The Bayeaux tapestry does not display any Franks, of course. But your point really is that the couched lance is a European development, which I'm willing to buy. It's clear anyway that an overhead lance is a perfectly feasable and effective way of using one's lance. From Alexander's cavalry up to the Mexican-American war, lancers generally used an overhead attack, except against other cavalry, so near as I can make out.
>Remember, armour was *rare* on the plains, and charges-to-impact are
>not as important with light cavalry unencumberted by infantry.
The Mongols were actually pretty decently armored, by most standards -- while I've never found a reference to their wearing plate, they certainly had plenty of chain, leather, and various weird armor-combinations of chain/plate/leather etc. I don't expect their archers wore chain, of course. But I know that the Mongols of the Golden and the White Horde had chain armor.
But anyway my point is that the Mongols definitely boasted heavy cavalry, by anyone's standard. Maybe not as heavy as the most heavily-armored German and French knights, but who was?
I've read that all Mongols, after the conquest of China, wore raw silk shirts under their armor. Apparently arrows cannot penetrate raw silk, but instead would drive the shirt into the wound (i.e., the shirt didn't keep the arrow from entering the body). Then conscript Chinese surgeons could easily remove the arrowhead, by pulling on the edges of the shirt, which popped it out of the wound.
>Prax and couched lances : I believe couched lances to be used in
>the West. I do not believe that Praxians could make strong enough
>spears. Pentans wouldnt need to develop the techniques for similar
>reasons. Lunars, maybe, but their armies dont appear to use cavalry
>as a shock weapon - just scouting and covering the flanks. The Black
>Horse (and indeed White Horse) Troop definitly couch lances.
I do not agree as I refuse to picture Bison or Rhino riders sans couched lance.
James Frusetta adds some useful info about Central Asia, and mentions
>Actually, most of the Mongol sophistication was added by Temujin
>after being entitled Chingis Khan.
I knew that Genghis made lots of alterations amongst the Mongols, but I had no idea how much of their skill was due to what they already had going for them. I concur that a Gloranthan Temujin would be a real troublemaker. Sheng Seleris, to me, was more of a Sitting Bull -- able to get the tribes under one head, but not a tactical innovator.
>The Mongols also used the "Mongolian thumb lock," a ring of stone on
>the right thumb which allowed you to release the string quickly
Also, the Mongols' style of release was different. The standard (poor) European archer just pulled the string back to his chest. The English longbowmen added the superior feature of pulling the string clear back to the cheek, which meant they got more power and accuracy from their bows. But the Mongols (and modern Chinese -- presumably inherited) pulled it clear back to the ear with a peculiar twist of the wrist, enabled by the thumb ring. Even modern Archers still use the slightly inferior cheek-pull.
Nils
>Which made me think of crossbows. How easy are they to come by in
>Glorantha?
Not too hard by now, I should think. I'm sure they're common as anything in the West and Kralorela. For some reason, I don't picture the Pelorians as using them much, but I can't justify this gut feeling. Maybe it doesn't seem "Greco-Roman" enough to me, or something. I think Heortland and Esrolia manufacture good crossbows.
Of course, nobody in Prax or Pent makes crossbows, but they could have them imported if they wanted them (but who would?)
>The people I game with include a couple of inveterate min-maxers who
>always choose heavy crossbows as their missile weapon
Wow. What incompetent minimaxers. Do you let them carry the crossbows around perpetually strung and ready to fire? It won't last long, if you do. Also, there's no "safety" on a crossbow, and any serious jiggling could snap the trigger. Note that on many crossbows, if you tilt it too far to one side or the other, the quarrel will fall out of its slot. Etc. Make carrying a cocked and loaded crossbow a big pain, to be realistic.
Think about it. If you were going on an expedition nowadays, would you carry your pistol _cocked_, safety off? Think of all the problems it would create. Now multiply those problems by about ten times and you'll see what's going on with the crossbow. I.e., it's not reasonable to carry a crossbow cocked and loaded all the time. If your adventurers are about to break into a house in an attack, they might be able to load up ahead of time, but not on the trail.
So, now that your minimaxers don't carry loaded crossbows around all the time, when there's an attack they'll have to spend a round or two loading before they can fire. Hardly the most efficient minimaxing tool around, it seems to me.
My experience is that crossbows are great for an ambush, but terrible if you're _being_ ambushed.
>Do the unicorn riders use stirrups? I think of them as not even
>using saddles
I'm willing to believe that the unicorn riders don't use stirrups or saddles. They don't need lances, after all (the unicorns supply those).
>Who is C.A. Smith?
Clark Ashton Smith. I stole the essential core of my story from "The Last Incantation".
>I walked through Zamokil, where live the Blue people with
>their polished stone knives and their cruel ways.
>As I understand it the Veldang had an urban civilization before Time
>in their Artmali Empire, but what's their society like in the third
>age?
The Zamokil Veldang culture has absolutely nothing in common with the Fonritian Blues, save that both remember they once ruled the world. The Zamokil Veldang are spread over a fairly wide area, so there's a number of cultural variants. Plus there's a few swamp Veldang, who would be yet more aberrant. The main Zamokil culture I've dealt with, which I believe is one of the largest, is that of Serrapu Lake. This culture exists in and around Serrapu Lake, one of the few lakes found in all the savannah, and they also exist along the river which drains the lake into Sozganjio.
The Serrapu Lake folk make up about 20% of the humans in their area. The rest of the inhabitants are Agimori, who are not subject to the Kresh, but know about them. These Agimori come from a number of different tribes, but generally regard the Veldang paternalistically, and as under their protection to some degree. They force the Serrapu Lake folk to participate in certain of their Pamalt rites, "for their own good", and the Serrapu Lake acquiesce. For instance, when there is a marriage to occur among the blues, the Agimori are informed, and they hold a Faranar/Pamalt feast for the couple. The blues endure with good grace, and when the happy Agimori have left, they then go back to their village and solemnize the wedding with their own rites.
These folk live in villages, and survive by fishing, horticulture, and gathering. They do not hunt anything larger than a rodent. They are an introspective and pessimistic folk, taciturn and sometimes dangerous. Their entire lives are centered on their knives.
The Serrapu Lake folk make knives from a variety of stones, especially jade and marble. The knives are polished to a sharp edge by rubbing them with fine sand and daka-wood. This naturally takes quite a while -- literally generations in some cases. A good knife can take as long as 20 years before it's finished. The handle and blade of the knife are all one piece, and there is no decoration on the blade (sometimes the handle is grooved or etched).
Women may not own the knives, which are passed on from father to son. If a man has no sons or nephews to inherit his knife, one of his daughters can take it into custody until she marries, but this is exceptional. No man can own more than one knife, and the knife owns him at the same time -- even if he loses the knife, it is still "his", and he cannot acquire a new one, except by actually making a new one (which takes years, as previously stated). But making a new knife "forces" out the old one, and the creator can then give away his old knife, if it still exists. A broken knife is given a funeral ceremony, as if it were a person.
These knives have their own personalities and histories, and sometimes a Serrapu Lake man will act quite irrationally because of his knife's influence. While the knives are always enchanted in the normal RQ manner, the knives are considered to have magic of their own. Some knives are fey, tending to lead their owner to an early horrible death. Some are thought to be "cowardly", bad for the owner in a fight. And so on, different for every knife. The older knives have more personality, as they have more history.
The Serrapu Lake people have special laws to deal with individual knifes -- for instance, the Katsuna family knife may not be touched by a woman, on penalty of death.
The Serrapu Lake folk are continually embroiled in internal plots, intrigues, and menages a trois. The arrival of an outsider can often trigger bloody duels amongst them, for complex internal reasons. The Agimori of the area know about this, and never befriend an individual Blue, though they express their benevolence towards the Blues as a whole.
There's more to these folk, but I've rambled on enough for now.
Mike
>during what period of history did pike & spear dominant solid
>infantry forms face shield & 1 handed weapon dominant infantry? The
>closest I can think of is Rome vs. late Greece.
There was also a period in the 16th century when the Spanish fielded sword-and-buckler men against the Swiss and Landsknecht, with notable success. This experiment on the Spanish part was eventually abandoned, evidently because the sword-and-buckler men proved vulnerable to cavalry, which was pretty effective in that time period (unlike re: the Romans).
Part of the problem is that sword+shield infantry are pretty rare in history.
I said
> I don't think the Europeans had a single solitary advantage over
>the Mongols except for numbers
Joerg helpfully points out
>Personal armor -- not that it helped
Well, the best-armored Europeans were doubtless better-armored than the best-armored Mongols, but I'm not sure the average was any better (especially if we consider the shitty European infantry of the time). Especially when we remember that the Europeans the Mongols faced were Eastern Europeans, who wore chainmail for centuries after the jousting French and German Knights had given it up. They were primarily faced off against Hungarian, Bohemian, Polish, and Russian enemies.
I said
> Pentans are short, too. They are not tall burly barbarians,
> but are ethnically a _lot_ more like Huns or other central Asians.
> The Pentans have plenty of Kralori blood in them.
Joerg indignantly asks:
>Why? As Greg has revealed, the horse nomads left the Dara Happan
>city of Nivorah (roughly modern Jillaro) when the Pelorian glacier
>advanced from the north, and mounted their chariot horses (for lack
>of wood?) Afterwards, they drifted between the two sets of glaciers,
>I suppose -
My reasons:
>Anyway, they were Dara Happan of origin, and I expect them to
>interact with sedentary subject peoples in a manner similar to the
>Indoeuropean sky-worshipping horse rider cultures by building a
>distinct caste of rulers over the lesser castes of subjects.
Sure, just like the Magyars, Scythians, Ottoman Turks, and Tartars of today maintain their distinct class of rulers. Give me a break, Joerg, after a couple centuries of nomadic wandering the once-Dara Happan nomads would be as indistinguishable from their subjects as are the Turks and Hungarians of today.
>So: When and where did they contact the Kralori? After Argentium
>Thri'ile?
I never said they contacted the Kralori. At least, not the Kralorelans. I posit indigenous humans in the Pent plains who were Kralori racially, and who were there waiting for the tiny band of wayfarers from the west.
>Would the son of a Kralori slave woman and a Pentan Yelm/Kargzant
>(or whatever) warrior be allowed to join the father's cult?)
Why not? It's only the father who counts, anyway.
I said:
>longbows were unable to pierce chest armors even at point-blank
>range.
Joerg disbelievingly assumes I'm a moron and says:
>Chest armour of which period? What strength longbows? What kind of
>arrows?
Chest armor of the 14th century. 150-lb longbows. Bodkin-pointed arrows.
I then said that no extant armor contains a hole conclusively made by an arrow.
Joerg:
>How many pieces of armour pierced by warhammers or lances were
>found?
Plenty. Also plenty pierced by bullets (which particular holes are quite distinctive. Of course, some of the problem is that an arrow-hole is not particularly distinctive, and a hole made by a pike, or a quarrel, looks almost the same. So it's possible that we _do_ have some armor with arrow holes in them, but we don't know it, because we can't tell.
>IMO a full-strength non-special hit from a longbow or real composite
>bow should be able to kill a character in ringmail hit in the ches
Why? Why must it be "non-special"?
Colin Watson usefully adds a new fact to the archery debate, mentioning that longbows are no good in the heat, while composite bows come unstuck in damp climates.
Really? I can believe that longbows are only good in cooler climates, which makes me glad I assigned them to Fronela and Umathela (both cold areas).
If comp bows are only good in dry places, that explains why the Praxians and Pentans are the main purveyors of this item.
>I vaguely remember reading somewhere that in Olden Days it was
>difficult to train troops to use crossbows.
You surprise me, Colin. I had read that crossbows were comparatively simple to learn, though apparently quite difficult to master, which is why many crossbowmen were mercenaries. Perhaps the answer is that no one "trained" their soldiers to use the longbow -- your Welshmen already _knew_ how. I know that the French king at one point tried to encourage the French to use archery like the damn British, but he utterly failed. The same was true for slingers in ancient times.
If we assume that it took no time to train a longbowman to use his weapon (of course, it took years, from the time he was a little kid, but this time isn't invested by the king), but only what minimal training occurred for any normal soldier, then if it took a few months to get crossbowmen up to speed, this would seem like a significant handicap.
PMichaels
>Greg says Eurmal has to break the rules. Sandy implies this too, but
>he can speak for himself here. Or not, as he chooses.
Well, Peter, you went ahead and quoted part of the RQ Con 3 Lore Auction, in which I pretty much gave my opinion in Eurmal. I said it best then, and will stick to what I said. Any questions?
> I've recently been considering that maybe the Orlanthi think
>about Eurmal similarly to the way the Norse think about Loki.
This is not a bad analogy. Not perfect, of course, because the way the Norse think about Odin isn't much like the way the Orlanthi think about Orlanth. And Loki, as a god of evil who will join the Giants in the final battle, is not a bad example for Eurmal, whom I think is generally regarded in a far more benign fashion that perhaps he should be.
End of Glorantha Digest V1 #242
WWW material at http://hops.wharton.upenn.edu/~loren/rolegame.html
Powered by hypermail