Banded mail
[ banded mail 
| |
|---|---|
| Appearance | banded mail |
| Slot | body armor |
| AC | 6 |
| Special | |
| Base price | 90 zm |
| Weight | 350 |
| Material | iron |
Banded mail is a type of body armor that appears in NetHack. It is made of iron.
Contents
Generation
In addition to random generation, general stores and armor shops can stock banded mail.
Description
While worn, banded mail confers 6 base AC and MC1.
Strategy
Banded mail is a slight upgrade from splint mail, providing the same protection while being lighter by 50 aum and having a slightly higher base cost. In general, it is still quite heavy, and either the dwarvish mithril-coat or elven mithril-coat is typically preferable at minimum.
History
Banded mail first appears in Hack 1.21 and Hack for PDP-11, which is based on Jay Fenlason's Hack, and is included in the initial list of armor for Hack 1.0. From this version to NetHack 3.4.3, including some variants based on those versions, banded mail does not grant any magic cancellation.
Origin
"Banded mail" is a 19th century neologism describing a type of composite armor formed by taking splint armor and applying the concepts of the personal banded armor (or lorica segmentata) worn by soldiers of the Roman army. Banded mail was believed to have existed during the 13th century in particular, but the historicity of banded mail is doubted: the term is a source of confusion due to similar armor being known by a wide variety of terms, and descriptions of banded mail have also been applied to plated mail, "laminar", brigandines, and splinted armor itself. Although considered a real type of armor during the 19th century, later history works claim that banded mail arose due to a misinterpretation of medieval manuscripts and tomb effigies.
Though there have been attempts at modern reconstructions of banded mail, no known historic examples are confirmed to exist. Existing manuscript and effigy representation has generally been interpreted as covering a variety of methods for depicting chainmail. British historian Charles John ffoulkes, author of the 1912 book The Armourer and His Craft, claimed that banded mail did exist as chainmail with leather thongs threaded through, and suggested that no specimen survived because the leather would have disintegrated in the centuries between their use and their discovery, leaving conventional chainmail. Regardless, banded mail is entrenched in the popular consciousness as a result of its inclusion in the armor list for Dungeons & Dragons, which NetHack draws from.
