Markdoc

Re: Hero D&D There's more to it than points: hero scales much better (or maybe I should say differently) than D&D so Epic-level fantasy in Hero has quite a different feel. Unless the GM carefully sculpts his game into another form, it's far more like Exalted, where the game is only about interaction between major characters. Physical environment becomes trival - in my epic fantasy game I had a fight on an abandoned orbital castle in a decaying orbit - the PCs weren't fazed by the fact that everyone was fighting in vacuum, at temperatures that made stone glow with heat, or that their ride was plunging towards the ground at a ridiculous speed*. Likewise, "ordinary encounters" are essentially irrelevant: on the way to fight a lich-queen, the King of Swords plunged into her army and killed 200 or so warriors in 2 seconds - he told the rest "If you stay here, in the next few minutes we'll just kill you all. Stay or go, we don't much care. It'll take me less time to kill you all than to change my clothes afterwards." You can make very tough D&D epic level fighters, but it's very hard to make one that has that sort of mass-slaying ability, or to make characters who are all-but-immune to normal attacks. In epic level fantasy hero, the game can play very differently to epic level D&D - or indeed, any sort of traditional fantasy game. cheers, Mark *Edit: even if it had burned up in the atmosphere with them all on board, it would only have been a temporary inconvenience ....

Re: Collaborative World Ending… One possibility for the "Something Taken, Something Given" mechanism. I didn't mention it in the earlier posts, but there are actually three types of magic in my current FH game. The third unmentioned one doesn't play a big role in the current game, but runs something along these lines. It's called "Gifts of the Forest man" and is basically olde-timey, peasant magic, from the days before the current culture conquered the archipelago where the game is set. Mechanistically, it works like this: cheers, Mark

Re: Populating and fleshing out Saltmarsh

Re: The Overbearing Presence That's been my experience as well - especially in heroic level games - a simple entangle can be a fight-ender. cheers, M ark

Re: Populating and fleshing out Saltmarsh Oh - a second thought - if you're interested, "Middle Anglo-saxon Lincolnshire" covers this area (and this question) in some detail. The author discusses the sites where large founds have been made and writes "A glance at figure 6 allows some common characteristics of these ' productive ' sites to be recognized. First, and perhaps most notable, is their inland location, situated along the most important routes and lines of communication, such as the Rivers Humber , Trent and Witham, and prehistoric and Roman routes, especially Barton Street , High Street and the route along the Lincoln Cliff" . Later she writes "In general, the large amount of coinage recovered, only second to those of the great Middle Saxon emporia or wies, strongly suggests the active involvement of these 'productive' sites in some form of commerce. This also seems to be underlined by the strong element of foreign coin from these sites" In the figures, it is clear that most of the productive sites are actually on roads, as are the largest, although they most closely clustered where the roads and rivers converge - North of Flixbourough, for example where the Lincoln Cliff route, and the Trent come together. Flixborough isn't on a river, but it's only about an hour's walk from the Trent and two-three hours walk from the Humber - it's probably where shipped goods were assembled for the trip down the road to Lincoln, or where goods moving north were transhipped for passage up the Trent (thus avoiding the treacherous lower reaches of the river) or sent on to the Humber ferry at Winteringham by road. Torksey, on the other hand - a site as large as Flixborough - isn't anywhere near a river. But it does sit on a major north-south road where it crosses the old Foss Dyke. It probably served as a border town, monitoring traffic up and down the road and levying tolls on good passing through to Lincoln. The archaeology makes it clear that it wasn't either/or roads or water but both. The north-south route tracks most closely with the road. The east-west routes, by way of contrast track most closely with the rivers. Also (facepalm) I should have thought of this book before with regard to the original poster's question because it lists the products of the villages at the edge of the fenlands "Apart from animal stock, the natural resources of the fenland also included wildfowl, thatch, oysters and mussels from the sea, as well as fish, and it may have been these, or similar goods, that would have been exchanged for the querns or other products arriving with the Ipswich ware." She also discusses the fact that many of the old village sites have no manufactured goods but lots and lots of animal bones - suggesting that cattle were driven into the fens to feed in summer and then killed and the meat and hides preserved (probably with salt) for hauling out as winter approached. That certainly sounds like Saltmarsh: those animal products could be traded to the city for all the stuff like leatherware, fancy work and glassware. It also means the swamp probably has little villages dotted about its edges where the fishermen and thatchers live, and the herders come to spend their summers. cheers, Mark

Re: Collaborative World Ending… A couple of comments that might be useful: I introduced the church magic system for three reasons. 1. I wanted to make the church integral to the culture. Since the church is the major source of magic, they serve as the "hub" of most towns - hospital, telecommunications centre and library rolled into one. 2. By splitting the priesthood up into cults worshipping one of the 12 gods, each jealously guarding their "cult secrets" I ameliorated the problem of "Swiss army mages" who have a VPP and can whip up a spell for any occasion. Players have to choose which aspects they want to pursue if they are mages and the challenges of becoming a cult initiate or adept provides roleplaying hooks and levers galore for the GM. Since the cult hierarchy also demands support from initiates and adepts, it involves the players more. In a lot of fantasy games, the temple is a place to get healing and the occasional divination, which you buy the same way you buy a sword. The obligations can be simple (ie: a tithe for the church) but more often for Adepts are services. They can be typical adventur-y things (Go the Castle of Arrrgh and recover the artifact of Woss' name) or plot-hook things (do a two-week round of these villages and cast temple magic for the faithful: healing, crop blessings, anti-house fire protection, etc) 3. To give a clear alternative to Spirit-cult magic. Interestingly, there is nothing "evil" per se in the spirit cults - although don't try convincing the players of that! The penultimate goal of this particular campaign is when the players discover that the "good temple" they have been helping - and have mostly joined - is also a spirit cult! And that it is altering them ..... cheers, Mark Edit: as far as "Dark Pact Magic" goes rather than Aid, what about "summon?" Summon gets you mucho bang for the buck, but has the disadvantage that you have to deal with whatever you have summoned. In such a system, instead of casting spells you call up and either bind to your will (if you are good ... well, goodish) or bribe (if you are bad) the summoned spirit. This is the core idea behind magic in Valdorian age, but they still suggest buying powers an just using the summoning as a "special effect". You could instead just cut out the middleman. If the mage wants to toast some enemies he doesn't (can't) Fireball them - but he can say a word of power and trigger that summoning he so carefully set up back in his sanctum sanctorum, bringing a fire elemental to perform its one agreed-upon task ... A good range of interaction skills might be useful to get the summoned beings to do what you want, and knowledge skills about otherworldly beings would be a good idea, but the only actual power you need is Summon. That would create a magic system that is simple, flavourful, and unpredictable.

Re: Populating and fleshing out Saltmarsh Heh. I've rambled across this country, so I know well what the Ouse and Trent are like. The lower reaches of both are considered "challenging" and are not recommended for inexperienced boatmen. Not because they are rapid, particularly, but because both have severe tidal bores and empty out in wide shallow rivermouths with shifting mudbanks. In theory (and rarely, in practice) you can also walk across the Humber estuary. However that's dangerous - though shallow, the tides race at high speed into the estuary and the banks are always shifting. But it was only last century the Humber got a bridge. Prior to that, Ermine street terminated in Barton upon Humber, where travellers took a ferry across to Kingston upon Hull. The ferry has been in operation for centuries - it was mentioned in the Domesday book and again Edward II's charter (still preserved) from 1351. It's rather hard to explain why a ferry important enough for a royal charter existed if travellers came principally by boat ... and also why it should be located on the road instead of the river mouth, many miles away ... where there is no town. The road (Ermine street) was certainly used in wet weather as well as fine - in fact it has two alternate routes near the Humber: a dry weather one (direct to Barton, across to Hull by Ferry and then up across the hills to York) and the alternate one I noted above that swings more inland. This route remained passable even in wet weather - it's known as the Roman Ridge or Roman Rigg, because it runs along high ridgetops, well above any flooding. You can still walk parts of it today - near Selby it runs along a high limestone scarp giving you great views out over the river valleys and providing firm dry footing even in wet weather. It was along this road that Harold bought his army at great speed to defeat Hardraada - and indeed, in autumn, traditionally a rainy period. Harold was in a hurry - but he didn't go by boat. It was also along Ermine street - at the crossing of the Welland near the natural ford at Stamford - that Harold's and Hardraada's armies clashed. Hardraada's force had also been using the road, in preference to their ships (not surprising - dragging a ship upcurrent, up a narrow winding river is a lot of work). The Ouse itself is also pretty shallow - one of the reason we know so much about early trade on the Ouse is because of medieval lawsuits over blockages: peasants setting wicker fish traps across the river, blocking passage of even light boats was recurring problem. It is fast in a few of the parts above Selby (that's as far as the river was considered navigable by larger boats: Selby served York as a secondary port though the primary port was Kingston upon Hull, which had a direct road connection), but generally it's more placid - and in many places you can wade across without even getting your shorts wet. The locks of course are a post 16th century addition to solve this problem. However, when it comes to road transport, the Ouse is a bit of a red herring. Ermine street runs direct to York from Kingston upon Hull, rising swiftly up out of the estuary valley and climbing towards the Wolds. It doesn't follow the river valley at all - probably precisely because of the concern about flooding. So, while I suspect strongly that people did use the rivers for transport, there's no question that the main artery for travel between London and York was Ermine street. We have much historical documentation of travel along it - compared with almost none for the Trent and a fair amount on the Ouse which nonetheless seems to be almost entirely about transport of goods from Selby and Hull. This also explains the pattern of settlement. If you look at England's east coast north of the Wash, one of the striking things is that towns did not spring up in numbers along the river valleys, but instead are primarily strung out along the lines of the old roads. That's quite different from (say) Holland or Northern Germany, or even south-east England where the pattern of settlement is much more clustered along the river bottoms. We are (as usual ) getting a little off-topic here, but it does mean that Saltmarsh can sit on a good road without seeming anachronistic. As a possibly relevant side note, excavations in Ermine street in Lincolnshire have revealed that the medieval road was more sophisticated than we might think. Although the excavated section runs across grey clay pans (very prone to flooding), the road had two ditches dug under the road, at its edge which were filled with gravel and then the whole lot edged with clay (giving a raised berm) and the gap between the berms filled in with sand. That gave a slightly raised sandy surface that would dry quickly and not form ridges and humps, and which would not collect water (it drained out rapidly into the gravel sumps and then onto the surrounding surface, which was lower than the road). Building and maintaining such a road is pretty labor intensive - you need to dig through heavy clay and haul sand in, but it gives you a good surface, suitable for wheeled traffic in both wet and dry weather. As far as Walter Scott and Hereward's secret woodland passage, I would - to be polite - be sceptical. For a start Scott was more into "feeling" than historical accuracy and for a second as far as we know, Hereward never went to York (the De Gestis Herwardi, the near-contemporary record of his life and deeds, makes no such claim, though it discusses his other - possibly fictional - travels in detail. I suspect if he had taken an army north, people might have noticed) and for a third, between Ely and York you have to cross no less than 4 major roads, the high (and long treeless) chalk downs of the wold and the area between Boston and Peterborough, which was already densely settled by late saxon times (and prosperously farmed) as attested to by numerous 8th and 11th century finds - including plenty of imported continental ware. cheers, Mark

Re: Collaborative World Ending… I actually have had two global apocalyptic events in the my game world. The first is an "extradimensional invasion" by high magic-using cultures (this is where the færie races come from: a world further from the sun than our own and with a slightly different chemistry: that explains their intolerance for some metals and their dislike of bright sunlight and heat It also explains the existence of different, but unrelated sentient races). After over-running the world (and erecting a magical shield to reduce sunlight, provoking something of an environmental apocalypse), the few surviving human cultures, dug in (literally: going underground to avoid attack in some cases, thus providing ready-made underground labyrinths) eventually enhanced their magic, fought back and re-conquered the world. Much later, the two largest empires that emerged from that reconquest, went to war - the war ending in waves of magical plagues and magically attracted meteors crashing from the skies in droves. The resulting environmental disturbance this time melted the polar ice caps, changing the coastlines and throwing civilization back into the early iron-age again. In the current game, things are much less apocalyptic - but there's something you can use for your "magic is corrupting and dangerous" idea. There are new religious cults that have arisen. In these cults, members take a patron spirit (thought to be an aspect of the Gods) - and these spirits can teach magic more powerful than that commonly used. There is a catch of course - if you are not careful, using this magic can be corrupting, driving the users insane, or "gifting" them with obscene marks - tentacles, non-healing sores, third eyes that look into dimensions best unseen - that sort of thing. The way this works is that the commonest form of magic (Temple magic) uses a VPP. The cost of the VPP means that you really have to sink a lot of points into it to get powerful spells. In addition all mages must take "limited number of powers". You can't make up spells on the fly, but have to learn them or slowly research them. This allows the GM to control access, and I do so by filtering magic through the "official" Temple cults. If you belong to a cult dedicated to the goddess of the sea, you can't expect to learn fire spells, for example, so temple-trained mages tend to be restricted in both raw power (ie: active points) and in the type of magic they can do. Temples might teach battle magic if you belong to the warrior cult but they are unlikely to teach spells that can poison, or curse. The upside is that Temple magic has no side effects - over the centuries temple magicians have worked all the bugs out of the spells they teach. They might not always work, but a spell failure won't do you- or anyone around you - harm. The cults that have patron spirits, however, while still restricted in the kinds of spells they can learn, have no such "moral" restrictions. And they use multipowers, sacrificing a little (but only a little) flexibility in return for far more raw power. As example, one player in my game has recently converted to such a cult. I allowed him to swap out the points in his Temple magic VPP for a multipower. He retained all his spells, but went from spells with a maximum of 30 active points to spells with a maximum of 65 active points! Here's the catch. All magic requires a power skill roll, with a penalty based on active points. Spirit cult magic also requires a side effect triggered by a failed skill roll. Of course the more active points you have to play with, the more likely you are to fail - so there's that temptation aspect. The side effect itself is a transform, affecting the body, spirit or mind, turning the caster mutant, alien or mad Generally the side effect from a single failed roll is not going to be enough to have any effect - you need to fail multiple rolls to get "transformed". But if you use magic a lot that is going to happen, eventually. The last refinement - which I stole from Valdorian age - is that this transformation damage does not heal normally: you can only dispose of it by either a) offloading it on a scapegoat or performing a service for your patron. As a result spirit cultists - if not actually mad - often behave like they are, since the requests of patrons are otherworldy, inexplicable - and often dangerous. Spirit cultists undertake long fraught quests to obtain a certain type of flower at a certain place or time, dig up the long dead to remove a lock of hair from the corpse, murder an old woman to collect her gallstone - or give away all their possessions to the poor, etc. I could see multiple ways in which you could weave this approach into your apocalypse cheers, Mark

Re: Iron Sky: Nazis on the Moon Like this? It's a retirement home in Alabama. So now you know where the nazis went .... at least the old, retired ones cheers, Mark

Re: Populating and fleshing out Saltmarsh Not really: we know that the old roman road from York to London (Ermine Street) was in continuous use up to ... well, today really: the A15 follows mostly the same route. The name comes from the saxon "Earninga Straete" so it was certainly still in use in the 11th century, trade privileges are confirmed in documents by the 12th century and it was an important pilgrimage route as attested to by the 12-14th century pilgrims' lodgings all along the route (some of which are still there!) However, it doesn't go very close to the fens, passing through Lincoln. That may be because the country closer to the fens used to be heavily wooded, or because of impassibility (the medieval road made a diversion south of Lincoln, to avoid areas with the worst flooding in winter/spring). We know from acts of parliament in the 1500's that funds were being levied for the upkeep of the road and in the 1600's it became England's first turnpike. It was considered the busiest and most important road in England. It's always had travelers' inns too. The George at Stamford on the London York road only dates from the 1500's, but it was built on the site of a much older traveler's inn. There is no "river route" from York to London (though people would certainly have used one if there was) - all of the rivers run west to east, draining into the North Sea. You could have gone to Nottingham, then northeast on the Trent, then into the estuary of the Humber, then up the Ouse to York - but then you would have had to tranship a couple of times (boats that could travel in the estuary, which was considered very dangerous for shipping, were too large for the Ouse or Trent) and also walked/ridden over half of the distance, anyway. Certainly almost all trade to or from York that came in by sea was transshipped at either Shelby or Hull for precisely this reason. The town council of York left us plenty of lawsuits regarding rights of passage and maintenance of bridges, roads and waterway, and levied tolls on both, indicating that the road was an important factor up until the decline of York at the end of the medieval period. You might have had difficulty getting a boat for such a trip, too: I'm not sure how much trade there was on the Trent (there must have been some, but it hasn't left the trove of records that travel on the Ouse or Ermine street has). Nottingham was a middle-sized town of no great import through the medieval period (the population in 1650 was about 3500, as opposed to about 3000 in 1400). Its rise to prominence starts after York's decline and is due to some of the same factors. If you wanted to travel by boat, your best bet would have been the coastal route - which could be faster, was arguably more comfortable, but also very unpredictable: onshore winds could strand you for days or even weeks. The old-fashioned idea that overland travel was difficult and that people rarely travelled in medieval England, doesn't match up with the archeological and documentary evidence showing lively travel and trade up and down the major roads. cheers, Mark

Re: Are single climate/habitat worlds really possible? I think canon for Trantor is 40 billion - that's a lot, but spaced out over the land mass of an earth-sized planet (Trantor still has oceans), means there's still plenty of empty space: that's about the same population density as the UK. However, I think it was suggested that a population of 1 trillion is more realistic. As for the heat pump comment, I am assuming that Trantor had, at one point, a climate and we know it has oceans - I assume that any civilization that can build a world spanning city can also build a world-spanning piping system: I'm sitting here looking out the window at snow and sub-zero temperatures - in a room heated entirely by waste heat. cheers, Mark

Re: Populating and fleshing out Saltmarsh The Fens are an interesting area - my wife's family is from Lincolnshire, on the coast and we've done a fair amount of traveling there. One of the striking things about the Fens in history is that although (to modern eyes) they are not very big, to the medieval eye, they were vast wasteland in which all kinds of things could hide - and which did in their time, serve as refuges to bandits and defeated people of various stripes. The difficulty of traveling through the fens (even though they were never as empty as popular myth made them) is attested to by the fact that pre-17th century, most people and most roads took the far longer route around them, rather than the direct route. cheers, Mark

Re: Gnomes? Gnomes? They're 17 feet tall and eat nothing but tar, right? cheers, Mark

Re: Populating and fleshing out Saltmarsh Try doing it in unpadded sandals with 4x the load ... That's what a legionnaire would sometimes have to do. There's a reason they spent ten times as much time on endurance training than tactics and weapons training added together. cheers, Mark

Re: Populating and fleshing out Saltmarsh

Re: Are single climate/habitat worlds really possible? Capture it and use it. Very large dwellings are nearly purpose-built for heat pumps. cheers, Mark

Re: Are single climate/habitat worlds really possible?

Re: Populating and fleshing out Saltmarsh

Re: What Have You Watched Recently?

Re: Are single climate/habitat worlds really possible? Roach equivalents? Maybe ... but one of the interesting things is that high rises - even in developing countries - don't seem to suffer many of the invasive species problems that low-rises in the same neighborhoods do (rats, roaches, assassin bugs, etc). Most natural species become invasive when transferred to an environment which is like their native one, but different in one or two important ways (lack of competitors or predators slight climate change, etc). However for a natural species, an all-indoors environment would be pretty alien.... So - not impossible - but also not all that likely, when you are talking about what might have hitched a ride from an "agricultural planet". cheers, Mark

Re: Are single climate/habitat worlds really possible?

Re: Are single climate/habitat worlds really possible? Invasive species are in for a pretty rough ride when your entire ecosystem is made up of buildings. Apart from infectious disease, that's one thing you probably don't have to worry about. cheers, Mark

Re: Solar Systems Like Ours in the Minority

Re: Are single climate/habitat worlds really possible?

Re: Populating and fleshing out Saltmarsh