Lodril(li) in Peloria

[nabda]

Let's continue the trend. I've been wanting to run a game set in the empire eventually, with lunar aligned players doing lunar things, so lets talk about the rural parts of the empire, away from the glitz of Glamour. Specifically more interested in social things for bringing an adventure into Lodrilli territory than esoterics and name games, but if conversation drifts towards that then whatever.

The Guide says that a Lodrilli farming village tends to be 2-5 extended families and that social success is measured by the amount of dependents you can maintain, but how extended are we talking here? What's a normal population for a village in the heartlands and how much land are they able to maintain? Are the vast majority of village folk farmers/herders as their primary trade, or is there a separation of duties such that some people are always responsible for certain other labors such as maintenance of irrigation channels or other tasks instead of direct farm work? Are taxes in kind collected at the village, or are they delivered?

Urban Dara Happa walls their cities, do the villages nearby also have that concern, or do the interconnected nature of their houses turn the entire village into a defensible point/holdfast? Do they prefer to build on hills for relative defensibility, or are their social/political concerns that lead them to build just anywhere? (I.E. "secure peasants are troublesome, tell them to tear it down and move down by the river."

[Jeff]

1 hour ago, nabda said:

Let's continue the trend. I've been wanting to run a game set in the empire eventually, with lunar aligned players doing lunar things, so lets talk about the rural parts of the empire, away from the glitz of Glamour. Specifically more interested in social things for bringing an adventure into Lodrilli territory than esoterics and name games, but if conversation drifts towards that then whatever.

The Guide says that a Lodrilli farming village tends to be 2-5 extended families and that social success is measured by the amount of dependents you can maintain, but how extended are we talking here? What's a normal population for a village in the heartlands and how much land are they able to maintain? Are the vast majority of village folk farmers/herders as their primary trade, or is there a separation of duties such that some people are always responsible for certain other labors such as maintenance of irrigation channels or other tasks instead of direct farm work? Are taxes in kind collected at the village, or are they delivered?

Urban Dara Happa walls their cities, do the villages nearby also have that concern, or do the interconnected nature of their houses turn the entire village into a defensible point/holdfast? Do they prefer to build on hills for relative defensibility, or are their social/political concerns that lead them to build just anywhere? (I.E. "secure peasants are troublesome, tell them to tear it down and move down by the river."

Normal population for a village is around 100-500 people.

[JRE]

Peloria has been at peace for over 150 years, and in the Celestial Empire period the nomad overlords surely discouraged walls around villages. So I would expect Pelorian villages to lack traditional defensive structures, unlike most orlanthi clans. There is no internecine raiding as with the orlanthi, and the Pelorian tradition is acceptance of oppressive overlords and passive resistance. Active resistance is rare. Which is why they adapt to Solar, Carmanian, nomad or Lunar overlords while remaining more or less the same. 

[Gallowglass]

I would think that Lodril’s more destructive rune spells would be restricted to priests in Peloria. Or maybe the number of initiates is much lower. 

[Jeff]

Villages in the Lunar Heartlands are not walled. They are typically a collection of huts - usually mud-brick in construction. There's usually a shrine or minor temple to Lodril and Oria (or one of the other Grain Goddesses), and often a shrine to the Seven Mothers.

[Eff]

On 11/7/2022 at 6:46 PM, nabda said:

Let's continue the trend. I've been wanting to run a game set in the empire eventually, with lunar aligned players doing lunar things, so lets talk about the rural parts of the empire, away from the glitz of Glamour. Specifically more interested in social things for bringing an adventure into Lodrilli territory than esoterics and name games, but if conversation drifts towards that then whatever.

The Guide says that a Lodrilli farming village tends to be 2-5 extended families and that social success is measured by the amount of dependents you can maintain, but how extended are we talking here? What's a normal population for a village in the heartlands and how much land are they able to maintain? Are the vast majority of village folk farmers/herders as their primary trade, or is there a separation of duties such that some people are always responsible for certain other labors such as maintenance of irrigation channels or other tasks instead of direct farm work? Are taxes in kind collected at the village, or are they delivered?

Urban Dara Happa walls their cities, do the villages nearby also have that concern, or do the interconnected nature of their houses turn the entire village into a defensible point/holdfast? Do they prefer to build on hills for relative defensibility, or are their social/political concerns that lead them to build just anywhere? (I.E. "secure peasants are troublesome, tell them to tear it down and move down by the river."

So there's a distinction to make here between the rice farmers and the wheat farmers. Rice farming has some important sociological effects that are generally agreed to exist as a consequence of rice- tighter social norms around labor exchange. Everyone in the village has to help out their neighbors when called, and the consequences for failing to uphold this can be pretty dire. There's also the material aspect of maintaining an irrigation system for controlled flooding and draining of ricefields- this is a big, complicated thing which must be manipulated in complicated ways and which everyone has to work together on to keep it functioning. 

In exchange for all of this, rice is about four times as productive per land area used than wheat, or barley, or millet. One social effect- wheat villages and rice villages may well have stereotypes about each other- wheat villagers being seen as lazy, unhelpful, or gullible, rice villagers being seen as greedy, petty, or controlling. 

In the real world, maize is in between the two- more productive than wheat/barley/millet, less productive than rice. Maize also can grow on more marginal land than any of them, so one of the historical effects of the spread of maize was the expansion of cultivated land into rougher terrain. 

One of the possible social effects of this would be the introduction of maize farming into areas like Arir and Darsen that are uplands not noted for their fertility, which can be countered with the non-edaphic Hon-eel cult, which creates potential tensions there between the "new" farmers and the older hill people, but another aspect of this would be the presence of maize fields in wheat-and-barley villages on the "edge" of their territory and assigning them to particular family members as their responsibility. Is this a way to manage independently-minded people by giving them a space where they're freer and away from the suffocating center, or is it an insult, a kind of internal exile? Probably varies from household to household and village to village. 

Now the nature of the Guide Lodril-village is one where there are 50-100 people per extended family, which suggests that we aren't dealing with villages as we think of them. Mandan earth lodges were large enough to house 30-40 people, so we need something bigger. We need large compounds of several buildings. At that point, each extended family might well be a small village in itself, and any fortifications would be built into the compound rather than the village as a whole (particularly to store food). 

The Guide also does not suggest that this is a manorial economy where rural nobles oversee serf labor, so we're probably dealing here with the informal hierarchy of big-men, and each village might well have an appointed headman or headwoman who's the one who's responsible for interacting with the higher ranks of society, collecting taxes for delivery, and maintaining public infrastructure like roads. And these don't have to be the most powerful big-man or big-woman in the village, and indeed a lot of tension can come from situations where a headman has been appointed to cause problems for a local leader. 

All of this is of course speculation. One wild possibility- Lodrilli were actually formally freed by the Lunars as part of the liberation of Peloria from the Carmanians, and like the Han supplanting the well-field system with land markets and emphasizing the peasant freeholder, peasants in the Lunar Empire are free- but continually in danger of falling into indebtedness, tenancy, and wage labor. Which also is an area fruitful for creating tension- put a peasant family that's fallen on hard times and has to send most of the younger generation away to work as wage laborers and another peasant family that's looking to take their farmland and relieve their overpopulated compound right in the path of the PCs and watch some sparks fly. 

[nabda]

13 hours ago, Eff said:

Now the nature of the Guide Lodril-village is one where there are 50-100 people per extended family, which suggests that we aren't dealing with villages as we think of them. Mandan earth lodges were large enough to house 30-40 people, so we need something bigger. We need large compounds of several buildings. At that point, each extended family might well be a small village in itself, and any fortifications would be built into the compound rather than the village as a whole (particularly to store food). 

One of the examples I saw Jeff suggest in another thread was that some Lodrilli villages might be somewhat of a cousin of Taos Pueblo, at least in appearances. In some cases then at the upper range of normal we could see multiple of these compounds and dozens of rooms, some with only ladder and stair access.

Part of my wondering about these rural villages was thinking about a prospective game in the Redlands, and thinking that maybe I could just take what I could find about the heartlands (particularly Oraya) and scale it down, make it less dense, and run some western style adventures out there. Run a Magnificent Seven when you haven't set up any other plots, etc, but now I'm thinking about how easy it might be to do A Fistful of Dollars as well with two feuding families on their adjacent compound structures.

Edited November 10, 2022 by nabda
grammar check

[nabda]

The size of these villages gives me a lot to think about though, even a smaller and depleted village could have numbers close to a healthy Sartarite counterpart. It will be a fine line to walk making something that can be a threat to a Lodrilli village, but could still be something a group of ~5 players can solve.

[Sir_Godspeed]

On 11/10/2022 at 9:13 AM, nabda said:

The size of these villages gives me a lot to think about though, even a smaller and depleted village could have numbers close to a healthy Sartarite counterpart. It will be a fine line to walk making something that can be a threat to a Lodrilli village, but could still be something a group of ~5 players can solve.

A very late reply, but I don't think this is too much of an issue since Orlanthi villages are SIGNIFICANTLY more militarized by default. Lodrili are intentionally demilitarized most of the time, with some notable exceptions. Simple numbers of accessible weapons and traditions of training militia aside, Orlanthi also have a significantly higher rate of adventure-capable rune initiates with useful, violent applications.