Animal Passers and Bows

[Lisa Padol]

A couple of questions:

1. If I create a demon passing as an animal and give it the Cover ability, does this mean that I can dispense with buying things like Travel or Flight for a demon passing as a bird or Travel or Transportation for a demon passing as a horse, and just assume that the demon can do what the animal it's pretending to be can do?

2. How would you handle damage from bows? My current plan, given the Renaissancy setting I'm using, is to have bows do damage like a small pistol, and rule that the smallest actual pistol is a big pistol.

Dei volenti, I've got another session tomorrow. Have discovered that, for me, copying the demon's stats onto index cards makes it easier for me to start thinking of the demons as favorite NPCs. I think this is because all of my other NPCs are on index cards.

-Lisa

[Valamir]

I believe you're correct for #1, I think Travel would be reserved if the horse could gallop at the speed of sound, or teleport, or dimension travel kind of thing.  Ron can confirm.

For #2, that depends on how important accurate crunch is to your group.  Some bows of the period were far more powerful and damaging than the available guns of the period.   That may or may not be a priority for you though.  If not, than your method is a perfectly reasonable short cut.  If you REALLY wanted to get all simmy over it, a key difference is that a heavy bow or crossbow would do more immediate damage (stopping power and greater initial lethality) while a bullet was more likely to kill you after the fact from infection and additional damage done trying to remove the bullet (this last was so difficult and dangerous that many civil war vets carried up to a dozen slugs around in their bodies because removing them would kill them more certainly than leaving them in).  So one could make a case in sorcerer terms for jacking up the initial damage of a bow while jacking up the lingering damage of a slug.

An interesting historical note is that one reason why silk shirts were preferred among gentlemen of the day is because silk fibers held together better and were easy to remove from a wound while linen or wool fibers disintegrated and little patches of cloth would be driven deep into the wound where they'd fester.  All of which may be way more fiddly than you need to deal with for Sorcerer purposes.

[Ron Edwards]

Hiya,

You got it about the Passer - when you make a demon a "cat" as a Passer, you don't have to give it Perception for it to see in near-total darkness. It gets everything cats get. Remember that Passers must have a Cover score, and that's what you'd use for all the "cat" stuff. Conceivably, you could have it be "Passer: Cat," and the cover be "alley cat" or "Himalayan show champion." I think it's pretty clear how you'd use all the scores and so on.

About the bow, hey, use the tables as you see fit. The best way to look at it is that the tables are fixed, but you can assign weapons to them as best works in your game. For instance, in pulp sword-and-sorcery, I mention that a thrown dagger functions as a pistol.

Best,
Ron

[Lisa Padol]

You got it about the Passer - when you make a demon a "cat" as a Passer, you don't have to give it Perception for it to see in near-total darkness. It gets everything cats get. Remember that Passers must have a Cover score, and that's what you'd use for all the "cat" stuff. Conceivably, you could have it be "Passer: Cat," and the cover be "alley cat" or "Himalayan show champion." I think it's pretty clear how you'd use all the scores and so on.

Okay, cool. Thanks.

About the bow, hey, use the tables as you see fit. The best way to look at it is that the tables are fixed, but you can assign weapons to them as best works in your game. For instance, in pulp sword-and-sorcery, I mention that a thrown dagger functions as a pistol.

Yes, I loved that. It fit the genre to a T.

We had our session. Pamela was too sick to attend, but we did a combination of AIM and a phone call on speaker phone. And, when I pulled out a bang I'd been planning, I was told that I was very evil, in a good way. Some things about the mechanics still have us doubtful, but the session went well.

-Lisa