Well, at least someone has been thinking about this for a long time in the game world. Hopefully he’ll have some ideas about what can be done.
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Take the distant continents right off the table – the only way they’d ever show up in game is in a G5 epilogue where you abandon the utter chaos of your home continent and join some Qalsa explorers to go find a new world. I’m afraid the only area in your known world with a sizeable food surplus following a Hegemonic collapse, other than Shayard, will be Halassur.
This is to some extent going to happen no matter what…but without Theurgic military support, these human waves would before long be mopped up and seve as large-scale fuel for Halassurq reprisals.
Giving the foragers/refugees military support – trying to launch a full-on invasion of Halassur from your failing empire as the Wards fall – will be an option. I’ve always said that throwing the starving masses into a scaled-up war will be one (horrific) way to deal with the crises of Hegemonic collapse.
But even for a COM 6 MC, that war can’t end with the conquest of Halassur – the empire is much too big for that, and your capacity to govern the hostile territory you conquer too limited. Meawhile, the more effort and resources you throw into prosecuting a war in the east, the likelier it is that the west will fragment behind you. You’d probably end up with your capital in Moncesano, ruling a crusader state that includes a newly annexed chunk of Halassur, but with limited (at best) control of lands west of Avezia.
Most Nyr would sooner consider an unarmed invasion of Shayard or Karagon than move onto land exposed to the Dead. And Ghaesh isn’t going to make a deal with you to encourage settlement in his neighborhood; he prefers his hinterland to be sparsely populated, not intensively settled and cultivated.
You’re correct. It’s not even close. As ever, the numbers I’m about to share are subject to change until publication… but here’s how things are looking on the current world model.
If you want to push your crops to full growth over the course of one week (which is how the ever-busy Theurges do it), getting one extra grain harvest using non-lethal Theurgy would require either 23 alchemically processed blood donations or the sustained attention of 7-9 self-cutting magi per hectare (an average small yeoman farm would generally be around two hectares).
For those 7-9 magi, the week’s intensive effort would push their aether levels low enough to have them falling unconscious if they tried to use Theurgy in the two months after that, or for anything moderately substantial in months 3 or 4. Depending on the land quality, the yield from their week’s effort would feed an additional 2-8 people for the year.
Local self-sacrifice Theurges would probably mostly choose to apply their power more gently over an eight-month period, speeding two grain harvests by boosting the plants just a bit each day. During that time, they’d still be able to spend blood on some other small-to-moderate stuff, or on somewhat more costly Changes if they were ready to accept a delay in the harvest. The ultimate outcome is the same whether you do it over a week or a full growing season – 7-9 local magi producing a year’s bonus grain for 2-8 people – but the latter approach doesn’t leave you with so many months where you can’t use your Theurgy for emergencies.
As this illustrration suggests, while “organic Theurgy” can marginally increase production by farmer-mages, the industrial agriculture that has boosted the Hegemony’s population by producing massive surpluses relies on using aether in greater quantities than self-sacrifice Theurgy can really muster. Even if you set loose a million or two trained Diakons on the best farmland in the Hegemony, they would at present be lucky to produce enough extra grain to feed just themselves, let alone millions of other hungry people. You’d need to explore other improvements to significantly increase average yields per hectare in the Hegemony (as the Diadoch is currently doing), not just mass education and dissemination of the Theurgic secret, before self-fuelled Theurgy could add enough grain to support urbanization and populations at anything remotely close to the current Hegemonic scale.
[Edit: worth noting that this is why the Abhumans won’t just shrug off the loss of the Hegemonic grain trade and just call up their own wheat fields. The self-sacrifice Theurgy they practice is good for lots of things, but large-scale agriculture isn’t one of its strong suits.]
What about donations? If you had a “blood tax” system where everyone was drained 9 times a year (the maximum that allows them to still be good for other work), you’d need to perfectly tax at least 52m adults to magick up enough extra grain to feed all 50m potentially starving people in the nightmare scenario. (Children’s extra aether is in their brains rather than their literal blood, and the low volume and increased risk of bleeding kids means that you should expect your tax system to focus on people over the age of, say, 13.) The total population above age 13 in Shayard is around 40m. And taxing a large-scale population isn’t remotely as simple as it may seem to us heirs of centuries of state formation, especially in a sprawling empire with low literacy.
The Hegemony is currently struggling to render its aristocratic and merchant population fully legible to taxation (combined total: 7.8m people over age 13). Throw in other relatively easily blood-taxable groups like the households of priests, Alastors, and conscripts, and Hegemony-wide, that gets you to about 20m people of taxable age. So the only way to tax enough people to fully feed the whole empire would be to extend the capacity of the state into the least state-legible social classes to a greater degree than any contemporary gameworld nation.
As I’ve noted before, that’s going to be hard to pull off in an imperial collapse, even for a low-anarchy player. And logistically, a system that has to take and process around 500m donations per year is a lot more challenging than one that has to carry out 3.6m executions a year. It will also be even more decentralized than the current system, multiplying opportunities for skimming off aetherial blood.
Yes, it’s possible to declare a state monopoly as a way of increasing money for your regime. There is no tobacco in the gameworld, but the others would be possible.
Theurges have developed various tools that let them make accurate maps based on aerial surveys. They’re trying to regularize land records on that basis – a slow and costly process, as we’ll see in the upcoming chapter.
Yes, it would be possible for an MC to order the printing and public dissemination of maps and the limited amount you know about your population, as well as your own plans and whatever accounts you manage to produce. But I can’t emphasize enough that early modern states had significantly less statistical capacity than even the world’s least developed states do today. You won’t have a lot of national statistics to share; and no province, let alone the whole empire, has ever had what we’d recognize as a national budget.
The Thaumatarchy invests a lot in its spies – mostly internal, but also in foreign lands. This is an area where it’s unllikely that you’ll be able to match, let alone improve upon, the empire you’re destroying; intelligence networks are hard to restore during/after a period of institutional upheaval and widespread anarchy.
He will – and also on what can’t be done or shouldn’t be tried. Him and the Diadoch both. How many of their ideas you’ll agree with, we’ll see in G3-G4.
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Hang on a minute! Cerlota just showed us how to refine aetherial blood from self-sacrifice. That’s military grade meth. She said the logic of the diadem was for combat theurgy when cut off from regular logistics. Surely this changes your math. She’s conjuring xaos storms and military theurges are flinging fireballs with that homebrew.
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Military-grade but not USDA farm-grade. 
Getting 2-3 million plants to grow properly at the same time takes more blood than making a vitriol phial go boom (or unlocking meta-teloi enough to cascade into a small-scale Xaos-storm). If Cerlota had had 21 more people to work with, she’d have been able to cook enough meth to make a hectare bloom.
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I still can’t reconcile these two things. Its only 14% more expensive to run the entire Hegemony’s agricultural system than it is to run its war machine. A theurge a week in combat should only be roughly half again as expensive as a week maturing crops.
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I wonder how many people in the regime are aware of the pending agricultural crisis. Do all the Enearchs know or was it just Sarcifer? I guess it would make sense to keep this information really hush hush even in the top echelons of power because it’s the kind of thing that causes the elite to lose faith in the regime, and that elite loss of faith (as seen with an Enearch and a 3rd circle Theurge going rogue) seems like one of the things that will make its collapse inevitable.
Curious about the thaumatarch’s agenda as well since he seems to be at least aware enough of the problem with agriculture to have factored it into choosing his designated successor. Although, I guess it sounds like he may no longer have feelings the way most people understand them due to how much he’s modified himself.
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If we’re forming like, a decentralized federation, or Koinon, will that help with this (as in, preventing the nation from fracturing, obviously we have less direct power in that case)?
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Good to hear how this is sounding to one of the people who’s been most engaged in the tactical side. Here’s why I’ve been thinking that even though industrial agriculture is too expensive to be done effectively through self-fuelled Theurgy, the war on Halassur can still soak up nearly as much total blood. Basically, a military Theurge on the battlefront against Halassur is doing a lot of tasks that individually range from cheap to costly, blood-wise, with a total that comes to vastly more per day than any self-sacrifice Theurge could possibly manage.
Making vitriol explode is one of the cheaper tasks. Every military Theurge burns a lot of blood keeping themselves in the air, shielded at all times, and in trance to spot infiltrators and enemy magi. They carry supplies aerially to forts that may be cut off by road; they throw up temporary bridges and rafts to get their troops where they need to go. They demolish enemy fortifications and transport. They Theurgically heal the injured, and prevent plague and cholera from wiping out the troops. They burn blood to keep themselves and their troops going with no sleep and little food for weeks during a raid on the Halassurq side of the Ward. They’re the main force responsible for the army’s recon, and shock assault on entrenched positions, and artillery, and medics, and a meaningful share of frontline logistics.
And when they do find themselves in a mage-on-mage clash, they’ll be trying to conjure fireballs, uproot and hurl trees and boulders, set off earthquakes, and turn the air to jelly all at once, while also doing counter-Theurgy to stop the enemy from doing the same – shielding their own troops while crushing the other side’s.
The diadem stash of emergency pseudoephedrine alchemical stuff wouldn’t cover more than the rudiments of any of this. If you’re reduced to cooking your diadem, it’s because you’ve burned through the multiple bandoliers of highly concentrated blood that every military Theurge tries to have with them at all times. It’ll hopefully give you enough to heal a few survivors and fly you home… but it’s not a situation you want to find yourself in.
Naval Theurges famously spend blood like it’s water. Weather Theurgy is expensive, and much more so if you’re trying to do things fast and local (rather than, say, taking a week to call up a counter-prevailing wind to carry a convoy of 15-20 trade galleons westward). Naval magi often have to whistle up localized winds to move small numbers of ships in weird directions, or conjure instant fogs to conceal them. They also spend a lot to make canvas and wood non-flammable if enemy magi are anywhere in sight.
The 20,000-ish Theurges who support the agricultural economy are doing expensive but routine stuff. The 18,800 or so who are deployed with the military are going to be called upon to do a crazy variety of things that differ on a near-daily basis. They get a huge blood allocation to give them the scope to do whatever needs to be done. (And of course they still routinely complain that it’s not adequate.)
Does that ring any truer? Or still straining credibility?
All the Ennearchs are aware of the trends, but most of them would object to calling it a “pending crisis.” They don’t believe they’re anywhere close to a world where the Hegemony collapses and suddenly up to 50m people are starving. Many of them think they’re in a self-balancing system where if hunger makes more people inclined to revolt, that will just lead to more Harrowing, reduced population pressure, and greater Theurgic capacity to invest in extra harvests.
Most Ennearchs would still consider the Scouring after Cabel’s Revolt to be a long-term successful approach to retaining power (rather than bringing forward the moment of hunger crisis by permanently dropping average grain yields in the empire’s breadbasket). They would point to the greater intensification of agriculture in the Shayard Coast over the ensuing decades, making up (in their view) for the loss of capacity in the Westriding.
Sarcifer and Phaedrx are, by comparison, unusual pessimists, because they think the strains on the Hegemony are taking it toward crisis and breakdown. One is trying to facilitate that breakdown, the other to prevent it, but they share that much in common…
With a koinon you’re really talking multiple nations anyway – that system takes a fractured continent as a given, and tries to establish some limited order among its component nations. And even your indirect power within the koinon will go down if you’re mostly focused on conquests in the east.
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Ah. So what if the Federation option?
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Well with one indifferent and two/three? outright shit neighbours I hoped for some potential faraway friends. Ah well voyages of discovery to expand the trade network and maybe colonize have to be put off then. Still my mc will remain curious about the wider world. Does the Hegemony have any knowledge of those continents at all, or do they still assume the world is flat?
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Educated people have known the world was round for thousands of years. The Ptolemaic cosmology that it seems the philosophers of the setting adhere to sees the earth as round. It’s a sphere at the center of a series of spheres that revolve around it.
To take one example that often gets garbled regarding early modern/late medieval beliefs, the dispute Columbus had with his Spanish nay-sayers wasn’t regarding whether the earth was flat, but the distance of its circumference. He thought Asia was a lot closer to Europe than they did, and it turned out their estimate was better. There just happened to be another couple of continents between that they didn’t know about.
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If the blood economy really is all about war and agriculture, I don’t see any way outside of maintaining the Harrowing regime. It’s easy to talk about just letting it all go to hell but I am not sure any organised structure of government would survive the process of the world coming to balance with the new agricultural yields and even if the MC and their faction of choice refuse to use harrowing, others will certainly not be as hesitant.
If there is anything the Hegemony gets right, it is basing its calendar off Hera doing her thing. She certainly changed the world, in a way that cannot be undone without fucking over the peoples of the Hegemony potentially for hundreds of years into the future.
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Keeping it as is is also unsustainable mind. Theurgy can make crops grow instantly and produce countless harvests but soil still has finite nutrients. And I sincerely doubt they’re practicing proper crop rotation and soil cultivation. The farms are probably just using up the soil and expanding to fresh plots they buy up to drive up the profit while the old soil heals.
The sheer aggressiveness of the tilling required to harvest that grain is probably devastating the complex microbiomes in the soil that facilitate plant growth (a real life problem that’s the main reason for the push towards till-free farming methods, be they traditional like many Native American practices or modern advances). Frankly, I’d be shocked if most of the blood didn’t go towards making the soil usable at all.
A famine will definitely happen with a mass scale back in harrowing but if they keep it up much longer (iirc a few years), there will be an even LONGER famine.
This is exactly what happened with the slavery based cotton trade in the south USA. They were solely reliant on a single cash crop (and a very water intensive one at that, which exasperated the issue), and it was getting to the point where even if cotton remained profitable (which it didn’t before the cotton gin, and that boon to the economy wouldn’t last forever), they’d eventually be incapable of growing both it and actual food. Here, it’s even worse since food is also the unsustainable cash crop and we absolutely can’t afford to stop growing it entirely, unlike cotton. This is an irl ongoing problem but here it’s even worse.
Our only choices really are a large, devastating famine, or an even larger, Dust Bowl style famine except much worse. The scale back is actually the option that saves the most people.
Where’s Fritz Haber when you need him?
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That’s probably what Sarcifer and Phaedrx understand that the others don’t.
That’s part of why they felt they had to expand slavery and why Lincoln’s firm “no new slave states and no slavery in federal territories” line was anathema to them.
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I don’t think any semblance of order could survive in Shayard with tens of millions of people moving into it without some pretty horrific measures to either feed them or see them contained in the border regions.
Even if ~20 to 40 million dead ‘pay for themselves’ within a decade of harrowing coming to an end the sheer chaos (heh) this famine would cause would be enough to cripple Shayard and the other nations of the Hegemony for decades and this is being generous.
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Yeah but again, not a lot of options.
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Colour me as more confused. I can understand how blood agriculture is expensive and intensive, particularly since it doesn’t seem to be top of list for new breakthrough, and better understanding of something seems to make more things changeable but also easier to change with less. But man, the priority list for research is so weird.
Circumnavigate globe 
Birth control plant
Better healing herbs
Impenetrable walls
Printing press
Crop rotation 
Understanding soil health
New super corn
Tank dogs
Space program startup
Anti-ageing cream
I don’t see how the breakthroughs around healing herbs, mullow, Plektoi, and public health have occurred without someone taking an interest in crop quality and yield beyond what seems to currently be just speeding up the growth process over a week.
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What will it look like if we establish a nation in the greater Aveche region?
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The activities you describe sound highly plausible and represent most of the things we would want combat aircraft to accomplish wrt to land warfare. Maybe the one thing left unsaid was ISR, which is implied by the theurgic sensor, flying, and having eyeballs features
Maybe this is where I am missing the math, and it may tune down my galaxy brain moment. Is a phial of diadem brewed aether effectively the same as a phial of industrially extracted and refined blood from helot brains?
From a game one perspective you can do the same things (only not fall unconscious) with phial blood and sacrifice blood, but that could be chalked up to inexperience.
Also when you say
Can this be read the same as 23 harrower harvested blood phials?
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So does the Hegemony officially believe the world is round or is that yet another secret shared only among very select people?
Expanding on that even if (trade) relations with other powers and peoples overseas will never come soon enough to to significantly impact the immediate post-collapse famine they might still be worthwhile to pursue for other things, such as to enrich our culture, spread new ideas (which may help research, particularly of the non-theurgic kind) and hopefully introduce some more lawful religions to the marketplace.
Even if it will be a last in or even post epilogue goal. Success there may be the beginning of the true road to recovery and also signal that the era of isolationism of the Hegemony is well and truly over.
Probably not, donated blood is constantly said to be less effective/potent compared to the harrowed stuff, which in turn is less potent than extracting it from babies, like Halassur does. If efficiency is our foremost goal then Hallasur is the game to follow. As others already said, switching from the current harrowing of a slave caste to the Hallassur model would allow you to get by on 300k babies or so as opposed to 3.5 million adults and also allow for a system without a slave caste.
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