Agemegos

Re: What gives the "rightful" king the right?

Re: What gives the "rightful" king the right?

Re: What gives the "rightful" king the right? Even supposing that were true (our only evidence for it is that William said so), Edward the Confessor had no right to appoint his successor, or to bequeath his kingship like a piece of property. The right of choosing teh king belonged to the Witanargemot, and they had elected Harold of Wessex.

Re: What gives the "rightful" king the right?

Re: Certain gods in real-world pantheons

Re: Military Size Not every male in the community. Only every male in the ruling class (the homoioi (Peers)). A large majority of the population of Laconia was of the helot class, forbidden arms. And a majority of what was left were perioiki, allowed arms but not required to be soldiers. I gather that the homoioi never numbered more than about 8,000 men under arms (aged 20 to 60), and by the end of the 3rd century BC they were down to 600. I don't know what the total population of Spartan territory (Laconia plus Messenia), but I would guess at least 300,000.

Re: Military Size

Re: Military Size

Re: Book suggestions? You might like to try Poul Anderson's Flandry series, about a naval officer who becomes an intelligence agent in a decadent interstellar empire. Ensign Flandry, Flandry of Terra, Agent of the Terran Empire, A Knight of Ghosts and Shadows, etc.

Re: Feudalism Made Simple They may even be more powerful than the king. Where the kingdom is elective they might be the king from time to time. Lots of marches developed into kingdoms in time.

Re: Feudalism Made Simple

Re: Feudalism Made Simple

Re: Feudalism Made Simple Good point. In English villages, for example, it was a crime (punishable by a fine of up to sixpence) to 'harbour' a stranger (ie. let a person who was not a member of the village eat a meal or sleep a night in one's house). So if you wanted to travel, you had to either sleep rough, stay overnight only in towns, or seek shelter from lords and religious institutions. And buy provisions only in towns.

Re: Monofilament Blade Indeed. And it is exactly such people who think "We've got an immensely strong, incredibly fine, light thread? Cool! That'd make great armour."

Re: Feudalism Made Simple Nice idea, but a don't think it is going to pan out. The 'mar' in marshal has to do with horses. The 'mar' in 'marquis' has to do with borderlands. The marshal was originally the 'mareschal', the "horse-servant" of the king's household. As the leading members of the king's household developed into great officers of state (Steward, Chamberlain, Chancellor), the marshal became a senior officer in the army (sometimes subordinate to the Constable (the 'count of the stables')). A marquis, on the other hand, was originally a 'mark-graf': the count (graf) of a borderland (march). Speaking of marshals instantly suggests sheriffs, and thereby hangs an interesting tale. The Carolingian kings of the Holy Roman Empire ruled a kingdom that was assembled by subjecting neighbouring peoples. The leaders of those peoples became dukes (from Latin 'dux', meaning 'leader') and herzogs (from an old German compound meaning 'leader of the army'). (Later, when national groups such as the Normans migrated into the kingdoms and retained autonomy, their leaders also became dukes.) The kings then appointed trusty companions to exercise Royal authority in compact territories (which were usually within the national lands of the dukes. In French these appointed administrators were called 'comte' (from the Latin for 'companion'). In Germany they were called 'graf'. The graf of a town was a burg-graf, the graf of a 'land' was a land-graf, and the graf of a march was a mark-graf. Now the kingdom of the English was also assembled by annexing and conquering lands that had originally been independent kingdoms. And the subject leaders of these peoples were called 'earls': the earl of northumbria, the earl of Mercia etc. The king divided his kingdom up into scirs (shires), and to run each shire he appointed a scir-geref (sheriff). So originally an English earl was equivalent to a French duke or German herzog, and an English sheriff was originally equivalent to a French comte or a German graf. Then came independent deveolopment. Royal authority in German and France degenerated almost to nothing. The castellans of royal castles and the counts and grafs managed to make their offices and authority hereditary. Some became practically independent (eg. the Count of Toulouse). But in England the royal government held things together much better, and 'sheriff' remained an appointive office in the royal government, not hereditary. Then the duke of Normandy (which was in France, but practically independent of the king of France) conquered England and introduced [a tidied-up, text-book version of] the feudal system. He created lesser vassals (called lords) and great vassals, whom he called earls. But the 'earls' were really equivalent to French counts, much weaker and more numerous than the French dukes to whom the earlier English earls had actually been equivalent. The office of sheriff, though distinctly non-feudal in its character, was too useful to be got rid of. And of course it no longer resembled the French office of comte to which it had originally been equivalent. Like the earldoms, it was demoted one grade. As long as official records were kept in French, the sheriffs were described as "vicomte"--'deputy count'.

Re: Feudalism Made Simple Actually, 'earl' is a distinctively English word. The French is 'comte', Spanish 'conde', Italian 'conti', all derived from Latin 'comes'. You face almost unanimous disagreement. 'Baron' is sometimes used to include all the great feudal landowners (such as dukes, earls, counts, and lords without specific titles). Less generally it refers to the barons who have no higher title. Now, the sieur de Coucy was one of the six greatest vassals of the King of France, and made some fuss of being a 'mere' baron. And in the late 14th century Enguerrand Vi de Coucy bought the county of Soissons for cash, But that doesn't make 'baron' a higher title than 'count'. Where 'marquess' or its equivalent (French "marquis", German "margrave") was anything other than an arbitrary title, a marquess was actually the count of a borderland (mark, march), with special powers. The title wasn't used in England until the mediaeval period was over (but the earl of Chester, the earl of Shrewsbury, the Bishop of Durham etc. had equivalent powers). On the other hand, 'markgraf' was a well-used title in Germany, by no means historically unimportant. Austria started out ruled by a markgraf (promoted to duke in 1194, archduke in 1493, emperor in 1806). The margkgrafs of Meissen promoted themselves dukes of Saxe-Wittenberg (1423) and ended up as electors and eventually kings of Saxony. And the markgrafs of Brandenburg conquered themselves a kingdom in Prussia (1688) and ended up ruling Germany as emperors (1871). The markgrafs of Baden weren't insignificant either (they ended up as grand dukes after 1738). There were some marquises in the South of France (eg, the marquis of Gothia, the marquis of Septimania) who ended up as vassals of the Comte de Toulouse. But teh County of Toulouse was an anomaly, and every order of precedence agrees in placing a marquis higher than a count. Only in the dying days of feudalism (fourteenth century and later in England, never in Germany). In the early and high mediaeval periods dukes were the rulers of people whose lands had been incorporated into an Empire, but who retained a large measure of autonomy. The dukes in France were the dukes of Aquitaine, Normandy, and Brittany. They were unrelated to the royal family, and practically independent. The dukes in Germany (herzogs, actually) were te descendants of the kings of the German tribes, the Bavarians, Swabians, Franks, Saxons etc.. A GM is of course always free to set things up differently in his or her fantasy setting. It is just that the terminology of your setting is going to steer people astray when they encounter more traditional uses of the terms.

Re: Monofilament Blade

Re: Monofilament Blade Okay. How about Desolid, usable against others, area effect radius, no range, personal immunity, one charge per day continuing for 24 hours? That is pretty cool if you can get a nice little NND does body affects desolid. Of course it isn't much like a monofilament knife, but neither are a lot of things. Me, I'd rather help a fellow GM construct a game that doesn't run into problems with the consistency and capability of technology.

Re: Missing SW-Brand Mono-Climates It isn't hard. But it will excite a tremble from anyone who trembles at the thought of Subtopia, the suburb world.

Re: Missing SW-Brand Mono-Climates Yes, and additionally the islands are all made of porous limestone. Swamps have trees, marshes have grasses and rushes and that sort of thing. Roughly speaking a swamp is a flooded forest, and a marsh is a flooded grassland. (Not really, but that is what it looks like.) That's the shot! Huge herds of bison. Wind-powered wagons. Horse nomads. A biome in which the trees are scattered with stretches of herbs and grass in between them, rather than forming a continuous canopy and starving teh undergrowth of light (as in forest). Nope. Cast my mind back to 9th Grade Geography. The reason that I am concentrating on Australian landforms is that filming will be cheap now that the Star Wars films are being made in Australia. Sort of, except with trees and heath growing on it. No, economics. Try living in Canberra sometime. Or most parts of Sydney.

Re: Missing SW-Brand Mono-Climates Thanks.

Re: Monofilament Blade Not when so many people's quips sound exactly like other folk's put-downs, no. For a person who is unfamiliar with extruded nylon 'monofilament' your post would not have seemed so side-splittingly funny. You know, and I know, that suture material, fishing line, and spaghetti shoelaces are monofilaments. But some people in this conversation have only come across the word in SF contexts, as a portmanteau of 'monomolecular filament'. There has to be a way of pointing out the existence of the non-SF sense of the word without being obscure and crushing.

Re: Monofilament Blade

Re: Monofilament Blade You seem to be assuming that the monomolecular edge will be unreasonably strong. But it won't. It will only take a few billionths of a pound force to break a monomolecule. Edges that smash through armour have to be robust. When it comes right down to it you have to deform the armour, and deforming the armour requires force. Furthermore, if strong long-chain molecules are available for edging knives, there will be an even better use for them in weaving cloth armour or reinforcing composite plates in armour. We use kevlar for armour, not for knife edges. I bet it would be better than kelvar for stopping bullets. So everyone with armour will be wearing it. So a monomolecular knife edge that cut through kevlar like a knife through cheese, even if it worked, which it wouldn't, would be a useless curiosity.

Re: It comes back to haunt you So it is series that suffer from this problem. Series of written stories as much as series of TV episodes, series of movies, or series of adventures.