Pyramid #3/52: Low-Tech II Overview

[Tzeentch]

The new issue is out. Here's my initial impressions. A more complete review will be posted to RPG.NET

Lord of the Manor (Matt Riggsby)
These are the guidelines and rules for running a fantasy manor (i.e. quasi-Medieval).

I found it a bit odd that the sidebar on Magic! (p. 5) did not mention the option of using the Stabilizing Skill rules (GURPS Magical Styles, p. 24). This could be what he has in mind when he mentions holy people may risk repeated castings of Bless Plants if they have some special protection against the chance of critical failures.

I wish that sources were cited, as I'm not clear how transport efficiency (p. 8) was derived, because it assumes that the animals are eating your marginal product of labor (the rules only cover pasturing milk cows with a supplement of grain, and don't list fodder as a economic crop). This would seem to be an unrealistic constraint to cities supplied by beasts of burden and carts. The rules do make some allowance for large cities having extensive trade links (e.g. Rome)

Concealed Armor (Dan Howard)
This is about the historical use of concealed armor (with case examples) and built examples of Low-Tech armor for all of your surreptitious protection needs. I really liked this article, especially because of the historical notes that give it that added degree of authenticity and grounding.

A standout example of this is the description of the hat worn by Judge Bradshaw (p. 13) which is almost a plot seed in itself.

Eidetic Memory: Low-Tech Armor Design (David Pulver)
This is a design system for Low-Tech armor. It's pretty straightforward and is similar in concept to some of my own analysis during the Low-Tech playtest that contrasted some of the DR/lb/sf with materials from VDS at the time. The numbers will not settle every debate though, as using historical armor weights will be biased towards wearers of smaller size than the TL7-8 burn victims that are used to estimate surface area by location in this article.

Note that the article does include some TL^ materials (adamant and orichalcum), as well as a few TL6 - TL8 materials. The system does not include data to build armor of cane, straw, or paper and references Low-Tech for those.

The Puckle Gun (Graeme Davis)
This expands the Low-Tech entry for the puckle gun (Low-Tech, pp. 92-93) into an entire article that discusses the history and operation of the weapon. That itself would be quite interesting, but the article has an entire section on how the TL4 puckle gun can be used in a campaign as a plot seed, related to its use and the spread of technology related to its manufacture.

The article ends with a Bibliography and Online Resources, which in my opinion should be used a lot more in Pyramid articles that are about actual objects or events.

Delayed Gratification (Douglas Cole)
This is actually an elaborate Alternate GURPS article that expounds upon the idea of setting up attacks using a variation of Feint. As noted in the article, it can actually be used to largely replace the standard Feint maneuver in a game.

A Caravanserai on the Desert Road (Dan Howard)
This article is written to flesh out the free Caravan to Ein Arris adventure with more information about how a historical travel waystation may have looked and what services it could provide to passing travelers. A more elaborate built example, The Prophet's Rest, is also detailed together with a map and basic NPC descriptions, and plot seeds that can be used to further expand on the free adventure. It even has a Random Visitor Table! It ends with some online references, which I always appreciate.

Random Thought Table: The Future is a Moving Target (Steven Marsh)
This is actually rather thought provoking: how do you subvert some player expectations in a historical campaign when you can access so much information about the past via Google and Wikipedia? Obviously, these are just sketches of ideas but I could easily see this being a full article in itself, dealing with expectations, divergence points for alternate realities, and creating a "space" for adventurers to impact the histories of their game settings, even if they are based on our own.

Odds and Ends
This section includes an aside on how to add flaws and minor inconveniences to technology and a Murphy's Rules from Fading Suns regarding crafting and repair skills.

[Steven Marsh]

Thank you, as ever, for your comments!

[PK]

Thank you very much for the thoughtful, in-depth review, Kenneth! I heartily endorse it for anyone still on the fence about whether this issue would be their cup of tea.

Originally Posted by Tzeentch

Eidetic Memory: Low-Tech Armor Design (David Pulver)
This is a design system for Low-Tech armor. It's pretty straightforward and is similar in concept to some of my own analysis during the Low-Tech playtest that contrasted some of the DR/lb/sf with materials from VDS at the time. The numbers will not settle every debate though, as using historical armor weights will be biased towards wearers of smaller size than the TL7-8 burn victims that are used to estimate surface area by location in this article.

FWIW, David did attempt to address this via the rules in Extra Detail: Armor, Surface Area, and Size (p. 16). I agree that it still won't settle debates, but then again, I'm of the opinion that nothing will ever stop debates among geeks of any sort, most definitely including armor geeks. :)

[Turhan's Bey Company]

Originally Posted by Tzeentch

I found it a bit odd that the sidebar on Magic! (p. 5) did not mention the option of using the Stabilizing Skill rules (GURPS Magical Styles, p. 24). This could be what he has in mind when he mentions holy people may risk repeated castings of Bless Plants if they have some special protection against the chance of critical failures.

That, or use of GM-dictated magical items which are proof against crits, or...well, whatever else might come to hand. Use of magic was already a digression, albeit one which comes up frequently, and I didn't care to go too deeply down that rabbit hole.

Originally Posted by Tzeentch

I wish that sources were cited, as I'm not clear how transport efficiency (p. 8) was derived

See Transport Costs, GURPS Low Tech Companion 3 p. 42.

Originally Posted by Tzeentch

the rules only cover pasturing milk cows with a supplement of grain

There are also some rules for feeding horses, mules, and donkeys (LTC3, p. 15).

[DouglasCole]

Originally Posted by Tzeentch

Delayed Gratification (Douglas Cole)
This is actually an elaborate Alternate GURPS article that expounds upon the idea of setting up attacks using a variation of Feint. As noted in the article, it can actually be used to largely replace the standard Feint maneuver in a game.

Elaborate? I thought it was fairly straight-forward, although there are many optional enhancements presented.

No?

[Tzeentch]

The Setup Attack rules cover three pages, with extra gribblies like Setup Attacks as Techniques (p. 24). That's pretty elaborate when the basic Feint rules are about five paragraphs (p. B325).

[Mailanka]

Dear Douglas Cole

Please stop rewriting the rules to Cherry Blossom Rain every couple of months.

Sincerely,
Mailanka

[DouglasCole]

Originally Posted by Mailanka

Dear Douglas Cole

Please stop rewriting the rules to Cherry Blossom Rain every couple of months.

Sincerely,
Mailanka

I sincerely apologize. I will stop trying to find ways to alter your game this very instant.

More seriously, this article was somewhat inspired by the debates on Feint being too powerful, or useless, depending on one's point of view. The thing I was always unsold on was that Feint was nebulous. It's not that it wasn't real - Feint is definitely a legit thing and should be modeled - but by stepping outside the attack/defense paradigm it put it into a bit of a no-man's land of what's going on.

Plus, with the wonderful options given to attack/defense rolls, but fairly minimal flavor for feints, it's nice to be able to apply them. All-Out Setup? Check. Rapid Strike Setup? Check. Defensive Attack Setup? Oh, yeah.

[Mailanka]

Originally Posted by DouglasCole

Defensive Attack Setup? Oh, yeah.

That, in particular, stood out to me, especially since a Defensive Feint is... strange.

[nondescript handle]

My super subjective review:

Lord of the Manor
That's the article that made this an insta-buy for me. Very, very nice. It's an continuation of the LTC3 and the Pyramid 3/33 article, and links all this to the almost forgotten (?) world building advice on settlements in GURPS Fantasy.
Good for designing the agricultural bases of lands at least on the manor/barony level and the 'hinterlands' of settlements.
At this point in the series (I hope it's not the last part) it's still static: no mechanisms for improving the domain or bad seasons and so on.

I can't seem to recalculate some of the example domains, dunno if these are mistakes or if I'm just not completely groking the system yet.

One thing I did not like was the insistence that all cash/luxury crops/animal husbandry is owned outright by the over lord. No wealthy farmers or minor nobles here, which seems strange to me. It's easy enough to houserule, with the tax brackets (0%/16%/33%/50%/66%/83%/100%) for the CR levels, but I think that should have been in the article itself.

Concealed Armor
I'm one of those GMs who don't allow openly carried mil-spec weapons and armor in civilized areas. Nice amount of crunch and advice, presented within a historic framework.

Low-Tech Armor Design
Another Pulver design system, yay! Haven't played with it much so far, but it looks easy enough to use. It is a bit too much tinkering for most standard human armor for my personal taste, I see it more as a system for exotic armor.
Aluminum low-tech armor for example is fully supported out of the box, stuff like strongboxes seem trivially easy, and even, say, armor for dragons should be doable once you've eyeballed the surface areas of draconian body parts.

The Puckle Gun
Statlines for a handful of caliber variants for the Puckle gun and 2 1/2 pages of fluff. The fluff, while historically interesting, stays a bit too close to history for my taste. Now I didn't need it to be wild "how to use it as the sidearm for your steam mecha" alternative history, but IMHO the adventure seeds where a bit, well, tame.

Delayed Gratification
Looks interesting, but I can't say much about it without playtesting it.

A Caravanserai on the Desert Road
An article I had great hopes for, but only half of it was fulfilled.
The description (and map) of the caravanserai (and its NPCs) are very good. It's a top notch location I will use repeatedly.
But: It's a caravanserai run by earth Arabs, who are clearly Muslims and speak Arabic. Not by Nomic tribesmen, who are polytheistic (Caravan to Ein Arris p.4) and speak Nomic or Lantrai. It's a historic (or alt history) or even Banestorm background, but not the setting of Caravan to Ein Arris.

The Future is a Moving Target
How to reduce the dangers of a historic campaign by turning it more into an alternative history campaign. Meh, that's why I don't play straight historic campaigns.