With all due respect, I think your answer misses the point of my question. It is natural that America will not collapse even if nuclear secrets are leaked. I also said that above. Because, unlike the leaking of theurgic secrets, it is not the case that almost all of the secrets related to the nation’s politics and economy are leaked.
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TBC “nuclear secrets” in the context of national security are not “how nukes work”, you can literally just google that. The term refers to the locations and dispositions of nuclear stockpiles and delivery systems.
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Theurgic secrets leaked relatively routinely in the Hegemony, but that is what the Kryptasts are for. They usually kill all involved or in exceptional cases incorporate them into the ruling order. Basically, some extent of leaking is expected and the state committed considerable resources to prevent it from spreading out of control. Naturally this leads us “to why is it failing now?” The answer is the Hegemony isn’t harvesting enough blood anymore to keep all its plates spinning. Furthermore it’s systemically incapable of jettisoning one plate to preserve the rest. It’s just allowing all of them to wobble at once.
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Hey gang, I’m going to sign out of the forums again in the interests of actually achieving Julduin. Feel free to keep the conversation going, and I’ll pick it up again when I’m back!
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I have a different hypothesis than you about the cause of the fatal information leak incident for the Empire caused by the MC’s attack.
First, the multi-layered information security system that the Imperial elite built up through experience made the probability of a fatal information leak incident occurring in a single attack attempt astronomically low.
However, at the same time, it also made the probability that any of the extremely large number of attack attempts made over 300 years “does not cause” a fatal information incident astronomically low.
And so, the Imperial elite’s luck finally ended, and the MC’s attack attempt caused the fatal accident that was bound to happen.
(If you don’t understand what I’m saying, please refer to the web page below.)
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Personally, I doubt the MC’s activities have anything to do with it. They are an embarrassing nuisance to the provincial government of the Sharyardene Arconty, but nothing serious at the moment. I suspect we won’t be on the radar of the folks in Aekos until we help drop the wardgate in the next game. They’ve got a lot of little fires to deal with. And some big ones.
We’re not even anywhere near the top of the Archon’s priority list yet (she only sent a battalion after us after all). The MC is currently merely the symptom of a growing disease.
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Even if MC’s actions did not cause such a result, the points I made above are still valid. Even if the probability of a fatal information leak occurring in a year is one in 100,000, my calculations show that it would almost certainly occur within a quarter of a century. It seems impossible to hide it for 300 years.
And that’s one of the reasons I think it’s impossible that the Empire could have lasted 300 years on Theurgy.
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What would concretely constitute a “fatal information leak”? And what would the concrete mechanism be by which it could come about?
I think we need to consider that to think about probabilities.
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That’s a good point. I would like to borrow the definition of a fatal information leak from azthyme.That is, the fact that Theurgy is a teachable technology and information on how to transmute Theurgy blood are leaked at the same time.
And frankly, I don’t know the specific mechanism of how it occurs.
However, I think I calculated in favor of the Empire the probability that people scattered here and there, that is, people who are not under the control of a central government, would be able to keep the secret in a country with only pre-modern state institutions.
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Yes Havenstone, please! Don’t let this infernal July heat kill me before I get to enjoy Irduin! 
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Not to mention that Google often opens with AI-generated answers, which as far as corporate trend-chasing goes…well, I’d say it’s up there, but a lot of people actually want that.
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There have been plenty of information leaks in the past, and the MC is not the first rebel theurge - Sarcifer exists, and there have been other independent dabblers. The latter is actually part of the system, since a rogue theurgic dabbler is exactly the kind of rebel who can think he’s more powerful than he is, creating a nice easy rebellion to quash and Harrow. However, no rebellion has ever reached the point where they could train Theurges on a large scale. That’s not an information issue, that’s an infrastructure issue that won’t be solved by a “fatal leak” alone.
Controlling literacy and printing has done a great deal to dampen the kindling for this particular fire.
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Major request: More content in The Fourth Harrowing chapter for the rebel assemblies. There is much Breden but not enough everyone else, I did not even remember that Blind Yebben is the brother of Elery for tens of games because it is mentioned in 1 passage (2 passages if you count his death, which I never readed)! It will also make the player feel more attached to the rebels, which would make the decision to stop the Fourth Harrowing seem more realistic for the protagonist to do, because it currently feel altruistic generally and little else, instead of desperately and intensely emotional.
Also, give the option to return to the villagers if the test to join the nomad camp fails
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So let’s say we define an incident as a rebellion progressing to the point where we can train large-scale Theurges, and set the probability of such an event at 1 in 10 million per year.
The result is that the time frame changes from 25 years to 30 years.
In essence, my argument can be generalized to say that in the extremely long timescale of 300 years, most seemingly impossible events will occur, including events that would be devastating to the imperial government.
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I think what cascat said is right and the issue is blood. They may be taking more chances on allowing small rebellions to sprout up which creates more failures as a result of desperation for blood. The blood shortage is also causing the imperial elites like Sarcifer and Cerlotta to lose faith in the regime because they can see that sooner or later it will collapse because its current structure is unsustainable. One of the 9 and a possible successor to another of them going rogue is a big deal that I’m sure wouldn’t have happened in the earlier days of the regime.
“As a rule, a regime perishes not because of the strength of its enemies but because of the uselessness of its defenders.” - Lev Tikhomirov, Russian conservative theorist, 1911
Quoted by Kotkin in Volume 1 of his Stalin
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For context to everyone else, Chara Thresher (pronounced either Kara or Hara depending on whether we’re using older or modern Greek) is my PC.
Anyway, yeah, it should be pretty easy to justify reactionary warlords and rebels like the Lacconiers or proponents of restoring the Hegemony as potential tyrants, and overthrowing other dictators like in Halassur fits well with my global revolution meets liberation theology ideology.
Trickiest part is counterrevolutionaries who are also progressive but still hate MY KIND of progressive, like anarchists or left-wing nationalists who still insist on forming breakaway states. You gotta justify cracking down on those without setting the precedent for a Stalin taking over
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Wars of Hegemonic succession I feel like are virtually guaranteed unless the MC has “one neat (theurgic) trick” or can pull an Aurelian and basically smother the successor states in their cribs.
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I think your argument doesn’t work. If the hegemony is like most states pre-industrial revolution literacy is probably between 5% to 10%. And those 5 to 10 % are the elites who are unlikely to revolt. Thus any leak on theurgy is extremely limited and unlikely to get big.
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That assumption is pretty weak, in part because we haven’t had a theurgic leak lead to a large-area theurgic rebellion yet, so either your probability is wrong or the dice haven’t come up the way you’d expect. If the probability is, for example, one in ten million per generation, you can expect an empire to last 900 years.
Also, of course, said probability changes over time. The reason the Thaumatarchy is leaking now is not random chance, it’s because the entire structure is going south and Theurges like Cerlota, who has the capability to train up a Theurgic cadre, are losing faith in the regime. This process has been ongoing for centuries.
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Well, it’ll be difficult for the nobles to try to form a breakaway nation when I’m done with them, that’s for sure.
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