Fitz

Re: Historical Fiction I'd recommend any of the books by Alfred Duggan if you're interested in medieval historical fiction. My favourite is "Knight With Armour", which is the story of a very earnest, but not terribly competent knight on the 1st Crusade. He also wrote a non-fiction history of the Plantagenet kings called "The Devil's Brood" which tends to lapse into some fairly speculative novelesque writing at times, but which is quite a fun read. He didn't just write medieval subjects though; he also wrote a book called "Family Favourites" about the Roman emperor Elagabalus, and another called "He Died Old" about Mithridates. Another excellent historical novelist is Cecelia Holland -- look for "The Firedrake" (irish mercenary ends up with William the Conqueror in 1066) and "Hammer for Princes" (the civil war between Stephen and Maude, c.1140 -- published in the US as "The Earl"). "The Lords of Vaumartin" is set in France in the mid-14th century, in the time of the Hundred Years War. She's quite prolific, and her books are always good (all the ones I've read, anyway). If you want stuff set in antiquity, Mary Renault is the best of the best. The Last of the Wine (1956) — set in Athens during the Peloponnesian War The King Must Die (1958) — the mythical Theseus up to his father's death The Bull from the Sea (1962) — the remainder of Theseus' life Lion in the Gateway (1964) — about the Persian Wars The Mask of Apollo (1966) — an actor at the time of Plato and Dionysius the Younger Fire From Heaven (1969) — Alexander the Great up to his father's death The Persian Boy (1972) — Alexander after the conquest of Persia The Praise Singer (1978) — the poet Simonides of Ceos Funeral Games (1981) — Alexander's successors Her writing is superb, and she really manages to get into the mindset of people of ancient times -- she doesn't try to dress them up to modern tastes. Others have mentioned the Cadfael novels of Ellis Peters, which are a fun read.

Re: Door opened in an airplane in flight. What next? If I remember correctly, there are rules for explosive decompression in Star Hero.

Re: The use of accents/voices in your game My accents are, frankly, pretty much crap. All peasants, no matter what culture or language, always sound as though they come from deepest Somerset, and that's about the extent of my attempts at accents

Re: Playing without END I've been running my current FH campaign without END (except for spellcasters) and without Stunning (but still with STUN) in an attempt to mimic the old-school High Fantasy tropes somewhat. It works OK, but it does have ramifications for various tactics and attacks, and I suspect I'll be bringing them both back into play. I expect a certain amount of wailing and gnashing of teeth from the more rules-resistant players, but screw 'em

Re: And off we go! Hrrrmm..... still getting rpglibrary's 404 message, plus they're only showing one new link added in the last two weeks, and it's not yours. [edit] Aha! Found the problem -- you've missed out a folder name in the href from the "Burried God" adventure page. It should be http://www.rpglibrary.org/settings/gothick_empires/adventures/the%20buried%20god/advent1/1_adventmenu.htm (missed out /advent1/ )

Re: And off we go! All of the links to rpglibrary.org from "The Buried God" scenario return 404 (page not found) errors.

Re: And off we go! "...where Gen scored a big bag of qurrock nuts..." -- poor qurrocks! As Lord Weird Slough Feg once said, "small the cut but exceeding greivous".

Re: Bizarre Spell Ideas #$@! You and the Horse You Rode In On This spell invokes one or two amorphous but very, ahem, friendly spirits which will engage the target (and his/her horse, if available) in some highly inappropriate physical contact. I think it might be an EGO-based Entangle maybe?

Re: FH without Stun I run my campaign without Stunning, but still with STUN -- when a character goes past 0 STUN they're knocked out, but they don't spend all their time trying to recover from being CON-Stunned. It's not ideal; it definitely changes the way combats go and it invalidates a lot of useful tactics. I think it encourages a tendency towards the D&D charge-and-suck-it-up and stand-and-slug-and-suck-it-up tactics, but it does simplify combat a bit. Personally, I'd like to bring Stunning back into play, but I don't know how my players are likely to react since they've become used to not having to worry about it now.

Re: U-Boat Deck Plan That's a great site altogether, but deck plans for an ocean liner are something I've been looking for for a long time. Thanks

Re: Sectional defences and AoE attacks That depends on the climate; in the Levant and North Africa for example, under-padding was kept to specific danger areas like the shoulders, kidneys and frontal abdomen, since European-style padded overalls would have you keeling over from heat exhaustion in no time.

Can anybody tell me where this is dealt with? I don't seem to be able to find it in 5ER. The specific situation I'm thinking of is a guy in a chainmail hauberk and akheton vs a fireball -- obviously, being engulfed in a roiling ball of superheated gas, hit locations aren't going to be appropriate, but he should be taking less damage than the Nudist Avenger in the same situation. Also, the type of coverage is going to be important: the akheton is going to be a lot more effective against flash-burns than chainmail would be alone, for example -- I wouldn't think an open-mesh armour would help much against a fireball at all.

Re: What setting does your campaign use? I've tried using published milieus for my campaign, but I always end up going back to my homebrew -- its been evolving peripatetically for the last 25 years or so and still is nowhere near complete, but I prefer to develop as I go rather than having to learn somebody else's stuff. That's too much like work.

Re: Aikido throw While we're on aikido anecdotes..... In the mid 1990s, Gozo Shioda Shihan (founder of Yoshinkan Aikido) gave a demonstration which was attended by a number of young karateka (among others). He tossed around his uchideshi with gay abandon, but after the demo some of the karateka accused them of not really attacking with their full force, so therefore the demo was bogus. The deshi replied in that very polite Japanese fashion, basically saying words to the effect of "Of course we weren't attacking with full force! YOU try attacking Sensei with full force and see what happens!" It's a truism in aikido that the harder you attack, the harder you fall. A large part of the skill of aikido is learning how to protect your attacker from the consequences of their own aggression without getting hurt yourself. If that sounds odd.... well, it's probably because you've seen too much Steven Seagal

Re: Aikido throw I don't think being able to Abort to a throw is either necessary or applicable to Aikido -- although it can appear seamless to an external viewer, an Aikido throw almost always follows an Escape, Block (interception) or Dodge (evasion) maneuver. In game that might feel a bit staccato, but in real life the maneuvers flow into each other quite nicely. I'd suggest that what would work better to simulate the Aikido double-maneuver (e.g. Dodge-Throw) would be some extra SPD so that you've effectively always got a Held Action in hand. If you wanted to make a Super Duper Mystic Master of Aiki you could build a Desolidification-based "Super-Dodge" power, and maybe a short range Teleport for the "Evasion faster than the eye can see" schtick. (I personally haven't managed to master these tricks yet, but I'm only sandan so maybe after another twenty years of training I'll have got the hang of it -- and then I can FIGHT CRIME!)

Re: Herophile Fantasy art This is the finished version of "The Little Brawl at Allen" I posted a WIP of earlier. It could do with some tweaking, but I'm so sick of it now I think I'll leave it for a while

Re: Do you have Active Point Limits? Not for my current campaign, but that's because it's a High Fantasy campaign in which (surviving) characters can expect to achieve god-like levels of power, eventually. My last campaign was a lot grittier, and had limits on just about everything: characteristics, skill levels, power levels, the whole nine yards* -- stretchable limits, but expensive as hell to do so. * Where did that expression come from? The whole nine yards of what?

Re: Herophile Fantasy art This is a detail from a work in progress, an illustration for a traditional Irish tale called "The Little Brawl at Allen". Essentially, the story is about a fight that breaks out at a feast that escalates from a fist-fight to all-out carnage, at the end of which over a thousand people are dead. It's one of the "Finn MacCool" (Fionn MacCumhaill?) stories.

Re: Herophile Fantasy art This is something I whipped up while procrastinating over schoolwork that I should have been doing instead. It's amazing how much stuff I get done that way. I'm not terrifically happy with the way he turned out; I'm not very good at doing fabric from my imagination — I should probably have found a photo of some Bedouin or something to get the folds right. Anyway, I expect he'll turn up as an NPC or something in my campaign.

Re: Someone's gotta know the answer to this: No matter how fit or well-trained they are, I strongly doubt that any number of rowers is going to get a raft going any faster than 3-5 km/h. A canoe? Sure. A rowboat? No problem. But rafts aren't usually terrifically streamlined.

Re: Fantasy Miniatures I have a lot of fantasy roleplaying miniatures -- certainly in the hundreds, possibly low thousands (I stopped counting a long time ago) -- and I still have trouble matching players' ideas of what their characters look like. I find it easier these days, for those who won't accept a "close enough" substitute, to point them at the teeming mass of figures when they're building or equipping a character and say "Find one you like and make a character like that". Or else get them to find and buy their own goddam mini Which reminds me -- I really should drag another couple of dozen out of the "Unpainted" drawer and make them all pretty and stuff. Maybe later.

Re: Sectional Defences Much Japanese armour? You may be right, but I strongly suspect not, since otherwise there'd be more evidence of such. I know of only one harness that could be described as being made of wood, and that is a pressed and laquered bamboo armour in the Japanese Imperial collection which was made for a very old man, in his nineties, and only because it was light enough for his doddery old frame to carry -- he was certainly never expected to get into combat. I've read extensively on the subject of Japanese arms and armour, and have found no instances of any materials other than iron, steel or rawhide being used as the primary defensive structure, even for low-quality munition armour issued to the arrow-fodder. It would be foolish to say that wood was never used; I haven't read every single thing ever written in all languages on the subject, and historical description can be remarkably spotty. However, the paucity of evidence for its use leads me to believe that it wasn't. (Or else that it was so common that it didn't rate a mention, but in that case I'd expect some physical evidence to have survived).

Re: Sectional Defences

Re: Export Template that shows equipment I have one; it's posted on my website at http://mojobob.com/roleplay/hero/fantasy/highfantasyhero/index.html It calculates the DCV/DEX roll modifier, plus the END/Turn for movement, according to how much stuff the character is carrying (i.e. what's listed on the sheet).

Re: Sectional Defences What's the probablity of rolling 7-13 on 3d6? I don't recall off-hand, but I think it's about 60%, so your armour won't work 40% of the time -- I'd give it -3/4.