Pre-industrial Fantasy STGOD OOC/Rules Thread:

[Eternal_Freedom]

Ooo goody someone for my super-frigates to fight!

[madd0ct0r]

Can people redefine the points system in here? There seems to be some inflation

[Esquire]

Ok, so I think I'm going to claim the Southeast, including Florida, Georgia, parts of Alabama, and parts of South Carolina, and various Caribbean islands, including Cuba. Borders include the Santee/Congaree/Saluda river, and the Mobile/Alabama/Coosa river. Between the headwaters of those two, the Appalachians form the northern border. I think this puts me at roughly the same area as everyone else. The islands will of necessity make me a major maritime player, and probable trading partner/rival of Orion.

I think we'll be decently close trading partners; I'm planning on a fairly significant commercial and military fleet based out of New Orleans.

[Esquire]

Oh, and I'm fine with having my borders de-historical-mapified.

[Simon_Jester]

What does 'de-historical-mapified' mean?

Also, re Maddoc:

The problem, I think, is that we've got fairly large physical countries, so that having their military consist of only, oh, 30000 men is not credible.

And we've also got multiple nations adopting gunpowder or heavy use of tactical war magic (Jub, E_F, me).

This undermines the "one hundred thousand spearmen" standard.

Since we can't shrink the countries without having our nations rattling around North America like a handful of dried peas in a tin can, and we won't realistically abandon gunpowder and war magic, I move that we define our national armies upward somewhat to the standard of "One hundred thousand well armed men."
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A "well armed man" is a human soldier, competently trained and equipped, to respectable if not the highest practical standards. Given the prevailing technological level, the reference line for such a soldier would probably include a man armed with musket or pistols, with lance or pike, and with at least limited body armor protection capable of stopping casual sword slashes and perhaps small, low-speed fragments (think birdshot), though probably not of stopping bullets or getting punched by a giant or something.

One "point" is a fighting force that is, on average, equivalent to one "well armed man." Two "well armed men" who are armed differently may thrive in different circumstances; in some conditions one will beat the other, in others the reverse will be true. Elven archers will probably beat blocks of musketeers when fighting as guerillas in a forest, but for purposes of open warfare on the Great Plains, history suggests that the musketeers are likely to win. For purposes of defending the walls of a city besieged by a swarm of murderous ghouls, the two might serve equally well.

Certain assets may be more dangerous than any one human soldier- examples might include but not be limited to orders of holy knights, war-mages, batteries of artillery guns, giant monsters, and demons.

Not counting relatively small numbers of paladins and war machines, my own fighting forces will, I expect, average at between 1.25 and 1.4 "well armed men" per soldier, with some units below this level and others above it. This is mostly because of their extremely strong resistance to a variety of powerful threats when operating in coordinated bodies.

Get Ohioan troops broken up into smaller groups and they will be easier to withstand or defeat, their effective point value being diminished much as it would be by operating in terrain they're bad at fighting in. If your hyenorcs remain worth 2 points apiece, then while it is very likely that the results of combat between us would look something like Napoleon's adage, adjusted for exact numbers because the Mamelukes weren't seven feet tall and couldn't regenerate wounds in hours:

"Two Mamelukes were undoubtedly more than a match for three Frenchmen; 100 Mamelukes were equal to 100 Frenchmen, 300 Frenchmen could generally beat 300 Mamelukes, and 1000 Frenchmen defeated 1500 Mamelukes."

Since your hyenorcs fight in small raiding parties as a rule, this is probably to your advantage.

If you are wondering how to make your Stone Age hyenorcs tougher competitors in this environment, I have a few suggestions- PM me.

[Jub]

I think the new map is fully up to date and correctly labeled. The areas with black lines through them are unclaimed spaces marked for clarity, but I expect that the players around them will probably pack them full of little NPC states soon enough anyway. Sioux territory is completely up for grabs, I only included it to show how nice and full the map is getting.

[Simon_Jester]

Classy. Good job, Jub.

Random thought:

I find myself drawing more and more on 17th century France, the era stretching roughly through the reigns of Louis XIII and Louis XIV, for inspiration about Ohio.

I find it amusing to use the basic structure of the French Republican Calendar founded by the French revolutionaries, in light of this.

So basically, twelve thirty-day months named after the prevailing climatic conditions of the month in and around OTL Cincinnati, Ohio, with an intercalary period of five days (six on leap years) inserted after the last month, to make sure that the first day of the year is always the autumnal equinox as observed in Cincinnati, Ohio. This occasionally results in the Ohioans having leap years three or five years apart, but means they don't have to fool around with rules like "drop the leap year in years ending in '00 that are not divisible by 400." They just go "welp, looks like we'll need another leap year this year" and go for it.

Of course, the Ohioans being who they are, their calendar of saints would no doubt be in place instead of the secular Rural Calendar used by the First Republic. By now the Church of the Living Stars has enough saints to name literally every day of the year after one of them- and they do, complete with appropriate minor (or not so minor) ceremonial rituals for all of them.

Does anyone have any thoughts about this? It's basically just local color on my end, really; I suspect the rest of us will want to continue to use some other calendar and I am quite happy to do the work of converting Gregorian (or whatever) dates into Ohioan dates.

[Jub]

Thanks, I'm glad that my efforts with the map are turning out well. Especially given the number of clicks needed to make some of these borders, roughly, follow natural features.

As for you using a different calendar I'm all for it. The Syilx are probably going to have three calendars themselves, Lunar, Solar, and Astrological. The first two to observe rituals with and the third holding the other two together and make sure that their year stays in line with the years of other nations and trade partners. For the sake of easing confusion, my story posts will have whatever date the Syilx think it is alongside a date in reference to the first in-game year.

ie.

11th moon waning, winter of the year of ill omens, 4563 (Early Winter, Game Year 1)

[Simon_Jester]

Well, I know my first story post takes place in what we would call early December, though for all I care it can be prologue since it is not affected by anything anyone else does. So it can go in whatever year is desired, as long as it doesn't happen years and years before game start (since it contains at least one character I intend to make recur).

[Eternal_Freedom]

Orion, displaying the arrogance endemic to their more advanced ways, measures dates as Before or After Empire's Founding (BEF/AEF), with the current year being, oh, 2999 so I can have a big party

[Simon_Jester]

Do you know, the hardest part is likely to be standardization on a calendar for everyone to use. Our nations probably can't agree on what year it is, but we should agree... any nominations?

[Jub]

I'd suggest using the current IRL year with pregame stories taking place in 2015 and the official start of the current timeline being Jan/1/2016. We open our game in whatever our nation's equivalents to January 1st are and go from there. Gametime can then go at whatever pace we please as we now have an anchor point to fall back on.

It keeps things easily trackable, pins things to the out of universe beginning of the game, and should generally keep things simple.

[Eternal_Freedom]

That's pretty much what I was thinking, since my BEF/AEF dating years are almost exactly aligned with OTL years (Well, they're the same length, but they run from winter solstice to winter solstice rather than Jan 1st to Dec 31st.)

Generally I'll stick with OTL dates for important things, but characters will refer to AEF years.

[Simon_Jester]

That's... actually rather convenient in some ways; I can use the real French Revolutionary date, because there were some fairly significant things happening in the state which was to become the Ohioan Empire around 224 years ago, which is the date in the Republican calendar at the moment. Note that this is NOT the date of foundation of the Empire- the Ohioan calendar is religious and honestly doesn't care much about such things- but that was far from the only thing of interest that was or can be retconned to have been happening associated with its foundation.

The clergy probably uses their own calendar which differs from the imperial one only in that it counts many more years- since the history of the Church of the Living Stars is at least approaching a thousand years deep, if not more, I haven't decided for certain.

If we start the calendar at the winter solstice or January 1 of the Julian/Gregorian calendar, my story posts are technically prologue since they take place around December 9th to 11th.

[Eternal_Freedom]

On another note, I've been thinking (inspired by my current headache and lack of any painkillers) that Healing abilities may be common in Orion as well as Telepathy and Technomancy. Not on the level of "regrowing limbs or healing broken bones" stuff, but lower-level stuff like, I dunno, eliminating infections in wounds, reducing fevers and sickness in the general population and so forth. It fits with my low-level magic substituting for modern technology theme. I could (borrowing yet another 40K term) refer to it as Biomancy.

[Simon_Jester]

While I do not want to refuse this, I must point out that at a certain point having enough magic that is ubiquitous (as opposed to rare) and takes the place of modern technology subverts the point of a pre-industrial setting.

[Eternal_Freedom]

True. But I've already established that one in five Orions are Mages. They can't all be Telepaths now can they?

[Simon_Jester]

Yes, but couldn't you get wackier? These are supposed to be 'advanced mental talents;' they don't all have to be magic-that-replaces technology.

Maybe 4% of Orions have a photographic memory. Or can instinctively understand all languages, including those of animals. Or can go for a month without sleep.

[Eternal_Freedom]

Ooooo...photographic memory? Instinctive language? I like those ideas. They would certainly work nicely in the Imperial Academy and would work nicely with the spies as well. And I can still call it Biomancy for kicks.

As for wackier, there undoubtably are wackier mental abilities floating around. However those are a) quite rare in comparison to Telepathy and the others and b) not officially sanctioned. They are kept safe as subjects for study, as "officially sanctioned" powers are those deemed to be both beneficial to the Empire and not dangerous tot he general population.

[TimothyC]

Jub, I hope you don't mind, and I'm sorry it took this long (I had to find a base map I was satisfied with using - this one has elevation and rivers, and is public domain), but I've got the good copy of the map started (only Ohio for now): Totally forum-breaking image file (2.7 meg PNG)

[Jub]

Jub, I hope you don't mind, and I'm sorry it took this long (I had to find a base map I was satisfied with using - this one has elevation and rivers, and is public domain), but I've got the good copy of the map started (only Ohio for now): Totally forum-breaking image file (2.7 meg PNG)

Nah, I don't mind at all. I just started doing the map because I figured that somebody should and I'm using Google Earth Pro mainly because it's easy to use.

[The Romulan Republic]

Just an update on where we're at right now:

The Rules Mk II are coming along nicely. I'll be posting them for review/discussion either tonight or tomorrow.

After that we'll have a few days if anyone has urgent additional revisions they want to discuss.

OOB thread will go up at the end of the week, as previously discussed.

It will be followed almost immediately by the main story thread, though if you are busy with holiday stuff and can't post until after Christmas, that's okay.

Edit:

Jub, I hope you don't mind, and I'm sorry it took this long (I had to find a base map I was satisfied with using - this one has elevation and rivers, and is public domain), but I've got the good copy of the map started (only Ohio for now): Totally forum-breaking image file (2.7 meg PNG)

Nah, I don't mind at all. I just started doing the map because I figured that somebody should and I'm using Google Earth Pro mainly because it's easy to use.

Looking good.

[Simon_Jester]

I note with some surprise that I'm up to seven thousand words and rising; it's only been a few days. I must be having fun... [chuckles]

Decided that the current Ohioan calendar is dated from the completion of the War of Souls- their "year zero" is the collapse of the last major necrocratic state in the Tennessee Valley. The first emperor was not crowned until about forty or fifty years after that time, but everyone was starting to see the pattern.

[The Romulan Republic]

Some more possibilities regarding my Travellers:

Original name: the Coronal (but often referred to colloquially as snow elves or cold elves).

Tend to be divided into clans, albeit under one monarchy. Clans have their local hunters/militia (Rangers), though their is a Ranger detachment under the crown's direct command as well. All clans are equally subordinate before the crown in theory, although the Queens tend to favour their clan of origin in practice.

The Orders of Scholars and Healers are sworn to serve all members of the society, and one renounces their clan upon joining. As a result, it is traditional for Scholars and Healers to only marry and procreate with others of their order, or more rarely, one of the other clanless orders. The leader of the Order of Scholars is traditionally the chief advisor to the Queen and a man. This is the highest office a man an achieve in the Traveler's society, as the monarch is always female.

Also clanless are the Guard, who are pledged to serve the Queen alone. They are mostly a ceremonial and bodyguard unit traditionally, and fairly small in number. However, they are also hand-picked from among the best fighters, and their commander is almost always someone who has commanded in the field before (it is also traditionally a woman). Thus, they also represent the elite shock troops. They are rarely committed to offensive action (this has only happened on four recorded occasions), but when they are, the effects are always devastating.

Edit: Weaponry tends to be bows, swords, daggers, and staffs, as well as magic. The Travellers traditionally use primarily long bows and swords, but their new cavalry units have adopted shorter bows for firing from horseback. The Guard, meanwhile, favours its swords.

[The Romulan Republic]

While I do not want to refuse this, I must point out that at a certain point having enough magic that is ubiquitous (as opposed to rare) and takes the place of modern technology subverts the point of a pre-industrial setting.

While you have a valid point in theory, I don't see anything terribly objectionable with what EF is suggesting.

Although one possible limit might be that just as with the real world, ones' access to such healing would depend on how wealthy one was. Just a thought.