Flexible Rooms

[loke]

A lot has been said, but I think there are few more perspectives to add.

Firstly, @Zaleramancer akes a good point that much has to be resolved at the table. I would encourage the editors to prioritise examples and precedents over universal rules, simply because universality is bound to fail anyway. The examples in @David_Chart ´s post with resolution would be immensely useful at the table.

I totally agree with the hut example. The hut's essential nature does not change even if it flexes, or even if the roof blows up. More importantly, the room inside remains essentially a room until the hut is dissembled to a point where it would no longer qualify as a room for the purpose of a new spell.

This could also resolve @ezzelino 's concern about the ship. Replacing materials or components do not change the nature of the ship (hut) nor the room inside. When it is dissembled to the point where the ship (hut, room) essentially ceases to exist any spell is bound to fail, even if it could be reassembled.

I am not so happy with the rucksack though. My gut objects even if my brain fails to come up with a solid argument. To me a room is something you can go into, not something you can carry away. However, if we agree that sacks and bags and pockets are rooms, I do not think that their bending and folding causes any more problem than in the hut example. However, there is another problem. What happens if you turn the bag inside out? Do you have then the same room (with the spell intact) or have you destroyed the room and made another?

My doubts about the rucksack are not entirely related to mobility, although they might partially be. A room onboard a ship feels no different to a room in a house. Inside the room, only the room matters, however much it travels with the ship. However, the deck space is less clear. Enclosed by the sides of the hull, it should be a room just like a courtyard is. However, the movement of the ship means that the room does not form the same kind of enclosed reality as either a fully enclosed room or an immobile courtyard.

I realise that I may have to let my quabbles go, both about the ship's open deck and the rucksack, but it is worth some thought.

The tent example is actually more than one example. @dc444 raises an important point about what a tent really is. To me, it takes walls to make a room, so the tent needs a certain standard. An oversail in a bivouac does not make a room. A proper knightly tent is a room though as long as it is raised.

In my opinion a folded tent does not define a room. The essential nature of the tent is still a tent, but the space inside is no longer a room in any essential nature kind of meaning. A room is a container. A folded tent is just a pile of canvas.

[silveroak]

If it matters to the discussion, ships in the 13th century generally did not have a top deck or other structures built within them- they were essentially just a hull like a super-sized canoe. Very large ones would have a walk way around the inside of the hull the same as would exist on a castle wall for patrols. Thus there were no rooms on ships. I realize that the existing settings do, however, have this anachronistically.

[loke]

Do you happen to have any authoritative and instructive pointers on 13C ship types? All searches I make turn up images of ships with rear towers.

[Arthur]

The larger Roman galleys certainly had decks... at least partial ones, no?

[Cyborg (thepsyborg)]

@silveroak

ships in the 13th century generally did not have a top deck or other structures built within them- they were essentially just a hull like a super-sized canoe.

Hard disagree. Most merchant ships and even some of the larger galley types were fully decked. I don't have student access to academic databases any more and like hell can I afford to buy it, but I recently read and enjoyed Davis 2009, which is available freely, and he makes several passing references to fully-decked vessels, citing his own sources in turn should you have the access and wish to look them up. See page 10, footnote 8 on p53, p54 (referencing Wallinga 1993), footnote 52 on p133 (the Libanius quote clearly distinguishes between sailors sleeping on the decks or in the hold). Footnote 108 (p228-9) asserts that grain ships in particular must have been not only decked but equipped with watertight or nearly-so hatches, as grain swells to more than twice its volume when wetted with disastrous results to the structural integrity of the hold.

[raccoonmask]

I mean, I know I tend to be strict on interpretations, but my default instinct wouldn't let a backpack be considered a room by the core definition. While I could put room, structure, and backpacks all as 'containers', and I'm willing to accept a well-made tent being a room, I'm less okay with a canvas backpack being described as 'a chamber'. I think whether or not a tarp with some tent stakes and rope is a 'room' is arguable in a per-saga definition, I think it definitely needs to be decided in core definition if a backpack is a room.
That said, I totally see that argument, but I don't like how it plays out. At that point, a sack is a room too. So if a sack is a room, how about a greatcloak that is pinned shut?

As a note, I would probably allow a group target for a backpack and everything within it.

[The_Young_Ottoman]

@silveroak

If it matters to the discussion, ships in the 13th century generally did not have a top deck or other structures built within them- they were essentially just a hull like a super-sized canoe. Very large ones would have a walk way around the inside of the hull the same as would exist on a castle wall for patrols. Thus there were no rooms on ships. I realize that the existing settings do, however, have this anachronistically.

Shipping, Trade and Crusade in the Medieval Mediterranean (edited by Drs. Ruthy Gertwagen and Elizabeth Jeffreys) has this to say about the average Med sailing ships of the 13th century:

Sailing ships appear to have been of a more standard type, at least for the larger examples. Whereas with galleys most information comes from graphic depictions, with sailing ships there are additional sources including contracts for their construction and leasing, mostly the result of Italian ports supplying crusaders with vessels in the thirteenth century. That material can be supplemented with the results of nautical archaeology and with the first treatises on shipbuilding produced in the fifteenth century. Sailing ships could have two, three or four decks though two seems to have been most common and the design did not vary substantially among the three sizes of sailing ships. The hulls were rounded and the vessels carried two side rudders at the stern. Planking was flat, abutting with strength coming from an internal frame as with galleys. The hull planks were tacked onto the array of keel, posts, floor timbers and ribs. That was the standard way to build a ship in the Mediterranean by the year 1000. The sailing ships typically carried two masts, the forward masts canted forward, and each mast had a lateen sail on a single yard.

Psyborg seems to have the right of this one.

@loke

Do you happen to have any authoritative and instructive pointers on 13C ship types? All searches I make turn up images of ships with rear towers.

Dr. John Pryor's The Naval Architecture of Crusader Transport Ships: A Reconstruction of some Archetypes for Round-hulled Sailing Ships, cited in the book above, has a ton of stats and diagrams of multi-decked period ships if that's what you're looking for. The good doctor even helpfully made some models:

[Damiancharon (Damian)]

I have heard about backpacks on the forum, and in game books, but did they exist in this time period, in Europe? I know baskets, bags, ceramic vessels, and metal vessels existed. I just haven’t seen depictions of backpacks. I know the original “backpacks” resembled baskets with straps, but collapsible vessels worn on the back?

[silveroak]

looking through the paper I found references to Roman decks, to 15th century decks, and assertions that there must have been decks, and one admission that no information about decks survived the archeological record.
While the hulks had forcastles and rear castles, each of which would technically have its own deck, it was not a top deck like we think of it to day which was nearly flush with the outer hull, but rather more like a cargo ship with an open top and a deck of sorts towards the bottom of the ship- the point being that it did not enclose the ship as a roof over the cargo area. Certainly the 15th century galleys did have top decks like we tend to think of for sailing ships.

[silveroak]

While the term backpack was coined in 1910 wooden frames for carrying loads on the back were found by archeologists in the possession of bronze age people who died of exposure. A sack to use with the frame is similarly a rather ancient device.

[The_Young_Ottoman]

@silveroak

While the hulks had forcastles and rear castles, each of which would technically have its own deck, it was not a top deck like we think of it to day which was nearly flush with the outer hull, but rather more like a cargo ship with an open top and a deck of sorts towards the bottom of the ship- the point being that it did not enclose the ship as a roof over the cargo area.

Are you certain of this? It seems like there are lots of examples of multi-decked ships from the 13th century Med more in the sense we would think. Here's the Venetian sailing ship Roccafortis from Pryor's paper cited above, which does include the pseudo-deck you describe but also a conventional deck:

...and a longtitudinal section of an typical Marseillese three-decked roundship, from the same paper:

Keep in mind as well that in the early 13th, these sailing ships are still primary warships as well as workhorses even in the Med, it's not until later in the century that the dominance of the galley really kicks in. Logistics of Warfare in the Age of the Crusades describes it:

The composition of Western war fleets changed considerably over the half-century between the establishment of the Latin Empire in 1204 and the outbreak in Acre of the War of St Sabas in 1256. In the wars between Genoa and Pisa in the Tyrrhenian Sea in the first half of the thirteenth century, fleets were often composed of a wide mix of sailing ships both large and small, galleys and smaller oared vessels of similar design, such as sagitae/saette, and intermediate types such as taride. Large sailing ships, or navi, were often mentioned as undertaking operations alone or as the primary warships in a fleet. However, by mid-century, when the first major war between Genoa and Venice broke out, galleys had clearly become the mainstay of war fleets.

[silveroak]

From this: Cog and Galley: Ships of the Crusade Era Part II
I get that multi decked ships were from the latter half of the 13th century, so they would not yet be used in 1220, and the Roccafortis was 1264.

[ErikT]

Some quotes from that text:

" By the tenth century dromons had become biremes with two banks of 50 oars, one below and one above deck. [...] They also had fighting castles on each side just aft of the foremast and a foredeck at the prow,"

" By the mid–twelfth century, iconography depicted as a matter of course two-masted naves with multiple-tiered sterncastles and substantial forecastles,"

"With the amount of deck space legislated by Marseilles for each pilgrim or crusader, ships of the size of the average three-decked ship could carry around 500–550 passengers. One thirteenth century Genoese ship, the Oliva, is known to have had a capacity of 1,100 passengers. Such ships were intercepted and captured by Saladin’s squadrons in the 1170s and 1180s and were referred to in Arabic sources as buțash."

[The_Young_Ottoman]

From the same scholar, cool! Nothing in this seems to contradict the other work I was looking at, the descriptions of the Marseillese ships used to create that diagram are supposed to be from the 1210s or earlier - from Shipping, Trade and Crusade in the Medieval Mediterranean:

Almost all the vessels appear in copies of either the History of Outremer by William, archbishop of Tyre, written around 1180, and the Histoire Universelle, originally written in France probably between 1208 and 1213 for Count Roger de Lille and brought to the Crusader States around the middle of the thirteenth century.

and in your posted source the good doctor says:

With the amount of deck space legislated by Marseilles for each pilgrim or crusader, ships of the size of the average three-decked ship could carry around 500–550 passengers. One thirteenth century Genoese ship, the Oliva, is known to have had a capacity of 1,100 passengers. Such ships were intercepted and captured by Saladin’s squadrons in the 1170s and 1180s and were referred to in Arabic sources as buțash.

The same author's The Crusade of Emperor Frederick II, 1220-29: The Implications of the Maritime Evidence also discusses ship types from the very decade and has this to say when discussing available ships (although the paper concludes that the emperor did not choose to use them, the fact remains that they were available):

As opposed to the one hundred or more oarsmen plus other crew required for a tarida or chelandra, an average sized two-decked, two-masted sailing ship could have a crew of twenty-five to seventy- five men but it could carry up to one hundred horses as opposed to the thirty or forty of a tarida or chelandra.

[loke]

@silveroak

While the hulks had forcastles and rear castles, each of which would technically have its own deck, it was not a top deck like we think of it to day

That hardly matters to this discussion. Fully enclosed rooms would form inside the castles, and and open-top rooms (like courtyards) would form between the castles, enclosed by the hull sides and the castles. Thus the ship gives rise to two potential kinds of rooms, each of which may or may not qualify as the spell target room.

[David_Chart]

How far should a spell following a growing container? Obviously, the spell has to fail if the container becomes larger than the size modifiers on the spell allow, but should it follow the container short of that?

[Tellus]

@David_Chart

How far should a spell following a growing container? Obviously, the spell has to fail if the container becomes larger than the size modifiers on the spell allow, but should it follow the container short of that?

I would prefer no. Just as I would prefer that Room/container effects collapse with the delimiters defining their volume collapses - ie tents being taken down.

[silveroak]

I would say that so long as the basic integrity of the container remains that up to the maximum of the size modifier would be appropriate. If you have to tear down enough wall to not make the room a room while it is being expanded then the spell fails- similarly you can't just tear down the wall between two rooms in order to expand a spell to cover both, the change must respect the integrity of the original room.

[ezzelino]

@David_Chart

How far should a spell following a growing container? Obviously, the spell has to fail if the container becomes larger than the size modifiers on the spell allow, but should it follow the container short of that?

I think that question hides two subtly different questions.
The first is: how far should a spell follow a changing container.
The second is: how far should a spell follows a growing-but-fundamentally-unchanging container.

Suppose I cast a "type 2" PeIg spell to keep the contents of a very large chest (T:Room) cold.
I don't have any problem having the PeIg spell stay on the chest if the chest is made eight times larger through Object of Increased Size (as long as the PeIg spell could have worked on the larger chest).

But if the chest instead gets connected to another identical chest, and that to a third; the "walls" between the chests are removed to create a single space; a few planks reinforce the bottom; two axles with wheels are attached to it ... and voila now you have a wagon, hmmm ... I'm not sure I'd allow the PeIg spell to work as air conditioning on it, even if the result is probably smaller overall than the Object of Increased Size above.

So ultimately, I think the answer is: a spell should follow a growing container up to the spell's limits as long as the container remains "the same". Troupes will have to adjudicate that "identity" question, though usually it's going to be easy.

[Ovarwa]

Hi,

At last, we have a practical application for the ship of Theseus. From a hermetic point of view, when does the container cease to be the same container or a container at all? New paragraph

Let's consider some of the more straightforward cases. If a circle is broken, that container is gone. If a room is destroyed or modified to the extent that it is no longer a room, or if a structure is obliterated, those containers are also gone, and the spell ought to no longer apply.

In a similar way, if the container increases in size beyond the parameter of the spell, the spell should similarly be broken. New

What happens if I cast a spell on a room, then break down the role between at room and an adjoining room to create a bigger room? I think it is reasonable to rule that if the new room is not too big, based on the spells original Target plus modifier, then the region extends to the new larger room. But it is also reasonable to rule that the new room is really a new room, and the old room no longer exists, so the spell no longer applies because it Target no longer exists. New paragraph

What happens if a spell is cast upon a room, and then I build a wall down the middle of the room, bisecting it into two rooms? The easiest way to rule is that the original room no longer exists. But that would leave open and exploit of walling off a small corner of a room to dispel magic cast upon the room. New paragraph

A type to container has a problem not associated with changing the size of the container. Other than mendham, spells are based upon an amount of stuff. Groups and rooms and structures are still based upon an amount of stuff in the group room or structure. So what happens if I take a basic type to spell, and stuff my structure with too much stuff? This problem does not exist for basic container spells, because the amount of stuff affected is established when the spell is cast.

Anyway,

Ken