Cripple. History Major. Irritable and in constant pain. Vaguely Left-Wing.

  • 10.9K Posts
  • 15.3K Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: July 21st, 2023

help-circle
  • NCO-equivalents were also immensely important once it became apparent that low-mid level command could still be effectively exercised in the heat of battle. Roman centurions, for example, got paid 16x an enlisted man’s salary by the time of the Early Empire precisely because it was recognized just how vital they were (and also because centurions took massive casualties and needed a bit of an inducement for anyone with a bit of brains in their skull to still want to stay in that front-line position)














  • Once when playing a D&D game, my character was a very ‘civilized’ guildsman who constantly went on about the superiority of urban mercantilist civilization (his counterpart, the other player in the group, was a half-orc barbarian who found this whole civilization thing very appealing; we made a good team). When one quest sent us to a halfling village in the middle of the woods, and they rebuffed all my character’s offers to buy land for ‘productive enterprises’, he, of course, came to the wholly normal and completely correct conclusion that ‘these people’ did not even have the concept of private property, how sad! and resolved to educate them (by force if necessary) after the quest was finished of the benefits and necessity of a thriving bourgeois society.

    Luckily for the halflings, our two-miscreant party was locked up by the local lord afterwards for a combination of kidnapping/theft/attempted sale of halflings who had been turned into stone by the cockatrice we had slain; and we were set loose on another problem (though not before committing unlawful commerce and gambling our unlicensed profits away at the local tavern playing dragon poker).






















  • Explanation: The Roman Emperor Caligula once ordered his troops to ‘make war’ on Neptune, the Roman god of the sea, by stabbing the incoming tides and collecting seashells as booty. Interpretations of this act… vary. Some attribute it to Caligula’s supposed madness - others, to him having a bit of a lark by exercising how total his control as Emperor was (“I can make you lot do anything, no matter how stupid or humiliating” sort of thing, very popular amongst tyrants of all ages). Some say it was to humiliate the troops for refusing to go on a supposed campaign to Britannia, which was not yet conquered at that point.

    This poor pupper is a prime recruit for Caligula’s next campaign against the brutality of Neptune!