How does the idea of enforcing Logan’s Run method of harrowing via confiscation of inheritance for evading read? I was think this would be inherently progressive since lower orders wouldn’t have much inheritance, but would increase compliance since elites have the most to lose from evading the system. Also kind of hard to run your estate into the woods with you.
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Wonder what the Rim will be like? I guess we’ll find out soon.
Also I just look at the codes again and saw that this line “While most communities today have lost the old Shayardene custom of a village moot, in which all yeomen had equal voice” about the moot that made me wonder that if you aren’t a farmer or at least own a land, you can’t vote?
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In the context of presenting an alternative to Harrowing (or at least a critical supplement that reduces a state’s need to Harrow to less horrifying levels), what stage of usefulness (aka the ability to be mass produced at affordable cost) will Phaedra’s agricultural biotech research achieve by the time we reach G4/G5?
Could MC’s early decision (as early as G3) to ally with Phaedra play a part in speeding up said research’s progress?
Or, given your earlier mention about Phaedra’s reluctant willingness to potentially fall back on “the old system”, perhaps she’s not as confident (in her own research) as she claims to be?
Duly noted, so how about a compromise: the homesick majority gets to play Nereish home defense (and/or invasion of northern Rump Thaumatarchy(ies)) as desired, while a mere handful of the Zhuj’s best/brightest accompany MC to Erezza as elite bodyguards and/or military advisors?
Behold my new idea for Shayard’s post-Hegemonic national anthem, “Paris Holds the Key to Your Heart”-inspired musical number!
(I’ll find time later to post the actual parody singing, for now, we’ll settle for the lyrics, and I welcome everyone to go into karaoke mode!)
(Opening)
Comrades! Ha ha ha…
Welcome, brave souls, to Shayard!
Here, share a tale, on me.
Discard your sad past,
You’re in Shayard, here at last!
I’ll show you Shayardene… dreams come true!
(Verse 1)
Shayard holds the dreams in your heart,
And every rebel plays a part.
We’ll march and we’ll sing,
To Shayard, in its spring!
And soon all Shayard will be singing with pride!
Ha ha ha! Ha ha ha! Ha ha ha!
(Chorus 1)
Shayard grants the key to be free!
We’ll surely kick Kleitos’ heinie!
There’s fire in the air,
Freedom’s flare, we declare!
We’ll gamble, and shout ‘c’est la vie!’
Shayard holds the key to your heart!
(Bridge 1)
When you’re on the run,
Go find Laconniers.
When your heart says don’t,
Shayard says do!
When you think you can’t,
You’ll find that you can can!
Everyone can can can,
You can can can too!
(Verse 2)
Shayard holds the key to our past,
Olde Shayard, we’ve found you at last.
Down with Kleitos,
His oppression, it will end…
(Chorus 2)
Shayard holds the key
To your heart!
You’ll be so “très braves,”
Playing smart!
Come rally through the night,
Setting flames, hearts alight,
A city of might!
Where a dream takes its flight,
And we’ll toss Kleitos’ corpse off a cliff!
Shayard
Holds the key…
To our…
Heart!
Ha ha ha!
Ha ha ha!
(Back to our main, non-singing discussion) So Havie, what would Carles think of such lyrics? In addition to the earlier mentioned “Toss a Coin to Your Rebel,” would he gladly promote a “Shayard Holds the Key to Your Heart” musical number?
All the more reason for my Homelander Eclect MC to go to Wiendrj and shore up his Archimandrite (potential) ally over there! (while Bethune stays behind in Shayard in build/maintain the bridges between MC’s band and the Westriding).
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Wonder if our hands gaining a weapon telos in g1 means we could use plektosis to enhance that aspect.
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It would definitely raise compliance levels among the wealthy – though at extremely high cost to your support levels among every kind of (non-priestly) social elite, mercantile as well as noble.
In the swaths of Olde Shayarde where moots were commonplace, everyone in the villages would have farmed. There would have been hardly any full-time craftsfolk outside the (few, and small) cities. People who didn’t have a legal claim to a specific plot would have had a share of common land to cultivate, as well as working on others’ land. Moots would have included them all, though it would often have been the case that better-off landowning yeomen had more power in the moot than their landless sharecropping neighbors did.
As you revive moots, you’ll have the choice of whether you want only propertied free folk to have a decisive voice in their decisions.
That will significantly depend on how much time and how many Theurgic researchers she’s had to dedicate to it… which will depend on the state of anarchy throughout the Hegemony (and especially in Karagon, which you’ll be directly influencing by G3).
Generating a super-wheat that isn’t highly vulnerable to engineered super-blights is a major Theurgic research challenge. A 4-5 INT MC could actively contribute to Phaedra’s efforts… but without a guarantee that Phaedra would use it to prop up a realm whose institutions they’d approve of. There’s no way to hold Phaedra to any conditions you put on your G3/G4 assistance with her research.
Again, we’ll have to see when we get there whether this is really feasible.
Perma-enhancing the weapon-telos of your fists would come at the expense of their other teloi, like holding and crafting. The Hegemony wants its human Plektoi to be able to (among other things) deftly wield superweapons, so it doesn’t try to turn them into One-Punch Man.
And ADAT, @idonotlikeusernames joined the thread for the first time. 
He’s since been not just one of the most prolific posters, but one of the people with the most specific and consistent vision for his primary MC–one that countless other forumgoers have reacted to, and one that’s fed a host of interesting conversations. Thanks, idnlun!
Edit: d’oh! I see I confused the day with the year when I popped this one in the calendar. A Decade Ago on Wednesday, idnlun made his first post. Sorry to be late in recognizing it…
I’ve also taken the liberty of going back and adding a slightly expanded comment for P_Tigras to the second-ever ADAT shout-out on this thread. Seemed wrong to give paragraphs to the other forum regulars and just a name-check to him.
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What would that… look like? Fingers fusing together into like bone clubs or something?
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I’m thinking muscle-and-bone boxing gloves.
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I hope there’s an option to revive moots where only the nobility could vote, and that a single noble could veto anything if we can have liberum veto.
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The moot was a village institution for handling village affairs, not for handling noble-commoner relations. If a noble had been present, it wouldn’t have been a moot, it would have become an intersection between two different spheres of power; the noble wouldn’t have had power over the decisions of the moot, and the moot certainly wouldn’t have had power to oblige the noble to do anything.
Where moots survive today, that’s how they continue to operate. Under the Hegemony, “a single noble could veto anything,” in the sense that nothing forces a noble to respect the word of a moot, and nobles have substantial resources to persecute moot participants if they seem to be contributing to sedition or unrest. But of course that doesn’t mean that when the noble walks away, the village will honor the “veto” of the noble rather than their own collective decision. That will depend on how much actual repressive power they think the nobles are going to bring to bear in enforcing their diktat.
Post-rebellion, if you want the nobles to manage your districts through a council of aristoi, that’s really more of an adaptation of the aristarchate system, rather than the moot system. Telling the nobles that they were a “moot of aristoi,” applying peasant language to their system of power, would be both confusing and embarrassing.
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Would they be more amenable to being called an apella, as a theoretically more prestigious term?
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Absolutely.
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There’s a segue into something I’ve been meaning to ask/opine about:
Is your staff a walking stick or a weapon? There’s at least a chance you’ll get it through
This question posed right before we cross the Xaos-Ward in Chapter 4. By the time we start Chapter 5, we’ve gone in medias res to a Xaos-storm bearing down on us with nearly all of our supplies lost or destroyed, so it’s still somewhat ambiguous as to what the answer was, which does point towards an underlying question as to the nature of the world:
What imbues a thing with telos? When is it distinguished from its materials? Was that telos always there, waiting to emerge? When does a length of wood become a weapon? When does steel? Is it in the actions that follow its creation? Or in the creation itself? Both? Another choice? And are people any different?
These are not just metaphysical questions about the mechanisms of the world, but potentially practical given the nature of provincial capitals like Grand Shayard — cities, mercantile hubs, enveloped in the semipermeable membrane of their own Wards. While the fall of the Ward would offer an unparalleled opportunity to smuggle items in (and out, perhaps), a rebellion might be keen on finding out the limits to what can pass through unobstructed and then assembled into a new, dangerous form within the city limits.
My interpretation: Telos is acquired through techne — the craft — but living beings are unique by their ability to shape their own purpose through action (given initial premises that follow from form). Or we could say that purpose derives from the first motion that sets a thing into being, but that the purpose for life is the freedom to travel one’s own path. Consequently, Theurgy is a reflection of an innate power of all people: to be a Maker of Change, shaping and creating form and purpose. For this, we might borrow the idea of gnosis as an awareness of that power, something that the Thaumatarchy will stop at nothing to crush.
There are a number of potential edge cases that could help us decipher the mechanics of Ward-work, and in less interesting times I would happily puppet my rebel protagonist to experiment with how the Wards perceive “weaponry” to test that interpretation. Would a broken blade be permitted? A dull one? Could just the hilt make it across? How about an arrow without the arrowhead? A stone used to hurt, versus a similarly heavy or sharp stone? A melted blade, reforged into something mundane? A vial of poison? The bullets of a wind-spitter? Anyway, you get the point.
Would Irduin happen to be one such place? 
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This is so right. In some (most?) communist countries the illusion of availability was laughably transparent, to the point of satirical works mocking it being aired in public media without any issues. The actual “bread” was usually acquired outside of the illusory public means. Something interesting to note is the systemic intertia - the fact that there are still social services in post communist countries that are a holdover from the previous era and even though everyone works around them (e.g. uses private rather than public health care) no one would dare remove them.
“Under pressure” - did I miss something? There’s BB guns in XoRiverse? All humour aside, pneumatic firearms would actually be much harder to make in a late-medieval technology world (XoR is difficult to categorise in terms of technology, I get Roman empire vibes most often, sometimes medieval vibes). Firearms were actually around much earlier than people realise. I think 1300s in Europe (?), probably even earlier in the east.
I dig the idea of adjusting the “weapon telos” of ones fists at the cost of other teloi. I recall a document about why are large primates so much stronger than humans, and it coming down to muscle strength and precision being inversely proportional to each other. It’s either playing piano and developing/operating fine tools or crushing rocks, not one and the other.
The Logan’s Run idea for blood policies is interesting. What I find the most intriguing is if there is such a thing as a “good harrowing policy”, or is it just all trying to make the best of a horrible reality. So far we don’t have any clues for harrowing ever not being needed. I’m super excited to see where you take it. I have my favourite interpretation of the possible philosophical angle here, though I won’t share it here in case it’s the one you’re actually going with and thus a massive spoiler.
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Given my plans for the nobility, this is a moot point.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mR3jnW2kcUs&pp=ygUUY3NpIG1pYW1pIHRoZW1lIHNvbmc%3D
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Ideas for non-Theurge MC to keep Theurges under control?
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Suppose it depends on what you mean by control? Beholden to state power would be via the same method the Hegemony uses: controlling the legitimate extraction and processing of aether combined with an external source of legitimacy (religion, elections, bloodline, terror).
The Hegemony also bribes theurges by making them their system’s elite. Honestly, wonder how Hallasur only permits women to be theurges, but is still primarily a patriarchal society? Might be some answers there.
We also know there is a magical way to suppress theurgic power from one of the game 1 badends.
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Kill them
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Not sure how effective witch hunting will be when they can actually kill you with their brain. I guess it depends if the theurge suppressor can be built and fired up by non-theurges. That seems unlikely to me.
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Do we know if theurgy is a naturally occurring phenomenon? If there is a way to “switch off” theurgy globally, that would do the trick. Book one there were no doubts, theurgy was part of the world the same as colour or wind or gravity (well, maybe not gravity with Aristotelian physics). But book two there’s space for doubt, what with the xaosstormly temple and aether only being present in humans, and most present in their brains.
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This actually makes me wonder,
What are the odds that anyone faction that the mc might hate, like the theurgy or nobility, is de humanised so much that a part of the world where there is a large number of them starts acting like a beacon of hope, a resistance, and maybe even a state of it’s own, fighting continuing to a standstill, with both sides hating eachother other so much it becomes a constant concern for safety.
The implications of raiding from only one group gulp
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