Post/Author/DateTime	Post
#1 CowSheepPig Jun 03, 2015 22:01:07	At least in Tyr and Balic,which are the two city i'm familiar with, the two classes are not the same. It seems that they are sharing politic powers and both have large family. And in the Prism Panted, it seems like kalak have a serie of templars around him. So is it true that templars are some sort of inner side of the government construction? And i'm also curious about why and how did these nobles emerge and exist without the favor of socerer kings
#2 Band2 Jun 05, 2015 20:46:02	Yes there are separate social classes, but there is some overlap.   Simple, the nobles are large families that own all of the farm land.  Templars are civil servants, covering everything from public works to the army.  Individual nobles can apply to be templars, but a templar does not have to be from a noble family.  There are not really templar families, though it may be tradition for certain families to have members become templars.   Typically in the social structure nobles are higher than the average templar.  However, the highest ranking templars would rank higher than most if not all of the noble families.   The nobles emerged on Athas because of their wealth, which comes from the land, and their personal armies.  The sorcerer-kings can use the nobles' forces.  It also creates social order to have some raised over others to manage certain aspects of society, in this case the slave labor on the noble's farms.   Does that help?
#3 OskarOisinson Jun 07, 2015 16:02:03	I might add, just experientially, Templars often fit well coming (the majority anyway) from a noble family as secondary progeny (assuming some sort of primogenitural distribution of accumulated inheritance amongst the aristocracy). I always imagined the Tyrian army, being full of conscripts, enslaved peoples, and poor freemen to comprise the majority of the armed forces in Tyr, while the secondary nobility or ambitious members of merchants houses might fall into command positions in the Templar bureaucracy.
(Reply to #2) CowSheepPig	Band2 wrote: