I imagine there’s some doubt about who the legitimate claimant is at this point and that might be an area of intra-faction friction. There’s probably several people that could make claims and parsing them could be tricky.
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I guess Caela is something of a sexual deviant by noble standards then, wanting to have relationships with people other than her relatives and all.
Well, not the Leaguers anyhow. I’m thinking of a federal state myself.
That’s probably for the best. Hard to have those in games with complex politics like that, especially if it’s a morality stat that actually condemns evil actions instead of having evil routes meant to be more of an “evil is cool and fun” power fantasy sort of deal. Most games with morality mechanics that you’re actually supposed to take seriously become SUPER preachy any time they deal with complex subject matter because one is automatically right or wrong no matter what the player thinks is justified. “Yeah, this villain makes a way better argument than the intended good guy in this quest but siding with them gives you evil points! Check mate, liberals!”
Choice of Robots had a huge problem with that (I SWEAR this is relevant) because not being against military applications for your robots automatically makes you have “lower empathy” and means you’re either a greedy war monger or a delusional fool blinded to the horrors of war by patriotism. Even though the war in question would (and does) have serious consequences for your country and its allies if you lose. It also does that thing a lot of anti-war stories do of completely ignoring the context of political ideologies or even just the basic reason you’re trying to fight in favor of a “more violence=bad always” storyline where everyone starts hating you and calling you a warmonger even if you’re just trying to take Alaska back from the PRC and return it to the US.
That didn’t necessarily ruin that game for me, but this is a game specifically ABOUT complex political ideologies and specifically forming your own revolutionary ideology, not just opposing the evil empire. A lot of games about rebellion just sort of stick you with one ideology that’s meant to be correct, usually one that doesn’t look too radical like secession from the empire or restoring some rightful king to the throne or smth. Don’t worry about the specifics. If you want to get into the specifics, you either need to pick a specific ideology as the correct one (not great for CHOICE of Games) or let the player decide most of what they think is the best ideology.
I mean, with how nobility works, there’s probably a fair few related to the original Royal Family somehow. Just need to use brute force to win then boom, you’re king.
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Another reason I excitedly and anxiously compare the potentially remolded post-Hegemonic continental koinon to America is because there’s a certain romanticism in seeing the parallels to the American Revolution, with all its complexities and contradictions (“warts and all”, including the hypocritical acceptance of slavery).
In both scenarios, you have oppressed provinces breaking free from an imperialist overlord to forge a better future together. This journey involves not just fighting for freedom but also negotiating the terms of their new union, aiming to avert the pitfalls of dictatorship and anarchy that have plagued other revolutions.
Then again, nascent independent America didn’t have the burden of contending with life-or-death stakes dilemmas about who to feed (food) and who to feed (into the blood magic wood chippers), so… 
One of the bigger-picture goals and underlying logic for my plan to unite the Laconniers and Leaguers under the MC’s leadership is to co-opt the high medieval mythology and grandeur of the Laconnier’s “One True Sovereign” legacy, in one manner or another.
This could legitimize Shayard’s post-Hegemonic leadership/governance by parliament, moot, or apella—or, perhaps more cynically, prop up a monarchical puppet (if the sucessful de Syrnon claimant is somebody other than my MC) to rubber-stamp decisions. Additionally, I’m hoping the Leaguers become powerful enough to curb the Laconnier’s isolationism/anti-Erezza agenda, while my MC deliberately keeps the Laconniers around as necessary “devil’s advocates” to keep the Leaguers honest (aka honest as in “not selling out Shayard’s sovereignty to foreigners”).
And again, the Alliance (from World of Warcraft) is a very formative influence on how I plan to guide certain MCs into becoming “High King/Queen of the post-Hegemonic, continental Alliance.”
But the most cosmopolitan factions will be the Big Three, the primary contenders (along, perhaps, with yourself) for an imperial-scale solution to the post-Thaumatarch chaos. All of them will find significant support within Shayard despite not being Shayardene-led.
Then obviously, the Leaguers will probably find all of the Big Three to be incompatible with the Leaguer agenda of having Shayard dominate (albeit under the pretense of a koinon) the post-Hegemonic continent, right?
@Havenstone, are the rest of the Leaguers mostly/fully on board with Horion’s “keep the existing provinces” preferred status quo, or would some prefer that Shayard’s ‘neighbors’/vassals be shattered into divided city-states? (similar to “divide and rule” practices such as those of the East India Company and British Raj in India)
And furthermore, would a Leaguer faction that embraced (or was swayed) into pursuing a “shatter the non-Shayard archonties into tons of weaker city-state vassals” strategy be more appealing to the Laconniers? (in the context of a Leaguer-Laconnier alliance and/or full blown merger)
The climactic resolution of Star Wars The Phantom Menace comes to mind. 
I certainly hope that any long-lasting friendly relationship (platonic or romance) that a helot MC can have with Teren and/or Abelard has plenty of juicy narrative material/dialogue options for my long-anticipated “sell out to the aristos” class traitor helot MCs!
(sees his bank account go up by several zeroes after the marriage is finalized) What’s that? You’re fading out! I’ve broken too many “richest married man ever” records! I can’t hear your “class loser/failure” insults amidst all this wedding dowry!
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Yeah though in this case England doesn’t get to keep on as is either. It’s like if the plan to annex Canada worked out and escalated into a full-blown internal conquest of the British Empire.
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I felt that Choice of Robots took the tack that “war is dehumanizing and traumatic, causing even good people to close off their hearts,” rather than moralizing it as such (you don’t lose Humanity for pushing back against the idea that war is bad, unless you don’t care about the people getting killed). Which Havie’s doing here with his Ruthless stat - you have the option to decide that killing a kid is the right choice to make your rebellion successful.
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Absolutely agree. Morality is not so easily quantified by a single variable in a text-based game. But that’s hardly a hot take, and we’ve yet to discuss how fictional worlds themselves can carry moral weight, and how that imbues them with story — with all the power a story can offer — beyond just being a collection of related events.
I could write a story where atrocities are not only unpunished, but actively rewarded, while kindness and empathy are only met with betrayal, suffering, and failure. I’d have no moraity mechanic, just actions and consequences. Consequences that I write, of course. And there’s no light at the end of the tunnel, no redemption for the evil world. There’s no explicit judgement made of what’s moral or immoral. And yet the world is designed in such a way.
This extreme example is to illustrate how perceptions of morality run far deeper into a game’s story and mechanics themselves. XoR strives to be realistic, to my understanding (bearing in mind how people have differing perceptions of reality itself), and the flow of action and reaction is well-done. But this is not so much an escape from morality mechanics as it is taking a specific justifiable stance, which is strongly apparent in what it rejects.
To take this a step further, players can decide what they think is the best ideology, but cannot decide the absolute consequences of their choices — and so the mechanics of the world inherently cast judgement on them. It is fair, I think, to treat self-destructive actions as appropriately self-destructive; to strike down hubris; to acknowledge that the world someone’s striving for might simply not be there at the end of their road, or that there may have been other means to that end.
As for Choice of Robots, I think your assessment is fairly inaccurate but my comments aren’t particularly relevant, so I’ll place them in the text box so only the curious need to scroll through it.
re: Choice of Robots
Choice of Robots definitely is preachy, in depicting its world war as an avoidable tragedy destroying countless lives and driving the United States to its worse instincts (from race-based internment camps to literally nuking a country—hey wait a minute—). Though there is a lot to criticise about its writing on geopolitics, including a couple truly glaring errors that probably should’ve been caught in the edit. But I think you’re misunderstanding how it quantifies “empathy” and “morality” in its mechanics.
“Humanity” reflects how much the protagonist has closed and hardened their heart. What have they sacrificed of themselves in the pursuit of intelligent (humanlike) machinery? How much have they become like a cold, analytical machine themselves? It’s fair to call it a variable to be optimised, with the ideal being to change the world without sacrificing one’s own humanity at all—but the game doesn’t demand the reader adhere to that, nor does it really punish them mechanically it. It’s merely a consequence of actions, scar tissue from a thousand mental cuts over a lifetime.
Joining the military-industrial complex doesn’t “automatically” hurt our protagonist’s Humanity—it just enables them to take actions that do. What does is marketing how realistically the robots would behave like real humans for target practice. Or deciding it’s not our problem—or being happy—if our robots get used by the Coast Guard to turn away refugees.
Not only is the same true for the War, but it’s possible to gain Humanity at war while guiding America to total victory. Refuse to attend meetings that revel in footage of enemy deaths; grieve for the people killed; raise the robots to be empathetic enough that they sacrifice themselves rather than nuke a city.
Just as it’s possible, and intended, for an unattentive protagonist to suffer emotionally. Of note, the no-win scenario of just wanting to build robots and abdicating all responsibility for their use to the military.
An illustrative example of how the game doesn’t treat all military applications of robots as immoral or empathy-crushing is how building literal autonomous mechas for the American war machine has no bearing on Humanity. Or the sheer comedy of building Transformers, robots in disguise, as the latest-generation weapon system. But building intelligent missiles for whom “only one thing brings joy … to speed to its target and die in a brilliant explosion” (“After all, you’re not a monster”): that hurts Humanity. It’s about navigating away from those kinds of choices.
As for Alaska… sure, it does kill romance, but it’s probably fair to break up with someone who announces their intention to lead a robot army to seize Alaska from a Great Power. The United Nations does condemn us if we actively raze a city to the ground with giant robots but like… I would hope so. It’s flatly inaccurate to describe this as everybody hating us.
The particular case mentioned of “just trying to take Alaska back from the PRC and return it to the US” is also pretty funny, because it requires first losing the war (suggesting one’s support for the war effort was ineffective and/or insufficient), and the US is all too happy to support the rebellion anyway, just with safeguards in case they get double-crossed by the warlord with the robot army.
Altogether, it’s about opportunity rather than necessity. Robots allows players the power to become a rich, exploitative merchant of death; but that’s the product of intentional choices, and those choices are judged accordingly.
Ancient conspiracy might give one claimant or another an advantage, of course. We hear stories back in Chapter 1 about the Laconnier Order (who are almost certainly a different faction than the Traditionalist “Laconnier” proto-party in Grand Shayard, though I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s overlap), who allegedly guard the Sovereign Bloodline. They’d likely be considered the highest authority on the “legitimacy” of particular claimants.
My guess for one way to cripple the Laconniers ahead of everything collapsing is betraying them to the Thaumatarchy. The wisdom of siding with the Great Enemy to destroy a fellow rebellion in anticipation of future conflict is questionable, I think, but it’d probably work. Linos already mentions that the traditionalist houses kept Horion’s rebellious politics secret during his sedition trial because it’s all too easy for the same accusation to fall on them.
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ADAT @poison_mara made a suggestion I liked a lot. I’m sorry that an unbelievable 10 years later it still hasn’t made the draft yet, Mara – but poison is still coming.
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Would that even work? The blood doesn’t actually matter if you’re just using the aether it’s holding surely, do toxins damage aether content? I feel like that’d just result in less aether (negligible loss unless you did it on a mass scale), rather than injury to the caster.
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No known natural poison would affect the alchemical matrix that prevents the aether from subliming out of refined blood.
Anything that did would need to have been designed for the purpose by a highly knowledgeable and skilled mage. And because magi know how much that would hurt their interests as a class, they’d surely never do that.
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You sounded to me like Gr Martin but in a Bad ass Version. Winter is coming is far less badass than POISON, poison is comming.
Also rereading my own postings decade ago or farther. I sound myself utterly insane… But really witty.
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Yeah the perception of reality bit is the one that’s been particularly relevant to me with a lot of stories like this because there’s no way to make a game that’s both internally consistent with the sort of actions bear fruit and which backfire, which are clearly atrocities and which the narrative gives leeway on etc. AND is palatable to everyone’s beliefs because even without factoring in more fringe, irrational belief systems one generally doesn’t care to cater to (like fascism), the general audience is going to have too many sticking points where things just don’t work how some believe they will work and ultimately you’re going to write either what makes sense to your worldview or what makes sense to ones you wish to accommodate.
A key example is the debate on whether nonviolent rebellion can work in the given circumstances. I emphatically disagree with @Vrangel_RIP on the necessity of atrocities in rebellion in general. My stance is that you actually DON’T need to commit atrocities on civilians or POWs in most cases to successfully rebel against tyranny and in fact most of the time they backfire despite supposed rational basis. There’s only a few times where I can see arguments as to the necessity of irl acts that can be described as such (and you’ll forgive me if I don’t name them for fear of starting discourse) and I’m typically skeptical of the argument regardless. Even if the tactical benefits of said atrocities pan out it’s really hard to set up a better system when your rebellion has people who do that sort of thing in high positions. The Bolsheviks learned this the hard way with people like Stalin, Beria, Molotov, and Iron Felix, all of whom were responsible for some of the most severe atrocities the Reds committed and also were responsible for shooting the new regime in the foot when it came to actually improving civil liberties or addressing a lot of the key issues with the Tsarist government, because they also did the same things for their cause and surprise surprise, staged a coup so they could keep doing them when it benefited them.
Since we’re both of opposite minds on this, you’re not going to be able to address the issue of the sorts of atrocities we’re talking about in a way that pleases both parties. One of us will think it’s ridiculous no matter what.
Conversely, there’s several points I disagree with Havie on, though not to the point where it bothers me too much. On the opposite end of the spectrum, I personally feel there’s not a snowball’s chance in Xaos that a nonviolent rebellion would achieve ANYTHING but being easy harrower fuel in a regime like this.
Gandhi himself said passive resistance relies on your oppressors having a conscious. When asked if it’d work on the Nazis, he said he didn’t know but that his victims should be martyrs rather than fight, which has understandably colored his perception among a lot of Jewish communities, among others.
Meanwhile when Hitler was asked how to handle Gandhi, he said to shoot him, then his closest followers, then the rest of his followers until the resistance ceased. The things that made Gandhi one of the best candidates to lead a rebellion against the British made him possibly the worst to do so against the Nazis.
There’s quite a few examples where dictatorships were opposed by pacifists only for them to just kill them. Happened to some missionaries in Myanmar a decade or two ago for example. The ones who don’t die often don’t get targeted simply because they aren’t a threat to the regime, which basically means they’re not getting much done.
Sometimes pacifists only successful because other people do the violence for them, and then often get condemned for doing that by the pacifists in question. And that seems to be the case here too. You let the other factions do the violent work and claim the moral high ground.
As said above, it’s up to player choice whether you think that’s a valid or even righteous method of rebellion or if it makes you a hypocritical coward who values moral purity over actually contributing to your supposed cause. That’s fine for player choice, I’m not saying you shouldn’t have that. Where we disagree is how viable it is in a regime like this.
The efficacy of pacifism as a push for change varies on the desired changes and ideology behind them, how likely the regime is to face repercussions for violent retaliation, how much the benefits of killing you are worth the cost, and where the regime lies on the scale of cruelty vs. conscious.
The Hegemony a) has a stranglehold over information such that they can cover up their actions or demonize the victims with relative ease and b) are not subject to any form of international law, so I’m not confident in repercussions. If your movement got big enough maybe, but well, that in and of itself seems to depend on plot armor because of the next points.
This civilization is dependent on human sacrifice to function. Blood is fuel and the Hegemony is full. They get actual, concrete resources by killing dissidents and pacifists by their nature do not put up much of a fight. You’d be shepherding sheep to the slaughter in an almost literal sense. They have every reason to wipe you out right away unless they want to fatten you up a bit with people more useful as fuel than labor.
The Hegemony is a regime literally built on the blood of the working class. They keep the vast majority of their population in slavery with the expectation that they will meet a horrible death at a young age to become fuel. They deliberately cultivate crime and rebellion as an excuse to get more fuel and make themselves seem necessary to combat said crime. They burn their own towns to manufacture casus beli. There is barely, and I mean BARELY enough consciousness left in this regime to give me confidence that enough of its membership will join me in overthrowing the rest so we can rework its institutions into something more beneficial to the people. I don’t see why they’d have enough consciousness to not just slaughter us.
I think the most pacifists could accomplish in this set of circumstances is surviving the revolution intact and being a somewhat well-known political movement that is more well-known for its contributions to relief and rebuilding efforts than actual political influence. Maybe if you’re good enough at helping people and community organizing, you can have some influence but people will still consider you less relevant than the factions that actually FOUGHT for them, especially since they’ll have seized most of the actual land and industry.
Tldr: the idea that pacifism CAN work in the circumstances it does flies in the face of my idea of realism.
Naturally, in terms of actual violent resistance, there’s also the issue what one considers an atrocity. Obviously the mass murder of civilians and POWs counts but good luck getting everyone to view all people of every class and culture as equal. You’ve got people saying killing the De Merre, who were basically warlords who hunted their people for sport, to be worse than slaughtering Helots in vast numbers. Obviously these biases are going to be something you need to deal with regardless of the author’s own opinions but that particular example is one where there’s a bit more weight given in the narrative to the idea of killing the De Merre being wrong than I would be willing to assign. I’d be hard pressed to write A CHARACTER voicing that opinion in a way that wasn’t clearly insulting them.
The main argument there seems to be that it’s not proper justice unless it takes place in a proper judicial system, which isn’t really how I see it. A proper judicial systems is an essential tool to GET justice with any consistency in a systemic fashion but justice in a criminal sense is simply when the perpetrator gets a proportional punishment and/or must pay proportionate restitution and atone (and there’s nothing g that makes up for murder so punishment is necessary imo). Justice by any other means isn’t not justice because it’s not the legal way. Legal systems are artificial constructs, they have biases and inadequacies. It’s not justice if a legal system designed to oppress does that and in this case lets the culprits of crimes get away with it legally as well, nor is it justice if someone is found innocent or guilty wrongly.
I don’t think anyone thinks justice is whatever the system says it is at the time. I do think however that a lot of people say that the necessity of being legally innocent until proven guilty automatically means anyone being punished in spite of the verdict or pact thereof REGARDLESS of whether they’re actually innocent because it undermines the integrity of the system. It’s sensible to oppose vigilantism and the like on general principle provided there’s a viable alternative since it’s at best extremely likely to get innocent people killed by people who are too incompetent to do proper investigation or are just so certain someone is guilty despite it just not being true with irrational reasons for this belief. However I decidedly do not believe you undermine the integrity of a just system by acting against it when it fails. It undermines ITSELF. Anyone who punishes someone who actually DID the crime, proportionately to said crime, isn’t undermining that system, they’re cleaning up a mistake. Few would say an innocent person failing to be punished because someone sabotaged efforts to do so via illegal means is injustice. It’s just that mistakes undermine faith in the system and that can be a problem.
This is not a system one should have faith in.
Like, here’s two examples applicable to both war and rebellion. Lots of SS officers were subject to illegal summary execution by both partisans and Allied forces for their atrocities. US troops frequently executed SS officers after the Malmedy Massacre for example, and the actual culprit was killed in an arson attack while hiding in Switzerland by vigilantes (were not totally sure who, that guy in particular had too many enemies to count, a lot even for a Nazi). Technically, this was illegal and merely being an officer in the SS wasn’t enough to merit punishment despite their whole job being atrocities in practice.
Another example is that Turkey let off a lot of the architects behind the Armenian Genocide. They were not tried in a court of law ever and Turkey’s political importance means a lot of countries have not even recognized said genocide. A lot of them WERE however assassinated by Armenian insurgents later on. And for that, officially, they are criminals to many. Legally, that was a crime.
In either example, you’d be hard-press to find anyone who’s actually willing to die on the hill of condemning these two instances. A fair few may be personally offended if you tried. It’s kinda the same thing with the De Merre imo. I think a little bit less of characters who condemn killing them. I can’t see them being that useful as allies to my particular cause.
There’s just one bit I wanted to address about the Robots thing before moving on since I agree with most of it and don’t want to spend too much more time on going over the stuff I agree with for something that’s technically off topic at the moment.
Robots point of contention
You make a fair few good points but I contest this one. The circumstances behind which great power you fight are again, quite different. My reactions to my spouse suddenly revolting against the government to declare themself a warlord would be rather different than them trying to oust a government that just conquered said land in a brutal war their efforts failed to win. The latter is much more understandable but the game just treats it as a text version of a pallet swap.
Also I don’t think you raze a city, you just TAKE a city. The battle’s destructive but you don’t need to raze it.
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But Gandhian theory isn’t the only–or the best-evidenced–explanation of the success of nonviolent resistance. It’s a popular story in the Anglosphere, in part because it pays the British Raj the (in my view entirely erroneous) compliment of implying that it fell due to its warmhearted conscientiousness, rather than the stark practical limitations of trying to wield ruthlessness when you’re a 0.05% foreign ruling class trying to keep the world’s single biggest colonial population under your thumb.
I’ve no doubt that Gandhi’s appeal to the British conscience was sincere, but it was also flattery–giving them an ego-saving excuse to take a path toward which all practical realities were pointing them anyway. As I said in one of those long posts on the topic above, I’m convinced that while it plays a minor-to-middling role,
The tactical nonviolence of a Popovic, which I discuss with lots of links to cases above, is much more relevant to the case of XoR. It’s not motivated by any convictions about the humanity or conscience of the oppressor – an XoR MC can have those, but they won’t play a strong role in the success or failure of their nonviolent tactics. Rather, the Popovician approach takes seriously the risk tolerance of the people whose participation you need for a mass resistance movement, and the corresponding likelihood that your rebellion reaches a genuinely threatening scale:
Brutal dictatorships are generally on pretty comfortable ground facing armed resistance movements; even where terrain makes a thoroughgoing victory impossible, as in e.g. Myanmar, the army can often keep the violent resistance small and marginal enough that it’s an irritant rather than a serious threat. Repressive regimes are often much more threatened by nonviolent movements that get hundreds of thousands of people disobeying them and gumming up the workings of the regime than they are by a few thousand armed freedom fighters. Myanmar’s dictatorship took an incomparably more serious hit from the NLD’s nonviolent activism than it did from decades of armed revolt in the hinterland.
It’s true that the Hegemony fuels itself on repression in a far more literal way than any real-world regime. That makes any rebel strategy more likely to end at a Harrower…whether you’re mustering people for discreet nonviolent resistance or to take up arms.
Yet like any horrific regime, the Hegemony relies on the labor of countless skilled and non-skilled civilians to keep running. It believes, like Hitler in the quote you shared, that the threat of death is enough to keep its civilians compliant, and as a result it’s built up a huge coercive apparatus. But that huge Alastor/domestically garrisoned Phalangite force is in various ways becoming more a destabilizing than a stabilizing factor; and it still isn’t close to enough to coerce everybody. If you can convince enough subjects to discreetly end or reduce their compliance…well, I was going to write that you’d be putting the Ennearchs in a situation they couldn’t just Harrow and magick their way out of. But they’re already in that situation; they’re just some distance from realizing it. Nonviolent resistance can bring the system to a crisis point just as readily, if not more so, than violence.
Sometimes, yep. And sometimes violent flank movements only “succeed” because other people did the mass mobilization and civil resistance for them:
On the far side of the rebellion, nonviolent movements also tend to be more successful at creating a stable governance regime. That’s perhaps where Gandhi’s insistence on respecting the humanity and conscience of your adversaries had the biggest real effect – less on levering the Brits out of India, and more in setting India up to be an unlikely democratic success story. (“Unlikely” in its poverty and literacy levels for the first several decades of independence, which were at levels more often correlated with authoritarianism.)
So much for the areas where we disagree, Comrade. We agree that it’s possible to have a violent revolt without atrocities; and the discipline that entails is also positively correlated with better post-revolution stability. A rebel movement that maintains clear rules of engagement (i.e. treating many tactics as out-of-bounds “atrocities”) and disciplines violators is also broadly more likely to succeed than one which sets loose a decentralized swarm of fighters to do as much damage as they can, any way they can.
In a story like this which tries to take seriously the effectiveness of many wildly different approaches to rebellion – Robespierre, Cromwell, Bolivar, the Taliban, Prachanda, Gandhi, Popovic, Gusmao – you’re probably going to come across choice blocks that include views you think are obvious nonsense. I can well imagine that it would never cross your (or your MC’s) mind in the de Merre standoff to think: “I’m keen to see true justice done, and it cannot be done by a mob in the night.”
But that’s not the only reason the game gives to not execute the de Merre. The reader sees three possible reasons to spare them – the “ethical pacifism” one, the pragmatist ally-seeking one, and the “we shouldn’t execute people without trial” one. Maybe the last one looms largest in your mind because the first two are utterly beneath your consideration? 
And there are two reasons to execute them: because in the absence of a just system, it’s the most just response to their crimes; or because you want to make an example of them to strike fear into the hearts of the regime and win more of the oppressed to your side.
I can’t keep readers from seeing #options they’d personally never consider picking without fundamentally betraying the whole point of this project – the theme that there is a choice of rebels, that there’s a wide variety of ways to take on and topple an intolerable social order. But if you pick the execution options, do you think the actual text you see outside the choice block suggests that your character wonders if they’re doing the wrong thing?
I certainly didn’t try to write it that way. I generally try to write the ruthlessness paths in ways that quietly recognize the humanity of the people you’re killing (so it doesn’t turn entirely into an unrealistic Manichaean revenge fantasy) without acting as if those touches of humanity mean it’s unjust to kill them. Similarly, I try to write the pacifism/compassion paths in ways that recognize that you’re making choices that cost lives, forgo benefits, and will be seen by many of your followers as a betrayal – without forcing the MC to conclude that those choices are therefore wrong.
Down one de Merre path you react to the accidental, especially-ugly features of Iokasta’s death with nausea, but that gets you recognized as a non-sadist who’s doing the right thing. I don’t think anything in the text suggests you regret or ought to regret ordering their execution?
At the end of the day, readers who believe successful rebellion must entail a certain degree of violence or atrociies will have the option to play through a successful rebellion in which they wield violence and/or atrocities effectively to weaken the Hegemony. I’ll aim to write that in a way that makes the human cost clear but still leaves the reader to decide if it was all justified. Ditto for pacifist rebellion and its human cost.
If it bothers the reader that the way they think best and most realistic isn’t the only available path…well, I’ll happily debate the historical analogues. At the end of the day we might need to agree to disagree, but there’s much to be said before we get there.
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Also we are forgetting one of the main forces a Charismatic low chaos can held. One of the most successful revolution forces in history. Religion.
Of course most of mages and rich people from Hegemony aren’t religious and see religion as a tool.
But if a whole mass of people started to believe X person can do miracles and also the Hegemony are a bunch of decadent assholes living in the air and being vampires that suck not only blood but their soul make them live in a perpetual hell for the eternity.
A character Like my Evil Gandhi gives a damn poors, gives a damn peace etc…
But sees this like a politician I won’t win this by force. Only chance in something like this when I am a damn flee they are the biggest mean magic army with mutants. It is ideologically convince them that my religion is good for they business at the end because it is too spreading in their ranks and the neighborhood barbarians are nearby
So my Girl will send her and her small part of Shayard like a Vatican Switzerland diplomatic religion trade hub neutral for everyone.
Everyone needs a Switzerland everyone needs a Vatican.
Still, I don’t think is reasonable that a pacific run can get all Shayard and even less the whole empire.
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I’ve always been wondering this but how limgually diverse the southern half of rhe continent was before Shayard conquered the south, like I know that its anglo french, but I have strong opinion that it had much more germanic/Romance languages/slavic languages too, most of which were exterminated. Tho this could be wrong as Shayard seems for too homogenous for that to be true, but oh well.
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I’m sure you already have an explanation and may not be willing to share as it would be spoilers, but what is preventing the Hegemony from going the Unquiet Dead route? I suspect we already have an example in universe of what happens when theurgy “uber alles” is actually implemented. I get that the Hegemony can’t survive a sincere nonviolent revolution, but can a worse extrapolation? I suppose to be more direct, isn’t some like conscience preventing that outcome?
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Hello, speaking about peaceful resistance, will it be possible to do something similar to the Baltic chain, where 3 million people made a chain to protest against occupation peacefully and succeeded in breaking free from the occupation of the Soviet Union. I was thinking more like a large group of people going to the Hegemony capital to protest peacefully, or something similar to that.
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You know, reading your post it occurred to me that many may have a tendency to read “non-violent resistance” as just doing the Salt March or the March on Washington over and over and over again until the government notices you, and not the campaign of sabotage and stoppage it would necessarily become. Such a campaign is a lot more proactive than I think some detractors realize.
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I think the common misconception from “pro-pacifist” side here, @Havenstone included, is that this approach is somehow incompatible with violent resistance or not the main focus of it. Violent resistance in almost all of its actions IS sabotage and stoppage because you usually can’t engage effectively with more organised non-underground enemy, so you need to compensate with other means until you can fight actual battles.
In most of cases it isn’t enough, and you need actively fight with violent means to save repressed people and push back the tyrants. Supposed efficiency of non-violent approach works only in narrow edge cases.
Polish resistance wall painting of turtle symbol, often associated with “work slow for Germans” motto. A useful help in the wider struggle against Nazis - but the struggle was essentialy violent in its nature and it couldn’t be anything else.
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The trial one mostly looms largest because I specifically remembered that being what the text option said. You may have a point that the pacifism and ally-seeking one didn’t really occur to me as much because I… don’t remember if there were options to say something to that effect or not. I wouldn’t say they’re beneath my consideration. I’ll engage in like, a debate over the ethics of it, but it is true that this particular brand of ethical pacifism doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me as an ethos. I feel like the last few times it was discussed in detail the topic of ethical pacifism, the idea of deontological systems of morality came up and I never got the mentality behind those at all.
No, it doesn’t bother me, it’s more about the point about people perceiving reality differently and different ideas of realism than any sort of disapproval. I’m fine with a pacifist option being viable it just isn’t something that would seem realistic to me. Though you’ve made interesting counterpoints.
There’s also the fact though that Hitler specifically wanted the people he targeted dead rather than subjugated. Now in his case, it wasn’t even about practicality or material gain, he just made a state designed to be one big engine of cruelty. The only real benefit he got from his atrocities was that he promised he’d do them, built a reputation around doing them, and needed to continue doing them at the expense of all else if he wanted to retain the loyalty of his power base. This is rather different than the British form of imperialism.
In the Hegemony it isn’t quite like that, they obviously don’t want to just wipe out their whole labor force at once (it’s almost as if having your two most valuable resources be mutually exclusive products of a specific thing is a huge drawback). It does however seem they’re getting more and more Harrower-happy by the day and the minute you stop working, you go into the chipper. A group of Helots, outlaws, and possibly some inconvenient nobles hiding out in the woods seems like prime fuel, and it seems the government feels the same way. And being nonviolent when they’re so determined to take advantage of this opportunity feels like a losing battle in the long run. I’m not saying it shouldn’t be possible, it’s just I’d bet a whole lot more money on it working in this story than irl, and that ties back to the perceptions of reality affecting stories point.
Oh, not at all! In fact, my intent was to praise the game for excluding something like that.
As a side note, I’ve never seen Manichaean used in this way. You mean like the religion?
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