Turhan's Bey Company
@turhansbeycompany
Tsundoku master, unreliable narrator. TTRPG (GURPS) publications at or
And where do you find it? As the DI indicates, there are museums which put at least some of their holdings on-line with permissive licenses or at least indications of licenses, allowing you to use them as you will. Indeed, many of the search engines allow you to filter by license.
human history to deal with, you can get your hands on a mind-boggling diverse array of architectural styles, weapon designs, outfits, decorative motifs, and so on. And since so much of it is quite old, much is in the public domain as well, in case you ever feel like publishing any of it.
One of the things about doing historical games or games in pseudo-historical drag is that there’s a vast quantity of material out there ready and waiting for you. Yes, there aren’t any Roman statues of noble dying orcs or Titian paintings of the sultan of the elves, but if you’ve got the whole of
Spider plant, spider plant, Does whatever a spider can't. Absorbs airborne formaldehyde But ineffective when inside. Look out! There sits the spider plant.
Hollywood is part of it, of course. And it's not just in what we think of as fantasy. Second world stuff has a long tradition of anachronistic dress. It's in science fiction as well. Prince Baron seems to be going for some kind of Roman look with that helmet.
There were also Chinese spindle-shaped dice, and non-Platonic solids like d14s.
A number of divinatory schemes across Asia and beyond used baton-shaped d4s, boxy dice with a square cross section.
With the domestication of large animals, “natural” dice became an option in the Old World. Knuckebones were used as randomizers by a variety of societies. The boxy shape with distinctive convolutions on each face allowed them to be used as d4s.
The oldest known dice have found in the Great Plains, dating back around 12,000 years. They’re basically d2s, flat bone objects with markings on one side and not on the other so when thrown, they produce a binary value.
Because of depressed economic conditions, an overqualified Asian man helps recruit several colleagues whose skills are devaluing against technology for a low-paying job with poor safety standards.
Addendum! I experimented with an ahistorical set of materials, and it looks like it worked.
Wrote what? Kinda the point. Couldn't make out a thing even under bright light and close examination. But hit it with the oak gall?
And that's with modern blinding white paper. What might it look like with a different writing surface? I pulled out a sheet of papyrus I had lying around and wrote this with the ferrous sulfate:
But brush some ferrous sulfate on the upper word and oak gall on the rest, and the text becomes very visible.
Here's the first attempt. "Secret" is written in oak gall solution, "message test" in ferrous sulfate. The letters are visible on the white paper, but just barely, except for the T which is on a spot where I'd spilled by cleaned up a drop of the oak gall. Chemistry!
I made the basic oak gall ink, hibr in Arabic but used through Europe and west/central Asia. Crushed oak galls, ferrous sulfate, and gum arabic for gloss. My handwriting's terrible and my Arabic all but forgotten, but the ink is great, a solid black.
Just this little guy, hanging out in the shade by the water.
In a way, the series provided its own best critique of how it was representing the discipline:
OK, but no. I mean, arguably we're humans PRECISELY BECAUSE we need to modify our food. Grumpy anthropological thread:
Having left behind some insulting verse, Henri never saw Poland again. And that's how, in 1575, Anna Jagiellon became the second queen regnant of Poland.
stopped over in Venice for a week and a half, and why shouldn't he? It's always been a party town. While there, he was politely received and enjoyed a number of entertainments. One of them was that the Venetians built and outfitted a war galley in front of him over the course of a lunchtime.