Sunday, October 14, 2012

Simple Pack Camel

Here's an attempt at a simple list based encumbrance for dromedary camels.  With 55 slots that are roughly 7.5 pounds you get a little over 400 pounds.  This is an average-- bigger camels would carry more and most camels might carry more but for limited distances.

I like that is sort of in scale with the mules.  Players should easily see that the camel can carry more.  This will be harder to continue if we get a creature that needs more than a page for all its slots.  I suppose I could do two sides of the page or something.

With the slots divided up into groups, players with lots of beasts of burden won't have to track every little thing, they could just have certain supplies in chests or bags that are kept track of and put on the beasts loaded, pretty much like a real expedition would.

7 comments:

  1. I was watching a television show called Nature's Giants, it's where they dissect a discuss big animals. One episode the dissected a camel. They showed video footage of a camel carry a compact car. I don't know how they heck they put it on the camel, but it didn't seem to have any trouble walking. Of course the engine could have been removed, but still, that's quite impressive.

    Are you going to do pack elephants? :)

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  2. 2nd the elephant request (howdahs! and shooting from elephant-back).

    Also, I thought you were going to add animal HPs or something on these pages?

    A note, camels didn't take in Arizona because of differing types of sand, their feet didn't like. Probably would be other issues, so they're only really useful in some specific geographical/campaign areas.

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  3. And damn have captchas gotten hard. o_O

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  4. Thanks for the interesting comments, both of you. I added a new post with an elephant and more.

    Sorry, anon, I thought I'd turned those off when I allowed anonymous posting. Anyway, I think they're off now. I hate those things.

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  5. I can see the reasoning for keeping out the spambots. I dislike the spam, and trying to whack-a-mole with 'em w/o captchas, has to be a super-pain-in-the-butt...

    But, I think people should allow a way for me to contact them (emailL hey, there's this *WHOLE* internet service devoted to communication, that will allow people to report link-rot... *sigh*), or a random, drive-by-post. No I don't want another blogger, ID, gmail, or some other stupid service's password to remember...

    Thanks for the stuff you do :)

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  6. my favourite stat to quote is that according to the Cairo geniza documents, pack camels can reliably carry half a ton (so you can make half ton bundles to be transported by whatever random camel and be confident they'll be OK).

    This is a really interesting approach. I love the next post with different animals too. No, I don't know what an elephant can carry... should be in Mughal or Siamese records, but alas those are still not well documented in English.

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  7. Hmm, half a ton? I'm off by a lot then, but all the web sources I was looking at didn't go that high for travel, maybe these were short, in-port stints? This page:

    http://www.silkroadfoundation.org/newsletter/vol3num1/7_bactrian.php

    has Bactrians at about 600 pounds, and I understand they are bigger and stronger in general than dromedaries.

    I think for the elephant I'll go for the nice round 2,000 pounds= ~8 armored riders or 4 manifest sheets worth of stuff.

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