I refer you back to my reply, which I don’t think has been meaningfully engaged with:
Should someone ignore slavery if they’re not the one enslaved? Should someone ignore genocide if their people are doing the slaughtering? Should someone ignore imperialism if they’re a citizen of the imperialist? I think suggesting that would be absurd. So it follows that we’d want to expand what it means to be an “existential individual” – and that once we do that, what it means to be such suddenly looks a lot like the mass resistance movements mobilising vast swathes of the population.
That’s what a cause is. Trying to defeat those concrete injustices so that they no longer persist is what it means to fight for “future generations”.
What I’m asking you is to square these two for me. Would you classify King’s approach as a “credible gradualist” one? And in one breath, you condemned Gandhi as “worse than Hitler” for mobilising people in nonviolent resistance, meanwhile you’re accepting my argument that MLK’s mass-mobilising nonviolent resistance (one that actively risked, and often suffered brutality at the hands of the police and the white man alike) is a worthy risk.
And the idea that people shouldn’t deal with morality because we are imperfect and not some Platonic ideal of existence is, again, absurd to me. It sounds like an abrogation of moral responsibility. People can be wrong about their moral principles, relative to what I consider to be just, which means that to them, I’m the one who’s wrong. But we can be arbiters of our own morality through reflection and confrontation, while still recognising the basis for others’ beliefs.
More laconically, if I was faced with the challenge that if only the Absolute defines morality, and I am not Absolute, therefore I cannot be moral, then my resolution is to cut the Absolute out, not the morality: at best, leaving a pursuit of the Absolute.
Not in hiding, not necessarily. Escaped to Allied or neutral nations, out of reach from Nazi persecution. And obviously brutal, industrial warfare kept the Nazis from rolling over these safe harbors too. But none of those address my point.
Would you argue that the Righteous Among Nations should not helped rescue the people they did, because their methods were nonviolent? Should they have taken up arms, planted a flag, and told the Nazis to come here and kill them all? I think you wouldn’t – and that’s my point.
You give the people too much credit. Germany is still wrestling with it. Japan has just swept it under the rug, put war criminals and their descendants and apologists in power. In the US, there are still people unironically venerating the Confederacy.
Violence is a path to changing power structures: you break the oppressors and carry out justice (and vengeance). I don’t think winning hearts and minds comes into play here when we’re burning their homes. That’s what comes after. I posit that what changes people is the revelation of the atrocities they’re complicit in, and the reflection that follows. Germany and Japan in the aftermath of WW2 form a kind of natural experiment for that, actually.
But I still trust that in most people, there’s something that can be awakened to resistance with the right push. Brutality and cruelty are some of those. I trust that if someone took you to gas chambers or a slave camp and could prove that it was your nation, your people, doing this, you’d feel something. That you’d want to do something about it. Resistance is about taking that spark and making it into a flame; nonviolent resistance is a strategic decision about how to fight back. That didn’t happen at scale in the Axis powers; but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible.
This is not some binary choice where either everybody has to choose between nonviolence and violence, and the whole world must follow. Nonviolent resistance is a tactical decision that can save people that violence alone could not save, and that matters for those who lived and their descendants. A blanket condemnation of nonviolent action ought to acknowledge that nuance, just as a blanket condemnation of violent action must acknowledge the nuance that comes with just wars (like Ukraine defending itself against Russian imperial aggression).
I actually categorically reject this reading, though I get where it’s coming from and I think it is intended. Of course there’s an internal logic to the atrocities of the Thaumatarchy; it’s evil for a reason. But I’m also able to decide, no, a slave caste slaughtered like cattle is fundamentally wrong, regardless of that internal logic. And even if Harrowing was absolutely necessary – and as far as my ‘main’ character is concerned, from a perspective of ignorance of the world (that we kind of share as readers), it is – the decision of who sacrifices, who goes to the Harrower, is one that distinguishes justice from injustice. And even then, you could still reject the Harrower: that’s a sacrifice in itself.
It’s crucial that we understand the internal logic of oppressive regimes, because if we want to make change we have to understand what we’re changing. But having acknowledged that logic, we can still make the decision to reject it and then navigate the sacrifices necessary to do so.
As far as I’m concerned with your opinion, the answer at this point is theoretically yes and practically no. After listening to your comments, I realize that I have forgotten the simple fact that slavery always threatens the freedom of oppressors and bystanders, either directly or indirectly.
First, let me frankly admit that I was wrong on several counts. It was an exaggeration to say that nonviolence is worse than violence. But I have not yet reached the point where I am convinced that nonviolence is better than violence. And I admit that I have made some errors that have led me to fall into a slightly vacuous argument and lose my sense of reality. But I don’t think I was fundamentally wrong.
And I accept with joy and pride the allegation that I am abdicating my moral responsibility.
But that’s not superficial nihilism or hedonism. It simply makes moral decisions in the worst possible way.
In my view, renunciation of moral responsibility means humbly kneeling before the Absolute.
And on top of that, it is to fight against “morals”.
Earthly morality, in my opinion, is the cause of earthly vice.
So this fight will also lead to your fight against genocide and slavery.
However, since humans are not perfect, they will make many mistakes in that battle, and they will not be able to completely abandon earthly morality. And I humbly accept that.
My basic idea is that I and my neighbor’s enemies are not cruel because they lack love or morality. Rather, I think that it is caused by excessive morality and narrow vision. I think it’s wrong to give them love or punish them for that. we need to educate them. Of course, I don’t think it’s always possible to follow this principle due to the necessity of self-defense. However, I also think that rules and exceptions should not be reversed.
In my opinion, the reason why everyone is opposed to these two is that there was a series of movements from ancient Rome’s separation of natural law from universal law to the 19th century slave abolition movement. It is not the work of God’s love or morality. It is the work of man’s own reason. As a deistic socialist, I would argue that God’s love, or at least those who advocate it, have never been instrumental in liberating oppressed person. Maybe that’s why I don’t accept your argument and you don’t accept mine.
On top of that, let’s ask some questions at the level of tactics rather than strategy. I think that my theory denies civil resistance applies when you can sit quietly and not get beaten. But I think that when civil resistance is necessary, it is when there is being beaten, or at least when harm is caused by indirect repression. Also, civil resistance undoubtedly carries harm to its participants. Mass movements often run the risk of being harmed by minority domination of the majority or majority domination of the minority. In my opinion this is not magically dispelled by the fact that the movement is non-violent or has no charismatic leader. Of course, it can be argued that the risks associated with mass movements are less than those of state domination. That’s why I basically support civil resistance. But doesn’t that mean that civil resistance is more moral than state rule? Also, as you point out, the non-violent movement sometimes faces “polite and moderate” enemies, as Dr. King did in Albany. How should the nonviolent movement defeat these enemies?
By the way, I would like to express my thoughts on King’s movement.
I don’t have enough information at this time to say with certainty whether King’s actions were a credible gradualist approach. but it more likely that it was a reliable approach.
Through realistic non-violent movements, it seems that step by step, the security of freedom and life for black people, and by extension, freedom and life for white people, has been expanded. In that respect, it may be said that the idea of the white moderates was wrong.
But as I said before, I don’t think that means King was moral.
And as for Gandhi, I think there is a big problem before non-violence and violence. Assuming that what I said earlier that he was alleged to have said during the Nazi persecution of the Jews was true, Gandhi would consider what you call “A suicidal charge into the jaws of death” as a last resort. I think it is possible that In this case, according to your logic and mine, I think we need to stop both the Gandhi movement and the British repression. Of course, luckily that didn’t happen, so this is just my speculation.
As an atheist who fears ( his ) death and loves ( his own ) life, I sometimes feel like I would desperately deprived of options , had I the misfortune of living under a truly oppressive tyranny or to be involved in a rebellion / revolution.
Giving my life for the cause simply isn’t on the table because once I’m dead… game over. The world ceases to exist. And yet there are changes who cannot be made without copious bloodshed.
I’ve yet to meet someone who is able to admit that , no, he would not give his life for any cause. It’s like I live in a world of fearless heroes and idealists who would readily give up the ghost before they renounce their morals.
But it’s probably just a facade.
Thanks for the clarification! And looking back, I now remember that one of the responses to Horion’s “how would the lot of the helotry be changed?” question was “(lowering voice to whisper) Bloody Angels, I wouldn’t do anything to change their lot.” (if the MC previously picked ‘arrogant aristo’ dialogue options)
Anyways, I generally prefer to play arrogant aristos who either…
1- Gradually change their attitude to eventually mirror my “nicer aristos” playthroughs,
2- Or retain their “nobles are entitled to their rights/status” attitude, but evolve it towards a “noblesse oblige” direction (in which MC is serious/sincere about giving the lower orders a fair shot of taking the abusive/irresponsible aristo “bad apples” to court, while also arguing that the “white sheep” aristos should still be in charge)
But as two exceptions, the closest things I have to the nastier, not-so-reformed variety of “arrogant aristo” MC are the “Robespierre” and “Saruman” builds that I mentioned a while ago; I am both simultaneously excited (and fearful) about how those paths will play out.
@Havenstone
And two other possibilities have come to mind (ever since I last pondered upon the topic):
1- MC x Elery x Zvad triad (if Kenon was established as early as Game 1, MC maintained good relationships with both Elery and Zvad, and Zvad didn’t abandon the band during Game 1 Chapter 4)
2- “Nyrish quartet”: Trans/NB MC x Elery x Zvad x Jev (Is this a conceivable arrangement, or would this require too much coding/branching on your end to implement?)
@Azthyme@Havenstone
Since I don’t want de Firiac (and their fellow future sword-theurges) to periodically blind themselves (every time they need to cross a Ward), might it be possible for MC to compromise by inventing Theurgic telos-vision “goggles”? (as separate accessories that can be stashed away/retrieved later when Ward-crossing is required)
It’s one theory of change around nonviolent resistance – that nonviolence works by awakening the conscience of the oppressor you’re confronting, causing them to relent and negotiate with you (or if you’re already a martyr by then, to regret killing you and negotiate with your successors). Demonstrative nonviolence on this view is a countervailing, rehumanizing force to set against the dehumanizing practices (authoritarian military training, colonialist or racist propaganda, etc.) that prepare people to use violence against each other. It was a key part of Gandhian thinking, though far from the only part.
It’s a theory of change that fails when you’re facing an oppressor who’s successfully deadened their conscience – where the dehumanizing of opponents has succeeded beyond the possibility of any quick or easy reversal. From his comments on the Nazis, Gandhi clearly felt that it was impossible for anyone to neutralize their conscience to the point where a sufficiently dramatic demonstration of satyagraha couldn’t reawaken it. Like many others, I find that unbelievable… we’re too skilled, as a species, at finding reasons to discount the humanity of others, even before malevolent propaganda kicks in. If “awakening conscience” were the only theory of change for nonviolent revolution, I would expect it to fail often.
While I think it plays at best an unreliable role, I should note that I don’t think it’s ever 100% ineffective; even the worst totalitarian regimes never snuff out conscience entirely. I imagine it’s a significant factor behind the higher rate of elite defections to nonviolent revolutions versus violent ones. But conscience-awakening isn’t the main story of why nonviolence succeeds.
You’ve asked in a few places whether we have moral reason to prefer nonviolence to violence. Any morality focused on harm minimization should I think have a built-in bias against violence, since the potential for harm is prima facie greater there. That of course doesn’t mean that violence is unjustifiable – its harms may be outweighed by a greater reduction in other harms, as @Sowe has eloquently argued for the war against Nazism – or nonviolence without its harms. Just that all else being equal, you’d expect violence to have to do more work to justify itself, since it entails doing harm directly in addition to any further calculus of consequences.
Even if “none of us can be moral” – a perspective for which I have some sympathy, as you might guess from what I’ve said about Levinas – we find ourselves in a world where there may be no purity, no absolutes, no freedom from mistakes, but still good reasons that on the whole we ought to do one thing rather than another. We need an ethical language suitable for that reality.
The answer to that will vary greatly depending on your worldview and how you do ethics. If you’re a consequentialist, then the line might be fuzzy – one person dies either way, and the story you tell about the consequences that follow from that death could take you in a few different directions. If you’re a deontologist or a virtue ethicist, the line might be a lot clearer; you’ll look at the nature of the act of killing, or whether killing is consistent with the virtues you think a good person will live out. In those cases, the difference between “me killing” or “me not-killing” is the ethically relevant one, and it may be huge. If in addition to any of the above you’re a Christian who doesn’t believe death is the end of the story, you may consider it worth taking your curtain call early if that gives someone else a chance to course-correct.
Of course, we’re not always talking about a one-to-one trade. As Hauerwas noted, an absolute commitment to nonviolence entails “being willing to watch innocent people suffer for your convictions… it’s not just your death, it’s watching other people die, whom you might have been able to defend.” He went on to note that this was a problem with any moral constraints on violence, e.g. just war theory. If you’re committed to sparing civilians, you will watch people die that you might otherwise have been able to save by e.g. a higher collateral damage tolerance in your strikes. The problem only goes away if you’re willing to abandon moral constraints on violence in war.
Not as a general rule, no; in some specific cases, yes. The academic literature on this talks about the “flank effects” of having an extreme, violent movement on the far flank of a nonviolent one. There can be positive flank effects, where e.g. out of fear of the extremists the regime promotes the legitimacy of the nonviolent moderates, picks them as its preferred interlocutors, and makes more concessions to them than it otherwise would have.
But there are also “negative flank effects,” where violence by an extreme wing can lead to a consolidation of elite support around the regime – its soldiers more primed to shoot, its international sponsor(s) readier to support a hardline solution, its economic elites afraid to accept a resistance that “can’t control its fringe” – which emboldens the regime to repress both the nonviolent movement and the violent fringe to keep itself in power.
Authoritarian regimes don’t always fear violent rebellion more than nonviolent rebellion. A military well-equipped for killing armed rebels in the hills will often falter when called upon to respond to a mobilization of tens or hundreds of thousands of nonviolent protesters in the streets. Not even the most totalitarian state can engage in hands-on repression of all of its people at once. In many cases of civil resistance, we see the regime trying through agents provocateurs to create the violent “flank” (or the appearance of one), because they have a playbook for dealing with a violent rebellion that they think will work better than repressing mass nonviolent mobilization.
This is an accurate description of a strong intuition, moral and practical, that drives many wars and revolutions. It’s not the only one that can fill that space – “hurt them until they stop hurting us” is what most people end up settling for, where the enemy may retain plenty of power but has been convinced that the cost of using it to oppress you is too high. Breaking the enemy until they cannot hurt you again is often out of reach as a goal… and when it can be attained, it almost always signals the rise of a new oppressive power.
I don’t think this is quite right. The firebombing of cities in an attempt to break morale doesn’t seem to have worked for any side, ever; and as @Azthyme already pointed out, “feeling regrets” didn’t actually follow from defeat, but hinged on very different post-war reckonings.
I don’t disagree with you that in the face of Nazi genocide, stopping them was a morally urgent necessity that could only be achieved through war. But it’s also a case study in how moral necessity can slip suddenly into moral horror, like the Allies targeting hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians in the name of a strategy that ultimately turns out to be near-useless.
Without diving into spoilers, I’m just going to say that while bringing the Wards down will have its costs and trade-offs – it would have to, or even a fascist empire would have dropped them when the blood started running low – I don’t intend the moral of the story to be “doom awaits those who do not keep their borders impervious.”
That’s a very strong historical claim… and of course it doesn’t logically follow from being either a deist or socialist. You could think someone is deeply mistaken about metaphysics or economics and still recognize that they played a key role (though perhaps for mistaken reasons) in liberation movements.
Religions of “God’s Love” played a key role in mobilizing people behind (off the top of my head) 19th century abolitionism in England and the US, the US Civil Rights Movement, the anti-apartheid movement, the Philippines People Power movement, and the Jubilee 2000 debt cancellation campaign. If your deism or your socialism means closing your eyes to that role because you think it’s inconsistent with “man’s own reason” being the only thing that can bring liberation, you’ll end up with a very partial view of history.
Most people who have a comfortable, pleasant life are reluctant to give it up for a cause, even if they believe in an afterlife. Rebellions tend to start when large numbers of people are so dissatisfied with their circumstances that the language of “nothing to lose” begins to feel literal – and again, on the evidence, that can happen whether or not belief in an afterlife is widespread. If you had the misfortune of living in truly miserable circumstances, you might find the risk of oblivion was starting to look acceptable if it meant you’d have a chance to truly live.
Or you might not – many people have an attachment to life that is stronger than any unhappy circumstances.
I’d expect you could find lots of people who would admit that they might chicken out when the time came to risk their lives. You’ll find a lot fewer people who would justify that retreat, though – who would explicitly take the view that their own survival is the highest good and that they shouldn’t let any moral qualms get in the way of that goal. Most people genuinely believe there are things worth dying for, including plenty of materialists from Trotsky and Che to the secular humanitarians I served alongside in Afghanistan.
It’s true that such people don’t spend a lot of time talking about the fear that might prevent them from living up to their beliefs. But that doesn’t mean that it’s all a facade. People recognize intuitively that where you focus your mind shapes the kind of person you’re going to be; focusing on the ideals you value, rather than focusing on your fears, increases the odds of you actually being courageous when the moment of truth comes.
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Anyway, folks, feel free to keep the conversation going on any of this, but I’m going to step back for a bit, the better to push toward my Feb goals. When I’m next back, I’ll catch up on other questions that have been asked in the thread!
Yes, as you say, it is influenced by my experience rather than a purely logical argument. I suspect it’s just like how your experience affected your Christian faith.
And in my opinion your claim looks like the order is reversed. It seems to me that these movements were successful only because they were given the correct theory by reason.
That’s a fair worldview. I think it’s still ultimately inconsistent with shutting out religion entirely from a positive historic role. I’d suggest that on any non-bigoted reading of history, the genealogy of ethical advances isn’t 100% limited to thinkers/activists of any single school or historic tradition – including both sides of the irreligious/religious divide.
But you can certainly construct a consistent worldview where whatever is of lasting value in our thinking comes down to its compliance with universal reason, no matter the intellectual context in which someone originally came up with it. We can consider the Pythagorean Theorem to be universally true, for example, without accepting the religious mysticism of Divine Number that originally inspired Pythagoras to contemplate triangles.
My worldview is different, though, and would I think differ even if I weren’t religious. From my perspective (as someone who badly wanted to find a comprehensive and absolute TRVTH in philosophy) the philosophers’ best efforts to bridge the chasm between the universal rationality of mathematics/symbolic logic and other branches of philosophy like ethics or ontology have ultimately just sketched out the edges of that chasm in sharper relief. Like I said on another thread,
We live in a world of plural rationalities, especially when it comes to ethics, and I think the dream of reducing them to a single universal and comprehensive rationality has not only failed (so far at least) but grounded a lot of totalitarian horror along the way, from religions and secular movements alike. Once you’ve convinced yourself that all reasonable people of goodwill should reach the same conclusions as you, it’s harder to maintain a commitment to the rights of error.
Faith in universal reason (i.e. the bet that one day the chasm between logic and ethics will be closed to everyone’s satisfaction) isn’t unreasonable or inherently totalitarian, but it’s a hope on the same level and with the same dangers as Christianity’s “one day every knee will bow and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord.”
Meanwhile, judging which rationality is the best fit with reality, and committing ourselves to action on that basis, is essential – but that’s fundamentally a process of interpretation, not proof, and we shouldn’t blind ourselves to the fact that other people operating from different rationalities will reach different conclusions. Understanding how their rationality holds together (on their terms, not ours) is essential whether we’re aiming to persuade them of something or just find some accommodation acceptable to as many people as possible to ground our life together.
Never would have thought you would have been so hardline, JJCB.
My mc, for one, might encourage Cerlotta to go bigger on Grand Shayard, rather than trying to dissuade her, as many people here seem to want to do as maximum chaos in Grand Shayard may lead to significant disruption of the Laconniers and other noble factions in addition to the Hegemony.
I suppose caste system falls somewhere under the pervasive ideology, considering its religious foundation. Still when people already view you like an animal to begin with it is not a great starting point for nonviolence and my mc does consider the animal welfare faction of Olynna and possibly prince nippletwister worse than even Zebed as he views the former as merely trying to have their cake and eat it too by cheaply buying off a somewhat guilty conscience while doing nothing about the fundamentals.
It may not be wholly malevolent…it occasionally creates things of great beauty too, remember.
We really need more information to call this one way or another and from what my mc has personally seen many people in the Xaos lands at least lead harsh but mostly free lives compared to the certainties of helotry in the Hegemony.
We haven’t yet meaningfully engaged with any of the things you’re so afraid of. The most we done is draw the tiniest speck of attention from Vigil to ourselves and for those unquiet dead we’re still a complete non-entity entirely beneath their notice. I think we can have a more meaningful discussion of this in later games when those things might change.
Considering my mc and those like him are nothing but mere animals to that enemy my mc at least won’t settle for this. Even if this:
@Havenstone Sorry for breaking off from the convo but I’d really want to know the answer for this question(unless it would be a spoiler you don’t want to talk about now), because I’m split between Split Up and Stand and Fight route for my game 1 canon run. And well, pardon me for bothering you again about that
Oh yeah. Take the American Civil War for example. The abolitionists were devoutly religious, and their reasoning for ending slavery was that it was an offense against God to enslave his children.
The pro slavery side was actually the more secular of the two. Not THAT secular, mind, but their religious fervor was far less pronounced.
First of all, I would like to apologize for the exaggerated and misleading way of saying “it never works”.
I then argue that a movement based on God’s love can save people, but it is an obstacle to saving those who could be saved by what I call a socialist movement, and I cannot accept that trade-off.
I know you qualified this, but I think it’s a bit off even so. The pro-slavery side had plenty of Christians arguing fervently from Scripture that the abolitionists were heretics:
I agree with you that the right side, theologically and ethically, won that debate – but it was a debate within Christianity, not a debate between Christians and secularists. (It was also a debate within Enlightenment deism, as Thomas Jefferson bears regrettable witness.)
And to respond to Sowe’s urgent query:
Probably viable, but Simon’s not making stuff up; I expect it will be harder to keep anarchy low and keep many aristos on side. Can’t say for sure until I’ve written it, played through a few times, and seen how it feels.
Choice of Games is interesting for me, for all that it offers, and no game has hooked le in as much as Choice of Rebels: Uprising.
It’s truly unlike any CYOA game and ztory I’ve ever come across, and appeals to two parts of me that are always in conflict: the desire for revenge, and the desire to be better.
In face of all the violence, oppression and the use of people as resources (in more ways than one), the first game pushed my beliefs and my skill to the limits as I navigated its paths and found what I wanted to be.
It’s an incredibly compelling story that challenges me at every step of the way, and the demo chapter for Stromwright picked that up and went even beyond that.
So… Thank you for writing this, and sharing it with the world. I admire and envy your skills as an author, and I’ll be following this series to see this world develop and forge a future.
Your helot MC will be mindful enough to at least evacuate his “useful idiot” Leaguer allies outside the WMD’s blast radius, right? (or discreetly tip them off to evacuate on their own under the pretenses of suddenly “taking a last-minute vacation to the Rim countryside”)
I currently understand that your goal is to weaken the Xthonic priesthood to the point of no longer being XoR’s dominant religion (and that your envisioned HRE-inspired koinon will allow for as much freedom of religion as possible), but has it ever been fully clarified which non-Xthonic religion (if any) your helot MC(s) will personally believe in?
100% Skeptic/Kenon is my first guess, but might the Abhuman/Seracca’s Nagyeh religion or the Whendish “forgotten gods” hold any appeal for your MCs during later games?
(And since you’ve firmly established your characters as both anti-Laconnier and anti-Halassur, I’m not going to consider the Halassur pantheon in my above speculation)
Per the information you’ve seen so far from Game 2’s demo, is Sojourn a worthy dream to invest in? (in the eyes of your helot MCs)
And per your current imagination, what place does Sojourn play in your MCs’ imagined post-Hegemony new world orders?
Despite our drastically differing XoR personal preferences, I’m very interested in recreating/tested your build (and future plans).
Could you please confirm if I’ve captured your Game 1 details (as below described) accurately?
Helot male who’s attracted to other males
Olynna origin story (hence why your MC is familiar with Olynna)
Skeptic/Cosmo/Ruthless (with Skeptic being debatable, pending your MC’s interest or lack of interest in the other non-Xthonic religious movements)
2 INT/1 CHA (Though if I remember correctly (from the Uprising forum), I think you may ultimately be pursuing a more balanced INT/CHA build in future games)
Uprising Ch 1 beginning
a. Ch 2 Winter raiding mainly ravaged the aristos and priesthood,
b. (Maybe?) recruited Bleys,
c. Massacred the De Merre family/estate
d. Inspected/sabotaged Harrower,
e. And in general, created enough anarchy to attract K to MC’s cause
Ch 3:
a. You didn’t kill Horion and Linos (since your MC has plans to turn the Leaguers into his pawns/useful idiots, and killing Horion and Linos would ruin that plan),
b. You rejected Linos’ offer to have him declare you Eclect (but didn’t quite have enough charisma to declare the beginnings of the Cult of Kenon),
c. And you totally seized the opportunity to violently fight back against Hector and his cronies (and you may or may not have killed poor Ganelon as collateral damage in the process)
Ch 4:
a. You chose Stand and Fight
b. You finally revealed to the wider world that your MC is a Theurge (by wiping out all four to five Theurges at once with a clever trap)
c. You (probably?) didn’t believe Breden’s pleas of innocence (by the time of the poisoning incident in the cave), thus allowing Radmar to execute Breden.
d. Other than Yed, your MC either took Ciels or K as his Xaos-land traveling companion.
Game 1 Romance Interest: Probably Kalt? (Unless your MC thinks that his preferred “guy of his dreams” will be found during a later game)
What’s your helot MC’s chosen name, by the way?
Welcome, Dreamer! (to the weird mix of excitement, randomness, and thoughtful discussion that is the XoR forum/community)
I’m glad to hear that you’re having fun (and that you’ve made up your mind on what kind of character you want to play); might you be interested in sharing your Game 1 details/decisions with the rest of this forum? (especially for those of us who want to test/min-max each other’s builds)
