Barwickian

Re: What Are You Listening To Right Now? There'll be some changes made, Chet Atkins & Mark Knopfler (from Neck on Neck)

Re: orichalcum Isn't Say-Hway Jin a Jedi? And if not, why not?

Re: Sci-fi swear words? I seem to recall that in one of Moorcock's Dancers at the End of Time books, a group of alien invaders made liberal use of the word "ferk". I can't remember what it meant in their language, but it definitely wasn't a swear word - which didn't lessen the severity of their punishment whenever the robot nanny who tamed them heard them using it... Gotta love Moorcock.

Re: orichalcum

Re: 5ER review I enjoyed bblackmoor's review. I don't agree with it - my own review of 5ER is at the start of this thread - but I enjoyed reading it, and I recognise some of the points he raised. What, as a relative Hero newbie, I enjoyed most was the comparison to past editions, which is something I can't do. And it's nice to hear a dissenting voice amid the chorus of praise for 5ER. If anything, it does a service for anyone who wants to research Hero before buying - reading the two RPG.net reviews and bblackmoor's review will give tham a very good idea of what to expect. (Does anyone actually research games before buying, or do we all impulse buy?)

Re: What Are You Listening To Right Now? Out, Demons, Out, by the Edgar Broughton Band An oldie, but a goodie.

Re: orichalcum I pronounce it "ori-KAL-cum". The New Oxford doesn't give a pronunciation for it, but does give OR-i-kalk for its root word (orichalc). The Oxford says it's a yellow metal, probably a form of brass, prized in ancient times, and adds that it came to English, via Latin, in the middle ages from the Greek oreikhalkon, 'mountain copper'.

Re: Herophile Fantasy art More thread necromancy. This one's called "Familiar Treat", and I'm rather pleased with the way it turned out...

Re: What Are You Listening To Right Now? Barbarian Horde, from The Gladiator soundtrack. (Getting ready for the UK release of the extended edition DVD tomorrow.)

Re: This Age and that Age

Re: I need a name for a Robin Hood-like fantasy character I'm with Savinien - just 'The Fox' does it for me. In the past, I've used the names The Silver Fox and The Grey Fox for similar characters. An alternative that may not be as well known: in the north of England, foxes are sometimes known as 'tods', so 'The Tod'. In German, however, Der Tod is Death, so the name may hold a hint of malevolence.

Re: What Are You Listening To Right Now? The California Guitar Trio, Bohemian Rhapsody Acoustic, instrumental cover of the Queen classic.

Re: What Are You Listening To Right Now? Kate Rusby's Sir Eglamore

Re: How can you feed this many people? Me too! Another idea that occurs is honey. Bees are natural woodland creatures, and it's possible, given the plentiful woodland, that you could forage for wild hives, as was done in Poland in the last century. Very useful stuff, honey. Hot only can you eat it, you can drink it (mead), and it's a good preservative and a fair antibiotic. There's much more on honey collection, uses and folklore on the farming section of my website (link below).

Re: How can you feed this many people?

Re: How can you feed this many people? I think it's something that really tends to surprise Americans. Even back in the middle ages, lowland England had a village every mile or so. Where then the great tracts of woods for outlaws to hide in? They weren't there. Even Sherwood never had more than two or three miles of woodland across at any one point. Here's a CC2 map Chris Golden and I (mostly Chris - I added the woodlands) made of medieval Nottinghamshire, just to demonstrate the point: http://www.minarsas.demon.co.uk/harn/scenarios/mednotts.PNG (warning - this is a 730kb PNG file) Sources for this map were (1) modern maps (2) Domesday Book (3) HC Derby's Domesday Geography of Northern England and (4) a little local history pamphlet we picked up in Nottinghamshire's county archives, which had the advantage of including woodland from an 1120s survey of the manor of Mansfield, which were not included in Domesday. The map's part of a as-yet-unfinished Robin of Sherwood scenario I ran for Gencon UK five years ago and still haven't got round to completing - the rest's in my head. But what is there includes some of the real history of Sherwood, some of the mythic history of Sherwood, and HarnMaster stats for Robin and his Merry Men. May make a useful addition for those old enough to remember the ICE Hero/Rolemaster Robin Hood supplement, which was also based heavily on Robin of Sherwood (and remains IMO one of the best roleplaying supplements ever written). Unfinished scenario is at: http://www.minarsas.demon.co.uk/harn/scenarios/allhallow.htm For those who don't know what Robin of Sherwood is, my rpg.net review can be found here: http://www.rpg.net/reviews/archive/9/9649.phtml For those, who don't remember Staplehurst's Robin Hood, read this and weep: http://www.rpg.net/reviews/archive/9/9649.phtml

Re: How can you feed this many people? It sounds a little like you're creating some kind of elfin city... The short answer is that Curufea's right and you probably do need nearby agriculture, or the ability to trade for agricultural produce, to maintain the city if you're going for a strictly realistic approach. Hunter-gatherer societies tend to be nomadic rather than city-based. My speciality is medieval agriculture, rather than pre-historic, but let me briefly run through some of the salient points of a bronze age economy, then think of some ways to tweak it to get you what you want. First off, you have no heavy ploughs, instead relying on ard or scratch ploughs. These can only work light soils, which means you probably can have your large tracts of woodland, while agriculture is confined to the uplands rather than the clay valleys. Fields, if any, will probably be square and about an acre in size (that's about as much as can be ploughed in a day - fields are square because with a scratch plough you have to plough criss-cross to break the soil up). A scratch plough can be pulled by a single horse or ox - or a person if necessary - so there's no need for large centralised villages as there is in the medieval period. The most common settlement type in this kind of agriculture is the hamlet of up to a dozen houses. If the medieval pattern holds (and I can't swear it does), each household of five people will probably need around 15 arable acres to support it. Ordinarily, I'd say you need around 30,000 people working in agriculture to support a city of 3,000, giving a total of 140 square miles under the plough. However, that's at a medieval level where almost the entire population relied on field grains to survive. Let's say that with the bountiful wildlife in your forests, people need only half as much land under the plough - you still have 30,000 people, but now you only need 70 square miles under the plough. That isn't very much - seven miles by 10 miles will do it. You can reduce it still further if (given your high fantasy setting) you come up with some kind of bless crops spell. Doubling the yield will more than halve the land you need because not only does the land yield twice as much, you need correspondingly fewer people in agriculture to support your city. You now have a city of 3,000, with some 15,000 people in about 300 hamlets farming about 30 square miles of ploughed land - though the scatter of hamlets will be much wider than this, with much woodland between them to allow sustainable hunting - at a pure guess, say about five square miles of wildwood for every square mile of ploughed land. In this landscape, agriculture is definitely going on, but you really won't notice it much - not compared to modern farming, or even medieval farming, where as much as 94% or the land in the counties closest to London were under the plough.

BBC Radio 3 broadcast excerpts of a recent concert given by the guitarist John Williams and the multi-instrumentalist Richard Harvey (formerly of the folk group Gryphon) as part of its weekly Sunday Gala programme. The concert featured music from around the world, including a series of medieval dances re-arranged for guitar and (variously) drum, recorder and psaltery. Sunday Gala is available online until next Sunday under the BBC's 'listen again' policy. Visit http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/sundaygala/ and click 'Listen to the latest programme'. The medieval suite is about 10 minutes into the show if you want to skip the baroque stuff (personally I wouldn't - it's a brilliant performance). The saltarello which forms the finale of the medieval suite is my favourite piece of medieval music - I've probably got half a dozen different versions of it. This is one of the best - they play it about twice as fast as I can manage on my mandolin.

Re: Master and Commander, Star Hero style.

Re: Space Cowboy WWII Hero! You must spread some Reputation around before giving it to OddHat again.

Re: Space Cowboy WWII Hero! Wow. Those shorts Spurs Jackson (if 'tis he) is sporting are rather disturbing...

Re: Campaign Ideas: Why are they on this ship?

Re: Herophile Fantasy art One I did in fairly short order after a request on the Harnforum for a dragon render. A combination of Poser and Bryce used for this - and just stock models, as speed was an issue.

Re: The Art Of The NPC For minor NPCs I borrow 2300AD's playing-card personality creator - essentially, you draw two cards to determine an NPC's major and minor motivations. Inspired by this technique, for major NPCs I'll sometimes do a full tarot reading if I find myself bereft of inspiration when I create them. A Celtic Cross spread is ful of useful information - how they perceive themselves, how they perceive others, what their immediate aims are and so on. Note that I'm far too rational ever to use Tarot cards on people. Don't believe in them. But they're a very useful NPC motivation-creator.

Re: Advice for Drawing Maps Given the size of the palce, it's likely overtaken and swallowed up smaller surrounding settlements during its growth. That means, like London, as well as the big urban core, it'll have lots of smaller "town centres" scattered throughout. Once they would have been villages in their own right, and they may still ertain their village greens, their taverns and their churches. Talking of churches, there's enough people there to support major temples to most of the deities in your campaign, and hundreds, if not thousands, of smaller temples and shrines. The density of housing you need to the roof-top gallivanting will be a major fire risk. Even if major buildings are stone, the majority of houses will be constructed of wood. A city this size is going to need a massive hinterland to support it. If Markdoc's calculations on the city population are correct, taking the lower end of his estimate, and we assume that about 80% of the population are involved in agriculture (a little low for historical, but this is high fantasy), then you'll have a population of 150 million for the city and its hinterland. At a medieval level of technology (which is still applicable until the agricultural revolution), you need about 3 acres of arable land to support each person at subsistance level. At 640 acres to the square mile, you'll need a little over 700,000 square miles of arable land devoted purely to feeding the city. Woodland and pasture comes on top of that. All of this food (and don't forget firewood!) needs to be transported into the city - river transport is cheapest, so I predict marginally navigable rivers will have early canalisation work: locks and weirs. There'll be plenty of bargees working the rivers and canals as well. There'll be massive seasonal cattle and sheep drives into the city, too. With limited food preservation, the best way of getting meat to the market is to make it walk. Depending on your culture, the herders may walk alongside the beasts (as the English and Welsh drovers did), or they may ride horses - the cattle herders of Andalucia were renowned horsemen even back in the 12th century, and developed many of the tools and techniques later seen in the American West. Most likely time for the big drives is late spring/early summer, when young surplus animals are sold, and late summer/autumn, when the non-breeding or working stock is sold. The beast markets will probably be close to the edge of town (you don't want all those animals clogging the streets for days), though the city may have grown around them a bit. Meat markets will be scattered around the city, though their may be a few big ones close to the core (I'm thinking of London's Smithfield market here). Milling the flour for that nuymber of people will be a major problem. Flour doesn't last particularly well - nowhere near as long as grain - so you mill it when you need it. There may be windmills on some parts of town, and the occasional watermill. I suspect that most of the bridges (hey, to support this number of people, you're going to need a fairly major waterway running through the city) will have floating mills slung between the arches. Floating mills are kind of cool - they were used in ancient Rome and medieval Paris. You basically build a watermill on a boat and tether it under a bridge. Not only do these things add a touch of authenticity to your city, they're a wonderful setting for a combat, with all that clanking machinery to avoid and the flour dust - which is highly explosive! With a city this size you can really go to town!