There’s just too many things it locks you out of it, for me. You can’t even maintain order in the initial revolt, nor stop them from plundering afterward…hm. Actually, I guess that’s the last major limitation, at least for a while. Can’t do anything religious with Linos other than simply accepting his blessing, though.
Why would I want to maintain order? The objective of this war is to burn the Thaumatarchy to the ground, not make friends.
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This is the funniest thing I’ve seen all day. Can we just rename the Combat stat to the “Ass Beating” stat?
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I suggest that we all mod that in when the game’s released.
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Of course. Even a noble who believes in the aristocracy likely has met completely incompetent fellow nobles who he or she believes are stupider and more corrupt than the overwhelming majority of helots. And any noble with a decent education knows that before Karagond showed up there were no helots and the yeomanry was significantly larger. From there it’s not a big jump to conclude that the Karagonds forcibly enslaved large numbers of yeoman, turning them into helots. It’s just a matter of connecting the dots, which an MC noble is fully capable of doing. @Havenstone, please correct me if my game facts are off.
The caste system in the Xthonic religion isn’t entirely immutable, it just seems that way to the powerless. The Karagonds have already altered the faith once in order to justify the insitutionalization and subsequent enslavement of the helotry. Whispers are rampant on the corruption of the faith among the educated, including the nobility, but all fear speaking up for fear of execution. That existing undercurrent of suspicion that the state has hijacked and corrupted the faith is something a savvy MC can tap into and use to lead not only his or her own reformation, but to justify a holy crusade to revive and restore the “the true faith of Xthonos”, without the heresies the Karagonds duplicitously inserted, heresies the very same heresies used to justify the institutionalization and subsequent enslavement of the helotry.
If you claim the title of Eclect, then the MC become’s Xthonos’s chosen representative to right the heracies committed by the Hegemony. From there it is fairly straightforward to declare that Xthonos has heard the cries of suffering from his wrongly enslaved children, and that he has sent the MC to restore the true faith and end the blasphemous Karagond heresies that make one person the property of another. You can wrap your call to free the helotry in religious faith, and wrap both of those in an appeal to Shayardene nationalism as a restoration of the yeomanry, selling helot freedom to nationalist nobles as a return to the old pre-Karagond traditions that they desire.
It’s impossible to create a truly classless society. Whenever peasant rebellions have tried, they’ve always failed. There will always be some sort of class system even if there are no castes, and there will always be some people who will scheme to increase their own power, often at the expense of others. The best you can do is smash the more predatory ones when you can recognize them, and co-opt the more benign ones into your power structure. Sometimes, however, the ones that seem benign, are the most predatory ones of all, eg. Stalin.
Country nobility generally aren’t quite so foppish or impractical as those who spend all their time at court in the capital. That said, historically speaking, titles weren’t the meaningless things they are in most places today. They represented respect and a certain deference from government entities, like a right to due process and exemption from taxation, that the typical peasant just didn’t rate. As a result they were treasured, even by those who didn’t own much land or wield any real power.
From the moment the mass seizures being, you’re only one failed harvest away from mass starvation during the next winter. You don’t really have time to teach teachers who don’t already know how to farm, and if you have no noble buy-in, you’re going to find it difficult to find people who understand how to run farms that are willing to teach.
You will lose more helots in one year than in 20 years of harrowings, furthermore it will be women and children who disproportionately suffer the most, as order will break down as soon as its clear that there isn’t enough food for everyone. Gangs of young men, in order to survive, will prey on those weaker than themselves, stealing food from those more vulnerable. Cannibalism will also rear its ugly head. First it will be lovestock that is raided, and when the livestock runs out, it will be pets that are slaughtered for food. Nevertheless it won’t end there and eventually it will advance to neighbors secretly murdering each other’s children and eating them. So too will some husbands murder their wives simply to eat. And for your own troops to survive, they will have to steal food from everyone else, and you will become hated by the rest of the helots in the nation. Starvation drives people to do very grim things in the name of survival, and those who refuse to compromise their ethics in order to survive eventually become too weak to resist those who do. Finally morale will tumble, and the starving nation will become easy pickings for a neighbor inclined to invade, and if that neighbor engages in Harrowings, then it will all have been for nothing. On the other hand if the newly freed nation is fortunate enough that another nation does not invade, than many of those who survived the grim winter will have done so by committing terrible atrocities, worse than even those they had deposed. At least the Karagonds didn’t prey on their own.
It is true that many nobles would think like this. Nevertheless, a good leader, noble or not, would not, most especially not during a revolutionary war. Helots who’ve earned high ranks in the rebellion that the MC has run wouldn’t be satisfied with merely being some noble’s valet after having lead dozens, possibly hundreds or even thousands of men and women. Other rebels who hold both the MC and those helots promoted to valets in high esteem would feel betrayed by the MC who promised to free them and better their lives. A good leader rewards his top people, and to make someone who commanded men and women a valet would be a slap in the face. Plus, who better to give these positions to than people the MC trusts, and if the people you trust are helots, so be it. They are less likely to betray you than some noble who hasn’t fought, suffered and bled with you for the past several years of war.
Sending that floating palace crashing to the ground is the first thing I’d do. I’d stop making Plektoi too, and put a lot of effort into finding a way to get by without the wards. So we’re largely in agreement here.
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Just as I’ve met people who I value less than my dog, still that doesn’t mean my dog could do anything those people could conceivably do.
Sure, still that would more likely justify elevating a few choice Helots to the yeomanry rather than directly to nobility, which you can reserve for distinguished yeomen instead.
Possible, however unlikely, the moment it turns former Helots into anything more than sharecroppers, as that would eat too much into the privileges the same elite currently enjoy.
Since that means having to pretend to be pious and obeying at least some of the current doctrines, particularly the chastity and moral codes, that’s something my character could never do. His plan is to introduce as many different priests and religions into the realm as possible in order to undermine the Xthonic faith with freedom of religion.
I’m also not too fond of Shayardene nationalism, once my character learns more geography he will, as I’ve already done likely set his eyes on Avezia as the future capital.
Who will still be sharecroppers and not true yeomen with that outcome and it comes at the cost of the MC having to pretend to be a faithful holy person, of a religion he truly despises, for the rest of their lives.
@Havenstone I know it’s a nice to have thing, at best, but can a skeptical Helot MC get an option to just laugh in Linos’ face when he suggests the whole Eclect thing? As in “You’ve obviously missed your calling as the court jester, my good man, funniest thing I’ve heard all month!”
Unfortunately true, however that doesn’t mean my character won’t try and from a Helot pov there are simply no benign class-structures to co-opt in the entire mess that is Hegemony. Therefore the most attractive option is to scrap the whole lot and just start over from scratch.
Oh, I know that. Still being exiled to the backwater periphery again, far from any centers of learning and knowledge or international contact would still feel more like a punishment than a reward to my mc and he would certainly not treasure any silly title that doesn’t mean much in practice, doubly so if it means having to marry to father an heir to leave any sort of legacy at all. There’s a reason I prefer the grand canal to a noble house or title as my character’s post-rebellion legacy.
Still from a Laconnier perspective I recognise that it would be grand if they could banish the original, yet inconvenient, helot founder of the rebellion to play lordling on a couple of acres of wasteland out in the middle of nowhere.
Well we could make the great estates into collective farms to begin with, in the beginning the former nobles can even still manage them, while we take loving care of their families, of course should there be any unfortunate shortfall in harvests that doesn’t have damned good explanation, they’ll know who is dead last on the food priority list.
Unfortunately all true, that’s why we’ll need be smarter about it than Mugabe or Chairman Mao.
There’s a number of things that could potentially be done, from keeping the families of the former noble managers hostage to offering them a good-sized farm of their own as reward for doing their patriotic duty and teaching their new compatriots for a number of years to possible cash-buyouts for the smaller former noble holds.
If the Karagonds preyed on their own depends on if you count the Karagond Helots as part of “their own”, one would think.
Any truly devastating famines need to be avoided, a few mild ones that would possibly allow for the culling of some enemies and the excess free population in the cities slums, while regrettable to be sure, might also have an upside.
Assumes the one doing the rewarding, in your case the new Laconnier monarch is in fact a “good leader”
A noble MC can likely become the King, or at the very least the King or Queen’s spouse with just a little shakeup of the system, for a Helot to be taken seriously in such a role would require utterly shattering the system, and if you succeed in shattering the culture, then why even go for something as old and boring as a monarchy?
If the MC doesn’t run the new monarchy him or herself, which is unlikely, at best, in the case the MC is Helot, then whatever they have or have not done during the rebellion becomes a moot point.
True, but those people don’t necessarily have to be the top agents of the MC’s rebellion though. It’s also likely many aristo’s would view it as “putting those people back in their proper place” rather than a slap in the face.
Going for a Laconnier monarchy means the MC will have to give up control at some point, so what they want may not matter much anymore at that stage, post-rebellion.
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Another small bug, this one in strangers2, line 6576. If you only qualify for the devoutness bonus followers, the high-nationalism ones aren’t going to happen; that “then follows” should only be triggered if natl > 74, without the skep < 26 as well. Otherwise, you can get a page that just says “Then follows”
also, not really a bug, but it sucks that Carles the jongler, in the intro, can’t survive when you have an aristocrat character. 
When I first played I wasnt very into the story. But your updates are amazing. There story has me captivated and the length and realism the characters and their feelings portray is amazing. I can’t wait to see the future of my rebelion. Great job
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Not literally true, otherwise you wouldn’t need followers. Increasingly so once the rebellion progresses, one would assume.
Why think in such anachronistic terms?
Agree with you there buddy!
We aim to please. 
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Another slight issue, in chirex.txt, around line 3829 - if an aristocrat picks the first option in the fake choice, the next page will begin with a double line break, which looks a bit ungainly.
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Ah! The arrogance greater than 1 line DOES exist! strangers.txt, line 3806, talking to Horion; a suitably arrogant noble can say he doesn’t want to change the lot of the helots at all. But you can only get that level of arrogance by the rather counterintuitive method I mentioned before.
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Dominic, you’re a treasure. I’ll fix those as soon as I’m at my laptop.
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@Havenstone Keeping your skep and devout balanced means you’re perceived as tolerant of both skeptics and devouts of all religions, right? Also, how does knowing if Horion might be Archon going to help you in game 2?
I don’t think “all religions” really comes into play, at least in what we have so far. There’s Xthonos, and there’s skepticism about Xthonos.
And the forgotten gods of Wiendrj. That or the secret gods; I forgot.
EDIT: Plus whatever Erestians and Abhumans worship. And the hallusar.
Yes, but they haven’t come into play. Everyone you can encounter is either Xthon…ic, or skeptical.
I assumed in later games it will have an effect, and wondered if it would mean you were tolerant of all beliefs.
@Havenstone When choosing your family name, it should be Your family is known as rather than are known as. Also, you should have an option to raid nobles and merchants without changing your mind about hegemonic authorities.
Also, when looking through the code, if your deputy dies in chapter 3 and you choose Elery, you wrote him instead of {xhim} and the correct sentence should be The others will take it as a sign of worthlessness and give up on him.
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