So I am working on a low magic D&D setting based around 16th to 17th Century Europe. I'm not trying to make it 100% historically accurate or anything, but are there any resources you fa/tg/uys could direct me to as to what sort of weapons, armors, etc would be available at the time?
Like, I feel like Mail Armor is probably not available - would it basically just be padded clothing and plate? Did they even bother using shields, or were they just using bucklers?
Obviously, given that the PCs would be Adventurers and not soldiers in a pike and shot formation, they might be using different gear, maybe bows and crossbows for stealth purposes? I figured maybe at some point in its history SOMEBODY has to have made a renaissance or pike and shot era gear list or campaign setting I can crib from.
Lamentations of the Flame Princess is quite literaly D&D in the 16h and 17th centuries
Anthony Howard
Thanks, I'll check it out.
Lincoln Mitchell
Check alternative wargaming general and ask for material of the pike and shot era. They have a lot of stuff
Charles Cruz
Full plate was on the way out but people still wore half plate and three-quarter plate. The fully enclosed late Medieval helmets like armets and close helms had been replaced by open helms like the morion (as seen on conquistadores). Shields were, as you say, generally just bucklers, sometimes also called targets.
Crossbows were already obsolete in the 1500s and the guns of the 1600s were better still. Guns were actually easier to make than crossbows too. While bows and crossbows never entirely vanished, guns were much more common. Even bandits and brigands used pistols by preference. Blunderbusses, also called dragons, were used both mounted and on foot. Grenades appeared in the 1600s and they look exactly like the classic cartoon bomb, an iron sphere with a burning fuse.
Rapiers, daggers of various sizes, broadswords and halberds would be your go-to melee weapons. Pikes are impractical outside of a mass formation.
Carson Bell
Renaissance D100, or it's daughter game Clockwork and Chivalry are all about playing in the 1600s.
Check out the C&C supplement Divers & Sundry if you can for full details, otherwise the free R-D100 corebook for the short version of what kit is used in the 17th century.
Pistols were more expensive and sophisticated than guns. Only reiters and offers had them. Your average firearm is a matchlock arquebus. Pistols had to be wheellock to be practical.
Noah Lewis
>at roughly 60 meters a minute
Bentley Bell
>Did they even bother using shields Yes. The primary non-gunpowder weapon of the day was the pike, of course, but armies at the time often had at least one kind of specialist soldier with a shorter, handier weapon- a halberd, a zweihander, a sword and shield, et cetera. In a actual history these guys would be fighting in with the pike squares, but a pike is only a good weapon if you're surrounded by other guys with pikes while a sword and shield is obviously a lot more useful by yourself. Hernan Cortes' troops were mostly equipped with sword and shield, with guys with arquebuses and crossbows mixed in (the crossbow was still a valid military weapon at that time.)
The archetypal shield at the time was the rotella, which is all-metal and convex (think the size and shape of Captain America's shield) and used with a side-sword or rapier.
>generally just bucklers, sometimes also called targets.
Targets/Rondellos etc are wholly separate from bucklers in both design and use. Targets were much larger, strapped to the arm, and some even proof from shot.
Mail armor was very much avaible. The most fancy full plate armor that you see in fiction are not even medieval at all, they belong to this era. That said, by the end of it, it was becoming obsolete. More and more of it was sacryfing protection in some bits (the legs) to protect the chest and head better.
Look at Warhammer 2e for Reneissance stuff to steal
Oliver Phillips
Poles and Russians keep using mail for another century.
Aaron Bailey
>Pistols were more expensive and sophisticated than guns.
This is objectively stupid. A pistol is just a shorter firearm.
>Only reiters and offers had them.
I assume you mean officers, but then you're forgetting that targeteers as seen in and were issued them regularly.
>Pistols had to be wheellock to be practical.
Depends on your job, and there was also the option of snaphauce. On horseback? Sure, a self contained lock system makes sense. On foot, you could deal with pic related the same way a musketeer did. No big deal.
Literal tons of it got sent to the new world. It stops chert arrows and such just fine.
It isnt when most pistols would be in the hands of cavalry which demands wheellock mechanism
Justin Perez
Best RPG setting
Gavin Baker
Did you read my post at all?
>Depends on your job, and there was also the option of snaphauce. On horseback? Sure, a self contained lock system makes sense. On foot, you could deal with pic related the same way a musketeer did. No big deal.
Further more, its not like they didn't use what was available until better tech was cheaper. Pic is a painting of a skirmish from the 30 year war, where the cavalryman is using a matchlock pistol with a sear bar trigger.
Helmet: +1 AC Gambeson: 11 AC + dex Brigandine 13 AC, max +2 from dex AC, disadvantage on sneaking Chain Hauberk 15 AC, disadvantage on sneaking Breastplate +3 AC, max +2 from dex AC, disadvantage on sneaking, can be worn over a Gambeson Shield: +2 AC
This was in a campaign set in a megadungeon, and the party started as prisoners so I had some control over their ability to minmax their AC. That said maybe you'd want to drop a breastplate down to +2 AC. The sneaking penalty only makes sense if you're crawling or have to quickly flatten against a wall.
Helmets were useful but I made up a lot of other specialized headgear that was useful and legitimate competition for your head slot. Out of combat usees were good because a lot of the campaign was also running from hoards of zombies and trying to find ways around them instead of fighting them. Like the players knew they would die really easily (i.e. Church Hat: instead of +1 to AC gives +1 to insight checks, commoners like you more)
Also in that same campaign everyone had their HP capped at level 3, and a martial die they could use once per combat (or spend an action to recharge). You could use it to parry or riposte, and also I wrote a few premade abilities or let players come up with their own (i.e. draw cut: spend it at the beginning of combat to make an immediate attack at the top of initiative; old shoe: spend it to make an unarmed attack as a bonus action; surprise dagger: draw a dagger with a free hand as a bonus action and make an attack with it). Enemies also had things like this if they were skilled. Another hat was Duelist's Helmet: instead of +1 AC gives +2 to AC to any parries you make.
Uh I could go on there were other random changes. They aren't about realism though. Sorry I wrote a lot, got kind of nostalgic.
if I was going to do it all over again I'd convert everything to 2d6 instead of d20 (I started doing this but gave up).
The foundation of a lot of early modern period armor was the buff coat, a long coat of durable leather. Worn alone it was of limited protection, though it did make it harder to cut someone.
After that, armor weight was mostly determined by how much plate you wanted to wear. For those going light a minimalist helmet, thin breastplate and nothing else offered good protection at modest cost and weight. A heavier breastplate, supplemented with other armor components could create a very protective armor harness.
Well its going to go way out of the realm of realistic campaigns, but it was set in actually a mega castle which included a huge dungeon. The players had been for various reasons captured before the campaign began, and were to be eaten at a huge cannibalistic feast held by the nobility of the castle, who were celebrating the birth of a new noble. This noble ended up for reasons being a new god, and his birth caused the dead to begin to rise from their graves (contained mostly rotting in the dungeons or in graveyard greenhouses in the castle, but they didnt stay contained for long). So it was a romp through hallways, barricading doors, looking for short cuts, trying to save peasants, stuff like that, complete with some helpful castle ghosts, undead knights, gargoyles, secret passages, etc.
It was.... kind of a disaster but I think it was kind of fun. I'm not really that good of a DM behind the screen, I'm better at just making stuff up but not so hot at putting it all together coherently.
We ran a one shot of an all-martial party versus a Necromancer and his undead minions, with the firearms from the DMG, and everyone really liked it. I mean, there are still evil sorcerers and stuff, so maybe it isn't low fantasy, I don't know how else to describe it. I've been pitching it as "Dark Sun style sorcerer kings set in 1600s Germany" and everybody was down for it.
William Gonzalez
Current plan is to do something sort of like the Witcher, where the PCs are professional monster slayers who go out from the heavily fortified city states to slay creatyres using their wits and, whenever possible, lots of black powder.
Austin Anderson
>Worn alone it was of limited protection, though it did make it harder to cut someone. You're entirely right, however that does understate things somewhat. A leather buff coat by itself (and even more so a gambeson, which would still be in use at the time) gives a pretty fair amount of protection and could very easily save you from a sword slash. It's a big reason why the swords of the period were mostly the long and pointy sort.
Against another equivalent soldier intending to stab you with a weapon designed to get through it, a buff coat by itself is obviously less than ideal, but it would definitely be a fair amount of protection in a setting where you might more likely get attacked by a kobold half your size with an axe or an animal trying to claw you. Some of the conquistadors dropped their breastplates in favor of soft armor for the same reason.
Easton Reed
I haven't done much outside of the Not!Germany region, but I'm actually thinking it's gonna be something like
> Sled Dog Riding Viking Inuits to the north > Germans below them > Cossaks/Mongols to their east, with further east being some vague Russian Empire type region > "The Sword Lands" aka the not!Mediterranean/Middle East which connects the northern continent to the southern one (huge trade crossroads every one fights over, hence the name)
> The Southern Continent, which will basically be Darkest Africa, but with Azteca in the Jungles and Apaches and such in the desert regions.
Logan Morris
I remember watching a video by scholagladiatoria where he reads a passage from a book where a swordsman in the 19th century(I think) fails to cut through a thick winter coat. There's a reason why gambesons were so good. Thick clothing is no joke.
Christopher Reyes
Hey dude. Your from VA and a bohurt fighter right? Can we get in touch? My team captain from NoVa wants to get into contact with the southern VA fighters.
Adam Long
>Thick clothing is no joke. Which is why, historically, you tend to see curved cutting swords used in hot places where people wear thin materials and straight stabbing swords in places where they wear thicker clothing. Even a thick coat not intended as armor at all can save you from a sword slash. A purpose-made gambeson is actually very effective as armor, which is why they were so popular for so long.
Soft armor tends to get overlooked a bit in fiction, though, where swords are treated as basically lightsabers so the idea of "cloth armor" seems silly.
Easton Garcia
Mount anf blade fire and sword... Great pc game but you dont have to play it... Actually set in that era so just look up wiki has most units and weapons etc from that period
Matthew Evans
> Western formations > Surrounded by mangas What did they mean by this?
