Well Launching from this I wanted to add my 2 cents and it seems to make sense to break it offThe original tribes of importance were probably all right bastards back in their day. The fact is that in the early bronze age you become an important tribe by butchering people and demonstrating a will to do things others will not in order to seize vital tin resources, arable land, and slaves. It's a kind of shitty time period, which is why it mostly turns into an "age of heroes" when people talk about it later on.
angelfromanotherpin wrote:
Speaking of, do we have anything like a working definition of honor for this setting, like the write-up in RoW?
We probably should. A couple of abortive attempts have been made, but haven't really gone to completion. Just for starters, I think that people should have a Mandate of Heaven concept. That is, the idea that wiping out "the people" of an area to make room for "your people" is something that is simply not necessary because of course everyone is the same people. The idea that other people properly belong to the same empire as you and that by extension you should not commit genocide on them is fairly important as a moral base.
I'm sure that there are other moral precepts that people take shockingly for granted, but I'm not entirely sure what they are. It is important to set the moral zeitgeist of the focused time period to something close enough to the modern moral zeitgeist that people can describe actions in the first person without vomiting in their mouths.But also as similar as possible to Earth history in order to create archaic feeling events.
-Username17
Heroes fight Heroes
It's obvious that heroes are a special breed; they can kill 100 regular people all by themselves for one. And regular people know this, therefore they tend avoid any conflict with heroes if at all possible.
Heroes feel likewise and would generally not bother actually fighting and killing a normie. A hero might rob, rape, enslave, ritually sacrifice, marry or otherwise abuse them, as is their taste. But fight them? Fuck no it's beneath them.
This means that wars are fought by armies of heroes and the peasants simply bow to the victors, after all anyone of a heroic nature and willing to fight for them would have already joined the army anyways. But a conquering army can't simply just leave an area after victory and expect obedience, why is this?
It is because heroic nature isn't genetic and is often latent, you can't just kill the the families of every soldier and expect to be done with them.
Moreover there seems to be a magical statistical diffusion of heroic potential; the fewer heroes in an area at a given time and the greater the apparent need, the more heroes tend to pop out of the woodwork. Due to the obnoxiously large quantity of ancient crypts stacked with gold and magic treasure waiting to be discovered on the outskirts of every small town, it doesn't take any oppressed region to develop a well trained and equipped resistance force.