@Havenstone I said I wasn’t ruling anyone out in my hunt for the traitor, never took Breden on a raid, and when asked to dance refused, which is when Breden thought Zvad was going to kill her and ran away. In chapter 3 Breden was with me to talk to Horion and I chose to bring her and Simon to scatter Keritou’s sheep.
@WinterHawk @Sneaks Also, forgot to add but I had Simon lead the mule train.
I take it you were also a noble on that run? I wasn’t able to get everyone doing what you described, unless I was noble. Nobles get a slight boost to ambushing Hector because your followers find it easier to believe that Ciels is actually a better hunter than Hector from a noble than a helot. That’s probably what is making the difference.
- GRRM hasn’t written a last book yet.
- I very much doubt that GRRM will kill --everyone-- in his last book.
Hmm…In that case I foresee a low charisma MC having difficulty preventing a backlash against all things Karagond, including the transgendered, especially when every single sex change operation likely costs the lives of several helots just to get the needed blood to power the procedure…
Jokes my friend!! Jokes. Don’t take much of what I say for anything serious.
Still I can see GRRM killing the majority of the characters off and leaving only the absolute worst left but that’s trailing off of what this threads about and I’d really rather not get hit by the hammer of ban for derailing things… Truly a terrifying tool it is… Back to your usual scheduled rebelling.
Personally I’m most concerned with doing well against the veneurs with Combat. My Intellect and Charisma MCs will be going the more circuitous route of wrecking sheep, only my Combat MC will be kicking the shit out of Hector directly.
My Combat MC is an anarchist. He’s going to be murdering sheep. I’ll probably use the theurge against Hector directly.
I enjoyed much of the demo however, I got to a certain point and then it was just “zombies, zombies kill everyone” which was rather inexplicable. I’m not sure if that’s just a twisted way of saying you’ve reached the end of the demo or just a profoundly underdeveloped ending. There really wasn’t any build up to it.
Well, you see, you can ask certain people why that happened.
Cough cough @Winterhawk, @Sneaks and a few others.
Ha! 
Apologies for the inexplicable zombies. You’ll find a rather different ending now.
Small thing - you can accept the Lonos’ offer to declare you Eclect even if you are high in skepticism, which is described essentially as playing along with a convenient fiction, as is appropriate. However, the actual declaration still gives -50% skepticism, making you rather devout.
Certainly it makes sense for such a declaration to affect popular perception of your band - but given that skepticism is primarily used to track your personal opinion, it probably shouldn’t be so altered when its done insincerely.
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Have you played through since the tenth? That shouldn’t be happening anymore. The how and why that happened is lengthy and less important. But if you are really curious just read the thread from here on.
EDIT: @Havenstone, I’ve getting pages with only “then follows” or “next comes” after the reinforcement scenes. I think it might be happening because I don’t meet conditions to receive all the possible scenes (as in I have a stat that falls between 25 and 75).
Yes. The character you meet in Game 2 will be seeking an alternative way to transition.
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Also, (and forgive me if this has previously been discussed in the thread - it’s long enough that I hesitate to read it through completely) I’m a bit perplexed about the Xaos-storms. Given that they are described by an apparently trustworthy source as utterly, utterly terrifying and catastrophic, and given that the development of the aetherial blood refining process occurred relatively recently, as far as history goes - how on earth did civilization survive to get to this point?
The Xaos-storms began in historical memory – they’re not a timeless feature of the gameworld.
Eh…this specific conception of gender, transgenderism, and of ‘transition’ as a way of dealing with it, is so inescapably modern that it always manages to break versimilitude for me when its used in historical/fantasy settings. Past societies have had a decent variety of ‘takes’ on the differences between men and women, and of people who might not fit quite into those two categories, but at least as far as I’m aware, no society before the 20th century had the specific conception of men being trapped in women’s bodies, or vice versa, and needing physical reshaping in order to rectify the situation.
Aha. Well, hell. “Figure out the cause of the xaos-storms, and stop them” suddenly becomes a far more plausible answer to the question of harrowing. Particularly if, as the timing might suggest, they’re intimately related to begin with.
Well, I’ll use some modern shorthand terms on the forum (like “transition”) that I won’t use in the game, as that language would break immersion for me too.
As you suggest, non-binary concepts of gender are there in plenty of past societies (notably across South Asia). I’m pretty confident that sex dysphoria existed before our century, and people (individually and collectively) dealt with it in ways limited by the technology of their times; while other cultures conceived of third-genders, agender, or transgender people for reasons that had little if anything to do with sex dysphoria. This occasionally included limited physical reshaping; more commonly it involved adopting the dress and roles of another gender.
It wasn’t until the 20th century that medical technology allowed more significant reshaping for people who experienced sex dysphoria – and once it did, cultures began shifting in response to it. We’re still fairly early in that process.
In the gameworld, that technological possibility has existed for a few centuries. When you get out of the backwater where you grew up, you’ll see that Theurgy has produced a world which had an industrial revolution earlier than on Earth, too. So there will be various ways in which it has a more modern feel. For me, verisimilitude is broken by high-magic worlds which still look just like medieval Europe, rather than early modern or industrial. And I think it’s plausible that in a world where sex dysphoria is a thing and Theurgy exists, people would have used it to reshape their bodies.
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It was about a week ago, I just saw the threat at the top so decided to comment on it.
Well, certainly I’d agree that given that underlying idea of people born with the wrong sex (and given the power, whether technological or magical, to accomplish an appropriate alteration), ‘transition’ would be a very natural development, whatever term one might give to it. But it’s that very idea which is so vanishingly rare until the modern era. Even in your link, the identification is of a third option, not of actually, in some underlying sense, being the other one of a presumed two. It’s those third options, of one variety or another, that seem to be most common looking back historically, and as you suggest, it often appears to be for more social reasons than psychological or physical - ways for individuals to take on roles, positions, or relationships that would otherwise be forbidden in societies that are strongly patriarchical or otherwise limited by sex.
Taking a broader view of it, of course, I suppose one might imagine that the development of the modern conception is itself a natural consequence of the ability to effect such a change. That the unease or ill-fit that in pretechnological societies could only express itself in third-genderism will instead, given an awareness of the kind of changes which can be made to a human body, turns into what we now call sex dysphoria instead. Still…hm. I don’t know. It tends very much to be an identity of the powerless and the outcast, when it isn’t done for the aforementioned social-role reasons. If ‘treatment’ were necessarily confined to those who already had a great deal of wealth and power, it’s difficult to imagine that it would still take on something like the modern form.