Tribal sizes

From: Peter Metcalfe <metcalph_at_bigfoot.com>
Date: Tue, 12 Mar 2002 13:48:32 +1300


Joerg Baumgartner:

>Alakoring brought a different type of tribal organisation from Lankst to
>Peloria. He weakened the priesthood, and as a side effect the maximum
>sustainable size of tribes (without accepting foreign influences) grew
>smaller.

Why on earth should the maximum size of the tribe collapse so drastically? Why should it even collapse at all? It is at odds with RW history in which changes in political structures are not accompanied by drastic size reduction.

And given that once the side-effect was known, AFAIK most Orlanthi kings would prefer to give up Rex as it's much better being a weak king of a sprawling tribe than to be a strong king with less than a dozen clans to his name.

And why on earth do unnaturally large tribes have to be the result of "foreign influences"? Try as I can, I can't credit the Orlanthi with no capacity for innovation whatsoever.

> > there's little difference in the magics of Orlanthdar
> > and Orlanth Rex

>I checked and didn't find any "command" among the Dar magics. Rex'
>"Authority" is different enough for me.

i.e. little difference as I just said. Certainly not large enough to warrant a decimation in tribal sizes that Joerg thinks has occurred. Given that Rex worship is not universal among the Heortling tribes (TR p246 only states that Rex's worship is "usual"), at least a couple of modern Sartarite tribes will not worship Rex. Yet they are all the same size...

> > Also problematic
> > is that Lankst, the home of Alakoring, is a large tribe
> > of the sort that Alakoring was supposed to have eliminated.

>Lankst is known as the Confederation of Jofrain. The tribe is a
>temporary alliance.

So why can't the Orgavaltes be a similar conglomeration but longer lasting in scope?

> > IMO a better interpretation would be to distinguish between
> > the tribes as groupings of clans on one hand (i.e. Colymar,
> > Torkani and Vantaros) and the tribes as an alternative to
> > kingdoms (Tarsh, Aggar, Heortland, and Lankst).

>I have done so all the time, by calling groupings of clans "tribes" and
>confederations of such tribes "tribal confederations". We know different
>levels of kings to lead these, that's why I used different terms for
>these past uses of "tribes".

But you think that the Orgavaltes (for example) are the same kind of tribe (grouping of clans) as the Torkani, hence leading to your belief that Alakoring's reforms caused drastic tribal size reductions.

If on the other hand, the Orlanthi have an extremely loose definitions for tribes, kingdoms and confederations that are capable of blurring into each other (like for example our republic and democracy) and allow them to have a good deal of creativity when it comes to devising supraclan  structures (rather than chant "foreign influences"), then the need for drastic tribal size reductions disappears entirely.

--Peter Metcalfe

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