First off, SD: thanks for responding so thoroughly and so coherently, as you always do. All your points are well thought-out, even the ones that make me sound like a jerk... aw, just kiddin'.
: Myth armies don't seem to carry much clothing for
: themselves; if they had had an extra parka or two
: along, presumably the Berserks wouldn't have been
: dropping like flies while they were operating in the
: Cloudspine.
While the Berserks in the snowy levels are still half-naked one imagines that has to be a condition that only pertains during battle. On the march they would almost certainly wrap themselves in whatever blankets or extra coats they could find. It still wouldn't keep them from dropping like flies, however--look at what happened at Valley Forge, or during Napoleon's campaigns in Russia.
And the ability of fairly small armies
: (like the diminished Legion toward the end of TFL) to
: operate at maximum effectiveness for months in hostile
: regions with no human presence whatsoever indicates
: that they're much more self-sufficient than real-life
: armies of that technological level, and less reliant
: on supply lines. We know that the Myth armies
: gratefully receive gifts of food and supplies from the
: villages they pass (as in "Crow's Bridge"),
: but they don't seem to be reduced to looting when such
: gifts aren't forthcoming.
Well, as usual the arguments against this are cop-outs: Bungie wouldn't have put looters in because it would make the Legion unsympathetic, or the journal writer wouldn't have been proud of this behavior enough to put it in the records. It's also possible that because war is so popular in the Mythworld, there's already an institutionalized penalty for looting, i.e., hanging, which would keep it from happening on an individual level. On the larger scale, however, I tend to think those gifts of food are also institutionalized: it's clear the Legion was going to skip town unless they got those pigs, and I'm sure the civilians knew the name of that game from countless previous experiences.
: So I think most maintenance stuff (sock-darning,
: weapon-polishing, etc.) is probably taken care of by
: the soldiers between battles, while wizards supply
: clothing and other necessities just as they supply
: food. This actually explains why, in spite of the fact
: that we know there were Light wizards in the TFL
: armies, and that Alric would presumably have
: hired/recruited more in the next 60 years, we almost
: never see them in combat; the wizards were much too
: useful as supply conduits and sources to be risked in
: direct battle. Wiping out the mages of a Light army
: may be equivalent to destroying its supply line.
I'm not very comfortable with these unseen food-clothing-shelter producing mages; it strikes me as a little too easy, something GURPS might have put in to fill a realism gap in the game. I suppose I have to let it slide since this is a fantasy game but it does raise one interesting point: camp followers. Where you have an entire food-producing industry (magic or otherwise) that follows the Legion around, you're going to have other, less savory professionals on the march as well. Specifically, prostitutes and bootleggers, all of whom are going to create enormous medical problems. No matter how well-disciplined your army or how fervently they believe in their cause, your men are going to cut loose every time they get a good whiff of thrall--it's just human nature when you risk your life every day to play hard, as well. The Crusades are a good example of this--no matter how devout the crusaders were they still had a small army of... friends to come home to at night.
: Strategic information and communications are probably
: fairly easy to convey when every major military
: division has at least one archmage at the head. The
: backup method (as we see toward the end of TFL when
: most of the Nine is dead) for conveying info and
: important items seems to be by individual couriers,
: such as unmounted Berserks (over long distances,
: humans can actually travel faster on foot than by
: horse). And I don't think any Legionnaire spends much
: of his time worrying about mail. :-) Lastly, even if
: bulk supplies can't be created or teleported by mages
: or scavenged from the environment, there's always the
: World Knots to use. Until destroyed, they'd still take
: the place of a continuous supply line, and they'd make
: it a lot harder to block an enemy army's access to
: supplies; you'd have to take control of every single
: World Knot which was close enough to the enemy for
: supplies to conceivably transported from it.
The World Knots definitely change the complexion of warfare, though I tend to think they're too few and far apart to alleviate all the problems of the Legion. You have a good point about mages as intelligence processors, though I don't remember seeing an Archmage at the head of every military division. If there's some intermediary stage between Avatara (who can be counted on one's fingers even after losing one to a thrall's axe--unless the Nine are just the best of a large bunch) and warlocks, who are essentially just very useful grunts, we never get to see it. Mages take decades to train and will therefore not, I think, be as readily available as all that. Berserk runners would probably be plentiful but unreliable; with the exception of a few heroes they probably don't make it through as often as they do. Since some of the most important information in TFL had to be gathered personally by Alric, and all the disinformation came directly from the head, I'm guessing that significant intelligence is still a major problem for the Legion, especially after the Head is deposed.
: The Province's clement weather seems to make winters less
: of a problem than you'd expect; the only regions where
: it'd be difficult to survive are the northlands (which
: are populated and guarded year-round by the Berserks)
: and the Cloudspine, which doesn't have to be guarded
: in wintertime anyway since the passes are closed off.
: Judging from TFL and GURPS, the armies just head down
: to the flatlands during winter and stay over in
: relative comfort (except for the poor sentries who are
: guarding the pass and getting stepped on by Trow and
: so forth).
Again, this seems a little too easy. In these modern times we tend to think of winter as a minor inconvenience. For people of the Middle Ages it was always a time of death, disease, and decimation--whether you lived in the temperate zone in a house or huddled in a drafty tent (no subzero sleeping bags, mind you) out on campaign. Food disappears, frostbite takes its toll, even water is harder to get... but again, I'll have to let this slide since we never see the deprivations of the Legion in winter except, as you mention, those of the poor saps guarding the passes.
: The Province seems to avoid this particular problem,
: since a) magic can back up mundane agriculture and
: textile-making to some degree, so that there are at
: least enough resources to feed the entire army in
: theory, and b) because almost all the known human
: lands are under the control of a single power, there's
: no issue of not being able to afford to purchase those
: resources. There aren't any rival states whose
: economic success harms the Province, nor any states
: which the Province has to pay for food and supplies
: for the army. It's somewhat analogous to the Church in
: the Middle Ages; everyone tithed a good chunk of their
: ownings and managed to get by on the rest. The economy
: continued to function; it was just scaled down to the
: processing of of the remainder of the available
: resources.
Hmm... dodgy centralized economy backed up by convenient wizardry... I'm not doubting you but it just sounds so unrealistic. Still, TFL was grim enough. Sufficient unto the game is the evil thereof.
: Well, on the issue of army behavior; as I said, Myth
: soldiers certainly seem to behave more decently toward
: civilians than the members of almost any real-life
: army, past or present. They occasionally make a
: somewhat selfish decision--like guarding the village
: that gives them the most pigs--but raping and looting
: and so forth is surprisingly absent. The main reason
: for this is probably that it's a fantasy world, where
: men are good and monsters are bad and so forth, but it
: probably also stems from rational methods of army
: selection and training in such a world. Whereas in a
: real-life army they generally have to beat down your
: sense of ethics a bit (I wouldn't go so far as to say
: that the average US soldier is a "conscience-free
: killing machine",
Major disclaimer: I was talking specifically about pre-20th Century armies. Current and past living members of the armed forces of the US and other countries were not included in this--all of the ex-soldiers I know are decent, upstanding folk who also got manners and decency drilled into them while they were being trained to kill. This is, however, a recently new phenomenon. As recently as the Napoleonic wars one of the major recruiting ploys for army life was the promise that one could get all the raping and pillaging one wanted while out in the field.
but your training definitely
: involves getting you to do things you'd normally feel
: leery about,) there's no question in the Mythworld--at
: least at present--that the war you're fighting is
: right. You're either battling human murderers, rapists
: and thieves, or genocidal Dark sorcerers, or
: blood-maddened nonhuman monsters, or mindless undead.
: As such, one might even guess that the first steps in
: recruiting and training a Myth Legionnaire are finding
: someone with a very strong conscience and
: strengthening it still further so that when he sees
: the forces of evil, he fights rather than flees. (And
: in fact we know from GURPS that the Legion doesn't
: take just anybody--their recruiters work very hard to
: make sure only the bravest and most virtous souls are
: inducted.) In the Mythworld, the soldiers are the nice
: guys, and as such they rein in their inhibitions even
: more than the civilians do.
See my point about the Crusaders above. There will always be bad apples, at any rate.
: There are also non-ethically-oriented ways of making an
: army want to behave itself. For one thing, the closer
: a soldier feels himself to home, the better his
: behavior. One of the reasons the Roman army was so
: little trouble to the civilian population--at least in
: the Republican phase and early days of the Empire,
: thanks to the Julio-Claudians--was that there was a
: very strong sense of community throughout the occupied
: territories, and the soldiers tended to treat
: perceived fellow Romans more decently. In regions that
: were Rome-occupied but weren't really thought of as
: Roman--such as Palestine--there was a lot more
: military misbehavior than there was in regions like
: Gaul. Similarly, the entire sphere of Legion
: operations is generally under a single culture and a
: single ruling power, and so a Legionnaire would be
: fairly unlikely to abuse a civilian who was a cultural
: brother, a fellow worshipper of Wyrd, and a fellow
: subject of Alric. They probably wouldn't feel so much
: kinship with Dwarves and Northmen, but any Legionnaire
: who chases a Berserk's daughter or burns down a
: Dwarf's house has a very limited lifespan in any case.
You make such important and intelligent points here that I feel arguing with you would just be an exercize in warrior-bashing.
: Furthermore, the Province's Legion, like the Roman army,
: employs the stabilizing tactic of putting nobly-born
: and high-status young folk (like Cruniac) in fairly
: low and dangerous positions. This more or less assures
: that every group of soldiers (say approximately 30
: men, like Cruniac's unit) has a commander and a few
: members who have a strong, selfish interest in making
: sure their unit's behavior is exemplary. A captain may
: need every pair of hands he can get, but if he's
: "more interested in political maneuvers than
: military ones," he's not going to tolerate
: behavior that makes him look bad and kills his chances
: for a promotion and social recognition.
True enough--though a captain who leans too hard on his men and has them flogged if they don't hold their pinky correctly while drinking their wizard-generated tea is going to get fragged--the Legion seems to operate pretty autonomously and spend a great deal of time in the field away from direct supervision of higher-ups. Maybe that's where all the pirates and brigands come from--battalions whose commanders were TOO noble to be borne.
: Well, (again, in Rome's heyday), the Roman Legions really
: weren't kept out simply because they'd cause too much
: trouble if they were returned to civilian life. The
: Legions did some vital work out there during
: peacetime; they were policemen, and infrastructure
: construction crews, and messengers all rolled into
: one. Also, individual Legionaries weren't kept on
: constant campaign; indeed, you only *had* to serve a
: few years and then you could come home if you wanted
: and never see the inside of a helmet again. It's just
: that a good fraction of the Legionaries found they
: preferred the life of the career soldier. By giving
: the soldiers the choice of whether or not to return to
: civilian lives, you give the disgruntled
: soon-to-be-deserters a chance to leave honorably, and
: allow those who don't want to go back to potato
: peeling to remain in the army and benefit the
: community.
: A similar situation seems to prevail in the Province. The
: Legion is fully active during peacetime, policing the
: land and defending against Brigands and Ghols and the
: like. Following a war, no one gets kicked out unless
: they actively want to leave. (Similarly, they don't
: seem to recruit a whole bunch of new people when a war
: starts--they just merge with nobles' private armies
: and with the Zerk and Dwarf forces). So I think most
: Legionnaires tend to end up as career soldiers.
But that's the problem. With the Dark periodically practicing genocide all over the continent, quickly enough one is left with nobody but career soldiers. One imagines the farms of the Mythworld run entirely by children, women, and elderly men who are too old to carry a sword. While this model works for a number of RL cultures it isn't likely to generate a lot of surplus. It seems to me that even in peacetime the Light is going to depend pretty heavily on those food-producing wizards.
: That's not to say there aren't ex-military troublemakers
: out there; GURPS tells us that the most dangerous
: Brigands are the well-trained Legion deserters. But in
: order to become a problem, you have to have seemed
: much more ethical and brave than you really were when
: the recruiters came by and you were fourteen, *and*
: you have to have resisted the Legion's rigorous
: character-building efforts over the last few years,
: *and* you have to have become dissatisfied with
: military life, *and* you have to also be unwilling to
: return to a steady civilian job. Which means that
: criminal ex-Legionnaires are few and far between, for
: the most part.
Sure, and they get hunted down pretty ruthlessly--though enough survive to become pirates or brigands that they represent a real problem, real enough to be commented on in flavor texts.
: (GURPS suggests that this *could* change if, in the
: future, the Legion starts downsizing and Legionnaires
: are unwillingly returned to civilianhood. On page 106
: it gives the idea for a Pulp Fiction-style scenario
: with rival ex-Legion drug-running gangs and the like).
So, anyway, the one point you didn't bring up, and which the game mentions pretty frequently, is disease. Cholera killed more soldiers than Napoleon ever did--and I would imagine that "disease of the blood" and water unfit to drink and the like are a MASSIVE problem for the Mythworld.
: Nope, dead boring to me, sorry. Why, I could barely rouse
: myself to write a word or two in response.
My apologies :)
: --SiliconDream
Wellington
