Hunt the Buggers?

From: Nick Brooke <100270.337_at_compuserve.com>
Date: 16 Nov 95 18:31:56 EST



Mark writes:

> The forces of the KoW are ... as fully capable of love and laughter, pain
> and fear, as anyone else, and I think it is necessary for them to be demon-
> strably so to prevent a campaign against the KoW from being simply a version
> of a bug-hunt.

A version in which the *players* are the bugs? Let's face it, part of the appeal of the Kingdom of War to us manic GMs is that KoW forces damn' well ought to be better at swatting players than PCs will ever be at swatting its marching columns. This isn't as easy as picking off isolated Lunar tax-gatherers and patrols in Occupied Sartar: this is a whole magnitude more difficult. There are no soft targets in the Kingdom of War: only warriors, and they're much better at it than you.

I can see your point re: leaving them human so they're more terrible. Of course, this is almost impossible to pull off; you're likely just to make them human, or find out things about your players you'd rather not have known. I was trying something similar with Loskalmi Idealism, though from the other side of the front line: trying to create something which could be ugly as well as good: beautiful but fragile, and all too easily perverted, the butterfly returning to the worm. I guess I'm putting my moral ambiguity into the PCs from the other end: not "Are they just as human as we are?" but "Are we really no better than they are?" Pessimist to your optimist? Who knows.

Still, we both agree that they'll have to get cannon from somewhere, and seem also to disagree with the idea that their forces are 100% mounted. And I completely agree with you about the need for "support cults" working alongside the main fighting cults of the War Machine.

Maybe I've had too strong a dose of Kubrick's dehumanisation films, esp. "Full Metal Jacket" -- a good modern soldier isn't meant to feel "love and laughter, pain and fear," and has these things drummed out of him in training. Can we extrapolate this back to Glorantha, and consider the implications within the society of our archetypal War Machine?



Nick

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