An important and ambiguous question, the nuances of which Theurges are still debating. Maybe I’ll give the option to test some “weapon” edge cases at the Grand Shayard ward, or at least let you talk to someone who has. Just to stir the pot further: any MC who’d actually used their staff as a weapon was unable to bring it across the Ward. A pacifist MC wouldn’t have had that problem with a pole of equivalent size.
We’re going to see some moot dynamics in Irduin (as you and your bandit envoys are also debating how widely you want to promote moot-like village self-government back in the Rim). But the breakdown there hasn’t yet reached a point where the nobles would be resorting to persecution to reverse moot decisions they don’t like.
That’s what Erjan has delivered to the Sojourn-folk toward the end of G2 Ch 1. The research energies that might have gone into firearms in a world with different laws of magic/physics have in the gameworld gone into pressured-air tech. We’ve been talking about them more on the forums than in the game, however:
Thanks to Theurgy, the gameworld is emphatically not a late-medieval tech world. It is however a world where the Hegemony tightly controls many technologies, such that they don’t generally show up on the fringes where you’ve grown up (and Game 1 took place). There’s no way either Karagon or Halassur would ever widely disseminate pressured-air weaponry to their armies, given the ease with which that tech could be turned against them. Against rebels, in particular, they’d never send air rifles, given the risk of one falling into the wrong hands if a battle goes wrong. Even for rebels with a known lone Goete at their head, they’d send battle Theurges, not air rifles. So a number of the gameworld’s early-industrial tech aspects will only be emerging for the first time in the chapters I’m writing now.
I’ve said elsewhere that this is a Theurgic technique, not a mechanical option open to non-Theurges.
Anywhere there’s sufficient aether, Theurgy is possible.
That’s exactly the kind of sense of tension I want to create throughout the series, as it becomes clearer and clearer just how many of the current world order’s good and/or necessary aspects, as well as its horrors, presently rest on Theurgy. But at the end of the day, I don’t want to paint a world whose message is that the Choice of Rebels is “sacrifice slaves or sacrifice babies,” i.e. choose which evil empire you’re going to build on the ruins of the old. That would reflect a level of cynicism about human depravity that I don’t want to put into my work.
There are no perfect outcomes, but there are substantially better ones to be had. There are, as you say, plenty of Harrowing-equivalents in our world, but there are meaningfully less than there were a century or two ago, and I’m sure there are futures on offer where we have even less than today. I don’t think those futures are remotely inevitable – history is no march of progress – but I do think they’re achievable, i.e. we haven’t attained the best of all possible worlds.
In the gameworld, the switch to a nonlethal blood extraction system will (I expect – we’ll see how the numbers come out) be far from “costless,” including in lives. You won’t be butchering people yourself, it’s true – but you will be allowing people to die that you could save if you just had more blood (to grow more crops, or expand your public health system, or push your conquests into the monstrous neighboring realm next door). And to keep up the state capacity needed to implement a blood tax at reasonable scale, you’d need to forgo punishment of a lot of people who were deeply implicated in the crimes of the old order, and (probably) suppress some of your old friends and allies who refuse to stop killing those noble and priestly administrators.
Theurgy makes both possible, and the air rifles work on the basis of the former (so they can be wielded by non-Theurgic specialists). Let me know what “greater effect” techs you think would naturally follow from this, bearing in mind the reasons noted behind the link above that gunpowder tech never got anywhere besides mining (where we’ll see it used in the forthcoming Ch2).
Off to play music with my kids – will answer more questions later.