Do you think you’ll be able to get enough Theurges to create the new Shayard border wards you’ll need to pull that off?
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We have some counter measure though - self sacrifice theurgy. If we spread it wide enough then we might stand a good chance against harrowing states, after all we can see that self taught theurge can kill plenty of trained aether driven theurges if caught by suprise.
Also we miss a lot of social unrest if we forego theurgy, which cant be said about harrowing states.
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It would depend on how many theurges can be appealed to switch their loyalty to the restored Shayardene kingdom, I suppose.
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You won’t be able to catch them by surprise though. They’ll know there’s a lot of sub-first circle theurges they’ll be going against and take precautions like they do if the MC revealed their powers before the surprise attack. I suppose it could make it too expensive to try to conquer you though because it would make defeating an insurgency much more difficult. You couldn’t win an offensive war but you might be able to get the harrowing states to see attacking you as more costly than beneficial.
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Said doctor, unsurprisingly, said he wished he’d never saved Hitler.
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Both seem likely to me, though this ties back to an important point about our legacy with the rebellion we left behind:
We were the sleeping king in the mountain: the Marble Emperor, Arthur in Avalon. We departed for the land from which only one man has returned (poetic license), the nightmare world of fairy tales. And when we return, they likely won’t see our face, or hear our voice, or touch us, or smell us (undoubtedly our protagonists stink): a distant figure speaking through intermediaries, and soon after that departing for a world beyond contact (Grand Shayard).
Already, we’ve been away from the Whendward Band longer than we’ve been with it. There will be new recruits who know us only as a story — potentially a story wielded by rebel leaders to claim authority.
So when we return from the dead, so to speak: if we have changed, or are merely perceived as having changed, I’d expect a kind of metaphorical homelessness. That the people of our past might prefer the old myth to the new reality.
Working with the aristos could be one potential such fault line. The Leaguers, for example, are led by a Leilatou, and not one our rebellion can just hold for ransom. If it seems like the wellbeing of these obscenely rich aristocrats from the metropole has become our priority—well, disillusionment is to be expected.
Kala’s counteroffer: Kalt will acknowledge this lineage, that the esteemed rebel leader was always noble. Therefore, they shall be treated like Kala treats all nobles…
Ah yeah, fair, you’re right. I was thinking of rest mass (rest energy), which would not vary, but it was wrong of me to just describe that as mass. But that ultimately leads back to the core point of reducing to absolutes where we agree.
The classical physics examples are more illustrative of a philosophical question about the bag of sugar regarding how we perceive the continued existence of objects. To change cold coal into hot coal or a contracted spring to a relaxed spring, energy moves in or out of that system. Applied to your bag of sugar example, I think it less challenges the notion of physicality and more how we perceive the bag. If I add more sugar to the bag, it remains a “bag of sugar” but isn’t a “1kg bag of sugar” anymore.
Also, looping back to this:
Is there any reading material you’d recommend on this topic? I have a very shallow grasp of Aristotelian metaphysics, but it’d be interesting to see if any of the current deeper mysteries of XOR’s magic system (like Wardwork and meta-telos) could be read differently in this context.
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Plato.Stanford.edu has some good articles on Aristotelian philosophy.
I’m not an expert in philosophy by any stretch, I just occasionally dabble, but I can say that 3 of the biggest metaphysical concepts in Aristotle are
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The four causes - material, formal, efficient and final
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Hylomorphism - belief that every entity (or at least every normal one) composed of matter and form
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Energeia/actuality vs Dynamis/potentiality and the theory that change can be explained by the movement in an entity from potential to actual.
Here’s an article on with an overview on Aristotle’s philosophy in general
And this one is on matter vs form and mentions prime matter (Form vs. Matter (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy))
Wikipedia will often have articles pop up regarding key Aristotelian terms if you google them as well.
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That’s what I roughly meant. Also if we spread the thing really wide then we can expect harrowed social classes in harrowing states to have a better chance at insurgency too, if they will get an abilty to wield theurgy against their masters.
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I wasn’t earnestly making an argument about skipping a meal, just attempting a humour. Of course 30% in any time before modernity can well be the line between subsistence diet and starvation.
Exactly. The union of concepts and concretes is an uneasy marriage if a marriage at all. The more modern we go the more the former stems from the latter. In Xoriverse it’s a bit the other way around and more even than that - the main means of progress - theurgy hinges on it being that way. It’s very unique.
On another note - how feasible would it be to make up ones blood needs by raiding?
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On what scale? If you’re still an outlaw band, or up to about a city-state in size, it should be pretty easy to support yourself by raiding and tribute (the Aztec Triple Alliance for an example). Once you get to a kingdom, though, raiding becomes increasingly inefficient, tribute shades into taxes, and you’ll probably end up with something like the current Thaumatarchy.
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Of course the downside of this approach is pretty well illustrated by how the Mexica ended up falling. The book I read on the topic estimated only 1% of the army that destroyed Tenochtitlan were Spaniards.
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A white male lead (who’s a minor nobleman) and a small expedition go to an evil Indigenous empire built on blood sacrifice and spark a rebellion of their oppressed peoples. The leader gets into a relationship with a local woman, overthrows the emperor and becomes leader of the people he liberated.
Cortes’ conquest of Mexico sounds like a classic Hollywood epic, so long as you end the movie right then. (I feel dirty writing that.)
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Other things that need to not be in the script: the fact that our hero had risen to prominence in Hispaniola and Cuba in part from his skill in slaving expeditions to replace the natives of the islands that had almost died out, the fact that he had his spy murder the governor’s agent and fled the port before he could be removed from leadership of the expedition to Mexico, agents of the governor and the Crown that came to reign him in kept mysteriously dying, the role the epidemic caused by the pathogens the Spaniards brought with them played in the conquest. And yes, absolutely end before we get into the aftermath of the conquest.
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Yeah Cortes was a total piece of shit and he probably killed one of his wives as well. Basically only good thing he ever did in his life was overthrow the Mexica. But to be fair, that was a pretty big thing.
Also, I never understand why he / the Spaniards get blamed for the plagues. The plagues would have still killed millions even if he’d rolled up to do nothing more than hold hands and sing kumbaya. It’s like blaming the Chinese for Covid or the Black Death. Nonsensical.
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yes Aztec where real monster if you ask cortes. it is good thing that there are almost no accounts of them expect Spaniards and most of there culture was burned if something was left who could imagine what kind of lies would they spread.
also argument that Aztec where so evil that cortes army mostly considered from other tribes is pretty big bs justification for Aztec evils if anyone know’s what they are talking about and Spanish most definitely where not better than Aztec in any measure.
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Current scholarship does support the idea that human sacrifice was quite extensive. Moctezuma II was also aggressively expansionist. There’s a reason so many city states were willing to throw in with Cortes.
However, Cortes and the other men in that enterprise wanted gold and slaves. There wasn’t any humanitarian agenda and it’s utterly fanciful to think they undertook their campaign for the good of the subjects of the Triple Alliance.
@VernonRoche - I do agree the epidemics weren’t an instance of intentional biological warfare.
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What they wanted is largely irrelevant to the goodness of their action. Intent only affects their personal virtue (or lack thereof to be more precise)
Example, Stalin did a good thing by defeating Hitler. He didn’t do it because he cared about Jews, Poles, and Romani. The action itself remains good even if Stalin himself is evil and lived an evil life.
My thinking on Cortes has always been pretty simple. He was a glorified bandit murderer who was an exceptional general and strategist. He was incredibly courageous, ambitious, and violent. He overthrew an evil, imperialist, expansionist system which most of the natives of Mexico hated. He then replaced it with something that was also evil.
Alongside him came a plague that he had 0 control over.
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That’s a fair summary.
I was speaking of not including the plague in the context of a narrative portraying Cortes as a hero. I don’t think it’s something he intentionally did. They didn’t know germ theory and it hit his allies too which wasn’t helpful to his cause.
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funny thing about Aztec and cortes is that no matter how bad they where they could not even come close to cortes and Spanish empire. i would not even consider them that evil from empires standards if i ever had to chose losing war against Aztec or Spanish i would every time chose Aztec.
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It’s also important to remember that Cortes was in some respects along for the ride. It was Cortes who provided military leadership, but it was Xicotencatl and the Tlaxcalan nobility who provided the vast majority of the soldiers, political knowledge, and who shaped the policy of the victorious armies towards the Triple Alliance.
Cortes planned the war and was the figurehead. The Tlaxcalans won it and they were the ones who decided what happened to their ancient enemies.
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