With the (re)appearance of missing digest #191 and with it the KoW thread, I figured I'd make a few comments.
First off, in response to Jonas Pope's well-worded criticisms:
>First, and minor, is the sense of anachronism it carries with it....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.
Yes, that was Gilles Deleuze (who recently commited suicide after a long and failing battle against terminal illness, sigh). You can find the essay _Nomadology: The War Machine_ in his & Guattari's book _A Thousand Plateaus_ or published individually in the Semiotext/e Foreign Agents series (though that series may be out of print, I'm not sure). It would be difficult to characterize their interests in that essay as being strictly modern -- it begins with Dumezil's tripartite mythological analysis, and veers along the way through the game of Go, Achilles, Kleist, Clausewitz, Virilio, Gothic architecture, Husserl, a discussion of space, speed and movement, and ultimately real nomads: the Scythians, Genghis, Tamerlane, Attila. It is, in other words, utterly and frustratingly typical of modern French philosophy.
They begin with Dumezil to demonstrate the axiom that "the war machine is exterior to the State apparatus": Dumezil separates political sovereignty -- itself a two-headed monster, with the magician-king and the jurist-priest -- from the warmaking aspect of mythological culture. As D&G put it, "Indra, the warrior god, is in opposition to Varuna [the magician-king, the binder of the State] no less than Mitra [the jurist-priest, the 'jurist of war']." In strictly Genertelan (and Orlanthi) terms, this analysis would imply a tension between Humakt, as the god of war and death, and Orlanth as the magician-king (with Lhankhor Mhy the Law-Speaker or perhaps Issaries as the jurist-priest arm of the pole of sovereignty, or perhaps even Elmal/Yelmalio if you want a closer martial Sun parallel)...a tension that could perhaps be supported by some of the recent discussion of Humakti ritually breaking kin-ties in some Orlanthi cultures (which also carries interesting echoes of those military theorists who see the weakening and eventual replacement of kin-ties as fundamental to the growth of warmaking culture). To simply say that the concept of "the State" only applies to the nation-state strikes me as too narrow -- perhaps then, as done here, the concept of "sovereignty" could be used instead to make it more palatable.
As a side note, I personally tend to view Loskalm as a nation-state -- the description of its military and government in G:CotHW seems to me to be of a centrally controlled and organized nation within the framework of Hrestoli Idealism, not the patchwork (largely familial and personal) ties of feudalism. The ultimate powers of government rest in the hands of the King, dispersed downward through the hierarchy of Idealism, and the army's organization is clearly that of a nation-state: regimented and organized numerically, rather than familially as is the case of the feudal warband. Of course, that impression may simply be the result of a poor presentation (or my own misreading).
>Second, and major, is the way this concept relates to game-play... 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.
Okay, a couple of things here (leaving aside what could be considered min-maxer mudslinging). In the first place, any discussion of the KoW must, by necessity, begin with its militarism and work backwards, simply because of the way in which the KoW has been presented to us in G:CothHW: the Ban lifts and behold, the KoW comes charging out claiming to worship a hundred gods of war (well, more or less; "poking about with happy curiosity" is, I suppose, an equally applicable description but not likely to be accepted by their enemies). That leaves us with essentially two choices, either a) try to come up with a coherent theory to explain the existence and motives of the KoW or b) junk the KoW all together. In that the KoW is placed at the very center of the Hero Wars in Fronela, option b becomes problematic, though a Loskalmi campaign run purely around the inner tensions of Malkionism and its competition with the heathen Jonatelans is perfectly possible (and that is, I assume, the direction of those who have chosen the "no KoW in my Glorantha" path). Personally, every RQ campaign I've ever been in as GM or player has pretty much written off everything north of the Nidan, which solves the problem quite nicely.
Secondly, I am curious about your repeated references to a lack of culture -- or perhaps more accurately, a lack of complexity -- in the notion of a "pure military" KoW. I suppose part of this might be a semantic problem around the term culture, etc. I don't see other aspects of culture necessarily disappearing from the KoW, simply that warmaking has become the dominant arm and that most other aspects of culture are now shaped by it. Ancient Sparta, frex -- probably the closest thing I can think of to the KoW in RW history, though the Mongols also come to mind (I'm less certain about Nick Brooke's Ottoman Turkey parallel); in fact, I'd suggest the term "helot" for KoW serfs - -- was, though entirely organized to support its citizen-military, a well-known haven for poets and artists, the apparent idea being something along the lines of "fight hard, party hard." While one could interpret the references to treasure hoarding in G:CotHW as proof that the KoW is nothing more than a spoof on D&D min-maxers ("kill 'em all, then count your gold pieces"), I see it as an example of trophy-taking: treasure is important to the KoW because it is a material, almost totemic example of their warmaking prowess, signs and symbols of their devotion to their gods and the war effort. I see no impediment, by extension, to the KoW developing a complex body of song, ballad, and literature, revolving around the glorification of the heroic and warlike virtues of its inhabitants (the Illiad, as opposed to the Odyssey), and triumphal art and architecture; in fact, I would be inclined to think of the KoW's lands as being peppered with arches, statues, shrines and steles both lauding the accomplishments of its heroes and mourning their losses (including public commemorations of their war dead along the lines of those of the Athenians). In this vein, I would posit a missing class from the G:CotHW Player's book, which reduces the KoW to serfs/helots and warriors -- any war machine requires a vast array of "support personnel", amongst which I would include both crafters and entertainers.
On the related question of whether or not there can be said to be something called "military culture", with values and ethos distinct from society at large, I think there can; I would suggest J.R. Hale's _War and Society in Renaissance Europe: 1450 - 1620_, which includes several chapters devoted to precisely that question (despite the verge-of-modernity time period of his study, though, once again, Loskalm in specific and the West in general strike me as being Renaissance in many ways).
Nor, for that matter, would I perceive the KoW as being monolithic in its internal politics, and certaintly no more monolithic than Hrestoli-dominated Loskalm; I would be far more inclined to suggest a fractious polyglot of martial sects vying for leadership roles, albeit within the framework of some sort of unifying structure, be it cultic or governmental (perhaps with something along the lines of the Humakti dueling code for the settlement of internal arguments, or quasi-mock battles -- though this is perhaps too martial in its nature for your liking; perhaps they settle it all by voting). As a side note, it occured to me that an alternative to Humakt might be Kargan Tor, emphasizing the "conflict and separation" in war rather than Humakt's province of death, though I have no idea what is supposed to have happened to Kargan Tor after the fall of the Spike...perhaps he was the object of a KoW heroquest early on?
While I agree with you that some of the comments about the KoW's capabilities in the digest seem somewhat offplace, I do think of the KoW as being militarily superior to their immediate neighbors; this does not IMO imply that they are unbeatable _on the field_. In the schema of the KoW as war machine, I still think that the subtler danger to their neighbors is, in effect, winning by losing: that the growing militarism of Loskalm would eventually undermine the Idealist underpinnings of Hrestolism, that the eventual lengths to which Loskalm will go to defeat the KoW will destroy its own economy and leave them as, well, Rokarians, having reduced the Farmer caste to peasants (i.e., helots) and exalted the warmaking castes of Knights and Lords. Loskalm would have become a mirror-image of the KoW in the moment of its victory -- a difficult thing to roleplay, really.
>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).
I just got Jones' book, and while I haven't been able to do anything more than skim it, I have to agree with your analysis from what I've gleaned so far. With due deference to Sandy, I'm generally disappointed with it.
Finally, Andrew Joelson wrote:
>This situation does not appear to be mirrored in Glorantha at the time of
the Hero
>Wars. Yes, tensions are running high in Fronela, and within the Lunar
Empire. But
>the KoW's actions have no direct bearing on the struggles of Dragon Pass &
Peloria.
>One never hear's of the Lunars (or Argrath) sending troops to Fronela.
The influences of the KoW need not be direct for them to be major; frex, Count Kaufan's castle-building campaign can probably be directly attributed to his fears that Charg will duplicate the KoW. Fortifications are amongst the most expensive outlays of any state (next to navies), and undoubtedly the people of eastern Carmania and eventually the Lunar Empire as a whole will feel the burden of his paranoia in the form of increased taxes, manpower shortages, and debt (what happens if the Count defaults on his loans?) -- not to mention the potential religious problems of the Count's embrace of Invisible Orlanth to bolster the martialness of Carmanian knights. The armies of Loskalm, Jonatela, and the KoW, like all armies, consume food and supplies on a massive basis, and if merchants from Seshnela, Ralios and the Empire begin exporting food to the ever-hungry stomach of the Fronelan war machine, then local food shortages, higher prices and more misery are sure to follow. Given the already chaotic state of Seshnela and the Safelstran cities in particular, this would only exacerbate the tensions of those areas, greatly speeding up the descent into the Hero Wars.
Hmm. Sorry about the length of this post.
Mark
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