High Circle Preview: Air Sailor

[The Undying]

FASA: http://fasagames.com/2017/03/03/high-ci ... ir-sailor/

Panda: http://pandagaminggrove.blogspot.jp/201 ... pline.html

[Lys]

Is there any reason why Windborne Speed can't affect galleons? They're pretty rare in Barsaive so it's not a huge deal, but they're not that much larger than galleys and it would seem to be in theme that they can be affected.

[The Undying]

I suspect it's to keep things from getting whackadoo. Even aside from the idea that "big things take more effort to move," which in itself is likely enough justification, big things also can hold more Namegivers. Imagine the largest air ships, which could have a crew of maybe a hundred air sailors (just air ship crew, not counting all the other people onboard); if you just do the percentage additive, you're talking about 1000% speed MINIMUM (since that's just a single success on a difficulty 6 test). Behemoths are now traveling across all of Barsaive in a single day ... that's bad ... very bad.

Now, given that, I'd also say a GM is within their right to say that larger groups of air sailors can combine their efforts to move bigger things. I highly advise against going into actual math - let's not weigh fun down with physics and equations - but just do something like "the crew of larger air ships can combine their efforts to apply this ability ONCE to that vessel; all air sailor crew take the required Blood Damage, and the Adept with the highest Air Weaving performs the test to determine movement speed increase."

[Lys]

The question is not why there is a limit, obviously speed boosting a Theran Behemoth is a little crazy, the question is why that limit is galleys rather than galleons, which are not that different in size.

The rest of what you posted is kind of bizarre. You need to be a Master Rank Air Sailor in order to use the speed boost ability, how many of those do you think there are in the world? Because my impression is that it's not enough that you are ever going to see a hundred of them in one place. Even if you could gather 100 Master Rank Air Sailors, a galley would be able to carry them just fine. They have a crew rating of 100, with a capacity for 150 additional passengers. It's not the size limit that prevents you from giving a ship a 1000% speed boost, it's the fact that Master level adepts are rare.

[The Undying]

Yeah, true strike, I wasn't actually thinking about how often this could be brought into play.

[Lys]

And that's assuming that the power stacks with itself, which is an odd assumption to make when the default with abilities in Earthdawn is that they don't.

[The Undying]

You are on a roll, Lys! another really good point ... likely no rocket ships as our mythical hundred Master-tier Air Sailors laser beam Behemoths across the night sky...

[Telarus]

Traditionally in Earthdawn (and I am retaining this in my re-design) larger ships have higher Speed Steps, smaller ships have higher Maneuverability steps. This is due to an age-of-sail idea that larger vessels can simply ignore most wave-action and beat downwind or tack against it without the choppy waves killing their momentum. Small boats really have this problem (ever see a "zodiac" inflatable raft going at high speed with an outboard motor, LOL).

And as it stands, my "test" Air Galleon has 134 crew, and a separate Men-at-Arms company with 134 soldiers (28 of which are griffin cavalry). The tricked out Air War Galley, on the other hand, rocks 68 crew and 48 men-at-arms (including 9 griffin riders). Including weapons, rations, and fresh water (gods, this was a lot of research), the Galleon has a new Cargo Capacity of 800 duari, the War Galley a Cargo capacity of 350 duari. Each are nearly maxxed out in the listed configuration (weapons, ammo, rations, etc). The Merchant boats usually have half of their space "empty" to allow random cargo.

We are still reviewing the new airship rules, so I can only assume this power will be updated as appropriate.