Sending a full-scale Xaos-storm through the middle of a major city would be mass destruction, no question. Whether that’s something that lends itself to a MAD dynamic is far from clear to me. There won’t be any other WMD discoveries besides the floating mountains, which are several orders of magnitude harder to generate than a Xaos-storm.
If you’ve wooed either the aristocracy as a class or the Wiends as a nation, you may be able to take over large elements of the trained Phalangite corps in your territory. If you build up your cred with other, lower classes, you may be able to win over the less-trained Phalangite tagmas that were recruited to drain the slums and prepare for human wave attacks. If you want to reject all the institutions that have been cornerstones of the old regime (and killed lots of your own rebels in the process) then you can build a new army out of your rebel forces; your degree of success at that will have a lot to do with whether you’re a high-COM military genius.
Absolutely – that’s a classlc early modern tool for economic management/extraction, and builds on the existing guild approach that’s already familiar in the Hegemony. The anarchy level and your state capacity will of course affect the enforceability of your grants.
The legal system of the Hegemony is set up to facilitate guilds, with their more tightly delimited approach to risk- and capital-pooling, rather than limited corporations. I’m not sure that the gameworld historical period we’re in now would be a plausible one for a significant step toward the evolution of corporations. And I’m also not sure that insurance systems would play enough of a role in post-imperial stabilization to feature in the game.
As I’ve said elsewhere, whether e.g. heliocentrism or germ theory apply in a gameworld centered around Aristotelian magic has so far been left intentionally unclear. I’m not at this point going to commit to what kind of scientific discoveries/inventions might be possible for a high-INT MC.
Breden isn’t comfortable with kenon, but having reluctantly backed down from challenging you over it in the Whendward, she’s not about to fight you for it in Sojourn – she’s just not as concerned about a bunch of Xaos-dwellers adopting it as she is about the rebel band she’s part of.
That will absolutely be a position it’s possible to take. I’m not sure you’ll be able to build much of a state on that position, but not all rebels will choose to be state-builders.
Yes. A helot can sincerely believe in the One True King and the glories of Old Shayard, or could just see value in including the Laconniers in their coalition.