Topic: Riding horse rules

[Ruffie]

Hi collective wisdom!

Can anybody point me to a source or give some advice on the speed of horses?

In my next session the players need to get from A to B. They are caught in an acidic rain and I need to know how much time they will be exposed to it.

The idea is:
They are in a town protected by a magical barrier against acidic rain. If they are caught in the rain it will hurt (a little). Every day the rain stops for an amount of time. During this time the group can travel safely outside. After a while the rain starts again.

Outside there is a cave or old keep from where the antagonist is controlling the weather. The party will find out where it is and try to get there as fast as they can but there is a chance they will be caught in the rain.

So I need to find rules for horseback riding and distance etc.

Hope I’m making sense.

[EltonJ]

Hi collective wisdom!

Can anybody point me to a source or give some advice on the speed of horses?

In my next session the players need to get from A to B. They are caught in an acidic rain and I need to know how much time they will be exposed to it.

The idea is:
They are in a town protected by a magical barrier against acidic rain. If they are caught in the rain it will hurt (a little). Every day the rain stops for an amount of time. During this time the group can travel safely outside. After a while the rain starts again.

Outside there is a cave or old keep from where the antagonist is controlling the weather. The party will find out where it is and try to get there as fast as they can but there is a chance they will be caught in the rain.

So I need to find rules for horseback riding and distance etc.

Hope I’m making sense.

Did you check Gamemaster Law?  That book contains rules for horses.

[MisterK]

There are a variety of resources to get strategic movement rates (and they do not give the same result, which is even more confusing). For overland travel on foot or by horse or cart, I use the Harnmaster charts, which provide rates according to terrain, presence of roads or trail, and modifiers for weather.
I wish Harnmaster would have made the same kind of easy-to-read table for river or sea travel, bus sadly, the released Pilot's Almanac instead, which is much more complex to use.

[Ruffie]

Hi collective wisdom!

Can anybody point me to a source or give some advice on the speed of horses?

In my next session the players need to get from A to B. They are caught in an acidic rain and I need to know how much time they will be exposed to it.

The idea is:
They are in a town protected by a magical barrier against acidic rain. If they are caught in the rain it will hurt (a little). Every day the rain stops for an amount of time. During this time the group can travel safely outside. After a while the rain starts again.

Outside there is a cave or old keep from where the antagonist is controlling the weather. The party will find out where it is and try to get there as fast as they can but there is a chance they will be caught in the rain.

So I need to find rules for horseback riding and distance etc.

Hope I’m making sense.

Did you check Gamemaster Law?  That book contains rules for horses.

Thanks! Had not checked there yet! I’ll be going through that one again! I knew I saw them somewhere but didn’t remember where.

[Jengada]

You could equally well Google horse speeds. Get a sense of walk, trot, canter, gallop. With that, you might look at the distances involved. You don't say what those are, in your original post, but a horse can't gallop forever - and you kind of have a "do you get wetter walking or running in the rain?" question here.
Side trivia: Jingle Bells/Sleigh Ride talks about a horse with "two-forty for his speed" which was a reference to the horses pace for a mile. That's a very fast sleigh.
Another thought you might consider, depending on how granular you want to be, or how much you want to focus on the rain ride, is how will the horses respond to the acid rain. Riding rolls should be much harder if they're getting burned as they run. What shelter do they see that they could run to? Do they just drop and roll in the dirt to relieve the pain?