Posted on

GM may I…?

You know that moment when you ask the GM if your character can do some thing which even to you sounds decidedly iffy?

Such as

Player: May I hold my spear in my bow hand while I shoot the goblins?

GM: No, you are on a horse!

Player: In that case can I hold it in the other hand and draw the string and hold the spear?

GM: No!

I think this came up recently in the RMU beta forums about could you swap a two handed weapon into one hand while you cast a spell. I think the idea was that a sword and shield user could probably hold their sword in the shield hand to cast a spell but the two handed weapon user possibly couldn’t.

Take a look at these photos from a horse combat competition in Iran recently. As with all horseback archery they are doing all of this at a canter, actually most of these arabian horses were doing a flat out gallop!

Here we have a spear being held in one hand while the rider is shooting a bow and the reverse of that of using the spear with the bow in the off hand.

This may not look that impressive but can you see the arrows sticking out of the ground? The archer is expected to reach down and pull an arrow out of the ground, traditionally it would have been a corpse but health and safety these days…, nock and shoot. They then swap to the spear to do some targets.

It is hard not to be impressed isn’t it?

Posted on

Say it isn’t so….

I went back through our posts to refresh my brain on our crowd-sourced adventure.  Apart from the quick blurb we had for the “Park and Deadly Tree”, our last post was July 31st!

I’ve been reading through “The Folklore of Discworld” and it mentioned banshees (banh sidh) as horrible spirits who herald the coming of Death.  If you’ve not read Discworld novels, Death is the anthropomorphic representation of Death… and He loves cats.  That’s why they have nine lives.

Given the Gallows in the courtyard area, and the amount of death and corruption, there should be a banshee or two wailing through the night to terrify the players.  A ghostly visage, combing her long white hair, wailing at the coming of Death.  This undead would fit wonderfully into this area of the adventure.  The party could mistakenly believe the banshee is responsible for the petrified apple attack that is coming from the tree. 

The banshee could even be harmless.  It’s merely the herald of Death, not the cause of it.  However, they are vengeful spirits.  As told in the Folklore of Discworld, (I’m paraphrasing) “A man stole the banshee’s comb and it haunted him until he returned it.  He put the comb on the end of a pitchfork and put it through a window.  The banshee took the comb and the pitchfork.  The pitchfork was a twisted mangled mess outside the house.”