Sharing real world expertise as a gaming resource - AMA

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The shelter half was this piece of green canvas that you were supposed to use with a buddy, and you would connect two of them into a tent. But they weren't really water proof and weren't big enough etc.
So basically, when you only have one, you have to build the other half:thumbsup:!
 
In theory you find a buddy and pair up, or as Sharrow implied, you make something else out of it or incorporate it into other shelter you had. In practice I never used them after boot camp. The larger GP medium and large tents though still crude (probably Vietnam era) they worked a lot better and they would put an iron 'pot belly' stove inside (also crude and a little dangerous but they kept you warm), you just needed a truck or an APC to move them around. I think they have far more sophisticated stuff now, i was re-activated briefly after I got out, to do some training on new gear including special air conditioned tents they had mysteriously created a couple of years prior to the Gulf War...
 
Couple of fun facts on that temple of Pluto in case you missed it -

Back in 'ye olden days' (starting around 190 BC) they used to sell small animals that you could throw into the cave opening and watch them die (as sacrifices to Pluto). Strabo said: "Any animal that passes inside meets instant death. I threw in sparrows and they immediately breathed their last and fell"

But the eunuch priests of Cybele used to crawl inside the cave, holding their breath, and they knew specific spots they could crouch where the air wasn't poisonous. They had some kind of ritual they had to go through where they went inside there. They thereby convinced onlookers that they were immune to the death causing effects of the cave.

Then they offered the services of their oracle...
 
In theory you find a buddy and pair up, or as Sharrow implied, you make something else out of it or incorporate it into other shelter you had. In practice I never used them after boot camp. The larger GP medium and large tents though still crude (probably Vietnam era) they worked a lot better and they would put an iron 'pot belly' stove inside (also crude and a little dangerous but they kept you warm), you just needed a truck or an APC to move them around. I think they have far more sophisticated stuff now, i was re-activated briefly after I got out, to do some training on new gear including special air conditioned tents they had mysteriously created a couple of years prior to the Gulf War...
I spent years using the things in exercises in the NZ bush. We didn't get to use tents when tactical, and I don't think we ever linked halves up after Basic.

I used to not take tent poles (just something else to carry, and lose/break), and used my entrenching tool as the pole at one end and anchored the other (rear) end directly to the ground, with a small log (if available) just inside the rear to give it a bit of height (and better wind blocking). The rear end would, if possible, face the prevailing wind, so the open end was sheltered. The result was just high enough to fit your pack on one side and for you to crawl in the other and lie in your bag along the centre (the pack thus blocking some wind) and being low to the ground was highly wind-resistant and hard to see.

Pretty crappy as living quarters go, but quick and easy to set up and much lighter and more compact than the tents then available. As we were 'light' infantry and the bush was not vehicle friendly this was a major consideration.

There's no way in hell I'd willingly do this now, decades older and a civilian. Bugger that.
 
Couple of fun facts on that temple of Pluto in case you missed it -

Back in 'ye olden days' (starting around 190 BC) they used to sell small animals that you could throw into the cave opening and watch them die (as sacrifices to Pluto). Strabo said: "Any animal that passes inside meets instant death. I threw in sparrows and they immediately breathed their last and fell"

But the eunuch priests of Cybele used to crawl inside the cave, holding their breath, and they knew specific spots they could crouch where the air wasn't poisonous. They had some kind of ritual they had to go through where they went inside there. They thereby convinced onlookers that they were immune to the death causing effects of the cave.

Then they offered the services of their oracle...
One wonders how many died finding those spots of sweet air.
 
I spent years using the things in exercises in the NZ bush. We didn't get to use tents when tactical, and I don't think we ever linked halves up after Basic.

I used to not take tent poles (just something else to carry, and lose/break), and used my entrenching tool as the pole at one end and anchored the other (rear) end directly to the ground, with a small log (if available) just inside the rear to give it a bit of height (and better wind blocking). The rear end would, if possible, face the prevailing wind, so the open end was sheltered. The result was just high enough to fit your pack on one side and for you to crawl in the other and lie in your bag along the centre (the pack thus blocking some wind) and being low to the ground was highly wind-resistant and hard to see.

Pretty crappy as living quarters go, but quick and easy to set up and much lighter and more compact than the tents then available. As we were 'light' infantry and the bush was not vehicle friendly this was a major consideration.

There's no way in hell I'd willingly do this now, decades older and a civilian. Bugger that.

I think I got more mileage by just carrying an extra pancho, they were light, rolled up real small and unlike the shelter half, were water proof. But I wasn't in any kind of hard core unit so we usually had the big tents.
 
But the eunuch priests of Cybele used to crawl inside the cave, holding their breath, and they knew specific spots they could crouch where the air wasn't poisonous. They had some kind of ritual they had to go through where they went inside there. They thereby convinced onlookers that they were immune to the death causing effects of the cave.
Wow! Where is that recorded?
 
See post 120 for links to wiki and Atlas Obscura article with sources

I got a lot of good stories about the medieval world and before, back to the Classical era... hit me up if you have any questions... "Ask me anything"
 
Part of the fun of relying on historical sources for RPGs, is that you can take everything at face value. For example, check this 13th Century UFO incident out, in which a man appears from a ship in the clouds, an anchor gets stuck on a .


My favorite part is this tidbit: "In a 9th-century Latin manuscript, Liber contra insulam vulgi opinionem, the Archbishop of Lyons complained about the French peasantry's insistent belief in a "certain region called Magonia from whence come ships in the clouds." The occupants of these vessels "carry back to that region those fruits of the earth which are destroyed by hail and tempests; the sailors paying rewards to the storm wizards and themselves receiving corn and other produce." The archbishop said he had even witnessed the stoning to death of "three men and a woman who said they had fallen from these same ships."

Those two sources are far enough back that we really have trouble following up or verifying beyond one or two fragmentary sources (still an awesome adventure hook though, trading with the cloud wizards...), but you also have incidents from much later dates where everything is well documented. For example this little broadsheet, kind of a proto-newspaper, tells a tale of a strange green meteor that fell into the Rhineland in 1493.

1680803351345.png
The meteorite, weighing 260 lbs, still exists, having survived being chipped at by people wanting to make talismans out of the strange, greenish stone, and later hung up on a chain inside a Church on the orders of Emperor Maximllian I. It's called the Ensisheim Donnerstein.

Donnerstein is another term for 'thunderstone', and this is another interesting little rabbit hole. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thunderstone_(folklore)

These things were used for all kinds of sorcery and necromancy, some legal and some decidedly illegal.

The green magic space rock could be a great adventure hook for something like Call of Cthulhu (or Cthulhu Dark Ages) or something from the Warhammer universe...
 
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See post 120 for links to wiki and Atlas Obscura article with sources
Atlas Obscura doesn’t mention crawling priests of Cybele, and Wikipedia says “citation needed”.

Without primary evidence the story about the crawling castrati is not very plausible. The presence of priests of Cybele at a temple of Plouto is not what I would expect. And what ancient writer would discover and record the cynical trick? It seems like a conjecture that someone must have come up with after J.B. Priestley's discoveries in the late 19th Century. Furthermore, carbon dioxide is denser than fresh air, so the existence of pools of breathable air is not physically plausible, and the trick as described simply wouldn't work. Are we confident that this isn't something out of a fantasy movie?
 
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Atlas Obscura doesn’t mention crawling priests of Cybele, and Wikipedia says “citation needed”.

Without primary evidence the story about the crawling castrati is not very plausible. The presence of priests of Cybele at a temple of Plouto is not what I would expect. And what ancient writer would discover and record the cynical trick? It seems like a conjecture that someone must have come up with after J.B. Priestley's discoveries in the late 19th Century. But carbon dioxide is denser than fresh air, so the existence of pools of breathable air is not physically plausible, and the trick as described simply wouldn't work. Are we confident that this isn't something out of a fantasy movie?

Apparently one of the sources is Strabo, who personally visited the site, another Cicero and the CO2 concentrates in the lower reaches evidently they were walking not crawling.

https://time.com/5171047/turkey-gate-to-hell-pamukkale-hierapolis/

 
Here is the direct quote from Strabo's "Geography"


"...the Plutonium, below a small brow of the mountainous country that lies above it, is an opening of only moderate size, large enough to admit a man, but it reaches a considerable depth, and it is enclosed by a quadrilateral handrail, about half a plethrum in circumference, and this space is full of a vapour so misty and dense that one can scarcely see the ground. Now to those who approach the handrail anywhere round the enclosure the air is harmless, since the outside is free from that vapor in calm weather, for the vapor then stays inside the enclosure, but any animal that passes inside meets instant death. At any rate, bulls that are led into it fall and are dragged out dead; and I threw in sparrows and they immediately breathed their last and fell. But the Galli,2 who are eunuchs, pass inside with such impunity that they even approach the opening, bend over it, and descend into it to a certain depth, though they hold their breath as much as they can (for I could see in their countenances an indication of a kind of suffocating attack, as it were),—whether this immunity belongs to all who are maimed in this way or only to those round the temple, or whether it is because of divine providence, as would be likely in the case of divine obsessions, or whether it is, the result of certain physical powers that are antidotes against the vapor."
 
So yes, while one cannot always trust primary sources, in this case the primary sources provide us evidence which correspond well with the modern testing at the site. So I am indeed confident that it's not from a fantasy movie. It would however, I am also confident, make a pretty good basis for a screenplay for a fantasy film (or an RPG game)
 
Here is the direct quote from Strabo's "Geography"


"...the Plutonium, below a small brow of the mountainous country that lies above it, is an opening of only moderate size, large enough to admit a man, but it reaches a considerable depth, and it is enclosed by a quadrilateral handrail, about half a plethrum in circumference, and this space is full of a vapour so misty and dense that one can scarcely see the ground. Now to those who approach the handrail anywhere round the enclosure the air is harmless, since the outside is free from that vapor in calm weather, for the vapor then stays inside the enclosure, but any animal that passes inside meets instant death. At any rate, bulls that are led into it fall and are dragged out dead; and I threw in sparrows and they immediately breathed their last and fell. But the Galli,2 who are eunuchs, pass inside with such impunity that they even approach the opening, bend over it, and descend into it to a certain depth, though they hold their breath as much as they can (for I could see in their countenances an indication of a kind of suffocating attack, as it were),—whether this immunity belongs to all who are maimed in this way or only to those round the temple, or whether it is because of divine providence, as would be likely in the case of divine obsessions, or whether it is, the result of certain physical powers that are antidotes against the vapor."
Excellent! Thank you.

I am especially interested to see that Stabo explicitly mentions the Galli specifically as performing this trick, which is one thing I thought was surprising.

I note that this account does not mention any crawling, nor any pockets or pools of "oxygen" or sweet air. I suppose that those details must be ill-informed modern conjectures.
 
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I've found in the past that half-elves can work well for when you want elves to be weird and otherworldly and therefore don't want them to be available player races.
 
Atlas Obscura doesn’t mention crawling priests of Cybele, and Wikipedia says “citation needed”.

Well, look. I'm highly active on Wikipedia, have been for nearly twenty years. ANYONE can hang a citation tag on a statement. I could. You could. That doesn't in of itself discredit it.
 
Well, look. I'm highly active on Wikipedia, have been for nearly twenty years. ANYONE can hang a citation tag on a statement. I could. You could. That doesn't in of itself discredit it.
Of course not. But I was following the link that was offered when I asked about the source of a particular statement, and "citation needed" is not a source.

The other thing that ANYONE can do in Wikipedia is insert bullshit about crawling castrati and pockets of oxygen, that obviously can't be true because oxygen does not sink in carbon dioxide.
 
So yes, while one cannot always trust primary sources, in this case the primary sources provide us evidence which correspond well with the modern testing at the site.

Yes, but the sources do not provide evidence for the statement that the priests crawled in the cave or that they knew specific spots they could crouch where the air wasn't poisonous.
 
I think you were right to question the details, and it does look it was walking rather than crawling or crouching, since the CO2 does indeed sink, but we don't know precisely how they did it. Strabo seems to think they were holding their breath. I can speculate about the structure of the cave (maybe there were some higher places relatively free of the gas plume), and I think there have been some scientific papers on the details (I linked one upthread). But clearly it was and is a real place and the threat of death was very real. Until they re-discovered it in the 1960s they thought this story was made up, because it sounds so far fetched.

And yet it was real. And I bet it was a pretty damn scary place in it's heyday, for an array of reasons.
 
I can speculate about the structure of the cave

Sure, or you can go and look at the cave, or examine the reports of people who excavated it.

I’d just rather that if you — or the author of that paragraph in Wikipedia — do speculate or conjecture you let us know, with a “maybe” or a “perhaps”.
 
Lol ok man. I was just paraphrasing what I'd read about the place, and provided links to the wiki and AA article as a starting point for anyone who wanted to dig into it more. I immediately answered your question and provided you with both the direct quote from Strabo and a scientific article. Please also remember, I didn't criticize you for questioning the Wiki, to the contrary. But I'm also not responsible for every detail of a given Wikipedia article. I gave up editing those many years ago.

I am not sure anyone knows exactly how the priests of Cybele pulled off their trick, all we know is what some ancient writers recorded, and that modern scientific analysis does indicate the site is indeed affected by lethal gas. So whatever they did, it was a good trick.

I would say that when you are discussing literary evidence from 2,000 years ago, there is typically some conjecture built in.

And I thought the whole story made an interesting adventure setting some RPG gamers might like. Which was my only reason for posting it here. For gamers, we don't actually have to verify the reality of historical anecdotes like this, all that matters in an RPG is if it makes a good story.
 
Lol ok man. I was just paraphrasing what I'd read about the place, and provided links to the wiki and AA article as a starting point for anyone who wanted to dig into it more. I immediately answered your question and provided you with both the direct quote from Strabo and a scientific article.

Yes, and I acknowledged it and thanked you (see post #138). It could have ended there.
 
One wonders how many died finding those spots of sweet air.
None, most likely.

In the first place, the contemporary source (Strabo) does not mention spots of sweet air, nor the priests doing anything that suggests they existed. He wrote that the priests seemed to him to have been holding their breath.

In the second place, the spots of sweet air are not physically plausible. Carbon dioxide tends to sink in air, not to float over it. The priests would have to walk on stilts, not crawl on the ground as Wikipedia says they did.

In the third place, the pool of deadly air was rather small: Strabo records that the railing around it was only half a plethron, i.e. fifty feet, in perimeter; which makes it perhaps ten or fifteen feet across. So if there had been spots of sweet air the priests could have found them by using caged sparrows held on poles.
 
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I do suspect animals would have been used to test where was safe, sparrows on poles seems like an effective method.

Apparently there are at least two other surviving references to this place by period 'auctores'.
 
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