Or just not conforming to the implicit gender standards set by the English language, but that’s a whole other discussion. 
(I’ll pass for that one.)
5 Likes
There doesn’t really seem to be stereotypical masculine or feminine professions in the Hegemony so no, that part of it wouldn’t be the punishment. The punishment is class based, making a pampered and privileged former aristocrat like Hector scrub floors and empty chamber pots.
True, my mc is content to leave the presence or absence of that part entirely up to dear old dad. He doesn’t care one way or another, having Hector slightly altered and doing menial labour for the rest of his days is enough for him.
Questionable, yet possibly highly satisfying, whereas a quick execution is far too good for the likes of him, nor can he ever be re-educated and rehabilitated.
Yep. I was thinking of Varys from GoT to begin with, only combined with doing menial work for a bitter, bitter old man instead of being a spymaster.
No it’s torture, long lasting torture, meant to last the rest of his life.
I doubt @Havenstone is going to allow that part in-game though, but nevertheless since there is nothing but the very class system and the religion behind my mc hates as much as Hector Keriatou it would be very much in character for him to do so, after all you can’t really punish, torture or take just revenge on concepts and systems, whereas you can on people.
To be perfectly fair a male chastity device would potentially work too.
Nah, the word you were using. I’ll let it slide though for now.
Many of them were also extremely committed. They died along with the unreliable ones. To quote Aleksandr Sozhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago:
Pity had moved the noble sympathizers of the past (all the enlighteners!) – and pity had also blinded them! They were tormented by pangs of conscience because they themselves did not share that evil fate, and for that reason they considered themselves obliged to shout three times as loud about injustices, at the same time missing out on any fundamental examination of the human nature of the people of the lower strata, of the upper strata, of all people.
“Only from the intellectual zeks of the Archipelago did these pangs of conscience drop away once and for all, for they completely shared the evil fate of the people! Only now could an educated Russian write about an enserfed peasant from the inside – because he himself had become a serf.
“But at this point he had no pencil, no paper, no time, no supple fingers. Now the jailers kept shaking out his things and looking into the entrance and exit of his alimentary canal, and the security officers kept looking into his eyes.
“The experience of the upper and the lower strata had merged – but the bearers of the merged experience perished…
“And thus it was that an unprecedented philosophy and literature were buried under the iron crust of the Archipelago.”
Both my noble and helot MC’s would gladly stick Hector’s head on a pike, although my noble MC probably wouldn’t parade it around publicly since the “understanding” he has reached with Calea is of some strategic value to the rebellion’s continued survival.
I can only imagine what your MC makes of Simon/Suzanne…
I don’t recall Ganelon specifically torturing anyone himself, although I could understand why as a veneur you might consider him guilty by association. It’s kind of a pity that it’s impossible to capture Ganelon, as I suspect a few months as a prisoner would have had a profoundly beneficial effect on his attitude.
Perhaps not having read the latest version I’ve missed out on some new info, but glee isn’t the word I’d use to describe Ganelon’s emotional state. He strikes me as someone who feels he has an obligation to help rid his home of a dire demonic threat, the corrupted thing that used to be his friend. As such, he now believes that killing the MC will save his home. I believe he feels the weight of responsibility more than he does any sort of glee.
Understood.
From my perspective the Helot path in XoR is far more doomed than @Havenstone believed the Iraqi occupation to be. And that’s to say realistically speaking it’s extremely difficult for me to see a pathway through this mess that doesn’t end in tragedy either for the MC and their not so merry band, or for countless other human beings. My gut feeling is that the helot path should be considerably more difficult and challenging than the noble path which shouldn’t be easy as it is. Can anyone think of a slave/serf driven rebellion that ended well? I’m drawing a blank atm.
Agreed.
Non-noble merchants and yeomen do not appear to have as much clout in the world of XoR as they did in ours during the Renaissance, and the divide between them and the helotry is huge given the rigid caste system. Why would merchants and yeomen sign up for a helot rebellion? Why would they risk their lives and livlihoods? Why would they take orders from helots? Why would they embrace the chaos that goes with your goals? The alliance of the Third Estate that you are attempting to build doesn’t feel particularly natural here.
lol. Chairman Mao would be so proud…
As I posted in one of my edits that apparently didn’t occur until after you hit the quote button:
"Follow that up with a secular ruling that countless yeomen were unjustly turned into helots, effectively doing away with the helotry and replacing it with free peasant “sharecroppers” who now have a clearly pathway to yeoman status if they’re ambitious enough to grasp it. You can even wrap the Griffin banner around yourself to pull in additional popular support if you choose since old Shayard had no helots.
Correct me if I’m mistaken, but from our numerous chats on the subject I strongly suspect that your issue with the clergy goes quite a bit beyond your MC. You enjoy having them in the villain role far too much to put out the effort needed to bring them over to your side.
True. It might well feel like Judas’s 30 pieces of silver if that title is anything less than King or Thaumaturch/Emperor, a position that would enable you to do more on their behalf.
As an ex-helot It likely isn’t entirely impossible to become king/emperor/thaumatuch without smashing the caste system entirely. You may well have to kill/imprison/exile half the nobles to do it (as opposed to killing, imprisoning or exiling virtually all of them), and that would still leave the system largely intact minus the bottom rung of helots, and leave you plenty of lands to give to your yeomen and no longer helots.
My MC’s perspective is altogether different. The established Church is a tool that can be used to uplift the masses with less spilling of innocent blood than the other available methods require. I haven’t yet decided to what degree if any my MC believes in Xthonos. Much depends on events in the story which have yet to be written. Regardless, where your MC is perfectly willing to rewrite history to suit his preferred narrative mine is perfectly willing to use the Church’s existing connection to the people in order to uplift the helotry and minimize the backlash that will ensue. My MC is rather pragmatic in this regard.
6 Likes
On other news, I replayed the game and letting Zvad deal with everything and here are the numbers:
[Note for playtesting:
You’re an aristo who chose to steal from anyone.
Your morale is 225.
Your notoriety is 124.
Your anarchy is 16.
You have 335 followers, 6898 drachems, and 67 arms.
Your credibility with aristos is 140, helots 145, merchants 220, priests 140, and yeomen 225.
Your followers’ leadership is: Breden 4, Zvad 10, Elery 5, Radmar 1]
Edit: That doesn’t go all the way to the current chapter 4, it only goes to the end of chapter 2.
1 Like
It’s too bad that it is so damned hard to separate the truly committed ones from the unreliable potential threats however…
Yes, that brings me back to the scars, fortunately theurgy will ikely allow my mc to undo the damage nearly 20 years of slavery and deprivation have inflicted on him, though only the physical parts of it.
Of course my mc is of the belief that “death is no punishment, merely the cessation of life”. While we may not be able to do anything but execute our enemies at this stage my mc considers that to be a deeply unsatisfactory state of affairs.
Hector won’t be getting away that easily, particularly if we can only capture him much later on.
Of course my mc will never even try to reach an “understanding” with Calea, particularly considering what she does to even remotely attractive male helots. 
Well he never meets Suzanne and his thoughts about Simon are, extremely cute, extremely brave (which is what saves him really) and extremely naive and misguided. Then again my mc means what I believe we can say when he first tries to join that we don’t do noble titles, so as far as my mc is concerned Simon is no longer a noble.
Yep, veneurs are after all Hector’s personal band of little bullies, sadists and torturers.
His “noble” childhood “friend” who he may have had a crush on, yeah, that would have been decidedly uncomfortable. although who is to say we cannot capture him alive, as he is only guaranteed to die on one particular path and my mc prefers striking at the sheep, rather than the veneurs directly. Guerrilla warfare, strike where your enemy is weak and all that.
If he thinks that he’s even more misguided than my mc assumed him to be, really that demon crap is just Hegemony propaganda to scare the gullible, I would have thought Ganelon would surely be able to see through that.
Haiti would be the big one, though “ended well” is always a matter of interpretation.
I must, unfortunately, largely agree with the first part, which is why my mc takes the second part as the cost of doing business.
This may be more true in the more developed and prosperous parts of the Hegemony, but it doesn’t seem to be very true in our backwards part at least, where both the yeomanry and the merchants seem both poor and desperate enough to be willing to take a gamble on my mc’s rebellion rather than Hector Keriatou’s established order. But like I said it could turn out that maybe, apart from being a poor and backwards one, our home district also is a very corrupt and poorly managed one that fosters these sorts of tendencies in populations that should otherwise be further removed from the helot population. For now the Rim’s helots, yeoman and merchants seem to have it in common that they’re all being poor and oppressed together and the difference between yeoman and helots in our part of the woods does not seem to be particularly large, except for the yeomen being nominally free and not harrowed or corporeally punished by the Alastors as much. They do seem to be almost as poor and possibly even more eager to rebel, to the point where I got more bang for my buck trying to recruit additional followers from the yeomen then I did from helot camps.
But again I do suspect that in the more urbanised parts of the Hegemony where the free underclasses are more numerous yet have far less contact with actual helots or drudges and are thus fully indoctrinated to loathe and fear them the situation will be different.
Maybe, but my mc getting half the nobles to join him would feel even less natural.
My mc’s ambitions stretch quite a bit further than becoming a nominally “free” sharecropper however.
As a helot I think that is very dangerous since it would be taken as acceptance of the return of the old, Laconnier, overlords and my mc no more wants to serve them than he does the Thaumatarchy.
Possibly, due to who and what I am I don’t have the greatest relation with organised religion IRL either, some of that may bleed through on occasion.
This is perhaps true, however my mc certainly has no intention of pretending to piously follow a religion that labels him an abomination for practicing magic and a deviant for being a gay helot, where being gay is seemingly a privilege reserved for those born into the higher castes (meaning that particular stigma could stay with my mc even if he were to later become a noble, since he wasn’t born as one it would therefore still be unnatural and against telos for him to desire other men).
Either way high-int helots turned mages and the established religion don’t mix since according to that religion we should only be happy as a straight farm-animal and certainly not read or use magic, since the “blessed angels” would never give the “gift” of theurgy to a mere slave.
In summary, no, my mc is not willing to reach out to them on their terms.
To my mc it would still feel like that even if the position is in fact Emperor, since even that would require assuming much more of the “culture” and mannerisms of the upper class than my mc would be comfortable with. The ceremonies, the decadence, particularly the clothing and the useless jewelry (especially considering that if my mc really is a “survivor” getting those things fitted in a tailor’s workshop would be tantamount to torture).
I’m curious why you think that this scenario would be more feasible than an “alliance of the third estate”, since my mc actually hates the nobles and I would assume the opposite is also true. Plus as Emperor he’d literally have to live and work among them, his former oppressors, for the rest of his life and do so largely on their terms too, which is a less than cheerful thought.
Whereas to mine the established church is the foremost tool of oppression and the most hated symbol of Karagond dominance.
It’s a good thing your mc isn’t my mc, then. 
@idonotlikeusernames If your Mc and mine would be in same universe What he would think of Evil Gandhi. I mena the image she shows not the real Mara .
By the way, @Havenstone, this might seem like a silly question, but: what is Hector doing when he’s not swearing to strangle our characters with their own guts?
Canvassing the helots, of course.
1 Like
Would you allow the other helots their own private retributions against their former masters?
Let’s all please consider Hector Keriatou walking arround, distributing pamphlets and trying to persuade people about how he’ll make Shayard great again.
And Calea going right behind him.
3 Likes
u gfhfgfgfufckfneneinging
Yes, this would totally happen and it makes me laugh.
We’ll put up a big giant wall across the Abhuman border-
wait…
7 Likes
Not as a general rule, no, which is hypocritical, I know. But really Hector would be the one exception that confirms the rule. As for the inner circle the answer is probably a qualified “yes”, however since most of the inner circle were also former Keriatou helots the only ones my mc would have to “give” them would be Calea and Lord Keriatou, cause he’s claiming dibs on Hector.
Besides it’s not really retribution it’s justice, Hector will get a trial and everything, in which he’ll be sentenced to life, it can even be a fair trial since with his record there would be no possibility he walks away from it. It is at the execution phase of the project that my mc would bend the law a little, instead of working to build useful infrastructure he’ll then become a maid to the new figurehead of state (providing his dad survives that long).
Then again it might not even qualify as bending since as head of government my mc could control the department of (re-)education and citizenship and welfare administration in order to assign prisoners to the projects and programmes that would best serve to re-educate and rehabilitate them. Which in Hector’s case would happen to be the position of a palace maid, totally based on his skills and previous record.
As for the other thing, we’ll just claim he hurt himself badly enough that he required some surgery to save his life. 
Of course the trial and rehabilitation and such would only happen if they were captured by the new official army or police forces (by the time we have some), anyone either captured by the secret police or bounty hunters wouldn’t enter the system unless they’re delivered to said police, if they are not delivered, or delivered dead, well…the priority is not on investigating such unfortunate accidents they happen.
Drinking, whoring, hunting, spending money on decadent things and abusing his slaves probably.
That you’re either a kryptast, or more likely a Laconnier, probably since the image you project while seemingly concerned about helot welfare, doesn’t actually recruit many people nor do you steal from the nobility or the Hegemony, which would make you highly suspect in his eyes.
1 Like
Are you afraid that such “small” hypocrisies will undermine your MC’s “high sparrowness” and ultimatly the rebellion/new state? I mean his leadership is one of the few things potentially holding it together.
How will you punish the extralegal retributive tortures and murders that your ruthless slave revolt will inevitably generate?
Kalt for instance seems to be of a mind to get some vengeance no matter what your MC has to say about it. I’m sure there are many, many more like them.
Your character is not fun lol 
Grumpy horses. Your followers would die because of borinessyou will forbidden all fun in your realm.
1 Like
Not particularly, some things just happen to fall through the cracks and everything that will happen to Hector will be in accordance with the letter of the law, it’s just that having written big parts of it in addition to controlling the executive branch, my mc will have a good handle on where all the loopholes are.
Even the surgery could potentially be explained as him “volunteering” for magical or medical research in order to get a possible reduction in his sentence. Believe it or not it was actually legal to do that here pre WWII, inmates could volunteer for medical research and get some time knocked off, although many just did it to spend some time in a comparatively nicer hospital (our prisons where shitholes back then too).
On the contrary “fun” will be entirely (well mostly) legal. Prostitution and mullow will both be fully legal for starters and the department of propaganda culture and regional affairs will ensure a constant stream of new, plays, opera’s and books hit the market. In addition to that music, aside from the opera, will mostly be left alone (mainly because my mc doesn’t much care about it). If it’s really necessary we could even encourage some new sports and sporting competitions.
What most likely won’t be legal is the old, decadent counterrevolutionary plays and some books, pygmarchy, falconeering and fox-hunting and some other noble hunting sports I’ve missed here.
Trust me, it’ll be a veritable cornucopia of fun (and tasty foodstuffs).
2 Likes
Oh another bloodbath bloodshed revolution. You sounds like Robespierre. Or Stalin. Anyone who started forbidding or burning books couldn’t create a freedom system. Only terror. Of course Mara would create similar terror, she would genocide 80% the helot caste .
1 Like