Baronial Knights

The Barony does not produce knights - the hereditary nobility of the petty kingdoms are expected to be capable administrators, planners, strategists, and logisticians - many of them also train with weapons, but this is mostly for personal, pragmatic reasons, and not socially expected. The culturally enshrined/romantic warrior archetype in the Barony is the mercenary soldier; usually the heavy infantry fighter, but also more specialised types: the fierce medium skirmishers known as arditi, valiant and clever kill team captains, and, of course, adventurers. Both light and heavy cavalry do feature in Baronial field armies, but neither is of especially high quality - competent and capable of everything you would expect them to be, but not elite troops. On the Southern steppes, by contrast, cavalry make up nearly the entire force of a given nomad army or warband, and fighting on foot is done only when there is no opportunity to avoid it (another post soon on the low-status but extremely…