ACKS and the Art of Not Being Governed

I have been reading The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia recently.  I'm pretty sure Noisms mentioned it at one point, but I can't find it if he did.  In any case, it's a bit rambling, but there are some excellent quotes which suggest new, exciting(?), and adequately-cynical ways to run the ACKS domain game.

Unfortunately I've done a poor job of logging interesting quotes as I read, so I'm going to go with bullet-point paraphrases and subsummaries.

• Intensive wet-rice agriculture, dense populations, and population centers pre-date monarchial states, which were introduced by "political entrepreneurs" who captured rice production areas. 
• Intensive agriculture is important to the formation of powerful states, both because it can support very high population densities (important for warfare, large-scale irrigation projects, and monument construction) and because it is relatively easy to tax (record, track, and steal) synchronized monocrop grain harvests.
• Southeast Asia is (historically) not very densely populated, with lots of empty land to which peasants can escape from tyrannical kings.  While policies were often enacted to lure population to the early states, net migration was often negative, with peasants escaping out in to the wilderness.
• The administrative reach of the court center was bounded logistically, by the ability to supply the army.  As an ox eats its own load in a matter of days, campaigns could be conducted only near navigable waterways, or in areas where provisions were readily appropriable (which is to say, where intensive grain agriculture was already under way).  Kingdoms often nominally extended about a hundred and fifty mile radius from the population-dense capital region, but in practice exerted direct rule over closer to a seventy-five mile radius.  Forests, hills, and swamps all imposed logistical barriers to military campaigns, and as a result became de facto state-free areas.  Their inhabitants might pay tribute to the state, but were rarely directly under its thumb politically. 
• Early states also suffered from untrustworthy administrators and inaccurate population counts; one example is given of district administrators understating the population of their district by 40%, in order to keep the difference in taxes for themselves.
• The monsoon season effectively limited the reach of the state to zero while it lasted, and often entailed expeditions to "show the flag" when the dry season began.
• Because kings needed peasants and peasants did not much like being ruled and taxed, there was an ongoing war of sedentarization and slave-raiding against the hill populations, when possible.  Some Thai and Burman kings went so far as to forcibly relocate and tattoo their subjects.  States competed to amass subjects, both by force and by diplomacy (with eg hill tribes, offering special dispensations and status if they settled within the kingdom).
• The primary focus of warfare between agricultural states was not taking and holding land, but capturing prisoners.  An example is given of a state taking 6000 prisoners and resettling them in the fields around the capital.  Prisoner-taking was not restricted to peasants, but also included military specialists and court poets.  A case is mentioned where a Burmese kingdom captured the entire court of a Thai kingdom (or the other way around, I forget) and brought them back to its own court, ushering in a temporary renaissance of Thai-Burmese fusion culture.
• Meanwhile, in the hills, tribal / kinship organizations prevailed.  Agriculture was practiced, but it was nomadic slash-and-burn agriculture, supporting a maximum population density of 20-30 per square kilometer.  Hill tribes self-divided into predators and prey as far as the slave trade was concerned.  They also raided grain states when the situation permitted, occasionally knocking over a failing dynasty and setting up their own.
• Hill tribes and grain-states traded extensively.  In addition to slaves, hill tribes sold a wide variety of raw materials to the agricultural states, including elephants, ivory, precious metals, medicinal plants, honey, opium, lumber, feathers, gems, fruit, livestock, and spices.  From the states they bought sea-products (salt, dried fish) and manufactured goods, including metal tools and weapons, pottery, cloth, and ritual/status items, like bronze gongs, crowns, and capes, which provide legitimacy to a chieftain.
• Hill tribes often had their pick of trade partners, because it was relatively easy to relocate to a different watershed, which drained into the territory of a different grain-state (compared to moving a state and its attendant population and fortifications overland to a different river system).
• In addition to hill tribes and grain-states, a few other types of states appeared.
• Maritime states were confederations of port-cities, and gathered wealth by taxing or monopolizing trade between the up-river and the down-river / ocean.  Maritime states tended to lose wars against grain states, because they lacked manpower.
• A similar sort of "trade state" was occasionally found in the hills, sitting at a major crossroads or mountain pass and gathering wealth by taxing trade.  These tended to be unstable, as trade shifts.
• In the hills, there were often small pockets of land which were irrigable and hence usable for intensive rice production.  Small towns grew in these pockets, and sometimes formed defensive alliances with nearby hill tribes and other hill-towns against the slave-raiding predations of lowcountry grain states.  Terrain and logistics typically prevented unification of these hill confederacies into centralized states.
• Religion is tightly-tied to mode of production / agriculture.  Highland tribes tended to be animist, while lowland states in the region were typically Buddhist or Hindu (and the maritime states were mostly Islamic).  There was an interesting note that when a particular group of highlanders tried to start growing lowland rice, they found that its successful cultivation required the execution of lowlander religious rituals, and the adoption of the lowlanders' calendar (hence cosmology).

This leads to a number of thoughts for ACKS.

• The mentioned population support limits of slash-and-burn agriculture (20-30 people per sq km) translate to 310-466 families per six-mile hex, well within the "civilized" band for population density, despite the nomadic hill-people very much operating as borderlanders politically.
• Might a tropical thing, though
• Decreased focus on territory suggests an alterate approach to Simple Domains - only track population, not territory.
• Clear an initial area for a settlement, then replace further hex-clearing operations with "domain random encounters" that occur over time rather than over space.
• Assume sufficient irrigable land that the limits of supportable population density will never be reached in PCs' lifetime.
• Also make population change somewhat interesting / actionable
• Rebellion and exodus
• Famine
• Plague
• Wars of capture
• Hired slaving expeditions (insert cash, roll on "slave raiding outcomes" table...)
• Diplomacy to get hill tribes to settle on your land
• This approach might be viable in other low-population-density areas, like the Baltic
• Frankly I could see doing away with Civilized / Borderland / Wilderness classification by population density, and replacing it with a domain type mechanism.
• Nomadic / Tribal - Can't really be taxed / yields low profit to its nominal ruler outside of warfare, experiences natural population growth, provides troops, can relocate domain.
• Settled Agricultural - Most like a standard ACKS domain.  Taxable (oh so taxable), requires a stronghold, experiences natural population decline.
• Settled Maritime - Not very taxable agriculture, increased trade range?  Really needs some domain-level trade mechanics to work.
• Provide some domain income based on number, types, and sizes of trade partners?
• States of trade between domains connected by water:
• No trade - sanctions or at war
• Natural trade - some trade, but no particular protection under the law for traders from the other domain
• Favored trade - traders from other domain are protected under the law, may be granted monopolies, possibly in exchange for exclusive trade (ie, a grain state offers a hill tribe favored trade status in exchange for that hill tribe cutting off trade with another nearby grain state).
• This is probably too complicated already
• Converting between domain types is roughly as bad for morale as New Religion Introduced, since that's basically what happens.

Whether any of this will ever see play is another question, of course.

D&D, Vietnam, and the Dungeon

Seeing Like a State's mention of compulsory village formation / sedentarization in precolonial Thailand reminded me of a similar phenomenon during the Vietnam War: the relocation of peasants into "Strategic Hamlets", where they could be monitored, in order to keep them from providing assistance to Viet Cong guerillas, which I had read about in War of the Flea I think.  This, combined with the savage beating my players took last session, brought to mind a blog post I once read by an old D&D player who played with his father, who was a Vietnam veteran and relentlessly paranoid in the dungeon.  Despite my best efforts at googling, I have failed to find that post (edit: thanks DHBoggs for finding the post I was talking about!).  Instead, I found this, which was pretty interesting, but left me with some unvoiced questions.

Whither dungeons?  Moria's all well and good, but as movie adaptations have shown, it's easily distilled down to a Five Room Dungeon.  I suppose there was some dungeoneering in the old Conan stories, though I've not read them.  But the campaign-tentpole megadungeon full of traps, and the style of exploration and dirty fighting that surrounded it, is not a thing I recall seeing much in fantasy (even post-D&D fantasy).

And then today, I stumbled on this excellent thread on that finest of subreddits, /r/AskHistorians, and via it the Cu Chi Tunnel Complex.  It's 75 miles long - the original megadungeon, the real deal.  Way too big to clear, and full of traps.

My contention, in extension of MacDougall's idea that D&D came out of the culture war in the Vietnam era, is that old-school megadungeoncrawling came specifically out of the American experience in tunnel-fighting in Vietnam.  Why else the great concern with light and darkness and air currents?  Why else the absurdly slow exploration movement speed, the concern with getting lost, the trap paranoia?  Somebody had been there, or read the reports.

It nicely explains the division between henchmen and mercenaries - henchmen and PCs are tunnel rats, crazy enough to go into an infinite hole full of traps.

Tucker's Kobolds are a profoundly guerilla war experience, a gamerculture memory of the Viet Cong.  The article is also interesting historically.  We observe that by 1987 (when Dragon #127 was published), 16 years after the withdrawal of American troops from Vietnam, this style of playing the opposition was atypical (the publication of OD&D in 1974 was just after the withdrawal of troops).  We also observe that the author was at the time in the Army.  Makes you wonder if the emergence of the New School was correlated with the dilution of the 'Nam vets in the gamer community.

The ecology of the Cu Chi Original Megadungeon, meanwhile, was supported by a combination of imports from the Ho Chi Minh Trail and rice grown on the surface by cooperative peasants.  This works somewhat less well in a fantasy setting where you can ethically exterminate the beastman villages responsible for growing food on the surface (although at low levels when dungeoneering is usually happening, PCs may not be powerful enough to attack surface villages).  But putting some fraction of beastman wilderness lairs underground (instead of aboveground villages) does solve some of my wilderness-level problems (including "let's throw mercenaries at this problem" and "let's just light it on fire from the air", which are perfectly valid strategies but sort of repetitive after a while).  It all goes very nicely with the notion of nonstate spaces, too.  The domain game is fundamentally about creating bubbles of order and safety, "pacified regions", and maps nicely to the poor counter-insurgency war conducted in Vietnam.

I wonder to what degree the "PCs are always foreigners" trope (as in Tekumel, among other places) was a product of necessity (in terms of DM bandwidth and player attention limits) and laziness, and how much it was a product of, again, the American military experience in Vietnam...  We also see Occupied Territory scenarios not that infrequently, including in Morrowind and Skyrim on the videogame side, and inverted in Midnight (with the PCs as rebels rather than occupiers).  Come to think of it, I don't recall the last time I saw a scenario that cast the PCs in with the occupiers; culture shift I guess (not that it stopped us from doing it again 30 years later...).

Of Classic Traveller

First - the Classic Traveller Bundle of Holding is back, this time with supplements instead of adventures.  CT had some pretty interesting features; if you already have Mongoose, it might be worth checking out for historical perspective and potential houserules.  I may have to dig through the supplements on the upgraded tier.

Second, I stumbled across this very, very interesting article from an old scifi webzine discussing the inspiring works for Traveller.  The author concludes that Traveller has always been hard science fiction noir, with a focus on the criminal and the political dissident, and that its two primary literary inspirations were the Dumarest Saga (which I'd never heard of before, but is evidently the source of low berth and the whole non-ship part of the game) and H. Beam Piper's Space Viking, which I've heard of but not read.  I think the article makes a pretty convincing case, and also explains where a lot of the odd Travellerisms like mesh, blade, and feudal technocracy come from.  Definitely worth a read, and not just because it supports my conclusions that Traveller is intended to be about cash-strapped antiheroes doing jobs of dubious morality to make the next payment.  I suspect a clear understanding of where it comes from and why it made the design decisions that it did might be important for successfully upgrading Traveller.

Viking Nonsense

Have had those crazy Scandinavians on the brain again.  Currently about halfway through Burnt Njal's Saga; most of my observations from Egil's Saga apply, though this is more similar to the very late parts of Egil's Saga; much trouble between households and politics at the althing and such.  Sort of interesting as a study in the functioning of an effectively-anarchist society with prechristian morality, but not super-gameable.

I also picked up and skimmed Mythic Iceland recently.  There were a lot of things I probably won't use (because I'm not running BFRP and doubt I could get buy-in for Runequest), but they had one rule that was pretty interesting.  Characters have Luck points, which basically work like action points and aren't recharged.  When your PC runs out of luck points, he starts to take additional penalties (beyond just being out of luck points); his neighbors say that he is "luckless", that his time is almost up, and that he has fulfilled his fate, and start avoiding him, because associating with a luckless man can bring no good.  So that's a big of an interesting variation on the standard action point system; I guess Dungeon Crawl Classics is sort of similar in that luck is a stat and if you run out you get no bonuses to luck rolls, but I'm not sure it goes quite as far with the penalties.

Also Mythic Iceland's Big Table of Icelandic Names and section on various places in Iceland are pretty good.  Oh, and the King of the Polar Bears.

Finally, there was an interesting post on /r/askhistorians about berserkers, and an historian specialising in Norse history made some remarks on how it's likely that berserkers were probably religious warriors associated with animal cults.  Thus, if I were to run a norse game, some manner of divinely-powered berserker class might make a good replacement for paladins...

Destiny Disrupted

As usual when reading historical works, I find my thoughts turning to gaming.  The current source of inspiration of Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes by Tamim Ansari.  Some notes so far:

• Ansari argues that "the Western World" is civilization as arose around Mediterranean trade, while "the Middle World" (Arabia to India, Persia, and the 'stans) grew up primarily around land trade routes, with the intersection on the eastern edge of the Mediterranean being a perennial area of cultural exchange and conflict.  This is interesting from the ACKS perspective, where the prototypical Auran campaign world (and a number of other campaign worlds, like my own Shieldlands and Omer's Barbarian Conqueror King) are built around the Mediterranean model.  It might be worthwhile to roll an ACKS setting along more Middle-World land-trade lines.
• Lots of good place-names to steal that my players have probably never heard of.
• It's sort of sad how quickly Islam went downhill (in terms of charitable / egalitarian social virtue and unity of the umma) after the first two caliphs.  Power corrupts, so it goes.
• The manner in which Medina and the bedouin tribes were united under Muhammed and Abu Bakr is interesting - there existed political factions, and the early leaders of Islam unified them.  These coalitions were then threatened by the death of Muhammed and the resulting Wars of Apostasy.  This ties into some thoughts on poltical deficiencies in the ACKS domain game I've had recently - I think I want a system where the resources present in a domain are more-or-less static, and there exist factions with some form of power (military, economic, moral authority over the masses, whatever) who contend for the resources in that domain.  Players then attempt to either gain influence over existing factions (befriending their leaders or membership, doing favors) to gain their resources and allegiance, or destroy them through intrigue or fire and sword and replace them with personal factions (extended henchtrees) of their own construction.  Uniting existing factions is a quick and convenient way to streamline your domain, make management less of a hassle, and extend your capabilities out onto larger scales (ie, a coalition of county-grade factions might be able to operate as a duchy-scale faction if unified).  But, as is apparent, I have yet to flesh out a system for this.
• The divide between the Mu'tazili rationalists and the conservative ulama (religious scholars responsible for generating, verifying, and clarifying religious law) during the Abassid caliphate is fairly interesting, particularly the way the Abassids allied with the Mu'tazili first (seeking to escape the power of the ulama) and then ended up yielding to the ulama's moral authority over the general populace.  Not unlike the attempts by Western monarchy to break the power of the church, but less effective.  Another good example of the Factional Domain Game in historical action.
• There's an interesting note in the section on the Crusades: "Usamah idn Muqidh described the Franks as being like 'beasts, superior in courage and fighting ardor, but in nothing else, just as animals are superior in strength and aggression.'"  Combine with reports of Crusader cannibalism (it turns out that supplying your sieges in deserts is hard) and the sack of Constantinople during the Fourth Crusade, and an amusing inversion comes to mind; what if one were to cast the orcs not as the Germanic barbarians invading Rome, but as the Frankish (or "Franj") barbarians invading the Middle East?
• Looking back at the original assassins, we see an organization much more interested in causing political strife / preventing unification / propagating fear than in making money.  I would like to see ACKS' assassin guilds operate similarly.
• As bad as the assassins and the Crusaders were, the Mongols did a very effective job of Chaotic/Evil.  Particularly notable were the utter destruction of a city whose original name is lost and which is now known only as Shahr-i-Gholghola ("the city of screams"), the breaking of the assassins after an attempt was made against Hulagu Khan, pretty much everything Tamerlane ever did, and this aside regarding the sack of Baghdad in 1258:

The Mongols had a proscription against shedding royal blood; it ran against their traditions...  So they wrapped the [Abassid] khalifa and members of his family in carpets and kicked them to death.

Anyway, good inspiration, and I'm still less than halfway through (though I expect things will get a bit more modern, hence less useful for RPGs and more useful for wargaming, shortly).

Further Thoughts from Transformation of War

I keep not finishing this book, because suddenly it's midnight and I have to sleep.

Most recent observations:

• Van Creveld's notes on the differences between Hebrew, Christian, and Muslim traditions of holy war are pretty interesting.
• The Hebrew Old Testament holy war came in two flavors - one was ordered by God and commanded the utter destruction of an enemy tribe and all of their possessions, livestock, and buildings, lest the righteous be tempted by the works of the unclean.  The other was undertaken against an enemy (heathen) tribe without divine command, and involved killing all of their males and taking their women and possessions.
• Christian holy war originally resembled Hebrew holy war (being inspired by the Old Testament) though with a different organizational structure (army rather than tribe), and softened rapidly during the crusades from being wars of extermination to being wars of subjugation.
• Muslim holy war was originally a perpetual struggle between the House of Submission and the House of the Sword, and expected to end with either the death or conversion of pretty much everyone.  In practice, the whole multiple-caliphates thing has complicated this a bit, and the policy has tended to soften over time towards subjugation without necessarily conversion.
• Heh, that'd be a fun mechanic - bonus reserve XP for getting proper last rites and burial, and lots of bonus reserve XP for dying on a mission from the church.  Or Iron Heroes-style glory points that let you interfere from beyond the grave and get canonized...
• VC's distinction between existential war and rational war was very interesting to me.  He argues that rational war is that carried out with the rational interests of a government or organization in mind and a calculus of gain and loss used to measure the effectiveness of operations, while existential war is what occurs when a people is faced with oppression or extermination and resolves to "sell their lives dearly", with no regard for their own safety or the rules of war.  He notes a number of circumstances in which technologically-and-organizationally inferior groups have defeated rational forces through existential warfare (albeit at typically at tremendous bodycounts), and also notes that any sufficiently-long rational war tends to eventually become an existential war as the combatants' resources are stretched thin and the war's political justifications cease to adequately justify the bodycount and personal sacrifices involved.  This supports my long-held notion that in war and many other endeavours, those who are willing to sacrifice everything for their ends tend to be the most likely to triumph, but are also usually left wondering if it was worth it.  This "by any means necessary" theme is one which I have explored with several characters, and which I occasionally exercise in board/wargaming as well.  I have also witnessed the rational dungeoncrawl rapidly become the irrational, existential dungeoncrawl of extermination ("They killed Monty!").   So this seems a useful distinction to me in understanding strategy and the conduct of war and life in general.
• Some of the historical mentions of cultural circumstances which made the conduct of war very different from our own would make for quality gaming.  Most notable:
• In Greece, the city-states each claimed divine origin, and so to destroy or found a city-state would be to act against the gods.  Hence, war was largely confined to the borders and to trade interests.
• The "just war" notions of the Roman and Medieval periods occasionally caused leaders to eschew certain advantages (fortifications, river crossings, ranged weapons) during battles, to prove that they actually had the moral high ground.
• Likewise, just-war considerations led to small-unit battles deciding the fate of provinces by agreement between both concerned rulers.  This would make a lot of sense for adventuring parties...
• Unfortunately, the end of this chapter, which attempts to counter the notion that every war is based on the community or nation's "rational interest" by arguing that interest is too broad a term to be useful, is largely sophistry bordering on philosophy.  Disappointing; sufficient evidence was laid out earlier that the conduct of war is often too disjointed to be rational.  No need to beat a dead horse with a featherduster for five pages, as is done here - it just makes the author look a bit silly in my estimation.
• The chapter following, on why individuals fight, isn't much better.  A lot of philosophizing on the nature of man and woman and why folks risk their lives.  There were a few insights buried in there, though:
• Honorable combat, as opposed to murder, massacre, and other crimes, is distinguished by rough parity of forces and risk of death for everyone involved.  The greater the risk, the greater the honor. 
• This is particularly interesting because it was written before the beginning of the Drone Wars, which are the ultimate in combat without risk for the combatant. 
• This is also particularly relevant to RPG gaming, where we see a lot of combats with utter disparity of forces and little risk of death for one side.
• A weak force needs a great deal of morale to initiate war against a strong force, but every victory it earns (and even some defeats) serve to boost that morale.  A strong force fighting a weak force loses a lot of morale if defeated, and may even lose morale from dissatisfying victories which look more like massacres than proper battles.
• In conducting anti-insurgency operations, it behooves a conventional force to try to avoid atrocities by imposing onerous regulations on the troops in the field.  If obeyed, these impede combat effectiveness and hurt morale ("We can't return fire until we've checked the regs and called battalion HQ...").  If disobeyed, discipline suffers, atrocities crop up, and scandals ensue.
• There was a really hilarious two-paragraph note about automation in warfare and artificial intelligence, to the effect that computers are unsuitable for battlefield operations due to their inflexibility, and that if we can reduce war to equations soluble by computer, that form of war will come to an end because it won't be worth fighting.  On some level this did reflect our experience with Starmada - we took apart its equations and solved them and then there was no game.  On the other hand, I think if we really wanted to build deeply, truly scary autonomous systems, the binary nature of the transistor would not stand in our way.
• The last chapter was pretty good, but with a fair bit of rehash from Rise and Decline of the State.  His hypotheses on the return of assassination and other "beheading the snake" sorts of operations seem to have come to pass, though I am, in the networked age, less optimistic about their effectiveness at destroying guerilla organizations than MvC was at the time of this writing.  It is also interesting that he argued that a new set of rules of war were likely to emerge, but I haven't heard of that happening yet.  Could just be a while in the making.
• He also makes the point that religious warfare is coming back, and that Islam is attractive to pragmatic rebels because it does not shun violence like modern Christianity does.  One prediction he makes is that secular ideals will be fought and bled for and acquire religious overtones as a result.  This is something I hear on the internet from time to time, that liberal atheistic humanism needs to militarize (compromising its principles) because The Believers Are Coming For Us.  I am very curious to see how this plays out.
• Professional soldiers may be hindered relative to their guerilla opponents by rules disallowing them to loot, which reduces their incentives to fight.  Interesting perspective. 

Anyway, that's enough Van Creveld.  Next book on my agenda is utterly unrelatable to gaming, so I...  guess it's probably going to get a bit quiet here.  Quieter than it's been, even.

Of Strategy and Software Engineering

This post has nothing to do with gaming.  Probably.

I've been continuing to work my way through The Transformation of War, and hit something somewhat interesting last night.  Van Creveld commented on the traditional division between strategy and tactics, that tactics is the art of winning battles while strategy is the groundwork, to make sure that the battle will be fought under advantageous circumstances, that men and equipment will be in good order on arrival, and that victory can be capitalized on to achieve a campaign's objectives.  Further, he argued that much of successful strategy is working around three sorts of difficulties; uncertainty and friction (the tendency for things to go wrong and impede progress) were recognized by Clauswitz, while van Creveld also adds inflexibility.

This is probably not news to those familiar with Western strategy, but it did make an interesting connection with software engineering for me.  You see, software engineering isn't really engineering as one might use the term for, say, civil or mechanical engineering.  A mechanical engineer can look up the strength of various alloys of steel in reasonably reputable sources, crunch the numbers, and figure out what he needs in order to make the thing he's designing meet the requirements.  When he's done, he can be reasonably certain that the thing he's built will more-or-less work as intended if he has done his job properly.  Software engineers cannot do this.  The performance benchmarks available are gamed all to hell, the mathematics taught in school are primarily concerned with asymptotic behavior and completely neglect very substantial performance concerns, nobody outside of Intel and maybe some of the agencies actually knows the full instruction set most general-purpose computers are running, and next year that library you're using is going to break its interface out from under you with no warning.  Not only do we not know the 'laws of physics' of the area we're working in, but those laws are constantly changing, often adversarially.

(And of course, the client wants it done yesterday with a completely different set of requirements than they asked for six months ago, but I figure that's probably normal for most engineering disciplines)

At the end of the day, software engineering has more in common with art and alchemy than with traditional mathematically-rigorous engineering approaches.  The proof of this, I think, is that we see reflections of strategy's aims and obstables in modern software engineering practices.  Waterfall has fallen by the wayside because its timetables failed to account for friction.  Its fixed requirements led to inflexibility and may have been wrong or useless by the time the project was brought to completion.  Test-driven development makes a tradeoff between flexibility and friction, as codified tests somewhat reduce your ability to adapt to changing requirements but also reduce the impact of random failures.  The Agile family of methodologies seems focused on flexibility to changing requirements and reducing uncertainty about customer requirements through communication, which is good, but may come at the cost of a flavor of friction as developer-time is lost playing Meetings & Metrics (have you heard of my new game?  Best-selling the world over...).

(Exercise for the reader: commission a civil engineering firm to design a highway suspension bridge using Agile.  Be sure the change the requirements regularly to keep them on their toes.  Record the stand-up meetings and put them on youtube.)

Anyway: at the end of the day, software engineering is about establishing a context to programming, where the unpleasant, messy work of one's developers can actually achieve the objective despite uncertainty and both human and machine failures.  In this it is like strategy.

Rise and Decline of the State (Part 2)

Continued from part 1

Also incorporates some elements from The Transformation of War, which my friendly local library has so kindly lent me.

I was close to the mark in part 1 when I guessed that the argument van Creveld would make was that the state's ability to wage war outgrew its willingness via nuclear weapons.  He does place the turning point at the beginning of the Atomic Age, but changes due to nuclear weapons are only part of his thesis.  The argument he makes regarding warfare is that the availability of nuclear weapons made extinction a possible outcome of any major war between powerful states, and this has so far been deemed an unacceptable risk.  As a result, we've seen border and proxy wars, but the sort of deep strategic advances hundreds of miles into hostile territory are a thing of the past because if you put a nuclear state into a position where it has everything to lose, then so do you.  Likewise, large concentrations of conventional forces are convenient targets for nuclear weapons.

The interesting bit of the nuclear hypothesis that I didn't see coming was its effect on international law, namely the criminalization of wars of aggression and the end of territorial annexation.  This is a significant change from the established order, and one which is (I suppose) being tested in the Donbas, where two social mores are in conflict - on the one hand, it sure looks like Russia is waging something rather like an aggressive war for annexation of Crimea / Sevastopol, violating the no-annexation principle.  On the other hand, the Russian majority in the regions they're trying to annex supposedly voted to secede and join the Russian Federation (admittedly, possibly after the spetsnaz arrived), so there is an argument from self-determination, representative government, and such.  Interesting times to set a precedent.

(Nationalism, incidentally, is part of what has made victorious annexation impracticable these days.  Back when, if your province was conquered you paid taxes to your new rulers much as you paid them to your old rulers.  Now national identity enters into the question, and popular resistance follows.  The end of annexation has meant that one of the main motivating factors (from the perspective of the state) for waging was has disappeared.  Consequently, he argues, conventional military forces are basically obsolete)

The other technology-center that van Creveld addresses is information and logistical.  I saw part of this coming too, as regards the ability of non-state, nonbureaucratic organizations to utilize information technologies more flexibly than states.  Again, while I see the micro view, van Creveld looks at the macro view, where from the telegraph and railroad to the internet technology over the last century and a half has become networked.  One telegraph doesn't do you any good, and if you can't agree on standard protocols for how to telegraph with your neighbors they're not much help either.  States which ignore these technologies and don't standardize with other states run the risk of falling behind economically and socially, but those that standardize end up losing some of their power to international standards bodies.  Likewise, the international corporation has become the center for technological development and economic growth, outpacing most states.  Finally, if you wish to participate in international trade, you also end up losing some degree of liberty over your own currency.

So what is left for the state?  With conventional warfare and its economic sovereignty in decline, the state is left to supervising a nuclear arsenal, maintaining order, and providing welfare.  Van Creveld and I do not see eye-to-eye on the future of the welfare state; we both seem to be on the libertarian side of the fence, but while he (as of 2000) sees the welfare state in decline, I see it resurgent, driven by a new wave of youth born after the fall of communism unknowingly allied with a pragmatic elderly population.  While van Creveld sees the end of the welfare state as inevitable as a result of "loss of faith in government" and economics, I believe that faith in government is in a cyclical mode for the time being, and that the demands of a hungry population know no economic bounds.  Lest I be called a heartless bastard on the internet (I am, though, you know), I am curious for the potential for distributed, non-government welfare systems, rather like I hear things were done back in the Bad Old Days, when communities took care of their own rather than expecting the state to solve their problems, but organized and run in a modern (ie, networked, webscale) mode.

Anyway, enough politics.

Van Creveld also looks at guerilla warfare and terrorism as a consequence of the end of conventional warfare, and this leads nicely into The Transformation of War.  One point I found interesting here was the failure of the French and British to keep their colonies after the Second World War; I had a theory that the rise of terrorism these days was directly enabled by the proliferation of arms during the Cold War, and that armed resistance movements were inviable before then, but now I think that this is false.  The note that resistance fighters are now recognized under international law was interesting too (though as he also notes, every country does its best to have its own local, home-grown freedom fighters classified as terrorists instead).

Another interesting thing that is mentioned is that traditional strategy (since Napoleon at least, and probably earlier) relies on encirclement and cutting off the enemy force's lines of supply and communication.  This is part of why fighting guerillas is hard - they don't (usually) have organized geographic lines of supply which can be cut by physical encirclement (consider, for example, the futility of Russian operations in Afghanistan to cut lines of supply across the Pakistani border), and they typically have sufficient initiative and motivation to continue fighting independently if lines of communication are cut.  It seems to me that the way to achieve strategic victory over the guerilla, then, is to cut his lines of supply by driving a wedge between him and the community of local sympathizers on whom he relies for food, shelter, and cover.  This is, of course, much harder than mere encirclement, especially when fighting a cross-culture war, where most of your force doesn't share the enemy's language and traditions.  Field intel folks, psychological ops, and special forces seem a more natural fit for this sort of war than conventional "line" military forces.

I am not that far into Transformation of War yet, but so far it seems quite a critique of Clauswitz; I think the argument being made is that Clauswitz's model of war, which has become the standard for 'conventional' war, was predicated on war between states and on clear divisions between military and civilians, and that as that distinction is now disintegrating Clauswitz's theories are no longer applicable (also that Clauswitz's theory of war was incomplete at publication, as it failed to account for war in the pre-state era).  I'm not sure if a new constructive theory (beyond that expressed in RaDotS) is to follow or if this is primarily a critical work, but it is interesting nonetheless.

Rise and Decline of the State (Part 1)

I've been reading Martin van Creveld's Rise and Decline of the State recently.  I'm not quite done with it (having finished the Rise section, but not yet read the Decline section), but it has given me plenty of food for thought.

Historical assertions follow; I have not checked all of van Creveld's sources.

The overarching 'plot', if you will, is that Western European monarchies spent a lot of effort eliminating the power of the nobility, the church, and the towns, then found themselves with nobody to help them rule (for one man alone cannot rule a kingdom).  So they created bureaucracies, which in turn outgrew and devoured them, creating the modern impersonal state.  These bureaucracies aggregated as much power to themselves as possible and eventually, via nuclear weapons, their ability to wage total war outgrew their willingness to wage total war.  Now we see a shift back towards the power of guerillas and militias who, using the technology developed by states with less bureaucratically-fixed tactics, can effectively oppose states (at least this is where I think this book and its sequel, The Transformation of War, are going).  To decentralize power in order to fight a decentralized enemy is counter to the ethos of the state ("All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.").  I think there are some glorious grand strategy gaming opportunities here, which make the failure of War on Terror all the sadder, but there remains much reading to be done.

One of the interesting thrusts of RaDotS is that a lot of the social context we take for granted today came about only in the last couple of hundred years (since 1600, say) as part of a feedback loop, where state bureaucracies caused changes in order to increase their own power, which in turn allowed them to cause more changes to their advantage (van Crevelds characterizes the modern state by its permanent, impersonal, secular bureaucracy and regional monopoly on violence; much of the book is really a history of bureaucracy, which is awfully relevant for tax season).

Mapping, census, languages, and fixed centers of government were probably the most interesting elements of this transitional period from an ACKS context.  Geometrically-precise mapping on the scale of national borders was not performed (at least in Western Europe) until the 15-1600s, after the development of the printing press, putting it well after the Medieval period.  If we want to be reasonably accurate to the experience of ruling a domain or exploring a wilderness, then, we ought to kiss our hexmaps goodbye (at least on the player side of the table) and switch everything to pointcrawls.  Likewise, William the Conqueror's Domesday Book aside, national censuses were not undertaken until about the same timeframe, with the natural interests of accurate taxation and ability to raise levies.  ACKS' familial abstraction may well be too fine-grained for the period.  Common national languages began to be standardized during this period, again primarily for military purposes, though as the Basques show this process is still not complete.  Again, the Common tongue is a mighty powerful abstraction, and we often skip having multiple human languages.  Finally, fixed centers of government are particularly entertaining from an ACKS perspective.  It was not until after the printing press and attendant beginnings of the rise of bureaucracy that kings stopped travelling their own countrysides and began ruling from distant seats through proxy bureaucrats; RaDotS cites several kings of the Medieval period who travelled perpetually through their domains, checking up on their vassals and holding court as they went.  This is very different from the fixed model of rulership we saw emerging while playing ACKS!  This change to remote rule also saw kings stop leading their own troops (with a few exceptions like Gustavus Adolphus).  Both of these changes, though, require an established, educated, loyal bureaucratic apparatus, which is something that takes a lot longer than a single king's lifetime to bring into being.

Another interesting thing to note is the relation of religion to the state.  van Crevelds contends that historically, almost all rulers of domains above the size of towns have been justified religiously, with emperors typically approaching the status of living gods and always holding the status of head of their religion.  An exception occurred in Western Europe, though, where Charlemagne became Holy Roman Emperor, but the pope remained head of the religion.  This put monarchical interests into opposition with religious ones, rather than the harmony typical of the rest of the world, and led to the eventual loss of religious temporal power in the West, which permitted the growth of a secular bureaucracy (which, without respect for traditional religious / "natural" law, soon rendered the monarchy vestigial).  "Separation of church and state" is an aberration from the 'natural order' of human history, if you will, albeit a rather durable one and one of which I am quite fond.  This separation of church and state, though, begat political philosophy (which served the same purpose as religion, ie justifying the power of those who rule - I have always been dubious of mainstream political philosophy, and am now moreso) and nationalism (a secular religion if ever there were one - Nietzsche would've called it an answer to the death of god, if he hadn't been too busy fighting the German protonationalists of his day about antisemitism to get a clear look at nationalism).

So anyway, all of that has some interesting implications for the whole fighter-cleric domain dynamic.

More to follow as I continue reading.

Inside the Soviet Army

From Suvorov's Inside the Soviet Army:

Only three forces are active in the Soviet political arena-the Party, the Army and the KGB. Each of these possesses enormous power, but this is exceeded by the combined strength of the other two. Each has its own secret organisation, which is capable of reaching into hostile countries and monitoring developments there. The Party has its Control Commission-a secret organisation which has almost as much influence inside the country as the KGB. The KGB is a grouping of many different secret departments, some of which keep an eye on the Party. The Army has its own secret service-the GRU-the most effective military intelligence service in the world.
Each of these three forces is hostile to the others and has certain, not unreasonable pretensions to absolute power but its initiatives will always fail in the face of the combined opposition of the other two.
Of the three, the Party has the smallest resources for self-defence in open conflict. But it has a strong lever at its disposal-the appointment and posting of all officials. Every general in the Army and every colonel in the KGB takes up his post and is promoted or demoted only with the approval of the Administrative Department of the Central Committee of the Party. In addition, the Party controls all propaganda and ideological work and it is always the Party which decides what constitutes true Marxism and what represents a deviation from its general line. Marxism can be used as an additional weapon when it becomes necessary to dismiss an unwanted official from the KGB, the Army or even the Party. The Party's right to nominate and promote individuals is supported by both the Army and the KGB. If the Party were to lose this privilege to the KGB, the Army would be in mortal danger. If the Army took it over, the KGB would be in an equally dangerous situation. For this reason, neither of them objects to the Party's privilege-and it is this privilege which makes the Party the most influential member of the triumvirate.
The KGB is the craftiest member of this troika. It is able, whenever it wishes, to recruit a party or a military leader as its agent: if the official refuses he can be destroyed by a compromise operation devised by the KGB. The Party remembers, only too clearly, how the KGB's predecessor was able to destroy the entire Central Committee during the course of a single year. The Army, for its part, remembers how, within the space of two months, the same organisation was able to annihilate all its generals. However, the secret power of the KGB and its cunning are its weakness as well as its strength. Both the Party and the Army have a deep fear of the KGB and for this reason they keep a very close eye on the behaviour of its leaders, changing them quickly and decisively, if this becomes necessary.
The Army is potentially the most powerful of the three and therefore it has the fewest rights. The Party and the KGB know very well that, if Communism should collapse, they will be shot by their own countrymen, but that this will not happen to the Army. The Party and the KGB acknowledge the might of the Army. Without it their policies could not be carried out, either at home or abroad. The Party and the KGB keep the Army at a careful distance, rather as two hunters might control a captured leopard with chains, from two different sides. The tautness of this chain is felt even at regimental and battalion level. The Party has a political Commissar in every detachment and the KGB a Special Department.

Sounds pretty gameable to me...  There were a lot of other interesting tidbits as well, though I'm nowhere near finished with the book.  Soviet doctrine on the deployment of nuclear weapons was sensible but unsettling ("strike first, because you never know when the enemy will go for his nukes...").  Doctrine on the allocation of brigade resources was remarkably pragmatic (if you have three battalions, one of whose advance is stopped, one which is advancing slowly, and one which is broken and retreating, you throw all of your higher-level reserves and artillery in support of the one battalion which is advancing, however slowly, because offense is king and you want a strategic breakthrough).  Anti-tank guns were intentionally almost never self-propelled, both for simplicity of construction and so that their crews could not retreat.  Optimism about the future of the tank in the pre-drone / ATGM era (though it also makes sense here, since one of the postulates of Soviet doctrine was that advanced manufacturing was going to get wrecked harder than it did in World War II via nukes, so neither side was going to be able to continue producing advanced guided weapons in any volume).  Doctrine regarding rifled vs smoothbore mortars and volume of fire was simple but sensible:

But what about accuracy? you will ask. It is of no significance. Soviet commanders have chosen a different way of approaching the problem. If you have to pay for accuracy with complexity of design, you are following the wrong path. Quantity is the better way to exert pressure. Since two simple, smoothbore mortars can do the work of one rifled one we will use the two simple ones, which will have the additional advantage of producing a lot more noise, dust and fire than one. And this is by no means unimportant in war. The more noise you produce, the higher the morale of your troops and the lower that of the enemy. What is more, two mortars are harder to destroy than one.

Helicopters viewed as lightly armored flying tanks instead of as aircraft, vehicle crews don't have Need To Know regarding the specifications or type designations of their vehicles, weird variations in shell calibre so that it's hard to confuse different types of ammunition in writing or speech, troops not provided rations or bedrolls but to spend no more than five days at the front at a time, and all kinds of just foreign concepts.  Promotion among officers was determined both by time in grade, but each command had a maximum rank that could command it - if at n years in service you hadn't acquired command of a larger force by impressing your superiors and being given command of a force above your rank, you were stuck at your current rank (a surprisingly meritocratic and very gameable arrangement).  I'm fairly impressed by the degree of focus on combined arms, with both air and land armies under the command of a single Front Commander, and necessarily cooperating. In any case, a very interesting read.

Orbital Bombardment and Giulio Douhet

There was a discussion the other week of what war in space will look like, and I have a number of follow-on thoughts to it.  This is one of them; others are probably forthcoming.

The general consensus was that if you can achieve orbital superiority over a planet, you've won.  You can bombard its population centers into glowing rubble with kinetic weapons, and there's jackall the defenders can do about it.  I voiced a minority opinion then, that the aim of one's campaign may preclude urban centers as bombardment targets, and that in order to conquer a population center one must necessarily have boots (filled with either flesh or sentient metal) on the ground for the messy work.  I'm also not entirely sure about the current state of antisatellite weapons, but I expect that at the very least you could fill the most likely orbits with shrapnel as an area denial weapon.

Further reading on my part has reinforced this suspicion.  I believe the predictions of Giulio Douhet are instructive.  Douhet was an Italian officer in the early 20th century and one of the fathers of Air Power Theory.  During the first World War, he advocated the construction of heavy bombers, which he believed could be used to bomb enemy population centers and cause the populace to revolt against their government.  He also pioneered the notion later summarized as "the bomber will always get through."  Douhet died in 1930, too early to see his theories tested during the second World War.

They did not stand this test well.  Extensive conventional bombing of civilian population centers was undertaken against Britain and Germany, and Tokyo was also bombed (with amusing preparations underway for further bombing).  Civilian morale did not crumble in any of these instances; in Britain "the blitz" as it was called strengthened civilian resolve, while the Germans kept fighting all the way to Berlin despite an absurd volume of bombs being dropped on them.

I think Douhet's theories about civilian morale were therefore misinformed.  The last half-century of guerilla warfare seems to agree that Douhet was mistaken.  As I mentioned in my previous short review of Fry the Brain, the essential method used by effective urban guerilla insurgencies is to incite security forces to inflict collateral damage on civilians, and thereby win the relatives of the injured to the insurgency's cause.  Indiscriminate bombing strengthens the morale of the enemy.  It lets mothers die in the arms of their sons, and there seems to me no surer way to make a devoted foe.  If you want to win by sapping civilian morale, you should instead strive to kill many sons in a distant land while leaving their mothers alive to lament over them.  Total war in practice relies on destroying the enemy's ability to fight, to resupply and reinforce (for which civilians are necessary), rather than his will to fight.  Infrastructure targets are still on the table, though, and pinpoint kinetic strikes against them do seem liable to reduce the enemy's ability to retaliate, but then you have the post-conquest problem of rebuilding all the dams and bridges you just blew up to make the conquered planet useful again.  So it seems to me that fixed military targets - command centers, missile silos, strategic fuel reserves, airfields, space launch sites - are probably the most promising for orbital bombardment.

Anyway, to return to Douhet - by the 1960s, "the bomber will always get through" had fallen by the wayside.  A British study in 1964 concluded that a strategic bomber inbound to the Soviet Union would meet on average six SAM/AAMs, each with a 75% probability of destroying it if countermeasures were not employed.

I think Douhet's case is much analogous to our own.  We see a novel means of offense, possible today but not yet deployed, and we cannot conceive of an effective/cost-effective counter to it.  We therefore are inclined to think that it will be an end-all-be-all of warfare to achieve orbital superiority over an enemy world, much as Douhet thought of air superiority.  But there is a concept in Filipino martial arts called tapi tapi; it means broadly "counter for counter".  There's always a counter, and for that counter a counter, and so forth.  We maybe haven't found the best counter to orbital bombardment yet, but I think we will.  Maybe we can't bury our command centers beneath any reasonable amount of concrete in the face of tungsten rods at Mach 10...  but such weapons are also fairly lousy for hitting moving targets.  Perhaps a widely distributed, redundant mobile command center is the answer (to the cloud!...  half-sarcastic, but half-serious).  If, as it is said, "fixed fortifications are monuments to man's stupidity", perhaps fixed installations and formations are as well.  Welcome to the digital age!  Granted, you're not going to be able to get unenhanced humans to move continuously at such a pace in peacetime...  but that's what machines are for.  If your enemy has a big hammer, become as a swarm of flies; present too many targets, each of which is waaay overkill for a 12 kiloton kinetic weapon if you can even hit it with one.  And keep them in or near population centers, so you get some collateral damage morale out of them...

(As for the computer security implications of a cloud command center...  well, some might call that job security d: )

Logistics

I've been thinking about grand strategy games recently, and it occurs to me that supply rules are a lot like encumbrance rules, in that they're a pain in the ass but also worthwhile because they convey the same concerns the character experiences up to the player.  A dungeoneer worries about how much weight he's carrying; a general worries about how to keep his men fed.  What's more, as Keegan's History of Warfare suggests, supply concerns dictated the largely-coastal structures of campaigns in the Hellenic era.  Without supply, you get all kinds of crazy long-term unsupported actions in the enemy rear (this is a problem I have observed in, say, the Civilization series of games).

But the difference between supply and encumbrance is that we're reached a reasonablish compromise between complexity and realism in our encumbrance rules, with encumbrance by stone or with Traveller's low-kilos threshold.  I don't know if supply is amenable to simplication...  but until I find a set of rules for it which are really light-weight, I expect that it will remain one of those much-begrudged rules which is ignored by the players whenever I forget about it.

(Been thinking about wargame campaigns again, since I'm back in Collegetown and one of my main wargaming opponents / buddies is still around)

Anabasis

One charming trait of the denizens of the Autarch fora is their historical tendencies.  Kiero suggested Xenophon's Anabasis as a source of inspiration for a campaign which starts the PCs off as leaders of a force of foreign mercenaries stuck deep in foreign territory after the untimely death of their employer.  Turns out it's actually quite a pleasant read!  Notes so far:

• Eulogies - Xenophon doesn't characterize people when they're still alive, but instead provides eulogies (or kakologies?  malology sounds good, but it's mixing Latin and Greek) for people after their death.  Book I, chapter 9 is a eulogy for Cyrus, while book II, chapter 6 is a eulogy for Clearchus and Proxenus and a kakology for Menon the Thessalian.  These characters have their natures hinted at in their actions previously, but they were not characterized directly until after their deaths.  I would argue that this is a nice form for OSR play - show me how your character behaves, rather than telling me, and when he dies, the party bard or chronicler will compose a verse summarizing his life and behavior.
• Pursuit - Xenophon stresses several times so far that the Greeks, being all infantry with no cavalry, can't really win a decisive battle against the Persian cavalry.  Should they win the field, they will be unable to chase down and kill the routed enemy and thereby break his strength, and should they lose the field, they will be unable to avoid capture or slaughter.  Domains at War's pursuit phase models this pretty well.
• Morale - I found it interesting that at the battle where Cyrus died, the Persian light infantry broke before even making contact with the Hellenes.  Also found it interesting that the Hellenes seem to have a high morale, and that Cyrus could go three months without paying them before they got uppity.
• Great stock is placed in omens before battle, and in not angering the gods via breaking oaths.  If anything the Vagaries of War tables at the end of DaW:C do not go far enough.  Would be sort of cool to give the Fate spell from ACKSPC an extra use as explicitly reading omens before a battle, for a morale bonus (or penalty) or other modifiers.

More to follow.

On Chivalry

I recently finished a short book by the title of French Chivalry, and found that it contained a few interesting bits for use in D&D.

During the early feudal period, fealty was not anything like absolute subservience, and was actually somewhat democratic (at least among nobles), to the point where "for a lord to marry, he required the assent of all of his vassals to the marriage."  Not the sort of stuff we usually see in modern portrayals of feudalism, but eminently suitable to ACKS domain play.

Tournaments began as basically 'small-scale wars' at a mutually agreeable time and place, with the defeated usually being taken prisoner and ransomed.   They were a source of income as well as a way to alleviate boredom in peaceful times.  Using peasant footsoldiers was uncommon, but occasionally done.  Only later did these tournaments evolve into jousts and more ordered forms of martial competition.

There existed three main strains of chivalry, which evolved over time and were often in conflict:

• Martial chivalry - Loyalty, bravery, skill at arms, and ambition.  Those traits which made a fighter effective.  The earliest form of chivalry.
• Ecclesiastical chivalry - Piety, humility, charity, and service to the church.  Subverted martial ambition to "the search for glory in the name of God" by permitting martial glory to earn admission to Heaven, opposed tournaments as vainglorious and wars between Christians as destructive to Christendom.
• Courtly chivalry - Wit, skill in music and poetry, love and the willingness to suffer any indignity in the name of one's distant maiden in a tower.  Broadly opposed by proponents of ecclesiastical chivalry due to its tendency to lead to adultery, while some proponents of martial chivalry found it distasteful to have to woo women gently.

What's interesting here is that we see all three influenced in the Paladin, where they're portrayed as a unified front.  The 3.x paladin clearly has martial chivalry by way of full BaB, immunity to fear, and required lawfulness, and a religiously-motivated code of conduct plus divine blessings and smiting enemies of the faith satisfy the ecclesiastical side as well.  Courtly is relatively muted, but present in their focus on Charisma, as well as their access to Diplomacy and Sense Motive (as compared to a common fighter, whose only social skill is Intimidate).

But if I were to run a medievalist game...  I think a proper 'knight' class would best be split into several tracks along the lines above.  Would add a nice bit of period philosophical conflict to the mix, and provide for some variation among 'ye olde fighting men'.  Working within ACKS' class-building system, I could definitely see Knight Errant being Fighting 2 HD 2, Brother Militant being Fighting 2 HD 1 Divine 1, and Courtier being something like Fighting 2 HD 1 Thief 1 with skills or power-swaps focused on interaction.

In any case, it was a worthwhile and enjoyable read, and small enough that I may keep it around for later reference.

Logistics and Lairs

Well, it's been a while, but I've been busy with job-hunt, travel (as a result of job-hunt), and school.  One thing I will say for travel is that despite the general unpleasantness involved in flying, it does give one quite a lot of time to read and reflect.  And so it came to pass that last Thursday during a flight from Phoenix to Seattle, I finished Keegan's A History of Warfare.  Quite a lot of good gaming inspiration in there - now I want to run a Polynesian ACKS game, an Aztec ACKS game, a Viking ACKS game, and probably a few more that I forgot.  I hear Drew wants to run Roman ACKS (fasces?) game as well.

A few other surprising points stuck out at me, though.  The first is that different cultures have some really different outlooks on war.  The kind of combat we see PCs engaging in in D&D is very strongly western european in style, just in terms of directness and willingness to press the enemy into decisive melee.  Many other cultures, including the steppe nomads, Arabian cavalry, the Greek peltasts, and primitive tribesmen the world over much prefer to engage at range and flee or fall back if threatened with melee (often to encircle the enemy from the flanks).  And yet, we very rarely see such hit-and-run tactics on display among either PCs or their opponents.  This is disappointing, but easily enough remedied by changing "fighting retreat" on my morale table to "retreats with intent to reengage later".  As for PCs...  well, they will do what they will do, and as long as they have some armored melee fighters, they're likely going to press for melee most of the time.

Also interesting was that many cultures do not run down retreating enemies.  Surprising, I know - never would've guessed from the way my PCs go about it...

Finally, the chapter on logistics was extremely interesting from a gaming perspective.  There were a number of excellent facts:

• On human limits - "A marching soldier cannot carry supplies for more than ten or eleven days" and "the soldier's load cannot on average be made to exceed 70 pounds of weight", or about seven stone.  Seven stone, curiously enough, is the cutoff between 90' and 60' speed in ACKS.
• Twenty miles a day is listed as the best speed achievable by men on foot "with any degree of regularity", and the Roman legions on their internal lines are cited as moving about this speed.  ACKS permits up to 32 miles a day to unencumbered humans on good roads, or 48 with a forced march on good roads.  That seems... a bit high.  Good thing there are no such roads in my setting...  Unless some of those dastardly PCs were to build one...  Man, I hate those guys, always causing trouble, breaking the laws of physics, deciding to go to unmapped dungeons...  ahem.  Sorry, where was I?
• Right, speaking of roads: "The lengths of roads per thousands of population were in 1860: 5 miles in Britain, 3 in France, 2 and a third in Prussia, and only 3/4 in Spain."  Now I feel even better about not putting much in the way of roads in there...  This means that a town of about 4500 souls, like Opportunity, has maybe 10-12 miles of good road in its vicinity, tops.  And wheeled transport doesn't work very well without them...  I guess the merchant caravans are actually mule-and-camel trains.
• On pack animals: A bullock (apparently a juvenile ox?) eats its own load in about 8 days.  We have been ignoring rations for pack animals...  That may be for the better.

In any case, it looks like most long-distance campaigns during the Classical era were supported by a supply fleet of galleys carrying food and water rather than by pack animals or wagons, which was part of why campaigns tended to hug the coast.

So yeah.  Before the PCs decide to take their army and march on an opposing town (say, Deal), they should consider stockpiling iron rations for a month or three...

So that was the logistics part.  What's this about lairs?

A week and a bit ago, a session of ACKS was played, with many new players!  Jarol the Thothite assumed command of a band of new adventurers and sought out bounties upon the giant scorpions troubling the peasants of Opportunity.  Among his company were:  the wizard Leo, and his cleric Hildegarde, Goradohi the Crocodile-Man and his war-crocodile Ota, the Dardantine merchant Guilleme Capouchen and his own priestess Perrin the Pious, Bhoskar, a dwarven warrior in the service of Jarol, and one war dog.  They succeeded in tracking and slaying five such scorpions in pitched battle with no losses, save the war animals, both of which were slain by poison.

Upon their triumphant return to Opportunity bearing the stingers of their quarry, they were met by Corinth and her warriors while collecting their bounty from the Baron Garwyn, and also came into the company of Max Parsley, hick-turned-swordsman, and his scribe Henx.  Without the aid of Carcophan's Zaharan lore, they were unable to decipher the map to the Vaults, so Corinth proposed an expedition to the destination of the Myrmidian map recovered during the dragonslaying, which pointed to a fort in the desert.  En route, they made friendly contact with a group of giant cactus treants, who warned them of orcs and goblins in the vicinity.

Upon their arrival, the perimeter was scouted and no means of ingress was found, and so they went over the walls via grappling hook and opened the gates from within.  While exploring the cellar of a tavern within the fort, they found a passage within the cellar which led them into a goblin den.  The goblins, maddened by Max's accidental blasphemy of their death-god Hao-Dee, rolled a pair of 12s for morale and all charged to painful burning deaths in a patch of flaming oil.  All 30 or so of them.  Goradohi complemented the company on their cooking while the rest of them searched for treasure, finding several pieces of silverware and a captive, a captured bandit named Demmin who knew little of the area, being from further west.  After emerging from the warren, they sent Demmin to outside the gate with the mercenaries, and searched a smithy, where they found five goblins cowering in terror.  When commanded to leave, they protested that the orcs would get them.  Goradohi ate one, and the rest fled as orcs attacked the party from the rear, badly wounding Leo, Hildegarde, and Corinth's nightblade Macha.  The orcs were slain, and the party found nothing of value in the smithy, so with their wounded in tow a retreat back to Opportunity was ordered.

No PCs or henchmen were killed in the making of this session report :(  Even more sadly, it looks like with my interview travel schedule, there will be no more ACKS before the 14th of October at the earliest.