>Harry:
>One of the main early encounters is going to be the Household of
>Death.
While I may be stating the obvious (and I'm at work, so I can't quote from
KOS) if the core were Royals then you'd expect Quivini, but since some or
all of the Household were based in Alda Chur, this might affect the
composition of mundanes and hangers-on.
>Just tossing numbers around off the cuff, figuring that these are
>soldiers and warriors planning on taking on a couple of lunar
>legions, I came up with:
>
>- 50 hardcore Household of Death members, I mean, how many senior,
>hard-core Humakti can there be in Sartar?
Even less, purely on personal bias. It was their geasa and oaths which were
so frightening, not their numbers. The Royals were basically a bloodline
based on an apical ancestor from 120 years ago, so the total number
wouldn't be large, and how many pampered royals, even of Sartar's blood,
are going to chuck everything away on a mega-geas Humakti death quest? I've
always thought perhaps a dozen royals at most, plus double that in cousins
and thanes, and a number of Swords and Death Lords drawn by the honour or
terminal romance of it all. There may be more, but how many would want to
move to Alda Chur?
>- Around 200 hangers on, mostly Humakti, but not senior or
>experienced enough to be in the hard core, perhaps not willing to
>take the gruesome oaths that the Household took, but would still like
>to be there.
Again, purely personally, I'd think a warband of perhaps 50 Humakti.
*However*, in the novella Helden
(http://home.iprimus.com.au/pipnjim/questlines/helden.html) I've described
a Humakti mercenary regiment / war temple based in Alda Chur that in 1625
still had several hundredthanes - Helden once commandered the several
gatherings of the Highblade Cohort. We know that the regiment lost many
members to Yanafal when *that other * temple project began under Harvar, so
there probably was an even larger Humakti mecenary temple in Alda Chur at
the time of the Lunar invasion: indeed this may have been one of the main
reasons (together with the obvious fact that Alcha Chur was a walled city
on the very edge of Sartar) why the Household based itself there.
So you could easily include a Far Place mercenary humakti regiment, and given the time period, it would be overflowing with Far Walkers, Tarshites and Wintertop veterans who had lost everything to the Lunars.
>- Perhaps a band of 150-200 light infantry, some archers and scouts
>to assist the Humakti Heavy Infantry? I just figure that a large
>band of heavy infantry with no scouts and baggage train to assist
>could run into trouble, even if it is there home ground.
And if recruited locally, these would include Yelmalian/solar cultist mercenaries, as well as Far Walker and Wintertop Orlanthi.
It's probably one of the few armies that doesn't have the usual
>caravan of prostitutes and thieves tagging along behind it.
A *small* army perhaps, one based in a walled city and so relying on speed
and the great Road to carry it far, to strike, and then to retreat to the
safety of the city walls. If only they knew....
Cheers
John
>__________________________________________
John Hughes
Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research
Australian National University
Canberra ACT 2600
Phone (02) 6125 0649
Visit CAEPR on the web at http://www.anu.edu.au/caepr/
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