>>>Cults and subcults will rarely separate out - family and clan
>>>are the primary ties.
>
>Yeah - after all if 'everyone' is initiated to Orlanth or Ernalda,
>there usually won't be enough specialist warrior cultists in a clan
>to make it worth them ganging together to do their particular thing
>in a militarily useful fashion (or at least more useful than
>bolstering the fyrd in order to keep them up to the mark). The one
>caveat being that the warband almost certainly includes all of the
>specialist warrior cultists in the clan in any case and they will
>be aspects of Orlanth for the most part (Adventurous and Destor I'd
>imagine) - so to the extent that 'the warband' does things as a
>single entity they can be regarded as a specialist warrior cult unit.
The warband may have Destor, Finovan, Vangarth, Vingkot Champion, Ormalaya and Tatouth from the Orlanth subcults. Humakt, Elmal, Yinkin, Vinga, Maran Gor, Babeester Gor and Urox from the rest of the Storm Tribe. Then the fyrd will be led by either Dar or Starkval. Try and get even some of those fighting styles working together....
>If a tribal king calls a muster then you might get enough members
>of certain warrior cults turning out to warrant them taking their
>place in the battleline as a distinct unit - although I'd probably
>say that the tribe would need to maintain a relevant temple for
>this to be a routine thing for any particular tribal fyrd. If several
>tribes muster then the number of wierd and whacky specialist groups
>goes up again, but this sort of thing happens maybe once a generation
>or so, so definitely not a routine thing.
Even where the numbers in a tribe justify grouping warriors from the same subcult together I don't think it usually happens. Orlanthi follow their selected leaders which is more likely to be their clan chief than someone from the same subcult in a different clan. The other proiblem is training, unless they train together they won't fight well together and few tribes can organise such joint training. So while many Kheldon Vingans follow Kallyr in preference to their own chiefs I think that's exceptional and doesn't represent the normal way tribes organise.
-- Donald Oddy http://www.grove.demon.co.uk/
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