Nevertheless, I'm trying to come up with a staff system that would work for Eberron. Now, in modern-day organizations, there are at least 5 branches. The setup I'm familiar with is: Personell, Intelligence, Operations, Supply, and Public Relations.
Now, if I was to move that to Eberron circa 893 YK, I'm thinking that Public Relations would be replaced by "Artifice" or something along those lines, to represent the strong place magic played in Galifaran armies. Later in the war, its quite possible that the Five Nations may have adopted their "6" branch to be some sort of liason with the Dragonmarked houses, but that's neither here nor there.
In any case, my vision is that the officer corps was purged, and a lot fell on the staff officers. Now, the question I have for all, Last War Grognards and Non-Last War Grognards alike, is, "How would YOU purge the Galifaran Army around 893 YK?"
King Jarot could have sent them (with their loyal subordinates) on suicide missions, into the Demon Wastes / Aerenal / Xen'drik / Seren...
Karrnath's ministry of the dead may want to send the PCs on a fact-finding-mission, possibly to recover and return the officer's bones?
Those secret mission briefs could still be found in the Citadel's archives in Breland.
Therefore, the services would be (roughly):
- An intelligence service (Detection, Finding, Shadow, and Scribing)
- A service for raising and caring for military animals (Handling)
- A medical service (Healing)
- A logistical service (Hospitality & Passage)
- An engineering service (Making)
- A communication service (Scribing)
- A security service (Sentinel & Warding)
- A weather service (Storm; I always considered that anyone in possession of the Mark of Storm should also have an intuitive grasp of natural weather patterns and should have some ability to predict it)
Alternatively, the security and intelligence services could be folded into a single branch. The division between the two is mainly for two possible (and concurrent) reasons. The first is a simple matter of personnel fatigue; too many responsibilities on the shoulders of a small group of people produces less efficient results. The second matter is political. Since we're talking about what amounts to the General Staff of Galifar, it would ultimately (over 900 years of history) become a very politicized organization, so putting security and intelligence functions into the hands of the same people could be an invitation for coups. I imagine they'd be set to spy upon one another to prevent this.
I imagine that in the Military Household of Galifar (which is what I would call it), each of these positions is probably filled by a mixture of Dragonmarked contractors and Galifaran officers overseeing them. It is entirely possible that the Marks and their powers could be more versatile than the list I presented here, so don't take my association with particular marks to mean that I don't think they could also be used within another service; this is meant to represent the conceptual basis for organizing the administrative infrastructure of the military organization, based on the Dragonmarked Houses and the role they serve in the economy. Basically, my contention is that living with the Dragonmarked Houses and their influence would form the basis for how they would think about organizing staffing functions.
In fact, this helps quite a bit with the idea of the officer purges. Along with strange dreams about military coups that provoke paranoia (which is usually what I use for Jarot's last days; I like the idea that the Quori were trying to use the same technique of internal conflict against Khorvaire that they used in Sarlona), he could have had to deal with actual murmurings of a military coup towards the end (perhaps provoked by his increasingly erratic behavior?). Naturally, a unified Intelligence & Security Directorate would become the focal point of those fears (real or imagined), since it's the logical starting point for any such overthrow.
He could have began by purging this Directorate (perhaps the ancestor of Breland's Citadel? I can't remember if that was the original concept) and as it's members were tortured into confessing, others would have been implicated. This could have been perpetrated by a mix of Jarot's willingness to believe that everyone was against him, as well as personal rivalries within the General Staff. So, the separation of the Security and Intelligence functions within the Military Household (I prefer this term to "General Staff" since Galifar was a monarchy) could have been something Jarot did just before his death. In the aftermath of such an event as a massive purge reminiscent of Stalin's purge of the Red Army before WWII, Karrnath would have been in a similar position to Soviet Russia (strong on paper, but actually weak because of a decimated leadership).
Similarly, much of the Military Household could have remained "loyalist" and went to Cyre, which would explain Cyre's survival against what appears (from what I read) to be several early coalitions against it.
* In human history this is really long. In general human dynasties collapse about every 300 years, even in Japan, where the same family is still the emporer for more then a millenia, the role and position of the emporer changed significantly about every 3 centuries ;)
Do you need complicated explanations on how?
Nah, not really. I just wanted to get a discussion going, 'cause invariably someone will say something that will make me go "OOOH!"
I figure that the Galifaran Army would need to have built-in loyalty to the King, while being composed mostly of "locals" or whatever. So, I figure that the commanding officers for most upper-echelon units, as well as their entire staffs, were appointed by the Galifaran Army Command, but the second-in-command (XO) and other, lower-ranking officers would be provincials. That way, the mechanism to actually do things with a unit have firm loyalties to the throne. However, purge them, and not only do you get army units reverting to local control, but the disruption to the staff system gives us the military blundering that we see throughout the Last War.
On the subject of a purge...eh, what kind of purge did you have in mind? The hypothetical you proffer -- and its RL implementation with regard to the Marlyand legislature -- is what I'd consider a "soft" purge. Given the unabashedly feudal nature of Galifar even on the eve of the Last War, I'd expect that kind of purge to involve lots of de facto house arrests of this sort: "Congratulations, Karrn General I.B.A. Guy! You've been made governor-general of the 49th Military District, whose borders just happen to follow the outer wall of your manor. Ain't that a crazy coincidence? You are expected to file daily logs of the goings-on therein and failure to submit even one will result in a full court-martialing." You'd get some jailings and some executions, to be sure, but overwhelmingly your goals in a "soft" purge scenario are of the sort that go beyond simply purging the officer corps: While the officer corps in such a situation may be a liability to Jarot's ambitions, whatever they may, simply stacking bodies like cordwood and the attendant disruption of the aristocratic elite of Galifar does more damage to the aforementioned ambitions than is fixed by removing the officer corps. Which...doesn't really sound like your Jarot, from our past conversations: Such coldly calculated realpolitik does not seem in-character from a man who the sourcebooks stress was in the process of going mad. There is also the not-insubstantial problem posed by the fact that, once open warfare broke out, the purged Karrn officers would find their way back into Karrn service out of the necessity of the situation, which just changes the question from "why didn't Karrnath steamroll the rest of Khorvaire in 894 Y.K.?" to "why didn't Karrnath steamroll the rest of Khorvaire in 904 Y.K.?"
The alternative is a "hard" purge of the sort Stalin undertook with the Great Purge of 1937-1940. The point of the purge in such a scenario is to stack bodies as high as an elephant's eye, and to make sure the officers who survive have learned their lesson. (Whatever that lesson happens to be.) The logic of the Great Purge works rather better with Jarot, at least from my vantage point: It just is more believable that an increasingly paranoid monarch with a brood of squabling would-be successors could see his generals plotting against him (or, for that matter, his children.) If you really wanted to ratchet up the politics -- and do a bit to humanize Jarot -- you could have him not be paranoid at all. After all, you're not paranoid if someone really is out to get you, and there're bound to be plenty of siblings, cousins, nieces, and nephews of the royal family who bear the ir'Wynarn name who could have risen to prominence in the Army but have reasons to dislike Jarot, Mishann, or any of the other woud-be successors. The cryptic imagery of the Great Purge also lends itself to Eberron: It's easy to see a rakshasa-led not-NKVD being handed quotas of officers to kill or imprison per month, and using nonsensical criteria to attain them. Given the long-lived nature of some of Galifar's races, it's also entirely possible that folks who were shipped off to Jarot's not-gulag not only survived the experience, but are still around in the modern era, to tell the tale to any adventurer who happens by. (Or who might be in need of liberation: If I were setting up a not-gulag, I'd want to set it up as far away from civilization and in the harshest conditions as possible. Places of the sort that also have a high probability of being adventure sites.)
First off, good point about an Artifice branch being like one on the I.C.E. What do you think about Jaster's suggestion of a Dragonmarked staff branch?
Second, your suggestion about a hard purge is kinda more I had in mind, but I think that I would want to keep it a secret. One of the key plots in my current game is that a professor wrote a paper (and presented it at Korranberg) about the similarities between Karrnath (a military powerhouse)'s failure to perform well, and another Giant tribe (also a military powerhouse) in their period of civil war sucking. The goal being that the professor's contribution to historiography is to ask the question "why did Karrnath not steamroll everybody at the start of the Last War?" The historian looks at some period documents, and sees Karrnath reporting, in addition to the famine and calamity we know, that Karrnathi officers were "inexperienced for their position"1
Well, how could this be? After all, Rekkenmark is in Karrnath?
That's where the purge comes in. A secret, hard purge. Disproportionately take out Karrnathi officers so that Karrnathi units don't have officers experienced in their positions. In the early days of the Eastern Front of World War II, Stalin purged something like 93% of officers colonel (battalion-level) and above. So, when the Germans headed east, guys who had been commanding a platoon a few months before were in charge of battalions. Regiments. Divisions. Do the same thing for Karrnath, and you see officers not exercising command efficiently. As for the Karrnathi staff section? Gone.
As for why that's important, its because of a Raksasha plot to spur magical innovation so that mortals can break the chains of the Overlords. In fact, a Raksasha was one of Jarot's advisors, and steadily fed his paranoia....until 892 or 893, where he staged his own death, blamed the "murder" on someone like the Army Chief of Staff or something, and pushed Jarot into full-blown witchhunt paranoia in regards to his own military. Thus, weakining Karrnath before the Last War.
I'm lucky in that the group I have is actually new to Eberron. They don't know the existance of the Lords of Dust, or how major their plots are. So, this thread (wait, a purge? and the accused guy was innocent? a fake coup? why?) will hopefully show that there was this massive conspiracy to weaken a military powerhouse. So, when they figure out that no, one Raksasha did escape the Binding of the Fiends2, they will put that together with a historical pattern of "sabotage the military powerhouse so that the magical powerhouses will have the time to develop newer magical means of waging war" to figure out the big goal of the Raksasha: Free the imprisoned fiends using the magic of mortals. Which gives us things like the Mourning. The Giant's cataclysmic sundering of Xen'Drik, and their attempt to use their magics again.
So, Juums, that's why your suggestion of a "raksasha-led not-NKVD" resonated with me so much. That kinda is what I'm going for.
Oh wow. I ranted. I hope my players do keep out.
1: I have to give credit here to the two people who spurred this idea, MrCelcius and Madfox11.
2: By the by, why did Vvarvak leave the Shadow Marches? Because she figured out that one Raksasha did escape the Binding....and the Conclave was manipulated into executing her for treason before she could widely spread that information. What's even better is that I managed to work that idea into one of my character's backstories, whose tribe was wiped out so that the Raksasha could destroy evidence of Vvarvak's proclimations.
But, honestly? I really don't like the idea. At all. This is due to how I think the Galifarian military interpreted the Korth Edicts: In the Edicts, the dragonmarked houses bartered to withdraw from politics in exchange for affirmation of their economic privileges, and Clausewitz's idiom about the relationship between war and politics is in full effect. The dragonmarked houses are entitled to no special dispensations from the military, and granting any -- such as, say, a dedicated S-5 staff section -- would damage the spirit, if not also the letter, of the Korth Edicts. Issues of institutional culture aside, I'd also see the Galifarian military being weary of such because of the security risks it'd create: There would only be a limited pool of potential staff officers with the requisite diplomatic skills and knowledge of dragonmarked house miscellania to properly do the job, and the paths to acquire such expertise leave such officers unduly vulnerable to going native or otherwise being coopted by the dragonmarked houses they are supposed to liaising with.
On the idea of a secret purge, I can't help but notice the fundamental tension between the fact that you want to dispense with large segments of the officer corps while simultaneously keeping it a secret. The problem is that you really can't eliminate half, two-thirds, or nine-tenths of the battalion commanders in the Karrnathi army in secret: The rank-and-file would invariably notice the officer churn as junior officers meteorically rose with alarming frequency, as would the feudal aristocracy as large numbers of its sons and daughters disappeared into the dead of the night. Now, your proposed scenario of a rakshasa advisor who uses the fact that he's a cheatin' Outsider to lead Jarot on is an excellent one. Just that I can't see a way to have it happen and an actual secret at the time of its occurrence.
That said, it's entirely possible for the purge to be forgotten in the intervening century. Were I running it, I would have Jarot's final years be caught up in succession politics: The trick, of course, being that it's not the succession politics of Jarot's children, but the ghosts of his own ascension to the throne of Galifar which are at work. The Galifarian Chief of Staff is Jarot's younger half-sibling by the previous king's second spouse, a Napoleonic figure of formidable intellect and insatiable ambition, who has grown continually alienated with the fact that the half-sibling will never attain the political stature of his/her more incompetant sibling(s) simply because of a fluke of chronology. The half-sibling's discontent has become sufficient that plans are being laid for a palace coup: The width and breadth of the support attained for the coup may never be wholly known, but it is sufficiently serious that several of the most prominent Karrn families -- all with heavy ties to the upper echelons of the Galifarian military, of course -- have signed on and that Kaius is sufficiently aware of the plot to extract certain guarantees from his aunt/uncle as to his place at the top of the succession pile once the coup was complete. Somewhere along the way, things go horribly wrong for the plot: Jarot catches wind of it and given the fact that plot was a product of the military elite -- with the most blame capable of being laid at the feet of the Karrnathi military elite -- starts a massive purge which inordinately falls upon the Karrns in the officer corps. Given that the Karrn political elite, from the king on down, were in the plot up their eyeballs, it is the type of incident that is likely to go down the memory hole and not exactly feature prominently in the official histories of the last years of Galifar and first years of the Last War promulgated by the Karrnathi monarchy and military. It is also not exactly the type of thing that is going to be well-preserved in the historical record, given that the players probably left few mentions of it in their personal papers, and what correspondance and other documentation about it exists is probably either under Karrnathi seal or was destroyed long ago. (It also makes it a rather impressive historiographic feat to tease out what happened. It also provides adventuring fodder, given that there're likely to be quite a few Karrnathi factions intent on suppressing the truth, as it's rather more embarrassing than the official "we got rolled at the start of the war due to famine and plague" version of events.)
The exceptionally long-winded setup complete, it's tailor-made for meddling by a polymorphed rakshasa set on playing both sides against the middle by fanning the flames of Jarot's paranoia (which, as a bonus just happens to be warranted, given someone is plotting against him) while also being the enabler and facilitator of the half-sibling's egomania. It's a also a convenient pivot for things to go south for the conspirators. (On the idea of murdering the rakshasa's alter-ego which is Jarot's advisor, I'd make it look like it happened while he was trying to bring to Jarot information about the conspiracy, making it look like he was killed because he'd gotten wind of things and was going to rat the conspirators out.) Not exactly my cup of tea, but that's because my Lords of Dust spend more time fighting against other evil factions than trying to free their imprisoned overlords, because between the daelkyr, aboleths, and Dreaming Dark, there's always a pressing Thirty Xanatos Pile-Up that can only be solved by stabbing someone in the face via a ridiculously circuitous plan.
Hoo-boy. Did that feel good. I know people like the Lords of Dust, and I get their appeal. But after catching up on the backlog from my forum hiatus, it seemed like every other thread had a suggestion that the Lords of Dust were responsible for...well, some major event in the history of Eberron. Which got me in a ranting mood.
As an addendum to my previous post, since we were on the subject of the Lords of Dust being manipulative gits and Ogiwan's usage of them in that capacity, I'd like to add a like ranting. Why can nothing in this setting ever happen for its own, internal reasons? Is it not sufficiently epic that a hyperadvanced ancient civilization finds itself in a life-or-death struggle that drives it to build a weapon which, in the course of "winning" the war, permanently disfigures the multiverse itself and causes the civilization's collapse? Is it not sufficiently tragic that the continent-spanning empire which has defined stability and prosperity for a thousand years is undone by the petty squabbling and egos of the final emperor's would-be successors? Why, on top of all of that, must everything seem to be the work of a cabal of Evil Outsiders whose job seems to be to sit in their citadels in the Demon Wastes, arching their fingers and nodding ominously while muttering that everything is going according to The Plan?
Hoo-boy. Did that feel good. I know people like the Lords of Dust, and I get their appeal. But after catching up on the backlog from my forum hiatus, it seemed like every other thread had a suggestion that the Lords of Dust were responsible for...well, some major event in the history of Eberron. Which got me in a ranting mood.
!Perhaps the Lords could be portrayed as not causing the whole conflagration with their manipulations, but as foreseeing its inevitability and piggy-backing their own schemes onto the backs of the mammoth about to trample the entire continent in bloody civil war?
I think mystical opportunism actually gives a much more frightening air to any would-be supervillain; it provokes, at least in myself, the idea that no matter how you might dash their plots and plans, no matter how complete your victory might seem, they will always find some way to twist your victory into the catalyst for their next scheme rather than relying on their own power to bring about events. After all, we are dealing with prophecy here, and as such the Lords really shouldn't believe that it is their own power which will free the Overlords; it's fated to happen.
Their interpretation of the Prophecy ought to be what spurs their plans, not the active goal of freeing their masters. "The Overlords will inevitably be freed; so sayeth the Prophecy. My destiny is only to serve their might and to bask in their glory."
Perhaps the Lords could be portrayed as not causing the whole conflagration with their manipulations, but as foreseeing its inevitability and piggy-backing their own schemes onto the backs of the mammoth about to trample the entire continent in bloody civil war?
I think mystical opportunism actually gives a much more frightening air to any would-be supervillain; it provokes, at least in myself, the idea that no matter how you might dash their plots and plans, no matter how complete your victory might seem, they will always find some way to twist your victory into the catalyst for their next scheme rather than relying on their own power to bring about events. After all, we are dealing with prophecy here, and as such the Lords really shouldn't believe that it is their own power which will free the Overlords; it's fated to happen.
Their interpretation of the Prophecy ought to be what spurs their plans, not the active goal of freeing their masters. "The Overlords will inevitably be freed; so sayeth the Prophecy. My destiny is only to serve their might and to bask in their glory."
It has to be said that one's own biases shape you how you view these things. In the name of full disclosure, I was in a game not too long ago that made hate the entire Chessmaster archetype into which the Lords of Dust. It properly portrayed what machinating Evil Outsiders with functionally infinite time and resources were capable of: The party spent 80% of the game futilely riding the plot rails because the baatezu Chessmaster BBEG had so completely black-boxed us that the color of the sky was DM's Eyes Only knowledge. (As this was a chatroom-based game, we even had cutscenes to a self-titled Omniscient Council of Vagueness modeled after the Gazel from Xenogears.) Once the Chessmaster BBEG did their big reveal about halfway through and everything was put together, the story's tension was completely gone: The only reason the party was still alive was because it was made up of PCs. We had Plot Armor from the BBEG's ridiculously elaborate contigencies because...well, there'd be no game if the BBEG took things to their logical conclusion.
Ironically, one of the running gags in my current game is that for all of their machinating, the Lords of Dust cannot catch a break. Five centuries ago, the Lords of Dust secured a major coup when they succeeded in getting the Keeper of the Flame branded as the Antikeeper and shipped off to Dreadhold to spend her life as a statue. (I cannot remember her name; she did get the write-up in the Dreadhold article in Dragon back when it was in print form.) To further cement the success of Ridiculously Circuitous Plot 13,052,678 Mk. 7, they managed to get the Antikeeper installed as the Keeper: Then the grim reality hit that the Antikeeper was, at the very most, only a threat to himself. The Antikeeper after that went native and actually believed the pap the Church of the Silver Flame puts out about goodness and whatnot. And so the cycle has pretty much continued since then, with their plans being foiled by the fact that they've yet finagle their way into an Antikeeper who's sufficiently egomaniacal and competent to move their agenda forward. And now the gravy train's about to pass, as the Dreaming Dark may or may not be initiating a Thirty Xanatos Pile-Up by petrifying Jaela and replacing her with an Inspired dragon. (Because, you know, the only thing worse than an Inspired is one that's also a dragon. Thanks for that horrifying idea, Dragons of Eberron! ...or was it Secrets of Sarlona? Either or!)
Now, to answer your question of, "Why can nothing in this setting ever happen for its own, internal reasons?" its because, in my current game, there's a bit of the Prophecy that says, essentially, that the bindings of the Raksashas cannot be broken by immortal hands, but only by the efforts of mortals. Thus, the one Raksasha who escaped the Binding (I never liked the thought of a Lords of Dust that competed with each other) guiding most of the civilizations down a road that would break the shackles of the fiends.
In the next game I run, that's probably going to be different. This campaign, I just had a great idea for the metaplot, and it involved the Lords of Dust. Last campaign, it was Emerald Claw. That's why I love Eberron: I can take liberties with the world beacuse its loosly written enough that removing one thread will be unlikely to bring the whole setting crashing down.
The Shadows of Thronehold
The official intelligence service of Galifar and by extent th Galifarian Army.
It would have 3 deaprtments: The King's Shadows (bodyguards of important military figures), The King's eyes (intelligence gathering) and The king's Blades (assaination)
Perhaps as part of the purge an important member of the King's Blades : Cale Sharpdagger was tasked with assasinating another important military figure such as a Karnnathi general. So next part Cale kills KArnnathi general and when he kills him his superiors brand him as a traitor petrifies him and ships him off to Dreadhold. Convienently King Jarot wanted this Karrnathi General dead and also wawnted Cale imprisoned or taken out of the picture. So basically this is the process of a military purge were the king kills 2 birds with one stone. This could be replicated in many different ways keep in mind. Another thing would be that with CAle being petrified he is effectively immortal so lets flashforward to 998 Y.K. or whatever time your campaign is at and you want your group to find out about the purges simply have CAle somehow escpe Dreadhold and his petrification and meet your group of players. Also it would make sense for Galifar to have it's own intelligence/assasination/Bodyguard that is separate from the Dragonmarked houses that there are no conflicting loyalties or double agents.