Following the previous post, what would I go with for a fantasy character in terms of personal camping/trekking gear?
Well, okay. Using my tweaks on GURPS weights for such things, and drawing on many decades of personal camping experience, I make the following assumptions:
* First off, that we’re talking an adult rather than a sixteen year old.
* Second, for encumbrance, I normally stick with the simpler multiples of ST used in earlier editions, but let’s assume standard 4th Edition Basic Lift for a character with average ST. That gives a ceiling of 60 pounds encumbrance to stay within Medium Encumbrance. This gives a -2 penalty to a lot of things like Stealth, Climbing, Swimming and the like. ST 11 goes up to 72 pounds. That’s the most I want a character to be hauling, and I’m not all that comfortable with even that much, on a route march by anyone who expects to be on top form for adventuring at the end of it.
* Third, that we’re not talking deep wilderness long-term camping, but that the PC is versed in basic survival techniques. The character will run into the occasional farmstead that will sell food, and won’t need to hunt ... but knows wild mint and onions when he sees them, and has a notion which mushrooms are good to eat or not. A half hour of forage in a forest will turn up stuff for the stew pot.
* Arms and armor: a rapier, scabbard for the same, leather armor covering torso and the head, belt knife and scabbard, a belt pouch. Total weight, 19.3 lbs. Add 3 lbs for clothing. 37.7 pounds left.
So, let’s go for a medium backpack, weighing 3 lbs and with a 40 lb carrying capacity. To this, we add:
- 2-quart waterskin (4)
- steel firestriker and tinderbox (.2)
- 2 4" wax candles (.2)
- hatchet (2)
- 50' heavy twine (.2)
- personal basics (1; razor, soap, willow stick, linen roll for bandaging, that sort of thing)
All of this is pretty self-explanatory, or else explained in the previous post. There’s a lot of space saving involved. No whetstone; use a rock. No axe, alas, but you don’t need to build a cabin, after all: get by with the hatchet.
For shelter and bedding, we add:
- light three-season bedroll (6)
- Forester tent (6)
- 30' jute rope (1.8)
- large sack (1)
- small sack (.5)
Yeah, I know, no mattress pad. That’s what the sack is for, to use as what’s called a “browse bag.” Spend a few minutes foraging for dried leaves, pine needles and the like. Sift through them to sort out branches, lumps, rocks and vermin. Stuff them into your large sack, and spread the sack out in your tent. That’s what you roll your bedroll onto. The small sack is what you stuff your spare clothes into, and that’s your pillow. Yes, you will want a pillow, however buff and rugged you picture your character being. (And, y’know, you have those sacks handy in case of loot!)
The Forester tent is the lightest tent there is, short of using shelter halves. You can see from the illo how it’s set up; that opening’s about 3' high. Part of your nightly routine will be to cut the poles and the pegs for it, but we’re just talking trimming saplings, and they don’t have to be dowel-true. The Forester benefits from being outstanding in high winds, in trapping heat from a fire in front, and from being as good as any tent before the invention of mosquito netting in dealing with bugs. The only serious drawback is space: it’ll fit two people only if they’re very friendly and don’t move much, you can't put much personal gear in it and still have room for YOU, and you can see that it isn’t the best option to slither out of in case of 3 AM monster attacks.
For extra clothing, we add:
- half-poncho, covering head, shoulders and upper chest (1.5)
- spare tunic (1)
- spare pair of wool socks (.2)
For cooking purposes, we add:
- wooden mess kit, with cup, small bowl and spoon in a fitted box (think bento box; 1)
- 2-quart pot (3)
- 1-pint pot (1)
- jar of cornmeal (1)
- 1-pint wine (1)
- jerky (1)
- ½ pint cooking oil (.5)
- box of cooking spices (1 oz ground mustard, 3 oz tea, 4 oz salt, total weight .5)
- ½ pint honey (.5)
The meal is for cooking pones, which can bake on a flat stone, or even in raked ashes from the fire. Shave some bacon into the mix. Haute cuisine it is not, but it’ll do.
In the field, you’ll be making a lot of stews in the larger pot. (The smaller one is for tea and hot water for washing up.) That’s what the wine is for, actually – tarting up your stew. Ditto spices, and the honey’s for your tea, and energy.
The total comes to 36 lbs, leaving a little over a pound and a half left both for food from the nearest farmhouse (most of which you ought to have eaten on the spot, granted) and for little things you just want to have around. A smoker’s pipe. Those dozen porcupine quills that you’re sure you’ll need one day. A religious amulet.
One consideration when it comes to weight, by the bye: GURPS has standard equipment modifiers for things like Cheap, Fine, Stylish, Rugged, Waterproofed, and so on. One option is for lightweight gear. It's not as sturdy, it's a good bit more expensive, but it's likely an option that you can at least try to talk you GMs into exploring. Copper cooking gear's a good bit less durable than iron, but if you absolutely need to save a couple extra pounds ...
Obviously, all this becomes a lot easier with a party: only one person needs to carry the cook gear, after all, the mail coat, sword-and-board the heavy fighter totes is offset by the gear the party mage isn’t carrying, and a group that stands watches can either hotbunk in Foresters or haul a much larger multi-person tent. A single donkey can reliably carry 100 lbs in rugged terrain for long-distance marches; a trained pack mule (much more expensive!) can manage twice that.
And just as obviously, this load has to change with conditions. A half-gallon waterskin won’t satisfy so much as a day of drinking requirements for hiking, and if you’re not traveling in an area with frequent streams, you need to carry a lot more. (A week’s worth of drinking water, that approaches sixty pounds per person ... without factoring in cooking, washing, or how much more one consumes with strenuous labor or hot temperatures.)
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