Right, jumping back a couple of weeks to catch up on questions asked:
No. 
Given even a few seconds to react, Carles invariably sacrifices himself to save you, whether you’re a noble or helot kid. But if Gellard has instantly recognized you as a helot before Carles has the chance to distract him (because you’d drawn Gellard’s stare earlier with your singing), then Gellard will sic the other Alastors on you at once, for reasons Azthyme unpacked upthread. Carles will sacrifice himself to pull Gellard’s attention from any kid… but he’ll duck out and save himself if there’s no chance to do that and it looks like the kid is already about to be caught and killed.
Teren would think it was understandable but ultimately unfeasible.
They’re strong believers in noble privilege, and abhor the idea of making commoners into nobles; but you could readily convince many of them that the institution of helotry is a Karagond abomination and that a non-chattel peasantry is the authentic Shayardene way to organize the lower orders. As for who to Harrow, they’d be up for considering a range of options as long as it’s never, never them. If there’s a lottery, true nobles’ names had better not be in it. If they thought it was possible to run the system off foreigners, most of them would be happy with that.
No, no no. “Responsible for” like Janet Yellen (rather than Alexander Hamilton) is responsible for the US Treasury Department. Ocharsis is around one century old, and has overseen the (nearly 400 years old) Lykeion for the past forty years.
At present, I’m debating whether it will be possible to end G4 with even one of them still alive (not counting Sarcifer). If so, she’d be an absolutely relentless G5 adversary, not a possible ally or servitor.
A few, no doubt, but not enough to significantly sap the strength of the Qasqer Zhüj nomad faction. That doesn’t mean that wiping out or marginalizing them would be the only options; many MCs would consider it quite useful to have a strong force causing problems for the rump Thaumatarchy(ies) in the north, and will be more interested in coordinating with the Zhüj than breaking them.
Search through G1 Ch1 (chirex.txt) for some other examples. It was the Pelematou who killed Olen Stonehewer. Even more than the casual cruelties of the Keriatou, the Pelematou have a reputation for brutality to their helots; as Breden says down one conversation path, “every day, we fear that someone we care for will fall afoul of Lady Pelematou’s temper.” They’re Loyalists with strong links to the Mourinatou of Rimmersford, the great House that will be doing the most to push back your revolt in the more populous and economically developed areas of the Rim.
That’s going to be an emergent feature of the endgame. You’ll certainly have much better odds if you’re trying for Earlund or Rim-plus-upper-SR than you will with the whole of historical Shayard, but at this point I can’t say how much better.
The Hector you get to see on the “summer of love” flashback is still one who’s otherwise always been an insecure jerk to you, but at once point opened up enough to share his greatest vulnerability with the MC: the humiliation and shame he’s made to feel when he leaves the Outer Rim and engages with the nobility of Grand Shayard. The MC then goes on to become an unequalled source of new shame for the Keriatou.
Hector will respond to that with fury and violence no matter what; the idea that rebellion must be answered with disproportionate terror makes every bit as much sense to him as it did to the Romans. But believe me, he’ll be seething 100 times as fiercely about a lowly cousin who betrayed the Keriatou despite Hector’s having once made himself uniquely vulnerable to her/him.
Not quite. The drudges are the non-free urban class – essentially, helots who serve as factory workers or house slaves rather than plantation workers. The free urban poor are the ones who would be ferociously opposed to any system that took away their exemption from Harrowing, since that’s just about the only privilege society affords them. Teren would probably look for a combination of repression and bread-and-circus bribes to bring the urban poor into compliance with a lottery system.
Opportunities based on taking away and redistributing the property of the wealthy? Oddly, socially privileged people tend to respond to that kind of suggestion from high-CHA reformers with intensified fear and rejection, rather than being won over. Teren would tell you that it’s a dead end because you’ll never sway a significant fraction of the nobility with that approach.
Uniting the nobility against foreigners (especially Karagonds, Abhumans, and Halassurqs) is a much more fruitful possibility, and may even be part of the only strategy that could lead to a tentative Laconnier-Leaguer rapprochement – but still, if you combined it with big promises to the helots, you’d lose a lot of the nobles again. Teren would point out that if you promised every freed helot a few acres of Karagond land, when your war against Karagon stalled out (like the paradigmatic war of everyone’s experience has) the helots would probably start demanding land a lot closer to home.
As you’ve guessed, “Do it but don’t let people see you doing it,” would be Teren’s natural response. “If you can find a way to Harrow far fewer of your population, most of them won’t even want to take off the blindfold to see how you’re actually doing it. Just keep it at a deniable scale, and even if some people try to condemn you for it, their neighbors will shout them down and punish them instead of you.” Much the kind of thing that @idonotlikeusernames has in mind, with a similar irritation that people’s moral qualms make it impossible to do it openly at larger scale.
Jev would be deeply saddened if the only way to keep the Qasqer Zhüj at bay was to strangle Nyrish nomadic pastoralism through sedentarization policies. Force o to pick, and o will pick the cities; but o will look for any reasonable alternative first.
Buried deep in the WIP thread, I shared a (very) little about the chronology involved here. This followed on from a question about the Leilatou archons, where I mentioned that Meletos was followed by his sister “Loudthroatclearingnoise Leilatou,” before Phrygia took power. In a similar vein:
So yes, Meletos was an active Loyalist in the Westriding during and after Cabel’s Revolt; but his actions during the Revolt didn’t immediately win him the Archonate.
Those are absolutely going to be possibilities – but there will also be ways for you to win/keep their allegiance even if you start making decisions that tend against their old loyalties. A dramatic break with Cabel will lose you Bethune, but in a tense relationship, she might well stick with you.
I don’t think you’ll meet Zebed again, no.
The MC can have religious experiences that they take to be revelations, yes – but those will come to an MC who’s looking for them and wants to have them, not to a skeptic, and they’ll never take an entirely unambiguous form. There will never be hard sensory proof, no golden tablets handed by an angel to the prophet; whether or not any real-world founders had an experience quite that unambiguous, it’s not going to be one on offer to the MC here.
I’m also not convinced that INT is a vital stat for religious founders. The intellectual elaboration of religious doctrine often comes later, as high-INT disciples start interpreting the teachings of the master. As a purely historical matter, we don’t really know how much of the nuance or intellectual coherence in the Pali Canon goes all the way back to Gautama and his immediate followers, and how much is the fruit of subsequent generations who contributed to its final written form.
Some religious founders may well have been high-intellect reasoners – please don’t take my use of Buddha as an example of CHA 6 to imply a claim that he was INT 0 or INT 1, I don’t mean to import that game mechanic into the real world! But regardless, I don’t think that was the heart of the founders’ success. You don’t need to be an intellectual to have profound insights into the human condition, or to express those and live them out in ways that attract disciples. If your charisma is powerful enough, those disciples will do the job of working out nuanced intellectual systems around your core insights (however nuanced and intellectual your original articulations may or may not have been).
Exactly the same from a doctrine perspective, sure – a 2-CHA MC can found a religion of kenon or the inner Angelic voice in Game 1. And the fact that, with that CHA level, the MC’s teachings won’t sweep the continent doesn’t make those teachings wrong.
Damn. I wish I’d thought of that line first.
I’ve said above that I’m not going to share too much about them now, since I’m writing them in the rest of G2 and want to see how they take shape. Sorry!
Which brings us back to @comradelenin’s question on compliance in Halassur. Here’s what I’d written upthread on that:
This too will get unpacked in Chs 3 and 4, for MCs who spend their time with Erjan and his sister Dilek. But it’s not actually that hard to cover up noncompliance; who’s to say that this particular surviving child is your firstborn? Regular readers of this thread are probably sick of hearing me talk about state capacity, so I’ll just confirm that the Halassurq state doesn’t have a history-defyingly good census bureau or the capacity to track all births and deaths in its jurisdiction. People’s neighbors are the ones most likely to have a good idea of whether a couple’s pregnancy is their first one, or whether one of the reasons for exemption really does apply to them; and those neighbors are a lot more likely to be attentive (and punitive, for evaders) if their village lives under a constant threat for which blood-fuelled magic is the only defense.
Big families are entirely compatible with babies dying – in fact, they’re causally linked. Birth rates tend to stay high as long as child mortality rates do, and begin to drop soon afterward, not because farms have become less labor-intensive, but because farmers have more confidence that the kids they do have are going to survive long enough to look after them in their old age.
In a world of high child mortality, it’s not clear that practices of child sacrifice move the needle all that much; there’s no sign that Carthage had demographic problems, even though child sacrifice seems to have been very commonplace there, not just during emergencies. In the gameworld, where blood harvesting leads directly to reduced overall child mortality, I don’t think there’s any utilitarian reason to forgo child sacrifice. The only reason would be ethical abhorrence at taking entirely innocent life.
The discussions can definitely be heavy. I’ll try to work those into the game at a somewhat more manageable level; we’re talking here about things that will unfold over four long books. Glad you’re sticking with it.