War in the Future! - Anvil Discussion

Burning Empires General Questions
30

Sydney, we both are guilty of simplifying the situation. Yes, everything in warfare is hard; yes the rocketeer has about 90 seconds to respond assuming he is at ground level and the terrain is flat… But we’re hardly talking about one man facing off against a single tank screaming across the ground. Any defender is going to have a tripline of sensors and elevated observation posts. And the fact that lasers strike at the speed of light means that as soon as you are seen, you can be hit. And you yourself pointed out that when a BE tank is hit by a heavy weapon, its chances of remaining operational are not terribly high.

True, blanketing an area with ECM will slow reactions and sow confusion. True, a high speed, low level attack surprise attack has a chance of penetrating defenses. Surprise is a wonderful force multiplier. I’m not arguing against any of those points.

That’s not what we were discussing earlier. We were discussing how grav tanks could traverse great tracts of land at high speed and therefore were a strategically potent force. THAT I disagree with. Any gains you make with a small force of fast moving tanks against a well equipped foe are going to be tactical. If you travel a long distance at high speed, as you would to make this option strategically viable as opposed to tactically, you likely will be detected. Engine emissions, your active sensors, communications… the longer you travel at high speeds, the smaller the chance of gaining surprise will be. But I’m not going to argue that a short, violent armoured thrust can’t gain short term success against unprepared defenders. For all the elegance of the lightning strike, its the El Alameins, Stalingrads, and Kursks that win wars.

31

Gentlemen,
Let’s try not to speak in axioms. Let’s try to continue to pose questions and propose solutions.

I’d like to through a few things out there: I don’t buy that static defense will be valuable in any form in the Iron Empires. MAYBE a fortress world might provide momentary defense for its much oppressed occupants, but Maginot Line would either be destroyed from orbit or maneuvered around. And a fortress world that proved to tough to bombard would either be planet-killed or bypassed, right? Weapons and maneuverability come pretty cheap in the Iron Empires.

Anyway, as the game is written: Sensors work, vehicle stealth tech doesn’t; grav mobile vehicles are faster than land/water bound vehicles by an order of magnitude; infantry have a plethora of anti-vehicular weaponry at their disposal.

I feel like there are two directions that this discussion can go. I think we’re dangerously close to creating a whole new paradigm of warfare that looks nothing like what we have in our pretty pictures. I actually think this is the most likely “real” solution. Given those statements above, war would be a very different affair. Or we can figure out some “solutions” to the problems posed and burn some tech so we can keep our visible, lightly armored, flying tanks and guys in power armor.

Hammer Flies, Anvil Dies,
-Luke

32

Cool discussion. I feel like I’m in a room with two Anvil Lords, one a proponant of maneuver, the other a proponant of positional defense yelling and pounding the table, with Luke, the Forged Lord sitting in the big chair watching them through narrowed eyes and smoking a giant cigar.

I’m going to deploy my “canon” cannon and give you a sense of how I visualize the IE battlefield. Tanks can be very, very heavily armored. As Sydney points out, antigravity makes tonnage a non-issue. Very, very heavily armored. Able to take hits and not go down (unless hit from below). Everything we’ve seen in the comics are weak IFV’s, not MBT’s.

Very, very heavily armored and very, very fast.

I think both fortress worlds and battles of maneuver are going to occur, depending on circumstance. There are going to be imbalances in the orders of battle: Faith’s Grey Rats vs. Sheva’s Landwehr. The landwehr deploy with excruciating slowness only to find themselves being rolled up by a half-dozen guys in Iron who can fly off in their IFV’s when things get too hot, and reapproach to mow down another couple hundred troopers.

I can visualize two mobile armies, both grav-equipped, in a swirling, planetwide fight, with no front lines, and hedgehogs around vital targets (cities, power plants, etc…).

Fortress worlds are unique in a sense… they are armored and armed specifically to deny orbital superiority to an enemy Hammer force, and provide shelter to friendly Hammer forces. As Luke suggests, they will be bypassed or destroyed completely (at great cost).

I’ve been “modeling” in my own very crude way how the technologies in the IE interact, and the primary characteristic is mobility. In the naval sphere, invading squadrons can blow right past a Fortress world without engaging it at all. There’s no way to block starships from going where they want to go except by denying them fuel (and the longer their logistical tails become, the more problematic any sort of planetary assault becomes, so that they quickly change from invader to raiding nuisance). On the ground, orbital control is of tremendous importance, and planets are very hard to “hold”. The best a defender can do is protect vital points, engage in running fights to destroy the attackers’ bases, and give over the bulk of the planet to the invader. God help the innocent civilians who get caught up in such a thing.

-Chris

33

I think you can either go about extrapolating how “real” warfare would work given certain technological and sociopolitical developments, or you can envision a style of warfare and fit the facts to it so it makes sense.

Which way did you go in the IE stories, Chris? I get the sense that you had some strong visuals you wanted to work around: Iron of course, low-flying hovertank/hoverAPC formations, Anvil as medieval/Middle Kingdom style ground troops. Obviously there’s some Warhammer 40,000 in the Iron; the piece in the rulebook with the big banner on the back sealed the deal.

What are some of your other visual inspirations? Maybe we should be aiming for look/feel instead of raw realism. Because I’m thinking war is going to be brutally awful in any “realistic” scenario.

p.

34

And there you and I stand at the point of “agree to disagree,” since I’m not going to convince you at this point. (Throws up black-gloved hands, shrugs armored shoulders, looks at Forged Luke Abzu in mute appeal). As a student of history and as a reporter who writes on defense, I’m a firm believer in the vital importance of both maneuver and attrition, the yin and yang of warfare that no less an ancient than Sun Tzu identified as complementary and alternating elements: kill to move, move to kill. As a reader of comics and a player of games (excellent Ian Banks novel by that title, by the way), I find maneuver a lot more fun.

Actually (m’lord), I’d disagree with you on one point: stealth. Certainly, you can’t get stealth as in “magical total invisibility,” but real-world 21st century stealth doesn’t work that way anyway: very often it’s entirely possible for the enemy to figure out your general position, but damned hard for them to lock onto you for an actual kill shot. And that kind of stealth is pretty easy to replicate in the Tech Burner, simply because “Skill Advantage” to make it easier to hit costs 2 points per +1D after the first die, but “Device: Obstacle” to make it harder to hit costs only 1 point per +1 Ob after the first point of obstacle – and +1 Ob cancels out not +1D advantage, but +2D, statistically speaking. So it’s four times as easy to make yourself hard to hit as it is to make your shots likely to hit.

Looking at it another way, Low Index technology can give you only +2D, but up to +3 Ob – and +3 Ob is plenty. When I was designing active protection systems, I actually had to tone the Obstacles down because +3 Ob was too easy to get.

I have two questions I’d really, really like to see the answer to:

  1. How high can you “stack” advantage dice (or obstacle dice) from different technologies? For example, if I’m at Low Index, and I’ve got Iron (+1D to hit) and a 4-point targeting scope (+2D to shot opportunities, 5 points; categorical limitation, only with that specific weapon, -1 point), do I get +3D? Or does the “Low Index technology can provide up to 2D” rule kick in and cap me at 2D for all my tech put together?

  2. What would a heavy grav tank look like in game terms? If the Assault Sled, at Integrity 6 and Structural Tolerances: Surface, H8. Breach, V1. Damaged, V7. Destroyed, V14, is a medium-weight vehicle (equivalent to a Bradley or a BMP, not an M1), then what would the Integrity and Tolerances be on a grav Main Battle Tank? I’ve tried to reverse-engineer a formula for Tolerances from the examples in the book, but without success, so I can’t Burn the darned thing without help from HQ.

35

Reverse engineering is actually an important point here, Paul. The fundamental idea “future = past” is the underpinning of the Iron Empires. When you think of something in the IE, imagine how it would work in the past and determine how it would translate forward. Example: Who builds cars? Now: big companies. In the past: guilds. So guilds build cars in the IE. That’s a crude idea of it, but my love of history comes from its alien-ness, and the flavor of the IE comes from projecting that alien-ness forward.

The banners in my sketchbook were inspired by the same thing that 40K was inspired by, I imagine: the war films of Kurosawa. What’s cooler than 2000 samurai charging over a hill with those bamboo back-banners waving? I tend to visualize my armor the same way I do everything else in the Iron Empires… it’s culturally back-engineered: The Karsan are “samurai” influenced. So their helmets are vaguely samurai-ish. They have loose-fitting pants and their leg armor is “bound” on with bands. The Darikahn are medieval France, with lots of decorative heraldry and a serious cult of the aristocracy. The Dunedin are a blend of Vikings and Tolkien-Dwarves (oops, the secret’s out!). If you look through the sketches in the brick, the Dunedin Iron has beard-icons moulded onto the front, their anvil has a “draped” chin covering that is vaguely beard-like, the Dunedin being into facial hair. It’s all like that.

My fundamental inspiration for the Iron Empires, the thing it sprang directly from, was Traveller. Iron is my visualization of Traveller’s Battledress. Beyond that, boiled down, my core visual theme is future = past.

I’m actually fine with raw realism. The Iron Empires (and beyond them, the endless Void) has room for it all. The Iron Empires themselves are going to follow canon more or less. Outside of them, the sky’s the limit.

Chris

36

My lord, the Maginot Line style defenses I am advocating would be a network of small forts that would dot a continent, or even the entire world. They would be equipped with sufficient anti-hammer weaponry and point defense to make the task of reducing them from orbit extremely tricky, enough intercontinental ranged artillery to be mutually supporting, and enough armour to survive friendly artillery fire being called down directly ontop of it to discourage direct assault by hostile anvil. Examples of such fortresses can be found in Sydney’s excellent Burning Hotok thread. An network of such mutually supporting forts would be extremely difficult to deal with, especially when friendly anvil units could maneuver with relative impunity under the umbrella of their defensive fire.

I second Sydney’s request to see what an IE MBT would look like.

One vital objective I can see major battles being fought over is high ground. Given the prevalence of long ranged line-of-sight weaponry, firing from above is advantageous because it allows you to not only fire into weak dorsal armour, but denies the enemy protection from terrain features and increases your unit’s LOS. It is hard to find hull-down positions against plunging fire. Unfortunately, the simplest way to gain the altitude advantage, flying high, is suicidal because it silhouettes your vehicle against the sky, reveals light ventrical armour, and denies you the use of ANY terrain features as cover. Thus, mountains and large hills will become vital objectives, since a tank platoon on a mountain top should be able to find plenty of cover, can fire down at hostiles at a steep, cover denying angle, and increases the distance to the horizon from 12km to well over 100km.

37

::The Forged Lord suddenly wishes the Primarch was more forthcoming when he was allocating his logistical assets::

38

I love the approach to the visuals, Chris – I’m strongly reminded of all the crazy-deep design work Jackson et al did for the LOTR movies. The making-of documentaries that come with one of the DVDs (Two Towers?) is packed full of stuff like this: how the horse-centered society makes all their armor have a horse theme, how the orcs’ weapons are vaguely organic, etc.

The super-duper cool thing about the style-first approach to warfare is, you can rationalize all kinds of crazy shit and write it off as tradition. I mean, why on Earth did European warlords insist on lining their dudes up in squares and march them into each other? Why was it such a revelation that you could hide in trees and pop your enemies from deep cover?

The future=past aesthetic makes my head spin thinking about how you square high formalism with the tools of the high-tech battlefield. Are there rules of engagement among the peers that one simply does not break? Do you have Anvil Lords breaking for tea mid-battle? What happens when they engage the Vaylen, who may not understand such niceties?

(More likely: the Vaylen have an overdeveloped sense of battlefield formality, and are saddened and disenchanted to discover the humans are a bit more practical in their war-waging than the propaganda holos suggested…)

I’d suspect this old-world formalism of war must have been modified by the available technology. There are probably not tea breaks per se, nor awkward or impractical formations. Many Anvil Lords probably appreciate an aesthetically pleasing battlefield. Whatever formal rules of engagement they’ve agreed on probably arose from some aspects of profound mutual unpleasantness that ultra-high-tech warfare brought about. If they don’t deploy Ogre-style AI tanks, they probably also elect to not deploy all kinds of stuff they could: NBC weapons that ruin the value of the target, time travel (via FTL communication and causality loops), deep space payloads that produce extinction-level events, etc.

And certainly some forms of warfare-based tech would be developed because of that old-world formality. All that comes to mind at this moment is a sigint equivalent of the fancy heraldry, units proudly broadcasting their leadership and lineage so the blazon shows up correctly on the enemy’s sitrep computers. Possibly entire battles fought Lord-to-Lord with very realistic, but completely non-lethal, weapons (a la Player of Games) – no point in all those nobles dying!

Just thinking a bunch out loud while I can’t sleep at 2 a.m. Thanks again for the awesome world, Chris.

p.

39

Because until technology reaches a certain level of deadliness, the Minutemen shooting from behind trees and walls can disrupt an enemy force, but they can’t control territory. Remember the British made it to Lexington and Concord just fine, and in fact got back to their bases in Boston as intact units. Likewise US troops in Iraq can go anywhere they want: Any insurgents that stand and fight will get overwhelmed sooner or later, usually sooner. The problem for both occupying forces is that the guerrillas could keep slipping away to make trouble somewhere else. The problem for both sets of guerrillas is that they couldn’t stake a permanent claim on territory without develop their own conventional force able to stand and fight, or without the occupier losing his political will to keep occupying: Both things happened in the American Revolution (in large part thanks to French intervention), neither has happened in Iraq, yet.

I would imagine Iron Empires forces are very much oriented towards occupying terrain and controlling populations, rather than guerrilla warfare to disrupt someone else’s control. In fact, when Anvil Lords aren’t fighting each other – which is probably 90% of the time or more – their primary focus is on occupation: They’re ruling their worlds by force, not by consent of the governed. That in turn means that, when the big wars do come, a typical Anvil Lord’s force may be mis-optimized, with lots of military police and light armored vehicles for riot suppression, and relatively little Iron, heavy armor, and long-range artillery.

This idea I love. Throughout history, we humans have usually found ways to be practical about killing each other and still project an image of honor. The Vaylen are just the types to idealize us.

40

The single most important “historical” factor on the IE battlefield is baronialism. Anvil Lords are permitted by custom and law to field a Battalion of troops. Which kind of Battalion… armor, cavalry, Iron, whatever, is up to the lord (and his income). Hammer Lords are permitted by custom and law to field a Squadron (the definition of which is loose, but basically = a half-dozen frigates, a couple of destroyers or a capital ship with escorts, something like that). Forged Lords get a squadron + battalion. Logistical supports are extra.

The upshot of this system is that Duke Alpha is only as powerful as the lesser lords pledged to him. Duke Beta might lure a couple of those over to his side, swinging the balance of power in his favor. Forming an army (or more accurately a “horde”), would consist of gathering, say, a hundred forged-lords, hammer lords and anvil lords together under one command. Each of those lords would have their own, private logistical tail (grouped into an ad-hoc supply “camp”), providing their own unit’s distinct needs for fuel, ammo, support, etc…

Can you imagine the bedlam? Can you see why the much more streamlined clan structure of the Vaylen can run rings around them? Why human armies are so subject to infiltration, betrayal and confusion?

That’s the Hundred Years War in space.

-Chris

41

So “battalion” is not a fixed organization in the Iron Empires, but a catch-all term for a certain level of organization which can vary widely in composition and in size? (Much like a “regiment” in the British Army or a “brigade” in the modern US Army).

Regardless, I’d imagine a battalion is going to be at most a thousand personnel (which is a huge battalion by 21st century standards)… If that’s true, then looking at the force to population ratios of 1:1,000 to 4:1,000 cited in the RAND study referenced in this prior thread, an Anvil Lord’s contingent of one thousand troops can control at most a million people. We also know from Thor Olavsrud’s and Chris Moeller’s comments in this thread that a typical world has “a handful” of Anvil Lords, which translates into several battalions, i.e. several thousand troops, i.e. enough force to police several million people.

These starting points lead inexorably to one of three conclusions:

  1. The sociology and/or technology of the Iron Empires are so radically different from that of our era that populations require much less policing. We haven’t seen any evidence that the people are so remarkably tractable in either Faith Conquers, Sheva’s War, The Passage, or the Burning Empires game-book, so this one strikes me as somewhat implausible.

  2. The populations of Iron Empires planets are much smaller than that of 21st century Earth. Most worlds would have to have populations in the 1 to 10 million range to make direct control by 1-10 Anvil Lords work. This is plausible, given the vast dispersion of humanity – 10,000 worlds in the eight core empires alone – and the centuries of decline, which presumably included population decline. But it seems a bit restrictive to me.

  3. Most of the day-to-day police work is fobbed off on someone besides the Anvil Lords. Communes obviously have the Law Enforcement lifepath, Merchant Leagues have the Security lifepath, and – most relevant to a feudalized world – Slaves and Serfs have the Taskmaster lifepath, so clearly there is support for this in canon. I’ve proposed the Watchman lifepath as the equivalent for the Freeman setting: Just as feudal lords employ Taskmasters on their estates, and Merchant Leagues have Security in their company towns or factory dormitories, so do Freeman communities hire Watchmen to police themselves. The exact form presumably varies, but off the top of my head, I can imagine four alternatives:
    (3.1) The wealthier Freemen, the ones with those Artisan, Engineer, and Manufacturer lifepaths, hire local toughs and/or expendables as Watchmen to police their own employees, both to keep the workers in line and to keep the workers from being beat up so badly by muggers that they can’t come in to work. These “Upper Freemen” might hire such forces either as individuals or collectively, with several local bigshots chipping in together. Call this a “mini-Merchant League” approach.
    (3.2) A Freeman Guild runs its own town or neighborhood for its members, ruled by the Guildmasters, with the Guild either providing directly or through approved subcontractors such services as housing, power, and security. Guild security is likely to be mere Watchmen but might rise to the level of League Security if the Guilds are organized well enough or there’s a well-organized security contractor on the planet. This is another “mini-Merchant League” approach.
    (3.3) A neighborhood or village of modestly well-organized and well-off Freemen form a Neighborhood Watch, supplemented with tough guys hired from outside. Call this the “mini-Commune” approach.
    (3.4) If none of the above applies, and the area is ravaged by criminals, the odds are that eventually one particularly well-organized bunch of criminals is going to kick out the rest and take over, at which point they have a vested interest in preserving some kind of order: You rob a man once, you’ve paid yourself for a day; you get a man to pay protection, you’ve paid yourself for life. (The so-called “stationary bandit”). This means that the local “police” will actually be drawn from the Outcast & Criminal lifepaths: Mostly Hive Thugs, maybe backed up by some Bikers, led by Gunsels and under the overall direction of one or more high-level Criminals.

Obviously, I personally like the third alternative - subcontracting out policework to sub-Anvil forces.
First of all, it frees up our worldbuilding calculations: We don’t have to figure out how relatively small Anvil forces are policing large populations all by themselves, because they’re not doing it all by themselves.
Second, it frees up Anvil forces to be proper military forces, rather than police units with some military functions.
Third, it makes it much, much easier to conquer planets, in classic medieval fashion. Instead of having to uproot massive garrison forces (1,000 troops per million population) [EDIT: and then replace them with your own garrison troops transported expensively across space], you just have to defeat the small, high-quality force that’s personally loyal to the feudal lord (i.e. the Anvil). Then you tell the commoners, “We have a new address for you to send your taxes to” and otherwise leave their local ad hoc law enforcement alone. The local Watchman on the street keeps doing his job no matter who the Baron may be, and the new Baron doesn’t bother himself with who’s patrolling the neighborhoods at night as long as taxes come in on time.

Of course, in especially important areas, e.g. the spaceport, the planetary capital, a major mining or industrial center, etc., the local Anvil Lord will probably want to exercise control directly without allowing any local security force in the way. That’s where you’ll see Soldiers, Anvil Bikers, and Military Police actually patrolling the streets.
And even in areas where the Anvil Lord delegates local law-and-order to sub-Anvil forces, he’s not ceded ultimate authority by a long shot. Merchant League Security, Freeman guild/neighborhood Watchmen, estate Taskmasters, and even the local protection racket’s Hive Thugs are no match for a low-grade Anvil force of Soldiers with ballistic armor and assault rifles, backed by a few armored vehicles and artillery pieces (i.e., in game terms, the Anvil Lord only bought a 1D Affiliation), let alone grav-mobile Iron. If any local authority gets out of line, a few grav sleds swooping in to disgorge combat troops should make the point about who rules the Iron Empires in short order.

42

/applauds Lord Freeberg

Your third (and preferred) alternative makes a LOT of sense. I’ve often wondered how a small, tight-knit noble-driven military force could hope to police a populace that could outnumber them over 10,000-to-one.

Thank you sir.

43

Perhaps lords might sell charters and grant communities permission to police themselves. This is in the lord’s best interest, because the dreary and dull responsibility (and cost) of policing gets fobbed off on peasants, it provides a scapegoat to blame if the people become restless (“My people, I am shocked, SHOCKED to hear that some of the wardens you appointed have been running extortion schemes. I promise you they will be dealt with”), and creates a pool of nominally trained and armed troops that can be quickly and easily conscripted into a levy army. Savvy lords might even charge communities for the privilege of not relying on his arbitrary and often lethal judgment.

This could also provide some context for commune and Merchant League run planets… their lord is absent or not very involved, and has granted so many charters that he has no effective power any more.

44

Yay! I love this thread. Remember, in Sheva’s War there is the Landwehr (people’s army), which is very large indeed (planetwide), and not a true baronial Anvil Force, although the unimpressive Baron Sheva is their commander. Here’s a very brief document in my IE folders entitled “Landwehr”. I’m guessing I wrote it while working on Sheva’s War:

Landwehr
Military resources break down into two broad catagories: the Landwehr and the Nobility. Landwehr are planetary forces, trained and maintained by the worlds of the empires. They are forbidden by law from using grav-pressor technology, personal armor or energy weapons (some worlds have made a case for landwehr equipped with laser & pack weapons), and may not leave the worlds of their origin. Landwehr are organized into squads, platoons, companies, brigades (up to 5 companies), corps and armies.

This is specifically about the Karsan League, with its more egalitarian “we’re all in this together” tradition, but similar entities will be present anywhere there’s a large population. So the distinction between these “militias” and true Anvil forces are interstellar mobility, and firepower. The “planetary militias” or police forces, which can be very, very large, are feared by the aristocracy, who keep the real weapons out of their hands (so that they can suppress them where needed).

The prohibition against such forces moving from world to world is again, the barons protecting their prerogitive as the Emperor’s Anvil, as well as the lordly class as a group protecting itself against the multitudes. There is a tradition of these local forces looking to their Forged Lords for direction. When he and his family are killed off, it’s expected that they will put themselves into the hands of his successor.

-Chris

45

Even the Landwehr, as depicted in Sheva’s War, are a step above what’s required for basic public order: They seem roughly equivalent to the Iraqi Army, or to the Public Order Battalions of the Iraqi Interior Ministry: AK-47, flak jacket, helmet, and an unarmored truck to ride in.

All you need for day-to-day policing – the 1 enforcer per 1,000 population – is a handgun, a radio, a badge, and a bit of attitude. The more I think about it, the more I think “Hive Thug” is actually a common lifepath for Iron Empires law enforcement.

46

P.S.: Particularly horrible thought:

“…and therefore this Court finds the defendant guilty of aggravated assault, larceny, and witholding of the reverence due our sovereign Lord, His Grace Duke Elias. The Court therefore gives the defendant a choice: He may spend three years at hard labor in the lunar mines, or, he may spend six years as bonded Watchman…”

47

… bloody marvelous.

48

Sydney, Mike… :: sigh ::

You guys are pansies.

Six years of bonded watchman duty is a “horrible thought”?

I think you guys need to take your pussified, freedom-loving, I-support-equality-and-civil-rights, democratic, north american morals and put them on the shelf for a minute.

Why do I, as a Forged Lord, care how my communities are policed? They will produce X amount of product Y, or I will bombard the shit out of them from orbit until they shape the fuck up. What? Gangsters have instituted a bloodthirsty reign of terror over the populace? Well, is production down? No? Fine.

A civil war or a coup is cutting production down? Orbital bombardment until the politics resolves itself. You can see the instability in the Hamas government in Palestine when the US etc stop sending aid money (witholding the carrot) - this is the same principle, only it’s all stick and no carrot. The people will police themselves and maintain adequate levels of production or they will die. Oh, did I kill them all? Okay, I’ll just buy some more. It’s a good thing I have Anvil to clean up the bodies!

You’re absolutely right, Sydney - maintenance of social order would be contracted out, NOT done by Anvil. But only a few Forged Lords are going to be picky about the way their peasants live. Some Forged Lords will control numerous worlds - all with numerous communities on them - and he won’t have time to poke around in all of them, checkin out their dinner tables. So they just become abstract centers of production for him. As long as the oil flows, it’s source escapes our notice…

Yes! I will admit this represents the most callous and inhumane attitude you are likely to find in the IE, but you guys are also working off a lot of more modern assumptions, when the fundamental paradigm of Chris’s work is based off medieval principles (and not so unrealistically, IMHO), which are quite different.

I have some more to say about that in a second…

49

No Johnstone, the horrible thought is punishing criminals by making them policemen. It’s hilarious. (edit, I can see a forged lord dancing about his palace singing
“My object all sublime
I shall achieve in time —
To let the punishment fit the crime —
The punishment fit the crime;
And make each prisoner pent
Unwillingly represent
A source of innocent merriment!
Of innocent merriment!”)

I also tend to agree most lords won’t care how their fiefs are policed… in a previous post I suggested that lords might sell their subjects the dubious privilege of not relying on the lord’s personal brand of law and order, which could certainly be “Battery A, fire for effect.” Though that might be less common than you might think. Infrastructure is expensive, as are trained personnel.