This is the second half of the final part (I, IIa, IIb, III, IVa, IVb, Va, Vb) of our apparently five-part series laying out some general guidelines for how pre-modern armies are organized, with fictional worldbuilding and historical patterns in mind. Last time we started checking some fictional militaries against the general patterns we’ve laid out and we’re going to continue doing that this week.
This week, I want to turn to some of the more complex militaries structures we’ve discussed and I found they were more common in my repertoire of video games than film or literature, perhaps because the ultra-long-form structure of many video games provides a lot more space to explore complex institutions. So this week, we’re going to look at an example of a professional standing army in the Imperial Legion of The Elder Scrolls series, some private enterprise war through the Vailian Trading Company of Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire and the finally try to untangle the military system of Baldur’s Gate from the broader Forgotten Realms constructed world (including but not limited to Baldur’s Gate 3).
But first, as always, recruiting and maintaining large pre-modern armies is expensive! Much like many of those pre-modern armies, this project is supported by devolving the costs of my ruinous book-buying habit on to recruits readers. You can help by spreading the word to new readers and by supporting this project over at Patreon. If you want updates whenever a new post appears or want to hear my more bite-sized musings on history, security affairs and current events, you can follow me on Bluesky (@bretdevereaux.bsky.social). I am also active on Threads (bretdevereaux) and maintain a de minimis presence on Twitter (@bretdevereaux).
The Imperial Legion
Now I should start by noting one of the obvious quirks of discussing any sort of worldbuilding when it comes to video games which is that video games are the product not of a single vision but of many hands, even more so than film or tv. After all, even just the dialogue of a single game is the product of more than one writer (Oblivion credits six ‘Quest Designers’ and two more for ‘Additional Writing,’ for instance) and of course a lot of the creative decisions are also made by artists, level designers and so on. And of course that team might be very different from one game to the next: there’s a lot of turnover from Morrowind to Skyrim.1 So it shouldn’t surprise us that there may be some inconsistencies or contradictions; nevertheless there is enough continuity here to proceed.
We can begin by sketching out our civilian society. I really think the society of The Elder Scrolls is something we should come back to in more depth, because while it often models itself as the most generic ‘generic fantasy world,’ it actually isn’t in some interesting ways. But we’ll have to stay brief here.
Tamriel (the world of The Elder Scrolls) is, like our previous examples, a complex agrarian society, but it is different in important ways: Tamriel is substantially more urban than either Westeros or Middle Earth. That isn’t just reflected in it having larger cities – these games city sizes are invariably products of graphical limitations, rather than direct one-to-one expressions of worldbuilding – but in the organization of society: in the places we’ve seen mostly clearly (Cyrodiil, Morrowind and Skyrim) the Cyrodiillic Empire (from here on, just ‘the Empire’ for short) is able to organize its administration entirely through urban centers. Castles – fortified private homes in the countryside – exist in this world, but local administration is urban, even in a relatively under-developed province like Skyrim, where each of the administrative divisions (‘Holds’) has a capital in an urban settlement, be that a major city for the larger holds (Riften, Windhelm, Whiterun, Markarth and Solitude all seem to be intended as major cities) or smaller towns for the lesser holds (Falkreath, Dawnstar, Morthal and Winterhold). This is a society organized around cities, rather more like the ancient Mediterranean world than medieval Europe in that regard (and given the frequent Roman theming of the Empire, this hardly seems like an accident). Still agrarian – most of what is going on is still farming – but meaningfully more urban.
The Empire is in turn organized into provinces (nine of them) roughly corresponding to the historic areas of settlement of its constituent fantasy races. Cyrodiil is the capital province and by far the largest (only Morrowind comes close and much of it is thinly settled) and most populous – it is the imperial core and its size and population helps explain why the government in Cyrodiil is able to more-or-less (mostly less, by the time of Skyrim) hold the rest of Tamriel. Each of the provinces has its own internal customary local systems of government. That may seem strange but pre-modern territorial empires often left local ruling systems in place when they could and Cyrodiil does as well. In Cyrodiil proper, we see the province is divided into sub-regions (Counties) with a local ruler (a count) who is strongly subordinated to the center. While the position of count is hereditary, the position has very limited authority (as the wiki notes). in practice, Cyrodiil itself is a state with one legal system dictated from the capital and local ‘rulers’ reduced mostly to functionaries who implement that system, rather than independent powers in their own right.
Outside of Cyrodiil, local communities are organized by local laws under local leaders: Morrowind is still ruled by its Great Houses, each with their own territory, while Skyrim is ruled by its Jarls. These entities retain their own local militaries independent of the Empire and so we ought to understand the periphery here as consisting of vassal polities. In short the state part of the Empire is Cyrodiil (and perhaps small parts of the other provinces), but much of the area it rules is non-state client rulers. That also shouldn’t be surprising: this was the normal structure for a lot of large empires – the empires of the Late Bronze Age come to mind especially. Notably though – and we’ll come back to this – the Imperial Legions (the military force of the Empire proper) maintain pretty obvious ‘escalation dominance’ over Cyrodiil’s vassals (at least until things get pear-shaped in Skyrim).2
So we have a fairly well-consolidated state in Cyrodiil which provides the imperial core for the Empire and then a periphery of vassal state- and non-state polities (mostly non-state, as we see them) which the Empire very much controls. How does the military system map onto that?
Surprisingly well, actually, so long as we account for the limitations in scale imposed by the genre (an RPG cannot have 90,000 men on the screen or it will crash) and the requirement for things like ‘town guards’ (so they player doesn’t murder-hobo entire towns).
The political structure (an imperial government with a core territory that also rules over vassal polities) is mirrored in the military structure: there is both the Imperial Legion but also local military forces. In Oblivion, these local forces (commanded by the counts) are little more than constabularies, something that actually is expressed pretty well in-game by how immediately out-matched they are by the Oblivion Crisis compared to the heavier forces of the Imperial Legion. In Morrowind and Skyrim, the forces of the local governments (the Jarls in Skyrim, the [dissertation on the wonderfully complex government of Morrowind here] in Morrowind) look to be quite a bit more substantial: particularly in Morrowind, one gets the sense that the armies of the Great Houses and of the Tribunal Temple are quite formidable (heavier, more expensive equipment, more magic, and so on), even if not a match for the Imperial Legion itself.3 That makes sense: in order to maintain control, the Imperial Legion has to maintain ‘escalation dominance’ – the ability to win at higher levels of escalation (thus dissuading potential foes from escalating) – over the many regional armies of the empire’s provinces.
The major problem with the local military forces is that they appear to be standing forces to a substantial degree. We see a lot of ‘guards’ standing around on duty and such. But in practice, such local rulers aren’t going to have much need for a standing military force on duty all the time: most communities have sporadic security needs and small communities generally do not even require much of a permanent, standing constabulary. Instead, we might expect the permanent force to be a small retinue around the local ruler (we actually do see this in Skyrim with the concept of thanes), but beyond that, we might expect a ‘raised for the moment’ form of military organization: some sort of levy or militia, possibly with a standing component that is just a rotating period of duty among those liable to be drawn into the full militia in an emergency (a select levy to go with the general levy). In that case, ‘guard’ wouldn’t so much be a career as it would be something like a two-week shift every year that you had to do, effectively as part of your taxes.
The Imperial Legion (or legions) itself is also a recognizable structure: it seems pretty clearly to be a professional army. Members of the legion are very clearly deployed far from home (a point often exemplified by the legion’s multicultural recruiting) on a permanent basis and are full-time soldiers. Recruiting seems to be done through volunteers. While we see some recruitment of local auxiliary forces in Skyrim, these tend to be lighter troops and might be local auxiliaries: the clear nucleus of the force, we’re told, arrived with General Tullius from Cyrodiil. The legion is most often stationed in permanent fortifications (we see a lot in Morrowind) or key cities (like the Imperial City in Oblivion) – it is not a local militia and makes no effort to be ‘everywhere.’ Its equipment is remarkably (though not perfectly) uniform even in regions where its styles are distinctly foreign such as Morrowind or Skyrim, suggesting that equipment is state-issued and somewhat standardized. It also seems to be a long-service professional organization: we see quite a few ‘old soldiers’ still serving, both in desk-jobs and in combat roles.
And this is a structure that actually makes a fair bit of sense for a state like this: vassal rulers retain smaller local forces and the Empire largely lets them deal with the day-to-day work of order and administration. Meanwhile, the imperial center, with its greater resources, maintains a large, professional, well-equipped standing army that enables it to coerce those local rulers as well as engage in large-scale warfare. One imagines that, in the event of a major security threat, we’d see the Imperial Legion forces form the core of a field army, probably supplemented by non-legion local forces. The amusing thing is, while I think the developers imagine this structure as ‘Roman-ish,’ the state it actually recalls to me most clearly is the Neo-Assyrian Empire (fl. 911-626) which maintained a core professional army of full-time infantrymen (in matched pairs of archers and shield-bearers) who were then supported by levies drawn up from the empire’s vassals.4
What I think is somewhat underdeveloped – especially in Oblivion and Skyrim – is the apparatus to pay for all of this. While other kinds of military systems can have their costs effectively devolved, a state-equipped professional army has to be paid out of the treasury, which in turn demands a state with the ability to raise a lot of revenue. Because it is a volunteer professional army, these soldiers would have to be well paid in order to recruit and retain them. Notably, we do not see in The Elder Scrolls, any indication that these costs are being defrayed by private enterprise war – the Imperial Legion is not a contractor-based army and commissions in its officer corps are not purchased, but awarded based in merit and internal promotion.
Now that’s not to say we don’t see any of that apparatus. The Empire clearly raises revenue both through taxes and through state-chartered monopolies. One of the first things we see in Morrowind is the Syda Neen Census and Excise Office, suggesting both head and excise taxes (excise taxes are taxes on specific goods) and there is a quest related to local tax collection. That said, the tax infrastructure in Morrowind is relatively minimal and that makes sense: most of the game takes place on Vvardenfel, which is only in the initial stages of having imperial control established. Notably, what collection we do see is in ports, suggesting customs and excise taxes may be central here, which also makes sense for a region that is only slowly being brought fully into central administration: port duties and excise taxes on luxury goods (I recall, but cannot find the line of dialogue, where we’re told that the excise taxes are on alcohol) are easier and quicker things to set up.
But what we don’t see is a more focused and intense extraction system in Cyrodiil or especially in Skyrim. By the time Skyrim takes place, the Empire is no longer at peace, but is recovering from a large war and trying to rapidly prepare for its seemingly inevitable sequel, which should demand high revenues and thus that taxes would be high as well. Yet ‘tax revolt’ is nowhere in the Stormcloak rebellion’s motivation (they’re focused more on religious persecution and ethno-nationalism) and we see almost none of the apparatus of extraction that we ought to see for a province that has been long-held by the Empire. The same is broadly true for Cyrodiil, though there are a couple of quests in Oblivion related to things like port taxes in Anvil and such.
Alongside that fairly minimal taxation apparatus, we have another major revenue source, which is the East Empire Company, a fairly obvious riff off of the British East India Company (even borrowing the ‘East’ despite appearing in places like Skyrim that are…not in the East), a massive vertically integrated company with a bunch of state-chartered monopolies on luxury goods. That is a very historically rooted way for a state to raise revenue, of course. The problem is that it isn’t enough. Recall, Tamriel is a complex agrarian society: we see no hint of even early mass manufacture, much less industry, so the overwhelming majority of economic activity is going to be in agriculture and pastoralism. That in turn necessarily means that the revenues generated from something like the East Empire Company are going to be somewhat marginal to the state itself. The Roman Empire had, for instance, a slew of state monopolies (on things like silver mines) as well as rents on state-controlled lands and resources which the Romans collectively called vectigalia, but it is very clear that the large majority of Roman taxes were what the Romans called tributum: taxes assessed on agricultural land or produce.
So what we ought to see in order to complete the Imperial Legions is the infrastructure, particularly in Cyrodiil and Skyrim, for substantial tax collection on the common folk, particularly on agriculture. Now that could be structured in two ways: we could see (as we do in Morrowind) direct imperial taxation, with imperial officials in each settlement assessing taxes themselves. Now those officials might be direct employees of the Empire, but an equally likely solution (which we do seem to see in Morrowind in Caldera, as I recall) are tax farmers: private businessmen who have contracted to do tax collection in an area.
Alternately, the Empire might do what the Romans eventually did: assess taxes on communities and leave it up to local leaders and governments on how to collect those taxes. Given how visible and important local ‘vassal’ rulers are in the Empire, this seems to me the more likely solution: tell the local Jarl or Count or Great House that it is responsible for raising a specific amount of money (or revenue in kind, so a specific amount of grain or recruits or whatever else) and then let them sort it out with their own local administrative apparatus. That said, if this was the system, we ought to hear about it more, especially in Skyrim where the local revolt against the Empire ought to mean that imperial taxes are being collected in some places and are not being collected in others.
All of that said, the fact that the Empire in The Elder Scrolls has a somewhat fragmented structure and then has a fragmented military apparatus – with a professional army enforcing imperial power over a bunch of much smaller local militaries which do the day-to-day work of maintaining law and order – works as a reflection of the society we’re shown. What is missing is mostly just the apparatus of empire itself, which has really been neglected in the setting’s worldbuilding since Morrowind.
The Vailian Trading Company
That said, bringing up the East Empire Trading Company of the Elder Scrolls games highlights one odditiy: the EEC lacks its own military force, instead relying primarily on the Imperial Legion (something we see clearly in Solstheim) and only occasionally on local goons. But of course a massive, state-chartered trading company of this sort is frequently going to have to operate far from the center of imperial control and potentially with local communities that object quite loudly to being so obviously exploited. As a result, these sorts of ‘mega-corps’ tend to operate their own independent military forces: the societates of Roman publicani that managed the tax-farming system (prior to Augustus’ reforms to the largely community-centered tax system mentioned above, though some taxes remained farmed) maintained private security forces we can see clearly in documentary evidence from Roman Egypt, while early modern trading ‘mega-corps’ like the British East India Company or the Dutch VOC maintained full-on private militaries, complete with armies and warships.
But we do see that structure in Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire. And let me also just say: if you are a fan of classic computer role-playing games (BG3, Wrath of the Righteous, Rogue Trader, Solasta, that sort of thing), you really ought to give Deadfire a spin. It is very good and very tightly written (and the stronger of the two Pillars games). It’s also, I think, a better introduction to Eora than the more recent Avowed and I really liked Avowed.
Here the setting is the Deadfire Archipelago, a smaller region in the larger world of Eora, with three principle military powers along with a fourth minor power (the Principi sen Patrena, a very loose pirate confederation that survives to a significant degree in the shatter-zone created by the other three that we’ll leave aside here) and all three are actually pretty well realized. The actually indigenous local power are the Huana. They are significantly fragmented: the strongest tribe (the Kahanga) are a complex agrarian society with a large capital city (Neketaka) that exert an imperial overlordship over smaller tribes and communities in their periphery. Their society is a caste-based one and their military structure follows that: the priests (including ‘Shapers’ who wield powerful magic) and the warriors both are drawn from the highest caste, the Mataru, which thus acts as a hereditary military-and-religious aristocracy which also – not by accident – controls most of the wealth. Their military is thus drawn primarily from this upper-class, drawing its cohesive principle from the exclusivity and strong social expectations for that class, financed by the wealth of its role as the ruling elite (that is to say, wealth extracted from the lower, worker classes). But of course that system imposes strong limits too: the military cannot be readily expanded beyond those classes effectively and the entrenched class interests of the elite render the Huana military static and unresponsive to new technology – though formidable, their position relative to rivals is deteriorating. As a result, the player’s interactions with the Huana are always contextualized by the Huana leadership’s own sense of growing military vulnerability to incursions from foreign colonial powers, of which they have two.
Deadfire is a really good RPG and I really encourage you to give it a try if you haven’t.
The first is the Royal Deadfire Company, which represents the distant maritime kingdom of Rauatai in the Archipelago. The name is something of a euphemism: the institution began as the Rauatai Trading Company, but was brought under the direct control of the ruler of Rauatai (the ranga-nui) and converted into the RDC, which in practice isn’t really a trade company anymore, but an expeditionary force, an army of the government of Rauatai which aims to conquer the region – albeit gradually, because the Huana are still strong enough to make a direct war of conquest a risky proposition. The RDC is thus effectively an expeditionary force of professional soldiers, funded and maintained by Rauatai (itself a large maritime empire) doing ‘ports-and-forts‘ imperialism. Consequently, what we see of them are fortified staging posts (notably Hasongo) to support their navies and channel goods back to the homeland and nearly all of the people we see are military personnel more or less directly employed by the Rauataian state.
Notably, as an aside, we don’t get as much information about the rest of Rauatai’s military that I recall. Honestly, I’d think something like a core army of conscripts might make sense (given how militarized the society is described as being), with only the forces deployed permanently abroad (like the RDC) being composed of professional ‘long-timers.’
In contrast to the RDC which is almost an army of a foreign state, the third power really is a trading company first: the Vailian Trading Company (itself a pretty clear echo of the Dutch VOC, down to the similar acronym). One oddity worth noting is that the VTC is not attached to one state, but several, representing the combined efforts of the Vailian Republics, a loose confederation of city-states. The nearest historical parallel here may actually be something like the historical Hanseatic League. But where the RDC is essentially an arm of the Rauataian state, the VTC is doing something different: private enterprise war. The VTC is a company, run by a board of directors, answerable to investors in the Vailian Republics under a charter sanctions by their confederation.
And (unlike the EEC of the Elder Scrolls series), it has its own military to secure and advance its operations, every bit as predatory as the RDC. And what we see – and I think this makes sense for the society being presented – is a contractor-based military. Indeed, we meet one of these contractors, Atello Valera, who the VTC has contracted to provide a pretty large security presence, including a number of warships. What I do think is missing here is a greater array of contractors and sub-contractors. Realistically, we might expect the regional heads of the VTC (Ignato Castol and Lueva Alvari, who split maritime and land-based operations between them) to have a few key contractors (whatever the Vailian equivalent to colonels or condottiere is), who would then have sub-contractors running individual ships or companies, with basically everyone in the chain effectively functioning as a sort of ‘military entrepreneur.’ We do get a real sense of that entrepreneurship from the Valeras, but they ought not be the ‘only game in town’ on the military side.
The VTC, in short, has a bunch of different people contracting soldiers for different tasks, so while there’s a clear cultural similarity in their equipment, it isn’t uniform (unlike the RDC, which is quite uniform!)
That said, I think Deadfire actually does a good job of correlating militaries and societies: the Huana, Rauatai and Vailians have quite different societies and thus quite different militaries: a warrior-class military with devolved costs that fits the caste-based Huana society, a professional military with standardized state equipment and regular pay that fits the very centralized Rauataian state and finally a private enterprise warfare military using military contractors that fits the decentralized structure of the Vailian Republics.
Defending Baldur’s Gate
Now we turn to the unusual military structure of Baldur’s Gate, drawing not just on the recent Baldur’s Gate 3, but more broadly on the lore of the city as part of the Forgotten Realms setting. We’re picking one city to focus on in part because it has become the most visible part of the Forgotten Realms’ setting and also because, to be frank, the military, social and economic structures of the Forgotten Realms are kind of a mess. That’s not necessarily a harsh criticism – this was a setting built for specific purposes (facilitating D&D gameplay) rather than worldbuilding verisimilitude. But that still makes them interesting to talk about from this perspective because they often test public assumptions about what pre-modern societies look like.
(Note that in BG3 one of the major plot-points is an effort by one of the villains to unbalance the city’s military system by adding on an army of evil metal golems to it, in a bid to take over. I’m going to leave that part out here, because the Steel Watchers aren’t part of the stable military system of Baldur’s Gate. Ironically, if Gortash had succeeded, the military system of Baldur’s Gate would make a lot more sense: you’d have a tyrant monarch who ruled the city by virtue of controlling its military.)
Baldur’s Gate, in the setting, is a major seaside mercantile city with a large population, clearly part of a larger complex agrarian society. Its upper-class are wealthy burghers (rather than large landowners) and it is ruled by a council of four ‘grand dukes’ who are elected for life.5 It is also a big city by pre-modern standards: the wiki figures a population around 120,000 or so in the urban area.
Now one thing in the lore is that because the city has a natural defensive position (it is located on an inlet) and because it has a very strong outer wall built by the heroic figure Balduran, for whom the city is named, that it is generally peaceful and does not necessarily require a large army. The problem here of course is that Baldur’s Gate doesn’t just need to defend the city core, it needs to defend the agricultural hinterland that feeds it. This is a common problem in fantasy worldbuilding – cities divorced from the agricultural lands they require to survive. Nor can this issue be salvaged by saying the Baldur’s Gate is a city that lives on trade and such. These are agrarian societies, which is to say that food production (via farming) makes up the lion’s share of the economy, with textile production (also via pastoralism, agriculture and peasant labor) making up quite a lot of the rest. Consequently, in the absence of industrial production, there’s no amount of economic activity you can be doing in the remaining small slice (think 10-20% at most) of the economy that is going to allow a city to import all of its food and fabric. The only activity that can manage this feat is empire: the (violent) extraction if someone else’s food and fabric, in which case you still have a hinterland, it is simply held by force and coercion.6 The city needs a hinterland and it needs to be defended.
That said, Baldur’s Gate does have an army – indeed it has one-and-a-half armies, in practice. Order in the upper city is kept by an armed constabulary called The Watch which, according to the Wiki, has about a thousand members, of whom perhaps 300 or so are on active duty at any given time, making this effectively a civic militia. What keeps the Watch from acting fully like a military is that they are not empowered to operate outside of the city walls. Amusingly to me, this force of – at any given moment – 300 active soldiers and 700 or so reservists, somehow rates a high command with six major generals and two more senior generals despite being no bigger than a battalion (which would normally by commanded by just one major or captain in our world).
Instead, the main force of Baldur’s Gate’s defense is the Flaming Fist, a mercenary company kept essentially on permanent retainer by the city. It is a standing, effectively professional force, organized on the employment principle, consisting of – according to the wiki – approximately 2,000 soldiers (with a peak strength of 6,000). The Flaming Fist was founded by a grand duke and it seems like its leader (the marshal) is generally one of the four grand dukes that governs the city.
It is striking how heavy and expensive their equipment is. Maintaining this organization on a permanent basis would be extraordinarily expensive, which if I was a citizen of Baldur’s Gate would get really frustrating, because as far as I can tell the Flaming Fist’s job is to spend the first two acts of every story about the place losing until the heroes show up and save everyone.
And there are a few problems here. The first is a problem that afflicts a lot of Forgotten Realms armies which is this is not enough army. A city-state with more than 100,000 people in the core urban area certainly ought to be able to muster up a much larger army. Medieval Ghent had a population by the late Middle Ages around 50,000 and was able to put something on the order of 8,000 men on the field to fight against the city militia of Bruges in 1382 and they were outnumbered by the Bruges militia. Baldur’s Gate is well over twice the size and yet has a far smaller total force. Indeed, its fairly close in size to Classical Athens (especially if we account for the missing rural countryside a city of that size must have), which was able to deploy more than 12,000 men against Syracuse, supported by roughly 200 triremes (so around 40,000 rowers) and was able to recover from the total loss of that force.
But that size problem gets us to an underlying problem in matching up this type of society, its resources and security needs with the kind of army it has. If we put the Watch aside for now, the primary defense force for Baldur’s Gate are the Flaming Fists and while the lore describes these fellows as a mercenary company because they sometimes take jobs outside of Baldur’s Gate, they’re really a standing army. No one is going to mistake your mercenary company for an independent outfit if it is also traditional that the marshal of the company is also one of the four elected leaders of the city. That’s not an independent mercenary company being hired, that’s a political alliance with Baldur’s Gate enabling another community to gain the protection of its army.
But you may recall as we discussed recruitment and payment principles that the state-supplied (the Flaming Fists have standardized equipment), full-time, long-service professional army is almost exclusively a creature of large, well-administered empires and there’s a reason for that. For one, only such a large and complex state is capable of mobilizing the resources necessary for such an expensive system and equally only large empires have the kind of round-the-clock security needs to justify one. That is, after all, the feature that makes professional armies so expensive: they have to be fed, paid, housed and equipped in wartime as well as peacetime – there is no option to simply send the men back to their homes and jobs. Thus, while smaller states might maintain a small standing force – a prince’s retinue, a small elite unit or a constabulary force – their military is not built around that force, it is built around forces which can be expanded and contracted to fit changing security needs.
As an aside, this is part of why we can’t just say the Flaming Fist function basically as a condottieri force. Italian states raised condottieri in response to specific military threats – they did not maintain them continuously in peacetime. Indeed, one of the key advantages of condottieri was precisely that: you could pay them in war time and not pay them in peace time, though of course they were also famously untrustworthy.
The Flaming Fists also do not fit the political structure of Baldur’s Gate. There is a reason that states which do use standing armies tend to have a unitary power structure, like a monarchy, because the very nature of a long-service standing professional army is that whoever wields that army is the state. Baldur’s Gate is ruled by four high officials who serve for life, three of whom collectively share control over a gendarmerie of 300-part timers and one of whom has control over and the loyalty of a standing for of at least 2,000 professional full-time soldiers. That is a system that becomes a monarchy very fast. Political power here is fragmented, but for some reason military power is not, which is hardly a stable structure.
And finally, the Flaming Fists do not fit the social structure of Baldur’s Gate either. This is a city dominated by a class of wealthy burghers (the ‘patriars,’ a clear riff off of Roman patricians), whose wealth mostly comes from trade or non-agricultural business. That’s fine – there really should be a landholding aristocracy somewhere too – but the problem is that this class is nowhere represented in the military structure. It’s the ruling class, whose interests the military system is intended to protect yet these families do not make up the elite of the military, nor its officer class.
We can effectively go in two directions ‘fixing’ Baldur’s Gate: we can make the society fit the military or the military fit the society. In the first direction: a city which has a professional military force that answers to just one guy (the marshal of the Flaming Fists) isn’t going to be an oligarchic quasi-democracy. It is going to be some kind of autocracy: the marshal is going to be the autocrat who sets the rules, de iure (as a monarchy) or de facto (as a tyranny). In this case, the weakness of the Watch makes sense: this was the city’s old militia, now sidelined because it would threaten the power of a tyrant-marshal, who is probably also busy breaking the power of the old ruling class (the patriars) and consolidating their wealth into his own political network. Alternately, we might get a sort of monarchy-within-bounds as we see in Venice and to an extent (with its two kings) in classical Sparta: a single leader does have command over the military, but the rest of the political system is heavily focused on constraining that leader, to the point that they have officials whose sole job is to watch their every move and there are other political institutions empowered to unilaterally remove a marshal who behaves badly. Even then, a purely professional force seems like a recipe for a self-coup in which the marshal sidelines everyone else because he alone commands the loyalty of the Flaming Fists, whatever the political system may say.
The alternative is to come up with a military system that fits the society we see: a somewhat representative oligarchy (with some democratic elements) primarily lead by a handful of elite families that wield outsized wealth. That kind of society has little need for a large standing army at all: the people with goons are also the people who wield political power and so the system they need is one that catches petty thieves and resolves disputes between each other, not a system to garrison whole districts of the city. The Flaming Fists are unnecessary for such a society (though the Watch as a gendarmerie which serves the collective interests of the patriars might survive).
Now those elite families could tax themselves extremely harshly in order to maintain a meaningful standing army but why would they? Instead, we ought to expect that Baldur’s Gate would defend itself with a civic militia that mirrors its own social structure: the very poor are excluded (and probably don’t vote), while the bulk of the burghers fight as infantry (and have some token political participation) and the patriars serve as officers and cavalry (and have maximum political roles). Because the patriars – or the middling burghers – would rather not tax themselves, they’re going to devolve military costs: everyone buys their own kit and serves based on wealth. That system might take the form of the sort of conscription-based civic armies we see in Greece and Rome or it might take the form of medieval civic militias, like the aforementioned schuttersgilde. If the latter, we should expect those military guilds to be major political actors in the city’s governance, either de iure (they have fixed places on the ruling council or whatever) or de facto (their members just tend always to get elected). Crucially, unlike the Flaming Fists, they wouldn’t be external to the city’s class system, but tightly integrated into it.
Conclusions
This series has ended up rather a lot longer-winded than I intended, but what I hope it has served to demonstrate first is that not all societies have the same sorts of armies. My critiques here have focused mostly on complex agrarian societies, because this was a series for worldbuilders and that is most of what fantasy worlds get made out of, but of course the armies of nomadic pastoral peoples or hunter gatherers are really different as well.
Importantly, societies do not pick their military structures at random, nor are they necessarily free to pick and choose whatever military system they like. Instead, military systems, which are defined by the interaction of principles of recruitment, methods of mobilization, systems of equipment, payment and supply and sources of cohesion are generally long-standing legacy institutions that emerge alongside larger social structures. Individual leaders are rarely at leisure to change or redefine these systems (though it does happen sometimes).
Perhaps most importantly, these systems are invariably tightly connected to the structure of a society and its political organization. No army can help but recreate its civilian social structures on the battlefield. So a society in which the dominant political and economic force is a mass of middling farmers who elect their leaders are likely to form armies composed of a mass of infantrymen who elect their generals. A society in which a handful of elites lord over the disenfranchised and largely impoverished peasantry is likely to have armies centered on mounted elites, with infantry that is limited and unreliable at best. More complex forms of organization, like private enterprise war with military contractors or standing, long-service professional armies, demand states with matching levels of revenues and complexity as well as a set of security needs which demand these expensive, complex and difficult solutions to the problem of raising military force.
While those rules may feel constraining, I think – and I hope in this post and the last, I’ve shown – they can also, for the worldbuilder, offer storytelling opportunities. After all, if armies reproduce their society’s social structures – often more explicitly than the civilian society itself – that means any time an army is ‘on screen,’ it provides an opportunity to say something about the underlying society. An observer who noticed, for instance that British military leadership in the early 1900s was generally drawn from the same handful of schools would have learned something about the structure of power in British society. The same might be said if the person glanced at Europe and noticed that despite its modern industrial economy, most of the high military command of early 1900s Germany in the first World War continued to be drawn from the old Junker class (visible because of the ‘von’ in their names), a trend which continued into the second.
And indeed, someone who glanced at the modern American military and noticed that American officers functionally always have college degrees, that high ranking officers generally have advanced degrees and that American enlisted personnel generally do not have either will have learned something about the structure of class, power and wealth in the United States: our ruling class is defined more by where you went to school and for how long than by your last name or hereditary titles (which we do not have). And the military cannot help but replicate that structure.
The same is equally true in fictional worlds. Of course one shortcut to producing these kinds of interesting linkages is to adopt a historical pattern wholesale by imitating a real polity and making modest changes. That said, it can be equally interesting to think about the implications of odd combinations, especially for societies in transition. Because, of course, societies are never static things and as they change – be that change swift or slow – their military structures will be forced to change with them, or else will be bent and deformed by the attempt not to change. In fiction, civil-military failure can be as interesting as success.
And in the end, a society whose institutions are interwoven and interlinked – as all real societies are – is just more interesting to read about than a fictional society which is a mere jumble of tropes.
- I am focusing here on Morrowind, Oblivion and Skyrim because that’s what I’ve played the most of. I am leaving out Elder Scrolls Online for the obvious reason that its empire is a different empire to the one we see in the mainline numbered games (ESO is set in the Second Era, between the collapse of the Akaviri Potentate and the rise of the Septim Empire, whereas the mainline games have been focused on the ending of the Third Era: the last days of the Septim Empire and the aftermath of its decline).
- Though it is worth noting that before the Hero and dragons show up, the Empire was minutes away from successfully reasserting its escalation dominance in Skyrim during that opening sequence: the Stormcloak rebellion was about to end before Alduin intervenes.
- A lot of my sense of ‘escalation dominance’ here is signaled by equipment: the Imperial Legion invariably has heavily armored troops as its backbone, usually in armor that at least looks ‘mid-game,’ while the county and jarl armies in Oblivion and Skyrim are in light armor. By contrast, in Morrowind, the Tribunal Temple troops are in late game medium armor and the Bouyant Armigers – the Tribunal Temple’s knightly order, more or less – are in late game light armor. The Great House armies are more numerous and in mid-game medium armor. That actually fits neatly with the plot of the game itself: Morrowind takes place at a time when the Empire is much stronger than it is in Skyrim, yet we get the clear sense that it still needs to be a lot more cautious and diplomatic in dealing with the powers in Morrowind.
- In contrast to the Roman army, which employed both Roman-citizen full time professionals (the legions) and non-citizen full time professionals (the auxilia) but during the early and high empire made relatively little use of militia or levy forces.
- That is, in itself, an awkward political structure: civic structures that divide power like that tend to do so because they are concerned about one figure making themself king or tyrant, which – if that’s a thing you are concerned about – you generally give them short terms of office and rotate power. Having a four-man board with life tenure is just an open invitation for someone to spend a lifetime suborning two of the others and thereby becoming king (and then swiftly ensuring the election of their son and their cronies and so on). By contrast, if you’re willing to have a Doge act as head of state for life, you’d generally only have the one of them and then have a different body with the power to police their actions (almost always including pretty explicit surveillance). But I’ve never gotten a strong sense that Baldur’s Gate’s ‘Parliament of Peers’ acts as a strong check on the Grand Dukes.
- This is, for instance, how classical Athens manages to be such a large city that it outstrips the agricultural production of its – also quite large! – hinterland of Attica. The Athenians have an empire for much of the fifth century and it is the wealth of tribute that enables them to import food and live ‘like an island’ during the Peloponnesian War. The same is true for the ability of certain ancient cities (Carthage, Alexandria, Rome) to grow to enormous size: they were first imperial capitals and then centers of imperial administration in a larger empire, so the economic activity that powered them was the collection and movement of taxes.
Regarding the Flaming Fist, I agree that such a power imbalance isn’t a stable arrangement.
The only thing I could think of to explain it, within the established facts, is if the Duke commanding them isn’t the one paying the standing army. If they get their weekly salary from the other Dukes instead.
Would that not divide loyalties?
It would almost certainly divide command! In the situation described, if the other dukes are paying the army, it’s both reasonable and likely that they’re going to demand a matching say in how it is run – or else, they’ll most likely split off to pay their own private armies, and soon you have a city with four Grand Dukes, each running one of four private ‘mercenary’ companies, along with a smaller and semi-vestigial Watch.
Which frankly sounds like a potentially interesting situation to be in for D&D adventurers; the potential for intrigue between armies with the constant specter of civil war if disagreements between the military generals spills over into disagreements between their armies could create some interesting tensions. Generals with the loyalty of personal legions, who ensure that those legions are funded – and those who try to join the ‘neutral’ force are… under-funded, instead.
Sounds reasonably like the plot to Jingo…
A good point.
Though it could then be that command is broken up between strategic and operational.
With one Duke doing the day to day command, while the entire council determines the strategic aims for the army.
But it is more likely that they would want a direct say, and we’d see the Flaming Fist break up as every Duke seeks to fund a group which answers to them.
Probably run into a similar situation with Roman Generals. It’s the state giving them their pay and their honors but the generals pretty easily positioned themselves as “You got this pay and these honors because I fought with the senate for you.”
Depending on how you count, Roman soldiers may have fought other Roman soldiers more often than any foreign militaries. There was an awful lot of civil war.
Speaking of Faerun having weird world-building! The settlement of Goldenfields is described in several sources as “The Granary of the North”, and is claimed to be the primary supplier of either certain staples or *all food* to several cities in the region, including Waterdeep and Baldur’s Gate. Which is incredible because judging by some of the published maps it has a land area under cultivation of about 20 sq miles.
If you take those claims seriously it implies that Baldur’s Gate actually doesn’t have a hinterland or landholding aristocracy – instead it has an absolute artery connecting it to this one farming settlement hundreds of miles away which is apparently so overwhelmingly fertile that it can achieve multiple harvests *per day*; any small local farmers who once held land outside the city walls must have long since given up competing.
This kind of explains the permanent standing armies a lot of these cities have, though given how incredibly vulnerable & vital the trade routes to Goldenfields and other agricultural hubs must be they should probably be defending those 24/7 rather than standing around inside the fortified cities.
Multiple harvests per day is not “overwhelmingly fertile” it’s some sort of magic that would rapidly end any similarity of the setting to premodern Earth if it were reproducible, or maybe even if it weren’t.
If it’s specific to Goldenfields I think that means Goldenfields becomes the most powerful city in the setting, because people would migrate to Goldenfields for food security, the ultra-high intensity farming would save labor and create surplus which would allow specialized labor and a higher standard of living which would drive further migration.
If it’s reproducible, the whole setting becomes urban within a few generations I think. Baldur’s Gate, for example, can have an “agricultural hinterland” entirely within city walls, and everywhere could completely escape the Malthusian dynamics of premodern living.
If Goldenfields were not reproducible and far from any navigable waterways that would create other interesting effects. It’s certainly a broadly interesting idea to have that kind of mechanic cause the setting to be in the process of departing a subsistence agricultural economy, with all the dislocations entailed, especially by the above process which lacks real world parallel.
The science fiction equivalent would be hydroponics. It exists in reality but not to the scale of being able to feed an entire city.
I have seen proposals that were at least taken seriously* to use hydroponics to feed people on a large scale using multi-level greenhouses in order to vastly reduce the land footprint of agriculture. Not sure how easy it would be to make sure all the levels consistently get enough sunlight or how much power artificial sunlight would take up compared to grid capacity.
Sci-fi stories split between really good hydroponics and agri-worlds depending on the story they want to tell.
*though moon factories to make space datacenters within the decade are also taken seriously so this doesn’t mean it’s actually workable.
My understanding is that hydroponics are not currently viable at industrial scales. The technology works, and is well-established–thanks in part, somewhat ironically, to pot growers. Hydroponics means you can grow the crops where the cops can’t see you, and the profits are high enough to overcome the high start-up and maintenance costs. Home gardeners without yard space for gardens also can do this, which has led to many amusing misunderstandings with police (heavy sarcasm here). As one judge of my acquaintance put it, it’s not illegal to have hydroponics or to grow tomatoes.
The problem is that crops like wheat, cabbage, potatoes, rice, and the like need to be extremely cheap to produce (so they can feed the poorest parts of the population) and produced at scales abundant enough to feed everyone. Hydroponics currently are a lot more fiddly and prone to breaking down than fields are, which limits the amount of food such systems can produce and increases the price of producing the food. So while hobbyists (gardeners) and cash-crop growers can make use of these systems, their value is limited in industrial-scale agriculture.
Decrease the costs via technological development, however, and this equation could very well change. Economies of scale could also help. It would also change if fields aren’t an option, such as onboard a starship or a mining asteroid. If you need hydroponics to produce food to live, you find a way to make it work.
Another word for “multi-level greenhouses” is “vertical farming”. I have read about people doubting we could ever grow enough cereal grain in hydroponics to feed the world. While we should not give up we should not trust such solutions too much either.
I feel reasonably confident it’d be physically possible, which is very different from it being technologically and economically viable with current populations and technology. But sci-fi is all about speculative future technology and better, cheaper hydroponics is no different from a space elevator. We can’t make it now but maybe we could in the future if we solve certain technological problems that are not barred by the laws of physics.
The biggest problem with using hydroponics on Earth or any Earth-like setting is why?
Why are you using a setup that is fiddly and requires a lot of setup and maintenance compared to horizontal farming, aka regular fields?
Hydroponics/vertical farming in hostile environments (airless bodies, space stations, starships) make sense. You have to build every cubic centimeter of every space, so it has to pay off big.
I wonder if farmers with scythes and animal-drawn wagons could actually harvest Goldenfields fast enough to make that equation work out.
“The biggest problem with using hydroponics on Earth or any Earth-like setting is why?”
This is why pot growers have been so valuable in developing this technology. The “Why?” is built in–hydroponics are a way to grow crops without people seeing them. It’s high-risk/high-reward (well, compared to wheat anyway), and they’re used to fiddly systems anyway (booby traps and the like), and hydroponics can actually reduce some risks. (Please note I’m not condoning this; I’m merely describing what’s currently happening.)
The other advantage I’ve read about is that hydroponics allows for longer, or at least more controlled, growing seasons. Since there’s no natural light to begin with, you can basically set up the plants to think it’s any time of year you want. If you want fresh strawberries in February, you can do that relatively easily. Goes back to the idea of being divorced from the supply chain–in the past, when most people were farmers, food was entirely seasonal because there was no other option.
There’s another potential value: Quality. Current practices sacrifice food quality for convenience. You can see this most clearly with apples: a red delicious apple picked from a tree at the peak of ripeness has about as much in common with the ones you see in a typical grocery store as the David has in common with a stone quarry. Tomatoes are also a stark example of this; eat a tomato from a garden, then eat the same variety of tomato from a store, and there’s no comparison. This is because the food is picked when it can best survive shipment, NOT when it’s at its best.
Hydroponics can solve this issue by reducing the transportation costs. Instead of getting tomatoes from somewhere by train, you grow them in the city in a skyscraper. Transporting tomatoes twenty miles is a very different thing from transporting them two thousand.
Is it worth it? The answer currently is no, it’s not. At least, not at large scale; who knows what rich people do. But the choice to prefer transporting third-rate produce, rather than growing it locally via hydroponics, is a choice, and society can shift its preferences. We’re already seeing that in a lot of ways, so it may be that we as a society become willing to accept the trade-offs of hydroponics over the trade-offs of transportation. Let’s not pretend that the highway system and railways aren’t themselves fiddly systems requiring tremendous maintenance; we just don’t view them as such because they’re fiddly in ways we’re used to.
Taste varies statistically between different countries. The strawberries grown in fields across most of Sweden are of sorts intended to be eaten within 24 hours after picking. Combined with our cool climate this makes them noticeably tastier than strawberries imported from for example the Netherlands. (Fruit grows slower in cooler climates and accumulate more flavour.) These are in season for approximately two months a year. Then they are for sale everywhere and commonly eaten as snacks or in desserts.
Because this is Trantor or something and there’s enough urban sprawl you need space-efficent farming and possibly also imports to support the population, or you can’t use much of the planet’s surface for farming because the government has decided to preserve the natural ecosystem for whatever reason, or the planet is habitable with a breathable atmosphere but does not have a lot of soil suitable for Earth crops for some reason.
The modern talk about vertical farms is with the intent of letting farmland revert back to nature either for its own sake or to limit pesticide and fertilizer runoff that is easier to restrict in a closed system.
My countryman Krister Sudelin has written most of the role-playing game “Second Empire”. Taking place in the 42nd century it is set in former space colonies which long lost contact with Earth. Its largest polity is the Federation of Althea which is modelled on the European Union. What is interesting in context is the capital world which is an Earth-sized moon orbiting a gas giant. Only 5% of its surface is land with much of it being covered in ice. Still, it is inhabited by ten billion people. About two third of them are humans or genetically engineered humans. My educated guess is them using hydroponics to feed such a large population on such a small landmass. There has been mention of food made from microbes cultivated for the purpose. But this has only ever been mentioned in connection with spaceships and space stations.
it s run by an an abby of the goddess of agriculture and likely prsonally blessed by her the source of multiple harvests per day?
If so the food is basically produced by local magic. Nothing else could produce “multiple harvests *per day*” as Baron von Tumbleweed put it.
“That is, in itself, an awkward political structure: civic structures that divide power like that tend to do so because they are concerned about one figure making themself king or tyrant, which – if that’s a thing you are concerned about – you generally give them short terms of office and rotate power. Having a four-man board with life tenure is just an open invitation for someone to spend a lifetime suborning two of the others and thereby becoming king (and then swiftly ensuring the election of their son and their cronies and so on). ”
That was actually the common tenure of Burgomasters of Hanseatic cities! E. g. Lübeck (confirmed number four), Tallinn (also four), Hamburg differed in having 3, Bremen also had 4.
Life tenure – but they needed support of the council colleagues (number 14 in Tallinn, 20 in both Lübeck and Bremen) to get things done.
The problem with the “awkward political structure” isn’t really with having four distinct magistrates, the problem is with one of these magistrates having sole control of the military apparatus and the power imbalance this creates.
I can’t find much information off the cusp about the Burgomasters of various Hanseatic cities, but I doubt any of these city had such an imbalanced delineation of powers between the various magistrates.
At least in Hamburg and Bremen, the mayors could keep their title for live, if they did not resign, or were removed by the city counsel.
But only two of the four would hold office in any given year, and after the year was over they would switch.
Also those polities weren’t exactly politically stable, and political differences were often decided by an mob of citizens casting out one or more of the mayors and the counsel.
“….most communities have sporadic security needs and small communities generally do not even require much of a permanent, standing constabulary.”
Most? Sure. But there are a few reasons why Tamriel may have them.
In Morrowind there are two things going on. First, the locals don’t like the Empire, so it makes sense that the locals would have their own guards (or, in the case of Hlaalu, Imperial guards). It’s a way to show they’re still in control without direct conflict. Plus there are religious reasons to have guards, particularly Ordinators, running around–you have the whole prophesy thing and the Temple occasionally has need to send armed groups to put down false prophets. Both could lead to standing armies. And there’s the Blight Disease, making animals more hostile (cliff racers don’t need help there…).
In Oblivion you have, well, the Oblivion Crisis. After Kvatch (which, remember, happens before the start of the game) the other counts are going to be thinking “How do we prevent ourselves from being taken over?” In the event, such thinking proves necessary, as Oblivion Gates open around each town. Having armed guards helps keep the counts safe and shows the people the counts are doing something. They seem more well-established than I would expect, but there’s a lot of retired Legion troops around so maybe that explains it.
In Skyrim, there’s a war on. EVERYONE is calling on their people to arm themselves. And it’s every jarl for himself, so it’s hardly surprising they have their own livery and their own army. Plus, Skyrim is a society that values violence, so it could be that doing a turn as a guard was a way for a boy to get a few scars anyway. Remember, there’s a lot of dangerous things out in Skyrim. Near Riften (where I like to spend a lot of my time, personally) you have giant spiders almost immediately outside the gates. Giants sometimes attack Whiterun as well. The Reach has the Foresworn. Even without the war, there’s PLENTY of justification for a solid body of armed men in Skyrim. I don’t think we can count vampires here, as they don’t start until well into the game (mostly).
And in every case you have the Daedra and, outside Morrowind, necromancy. Both are illegal, and both are exceptionally dangerous. The latter is typically handled by the Mage’s Guild (nice bit of fragmentation of authority there!), but the former is going to be an all-hands-on-deck sort of situation from time to time. Morrowind is more clear that the Imperial Cult has a body of armed people to, in part, deal with such things (Skyrim has the Legion of Stendar), but in general if you expect periodic attacks by lunatic cultists with demons on their side you’re going to want people trained to deal with them.
So while an Earth-like culture may not need them, Tamriel may well need some standing bodies of armed men to keep towns safe.
It is also definitely the case in Morrowind that maintaining the Legion in Morrowind is expensive and not at all cost-effective, at least according to the in-universe author of “The Eastern Provinces Impartially Considered”.
“Because, of course, societies are never static things and as they change – be that change swift or slow – their military structures will be forced to change with them, or else will be bent and deformed by the attempt not to change. In fiction, civil-military failure can be as interesting as success.”
Does anyone know of examples in history rather than fiction where the civilian structure and military structure didn’t match up for one reason or another and it caused one or the other to be bent/deformed?
The patterns of what happens when that idea is violated seems like an interesting one to try and track.
I’ve read that part of what made 18th century Europe so interesting from a military history perspective is that there was such a disconnect. Specifically, lords and nobility no longer were so vital to society.
There were several results. First, you see a proliferation of manner. In the Middle Ages people of course were concerned about proper behavior, but the 18th century took it to rather absurd extremes. The justification for this is that the nobility no longer had wealth or power to differentiate them from mere merchants, so they developed complex rituals to differentiate themselves. A fantastic example of this is the Irish rules of dueling. Duels have long been a thing, but the scale and formality of the rules–every one of which a gentleman was expected to know well enough to practice in the heat of the moment–was absurd. Those nobles in the military tried to maintain their power by demanding that subordinates pass for gentlemen–that is to say, could prove they were upper-class enough–as well as passing the technical requirements of their services.
The military requirements were a deliberate and conscious attempt to prevent the military from becoming like the society it served (and to prevent the society from changing further). The obscure social protocols may be considered an unconscious attempt at the same thing, depending on how cynical you want to be.
There’s also conquered peoples absorbed as hinterlands into an empire, but since the imperial core’s army does reflect the imperial core’s society, that may not be as applicable.
“Those nobles in the military tried to maintain their power by demanding that subordinates pass for gentlemen–that is to say, could prove they were upper-class enough–as well as passing the technical requirements of their services. ”
But across the Irish Sea, in Britain, didn’t that *kind of work*? The newly rich British upper class crowd ended up obeying many of the manners and customs of the “blueblood” crowd. Orwell claimed that, “[a]fter 1832 the old land-owning aristocracy steadily lost power, but instead of disappearing or becoming a fossil they simply intermarried with the merchants, manufacturers and financiers who had replaced them, and soon turned them into accurate copies of themselves”.
The old elite merging with the new one makes sense to me. Does the statement on point in time still hold?
“Pixel armies for pixel societies” is a title that somehow makes military history sound like a video game patch note. I liked the bigger point behind it, though: armies can’t be designed in isolation from the societies that create and support them. Recruitment, logistics, technology, economics, and social structure all shape what an army can realistically look like. It’s the kind of worldbuilding detail that makes a fictional setting feel lived-in rather than assembled. How much military detail is too much for worldbuilding?
Assuming that books and games are similar, I’d look at it two ways. There is “too much” for the author / designer, and “too much” for the reader / player.
For the author / designer, too much is probably better than too little. JRR Tolkien is the obvious example of an author who knew a lot about the details behind a medieval style military, and this shows through in the books. (And less so in the movies.) On the other hand I’ve heard / read professional writers reminding their audience that at some point you have to stop doing research and actually write the book. And Jane Austen didn’t need too much knowledge of exactly how the British Army fought its battles to include a military character in Pride and Prejudice. (On the other hand, maybe she did? She certainly had a good knowledge of how the rest of British society functioned. Not an Austen expert, happy to be corrected.)
For readers / players, depends very much on the setting and the medium.
For books, it’s easy to put in “too much” for the reader. JRR Tolkien’s knowledge of military operations shows in the Helm’s Deep and Siege of Gondor chapters, giving Prof Devereaux topics to write about at length. But because Tolkien is a good writer there are no infodumps, and if you the reader don’t care about military history, you can still enjoy the books. A book with an explicitly military character and setting (Sharpe?) presumably appeals mostly to people who are already interested in such, so the details better be right. But Pride and Prejudice wouldn’t have been improved by the inclusion of a musket drill scene. (IMHO.)
I was going to write that video games are the same as books: “War Thunder” needs to have lots of accurate military detail, while a Regency dating sim would not. But in thinking about the question, video games can do better, especially multiplayer games.
Video games have the tremendous advantage over books in being a dynamic medium, and can adjust the information being presented to the player on the fly. So if a player seems to be spending a lot of time and clicks/keystrokes on the military aspects of a game, throw more detail at them, more options. But if they seem bored with the nitty-gritty of low level micromanagement, give them more or less autonomous subordinates / NPCs and let them spend their time at high level, big picture stuff.
In multiplayer games this can fall out naturally, if the game is complex enough. Something like EVE Online has players who like zipping about in their own ship and players who like managing a megacorp. Some want to fight battles, some prefer the rule of law. So for the massive multiplayer online games (or online games with the goal of becoming massive) I say there is never too much detail, provided players can skip the bits they don’t care about.
Thanks for the question, made me think and the answer became much longer than I’d expected.
Video games compared to books as a worldbuilding medium are an interesting example. They’re simultaneously much less and much more compressed. Less compressed in that there are multiple different methods available to expose worldbuilding ‘ambiently’ through things like art style, object placement, environment design and even rules. However, they’re super compressed in terms of actual text. If you look up the actual scripts even for fairly sizeable games they’re usually only a couple of pages long. Maybe 30 max. If something actually needs to be said, you’ve got a tiny envelope to say it in.
Unless you do what Morrowind did and write a hundred or so in-game books that you can go and read. Another reason why Morrowind is the greatest RPG of all time IMHO.
Out of curiosity, is there any particular logic behind when the “Older Comments” cut appears? Seems unpredictable to me. Some very long threads where it apparently never appeared.
I think it’s based on the number of top-level comments and can have any number of replies on a page
Ah, thank you, that might explain it!
One thing which I tried to do a bit in my latest TTRPG setting, and which I’m curious about other attempts to explore, is the impact of high-level characters (who tend to have more pronounced power gaps than real life, even considering how important equipment and training are). One thing I’ve noted in my lore is that every society has high-level combatants that make up a lot of their military power, with two of the most defining features of any society being how those people relate to their civic structure and how they are deployed in war.
For example, the PCs’ home polity of Barnesend has a force of royal knights, which are a mix of young nobles awarded their positions as a political favor (though by dint of resources for training and equipment, they are often quite fearsome) and anyone whose feats are impressive enough for the king to want them. Most of the numbers of the kingdom’s full war muster are peasant levies reinforced by the nobility’s household troops, but the royal knights make up a majority of its real power, and they are organized into a force of charge-and-dismount cavalry (horses being too fragile to take into high-level fights) who are expected to decide engagements with a devastating impact.
The Tippyverse is a now somewhat venerable setting, presenting one imagining of the D&D 3.5 rules taken to a logical extreme. Briefly, high-level magic, especially teleportation magic, define civilization. In terms of economics, teleportation circles replace all traditional modes of transportation, and magical food/water “traps” replace all traditional modes of subsistence. In terms of military strategy, you just teleport your army into their city; the only defense is for the defenders to have their military forces already on-site, prepared to defend.
The presented conclusion is dense megacities, connected by teleportation circles, separated by vast swathes of wilderness, garrisoned by legions of flying golem supersoldiers.
High level character impact depends on what those characters can do.
You can have a Conan type. This guy will win when facing any other fighter type, and him against an army is mostly a contest of when his sword arm gets tired or when they run away.
But he’s still one man, and he can only be in one place at a time.
It’s also an open question as to whether he wins facing a spellcaster. In the stories he always did, but that’s a story.
Spellcasters have the possibility, depending on what spells they can do, of being in more than one place at a time. Or wishing that a loss didn’t happen. Or…whatever.
Yeah, I’m not sure that mounted high level types are viable. It’s a bit like putting a knight on a racing bicycle, there’s too many ways the knight gets dismounted.
I think they’d get mounts that are a lot more durable. Even an elephant only has 8 hit dice though. Maybe feats to increase the mount HP (a lot) or something?
Or switch to heavy infantry. Which almost all martial class player characters end up being.
Conan is certainly susceptible to spellcasting, and in Hour of the Dragon a big-deal ancient sorcerer was resurrected, remotely incapacitated him by sending some sort of spirit, killed his stand-in and a lot of his heavy cavalry by dropping cliffs on them, and took Conan prisoner. Conan did his usual thing and got out, but needed to retrieve a powerful magical artifact to counter the sorcerer’s magic before he regrouped his surviving army for round 2.
In general I think a lot of high level characters wind up in the same situation as Shardbearers and to a lesser extent Radiants in The Stormlight Archive; “Shardbearers can’t hold ground” and they need a regular army as support. And there’s a lot of tactics used to counter them without having your own Shardbearers, and these tend to take a lot of regular guys with special equipment and Shardbearers train on dealing with them, but ultimately they usually have a bodyguard of regular troops to keep them from getting surrounded and eventually dragged down.
Mages are a bit of a different animal in that they don’t have to get stuck in to do their damage, but in most settings they are extremely squishy and will need reasonably large escorts.
So in that sense sort of like tanks and artillery. They can do a lot of damage, but still need infantry to keep them from being killed. And the infantry hold ground, nothing else can.
The Tippyverse is a now-somewhat-venerable D&D worldbuilding concept. It takes the D&D 3.5 rules, and presents one interpretation of civilization, when high-level magic is taken to a logical extreme.
Briefly, permanent teleportation circles between major cities obviate traditional forms of transport, and magical food/water-generating “traps” obviate agriculture. The option of teleporting an army of flying golem supersoldiers into a target city obviates any credible form of defense besides having your own army, already on-site, ready to respond immediately.
The presented result is ultra-dense megacities, connected by instant teleportation for trade, separated by arbitrarily-large swathes of wilderness, entirely independent of any agricultural hinterland. Any peoples who don’t have access to megacity-enabling magic eke out a rough subsistence in monster-filled wilds; any who do form megacities by virtue of the incentives.
Extremely interesting. A minor point, but the Stormcloaks do sort of mention taxation as a motive for the rebellion, although as with much of the Civil War it has very interesting set up but is massively underdeveloped beyond that. During Ulfric and Galmar’s dialogue when you enter the Palace of Kings, Ulfric says ‘I fight for my people impoverished to pay the debts of an Empire too weak to rule them, yet brands them criminals for wanting to rule themselves!’
After digesting all the comments here regarding the issues with DnD and Elder Scrolls, I think I’ve come to a conclusion regarding their worldbuilding fault, which is actually sort of the same in both:
For gameplay purposes, both settings need to have a constant frontier environment. “Frontier” as in, there’s these dangerous, “unclaimed” lands into which civilization is just barely extending its influence, where there is only small, semi-safe outposts from which daring individuals sally forth on expeditions into the dangerous world beyond to bring back treasure and destroy threats to that precious civilization (Please read this entire sentence in a sneering voice due to the historical whitewashing behind this concept).
Which, whitewashing aside, is more or less fine as environment if you want to have mostly independent adventurers doing jobs for locals as the default game state.
The problem is that a frontier is not scaleable in either space or time. As in, you can’t have an entire continent that is entirely frontier, there needs to be a civilized hinterland which isn’t adventuring country – otherwise, the frontier outposts couldn’t be sustained with their supplies of craft goods giving them an edge over the locals. But that’s basically how Tamriel and the Forgotten Realms are structured, where even major cities (like Baldur’s Gate) are somehow just points of light in an endless wilderness with no permanently tamed lands around them.
And also, frontiers are moving. At some point, the land is tamed and the indigenous population driven off. That wasn’t just true of the American frontier which famously moved westward at a rapid pace, but is always true. At some point the Teutonic Order had to accept it wasn’t doing a crusade any more, it was now just another normal polity controlling territory. After a few centuries, the European border territories of the Roman Empire became civilized enough that one of the Emperors ruled in full imperial splendor only 100 km away from the border (Augusta Treverorum, now Trier).
I always thought a city without an agricultural area around it was unrealistic. Now I am trying to make my post-apocalyptic world pretty realistic regarding demographics, economy and transportation. Physical geography is the same as in reality except for some smaller changes caused by global warming. Due to the damage humanity has accidentially done to ecosystems there are no hunter-gatherers. The closest thing would be some herding peoples having smaller game as a secondary food source. Limited fishing is still possible in the colder seas. The great majority of humanity is dependant on intense agriculture to survive.
Cities and towns can be presupposed to have considerable agricultural hinterlands. The only exceptions are some oases and small mining towns. These have their population size limited by how much grain can be transported there on camelback or by boat. Anyway, the large roles are not played by cities but by countries. In the backstory it was not San Francisco re-establishing trade along the west coast of the Americas. This was done by the California Republic.
Less than 200 million people survived the apocalypse. However, they were very unevenly spread across the world’s land surface. Some parts of the world had areas the size large countries being entirely depopulated. Other had multiple polities with surviving populations exceeding one million. Still, only the largest successor state of China had a surviving population of more than 10 million. Population growth from there is relatively slow compared to what people tend to imagine. Not only is it impossible to entirely reverse social progress. But the nearly universal availability of efficient contraception means that pregnancies can be planed. Consequentially, most cultures have yearly population growth rates of less than 1% most of the time.
In the more densely populated parts of the world there is no frontier easily drawn on the map. Rather there is gradual population spread from numerous pre-existing agricultural areas. There is also a tendency for population growth to slow down sooner or later. Particularly in the more or less temperate areas where childhood mortality is proportionally lower. In the more sparely populated parts of the world there is a more easily drawn frontier moving noticeably over the generations. Various cultures spread into the previously depopulated areas. Usually the state where each culture dominates follows them. Sooner or later these cultures will encounter each other resulting in conflicts over land. This may lead to war but never all-out exterminations.
Regarding Baldurs Gate two things stand out.
First, the society is extremely unstable, the institution of the flaming fist is less than a hundred years old and has been co opted to try to establish a monarchy multiple times.
Second, when someone does try they tend to get smote by various divine pseudo authorities. The forgotten realms is a setting where the God of Justice might drop by for an evening chat about the ethics of your “reforms”; while he likely won’t personally crush you for violating your countries laws, he has several thousand tireless magically empowered servants who might. The gods are almost unquestionably the biggest stick in any fight, and only large mortal organizations compete politically, often in a gray area at the edges of a gods dominance and exploiting divine rivalries and limitations therin. There are also a bunch of large ngo armies, order of the gauntlet, Harpers, etc., which maintain their own political and idealogical backing.
Hence the realms has a weird political structure where a bunch of extra territorial pseudo states threaten any conventional power structure. Because of this an autocrat can never secure the “borders” of their domain, or at least not simply by taking over their local armies and political structures. Most attempts to truly spend the political structure thus involve a seemingly massive over commitment of force; Gortash has control of the traditional army, a bunch of constructs, an undead horde, a psychic overmind, and the backing of one to three gods in his bid to establish total control over Baldurs Gate and carve out an empire, and he ends up having *too few forces*. Although in truth he failed in part because his armies weren’t cohesive with each other, but in order to meaningfully dominate the local forces opposing him he needed that level of force.
The point is that to establish the kind of regional political dominance autocrats rely on to secure their position. There are simply too many institutions with armies, and opposing any one of them brings in a dozen others, rapidly cascading escalation; and as stated before, the gods sit on top of that ladder, in the end. It’s easier and safer to politically isolate an institution then take it down carefully, by removing it’s alliances, but that takes time and leaves other institutions which can reestablish whatever power you overthrew; the entire situation is simply too chaotic.
Yes, ‘Baldur’s Gate has an unstable system’ shouldn’t be a criticism, just an observation. I don’t believe there are *any* stories featuring the city that don’t involve a small group of talented people lucking into awareness of a conspiracy to subvert the city government.
Actually yeah, you’re right. I went through the more popular adventures briefly, and every single one involves a cult, either devils or the dead three, trying to subvert the city. Excepting minor mentions.
In contrast Neverwinter and Waterdeep occasionally act as the setting for war stories, heists, or dungeon crawls. But Baldurs Gate has been typecast such that its leadership is an unstable mess every single time we see the city; I don’t actually know of a story where that isn’t true. This may be intentional; Waterdeep has an effectively elected king backed by a nebulous council of lords and wizards who personally controls the military and Neverwinter was most recently an autocracy whose leader became leader by waltzing in after a disaster with a loyal mercenary troop, establishing order, and declaring himself duke and his troops the city watch.
In other words we see in water deep something like an early Athenian style oligarchy of the Eupatridae, or like Renaissance Venice under the Council of Ten, while in Neverwinter we see something closer to the Syracuse despotism under Dionysius I (albeit more popular; if I had a better reference pool I’d be able to find a better example of a mercenary-backed despot). And both Neverwinter and Waterdeep maintain larger, volunteer based forces and militas which supplement their guards, while explicitly maintaining at least some territorial control over their surroundings and neighboring towns.
Baldurs gate, in contrast, resembles some of the more unstable periods of Greek polis where an oligarchy existed but was clearly Not-Doing-Well©, usually ending in a transition to a different system. Baldurs gate is just hanging on in that place due to outside forces. This is probably at least partially intended to *weaken the city*. Baldurs gate is often depicted as the messy sister to the other two more respectable maritime cities, and there’s open meddling to keep it that way hy various interests (Amn is known to do this to the point where framing them is step one to several plots, but also NGOs like Bhaal).
The Morrowind-and-earlier lore implies that Cyrodil is quite a bit different than it was in Obliviion-and-later, a vaguely chinese/mesoamerican coded jungle society with a huge central city surrounded by massive complexes of rice-padies. A highly urbanized yet agriculturally self-sufficient heartland subjugating it’s neighbors through sheer numbers kind of scans with what we see, though the retcons made it far less interesting.
Mesoamerican agriculture was nowhere near as productive as the Medieval Southeast Asian one. It was so inefficient that people living in cities had to grow a considerable part of what they ate themselves. Consequentially their cities only had a few blocks of dense city in the middle. The rest was garden city with embedded parks.
The idea of Central America and Southeast Asia being comparable may have been influenced by the popular image of Tenochtitlán:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portrait_of_Tenochtitlan
The artificial islands most of the city was built on may superficially resemble rice paddies. But they were the large gardens of the city dwellers. Moreover we are talking about a specific place which is a city of canals built in Lake Texcoco. Most of this lake’s water is nowadays lead away with Mexico City situated on the former lake bottom.
I’ve heard estimates Tenochitlan had a population in the millions, comparable to paris of the same era.
Also, just because it wasn’t 100% accurate doesn’t mean it isn’t what Kirkbride had in mind when he was writing it.
Sorry, but there were likely no cities exceeding one million in the early 16th century. (Paris did not have either at the time.) When I see the linked reconstructions there is no way they could have cramped millions of people into an almost entirely garden city of virtually only one-story buildings. A few hundred thousand maybe if they could transport enough food, water and fuel for them. But definitely not over one million, much less several. You may have mixed up with the entire Aztec Triple Alliance which could well have a population exceeding 20 million.
Moreover, older reconstructions of Tenochtitlán I have seen show it even more sparsely populated with buildings covering a significantly smaller part of the artificial islands. If the core of the Cyrondiilic Empire was inspired by this historical city the inspiration would have been from those.
If you compare with China I don’t think Mesoamerica was anywhere near its population density. There are different estimate of how many people there were in the various parts of the Americas in 1492. But to me it seems plausible there were more people in China alone than in all of the Americas combined.