Burrowowl

The northern regions of the Iron Kingdoms are home to the Khadoran empire. Comprized of an amalgam of Khardic, Kossite, Skirov, Umbrean, and the Ryn, the martial history of this region revolved primarily around the untamed woodsmen of Kos, the barbarians of Skirov, and the Khardic and Umbrean horselords. Though these cultures now share a single military, some traces of the old preferences are still present, as fathers teach their sons and mothers teach their daughters the traditions of their ancestry. Through the play-fighting of children and the prejudices of drill sergeants, Khadoran armsmen still present a variety of martial weapons.

In addition to limiting the availability of martial weapons that have no strong presence in the martial traditions of these cultures, I am also including many of the “exotic” weapons into their native cultures, and adding a handful of additional “simple” weapons.

Khardic Martial Weapons

The Khards are a proud, ancient people with a long tradition of mounted warfare. Through their incessant wars with the Umbrean, Kossites, and Skirov, they simultaneously imposed their will upon their neighbors and learned from them on the fields of battle. Rifles have become extremely popular over the past generation, as the Khadoran military has been modernized under Ayn Vanar.

• Glaive, Guisarme, Halberd, Ranseur, Fork
• Light & Heavy Lances
• Short & Long Swords
• Great Axes
• Light & Heavy Horseman’s Axes
• Rifles
• Shortbows

Khardic Simple Weapons

• Battle Axe
• Khardic and Hunting Spears

Read the rest of this entry »

One of the traditionally-awkward aspects of the Dungeons & Dragons game system, going back to AD&D is weapon proficiency. Quite simply defined, proficiency with a given weapon means that a proficient character knows how to properly use the weapon in combat. Using a weapon one is not proficient with will incur certain penalties, most notably a penalty on all attack rolls. The problem has always been in determining which weapons a given character knows how to use.

In AD&D, this was accomplished by giving the various character classes a fixed number of starting weapon proficiencies (and in some most cases a restricted list of allowable weapons), with additional proficiencies being granted as the character progressed. The main problem with this was that the Fighter character, master of arms that he is, would end up with a stupendously long list of weapons he could use competently, but would run across an enchanted Ranseur and be at a loss as to how to use the darned thing until the following character level. In time, the Fighter would reach a peak point after which new proficiencies were of no practical use.

Third edition D&D addressed this problem by creating three major groupings of weapon types, “simple” weapons that nearly anybody would know how to use, “martial” weapons that only skilled armsmen would master, and “exotic” weapons, which were simply not typically in use, and required specialized training or exotic origin in order to put to good use. Fighters are considered to be proficient in all simple and martial weapons. Quite tidily done for any reasonably-standard D&D world.

But with third edition Dungeons & Dragons came the d20 system, the OGL, and eventually Privateer Press and their Iron Kingdoms setting. The Iron Kingdoms has a significantly different technology level than traditional fantasy roleplaying games, and distinct ethnicities with different cultures and martial traditions. How does the d20 system’s weapon proficiency match up? A quick search for threads regarding firearm proficiency rules on their forum will tell you that it works a little less well than you might expect.

I’ll be following this introductory article with some suggested lists of weapons that should be considered “Martial,” “Simple,” or “Exotic” based upon the Iron Kingdoms cultural groups. Expect most Khadoran subcultures to favor Axes, Cygnarans to favor swords, and so forth.

My former roommate is a mad scientist. By this I don’t mean that he is a professional lab-worker. Nor do I mean that he sits around talking about foo fighters and gravimetric displacement manifolds (though he’s been known to do that as well). I mean he likes to build things. Strange, wondrous things. Tiny walking robots are manufactured in his spare bedroom. Little electronic bugs with ominous flashing lights were a theme for a while. Now, however, he has decided to defy gravity.

This little device has no moving parts, but when exposed to a current by means of a little transformer he built (which brings power from the wall down to 6 volts), it achieves flight. The little white threads you see are there to keep it from flying away from his table, and the little wisps of wire off to the right are the power lines. The purple light on the upper right-hand frame is just a little discharge of excess capacity. Outstanding. Bravo, man, bravo!

(3.8MB .MOV demonstration)

*2006-01-25 update: a bigger, better lifter has taken flight.

Things have been pretty dry in the world of Japanese animation and comics for me these days. Speed Grapher, a new title by Gonzo, has been good so far, but most of the emphasis in the fansubbing and scanlation communities seems to be on high-school romance (read: harem) comedies and shoujo, both of which don’t hold a heck of a lot of appeal to me. I tripped across a pretty good new manga this week, however: Densha Otoko.

The basic premise is that a typical male geek, socially-inept and utterly lacking in self-confidence (an easy sympathetic match for your average scanlation reader) is on a train, wallowing in his state of lameness , when a belligerent drunk starts yelling at the other passengers. The geek, reluctantly, stands up to the drunkard, winning the momentary adoration of the middle-aged ladies that were being verbally abused, as well as the appreciation of a pretty young lady. The rest of the series largely revolves around the geek (we never get his name) looking for advice from total strangers on 2chan as to how he should handle his prospective relationship with the young lady. Supposedly this story is based on an actual thread on 2chan, which was fictionalized into a book, this comic, and a television drama.

It’s very funny, especially if you happen to be familiar with socially-retarded computer geeks. Unlike most romantic comedies that are circulating in the scanlation community, it is heavy of character development and very light on titillation and cheap “harem” tactics. Of course, I write this having only read 8 chapters of it, so it may yet take a turn for the worse. Check it out.

(Drama Wiki Entry regarding the TV show)

Movable Type, the “personal publishing system” that I use as the back-end for this site, turned four years old yesterday. During that time, it has grown up from a hokey little piece of beggarware to one of the most popular platforms from which technorati scream their drivel for public consumption. The feature set has grown greatly, a great many interesting plugins have been developed (several of which are used on this site, though you may never have noticed), they’ve launched their own hosted service, and have rewired their licensing system to encourage keeping the mouths of their employees fed. Did I mention they actually have employees now? Wow.

Personally, I hopped on fairly early in the game, in June of 2002 (my initial launch resulted in some badly-munged .db files, and are no longer available). I wasn’t sold on the idea of managing a website via a web interface at the time, and installed it largely as an excuse to tinker with the CGI and wrapping setup of my ISP, which happens to provide me with shell access. I set a goal for myself to actually place new content on the web of a fairly-regular basis and redesign the site almost continuously, seeing this as a means of keeping myself motivated to keep reasonably sharp on my web-development skills. I kept that up for a fair while, managing nine separate style-sheets during the first eight months or so. Eventually discovered that there really isn’t a lot of gee-whiz design that I actually like doing, much less enjoy looking at, and settled on something I found to be acceptable. There have been three major visual revisions of this site since then.

Things I’ve liked about Movable Type as opposed to WordPress (which my friends Augie and Dan use) include the excellent plugin availability that was available when I got started. Granted, a lot of catch-up has been played, so that isn’t as strong an argument as it used to be. Also, I found the support fora on the Movable Type site to be tremendously helpful in getting my wits about me in the brave new world of weblogging. As I have a better idea of how such things work in general now, this isn’t as strong an argument as it used to be. I also liked, and continue to enjoy, how easily one can set up custom templated in this system. One can have great variance in layout and content between various types of pages on a Movable Type site, which lends it towards use as a CMS for sites other than silly little vanity blogs such as this one. Other tools that provide this level of flexibility have had, in my experience, a far more punishing learning curve, and customizing WordPress looks like it involves some serious tooth-pulling.

All of this comes about as I’m seriously contemplating moving a number of sub-projects away from my trusty MT back-end, possibly going so far as to run my own Mandrake box. Movable Type has been a good buddy of mine for over three years now, but with licensing changes leaving the newer versions out of my reach (money I don’t intend to spend) or severely-neutered (one blog, one author), something’s got to give.

Thanks for a lovely product, SixApart, I’ve enjoyed it greatly, and wish you well.