Y’all don’t make it easy to keep up. 
Thanks for probing on this one! I went back to double-check my figures and have massaged the world model a little to make sure I’m satisfied with what it’s telling me. So let’s try again with some revised numbers (which like all worldbuilding numbers are flexible until they finally appear in a game, and who are we kidding, still subject to some slight revision until the last game is in a shape I’m happy with):
There are around 70,000 Theurges in the Hegemony at the moment, or 0.03% of the total population. (Just to make it even more parallel with the Phalangites, I guess!) Of these magi, just over one-half are first-Kyklos, with around 22,000 of those spending most of their time on staple crops. Over the course of a year, each of those Theurges will be expected to accelerate growth on between 8 and 12 square miles of cropland.
To be clearer on how I’m imagining the crop logistics:
(No, seriously, you guys **want** to read about crop logistics?)
The first thing to say is that the real cornerstone of the Hegemony’s Theurgic agricultural system is river/canal transport of grain from breadbaskets to elsewhere. The 5000-odd Theurges who are full-time involved in river barge and sea transport along the major trade arteries feed way more people per phial than the harvest-boosters do.
Direct harvest-boosting only takes place on around 20% of the Hegemony’s arable land – although 54% of that boosting does take place in Shayard, so it seems a little more normal to Shayardenes. This is rather lower than the 35% I cited upthread – I’d earlier mixed up the numbers for harvests and acres at one key point. A fertility drop of 1/5-ish of the land will obviously contribute to famine, but less than the likely collapse in the inter-provincial trade system. (Rome offers some real-world parallels for the impact of the latter.)
In terms of how it works: a trained Level One Theurge looking over a field will easily perceive the grow-and-bloom teloi of thousands of plants at once. They don’t need to devote individual attention and time to each plant; to that extent, it is a mass-scale process. But they need to devote blood on a scale proportionate to the fact that they’re making millions of individual Changes, not a single large-scale Change.
It takes about 8 minutes for a trained ag Theurge to bring an acre to bloom, if they’re easily able to walk around and get all the plants in eyeshot (which they usually do on elevated walkways built by the helotry) – and if they’ve got the roughly 10 blood phials per minute it takes to Change all those plants. (For comparison, a donor can safely give about 8 phials’ worth in a single sitting; a self-Theurge might be able to push themselves a little further than that. One Harrowing yields enough blood for 111 acres.)
This is what leads to agriculture consuming as much of the Hegemony’s blood supply as it does, and blood and trained Theurges, rather than land, being the primary constraint on squeezing more harvests out of the current Hegemony. You can see how the Ennearchs might imagine that they don’t have an unsustainable system going, but rather a virtuous cycle where increasing harvests leads to population growth and the greater blood supply for more harvest-boosting.
When the Ennearchs first started boosting harvests outside of Karagon (where 57% of the arable land now gets regular Theurgic assistance), they didn’t really imagine that it would bring them to a point where they had four times as many Theurges evoking harvests as they had moving grain upriver and over-sea. But they still tend to see the way ahead as more of the same.
Yes, it does.
I appreciate the warning. But the move from your corner of the empire’s periphery to see things at continental scale was always going to involve this shift. A major empire in a world of magic should be bigger than the standard medieval-Europe fantasy mental model.
This thread is going through the shift in perspective a lot more starkly than the game itself will. No one’s going to tell your MC in-game that the Hegemony has a million and a half total soldiers for a long time yet, if at all. (The great majority of them are deployed at the other end of the continent from you, and even if it wanted to the Hegemony couldn’t make peace with Halassur to deploy its full force against internal rebels). It’ll be multiple games yet before you’re in a place to make decisions with continent-level impacts.
As for levels of mobilization, here’s what I said upthread:
So I’m going to stick with the scale of the continental empire. But you’ll be relieved to hear that the Hegemony’s navy only has around 1,200 ships (a third of the naval personnel I mentioned play support roles in the ports), and there are only around 2,500 total Plektoi of all varieties (horse, hound, and human).
I’ll think about it – but I’ve also always been happy to have odd corners of the game that surprise people when they try new things.
I hadn’t – thanks for the recommendation! That is a gorgeous drawing.
I’ve hesitated to do that because it adds more coding variability into a game already thick with it, but it would be more in keeping with the setting.
Roughly, but with a lot more mouths. As to how they move, I think the best answer would be mind-breakingly. Like someone else said back when I first introduced the Naos prologue:
I don’t mean to borrow the full horror of the Xthulhu mythos, obvs, but I’d like the Xthonic mythos to have some warped beyond-our-ken elements.
Love it! The Shayardenes call their capital Grand Shayard, but I wonder if the Karagonds would pay it the same compliment. Maybe it would end up as Sayaropoli, like Vendopoli and Niropoli?
All of this is explicitly addressed behind the playtestable link. I understand that not everyone will have played it yet, especially those who had mixed feelings about game one, but maybe hold off on the blustery assertions that the world is dumbdark until you’ve caught up on it.
She was 51 at the time of the prologue. If she survived, she’d be 61 now.
@Engulfed, welcome and thanks so much for the fantastic feedback! I’m sorry that the cogdemos platform has been giving you and others headaches; it’s volunteer-supported, and I know they’re working on fixing the problems people have been experiencing.
I’m hopeful that the pacing dip will feel different when Stormwright is in its final form. It’ll still be a game with a quieter second half, one that encourages the player to catch their breath and start to think about the long-term stakes of what they’re trying to achieve, rather than focusing entirely on short-term wins… but hopefully the Mordor-to-Bree transition won’t be quite as jarring as it is at the moment.
With the Wolfsbait question: this may not at all satisfy you, but here’s what I wrote a few years back about one of my game design intentions, which includes a comment on the prologues:
The Wolfsbait prologue is (for those who click on it) a signal from the very beginning that I’m going to try to include reasons to select even the unlikelier or cautious options. It’s an incentive and encouragement to explore the odd corners of the story. Similarly, you won’t fail at the first Harrowing unless you the reader choose to…and you’ll learn new things if you do.
Rebels is not and will never be a game with a single perfect playthrough, I’m afraid. You can’t get everything that’s good about it (or, well, that I think is good about it) down any one path.
That’s not just because I like games that reward exploration, but because I think there are powerful stories along lots of different ways to overthrow an empire, and I’m trying to unpack a lot of very different ones.
You’re right that the first half of Game Two doesn’t favor CHA-heavy characters. Like others have said, CHA shines in interactions with other people, and the Xaos chapters are mostly not that. By contrast, CHA has a lot of benefits in Game One, and will help characters trying to change Irduin (or just dig up its secrets) without arousing dangerous levels of suspicion. But I’ll look again at the balance in the village-Reaver confrontation sections when I go back over those chapters.
When it becomes possible to carry over a save from G1, “Captain” should carry over (unless you’re hiding your identity in the X-lands, in which case your friends will only call you that when they’re sure no one’s listening). But I didn’t add a choice on that for players just joining the game in G2.
Thanks, I’ll look at that. But in general it’s best not to assume that people physically resemble the people from the Earth cultures whose languages I’ve borrowed to differentiate them (though I understand the tendency to do so). Shayard may be Anglo-French linguistically, but much of its population lives at latitudes more like Basra, Beirut, or Lahore.
Great example of something I’ve not gone out of my way to add until I write the gamgee updates.
Yeah, it was dodgy even in the G1 context, and needed fixing for the sequel.
Because you’re from a place that has none of that. Xaos is mind-blowing, but of course it was going to be mind-blowing, it’s infamously a place where world-eating horrors run free. Finding the next district over in Shayard is at a level of prosperity, technology, population density, etc. that the protagonist had never imagined existed is a very different kind of shock; the Xaos stuff was obviously weirder but not unexpected. I totally get the reader reaction, but this is intentional.
The core reason not to go back to the Rim is basically the reason that sent you to Xaos…the Plektoi might still have your scent. You’ll be able to push on that a lot more in conversation with the rebel leader you left in charge when I actually write that section. That’ll also talk more about the impact Irduin standing or falling might have for your Rim rebels.
Huh. When I first started making clear that telos was behind Theurgy (which a high-INT character can guess at with Horion in G1), a bunch of readers were like, “Well, that pretty clearly means your world’s religion is true,” because in a world where things have an empirically identifiable Purpose or Final Cause, the idea that Someone assigned those purposes immediately jumps in plausibility. This is the first time I’ve seen the reaction that Cerlota’s revelations should make the protagonist more skeptical. I totally see where you’re coming from, but I’m not sure that’s going to be everyone’s reaction.
A devout protagonist (who can of course be high-INT, not just high-CHA) is never going to know the truth of religion the way a high-INT character can come to know how to manipulate teloi. The voice of the Angels is never going to take a completely undoubtable form, and the protagonist is not going to get a revelation of what it all means. I think that’s consistent with most religious people’s experience in our own world, especially if they’re intellectually honest.
I agree that more can be written about the religion-founder MC’s reactions to what they’re learning, and a chunk of it will come in the (still unwritten) sections with your companion from the rebellion, since as you note they’re the main person who knows and probably believes in your new revelation.
Mostly that, yes–along with a certain amount of “whoever else the Karagond collaborators decided was clearly of low blood.”
Right, enough for now, will answer more later.