First of all this, my mc has trouble conceiving how anyone (perhaps even the so called “nobles”) could be “happy” with life under the Hegemony as it is.
As for what my mc would think, though he’d probably not say it out loud, that they must either be liars or really trippin’ high on something.
That farmland is likely needed to feed the population post rebellion, which means it needs to be given over to helots or yeomen who actually already know how to farm. So that bit of their “Shayardene Dream” would be a no-go.
That they want to learn how to farm is laudable but in the immediate aftermath we likely need people who already possess agricultural skills, not to mention that parceling out land to former helots an yeomen is likely to be one of my mc’s signature policies.
However since they apparently belong to the former merchant caste my mc’s government would probably need to compensate them as he cannot afford to alienate the merchant class or antagonize them too much.
It’s their Xthonic faith that would be the problem here, as members of the merchant caste they would not automatically be counterrevolutionaries, so if they can hide their religious beliefs well enough they can probably stay out of danger.
Well, good for them, however talk is cheap. My mc only believes in concrete actions.
And let me guess they consider Hector to be some sort of shining example of virtue and “nobility”.
Truth is that to break the Hegemony and its caste system certain actions must be taken that may make certain people, particularly those who have not experienced (most of) the depravity, corruption and particularly the physical brutality and rape of the Hegemony first-hand.
@idonotlikeusernames, how well versed are you with Alexander II of Russia’s emancipation of serfdom? Would that appeal to your character as a more moderated stance. Because, I’m not sure that you would even get good advisors due to how dangerous you are to people educated enough and with too much to lose should you win. There are different kinds of yeomen, the one’s who would join up with you are the lower end of them. You wouldn’t have intelligent and wealthy, and highly educated yeomen or nobles joining with you. Yet, your plan revolves around having good advisors around you who know how to build a nation.
Essentially all of your plans will fail due to a lack of knowledge, a feeling of distrust on the people who do have the knowledge, and your rebellion’s failure to understand the basic functions of a government and nationbuilding. Essentially, what I’m saying is your character is probably one of the most selfish people alive. They are unwilling to even process a moderated stance due to how utterly morally deficient they are due to how suck their life is. I do hope you consider that your character’s views can evolve based on the circumstances in which the games carry out.
Which is why you’ll be hated by every single person you come in contact with that isn’t a helot. You come to destroy their livelihood, take their lands, ruin their lives and abolish their faith all under the guise of saving the helots.
So a family who’s happy with their lives will be told they aren’t simply because they live in a society that you disagree with. That makes no sense, but moving on.
That they have to give up their land even though they can still accomplish the same as helots definitely will inspire the populace to work with you. All territory belongs to the state and if the state decides they think you’re not using it to maximum efficiency well you best enjoy sleeping in a cardboard box because that’s your new home.
Antagonize…you’ve declared war on them. Merchants don’t flock to the country where everything they own only remains theirs at the whim of the government. Nor do they enjoy trade when said trade is being regulated by the government. All farmers will sell their wares at a very low price to feed the masses of helots. Does it matter that the farmer won’t be able to survive off of such little income? Nope, not in the Username Union. What if said farmer decides they’ll move to a different country? Comrade Username says you cannot leave.
Ah, I can see the religious revolts already. So they can’t believe in anything but the union. This definitely won’t cause problems.
That’s right, spit on those who would support your cause if you didn’t stamp their hopes and dreams into the mud.
They don’t know who Hector is. Nobility to them come in the form of a leader standing tall in the face of adversity as well as keeping their people safe. The thin I think your MC doesn’t understand is that people who aren’t helots, are still people. They’re not the evil demons who watch with glee as a noble skewers a helot. Nor do they take delight when a helot is harrowed. In all likelihood it’s terrifying to them. Yet what you want to do is sentence them to a hellish existence where they can only pray that they have enough coin to buy some stale bread to feed themselves.
You wish to subject all classes but your helots to extreme poverty. How can you not see that you’re practically asking for your revolution to fail?
@idonotlikeusernames is intelligent and personally knows enough to know what he’s doing. His character is not. His character is wrapped up in years of anger, misery, and just hatred. He is willing to destroy everything to free the helots and really doesn’t have a plan for the aftermath.
You need to remember, he likes to RP these things out.
Then welcome to the club in which we bombard his character design with critiques and he responds by saying, “Anything is better than the caste system and being a slave.”
To be honest, I hold him as a person in high regard as he tends to be far more intelligent than I am. It’s just this particular character of his is so crazy that I can’t help but comment on it.
His character is nuts, I’m just going to install myself as the leader of the Shayardene Hegemony and emancipate the helots like the Russians did and let them enjoy their newfound “freedom.”
I don’t want to get too wrapped up on details when we’re not sure of the whole picture. But what my character plans is to try to hopefully win Shayard over and use it as a testing ground for their policies and to try to figure out how to make emancipation feasible. To do that I will need to hopefully have someone to basically by my regent while we march off to war for the rest of the Hegemony. The idea is that if we have a working Shayard without helots and is economically stable, that when I win the war I can basically say, “It works in Shayard, it will work here if you do it like this.”
True,magic has been the biggest threat to my campaign so far. I know I could defeat the hegemony forces man to man. Even with superior tech I could probably manoeuvre my agents in such a way as to destroy the local reserves or capture them. Though when they have such a phenomenal advantage in the form of blood magic, I’m having a hard time trying to imagine a way we could defeat them.
Xaos magic combined with new tech and asymmetric warfare, or at least that’s what my mc will try.
I’d say tolerably well, though I’m no grand historian by trade, like @Cataphrak for example.
Thing is I don’t think the conditions that allowed Alexander II to do what he did would exist for any mc, particularly one who is a (former)helot himself, to do what he did in Russia.
For starters, much like in the darkest days of Hindu India and unlike Russia, the existing order is literally divine and to even think it should be subject to change is heretical. Which is why my character believes everything begins with getting rid of the Xthonic church and its doctrines as a force in society.
There is also a distinct lack of outside pressure on the Hegemony, again unlike the Russia of 1861, whose feudal backwardness was beginning to become an embarrassment to them, to change. If it is especially backwards compared to Halassur and the Abhuman Federation then that is something we do not know about.
Lastly, if Horion is correct about the Hegemony currently needing the provincial nobility more then the reverse is true, then one key situation is even the exact reverse then it was for Russia in 1861, instead of the provincial noble landlords being heavily indebted to state owned banks and the royal family, if anything, the situation appears to be the reverse here, giving us next to no leverage over them with which to induce them to change their slavocrat ways, even if by some miracle the nobles and priests decided it would be okay to let my character “usurp” the Thaumatarchy as it seems he’d just be making himself their puppet.
The only way I can see to abolition on terms that come anywhere close to 1861 Russia, where the former serfs became full citizens, instead of a special class of second class, “freedmen” sharecroppers under a system of apartheid, scarcely better than outright slavery.
It is only this second kind of abolition, much more reminiscent of the American or Brazilian ones rather than the Russian example, that would be obtainable by “allying” with the current nobility and the “moderate” elements of the priesthood. In any case there would be no land for former helots, no reform of the alastors and no other forms of compensation for all the injustices we suffered and most importantly no end to the Harrowings since they are a vital element to the Church and its caste system, not to mention the continued prosperity of the “nobles”.
I won’t deny this one, the only thing my mc “trusts” the “nobility” to do is betray and re-enslave him as soon as the Thaumatarchy is defeated at the very latest.
Which is why he, grudgingly, plans to go lenient on the current merchant caste (they have education too and are currently also being oppressed by the Hegemony, the Nobles and their own “guilds”) as he hopes to draw those people from there, as to him the nobles and the priests are a lost cause entirely.
In raw IQ my mc here probably far outstrips little old me, who has never quite been able to get calculus through his thick skull and suffered for it. In education you and I both have such a huge advantage over the poor guy that it is probably laughable.
Well how sane would you be if you were repeatedly told that you are no more then a farm animal whose “duty and destiny” it is to be sacrificed in one of the most gruesome ways to die possible and that it is against your nature to be what you feel you are (gay and loving magic in my mc’s case).
Of course the both the Keriatou overseers and the Alastors as the religious police and “moral guardians” always set shining examples up to and including the severe degradation and possibly even the rape of my mc (and a great many other helots). Let’s just say that this doesn’t make him interested in the slightest in a “truth and reconciliation” commission headed by the same “moderate” ecclesiasts who have always refused to lift so much as a finger to address any of this. Seeing as how even the “moderate” interpretations of “canon” will always favour the Alastors and the “nobility”.
On top of that you were just betrayed by the one “noble” who always seemed friendly but turned out to be playing nothing more than a very cruel game with you by leading you on in seeming to believe that you could be anything more than a farm animal or a blood puppet to him and then he turns out to be just a gleeful a torturer as the rest of them.
Would that engender trust in his sort people in you?
The grim reality is that when stopping the Harrowings plus the war damage the post-rebellion state and country will be quite poor, or at least quite a bit poorer than it is now anyway. Fortunately for my mc he despises the decadence of the current elite anyway so he’ll hardly notice, seeing as how he is very much accustomed to suffering hardship and adversity.
Of course the same goes for the current crop of nobles and ecclesiasts, just in the other direction.
He is not unselfish, no. As I have repeatedly said by stating that now that he has made the step to rebel he’ll accept nothing less than the top job for himself. Which is something the priests and nobles would never be willing to grant to a former helot.
As for a more “moderate” stance, ultimately under the proviso that he still gets the top job himself he could accept the 1861 Russian emancipation as a starting point for a more moderate “new world order” with these additons, mostly relating to the position of the Xthonic Church:
The Xthonic Church is to surrender all wordly power and the new state will be secular and no longer a (nominal) theocracy.
All current ecclesiasts will be removed from office and subject to trials for their myriad abuses as will all Alastors, in addition the Alastors and all their privileges are to be disbanded immediately.
The faithful may choose new Ecclesiasts from among their own ranks, if this irrevocably splits the Faith, so much the better
The only legal income the Church and its priest are allowed to have will consist of donations made voluntarily by the remaining faithful.
Gay marriage and adoption into “dynasties” should noble titles remain in existence is to remain fully legal.
“Noble” titles can optionally remain, but much like in ancient China their wordly authority will be largely supplanted by new, merit-based official titles. Officialdom is to be open to all (in a moderated stance this would include former nobles) depending on examination results. Unlike in ancient China to bulk of these will not consist in reciting poetry or (quasi) religious texts and literature but the harder sciences.
In the interest of co-operation and co-existence with the remaining “nobles” there would likely be blanket pardons for the lower nobility and likewise for all rebel commanders and trials similar to the ones of the ecclesiasts for all of the former “high” nobility.
The cutoff point would likely have to be just below the rank the Keriatou held, because my mc will not allow those vile creatures to slip through his fingers, not if he can make the rest of Hector’s life a living hell.
That is about the most moderate I can ever see my mc becoming.
Alexander II was able to abolish serfdom because the people who had the most to lose were coming to the realisation that serfdom itself was an economically losing proposition: it was easier to hire free labour in cities to work factories than it was to maintain landed estates. Not only were industrial goods in higher demand, but serfdom itself was less efficient, since there was nothing to motivate the serf into doing more than the bare minimum (Chayanov’s On the Theory of Peasant Economy goes into this phenomenon in detail), while capitalist wage labourers could be enticed to work harder by roping them into a cash economy.
While the Tsar’s court was still divided on most aspects of policy, emancipation really wasn’t one of them. It was being accepted by the elite as out of date, so when Alexander II did away with it, very few people objected. There certainly wasn’t the sort of violent reaction you got in the United States, where chattel slavery remained an economic pillar of the South. The fact was that serfdom as an economic mechanism had been in decline for two generations, if not longer, and the aristocracy found it much to their benefit to convert their serfs into money (via hefty manumission-related payments) and reinvest that capital into something more profitable.
Exactly and unless you go for an existential war, much like my mc is planning, any “emancipation” in the Hegemony is much more likely to look like the one in the US South where the “emancipated” become distinctly second class “freedmen” sharecroppers still trapped in a pervasive system of apartheid barely better than actual slavery in terms of their rights and conditions.
Like I said that is very much not what my mc is fighting for both for himself and all the other (former) helots.
Exactly, didn’t Malcolm X say something in the vein of “the slave’s worst enemy is his own labour”, making slaves, including my mc, indeed vested to do the absolute bare minimum they can get away with.
And since Karagond currently heavily restricts technology and industrialization it will take the Hegemony at least two generations by my estimate to begin to reach that point even if a new government rescinds all the restrictions on the proliferation of industry and technology.
Whereas in the Hegemony it is currently going strong and even gaining ground by all indications.
It has failed to expand outward and is stuck guarding its borders, it isn’t necessarily winning that’s called a stalemate. All Empire’s need room to expand and enemies to fight, if they can’t expand past their own borders they will stagnate, when Empire’s stagnate rebellions occur, when rebellions occur and lose, they clamp down harder which will intimidate people, which has two outcomes, either they are intimidated and silent about it, or they are angry and rebel more. Basically, the Hegemony doesn’t know it yet, but they reached the start of the systemic failure that destroys all these kinds of empires.
However in this case, with that firmly entrenched caste system and religion that wouldn’t necessarily, or even likely, mean the destruction or decline of the institution of slavery along with it.
It’s a bit like in India, Hindu Kingdoms and Empires have risen and fallen and, yes, from everything we have been told thus far forces are at work that indicate that the Hegemony’s time in its current form at least is fast running out, but that doesn’t mean the religion and its caste system are going to follow it on the way out, unless someone like my mc makes it so.
I still think that unless we really go all out, and accept the costs of doing so, the best kind of “emancipation” we’re possibly going to get is something like the one in the US. Neither the mindset among the educated elites nor the economical circumstances that make slavery, along with its close derivatives like serfdom and apartheid seem like losing propositions are there yet to allow for an emancipation a la 1861 Russia.
Which brings us back to the fact that my mc is fighting to really liberate all the helots, including himself and not for them or himself to become sharecroppers under a pervasive system of apartheid post-rebellion.
Like I mentioned earlier, you won’t have any time to rule your new Proletariat Dictatorship because once you “win” you’ll have to spend the rest of your life putting down rebellions, fighting off foreign interventions, and not get coup d’etated.
But if my mc “allies” with the reactionary forces, the nobles and the priests, he won’t get to rule anything either and he and every other helot along with him can go right back to being at best second-class citizens under a new system of apartheid after the Pyrrhic victory over the Thaumatarchy. Of course he, himself would likely be executed for heresy and non-divine use of magic.
So that means it’s damned if you do and damned if you don’t and if he’s going to be damned either way, he’ll choose the first and at least try doing something that isn’t meekly accepting whatever meaningless “concessions” the current elites are willing to offer.
