Just curious, lots of roleplaying opportunities and i like swords more, but if I had to think of an actual reason, theurgy is very dangerous and not controlable by any government, unless you count obsessive warfare against information. I like it better when humans lack the ability to obliterate themselves. Just Cerlota creating a Xaos storm is extremely worrying in that throwing fireballs isn’t remotly the limit. Can possibly imagine a theurge grasping the telos of the universe is to exist or of the sun to shine and willing it not to. I’m not a person that believes in absolute freedom, nor in progress being inherently good.
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Thing is you can’t really close Pandora’s Box. Even accounting for the insane amount of atrocities necessary to suppress the knowledge of Theurgy, such is wiping out most of the scholarly class, you’d be trying this with swords and spears against people who can explode things with their mind and make mutant attack beasts that are essentially living tanks.
Theurgy is a highly developed field with fully researched and implemented military applications. It’d be like taking an army of musket men on a crusade to suppress the dangerous new steam combustion engine technology before it could be used for evil during the Cold War where nukes have been invented and all armies use tanks.
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The Empire thanks you for your service.
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While you make a beautiful analogy, it wouldn’t take wiping out most of the scholarly class, I think, because theurgy is kept secret only for the theurges, and if by scholars you mean the theurges, they are already your enemy. Furthermore, it would be a war of the many against the few, that while powerful, rely on a vast supply of “blood” to fight. I think victory is possible, just because they would run out of fuel. Then you just burn all the books and some witches from time to time and you’re set. You can also make magic not only a crime but also a cardinal sin in your religion. I’m also not insisting it has to succeed, only that it seems logical for some to try it.
True
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You’re assuming enough people would endorse this to give you a numbers advantage. Theurgy has improved a lot of lives. People aren’t gonna just give up the ability to mass grow reliable harvests in an instant, even if they’re willing to scale down the frequency of doing it.
Also, how closely guarded is this secret anyway? A scroll with the basics found its way to a helot camp. And when the war ends up thoroughly destabilizing the Hegemony, theurges are gonna start bargaining that knowledge to survive.
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Ok, I’m going to be a little self-indulgent and celebrate the community we’ve built here by rolling out a new occasional feature of the XoR game threads: ADAT (A Decade Ago Today). Because yes, we’ve been talking about it together for that long.
Ten years ago today, I posted the Choice of Rebels demo for the first time:
It extended through your first meeting with Horion (then called Platon) Leilatou, via a much shorter and simpler version of the winter starvation game. There was no arrogant aristo path, and only one prologue (Wolfbait – no Carles or Olynna).
By the end of the day, a bunch of people had given encouraging comments and helpful feedback. Some of those first day’s commenters are gone from the forum and much missed, like @FairyGodfeather and @Laguz (then known as Bagelthief). Others are still here with us, including @poison_mara and @Ramidel, the longest continuous commenters on this beast of a game.
Anyway here’s to the next decade, in which (God willing) I finish the series – and to the decade gone, with all the fun conversations we’ve had along the way. 
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I feel in a way deeply guilty for my first feedback to your game. It was harsh rude and 100% honest.
Still, You gave me the chance to not be that idiot helot lover of the first demo and for that I will be forever thankful.
So sorry, but not sorry same time, lol. And very happy about our friendship since that moment. Others would have hated me instead.
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Nah, I enjoyed it from Day One. Stay honest, Mara.
By the way, I should perhaps clarify that when I said above that Grand Shayard was in the doldrums, what I meant was the horse latitudes, not the near-equatorial trough. Shayard runs along the north edge of the gameworld’s desert belt; the Abhuman lands start in those deserts and end just south of the equator. They’ve got the proper doldrums down there.
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Does that mean the majority of Shayard’s croplands are irrigated?
If so is the water able to flow naturally or is the intervention of theurgic locks necessary?
Basically is it Spain or the south of France?
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Well, there’s no Gulf Stream hitting the continent, so it’s not quite as warm as Western European countries at equivalent latitudes. Grand Shayard and Osterport are at a similar latitude to Houston, Basra, or Cairo, with the kind of climate those comparisons suggest.
The land around the capital is hot and dry, becoming properly arid as you move toward the Ward. Almost all agriculture down there is irrigated, off the River Serdre and its tributaries. Lots of flax and sugarcane grown around there as well as wheat.
The peninsular Southriding which juts out between Grand Shayard and Corlune (districts: Martier, Leurs, and Bragat-Laconne, which like the Outer Rim is an underpopulated wilderness) is pretty Spain-like, relatively arid, with limited capacity for rainfed agriculture.
Corlune is at a similar latitude to Charleston, S.C., and Rim Square to Nashville. They get a lot more rain and less brutally intense sun. By the time you get up to the northern limits of Shayard in Veldrin or the Aveche Coast, you’re at the latitude of Genoa, or Maine in the US. In between, there’s a whole lot of scope for rainfed farming.
Karagon and southern Nyryal are in the rain shadow of the Wiendish peaks and the hill country of the Reach. They’re a dry, cold steppe, not a hot desert. Aekos is at the same latitude as…Ayagoz. Or Minot, N.D.
ADAT: We crossed the 100 post mark on day two of the WIP thread, thanks to extended discussion by (among others) the newly arrived @P_Tigras. While the Tiger has taken lengthy hiatuses through the years, he’s always come back not just to the forums but to XoR, and his probing questions and suggestions (especially his consistent advocacy for a non-caricatured, non-dichotomous version of nationalism in the game) have made the game much better. Thanks, @P_Tigras!
(Don’t worry, I won’t be doing this daily. Not every day had an ADAT-worthy arrival or topic.)
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This might be a game 3/4 question
Will we have a chance to choose a colour for our rebellion. My thinking is that our followers need something to further distinguish themselves from the Hegemonic’s red/crimson (IIRC).
Say for example our rebellion uses green to represent our resilience, surviving the winter and the Greenwood celebration or for a Shayard nationalist wearing the colours of the old nobility with the Gryphon sigil (I can’t remember if it was stated anywhere what the old Shayard noble colours were).
To further expand on this idea, when we eventually have our own magi, we create a uniform in stark contrast to the Hegemony’s black coat and iron diadems.
This might just be superficial, but I just thought to share this idea.
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There are too many noble houses for each one to claim a colour, or even a basic colour pattern. Houses in Shayard have heraldic sigils that may combine a colour with an animal or other symbol of the family. The Leilatou are the golden kennet, while the Keriatou are the crimson ram (though because kermes, crimson, is a quite expensive dye, the fact that they use it so extensively is noteworthy in itself). For some other families, especially smaller ones that have to take what dyes they can afford, the image more than the colour is the key identifying factor. You aren’t asked to pick a colour for the MC’s sigil, for example.
But I do think it’s an interesting idea, especially when we’re talking about uniforms to contrast with the Hegemony’s (both Phalangite and Theurgic). I’ll chew on it and see.
ADAT: on Day Three of the original WIP thread, across another 100+ posts, much virtual ink was spilled over the MC’s initial attraction to Breden, the K/S gender selection, and the prospect of having the telone path in Ch 2 as an IAP. New arrivals included @WinterHawk and @Jackrabbit, who would prove to be consistently thoughtful reviewers and testers over the years to follow (albeit also, in the case of the former, a rebel most foul…but thankfully we’re a couple of years off commemorating that).
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I hope we will be able to interact with de Rose and de Gallis in Grand Shayard if we cooperated with them in Game 1.
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Ah, I remember those early days, where I was so young and naive, determined to defend Breden through thick red flags and thin excuses! I have forced many friends to play the game so they can clearly see how correct my opinions are, so you can proudly take credit for being a source of internal strife in our Skype group (it really has been that long, ha).
I don’t have as much free time as I had back then - I’m sure you can relate - so I only briefly played Stormwright to verify that Breden is indeed as blameless as always! Glad to see I have been vindicated by history since everyone agree now.
Also, the IAP purchases in the first game have made it more fun for me, as you may recall I was always one of the ELI5 types who cruelly forced you to create a mode with minimal bushel arithmetic. Surely this one will be even more straightforward!
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I would like to ask the question again. What will the military look like?
Also, can you enact monopoly licenses and patents? How about creating a limited corporation or an insurance system?
What is the scientific standard of the empire? Also, what kind of discoveries did you make? (For example, have the heliocentric or bacterial theories been discovered?)
Also, will the players be able to invent something? (e.g. canned food, hot air balloons, etc.)
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Lol. For my symbol I choice a sickle and hammer. Ironically, red works perfectly for that.
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What can I say, I’ve enjoyed the world you’ve created and found the questions it was asking of me worth finding answers to even if the question was unanswerable. You could even say that is has all been very… inspiring. 
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Sending a full-scale Xaos-storm through the middle of a major city would be mass destruction, no question. Whether that’s something that lends itself to a MAD dynamic is far from clear to me. There won’t be any other WMD discoveries besides the floating mountains, which are several orders of magnitude harder to generate than a Xaos-storm.
If you’ve wooed either the aristocracy as a class or the Wiends as a nation, you may be able to take over large elements of the trained Phalangite corps in your territory. If you build up your cred with other, lower classes, you may be able to win over the less-trained Phalangite tagmas that were recruited to drain the slums and prepare for human wave attacks. If you want to reject all the institutions that have been cornerstones of the old regime (and killed lots of your own rebels in the process) then you can build a new army out of your rebel forces; your degree of success at that will have a lot to do with whether you’re a high-COM military genius.
Absolutely – that’s a classlc early modern tool for economic management/extraction, and builds on the existing guild approach that’s already familiar in the Hegemony. The anarchy level and your state capacity will of course affect the enforceability of your grants.
The legal system of the Hegemony is set up to facilitate guilds, with their more tightly delimited approach to risk- and capital-pooling, rather than limited corporations. I’m not sure that the gameworld historical period we’re in now would be a plausible one for a significant step toward the evolution of corporations. And I’m also not sure that insurance systems would play enough of a role in post-imperial stabilization to feature in the game.
As I’ve said elsewhere, whether e.g. heliocentrism or germ theory apply in a gameworld centered around Aristotelian magic has so far been left intentionally unclear. I’m not at this point going to commit to what kind of scientific discoveries/inventions might be possible for a high-INT MC.
Breden isn’t comfortable with kenon, but having reluctantly backed down from challenging you over it in the Whendward, she’s not about to fight you for it in Sojourn – she’s just not as concerned about a bunch of Xaos-dwellers adopting it as she is about the rebel band she’s part of.
That will absolutely be a position it’s possible to take. I’m not sure you’ll be able to build much of a state on that position, but not all rebels will choose to be state-builders.
Yes. A helot can sincerely believe in the One True King and the glories of Old Shayard, or could just see value in including the Laconniers in their coalition.
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Would significant numbers of first circle Theurges from the provinces consider defecting if their nation as a whole attempted to secede from the Hegemony as well?
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