> THE TOP TEN REASONS
>WHY THE GOD LEARNERS ARE BETTER THAN YOU'VE BEEN LED TO BELIEVE!
> 1. Although lacking trendy "emperor lists", the God Learner's
>game supplements
Actually they do have an Emperor List, it just hasn't been released for general distribution.
Richard Crawley:
>Does it say anywhere that the plate armour worn by the
>mounted clanking ones of the far west is generally iron
>or steel?
It does (cf the picture in the Genertela Books and Elder Secrets). But first off, some RW technological history.
When Iron became widely available, most armour was still made of bronze. This wasn't because the smiths had coprolithic brains, but because the wrought iron was very brittle when cast in big plates. So if you wore plate armour, it would fall to pieces when hot. A solution was to make it thicker but then it was too heavy to wear. That is why bronze armour was around in Classical times.
Now people wanted to have armor made of iron (mainly coz iron was cheaper than bronze) so they went searching for alternatives. The solution lay in better casting techniques but until then they experimented with bands of iron, chain links, bezants and so on.
So IMO there is no bronze armor in the west. The knights by and large use iron because it's effective against their traditional enemies (pagans and trolls). I'ma bit edgy about why Loskalm can blow its iron on making maximillian plate whereas the Seshnegi are using lamellar _despite_ Seshnela having more iron reserves. I suspect chain is the most common armour in Loskalm with the 'latest fashion' being the equipment worn by a few wizard knights. Plate would be more common in Seshnela due to industrial espionage...
Central Genertela has very little iron deposits but lots and lots of bronze. Thus everybody finds it suitable to wear bronze armour. I do not believe that there is stuff like bronze chain or lamellar bronze (but bronze/leather armour is okay). Iron is known and highly valued. It's main source in central genertela would be meteoric IMO - the Orlanthi believe these are javelin heads of Orlanth whereas the Pelorians believe that the metal is sacred to Shargash.
The Teshnans do have enough iron to equip their army with iron armor but I think they stole it from Diamond Mountain like they did with the crystals.
Nick Brooke:
>(Possibly their unenchanted Iron swords should slice through a wizard's
>protective magic more easily, too?).
Definitely and everybody elses protective magic IMO. Perhaps the weapon should ignore 1 point of magic for every 1 ENC of the weapon. Naturally most churchmen would be all to eager to get knightly weapons blessed by Saint Galvan so that their protection would be more effective. 'If you kill someone with a blessed weapon, it isn't murder...'. This still leaves the peasantry in deep dog-do as they're more likely to kill people with unblessed tools. But that's the Law in its majestic equality for you.
>maybe "sanctified" armour in the West is enchanted to resist
>non-Malkioni magic only? So pagan and heathen spirit and rune magics (and
>perhaps atheist sorceries?) would be resisted at whatever the going rate is
>(5% per ENC?), but pious wizardly prayers and Saints' blessings would be
>unaffected.
Sounds neato to me. I'll suggest that Saint Galvan be in charge of this so that we can have galvanized iron in glorantha (nyah nyah!). I think this sort of armor should be more common than the enchanted type but the blessing does not confer the increased armor bonus. This will alleviate game balance concerns, methinks.
This does raise an interesting point. Should the enchanted iron armor retain its immunity to magic? If we assume that the Westerners still 'sanctify' their enchanted iron armour to make it permeable to sorcery, then perhaps the divine magic makes it permeable to all magic - like faerie iron? So when an Orlanthi slays a knight and strips him of the iron armour, it is useless to him unless he takes it back to his priests to be made holy to Orlanth. And if a knight finds Orlanthi iron armour, he is vunerable to pagan magic...
I dunno about resisting atheistic sorceries as that opens up the way to resisting spells coming from Rokari or Hrestoli. Also Mostali are theoretically athiest so this looks counter-intuitive.
Jose Ramos:
> Several sources indicate that iron is "quite" common in the west,
>specially in Seshnela. However the costs in POW to enchant all the iron inThe POW cost is one of the reasons I am not very happy about the roolz concerning enchanting iron. I think that instead of having an enchantment, the blessing is more of a long term spell so that they will just have to spend magic points.
>You pray to the Saints and the Creator before the battle
>(without armour).
I dislike this type of mechanistic behaviour as we are all familiar with the sights of knights praying before battle in armour. Having the knights leave church and head towards the coatracks containing their suits of iron armour before heading of to war is a sight too ghastly to endure...
Jane Williams:
>Again, this can be reflected in Glorantha: does each tribe of
>Sartar have their own dialect? Are they mutually comprehensible? Or do
>they have to fall back on Trade (or Stormspeech? Lunar, even?) to talk to
>each other? Or would this make the whole thing unplayable until we invent
>some new rules for languages?
I treat the various languages within the same sub-family (1/3 skill to understand) as being a dialect. Thus Old Pavic and Sartarite are two dialects of the same language whereas Tarshite is a different language which is barely comprehensible.
I suppose most of the tribes can understand each other save for the Northern Tribes with their lunar speech. I suppose some sartarite tribes will think that the Lunars speak a variant of Tarshite which is nigh incomprehensible for any non-chaotic person. Whether the tribes themselves can pick out tribal accents with someone in the same region is an interesting question.
Just remember, one of the chief rules of the thumb in Linguistics is:
"A Language is a dialect with an army and a navy".
Powered by hypermail