Nope. Plenty of imperial founders have had talents other than intellect.
Yes, as an American and Christian I’m very mindful of how empire-building can follow from a liberating creed you want to spread (or an evil you want to banish as conclusively as possible), not just from greed or naked will-to-power. An anti-imperialist MC will still have people from other areas begging for their intervention to break the Harrower and prevent a neo-Thaumatarchy (or reinvention of pre-Karagond serfdom) from taking root. Personally, I’m anti-empire as I am anti-violence – and I recognize that both those stances involve living with evils (to myself and others) that I’d otherwise have a chance to defeat. They’ll be possible stances in XoR, but not without tradeoffs.
Yes, absolutely. My intent is that the MC will be able to choose a role as advisor/supporter/critic rather than actual authority when it comes to any rebellion, including the original one you started and led in Game 1.
They’re present in all the oceans surrounding the continent, but there are more of them in the northern ocean (i.e. the Erezziano and Nyrish coasts) where there are far fewer eel-hunters than in the south. No one has ever managed to study Great-Eels closely enough or capture enough of them to sustain a Plektosis project.
Great question! The famine-stricken refugees aren’t a “faction” you can win to your side with a land grant, like the Vikings-in-England example you mentioned on the old thread. And I’m now in a better place to answer your question I dodged then (“By the present day, how much vacant Shayardene land/acres is not yet owned/cultivated by its native citizens?”). With the caveat that I reserve the right to tweak these numbers more if needed, Shayard looks a bit like this:
Cultivated land: 48%
Pastureland: 22%
Forested estates: 9%
Waste/wild/desert: 21%
This level of arability is the result of massive Theurgic investment in irrigation systems, land levelling, etc. and relies on ongoing Theurgic maintenance of those systems. (The Westriding, though, has had a long-term dip in yields and loss of significant arable area due to the Scouring after Cabel’s Revolt.)
The population density of Shayard varies by region, but runs from 60 people/sq mi in the Rim and Reach (lots of waste/pasture) to 111 in the Westriding, or on average 175 ppl/arable sq mi. These densities are I understand high for the medieval/early modern period, reflecting the fact that Theurgy has pushed the gameworld’s demographics in a more modern direction (while the annual harvesting of around 5% of the adult population also keeps it from exploding in a fully modern way).
It’s of course possible to fit more people into that amount of land (as you can see by comparison to modern countries’ pop density). But in the middle of an imperial collapse (and for some time after) you’re not going to be able to bring significantly more marginal land under cultivation, with the infrastructure investment that requires. And settling people on marginal land isn’t an option at scale; the reason they’re fleeing en masse is that they come from agriculturally marginal land, where they were sustained by an imperial grain trade that has now collapsed.
So any resettlement of refugees is going to be almost entirely on owned land – inhabited by people who have already experienced a world-historic boom in population over the past century and thus feel that things are already too crowded, even before refugees possibly equivalent to around 40% of the existing rural population show up on their doorstep.
At present 83% of Shayard’s arable land is owned by the noble 2% of population (though it also hosts the helots, retainers, and most of the Alastors, collectively making up almost two-thirds of the population). 1% of land is directly owned by monasteries and priests, and 16% by yeoman smallholders. Of the noble land, about 35% of the acreage (29% of total) is now dependent on Theurgy to get a harvest and will have a massive drop in the yields of the exhausted soils with any disruption to the blood economy.
No more than Elon Musk was able to use repurposed SpaceX rockets for his Boring Company. Different purposes, different tech.
No, though they’re eaten in parts of Erezza.
Major physical changes of any kind – sex transition, becoming a leopard or dragon – are going to be saved for the late game. There won’t be time for multiple changes, even if that were something the MC wanted.
Alternative religions can be effective “glue” over wide areas – but “all of Shayard” is too wide an area for something novel to sweep in and hold it together. Spreading a new religion would help with some social-order problems, but the problem of Shayard’s internal diversity isn’t one of them.
Great question. Yes, but “average” wouldn’t necessarily be the way it’s calculated – it would depend on the circumstances.
Yes, but the lot of a serf wasn’t one that a post-revolutionary helot is going to be happy with either. 
It’s much, much easier and less blood-costly to do scouting and aerial assault with flying Theurges than with flying Plektoi. Plektosis doesn’t involve mind control (no Theurgy does or can) or increasing animals’ mental capacity (too poorly understood), so you can’t make a pigeon or falcon into an effective scout.
You can give humans wings and hollow out their bones… but that involves some pretty severe tradeoffs. In the words of longtime friend-of-XoR and design consultant Laguz: “If wings are so good, why hasn’t everyone evolved to get them? Well, they make you fragile as all cack AND consume an enormous amount of energy to the point that you can quite easily kill yourself if something goes wrong.”
In the gameworld magic system, it’s easier in every way to temporarily change your weight and impetus so you can fly, and drop vitriol bombs that you trigger Theurgically, than going through the agony and cost of Plektosis to be able to do the same things through higher-risk biological mechanisms.
Ha! That may be a case where I need to tweak the code to make it impossible. Anyone named “de Syrnon” or adopting a gryphon crest would have been killed long ago.
No. It would have some effect, but not nearly the same.
By and large, they’d wonder if you were serious, i.e. trying to become Seracca, or just messing about like the udud Theurges do in various ways they don’t respect at all. M’kyar would be sympathetic with the former but not the latter. Laj would be amused.
Thanks so much for the bug reports and all the encouraging words!