Choice of Rebels: Stormwright (XoR2 WIP)

Choice of Games games CoG Works In Progress
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I think so, yes – though it’ll be hard to make many plans while anarchy escalates over the next couple games. As the shape of the post-Hegemonic world starts to become clearer, there’ll be more space for you to make plans for your personal place in it.

The real theme of XoR.

Sure!

Absolutely. Though the more you managed to make it an organized distribution rather than a mass violent appropriation, the less anarchy you’d accrue.

@Azthyme can. :slight_smile: As can @Roodcross.

This is an area where we need to be very careful not to lend support to the noxious idea that people are only “really” transgender if they’ve made some degree of biological transition. A trans man is a man. In real life, there are a lot of different ways people respond when an RO comes out as transgender, and I’ll be trying to write true-to-life options that don’t send a toxic message.

Yes, that’s pretty common in real-world universalistic religions. (None of which have ended up associated with assassin cults, and in the interests of keeping some daylight between Martin’s tropes and my own, there won’t be Faceless Men in the gameworld.)

As you’ll see next chapter, Irduin’s model is collapsing under the pressure of your rebellion and the resentments and expectations it’s brought to the surface. It can inspire your MC to want to build a paternalistic aristocratic future, but the fact that other rebellions will be advocating for more radical options will be one of the toughest hurdles to overcome. Aristocracies work best under an undisturbed fogbank of tradition; once that starts to break up and the arbitrariness of its power divisions is widely recognized, it takes pretty strong charisma to get people looking away from it again.

None of them had a particularly strong nation-like identity; Shayard was the only real proto-nation on the continent. But to the extent that the experience of being an imperial province with an increasingly standardized vernacular language has brought the rest to the point of proto-nationhood, they’d definitely be traditional ancestry-based nations. I don’t think you can have values-based nations without something resembling an Enlightenment, a shift where people gain radical confidence in the ability of humans to create institutions out of rational reflection alone…and while something like that might be an outcome of your rebellion, it would need to percolate for a few more generations before you could have a USA-type republic that manages to have a strongly binding national identity based around something other than a shared language, culture, and religion. Classical cosmopolitanism is the closest you can come, and it’s generally threatened by nationalism rather than compatible with it.

If you’ve spread your skepticism widely enough by then, maybe? Otherwise, people are still going to use the common idiom for an extraordinarily good speaker, even if your specific message is anything but Angelic.

Exactly the intended effect. :slight_smile:

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Are there any ROs you see locking off because of a trans identity, or is that still a WIP? From what I understand it’s not unheard of in the Hegemony, and gender isn’t exactly something they harp on, but say Erjan might have issues with a transmasc MC trying to romance him, given Hallasurq puritanism regarding gender.

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There’s gonna be two Abhuman syncretic religions fighting a war over what to integrate. Mine wins because the others won’t fight.

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But what if you don’t have (enough) hair left to make that choice…we are the eternally oppressed it seems. :man_bald:
Fortunately my mc is learning Seracca theurgy so that dismal fate never comes to pass for him. :persevere:

And we can also subtly stoke those resentments perhaps to the point of boiling over? :pleading_face:

It is also important for me and my mc simply because he is only into men romantically and sexually.

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I really liked the meditation that we took part in. And if you have the headaches after the dreams she able to help you. I also thought the spirits where cool.

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Ah, I meant the Abhuman-Xthonos syncretist pacifists planned later.

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@Havenstone Should your relationship meter with aristocracy be more interpreted as “how much they trust you don’t want to put them out of power” or “how many reforms of the society can they accept before becoming outright hostile”?
Or can it be applied to both?

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What is the current status of Caroline’s “Arrogant Aristo” attitude as of Game 1’s end?
Will said attitude remain consistently boastful/unrepentant across G2-G5, or has it instead already began mellowing out as of Game 1?

Overlapping with my above question about Caroline’s Arrogant Aristo background/attitude evolution: How much social mobility would Caroline like to provide for her helot followers, or at least for her top helot lieutenants? (perhaps Breden and Ellery might prove worthy of such uplifting/consideration, while the more rowdy/trigger-happy elements (such as Radmar) could be put in their place)

After Cerlota opened Caroline’s eyes to the bigger picture truths of Theurgy (and the knowledge about “how to aetherize one’s own blood”), who will be Caroline’s main pool of recruits?

Shayard’s literate young nobles (particularly from the ranks of the Laconniers and/or Leaguers, depending on Caroline’s eventual G2 faction choice) are an obvious first choice.

But how much knowledge of Theurgy does Caroline wish to trust with Shayard’s yeomanry? Might Caroline want the nobility and yeomanry on equal footing (Theurgy wise), or might she instead seek for the nobility to be slightly (or drastically) dominant?

And in Caroline’s eyes, how worthy is Shayard’s helotry (or at least the minority that Caroline knows for sure is personally loyal to her cult of personality/credibility as Eclect) of being taught Theurgy? My Arrogant Aristo INT MCs, in comparison, have already softened up to the point that they’ve started giving lessons to Yebben.

And given Caroline’s G2 shift towards soft nationalism (and thoughts towards developing her idealized community of Xthonic nations), might an exchange student Theurgic program (between Caroline’s Shayardene followers and the soft nationalists of the other provinces) be in Caroline’s best interests?

And what about your earlier January statement, “My INT 3 CHA 3 version of Caroline will be plenty of power fantasy for me”?
Here’s my current understanding/prediction of Caroline’s planned stat growth.
G2: INT 2 to INT 3
G3: CHA 1 to CHA 2
G4: CHA 2 to CHA 3
G5: INT 3 to INT 4

Does Carolline’s decision to allow Erezza to keep Avezia (and to maybe(?) allow Karagon to keep Veldrine Hills) also indicate that she will similarly allow Wiendrj to keep Stezyc/Steswick?

Is your winter raiding habit a sign of things to come for your future rule of Shayard and foreign/trade policy towards everybody else? (Aka the merchants of all provinces will be super taxed/bled dry to appease your primary power base: priests, aristos, and yeomen)
Or might an “apology bribe” to the Shayardene Syntechnia be warranted to bring them back into Shayard’s fold?

Duly noted. Then I guess it most likely will boil down to a simpler “join or die” ultimatum for the Theurges of the post-Hegemony era? (if mere imprisonment turns out to be impractical)

But yeah, on another note, I am alternatively entertaining the idea of nominally keeping Phaedra prisoner (while secretly allying with Phaedra behind the scenes (and keeping Phaedra pampered in a Gilded Cage) to have MC’s faction benefit from Phaedra’s research).

Thanks for the advice! I look forward to having my MC’s heart broken! (yet again)

How Anglo-Saxon were the “ancient Earlund” aristo names? (Compared to the French-sounding “de (insert)” aristo names we see from the current era of Shayard)

Perhaps your MC might entertain the idea of having a lion-like mane of hair? (to further emphasize his post-Hegemony nationwide status as “king of the pack”)

Emphasis on subtly (if you want to ally with your future Leaguer pawns, while avoiding responsibility for the noble-unfriendly chaos in Irduin and the Rim).

@Havenstone Is the Seraccan cultural commitment to decentralized rule truly as unanimous as Mk’yar claims it to be?
I wonder if there might be a handful of Seraccan elites who (quietly) resent that current trend? (Thus qualifying as an “weaker faction who might have sufficient motivation to sign up with MC’s monarchical koinon of usurpers”)

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I re-played the update a couple of times. I really like the new interpersonal dynamics in the later sections. There’s a spark. I like sparks. Sparks are fun. My favourite is when two characters start somewhat at odds and grow into friendship despite mutual jibes and banter.

Here’s some reader pov for intent check. Might be helpful to find out which ones you wrote differently than I’ve read.

Is Cerlota a late middle-aged woman? My brain can’t help but read her as brunette Robin Wright with a less soulless voice. (It may be mentor trope and character role clashing with character description)

Xaoslands outside of the initial steep, cliff-riddled hills are in my brain basically Mongolian plains in early autumn/ late summer.

Erjan has weird tash. Almost like it’s painted on with a thin brush.

Jev is tall, very short-haired or shaved bald and wearing a long robe.

Sojourn faces the water on at least 2 sides. Walls and architecture is early medieval, somewhat dilapidated.

The conjured xaos storm moves at about the same speed as a car on neutral pushed down a gentle slope. You could probably outrun it at the early stage (it does, pick up speed as it goes until it dissipates, right?).

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Personally, I would pick Cobie Smulders as my choice of template for Cerlota’s appearance.

In your opinion, how likely will it be for Herne to become a Genghis Khan-like conqueror? (and by extension, for Sojourn to become XoR’s version of the Mongol Empire)

@Havenstone: Clearly, Emperor Tevqar is a cheapskate who didn’t give Halassur’s intelligence network enough funding! (if Erjan had to put up with such a lousy disguise/fake mustache)

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Big old WIP that won’t be entirely out-of-progress until there’s been a thorough sensitivity read of whatever I first come up with. :slight_smile:

Absolutely!

“How much they trust that they can live with the post-Hegemonic regime you’d put in place.” For many of them, “live with” does mean “dominate,” or at least “continue to wield power disproportionate to their numbers.” Others would just be more like, “seems like under this ${woman}'s rule we’d get to live free from Karagond oppression and Kryptasts while still getting to keep most of our land and wealth, as well as our lives. Sounds good.” Most aristos don’t have huge estates or vast amounts of property anyway; your popularity with the “average aristo” will be different from how the magnates of the realm see you.

I’ve never gone anything close to “full Dægbeorht” – the old names are just a little more Germanic.

An excellent question whose answer will await another day. :slight_smile:

She’s 38, so late middle-aged? I guess all the teenagers reading this will think “yes” and folk my age will think “no way.” I like your mental images, none of which are inconsistent with my vision, except that I think I described Jev a couple places as having long strands of yellow hair.

Finally, one of the things I’ve been doing this month in between writing is scouring back over the 13,000-ish posts in past XoR threads to make sure my current plans for the G5 endgame will catch most of what readers have speculated about over the years. (Some of you might already have guessed this as my likes belatedly pop up on your 7-year-old posts. I was stingier as a young writer.)

And I wanted to very belatedly confirm that @cascat07’s nerd-fu is strong:

Your calculations all check out, with pretty impressive accuracy given that you were working from my handwavy “Greenland-like” comments and a large-scale map (which I tweaked a year ago to avoid Mercator-esque distortions in the original projection). Total area of the Hegemony is 7,561,350 km2. That’s Shayard at 2,167,630, Erezza 2,057,598, Wiendrj 1,545,950, Nyryal 1,281,873, and Karagon 598,299. Nice work. :slight_smile:

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Might some of these Arrogant Aristo NPCs have reason to counter-intuitively object to CHA-specializing Eclect Aristo MC’s “the aristos who stay true to the cause have the birthright to rule” tenet? (merely because they see MC as being too obvious with his intentions, and it might be preferable for the aristo community to be on the top of the food chain “without saying the quiet part out loud.”)

After all, aristocratic rule does “work best under an undisturbed fogbank of tradition,” correct? :slight_smile:
And on another note, to quote Tywin Lannister, “Any man who must say ‘I am the king’ is no true king.”

(And overlapping with my previously suggested ‘Praetorian Guard’ analogy)
Surely, Arrogant Aristo MC’s co-conspirators/fellow allied aristos would find the concept (of an aristo-dominated Theurgic cabal/Illuminati ruling the known world from behind the scenes) to be appealing, right?

the level where your market manipulations have the power to render major factions desperate

@Havenstone :

1- To quote a Reddit post from 2 months ago (concerning Italy’s pasta prices), "it isn’t really about inflation, climate, or supply chains. It’s about the producers of pasta opportunistically colluding to keep their prices high.”
Will cartel pricing (and collusion in general) be an available option for merchant prince MCs to rely on?

2- And while we’re still on the topic of “collusion amongst competitors,” will a condottieri-like arrangement be possible between MC and his (nominal) rival mercenaries? (Deliberately arranging for staged battles with inconclusive outcomes and marginal victories/losses, so that the client post-Hegemonic states can be milked for all their worth?)
I’m wondering if you already thought of the condottieri (as the most likely model for a potential post-Hegemony mercenary), back when you last talked about a big independent mercenary band being “a satisfying option for some players in a post-Hegemony world of many little states.”

MC: " ̶̶S̶i̶m̶b̶a̶, M’kyar, you must take your place in the circle of life!”

(Concerning the future of the XoR franchise after G5)

@Havenstone : What are your thoughts on a potential XoR spinoff after G5 is finished?
(with the new protagonist being a Halassurq rebel/outcast/survivor whose circumstances and origin story is shaped by the consequences of the predecessor protagonist’s G1-G5 choices)

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Well I’m guessing that’ll pretty much be zero for me then, eh? :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

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On that note, are there any Hegemonic mercenaries or is the Hegemony solely reliant on it’s own professional military?

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Thinking over the significance of the dimensions a few thoughts come to mind.

First which historical empires of classical antiquity dissolved they tended to be broken into flinders before aggregating again around prominent terrain for civilization like navigable rivers and coastlines. I think @Havenstone hints of the Sub-Archonity regional identities are not idle speculation.

Second the fall of Rome is still considered as something of great tragedy despite its brutality toward certain classes of subject people. It is/was often regarded as a lost golden age even by much closer to contemporary scholars and leaders. In light of the post-fall chaos the Hegemony may be regarded with the same nostalgia.

Third Rome “fell” many times over its history. It is possible with the right set of compromises and sacrifices that this time of disorder and rebellion might be a “crisis of the third century” rather than the final “fall.”

Fourth the ERE survived the fall of Rome as more or less of a significant rump empire for nearly a millennia.

Fifth many of the powers that emerged for the fall of the Roman Empire claimed its mantle as true successors or heirs with various degrees of fidelity. Nevertheless such claims were seen to impart a degree of legitimacy even from such implausible inheritors as the Ottomans.

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In a democratic-egalitarian age like our own, the “fogbank of tradition” around aristocracy can be disturbed by someone saying too blatantly, “We rule because we’re the better sort”. In the Hegemony, where egalitarian ideas are a minor counter-current in an overwhelmingly hierarchical culture, the superiority of nobles doesn’t have to be “the quiet part” – it can be said out loud without stirring up the fog too badly.

Well, first, I’m very skeptical that the 3,600-odd pasta producers in Italy managed to collude on price-fixing; “inflation, climate, and supply chains” affected by the Ukraine War sound vastly more likely to me. Price-fixing by cartel is a lot harder than anonymous redditor thinks, and food prices are likely to go all over the place in the face of climate chaos and Europe’s first ground war in the better part of a century.

Similiarly, in the gameworld, prices are going to be knocked doolally thanks to imperial collapse, widespread lawlessness, and severe agricultural strain (if not all-out famine). If you end up largely in control of a particular vital resource, any MC (not just merchant-friendly ones) can try to leverage that for power and profit; but price-fixing is a game for a much more stable environment than the Hegemony during this game.

If when the dust settles the MC ends up at the helm of a mercenary company fighting for different post-Hegemonic states, that will be late enough in Game 5 that we’re not going to see a lot of gameplay detail around it – and I also doubt the chaos will be consolidated enough for condottieri to be confident enough to play-fight with each other rather than fighting to win.

I don’t think it’ll be possible – there will simply be too many possible outcomes to G5. I’d never be able to write a G6 that could do justice to them all, even glancingly. I also think with G5, I’ll have told the story I wanted to with this world, and I’ll be ready for something new.

The Hegemony has a massive conscript military – settled in garrison cities in key parts of the continent, as well as along the Halassur border – but no mercenaries. The Thaumatarch wouldn’t allow the existence of independent armed groups within his borders, and he doesn’t have good enough relations with any of the neighbors outside the Wards to hire mercenaries from them. Halassur uses mercenaries on some of its other borders, to free up its own citizens to face the great invader in the west.

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What/where are the garrison cities within Shayard? Seems like an important note to make for any prospective rebel.

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Right off the bat I think we can presume the gates in the wards have significant garrison towns. This is probably true of the city wards as well.

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For the moment, they are a centerpiece for my mc and he will heavily lean into and promote them during the course of his revolution. A non-eclect helot managing to outfox and overpower “the right sort of people” should count for something.

I feel we may have less of a choice, still my mc generally dislikes mercenaries too with the possible exception of privateers, should that prove a viable thing. Otherwise he’d only use the more classical, land based mercenaries in a possible cold war with Halassur and then only for highly dirty, highly dangerous ops requiring plausible deniability.

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What percentage of the Hegemony’s population is literate again? Or has it been mentioned?

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