That’s of course a fundamental element of the current helot harvesting policy, though with a lower age threshold (and one which has a bit of extension available for elders). A Harrower state trying to shift away from slavery while keeping up its phial numbers might well attempt to waive the other elements of helot harvesting while broadening or universalizing the classes who get auto-Harrowed when they get old. That might allow them to raise the age threshold to something closer to average cross-population life expectancy.
You’d have to fight a lot of people to implement it – both non-helots resisting having the sacrifice extended to them, and helots for whom the “Harrower at the end of all roads” is precisely what they’re trying to be free from. @Azthyme is right that it will be destabilizing.
But that’s true to varying degrees of any blood policy, and this one is unlikely to fail as utterly as trying to institute a child sacrifice system in Shayard. So yeah, worth having on the menu.
The kind of privilege that would among other things lock in their landholding rights and ensure that they are only accountable to their peers, not to the lesser orders, for any violation of the law. See the mention of Jefferson upthread for a reminder of the kinds of gaps in justice that would keep open.
The game will definitely give you the chance to talk to Abelard about his choice to send Halassurq weapons to a helot revolt in a district where his fellow faction members were aristarchs. 
Some as individuals. But not enough to swing the faction as a whole to support any idea of nobles going to the Harrower.
Plenty! There’s a lot more turnover among Ennearchs than among Thaumatarchs. But I’m not going to multipy Coughcoughatous to come up with a specific number that will almost certainly not be relevant to the actual story.
We’re still years off my writing out all the Zhüj options, but my instinct is that they’re going to be happy to be home, and not want to go back east.
Absolutely not. Ch 2 has alternating sections where you’re spending time with people in Irduin and spending time guiding the Rim revolt. The latter sections are available to all MCs, not just to ones that are taking a hands-off approach to Irduin’s crackup.
He doesn’t even pay much lip service to it, personally. That’s just Dad’s faction. His and Calea’s loyalty to the “One True King” is about as strong as Abelard’s loyalty to a minor Laconnier aristarch family – and the reverse also applies (Abelard’s a true believer in the de Syrnon restoration).
We’ll see. There’s a lot going on in Shayard City, and a lot of attitudes the MC can have that would be relevant. There will definitely be questions about your attitude toward the City (with some intended thematic resonance with the City you’ve already encountered in Ch1: is Grand Shayard a nexus of predators feeding parasitically off its massive hinterland, which needs to be brought down for the health of the realm, or is it a place of hope from which a strong leader could restore order and justice to the land?)
And because “Brimlund” is more than just the Southriding – as well as a concept with massive practical fallout – I certainly wouldn’t let any attitude the MC expresses toward Grand Shayard/SR nobles determine their choice on splitting the realm in a future game.
Good luck achieving that outcome, period – let alone achieving it before you’ve had to make a decision about blood harvesting institutions. Within its present boundaries Shayard has 9m free urban poor and 3m urban drudges, 15% of the province’s population; bringing that many people out of poverty is unlikely to happen during the economic devastation of an imperial collapse, even before you start talking about adding 40m+ former helots to their number.
Well, don’t rely on ChatGPT to help you figure it out. It’s right about the core meaning of the term: the purported Roman practice of keeping the masses from rising up by making sure affordable bread was always available on the market and providing large-scale spectacles/entertainments to distract them. But you could have got that just fine from Google/Wikipedia (along with more relevant and thought-provoking detail in the Wiki article).
What comes after that is mostly crap. The French example is (by ChatGPT’s own “analysis”) one of a monarchy ignoring the populace, not providing them with either bread or circuses; what’s it doing here? The USSR is a fine example of bread but it was pretty poor at anything circus-like (despite the weasel words GPT tosses in there).
The Nazi example isn’t as bad – Kraft durch Freude was arguably a pretty effective program to keep ordinary Germans happy with easily available entertainments, and Hitler was a master of spectacle – but public works take us beyond “bread”. The connotation of the original phrase is tossing cheap food to the masses; the building of the autobahn etc. is I think better seen as an example of mass mobilization, which was central to many modern ideologies and distinguishes them from premodern (or less ideological modern) authoritarian states’ policies for keeping the masses apathetic and disengaged.
ChatGPT can clearly help make some fun RP conversations – but when it comes to educating ourselves about something, honestly, it’s worse than worthless. It will confidently “lie” (because it has no way to reliably distinguish truths from lies). It will toss in irrelevancies and dress them up with meaningless verbal froth like “the situation was more complex and included other contributing factors.” Stick with Google, and develop the skills to recognize the quality sources it feeds you from content mills – that’ll serve you much, much better than developing a ChatGPT dependency.
Anyway. When I used the phrase for Teren, I didn’t have gladiatorial games in mind – I don’t think that’s likely to be in the future of the gameworld. I don’t have a specific “keep them entertained” option in mind right now, and don’t think Teren does either; we’ll both go looking for one when the time comes.
I think you could sustain a meaningful distinction in the public mind between the Karagonds (oppressors!), Halassurqs (war enemies!), and Abhumans (creepy and unnatural!), and the other provinces that have like you been under the Hegemony’s boot. It would certainly be possible for a homelander MC to demonize everyone who doesn’t speak some form of Shayarin, especially if millions of those people come spilling across your borders looking for food. But it should also be readily possible for a nationalist to distinguish some specific foreign nations as The Enemy while the others are OK. Especially for the ones like Erezza and Wiendrj* that share your religion.
*if the cult of the Forgotten Gods doesn’t make a massive comeback as the Hegemony cracks up
Absolutely not. Sorry, Crusader Kings IV this simply ain’t.
Sounds plausible. We’ll see.
Nope. As I’ve said upthread, while I reserve the right to make some exceptions, my plan is that the epilogues will generally end a generation or so after the main wars of G5 have reached a resolution. Whether that finds the MC expecting to die of old age soon or expecting many more Theurgically-granted decades may affect the tone of the epilogue but won’t affect where it stops.
I’m going to say not remotely likely. But let’s see how the story rolls.
This is, for the record, why I’m not sure that even Thaïs is going to make it to G5. But I’ll go ahead and reveal that this trick is actually one more thing in the special 4% category, and can’t be extended to the whole population.
And ADAT, @Beezlebub joined the conversation on the WIP thread – I think he still pops up on the forums from time to time? He provided a lot of enthusiasm and some good ideas over the years, so thanks, Beez.