My character was a reactionary nationalist, so something traditionally Shayardene would probably make the most sense.
You mentioned that the old Royal standard was a griffin and sand eel? Or how about my family’s coat of arms?
1 Like
I first met them in the woods (I did not explore the caves). Here are my series of choices which got to that point. Obviously I didn’t explore some of the additional dialogue options on this playthrough.
It also worked when I did your quick launch to start in Ch. 3.
If you do the quick launch, pick the following:
- Noble, and they call me kuria. (This step may not be that essential)
- Intellect strong, Combat weak
- Yes. (Practicing Theurge)
- Very cosmopolitan.
- Reasonably skeptical.
- Name: Not important
- Breden’s sex: Not important
- …can’t stand each other. (Another Breden relationship.)
- …and saved the lives of the helots who had been meeting with Breden.
- Started smuggling over the Whendward Pass with Alaine Leybridge.
- Convinced Bleys the Telone and his family to join my band. We’re on reasonably good terms now.
- Paid a Diakon to carry out a Sacrament of Compassion.
- Did lots of interesting things, but apparently none of the rest of it matters?
- A young female noble named Suzane de Firiac.
- I welcomed Suzane.
- But I wasn’t about to rush into anything.
Then once starts Chapter 3:
- Hmmm. I want to see these travelers myself.
- “Time to see what brings them here.”
- Keep their bows at their sides, while I ask the strangers what business brings them to Whendward.
- “Kurios, there are many things I’d like to discuss with you. Please accept the hospitality of the Whendward Band.”
- “No, father. He’ll enjoy our hospitality, answer some questions… and in a day or two, he’ll be on his way.”
- I’m jovial with them all evening.
- “As you can see, kurios Horion,” I say with a forced smile, “I owe everything to my father’s loving care.”
- Friendly host.
- Neither – it doesn’t really matter to me what they know or where they’re going.
- Despite my skepticism, I give the offer a moment of serious consideration.
- No – I want to declare myself Eclect, without relying on the priest.
It is after part 11 that it has them dead. Perhaps it is a combination of being skeptical, and Theurge.
I’m curious @idonotlikeusernames, how do you plan of keeping the rebellion for total anarchy with such a massive disruption of the existing order? Is there any element of the existing power structure you can anchor your revolution too? Also how do you plan on keeping everyone fed without the power of theurgy that provides the 7 harvests a year that the Hegemony’s populace relies on?
Bafflingly, I don’t think I’ve really written any yet. I mean, lots of things like Harrowers and diadems and blood bandoliers, obvs, but nothing that goes well on a flag.
So while I think about it, consider me open for suggestions on what image or sign the Thaumatarchy would use to represent itself…
You jest, but this is actually a Khoimeinist policy. 
XOR already has the option to write in your own sigil, actually. But you only have the chance to get it if you kill some Alastors in Rim Square during the tax collector raid and want to misdirect the new Alastor captain so he doesn’t suspect you were after Bleys the Telone. Which I realize is a tad obscure.
In the new and improved (hopefully!) and expanded (unquestionably!) version of Ch 2, everyone will get that chance in week 10 of winter, if they’ve not had it before.
It’s their playthrough. If they want the chuckles of being kuria Trouser Monster with the Gilded Urethra as symbol of their rebellion, who am I to stand in the way?
Gryphon and Great-Eel – and the Gryphon will definitely be (and is already) one of the options.
@Lys, I may have fixed the problem – can you see if you’re still getting it?
4 Likes
We learn something new every day.
Are they fond of geometric shapes? Did they have any significant cultural symbols before they discovered theurgy and took over the world, or have they lost a lot of that old culture?
@Havenstone
It appears fixed. I did a short (jump to Chapter 3), and then a longer version (the one I described earlier) and it looks fixed.
Sorry to trouble you with such a bug, especially since it looks like no one else really got it 
2 Likes
A shield covering a drop of blood.
A hand print, preferably made with blood. (Ha! I wrote seven words! Fuck the police!)
It’s a message to the Hegemony that the blood of the helotry is both figuratively and literally being turned against them. Not to mention seeing a couple dead alastors slumped against a wall covered from one end to the other with bloody hand prints gives the unnerving implication of “we are many, there is no place our reach does not extend”.
Which isn’t actually true yet, but we’re building to that.
And of course it’s very simple. You can send a message quickly and easily without needing to be able to write or draw a legible picture. Plus, just stick you hand in something red and water soluble and slap it on your face and bam, scary war paint.
3 Likes
Probably the merchant caste and the trade guilds and, ironically the Telones, like Bleys who tax and monitor them.
Maybe some of the other lower officials in non law-enforcement departments and ministries can stay too.
It is also why the true revolution might need to come after the defeat of the Thaumatarchy, of course that requires walking the tightrope of both creating a “moderate” unity government that seems good on paper but is being deliberately set up to fail by my character and his movement.
In the end though that caste system simply has to be broken, considering that if it remains intact my mc won’t have any future at all.
For a symbol for the Thaumatarchy, how about the four provinces besides Karagond as a background, with an iron gauntlet on top? It represents how the Karagonds rule the rest of the Thaumatarchy with an iron fist. If you do choose this, then how about a broken gauntlet as a rebel sigil, to show how they can’t break/control us?
You MC personally could probably jump up the caste system given their importance to the massive social change. I wouldn’t think it out of the question to have notable helots enobled and given estates from those nobles who were loyalists. Possibly with said nobles taking thier place in the lower orders…
Anyway I was just reading about The Great Leap Forward and The Cultural Revolution and I saw some parallels with your plan. Mao obviously thought both were a good idea at the time.
@Havenstone I feel like the double helix is a prominent symbol of the faith and since it is a theocracy they would probably incorporate it somehow. Maybe flags are decedent and detract from adhearance to the faith? So any symbol other than those used by the Church are automatically rebellious and xaotic.
You’re not the only one to notice. 
Also consider that the China Mao grew up in was arguably a lot more fair and meritocratic than the Hegemony, so, yes, my character wouldn’t have much of a problem with destroying some decadent art and reigning in decadent. expressions of “culture”.
To reply to your statement more fully my character would probably encourage a “cultural revolution” in the Hegemony and while he’d rather avoid the famines that came with Mao’s great leap forward, if it’s the only way to break the caste system well…
You are underestimating just how pernicious the caste system is outright ennobling is likely impossible as the Hegemony currently suppresses the very concept of manumission. I’ve already mentioned the possible loophole around this from periods where our own historical societies rigorously enforced a caste system, namely to discover a great and noble “ancestor” and consequently a noble lineage. Except that my character would find such a charade odious to the extreme and needless to say that if a noble ancestor was found, instead of merely invented, in his lineage he would repudiate that individual hard likely to the point where even mentioning it in public would be treasonous in the new regime.
In either case declaring, or having yourself declared a “noble” does not make it so and you’ll likely never get a shred of respect from most your new “fellows”. Particularly true with my character as he wouldn’t like the lifestyle one bit, so he wouldn’t even try to pretend to be a good noble, especially when it comes to procreating and wearing ill-fitting fripperies.
I did already discuss this with @P_Tigras here once, I believe, but unless we’re declaring ourselves noble and seizing some prime property for ourselves I wouldn’t put it past, in fact I would expect it of, the new monarch to simply make us lord of a bunch of worthless rocks out in the middle of nowhere. Of course with the country being a bad place for research and knowledge my character won’t be eager to go back to the backwoods, whether as a nominal lord or not as there’d be nothing that really interests him there.
Just as my character likely thinks anything that has the potential to break the caste system for good is a good idea.
In short, jumping up has way more drawbacks to my character than just outright destroying the system and ending slavery, that is what he fights for, not in independent, monarchical Shayard, or a mere coup in the Thaumatarchy.
Another slight continuity error. If the various helots died, but you managed to rebel before prison…before Ch. 3, you get the option of laying traps to the camp, and a sentence reads this:
“We’ve left two safe ways into and out of this camp,” Pin informs you gravely when they’ve finished the last one. “Make sure everyone knows them, kuria. We’d hate to see anyone get crushed in a landslide along the main slope.”
The problem is that Pin would have been harrowed. Considering you’ve done alternate names on another path, you could possibly do something else similar here.
1 Like
So my MC’s trying to romance Kalt then I added Brenden on my suspect list. Somehow she left the band and so I went back to trying to romance Kalt. The thing is, before my 20th birthday, I was suddenly in the middle of the forest doing things with Brenden then my MC’s father appeared. So I think it’s a bug or something? Getting heavy with Brenden even though she’s no longer a romantic interest or???
1 Like
Whoops. Fixed now, thanks. (In the version which I’ll post at the next update).
Double whoops. That will be fixed in the new forthcoming Ch 2.
She has joined the unquiet dead.
People are easily forgiven in the hegemony.
3 Likes
@Havenstone Now that I’ve had the chance to think about this, would the Main Character actually be the one who chooses their organisation’s symbol? It’s not as though they’ll be calling a meeting with their marketing team to brainstorm a new logo. Instead, the symbol which people associate with your rebellion is probably going to evolve out of the shared consciousness of those illiterate helots depending on what they think the rebellion’s about.
So, a rebellion with a high Anarchy might spawn something suitably bloodthirsty, like Sneaks’ bloody handprint idea. Or if you’ve got a high Devout stat, and they think they’re rebelling against the corruption of their ancestral religion then they might well choose a religious symbol (like the Pilgrimage of Grace, with their banner showing the five wounds of Christ).
It might be interesting to use it to give the player some feedback on their choices to date, and what their followers think they’re fighting for. If the Main Character backtracks on this later on then they can probably expect some resistance.
2 Likes
A simple symbol for the rebellion I like, with obvious meaning, is three letter O’s side by side with a slash through the central O much like is often shown in 0’s. What we’re symbolizing here is the breaking of a chain. This is easily and quickly drawn by even the most incompetent artists such as myself. 
And for the more artistically inclined there’s all sorts of interesting artwork possibilities involving chains being broken, upraised manacled hands in fists or other meaningful gestures, or people otherwise wearing broken chains.
As for the symbolism, while the most obvious reference is to the freeing of the helots from slavery,that’s not the only possible reading into the meaning, as nationalists, “cosmopolitans”, “devouts”, and skeptics can all see different meanings in the oppressive chain that is being broken…
8 Likes
Celtic Knot, I know two words.