The Orlanthi of Dragon Pass do indeed have some very reasonable causes to hate their lunar opressors, for the indignities, unresonable taxes, and many other acts of tyranny commited by the occupation forces. They also hate because they are religious fanatics and their creed is (or becomes) that the Moon represents everything that is unholy and abominable in the world.
Pretty much all gloranthans are religious fanatics, by RW standards.
But especially the Orlanthis, most of whom would (if my impression is
correct) make that bearded fellow in the Afghan mountains look quite
reasonable, and moderately secular. At least if one could measure by
the strength of their beliefs.
Second. Orlanthi morals and laws applies to other orlanthi (again as
far as I've understood it). Their in-group, or "people", consists of
anyone under orlanthi law. Killing a praxian, or dara happan, isn't
murder, or even manslaughter. It's not a crime. I think... that this is
typical for gloranthan cultures. Put another way, I don't believe that
our RW perceptions of ethical values, or human rights, as universal
constants, is shared by most gloranthans.
Many deeds that we would consider heineous on earth -mass slaughter,
ethnic cleansing, and so on- can be morally neutral, or even exalted,
in particular gloranthan settings. Hey, irl I would object to wholesale
extermination of broos and ogres!
So, in my opinion, the idea that the Rebellion would find moral reasons to spare the lives and property of lunar "civilians", is unreasonable. They might do it anyway. Because it is expedient, because they plan for a future where at least some lunar colonists live among them, because there are lunarized factions within their own communities, or just because they have more important things on their agenda, than stopping to grind all the possessions of a conquered city to dust, tear down its buildings, and putting the entire population -and livestock!- to the sword. But look, some times they will take the time and effort, and when they do, they will be doing "the right thing". And yet, I understand that many on this list are passionately on the orlanthi side, at least in their campaigns... (I wouldn't know myself, I've never played an orlanthi. In our current campaign I'm playing a representative of the lunar liberation administration, shortly after the fall of Boldhome, and our problems have been to prevent the foolish and traiterous designs of some other administration officials, who actively encourages atrocity, in order to stir up rebellion, so that they will be able to crush some little rag-tag barbarian uprising, get their promotions, and go home to civilisation.)
If you, as a GM, want to make your players think about, say... the
situation in Irak, or the Israel/Palestinian problems, and if you want
to make them think that these issues are actually a bit more
complicated than they look on Fox, then you have a good set-up to work
with here.
If you don't want to use your game-time for that... If, for instance,
you don't want to soil your orlanthi protagonists with a lot of what
would be war-crime behaviour irl, you still need to think about how to
set up your game so that you can avoid these issues.
For myself, I like moral ambiguity, or putting it more bluntly, I like
to trap my thoughtless players in behaviour that they would find
atrocious irl. This stems from my personal belief that it is easy to be
suckered into atrocity in real life, too, most especially if you
believe that it could never happen to you. Umm... and my desire to
teach that to people around me, hrm. So I know where _I_ would take
this. :-)
But in the end I think it ought to be a decision based on what kind of
campaign you want, not based on internal gloranthan logic.
Cheers,
Dan Guillou
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