December 2015 – Book and Sword

No Words Left

A Schludernser street scene. Photo by Sean Manning, May 2015. I find that after this week I do not have any words left. Rather than fake it, this week I thought I would post some Vinschgauer and West Coast fauna. Some BC fauna. Photography by Sean Manning... Continue reading: No Words Left

The Reconstruction of an Iron Age Building

A path running through light woods with a building at the side with a lower story built from fieldstone and an upper story built from logs with their ends crisscrossed at the corners — A Rhaetian house reconstructed on the original foundations at the Ganglegg. Near Schluderns, Vinschgau, in Italy. Photo by Sean Manning, May 2015.

If you head up the valley of the stream which runs below Schloss Churburg, cross the river a short way past the wading pool which the Vinschgauers built for bathers who want enough water to get wet in in the summer drought or won’t dare the slippery stones of the streambed, and ascend the path which snakes up the right bank amidst jingling cowbells, you eventually reach an archaeological park on the mound called the Ganglegg. Aside from the uncovered foundations and picknick tables and aluminum signs, the designers of the park also decided to reconstruct a handful of buildings. But that decision was not without controversy amongst the archaeologists.

Some thoughts on “GURPS Fourth Edition Low-Tech”

Cover of GURPS 4th Edition Low-Tech illustrated with Greek hoplites in combat, a First Nations man in bearskin cloak standing in front of a fire with a spear, and an eighteenth-century ship firing a broadside

William H. Stoddard, with Peter dell’Orto, Dan Howard, and Matt Riggsby, GURPS Fourth Edition Low-Tech. Steve Jackson Games: Austin, TX, 2010. Link to publishers’ online store.

Its a hard time for small publishers. On November the 12th Steve Jackson Games released its annual Report to the Stakeholders and announced that in a year with their second highest revenues ever they could not afford to print their fully typeset GURPS Discworld. Apparently they have a much harder time selling their roleplaying games than their card and board games. I think that is a shame, because many of their books would be valuable outside the small number of people who play games with the GURPS rules. One of these books is GURPS Fourth Edition Low-Tech.

Tromp l’oeil

Armour consisting of a crested burgonet with beak and small cheek-pieces and a breastplate with an upper breast embossed with a mask and floral patterns and a middle and lower chest embossed with scales — A burgonet and cuirass alla antica in the State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg. No information from label available. Photo by Sean Manning, September 2015.

Trying to interpret armour in art is not a new project. By the beginning of the sixteenth century at the latest, Italian armourers were looking at Roman coins and sculpture and paintings (and perhaps the odd scrap of bronze pulled from a tomb) and trying to decide how to give their customers their own Roman armour. In this case, the armourer looked at one of the statues of a Roman emperor wearing a form-fitting breastplate of scales with embossed decoration, and tried to imitate it with a few nods to the taste of their own day. But not all is as it seems.

Month: December 2015