Manirian Scratchpad II: The Pralori Elk Hsunchen

[Nevermet]

Also, the Aldryami deserve their own thread, but one thing that this thread has hit home is that they are not "Eco-Warriors / Terrorists" in the sense that those terms are used in the late 20th Century & Early 21st Century.  They dream of a Forest, no other ecosystem, and the question is not just whether they are anti-"civilization", but how anti-animal life they are in general. 

[Julian Lord]

4 hours ago, Nevermet said:

More seriously, could you talk about their shapechanging?

I was talking about it in a metaphorical manner. Actual shapechanging is rare magic, even in the Heler cult.

The remnants of the old Helering Tribe in Dragon Pass simply became Orlanthi, very much as your suggestion.

But in a metaphorical manner, you can see in Heler's myths that his reaction to a crisis is to change shape and escape from or adapt to it. I'd take it from that that the Helerings as a culture are capable of reinventing themselves and adapting to resolve their own crises.

[Nevermet]

18 hours ago, Julian Lord said:

But in a metaphorical manner, you can see in Heler's myths that his reaction to a crisis is to change shape and escape from or adapt to it. I'd take it from that that the Helerings as a culture are capable of reinventing themselves and adapting to resolve their own crises.

I really like that as a mythical core to Heler.  It makes for a good distinction between Heler and Orlanth, and it allows for Helerings to be kin to the Vingkotlings, but qualitatively different.

 

[Nevermet]

Another question about the Pralori: What are their interactions with the southern Safelster city states? There's of course trade,with the Pralori taking their toll to allow caravans into Maniria.  I could imagine the Ancient Beast Society being interested in a strong Hsunchen society like the Pralori, but I don't know enough about the Ancient Beast Society to know how that would go.  I suppose some city states would want elk-riding mercenaries, but that is made a little more complicated by the fact that their closest neighbours are mostly Galanini, who are arguably the least interested in mercenary cavalry, given their own tradition of horse-riding.  But at Seshnela marches into Safelster, I could imagine the Pralori being a group that could be convined to help oppose Tanisor.

 

One fun possibility is that the Reforestation completely dislodges the Pralori.  Maniria, save for the most staunch of cities, will get blanketed with a thick, primeval forest.  The Pralori don't like that, try to fight the Aldryami.  The Aldryami, recognizing the Pralori are a major threat, actively turn to crush them, and succeed.  The Pralori then flee en masse into Ralios and the Safelster city states.  ...That seems like a gloriously messy scenario

 

 

[davecake]

On 6/26/2020 at 5:27 AM, Nevermet said:

They dream of a Forest, no other ecosystem, and the question is not just whether they are anti-"civilization", but how anti-animal life they are in general

My version of Aldryami are not anti-animal, but Aldryami nations are all (more or less) made up of one biome, mostly different kinds of forest. They can (not much since the first age though) get into nasty ecological wars with neighbouring biomes, but they are happy with animal life native to their biome (which won’t include most humans, but can accept some, especially hsunchen). And a single biome can include both green and brown elves, but may be strict about which tree species (and corresponding elves) are accepted. The simple division into green/brown/yellow is just a misguided human misunderstanding.

[Eff]

1 hour ago, Nevermet said:

Another question about the Pralori: What are their interactions with the southern Safelster city states? There's of course trade,with the Pralori taking their toll to allow caravans into Maniria.  I could imagine the Ancient Beast Society being interested in a strong Hsunchen society like the Pralori, but I don't know enough about the Ancient Beast Society to know how that would go.  I suppose some city states would want elk-riding mercenaries, but that is made a little more complicated by the fact that their closest neighbours are mostly Galanini, who are arguably the least interested in mercenary cavalry, given their own tradition of horse-riding.  But at Seshnela marches into Safelster, I could imagine the Pralori being a group that could be convined to help oppose Tanisor.

 

One fun possibility is that the Reforestation completely dislodges the Pralori.  Maniria, save for the most staunch of cities, will get blanketed with a thick, primeval forest.  The Pralori don't like that, try to fight the Aldryami.  The Aldryami, recognizing the Pralori are a major threat, actively turn to crush them, and succeed.  The Pralori then flee en masse into Ralios and the Safelster city states.  ...That seems like a gloriously messy scenario

Some thoughts/notes on trade: shipping is primarily done by boat or by ship, so the easiest ways for Safelstran goods to get to market is for them to go down either the Tanier river or the Noshain watershed. Seshnela controls most of the Tanier, so it's no surprise that goods from Safelster are described as flowing down the Noshain watershed from Drom in Helby, passing through Highwater to Handra nowadays and Yolanda in the past. And then from Handra, the Quinpolic League's ships and Esrolian ones dock for trading. 

The Pralori sit right atop the portage between the Lake Helby watershed and the Noshain watershed. They also sit right atop the more difficult portage across the Tarin Mountains to Caratan from the Jtimb river. So it's not surprising they control trade, but it also suggests that they have strong ties with Handra/the people of the New Fens. (I believe in some older material the New Fens were home to otter hsunchen and the descendants of the three hsunchen groups made up the majority of the population of the Fens, which might imply a kind of solidarity...) 

Safelstran armies are described in the Guide as being consistently mediocre, so for Pralori versus Galanini, I think it's basically a choice between different flavors of barbarian (at least the elkriders won't want land...) 

I have a terrible Nick Brooke-inspired tendency to import modern things into Glorantha, so my immediate thought about connections between the Ancient Beasts and the Pralori is Pralori taking Safelstrans on Real TM Authentic (c) Experiences of Hsunchen Life (R) well away from anything important going on. Lots of "Oh yeah, the possum's eyeball is a delicacy, it'll make you really popular with your bedmates, ifyaknowwhatimean," etc. to mediate between the tourist trade meaning liberating lots of money from overly rich Safelstrans and the desire to teach them something more meaningful, allow them to more directly understand the Spirit World. 

[Eff]

Let's talk military logistics in the premodern world. Or. to be more precise, military logistics as they stood right up until the second half of the 19th century. 

During the American Civil War, at the tail end of this time period, the United States managed to, in the period before the Battle of Chancellorsville, develop an army that could lunge off of its supply lines and most of its baggage train for eight days. The meat ration for three of those days would be carried as dried, salted, and cured meat by the soldiers, the other five days of meat would be carried "on the hoof" alongside the army. 

And where do you get these rations? During the ACW, there were trains that shipped goods around, after all. Before trains, armies were reliant on forage- or, rather, requisitioning and stealing what they needed from the local residents. 

Pralorela poses a formidable military problem. There are no farms, no barns and silos, no easy way to take food and goods from the locals. There are no navigable rivers that cross through it- the shortest portage is 30-35 miles long, assuming quite generously that the unnamed Surbasi and Syrron tributaries involved are navigable all the way to their headwaters. If we assume they lose navigability right where they cross into the uplands of what we might call the "Pralori Gap", we have a 45-50 mile portage. 

Armies move slowly. An infantry force will move about 8-12 miles per day under normal conditions, which means that crossing Pralorela at its narrowest point will require 3-5 days of marching under generous assumptions and 4-7 days of marching under more realistic assumptions. Except that a typical infantry force would be reliant on foraging which it can't realistically do in Pralorela, which would slow it down significantly as it needed to mass wagon trains for any kind of expedition that would be expected to strain what people could reasonably carry. 

Pralorela is roughly 100 miles deep from the New Fens to Safelstran territory. This would take a foraging army 8-13 days to cross, but one that was heavily laden with a supply train (which it would need, since this is the part without major rivers) might take as many as 20 days to cross it. A rough estimate of the overall size of Pralorela is that it's 13,000 square miles or so. The Pralori themselves don't have the kind of fixed settlements to defend that agrarian people do.

All of this is to say that the Pralori are, while not military invulnerable, safe from large-scale punitive expeditions or overall subjugation without the kind of state that has a high enough state capacity to mass and feed its armies as they dive deep into Pralorela again and again. This kind of state doesn't exist in Maniria or Safelster, and it probably doesn't exist in Seshnela yet (the Seshnegi state is still very much in a period of expansion from merely being the Duchy of Tanisor). Places that could, hypothetically, subjugate the Pralori if they were right next to them? Loskalm, Kralorela, the Lunars, maybe Kethaela under Belintar. Historically, the Middle Sea Empire could have done it, but probably didn't bother too much with ruling them too tightly?

That being said, of course, the Seshnegi could mass sorcerous power to deal with the Pralori, and the Reforestation offers a threat to convert portions of Pralorela away from the Pralori's ability to use...

[Nick Brooke]

1 hour ago, Eff said:

I have a terrible Nick Brooke-inspired tendency to import modern things into Glorantha...

My bosom swells with pride. 💗

[Nevermet]

8 hours ago, davecake said:

My version of Aldryami are not anti-animal, but Aldryami nations are all (more or less) made up of one biome, mostly different kinds of forest. They can (not much since the first age though) get into nasty ecological wars with neighbouring biomes, but they are happy with animal life native to their biome (which won’t include most humans, but can accept some, especially hsunchen). And a single biome can include both green and brown elves, but may be strict about which tree species (and corresponding elves) are accepted. The simple division into green/brown/yellow is just a misguided human misunderstanding.

I really like the idea of thinking about the specific biome, with the balance of different tree species, rather than the green / brown / yellow distinction.

 

 

[Sir_Godspeed]

10 hours ago, davecake said:

My version of Aldryami are not anti-animal, but Aldryami nations are all (more or less) made up of one biome, mostly different kinds of forest. They can (not much since the first age though) get into nasty ecological wars with neighbouring biomes, but they are happy with animal life native to their biome (which won’t include most humans, but can accept some, especially hsunchen). And a single biome can include both green and brown elves, but may be strict about which tree species (and corresponding elves) are accepted. The simple division into green/brown/yellow is just a misguided human misunderstanding.

It's entirely possible that the Pralori will play the role of collaborateurs and be "gifted"/"allowed" open forest meadows in the forest, maybe under something a la the Forest Judgments of Umathela. 

This is entirely speculative, though. 

I agree with your presentation of the Aldryami.

[Nevermet]

8 hours ago, Eff said:

I have a terrible Nick Brooke-inspired tendency to import modern things into Glorantha, so my immediate thought about connections between the Ancient Beasts and the Pralori is Pralori taking Safelstrans on Real TM Authentic (c) Experiences of Hsunchen Life (R) well away from anything important going on. Lots of "Oh yeah, the possum's eyeball is a delicacy, it'll make you really popular with your bedmates, ifyaknowwhatimean," etc. to mediate between the tourist trade meaning liberating lots of money from overly rich Safelstrans and the desire to teach them something more meaningful, allow them to more directly understand the Spirit World. 

I really like this.

 

8 hours ago, Eff said:

All of this is to say that the Pralori are, while not military invulnerable, safe from large-scale punitive expeditions or overall subjugation without the kind of state that has a high enough state capacity to mass and feed its armies as they dive deep into Pralorela again and again. This kind of state doesn't exist in Maniria or Safelster, and it probably doesn't exist in Seshnela yet (the Seshnegi state is still very much in a period of expansion from merely being the Duchy of Tanisor). Places that could, hypothetically, subjugate the Pralori if they were right next to them? Loskalm, Kralorela, the Lunars, maybe Kethaela under Belintar. Historically, the Middle Sea Empire could have done it, but probably didn't bother too much with ruling them too tightly?

 

Thanks for the analysis of military logistics.  It's extremely informative.

One question that it doesn't quite focus on is a potential conflict with the Aldryami.  There are a lot of details about what exactly the Reforestation entails that are undefined, but as you've said above, it is at least plausible that the Pralori and the Aldryami will not exist in perfect unison after a magical primeval forest suddenly appears out of nowhere.  I'd imagine the main saving grace of the Pralori is that the Elves will be trying to pacify all of Maniria North of the New Coast, which is a lot of territory.

 

...Does this mean it's time to start an Arstola Forest thread?  

[M Helsdon]

10 hours ago, Eff said:

Safelstran armies are described in the Guide as being consistently mediocre, so for Pralori versus Galanini, I think it's basically a choice between different flavors of barbarian (at least the elkriders won't want land...) 

Safelstran militia are certainly mediocre; Safelstran mercenary armies are likely to be very diverse, with the best highly professional. (Sir Ethilrist and his White Horse Troop began as Safelstran mercenaries, and went north because of setbacks).

Regarding logistics - the caravan route from Drom to the Manirian Road will require a network of depots to keep the trade caravans fed and watered, mostly probably too small to appear on the larger scale maps, and the network might be used for military campaigns, but probably won't be, as for at least part of the route the Pralori are probably part of the supply chain. Similarly, some of those mercenaries in Safelster are probably from Pralorela...