I agree with you but what I thought was that the Serfs have tapped INT and POW but they will have an overseer who will have tapped STR, CON and DEX who organises the porduction. The scribes that organise the logisics will be the same. Fine leather Workers will have tapped POWs and CONs but normal INT and DEX etc. By selective tapping the KoW sorcerers _create_ task specific workers. To my mind the horror of this fate is acute. Captured specialists and craftsmen can look forward to being drained of anything that will give them strength to revolt and taken far from home, mixed with equally drained strangers and made to work endlessly.
>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.
I don't think that either but that, as I said above, is not the only way of tapping them to servitude.
>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.
I agree completely with you here. I think that there should be Gods devoted to all aspects of war, not just belting people over the head. The KoW machine is complete and a huge part of that must be logistics. However, I think any cult that would say be in ordinary Orlanthi society would be so warped in the KoW as to be unrecognisable. Imagine Orlanth himself worshipped as the God of the Flying Thunderbolt Regiment! All the fringe insane cults of the world will find a place in the KoW if (and only if) they bring a military capability which will aid the Kingdoms sucess. So the Hungry Ghosts is probably widely worshipped as an associate cult, the victorious warriors eating "Long Pork" and building their power to fight the next foe. In fact the KoW as a whole is a cannibalistic system. The Hungry Ghosts are probably a major spirit cult there, transcending Cult bounds.
>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.
Its horror is its brutal amoral drive to destruction that cannot be quenched except with defeat. I think it would take someone as dedicated and as ruthless to win. The KoW will sully all it touches with its drives. Its a lot like Moorcocks Granbretan. They destroyed the world out of boredom. What is more utterly terrible than that?
> 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_.
EXACTLY!!!! you've hit the nail on the head. With insights like those, I'd reccommend you stop taking the LSD immediately. Bravo.
I see the desire to join the rampant sucess of the KoW being overwhelming for many. It strikes a nihilistic chord in the souls of many warriors, especially Humakti. Its the reason why I think Urain (plugging my write up again) would work in the KoW, not because he's chaos, but because he is amoral destruction. Shargash might be big too. Or a form of Vadrus.
"The horror, the horror" were Kurtzs last words in Apocalypse Now. The horror of what human beings can do to each other in the name of victory and even of peace hile still thinking themselves in the right is terrifying. The KoW is the horrible "heart of darkness" in the soul of every Gloranthan warrior only its physical and stomping all over you!.
I speculated to Nick Brooke that the Syndics Ban actually seperated not only peoples but whole social forces in Froenla into sperate groups. So we have a Kingdom of Love, a Kingdom of Ideals & freedom, a Kingdom of Repression and Cynicism and a Kingdom of War.
Martin Laurie
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