The Biblyon Broadsheet

“Tips from Bill Cavalier on transitioning from player to Dungeon Master…”

The first time you get behind the screen, keep it simple! As Jamie Albrecht said, “Sometimes a caravan that needs to be protected from lizard men is just a caravan that needs to be protected from lizard men.”

Not bad advice for the second and third time you GM either.

“Consider the following as representative of a torch applied to a pool of oil on a dungeon floor. Is it possible to get that pool ignited by applying a flame? No way! I emptied a whole book of matches on multiple attempts…”

Some great photos.

I think I’m going to need to add an entry for oil lamps and lanterns to Arcane Lore. For all practical purposes, the stuff is not flammable—its flash point is too high. Medieval oil was olive oil or other vegetable/fish oils. It’s nothing like the refined petroleum we have today. That’s why such simple lamps could work in medieval life.

Delta has some great photos of oil not burning, and of oil providing slow fuel to a simple lamp.

Now, he needs to ditch the matches and build a fire from scratch to light the lamp!

“It reads like notes you wrote yourself while overestimating how much you’d remember later.”

Jim Henley writes about his experience discovering role-playing games, specifically, the three to four little brown books.

A sample page from Judges Guild’s Bob & Bill; the book is 12.75 inches by 10.75 inches, 80 pages.

I was on the Acaeum boards a few weeks ago and saw this announcement from Bill Owen:

I have gotten around to uploading the long-awaited coffee table edition of the JG history originally published 3 years ago with 36 pages. With 127% more pages (each over twice as big) with lots more pictures and text and most of the original pictures larger… this is a blockbuster!

Leads off with an embarrassing correction of the first edition! INCLUDES the original, full-size versions Tegal Manor and City State maps. This is a hard-cover, premium paper, case-wrap, full-cover, double-swanky edition.

It’s apparently a full-color book from Lulu.com. Today he uploaded a preview of the book. You’ve got to go look at it. At over a hundred dollars, I’m probably not going to get the book, but after looking at that preview I’m tempted. There’s also a PDF closer to my price range.

It’s filled with old-school ephemera, such as photos of hand-drawn maps of Tegel Manor, the City State, and many others I don’t recognize in the preview, as well as photos of other original documents and memories of gaming in the mid to late seventies.

The Bill Owen Q&A thread at the Acaeum is also an interesting read.

We and a lot of customers liked the classic, olden look of the maps. And I think it’s important to remember how our level of quality may have impacted customer usage. What I mean is that if we’d provided extremely high quality (printing wise) materials especially if on slick, glossy paper, how many people would have felt comfortable or even able to mark them up with their own personalization.

Rob Conley also pops ups with mapping tips and questions. It’s an amazing time travel expedition.

If you’re tempted, too, take a look now: he’s discounted the book during the “launch”, and of course Lulu.com is running almost non-stop sales over the holiday season.

When I saw the Spelljammer boxed set in Game Towne here in San Diego, and read the part about flying into space on the back of a roc, I immediately thought about Anne McCaffrey’s Pern and the thread that falls out of space from the red star.

When I discovered that the foreword lied to me, I wrote Dragon Dreams in the hopes of getting it into Dragon Magazine. But by then I’d lost touch with the D&D mainstream and it never went anywhere.

Dragonriders of Pern was pretty amazing when I first read it in high school. I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s still amazing now.

In the medieval world, anything important requires planning. Even things we consider the most trivial of actions require making a plan, collecting resources, and using those resources to execute the plan.

Take building a fire. Matches are awesome things. It’s not a wonder that time-travel novelists wanting to get their protagonists in trouble with the locals give them matches. However, in the standard fantasy faux-medieval world—such as Gods & Monsters’ Highland—there are no matches. Matches were only developed during the seventeenth century and onward, and until the late nineteenth century were dangerous.¹

If you have magic, that’s almost as good. Anything that a match can light, fan of flame or eternal flame will have no problem lighting, and you won’t have to worry nearly as much about wind.

Without magic, however, how do you start a fire?

Starting a fire without magic consists of three simple steps:

1. Start with a fire.
2. Light a torch, candle, lantern, log, or other long-burning combustible using the fire.
3. Transport the torch to where you want to build a fire.
4. Light your fire.

Yes, the best way to build a fire barring magic or technology is to start with an existing fire. The need for an existing fire is almost as important a reason to have a torch or oil lamp as the need for light.

Starting a fire without a fire

Whether you have a spark or need to make a fire completely from scratch, the most important step to building a fire when you don’t already have a fire is finding something that will burn easily. You want the kind of thing that makes brush fires start spontaneously: very dry, very light, soft, filamented and frayed. You don’t want density, you want fluffiness. Thin strands of something very flammable. Leaves, if they’re very dry, will work well, but they’re rarely really dry. Straw is another good choice if you can get it. Dry grass, too. If you have dry rope, unravel it and unravel it again. If you need to something to carry, aged and thin wood shavings are probably the best combination of durable and flammable. Sawdust is awesome.

If you want to make it easier, make or get some “charcloth”. Start with something very thin and light, such as cotton or linen fiber. Then dry it even further under heat (put it into a pot over a fire, for example). Put this in with your kindling, and the charcloth will light as long as it catches a single spark.

Can someone explain Villains and Vigilantes falling damage? I can’t be reading it correctly.

Falling speed seems to make sense. It is calculated per turn rather than per second, which makes things easier to calculate at heights lower than 500 feet, but that’s a decent abstraction.

Damage, however, is wacky as described.

Background

For background, the average human has about 40 power points and 4 hit points. That means 8 points of damage will knock them unconscious¹ and 44 points of damage will kill them. A large bomb will knock the average person unconscious (21 points average, from 2d20) but not kill them. A small nuclear bomb will kill the average person (53 points average, from 5d20).

A large nuclear bomb will kill just about anybody, doing 20d20 points damage for an average of 210 points.

Given comic book physics this makes sense. Bombs throw heroes around, knock some of them unconscious, and leave a few conscious to survey the carnage.

Falling damage

Falling damage is in another league altogether. Damage taken is the distance fallen during the last turn (fifteen seconds), in “inches”, where a V&V inch is five feet, times the square root of the character’s basic hits². Falling off of a 500-foot building will mean 100 points damage times 2 (the square root of basic hits) for 200 points damage.

That’s a large nuclear explosion. But it gets worse: if you have size change to small and you’re down to a quarter inch, you multiply by your height factor of 288 for a total damage of 57,600 points.³ That can’t be right. What am I missing?

Falling from an airplane has crazier numbers. Depending on height fallen, the height number will be anywhere from a hundred (as in the above example) to a thousand (terminal velocity in Villains and Vigilantes). Two thousand points damage for falling ensures death, even if you’re lucky enough to share it with the ground. That’s five large nuclear bombs.⁴

A solution

The thing is, there is already a system in Villains and Vigilantes for damage from high-speed impacts. Brawling weapons do damage based on both weight and velocity. Assume that falling means maximum damage, and falling from 500 feet does 12 points damage, ensuring unconsciousness for the average person. Terminal velocity means 44 points damage, killing the average person.

Villains and Vigilantes uses real-world weights for determining damage when throwing non-weapons. Thrown rocks do damage according to how much they weigh and how fast they’re going.

I personally find it difficult to visualize how much a rock or slab of cement will weigh. What does a 6-inch diameter rock weigh? What about a two-foot diameter rock?

The way to determine the weight of something is to multiply its density by its volume. The more dense something is the more it weighs, and the bigger it is the more it weighs.

Densities are almost always given in grams per cubic centimeter, or g/cc. Grams and cubic centimeters are pretty small; your superhero isn’t likely to be tossing pebbles at the villains very often. Grams per cubic centimeter, if you choose to do the math, can be multiplied by 1,000 to get kilograms per cubic meter.

However, Villains and Vigilantes uses the English system of pounds and inches and feet. It will probably be easiest to convert this to pounds per cubic foot. Convert kilograms to pounds by multiplying by 2.2. Convert “per cubic meter” to “per cubic foot” by dividing by 3.28 cubed, or 35.3. Thus, multiply grams per cubic centimeter by 62 to get pounds per cubic foot.

Lots of rocks are relatively round. It’s easy to imagine the size of a rock by way of its diameter. The volume of a spherical object is four-thirds times Pi times the cube of the radius; radius is half of diameter.

In general, if you know a brawling weapon’s density in grams per cubic centimeter, and what its approximate diameter in inches would be if it were spherical, you can multiply the density of the material by the cube of the item’s diameter in inches, and divide by 53, to get its weight in pounds.

Which leads us to a table of diameters to weights: