I'm not saying that the bloodlines follow class lines or occupations to any great degree, merely a tendency for sons to follow fathers and wealth to remain within a bloodline. The stickpicker is an example of someone who does not produce their own food and instead relies on working for others in a menial occupation. As such they are going to have a social status lower than those who own a vegetable plot or herd sheep. They and their families are also those who are going suffer first and hardest when food is short.
>Right; I mean possibly four or five generations 'horizontally',
>not necessarily vertically from a live ancestor. I'm not counting
>young children, though, as I was counting back from the PCs, who all
>belong to the same largeish bloodline (which I'd guess had someplace
>north of 100 warm bodies, but is pretty geographically diffuse).
I'm afraid I don't follow the idea of horizontal generations. To me generations are always vertical - grandfather, father, man, son and grandson etc. Certainly I would regard a hundred plus members as a big bloodline, not only because it means several generations with several surviving boys but also because you are reaching the limit of people who are actually known to one another.
>> While I accept that it is possible to be the forth son of
>> the forth son of the forth son of a Carl and therefore have little
>> more than your clothes I would contend this is rare. If it were
>> common the clan involved would be in serious trouble as it would
>> mean they were breeding more children than the land could support.
>
>Not that rare. It'd be in the nature of things that the wealthier
>types expand fastest (becoming well wealthy per capita in the process).
I don't see any reason why they should, a wealthy person is equally likely to produce mainly girls as mainly boys exactly as a poorer one. Survival rates to adulthood may be higher among the wealthy but I'm not sure the wealth differences are sufficent to make that a major factor. Fewer of the poor will go off raiding and to war so the mortality rate there will be lower.
>_Ought_ to be done tactfully, sure. But what's wise, and what actually
>happens, may not be especially close cousins in Orlanthi politics.
>The sort of micro-management I meant though, is more to do with the
>sort of not-formal-trade 'exchange' we were discussing; you might
>have it 'made known' to you that a certain amount of generosity
>was expected, or would go down well with the clan, even if you don't
>especially like the intended recipient.
That's even more difficult to phrase without accusing him of being ungenerous which is almost certainly an insult, even if true. Actually I would expect a need to be communicated though the womens' gossip grapevine ending up with a wife asking her husband to send such and such to so and so because they're short and we've got plenty. I don't see it being sufficently formal to be regarded as micro-managment and certainly not the top down approach implied by the term.
>You don't need to 'trade' every day, though; an annual gift of grain
>is more likely than regular consignments of bread, but with the
>same net effect, that not everyone has to be an equal generalist.
Then you are restricted to a fairly small number of items - those which won't deterioate. Basically grain, hides, preserved meat, some vegetables and cloth. Certainly individuals aren't equal generalists and even steads will tend to specialise but I don't see large scale transfers of basic produce between steads. Grain is in fact a bit special, at harvest time it is essential for as many people as possible to work on a field at once. So not only will every member of a stead be involved it is quite likely that people from neigbouring ones will also turn up. Those who are carls will be repaid with help on their own fields but those who are not will be given a share of the crop. Incidently do the Orlanthi have clan flour mills or does each stead grind its own?
>> Looking at that bit in KoS, it doesn't seem to distinguish between
>> disputes at between clans or between individuals within a clan
>> apart from who is accepted as the court.
>
>Well, it states the the case of feuding clans is 'typical', in the
>description of lawsuit procedure, and in contrast, 'normal justice
>occurs within a clan, and concerns only its members', which sounds
>different to me.
What's the difference between 'typical' and 'normal' ?
>I don't necessarily disagree with any of that. 'Property' is just
>such a loaded word that I'd prefer to avoid, or at least explicitly
>qualify what we mean by it when we use it. There's a sense in
>which you can say of 'formally odal' property "this is ours", but
>there's an at least as important sense in which the chief can say
>"no it ain't".
I'll try and stick to 'property right' to cover all the different bits of things which aren't property in the modern sense, unless you have a better term.
>> That is a property right which could be removed from that
>> person and given to another, e.g. to pay a fine.
>
>That's misleading; the point is that it can be removed _at the
>chief's discretion_, not solely through 'due process', which I
>contend is meaningless or illusory at this 'level'. Of course,
>a political debate among the Orlanthi will often sound like a
>legal argument (precedents are cited and counter-cited), and a
>law suit will often sound like a political debate (our side is
>vainly boasted about, yours is slandered and baited, threats and
>promises are trundled out shamelessly), so certainly the line
>is very blurry in practice, that I agree on.
I don't believe that in practice a chief has that much discretion, even the feudal system didn't give that much power to the nobility although some dishonest lords did grant and forfit tennants property arbitarily. If wealth can be reallocated at the discretion of the chief then you get a very centralised power structure with the chief at the top, then his cronies and finally everyone else.
In Heortling terms, I think Orlanth granted the chief the right and duty to allocate clan resources as he sees fit for the benefit of the clan while Heort ruled that it was in the interests of the clan to respect an individual bloodline's use of land and livestock. In practice therefore land and livestock will not be taken from a bloodline unless they have committed some sort of offence (which might just be some form of neglect). That doesn't stop all sorts of accusations, false allegations and so forth for political ends.
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