As I said, it places Warriors in a niche, instead of letting them use might makes right to brute-force their way into power. This in turn, I think would make the decision to take up the way of the warrior more deliberate, not necessarily pascifist, so much as 'are you sure?'. Someone doing it fool-hardly and dying quickly would be a source of shame, for they sought to take life but lacked the skill and ability to do so. Another who chose to be a warrior and managed a great many kills and a long life in spite of the danger would be seen as a proper warrior, I think?
Admittedly Shame and Glory ALSO probably will lead to a quality over quantity, but given that we are nomadic this go-around, I'm inclined to think that this also will be more bang for our buck-since unless we can manage to monopolize a large amount of territory we won't be able to easily build up our numbers like what happened in PoC, where due to our awesome agriculture, we had reserves and then some from a relatively early time.
...I should also mention I'm hoping to adopt more MAGIC into this world and thus divert from reality and thus not be bound to it's limitations. If that's hard-locked to realism then uhh well...Cripes. But if not, I want that room to scale into magical thinkings.
That might be how it works in modern times, but not here and now in tribal face culture where the people as are intelligent as we are but lack several thousand years of cultural developments and "developments".
Placing Warriors in a niche, some specific place, intentionally, instead of the organic format which we are doing right now is counter grain against human tribal nature in several ways. First, is that as warriors develop as a skillset separate from hunters, which has basically completed at this point or will begin to complete with this vote, they gradually trend toward the top of a societal hierarchy. This isn't even something so blase and simple as might makes right, which is held as an acknowledged precept for
all forces and interactions in the world around tribal humans. It's also a grossly misapplied stereotype common to this forum which I have yet to see properly done in a civ quest. There might have been a CK2 or two at some point but I can't remember them off hand.
This advancement is from garnered respect, via defense of the tribe, via demonstration of virility and safe families, via demonstration that a woman will have high status as a man's wife because the wives of warriors shared a good deal of their authority especially in matriarchal societies like the Kin. Observe the relationship from Lugalkam and his priestess. That is a elevation of warriors because they marry a priestess of their gods, the overarching glue of their society like laws and meta knowledge of the social compact are for ours, and thus all is right under the gaze of the sun according to their beliefs.
Having warriors is essentially the path to security, food, and shiny loot. These things are essentially all that is required for tribal nirvana, so its no particular wonder that every single tribal society basically ever outside of incredibly rare religious sects were pretty dang warrior happy. Some were so warrior happy that you got
specialization inside the warriors, for example the most prestigious man in Arab tribal society was an elderly(because veneration of age), of good bearing and manners(behaved as a good Arab man is supposed to behave), warrior poet. They literally have seven poems called the Mu'allaqāt from the greatest Arab love poet hanging one the walls of the
Ka'ba at
Mecca, quite possible the most holy place in their entire society from Pre-Islam forward. (Which is saying something since Islam era had a tendency to wipe out most traces of the Pre-Islam stuff)
Second, warriors in a niche don't stay there. Not here, because, rightly so according to their environmental cultural pressures, they should be somewhere near the top and acclaimed. Maybe not at the very top, again see the Godlanders. But close, and somewhere where they can directly speak out of their concerns. Think about it this way. Any man or woman, or boy or girl can go to an elder and ask a question or raise a complaint especially if that elder is
their familial elder. By making a niche you begin the segmentation of Kin society and one of the easiest ways that occurs is by who can ask a question of the elder
first. In a shame plus glory set up, it becomes possibly something like an adult of a family ranks
potentially equal to a warrior from that specific family, in who can ask first. The warrior might be lower, they might be higher in priority depending on where on the scale the elder falls most of the time. However, under no circumstances would it be expected, or indeed
right for a warrior from one family to raise a concern with an elder from a second family before the concerns of the families own warriors and adults is raised.
I'm sure you can see the problems with this, since it creates unnecessary tension in Kin society.
Directly trying to curtail might makes right by all evidence in history leads to issues. You must be
inclusive, and give them no
reason to think that they must take up arms to change X and Y things they object to.
Okay that went on for way longer than I thought it would, moving on from your first sentence.
What leads from your niche idea is not this.
This in turn, I think would make the decision to take up the way of the warrior more deliberate, not necessarily pascifist, so much as 'are you sure?'. Someone doing it fool-hardly and dying quickly would be a source of shame, for they sought to take life but lacked the skill and ability to do so. Another who chose to be a warrior and managed a great many kills and a long life in spite of the danger would be seen as a proper warrior, I think?
It is far more likely to generate resentment, or confused resentment, inside the warriors and to weaken the inter-family bonds we have just started developing because, as one should remember, in times of confusion the Kin and peoples on their development level default to family first values. Because those are what keep them alive up to now.
A tribal son would look at you if you literally asked them "are you sure?", and then depending on the region either try to beat you or kill you. Because you basically just asked "Are you sure you want to protect your family?". Warriorhood is equated to familial safety and guardianship in tribal society. Thus these societies cannot, by nature, support these sorts of implied ideas or soft checks without far more development than the Kin have and they are simply a source of tension because the answer is "Well of course!".
This is also entirely sensible because extremely few other people are going to slew at all pacifistic for a long ass time. We literally can't blame this for them, except in the heat of the moment, because that's their culture and that culture will eventually grow out of it after enough times where people get annoyed with beating on each other to solve their interpersonal problems. Its also sensible because it lets us make sure we're not trying to put out a fire and keep our civ trucking right along happily. And happy tribals are literally good civilization.
Indeed a warrior who lives long and kills many is revered and respected, his prestige is great, and his family is happy and safe under the aegis of his image. But a warrior son who dies on the battlefield is both potentially acknowledged as foolhardy, and also mourned like the dear son they are by the entire tribe. The idea of foolhardy, "Maybe this is a dumb idea", doesn't come into play for millennia because there is,
almost literally, no other means with which to excel or advance yourself if you are a young man than being a warrior or hunter. Nor is their any real way to become an adult, which is enormous obviously because you can then start having kids who can help you out and reciprocate your love when you grow old and can smile with them, without hunting or being a proven warrior.
Its like asking "How do I get to space?" with the one answer in our society being "Work for X space company".
They fundamentally do not treat it the same way we do.
As to quality over quantity, no not really. Shame and Glory do not push for either quality or quantity. It pushes for confusion first and foremost, and then shoving them into some nebulous half space. No normal person would really be happy excelling in such an environment where their very living future is kinda up in the air. Especially if their families are one of the unfortunate ones where the elder leans more shame than glory.
Expanding on this further in a brief tangent, it also creates belief lines inside the Kin about whether battle is shameful or glorious until one is discarded, weakened into irrelevancy or the contradiction is otherwise somehow dealt with.
Back to point. Further more, Nomads outside of very incredibly rare circumstances, never had more people on the field than sedentary civs. They always had lower populations in total, but the crucial difference was that all of them, every single individual regardless of gender, was expected to at least be able to defend themselves in most nomadic tribes(there were probably a few which leaned towards not teaching the women but it'd be pretty rare). And this militant population is extremely mobile even without herding beasts and beasts of burden, which means they can hit and then fuck off and run away to go bug someone else before sedentary armies, which usually develop a particular doctrine of fighting like "Attack city, do X to city walls, wait for loot to come out", can deploy.
Considering the constant fighting as well, nomads tended to be highly skilled as well. And then on
top of that, they had environmental pressures which pushed them to make really good equipment, instead of the lesser quality bulk items(though how much lesser varied a lot) the sedentary folks used to field their massive armies. So you get this trifecta of mobile, better equipped and better trained, fighters that you need to deal with and its just bloody awful.
Quality over quantity is basically baked into the nomadic lifestyle.
As to the magic thing... you basically end up replacing warriors at least in part with magi, since magi depending on how powerful your magic is provide the same things as warriors. So you basically just buy the same things you are trying to circumvent, with the added addition of extra powerful pressure to develop god kings like Sumeria. Which is like... well we can develop absolutism and a variety of various fun things to do with sedentary religions, but I'm not sure what one can do as a nomad.
Also, just, think about something for a second. Does it actually matter if the rain summoning in the Merthoc ritual was caused by the ritual or just simply happened? Specifically, does it change the scene in how the Kin themselves respond?
The answer to that should tell you how magic would affect the development of tribals.
