A darker age armour

MRQII Armour.[Revised]

• wiki

Body coverage

• Head – Skull, face and neck. 19-20
• Arms – Shoulders through hands 15-18
• Chest - 13-14
• Abd – Abdomen, hips and groin 9-12
• Legs – Thighs through feet 1-8.

• There are considerd to be six locations for encumberance purposes – the head, the chest, the arms, the abdomen and each leg.

Base encumberance is per location. Complexity of armour for smaller areas accounts for increased enc in those locations.

Armour ‘type’

• Half Armour. Reduce ap to half or nearest above (60% for Mail, for instance)
• Part Armour Reduce armour protection and Enc by ¾ or nearest (80% for mail, for instance. Round by AP and enc %’s as in the tables below.
• Full armour. As is.

Materials:

• All materials may be altered in weight to produce lighter or heavier armour, with corresponding changes in AP and Enc. They have been set to predetermined changes to make it work for the system optimum armour types – assume this is the equivalent of knowing the tradeoffs in the armoury business and how to build for them.

• Flexible armours can be worn under [or sometimes over] other armour types.

• Hard or semi-rigid armours can be worn under rigid armour only if carefully fitted. This adds to cost, generally doubling it.

• Rigid armours can only be worn on more or less inflexible parts of the body.
• Articulation is still fairly crude and adds 50% to weight and cost for full armour on the legs arms or abdomen.

• All AP are optimised for piercing attacks [arrows, swordpoints, etc].
• All changes to slashing (edged) and crushing damage are cumulative and can cancel each other out.
• All costs and enc are per location.

Flexible AP

• Cloth 1 [enc 5lbs] Only full coverage is useful. [enc 0.5] cost 20s
• Leather, soft. 2 [-1 dam slash+1 crush] [enc 1] cost 50s
• Quilt 3 [-2 dam crush] [enc 1.5] Can be made lighter by 30% cost 75s
• Mail 5 [+2 dam crush] [enc 2] Can be made heavier or lighter by 20/40% cost 400s

Hard AP

• Leather, hard. 3 [-1 dam slash] [enc 2] Can be made lighter by 30% cost 75s
• Light Mail [‘ring’] 4* [-1 dam slash] [enc 2]can be made heavier or lighter by 25% cost 200s
• Scale 6* [-2 dam slash] [enc 3] Can be made heavier or lighter by 20%. Cost 850
• Scaled kurbul, horn. 4 [enc 2] [ -2 dam slash]. Can be made lighter by 25/50% [-1 dam slash.] Cost 210s
• Banded Kurbul 5* [-2 dam slash] [enc 2] Can be made lighter by 20%. Cost 150s
• Banded plate 6* [-2 dam slash] [enc 3]Can be made lighter or heavier by 15/30%
• Plated mail 6 [+1 damage crush, -3 dam slash] [enc 3] can be made heavier or lighter by 15/30%. This is also assumed to cover Brigandine made with *steel and leather. Cost 1050s

• Assumes a soft leather underlay. Can be replaced with Quilting. Remove -1 from slash damage reduction and add -2 crush.

RigidAP

• Kurbul 4 [-2 dam slash] [enc 2] Can be made lighter by 25/50%[-1slash]
• Kurbul is also used to cover horn and bone armour. Cost 250
• Metal, Rigid. [Plate: Bronze, Worked iron or steel]
• Plate 6 [-3 dam slash] [enc 3] as a base. Cost 1200s
• May be made lighter or heavier by 15% or 30% [adding or subtracting +1/+2 from encumbrance.
• Bronze plate is -1AP and 20% lighter. Cost is 1000sp
• Worked steel is +1AP and 15% lighter. Cost is doubled.

• Encumbrance is done by location [sorry about the % stuff, but assume that all % changes are added and subtracted before armour enc is determined.]

Add the final enc and divide by six to get your Strike rank reducton and other effects. A maximum of three layers of armour is arbitrarily declared, as it allows for pretty much all the historical examples I can think of.

• You could get as complex as you want with this armour system – you could make armours to fit exact replicas of historical styles by fiddling with the layered coverages of different areas.
• I suggest buying armour by the area and pulling it together as a basic armour ‘type’ appropriate to the era.

• I also declare a specialist skill for soldiers, warriors, etc called Wear Armour [con x 2] which is never rolled but reduces SR reduction by 1 for every 10% in the skill, to a maximum of half the armours reduction (rounding down but always at least 1).

• Warrior types get +10% in it, courtly types get it at base and add 10% to their courtesy, The reeve would have it at base and cop Streetwise at base. *The herbalist wouldn’t actually have it and can open a lore skill [something obscure] at 10% to compensate.