While I appear to be slowly losing this battle, there's a tiny voice in the back of my head which keeps chanting "Fight the good fight! Fight the good fight! Become _one_ with the Kingdom of War! Ohmmm....", so here goes:
Martin Laurie and Peter Metcalfe have weighed in to support Nick Brooke's "no humanizing the KoW" edict. In fact, I agree with a lot of what Martin has to say about the dangerousness and amoral nature of the KoW, including the Child Quota and his observation that in many ways they are a far more laudable foe than the Lunar Empire, and I like Peter's suggestion of a KoW account with the Nidan Decamony (though I still hold out some hope for KoW cannon, replete with individual names in echo of Mons Megs). Some particulars:
Martin wrote:
>Having nof will and smarts, the peasantry will lack drive, ambition and
>motivation to produce hard. Time and again throughout history it has been
>proven that fear does not create the productivity of honest patriotism or
>entrepreneurial drive.
[and]
>Eactly right. Joy Regiments, BoneSmith Companies, Supply Slaves, Sribe
Slaves
>will be the logistical support of the KoW. The only hope for such slaves is
>that their children (they are encouraged to produce them in massive numbers)
>will be taken into the warrior caste and rise above their parents retched
>status.
It is precisely _because_ of the historical inefficiency of slave/serf labor that I tend to postulate a missing class from the KoW's social hierarchy, even if it is nothing more than a class of "privileged serf overseers" whose INT and POW aren't tapped. The War Machine needs to run smoothly, and I doubt that they would entrust such an integral part of their power to mind-numbed idiots. This is particularly true if, as some folks have repeatedly suggested, the KoW is entirely mounted; if we assume the G:GCotHW numbers are correct and the KoW's army is about 80,000 strong, and further assume one mount and one spare (or a pack animal) per person (itself a low-ball estimate), that's 160,000 horses -- which, using Donald Engels' formulas in his _Alexander the Great and the Logistics of the Macedonian Army_ (20 lbs. of grain and forage per animal per day), means 3,200,000 lbs. of grain and forage consumed by their animals _per_day_ , plus 1,280,000 gallons of water...numbers which I personally find incomprehensible (god of MREs, indeed).
I don't think that the cults of the KoW should be restricted to simply battle-gods, but instead they should represent the full array of the aspects of war and the War Machine; just as Lokarnos serves as, in effect, Yelm's Logistician and occupies a place in the pantheon of Lunar war gods, so too should the KoW possess subcults which deal with the squeaky wheels of the War Machine. Wagon gods, pack animal spirit cults, pathfinder cults, the Eyes and Ears of the War Machine, cults of Battle Din and Discord, Pillage and the Scorched Earth, Vile Rumor and the Fear-in-the-Night, cults of Wall and Tower with their patron saint Vauban, cults of Crow and Vulture (the cannibalistic[?] Carrion Eaters, the Sacred Eaters of the War Dead), all these should exist in addition to the regimental cults of Sword and Spear, Axe and Lance, Phalanx and Company. The KoW should possess arms and armor at least the rival of the full plate of Loskalm, though undoubtedly more barbaric in appearance and accouterment, and hence the cults of the War Smiths, the Damascened Gods, trading whispered secrets with the dwarves of Nidan and stealing the secrets of Third Eye Blue.
As a side note, I have to admit the phrase "Joy Divisions" gives me pause; more or less voluntary camp followers have been a facet of virtually every army in history, and I see no reason to make the KoW any different. Joy Divisions are a little too easy, IMO; more on this later.
Peter Metcalfe:
>Reading about some peoples desire to 'humanize' (Nick B.'s words) the
>Kingdom of War, I think this is heading down the wrong track. When I
>look at the Kingdom of War, I am reminded of the enormities of Nazi
>Germany, the Yezhovchina of Stalin's Russia, the Cultural Revolution,
>the Witchcraze etc. The Kingdom of War is _not_ a normal society, it
>is a Madness. Whether Lord Death on a Horse does it for the Great God
>Pookums or is a bewildered Humakti trying to keep a grip of things is
>immaterial.
>
>Complaining about the lack of apparent culture in the Kingdom of War
>misses the point. I would only use cultural practices in the Kingdom
>of War to bely the senselessness of it all.
I do not, by any stretch of the imagination, believe that the KoW is a "normal" society, though in arguing this point it may appear so; the KoW is a culture totally out of whack. However, to dehumanize it to the extent that some have argued robs the KoW of its ultimate horrors. The most disturbing film about Nazi Germany that I've ever seen, except perhaps for _Night and Fog_, is the bone-chilling film based on the actual transcripts of the Wannsee Conference (I can't remember if the film is called _Wannsee_ or _the Wannsee Conference_), in which a bunch of Nazi bureaucrats sit around discussing the Final Solution over the German equivalent of tea and crumpets. To reduce the Nazis (or Stalin, Pol Pot, the Inquisition which nobody expected, or the overworked guillotine) to the unfathomable Other is to ignore both the horror of logic in the service of irrationality and the hidden parts of ourselves, the "madness of crowds": the appeasers throughout the West that openly professed before and during the war that Hitler was right about the Jews (and who, after the war was over and Stalinist Russia had become our bogeyman, whispered that we had been on the wrong side even after the horrors of the Holocaust had been revealed), the collaborators in France and Denmark and Lithuania and on and on who not only helped round up their Jews and Gypsies and gays and communists but actually _joined_ the SS's foreign national divisions.
Is the KoW Nazi Germany? I don't think so -- the War Machine is a different kind of beast -- though I can understand the parallel. IMO, however, Evil which is Ugly, which is Other, is just too..."easy." There's already a certain amount of that going on in Glorantha with Chaos, sometimes, with its abominations and mutations. A number of commenters have brought up the parallel between the KoW and Mordor, the penultimate Big Bad Evil of the fantasy genre. To me, what made Mordor most frightening wasn't its armies, its mailed hordes, but the temptations of the One Ring, the temptations which Gandalf and Galadriel recognized and refused, that Boromir and Gollum and eventually, at last, Frodo fell prey to: the desire for its seductive Power. I looked up this passage from the LotR, it's Galadriel speaking:
"...For many long years I had pondered what I might do, should the Great Ring come into my hands, and behold! it was brought within my grasp. The evil that was devised long ago works in many ways, whether Sauron himself stands or falls. Would not that have been a noble deed to set to the credit of his Ring, if I had taken it by force or fear from my guest?
"And now at last it comes. You will give me the Ring freely! In place of the Dark Lord you will set up a Queen. And I shall not be dark, but beautiful and terrible as the Morning and the Night! Fair as the Sea and the Sun and the Snow upon the Mountains! Dreadful as the Storm and the Lightning! Stronger than the foundations of the earth. All shall love me and despair!"
In a sense, Chaos has its One Ring in the guise of Illumination, the "gee, if I just answer enough Riddles, I can get Features without being a Fiend" temptation that I have seen strike so many players (including, I must admit, myself). To dehumanize the KoW is to rob it of its Ring, and you might as well take it to its logical conclusion and just declare that the KoW is populated by Orcs (tm? -- world-design joke).
One last example of what I'm thinking of. In a previous post I had speculated about the possibility of a KoW -- Predator parallel, but last night I think I hit on the right filmic example (I know I'm thinking about this too much when I look up stuff in LotR and ideas are popping into my head when I'm trying to fall asleep; sigh). In _Apocalypse Now_, there's the scene where Brando/Kurtz is rambling on about his revelatory moment, when he and his men returned to a village where they had been inoculating children and discovered that the VC had come to the village and "chopped off every inoculated arm", and he talks about the "diamond" of realization that struck him and says something like -- sorry, I'm doing this from memory -- "...and it hit me, these were not monsters, but they were men, men with children of their own...and they had the strength, the _strength_ , to do this...if I had ten divisions of such men, our troubles here would be over." The forces of the KoW are, in a sense, those ten divisions: as fully capable of love and laughter, pain and fear, as anyone else, and I think it is necessary for them to be demonstrably so to prevent a campaign against the KoW from being simply a version of a bug-hunt. A campaign against the KoW should be a journey into the Heart of Darkness (Nick Brooke's "dark heart of Fronela"), its pathos and existential horror coming from the moment of realization of shared humanity. The KoW needs to be "beautiful and terrible," IMO, representing not only the horrors of war but its perverse attractions: comraderie and elan, glory and heroism, the glint and glimmer of plate and sword and flying standard, the rush of adrenaline, the Song and Celebration of Victory and Survival. It is the land of Nietzche, beyond "mere" Good and Evil; amoral, yes, but seductively so. The KoW should frighten the crap out of players not simply because their armies are cruel and vicious and really, really dangerous, a threat to the players' way of life from within and without, but because somewhere in their secret heart of hearts _they_wanna_join_up_.
(Hmm. Brando/Kurtz as Deathy-Poo, riding around Fronela muttering "I'll make them an offer they can't refuse" and "Here, in da Kingdom of War, we got ourselves something called da Napoleonic Code"? Or perhaps Brando/Kurtz as Sir Meriatan; "I had no idea why the Fronelan High Council wanted this man dead..."?...nah.)
Sorry about the length of this post.
Mark
End of Glorantha Digest V2 #212
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