First some appropriate music.
One of the things I wanted with MYFAROG was to have authentic armours in the game; no anachronisms (like e. g. a plate armour from the 16th century would have been in a setting aiming to be similar to Classical Antiquity, and with no armours more modern than those from the Viking Age). This left me with fewer options, but I still managed to include quite a lot of armours.
All the metal armours can be made of either bronze (more expensive, not that good and heavier, but better for enchantments), iron (the most common and the cheapest solution) and aurichalcum (very expensive, but also very good). The dragon scale armour (or armour made from aurichalcum, for that sake) is as you might suspect not very historically correct, but this is a fantasy game…
Mail shirt (the least cumbersome of the metal armours)
Mail shirt with scales (the armour offering the best protection)
Scale armour
Dragon scale armour (the lightest of all armour)
Fur/leather shirt
Ivory scale armour
Laminated armour (a fairly cheap yet very good solution)
Laminated leather armour
Leather scale armour
Muscular cuirass
Muscular leather cuirass
Greaves (leather or metal)
Arm guard (leather or metal)
Conical or round (leather, metal or ivory) caps with or without neck-guard, nose-guard, spectacle guard and/or cheek plates; (metal) full helmets (Greek style); and (leather or metal) Sun hats (Boeotian style).
The possible armour combinations in MYFAROG are actually quite many, and more than I have seen in any other fantasy RPG.
Many RPGs try to balance things, so that e. g. an armour becomes more difficult to use the better it is. I have avoided such steps consequently and have instead included the real advantages and disadvantages of the different types of armour. A thing I have not included though is information about how much time would be needed to maintain the armour to keep it in usable condition, and thus the mail comes out a bit less attractive than it really is. In reality the mail needed almost no maintenance and would still be usable for decades, while e. g. a laminated armour would need a lot of maintenance in order not to quickly become useless, and it lasted much shorter too.
Another factor that play an important role in MYFAROG is the quality of the armour (and of weapons and shields too, for that sake). So a “poorer” armour type of superior quality can easily end up being better than a “superior” armour type of poor quality. You can naturally (?) also carve different runes into objects, including armours and weapons and such, to enchant them with special powers.
Strength negates much of the negative effect of wearing heavy armour, and if all the alternative rules are used a physically weak character will soon regret his choice to put on that heavy armour once he starts fighting on rooftops or on the ledge of a steep cliff…
I love Ancient European armour, and had it been socially acceptable I would of course have worn my own lorica hamata (mail shirt) most of the time.
PS. All armours and weapons are illustrated beautifully in MYFAROG by Andrey Nazarov.
