War and magic

From: Sergio Mascarenhas <sermasalmeida_at_mail.telepac.pt>
Date: Thu, 18 Dec 1997 18:08:38 -0000


Kevin Rose made some very interisting analysis on Glorantha Military Magic (GD v5#283).

The way see it is that we don't have a magical system for war and the military. We have magical systems suitable for 'civilian' conflicts, not for the military. Magic in RQ (and most other game systems I know) provides the 'handguns' for tugs and 'policemen', not the 'cannons', 'bombs', or even 'catapults' and 'castle walls' required by warfare.

What could magic provide?

  1. Large scale, far reaching, and integrated communications and intelligence.
  2. Spells (both offensive and defensive) that can target a group instead of an individual, or an area instead of a point in space.
  3. Spells that remain active for a long period.
  4. Spells that result from the combined eforts of several people.

The existing rules cannot provide for it. If you want to carry something weighting several tons, you don't need hundreds of bycicles, you need a truck (or you need to devise a mechanism to turn the hundred bycicles into a single vehicle; yet the truck is still better). The same can be aplied to magic:

> A line of Loskalmi heavy crossbowman with damage boost 8
> (achievable due to practice and ceremony) can pretty much
> guarentee stopping one cavalry charge per battle.

is good, but is not the ideal solution. The solution is a single spell doing the damage instead of the crossbows.

Kevin gives some examples of this type of magic in Glorantha but we still don't have the principles on which it operates.

Certainly, this high level magic will not eliminate the usefullness in the battle field of the individual scale magic we know so well. After all, today our RW infantry soldiers still carry a bayonet.

Best,

Sergio

End of The Glorantha Digest V5 #285

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