From: Sandy Petersen (sandyp)
Date: Thu 16 Nov 1995 - 01:24:11 EET
Jonas
> As you may have gathered, I don't much like the bellator's style
of >play. From this stems most of my objection to the 'pure
military' >version of the Kingdom of War.
I concur with Nick, however. The KoW is the perfect answer
to the bellators -- total ruthless powergaming in the service of
combat. Part of the wonder of it (and a secret that I believe no one
in Glorantha has yet caught on to) is the the obvious way to resist
these guys is to imitate them, their bellatoran ways, tactical
techniques, and eventually, in order to support the costly
professional armies necessary for this, to emulate much of their
social system.
After several years of hard-fought imitation, training
warriors who are ever-more-cruel, ever-more-deadly, steadily losing
any trace of responsibility to their society and culture, your
warriors become indistinguishable from the KoW, and at that point
they've won. It is only a matter of time before the warriors realize
who their _real_ enemies are -- the leaders and peasants who deny
them the tools they need to carry forth their mission. Soon the two
nations are one, and the two societies are won.
It is my contention that this process has already
progressed apace with the Jonatings, whom I believe to have been
much less harsh and grasping when the Ban first lifted.
Look at the Order of the Swallow. Suddenly, in a nation
normally remarkable for its lack of imperialistic greed, an elite
group of warriors arises for the express purpose of combating
another nation that has not yet, at present, threatened Loskalm.
Rumblings within the Order call for the occupation of lands east, as
buffer zones and to use to defray the cost of the struggle. The
Order of the Swallow are still, in my opinion and despite Nick's
neo-Nazi ravings, largely Good Guys. So were the Chinese
revolutionaries before 1949.
Nick
>As for the culture of the KoW, I'm not sure we should detail one.
>They are intended to be a Big, Bad Evil, not a
>sympathetically-detailed culture. You don't send ambassadors to the
>Kingdom of War; you don't trade with it; you don't travel there on
>relief missions, or wander through it on your way somewhere else.
I concur. The KoW is a state perpetually at war, if not
with outsiders, then with itself. Its society, if it can be said to
have one, resembles a freshly-occupied nation, under the iron boot
of the tyrant. Its warriors are garrison soldiers in a foreign,
though subjugated, land, even in their own home country.
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