Oh I was just about to add this to my previous message, I’m also interested!
Thanks for pointing this out, I missed this while typing away.
How do you part on good terms with the villagers? With a high CHA character, they ask me to leave after the Reavers show up, after I help them negotiate terms. With a high INT character, they also ask me to leave, even if I help them fight off the Reivers (including killing their leader). I tried helping them heal sick villagers and they seemed really grateful.
The only time I’ve been sent off warmly was when I went with Wolfsbait.
And how do you get equipment off the Reivers?
I haven’t tried meeting the Nomads yet so I’ll definitely try that out.
Since she led conquests built on mass butchering a hereditary slave caste her vision was, at best, only utopian for a tiny slice of the population at best.
Well no shit.
My mc would rather hope to strike the killing blow or spell or whatever to that particular monster himself.
I don’t think there are supernatural eldritch horrors or at least not ones with supernatural origins. The ones that there are, like whoever is in Vigil and the archlich seem to have once very much been human.
The author has often enough said that this is not a D&D esque world where the angels can be summoned and good thing it isn’t otherwise my mc would definitely want to kill one of those so-called “merciful” monsters, slowly and painfully.
As it stands the three main monsters of this world seem to be the Thaumatarch, whoever is in Vigil and the archlich. One of those, the Thaumatarch is destined to fall, no matter what over the course of the series…which just leaves two.
The foundation of Lenin’s Utopia required the enslavement of peasant-farmers into collectives under a judicial system that its framers purposely rejected the concept of “rule of law” and used terror and repression to coerce the peasantry into compliance to build Socialism on the backs of.
Yes, Hera did that and it’s awful- but it was to achieve a goal that we will never know ostensibly.
Can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs, can’t create a Utopia on Earth without demanding sacrifices.
For the Villagers if they don’t turn you over then you are on good trems with them but if you want the seed (First thing first you have to make sure to talk to their main farmer) you either have to leave before the party or completely destroy the Reivers with their help (which isn’t possible yet despite it being in the code)
For the Reivers equipment you have to kick their ass without Cerlota being there since from what I recall she anyways do her Xaso Storm thing. You don’t need to do that if you are on good terms with the village (If they had time to give you gifts) or nomands since they give you weapons anyway
For the Nomads special thing you just have to make it to the end of their mini plot without being on bad trems with them
There will a new option during the free time moment in Sojourn for the seed or totem
The point to focus on, is that you don’t know what they are, you don’t know their powers, you don’t know their plans, you don’t know if you could stop them, and you don’t know if the moment the Wards fail if they plan on doing something to all living creatures.
We have no basis for it yet, because we can’t be expected to. We didn’t know that the Rim was a backwater Province in Grand Shayard that can’t even speak properly. We were told this by a backwards Grand Shayard Riding.
There’s so much we don’t know and that’s what’s so interesting
You are actively dealing with centuries of lies, intentional historical revision, obliteration and state misinformation at a scale that will be mind-boggling to uncover.
The more powerful our movement becomes, the greater our deeds, the less and less of our truth will also be allowed to exist.
We’ll become a living myth, a vessel that others impose their truths onto. We’ll be a heroic liberator to some, a vicious tyrant, and potentially a Prophet or God-Adjacent figure. Every aspect of our lives will be recorded and remarked upon.
Our oldest friends and companions won’t be immune to this either. The greater and greater our MCs become, the more our relationships will change. No matter how much you try to prevent it’ll be inevitable that some part of them will begin to see you as the historical figure you become. Not the wet-nosed rebel they knew.
The more the legend of someone rises the less human they seem and more like a god they become. If your MC is someone that wants to retire to a farm he better ready things or else he may become enslaved to the throne he/she accidentaly climbed the steps to take.
I’m not really sure (Right now at least) that Ghaesh is that much of a monster in comparison to all the others ones (I’m including all the perfectly human monsters too ). Right now he just seems to me to be a mad (?) scientist who wants to be left alone
If he does not want to interact with people so much, then he should stop going out of his way kidnap every Xaos-lander within 100 kilometers of the Bloodless Reach
Thanks for probing on this one! I went back to double-check my figures and have massaged the world model a little to make sure I’m satisfied with what it’s telling me. So let’s try again with some revised numbers (which like all worldbuilding numbers are flexible until they finally appear in a game, and who are we kidding, still subject to some slight revision until the last game is in a shape I’m happy with):
There are around 70,000 Theurges in the Hegemony at the moment, or 0.03% of the total population. (Just to make it even more parallel with the Phalangites, I guess!) Of these magi, just over one-half are first-Kyklos, with around 22,000 of those spending most of their time on staple crops. Over the course of a year, each of those Theurges will be expected to accelerate growth on between 8 and 12 square miles of cropland.
To be clearer on how I’m imagining the crop logistics:
(No, seriously, you guys **want** to read about crop logistics?)
The first thing to say is that the real cornerstone of the Hegemony’s Theurgic agricultural system is river/canal transport of grain from breadbaskets to elsewhere. The 5000-odd Theurges who are full-time involved in river barge and sea transport along the major trade arteries feed way more people per phial than the harvest-boosters do.
Direct harvest-boosting only takes place on around 20% of the Hegemony’s arable land – although 54% of that boosting does take place in Shayard, so it seems a little more normal to Shayardenes. This is rather lower than the 35% I cited upthread – I’d earlier mixed up the numbers for harvests and acres at one key point. A fertility drop of 1/5-ish of the land will obviously contribute to famine, but less than the likely collapse in the inter-provincial trade system. (Rome offers some real-world parallels for the impact of the latter.)
In terms of how it works: a trained Level One Theurge looking over a field will easily perceive the grow-and-bloom teloi of thousands of plants at once. They don’t need to devote individual attention and time to each plant; to that extent, it is a mass-scale process. But they need to devote blood on a scale proportionate to the fact that they’re making millions of individual Changes, not a single large-scale Change.
It takes about 8 minutes for a trained ag Theurge to bring an acre to bloom, if they’re easily able to walk around and get all the plants in eyeshot (which they usually do on elevated walkways built by the helotry) – and if they’ve got the roughly 10 blood phials per minute it takes to Change all those plants. (For comparison, a donor can safely give about 8 phials’ worth in a single sitting; a self-Theurge might be able to push themselves a little further than that. One Harrowing yields enough blood for 111 acres.)
This is what leads to agriculture consuming as much of the Hegemony’s blood supply as it does, and blood and trained Theurges, rather than land, being the primary constraint on squeezing more harvests out of the current Hegemony. You can see how the Ennearchs might imagine that they don’t have an unsustainable system going, but rather a virtuous cycle where increasing harvests leads to population growth and the greater blood supply for more harvest-boosting.
When the Ennearchs first started boosting harvests outside of Karagon (where 57% of the arable land now gets regular Theurgic assistance), they didn’t really imagine that it would bring them to a point where they had four times as many Theurges evoking harvests as they had moving grain upriver and over-sea. But they still tend to see the way ahead as more of the same.
Yes, it does.
I appreciate the warning. But the move from your corner of the empire’s periphery to see things at continental scale was always going to involve this shift. A major empire in a world of magic should be bigger than the standard medieval-Europe fantasy mental model.
This thread is going through the shift in perspective a lot more starkly than the game itself will. No one’s going to tell your MC in-game that the Hegemony has a million and a half total soldiers for a long time yet, if at all. (The great majority of them are deployed at the other end of the continent from you, and even if it wanted to the Hegemony couldn’t make peace with Halassur to deploy its full force against internal rebels). It’ll be multiple games yet before you’re in a place to make decisions with continent-level impacts.
As for levels of mobilization, here’s what I said upthread:
So I’m going to stick with the scale of the continental empire. But you’ll be relieved to hear that the Hegemony’s navy only has around 1,200 ships (a third of the naval personnel I mentioned play support roles in the ports), and there are only around 2,500 total Plektoi of all varieties (horse, hound, and human).
I’ll think about it – but I’ve also always been happy to have odd corners of the game that surprise people when they try new things.
I hadn’t – thanks for the recommendation! That is a gorgeous drawing.
I’ve hesitated to do that because it adds more coding variability into a game already thick with it, but it would be more in keeping with the setting.
Roughly, but with a lot more mouths. As to how they move, I think the best answer would be mind-breakingly. Like someone else said back when I first introduced the Naos prologue:
I don’t mean to borrow the full horror of the Xthulhu mythos, obvs, but I’d like the Xthonic mythos to have some warped beyond-our-ken elements.
Love it! The Shayardenes call their capital Grand Shayard, but I wonder if the Karagonds would pay it the same compliment. Maybe it would end up as Sayaropoli, like Vendopoli and Niropoli?
All of this is explicitly addressed behind the playtestable link. I understand that not everyone will have played it yet, especially those who had mixed feelings about game one, but maybe hold off on the blustery assertions that the world is dumbdark until you’ve caught up on it.
She was 51 at the time of the prologue. If she survived, she’d be 61 now.
@Engulfed, welcome and thanks so much for the fantastic feedback! I’m sorry that the cogdemos platform has been giving you and others headaches; it’s volunteer-supported, and I know they’re working on fixing the problems people have been experiencing.
I’m hopeful that the pacing dip will feel different when Stormwright is in its final form. It’ll still be a game with a quieter second half, one that encourages the player to catch their breath and start to think about the long-term stakes of what they’re trying to achieve, rather than focusing entirely on short-term wins… but hopefully the Mordor-to-Bree transition won’t be quite as jarring as it is at the moment.
With the Wolfsbait question: this may not at all satisfy you, but here’s what I wrote a few years back about one of my game design intentions, which includes a comment on the prologues:
The Wolfsbait prologue is (for those who click on it) a signal from the very beginning that I’m going to try to include reasons to select even the unlikelier or cautious options. It’s an incentive and encouragement to explore the odd corners of the story. Similarly, you won’t fail at the first Harrowing unless you the reader choose to…and you’ll learn new things if you do.
Rebels is not and will never be a game with a single perfect playthrough, I’m afraid. You can’t get everything that’s good about it (or, well, that I think is good about it) down any one path.
That’s not just because I like games that reward exploration, but because I think there are powerful stories along lots of different ways to overthrow an empire, and I’m trying to unpack a lot of very different ones.
You’re right that the first half of Game Two doesn’t favor CHA-heavy characters. Like others have said, CHA shines in interactions with other people, and the Xaos chapters are mostly not that. By contrast, CHA has a lot of benefits in Game One, and will help characters trying to change Irduin (or just dig up its secrets) without arousing dangerous levels of suspicion. But I’ll look again at the balance in the village-Reaver confrontation sections when I go back over those chapters.
When it becomes possible to carry over a save from G1, “Captain” should carry over (unless you’re hiding your identity in the X-lands, in which case your friends will only call you that when they’re sure no one’s listening). But I didn’t add a choice on that for players just joining the game in G2.
Thanks, I’ll look at that. But in general it’s best not to assume that people physically resemble the people from the Earth cultures whose languages I’ve borrowed to differentiate them (though I understand the tendency to do so). Shayard may be Anglo-French linguistically, but much of its population lives at latitudes more like Basra, Beirut, or Lahore.
Great example of something I’ve not gone out of my way to add until I write the gamgee updates.
Yeah, it was dodgy even in the G1 context, and needed fixing for the sequel.
Because you’re from a place that has none of that. Xaos is mind-blowing, but of course it was going to be mind-blowing, it’s infamously a place where world-eating horrors run free. Finding the next district over in Shayard is at a level of prosperity, technology, population density, etc. that the protagonist had never imagined existed is a very different kind of shock; the Xaos stuff was obviously weirder but not unexpected. I totally get the reader reaction, but this is intentional.
The core reason not to go back to the Rim is basically the reason that sent you to Xaos…the Plektoi might still have your scent. You’ll be able to push on that a lot more in conversation with the rebel leader you left in charge when I actually write that section. That’ll also talk more about the impact Irduin standing or falling might have for your Rim rebels.
Huh. When I first started making clear that telos was behind Theurgy (which a high-INT character can guess at with Horion in G1), a bunch of readers were like, “Well, that pretty clearly means your world’s religion is true,” because in a world where things have an empirically identifiable Purpose or Final Cause, the idea that Someone assigned those purposes immediately jumps in plausibility. This is the first time I’ve seen the reaction that Cerlota’s revelations should make the protagonist more skeptical. I totally see where you’re coming from, but I’m not sure that’s going to be everyone’s reaction.
A devout protagonist (who can of course be high-INT, not just high-CHA) is never going to know the truth of religion the way a high-INT character can come to know how to manipulate teloi. The voice of the Angels is never going to take a completely undoubtable form, and the protagonist is not going to get a revelation of what it all means. I think that’s consistent with most religious people’s experience in our own world, especially if they’re intellectually honest.
I agree that more can be written about the religion-founder MC’s reactions to what they’re learning, and a chunk of it will come in the (still unwritten) sections with your companion from the rebellion, since as you note they’re the main person who knows and probably believes in your new revelation.
Mostly that, yes–along with a certain amount of “whoever else the Karagond collaborators decided was clearly of low blood.”
It could well be Sayaropoli though it wouldn’t be impossible for the capital of Sayari to be simply called Sayari as well. Same deal as Luxembourg/Luxembourg.
I’d like to second the request for more faith based reflection in the chaos lands, especially if your character is already on either extreme. There’s a lot of implied material there, would be nice to get your character’s explicit thoughts on it, similar to the reflections you can have about nationalism when interacting with the farmers of Irduin. There are a few times when you can ask about people losing their souls, but at no point can you reflect on how what you’ve found has shaped your own faith, whether it’s strengthened or weakened it to recognise that there is no clear truth to xaos creating the xaos storms. There’s an interesting path to skepticism to be explored there for an MC who’s never really cared about religion before, in a similar way to how helping the nomads find a new whiskered hawk skull can lead you to reaffirm your faith in a more syncretic direction.
Personally, one of the most interesting readings I’m leaning towards is to start the game as a merciful cha2 inner voice noble who learns theurgy in the chaos lands, I think it makes for the best faith based story. Feeling the angels call to bring about change, and learning the skills most likely to lead there, before revealing the secrets to the ecclesiast in Irduin.
Separately, I also think that people are massively underestimating the return to the camps ending of game 1. I think unless you want to burn it all down, it’s by far the best choice. It massively expands your recruitment base in future, giving thousands more helots a specific link tying them to you and your rebellion, rather than another faction. It allows you to spread whatever faith based experiments you’ve been playing with. I’d also argue that if we were to look to real-world examples, insurgencies that fight pitched battles don’t tend to last nearly as long, even when they win a few early victories. I think the worst possible outcome could end up being winning the battle on a low anarchy run, just in terms of the resources devoted to ending you. You become top priority while not having done enough damage to keep people busy. Your rebels also don’t have you to lead them anymore, and likely won’t until game 4, so no more crazy metagamy shenanigans.
NGL this does make things look a bit better. The collapse of mass theurgic agriculture is gonna hurt, but these numbers do seem to dispel a little bit of the “ending harrowing would result in the death of modern civilization which will take centuries to recover from” hysteria that’s crept in since some of the revelations in Ulmey’s path. At least, as long as there’s a concerted effort to keep less blood intensive things rolling off self-sacrifice/a blood tax.
Oh totally, it just occurred to me. I imagine the rebels say “Lastname” enough that that’s what spreads and as you get further from the Outer Rim what house the rebel helot belonged to on the first place is lost in retelling. The Aristarchs or one of their vassals, the de Kurmudgeon or some such. Some nobodies.
But where would they even… no wonder little MC started crying when they saw one of these things.
I’d note that in my mind the CHA approach and the religion-founding storyline(s) aren’t identical–the latter is just one way of doing the former. Edit: which I see you also said, a few dozen posts downthread.
During the Rim management sections of Game 2 a high-CHA character will get the choice to kick a cult of personality properly into gear, regardless of religion. If that seems excessive, you can just continue to preach “justice, a better world, and the inevitability of change” with greater persuasiveness than low-CHA builds. You’ll continue to have benefits of greater loyalty, diplomacy, and persuasiveness, as well as a larger and more devoted general following, whether you choose to go religious or not.
Of course the religion plots are going to be distinctive and interesting (I hope), and they’ll have you radically engaged with one of the most powerful forces for social transformation – once you’re back in society, not in Xaos. But there are downsides to making radical religious claims, too.
As for high INT, it’s useful for winning encounters, for delving into some of the secrets of the world, and (if you distrust Cerlota) doing your own stunts and training your own mage corps – all good stuff. But it’s not particularly good for growing your following or for winning wars (if an all-star Theurge could win a war, the Heg-Hal War wouldn’t have lasted three centuries and counting).
My goal, taken across the games, is to have enough fun stuff down each major stat path to encourage replays.
I’ll add some points to underline this.
Just to clarify the Hegemonic story: their claim isn’t that it was random, but that the Xaos-worshiping Braurach cannibals opened a previously unthinkable link to Taratur while seeking to enlist the dark powers in their war against the holy Hegemony. On this account, it’s the depravity of Braurach that’s been unique in all the millennia of recorded history–and thankfully, the Angels had already raised up the right Eclect (Hera, her Ennearchs, and her successor) to defend us against it.
Just to be clear, I’ve barely written the companions’ arcs in the current Part I. My intent is to go back now that I know the overall shape of Game 2 and write arcs for the optional companions that fit it more clearly.
Absolutely. As it happens, I was just reading the Meno with my kid as part of our home school today – he was surprisingly fascinated with it, I’d just wanted to give him a taster of what the original “Socratic method” looked like but he was keen to hear the whole thing! – and we were both struck by how much explicit religious argumentation was part of Plato’s/Socrates’s case.
As others noted, it’ll be part of the Rim management sections of G2 Part 2 – and you’ll get a slightly better rate for your mules than you do at the end of G1.
I’ll admit that one reason I gave Wolfbait such a banger of a followup sequence is that just about no one has his prologue as their favorite origin story. Everyone’s either a Carles or Olynna stan.
I don’t want to brutally crush the hopes of everyone who wants to end the Xaos-storms… but I will say that if there’s any possible way forward toward that goal, it’s not going to rest on having gone to Vigil with Wolfbait. In plot terms, the Vigil story is a sideline. I hope my re-readers find it eventually, because I loved writing it; but it’s too narrowly available to have major plot consequences.
Well shit, there’s something else I’ll have to fix on my next pass through that chapter…
Heard and accepted.
If I implement it right, I think there’ll be a lot more people agreeing with you when this game is done.
But you better believe that the Pelematou will be trying to get everyone in Grand Shayard to call helot MC t’Keriatou…
I mean, not to go all Abrahamic again, but the winged creatures and wheels of eyes in Ezekiel aren’t a million miles from my winged helixes either. So maybe I’m riffing more on Madeleine L’Engle than Lovecraft.
Well from what I saw in the code (and tested myself mainly though INT2 with different runs for cha 1 and com 1 along with a few COM2 runs) and been told in the discord that is true but the latter was a while ago so let me ask again and get back to you in case someone has found a way to do it since then
Edit: So far they are saying that it’s still impossible even with com 2 with cieals (Which was from @maroder123 testing) @Havenstone
From all the information revealed here it’s hard to not think of Shayard as perhaps the most important archonty in the Hegemony. The Hegemony’s religious underpinning comes from a Shayardene religion, Shayardene crops feed most of the Hegemony. The Hegemony could lose Nyr or Erezza and while a huge blow, they would not be enough (I think) to cause its collapse. The Hegemony cannot lose Shayard and survive in any shape as a great power of this setting.
). Right now he just seems to me to be a mad (?) scientist who wants to be left alone
Thanks, I’ll look at that. But in general it’s best not to assume that people physically resemble the people from the Earth cultures whose languages I’ve borrowed to differentiate them (though I understand the tendency to do so). Shayard may be Anglo-French linguistically, but much of its population lives at latitudes more like Basra, Beirut, or Lahore.