If you look at the map, the forest begins directly north of Irduin. They’ll have to get into the woods and cut around the edge of the rim in the woods and highlands.
That being said, it does feel a bit unnatural to spark a rebellion in Irduin, at all. High risk, low reward.
More general feedback:
Very much enjoyed it. Your writing remains excellent and the subject matter is still ocean-deep compared to the typical CoG puddle.
This installment, particularly once you make it to Sojourn feels much lower pace and lower stakes than book 1. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. War is mostly waiting around, after all.
The worldbuilding throughout is very interesting. Seeing the different cultures in Sojourn and the way of life on the way to Irduin were particularly colorful in expanding the scope of the world.
The Irduin social experiment is an excellent scenario, in my opinion. Basically showing an ideal village in the Hegemony and asking how you’d deal with it. Personally, it seems obvious that the right thing to do is to leave it alone in most cases. The nobles seems ideal to bring about to your cause long-term if you are lower anarchy/shayardene, and the lower classes the least likely to aid you. Plus, the local nobles have nearly no military power and low loyalty to the regional higher nobility, so there’s not much downside to leaving them alone.
The Irduin conflict feels entirely disconnected from the wider rebellion. To the points people are making above, it doesn’t seem clear how causing rebellion here will meaningfully help your larger rebellion, to the point that you’d risk your life provoking it. Having a link there, probably once we get the rebellion-directing segments, would be an important addition.
P.S. I haven’t played all the paths, so I may be underinformed, but creating a secret society / rebel cell in Irduin does seem much more prudent than fomenting open, immediate rebellion. Something along the lines of a Filiki Eteria cell, including whichever social classes your rebellion includes (particularly nobles if possible) which would take over the town once your rebellion gets close enough to make it prudent. Having a group stockpiling the resources generated by the town - food, weapons, metals, etc - would be more helpful than another group of untrained refugees who need to be kept alive on a backwoods odyssey.
P.P.S.
You should edit the most recent update section on the top post. I didn’t see there was an update until I decided to peruse the latest conversations on the WIP on a whim.
What’s your plan for the famine and subsequent extermination of Nyr once the Harrowed agriculture collapses and they can’t feed their herds?
P.S. I haven’t played all the paths, so I may be underinformed, but creating a secret society / rebel cell in Irduin does seem much more prudent than fomenting open, immediate rebellion.
The great famine is ultimately short term pain for long-term gain. It basically pays for itself within two decades, but I am not going to lie it will be by far the toughest time ahead. But other historical states have weathered great famines before too, so nihil novi sub sole, historically speaking.
The group most affected in my mc’s case are likely going to be the free urban poor. Other than that throw everything and the kitchen sink at the food production and supply problem there’s the crop research prince nippletwister is conducting, there is land that can be turned to more productive use and there is self-sacrifice agricultural theurgy we could possibly teach and unleash to lessen the impacts, there’s even black-sites where a few young stray children and orphans might disappear but there’s not going to be one magical silver bullet. Ask me again by game 4 or the beginning of game 5 when we will get a clearer idea exactly what is and isn’t possible while ending slavery.
Except that’s not how famine’s work. The people who suffer the most aren’t the urban poor but the subsistence farmers aka the Helot farmers. Yeoman farmers and people who produce it for a profit will be fine because they make for themselves and sell for a profit.
Sorry bud, I’ve seen the USSR Famine’s statistics. They were mostly rural farm workers who perished, most of them collective farmers, and what kept them going was state terror, food purchases from overseas, and strategic authorization to use the grain reserve.
They still starved throughout it, but they were able to produce just enough that the death stopped.
The statistics were also very clear. It was not a short-term drop off. The Russian and former Soviet States never recovered in egg, milk, and meat production.
If the price of “recovery” here is slavery and misery then Hera has already doomed the world and it is decidedly not worth the cost. Any society with slavery on the level of the Hegemony is a thoroughly sick society and one not worth having or saving.
My mc will never be cattle again nor will he condemn anybody else to that fate.
And I have seen ours from the last winter, aka the “hunger winter” under the nazi occupation where the countryside mostly made it through and the deaths and epidemics were mostly confined to the cities and larger towns, as well as the weak and elderly everywhere.
Your farmers I’m sorry to say were not the same as the Helot farmer. The Netherlands was an industrialized and educated nation.
If you’re basing your concepts around the starvation of a first world nation compared to a pre-industrial nation that’s just not feasible. It’s not something that should be the baseline for what you’re expecting.
Mao’s Great Leap Forward ended in failure when the Seven Thousand Cadres Conference forced him into a self criticism, rolled back most of it, and then steered a path of moderation. Then he exterminated the ones who saved China with the Cultural Revolution.
Stalin was saved because of the Great Depression. European and American industrial farming companies were willing to sell to him now due to them trying to stay alive.
The thing I’m asking you to do, is just understand that 60-100 million of the 200 million people in the former Hegemony will probably die of starvation, disease, and the inevitable banditry and collapse of civil-military order. That’ll be the price for liberty. Well that and probable conquest by Halasurq.
Again let’s discuss this in greater detail when we have more of the pertinent information. We may have had a more modern industrial and knowledge base and some of the most fertile land in the world but we did not have magic or seven friggin harvets per anum. However ending slavery is the core reason of my mc’s rebellion not putting himself in a rulership position over the rotting corpse of a slave state where the current system is unsustainable anyway.
From what he have been told more blood actually flows into distributing the food than producing and self-sacrifice theurgy may be able to keep most of the production side relatively intact. Furthermore the distribution systems mostly channel things into the cities, particularly the ones built on less fertile grounds, like Grand Shayard and presumably Aekos itself.
I think the thing is, the Out Rim rebellion isn’t the “wider rebellion”. It’s a disturbance in a nearly irrelevant, sparsely populated backwater.
What we do outside of the Rim is ultimately more important, I think. The Rim rebellion isn’t just going to be disconnected from Irduin. It’s disconnected from all the rest of Shayard.
To me it’s important to see how self-management can work. It’s eye-opening for my MC to see that a lot of the issues back home was due to official incompetence.
To her, it feels like the issue is that the top puts pressure on the local administrations to meet unsustainable targets which created the conditions that triggered her revolt.
So when she forms her new state, she’ll apply rational targets and devolve more powers to local administrations.
The rebellion has spread much further than that. Assuming you’ve done well (which, only way you’d get a rebellion in Irduin off successfully), you should have some proper rebel networks in the Rim Hethe. I assume the success of a rising in Irduin will depend on how well you can set those up.
The self management by the local nobles that keeps Irduin in a lot of ways in its old pre-Hegemony system is only made possible because they do not use theurges for extra harvests and use animals for some of the work most use helots for. If you want to export that model not only would you regress to full-on feudalism you’d need just as big of a famine to cull enough of the population to make the Irduin kind of order sustainable across most or all of the former Hegemony as my mc does.
Bringing in those extra officials and theurges for the extra harvests brings more corruption, more discontent and more of the attendant cruelty and corruption and would turn Irduin into a place like everywhere else in the Hegemony and just as badly managed.
Never said that was the system that I’d use. I said it was informative for self-management which it is.
Unless your lieutenant has been completely incompetent, their efforts over 1 year with your existing band will be far more than what the MC does in one small town, Irduin. Thus, they are controlling the wider rebellion in the Rim, Wiendry, etc.
My point is we are still pretty small fish in the grand scheme of things either way. Not so much that Irduin is more important than the Rim, but that both are out of the way so to me it’s six of this, a half dozen of the other.
There’s not much difference in stirring up trouble in Irduin compared to Rim Square where we started.
There is no “wider rebellion” at this point in the story.
Also, very importantly, the “peaceful Irduin order” IS STILL A SLAVE ECONOMY. By accepting it you are fundamentally accepting that slavery is tolerable, so long as everyone gets along. Strabaud gives Haldine living people as a gift, and it’s touted as an excellent example of the neighborly spirit and compassion in Irduin. The fundamental rot at the core of the Hegemony isn’t gone in Irduin, it’s just been papered over with (admittedly genuine, in most cases) smiles.
It is, but without the pressures of the Hegemony and after the famine it could be transitioned fully into the older model and the maximum compromise the Lacconniers would be prepared to make by turning the current helots from chattel into serfs. That is still far from acceptable to my mc and why he will not go for that, but it would be possible.
Indeed, makes the blood boil, doesn’t it? At least it did for my mc.
Again because I don’t think people got what I meant about self-management. The central takeaway is that if we have state industries of any kind they can be sustainable if sensible targets and quotas are established.
Slavery and coerced labor is not the thing she’s focusing on. The things she wants to focus on is how to tool a classical economic model and tune it with more reasonable goals to minimize state terror and corruption.
She wants to abolish the helot class and do away with coerced labor. But she feels that state employees should have elements of self-management within a planning framework. Which means that there’s potential for abuse of state employees if they are forced to work towards unsustainable targets or quotas.
The critical turning point in Jefferson’s thinking may well have come in 1792. As Jefferson was counting up the agricultural profits and losses of his plantation in a letter to President Washington that year, it occurred to him that there was a phenomenon he had perceived at Monticello but never actually measured. He proceeded to calculate it in a barely legible, scribbled note in the middle of a page, enclosed in brackets. What Jefferson set out clearly for the first time was that he was making a 4 percent profit every year on the birth of black children. The enslaved were yielding him a bonanza, a perpetual human dividend at compound interest. Jefferson wrote, “I allow nothing for losses by death, but, on the contrary, shall presently take credit four per cent. per annum, for their increase over and above keeping up their own numbers.” His plantation was producing inexhaustible human assets. The percentage was predictable.
In another communication from the early 1790s, Jefferson takes the 4 percent formula further and quite bluntly advances the notion that slavery presented an investment strategy for the future. He writes that an acquaintance who had suffered financial reverses “should have been invested in negroes.” He advises that if the friend’s family had any cash left, “every farthing of it [should be] laid out in land and negroes, which besides a present support bring a silent profit of from 5. to 10. per cent in this country by the increase in their value.”
One of the chilling things about slavery is at the end of the day slaves are treated like any other asset on a balance sheet.
Well, that is true.
I was more thinking you basically become the same as a cow or horse on the farm.
