I LOVE Characters Who Are Crazy Powerful But Their Biggest Fear Is Likebugs. Theyre Holding Onto A Chair

I LOVE characters who are crazy powerful but their biggest fear is like…bugs. They’re holding onto a chair and screaming at the centipede like “I have fought and killed primordial beings bent on apocalypse…but THAT FUCKING BUG…NO.”

I was about to say, that sounds like Rusty-rambling. :D

So one of the other Tapas writers rambled about armor in the medieval world in the Tapas discord server, and I figured I should share it with you all because it's some really good stuff!

So depending on the type of armor, how you'd process it for reuse varies pretty heavily. Mail, for instance, is fairly easy to resize for someone else because you can add or remove links fairly easily. Same goes for repairs. A good thrust can bust through even riveted mail, but the damaged links can be replaced easily enough. Well, I say fairly easily. It's a pain in the ass to work with. But it's still cheaper on the whole than plate armor, and it's far more likely that someone who isn't a member of the nobility can get their hands on it. Plate armor can range from a simple cuirass to a full set. A full set is usually bespoke to the person, so you probably wouldn't try to steal the whole thing. It would take ages to remove it from a corpse, and if they ended up dead whilst wearing it, the stuff probably isn't worth the effort to begin with. A chestplate or helmet that's been stoved in by a warhammer isn't exactly a candidate for the "it'll buff out" treatment. Then there's the fact that the previous owner's family might reasonably expect this expensive and time consuming investment of theirs to be returned with the freshly minted corpse. So, take the good bits that you can get off in a hurry, but stripping the whole set is ill advised. You expect a helmet to go missing, but if someone's taking the time to remove, say, the codpiece, there will be questions. Recycling any sort of armor into weapons is probably not the best of ideas. The steel you'd want to use for armor is different than the steel you'd want to use for swords. Swords, especially around Europe, North Africa, etc, were typically through hardened and made to be flexible. Armor needs to be more rigid, so it would go through a different heat treat process and would need different carbon content. Not that medieval smiths knew what carbon was, exactly, but they had their own ways of grading steel. It can be done, but there are a lot of things that can be done that you wouldn't necessarily want to. I can, if I was so inclined, go to the shooting range in a tactical maid outfit. That doesn't mean it's a good idea. Full plate would be the equivalent to rocking up to battle in an M1 Abrams. Cool as hell, but waaaay to expensive for the average man at arms. Just about everyone would have a helmet of some kind, and there were all kinds of variations on armor that were more affordable to peasants pressed into military service. Gambesons, as you mentioned, were surprisingly effective. They could be augmented in a lot of useful ways, too. If you want a really good reference for historical arms and armor, there's an anime called Maria the Virgin Witch that gets a lot of stuff right. Not only in terms of styles and types, but how it was used and how one might reasonably expect to fight against it.

This all was written by Rusty! He's a great writer and has a whole bunch of novels out if any of you guys want to check it out!

(You guys should totally reblog this to help those who could use this information to see this <3)

he did it again

Immortal Nox: The Lost City

Stretching her arms over her head, Astra swished her tail and laid her ears back with a yawn. She’d been feeling odd since getting up from an unexpected crash hours earlier. It was the first time she’d ever had that happen while playing a VR game. “Maybe it’s an update?” she wondered aloud and squinted through the tree canopy at the sky’s golden hue.

Tiredness was a new sensation to her while playing Ashguard. She’d been gathering herbs and materials for hours in-game. Long enough for the sun to begin dipping down behind the mountain range that bisected the main continent. To the north were the three major cities of Aesir, Vanaheim, and Nifelheim, and Astra Diane’s current location was three months’ worth of in-game travel into the unmapped Southlands.

Being a Healer Class, it was a miracle she’d made it this far by herself. Usually, she had her Porter, Xander, but she’d sent him back to Aesir to sell some things in hopes that he wouldn’t catch the plague from her.

The plague plotline had come out of nowhere for a game with very little story. But attempting to find a cure for it had been a fun use of the Crafting Skills she’d spent so much time leveling up. Unfortunately, she’d caught it too, and while Players respawned at the Soul Stones in the three major cities, NPCs did not.

Astra Diane pulled her Menu out of her pocket. “I should check on him,” she muttered. She hadn’t been feeling the plague symptoms since her crash earlier. Her Menu, a Scroll that always existed in her pocket, was a touch screen once unrolled. Swiping through the tabs, Astra selected her teleport list.

As for the symptoms, they were miserable. It was similar to having the flu, but in her mind, the tiredness and aching in her body lingered even after logging out. Earlier that day, she’d collapsed in-game and woke up several hours later. Astra felt fine now, so she supposed the plague had run its course, and she was free to return to town.

Being in the Southlands for so long by herself was lonely. She was, after all, a squishy Healer Class and tended to rely on the fact that she could heal herself to get through fights with monsters more than an actual strategy. She knew she wasn’t a very good Player.

She glanced top left to see her and Xander’s health bars. The Porter was at full health, as was she. Top right, she could see the in-game time, which only showed hours and minutes of the day. That was the extent of Ashguard’s HUD.

If she wanted to use a Skill, she had to remember and activate it. There weren’t easy buttons that stayed in view to remind Players of what they had, and the Skills didn’t organize into trees. A Skill simply got stronger the more it was used, and there were rumored to be hundreds of Skills out there to find. She did have a menu that listed all her Skills, but battles required quick thinking, and Players tended to have Skills they relied on more frequently than others.

She’d left a daisy chain of Soul Stone Shards, small, single-use devices, on her way through the Southlands.

They weren’t very durable, as other Players or monsters could destroy them, but they lasted a week in real-time. The most frequent complaint about them was that Players couldn’t respawn to them. They were available as teleport locations in the list, great for a quick run back to one of the major cities for a minute, but that was it.

Astra stared at her empty list.

What the heck?

She was some distance from the last one she’d dropped, and the others were older, leading up to the Player town at the edge of the Southlands, but that didn’t explain why they were all gone.

“Ugh.” Backing out of her teleport list, she moved to Inventory to get a Soul Stone Shard. That all of the ones she’d dropped in the last four game-time weeks were gone was only an inconvenience if she died. She wouldn’t have a quick way back to her current location after respawning at the last major city she’d been in. The faster she got one activated, the better.

Astra activated the item and dropped it just as she heard shuffling in the bushes.

Looking up from her Menu, she met the eyes of a Razor Boar mid-charge. “[Dodge]” died on her lips as the two pairs of tusks ripped through her midsection. Pain like she had never felt before overwhelmed her senses. She collapsed to the ground. Her armor, which was as high-quality as she could make it, had protected her a bit from the attack, but the Boar continued to slash at her as she lay helpless on the ground, unable to think past the pain.

A tusk caught her in the throat, and a terrible coldness descended upon her.

Her consciousness hung suspended in darkness; before her were the options to Wait or Respawn. Choosing Respawn, her body exploded in sparks of light, teleporting back to the last Soul Stone she’d attuned to.

Astra wheezed out a moan of residual pain as her feet touched the pavement. Gripping herself, she shivered. Her pain setting must have gotten changed. Had they updated the game? Maybe that was why she’d passed out earlier.

She now stood in the Soul Stone Plaza of Aesir, a city built on the mountainous shore and sprawling onto an island within visual distance of the rocky beach. The architecture resembled ancient Greco-Roman, giving it an air of philosophical sophistication. It was her favorite city, and it looked gorgeous in the setting sun’s light. However something was off.

Why was it so quiet?

Turning away from the Soul Stone, she found that the plaza, usually bustling with Players coming and going, was filled with market stalls and a crowd that was just trying to get their last bit of shopping done before it got too dark. While physically, Players and Non-Player Characters were identical, the system showed Player names to other Players in text hovering over their heads.

There were no Players in the crowd.

The stall owners and their customers stared at her, pale, jaws agape. A Human grandmother had dropped her basket of apples directly next to Astra. A Lycanth woman clutched her cub to her chest.

___

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Read Soulless Prince

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Suffer and become one with Me

The world was on the brink of ending. A thick, sulfurous miasma covered the land, leaving only small settlements clinging desperately to life in a never-ending war against the demons.

One woman, heart shattered by her beloved's death, loosed a cry of despair that pierced the heavens. Her impassioned plea stirred a passing goddess to action. In a selfless act of love, the goddess donned the Saintess' body and burned away the miasma to restore light and life to the world.

But this was only a short stay of execution. The dark god planned to return and consume the world he had left to marinate. Only the reborn Saintess, her Beloved, and the unexpected element of a hillbilly transmigrator have the skills to save the world.