: And, unlike The Man, presumably don't have the cash or
: status to hire a bunch of wizards to make food for
: them. Also, there may not be enough wizards/mana to
: magically feed the entire population.
: --SiliconDream
Food isn't the only supply a moving army needs, though. Clothing, ammunition, luxury items (for morale), mail (probably not a big deal for a largely illiterate army, but still) as well as more strategic stuff: intelligence and reconaissance all have to travel along supply lines. Magic might provide some of these but probably not all. Then there's shelter--you can't ask the army to spend the winter in bivouac and expect enough of them to survive to fight in the spring.
Until the twentieth century, armies were often more dangerous to their homelands than to the enemy. There were three reasons for this: the first is that an army, which produces nothing but corpses and wounded (and therefore has a negative effect on production of goods and supplies) requires far more energy than your stay-at-home population and can therefore decimate a cottage industry-based economy.
Secondly, soldiers were always notorious for losing their inhibitions while on campaign--a farmboy surrounded by a close-knit community would know better than to steal an apple, say, but give him a spear and suddenly he'll not only steal the apple, he'll cut down the tree, make bootleg hard cider and get drunk, light the barn on fire, chase the farmer's daughter around the smoking wreckage, and then run away back to his unit where all will be forgiven because his Captain needs every pair of hands he can get. Plus, armies tended to live in VERY unsanitary conditions (pretty much impossible to avoid when your only latrine is a slit trench dug by a tired grunt at the end of a forced march) and therefore carried every possible disease with them.
The third reason armies were so dangerous to their own rulers was that after they were demobilized they remained tricky to deal with. You have a mob of men who suddenly have no interest in farming and feel like they're owed something for their military service (often this was true, since pre-modern armies weren't paid until after the fighting, if at all). These are hard, bitter men who've seen the world ("how do you keep them down on the farm, once they've seen gay Paree?" comes out of this exact situation) and remember all those farmer's daughters (not to mention camp followers) that they... chased around the burned down barn, yes, that's it... and now you expect them to live their old, dull, miserable lives again. Add to this the fact that you've now spent all your money training them to be conscience-free killing machines and you have a tax revolt on your hands at the very least. Even if we assume that the troops of the Light are far more decent and Alric-fearing than troops in the real world (they were the Good Guys, after all) we know that some of these scenarios are going to be problems--for instance, how many ghost towns are there in the Mythworld, what with all the men who have nothing to go back to (their homes having been razed by Soulblighter) and who want to join the Heron Guard, or make new lives in the West, or whatever? I don't remember a single character/narrator/etc. in the game saying, "Thank Wyrd that's over--now I can get back to hardscrabble farming and my old life as a potato peeler."
Add it all up and you've got a very volatile situation on your hands. There are some exceptions in ancient Earth societies, like the Spartans--militarily based societies which trained their men to be fighters and farmers at the same time, and therefore would escape some of the worst effects I've described above. The Berserks would probably fit into this mold, and maybe even the dwarves (who had a more high-tech industrial base to start with, and therefore a slightly less boring and certainly far more prosperous home life to return to, kind of like Our Boys coming home after WWI--who even still spawned the Lost Generation). On the other hand, the Warriors of the Legion sound much more like Roman soldiers who, Russel Crowe notwithstanding, had to be kept on constant campaign lest they come home and start tearing up the joint.
Wow, sorry--I got off topic there, but I hope it's interesting stuff all the same.
