A few more responses:
I’ll save the explanation of what’s going on with adamantine stone until we hit Ch 4, when you first encounter it on the “home” side of the Ward. For now I’ll say that producing it is an aether-intensive tech, but not unthinkably intensive nor limited to the mysterious ancients. As for the tower ring around Vigil, I’m not going to add any hints to those already in the text as to its history.
Not at all. Their omission from that comment was because I was responding to a question about the genderflipping ROs. M’kyar is a woman when you meet her, regardless of MC preference.
I will add a horrified MC reaction option for that, giving Cerlota the opportunity to explain that (as @WinterHawk noted) as long as a bit of tunnel-digging near the City-Ward is possible, she should be able to bring it down without a significant likelihood of collateral damage. The MC can of course still draw the line at this and refuse to have anything further to do with Cerlota’s scheme.
Not as “ambassador”, but as heir to the Thaumatarchy, Phaed has traveled quite a lot. They’re more likely than their father to leave the Floating Palace. I’m not going to comment on NB Phaed because there’s still a bunch of work for me to do to get that halfway right. 
For example, I need to do some more work with this:
so it’s not quite so missable!
There’s an aspect of the magic system here that I need to make more explicit–I think a minor tweak or two to Cerlota’s dialogue should be enough, with some more detailed follow-up in the chapters to come.
The ability to perceive teloi isn’t just an automatic thing that happens in trance. Most of what you see in trance is a confusing blur. You don’t see or understand every telos of everything around you. Sometimes an intuitive leap will get you there, but it usually takes careful study before you can recognize teloi enough to properly perceive them, let alone change them.
Some of the easiest teloi to perceive are the elemental ones, and even those require study. (Game One establishes that you did a lot of reading and reflection on the elements before you ever learned Theurgy.) You’ve got a good enough grasp on elemental teloi to notice when e.g. the stone of the tower has been purged of all elements but one.
But going beyond what it’s built out of, if the Tower had a weird and distinctive telos – say, if it was a gateway to Taratur as the MC initially fears, or the linchpin of the multiverse, or something in between – you almost certainly wouldn’t be able to perceive that in any useful form. That telos would be in a category that (at least for now) escapes your intellectual grasp.
I’ve heard articulations of Aristotle in which fire’s tendency to go upward represents the telos of fire… and others in which that’s taken as part of fire’s material cause. It is possible that my gameworld version of Aristotelianism is somewhat conflating multiple cause-types under the label telos, as well as somewhat muddling “nature” and “purpose”. Apologies to my philosopher friends and readers if so.
The Turko-Persian empires of central asia are a central referent for Halassur and Nyryal alike. If all my Turkic names and vocab were concentrated in the antagonistic eastern Empire with high religiosity and rigid gender roles, I hope CoG’s sensitivity readers would flame me for recycling some of English fantasy writing’s dodgiest tropes (as they yet may). Fundamentally, Halassur and Nyryal are based on the same root cultures. The Nyr reindeer pastoralists will end up with more borrowings from Nenets and Inuit material culture, but at the end of the day the Nyr and Halassurqs should be understood as two very different outworkings of the same cultural matrix.
It would be, yes–just very unlikely, which is why I’ve not written it into the chapter.
@mshan95032, there will be no option to be “pragmatically trans,” for the reasons indicated by @apple.
The “vital vapors” mentioned by Cerlota are what we’d understand as oxygen. The Abhuman concept of spirit is somewhat closer to ki – but perhaps only to the extent that there’s a family resemblance between all “breath = spirit = life” framings in cultures that take that seriously. The magic system of the gameworld is I think not really going to look a whole lot like ki energy from any angle.
No–interesting as that idea would be! To keep the worldbuilding manageable (ha! how often will you hear me say that?) I’m going to stick to my line that the Plektast specialists have been entirely focused on military ends, with a sideline in scaring/impressing/repressing the civilian population.
I henceforth appoint @Azthyme to explain all my creative choices.