Perimeter Safety

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Canotila

Sever your leg please.
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The dog idea is an excellent one.

What do your people eat? If they are living in mist, on the run, for a third of the year they can't exactly store up a season's worth of food and last on that. If something attacked they would have to abandon their storage and then they'd be in trouble.

Dogs are excellent hunting companions. I hunt with both scent and sight hounds. If we were in a survival situation I have no doubt that as long as there was enough game to hunt, we would have no problem collecting enough meat for my family and dogs to live on.

If a dog is eating a raw diet, the general guideline is 3% of their body weight in meat every day. My 50 lb. wirehaired pointing griffon taught himself to fish for sea cucumber and to dive underwater for butter clams at high tide. He will swim out and bring them in, until we make him stop. Once he caught a trout just by wading into a stream and being patient. He also is an excellent bird dog, creeping up on them like a cat and going into a point, sometimes less than 3 feet from the bird without it noticing. If your people are living in fog, and there isn't enough daylight to support a lot of plant growth, a dog would be a valuable ally in finding game, could be trained to find edible mushrooms, detect bad guys, slow down bad guys, etc.
 

S. M. Worth

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How about some part of a sybiotic relationship. A creature that follows these nomads and lives off their scraps, remain, waste...actually just read they are herbivores. Maybe your people still hunt for pelts or bones of animals, discarding the meat. Gives you the symbiotic relationship at least. These creatures nest in the trees, or on the outskirts of the camp, but also fear what your people fear. Therefore, they let out some awful screeching when something approaches, but nothing if its a person. This relationship may have formed over thousands of years. Maybe these creatures dwell only in the mist, moving to caves when the mist is gone. Or maybe they always follow these nomads...

Or if the world has magic what about a simple use of "wards", set by an elder of the camp. When breached they sense it. Being nomadic maybe the magic is shamanistic in nature?

Blah rambling now...
 
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Canotila

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Or you could go low tech and put up trip wires attached to something noisy, like a can full of rocks. Well, maybe not a can but you get the idea.
 

BlackMagic528

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You know, I've been in the vicinity of a screeching peacock. Of course, at the time, I didn't know peacocks made any noise at all. So, imagine my fright when I heard what sounded like a pterodactyl behind me!

Okay, back to the thread now . . . .

I'm going to do some thinking about trying to forge some type of semi-relationship between the adones and some other woodland beast, most likely a fowl of some sort. I can't see them really domesticating anything, but I can see them figuring out how to read the warning signs (like if suddenly all the birds fly away). Not a perfect system, but good enough, I suppose.

Of course, any more ideas are welcome. :) Thank you all. :)

Kyle
 

BillPatt

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I am trying to imagine gazelles with hands.
And a low-tech herd. Sure, you've got a few coals wrapped in a leaf. You don't have a parachute flare that you can set for an early warning system.

Their limbs are probably not build to dig out a decent deadfall, or rig a stake trap. Fire is possible, but requires a decent amount of time to get one going. And, being herbivorous, they are on the move all the time, except when it's sleep/cud chewing/foaling time.

The only answer I can come up with is some form of tripwire for early warning. Or craft a plant that creates seed pods under pressure, then have your friends bury them under leaves on the path. They'd pop like balloons when stepped on, giving warning. If not set off, they decompose after some period of time The vines used for tripwires would likewise decompose.

The problem with fun things like caltrops is that they'd last, like land mines. Herbivorous animals tend to regraze the same areas after regrowth. Future herds (or you own!) would move into 'mined' territory. Explain to the chief's daughter how you forgot to pick up the caltrop you're digging out of her foot. Without anasthetic.

Countermobility, you'd really have just brush and such. I don't see gazelles felling trees to form abatis - that would be a dead giveaway that the herd is nearby. In fact, the churning of the forest floor would pretty much give their presense away anyway. No, you'd use brush to limit the intruders' routes into your site. And those routes would be protected by tripwires or pop-pods.

Good luck.
 
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