Oh please if your MC’s half brother was a noble you’d have fed his horse to him.
But, but it’d be good for him very nutritious and it would be my mc’s duty to ensure his family members stay in good, shape, even if some of them would have been rotten, decadent nobles. 
(besides what they were hardly matters in the new world order we’d all be equal citizens anyway).
Besides, mmm…mmm horse meat is simply delicious, why we may even have to institute a holiday to celebrate the noble horse in the new order, the “feast of the horse”. 
Btw, I hope Havenstone will consider allowing us to loot the de Merre horses too.
And you can place the head on the pillow of your enemies too. So it’s delicious, nutritious and no part of it needs to go to waste.
In all seriousness though the modern aversion to horsemeat seems to be mostly American squeamishness, something someone who has grown up a hungry helot literally cannot afford and historically many nations have had both a horse culture and eaten them.
The yeomen may yet convince my mc of the use of the creatures for farm-work and if the Neres have a different style and tradition of cavalry compared to the modern Shayardene nobles then I’ve repeatedly said they stand a good chance of convincing my mc of the utility of their kind of cavalry.
Lastly I’ve already said that it isn’t impossible, even for his fellow Shayardene countrymen to convince him to allow at least some auxiliary cavalry under certain conditions that I’ve summed up elsewhere on this thread.
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I’m sure now that “idonotlikeusernames the horse-eater” is the meme this thread will never forget.
Your MC is certainly one odd duck. I’m sure many cultures enjoy eating horses but I don’t think they’ve taken to it with as much gusto that your MC has.
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Odd horse. 
And since everybody loves my random D&D recollections:
Generally not. There’ll be more scope for that with the hostile outsiders in XOR, as I’ve moved away a bit from the implacable humanity/reality-destroying forces of my earlier work (though neither the Halassurqs nor the Unquiet Dead will be easily bargained with).
In my old D&D campaign, both the sea elves and the sand elves had a powerful renegade who was sympathetic to humanity; the party made the most of those relationships in averting the threat from the otherwise implacably human-hostile elves.
The party did manage to temporarily form a detente with three ghastly archmages who nearly destroyed the empire 300 years ago – Syraxus the Damned, Nul-Gashar the Nightsummoner, and Z’kaatra of the Blood Raven, that necromancer son of Death I mentioned earlier. The detente lasted long enough for them to collaborate on a solution for the genetic mind control that the sand elves exerted over human mages. After the all-out war resumed, the party managed to kill Nul-Gashar in a grand battle over the Holy City of Deshiao when one of the party’s undead members used his power to travel through shadows to leap across half the city (by rolling with a 3-in-100 chance of success), and disrupt the Nightsummoner’s spell so that he was eaten by his own extraplanar portal. That was a fine game. 
Deals with Death were integral to the plot of the game; by contrast to most D&D worlds, in this one there was no Raise Dead spell, just Summon Death (and cut the best deal you can, if he’s interested). But after one of the party members refused to accept the terms of Death’s bargain – handing over her Deathborn child, which had been touched by Death in the realm of True Forms and shared some of his power – they became targets rather than beneficiaries of Death’s deals. We were still probably many game-years and a lot of gaming sessions out from the point where little Amaranth would defeat her “father” and become the new Death; but she had already got his sword.
With the Yrchhu, the Horror of the Many, there is no negotiation. Any more than there is with Xaos-storms.
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Well we talked about game balance a bit.
Speaking of which, I tried out for the first time in years a playthrough where I didnt stop the harrowing to go for a small number of followers, a strategy I understand your MC practices, and really Mara I don’t know how you do it.
To have so many things going in your favor and still manage to yell at poor Havie that he is stacking the deck against you.
Truly mind blowing.
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I always ending sleeping with people and killing them into sleep or singing luyabies to trolls . Or using ferrets tricks in carnivals. I am all charisma. Those bulky dwarves and op necromancers could fight for themselves while i am looting and sometimes even i am generous enough to use my bard singing and poison… However nothing beats my vaginal poison dard implant in Cyberpunk. Nothing…
I have so much in my favor… I AM TRYING DEFEAT HEGEMONY WITH 43 PEOPLE AND PEACEFULLY… Could you explain me where I have so many advantages confronting an ENTIRE EMPIRE ?
This is why we can’t have nice things.
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Blame the Cyberpunk 2013 rulebook that allow to genitalia cyber implants. So I though My girl is all carisma as a media entretainer also she is super hot and allure so what secret weapon i could choose a Black widow one. I had that and my ultra steel retractile claws and a tiny pistol. My main strategy is hide and let the op fighters do they stuff then cure them and obtain all the dialogue bonus and sabotages. Why fight if you could laid your victories ?
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Note that a rock to the face still kill them. I find it pretty unfair that you use those comparison when skilled melee warriors have to potential to kill dragons and armies by themselves. Also, I dont know many games where we can drop a mountain on someone. In fact I dont know any.
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You: Outnumbered by about 1,000,000 to 1
Everyone else: Outnumbered by about 1,000,000 to 1
You: Easily able to feed your band a healthy diet off of hunting alone and still have bandits left over for other stuff.
Everyone else: Pays a bit over 100 gold starters just to feed the band a bare sustinance diet for the winter. That’s over 10,000 silver.
You: Free magic weapons given to you… Literally magic spears. Just given to you. For free.
Everyone else: Free… nothing. Nothing is free and no cool weapons. I raid hard and pay 25,000 to 30,000 just to equip my band with normal weapons, if I didn’t raid I wouldn’t have any weapons at all.
Then again, if I didn’t raid I would also be dead.
Of starvation… From not eating…
Awkward silence.
Moving on…
You: Simon is easy to get
Everyone else: Those of us who want Simon must tread very carefully and make many sacrifices. The rest have to deal with Kalt. (Kalt likes to literally shoot your friends when you aren’t looking)
You: Small army detachment and a few of those infamously incompetent alastors sent after you. Maybe a theurge or two.
Everyone else: A full company reinforced of phalangites to assist the alastor militias, plus any faction we pissed off just to feed our little village, plus nearly half a dozen military-trained theurges.
EDIT: You could also have a lot more than 43 even without stopping the harrowing. What are your ruth/comp skep/dev nat/cos stats?
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But you could defend yourself with your healthy men and you have tons of weapons and a lot of money . I have neither also nobody fears my little tiny army 43 it is not an army. I didnt harm the hegemony like all of you did. You are harming them i m not i will have more enemies in future games.
edit Oh 43 its my start number. I try to maintain it there however people is obsessed with joining me and Havie doesnt let me kill them all so i usually end with 70 of stupid helots.
Not really. What I’ve done to the Hegemony so far is the real world equivalent of killing 100 or so cops and pulling a heist on an armored car transporting money to a bank.
Not exactly government-shattering actions. Not even a punch in the nose, more like a flick to the forehead. All my points stand.
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I can never seem to rob the tax collector do you need something to do that I usually have charism and fighting
Minimum of INT 1 to discover the time of the visit.
Maybe some former slaves have, but slaves and commoners are not usually the sort of people historians like to chronicle in any exacting detail. 
If you really are curious about my rp reasons for why my mc may have a preference for horse meat, other than the fact that it is sweet and not very fattening.
It is really the fact that it is sweet and sweetness for most slaves has historically been the rarest flavour in their often bland diets. Of course my mc will likely come into contact with a variety of foods during the next few games but, well nothing prepared in a fancy palace can rival the taste of horse-meat roasted over an open fire in the wild. Of course this will all be dependent on actually being allowed to loot an slaughter horses during that first winter, otherwise I’ll have to think up another food-related quirk for my mc.
Well the drawback there would be that those are Laconnier weapons, not people my mc would want to owe anything to.
Nope, I never do barley runs anymore, although I think @Havenstone increased the anarchy gains from certain actions as I can now no longer loot the merchants the nobles and the tax-collector and raid enough grain barns to stay under 20 anarchy. 
Which sadly means that on my latest playthrough the damned nobles didn’t hate and fear my mc as much as they rightly should.
This is true, but if you don’t stop the Harrowing most of our potential other friends are dead anyway.
On the other hand
Eh? Come again, I’ve got 883 Hegemony troops and a couple of theurges bearing down on my fully equipped (but with normal weapons only) band of 338 outlaws (yes those were my actual numbers, which is kind of funny, I’ll admit) and 1.5 Goetes.
I must say I tried to play a helot who didn’t try to stop that Harrowing and it felt awful, I could barely do it.
However once I did, I do wonder why The Laconniers would bother to break the helot mc out of prison, I can maybe understand why they’d risk it for a fellow noble, but a mere helot? Why go to all the trouble unless there’s something the de Tomans aren’t telling us.
Nah, but there is possible negotiation with the guy who may have created them right?
While I respect your design decision it would have been something (dramatic) if the aristo mc’s dad would have fathered a child on a helot woman and vice-versa.
But I get it, no half-brothers for our mc’s.
Ah, well that’s what fanfics set in a slight au are for right?
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I’ll fight you for insulting his (lack of) honour.