Other materials..

[Mortepierre]

Has anyone thought about how using, say, bronze or iron instead of steel would affect the 'performances' of the various armors/weapons available?

It seems that me that this is an aspect of the game which has been all but ignored till now. Yes, primitive weapons do exist but I rather associate them with stone & wood-using cultures than with kingdoms having access to advanced metalcraft.

 

[The King]

Has anyone thought about how using, say, bronze or iron instead of steel would affect the 'performances' of the various armors/weapons available?

It seems that me that this is an aspect of the game which has been all but ignored till now. Yes, primitive weapons do exist but I rather associate them with stone & wood-using cultures than with kingdoms having access to advanced metalcraft.

I remember bone weapons from the Dark Sun setting. The sourcebook Trojan War (Green Ronin) gives also some hints about bronze weapons.

As a suggestion you could give such weapons a die less than for steel, i.e.: 1d10 becomes 1d8, 1d6=>1d4 and 1d3=>1d2. You could also reduce the weapon's structure by 40-50% because bronze is more brittle than steel. Weight should be approximately the same (perhaps with bronze weighing 10% less than steel).

 

[Neeklus]

I definately think stone or jade weapons should be added for the more primitive tribes and races of the game.

 

[René]

Maybe SLAINE RPG gives some info? Is there a D20-Stone Age-Supplement anywhere out there?

For Dark Sun: go to athas.org, there is a near complete rule set (3E), which includes various weapon materials - although Dark Sun had some silly (at least in my physical understanding) things like full-obsidian and full-bone swords :?

 

[MightyCthulhu]

I would not drop damage, but I would reduce penetration and structure by a few points.

 

[Hyborian Apeman]

I would say bronze weapon effectiveness should be somewhere between primitive and normal steel weapons. That doesn't leave a lot of room in the game mechanics to differentiate.

 

[Sutek]

Obsidian blades used by the Aztecs and Mayans were sometimes sharp as a modern razor blade, if not sharper since they are essentially molecularly tempered glass, bt they shattered after a good hard blow.

 

[The King]

Anyway, I would say that weapons found in the Conan core book are in iron because steel requires a very sophisticated process to obtain with very high temperatures needed to reach the melting point that an artisanal forge would never be able to maintain long enough.

I also read a book on the subject that even iron was very scarce in the antic time and the sole iron made was forged from iron meteorites because even iron was difficult to obtain because of the melting point.

Bronze was definitly easier to forge because stemming in part from copper.

 

[René]

I also read a book on the subject that even iron was very scarce in the antic time and the sole iron made was forged from iron meteorites because even iron was difficult to obtain because of the melting point.

This depends how you define antiquity: in the age of Athens and Sparta (from 500 BC on) there was a regular supply of iron. During the Dark Ages they main source may have been meteorites (I don't know).

Homer (maybe 750 BC) talks often about the high value of iron, but this is at least in part a reflection of earlier times.

 

[The King]

Are you sure that Greece used iron at that age as it is called the bronze age.
My reference is from Mircea Eliade (The Forge and the Crucible : The Origins and Structure of Alchemy). He is a specialist o mythology.

 

[René]

Are you sure that Greece used iron at that age as it is called the bronze age.
My reference is from Mircea Eliade (The Forge and the Crucible : The Origins and Structure of Alchemy). He is a specialist o mythology.

I don't have my books at hand and haven't read Mircea Eliade, but IIRC the Hitthites had a monopol on iron as early as 1400 / 1200 BC in the Ancient Near East.
But surely this time would be much too early for a regular use in Greece.

Homer mentions often iron (besides bronze), especially when friends are parting and exchange gifts: these gifts are precious textiles, gold, women, but very prominently iron. You find such passages more in the Odyssey than in the Iliad, simply because in the former there a lot of partings.
Some passages from the 4th book of the Iliad are: 123, 485, 510. All in all my computer found 48 examples in the Iliad. These passages indicate in most cases a high value of iron - but are too numerous to have iron as an extremely rare thing.

Edit: Oswyn Murray, Early Greece (chapter 1, subchapter "archeology") gives 1050 BC as the time when iron begins to supplant bronze in Greece.

 

[The King]

I have several books on antic Greece but I couldn't read them yet. Rereading the first chapters of Mirceu Eliade I second what you said concerning ironsmith in that the industrial forge of iron was "invented" in 1200-1000 BCE in the Armenian mountains and then spread across the Mediterrannean, the Middle East and Europe.
Some small iron ores were discovered in Mesopotamia ca. 3000 years BC but couldn't be exploited.

Concerning metoritic iron it was discovered between several blocks of the Great Pyramid (Gizeh - 2900 BC) and is known on Creta since the Minoan Age (2000 BC) as it was fond in Cnossos.

In fact, I bought this book from Mircea Eliade: The Forge and the Crucible : The Origins and Structure of Alchemy (and read it many years ago) to have answers to my questions which were very similar to the poster of this topic.