Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest
- Thread starter Boney
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- warhammer warhammer fantasy fantasy be gay do crimes (gay) female protagonist pansexual protagonist ck2 quest divided loyalties mountain vietnam ranald is real this is a dwarf quest (dwarfs) this is maybe an elf quest this is not a vampire quest this is not an empire quest try it and find out open voting
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NexusEye
Aspiring God
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The standing army might be voluntary but the Wikipedia description of a feudal levy is "a form of medieval conscription". That said I did a quick search through the thread and I couldn't find any mention of Roswita raising levies.
It might have a volunteer standing army with a conscripted reserve.
Horologer
Incertae sedis
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- a risen sea
This expedition has unreliable leadership and is literally headed straight to hell. On top of that, Gotri regards it as essentially pointless, and generally speaking I'd regard him as pretty reliable.
There's a wide gap between conscripting someone into that, and then conscripting them into defending their home.
Stop debating this way. It's entirely valid for people to have a higher moral standard than is normal for the setting.
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I do not believe chocolote was saying that conscription is evil and should never be done; certainly what I was saying was that the moral component is a component in the cost-benefit analysis. And yeah, I do feel comfortable saying that a volunteer military is better than one made of conscripts; there might still be situations where the moral cost of fielding a conscript army is less than the moral cost of not fielding that army, though! I'm not advocating deontological reasoning by any means.
If we knew that there were important runic arrays in Karag Dum that needed a trained runesmith to interface with such that not doing so would represent a great failing on the part of the Expedition, then hell yeah, let's accept the moral cost of conscription and go for it. But we don't know that. What we're doing here is balancing probabilities, like "the chance that such a need exists," "the chance we can get some of the benefits some other way," and "the chance everything goes to Hell in a way that wasn't the planned way of going to Hell," against the known costs, like "six dwarf favour" and "taking a non-volunteer portion of dwarfkind's dwindling glory somewhere extremely dangerous." Different people are going to get different answers based on their different subjective probability assessments. I just think that the moral cost of such an action is greater than zero, not that it is necessarily larger than all conceivable benefits.
Mopman43
Mountain-Hermit of Nitpeak
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The State Troops are explicitly professional soldiers, even if that's not something you'd find in historical Europe before more modern times.
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BirdSamurai?
Mopman43
Mountain-Hermit of Nitpeak
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- Vermont
I actually am curious, are conscripts common? Going purely off of tabletop material, I think the only unit presented as conscripted are Free Company Militia?
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If you asked any Marshall of Stirland about the possibility of invading Sylvania prior to Abelheim, they'd likely say the same. Too costly, for too little return. But it was done, and the peasants bled for land they'd never trod upon.
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I'm not necessarily arguing against Mathilde having a higher moral standard, I'm arguing for her being consistent with it. Dwarf blood is no more precious than that of humans. If the latter can be morally conscripted, so can the former.
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Sir_Travelsalot
Never wakes up tired.
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I mean, the Empire is in terms of military in the age of pike and shot. Professional armies have been a thing for quite a while, augmented by mercenaries to fill out the ranks, and local militias if there isn't anyone else to muster.
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Mathilde has never conscripted Stirlandian Peasants, as she has never been in the position to do so.
And, as pointed out, there is a difference in an expedition to chaos wastes and national defense.
I'm fully onboard with conscripting runesmiths to defend the Karak they are living in, sending them to the chaos wastes in a potentially pointless quest, where they may or may not be useful, is a very different proposition.
Fluff goes back and forth on it, but in quest there's a professional full-time military and a conscript militia that can be raised for the defence of the province.
No, you're not. You're strawmanning. It's not morally inconsistent to not want to personally do X while also not crusading to end X everywhere.
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Yehhhhhhhhh.
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Mathilde was on the Council of Stirland. Her only direct superior was the Elector Count himself. And she raised nary an objection to the idea of conscription while in that position. She personally led levies in combat, or so I assume as you've not yet answered the original question.
I can buy the idea that the Stirland campaign changed her mind on that point, but there's been nothing in the text to indicate that.
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Horologer
Incertae sedis
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- a risen sea
This is not about conscription as an abstract idea. This is about what we are conscripting people for.
I answered the question in the post you're responding to.
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- Finland
If you have to continue alongside this tangent even aftr being asked not to, could you please not ignore people who actually engage with it.
There is a difference between doing a thing yourself, and trying to stop others.
There is also a difference between national defense and expeditions to the chaos wastes.
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- North Wales
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So, to be clear, she did indeed lead conscripted levies in combat on an offensive campaign. And either had no issues with it, or chose not to raise those issues with Abelheim. I'll stop after this, I promise.
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No. She lead a professional military on an offensive campaign. The conscript levy, which I just described as for defensive purposes only, was not lead on an offensive campaign.
NexusEye
Aspiring God
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Morally perhaps. In practice dwarven lives are much more precious than humans. During the Battle of the Caldera we were actively planning to try and make it so humans ate up as many casualties as possible instead of dwarves. Dwarves take several decades to reach adulthood, are a declining population, and are much better warriors than humans quality-wise. From a military standpoint they're much more valuable, and with Mallus being in a constant war with chaos, the military perspective is what matters. And this isn't an average dwarf, this is a Runesmith, a member of a tiny minority of the population that has likely spent centuries perfecting their craft. They are not expendable.
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Fair enough. Apologies for raising the blood of everyone involved.
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- North Wales
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I think the question of 'are they expendable' is separate from that of 'is conscription moral'. A Runesmith's future contribution to the Karaz Ankor is the same after his death whether he's compelled to join the expedition or chooses of his own will.
They're both factors to bear in mind, and the consensus on both seems to be 'no', but they are separate factors.
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- Finland
No, as far as i can tell, the consensus on conscription is "depends", and if you had not completely ignored everyone responding to you, you would have noticed people telling you this.
I've given this sort of thing a lot of thought and there's two major variables at play here. The first is that the IRL military timeline is built on a lot of basic assumptions like 'the enemy will be human' and 'the enemy is capable of feeling fear'. The equation changes harshly for the Empire, and levies just don't cut it when their enemies are so much more variable and often so much harder to kill or rout. The second is that the Empire never went through a post-Roman equivalent like IRL Germanics did* - the closest is Tylos and that's more a city-state than an Empire, and the ancestors of the Empire migrated to the Old World long after it fell anyway. So they never stopped having a large professional military, in their transition from tribal to sort-of-feudal they retained a proportionally high number of professional soldiers instead of concentrating military power in the very richest members of society, simply because it was a requirement for survival.
* Yes, most Germanics were never conquered by Rome, but they were definitely influenced by it and a lot of them were uprooted from their homelands and forced to resettle in formerly Roman land by the one-two punch of the Huns and a Little Ice Age.
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