Just a couple of quick comments about some stuff on the Art of War in gd170 - -- I believe the author was Sandy P., though the message was tagged as "owner-glorantha-digest" and the end of it cut off by my mail server (if it was, in fact, Loren writing, I apologize for the misidentification -- it just seemed like a Sandy post).
>They [the KoW] worship war gods, not cavalry gods.
Hmm, sorry, that was, in a sense, precisely the point I was trying to make; I apologize if I was unclear. Part of the problem, I think, is that in Glorantha the relationship between humans and horses is almost always defined as a cultic one (outside of the West, that is, but then they're always kind of the exception anyway), primarily in the cults of horseman gods (Hyalor, etc.), so I tend to think of heavily-horse oriented war cultures as possessing specific cults which formalize this relationship in some form or another.
>The troll members
>of the KoW doubtless fight afoot. There may also be bands that are
>able to dismount to fight, though they normally travel on horseback
>(like the Vikings). I predict that after the KoW has fought good
>infantry, they'll start using more infantry of their own. Presumably
>the Jonatings have some worthwhile footmen, and the KoW may already
>be learning to dismount some men in every major fight (as the
>French learned to do after repeated defeats by the English foot).
This seems, on a certain level, to contradict to some extent your previous comments on KoW tactics, in that siege operations (both offensive and defensive) are almost exclusively carried out on foot. If the KoW is already capable of constructing defense-in-depth fortifications and of mounting (no pun intended) successful castle-cracking sieges, that seems to me to imply they've already incorporated the concept of infantry operations (dragoons, if nothing else) into their war theory. I agree with Kevin Rose, incidentally, that your statements about the easy success of KoW siege operations seems a little odd.
>Wild-eyed horsemen aren't as common to Western
>minds, but they existed, too. Think of Sioux warriors, crazed on
>hallucinogenic drugs and holy frenzy; or the French knights at
>Crecy, so hungry for blood that they trampled their own men and
>charged into battle immediately after completing a long and tiring
>march; or ululating Arab horsemen, certain that to die while slaying
>on behalf of the faith means immediate Paradise. This may help you
>in picturing a ferocious mounted berserk.
While the examples do help, my trouble with mounted berserks had more to do with the nature of the spell Berserker, which, in creating a single-minded obsession with killing and the attack, always seemed to me to imply that a Berserker would have trouble controlling anything but the best-trained mounts in the heat of battle. This is particularly true since almost all examples of Berserks I've ever seen -- in published works and private play -- have used two weapons, making use of the bridle increasingly difficult (I'm not saying it's impossible, just -- IMO -- improbable, that a Berserker is going to be busy controlling his mount with his knees while frothing at the mouth and swinging twin bastard swords). RW berserks don't strike me as being quite the same thing as Gloranthans under the influence of divine magic.
As a final note, I just wanted to second what Kevin Rose wrote about the degree to which military culture is bound up with the culture that produces it; Victor Hanson has written extensively, frex, about the growth of hoplite tactics and ethos out of the farmer-citizen culture of the early polis and has argued, quite convincingly IMO, that those tactics would have been antithetical to kin-dominated cultures (or even aristocratic ones). Orlanthi culture, frex, strikes me as emphasizing the individual, close kin and clan to a degree that makes it unlikely they would produce disciplined infantry.
Just a few thoughts.
Mark
End of Glorantha Digest V2 #174
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