>Donald Oddy
>>I don't believe Orlanthi children have much time for play in the sense
>>modern city children do. They are doing tasks which teach them what
>>they need for adult life - most of which is related to farming or
>>hunting not fighting.
>
>A good deal of which is play.Furthermore fighting is a skill they will need
>in Adult life.
Indeed, one of many and I don't believe it gets a great share of time. To compare, the Yeoman bowmen of England practiced each Sunday after church. Less than a full day a week to get a good standard of skill in one weapon. The other six days were needed for farming even though medieval farming was more productive than Orlanthi farming is likely to be.
>>Furthermore you don't send a child out with a spear until they know how to
>>use it.
>
>Why not? Modern armies formalise this & call it Weapons Familiarisation.
>The difference being that modern armies can rightfully say:
>> better for them to run back for help then get killed through clumsyness.
>While the O/i youngster has a better chance fighting than running from the
>wolf. The threats are vastly different.
Not true, if wolves are after livestock, which is the most likely, then running back to get help is the far better option. Both for the individual and the clan. The alternative risks a youngster imagining s/he is a hero and capable of taking on the wolf pack by themselves. Result a dead herder, dead and scattered livestock which the rest of the clan doesn't know about for hours.
>Even in the RW & within the last century & in a peaceful, stable western
>culture all rural kids could expect to learn to shoot before their 10th
>birthday & carried a rifle far more than could be expected given the level
>of threat (virtualy nil in Oz). And yes many were killed through clumsyness
>but it took a massacre for the practice to be even moderately curtailed.
>Even so the law allows for children under 14 to learn to shoot.
But they were taught to shoot, not handed a gun and bullets and told to go shoot some rabbits.
>>To get to that stage requires someone to train them and there is only so
>>>much time to do it. That's why I think a day a week is the best they can
>>hope for.
>
>Depends on who's doing it. Grandad 'cos the kid should know', older sibs
>just to show off, Granma to keep the kids busy during a lull in the work
>(which I suspect happens more often than you credit), Dad to relieve the
>boredom of Dark season, Uncle Fred to relieve the boredom of missing the
>Fire season raid etc etc.
I'm just comparing it with the farmers I've known. Even with modern methods and crop yields there isn't much spare time and labour intensive near subsistence farming will allow even less. Same applies for women, housework is a full time job not a few hours a day. Certainly a warlike culture will, out of necessity, find some time but it won't be anywhere near that spent by a professional soldier.
>Which teaches tactics. Theres vastly more to warfare than just the physical
>stoush, & more than this even to becoming a Hero, but all of it is
>available in the course of daily O/i existance. Examining the development
>of G shows early *rules* mechanisms to substitute for this system which has
>been gradually appearing as we explore life on the Lozenge. As it has
>appeared the PC centered training & guild mechanisms have vanished.
A lot has vanished into the background in HW, which doesn't mean it no longer exists on Glorantha. The formal purchase of training which characterised RQ was a game mechanic which never fitted the Orlanthi and had limited application to other cultures. Equally the idea of learning skills from experience only is absurd although it could be implied from the mechanics of HW.
>>No, 25-33% of steads have a single hero. And while it may be easy to
>>disrupt you have to find out which hill and get sufficent troops there.
>>Of course if you blunder you will strengthen the ritual.
>
>IMO you grossly underestimate the Hero producing potential of O/i society
>but then that's the point we're debating.
Well heros are supposed to be exceptional, with an average of 20 to 30 people per stead that gives about 1% heros which seems reasonable.
>NO but thats not the point. The point is that Pelorian peasants miss out on
>all the O/i version & are probably more near the W Qld experience. I'm
>comparing brawling cultures (or sub-cultures) to more sedate cultures not
>the relative abilities of groups within those cultures. No police unit
>would stand before the TA scenario I described in the last post.
If such a scenario existed then the police would be trained to handle it, probably brutally. I expect there is a Lunar police force in Pavis and Sartar towns doing just that when Orlanthi brawlers get out of hand. It may have been recruited from the back streets of Glamour rather than the surounding farms but it will still exist.
>>My view is that the fyrd would have trouble with
>>an equivelent number of peltasts who are professionals trained in a
>>similar style of fighting while just bouncing off a formed phalanx.
>
>Providing the Fyrd declines to fight on the Phalanxes terms Peltasts will
>be a greater threat. An unformed Phalanx is just a bunch of spear carrying
>Pelorian rabble while Peltasts operate in a loose body & are trained &
>diciplined to do so. Once again it comes down to using tactics apropriate
>to your technology & diciplines.
I think it would be difficult to stop an Orlanthi warband charging a Lunar phalanx. The culture almost demands attacking an enemy of equal strength, certainly some peltasts could lure them into charging and then retreat around the phalanx.
>>Precisely what I mean, making sure you only target known opponents
>>and separate them from the bulk of the population with propaganda
>>and bribes.
>
>Which consists of one of the many tactics. What you notably miss is the
>seperation from recruiting, support & supply organisations.
In a guerilla war that is the bulk of the population, or the bulk of a section of the population where, in places like Kosova, Northern Ireland and Israel/Palastine, there are distinct groups within the same area.
>>The Malayan Emergency is just about the only RW example I can think of.
>>Whether the Lunars have the time and knowledge to achieve that
>>successfully is the question.
>
>I seriously doubt it as the strategies involved spring from a 20c liberal
>humanist viewpoint which should be utterly foriegn to all but a very few of
>the Lunar forces.cf Strangers in Prax for the types I mean.
The only difference is that genocide is a more acceptable option to the Lunars. They have not chosen that and are trying to isolate and neutralise the extremists while courting the majority.
>>To counterbalance healing and protection magics there are hostile,
>>particularly chaos, magics
>
>Which are not nearly as sigificant to human fecundity as to the fertility
>of the land & even that is limitted outside Prax (which has been rendered
>barren because of a single use of magic not as a result of ongoing magics)
Depends how much the Orlanthi use curses against rival clans. I would certainly expect there to be problems with broo introducing diseases and trolls using magic to stop those prolific human breeders.
>Fertility & childbearing is a biggie for Ernaldans. Successful child birth
>being a pre-req' for progress in the cult. Thus controling (in terms of
>limmitting it) it is a process used by the few not the many.
I would agree that few women chose not to have children, but controlled fertility allows the choice of when and how many children to have. Only in a society where women are kept ignorant does the baby at every opportunity syndrome occur. A female fertility cult is going to be interested in strong healthy babies and children rather than simply numbers and will educate its members to that aim. So I would expect a baby every other year between 15 and 35 with additional gaps due to poor harvests etc. rather than a baby every year between 13 and death due to overbreeding.
>>In any case one of the biggest population controls in the RW has always
>>been famine and families the size you suggest would be very vunerable
>>to a crop failure.
>
>Yep it did. The families existed nay-the-less, albeit with higher infant
>mortality than postulated for G.
Because contraception was rare, expensive and a cultural taboo which is not true of Orlanthi society. But my point is that the bigger the family the bigger effect famine has on child mortality rates.
>>Even in Orlanthi society healing people and animals is going to be
>>more common than fighting. For every combat injury they'll be at
>>least one caused by handling livestock plus twice that number of
>>injuries to livestock.
>
>But O is a warrior god & neither O or E are specialist healer gods. If 48%
>of my population was initiating into a warrior cult I'd have pretty fair
>grounds for saying it was at the heart of the culture.
>As How many Heros notes even the O/i farming deities have myths about their
>fighting prowess
A cultural attitude rather than real practicalities - the hero fights on with a broken arm, forgetting to mention that he knew enough to bind the arm so it didn't either get in his way or get damaged further. It's also a fact of even modern life that children hurt themselves so Ernalda the mother has to have some healing powers.
End of The Glorantha Digest V8 #154
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