Is that right? I’m pretty sure abhumans can’t cross a ward. I can see acceleration of healing as not preventing passage, but the natural process would almost certainly leave scar tissue. Cerlota even points out most theurges delay life extension until old age to avoid the disadvantages that come with not being able to cross a ward.
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It’s not the permanent skin change of plektoi hide or abhumans adding fur and other things human skin shouldn’t normally have and it wouldn’t prevent against future scars either, so it should ultimately leave the mc pretty much unchanged and not prevent ward passage, I think.
The mc may not be able to pass a ward while the supercharged healing is taking place however, but they shouldn’t need to.
Edit. Forum search function is rotten as always but I have found this old post again from our dear author:
Note the temporary enhancement which presumably leaves the ability to pass wards afterwards intact as it seems to still fall firmly under healing and not abhuman autoplektosis or the more vain ennearch’s permanent autotheurgy.
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its interesting question. we don’t really know how it works exactly and when body transformation options will become aviable i hope we get better understanding of how it work’s exactly and what will and will not let us cross the wards.
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I smiled a bit seeing the word “Pandocheion”, which in fact used to be one of most controversial ‘innovations’ of the Greek language. The Atticist Phrynicus of Bithynia much lamented that his contemporaries had replaced «πανδοκεῖον» with «πανδοχεῖον», calling the use of the latter a sin against the Greek language.
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@Havenstone Alasais should have a reaction to suggesting that the Telone “slip and fall” if other “accidents” like that have been happening around town.
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Now that I finally gotten my guide to a state that I like I have finaly gotten around to playing the update and I’m really loving it even though I haven’t gotten to Irduin yet 
. I have forgotten just how much I enjoyed the Xaos chapters with exploring a hostile and somewhat alien land and interacting with different cultures
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I’m kinda surprised we can get the info on this new bomb through torture. I get why the rebels would TRY because people try that all the time but irl, torture is actually pretty awful at getting useful info.
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The risk is the victim says whatever they think the interrogator wants to hear even if it’s not true right?
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They’re also known to lie out of spite.
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People will say anything to make the pain stop, after a point. So yeah, nothing guarantees you get the truth.
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Havie at this passage could people who went to or spied on the moot and tried to institute a moot or appella in their own rebellion not get a fourth option here conceding some local leeway may be necessary or prudent but that those local leaders need not be nobles or potentates but favour a more empowered moot or appella system? Since it is just a thought of the mc here anyway and nowhere to being able to be put into practice just yet.
Spoilers
Lady Alasais is right. We need an order where local leaders adapt the far-off ruler’s edicts to local realities.
No. I’ll make laws for the genuine good of the realm, and insist on them being implemented faithfully and exactly.
I don’t want a world of vast realms at all. Better to have small ones, whose many rulers can never be too far from the people they rule.
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“Yes, I’m a witch. I did all the witch tropes. Also, it turns out that all the people I have a reason not to like were at the witch meetings too.”
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Oh, I loved this.
This must be my favorite CoG IF series.
Irduin was better than I imagined, and I’m challenged left and right with every version of my rebel in every route that I try.
You never disappoint, Havenstone, great job.
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Also do they mean “vast realms” as in countries or “vast realms” as in the same local government controls vast swaths of land?
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No, I rather meant this:
Lady Alasais is right. We need an order where local leaders adapt the far-off ruler’s edicts to local realities. But those rulers need not be nobles they might come from the people instead.
Early “dreams of federalism/federation”, not a confederation or a koinon. Just the principle of subsidiarity applied to a new order. It also doesn’t have to spring up to the mc all refined, just the seed of a possible idea, particularly for those who have observed the moot in Irduin and tried to have their own moot or apella back in the Rim too.
But the smaller is better thing is generally applicable to the new divisions under any sort of federal state too, even if it only controls most of Shayard, Wiendrj and a few orher western bits of what is now the Hegemony, provinces, districts, prefectures, etc, those boundaries would need to be redrawn in any case. Although of course my mc really wants Nyral (re)integrated with it at one point too but in the western option he might need to accept cutting Karagon and Erezza loose, painful though that might be economically in the short to mid term.
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@Havenstone I have a little suggestion! 
I think it would be really cool if our MC could reveal their true identity as the rebel chief at some point during Agarie de Irde’s torture. Perhaps at the end, for a grandiose moment of satisfaction. (and maybe she could be so exhausted and passed out that she wouldn’t even hear you, making you feel like a fool)
Great chapter so far! Looking forward to reading all the content it has! 
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Firstly, I’d just like to say that I think that your writing is phenomenal. Your world feels so alive and self-consistent in a way that’s very rare in fantasy, and I’m absolutely in love with this series. But I really don’t like the current arc of this game, and I’m curious if my criticisms have any validity.
I can break down my criticisms into two parts: the pacing and the characters.
My pacing issue really stems from this game being cut in half, and I completely understand why the choice was made, I’m sure you want to publish sometime this year, but I figured I’d express my thoughts anyways.
Game one is excellently paced. It feels like the tension is rising throughout and comes to a very explosive climax at the end. Everything you do feels like it’s moving you along the path of being a rebel. Every action, even a failure, feels like it’s moving you along the rebel arc. The chaos lands are also great, even if death isn’t easy to achieve in game terms the writing makes you feel the ever present danger and risk you’re taking, and Sojourn feels like an interlude with wide-reaching consequences for your rebellion, both in the people you’re meeting and the faction you’re helping to build. It even ends with a bang, with Cerlota’s proclamation about bringing down the city ward, which sets up major tension.
But then, you get to Irduin, the place where tension goes to die. And don’t get me wrong, Irduin is super interesting, both from a worldbuilding perspective, and in the thematic questions it makes you have to face: state capacity vs local order, where the various social classes (represented here in their most idealised forms) fit in your vision, what you’re going to do about genuinely ‘good’ people in positions of power that you should be opposing as a rebel. But, Irduin itself just doesn’t matter, in the grand scheme of things. At no point does the collapse or stability of Irduin’s order feel like it matters to your core rebellion. The rewards for either outcome aren’t clear from the outset, and while obviously I haven’t seen how things end there, I’m struggling to picture a payoff that would make me satisfied as a game conclusion. When you combine this with the physical safety that your character is in, after spending a game and a half at the edge of death, the pacing just feels super off. Irduin works great as an interlude between the chaos lands and moving on to Grand Shayard, because you, the reader, know that the tension will only rise, you’ve been promised that a ward will come down. But it feels abrupt and unrewarding for the game to end here, with you having not really accomplished anything major. Your character has learned a ton of things in this book, and then accomplished nothing significant with that knowledge. You even get a stat boost at the start of the game, then don’t use it in any real significant way. It’s particularly striking compared to the flashy things you could accomplish in game 1 with less stats.
Now, for the characters: All the Xaoslanders and residents of Irduin feel like real people, I especially like the innkeepers and enforcer captain. but the people who travel with you don’t feel nearly as ‘real’. I understand that you’re planning to write in more scenes for your chaos companion, so for now I’ll focus on Cerlota.
Who is Cerlota, really? She’s a pragmatic theurge, that’s great. She likes her homeland. That’s about all we know about her. At no point does she ever express any opinion about our rebellion, other than why a theurge shouldn’t lead it. I have no idea what kind of order she wants for the world, what she thinks of my other companion, what she thinks of anything in Irduin. Does she think that your actions last year in the rim were justified? I dunno, you never talk about specifics with her apparently. She feels like a shoe in to tell the reader how theurgy works. that makes sense for the various diplomats in Sojourn, presenting their various cultures and said culture’s quirks is literally their job and feels less unnatural. But your character spends almost more time with Cerlota than with their original group of rebels from game one, and it feels like we know nothing about her. Yes, she’s playing a mute, but there’s no way she and the MC don’t have at least one conversation about the future, before Irduin, if nothing else. The scene where she’s bleeding the helots secretly is the only significant character development she gets in Irduin, but how many people will see that. Even her orchard scene is just another way for her to tell you more about the theurgic order and how reliant the Hegemony is on it.
I really hope this doesn’t come across as disrespectful, I still really love your writing. I just figured it was worth offering my perspective. I truly believe that with one or two more scenes the characters will be in a much more satisfying place, and completely understand the decisions that make the pacing feel the way it does.
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I’m becoming a broken record on this, but neither does the Outer Rim. I think the difference now is that the MC has seen enough of the world to realize that whereas in the first game the Rim felt more important than it was because that was all the MC had ever known.
The Rim would likely seem smaller if we were to go back now because the MC’s POV has changed. For example, the MC thinking of the hegemonic “host” or “army” whereas what they’re really facing is a unit that’s roughly equivalent battalion with some local auxiliaries tacked on, makes it seem grander than it really is because the MC’s sense of scale is affected by having spent their whole lives in small town in a sparsely populated and isolated section of the Hegemony.
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Grand Shayard will probably be the first thing we do the Hegemony really feels if we can collapse it into disorder, if not open rebellion. Unlike the Rim or Irduin that won’t be just a pinprick it could be our first real stab. It’s sadly probably also gonna be what makes the Laconniers wake up and crawl out of the woodwork. 
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whole reason why we go to irduin is that its so unimportant location hegemonic authority rarely bather to go there. there is really no way to fix that its why its was just small stop in initial draft.
i personally really like it. it dose world building aspect that first game did not really did. shows different factions and what they may want in future and generally prepares mc for GS.
i think one big aspect that is lacking is management system’s which i think will help with some pacing issues, at these time only really way to further rebelion is by blowing it up and its kind of a little underwhelming. but when management will be add it will change. band management will be our primary method of spreading rebelion while irduin will take its intended place as our hiding location .which we can also blow up if we want.
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