Do armies in your campaign go around raping, pillaging, and plundering?

[Fade]

So assuming you're not spending several hundred gold on each trooper, thus cutting the size of your army by a massive amount, how do your theoretical 'good-aligned' armies feed and pay themselves? Just because the rulers are 'good' doesn't mean the soldiers are.

Always remember, rape, then pillage, then burn.

 

[Black Omega]

Varies quite a bit. Rokugani armies are lawful and disciplined but nobody's perfect. And the more Ashigaru and Ronin brought in for manpower the more lapses will occurr.

For Shadowland armies about the only constant is destruction. No real economy so little need to plunder beyond those creatures that might think something looks interesting. As for rape...sometimes yes,many times no for a variety of reasons depending on the type of creature. Someone of them would consider doing such a thing with a human revolting.

 

[bramadan]

Romans throughout most of their glory days did not do either (unless ordered). But they had infrastructure to support them.
Medieval armies kind of have to (at least plunder) in order to survive but even here things were not so bad throughout middle ages as they became during the wars of religion.
It is only with the rise of Mercenary as the preeminent military unit and with lifting of religious inhibitions that situations such as "rape of magdeburg" could occur.

To answer your question: Largely not. I play a Birthright game and armies of anuire are fairly small, well discipined and infrastructure is good. They all share common faith and know that they will have to live by each other after the war. Battles are largely proffesional events of which peasants sometimes never even learn the outcome.
On the other hand my other campaign was set in the decaying days of Great Kingdom in Greyhawk all moral and societal norms were unravelling and armies were huge and discipline nil. - Players were quite depressed when I was desribing the countryside to them.

 

[med stud]

The armies of my campaign burn, plunder and rape. The good aligned soldiers in a given army dont do that, though; they maybe plunder some, but that is all. The evil soldiers really enjoy it, and the neutral plunder a lot ("If not I do it, someone else will").

Even if some countries IMC can transport supplies to the front it is rare that they dont plunder to a degree. It is the priviliege of the soldier to plunder, after all.

 

[Hand of Evil]

Mostly the evil ones do it all.

The good ones punder mostly, sometimes start a fire or two.

 

[Carnifex]

IMC, armies do indeed do all that, and sometimes worse - the Huronese and Carthagians in particular take hundreds of goblin slaves who are then biothaumaturgically 'Manipulated' to create slaves better adapted for deep mine work. The Carthagians release terror troops on gnoll settlements - just to see how effective they are. Cryosian high mages go on lone assaults, destroying entire villages of barbarians single-handedly to relieve their stress.

Armies loot, plunder, rape, burn, destroy, raze, desecrate... Good-aligned commanders might try and keep the troops in line, and forces of good alignment will generally try and restrain themselves, but they usually go to war in the first plac driven by vendetta or hate or intolerance anyway - this translates through to their treatment of the lands around them. Usually on home turf things are pretty limited, but when they get onto some other nations land it can become no holds barred.

 

[MaxKaladin]

The nation my campaign is set in is based on imperial rome in many ways and has a professional army with proper supply infrasturcture. They don't need to plunder or anything like that, though it is sometimes ordered in enemy territory.

The empire is blessed with a couple of very fertile areas where large crop surpluses are grown. It is these areas that allow their army to operate without such behavior. In fact, my campaign is set in the most important of these provinces. A war has just broken out and the party just captured the first of what will, no doubt, be many enemy agents sent to try to stir things up and disrupt supply as much as possible.

 

[Reprisal]

A somewhat related question:

How effective were the Provosts (in the British army)?

I was thinking of doing that with the Brandobian and/or Kalamaran army in my (future) campaign...

 

[Al]

Interestingly, I would say it's less of a good vs evil thing than a Lawful vs Chaotic thing.

Lawful armies try to maintain discipline within the troops.
Lawful armies understand that having the local populace on your side is STRATEGICALLY more useful (to LE the moral side is negligible, but the strategic usefulness is high)
Lawful armies tend to be sufficiently provisioned, especially by clerics with Create Food and Water/Decanter of Endless Water/Murlynd's Spoons etc.
Lawful armies tend to have very severe punishments for miscreants (e.g Wellington's British troops)

Chaotic armies on the other hand, are relatively indisciplined, tend to think less about strategy, have light punishments and worse logistics.

Of course the G/E thing plays a part, but I'd say that defining difference is law v chaos.

 

[Magnus]

apologies in advance ...

i may take some flack for this, but:

after reading the title to this tread on the boards, i couldn't help thinking, that word kinda gets thrown around in that sentence a lot, without anyone ever thinking about it. you kinda automatically expect rape to go with pillage and plunder when talking about marauding armies. then i started to think about the last fantasy book i read which had that sort of thing in it, which was one of the Sword of Truth books by Terry Goodkind. it seemed to happed a lot in those books. without much by way of consequences.

it occurs to me that perhaps people don't really take it as seriously as they should. i mean, does anyone ever really stop to think about the consequences of it. we all say that line at some point of other, in passing. me too. but it's reality seems to have gotten buried under some sort of familiarity. then again, i suppose, why would they? isn't it just easier to just to soften it, and make it into something that's less painful? even if it's only in our minds? since we can't change reality, we change fantasy? i don't know. i just feel that it gets thrown around a little too loosely.

now, i'm not trying to be the killjoy or just be all "preachy" here, or anything like that. i'm not even really sure what i actually wanted to accomplish by saying any of this. truthfully, i passed up writing this twice already. but after the thought made itself known, i just kinda had to put it down. not to, felt like a betrayal of my own conscience. so, i apologize if i upset anyone, or if i ruin anyone's fun. but i kinda, sorta, had to say it.


*edit to remove the disclaimer at the top*