exhaustedThis one's a bit later in the day due to other things that I was doing today.
Day 29 - Ride
What a lovely prompt word for the day.
One of the neat things about fantasy roleplaying games is travel. Land travel. One can be heading away from the more settled regions and heading for the unexplored wilderness, or one can be travelling from one's last adventure in the wilderness back to civilization (or what passes for it at any rate!).
I am playing in a campaign, in theory at least, which has a lot of over land travel. Yhis isn’t a hex crawl, we are going between cities but heading away from the more settled regions. One of the best ways to travel is on horseback. (Assuming your world permits that or even has horses, of course.)
Horses are intelligent, marvelous, beautiful creatures - and yet, in most fantasy rpgs or others that have horses in them, they are treated as a means to an end, and rarely even given a name. Heck, very few games actually give horses individual game statistic blocks. What got me thinking about this subject is the Zorro: The Roleplaying Game from the folks at Gallant Knight Games. Horses are important in the Zorro RPG, and needless to say Zorro's horse Tornado is one of the most famous horses in all of literature and media. The game provides an introduction to Basic Terminology, talks about Gaits, Horse and Mule Colours, Basic Horse Markings, and Names for Steeds (such as Fuego = Fire and Sangre = Blood). It then provides some samples of horses for the game, such as:
Modesta - This gentle silver-white mare is the heir to the famed Spanish palfreys of ages past. With the smoothest gaits and a nearly intuitive connection with her rider, she is a dazzling companion with a glowing beauty. But do not mistake her good nature for weakness or cowardice. She has faced down bears and bandits alike, and does not have a frightened bone in her elegant body.
Another example of a horse that I just came up with:
Aggresivo - This stallion with a white body with a black mane and dapples tends to be handy in a fight, but ca be difficult to control in crowded towns and on roads and paths, where he like to assert his dominance with other steeds and horses.
These two examples of horses, one from the game and one of my own quick design bring home the best way to make horses noticeable. Give a horse a name, and a bold personality type or trait that gives the rider both an advantage and a disadvantage at times.
So get out there, and make the horses in your games stand out!
And there you have this twenty-ninth post for this #RPGaDay for August, 2020. Comments, thoughts, questions, etc. are all welcome, of course. :)