Ynneadwraith

That raises an interesting question... Can Argan Argar Sense Chaos? Is Sense Chaos an ability of Storm Bulls, or an ability of Storm Bull himself? Yes Argan Argar hates Chaos, but like all rules it butts headfirst into the issue of enforcability.

I suppose my point is that the entirety of Glorantha is tainted as Chaotic, and has been since at least the Greater Darkness (if not before, depending on your views of Gloranthan cosmology). Time itself is likely a chaotic entity (that which nourishes itself with Chaos becomes chaotic -> Arachne Solara ate Wakboth and birthed Time). You might think that, but I'm going to go out on a limb and speculate that you don't live in a culture with strong guest-rights. Guest rights are an all-caps RULE. The very Devil himself could trick you into giving him guest-rights and you would have to uphold them. It doesn't matter if he's the embodiment of all evil. It doesn't matter that he tricked you. You extended guest-rights, and unless he breaks them you are bound to uphold them. (In fact, there are numerous myths from numerous cultures that use this as a fundamental conflict in their narratives). There are very specific rules for when guest-rights come into force, and very specific rules for when they are lifted. Unless one of those very specific rules is met, there is no weaselling out of your obligations (no matter how justifiable your weaselling might be).

Rescinding guest rights?! Whatever next! Might as well invite Wakboth into your house right now, seeing as nothing is sacred anymore. People took guest rights very, very seriously. To the point pretty much all cultures had some variation of a myth of gods/spirits/angels coming to check up on people to make sure they were doing the right thing. Pretty much the only way for guest-rights to be rescinded was for the guest to renege on their obligations as a guest, rendering the arrangement moot.

Another thought. Does a Storm Bull sense where chaos is, or do they also sense where chaos was? If it's the latter as well as the former, does the Storm Bull have the skill and experience to be able to tell between the two? Considering what happened during the Greater Darkness, it could well be that a Storm Bull's sense is pinging 24/7 (if it's a passive ability), or they're simply swamped by signals from all sorts of directions and need to learn to sift through all that mess to get any usable information (if it's an active ability). Perhaps that's why they're so insufferable all the time... Even if they're an experienced Storm Bull, could they tell the difference between something like a canny Ogre 15m away and an adulterer standing right next to them? Could they tell the difference between a Krarsht cultist in a crowd, and the spot Krarsht herself once stood in the Greater Darkness?

Oh man, the detective story just writes itself!

Double post

We know Storm Bulls don't lie about that. We know because Word of God tells us they don't in official documentation. How would your average Gloranthan know that Storm Bulls don't lie about that? They lie about other things. Sometimes they get things wrong, or get it right but there's no outward proof so it just looks like they've murdered someone and covered it up (which they also do, because they're violent brutes). They may know exactly who it is, but it's still incumbent on them to convince everyone else which becomes a social issue. On the one hand you have the general respect most Orlanthi and Praxians have for Storm Bulls. On the other hand, you have how catastrophically anti-social most Storm Bulls are. Treat it like all the best detective stories where the main character knows damn-well exactly who did it, but the evidence is all circumstantial and suspicious enough that it's a battle royale to convince everyone else of the truth. Go watch some Luther, or True Detective, or Sherlock for inspiration. All of those deal with the issue of brilliant anti-social detectives struggling to convince everyone else they're right (and are fantastic watches even without the homework).

Here's a question... We know that a Strom Bull's Sense Chaos triggers within 15m. Does the Storm Bull? I suppose it's a little moot as the issue is that we're facing is players gaming the system to foil cool 'secret cultist' plots, but it might help with the societal one. Especially if it's paired with a few false positives. Perhaps the Storm Bulls know that there's chaos somewhere in Pavis, but do they know that it's right next to them? As far as they're concerned, does living in Pavis just give them the creeps periodically. If you think that's unlikely, remember that it took until 1898 for us to discover the Black Death was transmitted by fleas (for reference of how long this took, we've found plague-adapted archaic Yersinia Pestis as far back as 5000BC).

Oh absolutely. There's a lot of suspiciously familiar saints knocking around 😉 I only mentioned their polytheistic phase as that's what I know more about (and seems a bit of a better fit for Glorantha, Irensavalists be damned 😉).

That's how I see it. It's a historical fiction maintained by a ruling class who still think they're in a now-extinct social structure. How stable that social structure is, or what it might evolve into is an interesting question. What's odd about it is it usually happens the other way around (a ruling people pretend that a subordinated people are actually equals). That's one of the things that makes it feel unstable. Eventually the slight will rub the wrong way at the right moment (for the vendref) and something big and bloody will happen. Either that or they'll gradually forge themselves into a true class structure (like the Anglo-Saxons and the invading Normans), and the meaning of 'vendref' will shift away from being synonymous with 'thrall' and start to mean something like 'commoner' instead.

The Romans had a weird attitude towards human sacrifice (in the best spirit of 'of course when we do it's different'). Broadly they were strongly against human sacrifice. During the polytheistic phase they were avid syncretisers and absorbers of other cultures' gods and cults. The exception was if there was human sacrifice involved, in which case worship was stamped out as much as they could (e.g. gallic druids). It doesn't seem to be some moral compunction against it, moreover that they thought human sacrifices were too powerful to be used. Now hold that up against things like gladiatorial games. Or even better, Triumphal parades (dedicated to their god of victory), where at the climax a captured enemy leader was ritually strangled. Now if that isn't a human sacrifice it's pressing it's face right up against it.

Addendum: I'm not saying that Orlanthi shouldn't have a tradition of training. Lots of cultures did. It's just a continued defence of 'untrained' militia 👍

I was always of the understanding that historic polytheism was quite a practical thing. You did offer worship to a deity primarily for a concrete achievable outcome. This article explains it well. However, in practice this works out to function a lot closer to what Ali is describing. The reason is the time period we're thinking about isn't one of post-enlightenment impersonal cause and effect. It's a time of deeply personal cause and effect. So, let's think of our oil well. But this oil well isn't a modern unthinking contraption of metal and plastic. This oil well is a person. It is capable of being insulted. If it is insulted, we do not know for certain what the consequences could be. Perhaps it is a terrible oil well, and everyone knows it is a terrible oil well, but if we insult it we might be cursed to never draw oil from the ground wherever we go ever again. Or get turned into deer and eaten by our own hounds. Perhaps a more powerful god will protect us. Perhaps our insulted oil well will take it's grievances to an even more powerful god that doesn't like us. Perhaps the oil well is not as weak as we thought (and it is a good, it's certainly more powerful than us at any rate). Can we take the risk? That's how you end up with Greeks worshipping Ares even though everyone knows that Ares is terrible and everyone just wants him to go away. He gets worshipped so he doesn't get insulted, even if everyone really much prefers Athena. Sometimes someone will be brave and say 'you know what, I believe Athena will protect me'. Due to random chance, maybe that person gets hit in the eye with a spear and everyone goes 'see, we told him not to annoy Ares, we must keep up our sacrifices'. Maybe he survives and nothing bad happens for a while. No plagues. No famines. No random horrible circumstances (rare in the ancient world). Maybe people start believing that Ares isn't as strong as they used to believe. This is how worship lived and died in the real world. Largely through random coincidence and popular superstition. In Glorantha there's a bit more to the feedback loop. Sometimes God's genuinely do leave their calling card for actions they've taken. However, I still think there's a lot of superstition involved. Which god caused this thing to happen? Why did they do it? What did we do to offend/please them? Can we do it again/stop it from happening?

True, though one of the points I was making is that formation fighting really isn't as complex as it looks, and can function effectively without much dedicated training at all. For instance, to form up in ranks you're just told to place your arm on the shoulder of the person in front of you while marching, then when you come to a stop (orchestrated by an officer), you turn around. That puts you the right distance apart to fight (there's some variation in spacing between situations and between cultures, which is achieved through similar techniques, like wider spacing by both people reaching out and stopping when your fingers touch). This isn't something you need to practice to get battlefield capable, especially if you live in a culture where stuff like this is everyday knowledge. Orders is another interesting one in that there really aren't many. Mostly it's 'follow the guy you've been told to follow, and do what they do' in a big chain up to a unit commander. Once the battle commences there really is very little that command can do to influence what's happening beyond riding their own personal guard up and attacking someone. Where you do get complicated battlefield manoeuvres (like Macedonian phalanxes spreading themselves out into half-depth/double-width formations, or Romans cycling their ranks), you do have some drill involved to get it slick. However, it's mainly achieved by having a massive pyramid-stack of officers (like 2/3rds of the entire formation being some form of officer). This lets them stack up huge chains of 'just follow the guy you're supposed to follow' until it's only a dozen or so people per unit that actually need to think about what they're doing. The vast majority of formation stuff is so bog simple you can get school children to do it with 5 minutes of instruction and a bit of guidance (provided by an officer). Most of the rest is stuff that would be writ large in your oral culture (don't chase fleeing enemies too far etc.). Anything not covered by that is in the realms of 'very complicated battlefield manoeuvre' and is generally tackled by having loads of officers. That's not to say that training wouldn't help, but it doesn't help because what they're doing is complicated and they need to learn how. It helps because it's a teambuilding exercise (which is one of many ways you can build cohesion, and not even the most effective for communal cultures like the Orlanthi).

@Jeff You're right of course, though I suspect the more narrow definition of training is the one most people in the modern world would jump to first. The idea that you are 'untrained' and ineffective before you join the military, and are trained to be effective once you have joined. I'm not entirely sure @Joerg even suggested that, but I suppose I saw an opportunity to witter on about ye olde warfare 😄 I'd say the broader point still stands. Cultures do not need to conduct specific military training when inducting people into the army (unlike us) because their day-to-day life has already provided that for them. Cultures that didn't provide that don't tend to last very long next to cultures that did. Where you do find cultures who do not provide this for their people, it's usually an artificial circumstance applied to them by another group (e.g. demilitarisation of lower classes by a warrior class, or of certain groups by their conquerors). Either that or they're fortunate enough to live in a place without any endemic warfare (such as a fair chunk of the modern world). This is a good point to make. In the pre-modern world you had to go a long way, and get into some really rather sophisticated state structures before you found a military that is not at least 90% militia of one sort or other. Rome unified the Italian Peninsular, beat Carthage, conquered Spain, Greece and Macedon and wrested control of Western Asia Minor from the Seleucids with their militia. There's nowt wrong with militia (provided their culture values them).

And there we get to the actual benefit of professional armies 😉 You can get quite far and back again in the agricultural off-season, but it does put a finite limit on activities.

That's a good way of phrasing it. My mate worked in a coffee shop after graduating. It transpired that every single employee in that coffee shop was in the same pyramid scheme. Although it was objectively a terrible idea and had no relation whatsoever to making coffee, my mate was faced with a choice of joining the pyramid scheme or being let go for 'not being a good cultural fit'. This is a power-environment in action, and they can get very powerful indeed.

Outlaw biker gang that is the only thing standing in the way of being overtaken by a people trafficking cartel?

Skirmishers are an interesting one in that they can often buck the trend for not lumping together inexperienced fighters. Depending on the cultural attitude towards skirmishing (i.e. whether it's seen as a decisive arm of an army), you might get differing results. The pre-professional Romans did value skirmishers, but they weren't seen as decisive. They did put their more unbloodied newer recruits into the Velites, which is less of an issue than in the main line because if they break they can fall back to the safety of the more experienced fighters behind them (indeed this is an expected part of their battlefield role). This exposes them to warfare from the relative safety of skirmishing, all the while being overlooked by all of their social superiors in the main line which maintains the social pressure in cohesion.

Well this turned into an essay! tl;dr at the bottom... This might get a little too real-world for the magical world of Glorantha, but I wouldn't underestimate militia in this way, especially in a culture like the Orlanthi. Historically, most pre-modern militia did not receive training, because they did not need to receive training. Their culture and lifestyle provides that training for them. Collective activities like cattle-raiding, group activities like sports and athletics, and general exposure to martial traditions like swordfighting are how cultures ended up with a body of war-capable fighters. This is true of pre-professional Roman legions, Macedonian phalanxes, Greek Hoplites, Gallic warriors etc. etc. These were all very effective bodies of troops. None of these things require additional training for people to reliably do. In a martial culture like the Orlanthi, these things will be drilled into you through cultural experience (and very nearly all pre-modern cultures would be considered 'martial' to these standards). You will have grown up your whole life learning how warfare is conducted. You will have heard multiple precautionary tales about over-stretching while pursuing a fleeing enemy. You will have been play-fighting with stick-swords/spears and shields from an early age. You will have been co-ordinating yourself alongside your fellow warriors-to-be in group activities (sports, construction, harvests etc.). Men who have been steeped in a cavalry tradition will know this too. The failure to break off chases to routs is an interesting one, as everyone knows 100% this is a really bad thing to do. The difficulty comes in recognising when is the right time to stop chasing. Stop chasing too early and they could reform and attack you again. Stop chasing too late and you could get attacked while out of formation. This is made more difficult by the fact that you individually cannot really see the information you need to to assess when the time comes. The failure point comes in the communication chain between the chasers who can't assess the situation well and the folks who can. That's a lot to do with the number of officers an army uses, and its available communication methods (which are miniscule in real life, though may be a little better in Glorantha). There's other failure points which apply to threat identification (especially with cavalry). Cavalry tend to see other cavalry as the most important thing for them to defeat on the battlefield (generally a product of upper-class snobbery). So when they defeat their other halves, they often see it as more important to make extra certain they're defeated and chase them off the battlefield than to do what they're supposed to and support their infantry. This isn't really true. Mainly because breaking under assault (from cavalry, infantry, ranged combat, scary spirits etc.) has very little to do with training. This is a culture steeped in warfare. They know what they'll be facing. What it does have to do with is cohesion. The will of a body of people to keep fighting. This is the decisive factor in warfare, not your individual martial prowess. Cohesion in cultures like the Orlanthi is built through shared community, and is generally enforced by shame. You are fighting side-by-side with everyone you know, and everyone who knows you. If you run away, they are likely to die. If you are the first to run away, everyone you know will know you left them to die. This is a powerful, powerful motivator. And it's something that occurs naturally from living (and fighting) as part of a tight-knit community. I think the confusion around the importance of training comes from a deracinated modern perspective where training is used to build cohesion. In the absence of strong community ties, our armies put people through gruelling shared experiences to forge a new community between unrelated individuals. There's also an element of building military skills that are absent in our civilian life in a way that didn't exist for pre-modern societies, rendering the skills part of that training more necessary. This is why the Romans only start training regimes when they move to a professional army. They understand that they need to build cohesion between unrelated people to make an effective fighting force. That cohesion isn't particularly stronger than 'natural' cohesion, but the professionalisation offers other benefits that in the long run proved effective, though on any given day are far from decisive. Interestingly, this is one of the few places that additional training does seem to make a difference. The Romans got a hell of a lot better at their engineering works after they professionalised their armies. tl;dr I suppose what I'm getting at is that in a culture like the Orlanthi, there is no such thing as an untrained militia. You will have militiamen who are unbloodied and thus less exposed to rigours of combat, but they won't be formed up in a single weaker formation to fend for themselves. They will be fighting side-by-side with the more experienced members of their militia, who can lead by example, show them what to do, and prop up their morale if it wavers. You will have militia that are more experienced than others, which will potentially show in greater cohesion (though it's not a given, seeing as motivation to fight is the key factor). You will have formations of professional soldiers (royal guards etc.) deployed alongside militia. Their role will be to face off against dangerous elements of the other force, and prop up the morale of others. Unless they number a significant proportion of the army (say at least 10% if cavalry, more if infantry), they're unlikely to be the battle-winning military arm (though they're going to tell you they were). It is willingness to keep fighting, not individual skill at arms that is the decisive factor in winning battles. Part of the way you erode that willingness to keep fighting is by killing people, or looking tough an scary, so individual skill at arms isn't a non-factor, but it's nowhere near the primary one. Militia are fully capable of producing stunning amounts of cohesion naturally through their peacetime communal structures. Professional armies need to use training to artificially produce a strong community without that peacetime structure. This is hard, and many professional forces proved to be less cohesive than their unprofessional adversaries (and thus performed poorly).

Now this I love! It's a bit like the Skyrend shout in Skyrim that essentially gives the immortal dragons a momentary glimpse of what mortality is like (which is suitably traumatic). For all its shortcomings compared to the wonderful weirdness of Morrowind, that concept is just *chef's kiss.

It's worth noting, though as a side-note really, that the association we have of a militia being a bit of a sub-par mob compared to 'proper soldiers' doesn't really do most of them justice. Militia were often 'elite regiments'. It's only really when the world became wedded to professional soldiers that the idea of a militia became something 'second rate'. Greek hoplites were militia. Alexander's phalangites were militia, as were those of his successors. Republican Roman legions were militia. It's sort of the long-winded point I was making earlier. If the Colymar militia are viewed with high prestige, there's no reason that militia can't be the 'elite' of Colymar warfare.

Mythic justification for Esrolian tax collection. Said both in jest and in all seriousness...

Some potential learning from history: It seems like Rome consistently dedicated a greater proportion of its manpower to military means than most other cultures around them, so 'being more martially minded' is an option. This necessarily meant losing out on the other things those folks would be doing, but the spoils of successful military conquest worked out more lucrative. The reasons for this are likely complex, but seem to be significantly influenced by the traumatic sack of Rome by Brennus' Cisalpine Gauls. So you might be onto something with the Colymar needing to protect themselves more than other tribes, leading to greater emphasis on militarism. There's also an interesting influence of (relative) egalitarianism on the numbers of different troops cultures can muster. There's a bit of a military sliding scale between 'having a really good citizen militia' and 'having really good heavy cavalry' that depends on concentration of wealth. It's a lot more complex than that, but basically the more wealth that is widely distributed among smallholding farmers, the more likely the sorts of militaries they produce (usually militia/fyrd/pre-professional legion type things) will be well equipped and well motivated. The more it's concentrated into a wealthy elite (who are usually the ones who can afford horses), the better the cavalry arm will be. So, perhaps the Colymar are a little more egalitarian than other tribes, and thus more of their membership can afford to fight in the militia. 'Egalitarian' in these terms means things like 'each plot of farming land is closer in size/productivity, and you don't so many big estates' and/or 'spoils of war are more evenly distributed'. Things like that. This sort of leads into the next point, which is the emphasis which different cultures place on different military arms. If your infantry levy is well equipped and well motivated it's more likely to gain prestige for itself in battle. Thus, you're more likely to find a bigger proportion of that culture's warfare expressed as an infantry levy. This is one of the ways you end up with different military traditions between different cultures. So, perhaps the Colymar militia are particularly successful, and thus the Colymar express themselves militarily in a high proportion of militia compared to other tribes, with those tribes providing different troops other than militia (e.g. mounted elites, or some of the stranger troops Gloranthans can muster). All a bit of a long-winded way of explaining the three bullet points @metcalph put down, but it's useful to build some of the societal context we can infer from the information we get on troops. Helps add depth to some of the cultures we're encountering 🙂

Agreed (with all of it tbh). Throw into the mix that some/most/all of it could be heavily skewed towards syncretism and 'interpretatio Glorantha' by the God Learners (and anyone else involved in syncretism) and it gets even messier (which is a good thing). How many of these relationships are manufactured? How many of these entities are manufactured? That doesn't make them any less real, but opens up opportunities for different cultures arranging the relationships in different ways, which can only make the experience of Glorantha richer (again, a good thing).