Well, the first bit is a lost cause but I’m already the leader of a Wiendish clan made up entirely of Phalangites.
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No. Chapter 2 of the game is being worked on right now.
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Not unless there’s a dead author. 
Just a very complex game that takes a while to write.
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Or possibly how much you’re willing to trust some high COM subordinates. Of course there are reasons why neither Stalin or Mao let their top generals run riot and in fact purged their army brass once in a while. The tradeoff to that being worse military performance the tradeoff to trying the former and taking the road historically not traveled either a potential military coup or a lot more influence of the generals.
In the history of my country co-ops were kinda like guilds (for farmers) and also the beginning of the end for traditional guilds due to their tendency to take a lot of production in-house, cart and barrel making as well as blacksmithing for instance and setting up their own farmer’s schools and near the end even universities and banks. The other factor squeezing our historical guilds was ironically the two huge public private enterprises our supposed “nightwatchman” state built to facilitate our particular form of colonialism those being our East and West India companies who were huge monolithic entities who would, like the Walmarts of today, put a lot of downward pressure on prizes and conditions for the small middle and the larger working class.
Also my mc already intends to experiment with a regulated “free” market only in the religious sphere but there is no reason why with the right developments some bright spark couldn’t in a century or so see value in extending that system to business and trade.
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ADAT: A young @Samuel_H_Young gave his first feedback on XoR (under the handle he was using before he published Demon Hunter and switched to using his real name on the forums). And I committed to adding the Olynna and Carles prologues – picking what was perhaps the most elaborate way to incorporate the forum feedback that the prologue section ought to do more with the religion and nationalism stats.
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I’ve been thinking about it and for a Shayardene nationalist willing to compromise on their moral/religious fervour, Erjan’s terms are probably the best out there. Supporting a free Shayard (presumably with little issue regarding regaining the odd lost province back) all for moving the border to Cocenza, no wards on the new border, the Erezziano broken up into little pieces and the Thaumatarch dead? Some of these things can be a certain kind of MC already has been planning, just without Halassurq input thus far. The only people losing are arguably the people of Erezza…
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When do you think these matters will be decided? Also, if these matters come out, which game do you think it will be? (Of course, since you’re a gardener, I know there are no exact answers to these questions. But let me give you a rough idea.)
Also, what are imperial guilds like? (For example, what kind of field commercial and industrial guilds are there, how long is the apprenticeship period, how much influence does it have on product standards and prices, and how much influence does it have on politics?)
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Not for a while, I’m afraid. I have a much clearer picture of gameworld dynamics outside the Rim than I did a year ago, having thrown many (many) more hours into my research, maps, notes, and spreadsheets in preparation for writing the rest of the series… but that’s only confirmed that Grand Shayard and the other provinces will come into clearer focus for me as I write them, and not before. For now, I’m not ready to make commitments about what may be possible for a high-INT character by G5.
There will be a lot more about the Syntechnia and its many branches in the chapters I’m writing now. I’m going to hold off for now on answering questions about it and see what you all think when the draft chapters come out.
But lest I leave you all completely unsatisfied, let me give some grist for future imperial planning. I’ve said a few times before that the Hegemony has nothing resembling a central blood budget, and your MC will never know the following with any precision…but here are my (subject to change, but grounded in a detailed gameworld model that has been holding together in a way I’m pretty happy with) rough percentages of where the blood goes under the current Thaumatarch.
- 37% - staple agriculture. (Extra harvests; rain/deep-well irrigation; post-harvest prep; transport around the Hegemony, mostly to big grain-deficit areas like Karagon, lowland Wiendrj, central Nyryal, the lower Southriding, and the contested region on the Erezza-Halassur border)
- 23% - non-Plektosis military expenditure. (Troop transport, battlefield healing, attack.)
- 14% - infrastructure. (The river-canal transport system, above all, but also major roads, bridges, flood control, etc.)
- 9% - major techne-driven industry. (Especially iron, steel, and textiles, including both production and transport.)
- 6% - Harrowers. (Operating them and getting the mobile ones around the districts.)
- 5% - specialist Theurgic units. (Including the Kryptasts, but also the flying messengers, public health and fire brigade)
- 4% - the Wards (Border and City) and the Floating Palace
- 1% - Plektoi. (Making them and sustaining them.)
- < 1% - the small amount of discretionary aetherial blood that individual Theurges are allowed to use for other purposes.
The relatively low percentage going to the Wards and Floating Palace will come as a huge and unwelcome surprise to the MC (and indeed to Cerlota) when they find out about it in G3/G4, as I’m sure it will to many readers who had been counting on that to ease more of the transition to a post-blood economy.
And ADAT, @stsword joined the conversation over on the WIP thread.
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I feel like this doesn’t track given what we know about the mountain nuke or the scouring of Southriding. I think it makes sense that the maintenance expenditure is low, but the blood demand for feats like digging a new canal or making a ward should be eye watering. That will add to the dilemma of dropping them. Its blood intensive to reverse that decision and a much smaller evil to keep them up. I’d say the same for manufacturing Plektoi. If should be an extreme cost to make one but keeping them going relatively cheap so long as it is only change maintenance. If you want to keep it 1% it should mean they are making very few these days. Perhaps killing three was the most costly part for the Hegemony of the initial rebellion?
I also think the industry to infrastructure ratio should be reversed unless that includes new construction and the Hegemony is on a public works binge at the moment.
Perhaps a basis for the discussion below:
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Totally reasonable reactions, and thanks! I shared this hoping for long-time readers to correct me if I’ve left something out or got something wrong.
In this case I think the model more or less holds up, though don’t stop pushing back where anything I say below sounds off. When it comes to the 4% category… sorry to be obscure, but creating a Ward or floating mountain relies on something much scarcer than blood, and a “something” that isn’t of general-purpose use. You couldn’t use it to scour a province or dig a shipping canal, either of which could only be done through eye-watering investment of blood resources.
Official propaganda uniformly makes it sound as if the Wards use up well over half the blood harvested in the Hegemony. Even most Theurges would believe that the Wards use at least a third of the total… though Theurges of Cerlota’s level have learned enough to doubt that. (As she says in G2 Ch1, “The Wards do genuinely consume much blood, but far less than they should, given their outrageous scale and power.”) The official story fits with having “they die to protect us from Xaos and its minions” as the primary justification for Harrowing, and keeps Halassur’s researchers off track when it comes to figuring out how to replicate it.
As for the dilemma around dropping the Wards, 4% of the three and a half million people Harrowed each year in the Hegemony is still a big number. Each Ward costs well over 12,000 lives per year in maintenance. Unlike, say, powering riverboat grain transport, it’s not one of the things an MC who spreads knowledge of Theurgy to the masses could try to do piecemeal with lots of people cutting their hands. MCs trying to switch to a blood tax will find that the scale of donations required to keep a Ward up could generate enough harvests to feed over a million people a year. It will I think be an unusually lucky MC for whom that trade-off doesn’t represent a dilemma.
The Hegemony is making relatively few Plektoi these days, especially the hounds, which are extremely Theurge-intensive – for each one you make, you’re tying up a Theurge to spend most of their time as its keeper. The hounds are disproportionately useful in less populated areas of the Hegemony, where they can effectively terrorize areas where the Hegemony doesn’t want to base large garrisons. Because Plektoi can’t cross a Ward, the Hegemony can’t turn the tables on Halassur by sending a horde of tens of thousands to overrun the enemy; the defensive uses of Plektoi in the contested zone are real but limited. And maintenance is actually the lion’s share of their blood cost – Theurgically enhanced nutrition, tweaks to keep their Changed bodies from breaking down, and (for the hounds) seizing control when you want them “on the leash” but they snap and try to kill and eat everything in sight.
Finally, canal maintenance is the cornerstone of the Hegemony’s limited-scale industrial revolution. Keeping up a continent-wide network with the capacity to transport millions of tons of grain and other trade goods to the center of power is enormously costly – but it’s those millions of tons of grain that sustain the populations that ultimately fuel the system. I think within the gameworld, it makes sense for the Hegemony to have its infrastructure demands crowding out what might otherwise be more intensive industralization.
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Hmmm, my initial instinct is talismans, but we know about those from a meta perspective so that doesn’t seem to be it. The other feat we can possibly witness is our own theurgic suicide bombing which destroys a mountain. Other than the training of an extremely powerful theurge. Its something beyond the ken of even the Unquiet Dead or whatever is at Vigil since they would presumably drop the wards if they understood them well. Its also not child sacrifice or Halassur would have beat the Hegemony there.
I presume there is some horrific downside to talismans that we aren’t aware of yet?
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I think Cerlota mentions the Thaurmatch as being covered in talismans in certain dialogue paths. I imagine they may help but my understanding was they were simply a space rock with lots of atherial components, a useful substitute for blood and rare but not exactly something that would be a bottle neck.
It seems more likely to me to be related to those obsidian towers made of pure earth out by vigil. We know real earth stops Xoas storms, what if we just put the most earthy earth at the bottom and extended that telos like we do with making knifes sharp? Those are probably what makes the physical 3 stone high wall part of the Ward and the rest is just talisman/blood of a well trained Theurge enhancing or extending the telos of protection.
Isn’t Scarth Isle a volcano? Could you be getting the obsidian from there making it into stones and then using that to make the ward work? That might explain why it is so hard to extend a ward or build a new one while cheap to run. I doubt any Theurge knows how to jump start a volcanic eruption or at least the kind that would be a slow lava flow needed for obsidian to form instead of the kill everyone with smoke and fire quickly kind.
Granted it seems it would be easy for Halassuar to figure all that out if the wall was made of a particular kind of rock that’s obviously different in theurgic trance, but I dunno they seem keen on only having the men fight and how often do their female Theurges get to hangout by the ward safe and sound looking at rocks for fun?
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So the floating palace also uses this resource?
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Um…the fact that nightmarishly evil people have hoarded almost all of them, making them virtually unbeatable?
Keeping a mountain afloat requires a variation on the same fundamental thing that powers the Wards, yes. All will be clear by Game 4. For now I’ll just say that it’s a (non-obvious) ramification of stuff I’ve already introduced, not a radically new feature of the gameworld; it’s not an alternative fuel for Theurgy that could displace aether; and it’s useless for all the stuff I listed that’s not in the 4% category.
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I’m honestly expecting talismans to become a big thing. Like if we can grab one we go from basic mage boy to this version of Jesus with super charged magic. Honestly can’t wait to see what kind of effect grabbing one gets
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Then how does one beat Kleitos…
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Though it COULD mean I can keep the palace without sacrificing millions.
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I understand the standard of the natural sciences. But what about the standards of mathematics, social sciences and cultural sciences?
Also, are there things like banks and traders? what is the currency like? Do you have promissory note and Bill of Exchange and book settlements and credit creation?
Any details on the language of this game world?
What is the extent and format of documentation within the Imperial bureaucracy? I think it will be a small but important matter.
How is the availability of clean water and sanitation in the empire? Also what are they like?
To what extent can the national statistical system develop, including the development of a telone tax collector system? (For example, is it possible to do something like a census?)
Also, I heard that it is possible to publish a newspaper, but what kind of content can it be?
What entertainment is there in the empire and other countries?
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Does the loop need to be closed for a ward to work or can it be built in a line?
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Just kidding everyone, I’m wrong about that being part of the ward. Although maybe there are other fun implications of that. But Horion is pretty explicit that they just break up normal rocks on the other side of ward to extend it.
Horion does say the ward wouldn’t work until they finished it and connected it back up with the rest of the wall. I’m gonna bet that means it must be a completed loop, especially since it “seems” to extend infinitely deep and high.
My theory is now that the Wards are actually just a small scale version of whatever passes for the barrier between Heaven and Earth in Aristotelian cosmology. No, I can’t explain further that would require understanding Aristotelian cosmology.
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