: Building an Urban Fantasy Setting I'm liking this. cheers, M ark

Re: battle Wear vs. Town Wear

Re: battle Wear vs. Town Wear Isn't that odd, in itself? Why do the towns even exist if they are dangerous places to be?

Re: battle Wear vs. Town Wear

Re: Some basics of trade and the town/city of Saltmarsh Yeah, we should, but that's a hard one to quantify: if no-one interested, the selling price is zero. If the demand is really high, even local goods normally given away free might be hugely expensive - water, in a terrible drought, for example. But you could add a demand multiplier, if you like using the same sort of mechanism, but starting with a negative number. cheers, Mark

Re: Some basics of trade and the town/city of Saltmarsh Price (especially in medieval times) has little to do with distance and only a nodding acquaintance with cost of production. It's all about rarity and how many sets of hands it had to pass through to get to market. Point in case: in 15th century London, pepper cost about 19 pennies a pound - nearly 3 days' wages for a master tradesman. Saffron, on the other hand came from a closer source (geographically) and sold for around 190 pennies a pound - about a month's wages for a master tradesman. Reason? Saffron is picked from the stamens of a certain flower and produced in far tinier qualities - even today, it costs roughly $1,000 per pound. Back then the markup on saffron from producer to final buyer was in the region of 10,000%. For medieval traders (even for traders, today, really) the other thing that affects price is risk. Pepper was produced in large quantities but was expensive in medieval Europe because a) it had to be brought from far away and there was a fair degree of risk involved in the long voyage - when the crusades opened up the eastern trade routes, even though that added an extra middleman to take his cut, prices on spices such as pepper still fell, because the risk of trans-shipment of goods decreased. This has interesting consequences: goods like spices travelled mostly by sea, up through the Mediterranean. London was a major port from the spice trade, so ships would stop there and unload, and merchants would buy there for shipment back to their own countries - so that pound of Saffron that cost 190 pennies in London cost over 370 pennies in Antwerp, 3 days' sail away. That's a markup of 100% The last thing to notice is that goods generally had higher markups than we are used to today since medieval societies were generally much less consumer oriented: the low markups we enjoy are a result of high volumes of trade and decreased risk. So what I'd do is work out your basic price list and then grade goods by rarity, distance and proximity to major trade routes: Rarity (at the place it is bought) 1. very common, common, uncommon, rare, exotic, unobtainable Produced: 2. In the same place, in the same province, in a neighbouring province, in a neighbouring kingdom, in far off lands, in legendary locales Commerce (at the place it is bought - only for goods that are actually transported) 3. On a major sea trade route, on a minor sea trade route, on a major land trade route, on a minor land trade route, on no trade route, really out of the way. If you take 10% markup to the price and then multiply it by 3 it for each extra step along axis 1, 2 and 3 (+10%, +30%, 90%, 270%, 810%, 2700%) and then add each axis, you should get a rough and ready price calculator. So Saffron in London: It's an exotic good (+810%) produced in far off lands (+810%) - but on a major sea route (+10%) - that's 1630% higher than cost at source. A bit cheaper than in real life, but in the same ballpark - and in Antwerp it'd cost twice as much since Antwerp is on a minor sea trade route. On the other hand, during the medieval warm period saffron was grown (briefly) in Cornwall - so Saffron was much cheaper in England back then. Salted fish in Saltmarsh, however, is very common (+10%), produced locally (+10%) and it is not transported (ignore axis 3) so the markup is 20%. Of course you have to look at demand - if you bought a bed in Baghdad and transported it to a small village in the Cotswolds, you are unlikely to get (very common: +10%, far off lands: 810% and on no trade route: 810%) 16 times what you paid for it. You might get someone to buy it as a curiosity, but you'd need to find someone who wanted a strange bed. If there's no such buyer, you end up with a bed you can't sell. You could also use this as an indicator of local costs for luxury goods - scarlet broadcloth cost about 10-40 times the price of ordinary imported linen (up to 228 pennies per yard, in 15th century London). That's because it required dye made from tiny beetles, which were collected from far away. But you don't need to know that - all you need to know is that it is a luxury good, so will cost between 270-810% the cost of normal items of that sort (again, that's a slight under-estimate of historical cost, but it gives you a ball-park figure). cheers, Mark

Re: Prince Madoc Not St Benedict - St Brendan, or Brendan the voyager. Erik the Red was said to have taken two irishmen with him on his quest to discover Iceland, and that their stories of Brendan were what led him out there in the first place (personally, I suspect that was added later to his saga by an Irishman, but hey ...) cheers, Mark