What about shields?

The weapon & armor lists in FV include neither shields nor firearms. Based on my knowledge of real world Terran weaponry, shields were a nigh-universal piece of equipment until personal firearms rendered them obsolete. Thus, I see five possibilities concerning Venus:

• Firearms do exist on Venus, they just aren't included in FV, but will appear in some other "module" (Banners of War?). They've been widespread as weapons of war for long enough to drive the shield completely out of fashion.
• Not firearms, but some different, fantastic weapon of war exists which has made shields useless and driven them out of fashion.
• Firearms don't exist, but shields were never common on Venus or fell out of fashion for unrelated reasons. The only real world example I know of a land where shields don't ever seem to have been used is Japan, and that's quite puzzling: there, it probably has to do with horseback archery being the prime weapon of war for a long time, and their bows being large, so that carrying another large piece of equipment was very impractical; this drove an early evolution of swords towards large size and two-handedness and an evolution of armor towards including oversized shoulder-guards and other parrying pieces, long before the introduction of firearms in the 1500s. But this was a very local phenomenon in a small and very homogeneous culture of war - that it happens planet-wide is surprising.
• There are shields: as military-grade equipment, they're just implied as part of heavy armor. All suits of armor worth 2-armor are assumed to include a shield, just as they include a helmet, etc.
• There are shields, but specific rules for them just didn't made it to this first draft. Some possibilities include a shield providing bonuses to the Fight move (such as: extra +1 armor, but only if you've spent at least one on +armor) or negating harm when you sacrifice it, or providing an extra bad experience type to mark: "My shield was destroyed" or such.

The only reason I care is that I've been coming up with a couple shield designs this week, based on one weird general idea I had...

Interesting!

Would you share your shield design ideas?

(Your rule suggestions are pretty good. They could even all be used together. I'd lean towards "military armour includes a shield" interpretation. After all, there's no way to look inconspicuous when you're carrying around a shield.)

Would you share your shield design ideas?

I will, eventually, when they're mature ideas and I master the right tools.

Yeah. It's that shields, along with horses and dogs, are visually wrong for the game.

I can do away with horses and dogs by saying that there never were any on Venus. No domesticable canids, just jackals, and no horses whatsoever.

Shields, being a product of human invention, are much trickier. I don't have an in-game reason why there are none. It's a stumper.

-Vincent

It's #3, then!

No horses, really? Oh, noes! I was totally assuming horses. I'm pretty sure there are already horses in my game, though just as background noise. Will it somehow "break" the game at a later date, if I have horses in it? Like, in Banners of War? ^_^;
(But please tell me there are war elephants!)

As for no domesticated canids, I guess that's just fair to cats, and I do have ideas for replacements. See this other thread.

You definitely won't break anything! You won't even break anything if you include shields.

"Visually wrong" isn't load-bearing, it's just more of my nonsense.

-Vincent

"Visually wrong" isn't load-bearing, it's just more of my nonsense.

I'm definitely interested in what your vision is, mainly because I've actually liked what's transpired of it so far. Of course, in practice it's always going to be down to some interplay between what transpires of the author's vision and what the actual players actually feel like doing of it, but...

Anyway, we officially established "no domesticated dogs" during today's session and I also stood corrected about horses: players say I haven't mentioned any horses so far.

For what it's worth, my personal vision of "Venus" doesn't include horses, either - they just don't seem to fit the aesthetic landscape, so to speak.

There seems to be an assumption that, though the humans are basically... human, all the fauna and flora is exotic and alien. (However, with the use of some "Earth terms" and some variation on Earth-based lifeforms.)

Dogs, horses, and so forth all seem to be "foreign" to the Venusian environment, in my mind, unless they're meaningfully distinct from their Earth counterparts.

It's an interesting inkblot test of sorts!

There seems to be an assumption that, though the humans are basically... human, all the fauna and flora is exotic and alien.

Funny how this makes perfect sense now that you say it, but isn't what I'd read in the text myself, at all. Interesting inkblot test indeed!