Search results

There are eighty-nine chemical elements and four spiritual elements. The spiritual elements are white, black, cyan, and scarlet. White is hot and wet, black is cold and dry, cyan is cold and wet, scarlet is hot and dry.

Yep. With a bit of cheese or fish and some pickled cabbage, it'd be enough for two days. If you wished for wheat instead, you'd get perhaps enough for four days. How many XP have you got there, pard? And don't you think they might be better used to break the siege?

Use-per-day items used to be the way to go for cheap effects. An apron of 'Create Food x3 per day', or even a chef's hat of 'Heroes' Feast x3' per day' is worth investigating. Yep. If there were an alternative to agriculture, there wouldn't be agriculture. These refugees need 300 tons of food...

More accurtely still, transfer of momentum per unit time is 'force'. Impulse equals forces times time (or more accurately, the integral of force through time), and is equal to the change in momentum. You remember those car safety engineers you mentioned. I used to work for one. He described his...

That's right. It takes a given amount of energy to produce a given deformation in a given material. Sure, a bullet of high energy may miss a vital organ. And a slow-moving train may exert only forces that are less than the strengths of the materials of a body, so that one is pushed out of the...

Those two things work out to be exactly the same. Do the math. After falling for t seconds at an acceleration of a ms^-2, an object has velocity v = at, and has travelled a distance d = 0.5 at^2. Having velocity v, the object has kinetic energy E = 0.5 mv^2 = 0.5 m a^2 t^2 = m a 0.5 a t^2 = m a...

Until they reach terminal velocity, yes. Certainly. It would be too bizarre if they behaved differently from objects with which the players are familiar. I'll assume that you mean 'what are they?' They don't represent things because they aren't symbols. No-one is quite sure, because they...

Don't let it develop into a habit of reckoning not on consequences, nor breed an expectation of getting away with nonsense. I think you have to play this straight. Give the soloist all the XP he lucked into, which will leave him 1 XP short of gaining two levels. Give him all the junk the NPC...

I concur. I find D&D unable to do a satisfactory job at emulating anything not derived from D&D. I'm happy to play D&D as D&D, but it certainly doesn't do everything.

Indeed: the study of Greek originals in the West did not resume until the second quarter of the 13th Century, when Robert Grosseteste was chancellor of Oxford. It is possible that Greek texted looted from Constantinople by the Fourth Crusade were crucial. But Islam is hardly an example of a...

Particularly, bread made out of grain that had been infected with ergot. I'm not convinced, though the effects of ergotism are interesting, and may be involved in various episodes of religious hysteria. Ergotamine is a powerful psychoactive toxin, and ergotism has some very peculiar symptoms...

Not just the less-educated. Nearly all of mediaeval medicine was an application of the magical beliefs of the Greeks and Romans. In fact, reading about the history of medicine it strikes me that the fantasy stereotype of the wizard (tomes, speaking words of power, weird ingredients, astrology...

I understand your appreciation for the great variety that SF offers, but I think you might have got a little bit carried away with your rhetoric, because there are certainly things that are known to be impossible. For example, we will never come across a race of primitive giants using 100-kg...

I think that perhaps you are overlooking the difference between 'real' and 'realistic'. To be realistic, a fiction only has to resemble what we believe is real, not be what actually is real. The point of 'hard' science fiction is not that it accurately predicts what we will find when and if we...

G'day A lot of people these days seem to use the phrase 'internecine conflict' as though it meant 'internal conflict'. It doesn't. 'Internecine conflict' is a fight to the death. The Latin source of the word, spelled variously 'internecnus' and 'internecvus', meant “fought to the death...

I'm not sure that that is true. The D&D alignment system gives a much wider latitude to violence than the techings of Christ permit, and completely overlooks some issues that Christ taught were very important: lying, divorce (evil), forgiveness (good).

Is that right? I never heard before that Athena was goddess of the hunt. I thought Artemis was goddess of the hunt. But then, I really can't say what Athena was goddess of (apart from keeping your head when all around you are losing theirs), so perhaps that's right. The explanation that she was...

<applause!> Consider yourself comprehensively plagiarised.

I don't see anything inherently evil about eating people who are already dead. It is not a healthy practice. And I would be too squeamish to do it myself, I think. But I don't think it is evil as such. Killing people to eat, however, is murder. As for immolating humans as a religious ritual...

In the circumstances specified I would build a huge mechanical (and therefore immortal) robot god to protect my people, populate it with an elite corps of dwarvish mechanics and artificers, and give them an Operator's Manual explaing how to maintain, adjust, and repair the god.