Yes. In the old chapter 3, you could put a few of your gains during the winter to pain a mercenary to come and train your rebels. You also had the option of arming them with better equipment.
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I guess I am not following your logic; a sword becomes dull with use even after you use a whetstone to sharpen it. Why would a sword not become dull with use after using a spell in place of the whetstone to sharpen it?
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This is a bit different then sharpening by wetstone their otherwise mundane weapons can cleave through iron:
"The looted spears, axes, and swords of your followers are simple tools with a clear, violent purpose. To your altered senses, they shine starkly in a world of blurry complexity. Now you reach out with your mind and try to enhance their reason for being: to cut, to penetrate, to kill.
Just in front of you, one of your hapless bandits has brought her sword up to block an Alastor’s blow, clumsily and too late. The Alastor’s iron mace is clearly going to bat her weapon aside and break her arm. Instead, the mace shears in half when it touches her blade. Braced to receive a blow that never properly falls, the bandit lurches forward, her sword trailing erratically upward. Despite the poor angle, it cuts through the Alastor’s jerkin and ribcage as if they were cream.
All around you, the Hegemonic enforcers discover to their horror that their weapons and armor are worthless against your followers’ blades."
Even if the explanation is that this sharpness fades with use why not apply this change more broadly to all your bandit’s weapons back at camp rather than waiting for a crisis?
Same reason your levitation doesn’t keep going when you run out of blood. The elements in your body slowly “realize” they aren’t in fact meant to rise that much, and stop. Similarly, the sword “realizes” that its edge isn’t actually sharp enough to cleave metal. (Wile E. Coyote was a noted gravitational Theurge.)
Changing a thing’s telos is easy (relatively!) to do on a temporary and local basis, with reality quickly reverting to status quo once you stop shedding blood. Making a permanent and sustainable change is far more difficult, and takes both a better understanding of a thing’s underlying nature and a lot more blood – yours or others’.
(Readers in search of the series’ core metaphor will find it pretty close to the surface here.)
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Some easy things don’t change back/realize their telos imbalance though once the blood runs out like fire or stopping a harrower what is the difference there?
Also does this mean you can make weapon change like this permanent or at least long lasting (a couple of days even)? I can understand why the Hegemony doesn’t do this in practice but a more “democratically” minded theurge could do a lot with an army armed effectively with lightsabers and “lightarrows?”
Also are you saying we’ll all realize we are better off under the loving embrace of tyrannical rule eventually??? Wait…
You’d need a loooot of blood to keep all of that going, and I’m pretty sure that battles in Rebelverse tend to last a few hours, at least. It’s possible, but I think it takes too much to be viable.
Maybe what he’s trying to say is that changing people’s minds after years of tyranny would be hard? Because… people’s nature (telos, in this case?) has grow used with the Thaumatarch’s influence? I’m not sure, but this was interesting.
Just as the legs and arms you cut off with your “lightsaber” don’t reattach when the blood runs out… anything that has caught fire from whatever you temporarily made superhot will stay afire even when the superheat recedes.
The Harrower doesn’t restart for two reasons: it’s being driven by Theurgy at the time you intervene, not solely by its own nature; and forcing a few key gears to halt has a similar effect to throwing a car into reverse when you’re doing 70 miles an hour (well, the imagined effect, anyway, rather than the less dramatic reality). It sufficiently chews up the rest of the machinery that the Harrower won’t be working again any time soon.
Yes – or very, very long-lasting, anyway. A few days ago, I wrote the first Theurge-forged weapons into the game… a purported gift to your rebellion from the Laconniers (for those who’ve had occasion to meet a Laconnier).
If you’ve read Brandon Sanderson’s Way of Kings, think of how he’s written Shardblades – weapons used by an elite handful, and whenever they appear on a battlefield, all your standard infantry are pretty much screwed until another similarly armed warrior (or, in this world’s case, a Theurge) can arrive to engage whoever’s wielding the “lightsaber.”
But the cost-benefit of making permanent superweapons is poor. It takes more blood to make a single lightsaber than it does to convert several dozen weapons into tempsabers for an hour. And if you’re facing a Theurge with a lightsaber, they can (temporarily) dull it with only slightly more effort than a normal weapon, and do a variety of things to break or otherwise ruin it.
Halassur still puts a good share of its homefront Theurgy into forging superweapons, for cultural reasons we’ll hear more about in Game 2. The Hegemony prefers to counter them with Theurges; it forges a few supersabers for high-level captains and Plektoi soldiers on the Halassurq front, but more often if you see a Phalangite wielding a Theurge-forged weapon, it will be one captured from Halassur.
And whether or not you’ve met a Laconnier, you’ll have the chance to see that soon.
I’m saying that
(a) most efforts to throw off tyrannical rule get replaced by another tyranny, as the underlying structures of tyranny often persist despite the superficial regime change;
(b) to avoid this and actually make a sustained transition to a more open system takes a lot more thought, hard work, and sacrifice. And the choice of who’s going to bear the sacrifices is morally fraught.
And when you bring Xaos-magic into the metaphor, I’ll be suggesting things like,
(c) when the old order is simply levelled, the resulting chaos is often bad enough to make people nostalgic for the loving embrace of tyrannical rule (cf. Taliban nostalgia among Afghans who hated their rule while living under it);
(d) having chaos just across a border can be useful for tyrants, for a variety of reasons; and
(e) when any political actors – states or rebels – use anarchy as a weapon against their enemies, the chaos can take on a life of its own and spiral entirely out of control.
But that last one won’t properly come into play until Games 4 and 5. 
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So that means Evil Gandhi no anarchy has positive effects to the country? I thought the not anarchy it was a bad thing for us because helped our enemies.
Thank you! You answered all my questions, and one I didn’t even know I had.
So “in-world” do humans have a telos for how they expect to be governed? Or do human abstractions have a telos all there own like the state for instance? I wonder if arguing for classical liberalism in those terms might make sense to the people of the Hegemony ah la “State of Nature.”
In the short term, sowing less anarchy means that there will be more Alastors and Phalangites coming for you, yes.
In the long term, sowing too much disorder risks taking you off the cliff.
The Hegemony strongly argues that human nature demands a fairly specific governing structure – authoritarian, hierarchical, imperial expansionist. If they’re right, then anything else will ultimately fail once you stop pushing to unnaturally keep it in existence. (This is how they see the heretical Halassurq social order, for instance… though their ideological confidence in its inevitable fall has been somewhat shaken over the centuries).
People raised under the Hegemony absorb its view on the telos of the governing class and the governed classes. As you consolidate the shape of your new ruling order – whatever it looks like – you’ll have the chance to make the case to people that yours is the truly natural order of things. And you might convince them.
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Enlightening as always, Havenstone. Thanks. This has let me more pumped for the next books, if anything.
Speaking of which:
Are you a fan of Sanderson? Can we expect infiltrating balls in future books, Mistborn-style?
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Well, I don’t know if it’ll quite be Mistborn style. But yes, I’m a Sanderson fan, even when he’s being depressing as all hell.
And yes, in Game 2, we can look forward to infiltrating an aristocratic ball in Grand Shayard.
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I find it an interesting logical inconsistency that the Hegemony would readily admit that a blacksmith forging iron ore into a weapon vs a horse shoe definitively changes its telos and in different ways but that a human’s telos is immutable. Would they say a helot learning to be a miner vs a field hand is changing their telos in the same way as a lump of iron telos’ can be changed into a pickaxe or hoe?
It seems like you’re confirming my suspicions about young Simon…
I thought that maybe Hallasur invented the air rifle as a technological solution to partially counter the Hegemony’s advantages in raw Theurgy?
If so, I wonder if and when we’ll also be able to get some quality air rifles from our Hallasurq neighbours? Late in game 3, maybe, or that would be my best guess at least.
Unfortunately, not that it will deter my mc in the slightest of course. 
Everybody has got to make some sacrifices but my mc firmly intends for the (former) nobles to shoulder the brunt of it and we’ll see how that goes.
Yes, the infamous “anarchy cliff”, which my mc will need to come perilously close to in order to get the sort of societal transformations he wants going.
On the other hand the Hegemony is such a nightmare state that to its Helots at least even the Taliban would have seemed fairly benign, if perhaps still not truly benevolent by comparison.
And that is really the fundamental disagreement between them and my mc, who rejects their religion, their philosophy and its attendant caste system and will do everything in his power to destroy that way of thinking.
Symbolically I do hope we can switch from using primarily Hegemony brand theurgy to using genuine Xaos magic to combat it.
I hope that won’t require a charisma score of 7 and can also be achieved by using intellect and magic, otherwise my mc is screwed there.
Is that mandatory or can it be circumvented? If it can’t the clothes alone will probably make my character feel “impure” for weeks.
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Definitely not mandatory. Realistically, I think only nobles and high-CHA helots have a shot at it. There will be other plots in the city’s underworld.
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Yes, I understand. The premise of a bunch of rebels building a rebellion against what is arguably an oppresive regime is kind of like Mistborn, although your worldbuilding has a lot of differences from Sanderson’s, and your stories are different from his, despide a similar premise.
Ah, I only read the first Mistborn, but I have the second at home and am planning on beginning it soon.
I had a professor who grew up in Poland during the Soviet era who said things went the same way. The current government is very Catholic, so the women and other disenfranchised people are especially nostalgic, even though they were just as miserable under the old system (just for different reasons).
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Pssst…
I think Ch 2 is in a shape where playtesting would be useful again, so I’ve opened it up again.
In particular, I’d be grateful if you take the time to play through the new storymode (where you let your deputy steer) and let me know how that reads to you under different strategies.
Also, I’m happy to receive suggestions for other kinds of advice that your deputy should give (at the moment, it’s “focus on food first” and then “don’t neglect mules”).
The stat balance is a work in progress, which will go forward along with completion of Ch 4. But let me know if the current direction is an improvement on June’s update.
Oh, and let me know what you think of Ch 4 so far. We’re just about to get to the last battle.
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Chapter Four: Hounds of Karagon
[runvote = 1, zv_lead = 1, el_lead = 0]
[govote = 1, bred_lead = 1, simz_lead = 0]
[warvote = -23, rad_lead = 0, kal_lead = 0]
The tension is palpable among the cluster of outlaws
WHAT THE frick frack IS THIS. IM JUST A SMALL NB, TRYING TO LEAD MY BADLY ASSEMBLED D̶A̶W̶N̶ ̶B̶R̶I̶G̶A̶D̶E̶ REBELLION, WHY AM I ASSAULTED BY NUMBERS
I skipped to chapter 4 and this… thing
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But havie darling, how could you expect I trust my rebelion to Radvar and Zapdos? They are smelly peasants unliterate. If i let them planning something i will end with a 300 anarchy and my 43 men death. The y are STUPID AS ROCKS could I put a mule instead of helots? Mules are peaceful and have common sense stuff no damn rebel has.