Let the big edits begin…
In response to your abundant feedback, I’ve considered how best to change the Prologue so that
(a) it doesn’t push you into being a helot-lover,
(b) it gives evidence to underpin the other dimensions of “what I hate about the Empire” for your stat-setting choices in Ch 1,
© it shows the oppressiveness of the Ecclesiasts and Alastors, and
(d) it demonstrates your bravery and precocity as a kid – when not about to be eaten by Plektoi.
FairyGodfeather had a good suggestion about including a faith figure after the trauma of the Plektoi… but upon consideration, I think that trying to fit background on faith and nationalism into the current prologue will just stretch it out into shapelessness.
Instead, I think I’ll allow you to pick your prologue. One of them (the current one) is the “isn’t-the-Empire-horrible-to-helots” path. Another, in which Ecclesiast Zebed arrives in Rim Square, violently replacing an earlier, gentler town cleric, centers on the Imperial religion and supports your Ch 1 choice to either be devout or skeptical. The third, in which a traveling bard holds you rapt with stories from other lands and Shayard, and is eventually killed by suspicious Alastors, will give background for your choice to be nationalistic or cosmopolitan.
In other words, each prologue will explain the background for one of your three opposed stats, without requiring you yet to pick which way you’re going to swing. The opening would thus look something like this:
[b]PROLOGUE[/b]
No one ever asks when your rebellion began. They assume the answer is obvious.
They would be surprised to learn that it began eight years before any price was put on your head; before any priest damned you as a servant of Xaos; before your name was known to anyone outside the Shayard Rim. It began the first time you found yourself eye to eye with a man who intended your death.
He could have killed you with relatively little consequence. All the power of the Karagond Empire stood behind him; you were just a provincial child.
And even as a child, something in you understood. Under his serenely murderous stare, you knew that in the end it would come down to yourself or the Empire.
Not incidentally, it was also the first time you had been confronted with:
*choice
#The depths of the Empire's cruelty to its lower castes.
*set introhlt true
*goto helotrunaway
#The Empire's intense persecution of even the mildest of religious heresies.
*set introrel true
*goto heretic
#The Empire's suppression of the folkways of all other nations, including my own.
*set intronat true
*goto travelingbard
Thoughts?