First, and minor, is the sense of anachronism it carries with it. I have not read the article by Deleuze and Guattari that Mark is drawing on ( though I'd appreciate a full citation for it--it looks interesting), but the concept and the language are to me redolent of the last half of the 20th century in our world, with its justified worry about the 'Military- Complex' and the 'National Security State.' None of this seems to apply very well to pre-industrial cultures, even those of Glorantha, which are surely different from the ones found on earth. If Deleuze = Gilles Deleuze here, it seems even more likely to me that he is considering modern phenomena rather than pre-modern ones.
Second, and major, is the way this concept relates to game-play. A familiar figure from my own experience in RQ and other systems is a playertype I think of as the 'bellator', equivalent, more or less, to the 'wargamer' of the canonical 4-fold path to rpgs. The bellator's characters aren't *characters*; they are killing machines, sometimes approaching the one-dimensionality of the cyborg in the first Terminator film. Bellators' characters have all the appropriate skills for a soldier/commando, with no development of other abilities; their personalities are at best a couple of quirks, often ones that will promote a macho image; no emotions, interests, cultural biases, etc. get in the way of tactical considerations when they determine their actions.
As you may have gathered, I don't much like the bellator's style of play.
>From this stems most of my objection to the 'pure military' version of the
Kingdom of War. It sounds very much like the sort of kingdom that a
bellator would invent, and its inhabitants (of the warrior class) seem to
be bellators' characters. According to the 'pure military' thesis, the KoW
is focused completely on fighting, with little or no culture apart from war
. Like a bellator's character, this KoW has no distractions from its
pursuit of military victory--in particular, no internal politics. Also, to
judge by some postings at least, Lord Death-oaH and his commanders are
infallible in their military judgment and their soldiers are world-class
experts in their military skills (indeed, I think their prowess has been
rather overstated). True, in typical Gloranthan fashion, the KoW's warfare
is tied to religion. But even on this point much of the list discussion
has approached things from a warfare-first point of view, starting from the
KoW's militarism and reasoning back to their religion.
Now, I have no problem with the theme of the vast enemy army on the march which Nick invoked for the KoW. But looking at the two of the examples he gave (Ottoman Turks, and Moorcock's Granbretan) just points out the poverty of the 'pure military' KoW. Where in our discussion of the KoW is the equivalent of the Ottomans' ideology of the 'Circle of Equity', which linked together the military, the productive classes, and the sultan through justice and religious law? Or, for that matter, any hint of equivalents to the Ottomans' complex bureaucracy, legal system, fractious internal politics, or other things that made Ottoman culture fascinating and rich? Granbretan, of course, has infinitely less depth than the Ottoman culture, yet with its masked societies, weird pseudo-science, and constant internal wheeling-and-dealing is still much more interesting and complex than the KoW.
Here I think the close connection between the Art of War and KoW threads is important. The AoW thread built on the ideas expressed by Archer Jones in _The Art of War in the Western World_. As Jones makes clear in his introduction, his work is not an all-around history of warfare, but a narrowly focused study of certain "operational variables" over time. Broadly speaking, I think that it's fair to put Jones in the same camp with those that Keegan refers to as 'General Staff' military historians, dedicated to discovering underlying laws of the military art that remain valid through time (see particularly the last chapter of Jones' work). Such an approach is not likely to show many connections between culture and warfare; in fact, Jones notes that his book is not concerned with morale and motivation, nor with the integration of political and economic means and ends with more purely military ones in grand strategy--areas where military considerations merge with wider cultural ones. Because the AoW thread has largely left cultural connections out, the list's version of the KoW has remained focused some aspects of the kingdom's military expertise, ignoring its culture.
Jonas Pope
End of Glorantha Digest V2 #191
WWW material at http://hops.wharton.upenn.edu/~loren/rolegame.html
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