YT

From: Aden Steinke <Aden_Steinke_at_uow.edu.au>
Date: 9 Feb 1995 16:52:12 +1100


Hi All,

Nick Brooke writes on why YT is not ubiquitous amongst Lunar dog feet -

>Humakt (as spelled almost everywhere) is the Sartarite God of War. Are most
>Sartarite warriors Humakti, then? Not in my gaming experience.

Nor in mine, but

  1. Sartar and the Lunars are two entirely different kettles of fish - there is a major difference between the practices of a civilised Empire with a standing army and the practices of a bunch of backwoods semi-civilised (at best) yobos.
  2. Humakt is surely the god of Death, not strictly War - war in the Orlanthi pantheon is equally a matter for Orlanth.

>Does Yanafal Tarnils even look like a god who could have a vast following
among
>the common soldiers of an army? Let's have a go at applying the CoP Humakt
>parallel to the two sides of this "mass Yanafali" coin.
>
>Obverse:
>If Yanafal Tarnils is a common soldier's god then many Lunar soldiers are
>decent, honourable, clean-living, gifted/geased, etc. This seems unlikely to
>most of us, and certainly would come as a surprise to the authors of the
Tarsh
>War and Soldiers of the Red Moon.

Most Lunar soldiers would be 'decent, honourable, clean-living, gifted/geased, etc' at least as much so as any army :) though the concept of clean living doesn't really seem necessary in either Humakt or YT, otherwise the Lunar Empire could not have expanded as it did with the incorporation of culturally / ethically diverse areas that then assisted in the further expansion of Empire.

Empires created by armies that behave particularly poorly [ for armies :) since any agglomeration of individuals will gravitate to some lower common denominator I guess] tend to be wracked with revolt and non-cooperation and have limited sucess in either getting the incorporated areas to play along, look at the Empire of Tamurlane (Timur-i-Leng if you prefer) for a historical example of an Empire created with massive violence, or the Assyrians, or the Hussite wars for the result of excess.

Empires whose forces are made up of fairly willing contributions from all of the empire tend to be like the Achaemenids - tolerant of the belief structures of incorporated areas.

Aden


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