Mithril Armor in Dungeon Fantasy

[Peter V. Dell'Orto]

Originally Posted by DanHoward

Elven armour and Mithril mail are two different beasts.

They're equally made up stuff that's supposed to have effects beyond their weight, construction, whatever. It's an adjective attached to a piece of armor to let you stick numbers after it that reality wouldn't support otherwise.

[Gudiomen]

Originally Posted by DanHoward

How can you make flexible armour more resistant to crushing?

The question was for Dungeon Fantasy, Dan. And the "elven" mail quallifier on DF: 1 does just this. It's mind-boggingly unrealistic, ofcourse... but I didn't think this was an issue for the OP. Standard explanation is probably "elven smiths can imbue their works with quasi-magical qualities, such as the mail becoming hard as plate when struck" or some other low-techno-babble like that.

Originally Posted by DanHoward

Which is covered using the heavy plate rules in Low Tech. You can have armour up to around DR 14 if you are willing to bear the additional weight. All you need is to assign a cost and weight modifier for a particular material and the regular armour customisation rules will handle the rest.

Yes, it's pretty logical and ever since you commented on that system for Low-Tech I figured it'd feature something as simple as this as well as the other tricky stuff. Good to know though, always good to know... keep throwing us tidbits like that :P

[RyanW]

Originally Posted by Evil Roy Slade

Seems to me it was occasionally referred to as "true-silver" in LOTR. And I am revealing to much geekiness here, but in Sindarin it means "grey-glitter."

According to Wikipedia:

In the first 1937 edition [of the Hobbit], the mail shirt given to Bilbo was described as being made of "silvered steel".

However, the term 'mithril' was apparently never officially trademarked, and copyrights don't apply to individual terms.

I'm partial, personally, to somewhat odd magic armors. My settings have things like silver-thread (basically, Elven kevlar). My dwarves, though, tend to favor craftsmanship (er... craftdwarfship). They are more likely to use a ritual intended to give the smith endurance and wisdom than to directly affect the materials.

[nik1979]

This gets me wondering if Magic items should have a TL modifier. How weird would it be to have elven armor as TL3+6 (effective TL9), Mithril Plate would be as effective as Titanium could be Plate TL3+4, or Gondorian Plate TL3+1 plate?

In this manner one would have an average gauge of Power level in a given setting. So players who run around with Golem armor would have the equivalent of a TL3+6 Power Armor, wield staffs of Uber Fireballs are using TL0+7 RPGs etc. etc.

If one carries on a Out of Atmosphere High Fantasy, they could just use GURPS Ultra Tech to make the items.

[Not another shrubbery]

Originally Posted by nik1979

This gets me wondering if Magic items should have a TL modifier.

In the context of a DF game, I wouldn't think so. In another type of campaign, it might be something to spin off of.

[Lupo]

Originally Posted by Ed the Coastie

Mithril may be a copyrighted word, but the concept isn't and yttrium silver fills the same niche that mithril does. Now I just have to find an appropriate "fair use" word to represent it.

Please note that single words and names cannot be "copyrighted". You can trademark them if you want, but this is rarely done.

So if you write a book where you mention "mithril", the book itself will be automatically copyrighted, but the names of characters, places, things are not.
Words need to be specifically trademarked if you want to prevent others from using them.

In the case of Mithril, it's quite obvious it wasn't trademarked, as it is used in dozens of rpg and video games...

According to Wikipedia:

The name mithril or similarly spelled variations (mithral, mythril, and others) is present in other fictional contexts like role-playing games, since the Tolkien Estate did not trademark the term. One early example is Dungeons & Dragons most notably the Forgotten Realms setting. It appears in many computer and video games such as: The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall and Time of Castles, IV: Oblivion, EverQuest, RuneScape, Dark Age of Camelot, Lineage II, Dungeons and Dragons Online, Tales of Symphonia, World of Warcraft, Final Fantasy, Maplestory, Patapon, Star Ocean, Cabal Online, Harvest Moon and Kingdom Hearts. The name is usually used for a special type of metal (often used as armor, and is then almost always the best type), or as a denomination of currency, or as a name for a project or device.