Monday 30 September 2013

Cloth armour fashion

Yesterday (Sunday) I had a headache that lasted the whole day. I took two regular ibuprofen pills, but they didn't help a lot so I took that day off. I tried hard to do nothing and almost succeeded in that. Today I feel much better, like almost sharp.

I've been reading about bronze age armour from the Bronze Age Military Equipment book and it has given me many ideas about how to use armour in more realistic way. Scale armours were probably most popular armour, because it allowed good mobility, enough protection and wasn't too heavy. Scales were made of almost any hard material. There were even bone scales and scales made of leather. It was also easy to fix a damaged scale mail by replacing damaged scales.

What I didn't realize before was that cloth armours were also very popular. They were usually made from linen that was layered even 14 times to create thick armour. You couldn't have endless amount of layers, because then moving became harder. Surprisingly, also felt was used as armour or more likely as pads.

Because I'm using more "realistic" physics I can use all those differences in armours to get trade-offs between mobility, weight and protection.

Sunday 22 September 2013

Bronze age style

I'm reading "Bronze Age Military Equipment" by Dan Howard. It's a cool book, because not only it tells about weapons of that age, but also how they were used and tactics involved in warfare. I was always thinking Kaduria will be low fantasy, but now I'm more convinced that it could be even lower!

Bronze weapons could be the main stuff used in combat, or even stone age weapons. The setting could be in between fantasy style bronze and iron age, making iron weapons extremely rare and efficient. This was the case in real life when metal weapons were invented. First they were used by only few, rulers and their elite troops. This historical fact could be a source of interesting weapon distribution where a simple iron sword is hard to find.

In fantasy context low fantasy doesn't mean there is no magic. In fact magic could be a noticeable part of the gameplay, possibly making it even more important than in regular role-playing games.