Well, many of you have given me some great advice regarding how to spend Temian’s money – and I’ve taken most of it. Here are the results.
To wear, he’s bought:
- Mail Coif (55sp, 4lbs, DR 4*, only 2* vs crushing)
- Heavy Leather Leggings and Sleeves (110sp, 6lbs, DR 2)
- Leather Gloves (30sp, neg., DR2*)
- Boots (80sp, 3lbs, DR 2*)
As you can see, I decided to bite the bullet and armor him properly, so as to be able to use the proper hit location rules and still survive. All this adds 13lbs to his armor loadout, which brings it up to 38lbs. Sadly, this moves him from “No encumbrance” to “Light encumbrance,” and therefore reduces his Move and Dodge by 1. Damn! But never mind – it couldn’t be helped!
To lug around, he’s bought:
- A brand new backpack – but just a small one. (60sp, 3lbs, holds 40lbs)
- First-aid kit (50sp, 2lbs)
- Climbing Gear (20sp, 4lbs)
- Rope, 3/8″ (5sp, 1.5lbs, 10 yards long, supports 300lbs,)
This adds 10.5lbs to his pack loadout: the full pack now weighs 19.5lbs by itself.
This means that, wearing his armor and carrying the pack, Temian is now going to be carting around 57.5 lbs. I’ve just looked up the encumbrance penalty for this, and somewhat hilariously, the cutoff for is 58lbs, so this is just barely still only “Light Encumbrance”! I really didn’t mean to min-max that.
Hmmm..now that I think of it, I haven’t actually calculated the cost and weight of any food to put in that pack. Food seems pretty damned important! And frankly, I can’t believe the GM was so careless as to let me get away with this last time… 🙂
So let’s whack in 15 meals worth of “traveler’s rations” (30sp, 7.5lbs). That puts his pack load up to 27lbs, and his total load up to 65lbs – solidly “Medium Encumbrance.” Good to know I’m not min-maxing any more!
Q: But what about his sword?
Good question. His broadsword is “cheap” quality, and there’s certainly a case to be made for getting a new one. But last time, in the comments, swordtart made an excellent suggestion: that it might be possible to refurbish the sword, rather than replace it, since the “cheap” modifier on Temian’s sword has always been justified by saying that it’s a rusty heirloom, rather by saying that it’s just a poorly-made sword, which would be the usual way to justify it.
I think this is a fun idea – particularly since swordtart makes such a rousing case for it. I quote: “He owes it to his profession and his ancestors.” Hard to argue with that! And yet, I don’t really want to take a discount for it. (I’ve found that when you’re acting as the GM as well as the player, it’s pretty important to err on the side of being really scrupulous about these things, since fudging things in the present often takes some of the fun away further down the line).
So I’m going to say that Temian gets his sword refurbished, thus making this old heirloom sword count as a “Good” rather than cheap – but I’m going to charge him for it, just as if he’d sold the old sword second-hand and bought a brand new one – so that works out to paying an extra 350sp or so.
All of these new purchases come to a total cost of 760sp, which is obviously well within our budget of 1400sp – so he’s got plenty of money left over for future expenses.
Wrapping up
And that’s the new loadout! Now I’ll head over and update it all on Temian’s character sheet.
Stay tuned for the next Temian adventure, coming soon! (i.e. as soon as I can get a free moment to play it out…)
(Later edit: ok, that “coming soon” turns out to have been a total lie: it took a few months. But never mind – it’s here now: The Adventures of Temian Fell – Episode 7 – Into the Wistwilds)
The Collaborative Gamer 