Solo Play - Battle of Haldon's Cows

Misty the morn  / We left host Haldon
A dying cry / Back brought us to him

Knelt over young Wili  / The cattle are stolen! 
Recovered they must / Or great hunger stalks us

Bold Tlichnolli / Leads us on trail
To save the house / Where we guested

There cross the field / Spied we the cattle 
Herded by skraelings / Careless of vengeance

Deeds must be sung / Even in battles so humble
Our Dancer of Wrath / Skewers two with one blow!

Watseka the Scarred / She of the Power
Slew the leader with darts / Another with staff
The last melted away / Under her witch-fire!

Setup Using Adventurer Conqueror King to run a group through the
Wilderlands, based out of the City State of the Invincible Overlord.  The
initial action is driven by an NPC - Miortus, a priest of Arghrasmak, the
Gargoyle God. He is researching Carcosan rituals to bind or imprison
his god and bend the god to his will, making him the master of the temple.  
None of which is known by the PC’s; they have agreed to take a sealed
box to the town of Anvil and return with the priest Fladhal’s response.

Preparation Generated random monster lists for various areas on the
Wilderlands City State regional map.  The monsters are pulled from
AD&D, ACKS, Gamma World 1e, Metamorphosis Alpha,
Runequest (Classic), Warhammer FRP 1e, Empire of the Petal Throne 1e,
Labyrinth Lord, Barsoom, The Dark Eye 3e,  Traveller (GDW), Carcosa
and Infernum RPGs. I’ll post monster conversions under the ACKS group
as I need to write them up.

Characters

Watseka - Mage (Elementalist)

Sydney Harcurt - Bard

Tlichnolli - Fighter (former gladiator)

Perpetua Maria de Rosario - Blade dancer (Cleric/Fighter class for those
of you not familiar with ACKS)

---

Diary of Sydney Harcurt

Note: Month names are from the Commoner's Calendar in City State
of the Invincible Overlord. Names of the day are from Ancient Athens lunar
calendar.

Portly Pomp. 8th waning  Met with the employer Tlichnolli’s cousin had
set up for us at the Bloody Foam (what a dump).  Turned out to be Moitus,
a priest of the temple across the street. He wants us to deliver a box to
another priest up in Anvil.  Perpetua turned into a little prig, almost
queered the deal for us. She wants us to detour to Byrny to get the blessing
of some senior priestess, at least it’s not far off our road.  Took us hours to
get over to the Grand Gate, the merchant quarter was packed. Then some
constables shook us down, said they were looking for a shield stolen from
Hellbridge. I feel sorry for any idiots who stole from that bunch.  We’re
spending the night at the Crab. Earned 2 silver

Portly Pomp, 7th waning Watseka was attacked by a horned serpent just
outside of Darkfield, her face is horribly burned.  I thought it might be a
basilisk, but the farmers went out to look and told us it was a snake they
call a “Horned Spitter”.  Brought in 7 silver

Portly Pomp, 6th waning  Staying at the Bottle and Grimoire, Watseka is
resting.

Portly Pomp, 5th waning  Her face isn’t healing well.  Snarzak the Stern
came by and gave us 20 gold for killing the serpent before it preyed on
any of the villagers.

Portly Pomp, 4th waning  She’s still not better.  Went out this morning and
saw that a house near the wall was damaged by a rock last night.  Asking
around, I heard that it belongs to Durmnos the painter, who refused to do
some work for a giant.

Portly Pomp, 3rd waning  She’s up and around, but her left ear is ragged
and her face is scabbed over.  We decided to leave in the morning, we should
be able to get past Haghill, maybe all the way to the ford on the Eorlbane.
Earned 3 silver

Portly Pomp, 2nd waning Long walk through the hills, but made it to the ford.

Portly Pomp, Old & New Walked through the moors, no sign of the
Moonrakers or the famous Roc said to hunt the moors.  Camped east of the
Moorwood, too dark to start through. Looks like Watseka’s face will be scarred
forever.

Yellow Moon-Dog, New Through the wood and back into the hills.  Spending
the night at Haldon’s farm. Warm, if fragrant in the hayloft over the oxen, but a
good meal in exchange for a couple of the epics.  We should reach Rorystone
Vale tomorrow.

Yellow Moon-Dog, 2nd rising We were just leaving Haldon’s, when we heard
a commotion.  We found Haldon standing over Wili the cowherd; a group of
seven goblins had ambushed him and were stealing the oxen.  We managed
to kill the goblins; Watseka killed four of them by herself, two without any
magic!
Tlichnolli and I are pretty banged up, so we’re staying here a couple of days,
that will give Perpetua a chance to say prayers over Wili’s grave.

Lunch Bag of Holding

     The flawed creation of an apprentice wizard attempting to create a Bag of Holding that would disguise it's contents as innocuous objects a thief would overlook.    The apprentice succeeded - sort of....

     The Lunch Bag of Holding appears as a small brown paper bag, wrinkled and having a large grease spot bleeding through.  The bag can hold any object that can fit through it's relatively small opening (3" x 5" / 7.62cm x 12.7cm) at negligible weight, after 50lbs (22.7kg) are reached there is a 5% chance for each subsequent pound (.45kg) of items placed in the bag that it will rupture, cascading it's contents over the floor at the next inconvenient moment.
     Items placed in the bag will be transformed according to the following rules.

Money
    Standard copper pieces are transformed into smaller copper coins roughly one quarter the size of the original.  The smaller coins are also only worth one quarter of a regular copper coin.
    Other coins are transformed into silver pieces, approximately 2/3 the weight of a standard silver piece.  Due to debasement of the silver by an alloy of copper, the new coin is only worth one half of a standard silver piece.  Silver pieces are transformed on a one to one ratio, electrum at two new silver coins for each electrum piece.  Gold pieces are transformed at a four to one ratio and platinum at a twenty to one ratio.

Items
     All other items stored in the bag are transformed based on a percentile roll on the following table.

Roll	Item appearing
01-05	Peanut Butter and Jelly Sandwich
06-09	Apple
10-27	Package of potato chips
28-32	Turkey sandwich
33-34	Chocolate chip cookies
35-39	Bologna sandwich
40-43	Banana
44-48	Cheese sandwich
49-52	Orange
53-57	Tuna salad sandwich
58-59	Peanut butter cookies
60-64	Ham sandwich
65-68	Celery sticks
69-73	Egg salad sandwich
74-75	Chocolate cake
76-80	Salami sandwich
81-84	Pear
85-89	Chicken salad sandwich
90-91	Fruit pie
92-96	Vegemite sandwich
97-00	Carrot sticks

Rural Dwellings

     The countryside is not all orc-infested wilderness, individual farms are encountered not only near castles and villages, but also tucked away by themselves in fertile areas. However, they are built with an eye towards defense of the family and livestock, and are able to hold off a casual raiding party for hours; although a determined war party will triumph in the end. Generally, the inhabitants will have reached some accommodation with any intelligent monsters in the area, such as trading chickens for pelts with the local goblin tribe. 
     Smart adventurers will look for these isolated dwellings as the sun begins to set; much better to have a roof over your head and walls around you than camp under the stars or rain clouds. See for example Fritz Leiber's The Jewels in the Forest. 

Here I present three variations of combination house barns (using the American term; house byre or byre dwelling for the English) superimposed on the traditional five foot grid.

Dartmoor Longhouse 1.

This rude dwelling is a single structure with the family at one end and the livestock at the other. The walls are usually dry stone and the roof is thatch. Inside it is dark and smokey, as the there is no chimney or flue for the open hearth. Always built on a slope, the livestock are kept on the downhill side of the building where a small culvert drains the foul slurry away through the wall. This plan can be used to represent a variety of primitive house barns like the Scottish blackhouse or French maison longue.

Dartmoor Longhouse 2

Externally the same, the interior has been made more habitable by adding posts to support sleeping, storage and haylofts; accessible by ladders. The hearth has become a ventilated fireplace, making the interior less smokey at the cost of reduced light and heat. A manger has been added for feeding the livestock.

More about Dartmoor longhouses here

Low Saxon Farmhouse

More prosperous than the longhouses, this building contains separate entries and rooms for people to sleep in; as well as stables for cows and horses and a indoor chicken coop. Pigs are kept outside. The hearth is open again, but the thatched roof will usually have an 'Owl hole' for the smoke to rise through.  The walls are timber framed and filled with wattle and daub or brick.

More about Low Saxon Houses here

Pseudo-Basilisk conversion for ACKS

Horned Serpent or Pseudo-Basilisk

% In Lair  None

Dungeon Enc: Nest 1d6

Wilderness Enc: Nest 1d6

Alignment: Neutral

Movement: 90’(30’)

Armor Class: 2

Hit Dice: 3*

Attacks: 1 spit

Damage: 1d3 + 1d4 CH loss

Save: F1

Morale: -1

Treasure Type:  None

XP: 65

A six foot long, fat, greenish-brown snake with a yellow horn on its’ nose. It
attacks by spitting acid with a range of 6 feet.  Anyone hit by the acid must
make a Save vs Breath or take an additional 1d4 Charisma loss. The
Charisma loss is permanent unless the character washes with soap and
water immediately afterwards, in which case the Charisma loss is reduced
by 1 point every two days as the skin heals.

A successful Beast Friendship, Knowledge Natural History or Naturalism
check will correctly identify the creature and know the requirements to
avoid the permanent Charisma loss.  A failure will leave the character
believing that it is a real basilisk. A successful Loremastery check will not
identify it as a pseudo-basilisk, but the character will know it does not
match the description of basilisks of legend.

 Based on the pseudo-basilisk from The Dark Eye (3rd Edition)

Fascinating but flawed.

Anyone doing a historical political or trading game should have this in ther Appendix N.

The Roman Empire and the Indian Ocean by Raoul McLaughlin

   A well written account of the foreign trade of the Roman Empire through Egypt and the Red Sea. It explores the products associated with it's trading partners, the difficulties merchants faced in obtaining these products and the internal and external taxation policies effecting foreign trade.

While concentrating on the goods obtained from East Africa, the Arabian Peninsula and the Indian subcontinent, it book also includes valuable information on balm from Judea, the Nile to Red Sea caravan route supporting the Indian Ocean trade and the Roman trade goods sent to the east.

   Well organized, the book starts with tables of common abbreviations, comparisons of Greek, Egyptian, and Roman currencies and estimate of Roman government expenditures, especially the costs of maintaining the legions. He follows this up with an enlightening description of the various trade routes before moving into chapters discussing the trade with the individual regions and countries. He relies mostly on Pliny and the Periplus of Erythean Sea for these areas, but adds insights from a number of modern secondary sources, as well as nuggets of information and colorful illustrations from other sources from antiquity, such as Martial, Philostratus and Strabo. The book ends with a brief discussion of the Antonin embassy to China, the authors conclusions and appendices showing the author's economic calculations.

   His overall thesis is that many of the Roman provinces, such as Gaul and Britania did not produce enough tax revenue to support the legions stationed within their bounds. That these local shortfalls were made up by taxation on foreign trade. That the foreign trade was imbalanced in that Rome was exporting bullion acquired from previous conquests and mining in exchange for luxury consumables and that the foreign trade collapsed due to running out of bullion and this in turn caused the collapse of or significantly contributed to the collapse of the Empire.

   McLaughlin is a gifted author who writes in a clear, engaging style. He takes what could easily be a dry scholarly dissertation and creates a readable narrative, supported by copious footnotes. I find that his conclusion, while plausible, is not convincing for a number of reasons.

   First is a stylistic reason concerning his footnotes. There are many, but he only uses the an abbreviation of the name of the work, never including the edition nor in the case of sources from Antiquity, the translation if he used them. This makes researching his footnotes a matter of deduction and selecting an edition and translation. For example, the very first footnote is simply Res Gesta, 15. I can infer that he means the funeral inscription of the Emperor Augustus - Res Gesta Div Augusti, as opposed to the Res Gestae of Ammianus Marcellinus or other such works. I used the translation available at the Internet Classics Archive (http://classics.mit.edu/Augustus/deeds.html).

   While this might seem minor, his whole conclusion rests on the statement “Pliny confirms over 100 million sesterces of Roman bullion was exported from the Empire every year.” The footnote supporting that statement reads Pliny 12.41. Now, we can infer that by Pliny, McLaughlin means Pliny the Elder Natural History as the likely reference. Looking up editions we find that Henry T Riley's translation (H. G. Bohn, 1855) is available at www.perseus.tufts.edu and Philomon Holland's 1601 translation (Desfontaines, Paris, 1829) is available at penelope.uchicago.edu . Holland's translation can not be the source of the assertion, as he does not have 41 chapters in Book 12. Now in Riley's translation we find Pliny writes “At the very lowest computation, India, the Seres, and the Arabian Peninsula, withdraw from our empire one hundred millions of sesterces every year “, looking for a similar statement in Holland's translation we find Book 12, Chapter 18 “ India, the Seres, and that demy-Iland of Arabia, standeth us at the least in an hundred millions of Sesterces, and so much fetch they from us in good money“. This one does mention money, which would have included bullion in it's composition, but what is the original Latin text? From bibleotheca Augusta (www.hs-augsburg.de) we find : “minimaque computatione miliens centena milia sestertium annis omnibus India et Seres et paeninsula illa imperio nostro adimunt” Which tracks with Riley's translation much better than Holland's.

   “Sesterium” referring to money would indicate the large brass coins worth ¼ of a silver Denarius or 1/100 of a gold Aureus. However it's most common use in Latin literature is as a unit of accounting, indicating value. As brass is not an alloy of precious metals, then assuming it to refer to the coin itself would not support McLaughlin's conclusion. As a unit of accounting, we then need to determine if goods other than silver and gold coins were exported from Rome. And the author helpfully supplies us with multiple references to the export of red coral, wool and grain to India. Thi conclusively disproves the author's interpolation of bullion into Pliny's statement. While gold and silver coins, particularly the high quality early imperial coins were used for commerce, we are unable to demonstrate the proportion of the trade value they accounted for. Therefore, we can nly conclude that McLaughlin's contention is plausible, not certain.

   One other flaw, that contributes to taking a close look at his conclusion is his unquestioning use of the legendary Syracusia as an example of the technology available and used by Roman merchant ships. Our source for information about the Syracusa is Athenaeus of Naucratis text Deipnosophistae (http://www.attalus.org/old/athenaeus5b.html#c40) – also known as the world's first cookbook. It recounts a series of tales told at banquets; in the case of the Syracusia or Hieron's ship; it is told third hand repeating a tale told by a man named Moschion.

   Now the Deipnosophistae was written in the early third century AD and Hieron lived in the early third century BC; so any information has passed down generations before it was written down. What caught my attention was the description of a device called a raven “ iron ravens, as they were called, all round the ship, which, being shot forth by engines, seized on the vessels of the enemy, and brought them round so as to expose them to blows “; I immediately recognized the term and knew it to be wrong. For the raven or corvus was a Roman invention from the Punic Wars described clearly by Polybius as a hinged gangplank with a spike on the end that was dropped on enemy ships in order to facilitate boarding by Roman infantry. Quite sensible in galley based sea battles – completely useless as a defense against pirates as McLaughlin postulates. The last thing a merchant wants to do is attach his vessel with a pirate ship full of armed men. I then started looking at the description of the ship itself and started laughing at the idea of towers with rocks and weights to drop down on other ships, as well as gardens and tile roofed pavilions on the deck – for so much weight above the waterline will raise reduce the stability of the vessel and increase the risk of capsizing. As happened with the Vasa in 1628. The ship was said to have been built in two sections which were launched separately – unlikely but possible. I served on the USS Tarawa (LHA-1) which was constructed in that manner and had a step in the middle of the passageway where the builder had misaligned the decks. Having been launched separately, by necessity it would have needed to be moored somewhere while the halves were joined, yet Athenaeus goes on to relate that the ship was too large for an harbor in Sicily so it was given to Ptolomey in Egypt. I've seen two estimates for the size of the ship 55 or 110 meters; I've also driven an Anchorage class LSD (169 meters) into Syracuse. The Grand Harbor although less sheltered than the little harbor, has always been of ample size. The more sheltered little harbor is still almost 500 meters from it's base to the current breakwater. Such uncritical acceptance by the author detracts from the work.

   I've pointed out the flaws in the book, but it's still a worthwhile read for anyone interested in the Roman Empire and I recommend it as a launching point into the sources so the reader can draw their own conclusions.

Review – Beneath Kra'adumek by Venger As'Nas Satanis

     Kra'adumek is a preview of Venger's upcoming Cha'alt kickstarter. He offered it as a free download a couple of weeks ago and I grabbed it off DriveThru.

     A small dungeon, consisting of 17 separate encounter areas, it's full of unique monsters and Venger's trademark weirdness – with hardly any sleaze.

     He provides a quick overview of the Cha'alt background and Kra'dumek in particular, including Magical Mishap tables, details the PC's will know, rules for advantage and recommended charcater numbers and levels. The Noteworthy Details section could use some logical organization – it's an ordered list of all of the above. Not a big impact in this product, as it's only one page, but would be difficult to follow if it went on for two or more pages.

     The adventure hook is straight forward, the characters and other citizens have all been mind controlled – in super HypnoToad style – for years. That control has been interrupted, so it's time for some payback. This works well for a one shot and may be the recommended intro to Cha'alt (I don't know). I could see, in an episodic campaign, having the characters come to their senses there with no idea how they arrived. But overall, I would treat it as a one shot if you don't have Cha'alt.

     The encounters are well written, giving the DM plenty of info to extemporize role play when applicable. There are a couple of encounters that will wipe the party out if they go into the wrong place – there's warning of trouble ahead, but hack and slash parties will bull ahead into deadly trouble. Because that's my kind of group, I think I'd modify the hook a bit and have the characters trying to rescue the sacrifices or prisoners in the more 'civilized' area of the dungeon.

     New spells and weapons are well detailed and he has a nifty new (well different from The Isles of Purple Haunted Putrescence) stat block format. But I have to assume he's using an ascending AC system as it's never called out. Of course, I don't really care what the numbers are there, it's been years since I last ran an adventure using the game it was written for. I just convert them to suit.

     Overall, a solid little dungeon. But I'm deducting a skull because it won't be easy to drop into another campaign and the information organization issues.

Barbarian Emperor by Jon Mollison

Alexander Macris has been posting some publicity for this volume, so I decided to give it a shot ($2.99 on Kindle), as I have been looking for something new to amuse myself for the last few months.

Superficially, it's another sword and sandal fantasy story, albeit one in an ACKS friendly setting. I bulled through the inauspicious beginning; wherein the old Barsoom trope of the hero being mysteriously translated to another world gets a trotted out. As the new setting is an ersatz-Roman Empire, it was doubly inauspicious to me, as I am extremely well read in the history of the Republic and Empire; not just having read the popular histories and even Mommsen's seminal works, but having dug up writings on demographic patterns, city planning, and Roman religion (pity Varro's books didn't survive outside of Augustine's hatchet job refutation). Since I didn't watch the series, I can't say how much the story was influenced by Spartacus: Blood and Sand; but it certainly has more to do with that than the writings of Polybius or Caesar.

Then the action started, the pace of the story picked up and the author began to weave different threads into a tapestry, every scene advancing the hero's story. The tale became increasingly more enthralling as it moved away from ersatz-Rome to a unique borderland. Pulpy like Robert E. Howard's stories but in a different, self-consistent and suitably mysterious way. Exposition of the characters thought processes provide reasonable rationales for decisions, both good and bad; and almost as importantly are concise, setting up the next action scene. No spending half a book lost in the fens outside of Mordor's front door in this story!

Three plot twists that caught me off guard. One I should have seen coming and one where I completely swallowed the hook. Well played! In the end the hero gets a girl and a crown ... and I found myself wanting to know what happens next. That to me is one of the marks of a good story, when it leaves me hungry to know what's in the next chapter.

I won't give out any spoilers, you can always drop me a line after you've read the book if you want to know what I missed until the end.

Over all, I give it four skulls out of five and recommend you pick it up for a couple of hours of light reading pleasure.