Linen armor

You probably think this is an April Fools' Day joke, but it's not. It turns out that one of the most common forms of armor in ancient times was the linothorax, or linen armor.

No examples of it survive, but the it's believed to have been armor made from layer upon layer of linen. A group from the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay has even had some luck reconstructing it. (How come my history classes were never this fun?)



This is something else I've never seen in an RPG. Sure, there's usually some kind of padded cloth armor, but that's not the same thing at all. Now it's just a question of where to fit it on the arbitrary scale by which RPGs rank armor...