It’s an obvious passion project, with fantastic characters, dialogue, and mystery, and there’s a lot to be excited about in its future.
Trying to figure out our rebellion’s future is one of the weirder things about the game for me, because we’re still ignorant about a large part of the workings of the world. My impression is that this story is as much, if not more, about the path towards an end (and the sacrifices that come with following that path) more so than the end itself – and it’s a rough and cloudy road ahead.
I can picture, for instance, a grand alliance of nations bound together by trade and shared resources, free of the Karagond colonialism extracting all wealth towards the metropole. I can picture a Shayard rebuilt from the grassroots up, with the moot as the basic local government, each sending representatives to an Althing for all Shayard, a house of commons. But I can only influence what my protagonist does, and the rest is up to those other fictional characters to do as they will.
We can iterate ideas through contact with other ideas, but that keeps us locked in the world of ideology. As of yet, we haven’t been given tools to evaluate these ideas in practice (i.e. the consequences of our actions) – which is to say that in the grand scheme of things, this is a fleeting moment that will eventually be tempered by those consequences, if not disappearing altogether. For now, the possibilities are seemingly infinite, and trying to grab hold of one is like trying to grab hold of water itself.
Hey wait a minute, now I’m just describing a Xaos-storm again…
While I’ll admit that it is rather hasty/premature of me to make bold claims/predictions about what sort of rebellion/future nation I want to craft, the earnest exchange of ideas and insights amongst ourselves (along with the clever banter/inside jokes between us forum-goers) is a very fulfilling experience in and of itself. (regardless of the outcome of our respective future XoR playthroughs by Games 2-5)
And Azthyme, I am very, very grateful that we have you as a valuable resource to make sense of Havie’s lore.
I sincerely hope you continue sticking around with this community for the very long/foreseeable future.
Such a beautiful picture, indeed!
By the way, is your scenario just a randomly selected example for your current topic, or also (or instead) a reflection of your ‘headcanon’ personal preference playthrough?
And assuming that you do manage to avoid the unpleasant “Prime Minister at gunpoint” scenario, what’s your ideal post-Hegemony, non-empire building career (or retirement plan)?
1- Lounge about on the old family estate as part of the surviving community of ‘idle rich’ (if playing an aristo)
That’s true, but he’s presented as the protégé for your combat character. However, that may just be in personal combat skill, because I think only the MC and Simon/Suzane would beat him in a duel.
I’ve just wondered why he’s not as good as a tactician, because if you choose to teach the helots combat tactics as a aristo, Rad’s the one who benefits.
Similarly when talking to Horion, Radmar comes up as a sort or Protege who’d equal if not surpass the MC if he received your lifelong training.
But might just be a case that Radmar will improve dramatically the longer you keep him around you.
Thanks, all, for your patience while I took a break from answering game questions not related to violent/nonviolent strategizing. Time to catch up!
If this happens, I think you’ll need to abandon your old family name and just go by de Syrnon.
It had a hierarchy of cape, cloche, cheval, and campagne – i.e. noble by dint of heritable royal offices, control of great cities, glory in war, and mere landownership (the latter mocked by the higher ranks as the nobility of the “charrue,” or plow).
I don’t think I’ve ever suggested that there’d be a Game 4 attack on Nyryal; any plans Halassur has for its Nyrish cousins will I think mostly be worked out as part of the G5 endgame. Regardless, if you’re known as a Halassurq pawn, the Erezziano will doubt any stories you tell about your role in the defense of other archonties. You might need to just accept that accepting help from Halassur will hurt your credibility with their arch-enemies.
Neither.
S might go down the Theurge route. We’ll see. Yes, @Ramidel, it will be possible to give blademasters basic Theurgic skills to help them fight more effectively. Regardless, though, having a Theurge-forged sword doesn’t give any advantage when it comes to mastering Theurgy.
If the alternative clearly was being absorbed into Halassur, then yes. But you shouldn’t rely on Erezza failing right up to the Aveche border – I suspect that will require a very particular outcome to a bunch of G5 factional conflicts.
If you split and unsplit that fast, you’d just be “Shayard” again. It takes longer than that to firm up a meaningfully distinct subnational identity.
I’ll give that option, absolutely.
No, you can be helped by others.
Like @apple said, you couldn’t do it without shedding someone’s blood. I’m being brought round to the idea that wings will be an option for G5 transformation. So would-be dragons can look forward to flying and scales, and maybe farting boiling poison as the closest biologically realistic equivalent to fire-breathing.
Extra-hard or sharp armor and weapons: absolutely. Magic rings: definitely not. There’s no way to change anything’s telos to make its wielder invisible or give them superpowers.
I’m afraid there’s no Khorne equivalent, and if there were, it would look like Ares – the god people generally propitiated to keep him far away, rather than embracing in popular devotion (i.e. no crowds chanting “Blood for the Blood God!”). You can absolutely turn yourself into a mass murderer in the game, but you won’t be able to make a religion out of it.
I’m not sure that I’ll write any poly options into the game – that might be a bridge too far in terms of coding complexity for relationships.
Nope. The ability to see teloi isn’t something you can endow an inanimate object with.
Let me be clear: Cerlota is not planning on using the Storm as a Xaos-nuke on Grand Shayard. Like she says in the game text, she’s trying to collapse the City-Ward, the better to smuggle in “weaponry, refined blood, items of magic,” etc. for a major operation that can be targeted against the forces of the Hegemony… not indiscriminately turning tens of thousands of innocent people into meat-puddles.
@Azthyme is right that there’s dramatic and thematic power to the image of Grand Shayard limned by Storms, visually echoing Vigil, right down to the adamantine granite structure at the heart of the Xaos. But I’m afraid all that’ll have to wait until G4.
That’s a question that I’ve spent all of Jan and Feb doing the work to answer more concretely than I have in the past, starting with turning my last hand-drawn maps into vectored drafts like this:
(A note to cartographers: in this process I’ve adapted my former maps to more consistently take account of the likely biomes at various latitudes, so e.g. Nyryal now has an extensive northern taiga rather than just being plains and tundra all the way up. At some point I’ll share hand-drawn updates.)
I’m doing this in large part so I can open Ch 2 with an accurate description of the MC’s shocking experience of arriving in the densely populated heartland of Shayard, which is just nothing like the Outer Rim. I’m still tuning the results to make sure they hold together, so all numbers below are still tentative.
But it’s looking like over half of Karagon’s population relies on wheat imported up the major canal networks. Aekos has extensive farm country around it but still takes in 50+ big grain barges a day to make up the gap. Erezza is self-sufficient in food unless there’s a big post-Theurgic crash in yields; Nyryal and Wiendrj are strongly dependent on imported bread to sustain their present population levels no matter what.
It will be hard for a post-Hegemonic Shayard to keep exports flowing. You’ll have the option to swap land out of cash crops (e.g. flax and sugarcane) to focus on staples, and with grain shortages prices would soar to a level where you could still make a decent revenue from the trade despite shrinking your previous major export crops… but wheat yields aren’t the only part of the current system that relies on Theurgy. You can’t run trains of huge grain barges up the rivers and canals of the Hegemony every day without First-Kyklos Theurges at the wheel, keeping the barge trains moving, as well as Syntechnia coordination of the trade.
What you’re likely to see as Hegemonic authority recedes and famine hits:
people overrunning any grain barge that isn’t heavily guarded, as well as plenty that are
hundreds of thousands of people flowing into Shayard across nearly all borders to access the areas where they’ve got a chance of finding food
smaller villages shrinking as shipments no longer reach them; massive growth in cities and towns across the most fertile districts, with all the chaos that big underfed urban populations bring
medium-term relocation of milliions of people out of the food-scarce areas that could only be served by an extensive trade network to live closer to the breadbaskets – i.e. mostly your territory
It won’t be easily managed.
Hi Eddie, welcome, and so glad you’ve enjoyed Rebels for years! Elery has a unique gift; she’s naturally a lot more competent at tactics than just about anyone. Radmar isn’t going to become her equivalent in that department. But as Hugh noted, he’ll support going to war at times when Elery doesn’t, and will lead other fighters with reasonable effectiveness; and you’re right that one-on-one he’s a better fighter than Elery. Both will continue to develop in future games.
It’ll make it more appealing to Abelard and the Laconniers, and to individual nobles who are ready to risk anything against Karagon. (Though as @mshan95032 noted from my earlier comment, that still doesn’t mean they’ll see you as a suitable leader for the rebellion writ large.) But in terms of general cred_a… the majority of the Shayardene nobility don’t want to see helots and ex-helot outlaws rising up as an effective force, even if it’s under a young noble’s leadership. Just because they laugh at your weakness doesn’t mean they’ll swoon at your success.
Meaning they’ll just about have an apoplexy when it is a young helot, not a noble leading them.
A complication for all cosmopolitans, including my mc’s, then? These sorts of things tend to fuel nativist, isolationist and xenophobic sentiments in the real world after all and I’m guessing the gameworld is probably no different.
On the other hand a bigger urban population could be a help with industrialisation. I mean I read that in the early years of it in the UK London some other cities were such death traps that they handily absorbed the extra input for their particular meatgrinders of industry before any sort of safety standards or unions.
Less rural population, particularly if the big slave plantations fail potentially makes it easier to parcel out the land to new smallholder, yeomen farmers and hopefully farming cooperatives who can be more effective than the old slave plantations and my mc would support cooperatives either in lieu of or in addition to collective farming if the idea were to be pitched to him as a convenient way of both improving agriculture and gaining yeomen support.
So eh, a mage can create man made monsters beyond comprehension and grow animal parts, does combat focused char get anything cool?
I guess we can play around with primitive guns, but reading the options mage have just reminds me of dnd, where mage can straight up break space time while fighters are stuck attacking 4 times in a turn
Noted, and does claimant MC also have an opportunity to update the de Syrnon name into a more Cosmopolitan version? (e.g. “Syrnontou” or “Syrnatou”)
(especially if MC was interested in communicating a certain gesture to his envisioned monarchical koinon: that the de Syrnon monarch would be a High King/Queen who served the public interest of ALL member state nations, not just Shayard)
And if the de Syrnon name is changed by MC (for the above stated reasons), how severe would the political backlash be from the Laconniers?
Would the Laconniers feel infuriated by MC’s lack of complete devotion to Shayarin language, or might they instead empathize/understand that MC is merely doing his own take on the “have your cake and eat it too” approach that the Laconniers (as a whole) have been doing? (cherry picking which useful aspects of foreign cultures can be kept/integrated, while still preserving enough of “the most important of classical Shayardene traditions” to be considered ‘true Shayardenes/Laconniers’)
Which analogy best describes those past “heritable royal offices”: the Small Council (from GoT/ASOIAF), or the noble peerages of the UK’s House of Lords?
(My hunch currently tells me you’re going for the latter)
And has the moot ever had any historical relevance/meaning for Shayard’s aristos? (or is the moot mostly a yeomen-favored term/institution)
Rank/hierarchy-wise, is cloche on the exact same tier as an aristarch of the Hegemony? (or does cloche instead correspond to an Archon)
Oh my, is this the “opportunities for social climbing” institution that my helot/yeomen-sympathetic aristo MC has been looking for all along?
(especially after Horion told MC of the historical lesson about helots being able to earn their citizenship/status through sufficiently great deeds)
I suspect that Elery, in particular, might be a good candidate for getting promoted to a cheval in MC’s envisioned post-Hegemonic Shayardene faction, since…
1- She has enough tactical talent to achieve ‘glory in war’,
2- Her main “class beef” is with merchants (compared to aristo/priest-hating Radmar and aristo-hating K),
3- And building upon an earlier talking point from @idonotlikeusernames, Elery is potentially (and pragmatically) more interested in power/security than her friendship/class solidarity with fellow ex-helots
Could an invitation to the ranks of the campagne be a good incentive for Shayard’s richer yeomen to support MC’s envisioned aristo-led world order?
With regards to the “Nereish spices” (quoting some of the contents of Alaine’s trade goods in Game 1), how spicy are these spices?
Which real-life spice would most closely resemble the flavor profile of a Nereish spice?
“Erretsin oils and silks” (quoting some of the contents of Alaine’s trade goods)
Might Erezza be an ideal place for discovering oil (of the fossil fuel variety) too?
If so, I wonder if “Rockefeller-inspired oil baron” might be another viable specialization for merchant prince MCs to focus on?
#1: By the way, is “To Shayard in its lovely Spring” (the song that Carles sang in the Jongler prologue) the closest thing Shayardenes have to an official, pre-Karagond Conquest national anthem? (Or is “the forgotten national anthem” something more akin to “God Save the King/Queen” or “Le Marseille?”)
#2: Also, if Shayard (as an overall nation) gains a bad reputation for being untrustworthy, then what is the XoR counterpart term for ‘perfidious albion’? (Aka the term for deceitful agents of Britain back in the day)
#3: And will XoR nation-states ever be metonymically labeled by their capitals/capitol state buildings? (In the same way that America is sometimes called Washington/the White House, China is sometimes called Beijing, and Russia is sometimes called Moscow/Kremlin)
Well, that’s certainly one way to give your enemies a crappy day!
Ok, gotcha. So let me rephrase (to see if I understand you properly): collapsing the City-Ward (via Xaos storm) is more about creating a supply chain for MC and Cerlota’s now-expanded rebellion, rather than nuking for the traditional purposes of intimidating your surviving enemies into an early surrender! (or wiping them out wholesale), right?
Considering how tiny Karagon looks on the map (compared to the other provinces/archonties), that’s a very big nation-wide appetite (and population) we’ve got going here! Does this mean that Karagon’s got ton of skyscrapers (and/or other cramped, multi-story tall buildings) to contain their vast population?
Hence a huge reason for Theurgy being a necessary requirement for any MCs who wish to pursue an empire-building path.
Anyways, would MC and Cerlota’s education timetable of their faction’s Theurges be fast enough to solely rely on the barge wheel operators that they’ve personally trained from scratch? (or would there still be a gap/urgent need to recruit already-trained, ex-Hegemony Theurges?)
I noticed that you left out the Leaguers from your above-mentioned list.
Is this because the Leaguers would instead prefer to play the long game? (of gradually convincing the Hegemony’s politicians, merchants, and priests to defect to the Leaguer cause over the course of several years/decades)
It would certainly be consistent with “friendly with MC” Horion’s reason for refusing to join MC’s rebel band (“Your place is with the Whendward Band, while my place is in the royal court.”)
“Ra ra Rasputin Lover of the Russian queen There was a cat that really was gone”
Wouldn’t it cool if MC could become a literal embodiment of that last line/verse?
You’re right that it would move sentiments against you. But even if your MC were a cheerfully isolationist xenophobe, mass migration will be a “complication” for you too! There’s no easy way to manage an enormous surge of foreigners into your territory.
Leading a military campaign that defeats your enemies (including those who can create monsters and grow animal parts).
I’m picturing the Laconnier reaction if you tried. Other than passing a law forcing everyone to speak Koine, there are few things you could do that would more quickly get all the Laconniers to conclude that you were clearly a fraud and no true heir of the monarchs.
I’m not going to give a strict analogy, since I want to have some flex in drawing from different potential analogues… but the Small Council would be an especially bad one, since the offices it represents are anything but heritable. E.g. the Hand of the King is pretty much never a relative of the previous Hand.
It’s very much a yeoman village thing. The pre-conquest noblesse weren’t a moot-friendly bunch.
Two incommensurable systems. An aristarch is much more like the Hand of the King in ASoIaF; the pre-conquest noble offices were heritable, where e.g. your family had been the Towerwardens of Wrakehold (with the lands and privileges that attended that title) from time out of mind.
In the present day, aristarchs have actual state power behind them. The authorities don’t hew to the old hierarchies when they’re selecting an Archon, or aristarch, or eparch. (This last role is provisional; an Archon has the power to appoint an eparch over a group of aristarchs; for random example, the Rim as a region might get an eparch appointed over its six aristarchs to coordinate, should there be a massive crisis that requires it). You’ve got plenty of “cape” aristarchs under a “cheval” Leilatou Archon at present.
No! Facilitating social mobility has never been the point of any aristocratic institution. All these distinctions allowed the selection of an elite-of-elites when the original Shayardene nobility began growing too big. Any cheval-noble family would have been a campagne family before the monarch recognized them for their military usefulness – not yeomen. No non-noble would ever have been invited to become an aristocrat of any level.
Not hot-spicy, those come from Shayard, the trans-Halassur states, or the Seracca. More like fennels or thymes.
Nope. No plans for petroleum to play any part in the story at all (in non-metaphorical form).
There isn’t a national anthem – those are creations of modern nationalism, and we’re not quite there yet. There are important national songs, but the Lay of Samena is a better example of that than a cheery ballad.
Sure! Like, um, Shayard.
More about creating the possibility for an unexpected strike of some kind.
Cerlota doesn’t see the population of Grand Shayard as her enemies. She’s not at war with Shayard. There’s no reason to think that an indiscriminate mass killing in the Shayardene capital would meaningfully weaken the Hegemony, as opposed to an attack on a particular military or political target in said capital.
Remember, this is a decent-sized continent. Karagon is roughly the size of Ukraine.
We’ll see!
They would be much more divided on whether a noble leading bandits to victory in the wilderness was a good thing for changing the realm.
And now, presenting some basic analysis of this Erezza map:
As a disclaimer, this is most likely not a 100% full map of the country: it cuts of Sescia and the Aegre Strait in the south, as well as the peninsula north of Cocenza in the north, but it nevertheless gives us a good foundation to work with. All numbers below and working solely with the Erezza pictured above.
Each cell is labeled (EH, EC, EP, etc.), with the “E” likely standing for Erezza. Here’s the frequency of each cell type on the map, and what they likely correspond to:
EH (35.8%) – Hills (crags, probably)
EC (23.7%) – Cultivation
EP (12.8%) – Plains (or more broadly, land unsuitable for cultivation)
EF (12.6%) – Forest
EI (3.6%) – Irrigation?
EG (1.8%) –
ET (0.3%) – Taiga?
EU (<0.01%) – Urban (Soretto, the capital)
Forest, hills, and plains (a la the Brecks) are trivially confirmed by cross-referencing with the core gameworld map. Cultivation is a likely guess, given the importance of farmland to the crises ahead. The Halassurq border has likely been scarred by Theurgic fire and is under perpetual threat from infiltrators, and so that stretch of plains seems to be potential arable land if the war ends.
“I” is the most interesting, because it’s concentrated around major settlements. In the southwest, you can see three pockets roughly corresponding to Amaccia, Avezia, and Rinocci. The largest sections of “I” are in the middle of Erezza, with one around Soretto, the capital (which is marked with “EU”), and one around Cocenza further north. We see another pocket around Moncezano (Cerlota’s hometown) in the east. Given that these “I” lands are surrounded by “C”, and following visual design principles, we can argue that this is irrigated land.
This would mean that 12% of agricultural land in Erezza is irrigated.
It’s not clear to me what “G” means, aside from likely being related to the sea, but it’s noteworthy that the two in the northwest correspond to known settlements, Salere and Canterna.
Following these assumptions, we notice one unusual settlement: Lacevra, the hometown of Ennearch Ilaria Lacevra, Cerlota’s mentor. While it’s situated by a river, none of the surrounding land seems to be agricultural. This may suggest that there’s something in those hills really worth mining for – gold, maybe, or alchemical minerals.
And because I’ve taken a very clinical approach to describing Erezza, I just want to interject Cerlota reminiscing about her homeland to really put the map into perspective:
“Away from the ravaged border country, Erezza is the most beautiful of lands. Mountain crags emerging from the ocean, in sheer cliffs that stretch from sky-height straight down to unfathomed depths. Great forests of pine and oak, fir and birch, dotted with flower meadows. Steep valleys of a thousand cascades. And almost everywhere, even in the heights, you can hear seabirds crying for the waves.” Cerlota’s eyes are faraway and mournful. “Our poets are the envy of the world, and it is because they grow up feeding their minds on such beauties.”
And this will help put into perspective what Erezza (and any fledgling union that hopes to integrate Erezza) stands to lose. Halassur would demand suzerainty from Kochent (Cocenza) eastwards in exchange for peace, according to Erjan. To represent this, I use the BK column as a border, a bit west of Cocenza. This constitutes 31% of Erezza’s total land area, and 36% of Erezza’s farmland. And that’s not counting the ravaged border country: if we treat all of that as potential farmland once the war ends and the land has been given time to recover, Halassur’s imperial demands suddenly become 47% of Erezza’s farmland.
Now, what if Shayard reconquers Aveche (Avezia)? It’s not clear where the historical territory of Aveche ends: placing Avezia at the border would be a relatively small loss, about 4% of territory and 6% of farmland. But if a conqueror were to see all that farmland and claim territory up to, say, the river east of Aveche: then we’re looking at a more substantial loss of farmland, maybe around 11%.
Anyway, with that done, I also want to talk about Elery…
Elery is a character driven by intense emotion and loyalty to those she loves – which makes losing them all the harder, and all the more something she wants to avoid.
Elery suffering as everyone she loves dies around her
When Elery learns of Zvad’s death, her first reaction is to find you and punch you in the face.
“Your fault, ${kuria}, damn you!” she howls as you try belatedly to fend off her fists. Her own face is swollen and streaked from weeping—and taut with rage. “Damn you! You and your Xthon’damned sneaking around! If we’d gutted Hector rather than trying to avoid him, we’d still have Zvad!”
[…]
“Weeks, ${kuria}. We only had weeks.” Her voice is numb, choked-sounding. “If there are Angels, damn Them for Their shitty little mercies.”
[…]
“What I need right now, ${kuria}? Either Hector Keriatou or myself dead. If They want to, the bloody Angels can kill me and welcome.” Elery’s voice is beginning to crack again by her last sentence, and she stalks off in the middle of it.
Elery screams in frantic denial. You crawl over to where the voice came from. Yebben Skinner’s body is almost as pallid as a Nyr, drained of all its blood. Whatever he managed to do saved you, but at a fearsome cost.
Grief and fury are stark in her eyes. “Lead these bastards, ${kuria} ${lname}? Help you lead the swivers who just murdered ${xhim}?”
And I’d bet she’d rather die than betray those she loves, and would rather die fighting than watch them die before her. That much is on display at the Fourth Harrowing, when she attacks the Theurges and is the first to die because of it. “Damn the Thaumatarch! And damn you all!” She does not easily forget, and she does not easily forgive.
And so we see exactly why Elery stayed when we “murdered” Breden:
“Xthonos damn you both,” she whispers. “If I thought Yebben and I had a chance anywhere else…” She spits on the ground and stalks away.
or if we drive Breden away:
An hour later, Elery storms into your tent and jabs a finger at you as if she wishes it were a dagger. “Yebben has asked me to stay. That’s the only reason I’m still here, you brainless bastard. And I won’t be the only one to feel that way.”
The only way to separate her from Yebben is to kill so much of the band that they mutiny — and even then, the mutineers send back food and supplies to keep the rest of the band alive.
(Incidentally, many including myself find it pretty likely that Breden survived the assassination attempt in the winter, and that the first opportunity to genuinely kill them is after the hellebore poisoning. But we’ll find out soon enough.)
Now, when it comes to the aristocracy, it’s true that Elery hasn’t exactly suffered the same trauma as, say, Radmar, seeing that Poric was beaten to the verge of death and had his tongue cut out because an aristo didn’t want to admit to getting birth control. Or to Kal, who was raped, and whose mother was raped and consequently executed. It’s possible she had kinder masters – we just don’t know (incidentally, if I had to wager a guess, I’d go with House de Morgane). But she was still Radmar and Poric’s friend, and lived under the perpetual fear that every helot in Rim Square did, and that’s more than enough to foster a hatred for the aristocracy and all that it stands for.
I’ll ask Elery to protect them.
Elery arches an eyebrow when you whisper your thoughts. “You’d have to convince me not to help ${kalt} first, ${kuria}. A Leilatou’s no friend to us.”
She can come to see some nobles as allies, if they can prove their loyalty: de Firiac being the case for that. It’s true that Elery has a natural alignment against “the merchants who profit from the rule of the oppressor” (in her words, during a New Sacrament), and her tactical skills at banditry are wielded effectively against merchant caravans in the mountain passes. But if the merchants are condemned by profiting off the oppression, there’s little doubt that the oppressors are condemned with them.
And don’t forget that her own skepticism places her at odds with the priests to begin with. Radmar’s opposition to the priests during a new sacrament might be foreshadowing an eventual break with Xthonos worship (for the Forgotten Gods), but Elery’s the lieutenant who’s ahead of the curve on calling the priests liars right now.
Though one interesting detail I recall is that the aristo Father, in being uncooperative and refusing to help us after seeing Horion under duress due to being, well, kidnapped, uses moot as a verb, which is to say:
But at my last Season, anyone named Leilatou was being mooted for Archon. Same for kurios Horion as anyone else.
It raises some neat questions about how Archons are chosen, since they seem to be handpicked by the Thaumatarchy for the most part. Not sure if those are useful questions though… I might be bearish about Archon Phrygia’s life expectancy, but I wonder if the Thaumatarchy would even appoint a successor, or try for any veneer of legitimacy from anyone but their loyalists.
For a glimpse of what Aekos, the Heart of the World, might be like, we can reference the time we can visit Grand Shayard back in Uprising…
You'd had no idea the Rim was so big, let alone the world.
As you approach the capital, for the first time in your life you see other machines that look as elaborate as Harrowers, but turned to the spinning of wool, the grinding of flour, or the weaving of cloth. Your captors tell you before you arrive that twenty-two hundred Rim Squares would fit comfortably into Grand Shayard…but that’s a reality beyond imagining until you see the smudge in the sky from a hundred thousand house-fires, and finally look down onto a vertiginously huge city, ramshackle houses spreading out to the horizon on all sides.
Your Slow-Harrowing on the steps of the Naos takes six days. On the last day, when your limbs have all been flayed and severed, you
(This might also be a taste of what Soretto is like, and why it got a category of its own on the map of Erezza. That’s right, we have continuity in this post.)
Are these foreigners coming just for food, or do they also urgently seek housing/asylum/relocation to Shayard as well? How blood-expensive is it for Theurges to craft new floors/skyscrapers (and housing in general) from scratch?
Has anyone ever tamed a Storm-changed Xaos-land creature (and then later/further transformed it into a Plektoi)?
Okay then, keep the de Syrnon brand name as is!
I think the Lannisters in particular wanted to start changing that trend (to keep the office of Hand ‘within the family’, so to speak).
The succession chain of Hands goes from Tyrion to Tywin to Kevan (all three of whom are Lannisters).
Ultimately, this chain of Lannister Hands is broken when Cersei kills Kevan (and tons of other King’s Landing casualties) with her “wildfire terrorist plot,” which allows her to install her mad scientist sycophant, Qyburn (a non-Lannister), as the next Hand of the King.
And might the chaos of the Hegemony’s collapse warrant the eparch role evolving into a long-term (potentially lifetime) job?
New idea for non-empire building MC’s G5 endgame role: “We can be both Earlunders AND Shayardenes.”
More specifically, what if G5 MC becomes eparch of the duchy of Earlund (but has still faithfully maintained his oath of loyalty towards the monarch or Grand Moot of Grand Shayard).
Or, what if instead of manifesting as a separatist movement, the Earlunders simply settled for being a political party of the G5 Shayardene Grand Moot?
Duly noted. Anyways, taking a cue from @Ramidel’s Alya, my aristo MC is aiming to create a balance between the Napoleonic “new arrivals” and the surviving, cooperative hereditary old guard aristos. Perhaps some measure of additional anarchy will be warranted (to scare the old guard aristos into compliance).
Haha, very funny.
But the sort of metonym I was trying to confirm were the following examples:
1- Shayard being alternatively referred to as Grand Shayard, Corlune, or Aveche
2- Erezza being alternatively referred to as Soretto
3- Wiendrj being alternatively referred to as Wiendwic
4- Nyryal being alternatively referred to as Nyrnakan
‘Bandits’? Pfff. Not if my MC gets to be the one who writes the history books! ‘Heroic rebels’ will do nicely.
You know what, after seeing the points you’ve brought up, I’m convinced!
Elery really is quite a lovable/loyal character, and she’s intense in everything she does! (whether it be hating or loving other characters)
@Havenstone: MCs do have the option of peacefully grounding Aekos (without any additional civilian casualties/collateral damage), correct? I earlier entertained the idea of repurposing an intact Aekos, but I’m not sure if we ever got blatant confirmation from you that it was an achievable option (or if Aekos is instead destined to crash/fall in every player’s playthrough (thus requiring the player to rebuild Aekos from scratch, if interested), regardless of our choices).
“The cargo turns out to be oilcloth-wrapped cakes of notteco, a rich blue dye from the Abhuman lands to the south. You know it as a color favored by House Pelematou—one you used to admire with the detachment of knowing it was hopelessly beyond the (insert aristo MC’s family name) means.”
Do the Abhumans also sell “royal” purple dye? (Or would buyers instead have to look elsewhere to find/purchase a beautiful color)
Then again, maybe mixing notteco blue with cheaper red might be the easy solution for making the purple dye?
“By nightfall, the other guests’ gossip has led you to the brothers Aven and Joules Sarinatou. Their small Shayardene House has grown rich on trade with Whendery and the Abhuman tribes to the south; every other trader and aristocrat in the Pandocheion speaks with envy of their courtly connections and their knack for sniffing out an opportunity.”
Well, those two sound like natural candidates for acting as liasons between the Leaguers and the Syntechnia! (Along with helping MC establish Shayard, Wiendrj, and the Seracca as the founding members of a merchant/aristo-led koinon)
@Havenstone Considering older posts about Shayard total land area (about Congo or Greenland-sized) how much internal diversity are there in Shayard proper (aside Earlund and Brimlund)? Considering Nationalists movements in real life history tend to hate regional cutures as much as foreign influence, viewing it as “divergent” and “incorrect” practices, I actually think focusing only on Shayard will not be as easy as it seems unless the Karagonds had made think much more homogenous or the natural environment does not lend well to linguistic or cutural diversity (in Greenland’s case). Though I do headcanon that Shayarin are technically a collections of languages (like the Arabic and Chinese “language” though to be honest every language in existence are like this).
So, checking the beginning options for the choices made in the first game, it mentions a woman and her surviving child/her children. But I never encountered her in Uprising.
I have somewhat similar question - considering regional differences, old enmities and sheer size of Shayard, how hard would it be to keep it united in current archonty borders? Are homelander rebellions going to have advantages when we will need to address this problem?
Homelanders will need to deal with revanchists who have a different definition of Shayard than the present day (and who will, in turn, need to deal with an Aveche that calls itself Avezia and a Reach that liked being part of Karagon).
If you’re referring to Huette Meriweather and her children, then, to meet her, in Ch 2 of Uprising, you must attempt the Architelone raid, and choose to go find information by threatening the telone, Bleys. If your mission at Bleys’s house goes on successfully enough, you’ll meet her and her children.
A Tale of Heroes (WIP) - 197k words. Updated 03/07/2023 with Chapter 5!
. Because the current noble are corrupt or schemes each other.
