If the census were perfectly accurate and reaches the center in that state, yes. In fact it is not, while they are likely a bit better than the Hegemony Hallassur probably has no more of an exact population count or accurate census than the Hegemony does. In the East the Hallasurq authorities are likely a lot more lax so families of sufficient means or standing can probably bribe them quite easily and that is just for starters.
That’s where you are wrong, it is, harrowing babies or (very young) children is far more efficient than harrowing adults, ludicrously so. The 4.5 million adult helots the hegemony harrows annually could be replaced by between 50-75000 babies and it is also undeniably more efficient in quicksilver. So Hallassur has a frighteningly more efficient system here, unfortunately centuries of Hegemony propoganda means we cannot just switch to it as Hallassur has built up their own institutions that enable this kind of sacrifice without widespread revolts have been similarly built up over centuries in opposition to that very same Hegemony.
It also allows Hallassur to apparently get by without needing a slave caste. Albeit at the cost of gender and gay inequality.
In fact their much more efficient system increasingly leaves me to think that if we want to abolish the nightmare caste system a Hallasurq century (or two) may be an unavoidable consequence of that as self-sacrifice theurge plus blood tax plus whatever theurge counters we can get like air rifles would still at best allow us to play defense to the sheer efficiency advantage the Hallasurqs have created for themselves here…it will probably require the second industrial revolution and commensurate advancement of non-magic tech to somewhat balance the scales again.
That makes sense. Honestly, I know it’s for religious reasons but sacrificing first born sons systematically is perhaps not very smart. Like, a lot of people throughout most of history have had very large families and kept several generations together because it was necessary to have many children to work the farms. Two people can’t really produce enough food on their own. So if you have people trying to branch out and start new homesteads, having to wait nine months for a kid, then losing them, then having to wait for the mother to recover, then wait ANOTHER 9 months could be a serious detriment.
I imagine that the firstborn son was chosen BECAUSE it’s such a great sacrifice, iirc some cultures like Carthage did this during emergencies, but I don’t believe it’s the most practical harrowing process.
As someone that recently read Choice of Rebels and Stormwright, and has little to no clue what 90% of the discussions mean only to randomly nod slowly when someone goes " slavery bad" lol ( tho i can blame my own ignorance for that), I’m suprised by how much thought people and the author gave to this world and the repercussions of everything basically: the Harrowings, our revolution; maps; lore; political views etc.
It slightly hurts my brain, since the game and the discussions can get a bit too “heavy” for a dumbass like me who honestly never thought about what could happen if the revolution is successfull lol
I guess i’ve always been a bit too narrow minded and for me all consequences are forgotten when there’s a system that thrives on the sacrifices of millions and I can do something about it. That doesn’t really help my MC get along with characters that have different ideologies, to the point of being openly hostile, but it is what it is lol
Right, jumping back a couple of weeks to catch up on questions asked:
No. Given even a few seconds to react, Carles invariably sacrifices himself to save you, whether you’re a noble or helot kid. But if Gellard has instantly recognized you as a helot before Carles has the chance to distract him (because you’d drawn Gellard’s stare earlier with your singing), then Gellard will sic the other Alastors on you at once, for reasons Azthyme unpacked upthread. Carles will sacrifice himself to pull Gellard’s attention from any kid… but he’ll duck out and save himself if there’s no chance to do that and it looks like the kid is already about to be caught and killed.
Teren would think it was understandable but ultimately unfeasible.
They’re strong believers in noble privilege, and abhor the idea of making commoners into nobles; but you could readily convince many of them that the institution of helotry is a Karagond abomination and that a non-chattel peasantry is the authentic Shayardene way to organize the lower orders. As for who to Harrow, they’d be up for considering a range of options as long as it’s never, never them. If there’s a lottery, true nobles’ names had better not be in it. If they thought it was possible to run the system off foreigners, most of them would be happy with that.
No, no no. “Responsible for” like Janet Yellen (rather than Alexander Hamilton) is responsible for the US Treasury Department. Ocharsis is around one century old, and has overseen the (nearly 400 years old) Lykeion for the past forty years.
At present, I’m debating whether it will be possible to end G4 with even one of them still alive (not counting Sarcifer). If so, she’d be an absolutely relentless G5 adversary, not a possible ally or servitor.
A few, no doubt, but not enough to significantly sap the strength of the Qasqer Zhüj nomad faction. That doesn’t mean that wiping out or marginalizing them would be the only options; many MCs would consider it quite useful to have a strong force causing problems for the rump Thaumatarchy(ies) in the north, and will be more interested in coordinating with the Zhüj than breaking them.
Search through G1 Ch1 (chirex.txt) for some other examples. It was the Pelematou who killed Olen Stonehewer. Even more than the casual cruelties of the Keriatou, the Pelematou have a reputation for brutality to their helots; as Breden says down one conversation path, “every day, we fear that someone we care for will fall afoul of Lady Pelematou’s temper.” They’re Loyalists with strong links to the Mourinatou of Rimmersford, the great House that will be doing the most to push back your revolt in the more populous and economically developed areas of the Rim.
That’s going to be an emergent feature of the endgame. You’ll certainly have much better odds if you’re trying for Earlund or Rim-plus-upper-SR than you will with the whole of historical Shayard, but at this point I can’t say how much better.
The Hector you get to see on the “summer of love” flashback is still one who’s otherwise always been an insecure jerk to you, but at once point opened up enough to share his greatest vulnerability with the MC: the humiliation and shame he’s made to feel when he leaves the Outer Rim and engages with the nobility of Grand Shayard. The MC then goes on to become an unequalled source of new shame for the Keriatou.
Hector will respond to that with fury and violence no matter what; the idea that rebellion must be answered with disproportionate terror makes every bit as much sense to him as it did to the Romans. But believe me, he’ll be seething 100 times as fiercely about a lowly cousin who betrayed the Keriatou despite Hector’s having once made himself uniquely vulnerable to her/him.
Not quite. The drudges are the non-free urban class – essentially, helots who serve as factory workers or house slaves rather than plantation workers. The free urban poor are the ones who would be ferociously opposed to any system that took away their exemption from Harrowing, since that’s just about the only privilege society affords them. Teren would probably look for a combination of repression and bread-and-circus bribes to bring the urban poor into compliance with a lottery system.
Opportunities based on taking away and redistributing the property of the wealthy? Oddly, socially privileged people tend to respond to that kind of suggestion from high-CHA reformers with intensified fear and rejection, rather than being won over. Teren would tell you that it’s a dead end because you’ll never sway a significant fraction of the nobility with that approach.
Uniting the nobility against foreigners (especially Karagonds, Abhumans, and Halassurqs) is a much more fruitful possibility, and may even be part of the only strategy that could lead to a tentative Laconnier-Leaguer rapprochement – but still, if you combined it with big promises to the helots, you’d lose a lot of the nobles again. Teren would point out that if you promised every freed helot a few acres of Karagond land, when your war against Karagon stalled out (like the paradigmatic war of everyone’s experience has) the helots would probably start demanding land a lot closer to home.
As you’ve guessed, “Do it but don’t let people see you doing it,” would be Teren’s natural response. “If you can find a way to Harrow far fewer of your population, most of them won’t even want to take off the blindfold to see how you’re actually doing it. Just keep it at a deniable scale, and even if some people try to condemn you for it, their neighbors will shout them down and punish them instead of you.” Much the kind of thing that @idonotlikeusernames has in mind, with a similar irritation that people’s moral qualms make it impossible to do it openly at larger scale.
Jev would be deeply saddened if the only way to keep the Qasqer Zhüj at bay was to strangle Nyrish nomadic pastoralism through sedentarization policies. Force o to pick, and o will pick the cities; but o will look for any reasonable alternative first.
Buried deep in the WIP thread, I shared a (very) little about the chronology involved here. This followed on from a question about the Leilatou archons, where I mentioned that Meletos was followed by his sister “Loudthroatclearingnoise Leilatou,” before Phrygia took power. In a similar vein:
So yes, Meletos was an active Loyalist in the Westriding during and after Cabel’s Revolt; but his actions during the Revolt didn’t immediately win him the Archonate.
Those are absolutely going to be possibilities – but there will also be ways for you to win/keep their allegiance even if you start making decisions that tend against their old loyalties. A dramatic break with Cabel will lose you Bethune, but in a tense relationship, she might well stick with you.
I don’t think you’ll meet Zebed again, no.
The MC can have religious experiences that they take to be revelations, yes – but those will come to an MC who’s looking for them and wants to have them, not to a skeptic, and they’ll never take an entirely unambiguous form. There will never be hard sensory proof, no golden tablets handed by an angel to the prophet; whether or not any real-world founders had an experience quite that unambiguous, it’s not going to be one on offer to the MC here.
I’m also not convinced that INT is a vital stat for religious founders. The intellectual elaboration of religious doctrine often comes later, as high-INT disciples start interpreting the teachings of the master. As a purely historical matter, we don’t really know how much of the nuance or intellectual coherence in the Pali Canon goes all the way back to Gautama and his immediate followers, and how much is the fruit of subsequent generations who contributed to its final written form.
Some religious founders may well have been high-intellect reasoners – please don’t take my use of Buddha as an example of CHA 6 to imply a claim that he was INT 0 or INT 1, I don’t mean to import that game mechanic into the real world! But regardless, I don’t think that was the heart of the founders’ success. You don’t need to be an intellectual to have profound insights into the human condition, or to express those and live them out in ways that attract disciples. If your charisma is powerful enough, those disciples will do the job of working out nuanced intellectual systems around your core insights (however nuanced and intellectual your original articulations may or may not have been).
Exactly the same from a doctrine perspective, sure – a 2-CHA MC can found a religion of kenon or the inner Angelic voice in Game 1. And the fact that, with that CHA level, the MC’s teachings won’t sweep the continent doesn’t make those teachings wrong.
Damn. I wish I’d thought of that line first.
I’ve said above that I’m not going to share too much about them now, since I’m writing them in the rest of G2 and want to see how they take shape. Sorry!
Which brings us back to @comradelenin’s question on compliance in Halassur. Here’s what I’d written upthread on that:
This too will get unpacked in Chs 3 and 4, for MCs who spend their time with Erjan and his sister Dilek. But it’s not actually that hard to cover up noncompliance; who’s to say that this particular surviving child is your firstborn? Regular readers of this thread are probably sick of hearing me talk about state capacity, so I’ll just confirm that the Halassurq state doesn’t have a history-defyingly good census bureau or the capacity to track all births and deaths in its jurisdiction. People’s neighbors are the ones most likely to have a good idea of whether a couple’s pregnancy is their first one, or whether one of the reasons for exemption really does apply to them; and those neighbors are a lot more likely to be attentive (and punitive, for evaders) if their village lives under a constant threat for which blood-fuelled magic is the only defense.
Big families are entirely compatible with babies dying – in fact, they’re causally linked. Birth rates tend to stay high as long as child mortality rates do, and begin to drop soon afterward, not because farms have become less labor-intensive, but because farmers have more confidence that the kids they do have are going to survive long enough to look after them in their old age.
In a world of high child mortality, it’s not clear that practices of child sacrifice move the needle all that much; there’s no sign that Carthage had demographic problems, even though child sacrifice seems to have been very commonplace there, not just during emergencies. In the gameworld, where blood harvesting leads directly to reduced overall child mortality, I don’t think there’s any utilitarian reason to forgo child sacrifice. The only reason would be ethical abhorrence at taking entirely innocent life.
The discussions can definitely be heavy. I’ll try to work those into the game at a somewhat more manageable level; we’re talking here about things that will unfold over four long books. Glad you’re sticking with it.
Do you think you’ve made child-sacrifice too compelling? Because, to be entirely honest, a system of global firstborn sacrifice, perhaps capped by some kind of quota/lottery, seems infinitely more moral than keeping a slave caste as livestock. Especially when you consider how massively efficient child sacrifice is compared to adults, the only reason to disdain child sacrifice as a replacement for helotry is if you think the life of a child is more than a hundred times more valuable than the life of an adult slave (I don’t). I’m not sure if you mean the Hallasurq solution to seem this obviously correct though, if one takes total abolition off the table for “total economic and societal collapse” reasons, it seems a bit harsh for what I know about you.
Soo, ironically that means the making peace and keeping it (for decades) with Hallassur option, even if that means sharing ward tech, might induce something similar to post cold-war mandatory draft fatigue in lots of European nations? It seems to me that this whole make them complacent with diplomacy, trade and friendship, which might make their own population less compliant with the institution that relied on opposition to a mortal enemy, instead of a mildly friendly power they have the occasional minor dispute with in combination with a possible second industrial revolution would then be needed to make the times change again and end the era of unquestioned Hallasurq dominance. The slow ones now will later be fast from this song may be a particularly apt bit for the dormant potential of the western option in a second industrial revolution.
The conclusion my mc will inevitably reach, still that won’t move the needle on much of the population’s moral qualms any time soon. So he’ll still be limited to anywhere from a couple hundred to the low thousands at best of foundlings and camp/prison born babies and some kids from occupied Karagon…i.e. the kinds of kids nobody in any position of influence much cares about anyway “mysteriously disappearing” per year, in addition to the blood tax to fuel whatever magic we need that cannot be done through self-sacrifice alone.
Fortunately within reasonable bounds this is also true:
As for the rest and why we will likely not match Halassur again (without a second industrial revolution at least, so any time soon):
You don’t, my mc being or having been a part of that slave caste and not being religious does not. However for the “free” people of the Hegemony one of their children is likely worth a thousand helots, with that view being espoused and legitimized by the sacred Karagond codex and the nightmare religion with its caste system. The biggest reason why my mc wants only lawful religions on the free religious market, which means only significantly reformed Xthonicism that distances itself from the Karagond codex completely would be legally allowed.
Furthermore, considering the fact that current Karagond culture is descended from something close to our Spartans, being particularly vile as far as our ancient cultures go. Fortunately they never had the capacity for industrial scale warfare. So indeed expect a Morgenthau esque plan and significant de-Karagondization for any part(s) of Karagon my mc’s state controls. They are even likely to be exempt from the (Nepalese type of) democratic experiment in favour of a more direct occupational/colonial type of government, thus occupying a unique position in the federal government, more a territory than a legit province.
Well if my mc pursues the Western option and wants that two ocean state in the West, which makes it easier to be somewhat friendly with Halassur (provided they keep their word on non-slavery in any former Hegemony territories they annex in exchange for that ward tech) since we will not directly border them, the northern parts of Nyral, even if we cannot control them directly, would be seen by my mc as his back yard. And while it may not be immediate if and when the situation stabilizes particularly if my mc’s state creeps gradually further north over the decades the pastoralists nomads would be increasingly hemmed in thus making it ever more attractive to encourage them to join their cousins in the cities or start their own farming communities with the ultimate holdouts possibly receiving the treatment of being put into reservations on the worst bits of land left.
It’s possible… but the child sacrifice option is also a bit of a trap, one which I think can never be nearly as appealing in practice as it seems on paper. (Like many grimly utilitarian thought experiments.)
Because we tend to value our own children at such a visceral, fundamental level, a utilitarian child sacrifice system trends toward an other-people’s-kids-sacrifice-system, and thus toward some version of slavery, genocide, or both. We could debate at what point harvesting a given number of slave babies becomes morally preferable to harvesting a bigger number of slave adults, but I think this is where utilitarian moral reasoning goes off the rails, discounting the fact that all the outcomes it’s weighing are intolerable. The idea that we could escape this by coming up with an impartial selection mechanism (one which everyone would end up accepting – one which didn’t lead to the baby harvest repressively targeting a social underclass) strikes me as an illusion, the hubris of the social engineer.
As will become clearer in later chapters and games, Halassur’s extraordinary set of social institutions has only been sustainable (with many adaptations and shifts as particular iterations became intolerable) because the nation is under constant threat from a vampiric genocidal invader. If child sacrifice were less temptingly potent, or if Halassur weren’t under attack, the institution would have collapsed or been reinterpreted out of existence long ago.
Meanwhile, child sacrifice and slavery aren’t the only blood economy options – just the easy ones. For all that I’ve written above about the impossibility of immediately getting to a blood tax system that reaches >50% of the population and allows a costless unwinding of the Hegemony’s excesses, every reader of this story is going to be aware that mass taxation is an entirely achievable social goal, not some crazy utopia. Players willing to invest in a smaller realm and forgo salvific imperial dreams will be able to make major strides toward that goal. Players who dream of saving the whole world by imposing a child sacrifice scheme will I think find the outcomes unsatisfactory.
I don’t want to write a story where there’s a simple moral “out” and only people who want to roleplay monsters would continue lethal blood harvesting of one kind or another. I don’t think that’s an adequate parallel to the real-world dynamics for which the blood economy is a crude metaphor. The road to a political/economic system that doesn’t rest on sacrificing an oppressed underclass isn’t a simple or costless one in our world, either. But that doesn’t mean it’s unthinkably utopian or preferable to the systems of exploitation that come more readily to hand.
Having said all that… I might still come back in a few months and say, “Actually, Harrowing babies only yields half as much as I told you back in 2023.” But at this point, I don’t think a shift like that would affect the dynamics and dilemmas at stake all that much.
I was hoping that might be the case, especially if laced with a healthy dose of MC-inspired religious nationalism (Homelander Eclects can already have some very Shayard-centric idea about the Angels and how much they love his/her homeland).
Would dissolving the Hegemonic state and transforming it to a society like the Abhumans (ie anarchic) be feasibly possible, or would it only be possible on a smaller scale, like just Shayard.
@Havenstone What’s the Rim Square population? I just realized that ~300 helots that we take from there in a scenario of successful uprising feels like a really low number, considering that we empty all helot camps from there?
My intuition has matched @apple’s as to thinking child sacrifice has been overtuned for Halassur’s policies to ‘make (utilitarian) sense’, but I am comforted by the nuance at play here. In particular, the rejection of the idea of “saving the whole world by imposing a child sacrifice scheme” — and it’s that phrase, “saving the whole world” that I find fascinating with respect to the story as a whole.
The world here is broken; or, at least, the Thaumatarchy broke it. Not just through transmuting lives into economic fuel, but in Hera’s dream of Hegemony over all the world. That lies at the foundation for our current setting, and those sacrificed lives are almost like a cosmic debt that’s coming due in this story — a debt accumulated when the crops were watered in blood, that’s paid in starvation, war, suffering, and death. It poses a dilemma for those who’d find those consequences intolerable.
And it doesn’t seem like we can save the whole world. Not in that single lifetime (maybe not even one that lasts for two centuries), not with the power even a single movement can muster. That all we can do is save who we can, and that doesn’t mean everybody. After all, even “major strides in a smaller realm” exclude, for now, those suffering injustices in another realm. Or, perhaps, excluding those starving in another realm. It’s only just… setting the world on a better course. I rather like that aesthetic, if it is what’s ahead — it’s bleak, admittedly, but realistically hopeful.
But it does foreshadow what I’m already seeing as fault lines within the community; between imperial-scale solutions and local/regional-scale; between conquerors and consolidators. I don’t have a third fault line to complete the tricolon.
I don’t know if it’s intentional, but to me the idea that children naturally have more aether within them fits naturally into the symbolism of the world. Aether is the catalyst for Change and a doorway to seemingly infinite possibilities, rendering once-stagnant concepts malleable: these are all traits associated with childhood and coming-of-age. As far as the World is concerned, this is good — it’s only when Harrowing emerges that this turns into a nightmare. It’s just another way that Hera broke the world.
Essentially, the numbers may be overtuned for my taste, but I can sense the aesthetics.
It’s worth remembering what M’kyar says about Seracca history: “Of course you are capable. You are spirits in motion; any change we have learned, you may learn. But the Seracca fought among ourselves for an age before settling into the ways of today. No one wishes to see the udud of the Hegemony repeat those wars, with a far greater populace, and starting from an even uglier culture.”
The Seracca are the legacy of a thousand years of learning, and maybe even longer — but the path there was drenched in blood, and probably longer than a lifetime. I think it’s likely that the world after the Thaumatarchy falls will be rather like that age of war and conflict. And if knowledge of Theurgy becomes widespread; well, in that world, frankly anyone could be a living bomb. It’s a world that would demand a renegotiation of how power is wielded, and I don’t know how far we’d be able to go. But I imagine we’d still be able to hold onto that hope and that vision to the end.
But, of course, only @Havenstone can really comment on practical specifics.
this sounds bad but could we have idk breeding farms(idk a better name for it). But where females can volunteer to have a child and give them up for a compensation? Like we’ll take of your family for a set whatever time or tax break ect.
One of the most thought-provoking university courses I took (along with Adam from CoG, as it happens) was on “tragic choices”: situations where societies have to decide on an allocation mechanism for scarce goods with life-and-death stakes. The course’s core text explored among other things the way we select people for military service – and noted that over the course of the 20th century, the US changed its process several times, because the costs of any particular way of choosing who was going to die for their country became hard to bear when our faces were rubbed in it for too long. My vision for Halassur is similar; because IMO there ultimately is no humanly tolerable mechanism for mass-scale harvesting of babies, the Halassurqs have gone through multiple variations of allocation mechanism, and would find it hard to sustain any large-scale mechanism if the western invader ceased to be a pressing threat.
The transition from an overpopulated authoritarian empire to a non-state society would be incredibly bloody and costly, and is I think only likely to work in areas where the geography is less suited to large-scale, centralized agriculture – otherwise you’ll get warlords turning themselves into micro-states again, trying to recapture the glory of the old empire like we saw in Europe post-Rome. You might be able to forge a non-state society across much of the Rim, except (probably) its agricultural heartland.
Only about 2,000 people, the majority of whom are households of retainers on the noble estates. In addition to 300-odd helots, another 230-ish are local town-yeoman households with small farms the local nobles haven’t gobbled up yet, and around 160 come from trader/artisan households. The permanently resident aristoi themselves come to barely 40 people, though the frequent long visits from lowland cousins make for a noble community that might comprise 60-100 people at any given time. When the drovers come back off the Brecks every year, the town temporarily grows by a few hundred people and many thousand sheep.
It’s definitely odd for a district seat to be in such a small and remote town (and that’s a big part of why Hector and Calea get mocked so much when they go to Rimmersford or Shayard City). The Outer Rim has around 107,000 people all told, and most of that population is based in lowland farm country downriver or northeast of Rim Square. Those placid eastern lowlands (bordering on the even richer farmland around Darridge in the Rimhart) have much bigger helot populations on their plantations, much bigger Alastor garrisons to control them, and only a handful of big families like the Pelematou or Keriatou owning most of the land.
As we’ll learn more in Chs 3-4 and Game 3, Stilos Keriatou won the aristarchate of the Outer Rim by being the first major-family patriarch who was willing to base himself on the troubled fringes of the district, on the verge of the Whendward Hills, rather than in his traditional grand family estate in the lowlands.
25-30 years ago, the Whendward bandits were more actively predatory all along the fringes of the Outer Rim. The aristarchs of that time (living mostly in Rimmersford, with visits to their lowland estates) repeatedly failed to stem the problem; their campaigns to restore order were easily avoided by the bandits who would fall back into the woods and reemerge once the aristarchs left. Petty gentry like Memnon de Merre whose land was under permanent threat began organizing self-defense networks and appealing loudly for more effective support. (The noble MC’s grandmother was part of that movement, while her siblings escaped to the Westriding.)
Young lord Stilos Keriatou won the allegiance of this network when he moved his family out to the most remote bit of his patrimony, in the drove road terminus of Rim Square, and began actively pacifying the region. Over a few years of constant pressure and “veneur-style” bandit hunting, Stilos and his allies reduced the bandits to a demoralized huddle in the far wilds, and even reopened the Whendward Pass for a few years (until it became clear that almost no one wanted to use it to get to Szeric anyway, and it lapsed back into de facto bandit control).
The newly elevated Archon Meletos was pleased (especially since it meant he didn’t have to go through the costly and unpopular process of re-basing a Phalangite tourma in the Rim to address the problem). Since he didn’t have patronage ties to any other House in the Outer Rim, he was happy to give Stilos the aristarchate.
One of the reasons the late Lord Pelematou was such a bitter, hateful man – to his family as well as his helots – was his lasting resentment that the Keriatou had forced him to move out beyond the acceptable fringes of civilization in order to sustain his ambitions of regaining the aristarchate for his House.
It’s absolutely intentional, and I’m glad that resonates. Having it be greater by a factor of nearly ten at birth, falling quickly to five and then three as more of the child’s potency becomes actual, feels consistent with the world to me – it’s not just a high number to keep Halassur competitive with the Hegemony in blood phials.
I’m on the record as a real-world member of a “save the world” movement whose founder was described as rejecting both imperial power and liberationist revolt, and instead opted to start a small transformational community, telling his followers that the goal was to be like leaven spreading through a loaf. That was how to set the world on a better course; the idea wasn’t to give up on saving the world, but to recognize that it was going to take a loooooong time, and that the more shortcuts we tried to take, the more we would end up as part of the problem.
Now, from that founder’s unceremonious execution until the present day, his strategy has seemed obviously inadequate and unjust to many people (including many, many Christians). Especially given that the community he founded didn’t generally center political or economic justice as one of its primary features.
In XoR, I don’t want to neglect the moral appeal of liberating conquest, or the moral cost of leaving people to suffer injustice just outside your borders. The choice to make an exemplary realm on a smaller scale, in the hopes that its success will ultimately transform the wider world more effectively than direct conquest and empire-building, isn’t obviously the morally or strategically preferable one. But I want at least to write a world where it’s not obviously the wrong one. (And where the choice to forgo kingdom-building at all, in favor of joining a pacifist movement whose goal is to “leaven” society without violence over the long haul, is also available – reflecting the choice of the rebel to whom I personally owe allegiance.)
You could pay people generously to give you their unwanted babies. But remember that because of the existence of mullow, there are a lot fewer of those in the Hegemony than there are in our world. So for example, brothels aren’t associated with frequent pregnancy and higher levels of infant exposure, like they were in much of the Mediterranean world historically. Given that, plus the high levels of abhorrence for child-killing built into the society, I don’t think you’d get a lot of take-up for a scheme where you offered huge amounts of silver for babies to kill – and it would crash your legitimacy pretty hard.
Vigil is not accepting new applications to join at present.
Given even a few seconds to react, Carles invariably sacrifices himself to save you, whether you’re a noble or helot kid. But if Gellard has instantly recognized you as a helot before Carles has the chance to distract him (because you’d drawn Gellard’s stare earlier with your singing), then Gellard will sic the other Alastors on you at once, 
this sounds bad but could we have idk breeding farms(idk a better name for it). But where females can volunteer to have a child and give them up for a compensation? Like we’ll take of your family for a set whatever time or tax break ect.