In the near to mid-term future I see a postal system along the lines of the pony express and, where canals are available or between coastal towns mail barges and ships as the most immediate solution to open up communications to a lot more people, as well as distribute the official broadsheets of course, although at the very highest level and mostly for emergencies only it will be necessary to keep a few flying theurges on hand.
I assume in the current system there is no such thing as a regular postal service so only nobles, state actors and wealthy merchants can afford private couriers with the best and most expensive of those being flying theurges for the 1% of the 1%.
In practice Theurgy, that is the massive power on display from a true Theurge, will always be restrained to a select few. It’s simply a matter of natural inclination, not everyone has the stuff in them to be a Theurge, just as not everyone has it in them to be a physician or [insert professional]. While a world where everyone could, say, make small alterations in the world around them just as anyone can throw a punch or do first aid could exist, I think the threat of Theurgic anarchy and terror from the masses is a bit overblown. At the very least, it’s no greater than the IRL threat posed by the commons having acces to gunpowder and other explosives. An untrained Theurge is just a more subtle suicide bomber.
I doubt it’s even a matter of the 1% of the 1%. Theurges are a state resource, I assume they only get used as couriers for state matters. It doesn’t matter how rich a noble you are, you aren’t hijacking a Theurge to deliver your letters unless it pertains to the running of the Hegemony (maybe you can slip some personal correspondence in if it’s on the route and you have the right connections).
This is Reichkomisariat Moskowien, a German colony that covers the occupied territory in what is modern Russia in our timeline. The source is a teaser by The New Order, a mod of Hearts of Iron IV that has the premise of an Axis victory. I hope that it will inspire Havenstone because there are many paralels between its collapse (into 6-9 factions, I don’t remember how many) and the collapse of the Thaumarchy
Its worth to note that TNO is famously unrealistic, and only recently managed to steer the course towards realism - and I suppose XoR under Havie vision still wants to stay plausible even despite being a world of aristotelan physics and blood magic
I’ve worked on TNO back then and Moskowien, along with most of Reichskomissariats was at the time a fantasy and fanfiction of its authors, and while not necessarily wrong because it could still create very interesting gameplay and story, it was still a fanfiction, not some rational model based on statistics or history.
Yeah, that is why I avoided mentioning more details (also because I never played in Moskowien), it has some weird parts. Gorbachev is a German colaborationist
Even the current authoritarian Hegemony in which around 0.25% of the population knows the secret, the system is leaky. I don’t think it’s plausible to teach Theurgy to 20-ish% of the population and keep the other classes from figuring it out – unless you try to shift to an incredibly repressive anti-literacy push in which you try to kill off helots, drudges, and the free urban poor who learn to read. That obviously wouldn’t fit with your benevolent vision.
Fair enough! In response, let’s talk about one of my biggest problems with standard fantasy: worlds that have stayed purely medieval-Europe despite widespread magic. A world with magic ought to be significantly different from our own in its social structures, politics, and technologies. Unless the magic is 100% a stand-in for a real-world technology (“I am Watt the steam sorcerer, fuelling my wizardry with the power of coal!”) it shouldn’t leave the world with the same tech/civics tree we see in any given Earth civilization. There should be odd jumps and Earth-anachronisms.
It’s more than fair to be unconvinced by the way I’m imagining Theurgy would have made the gameworld more modern/industrial in some respects while remaining premodern (from our perspective) in others. And I definitely agree with you that in our world, totalitarianism requires high state administrative capacity. A state with premodern state (in)capacities in all areas wouldn’t be able to keep huge cities from boiling over and demanding more rights, even if it could magically conjure bread and banish cholera.
But Theurgy also massively boosts the state’s repressive capacities. Theurge-Kryptasts can hear through walls, “disappear” dissidents, crush riots, and level slums very effectively without relying on the techniques of social organization and administration that our world’s secret police and gendarmes required. And then there’s the fundamental impact on social control that blood magic brings into the picture:
It’s as true of urban revolts as of slave revolts. For all these reasons, I think the world’s magic system makes it feasible to hold large urban populations in long-term oppression, a system I’ve elsewhere called precociously totalitarian, even though the Hegemony overall still has weak state capacity by modern Earth standards. Magicians have a high capacity to inflict totalitarian terror even without a Gestapo or NKVD bureaucracy backing them up.
In our world, the administrative capacities of the modern state were developed painstakingly over centuries by rulers who faced problems of social control and inter-state competition that they couldn’t solve by easier means. Theurgy – as a “technology” initially monopolized by an utterly dominant colonizing empire, and only slowly spreading beyond that empire’s elite – has provided a shortcut for managing many of those problems.
But it’s not adequate even for the Thaumatarchy’s current political challenges – which is why the Hegemony has been trying at great effort to create more modern institutions of taxation, and using the Telones to render its population more “legible”. That’s the main theme of the Irduin section, which also shows how Theurgy can in some ways ease along this modernization push (e.g. flying Theurges make it easier to develop an accurate cadastral map). We’ll see how believable you find it.
While this is true, the “select few” is (for most purposes) still orders of magnitude bigger than the current Theurge corps. Not everyone has it in them to be a neurosurgeon, but a world where almost everyone knows first aid and there are a thousand times as many General Practictioners is still a very different world from one where only a tiny few can access a doctor. Similarly, setting aside the nuke analogies, a world where everyone has a gun is very different than a world where only a select few do – and the change from one to the other is highly likely to be destabilizing.
I’m not sure how oppressive the Tang dynasty was but there were cities of that size in the medieval times. Just not in the west.
Author mentioned cholera and food issues but apparently non-humouresque medicine and civic planning take care of that well enough.
That’s fair, my geo/cultural circumstance probably attaches too drastic connotations to the word famine. I do recognise that in most cases it’s not a complete lack of food but the distribution of it.
one more interesting fact about famine if i understand correctly is that it happens despite hegemony using theurgy to farm because land has become to exhausted and depleted. it means that feeding 190m natural and 80m with theurgriculture isn’t possible anymore, next year hegemony’s food output will decrease so much that it will cause famine despite use of theurgy. these is good and bad in equal measure.
good is that in first year we will most likely not have deficit of 80m food for all population it will be smaller because its not caused by lack of theurgy.
bad news’s is that in worst case scenario if hegemony stopped using any theurgy at all our food deficit will be much more bigger then deficit of 80m food.
and worst fact is that it is not problem just for these one year rather we will have to deal with it for quite some time.
This has got me thinking are high anarchy and diffusion of theurgy linked? The fact that it is a state secret means it is an element of state totalitarian control. In a high anarchy rebellion it stands to reason that theurgic tech must diffuse, right? At least the goety self-discovered version.
I think you’re right – I’d been thinking of diffusion of Theurgy as the MC’s choice, but it should also follow from very high-Anarchy strategies, as the Hegemony’s ability to keep the secret breaks down entirely. Probably will start showing up in Wardfall.
(Which is how I think I’ll start referring to the upcoming volumes, to avoid confusion over what’s now G3/4/5 – after Stormwright we’ll have Metropolis, Omphalos, Wardfall, and Hegemon. Two titles of which I owe to this community.)
The more I read about magic in this world the more I question how any other path would come close
Charisma is cool yeah, can inspire and make people change sides
But on the other hand twist reality to make half your army explode dr Manhattan style
And more realistically seems more directly intertwined with how this world works on a fundamental level. Learning the lore of this world and all.
Ah, sorry for the misunderstanding. I didn’t mean to be against your progress being different from the real world. I have a Whig view of history, but at the same time I understand that the progress of technology and society in the real world is not linear.
I just wanted you to explain in more detail why it is different from reality.
For example, let’s say an empire can literally magically make people disappear. I don’t think it would be possible to prevent rebellions in an environment with many million-person cities where it is easy to organize. Without the bureaucratic organizations of the Gestapo and NKVD that you mentioned, the state apparatus would eventually be overwhelmed by the frequent rebellions trying to steal the secrets of magic.
Also, let’s say you can skip the era and create a modern totalitarian system. That would cause a different kind of problem. Its lifespan is obviously shorter than that of pre-modern dynasties and modern authoritarian systems. There is debate about the reasons for this, but it is a fact that is empirically known in our world. For example, there are many Chinese dynasties that lasted for 300 years, just like the empire in this game, but even the Stalin regime, which is one of the longest totalitarian regimes, only lasted for 30 years.
I think there is still room for further exploration into these differences with the real world and the reasons for them, and we should do so.
Also, why can’t theurgy separate knowledge for violent and non-violent uses? For example, in the real world, knowledge on how to make a gun and knowledge on how to make a phone are separate. No doubt this technological limitation is what prevents theurgy from being made public.
And there is another point where you and I disagree. I don’t think that the distribution of weapons necessarily leads to anarchy. Of course, long-term anarchy would be a plausible and likely path. But it could also produce a free nation in the short term achievable, like the United States, with some problems with the monopoly of violence. Also, as you point out, the progress is different from the real world because of magic, but that could be an advantage in solving these problems.
TD:LR Not all nations are Afghanistan or Pakistan.
…accepts that the past was characterized by varying degrees of oppression, and looks to the present and future for the steadily increasing spread of liberty. It posits a natural human yearning for freedom and security, but doesn’t claim that will automatically or quickly yield accountable, participatory, law-based institutions – the idea that it would is I think more anarchistic than Whiggish.
Even if we don’t buy the Eurocentric focus of the original Whig historians, it’s still true that liberty has a history… and this game is set earlier on the road to liberty than Europe was when it had million-person cities. As others have noted, even without magic harvests or sanitation, the Tang had a million people in Chang’an without changing the dynasty’s fundamentally authoritarian character; and the Hegemony is more like China than Europe, geographically and socially integrated on a continental scale, rather than fragmented in the ways that led to Europe’s high levels of contestation and broadening spheres of autonomy. (Areas like Wiendrj and Erezza that might in our world have stayed fragmented have been integrated by Theurgy, which like modern transport and communication techs allows the state to extend its reach into difficult terrain.)
Well, again, in a world fuelled by blood, the goal is not to prevent rebellions – that would be counterproductive – but to have them at a level where the rioters can quickly be crushed and some significant percentage rounded up and Harrowed. That’s a much higher threshold than any authoritarian empire could survive in our world. In G3 Metropolis you’ll see in more detail how the Hegemony manages its cities, capitalizing on the fear, uncertainty, and mistrust between the urban classes, with violence ever-present but the Theurges’ violence still having the last word. (Until you or Cerlota compromise the City-Ward that reduces the possibility of effective anti-state violence in the areas the Hegemony most cares about.) You can tell me then if you find the alternate social order unbelievable.
But the reasons are essential when we’re talking about what’s plausible in an alternate world. Again: the Thaumatarchy is significantly less brittle than any authoritarian system in our world because (up to a pretty high threshold, like the Scouring of the Westriding) killing off its restive or rebellious citizens directly contributes to its core means of production. That alone completely changes the empirical picture. It’s operating in a far lower-literacy, less-mass-communication environment than our modern totalitarians, which has let it keep a monopoly on the secret of Theurgy for much longer than Stalin could keep anything secret. It doesn’t have any neighbors that are democratic or are dramatically outperforming it economically; its oppressed people’s dissatisfaction can’t really congeal around a clear alternative.
Looking at how long premodern authoritarian systems survived, I find it entirely plausible that if Theurgy allowed a premodern state in the gameworld to precociously achieve levels of repression that were only possible in our world’s modern era, that state could have a similar multi-century lifespan. The Hegemony is also a colonial empire that started with an enormous and hard-to-erode tech advantage; look to Latin America to see how long that can last before the dominated successfully rise up against it.
Good question – but with Theurgy, once someone’s learned the core skill of perceiving and Changing things’ teloi, most people can pretty quickly figure out various violent uses by themselves. Teach them enough to do useful non-violent stuff through elemental manipulation, and they’ll be able to use those skills lethally.
You’re right that widespread distribution of weapons does not automatically result in anarchy. It doesn’t even necessarily result in the level of tragic but not society-threatening civil violence we see in the USA; Canada, Finland, and Switzerland all have relatively high levels of private gun ownership without having gun murder rates that are correspondingly proportionate to America’s.
But the way we get to high levels of weapon ownership matters, as does the social context. When we’re talking about a just-collapsed authoritarian empire which repressed its colonies’ traditional folkways, put over half its population into a regularly murdered slave-caste, and heavily taxed its remaining free population, whose gendarmes have been growing ever more loathed for their corruption and extortion–and we suddenly arm half the population, including some of that slave caste? (Small as a proportion, but large in absolute numbers.)
I’m comfortable positing that that scenario is going to look a lot more like Afghanistan than the USA, let alone Canada.
First of all, I apologize for the poor way I asked the question. And frankly, I didn’t expect a tautological answer like “because if you know one, you automatically know the other” to the question “why can’t you separate the two pieces of knowledge?” Do you have a more detailed and easy-to-understand explanation?
Certainly, the distribution of weapons and the repressiveness of the previous government are factors that determine the success of a revolution. But in my opinion, they are not the main factors. In my opinion, it is whether there is some kind of broad coalition support and the transfer of know-how from the previous government. I think this also explains why Afghanistan has become one of the most lawless places in the world. The occupying forces carried out excessive purges of civil servants and then replaced them with their own puppet privileged elites. And this happened twice, under the Soviet and American occupations. It is no wonder that anarchy has developed.
Hello can anybody help me because When I chose the personality traits like “devout” “ruthless” “compassion” or “skeptical” the game will break and says “ chaos line 22664:no selectable option”
You’ve probably edited stats to get a 2 INT + 2 COM + 2 CHA character, which causes the game to break right before it asks you to choose a weakness (because it removes the choices that are already your strengths, leaving you with no selectable choices").
The solution is to drop one of those stats back below 2, then raise it once you’re past this choice.
You already posted about this 6 months ago. It’s a JavaScript issue rather than a ChoiceScript issue; I don’t know exactly how to resolve it on your device, but refreshing the page or clearing your browser’s cache would be the classic Tech Support way to start.
When you asked about separating violent and non-violent Theurgy, you probably were imagining complex Theurgic technology, but violence can be very simple and blunt. The gun-vs-phone analogy you offer is applicable to more advanced Theurgy: Xaos-storms, for example, or even just suffocating somebody by manipulating the oxygen around them. But for blood magic itself, I’d argue our analogy ought to go all the way back to fire. Teach someone to make fire, and can you prevent them from then learning how to burn down a home? That’s the domain of society.
For reference, some things that our MC can do with no formal education, less than a year of practice, with just their own blood:
Break a dam, causing a flood
Cause a cave collapse; cause mountain outcrops to fall
Sharpen wooden pikes to cut through flesh like butter (one goes straight through our arm and kills the mule next to us)
Lift a man into the air, then slam him in the ground from a distance
Turn trees into projectiles
Also have to shout out turning a person’s eyes into razor blades, at the cost of falling unconscious. With some vials of aetherial blood, we can strangle an entire room with their own clothes. And for the martyr-seekers: bringing down half a mountain at the cost of your own life.
None of these are particularly complex, and derive from basic principles of blood magic, without even giving them names. This is nowhere near the upper limit of Theurgic threats, but still intensely dangerous for the average person.
Yeah, the closest I’m seeing to democracy might be village self-management, which can be pretty functional in conjunction with a theocracy (as several Asian movements such as the Yellow Turbans and Ikko-ikki demonstrated) and carefully-controlled dissemination of theurgic knowledge (though the latter is a genie with a very leaky bottle). Or a koinon focused around city councils and syntechnia (both village and city democracy is a recipe for xaos).
I’d be surprised to learn that village and elder councils aren’t already the norm. Even if you have a lord who owns the land you probably wouldn’t want to bring water management or dickering over pastures to them. They are going to take a rake of any pot they have to referee after all…
