Markdoc

You're right of course - the idea of intrinsic value as a driver of currency value is ludicrous (and a quick glance at history confirms this). Many people take for granted that gold has intrinsic value and that it's more valuable than silver, but in 15th-17th century Japan, gold was trading at a half to a third the value of silver by weight (at great profit to European traders!) and you can find other similar situations. People used to think that aluminium and cowrie shells had great intrinsic value at one point, too. At the same time, you can't entirely ignore the value of metal - the English had to reduce the weight of their silver coins because the face value of the coin was worth less than the value of the silver in France - so literally tons of coinage was vanishing across the channel to be melted down and turned into cups, jewelry and counterfeit French coinage. This example makes the point both ways - the new coins had far less silver than the old ones - but were worth the same for transactions. So it's not the silver in the coin that makes it valuable - it's the ability to use it for transactions. At the same time silver does have an intrinsic value - said value being its use in non-currency products. But I think you missed the poster's actual point which is that it doesn't actually matter for most gaming purposes: what matters to players is what you can buy with your coins and how much coinage you can carry. The idea is that the same mass of silver coinage has the same value, regardless of which coins it made up of. It's an interesting - even ingenious - idea, though it doesn't match with any historical coinage system that I know of. But then, this is not a historical game. As for the taxation thing, that's actually pretty simple, State-backed currency has value simply because it is backed up by the ability of the state to levy taxes. The US dollar is stable because it's backed up by the purchasing power of about 240 million taxpayers who mostly pay in full and on time. If the Greeks crash out of the Euro and go back to the Drachma, it'll swiftly lose (relative) value, because it's backed up by a smaller number of taxpayers who pay unwillingly, if at all. In this regard, the value of a currency is no different form the value of a company stock - both rely on cashflow and expected (future) performance. It's got little or nothing to do with geographic proximity - US dollars are legal tender in the US - but also in Zimbabwe. In the preindustrial era, Austrian Thalers were accepted as legal tender in a swathe of countries from Senegal to India. Again, geographical reach had nothing to do with it. It was just that in both cases,the currency was perceived as having a stable - and therefore tradeable - value and also (important) it was available in sufficient quantities to make it practically tradeable. cheers, Mark

Eh. You can understand the reason for the ban in 3 letters ...IPO. Etsy's planning to go public and the last thing they want is a lawsuit (or even the possibility of a lawsuit) because someone claims the love potion they bought turned out to be an ordinary level 1 potion of cure light wounds. Or more seriously, a lawsuit because people are selling services that - let's be honest here - are outright scams, like claiming to sell a love potion. They're marketing a service via which craftspeople sell tchotchkes - not high priestesses sell magical spellcasting services. As long as they don't target one group or religion - by banning, for example high priestesses and not pastors, then I'm good with it. The petition to rescind it makes perfect sense as well: after all, scammers are selling these services and someone is buying them. I'm not surprised that they're annoyed. This is how some people make their living, or at least a little cash on the side - now they're going to have to go over to craigslist or somewhere similar. For their customers, the direct implication is that they are being scammed with the extra gloss that it could be seen as their religious practices being made light of. cheers, Mark

Except as far as we know - and granted the figures are always going to be a bit vague -, the majority of the Roman Empire's population didn't live in the East. Most estimates put the split at about 40% in the east and 60% in the West, There's always quibbling over these figures, but I haven't seen anything that suggests a majority in the East - some put it at less than 40%, some put it at a bit more ... but never a majority - even taking Egypt into account, which I agree is fair enough. Those figures also include Greece, Anatolia and much of the Balkans in the "East" since the traditional split is along the Greek/Latin axis. If you include the "european" part of the Empire (ie: Greece westwards) as part of the West, then the split becomes more like 70-30 in favour of the west. I don't want to understate the importance of the region - both pre-and post Islam, it played a major role in trade and on the culture of the three major players. For example, for about 1000 years, the Asia to Europe trade was dominated by Arabs and Persians - which is pretty odd when you think about it. We know from archeology and and from Chinese and Arabic records, that Arabic and East Asian traders had long had bases in China.The Xin Tang Shu documents a thriving Arab and Persian colony in Yangzhou in the 700's and the Arabic Akhbar al-Sin wa-I-Hind records multiple Arabic trade colonies in China (in fact Abu Zaid, the author states that there were 120,000 muslim traders living there). I treat that figure with suspicion, but it's clear from archaeology and both Chinese and Arabic sources that there were a lot. They didn't just move goods, but also idea, historical artifacts and fashions - all of which had an impact at both ends of the trade routes. The middle east (Egypt slightly excluded and North Africa very much excluded) derived much of its prosperity from trade and not so much local trade as passing trade between Europe and India (much of the latter ultimately derived in China). It's no coincidence that the economic (and population) decline of the middle east started shortly after the Roman empire started to experience problems in its western half because troubles in western Europe meant that resources were pulled out of the east and demand fell. Yup. Warfare in Britain and France meant falling demand and unemployment in cities in Syria. That's how important Western European demand was to global trade even back in the early days of the empire. When you consider that Pliny estimated Roman trade with India (and China, via India) at 100 million sesterces per year, you get an idea of how much trade there actually was in Roman times. And almost all of that trade ran through cities in Persia and the Arab lands, who took a percentage. The division of the empire had a similarly negative effect on trade - with further economic decline for both east and west. And of course, the Islamic conquest hit trade even harder, disrupting for a while, the vital trade lifeline of many Eastern cities. Between about 300 AD and 1300 Ad, the population of Persia, Anatolia and greater Syria all fell (in some areas, it more than halved) ... while the populations in India, China and Europe all increased about 0.1% a year, more than doubling over the same period. The effects and causes are clear. I've visited the "dead cities" of Syria - a whole arc of cities and large, prosperous stone built towns that survived more or less intact because they didn't fall to plague or war. They were simply abandoned when trade dried up and their citizens drifted away in search of work - first to other cities in greater Syria, later to Anatolia and the Eastern Empire. So ... influential? Very. Dominant? No, not so much (or more accurately, not even). Ironically, the trade problems that further afflicted the Middle East/Asia in the 14th and 15th century (endemic warfare in Persia and Arabia, destruction of cities that had been trade hubs by the Mongols and their successors, the lockdown on private sea trade in China) did a lot to drive European expansionism. It wasn't - at least initially - dreams of empire, so much as affluent households all over Europe going "Where is the ****ing pepper?" cheers, Mark

Not really a terribly accurate picture - by the time you're discussing (Yuan Dynasty) the caliphate had centuries since collapsed into mutual feuding kingdoms and the tiny rump Abbassid caliphate in Bagdad (which hadn't really controlled anything outside the area around the Tigris for about 200 years) had finally been put out of its misery by the mongols just before the beginning of the Yuan Dynasty. While the middle east once had an economy roughly the same size as western Europe in Roman times, by the 14th century it had experienced 3-4 centuries of steep decline and had an economy roughly about a quarter the size of western Europe's. For the reasons, look at Maddison's discussion in "Contours of the world economy 1-2030 AD" - but basically it was due to the breakdown in international trade, and the rise of internal trade in Europe. Bagdad, for example, which had an estimated 500-700,000 inhabitants in the 8th and 9th centuries and had been one of the world's pre-eminent cities, had dwindled to 70-90,000 in the 14th century - a bit bigger than say Siena, in Italy, or a bit smaller (and much less influential) than Venice. The whole population of mesopotamia in the 14th century is estimated to have been about half or less what it had been 5 centuries before. There were three major economic spheres, all right, but the caliphate sat in between two of them - Europe and India - and was desperately dependant on trade. Historians quibble about the details, but they're quibbling about whether the middle east had an economy 20% or 30% the size of Europe's in the late medieval era - nobody's suggesting it was even close to the same size. Actually one of the interesting things - which explains a lot about world history - is that there have always been three major population and cultural centres: Europe, India and China. Together they make up about 16% of the earth's surface but for most of history, they contained about 60-80% of all humans and about 90% of all economic activity, with the remainder spread out across the globe. If you want to understand the shape of human history, there's one major factor right there. Far from being "locked out of" the asian economy, Europeans were well involved: international trade in Europe had been booming for 2 centuries by this time. You just need to look at the ornate toll houses and merchants guilds being built as the wealth poured in. Bruges, for example built a giant trade facility in 1200's, in the centre of the city where ships could sail inside, have their goods lifted by crane to overhead warehouses, or moved directly out into the market square for sale. You don't do that for a few rowboats with some bags of turnips! By the beginning of the 14th century, Genoese and Venetian companies had already established branches in India and China, in Zaytun (modern day Quanzhou) and Yangzhou: these cities had long had Arabic trading colonies too. There was enough demand by that stage, that in the early part of the 13th century, Francesco Pegolotti wrote "Practica della Mercatura" or "Practical guide for Merchants". Instead of the sort of fuzzy travelogues of earlier travellers, this one was for company employees heading out to offices in other countries. It described customs rules, weights and measures, helpful hints on how to dress and behave, information on packing favoured trade goods, etc., plus helpful phrases for trading. There was some instructions on travel and some information on places, but the bulk of it is information on exchange rates, taxes and coins (he worked for an international bank, after all). I can give you a taste of his style. Here's his information on how to cover part of the southern overland silk route into China: "You may calculate that a merchant with a dragoman, and with two men servants, and with goods to the value of twenty-five thousand golden florins, should spend on his way to Cathay from sixty to eighty sommi of silver, and not more if he manage well; and for all the road back again from Cathay to Tana, including the expenses of living and the pay of servants, and all other charges, the cost will be about five sommi per head of pack animals, or something less. And you may reckon the sommo to be worth five golden florins. You may reckon also that each ox-waggon will require one ox, and will carry ten cantars Genoese weight; and the camel-waggon will require three camels, and will carry thirty cantars Genoese weight; and the horse-waggon will require one horse, and will commonly carry six and half cantars of silk, at 250 Genoese pounds to the cantar [a Genoese pound was apparently about 12 ounces]. And a bale of silk may be reckoned at between 110 and 115 Genoese pounds." etc, etc. He has long lists of prices and exchange rates. Interesting stuff if you are interested in late medieval European economics, otherwise a bit tedious. He never went to China himself (though he worked at company offices in different countries in Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean) but compiled it from reports of other merchants. Which makes the point really: this wasn't a "book of wonders" but a practical work guide of the same kind that expat.s heading off to Asia get from their companies today. Cheers, Mark

Great! Cheers, Mark

It's not until the end of the year (we're combining a week's holiday in Japan with a trip back to New Zealand). With only a week, I don't want to spend a lot of time racing around. Last time we spent a week in Tokyo, with a couple of day trips to nearby destinations. The next trip we'll do the same, just based in Kyoto. If you are nearby it could be cool to meet cheers, Mark

I try to visit at least one new country a year, and given my interests, naturally gravitate to the ones with ruins, old castles and temples No new countries this year, sadly - we've decided to go back to Japan for holidays, since we liked it so much last time, and there's so much more to see. The guy who wrote that was a Chinese court official. He was apparently responsible for collecting information about foreign kingdoms, and as far as we know, never left central China, although he compiled several books. From what has survived of his work (not much 1800 years on!) he seems to have gathered all sorts of material, without too much filtering, so real stories that might have been taken from travellers and merchants are mixed up with old myths and folktales, plus official Chinese documents that were already a couple of hundred years old when he started his work.. Until the Romans turned up in China, it's not clear that anyone ever made the whole trip between Rome to China (though of course some people might have done - they just didn't leave a record). It wouldn't be a big surprise if nobody ever did make the trip before: Rome was often at war with the neighbouring kingdoms, so a Roman travelling through those lands would find few friends and much of the trip was across barren lands and mountains with no laws to protect foreigners. A single traveller would almost certainly be robbed and either killed or enslaved, while merchants normally travelled in large groups for protection. The ways things normally worked was that a group of merchants based in one place would travel a part of the route that they already knew and where they had contacts with the local rulers. So Chinese merchants carried goods to - say - Jiayuguan, where Chinese rule normally ended and then sell them to merchants allied to whatever group ruled the oases in the western desert at that time. In turn these guys would meet up with merchants allied to the steppes nomads further west and do another deal. That crew would haul the goods over the mountains and across the steppes to the next city (which one depended on what route they chose.) Then the merchants from that city would travel across the steppes to the next city, do their deal and then head for home. The steppes were pretty lawless areas for most of this period, so we're not talking about a merchant and his guards, but a whole mass of merchants and their guards and helpers - sometimes hundreds of people. I've visited a few of the old caravanserais, and the biggest I've seen, in places like Aleppo could easily hold a couple of hundred travellers - and it was just one of many caravanserais in the old city. The merchant trains would normally wait until they had enough people (and money) to cut a deal for safe passage with the local powers. The whole process was involved enough that it could take a long time - months (or occasionally years) might go by between merchant caravans. One Chinese (Tang Dynasty) document I saw indicated that they would send a major caravan every 2-4 years. Of course, at the next city, you'd have to repeat the process, until you got to Persia or the Roman Empire itself, where things were a bit more ordered. For a single traveller, that would mean cutting a deal with each caravan, and many months of delay. Possible, but far from easy. No wonder the Romans sailed around the long way. But it wasn't just Romans. We know the Chinese sent out emissiaries. One guy - Gan Ying - apparently got as far as Persia before giving up and going home. That sounds defeatist, but consider - China to Persia sounds like a long way, but actually you're still only about halfway to Rome (admittedly, the hardest part is behind you). Chinese merchants sailed to East Asia and occasionally made it as far as the Middle East - they certainly made it as far as Indonesia and Malaysia, where they set up trading colonies, and probably also in India. The sea route was also important to China - that's the route that Chinese porcelain made it to the middle east. Admiral Zheng He also apparently made it as far as the middle east on his famous voyage of discovery in the mid-1400's. And of course, Chinese merchants and pilgrims also made it over the mountains into northern India and then on to Persia that way. In China I also visited the Big Goose pagoda established by the monk Xuanzang, to translate the buddhist sutras he brought to China. So lots of people travelling back and forth along part of the route, and swapping stories about what they had seen or heard, but few, if any, making the whole trip. cheers, Mark

Actually the Romans apparently mostly sailed. Smart fellas those Romans. The earliest Roman trade mission to China that we have documented evidence for, during the antonine period, apparently entered China via what is now Vietnam, and what appears to be Roman material has been found in Vietnam at Óc Eo: possibly a colonia (trading post) or possibly material brought from India, where we know that the Romans did have trading posts. According to early maps, the Romans had an outpost in what's now eastern India or Bangladesh. Since the Roman Empire controlled Egypt and the Levant, the safest trade route for Romans was across the Mediterranean to Egypt or Palestine overland to the Red Sea and then down the Red Sea and across the Indian Ocean to India and from there to East Asia. The Greeks had been using that route as well and Ptolemy and others have left us descriptions of it. As far as trade goes, the Romans conducted active trade with China, mostly for silk (the India trade focused on pepper). There are numerous roman sources documenting this - including Pliny's well-known rant - but we can see that it was big deal because of the numerous laws attempting to restrict the trade. As far as we can tell though, almost all of that trade went via intermediaries along the silk road: Romans (in what's now Turkey) trading with Parthians, Parthians trading with Kushans, and Kushans trading with Chinese (you can sub out any of the various tribal/ethnic groups in the middle with others as political fortunes waxed and waned). We don't know how many - if any - Romans actually made the trip the whole distance. As an aside, I spent a month last year travelling the Chinese leg of the old (northern) silk road. It's pretty tough terrain so I can see why people did not make the whole trip! Also we drove about 6000 kilometres and that's less than half the total distance (I plan on doing the other half another time). cheers, Mark

Because their attitude - not always, but often - is that their authority is absolute and may not be questioned: and that therefore any interaction with the public is fraught with potential for trouble. I know, anecdote, not data, but here's an incident that has stayed with me lo, these many years, that illustrates it perfectly. Years back when I was still at NIH, I was working late. It was winter, snowy and cold. As I came out and headed for my car, I saw a cop parked at the roadside* who suddenly told me to stop. Thinking he was wondering what I was doing there, I held up my security badge and said "It's OK officer, just been working late" and he said "STOP!" in a much louder voice and put his hand on his gun. I stopped. When I asked him - politely - what the problem was. He said "The parking lot's all icy. You should go around". Seriously? He put his hand on his gun to ensure I was walking safely? What was he going to do if I walked on the parking lot? Shoot me? It wasn't about his personal safety - I was 30 feet away from him and walking parallel, not approaching, not fleeing. Now in all honesty, I doubt he actually meant to threaten me: he was trying to be helpful. I think it was simply a reflex - he had issued a command and I had not complied! Therefore - gun. It's like the old saying - if the only tool you have is hammer ... Cheers, Mark *This was before they put up the giant security barriers and such **** around the campus

The guy's in his 70’s. Even really smart guys tend to get kind of stoopid as their brain ossifies. God knows, I've met a few nobel prize winners who were hot stuff in their day but in the "should have been pensioned off a few years back" phase tended to say really stupid things. Look at James Watson. My guess is that these guys - who grew up in the 40's and 50's - were always racist, sexist or both. Back in the day, lots of people were, so they didn't stand out. By the 80’s they had learned to keep a lid on that kind of talk in public, but as they get older, the social restraints start to slip, and these old ingrained prejudices start to escape. I've actually seen this kind of thing myself in older prof.s. Cheers, Mark

Probably figured the "concealed weapon" defence would be a stretch if hauled up for gunning down bikini-clad girls

As Ternaugh says, they watch for patterns which suggest people are trying to deliberately play the limit - in fact "watching" implies more activity than is actually the case: since all transactions are automated these days, anything that looks like "suspicious activity" is simply flagged by a computer and reported if the bank can't get a good explanation. Even very small amounts can trigger the system if they are flowing in suspicious patterns (for examples multiple accounts sending small amounts of money to a single account, that then transfers funds offshore, or multiple (supposedly unlinked) accounts which send routinely money back and forth between them, etc) These days the fact that you are sending small transactions does't mean you are flying under the radar. cheers, Mark

Yeah. This sort of thing is why I worked up coinage for my own games, more than the economics of it (see here for the earlier post on this very topic). cheers, Mark

Just to add to the chorus, the idea that "commoners never saw a silver piece, let a lone a gold one" is completely not based in history. As already noted, archeologists routinely unearth hoards of silver coins (and occasionally gold ones) almost all of which were apparently buried by commoners. Wealthy commoners, to be sure, but still commoners. If a wealthy farmer in a rural district has a hoard of 600 silver coins, you can be pretty certain that coins were circulating in his local area. In addition, we have plenty of medieval accounts (from about the 14th century onwards) which indicate that even small to medium-sized businesses such as ale-sellers were using cash regularly. By the 15th century, in Europe, Banks were big business, with the largest banks being international, with a network of offices across Europe (and in a few cases, outside Europe). You could for example deposit coins in a bank in Rome, get a letter of credit, and for a small fee, withdraw coins from a branch of the bank in Estonia. A "branch of the bank" of course was not like a modern bank: it would normally be one person or a family who had made an arrangement to carry transactions. But it was big business - I recently visited a medieval branch of the Medici bank in Bruges, which for 300 years was a major corporation. Outside Europe, there was a similar - though smaller and less sophisticated - network of banks across the Middle East, which actually had branches as far afield as India. In China, banks and coinage operated in a similar way. So if you want a "realistic" system for money that reflects medieval Europe (let's say western Europe 1300-1500, with big stone castles, knights in plate armour, etc) there are a couple of things you can do. 1. Forget the D&D copper/silver/gold coinage system. Almost all European currencies used silver and gold pretty much exclusively. (Yes, I know copper and bronze coins existed: so did iron and bone ones - but we're not talking edge cases here). Coins came in various sizes and values, and the values changed over time depending on size/weight/purity and economic questions: Silver coins lost value, for example when silver started flooding into the market with the Hapsburgs. For example in 14th century England was coinage was 320 farthings (small silver coin) = 80 pennies (slightly larger silver coin) = 20 groats (large silver coin) = 1 noble (gold coin). You can see that each step up in silver is 1:4 and then a step up of 20:1 gold to silver. To complicate things, there were also 1/2 nobles, 1/4 nobles and 1/2 groats and 1/2 pennies, so it was pretty easy to make change. Across the channel, in France you had 240 deniers = 20 sous = 1 Livre Tournais, so a 1:12 ratio between large and little silver coins, but again a 1:20 ratio of silver to gold. In France it is a bit more complicated in that you had two sets of the same coins (minted in Tournais and Paris) but the ones from Paris were officially only worth 80% of the Tournais ones. So you actually had Parisian derniers and sous as well. But these are the official rates. The real rates varied (for example) from 10 to 25 sous per Livre over the first half of the 14th century. At the same time, prices varied wildly - from year to year, from place to place. And that's even before you take into account bits of silver, jewellery and so on that were also used as currency, plus the fact that foreign currency was also often acceptable (albeit at a discount). There was no such thing as "standard prices" except for those few things fixed by royal monopolies. The key points to take away from all this minute detail are: 1. There are a whole bunch of different coin types (6 different types of silver coin, 3 different types of gold) circulating even in one kingdom. There are plenty of good reasons to work up some currencies for your fantasy game, but none of them have to do with book-keeping. For gaming purposes, it really doesn't matter in 99% of cases. Saying "You find a pot filled with silver coins, worth - in total - 6 nobles" is plenty of detail. Honestly do you really care if the PCs pay their inn tab with a 1/2 noble or 20 pennies and 40 farthings? 2. While barter or work in exchange for goods was a common part of any medieval economy, it really only applied to people of fixed abode/staus. Peasants might work for a share of the crop, and the local blacksmith might work for food or goods, but good luck trying to pay for your beer with a chicken in the city. In most cases, adventurers will be part of the money economy, the same way that mercenaries, travelling guildmen and merchants were. So. If you want a "realistic" currency system forget about medieval Europe. Look instead to how things function in countries like - say - Egypt today. Barter exists - is important even, some places - but it doesn't usually apply to travellers. There's the official currency, the unofficial currency rate and the fact that you can buy things in foreign currency. Don't have any Egyptian pounds? Ask for a price in dollars or euros. You might pay a fraction more, but it's usually not a problem. Prices are negotiable, often even when a fixed price is displayed. That's how things used to be most places. cheers, Mark

Use charges, with the "continuing" option. So that would be “1 use/day, each use lasts 1 hour" for -1/4. As a general rule of thumb, with Hero system the easiest, most straightforward build is usually the best way to do it Cheers, Mark

Plenty of people (gay and straight) already get married outside church, so I doubt that the state has much interest in forcing churches to marry gay couples. It's always possible that individuals might sue but I'd rate their chances of winning such a suit somewhere between zero and nothing - meaning the issue will never get anywhere near the Supremes. We can estimate the outcome of this decision, and the likely outcomes are summed up in this handy graph (http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-rDtD2GFR2wQ/T9ecKo7jQhI/AAAAAAAACQc/2Dj3NZfUiNw/s1600/consequences_of_gay_marriage.png) Cheers, Mark Edit: and I should note that in a number of countries where gay marriage was made legal (eg: New Zealand, Denmark and others), and some church groups campaigned against it, post-legalisation, those same groups are quietly adopting "rules of conscience" allowing gays to get church services anyway, if the pastor is agreeable. I mean, marriage licences, and their money is as good as anyone's, and pastors have bills to pay too, and etc, etc. Obviously, not everyone is going to change their stance, but removing gay marriage from the political agenda (via legalisation) allows a lot of the fear and angst to drain out of the issue.

It's purely a special effect for a power. It's not even a focus. You can't take a Soulknife's Mind Blade away from him - he'll just manifest a new one. Same for similar powers - you can't take a martial adept's maneuvers away from him by disarming him - in most cases he can just use the maneuver with another weapon or even a fist. And so on. When a power is inherent like that, it's just a power. Doesn't matter if they "summon a blade" - the actual power is just damage. Cheers, Mark

You are forgiven (waves munificently). Happens all the time, actually. As for the guy who was arrested, he was originally arrested for public disorder He was at a concert and climbed into the orchestra and then up onto the stage to do his rant. The orchestra walked out until he was taken away by security. He does this kind of thing on a regular basis, apparently. The article seems to have mashed up multiple incidents which is why it originally says he was filmed at a demonstration and later says he was removed from the stage.. The charge of lèse-majesté is pretty bizarre though - the Netherlands is one of the last places I would have thought still had one of those on the books. cheers, Mark

Which to me looks to be exactly what's driving the fear and rage of the Gamergate guys. Change is (very slowly) coming to their part of the universe and it seems to drive them bug**** insane.

For the last game I ran, I actually lifted a good amount of the ”feel” of cult membership from Runequest, although I transposed it to a more traditional pseudomedieval setting. The benefits the PCs got from worship are not based in game mechanics, but come from the kind of things that people got out of real worship – membership in a group, group assistance, cultural identity, etc. Obviously this works in games as well as real life, since the players happily gave up a chunk of their PCs income and time to fulfill religious duties in exchange for cult membership in a temple. This involved paying dues to the temple, and accepting jobs on the temple’s behalf. In return they got help from the cult’s priests and occasionally other cult members. That could be healing, for example J, or a message magically sent cross-country to another cult shrine, but it could also be something as mundane as a letter of conduct enabling them to get assistance when they arrived in a distant town, or the offer of accommodation and a boat ride from a fellow cult member. This could be important – access to the cults historic archives let them puzzle out the location of a ruined and forgotten temple they were seeking, for example. In addition – and perhaps most importantly for the PCs, being a member in good standing of a cult (and especially of the cult’s inner circles) gave access to cult secrets. This could include learning special spells that otherwise were not otherwise accessible to PCs (and to most NPCs for that matter) to things like special magical artifacts belonging to the cult or even mundane (but secret) knowledge – like for example ,the names of cult agents in official positions, access to ancient maps or books of lore, etc. In return, those higher in the cult were expected to work for the cult (for PCs, this usually meant dangerous adventures). But it could also be things like civic duties: the team’s healer was expected to spend some time in the temple healing as he rose in the temple hierarchy, two of the warrior types took up positions in the city guard (and one eventually rose to become Captain of the local militia). Another ended up becoming a senior cult priest, so spent time leading ceremonies, participating in temple and city council meetings, etc. All were expected to pay a tithe to the temple, and they also handed over some of their magical goodies to the cult, where appropriate. In return, they were considered local heroes and could call – to some extent – on temple and city resources. Importantly, as the game progressed, that also gave them some degree of protection from their enemies: this wasn’t just some bunch of no-account armed thugs who could be arrested or harassed with impunity, but important political figures. Finally, there was also the suggestion that diligent cult membership might lead to divine intervention or favour behind the scenes – certainly the PCs, from time to time were unusually lucky (the way that PCs often are) J In fact, I didn’t actually manipulate the dice or other things, but the PCs did from time to time bump into spirits or other magical beings who were friendly to one cult or other, and this gave them opportunities that they otherwise would have lacked. cheers, Mark

As an actual country, no, not a chance in hell. As a minor tourist attraction and oddball novelty, yeah*, maybe, depending on the reaction of the owners of the land. It's perhaps telling that the "president" of Liberland still lives in the czech republic and has shown no signs of moving to the "country" he's "president" of. cheers, Mark * indeed, you can already buy Liberland hoodies and T shirts online.

True, but something which argues completely in support of the point I and others are making. In fact, I made exactly the same point above, noting that the weight difference of a dagger or a one-handed sword is trivial in comparison to the weight and muscle effort involved in using and moving your upper body or whole body. Which is why we do not give weapons speed bonuses or penalties to reflect such trivial differences. The technique and physical skill is what counts, not whether your weapon weighs a touch more. I would point out that the difference between a jab and a reverse punch in mass is not "greatly different" - in fact it is not different by even the mass of an atom. What *is* different is the way that mass is deployed - as I keep saying, and as you note, it's technique that counts ... not mass. Cheers, Mark

True, but it not only meant that mages were a bit same-y in terms of playstyle, but also that they were all swiss-army-mages with a fully diverse skillset - defence, attack, flight, etc. In a Western Shores style game, there's really very little reason to play anything except a mage, other than pure dogged love for a nonmagical archetype. Western Shores presents both the good and the bad with open play systems for Fantasy: the power of special efffects, as you note, but also the fact that "magic" is such a broad special effect that it ceases to be a meaningful special effect at all. That's why I recommend cutting down what's actually permitted under a given special effect. Cheers, Mark

He used stealth to attack by surprise. Perfectly legitimate tactic for a rogue Cheers, Mark

Unfortunately, he's a pretty stupid guy. He and his political cronies been repeatedly caught doing stupid things - lying to the public, lying to parliament, leaking confidential information, using intelligence services to spy on political opponents, etc. A fair number of his friends have had to resign, but he personally has gotten away with it. This is actually in character for him: he has form for harassing people and when/if they complain, going "Aw, it was just a bit of fun. What's wrong with you, can't you take a joke?" Etc. Basically, he's a rich, politically powerful guy who seems to like pushing other people's buttons, assuming that he can away with pretty much anything short of full-on assault or rape. Sadly, so far he's been right. He manages the trick of getting re-elected despite the fact that a majority of voters think that personally he's a bit of a d***, because the opposition is in complete disarray, infighting over trivial issues and because the economy is doing well and he gets credit for that. Cheers, Mark