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| bhu09-03-07, 02:34 AM | Im going to be doing a lovecraftian type campaign where the US colonies get cut off from the world after the revolutionary war (monsters have effectively ended shipping). Im debating on how long after the war to set it and what the PC's would have access to. In general most society still doesnt realize monsters or magic exist at all. And with teh colonies being cut off im assuming technological advancement might have some problems (i.e. advnaces in guns might not take place). Got any history buffs in the forum? I could use some advice. |
| Roog09-03-07, 03:01 AM | Im going to be doing a lovecraftian type campaign where the US colonies get cut off from the world after the revolutionary war (monsters have effectively ended shipping). Im debating on how long after the war to set it and what the PC's would have access to. In general most society still doesnt realize monsters or magic exist at all. And with teh colonies being cut off im assuming technological advancement might have some problems (i.e. advnaces in guns might not take place). Got any history buffs in the forum? I could use some advice. In what areas is the campaign set? Some small location? The Colonies? The Americas? The whole world? You say "monsters have effectively ended shipping", does that mean no shipping for large scale purposes or no shipping at all? Without immigration and trade etc, the reasons for anything more than a very slow expansion disappear, and the (american) world quickly diverges from ours. How different do you want the campaign world to start? Do you want the campaign to last for years/decades with the players potentially having an influence (or just watching) histories diverging path? If there is still some small amount of contact with the rest of the world, technological development will simply tend to slowly follow the rest of the world (think in a few years what a ship load of European patents would be worth). How much development would you like to see? |
| bhu09-03-07, 03:51 AM | In what areas is the campaign set? Some small location? The Colonies? The Americas? The whole world? You say "monsters have effectively ended shipping", does that mean no shipping for large scale purposes or no shipping at all? Without immigration and trade etc, the reasons for anything more than a very slow expansion disappear, and the (american) world quickly diverges from ours. How different do you want the campaign world to start? Do you want the campaign to last for years/decades with the players potentially having an influence (or just watching) histories diverging path? If there is still some small amount of contact with the rest of the world, technological development will simply tend to slowly follow the rest of the world (think in a few years what a ship load of European patents would be worth). How much development would you like to see? It'll be in the colonies, preferably in a coastal port town (whichever one i can find maps for, but preferably not the really big ones). Shipping is dead. Any ship leaving sight of shore never comes back. Any technological development the colonists will be responsible for themselves. How much influnce the PC's eventually have depends on them... |
| Roog09-03-07, 06:05 AM | Any technological development the colonists will be responsible for themselves. A simple way to handle that would be to assume that unless a large amount of time has passed (say up to 100 years) almost all technological development is just the spread of technologies available before the embargo. It would probably fit the style of the game, and would significantly simplify your task. |
| Watchman09-03-07, 08:15 AM | I take it we're talking about a time period of circa the very late 1700s and the first decades of the 1800s, ie. the French Revolution/Napoleonic period ? ("After the revolutionary war" is kinda vague, as it strictly speaking encompasses everything up to the present date and beyond...) If so, you're basically stuck with black-powder muzzle-loaders for firearms and bayonets and assorted one-handed swords for the cutlery. Long spears and assorted small axes were still being used in boarding actions at the time I know (although with Chthulhoid horrors widely active in the oceans, one imagines all shipping hugs the shoreline now), and I understand both the natives and the settlers used light axes for both combat and utility purposes in the forests. |
| natzero09-03-07, 09:13 AM | well that sounds interesting. In the sense of the Napoleonic era, it should also be brought up that that is about the same time of the War of 1812. You could very well have the PC's fight against the british to defend the country. also the DMG has a section that lists flintlock muskets and a few other more modern weapons. |
| Watchman09-03-07, 11:53 AM | well that sounds interesting. In the sense of the Napoleonic era, it should also be brought up that that is about the same time of the War of 1812. You could very well have the PC's fight against the british to defend the country....except, you know, the little detail trans-Atlantic sailing gets you eaten by Things Man Was Not Meant To Know kinda makes the European states a nonpresence in the New World. What their stranded remaining territories do is another thing, but odds are they've better things to do than picking fights with the biggest kid on the block. |
| silvergamgee09-03-07, 12:28 PM | Pikes were still used through the American Civil War. Remember, in game terms, a muzzleloader takes a full round action to reload each and every time you fire (to an average of 3 to 5 aimed shots per minute, a bit fast for the period, but close enough). And this cannot be easily done if you can't focus (I.E. someone is trying to stab you with a pike, sword, knife, bayonette). Melee weapons and even a longbow (fire faster and no noise, guns are LOUD) did not completely lose their utility until repeating firearms started to appear near the mid 1860's. I imagine that technology would grow slowly, but steadily. Particularly in the ship-building and navigational realm as people would be desperate to learn what is taking out all these ships. |
| 1 ton ghost09-03-07, 04:26 PM | interesting plot, though isolated protagonists has a been done a million times. lends to a microcosm w/ alot of flavor. this is after war, yes? there was enough industry to allow tech growth though zero cross-atlantic commerce would drastically reduce capacity. upside is americas had(s) so many natural resources/labor pool they would eventually make do. americans were alot tougher and motivated...back then. they would stress a navy first and foremost. our "ships of the line" were so incredibly badass; they had to compete w/ brit navy whom had significantly more military vessels and they were very good quality as well. best navy in the world actually. incredibly disciplined and cruel (press gangs and the like), but terribly effective. see "Master and Commander" btw. we (US) just had way more old growth trees and a large labor pool that knew shipbuilding, etc. unless you were an indentured servant, you were probably a skilled tradesman. "Old Ironsides" (U.S.S. Constitution) is not just a gimmick; the hull was incredibly dense oak (i believe) and from time to time would not be beached by canon fire. plus, the oft overlooked, homefield advantage. just ask the afghans...that land has swallowed armies for centuries. anyway, they wouldn't just ignore the shipping phenomena and either would Europe. they'd probe and fight tooth and nail. too much money was at stake and the nation's economy. think about all that tobacco, cotton, native spices and minerals, etc. plus, the land...so much land for cheap. i mean, look at the flood of immigrants that wanted a piece. given your campaign, they'd eventually pick up the slack in terms of tech, but it would take a while. french were supplying us for a minute vs. brits, but we crafted superior weaponry and ships. always kinda' had that maxim of quality vs. quantity, especially during Cold War. smooth bore (not rifled) black powder firearms, cav sabres and rapiers, bayonets, reg. knives/daggers, field guns/artillery and mortars, occaisionally pike staves/halberds. |
| Watchman09-03-07, 07:42 PM | Pikes were still used through the American Civil War. Remember, in game terms, a muzzleloader takes a full round action to reload each and every time you fire (to an average of 3 to 5 aimed shots per minute, a bit fast for the period, but close enough). And this cannot be easily done if you can't focus (I.E. someone is trying to stab you with a pike, sword, knife, bayonette).IRL it tended to take at the very least half a minute to reload a muzzle-loader. And way longer for rifles, since it's a lot harder to ram down a ball that grips the walls of the barrel (an issue that wasn't really solved before the invention of the Minié ball (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mini%C3%A9_ball)). Which is why pikemen were kept around to ward off enemy cavalry and suchlike, until the introduction of the bayonet in late 1600s made every musketeer a semi-decent spearman and the damn flagpoles could be dumped. I suggest reading your history books again. |
| Roog09-04-07, 01:25 AM | IRL it tended to take at the very least half a minute to reload a muzzle-loader. Once you have paper cartilages this speeds up (IIRC 20sec or less). #Edit Sometimes its OK to reduce reload time (etc) to make the game play simpler. Heavy crossbows should take more than a round to reload. I would see the following as reasonable. Long Arm (Standing) / Pistol (Any Position) - Loading with loose powder and ball takes 6 rounds - Loading with paper cartridges halves this, to 3 rounds. Long Arm (Sitting/Kneeling/Prone) - Loading with loose powder and ball takes 10 rounds - Loading with paper cartridges halves this, to 5 rounds. Rifle (Standing) - Loading with loose powder and ball, is 6 rounds, if greased patches to wrap the ball are used. - Loading without greased patches, is 10 rounds. Rifle (Sitting/Kneeling/Prone) - Loading with loose powder and ball, is 10 rounds, if greased patches to wrap the ball are used. - Loading without greased patches, is 15 rounds. Characters with appropriate abilities (eg Rapid Reload possibly Quickdraw or high Slight of Hand) can reduce this time {15->10,10->8,6->4} Or for a (possibly) better fit to the flow of D&D combat (ie more chance for a heroic firearm user) Long Arm (Standing) / Pistol (Any Position) - Loading with loose powder and ball takes 4 rounds - Loading with paper cartridges halves this, to 2 rounds. Long Arm (Sitting/Kneeling/Prone) - Loading with loose powder and ball takes 6 rounds - Loading with paper cartridges halves this, to 3 rounds. Rifle (Standing) - Loading with loose powder and ball, is 6 rounds, if greased patches to wrap the ball are used. - Loading without greased patches, is 10 rounds. Rifle (Sitting/Kneeling/Prone) - Loading with loose powder and ball, is 10 rounds, if greased patches to wrap the ball are used. - Loading without greased patches, is 15 rounds. Characters with appropriate abilities (eg Rapid Reload possibly Quickdraw or high Slight of Hand) can reduce this time (and possibly advanced feats could reduce it a total of twice), {15->10,10->6,6->4,4->2} |
| bhu09-04-07, 04:19 AM | And how many people will be trained in guns outside of the military? Were bows still widely used in hunting? Because Im pretty sure not everyone in the group will want to be a militia type. God knows I'm gonna get at least 1 pig farmer... And I still need to think about what Im going to do about armor (i.e. no one has any so eventually they'lll be easy to hit) |
| Watchman09-04-07, 07:20 AM | Around that time the only people (within the "Western" culture-sphere anyway) who wore armour into battle were a select few elite cavalry units in Europe - cuirassieurs and for a time at least the French carabiniers. It was almost de rigeur for every major European army to have a cuirassieur unit, although not all of them actually wore the breastplates and helmets. This was a relatively recent fashion that had been introduced by Frederik the Great of Prussia after a round half-century of total absence of standard-issue body armour on the battlefield beginning in the early 1700s. Shields had entirely disappeared from use already in the late 1500s or so. Other than that, some of the more warlike Native American peoples made limited use of leather and hide body armour (sometimes reinforced with pieces of hard wood and in the Northwest iron trade coins) and substantial enough wooden war-masks that they in practice served as helmets. So I'm afraid you're going to have to fudge the D&D AC system a bit. That aside, guns are very easy to use - point and shoot - although the potential accuracy of the smoothbores is starkly limited even in skilled hands due to ballistics issues (even skilled shots cannot hit a man-sized stationary target at fifty paces more than half the time or so). Neither are they terribly difficult to operate (we're talking flintlock period here, not the pain-in-the-ass wheellocks); anyone can learn the basic competence in a matter of hours. (On what basis the DMG rates firearms as Exotic is quite beyond any rational comprehension.) Moreover at the period we're talking about the US was still pretty much a string of colonies on the coast, a frontier often enough in open conflict with the justifiably surly natives, the European overseas powers (their recent and sudden lack of access due to Mythos interference aside) and any amount of the usual homegrown violence and lawlessness; on top of which the ample wilderness to hunt in and the necessities of communal defense in a somewhat precarious frontier zone (nevermind now the occasional squabble with honest-to-God armies from overseas) would all suggest basic marksmanship competence would be common enough among the populace. Well, not the plantation slaves and suchlike of course, but that economic system will have to undergo some pretty major changes anyway due to the practical absence of overseas trade in any direction. Actually, the utter factual inability to export the produce ought to demolish the whole plantation economy pattern in a very short order... |
| spectralphoenix09-04-07, 04:47 PM | If there are bunches of monsters roaming around, body armor might make a comeback. Even if it doesn't help much against guns, a lot more of the fighting might be against monsters with natural weaponry than human armies. |
| Watchman09-05-07, 03:37 AM | May I point out it failed to make a comeback when they were fighting the local natives still relying primarily on bows and something to hit people with ? You didn't see military body armour again before the trenches of WW1... I've read that back in the American Civil War some officers wore privately purchased bulletproof breastplates under their uniforms (good for foiling snipers), but that's about it. Plus, against any Mythos critter that you can't drop readily enough with applied musketry and bayonets, body armour isn't going to make any difference anyway. Even the low end of the genuinely nasty and dangerous stuff tends to start out at the size of a small house, and more likely than not has at least one weird method of attack. |
| bhu09-05-07, 03:52 AM | So guns, axes, and knives are pretty much everyman skills. Swords and Pikes would be military. Bows are common hunting weapons. I wonder what i do with female characters though? Or former slaves? Hadn't really thought about bringing that into it... |
| Eikre09-05-07, 04:42 AM | I'm going to toss ideas here. I'm not sure how much I'll hit the mark; I'm not a highly disciplined student of history. On rifles and firearms: Consider having high-priced, high-end options for the gun-toting crowd. If I recall- though this might be pulling from another time period- pump-reserve airguns have been in sporadic use in Europe; they're not common weapons of war, because they're more expensive to manufacture and harder to maintain, but they're more accurate and less obvious. I don't know what precise time period you're planning, but skewing a bit towards revolvers would probably be a good idea from a game perspective. And, of course, Bows are around, and they're more optimal than guns. Perhaps not as practical, but, again, we're talking about adventurers, who, in other sorts of campaigns, have swords that cost more than kingdoms and unsymmetrical shields. Indians still use 'em, and over in Europe archer corps are still being disassembled. They're not common hunting weapons, though; A single shot from a firearm is highly expendable. An arrow isn't as much. On gender and race: Consider lessening their importance. In the face of isolationism and a lots and lots of uncharted territory, we can often find it in our hearts to abandon such trappings, and I think it makes for a better game, anyway. Indians will tend to the west, Frenchmen to the north, women are at the skillet, and black men in the fields, but you'll soon find that if any of the above have a weapon and a high level of proficiency, then it doesn't matter as much. Whenever someone questions race or gender, it's just grit in the role-play. |
| Watchman09-05-07, 06:10 AM | The closest you're going to get to revolvers is multiple-barrel pistols I'm afraid. Proper revolvers pretty much require the firearms technology to already be at caplock (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percussion_cap) level to be feasible. Most folks looking for ammunition endurance just carried a bunch of pistols and reloaded them after the fight. Europeans last made any military use of bows in the English Civil War (mid 1600s), and that just because of lingering training traditions and some shortages of proper war gear (ie. guns) to equip emergency formations with. Guard units termed "archers" had usually stopped carrying bows already back in the Middle Ages, had they ever done so in the first place... And the Indians had a very clear opinion on which they rather carried to war, gun or bow. As did assorted natives in contact with European outposts the world over for that matter; some trade-post adminstrators in Africa were long rather worried about the unnerving degrees of skill the local warriors developed with their imported muskets. In Scandinavia the old steel-stave crossbow incidentally remained a common hunting weapon for a very long time, not being superceded by firearms until around early to middle 1800s or so. That it was good for killing squirrels and other small animals with blunt bolts without damaging their valuable furs was probably an important factor, besides the obvious availability and price tag issues. If you're going to go with an even remotely egalitarian society you're just plain going to have to ride roughshod over historical accuracy for convenience (and, one suspects, tolerability). The legal and social standing of women in most Western countries at the time would probably have made the average Taleban take a step back, Indians were generally regarded as barely capable of walking on their hind legs, and Blacks were... beasts of burden at best. It took the massive manpower drain of the World Wars to factually break the women out of the confines of the home in most countries, and still long after their abilities and potentials were - and are - readily enough belittled if not outright restricted. Black slavery received its death blow already in the American Civil War, yet Blacks were still having to fight for full and equal rights in the 1960s... Even assuming a recent collapse of the plantation system on economic grounds, I think it's safe to say the newly unnecessary and therefore probably at least de facto free slave labour force is unlikely to elicit much more than scorn from most Whites. Especially down South, which is probably undergoing a total collapse of economy anyway. The Indians were pretty much summarily exterminated out of the way once the White Man began colonizing the American interior for real. No, we're not talking terribly enlightened times and attitudes here. Either in the "Western" culture-sphere in general or the Bible-thumping "Hellfire Nation" of USA in particular. And being under a vague, undefined threat (ie. something eating the shipping) during a crisis (ie. the economic effects of that marine intrediction) never did much to improve such issues - quite the contrary, it tends to result in "closing the ranks" and an intolerant garrison-state mentality that brooks no deviations from the hegemonic norm. Religious and moral puritanism ought to also be on the upswing, and not in the least thanks to the inevitable whispers of sightings of Hellspawned monstrosities (ie. Mythos beasts) and more likely than not a proliferation of Mythos-worshipping cults, particularly in coastal regions hard hit by the end of ocean travel and easily accessible to insidious Mythos entities such as Deep Ones. Still, at least out on the rugged frontier zones one imagines survivalism and competence trumped an individual's race and sex in a pinch. |
| 1 ton ghost09-05-07, 01:39 PM | yes, we have all benn focusing on tech, econ, defense, and the like, but i think the social upheaval bares mentioning as well. religiously, what are the odds that alot of panicked colonialists that can't trade/contact relatives, etc., in the old country, will handle this rationally? that is, i think it's safe to say they would probably turn in their righteous ignorance on the indigenous ppl, ie)the godless heathens or Indians...or whomever doesn't fit their mold of God fearing Christian. think of all the scapegoating and terror, i mean, you said ALL SHIPPING, yes? long way to Cali and the Pacific... you could rework The Witch Trials as a very compelling plot hook, or as a means to help explain magic or some $hit. not sure about the total scope of your campaign, but respect for the monumental undertaking. realistically, w/out marshal law and some seriously decisive action, most urban cneters reliant on trade in a market-based economy would fall into anarchy or at least a severe depression followed by rampant lawlessness and warlord-esque fiefdoms, ppl claiming whatever resources they could by force and exploiting others (Somalia, Sudan, etc.). |
| tarkin09-05-07, 01:51 PM | Also, I would have to side with the ROF people. ROF (Rate of Fire) was THE essential weapon characteristic back then. The way people obsess about more damage in d20 today? That was NOTHING compared to the importance of ROF in a Colonial/Napoleonic period. As such, I would enforce ROF more strictly than done in a regular game. ROF feats (Rapid Reload) and enchantments would be so important and powerfull that they simply should not be 'ignored away'. This was in large part because standard ROF was so poor. It could take an untrained man a minute to reload and fire a weapon. Trained men (i.e. WITH the Rapid Reload feat) could get 2 or three shots off a minute. |
| Watchman09-05-07, 03:24 PM | It'd actually be interesting to know how thorough the shipping intrediction is. My guess is it'd just hit ocean travel; if only because coastal shipping involves such mind-boggling numbers of cheap and cheerful little boats all over the place you'd pretty much have to turn the water into acid or something to make an impact on it. Quite simply, trying to mess with it on a large scale just isn't worth the effort (and is unlikely to be very succesful) for even major Mythos actors. Plus if the creepy critters are trying to keep a low profile while going about their nefarious plots, I'm having a sort of hard time seeing how they could manage it if they had to constantly chew up boats right next to the coastline and in full view of anyone who happens to look that way. In any case merely scuppering ocean travel pretty much pulls the rug from under the feet from some linchpins of Euro-American civilization. The Euros would deal with it better mind you; you can reach any point on the Eurasian and African coasts without losing sight of the land, and after all they did just fine for millenia never knowing a thing about the Americas. Heck, by island-hopping from SE Asia even Australia is still reachable. The sudden total collapse of trans-Atlantic trade ought to cause some major economic reshuffling (read as "depression") though. And the Spanish crown is so going totally bankrupt without the influx of Potosi silver. Probably takes a few moneylenders and banks with it too. The Americas just suddenly got isolated. Central and South plus Caribbean, already thoroughly colonized centuries ago, ought to get by on their own without excessive trouble (what now the colonial adminstrations suddenly found themselves hung out to dry without any help from back home to call on in case of problems, and the economy just developed a sudden need for some very thorough and urgent revisions). The North would be rather short of new colonists, settlers, outcasts and sundry to swell the demographics however; presumably this would rather limit their enthusiasm to try and expand at the Indians' expense, both because of more limited resources and less need for Lebensraum - indeed working out mutually beneficial relations with the natives might suddenly become rather important, what with links with the Old World being cut. The major inland seas - the Med and Black Sea, the Baltic, the Red Sea - would probably be directly unaffected though. They're not really "Mythos country" owing to relative youth and shallowness and a lack of the kinds of abyssal depths marine Mythos horrors seem to dig, or at least that's the impression one gets. Not enough elbow room, as it were. One also has to wonder about the fishing industry. Long-range Atlantic and other high-seas fishing is presumably Right Out (unless you've made a pact with the Chthulhoid thingamabobs responsible for the embargo presumably), which just might gut the ecology of rather a few coastal regions. Going hungry sucks. Things brings up an important point. Pretty much the only Mythos critters with the cunning and resources to realize such a shipping ban would be the Deep Ones, and even they would have to rely on some sort of heavy-duty Weird Magick effect to do it (the critters die easily enough for swarming the ships to not be a viable option in the long run - there's not *that* many of the fishy buggers around - and tougher auxiliary monsters like Shoggoths and Star-Spawn of Chthulhu are kinda rare and capricious). No doubt The Stars Are Right for something of that magnitude to be pulled off or something. Anyway, those guys are among the few Mythos monsters with a grasp of something called "subtlety" when dealing with humans, and one wonders if they weren't only too happy to start making "offers you can't refuse" to assorted starving and impoverished coastal communities over time - if Shadow Over Innsmouth is to go by, among the more concrete benefits they can offer are fish and gold... "I got what you need", as it were. |
| bhu09-06-07, 04:30 AM | Well I was going to avoid too much detail, but since my players never ever come to these forums here goes: I won't be using Lovecrafts mythos. They're too familiar with it, and once people are overly familiar you cant make things seem as unnerving. I'm making all monsters/gods/whatever from scratch and introducing them slowly. The idea is that at some point near the end of the Revolutionary War both sides tampered a bit with opening gates to places they should've left well enough alone. They managed to close those gates in time before the public realized (or so they thought), and as the war ended were pondering what to do. But whatever was on the other side of the gates they opened decided to claw their way through to this reality now that they know it exists. Several major gates opened in the oceansand now monsters from a dozen or more realities have been pouring through. The seas are a mess, and becoming less profitable by the day because the fish populations are dying or being eaten. Well established trade routes are watched and preyed on. And there's always the possibility of random occurences. Staying close to shore helps minimize the risks, but the Americas are still msotly cut off by monsters and huge banks of impenetrable fog. The interior is okay for now, but people in the port cities are starting to see things that have them questioning what they knew as reality. So far all they know is that any ship leaving sight of land or going into the fog hasn't come back. SHips leaving to check on them haven't come back either. What I'm trying to decide is has the government managed to consolidate the colonies into a smaller but feasible country, or have the states separated and gone their own ways? Europe has had far more problems. It's people actually know more of what is going on because they're being openly slaughtered. They're pretty much in a full scale war. The Americas on the other hand just know that the weather has changed, there's a lot of weird things going on, and something doesn't seem right. Things haven't progressed as quickly here for reasons unkown. Perhaps it's simply harder to establish an opening to come through, or perhaps soemthing about the locale is hostile to the things on the other side. Either way the PC's will basically be the group to first fully realize the possible things coming, and be given the unfortuneate responsibility of informing everyone else. |
| xammer9909-06-07, 11:51 AM | Things might be a bit different in Europe, but in America... 1. If you want "fast" guns, then have the Ferguson make a come back. It was a breech loading rifle and allowed for fairly rapid aimed fire. These were actually used in the Revolution by a unit of British under the command of Major Patrick Ferguson. He was NOT a popular man in the colonies to put it mildly, but he came up with a pretty nifty gun. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferguson_rifle If you set things a bit latter you can use the Hall Rifle, a purely American invention. It also had the totally awesome benefit where you could actually take the breech block out of the gun and carry it around as a pocket pistol since it contained the entire firing assembly and was designed to be removed. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hall_rifle Then you could also speed things up a bit more as well by having the percussion cap come in a bit earlier than the 1820's. Speaking from experience, using percussion caps is a MAJOR thing. It's so much faster and easier to do. Not to mention that it make shooting in the rain reasonably reliable. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percussion_cap 2. Rifles were absolutely and commonly available in the colonies. Which was one of the major british sticking points when American sharpe shooters would pick off British Officers from several hundred yards. The Kentucky Rifles at the time however were not "military" weapons. They tended to be significantly less rugged and could NOT support a bayonet. NOTE: This is NOT the case with the Ferguson or Hall rifles. Those are military weapons. 3. A trained professional soldier could get off about 3 aimed shots a minute with a musket. It took longer with a rifle, but by the time of the Civil War it was back to about the same. 4. Armor in the colonies would face _VERY_ tough acceptance because of the heat. America is a much warmer place than northern Europe and heat exhaustion would be a major issue for folks fighting in the stuff much less just wearing it while tromping around in the late spring through early autumn. It'd be totally out of the question in the Southern colonies. 5. Technological development would by no means end, but it would slow a bit. It would slow because frankly there would now effectively be a much smaller population with less people who could afford to do nothin but sit around and think crazy stuff up. Also don't sell folks out. If something is a threat, humanity will hunt it to extinction or at least shove it hard to the periphery in fairly short order. Just ask the wolves of England how that turned out for'em or the big European/American predators that use to have free reign. 6. Slavery would end in very short order. Slavery was instituted to support the majorly labor intensive cash crop farming (Tobacco, Sugar, indigo, rice, cotton, etc...) but with no outlet for those cash crops to be sold (cosmopolitan europe) then Slavery is done and quickly. 7. Back to guns. If you are going to be dealing with guns a lot and they'll be a major thing then do'em a little justice and make attacking with them a ranged touch attack. Also give'em the ability to overcome DR that isn't material specific. There is a great deal to be said for being hit by a dense lump of fast moving metal. 8. As for who knew how to use a gun...to put it bluntly anyone who had even the slightest inclination and economic means. On the frontier guns were a staple of life and how you fed your family. You could make the argument that in more urban settings they were less common, but cities weren't that big and hunting was a common sport and had been for centuries. Pistols were not that common because they didn't serve a lot of purpose other than personal defense. Shotguns & rifles though are a MUCH different story. So for feats, if you want it to be realistic, make'em simple weapons and then use feats to decrease the reload time of the things noticably. With a Ferguson or a hall, you could get your rate of fire down up to 5-6 shots a minute for a trained professional who knew what he was doing and how to take care of his weapon. 9. Personal weapons. Pikes: These were mantle pieces, displays, and kindling by the 1700's. The only polearms still in use by a western army were the halberds of the Swiss Guard in the Vatican. Further, they are stupidly impractical in the heavy forests of North America. Swords: Only sabres and lighter rapiers were around as "gentlemans" swords. I.e. officers. Few common folks used'em or could afford the years of training time necessary to learn to use'em really well. Dagger/Knife: Everyone. Axes: The ubiqitous tomahawk was actually very popular with folks. It was light, easy to carry, and very multipurpose. It was a tool and a weapon and frequently incorporated a blunt hammerhead on the back for that purpose. Basically all the "big" medieval weapons were pretty much dead and burried by the mid to late 1700's. Folks just used guns. They were cheaper, more plentiful and a hell of a lot easier to use. That all applies to Europeans however. Amoungst Natives its rather different. Bows, axes, and spears still saw a fair bit of use if a gun wasn't available. One other thing, the notion of folks going back to swords, spears, and crossbows...that's frankly pretty ludicrous if guns are available. Guns are a far more effective, efficient and SAFE tool for killing. You don't have to be close, you can use cover, and you can learn how to use it quickly. |
| xammer9909-06-07, 02:27 PM | Oh, something else for tech progression. If trans-oceanic trade becomes impossible then the Industrial Revolution becomes an impossibility. The very high value long raw mats produced in the Colonies and later the US, not to mention Egypt & India, were what financed it in Britain first and then the rest of Europe later. |
| bhu09-07-07, 08:05 PM | So what really is the difference between a rifle and a musket? |
| xammer9909-07-07, 08:28 PM | So what really is the difference between a rifle and a musket? The principle difference is the inside of the barrel or the bore. A musket has a smooth bore where as a rifle has a series of grooves that forming a bit of a spiral. The rifling first grips the bullet when its fired meaning less gas gets past and thus imparting more momentum to it and second it gives the bullet a predictable and reliable spin. This helps to really stabilize the bullet in flight making it's flight far more accurate. In practical terms it means a few things. 1. For a muzzle loading (where the powder, patch, and bullet are rammed down the barrel from the front) rifle its a bit load harder because the bullet, or the patch around it, is gripping the riffling. So you aren't just shoving it straight down, you are forcing it down the grooves as well and gotta carve up the lead a bit. Thus making significantly slower to load than a muzzle loading musket that you are just hammering straight down and the bullet doesn't really fit very well. However, a large part of this disparity was off set by the advent of pre-measured cartridges that contained the appropriate amount of powder, patch, and ball. Another MASSIVE invention in terms of speed and accuracy was the mini ball, or the forerunner of todays conically shapped bullet. The Miniball was cast so that when the weapon fired the bullet deformed up and out to grab the rifling. So instead of having to have a round ball that was a really tight fit, you had a lead slug that was just a hair smidge smaller and was thus far easier to load since you weren't fighting the rifling all the way down. 2. Cleaning a musket is also easier because you don't have to clean out the rifling grooves. 3. Rifles are far far far more deadly weapons. Look at the difference in the casualties between two wars the US Revolutionary and the US Civil War. The two used remarkably similiar combat tactics (large units of men marching across open ground). In the Revolution, reasonably effective combat range for a musket was 50-150 feet. Hence William Precott's famous order at the Battle of Bunker hill "Don't fire until you see the whites of their eyes." He said that because that way he'd assure maximum damage and accuracy with his first volley. Now, fast forward to 1863 and engagement ranges for a skilled rifleman were in the hundreds of YARDS, 3 to 4 times that of the Civil War. This is what got Pickett's Division shattered at Gettysburg. He lead an infantry assault of over 12 THOUSAND men over 3/4 of a mile in the process taking _50%_ casualties. That is a truly staggering number of dead and wounded and it was all thanks to the rifle cause the Union defenders, though the center was indeed the weakest point, were able to begin reasonably effectively engaging the enemy at a quarter mile or more away with RIFLE fire, not to mention cannon. In the simplest terms... a musket will kill you from 100'. A rifle will kill you from 1200'. That is probably way more than you wanted to know but hey...gotta put this stupid degree to use some how. |
| Watchman09-08-07, 01:05 PM | Mind you, by the American Civil War early magazine rifles were also around already, although they were uncommon and expensive enough that only a few small units could be armed with such. However these could severely decimate much larger enemy formations armed with the old single-shot stuff, Minié balls and rifling or not. |
| bhu09-09-07, 02:43 AM | How about larger weapons (cannons/explosives). I know cannons existed but not sure in what numbers. |
| xammer9909-09-07, 01:11 PM | Artillery.. 1. The split train (look at any modern howitzer and the braces at the end that split, thats the split train) was not invented so they fired in basically flat trajectories. Skilled artillerists went for the bouncing shot where they skipped the ball off the ground to bounce through lines of people like bowling balls. But not everyone could muster this degree of skill. 2. Artillery came in a wide variety of sizes and types from mortars that fired in steep arcs to field guns (as described above) to naval guns & fixed guns. Basically immobile field guns. There were also deck guns in the navy (small guns mounted on a swivel) which were essentially the same as swivel guns that were used by infantry. 3. Ammunition came in a variety of types depending on what piece it was being used by. Most guns just used a simple iron ball. It was effective and long range. Then there was cannister, the ubiquitous shotgun shell and when things got REALLY hairy there was double cannister (loading two cannister cases in the gun & firing). For naval guns you got chain shot (2 smaller balls attached by a chain), bar shot (two halves of a ball attached by an iron bar), and then grapeshot, basically cannister but a lot bigger and fewer balls were used. Then on occasion you'd get some wild eyed psychos who'd use "hot shot" which was where you took your ammunition and heated it iron hot and then fired it. But this was a recipe for blowing your gun up or a premature ignition. Regardless of the ammunition, if you got hit by an artillery piece at best you were now an amputee, but most likely you were just flat out dead. 4. Field guns & mortars were all muzzle loaders and took a significant crew working well together to fire. Naval guns actually employed breech loaders on smaller pieces. 5. As far as numbers...artillery wasn't used by anything but militarys, well to do militias, and the occasional merchantman. But they were not pieces that folks just toted around the country side by and large. They were just too cumbersome and slow. Though there is one instance that I know of where some traders lured in some indians and ambushed'em with a swivel gun, but that was a very rare occurance. 6. Explosives the always popular gunpowder keg. Gun Cotton (Nitrocellulose) was invented in the 1830's, Nitroglycerine in the 1840's and both of those are crazy dangerous. You'd be a total lunatic to tote'em around. "Safe" explosives didn't come around till 1866 from Alfred Nobel of the Nobel Piece Prize who finally came up with a way to stabilize Nitroglycerine in Dynamite. So stick with kegs of black powder. Oh, one of ther thing. If you have a big gunfight, make sure you start handing out penalties to hit from all the smoke. Smokeless powder wasn't worth usin till the 1880's. |
| Watchman09-09-07, 06:02 PM | Black powder don't burn clean at all; the adage "fog of war" may well have come from the way clouds of the thick acrid smoke obscured visibility on battlefields. I've read some participant accounts of line-infantry gunfights; references to only ever catching a glimpse of the enemy unit when the smoke was parted by wind ot whatever seemed to be common. And these shooting matches were done at like twenty-thirty meters. Field artillery was used for shooting holes (ragged, ugly, bloody corpse-strewn holes) in enemy formations. Even very light pieces like 2-pounders tended to go through at least one man or horse (or both) with solid balls, and bigger shells had that much more momentum to smash through things with. AFAIK armies mostly used 2-12 pounders for field battles; anything bigger was too heavy and cumbersome to be of any value except in siege trains, fortresses and warships. Even the little 2-pounders, fairly commonly used as organic fire support in infantry formations, AFAIK massed with their carriages closer to a ton (a full crew complement could manhandle one along if necessary - hence their viablity as integrated fire support - but wouldn't enjoy the experience); a 36-pounder with the same weighs in at hefty seven and half tons by what I've read... Naval pieces got off with lighter carriages mind you. Heavy metal, dude. Comes from having to make the piece with thick enough solid iron walls to be able to take the pressure build-up in the chamber without coming apart. The lighter you made the gun, the lighter shot and propellant charges you could safely employ. One example of this were howitzers (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howitzer), light thin-walled guns designed for firing grenades and case shot (see below) which didn't need much of a powder charge. The somewhat specialized "ship-smasher" carronades (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carronade) were somewhat similar. Ammunition was normally solid cast-iron balls, suited for plowing through ranks of fleshy things and smashing stuff. These could be heated for use as incendiary ammunition; a Prussian mercenary officer who invented a sort of portable forge for the purpose was reputedly told he had but to name his reward (the man asked for enough booze to drink himself to death, which he managed within year, or so the story goes). This wasn't as much of a safety hazard as one might think, as there was always some sort of wad/gas seal between the projectile and the propellant charge anyway. Balls were also made hollow, to be filled with gunpowder and fitted with fuses for use as grenades. The light end - 2- and 3-pounder size - were also small enough they could be used as hand grenades. These had their obvious uses in siege and naval warfare, especially the kinds of big bombs mortars lobbed ballistically, but mauled men and horses readily enough if you managed to get one to blow up inside a formation; I understand they were particularly effective against cavalry, as the horses were easily spooked by the explosion and the fragments. They were also sometimes shot empty to effect similar to solid balls, albeit of course with much less impact power and naturally smaller propellant charges (and less pressure issues as well) as well. One fun thing was grapeshot (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grapeshot) (canister, case shot... I've seen the latter used particularly in the context of howitzers), which turned the gun into a giant shotgun. Given the closed ranks most troops fought in, I think the amount of carnage these inflicted on battlefields is easy to imagine (or not, depending on how gory and graphic visual imagination you have). These go back a long way, the idea being simple and brutally effective - especially given that as early as the 1600s (if not before) the shot tended to be used with a pre-measured and -packed propellant charge, which allowed for very rapid firing by well-drilled gun crews. Guns tended to switch to grapeshot when an enemy formation came within about hundred meters and start pumping out blasts as fast as the individual crews managed - very much a necessity anyway if that enemy was an incoming cavalry charge, which had better be convinced to turn tail before it got to the pieces. As a side note, artillery batteries could often defend themselves right well with only small infantry details for close guard; the raw firepower they could dish out saw to that. Grapeshot was also used in naval warfare at short ranges, to sweep the decks in preparation to boarding (or just to hurt crews and hence to operability of the ship) and at point-blank distances directly against the hull - big cannons at least gave their shot enough velocity for the balls to penetrate ship sides reasonably reliably, and one can imagine the damage they did in the crowded gun-decks. The assorted peculiar sail-shredding types of shot (chain-shot (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chain_shot) being a classic, but interesting fold-open "star" and "knife" shot types also abounded) also had ready and messy anti-personnel applications, although obviously you'd normally encounter them on ships (and perhaps some coastal batteries). De facto artillery was since the Early Modern period more or less the sole purview of proper armies, sailing ships nonwithstanding. It was quite simply too cumbersome and inconvenient, even the light pieces, for anyone else to bother with, and required a fair bit of specialized training to be of much real value. Plus guns ate powder at prodigious rates, and that stuff didn't come free. Tiny cheap and cheerful pieces like swivel guns (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swivel_gun) might be found more widely, but then they mostly acted as short-range antipersonnel shotguns anyway; not much you can mess up with something that simple. There may have been some experiments with using them as horse-carried organic support artillery as well - I recall seeing a mention of Peter the Great trying that with his dragoons in the early 1700s (he was a bit desperate to augment their firepower so they could reasonably go toe to toe with the nasty Swedish shock cavalry), although the idea apparently floundered pretty quickly. After the early experiments this size of gun was also about the only one where you'd find breech-loading with separate detachable breeches holding the shot and propellant. The use of this design in bigger guns (in Europe anyway; Asians seemed to be more willing to live with the cons) was discontinued due to persistent issues with pressure leaking from the imperfect join between the breech and the barrel, but that probably wasn't a meaningful concern with a piece as small and weak as a swivel-gun. |
| xammer9909-09-07, 07:38 PM | Tiny cheap and cheerful pieces like swivel guns might be found more widely, but then they mostly acted as short-range antipersonnel shotguns anyway; not much you can mess up with something that simple. There may have been some experiments with using them as horse-carried organic support artillery as well - I recall seeing a mention of Peter the Great trying that with his dragoons in the early 1700s (he was a bit desperate to augment their firepower so they could reasonably go toe to toe with the nasty Swedish shock cavalry), although the idea apparently floundered pretty quickly. After the early experiments this size of gun was also about the only one where you'd find breech-loading with separate detachable breeches holding the shot and propellant. The use of this design in bigger guns (in Europe anyway; Asians seemed to be more willing to live with the cons) was discontinued due to persistent issues with pressure leaking from the imperfect join between the breech and the barrel, but that probably wasn't a meaningful concern with a piece as small and weak as a swivel-gun. 1. The field breech loaders you are thinkin of are the ones with the screw on breeches. Huge pressure problems not to mention thermal expansion & poor tolerances making the things nearly impossible to use after a shot or two. 2. The portable piece you are thinkin of was played with by Gustavus Adolphus (Swedish King) who experimented with a LEATHER gun. It certainly woulda been portable, but you can imagine the results. |
| bhu09-09-07, 09:33 PM | So how often can you fire a cannon? Much thanks for the responses so far btw :D you guys rock |
| xammer9909-09-07, 09:50 PM | For Siege Guns & Mortars, about 12/hour For Siege Howitzers, about 8/hour For a field piece, 1-2 a minute depending on the size of the piece. Also remember most field pieces fired in coordination as did armies for that part. It wasn't a fire at will situation unless you were well and truly deep in it. Instead they did volley's so that slowed down things a bit more to let lesser crews keep up. But it was worth it cause it let you put out a god awful hail of lead & steel and really shred an opponent. Also another huge reason for this with cannons is all that powder builds up a lot of heat quickly in the tube. So firing faster gets you increased risk of a serious mishap. Anything from a burst tube (cause metal gets weaker as it gets hotter) to it going off when the loader shoves in the powder. And you are most welcome =) |
| IrishRover09-09-07, 10:29 PM | Guns are clearly the predominant weapon of the era, as has been explained in depth. I do have an idea to make things a bit more ...interesting...shall we say? (And encourage diversity as to weapon choices.) I'm assuming that magical stuff is very rare, as befits a horror campaign. And most of it's a product of a bygone age. So--almost no magical guns. And perhaps if a magical gun is found, it might be great grand dad's blunderbus or a matchlock that was carried by a Conquistador officer. Less effective than a modern weapon for sure...but with that little bit of power in it... And of course, there are some ancient swords, especially in the homes of aristocrats...some of them might well be magic. Perhaps carring an antiquated weapon becomes a tip-off that the person is "In the know" about the monsters and such. And...don't underestimate the power of religion...from the puritain faith of New England, still strong inthe days of the revolution, to the Anglican communities here and ther, and the strong Catholic faith in Baltimore. (The Catholic Church seems to me <And please correct me if I'm wrong, I'm not Catholic> to be more inclined towards the collection of holy relics in churches and cathedrals...there's some useful stuff.) There is the question of "Is it REALLT a piece of the true cross?" Some armor was in the colonies, though likely long forgotten...at Jamestown, there were soldiers with breastplates. Oh, yess...the minnie ball. That was a breakthrough that could happen much earlier, if someone had the idea. If you need more effective firepower to show up, introduce that. |
| xammer9909-09-07, 11:24 PM | 1. Instead of doin stuff by the book for magic items, the "magic" weapons being the product of having a history is a good idea. 2. Also you could have the seriously gifted old world craftsman hangin around that can do like suggested in the recent article of Dragon where you have varying add ons to Masterwork. 3. There won't be a lot of those antiques laying around though. Not many folks would bother to tote old grampy's sword across the atlantic, though certainly some would. |
| bhu09-10-07, 12:57 AM | Magic weapons will be about as common as they are in Lovecraft's stories, which is to say the odds of the group getting one are small. Most products of magic will come from the other side or the one in a million individuals who can make one. And in true mythos fashion they wont always be attractive to use... Religion will be by and large of no hope to them. If there is a god, he wont be showing up to help. Usually my players dont follow gods in any campaign unless they're a cleric anyway. And it fits with a Lovecraftian theme. |
| Watchman09-10-07, 08:20 AM | 1. The field breech loaders you are thinkin of are the ones with the screw on breeches. Huge pressure problems not to mention thermal expansion & poor tolerances making the things nearly impossible to use after a shot or two. 2. The portable piece you are thinkin of was played with by Gustavus Adolphus (Swedish King) who experimented with a LEATHER gun. It certainly woulda been portable, but you can imagine the results.The most common type of breech-loader field gun AFAIK had the breech assembly as a sort of bottle with a handle, which was inserted into a sort of tray at the rear of the gun and locked in place with a wedge. Worked well enough as such, and allowed for some pretty rapid firing (since to roload you just swapped in a fresh "bottle", while another guy reloaded them), but obviously there was some major gas leak from the join between the breech and the barrel. The screw-on types were AFAIK usually siege guns. That being the 1400s to 1500s period when people were into building truly monstrous siege artillery, these could be massive - the giants the Hungarian master gunsmith Orban built for the Ottoman Sultan for the assault on Constantinopole being a case in point (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Turkish_Bombard). Wroked well enough far as I know, even if by the 1500s it was realized it was way more cost-effective to have a battery of normal-sized heavy artillery hammer at the same wall section instead. The leather cannon (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leather_cannon) was actually a clever enough idea (and the brainchild of a French adventurer IIRC), but the structure had unfortunate heat-dissipation issues which caused the concept to be abandoned rather quickly. These were not exactly "man-portable" pieces mind you - the smallest were AFAIK in the 2- and 3-pounder regimental gun range (not in the least since that's what Gustavus was looking for), with the appropriate carriages. They just were way lighter than iron or bronze pieces of the same size. AFAIK at least the light field guns could keep up pretty scary rates of fire by the standard of the time - several times that what a musketeer could, something in the order of a shot every ten to fifteen seconds if not even less depending on munition configuration and crew drill. The reasons are actually simple enough - even small regimental guns had a crew complement in the order of five to six people, all with a well-defined and -drilled role in the reloading sequence. Moreover the gun itself neede little moving, unlike a handgun which has to be turned this way and that to be reloaded. The musketeer in comaprision had to go through all the moves by his lonesome and fumble with the relevant equipement on the side. Of course bigger pieces were slower already by the simple fact their larger powder loads and heavier projectiles were more strenuous to handle, and naturally any casualties among a gun crew started ramping the loading times up pretty fast since someone had to start multi-tasking. Plus in spite of their great weight the ferocious recoil of the big guns tended to roll them back a fair bit, requiring that much more work to move the piece back into firing position - although on the plus side this trait could be exploited to run the gun back to a spot where it could be reloaded more conveniently and in at least some degree of cover, as with shipboard pieces. |
| IrishRover09-10-07, 11:25 PM | By the colonial era, breech loading cannons were long obsolete. They were DANGEROUS, that's why they stopped making or using them. Breech loading cannons blow up--frequently..until modern machineing techniques start to be developed. |
| bhu09-12-07, 02:16 AM | So axes, daggers, and most guns as simple weapons cannons and grenades as martial weapons everything else as exotic Sound about right? |
| Watchman09-12-07, 06:34 AM | Well, I don't really see any reason why swords and such would not be Martial as usual. Dunno about the Americas, but back in Yurrup the smallsword was still the standard upper-class dress and dueling weapon and most soldiers were given basic drill with a sword or sabre. See Ridley Scott's excellent movie The Duellists (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Duellists) for one for some inspiration on the topic. ;) |
| xammer9909-12-07, 05:23 PM | So axes, daggers, and most guns as simple weapons cannons and grenades as martial weapons everything else as exotic Sound about right? For Americans, Simple: Guns, small axes (tomahawks), knives, guns, shotguns, spears, crossbows (cause any nub can use a crossbow), clubs, etc... Martial: Swords for sure since they are still common, just require disciplined training to use. Any large weapon basically for martial since you have to have real disciplined training to use it effectively. Exotic: Polearms. These things have gone the way of the dodo and after having played with a 15' pike a weekend or two ago, they are not that easy to use. There is a strong argument for adding or subtracting things depending on cultural background. I.e. it's common for a colonial to know how to use a gun, but its also common for a native to use a bow. So what'd be a simple for one is a martial for the other. |
| Watchman09-12-07, 06:07 PM | Eh, polearms are easy too. No harder than swords all things considered, and in many cases easier (eg. spears - poke with the sharp end). As an aside junior military officers long carried all kinds of ceremonial parrtisans, ranseurs and sometimes halberds, primarily as marks of rank and for prodding soldiers back into the line with, but anyway... Pikes, it should be noted, were only ever supposed to be used in formation - but it wasn't difficult to teach some half-assed conscripts to do so effectively. That's why such weapons were adopted in the first place after all - you made up for any lack in individual combat skill with teamwork, formation and the right choice of equipement. Random afterthought: AFAIK the last true pikes in "Western" armies were used by the Swedish and Russian infantries during the Great Northern War (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Northern_War) (1700-1721), an anachronism in the age of the socket bayonet which both retained in small numbers due to their special requirements - the Swedes were focused on close assault with "cold arms" (partly to make up for their on the average relatively small numbers but generally high morale and aggressive training) and the lenght of the pike served well in this, whereas the Russians found the extra cavalry protection for their infantry useful against the aggressive and feared Swedish heavy horse. From the practical end, as mentioned navies used long spears ("half-pikes" or "boarding pikes") for boarding actions. I seem to recall seeing these things mentioned as late as the Civil War, although I could be wrong there. Also from the practical end, in siege assaults soldiers sometimes used assorted hefty working axes and the like - sort of like the use of sharpened entrenching tools as dedicated weapons in WW1 trenches I imagine, and useful for dealing with obstacles of course. Or at least they were still doing so in the late 1600s by what I know of it. The bayonet was presumably the norm though. |
| xammer9909-12-07, 07:20 PM | Eh, polearms are easy too. No harder than swords all things considered, and in many cases easier (eg. spears - poke with the sharp end). As an aside junior military officers long carried all kinds of ceremonial parrtisans, ranseurs and sometimes halberds, primarily as marks of rank and for prodding soldiers back into the line with, but anyway... Pikes, it should be noted, were only ever supposed to be used in formation - but it wasn't difficult to teach some half-assed conscripts to do so effectively. That's why such weapons were adopted in the first place after all - you made up for any lack in individual combat skill with teamwork, formation and the right choice of equipement. Correct, they were no harder than swords, and prolly a touch easier. But the problem is no one is teaching them. Carrying a pike/halberd/partisan/ranseur in a ceremony is one thing, applying it to the innards of someone who doesn't want it there is quite another. Add in that the US at that time was predominantly wilderness, so carrying a long stick into the forest is just a dumb idea. So there'd be considerably less inclination for teaching the things. |
| Watchman09-12-07, 07:38 PM | It's not like the basics were terribly difficult to figure out yourself if need be. The bigger hurdle would be the availability of the devices - or rather lack thereof - and the blunt fact there was little point even trying to get them, since the sword, knife, axe and bayonet filled the needs quite handsomely. I'm pretty sure neither American nor British officers for example carried the ceremonial polearms during the Revolution, and they may well have in general been relegated to court ceremonial and the like in most armies already in the early 1700s. None of which would justify altering their proficency level of course. |
| bhu09-13-07, 03:35 AM | It's not like the basics were terribly difficult to figure out yourself if need be. The bigger hurdle would be the availability of the devices - or rather lack thereof - and the blunt fact there was little point even trying to get them, since the sword, knife, axe and bayonet filled the needs quite handsomely. I'm pretty sure neither American nor British officers for example carried the ceremonial polearms during the Revolution, and they may well have in general been relegated to court ceremonial and the like in most armies already in the early 1700s. None of which would justify altering their proficency level of course. My thoughts were running towards making Simple Weapons stuff anyone could pick up or that were relatively common, Martial Weapons are stuff you only get training for in the military, and exotic weapons anything not covered by the above or that are new inventions. I was also going to have it differ based on the PC's race/culture, but i doubt any will be playing indians. I currently want to set it on a port city somewhere on the east coast in that time (the decision will mostly be based on whchever one i can find a map for). That will likely influence things as well. |
| Watchman09-13-07, 06:45 AM | That's better handled by treating sufficiently different human groups as subraces, and assigning them Weapon Familiarities as necessary if you ask me. While you're at it you can also give them different skill bonuses to represent their backgrounds - forest-zone Indians needing different skills in their everyday life than the plains-dwellers, and urban White colonists of the seaboard obviously being a fair bit different from both in this regard. Even if this doesn't directly affect the PCs (although one would imagine a division between rugged pioneers in the wilderness frontier and comparatively urbane coast-dwellers might be appropriate) it should help add depth to NPCs. Works well enough in Conan D20, anyway. As for the weapon prof levels, I'm firmly in the opinion that the exact only criteria (outside of course balance issues as in most standard D&D Exotics) should be the relative difficulty of use; after all, it matters little if a weapon is uncommon or even unheard-of if it is so simple to use any fool can pick up the working basics in a matter of hours (eg. guns - natives everywhere who got their hands on them tended to become pretty good shots pretty damn fast, and European armies drilled the basics into conscripts in a matter of hours). |
| bhu09-14-07, 02:37 AM | I'm thinking of setting it in Boston, Charleston, or Newport in about 1790 (5 years after the wars end). The decision of which city wil be heavily influenced by what map I can find, and what I can figure out about each cities resources at the time. I would prefer it to be a city that has several smaller towns within several days ride. |
| MrSpaceBear09-14-07, 02:54 AM | British, Prussian, and American line officers did use halbeards in the Revolution, to deadly result. Im a Civil War reenactor and I have a few Revolution reenactor friends. One is red coat Luteniant and his line wepon is a halbeard. Also, d20 Past has TONS of in game info on wepons from the 1500's up to WW2 |
| MrSpaceBear09-14-07, 03:01 AM | One more thing. Bayonets during the revolution were plug bayonets. The socket bayonet was not yet in use. That means that the bayonet was a spear head with a cork bottom that went into the barrel. So once fix bayonets was ordered there was no more fireing. Thats when things like the halberd gave officers a huge advantage. Its a VERY common mistake by artists and scholors today to depict the muskets of that time with socket or locking bayonets |
| Watchman09-14-07, 06:55 AM | Nuh. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayonet) The Brits had early socket bayonets in general issue around the beginning of the 18th century, the French a couple of years later. Similarly all the Swedish bayonets in the museum I work in from the era are sockets. Why in the world anyone would have used the obviously problematic and thoroughly antiquated plug bayonet in the last quarter of the 18th century is beyond my comprehension. No offense, but your getting this kind of elementary detail wrong sort of saps the credibility of the bit about halberds. Not that the officers might well have waved such ceremonial polearms around; armies of the period were heavy on pomp and bluster. But if they would actually have used the gaudy things for fighting, instead of whipping out their swords which they usually were properly trained to use, is questionable. Edit: for a case in point concerning the bayonets, might I present this contemporary drawing (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Revolutionary_War#African-Americans_and_Native_Americans) ? |
| xammer9909-14-07, 08:10 AM | 1. Socketed Bayonets first appeared in the 1680's and began common adoption by the early 1700's. 2. As for setting, do keep in mind the effects of what you described with transatlantic shipping being at an end. Boston & Charleston were major commercial transatlantic ports. With that having ended then those towns are gonna be withering. So if you want a big feeling of serious hopelessness and decay, then either of'em would be perfect. Once great cities that now can't sustain themselves. |
| bhu09-17-07, 01:21 AM | Y'know I just thought about it. Whether I use Cthulhu d20 or regular d20 I'm gonna have to make or change ranged fighting feats. Cause several of them wont work as is. |
| bhu09-20-07, 02:46 AM | Here's a thought: A friend just mentioned the Kaiser Blade aka Sling Blade. That would effectively be a polearm if it were common in the us then. Anyone have a clue if it was? |
| Watchman09-20-07, 06:29 AM | Wiki is your friend (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaiser_blade). Agricultural tool; I'd say it were closer to an axe if you were going to take a swing at someone with it. See also bill (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_%28weapon%29) for a remarkaby similar device that evolved into a popular weapon in the Middle Ages. |