Death to the Stormcloaks…
Hopefully fixed the latest bug batch.
Good call. I’ll add that in.
The least violent solution, alas, is to focus on protecting yourself rather than trying to strike back at Hector. And like most nonviolence, it comes at a cost in your followers’ lives.
It should. 
I’ll have a look at that before all’s said and done.
Yes.
Ultimately, there is none. But that doesn’t mean you have to become a Theurge.
Yes. You’ll spend the second chapter of Game 2 based near the Brecks again.
I hear this, and gave a bit of thought to it before pushing the update – but anything else didn’t feel consistent with the way I’ve currently written the MC and cousins. Calea’s the one who was always cruelest to you, and you know she has her family interests ruthlessly foremost in mind; it comes as a huge surprise to the MC that she’s willing to collude with you because she’s come to see that as in the Keriatou’s interests.
There’s no reason a noble MC would expect a direct approach to Calea to end well at all, especially when the overture would come just after losing ${randfoll} followers to her brother. From the noble MC’s perspective, Calea despises weakness. The last time you’d expect a parley to work would be when you were on the back foot.
Of course, I could change the way I’ve written the MC and cousins. But I like the dynamics as they’re shaping up. There will be options in Game 2 for a noble not in love with Hector to choose collaboration with Calea (as there will be for a male helot to become her lover – @idnlun, the Dann story will turn out to be even less straightforward than the story of Kalt and Markos).
“Cousin marriage is reasonably common in the gameworld.” Like P_Tigras said, it keeps the property rights in the family. However, in your case, the relationship results from “the highly unwise love match between their great-grandfather’s brother and your great-grandmother,” so the last ancestor you shared were great-great-grandpa and grandma Keriatou. No longer living, and rather less awkward.
@WinterHawk, I’ll consider your suggestions seriously as part of the final rebalancing and edit. Except for 3, where I figured that totally wasting one of your handful of blood phials might be a game-restarting annoyance for many readers and that I’d have mercy.
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I’d echo the request for moar theurgy but for me it would be at the Brecks ambush in addition to the Hector ambush. Feel like a little blood magic should get those shepards to throw down their weapons with a bit less rancor than the traditional method.
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@cascat07, Good point. I’ve written in Theurgy as a last resort for the Brecks ambush, but there’s not a good reason that it should need to be.
On a different topic: A friend recently pointed out to me that the MC doesn’t have a whole lot of emotional/psychological reaction to the violence around them – notably to killing people or having them killed. I think that’s accurate. I did write a physical reaction if Iokasta de Merre dies in front of you in a particularly ugly way, but otherwise it’s easy to read the MC as not just ruthless but psychopathic. For most people, ruthlessness comes at a psychological cost; and I’ve not yet written that.
I’ve been wondering how best to write the MC’s reaction to all the blood and horror and killing. (As opposed to the reactions of others, which have taken up plenty of column-inches so far). There are a few reasons I haven’t launched into it yet.
- It’s always risky to tell people what they’re feeling. But I do this a fair amount with what makes the MC angry, and I could do the same with responses to violence. Or I could have a choice of psychological reaction, allowing the reader to co-author the character (even if IRL you don’t have a choice).
- My time in Afghanistan left me believing that in a culture and context where the experience of mass violence has become normal, people’s psychological reactions to death and killing are often a lot more muted than people coming from cultures that experience violence as a devastating exception to the norm. But that’s not a reason to leave it out, or to default to the casual psychopathy of an Elder Scrolls protagonist.
- I’m pretty neurotypical myself, and probably tend to write characters who’re more like me – despite the MC and co. having undergone formative traumas that are nothing like mine.
- It’s one more bloody thing to write.
What do you all think? What’s appropriate, what would you like to see?
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I personally wouldn’t spend to much time on it until the MC has a chance to do something other than survive. I agree with you regarding desensitization and since in the MC’s world observing a harrowing is a fairly normal activity I wouldn’t expect blood and guts to elicit much of an immediate reaction from anyone except children at their first couple.
There are two opportunities for an introspective gut punch (or not) that occur to me. The feast and the religious ceremony. If the MC has an the opportunity to remember the fallen, their actions, or ponder the course they are charting in life it would be then. For the feast in particular during the toasts the MC can throw one in and have an introspective moment that is disturbed by Breden asking to dance.
For me combat stress manifested in-country as nightmares vivid enough to wake me up, particularly hearing explosions that weren’t real. I never did any deep thinking though until I was home. Your heart gets a bit hardened when they are trying to kill you…
As for my overall thoughts on the merits of inclusion. I don’t think it should be a priority. Again until the MC is in a bit more secure position I think its a rational explanation that any physiological impact is happening off screen. Until it is more important to the MC’s big decision moments as a more established leader that is.
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My character IS a ruthless sociopath, She doesn’t care for the people around her. She sees them as tools, disposable products. She has respect for nobles, but helots… If there’s a choice between save a horse and save an helot her first-hand inclination is save the horse. But of course, She knows that she has to pretend care for them. So please, if you want add emotions, please add a no emotions sociopath path.
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I think this is certainly a valid path and Stalin/Hitler-esq leader should be an option, but I think there should also be consequences. Your followers that are perceptive of human nature and character should be the first to get wise to you like Breden. Fortunately for you @poison_mara that’s probably the first person on your list…
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Also don’t forget as Hitler Stalin Castro. My Evil Gandhi has a unique charisma and a religious mumbo jumbo ritual Kenon in Mara de Jade case. Breden hasn’t that mesianic halo and my character is prepared to kill her reputation. She couldn’t participate on anything and I made her being suspicious of treachery so I don’t care her she would be purged soon. So bye bye Danger ape.
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My aristo is sweet and innocent.** Let them eat cake?!**
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So a Mary Antoinette character, cool. So a frivolous charismatic Aristo girl flirting her way through With a motherly issue with helots.
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Yeah, my character isn’t nearly enough of a masochist to fall for that one, even if he were straight or bi. While it might be necessary for him to keep his ultimate plans about a secular and classless society to himself until we’re nearing the end, the Keriatou’s are just not nobles he could ever work with. Both Hector and Calea would provoke a murderous rage at this point. The only use those two would have to him alive would be as experimental subjects for his magic.
About the Dann story the only thing that really matters to my MC in the end is that she used him and had him Harrowed for it in the end, what comes in between is far less important to him than the end result of that affair.
Well personally I think my mc could pretty much tolerate any amount of violence without flinching so long as he could intellectually justify it to himself as being “for the cause”, which ironically might mean that brutally butchering the Keriatou’s might give him both (fleeting) satisfaction and a bunch of nightmares. Like Cazarosta in the Infinity series, though obviously in a slightly different way my MC is at his core an idealistic fanatic, but hopefully a shrewd and calculating one, willing to do pretty much anything to turn his vision into reality.
Since it’s decidedly not a religious vision that makes him a cold, logical rationalist most of the time (though people like the Keriatou’s might trigger a less than rational reaction at times).
Like I’ve previously said, he would ideally wield (the threat of)violence as a scalpel, even if cutting out the current mainstream culture is going to be a tall order.
All in all my psychologically it’s highly likely my Helot MC is somewhere on the spectrum of high functioning autism disorders and his mild charisma, along with any interest from the likes of Calea, might be mostly due to a physical appearance that is significantly above average.
The physical clumsiness part might even be manifested in the com 0 stat, now that I think of it.
Now imagine that “they”, as in the Hegemony and the nobles were trying to (ab)use and kill you from pretty much the moment you could think for yourself, I’d say that ought to harden one’s heart a fair bit.
This seems the most likely scenario to me and it would also mean @Havenstone could delay writing anything at length about this until the second installment. Not much opportunities for grand reflection and manifesto writing have come to us so far, after all as we have been far too busy with just surviving.
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I only get the impression Calea is crueler when playing a helot. As a noble, Hector comes across as the crueler of the two. He’s the one who pursues a cruel vendetta against you all through your childhood. Calea may be cutting, but it doesn’t come across as personal, and at times she even seems fascinated with you, her impoverished cousin. And with Hector you only really get to see the chink in his armor if you have the summer-long romance with him. With the unacted upon crush and the one night stand options, you have nothing other than blind wishful thinking to base your attempted approach of him on. So while I support your desire to stay true to the personalities of the characters that you’ve written, what you’ve said is not what comes across to someone playing a noble.
I hear you, but
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Approaching her brother strikes me as being even more foolhardy than approaching her as he appears to not only share her contempt for weakness, but has historically viewed the MC as if he were a walking, breathing stain upon the family’s honor.
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You seem to be saying that despite growing up with her, it’s impossible to understand Calea well enough, regardless of your character’s social intelligence, to get a good enough sense of her motivations to play to them to your mutual advantage, or to sufficiently understand the delicate political situation the MC’s rebellion has placed her house in, and have an idea how she’s likely to react to it. This strikes me as odd. As the poor impoverished relation, I’d think the MC would have had significant motivation all through his or her childhood and teen years to develop a strong understanding of his/her cruel, but extremely affluent cousins, not only to avoid painful missteps, but also to get as much as he or she can out of the familial relationship.
Ok, hurry up and get to part 2 then. 
So that makes you and Calea/Hector 3rd cousins then, which is legal nearly everywhere, not that I’m masochistic enough to find the idea of marrying either of them an enjoyable thought. A roll in the hay in very controlled circumstances, maybe; hate sex can be powerful, lol, but actually attempting to settle down with one of those two comes across as a blunder of epic proportions.
Speaking of how it’s a bad idea to tell people how they’re feeling… While I don’t hate Breden enough to want to kill her the way Mara does, Breden rubbed me the wrong way so badly initially for this reasion, that I still don’t care for her. That’s why I always lied about my sexual preference at the beginning of the game until I wrote a little mod so I didn’t need to any more. I greatly prefer Suzanne over Breden.
This is one of those “Truth is Stranger Than Fiction” tropes. Just like cars that explode when they catch on fire, people vomiting when they kill for the first time has sort of become the expectation for non psychotic characters even though very few people do so in real life. Imagine for a second the first battle of a war when most of the soldiers who survive the first shots on the front lines are too busy vomiting after their first kills to fight or do anything else. Sounds ridiculous doesn’t it? Yup. But for some reason “decent people always vomit after their first kill” has become a “Hollywood truth” that has since found its way into books. So we read about people vomiting so much now that we’re more suprised now when they don’t.
Personally I prefer that my reading, even my fictional reading, be more realistic in terms of both the human mind as well as overall cause and effect, improving our understanding of the world that actually exists, and giving us a sense of how we can triumph over the uglier parts of reality and make the world into a better place. So things like exploding cars, heroes always vomiting, and/or heroes always throwing down their weapons when a villain puts a gun to a hostage’s head, tend to bug me. Since instead of illuminating how the world works, they create a false and sometimes dangerous expectation instead.
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@p_tigras (i’m sorry, I forgot to reply)
People aren’t talking about the, you know, more realistic, but less obvious effects. Like dissociation and shock (acute stress reaction, not the bleeding kind).
I do agree with you on Hollywood is overblown - barely anyone vomits after killing someone and some things are just silly; but growing up, seeing and learning about people my mother helps, and being an abuse survivor myself, the effects of trauma aren’t always that strong at first or immediately noticable or even noticable by other people at all.
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You’re absolutely right here. Those sorts of effects are very realistic, and as you say they can often be extremely subtle and hard to notice by others. I’m not without first-hand experience with this issue myself. I think the psyche of nearly the entirety of this fictional nation’s society has been deeply and profoundly affected in a very negative way by the extreme brutality they are forced to regularly observe and are utterly powerless to prevent.
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Few questions about the whole body modification bit if you’ll indulge me:
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Do thruges do it to themselves or other humans and to what extent is considered normal?
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Is blood magic used in place of minor cosmetic procedures like braces for instance?
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Are their modified super soldiers out there?
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Can thruges extend their lifespan or slow aging?
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To questions 3 and 4 that answer is yes. The modified super-soldiers are called the plektoi and are very much the product of theurgy. Bones as hard as steel and all that.
As to the fourth point considering one of the previous Thaumatarchs lived for nearly 300 years that is a yes, though it might be restricted to the very powerful.
As for your first question, I’d say that’s a given considering the answers to your later ones, though obviously they likely take much better care with what and how they do to themselves than with what they do to others.
Question 2 is the most intriguing to me, but if the Hegemony is focused as much on physical (and mental) perfection as some of our Ancient Greek philosophers I’d almost certainly say that’s a yes. Though maybe wierd taboos prevent this from being discussed in public, as doing it or having it done is an admission that one fell short of perfection to begin with?
IIRC, there are some Byzantine elements in this universe. Yet I can’t help but think of Shayard as more Celtic.
That’s because it is, though the wealthier coastal parts are apparently more French than Anglo-Saxon in inspiration.
Historical Shayard was likely what might have been the product of an unholy Franco-British union under one monarch.
The Greek/byzantine culture comes entirely out of Karagond proper though provincial nobles are apparently required to assimilate into it to a greater (the Keriatou’s) or lesser (the de Firiac’s) degree. With greater degrees of assimilation usually opening up more paths to power and influence.
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Yeah, I’m trying to recall the information from a few months ago… It’s slowly coming back to me.
I think some psychological reaction to the violence would be nice. I love playing as an almost idealistic noble striving for a peaceful revolution; accidentally getting a lot of innocents killed probably should mess with their mind.