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Having played the yeomen, merchant, priest and noble paths so far;
I think it will be harder to find a compromise for all these people that makes them amenable to the same post-Karagond order. Really the one grouping I can see sticking together is helots-yeomen-priests… but can Shayard even exist without the armies, wealth and adminstration of the nobility?
I suppose another group that might work is yeomen-nobles-priests but this would involve throwing helots under the bus and I am not sure that is viable long term either…
I found it interesting that you can start thinking about the concept of proto-republicanism if you involve yourself with the yeomen. A taste of what Cabel 2.0 might look if not reconciled with the Laconnier faction?
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First proper playthrough since last night was drunken skimming. It really does seem that currently tearing down Irduin’s old order is nigh impossible for high anarchy mc. Also prefer Dashingdon to CogDemos with the privated code, so I couldn’t browse that to see if there already is an optimal route where high anarchy mc can indeed bring unity down enough with the right choices.
Still all in all it was good and maybe my mc will just need to be more careful in Irduin as you cannot win them all and save the active sowing of discord for Grand Shayard which is a bigger city where everybody doesn’t know everybody else that is also being run in what we can assume is the the Hegemony’s more typically brutal fashion so all in all maybe a much riper target for the kind of transformative revolution my mc hopes to engender than relatively content and complacent little Irduin. 
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Well, I think that the Thaumatarch’s most conscientious Telone being there has made the current situation unsustainable.
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i like him quite much. im very interested what choices do we get with him in future.
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Ngl, I’m also nervous about what Kleitos’s plans are. It seems to be generally known that the current situation is not sustainable, so I’m assuming he has an awareness of this too, particularly given that he has enhanced his brain in certain ways by altering himself. The Thaumatarchy seems to be squeezing a lot harder the past few years in particular. Are they building up blood for some really grand and horrific ritual perhaps?
It’s dangerous to assume your opponent is stupid.
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most likely nothing. hegemony is not that smartly governed.
same can be said of thinking them more smart then they are
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That’s true at the moment, and the sense of powerlessness isn’t helped by the modular way I’ve represented unity on the stats screen. I only tried to add it as a visible stat very recently, and hadn’t had a chance to playtest that aspect myself before yesterday.
I guess the message is: right now, play the draft for story, not stats. 
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Finally managed to finish a run through of Irduin! Excellent writing as always, though I’d call it mechanically… opaque. I think this will be better after the Rim stuff is implemented and there have been a few balance passes, so not really going to comment on it rn.
Narratively: so many moving parts!I think I’ll have to look it over a few more times to get a proper grasp, but as is it feels like it all comes together alright. The lyssa scene absolutely wrecked me as a helot, though I feel like if you’ve been hanging with the helots and yeomen the yeoman reaction should be “wow, look what the apothecary is willing to do for helots, imagine how far they’d go for us!” rather than “ugh look what the Helots are getting instead of us”, since you’ve been their buddy. I did end up enjoying the tension of “I need to make everyone’s life worse to spark revolt” with “these people don’t deserve me fucking with them”. Assuming that theming carries into Metropolis I think it’s an excellent prelude.
One thing that I kept expecting to come up after the convo with M’kyar about it was the MC’s whip-scars. I would have expected some internal monologue regarding it when the MC can bathe for the de Irde, and I kept looking for the opportunity to show our back to some of the helots (perhaps the Radical Youth:tm: to prove we’re no Kryptast, and that we know what it’s like).
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I would like him to live, honestly. In his odd way he is far more honest than some of the more “likeable” characters in Irduin. And him living would be be in line with that passage from the earlier revelations that Tamran quotes about compassion. I’m surprised that one has remained in the Codex, honestly.
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these is totally in line with previous depictions of yeomen. one of there request to de idre is that she should treat her helots worse 
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“How can we feel just barely superior to the slaves of the slaves are treated well? You’re messing up our whole thing here!”
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I mean, this is perfectly in line with how this dynamic usually worked in slave societies historically. “At least I’m not a helot” is going to be a great consolation in life for a lot of the yeoman, so if the distinction breaks down it’s an attack on one of the pillars of their self-esteem.
It’s ugly but it’s quite in line with how the poorer free people in societies like this usually feel and why the people that actually own the slaves can often get their support. It’s a big part of why your non-slave holding southerner in the Confederacy was so willing to fight for what was objectively the interests of a small number of big plantation owners.
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The stratification between the lower yeomen and the helots does seem worse in Irduin than it was back in our patch of the Rim where my mc in spite of his more radical tendencies seems to have gotten almost as much former yeomen as helots to join up the two times he actively recruits. It probably all comes down to the gist of this quote again:
But breaking that dynamic and the caste system is one of the foremost reasons why my mc rebels in the first place. He doesn’t want to be cattle and the other helots are people too, not cattle.
I am thinking with Irduin however what if Havenstone’s current implementation was a feature? Not a bug? Maybe really the best thing to do in Irduin for an mc like mine is to lay low, manage what he can of his own rebellion from afar and practice his disguise to perfect it for blending in with the merchant class in Grand Shayard? Maybe the thruth is the Hegemony itself is already doing more than mc plus Cerlotta and potentially one other companion can to break the complacent fantasies Irduin comforts itself with?
Maybe it is better if it is the Hegemony and not the mc that brings down Irduin. So maybe doing mostly nothing in Irduin is really what my mc ought to be doing there. Then even if the Irduinites later realise who the mc truly was after the Hegemony breaks them then maybe that is the best thing my mc could ever do to get at least some former Irduinites to see he is not the monster the Hegemony likes to paint him as now (just quite yet) and give his rebellion and thought a second and more favourable look after the Hegemony itself shatters their lives and fantasies. After all we can try to lead them to water but they still need to want to drink it and when mc first arrives Irduin is maybe not proverbially thirsty enough for that yet.
So I am going to try another playthrough where my mc really will just try to lay low, perfect his disguise, refine his thoughts and goals for the rebellion and plan for Grand Shayard and let his enemies do the heavy lifting for him when it comes to breaking Irduin’s complacent old fantasies.
In Doylist terms I am going to treat this like a light breather episode in between game 1 the Xaos lands and Grand Shayard.
Well I was hoping for the opposite, my mc wants to be rid of them so I was thinking my mc might want to start putting into practice what he has learned from the abhumans by slowly healing those scars then working up to rectifying any deformities he may have received from dear old dad beating the living crap out of him every so often, even if it was done in dad’s typically twisted way to prevent male helot mc from having to share Dann’s dismal fate and finally moving on to really adding his own twist to what the abhumans taught him by using it to further perfect his human and male form instead of adding on the animal characteristics favoured by the abhumans themselves.
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Code diving is working for me: https://cogdemos.ink/play/havenstone-/choice-of-rebels-stormwright/mygame/scenes/startup.txt
Way too long since I read the first part so I haven’t reached the new content yet, but I’m sure it won’t disappoint.
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Question I haven’t finished the new update yet but was wondering how to increase your opinion for the helots and yeomen. Are they place holder stats because its saying every group hates you. Does it actually effect anything.
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not yet because they don’t know who you are . i would guess they are placeholder.
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From what I can tell by looking at the code it’s because without importing your save (though editing) right now everyone opinion off you starts of low no matter what option you pick during character creation
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Ok thank you 
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@Havenstone assuming Irduin were to fall to rebellion, would that make it the first like actual settlement of any note to be taken over by the commotion? Or are there any “liberated” towns back in the Rim with a strong rebellion?
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