One blog I love to pop in and read is The Monsters Know What They’re Doing, by Keith Ammann. Each post breaks down a particular monster or monster type, looks at their writeup and stats, and assumes that, you know, the monsters aren’t dumb. They’re optimized for filling their ecological, magical, or theological niche and don’t…
Yesterday I wrote about the construction and use of Viking shields: a roughly 30-36″ diameter shield (call it a medium shield) of very, very light construction (6-8 lbs), low face thickness (7-9mm at the thickest, including the up to 1mm of hide and glue covering, and maybe 2mm wood at the edge, with another 2mm…
I’ve been building a lot of shields recently. Part of this is just because I like working with wood. The crafting aspect of it is very satisfying, and is more visceral than blogging, obviously. But it started with me doing research for Dragon Heresy. I’ve always been skeptical of the bonuses from shields in D&D,…