YMMV / Banestorm

• Alternative Character Interpretation: Actively encouraged by the authors in this Pyramid article.
  Talking of the King of Caithness — even in our final version, he's someone who appears very differently depending what angle you choose to look at him. Disastrously weak king or noble ruler growing into his office, hard-working and dutiful or a boring control freak, romantic or just neurotic . . . You can find all of these opinions in Caithness. (One of our playtesters certainly disliked the poor guy.) However, any of these opinions could be completely justified.
• Artistic License – History: While the game use the historical Ghazis as the Islamic equivalent to the knights, a far better term would have been the faris, at first practitioners of equestrianism (as faris means "horseman"/"cavalier") before it developped a wider meaning as an Islamic warrior code, the furusiyya, which influenced and was influenced in turn by the European concept of chivalry.
• Artistic License – Traditional Christianity:
  • According to the sourcebook, Islam had more theological justifications than Christianity to accept the conversion of nonhumans due to the fact that Djinn could be Muslims in Islamic theology. However, more in-depth knowledge of the history of Christian theology shows that there are some avenues that could have been used to allow conversion of nonhumans: famously, in the early 5th century, Patron Saint Augustine of Hippo wrote in his magnum opus The City of God an entire chapter devoted to the hypothetical questions of whether fantastical races of monsters would have souls, be descended from Adam, and could be converted. Another parallel that could have been invoked is the great theological debate in Wooden Ships and Iron Men Europe over whether or not the indigenuous inhabitants of the New World had souls, notably the Valladolid debate presided by the School of Salamanca (which concluded that Amerindians indeed had souls and thus deserved human rights). Also, both Islam and Christianity have a long history of theories over cosmic pluralism, debating whether there were other worlds than Earth and, if yes, whether they harbored life as well. Realistically, their arrival on Yrth and their meetings of other races would have solidly confirmed an already existing hypothesis.
  • Most of the initial Banestorm occurs between the years 1050 and 1200 AD, yet no mention is ever made of the Greek Rite, Eastern Orthodoxy, or Eastern Christianity in general, despite the Great Schism occurring in 1054 and much noise being made of Protestantism and the Reformation by the Megalan Church, leaving the impression that the writers forgot about it or that Christianity is Catholic is in effect. Averted in later supplements, notably the Abydos sourcebook, which notes that Orthodox Greeks were transported to Abydos in the 1190s and thus the Eastern Rite traditions they brought with them were integrated into the later Lazarite Church.
• Named Like My Name: The authors, Phil Masters and Jonathan Woodward, are not related to (respectively) the Fantastic Four villain or the actor.
• Patchwork Map: Yrth mostly tries to avoid getting too egregious about this trope, if only by sticking to the basic principle of "cold in the north, warm in the south" — though the center of the continent seems fairly lush, while the deserts are more coastal, which seems a little odd. (Some of the deserts were blasted into that status by a magical cataclysm, to be fair.) However, that leaves Sahud, north of some bleak mountains and on a similar latitude to the sub-arctic Nomad Lands, which is kind of temperate, being similar to Japan or coastal China. Banestorm attempts to explain this by some handwaving involving a warm ocean current, but it's a pretty blatant kludge.