I concur with Nick, however. The KoW is the perfect answer to the bellators -- total ruthless powergaming in the service of combat. Part of the wonder of it (and a secret that I believe no one in Glorantha has yet caught on to) is the the obvious way to resist these guys is to imitate them, their bellatoran ways, tactical techniques, and eventually, in order to support the costly professional armies necessary for this, to emulate much of their social system.
After several years of hard-fought imitation, training warriors who are ever-more-cruel, ever-more-deadly, steadily losing any trace of responsibility to their society and culture, your warriors become indistinguishable from the KoW, and at that point they've won. It is only a matter of time before the warriors realize who their _real_ enemies are -- the leaders and peasants who deny them the tools they need to carry forth their mission. Soon the two nations are one, and the two societies are won.
It is my contention that this process has already progressed apace with the Jonatings, whom I believe to have been much less harsh and grasping when the Ban first lifted.
Look at the Order of the Swallow. Suddenly, in a nation normally remarkable for its lack of imperialistic greed, an elite group of warriors arises for the express purpose of combating another nation that has not yet, at present, threatened Loskalm. Rumblings within the Order call for the occupation of lands east, as buffer zones and to use to defray the cost of the struggle. The Order of the Swallow are still, in my opinion and despite Nick's neo-Nazi ravings, largely Good Guys. So were the Chinese revolutionaries before 1949.
Nick
>As for the culture of the KoW, I'm not sure we should detail one.
>They are intended to be a Big, Bad Evil, not a
>sympathetically-detailed culture. You don't send ambassadors to the
>Kingdom of War; you don't trade with it; you don't travel there on
>relief missions, or wander through it on your way somewhere else.
I concur. The KoW is a state perpetually at war, if not with outsiders, then with itself. Its society, if it can be said to have one, resembles a freshly-occupied nation, under the iron boot of the tyrant. Its warriors are garrison soldiers in a foreign, though subjugated, land, even in their own home country.
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