Homogeneity within Heterogeneity: Justifications and Weapons and Armour Combinations that Create the World

The Thracians in the army wore fox-skin caps on their heads, and tunics on their bodies. Mantles of diverse colours were their covering. They had shoes of fawn-skin on their feet and legs, and carried javelins, little shields and daggers...

-Herodotus, The Histories

In the last post, I noted the tendency for armies - particularly imperial armies - to be highly heterogeneous even into relatively recent times. Particularly in ancient sources, or in the work of authors like Tolkien who are to an extent aping ancient sources, we see in descriptions of armies these long catalogues of different troop types of different origins, implying a great patchwork of peoples and fighting styles, all crammed together into one giant horde. 

What is interesting about this heterogeneity, however, is the fact that the individual groups that make up the mass are themselves very homogeneous. Each is described as having one archetypal item of clothing, weapon and armour, as in the example of the Thracians above; while the Thracians are just a small piece of Xerxes's army, they all have fox-skin caps, all have shoes of fawn-skin, all have javelins, little shields and daggers.

How realistic is this? And, implicitly, how realistic is the way D&D monster manuals usually describe a group of orcs or gnolls or goblins as all have the same type of armour, all having the same weapons, and so on?

The answer I think is that it is probably pretty realistic, when one reflects that when soldiers in an army are conscripts, and their technology is pre-industrial, those soldiers are probably rounded up en masse by an official of some kind off the cuff (perhaps their own chief or whatever) and therefore go off to fight with the equipment they have to hand. All Thracians, etc., are equipped in the same way because that is what men in that society use in their daily lives as hunters, fishermen, agriculturalists, and so on. Here is the Oogingloop tribe and they're all armed with bill hooks because they are farmers; here is the Wakkawippy tribe and they all have blow guns and clubs because they are jungle hunter-gatherers, and so on. They don't have a wide variety of armaments because why on earth, as amateurs, would they? They simply seized what was to hand when they got the call to arms.

This raises the interesting prospect of using the basic tools of DMing (reaction dice and random encounter tables) to create the world - something which I have written about for, some time ago (here and here). In this case, encounter tables. Picture the scene: a random encounter is rolled with a band of humanoids (orcs, gnolls, bugbears, whatever). The DM goes through the usual process. But then he consults the Table of Homogeneous Amour and Armaments and Their Implications, and the world becomes richer:

Table of Homogeneous Armour and Armaments and Their Implications

1d20	Weapon A	Weapon B	Armour	Shield	Special attire
1	Javelin*	Dagger	None	None	Animal skull headdress
2	Spear	Club	Hide	Buckler	Feather headdress
3	Dirk*	Hand axe	Lamellar	Medium	Furs
4	Glaive	Cleaver	Hard leather	Large	Face paint and/or body paint
5	Axe	Machete	Splint mail		Flowers in hair
6	Great club	Garotte	Banded mail		Gaudy clothing
7	Trident		Chain mail		Sashimono
8	Falx		Padded/cloth		Ritual scarring
9	Bill hook		Paper		Tattoos
10	Bardiche		Soft leather		Conical hat
11	Blow pipe*				Skullcap
12	Long bow*				Dreadlocks
13	Short bow*				Feather cloak
14	Sling*				Horned helmet
15	War scythe				Elaborate beard
16	Mace				Ostentatious jewellery
17	Long sword				War trophies
18	Pike				Silk cloak
19	Military pick				Ivory jewellery
20	Harpoon*				Turbans or long plaited hair

*Only roll for Weapon B where Weapon A is asterisked.

Hence, we roll an encounter with orcs, and it turns out they are armed with great clubs, wear cloth armour, and have conical hats. What does that suggest to you? To me, it suggests a region, and a people, who either lack access to metals or have not yet figured out metallurgy, but who have nonetheless developed an advanced culture of a kind. Perhaps this due to some feature of the environment (they live in a swamp, or a river delta?), or perhaps it is a religious taboo. In any event, enough to riff on and populate a couple of 5- or 10-mile hexes.

Or we roll an encounter with gnolls, and learn that they are armed with javelins and machetes, wear no armour, carry medium shields, and wear furs. Here, the image that comes to mind is a tribe of forest-dwelling hunters, perhaps with shields of monkey or tapir hide, and clothing fashioned from the skins of jaguars killed in the hunt which makes one a man. Or, if the setting is more temperate, shields of aurochs hide, and wolf fur clothing.

Or we roll an encounter with goblins, and find that they are armed with tridents, wear paper armour and carry bucklers, and weave flowers in their hair. Clearly, they are a tribe of fresh-water lake-goblins, making their living from fishing and used to a semi-aquatic lifestyle (everyone knows paper armour is more effective when damp), who decorate themselves with the water lilies they use for camouflage when hunting prey.

And so on. Some tailoring of contents can obviously go on depending on the campaign setting and what has already been established within the region, and results like 'hide' or 'furs' are deliberately open-ended (in a coastal hex in an arctic region, 'hide' might mean walrus hide, whereas in a hot savannah it might mean elephant or giraffe, and so on). Feel free to tinker.