Most retro or adventure games tend to categorize armour as Light, Medium, and Heavy. And it's almost always leather, chain, or plate mail with a spattering of nonsense such as studded leather or banded mail or splint mail.
In the real world, armour can usually be divided based on its construction into three groups:
- Soft armour, that is quilted fabric and leather that has not been subjected to any hardening process.
- Mail, that is a defense of interlinked metal rings.
- Plate, of metal, cuir-bouili (leather hardened by soaking in heated wax), whalebone, or horn. This group can be subdivided according to whether it is composed of:
- large plates articulated only where necessary for the movement of body and limbs.
- smaller plates riveted or sewn to fabric to produce a completely flexible defense (the so-called coat-of-plates construction).
- small plates joined together by a complex system of lacing (the so-called lamellar construction).
What follows is an armchair look at some classic armor throughout European history. While there are a plethora of other armour types in the world to take inspiration from (which still largely conform to the above constructions), I think the following will help with the types of armor you see in the standard Vanilla Fantasy setting with knights and dragons and castles and such.
After all, when was the last time you had a brigandine or a coat-of-plates in your game? And if you did have a brigandine did you make it worse than so-called 'chainmail' hmmmm?
