HELOTS:
You are on the way to becoming a helot folk hero.
ARISTOCRATS:
Most aristocrats abhor your rebellion, but a handful are growing cautiously sympathetic.
PRIESTS:
The priests of Xthonos dislike you for your impious offenses against the Imperial religion. In particular, your public displays of Theurgy have led them to accuse you of trafficking with dark powers.
MERCHANTS:
While most merchants think your rebellion is bad for business, a few of them see opportunities in working with you.
The rebels who will be remembered with you in legend include:
Breden Reaper, charismatic and eloquent helot
Radmar Millstone, physically powerful and short-tempered helot
Elery Skinner, brilliant helot tactician
Zvad of Whendward, outlaw and ex-mercenary
Ciels Gamekeep, expert tracker and fighter
Kalt Swineherd, passionate and vengeful helot
Intellect is OP imo, but it needs to be or you’d starve.
You may find this a strange opinion, Havenstone, but I’m actually much more accepting of paying a little extra *purely for mechanical advantage*, as opposed to paying more to receive extra story. I despise paying more for more story because it feels like I’ve been cheated into paying for half a book. However, paying more to get an easier path to my desired result feels fair because I’m opting to suffer a real-world cost to avoid an in-game cost. For reference, I thought the IAP approach in the later Affairs of Court were spot on. In order to achieve certain desirable starting positions like having an appropriate heir, you either played through the first game skilfully and extracted the desired approach, or bit the bullet and paid real world cash for it.
I’d not looked in on CoR for some time, and I was delighted to see it’s still trundling along. Loved the new tax collector scenes and the alternate beginnings. I actually feel that the religious/Shayard beginnings got my blood pumping and ready to murder the entire Empire to an even greater extent than the hunted helot! The tax collector scene gave me a real dilemma as to whom I wanted to take forward; I felt that the Telone would probably be more useful long term, but didn’t want to screw over the merchants who’d dealt with me fairly thus far.
@Dreckitt, your views on IAPs seem pretty representative. People who would never buy mechanical-advantage IAPs themselves still seem, for the most part, not to be annoyed by their existence. Story IAPs get most people’s hackles up. And glad you’ve enjoyed the new stuff!
@ricepatrick182, possibly. If I do have a map in it, though, it won’t be the Hexographer one. Making a hex-map has been useful for calculations of crop yield, population density, relative area, etc. (all relevant to the question of how much blood you need to run an Empire). There are various sites out there for world designers which use the hex as their base unit. For the game itself, I’ll have something prettier.
As will become increasingly apparent when you get out of the Shayard Rim, the Karagond order relies on blood for most of its agriculture, industry, health, and security (both internal and external) – before you even get to Theurgic research and symbolic stuff like the Floating Palace of the Thaumatarch.
Changing to a blood-free economy will lead at best to the severest economic depression the continent has ever known… at worst to famine, plague, and social collapse.
Yet Breden claims the old order was able to run some semblance of an economy without blood, so it would seem possible. Is this perhaps something where we could finally see the benefits of a more cosmopolitan attitude, or are the Hallasurqs and Abhumans (and perhaps whatever lurks in the Xaos lands) just as reliant on blood to fuel their economies?
Even so I would never expect any sort of economic transition to be easy, I just hope there’s at least a way to avoid famine and social collapse that won’t require some sort of monarchy.
I at least didn’t get the impression that the part of the empire my character comes from requires blood for anything other than sorcery and powering the wards.
Breden is of course reporting things s/he heard from disaffected, nostalgic aristocrats about a time three centuries past.
Even assuming that hearsay to be accurate, the priests will be quick to counter that it was also a time with a much lower population and more frequent famine and plague. The old monarchy was also a time of Shayard fending for itself rather than being an integrated part of the continental system. If the empire breaks up, Shayard has some of the best farmland, so it will do better than some in a post-Theurgic system… but it will nonetheless be a hard shock.
The Abhumans operate at a much more primitive level and with a lower population. Halassur has its own issues and significant blood dependency. There will be no easy ways out.
First eliminate extravagant and wasteful expenditures of blood. Second, institute a blood tax where everyone is required to “donate” blood once a month for the good of the nation. Over several decades each citizen will donate many, many times the blood that could be reaped by killing them. Furthermore if someone dies, their blood can be taken as one last contribution to society. This way no living people need to be murdered, and plagues, famines and other terrible disasters can be kept from occurring.
Yep. Unfortunately, “blood” isn’t just blood, as will become clear early in Game 2… So an Empire-wide blood tax/donation scheme would have to hit a much higher total volume to accomplish the same effects.
@Havenstone so then Bloodmagic would follow the theoretical evil witchcraft principles, where is not only the blood or sacrifice, equally important is the victim´s feeling .pain, rage fear… improve and impact the magic power. ?
That’s what some people throughout the empire believe - a reasonable interpretation of the Theurges’ insistence that without the rite of sacrifice, blood has no power. They’re mistaken, however.
Really interesting, @Havenstone Sadly second part is too far. And by way Mara de Jade my character is charm focused so blood theories are meh for her. I got a question from her so here go
kuria Mara de Jade ask to you: Why if im so irresistible to this ugly slaves, i cant gain more human shields to my cause? The stupid farmers give me tons of food i got food to fill four quarters."
"Why i cant change food for a smith or hire one. Nope, I´m stuck with 40 slaves, 7 rusty maces and my father… you could consider that a army. Ahh and the only chaste man in the aristocracy… X( "
Personally, i hope that some way down the storyline the player (using theurgy) will find a way to use theurgy without the use of blood! I mean when i saw the Renegade archmage sacrificer, i was thinking to myself “They are really beating down on him, claiming he sacrificed countless to fuel his evil xaos purposes” To me it sounds like propaganda trying to get the common rabble to fear and hate him because he accomplished something other theurges could not/ would break down the current social order requiring helot blood etc etc~~ XD Sincs Sacrificer would be making an appearance i wonder~~~~ If he’d share the secret with the character? Oh man. Im just guessing tho but i cant wait to know how the blood crisis would be solved~
Oops! Hey Havenstone, I found an error, error: line 2722: Invalid indent? Expected an #option here, not *label. It was on the page were you can choose to kiss brenden for the second time.
@Havenstone I liked this story a lot. It’s a bit lengthy, but that’s just fine considering I love stories with a bulky word count. This was my first playthrough so I was a bit at a loss with some of the words, but the index came in handy there. Can’t wait to see more.
Hmm… while that is all certainly true the empire also seems to be hugely depraved and wasteful when it comes to running just about anything, including the economy. Just from what you’ve mentioned it seems blood usage could be greatly reduced by eliminating the wards (which I assume is where the greatest percentage actually goes to), wasteful prestige projects including, but presumably not limited to, the floating palace, the rest of the blood powered internal security measures and likely even the external ones too. In short it might be possible to eliminate just about everything but agricultural and industrial use in the short term. Just agriculture and the bare minimum of civilian industry might be sustainable with a “blood tax” even if that blood is somehow less efficient.
The only problem that then remains is essentially an ideological one. My character fought the rebellion to establish a new state/government and a new order not to take over the old one and maybe eliminate some of its excesses.
The question then becomes if I, like some other leaders before me would be willing place more value on ideological purity over pragmatism, however if I choose the former then I fear any sort of participatory government will become effectively impossible. Since forming a new sort of participatory government (and NOT having to be head of state or head of government myself) and I’d like to envision both a blood free economy and forming a completely new state/government (social order) as core values of my rebellion so you’re placing me in a real conundrum here @Havenstone.
Sacrificer having discovered a third way would seem like an easy way out however unless his way also has some sort of hidden cost comparable to the Harrower, like maybe an actual Faustian bargain, Dark Sun defiling or something like that.
This is going to be a great game. I have a question though. Are you going to be able to destroy the Ecclasits and bring back the older religion from pre-empire Shayard if you play a Skeptical Nationalist? Honeslty, I imagine when I buy this game I am going to do everything in my power to undermine, if not outright destroy, the ecclasiats lol. As such I probably wont play the Demo anymore until it gets released so it is still somewhat of a new suprise/adventure :). Keep up the good work!
Oh man. Im just guessing tho but i cant wait to know how the blood crisis would be solved~ 
