Tetsujin no Llama

I've been seeing some things crossing my Twitter feed about somebody making up a magic combat wheelchair (see the #CombatWheelchair hashtag ) for the current edition of The Other Game (tm). So, naturally, I thought about how GURPS would handle it. GURPS being GURPS , it potentially handles it in several ways. I'll delve into how to deal with it as a piece of equipment intended for use in Dungeon Fantasy -flavored campaigns and using the basic magic system. Wheelchairs are addressed briefly in the core rules. A wheelchair (p. B142) provides ground Move = 1/4 ST, with limitations like movement on staircases, through narrow doorways, and so on. High Tech (p. 226) has full weight and cost stats as well as rules for powered ones, but let's consider the fantasy chair. The first issue is making it self-propelled. Hard to fight if you're rolling your chair around with your hands. However, it can probably be made self-rolling with the Dancing Object spell ( Magic , p. 144). I...

Over on the forum, somebody asked me how much frankincense and myrrh cost in antiquity. Well, we don't know. We never get as much price information as we like out of history. There's the occasional mention of this or that product being worth its weight in silver or gold, but we can reasonably believe that those are descriptions written by political, cultural, or philosophical commentators trying to give an idea of how expensive things are, not people who have actually done an economic analysis and discovered that the material in question is, by coincidence, exactly the same value as silver or gold and not, say, one and a half times the price of silver or three quarters of the price of gold. We know it was valuable, but not how valuable on the level of individual purchases. But for the convenience of the GM, we can use those comparisons to establish some ballpark figures. Mind you, this is based largely on GURPS rather than historical sources, so it's not something I would h...