Easy! They can’t read her mind either!
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Not through all the telos of the intervening trees, you can’t - one reason why you camp among the trees to hide from the flying theurges.
That may be a limitation of the MC’s own rudimentary skill. From @Havenstone’s defense of the theruge ambush they may well be able to see the band and pretend they don’t. They might just be keeping tabs.
Here is how the litany goes: “I look beyond the ephemeral. I see the nature of things, their reasons for being, the final causes of all their motion. I see that nothing comes into the world without purpose. Fear does not cloud my vision. I see the world without its masks. I see myself without a mirror. I see the ends of all things. And I know, I am the nature behind nature. I am the cause beyond the final cause. I am a Maker of Change.”
At the Harrowing the MC even describes being able to see through people’s clothes: “Your disorientation isn’t you falling away from the world; rather, you are directly sensing the world falling all around you, the stones and water striving downward and the air and fire upward, each element seeking its natural resting place in the cosmos. Behind the clear, bright shapes of their clothing and tools, the people around you have become seething blurs of complexity, so dense in detail that it hurts you to try to focus on them.”
Seems like a tree would be much less complex than a human and a strong enough elemental signature might be able to be seen beyond what the eye can see, like a forge or something perhaps.
You’ll just have to use the charm for which you’re famous, Mara…
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WHO are good helot followers …Yes You’re! Go fetch that Hegemony structure Yes good doggy I mean commoner 
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It seems my ideas about camouflage aren’t all that out there … maybe I had some good ideas after all 
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I don’t think I said they were a bad idea. In practice yeah we totally need to find a way to conceal rebels from theruges. I just don’t know if our IRL understanding of color patterns that deceive the human eye will work on a theruge. It would certainly work on the more mundane of the Hegemonic servants.
I also suspect that telosflage is possible but we just don’t know how to do it yet.
Yes and no. You’re right that on a fundamental level you’re not “seeing” teloi with your eyes. But that’s how you (and most sighted people) experience it. Your reliance on your eyes for understanding the world is (to a great extent) carried over to your use of Theurgy.
Some teloi are so strong or (as in the case of the clothes and the people) the contrast in complexity is so great that you’ll experience them as if you’re seeing “through” something that would normally block your line of sight. But you’ll only be able to focus on them if you have some idea they’re there; you wouldn’t notice a person through a stone wall on the strength of their teloi alone. And you’ll more easily lose your grasp on something you’re trying to Change if you don’t have and maintain a proper line of sight to it.
A very experienced Theurge – or someone who starts off relying primarily on another sense – might experience teloi very differently, independently of sight.
Edit: @cabinpersephone, I’ve not been able to replicate those errors in Ch 3, and I wonder if they might be glitches caused by my updating a game file while you were playing. When you have a moment, can you check again and see if you can get them to recur?
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@Havenstone If I skip to chapter 3 directly some stats and choices act weirdly also phantoms are leading my rebellion also I have debts in middle of Forest
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Thanks for that info and that makes a lot of sense given that the secret sauce of the magic seems to revolve around entering a trance. Capability with theurgy must always be limited to the individual’s ability to let go of the reality they are accustomed to and embrace the reality behind reality without condition. In other words, “Is that air you’re breathing Neo?”
I have been thinking about this a bit and I think the key problem with chapter 2 is the randomness. Choice games are most effective imo when the choices are about tradeoffs. I think the way to engineer this is that you can’t get everything you would want but without the dice roles. A Ghandi is going to lose people to sickness and starvation, a ruthless bandit will alienate to populace, and someone who tries one of the various middle roads will need to make a compromise on one of those. That is the key to making the winter feel hard in that the choices are gut renching compromises between raiding yoman farmers and seeing your band’s children starve.
I think the ways To accomplish this is to not permit the raids to be repeatable like before with vastly increased totals for what you need to survive and thrive in the winter. This would be representative of the fact that there is a very limited target profile in this rural area that your rag tag bandits are actually capable of taking on. If the MC is willing to raid nobles and the church but not the less fortunate they should be able to barely make it with a few dead but with the aristocrats and church howling for their blood for instance and not even two left over coppers to rub together.
I understand this is not reflective of really leading a band in the woods where uncertainty and death are everywhere but even with the randomness you can’t avoid the player “perfecting” a play through with choic script. Now they just need to do it a bunch more times until you get lucky which is just frustrating rather than gut renching.
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Then I just should skip playing the game and directly go to game over or turn cannibalism. I have 43 people I can’t raid like 123 people I don’t want to so if i only could choose the only damn choice i could choose once in 3 months I just can’t survive a damn weeek. It’s like said Robin hood sorry robin you only could steal and use bow once in the winter deal with it.
For the winter, yes, however successfully completing the tax raid and recruiting Bleys should give us access to some more resources, maybe not even after the winter, but after we survive the Hegemony reprisals to resume our fight with. As that was the whole idea behind the tax raid right, sacrifice some resources now for a potentially big payoff later?
But those tithe barns seem to be absolutely stuffed to bursting!! Therefore I think someone willing to really ruthlessly go after that corrupt church with some extra’s from raiding the de Merre’s should be able to make it through the winter with most people, including the children alive, but it comes at a potentially great cost to the morale of our more superstitious rebels, which seems to be a big penalty in and of itself since it would likey lead to Radmar, or even devout Breden taking that portion of your followers and splitting away from us, possibly for good. Which would likely increase anarchy even further, which in turn means we’d need to be more careful in the future in order to not go over that “anarchy cliff”.
Of course for my character personally it would confirm that the Church and its Ecclesiasts are nothing but horribly corrupt, worse than even the nobles, peddlers of nonsense, but that’s a though sell in mostly devout Shayard (particularly when made by a bookish gay former helot would-be mage, or in short someone who represents everything that religion condemns).
Which is why I think that it would have been easier for someone like my character to start a rebellion in Nyral or Erezza where the Church of Xthonos seems a fair bit less influential in practice. Sadly, unlike Horion the mc has to take what they can get and doesn’t have the luxury of planning that far in advance.
Then again my mc’s shit list goes in this order. (Which is handy to remember when @Havenstone is going to force our poor characters to make even harder compromises in the upcoming games)
- The Xthonic faith and its caste system.
- The worst of the collaborators nobles.
- The Karagond Thaumatarchy.
Aw, being merciful to the de Merres lowers your credibility with both helots and aristocrats now, instead of increasing it with the aristos. Guess that’s off the list - it’s damned hard to get the aristocrats to like you.
It is not st all if you know how play your cards
Yeah, it should be, they are, after all, the collaborators who profit most from the current barbaric system and stand to lose (a lot) if it changes. With the exception of the Karagond nobles themselves who are the masters of the current mess and for whom there can be no mercy (at least not in any revolution my character leads).
It think that, unless you’re Mara, if the nobles like you, you’re doing something wrong at this point.
So don’t be. I do wish we could capture them alive so we could either ransom them or give them a trial and a proper execution though.
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It is, Mara. Aristocratic credibility boosts are few and far between; I’ve checked the code.
Bah, not at all. My primary character notion is an aristocrat with a firm belief in noblesse oblige - they are the rightful rulers, but they must be just and generous in that role.
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I have the most of them abhor you publicly But a growing number is becoming sympathetic. Is easy if you know play your cards. And Is Mara. You have to renounce saving death weight in square, no anarchy and be charming with the correct people help the good cousin defend right stuff.
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Mara… you can always quit your own rebellion and join mine as my spy mistress… you know that it would be brilliant … us together to rule the world 
@Havenstone will have his hands full making sure we don’t break his walls of immersion.
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Just don’t let her prepare your victory dinner. That never ends well.
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2 weeks later zolataya was found dead with a mule next to the body with a note attached saying “I did it”
The great mule war started a few days later
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