Thread: Questioning chirine ba kal

Originally Posted by Hrugga

Uncle,

Could you briefly go through the different parts of a Legion? Such as your All-Consuming Flame...What and who went along for the march on the sakbe roads with you as you served The Petal Throne? Thanks again.

H:0)

Oh, sure. (This is Tsolyani practice, by the way.) First, you have your line cohorts; 400 men, in 20 man sections, each led by a Hereksa, for a total of 20 of these officers; each cohort has a Kasi, so you have however many of these as you have cohorts. All-Consuming Flame is not an Imperial legion; we're Engsvanyali, with a possible connection to Bednjallan times; we're still organized like a Tsolyani legion, though. Unlike a Tsolyani legion - with the exception of Storm of Fire, a mixed legion - we have the following cohorts: I and II, heavy infantry pikemen; III and IV, medium infantry (Vriddi); V, 'guards' troops of various types; VI, archers; VII, crossbowmen. We're a mercenary legion, and I got them as personal troops from Phil when I was in Hekellu. I can give you the miniatures information, if you like; I have the legion built out to full strength.

Now, all the extras. Every legion has a headquarters, and how much money the legion has will determine what the General will have as support people; these are normally not soldiers. He does have two each of junior 'field' officers, and one to five 'staff officers' who are usually clan-cousins or friends; a very big problem with the legions is that there is no real organized staff to handle medical, logistics, and commissary needs. For my general, I hired these people for his personal staff / rtainers, and they dealt with the legion as his employees. In my legion, they are on the establishment - I used Sir John Hawkwood's 'White Company' as a model for this (Thank you, Gordy!) - and either 'enlisted' or 'officers'; the Tsolyani don't make much of a distinction between the two, as we do. So, I have on the 'establishment':

Household staff:
Lord Chamberlain and his officers (herald, accountant, master of the revels, etc.)
Bearers - move all the baggage, includes chlen carts and fodder; I have my own herd and drivers
Porters- handle internal security in the HQ
Court Ladies / Ladies-in-waiting - serve Their Ladyships, who have a habit of coming on campaign with me
Personal bodyguards
Court Pages - never play games of skill and chance with them; just sayin'...

Adjutant's staff
Adjutant and his officers (quartermaster, commissary, scribes)
Provost and section of troops
'Openers of the Way' - investigators of mysterious things
Chamber of Torments (we have ways of making you talk)
Duty sections (2) of HQ guards troops
Supply section
Sapper section

Medical staff
Physicians, apothecaries, 'nurses', 'orderlies'

Sorcery staff
Assorted priests, priestesses, and magic users

Secret staff
None of your business, thank you

Naval staff
we have a couple of small galleys for local patrol work; several officers, about 75 sailors

I think there's something like 250 people on the staff list. So there's quite a lot of baggage involved with a legion. An ordinary traveller, like I've been, would probably have something like 20 to 40 bearers and drivers when going between cities.

Does this help, at all? You can see the possiblities for adventures, too!

Originally Posted by chirine ba kal

Oh, sure. (This is Tsolyani practice, by the way.) First, you have your line cohorts; 400 men, in 20 man sections, each led by a Hereksa, for a total of 20 of these officers; each cohort has a Kasi, so you have however many of these as you have cohorts. All-Consuming Flame is not an Imperial legion; we're Engsvanyali, with a possible connection to Bednjallan times; we're still organized like a Tsolyani legion, though. Unlike a Tsolyani legion - with the exception of Storm of Fire, a mixed legion - we have the following cohorts: I and II, heavy infantry pikemen; III and IV, medium infantry (Vriddi); V, 'guards' troops of various types; VI, archers; VII, crossbowmen. We're a mercenary legion, and I got them as personal troops from Phil when I was in Hekellu. I can give you the miniatures information, if you like; I have the legion built out to full strength.

Now, all the extras. Every legion has a headquarters, and how much money the legion has will determine what the General will have as support people; these are normally not soldiers. He does have two each of junior 'field' officers, and one to five 'staff officers' who are usually clan-cousins or friends; a very big problem with the legions is that there is no real organized staff to handle medical, logistics, and commissary needs. For my general, I hired these people for his personal staff / rtainers, and they dealt with the legion as his employees. In my legion, they are on the establishment - I used Sir John Hawkwood's 'White Company' as a model for this (Thank you, Gordy!) - and either 'enlisted' or 'officers'; the Tsolyani don't make much of a distinction between the two, as we do. So, I have on the 'establishment':

Household staff:
Lord Chamberlain and his officers (herald, accountant, master of the revels, etc.)
Bearers - move all the baggage, includes chlen carts and fodder; I have my own herd and drivers
Porters- handle internal security in the HQ
Court Ladies / Ladies-in-waiting - serve Their Ladyships, who have a habit of coming on campaign with me
Personal bodyguards
Court Pages - never play games of skill and chance with them; just sayin'...

Adjutant's staff
Adjutant and his officers (quartermaster, commissary, scribes)
Provost and section of troops
'Openers of the Way' - investigators of mysterious things
Chamber of Torments (we have ways of making you talk)
Duty sections (2) of HQ guards troops
Supply section
Sapper section

Medical staff
Physicians, apothecaries, 'nurses', 'orderlies'

Sorcery staff
Assorted priests, priestesses, and magic users

Secret staff
None of your business, thank you

Naval staff
we have a couple of small galleys for local patrol work; several officers, about 75 sailors

I think there's something like 250 people on the staff list. So there's quite a lot of baggage involved with a legion. An ordinary traveller, like I've been, would probably have something like 20 to 40 bearers and drivers when going between cities.

Does this help, at all? You can see the possiblities for adventures, too!

Fantastic!!! One more follow-up question. How long would a march take for the whole legion from lets say Jakalla to Bey Su(normal march and emergency)? Thank you much.

H:0)

Originally Posted by Hrugga

Fantastic!!! One more follow-up question. How long would a march take for the whole legion from lets say Jakalla to Bey Su(normal march and emergency)? Thank you much.

H:0)

From Jakalla to Bey Sy, not much. Bey Sy to Sunraya, forever and a day. At least it seemed that way.

Originally Posted by Greentongue

I assume there are variations on how "Secret" societies / staff identify each other?
Can you give some examples?
=

I'd bet at least one of the examples involves "who has the most elaborate dress with the Top Secret Sign (TM) of the Society Of Secretness (TM)". It wouldn't be Tsolyanu otherwise!

Also see: secret police in Tsolyanu and Secret Language of priests of Ksarul, earlier in this thread.

Originally Posted by Hrugga

Fantastic!!! One more follow-up question. How long would a march take for the whole legion from lets say Jakalla to Bey Su(normal march and emergency)? Thank you much.

H:0)

Each hex on the big maps is 100 Tsan / 133.333 across, to it takes a while. We used to figure a week to march across a hex, so Jakalla to Bey Su would take maybe three months of marching. (See also the Sourcebook, on this.) In a crisis, we'd have shipped the troops by river, and gotten there in maybe a month, all told. This is why there are the great regional military centers, and it's rare to move troops from front to front - the logistics are just too difficult to make it worthwhile. See also Edwin Luttwak's book on the grand strategy of the Roman Empire - a book that Phil introduced me to.

Originally Posted by Erotectic

Hi chirine!

Can you tell us more about the writing process behind the rules in *Swords & Glory*, Vol. 2. You have told us a great deal about how professor ran his games, but did he actually design the S&G rules? Did he write the text explaining the rules? To what degree was that set of rules a collective creation on the part of people who weren't the professor?

Thanks!

Oh, gods. We really liked EPT, but Phil got it into his head that he really needed to have a 'more realistic' and 'more detailed' set of RPG rules. he started an RPG called "Skein of Destiny", which had all of the information and game mechanics that later became the three volumes of S&G all in one book; he'd tell you all about chlen beasts, for example, then he'd give all the rules needed by players to deal with them, and then he'd give all the rules that the GM needed to run them in an adventure. He got up to 450+ pages of manuscript, and then realized that the thing was, for all intents and purposes, unplayable by anyone - back then, all he had was a typewriter, and so doing an index was going to be just as big a task as doing the game. So, he abandoned it (I got the manuscript out of the trash) and he redid the information and game rules as the three volumes of S&G. It comes to over 950+ pages of material; the combat and sorcery summaries, which are very playable games in and of themselves, are something like twenty and thirty pages long respectively.

Yes, he designed the whole thing by himself, which led to Dave Arneson telling him, quote, "Phil, you can't design rules in a vacuum." Phil simply dropped the manuscript on the table one night, as was his usual habit, and we used it to roll up PCs - and then never really used it again, as the number-crunching was simply too much, even for Phil. The Sourcebook is wonderful, but the RPG is a pain to use - even for me, and even after all these years.

I don't know why he did the thing. I suspect it was in reaction to Gary's various writingd in various places, and Dave's "Adventures in Fantasy"; and it may have had something to do with AD&D. Phil was always a very solitary writer, and we'd first see a book when he'd wave the manuscript around and he'd sent a copy off to a publisher. S&G was, to the best of my knowledge, never really play-tested, and not really used by Phil in his own campaign. However, the game is a monument to Phil's view of how he thought his world worked, and how it could work in the context of an RPG. There was a lot of our input into the world itself, but very rarely into any rules that he wrote.

He played a very simple game - 'you roll, I roll' - and then he'd just get on with the adventure. He would tell the tale, and run the adventure, and not look at the tables and such; he'd just do it.

Does this help, at all?

chirine,

That was precisely what I wanted to know. Thanks!