A gnostic cult leader or grifter in any era can make a living by peddling nonsense dressed up as “the secret wisdom the world disbelieves/doesn’t want you to know.” But governments knowingly promoting a lie about the world without obvious direct gain, just because it’s a lie, are I think a phenomenon of late modernity–as in Vaclav Havel’s analysis of post-totalitarian regimes, or the “flood the zone” tactics of mass media manipulation we see in both democracies and authoritarian states today.
I don’t think either of those fit with the Hegemony, in its totally different political and information environment. I also don’t want to play into false tropes from our own world like “religious people believe world is flat, and theocracies persecute people for claiming otherwise.” So no. No flat earthers of any significance in Karagon.
It will totally be possible to try to focus suspicion of elites on one category of elite rather than spreading it wholesale.
I don’t think the MC will ever visit Halassur or the Seracca lands – certainly not for long enough to start a cult there, let alone a mass conversion movement that sparks a political rebellion. Halassur is a culture in transition and may well be vulnerable to people looking away from the state religion…but the last place they would look for an alternative is some version of the state religion of the genocidal invader.
Jev mentions it at one point: “They brought me south to Yludud, the main port in these parts of the Abhuman lands.” It’s on the east coast of the desert; I haven’t drawn it on any of the maps I’ve shared yet.
To tie in all of Wiendrj, you’d I think need to match the Thaumatarchy’s levels of Theurgic oppressiveness, because the only thing that’s kept Wiendrj from splintering into tiny bits is the threat of the Theurges flying in and slaughtering separatists. That’s true of lots of small highland valleys all over the map, and also of the big northern Marausz-Siszula river system, which would be almost impossible to keep under southern Wiendish control without Theurgic force. Post-collapse, it’s more likely to be pulled into the sphere of influence of the newly magi-ruled Free City of Tsagir (or a Nyrish urban confederation if you can keep one alive post-collapse) than anything you set up in the south…unless what you manage to set up is an all-conquering Theurgic dominance machine focused on reestablishing the Thaumatarchy within more or less its G3 boundaries.
Ha! Well said. 
Not if you want it to live for more than a minute afterwards.
No, no, the name was just a joking gesture at one way you could split off the Rim – under control of a charismatic local leader.
She’s certainly not going to abandon her father and the Hegemony to be torn down violently by the other antagonists who will be there at the Battle of Aekos. There’s no G4 scenario where she’s “working with you to depose Kleitos.”
100% the former. That’s going to be a major Aekos G3 plotline.
Because it’s been part of the royal standard of the de Syrnons since way back when Oster tried to make them into a seafaring people, it’s more a Shayardene symbol…but you could do worse, as far as mutuality goes.
That’s an area I’m going to develop when I need to, as I write the different provinces you visit, so I’m not going to make any firm commitments now.
Forgive me, I’d been assuming you wanted the kind of federation that masks genuine control; I need to not read too much into your username. If you leave behind a loose federation that you only lightly influence in the west, it will free you up for the hard slog of imperialistic conquest in the east. But in case your commendable loathing for the institution of child sacrifice is what’s nudging you toward the latter, it’s only fair to warn you that there’s no way to breathe more life into that wretched institution than by realizing every Halassurq’s worst nightmare: breakthrough and colonization by the loathed Karagonds. You’d have your desperate subjects queuing up after dark to give their babies to the insurgency.
If as I suspect this will be frustrating news to you…I don’t take any satisfaction in causing that frustration, honest. But conquest and colonialism are a deeply crap solution to social evils, vastly less effective than Europeans have told themselves during their centuries of exploiting the globe. I’m not writing a settler colonial fantasy where a society is fixed (of its misogyny, homophobia, or anything else) by being conquered by enlightened outsiders.
Indeed they are, which is one reason child sacrifice is less common in the eastern 70% of the Empire.
There’s been a lot of talk on the game threads of mutually assured destruction with Halassur, resting on the idea that you could credibly threaten to inundate them with Xaos-storms if they don’t negotiate a peace. I have to say, I’m not entirely sure that would work. It’s not clear to me that the most rational Halassurq response to an initial barrage of Xaos-storms would be yielding and trusting the MC’s assurance that you’d refrain from future attacks, leading to a cold peace… rather than redoubling their war and research/espionage effort, fueled by their population’s outrage and fear at this new, devastating Qarag tactic. MAD works on the principle that no victory could justify the cost of WMD-centric war. But if you’re already engaged in total war and experiencing its costs, I’m not sure unleashing mass destruction gets you to a cold-war standoff, rather than the more historically common reaction: “being bombed hardened civilian will to resist.”
Meanwhile, keeping Xaos-storm “tech” a secret from Halassur would be a challenge. Only about 20 people in the whole Hegemony know how to make a Ward, none of whom ever expose themselves to the serious risk of capture by Halassur, so that secret has stayed safe. If only a similarly small circle learned how to produce Xaos-storms, I don’t think you’d be able to deploy it at MAD scale; and if you taught it more widely, the likelihood of Halassur’s spies or interrogators figuring it out would rise with each passing year. Once both sides have it, the risk of a gruelling tit-for-tat rather than a MAD standoff seems to me even higher.
No one has yet speculated about the opposite, mutually assured defense, Reagan’s ostensible endgame of sharing SDI technology with the world – in this case, teaching Halassur how to make a Ward. (Since sometime in G4, you’ll join the small list of people who broadly know how it’s done, and you could steer the Halassurq research team in the right direction even if you’re not an INT 6-er who could eventually do it yourself.) But that’s one possible answer to the non-quite-decade-old question:
If Halassur could also make Wards, it would remove the asymmetric advantage that has allowed the Hegemony to set the line of contestation and enjoy a one-way ratchet on territorial expansion for the last few centuries. The power to draw a line in the sand to prevent further Hegemonic Ward expansion and protect its coastline from armed or Theurgic incursions might do more to move Halassur toward a cold war standoff with you than any attempt to unleash intolerable damage. (It could go wrong, too, of course. But it seems at least as likely to succeed as any attempt to brutalize Halassur into submission, which hasn’t been working well for the Hegemony over the last couple centuries.)
As a big fan of polyarchic institutions myself, I have to say: I don’t think the gameworld is in a position to generate 18th-century parliaments. Those rested on hundreds of years of experience of various representative assemblies as a venue for high-stakes power struggles between monarchs, nobles, and bourgeoisie. The MC in this game, by contrast, is coming out of centuries of near-totalitarian empire which deprecated prior local-level institutions for participatory decision-making (like moots in the Rim and Westriding, or the assemblies of the Nyrnakan Republic) and has a thoroughly patrimonial political culture in which decision-making offices are the gift of the central authority. More than half of its population are an enslaved caste. The Hegemony has incomparably fewer people with experience of participatory or representative governance than in any of the countries that expanded/transformed their democratic institutions in the 1700s of our world.
Even the States General in the Dutch Revolt, a 16th-century body whose delegates weren’t elected in anything resembling 1700s-style polyarchy, was building on “ancient liberties” that the Low Countries’ burghers had first claimed centuries earlier, like the 1304 constitution of Utrecht. There are some parallels between that and the gameworld situation – it’s a better match than anything from the 18th century onwards, for sure – but the ancient liberties of Shayard are more tenuous, with less institutional continuity, and the rule of the Thaumatarch more consistently oppressive than anything the Netherlands had experienced.
So: you’ll be able to pioneer representative assemblies and popular participation in the wake of the Hegemony’s fall, as we’ve discussed upthread, but I don’t think we can expect them to look much like the post-revolutionary US congress or French Estates-General.
Good point. The Harrowing/kids joint combo is already a reality in both the Hegemony and Halassur, but you’re right that the MC’s state could be a pioneer in trying to maximize both approaches rather than just one of them – especially if the focus of the latter approach was on helot babies, building on the existing dehumanization work you’d inherit from the Thaumatarchy.
The Harrowing/mass Theurgy combo would I think be hard to dual-maximize, for the reasons @idonotlikeusernames suggested. Even if you tried to keep your Harrowed caste illiterate, once the secret was out of the bag, you’d inevitably increase the rate of helots who figured it out and fought back with an effectiveness much higher than non-Theurgic slave revolts. It would at any rate be a high-risk approach; Thay is one horrid outcome, but so is 1990s Afghan-style chaos where no one had a stable monopoly on violence.
The kids/mass Theurgy combo could be sustained as long as you had the institutions in place to keep the child sacrifice largely enforced by social pressure, as it is in Halassur today, rather than state violence. But while that might be an option for a somewhat enlightened, somewhat desperate Halassurq emperor to take, it’s highly unlikely that the MC would be able to get voluntary compliance with a child-harvesting program anywhere in the former Hegemony…so it would face the same problems of your victims learning to blow you up.
ADAT: I shared the first tentative world map, in which Karagon had a coast(!) and everything was, um, a bit rough:
Thank God for @DariaRF, eh?
I should note that in the past week I missed the ADAT for @Cataphrak and @Player joining the WIP conversation. Both have been gone from the XoR threads for a while, but both are still active on the forums and made some terrific contributions to that long-ago WIP thread (and Cataphrak in general is an inspiration to all of us working on “realistic” fantasy worlds in this medium). So thanks, gents.