I'd like to see a few more of your assumptions here: I don't get a figure of anything like 80% deaths with a 1d8+1 damage arrow hitting an average 5 HP chest with no AP, even when including criticals/specials and no healing.
From the discussions on Mongols vs Eurpoeans
> Crossbows, being nigh-unusable on
>horseback, were worthless to them.
I was reading "War in the Middle Ages" by Philip Contamine (a translation from the french) this weekend and found a curious reference to the use of mounted crossbowmen as a small but significant part of several armies (John Lackland is known to have recruited 83 of them for an army of roughly 1200 knights). The author doesn't explain how they loaded from horseback; it may have been that like the mounted archers of a later period they used the horses for transport but dismounted to fire.
(PS, a good point about the lack of a safety in a crossbow: this is something that should be in the rules, as few people would know this. Most players and GMs just treat the heavy crossbow as a form of gun)
An interesting comment that the same author takes from an older source is that around 1250 the equipment of the average knight in an English army, including horses, was roughly equal to a years income for the same average knight (about 20 pounds).
>>Interior lines of communication.
> Huh? How did Europe have interior lines of communication vs.
>Subotain? They had to gather their forces from Hungary, Prussia,
>Poland, Bohemia, etc. while the Mongols split their forces at will,
>recombining for the major battles.
Couldn't the Europeans make good their losses more rapidly than the Mongols, due to the shorter distances to their major population centres? If the Mongols could be said to have any population centres, a lot of them still had to be in the East holding their other conquests. (This is an actual question, I'm curious to know if and how the Mongols got around this)
>
>From: joe_at_sartar.toppoint.de (Joerg Baumgartner)
>I know some people are going to howl about this, but in my mind the
>daily routine of Lhankor Mhy sages has a lot in common with that of the
>Benedictine monks as shown in "The Name of the Rose",
No big howls here, but a couple of quiet whimpers...
This sounds good to me, but I think once at the rank of priest a LH has a lot more independance than the monks were allowed; certainly they seem to have more freedom to travel. I think your examples are pretty close to the life of initiates.
For the priests, I suspect life is more like that of the tenured staff at a university: internal politics and administration combined with getting your initiates to work on the topics you're interested in.
>I supose that a (greater) communal service to the Lord of Knowledge is
>held at dusk, after the work for knowledge has been done mostly. The
>time afterwards might be reserved for research or scholarly discussion.
In an henotheist temple, with access to sorcery, it might be possible to read for long periods after sunset, but most premodern periods found reading and writing by candlelight too difficult to try it regularly, or so I've read.
Graeme Lindsell a.k.a Graeme.Lindsell_at_anu.edu.au Research School of Chemistry, Australian National University "I was 17 miles from Greybridge before I was caught by the school leopard" - Ripping Yarns
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