I’m going to tuck my response behind a cut, so anyone who wants to experience the Irduin chapters without preconceptions doesn’t need to see it.
Mechanics of the Irduin section
So in the back half of Stormwright, you’ll be hiding out in Irduin while periodically sneaking into the Rim to meet with your rebels there and try to give them a bit of a long-distance steer. You have the option to be working to destabilize Irduin or protect its order – either because you just don’t want it to collapse while you’re there, or because (like @Sowe, apparently) you have some attachment to its traditional order, which is both relatively benign and under active pressure from the Hegemony to get a lot worse. (Notably from the newly arrived taxman, Telone Baldassare)
The key overarching stats for these chapters are ird_sus (how much Irduin’s people, particularly the local Alastor captain, are suspicious of you) and ird_unity (the strength of Irduin’s social order). (At present, I’m not planning to put them in the stats screen, but to have the game give ample verbal cues of how things are going. We’ll see what you all think of that in practice.)
There’s lots of things you can do to affect these stats, including choices you’ve already made and are making about the Rim revolt. Broadly, the more aggressively you’re trying either (a) to bring anarchy to Irduin or (b) to find out its secrets, the better to defend them… the more suspicious you’ll look.
That will affect the range of endings you can get in Irduin. Do you get arrested as a suspected rebel or murderer, or shot at because the wrong people have decided you’re a Kryptast? Do the Irduines start betraying and sniping at each other, or do they close ranks against the Hegemony? Does an actual rebellion start in Irduin, and if so does it have any chance of getting support from your friends in the Rim? (That part will depend on where you left things at the end of Game 1, as well as the decisions you make in the “remote controlling the rebellion” bits of those chapters.)
You can choose to hang out primarily with one influential group (nobles, priest/Alastor, merchants, yeomen, helots) and secondarily with another (as above, but also including the innkeeper Maurs, a pacifist prophet of compassion). Each of those routes includes different stories, which you see more of in your primary hang-out group than your secondary. They play off each other in different ways, so a noble/merchant playthrough and a noble/helot playthrough will have you seeing different stuff in the “noble” bits. Some chunks of story are only reachable with particular combinations of who you’re hanging out with.
On the aristo path, you can access different subplots based on whether you’re hanging out with the heir to the House, her younger brother, or their cousin and her suitor. (Most of what’s eaten July for me was writing through the last round of events and resolutions to these.) On the helot path, you can stick with the elders who are part of Irduin’s benevolent order, or train the young firebrands who resent it, or (if you don’t get along with the firebrands) get caught up in intrigues with the dissident elder who’s even more resentful of the Irduine order.
You also pick your alibi – are you a tinker, apothecary, tutor, weapons trainer, or player/jongler – which is mostly cosmetic but occasionally opens up distinctive text or lets you accomplish something while accruing less (or more!) suspicion.
In short, yes, there will be rather a lot of paths and subpaths. 
And I hope that people will be able to have fun challenging themselves with combo possibilities – “minimum unity, maximum suspicion, merchants and helots” – in a way that’s not a million miles from how Game 1 has been received.
When I do finally update the demo, the Irduin chapter stat balance will not yet be even rough-tuned, let alone fine-tuned. Until I go back through and write the sections where you visit the Rim and the decisions you make there, all the ird_sus and ird_unity stat numbers should be treated as extremely tentative. The next updated demo will give a pretty good sense of the story framework, but only a rough sense of what the stat-balancing game is going to feel like.
In that way, too, it’ll be more than a little like the rollout of the G1 Ch2 revisions eight years ago.
Yes! Hanging out with different groups in Irduin can give you an introduction to one or more of the major factions you might want to hang out with in Grand Shayard, including a number of underground ones.
Also will there be any benefits to having a high suspicion, or is that a stat that universally every MC wants to keep down? 
