Thanks, though I do think that there may be divide between sympathizing with the plight of the helots but believed that their place in society must not change (some people said Olynna the Ecclesiast is this) and absolutely wanting to emancipate the Helots and abolish the caste system (I personally think Phaedryx is the former initially but a compassionate MC can change their line of thinking, though I may be surprised when I met them, who knows?)
Yeah I personally don’t think Diadoch will be revolutionary or radicaly reformist when it comes to the helots, but I also don’t really get from where this MC sex toy stuff came from.
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I have a suspicion that given that theurgy can make someone effectively immortal, the Heir might get disillusioned with the concept of waiting indefinitely to inherit and therefore sees your rebellion as the best way to secure a seat of power more quickly, even if it isn’t at the top.
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can you tell me where this sneak peek is?
https://forum.choiceofgames.com/t/choice-of-rebels-part-1-wip-thread/1601/5681?u=zincvit. It just a small piece of dialogue though so don’t get your panties in a twist
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@Havenstone I am actually wondering something, after looking at all the main factions you will meet in Grand Shayard, I’m sort of stumped that there are no large bureaucratic and scribal class that we can woo. With the Rim I can see it due to it’s remoteness and the local aristocracy acting as administrator but with large urban areas surely the Hegemony as an Early Modern State must already have some sort of bureaucracy going or do they still continue the arrangement of the Church continue to as the main bureaucracy like in Medieval Europe (I’m also asking this to see if I can circument the aristocracy as the main leadership in my future state but if the Church do hold this role then I’m somewhat fine with it)
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It couldn’t literally be a gunpowder empire, and a “compressed-air empire” wouldn’t happen in this gameworld. Theurgy is the closest equivalent of gunpowder, and (as with our world’s gunpowder empires) the empires with a monopoly on Theurgy have already used it to consolidate huge stretches of territory. Ventisputori are one useful weapon in countering it, but they’re a tactical innovation–they don’t shift the whole strategic picture like cannon did.
If you keep learning Theurgy from the Abhumans, eventually you can start specializing in Plektosis. You couldn’t keep your Plektoi a secret forever, but because you’ll be some distance from Abhumans for most of the time, you could accomplish a fair amount before they found out.
You’re right that there have always been people who felt that newborn lives were of little inherent value, and cultures that reinforced that in various ways. For people whose ethics tend that way, a trade-off with even 2-3 lives is a no-brainer. For ethical systems that really insist on the protection of innocent life, you’ve got to get significantly higher before it presents anything resembling a dilemma.
I wrote about this on the Game 1 thread:
@mshan95032, Cerlota will be able to get some digging done in Grand Shayard without the need to ally with any specific faction. And she’s going to drop the City Ward whether you like it or not–there’s no talking her out of the experiment.
Absolutely: fire, earth, air, water, and aether, in various combinations. 
I don’t think the game is ever going to focus all that much on the problematics of heir production, even for a Laconnier-allied MC, and the fact that neither Abelard nor Cerlota are interested in poly relationships would be a dealbreaker in any case.
Depends on where you wanted it to live, and what you wanted it to do…
If you gave it to the band leader or de Firiac, it’ll be relevant this game. If not, you’ll have a chance to get it in Game 3. You crossed over a long way from where you’ll cross back – there’s no chance to pick it up this game.
As noted, I don’t have any planned.
If they stick with their Theurgic studies, yep.
It crosses a line into new territory–something that we all have an instinctive urge to protect, and something that, as @apple says, can’t be taken nonlethally.
Meant to be pasture, but that works.
I’d thought I’d just posted that somewhere, in the last few months, but now I can’t find it. I’ll have another look.
Great questions, all.
As a Nepal-raised kid, my model for this will always be the Rana oligarchy of hereditary prime ministers dominating the puppet kings in Kathmandu for a century. And yes, something like this should totally be a possible G5 outcome.
Nobles, Alastors, priests, and merchants all perform different functions that we would consider “bureaucratic” from our modern perspective. There’s no single class that does it all.
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Damn that’s good enough for me 
@Havenstone how well known will the details of what happened to the Phalangites be? Will people know for example several Theurges and Plektoi died (assuming they did), or will the Hegemony run damage control and keep it too ‘a host was defeated by the Rim rebels’?
It does, but I’m curious what details the general populace has beyond ‘Karagonds got stomped.’
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I think the scale of the triumph drives the hidden notoriety stat up right?
On another note: is Chirex still out there or was she one of the Theurges that were potentially killed by the MC? I’d love for the MC to meet her again as a full Theurge.
Hey everyone. Haven’t had time to play the game yet but I’m looking forward to it.
Anyway, per Havie’s request, I’m yoinking a discussion point from the other thread:
And yet, as we see with China several times, that also means that the center has little ability or interest to clear out corruption in the sub-realms, so when the machinery on the ground throughout the Hegemony starts to seize up, there’s that much less that can be done from the top to correct its course. One of the possible complaints the MC can have in Book 1 is that the Hegemony isn’t willing to ruthlessly enforce its laws against its own agents so long as the blood and treasure flow to Aekos.
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I’ll admit that the current numbers 10 or even a dozen to 1 have my mc leaning more towards it than he did previously although his preferred method would be to expand the number of people to collect a blood tax from. Cerlotta says the numbers would need to be at least double what the helot class can provide but if that is with current blood expenditures, including the wards, the floating palace and luxuries for the noble class than my mc would indeed seek to reduce the base expenditure by cutting the wards, the floating palace and most luxury out of the picture, which might make blood tax for the necessities just barely viable.
His nickname is prince nippletwister…so…
If they can be produced at scale they could nevertheless produce the shift from the dedicated warrior class to the citizen soldier/militia with or without mandatory conscription. Good archers and theurges themselves after all need to train their whole lives to keep up and refine their craft, whereas conscripts with guns are useful with a few weeks of basic training or 1-2 years to train them into professional soldiers.
So, in the regard, I do think compressed air rifles produced at sufficient scale could help in transitioning from the age of warriors to that of soldiers.
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I’ve been having a think about aether economy and how it is tied to authoritarianism in game. I’m generally pretty skeptical at revolutionaries ability to remedy injustices or even grievances in a way that actually returns a net benefit. In the case of the Hegemony though the incentives are so strong most future paths lead back to totalitarian magocracy. So how to get to, " I’m not going to stop the wheel, I’m going to break the wheel.?" I initially thought this was social suicide, but I think the golden path is inner voice combined with spreading the knowledge of theurgy.
First the inner voice. We need a strong moral fabric that is both democratizing, but also insists on a prohibition on killing for the purpose of harvesting aether. Kenon might be able to pull this off, but I don’t see how it gets around to creating a strong killing taboo. The Elect can solve for the taboo, but reinforces totalitarianism. I think this will ultimately prove easy to hijack as it has been in the past (and by the MC!).
With our protestant reformation going I think we can incorporate learning theurgy as akin to reading the bible. Conversion and theurgy can then spread exponentially. This of course will leave the Hegemony a blood soaked wasteland as it did Germany irl, but I really don’t see how we don’t get back to where we started without it.
So @idonotlikeusernames, while I disagree on the particulars I think I have come around on substance of the high anarchy revolution! To get to a society that doesn’t revert to the mean of prioritizing aether extraction over all else, I don’t see another way.
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I’ve just got this weird feeling…
- Cerlota: drops the Ward
- Rebels: smuggle in weapons to throw Grand Shayard into chaos
- Thaumatarchy: "You’re saying we can bring as much aetherial blood and weaponry as we want into Grand Shayard? Say, remember who has the Theurges and the armies?"
- Rebels:
Speaking of which, I think it’d be neat if (3 INT) Theurges who learn from M’kyar could also adopt Egeity as their name for Theurgy. More broadly, I think there’s a good opportunity in Sojourn for Theurges to reflect on everything they’ve learned and decide to change the way they refer to it. The revelations about aether, Harrowing, Xaos-storms, and the Seracca would be a good impetus for rethinking and reaffirming that decision made in the woods.
Continuing on the minor but neat suggestion train:
Right before the name ventisputori is dropped by Herne, it’d be neat to have a brief line of a (2 COM) MC starting to realize what they’re looking at, as a call-back to when they’re referenced during the summer battle by a (2 COM) MC as an anti-Theurge weapon they’ve heard of before.
Speaking of the battle, there’s a bug here on line 783 of chaos2:
@{plekspear The Theurgic spears you wielded against the Plektoi were of Halassurq make; even a few more of those could be extraordinarily helpful.|}
plekspear, in practice, only tracked whether your deputy still had their Theurge-forged spear at the High Crag, and would be flipped to false after they used it. It is possible to defeat all three Plektoi without the deputy using it, but I assume that’s unintended since the second Theurge-forged spear isn’t addressed again afterwards. But setting that aside, rescuer would be the condition to check here.
I bring this up because xaosseed is in a similar boat. It gets set to false after sharing it with the people of Sojourn, but even though it can’t cross the Ward, I feel like it’s potentially really important information, especially for rebellions trying to break the Harrowing economy entirely, because a hardy crop able to grow under inhospitable conditions seems like it’d be really useful during a famine and agricultural crisis. The moment I read what Quirene had to say about it, my first instinct was that it could transform the Brecks if it could make it across the Ward.
It could be tracked numerically instead, e.g. xaosseed 0 = never mentioned, xaosseed 1 = has it, xaosseed 2 = Sojourn has it. Though it is, admittedly, possible that by the time Sojourn comes back into play as a faction, both Bellem’s village and the Whiskered Hawk are a part of it…
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That way the Empire can squash you like Hera squashed everyone else.
I’m not so sure. One thing I’m relying on is for the new angelic faith to infiltrate Halassur as it will the Hegemony (and it did irl). I’m hopeful this will create enough internal problems to generate a detente. For another we see what a highly trained theurge like Cerlota can accomplish with refining her own aether. This revelation is key. I’ll admit this is picking quantity ideas, but I don’t see another way to permanently diffuse power.
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Well…the human resources used to make aether proposes a conundrum for the rebellion
How the shit do we have a fair system if every other country has the equivalent of an M16 using sacrifice, when if we don’t we have to basically use M1 garands
This really seems like an unwinnable situation put in for the PC. At most we could do what the transhuman peeps do and modify them to not require it bust still that would take forever, how on earth would we do that
Honestly the best solution, for an MC who doesn’t want to Harrow people, seems to be to spread the secret of self-theurgy through the rebellion. Yes the others have Aetherial blood to rely on, but if a bunch of our rebels can do a bit of Theurgy, and the skilled ones know how to ratriy their own blood, we can hold our own, although at a disadvantage.
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Wasn’t that a given anyhow in this game. 
In any case my main mc is not charismatic enough to pull off the inner voice thing, which is indeed a missed opportunity but he wouldn’t have contemplated the eclect thing even if he had the inner voice.
Will we be able to use Egeity to go all animal hybrid too?
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