Oh i have reject being declared Eclesiast i dont like that religion and my charisma serve me well enough to being followed without that anoying priesthood. A prieshood that is maintaining a blood saceifice system.
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I don’t think that’s in the original Canon, just in the stuff the Karagonds tacked on later…
Maybe yours doesn’t, but I went to Cornell.
Some of the unbelievable power granted by Theurgy is dimmed a bit without ready access to aetherial blood, at least, which requires institutions to produce and so isn’t necessarily available to every Tom, Dick and Artemidoros with theurgical training who wants personal power. But close governmental association and control of theurgical institutions seems inevitable, much like you kind of need governments to be in control of tanks and jet fighters.
And you really gotta hope that there isn’t much in the way of mind control via theugy.
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Tanks and fighter jets have no agency (and no claim to it) because they are machines. When the weapon is the human themselves things get a bit more complicated. Never mind that they are also engines, power plants, and combines. The existing society depends on therugy. I don’t think the 7 harvests it currently provides is all surplus. If the thruges stop ripening the crops someone is going to starve and my bet isn’t on the guys and gals that also happen to be generating the Hegemony’s sorties…
Oh, no doubt it’s more complicated, but that’s the rough analogy I’d make.
Kind of an odd point about the food, though. I’m not sure how prevalent the theurgical harvesting is really meant to be - probably it’s been posted about somewhere or other. But if it’s truly commonplace, and as significant as one supposes, it would mean that the game world’s experienced an early, magic-powered agricultural revolution like that of 18th-century Europe - which historically resulted in widespread urbanization as masses of farmers become less necessary to feed the population. Here, that would be fewer helots, or potentially a shift of helots into cities for non-agricultural work…but I’m not under the impression that that’s supposed to be going on.
It’s as if this is the end of the world and everyone will die if the crops aren’t magically flourishing.
Never mind that people are already dying of way more stupid things than starvation, such as, I don’t know, being Harrowed for blood to raise crops.
How about you spread manure on your damn crops, like normal people? 
We need an industrial revolution to keep up with farming, which isn’t happening if here is all refusing outside machinery in favour of their weird indoctrinated mages. We don’t need more Theurges or more blood when we could just get better equipment.
About farming Shayard and everyone lived perfectly before the Theurge. For me was thee theurge a poison through life. Yes it give advantages but it is not worth the price. No more city in the skies no more wards. I am firmly belive the xaos storms are created by the theurge in a sort of butterfly effect in the atmosphere. I will let the healing theurge and create a blood bank similar to our modern blood bank . Like helots wont be reproducing like rats and the use of mullow i wont need so much food and i will wipe out all karagon so yeah no so need of food.
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7 harvests a year is only barely possible with the most mordern technics like hydroponics and electric grow lights and that is with extremely fast growing crops like lettuce. I don’t think anyone is getting 7 grain harvests a year today. Saying we just need an industrial revolution is like saying that all the Romans needed to defeat the Huns was cruise missles. This society has evolved along completely distinct lines from ours. I think part of the reason helots are still necessary is because the means to grow crops faster has advanced to modern levels due to theurgy but not the ability to harvest at modern levels. In place of mechanical harvesters driven by fossil fuel you have an army of slave labor.
@poison_mara the trouble is when Shayard was able to feed its population with conventional technics it was much smaller. The population has clearly grown into the capacity provided by therugic agriculture. Suddenly take that away and someone will go hungry.
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Nah, the issue can’t be evaded - it’s inherent to the whole point of it. If you’re using magic to increase the amount of food a given farm will produce, then fewer farms are necessary to feed the population, and the excess workers wander off to do something else. Otherwise you’re growing far more than your population actually needs.
Besides, modern techniques generally involve increasing yields on a given harvest, not increasing the number of harvests.
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Show me how I’m wrong here:
Let’s say 10 helots can harvest on a hectare a week. They can also sow that same hectare in a week with draft animals. The time it naturally takes for the crop on that hectare to mature is 4 months but with theurgy you can do it in two. Does my farm need more workers now or less?
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Your farm can produce 1.5 times as much in a growing season, so only two-thirds many agricultural workers are needed overall. Maybe your farm keeps the same number, maybe it’s shut down, maybe the entire agricultural economy shifts towards large cooperatives, but a third of the farming helots are going to be doing something else, unless we want a third of the crop to sit uselessly after everyone is fed.
You don’t need to go from the Classical times into the Information Age to survive. Rather you just need to advance your technology base one or at most two steps.
For example - Adding the horse collar will take you from the Classical production of agriculture to the medieval - a giant leap in of itself. Add crop rotations, irrigation methods (assuming you need to) and basic crop breeding techniques and you go from the medieval to the Renaissance …
The population had a cap on it due to the culling for magic - it won’t be like going from 2016 USA to 550 Byzantium… it just won’t digress that far in production.
It can produce more but only sow and gather at that rate with more workers. By your logic the cotton gin should have ended slavery in the US upon its wide scale adoption but historically it increase the demand for it many fold.
@Eiwynn based on what we have read so far and the prevalence of animal domestication I think we are at Renassance level with the plow etc but we are supporting urban populations similar to modern size. We aren’t going to get anywhere near 7 harvests a year again until the advent of fossil fuels which this society has bypassed entirely in exchange for therugic industrial revolution. Losing that will set back the clock quite far and I don’t think it is reasonable to work out the alternatives rapidly given the lack of the cultural forces that led to the enlightenment.
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I don’t know - my MC might have a better idea but so far all I’ve seen is North Dakota and the Black Hills of @Havenstone’s storyverse… perhaps @Havenstone would clear that up for us. My intuition is that the non-magical technology level is not yet at the Renaissance level.
Or a different source of magic is found…
Those cultural forces were necessary because in our world, the knowledge and libraries and teaching ability was lost to the Western half of the Roman empire. It took Constantinople falling and the Byzantium Diaspora to Italy to “jump-start” our Renaissance
You never had the “barbarian migrations” of the 500’s, the Turkish invasions of the 600-700s nor the Arab expansion of the 800-1000 events you had in our world. In fact, @Havenstone’s world is closer to the first crises of the Roman Empire in analogy - all the information and knowledge is not yet divorced from our society.
Yes the fabled “Shayardene Codex”, but that’s
a)Not something my mc believes in
b) Something that may have a few nasty surprises of its own, for example @Havenstone has never wanted to answer its position on slavery and its derivatives, like the modern helotry, beyond the fact that old Shayard (the state) didn’t have slaves.
Therefore it may well be that under the Shayardene Codex, my mc being born a slave, would be fated to remain one, or that the use of magic would still be forbidden to him and maybe under the “Shayardene Codex” slaves could have only whatever sexual relations their master commands.
We just don’t know the answers to any of that at this point, but since my mc doesn’t believe in Xthonos anyway he certainly isn’t waiting to find out. 
I think that is almost exactly what’s been going on.
Well that won’t get us 7 harvests a year though.
Nope, whatever industrial revolution is going on, farming isn’t keeping up with it.
No, same as now, only the nobles did really. There was more widespread hunger and disease among the rest of the population than there is today, except for what’s deliberately inflicted on the modern helots.
This may be true but the slave society means that the helots aren’t free to wander off and are instead used for drudge work that our world used animals or (primitive) machinery for. They also may very well grow more than the population actually needs, or rather the luxury loving nobles may consume far more then they actually need.
Sure we may be able to add the horse collar, but I think the Hegemony already knows about and uses pretty advanced crop rotations and irrigation schemes, though I would love to be proven wrong on this.
Which is another reason why we desperately need an education system that is a real education system but also educates more mages.
That may give us a very good reason to want to preserve, sigh, Aekos intact since it’s where the Hegemony hoards all their knowledge. However making the knowledge gathered there more broadly available should then have the potential to help us tremendously.
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But that knowledge (read technology) is interpreted as being of a supernatural/liturgical nature. The Karagon’s and their vassals conceptualize getting to “Truth” via philosophy and and a better understanding of the mysteries of faith. The MC themselves achieves the ability to due theurgy not via the scientific method by via a mantra. The Therugic academies most likely resemble a madrasa or Buddist temple rather than the laboratory and library of our traditional conception of magical academies. Incidentally the parallels with Dragon Age are starting to get kinda deep at this point in my mind…
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That and the Belgarion series … I see a lot of David Eddings in @Havenstone’s world.
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Yes and no. Yes, the Overlord’s knowledge is of that nature but no - traditional Shayard knowledge is of our scientific/greek tradition and being the heartland in terms of farm land … the knowledge still is there for our exploitation.
Happy to say that I’ve never played Dragon Age, so any parallels are coincidental. What are the Belgariad parallels?
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The Classical Greek approach to knowledge and learning was indisputably philosophical. That’s doesn’t mean you can reach some of the same conclusions but the Socratic method forinstance is the the height of unscientific in terms of “why this works” (i.e. you already know everything due to your divine spark I just need to ask you the right questions)
@havenstone honestly they might have copied you given how long this WIP has been up… When they call their post revolutionary imperial magiocracy “The Hegemony” you need to be like, “royalties please!”
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