>count) of Horse Nomads goes to Timur the Lame who was also
>pointlessly destructive to boot.
Hear, hear. Timur is also _my_ choice for Worst Person To Get Invaded By, throughout history. Worse even than the Nazis in Russia, which takes some doing.
That said, the Mongols were monstrously harsh when they invaded the middle East. The poor Moslems really took it on the chin.
Graeme Lindsell
>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
Assumption (1) doing double damage (i.e., 10 points) kills the target.
Assumption (2) a target reduced to 0 or fewer HP must start making Bleeding rolls (CON or less on d20). Each round that he fails, he loses 1d3 further hit points. Once he succeeds, he stops bleeding.
This, no doubt, is where the extra deaths are coming from.
>I found a curious reference to the use of mounted crossbowmen
In the Crusades, there fought the reasonably well-known Turcopoles, who were mounted crossbowmen, fighting in the same style as the Saracens. They were named "Turcopoles" apparently because most of them were halfbreeds (i.e., half-"turk" half-"pole"). I can only assume that they were quite good at using a cranequin. In at least one battle account I've read, it's clear that the Turcopoles didn't dismount to fight, but fired and reloaded on horseback.
Here is an interesting quote from a good friend of mine, Kelly DeVries (a medieval military historian -- I recommend his book "Medieval Military Technology" to anyone interested in the subject).
> I have shot both a longbow and a crossbow. The longbow was a 55-60
lb. pull and the crossbow was 140 lb. So, according to those who
study these things, the pulls on both of these weapons were a bit low
for medieval exemplars.I got quite proficient with both bows. With
the longbow I could hit a small target at 50 feet without difficulty,
a man-size target at 50 yards and come close to the same at 100
yards. But with a crossbow there was a different problem. At 50
feet there was great proficiency, at 50 yards however I could come
only close to a man-size target. At 100 yards I came nowhere close
to the target, missing it consistently by a good 10-20 yards to one
side or the other. It seems, after I had talked to bow instructors,
that wind plays a greater role on the smaller bolt than on the arrow.
As well, the recoil of a crossbow is of course far greater than a
longbow and even more so when a crossbow is raised at a higher angle
of fire to get a longer distance. That tends to jerk the bow and
thus the bolt from the target. Furthermore, if illuminations tell us
anything, longbow practice was done on a target raised not far from
the ground ala Robin Hood, while crossbow practice fired at a target
raised on a pole some 25 feet in the air, as if shooting at a bird.
>Couldn't the Europeans make good their losses more rapidly than the
>Mongols, due to the shorter distances to their major population
>centres?
It wasn't a war of attrition (most premodern wars weren't). And no, they couldn't, because the Europeans of the time were still feudal -- it wasn't a question of how many men were available, it was a question of how many men were fit to fight. And basically everyone fit for war was out there on horseback armed as a knight.
The middle ages' lack of a money economy made it impossible for anyone to field a true army. All you could do was summon your vassals together. It's hard to replace said vassals when they get killed en masse. They say that after the battle of Tannenburg (in which a Polish-Lithuanian army stomped the Germans), almost every small village in Germany was ruler-less.
End of Glorantha Digest V1 #246
WWW material at http://hops.wharton.upenn.edu/~loren/rolegame.html
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