The Kingdom of War is not a kingdom at all. It is not even a state in any meaningful sense. The elite, the Warlords, are parasitic. They take from the producers, the Peasants, but give nothing in return: no protection from external threats; no law and order.
Unlike the Hrestoli the Warlords do not believe in chivalry. Rather they believe that might makes right. They take this dogma to it's furthest extreme utterly dehumanizing non-Warlords.
They operate what might be described as a billeting economy. When a Warlord regiment enters -any- settlement they ransack it. They force the inhabitants to provided them with accomadation,slaves, tap-victims, supplies and plunder. A settlement in the heart of the Kingdom of War will recieve exactly the same conditions as a Junoran free-city. The difference is that the Junorans are more likely to provoke a massacre by refusing to provender their visitors.
After billeting a regiment a settlement is allowed to recovery sufficiently to be worth ransacking again. However the settlement won't recieve anything like enough time to recover from it's previous shock. The Warlords slash and burn on a grand scale. Today the Black Forest is probably a blasted heath, it's resources utterly exhausted.
The Peasants of the Kingdom of War live in isolated settlements: they are too terrified to travel. They have no specialists, all their crafters have been carried off as slaves by the Warlords. Their settlements may have quisling "headmen" but the peasants have no formal hierarchy. Their underling culture is a mixture of Malkioni and Theyalan elements. It is impoverished by their circumstances. Most have been so heavily Tapped that they are no more intelligent than cattle. Those that are n't are paralyized by despair.
Recruits to the Warlord class are,in the main, members of the peasant class enslaved as children. They are nursed by regimental camp followers. If they survive long enough to come of age they are dubbed and manumited simultaneously. The social unit is therefore not the family but the troop (60 men.) The regiment operates as a kind of surrogate clan. No doubt the Hrestoli Idealists of Loskalm will find much to admire in the meritocratic Warite caste system once they have experienced it for themselves. Occasionally a particularly brave foe may be offered the choice between converting to the Warite way or being Tapped until they could be mistaken for a gorp. Few are "lucky" enough to get a choice.
The Warlords have a subsistence culture; the drive to survive is always uppermost in their minds. Their underlying culture is Stygian Malkionism reflected through the prisms of their Supremacist dogma and constant campaigning. For example courtly romance is out and fraternity is in. Lord Master of the Demons of Death, St Humct and St Arkat are more popular patrons than St Valkaro or St Xemela.Their crafter-slaves and plundered treasure probably dictate the material culture of the Warlords to a much greater extent than any conscious decisions they make themselves.
All this does have implications form the way the Warlords fight. The only way they know how to get even the most basic commodities is to plunder them. Therefore their expansion has a momentum of it's own which the death of a leader could not arrest. The regiment is the largest unit with which a Warrior will identify himself closely and is probably the largest practical unit to billet on a Kingdom of War settlement.However leaders such as Lord Death on a Horse play an important role in assembling disperate regiments into larger forces to attack big targets, such as Riverjoin or Perfe. The Vikings operated in a similar manner. Also the regiments of the Kingdom of War are peripatetic. After a few weeks billeting a regiment a settlements resources become very meagre and the regiment is forced to move on to another one.
The Warlords are distinguished from Jonatelan or Loskalmi knights by
their unbridled Supremacism and their military/social unit. The
former is perpetuated by the fact that everyone in the Kingdom of War
except the Warlords is tapped into sub-humanity. The latter is
perpetuated by the severing of family ties by recruitment. If we knew how
these distinguishing features arose the nature of the Kingdom of War
would be explained. Finally, if 55,000 Zorak Zorani appeared out of
nowhere without any Kyger Litor mothers to reign them in would they behave
any differently to the Warlords? Also does n't Lord Death on a Horse sound
exactly like what Zorak Zorani runelords would be called if they were mounted?
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Andrew Behan
e-mail ajbehan_at_alf2.tcd.ie
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