I’d note that in my mind the CHA approach and the religion-founding storyline(s) aren’t identical–the latter is just one way of doing the former. Edit: which I see you also said, a few dozen posts downthread. 
During the Rim management sections of Game 2 a high-CHA character will get the choice to kick a cult of personality properly into gear, regardless of religion. If that seems excessive, you can just continue to preach “justice, a better world, and the inevitability of change” with greater persuasiveness than low-CHA builds. You’ll continue to have benefits of greater loyalty, diplomacy, and persuasiveness, as well as a larger and more devoted general following, whether you choose to go religious or not.
Of course the religion plots are going to be distinctive and interesting (I hope), and they’ll have you radically engaged with one of the most powerful forces for social transformation – once you’re back in society, not in Xaos. But there are downsides to making radical religious claims, too.
As for high INT, it’s useful for winning encounters, for delving into some of the secrets of the world, and (if you distrust Cerlota) doing your own stunts and training your own mage corps – all good stuff. But it’s not particularly good for growing your following or for winning wars (if an all-star Theurge could win a war, the Heg-Hal War wouldn’t have lasted three centuries and counting).
My goal, taken across the games, is to have enough fun stuff down each major stat path to encourage replays.
I’ll add some points to underline this.
Just to clarify the Hegemonic story: their claim isn’t that it was random, but that the Xaos-worshiping Braurach cannibals opened a previously unthinkable link to Taratur while seeking to enlist the dark powers in their war against the holy Hegemony. On this account, it’s the depravity of Braurach that’s been unique in all the millennia of recorded history–and thankfully, the Angels had already raised up the right Eclect (Hera, her Ennearchs, and her successor) to defend us against it.
Just to be clear, I’ve barely written the companions’ arcs in the current Part I. My intent is to go back now that I know the overall shape of Game 2 and write arcs for the optional companions that fit it more clearly.
Absolutely. As it happens, I was just reading the Meno with my kid as part of our home school today – he was surprisingly fascinated with it, I’d just wanted to give him a taster of what the original “Socratic method” looked like but he was keen to hear the whole thing! – and we were both struck by how much explicit religious argumentation was part of Plato’s/Socrates’s case.
But the game religion, for all its Demiurgic Angels, is much more cod-Aristotle than Plato – instead of a realm of Forms with The Good above all, there’s an Unmoved Mover deity and a multiplicity of teloi to study and codify. And the Abrahamic echo is there too, because I didn’t want my nightmarish establishment faith to look too much like a demonization of anybody else’s religion, and in part because I want to dig into the nonviolent “choice of the rebel to whom I personally owe allegiance.”
As others noted, it’ll be part of the Rim management sections of G2 Part 2 – and you’ll get a slightly better rate for your mules than you do at the end of G1.
I’ll admit that one reason I gave Wolfbait such a banger of a followup sequence is that just about no one has his prologue as their favorite origin story. Everyone’s either a Carles or Olynna stan.
I don’t want to brutally crush the hopes of everyone who wants to end the Xaos-storms… but I will say that if there’s any possible way forward toward that goal, it’s not going to rest on having gone to Vigil with Wolfbait. In plot terms, the Vigil story is a sideline. I hope my re-readers find it eventually, because I loved writing it; but it’s too narrowly available to have major plot consequences.
Well shit, there’s something else I’ll have to fix on my next pass through that chapter…
Heard and accepted.
If I implement it right, I think there’ll be a lot more people agreeing with you when this game is done.
But you better believe that the Pelematou will be trying to get everyone in Grand Shayard to call helot MC t’Keriatou…
I mean, not to go all Abrahamic again, but the winged creatures and wheels of eyes in Ezekiel aren’t a million miles from my winged helixes either. So maybe I’m riffing more on Madeleine L’Engle than Lovecraft.