@Havenstone The way an MC views a “defeat” from the previous game can feel too pessimistic and bitter in some of my playthroughs. I had a nonviolent MC that ended the last game with 500 people who escaped back to infiltrate the Rim, and about 20 or so people left in the Whendry that were captured or scattered.
I know the ability to port save games isn’t up yet, but I played through the first two chapter of Stormwright with the wonfight variable set at 0. The wonfight < 5 checks seem incredibly bleak, which makes sense for many (most?) MCs in that position, but it doesn’t fit when I feel like I succeeded in saving a large majority of the band.
The betrayal of the hegemony by Cerlota feels implausible. Only 1000 Eretsins were massacred, but that caused a Third Kyklos Theurge to turn her back the Thaumatarchy? HOW? I think that if the death toll increased to 5000 (with the area around the destroyed city being attacked too) would be a far more realistic reason for her to defect, since killing THAT MANY Eretsins for such a terrible reason would be a shock even to people that already know that the Hegemony is very brutal (people like her). To be clear, I mean that Havenstone should rewrite the sentences that mention the massacre by changing the death count from 1000 to 5000 and put more emphasis on its brutality.
I agree, which is why I think she’s lying. While she likely wasn’t too happy that the leopards finally ate her face too, I think the real reason is her Xaos Storm mad science. She’s already shown her duplicity if you insist on banning theurgy in your presence.
I’m interested what big battle’s will look like when rebellion goes in full swing between two big army’s.
will it be more like ancient battles where it all comes down to few big engagements where army’s will be arrayed in field against each other or maybe more like ww1 and it will be dominated by incremental advances on all front like ongoing war with harsqul or maybe like ww2 where it will be combination of two?
on more tactical level who will be responsible for reconnaissance, logistic, how will battles open? how will be battles be commanded? how will army’s be able to deal with routed enemy’s? how big will army’s become?
Lying about her reasons, yes, not necessarily lying about her newfound disdain for the Hegemony. I agree she seems like a mad scientist who wishes to pursue lines of research and inquiry the Hegemony, or at least its current leadership, will never tolerate. I don’t think she cares very much about murdered Erreziano, I certainly think she doesn’t give a shit about about murdered helots or the evils of the caste system, she just wants her freedom to research whatever she wants whenever she wants.
She 1000% does not, see how she reacts to a Helot MC who pushes the issue. Cerlota is a valuable asset who should be kept on a short leash, until such time as she can be discarded imo. At the end of the day it’s better to have her working “with” the MC than running around on her own, and if it comes down to it her flesh is still mortal and she still needs to sleep.
Realistically, if she did care she wouldn’t have been able to make it as a Theurge. She tells you she was doing harrowings right up until the moment she ran off. She’s killed thousands throughout her career.
“Haven’t you taken enough swiving helot blood already?”
Cerlota recoils at the venom in your voice. “I had not thought…”
“That’s clear enough.” You fold your arms and glower at her.
And that’s the crux of it, I think. Having empathy for each of the tens of thousands of helots she’s tossed into a woodchipper would be perhaps an unbearable weight, something that could instill doubt where she believed there could be none. She was born an aristo and the Thaumatarchy only brought out the worst of that, as is likely the case for many other Theurges: it’s a piece in the interconnected chains that bind the Hegemony’s injustices together. There is a genuine question as to whether she even has an active conscience, beyond her individual loyalties. It’s a curious response on her part:
“You expect us to believe that a conscience that never woke up at a Harrowing was somehow kindled after Muran?”
Cerlota just raises an eyebrow in response to your hostile tone. “I did not call it conscience. But yes, I was pained by the massacre of the Muragnese. These were my people.
And yet even with all that — I don’t buy the arguments up above that her pursuit of knowledge into Xaos-storms would’ve been her driving motivation for rebellion, because I’m not convinced that the Thaumatarchy would forbid her research.
It is true that Xaos-storms have been on her mind from the beginning (that’s why she says she fled to Szeric, the nearest “Uendish” major city to the Xaos-lands), and it is very true that she’s actively deceptive about her research (“Trying to guess if it’s about to come toward us" is a pretty bold-faced lie with the later context of her creation of a Xaos-storm). The absence of written records about the origin and nature of Xaos-storms could be evidence of censorship, and we could read disdain into Cerlota’s comment that “If anyone in Aekos knows […] they have never told me." But this all merely points to Cerlota’s fascination with this unconventional, “mad” field of study — it’s possible that the Thaumatarchy genuinely refuses to tolerate her work, but I can only see that as a leap of inference.
“The Hegemony’s greatest advantage against rebels is its overwhelming advantage in Theurges and aetherial blood. As someone who has battled magi on the Halassurq front, I can tell you that such an advantage is almost always decisive: the side with the most mages and blood will win.” Cerlota’s breath hisses through the bared teeth of her smile. “But a tactic known only to one side may shift that balance. Especially if one finds ways of making them larger and longer-lasting.”
Here, Cerlota is advertising the military applications of Xaos-storms for cutting down the Thaumatarchy’s blood magic edge, but these same arguments are no different for the Thaumatarchy at war with Halassur — something that many on this forum have already leaped to when viewing the far future after the fall of Aekos. For all that the Hegemony uses the Halassurq War as a unifying common enemy and a population control mechanism, I don’t imagine the losses in potentially useful Theurges is welcomed, and gradual victory does capture valuable agricultural land and potential resources.
And as for resources, Xaos-storms are known to, at times, create alchemical resources: we see it make quicksilver in the Xaos-village, while the motivation for expanding the Ward in Horion’s story was to obtain “one particular hillock where everything had transformed into something unpleasantly alchemical-smelling” — a potential understanding of this process could yield material benefits for the Theurge class. And it’s not as if the Thaumatarchy isn’t willing to invest resources in delayed-reward projects that might never pan out (*cough* space program).
Point being, an understanding of Xaos-storms offers genuine benefits to the Theurge class, and could feasibly be conducted in secret until meaningful results were found and a propaganda groundwork laid for explaining the new technology — after all, most people in the Hegemony have so much as glimpsed a Xaos-storm. And Cerlota, by her account, was pretty high-ranking as a Theurge, potentially heir apparent to an Ennearch. The resources the Thaumatarchy could potentially offer ought to far outweigh what she’d be able to accomplish on her own, on the run.
So when we’re looking for the missing piece in why Cerlota would choose rebellion, I think a more likely influence is what she shares with us at the very end of the chapter: Sarcifer. His criticisms of the Thaumatarchy’s monstrous imbalance, which she seems to share, and a certain kinship with him:
He was one of the Nine, the greatest archmages of the Hegemony. He passed all the tests, learned all the secrets, mastered one of the Border Wards. And after three decades at the heart of power, he chose to betray the Thaumatarch. A man of this kind, who has already reached the penultimate pinnacle, does not throw it away on some unlikely gamble.
“Since I was sent to the Lykeion, I have done all I could to bring myself to a position of greater influence. One where it would be possible to reshape the Hegemony, not merely accept it as it is. If I’d thought I would never be able to make that kind of change, my life would have been intolerable.
Sarcifer was at the place Cerlota sought, and in the end he chose rebellion over internal reform. Perhaps one day Cerlota would reach that same crossroads, except she wouldn’t have the knowledge of how to break the Thaumatarch’s kill-switch, and she’d be forever leashed to his will. It exposes the limitations of her old worldview, and offers a new one to compensate.
And maybe she did discover some secret about the Thaumatarchy that she’s still withholding from us; that’s hard to judge. But either way Sarcifer makes more sense to me as the missing piece connecting the Massacre of Muragno to Cerlota’s rebellion.
Replies below the cut
It’s a compelling argument, and one that I could definitely accept with evidence, but it’s currently too entwined with assumptions for my taste. Basically, it’s the gap between “potentially crucial” and “crucial”. There probably does exist a bias towards Karagond Theurges, just as Karagonds are placed as the dominant ethnicity in all matters of the Hegemony, but it still strikes me as a leap to go from this to Cerlota needing to leave her high-status position to continue her research. Provincial Ennearchs are rare, but they do exist: Cerlota’s mentor, Ilaria Lacevra, signifies that. And Cerlota was based out of Aekos anyway: she had to “escape Aekos” and joined a Theurge for Harrowing in Wiendrj — she would’ve already been at the heart of Theurgic technology. Not to mention that part of the Thaumatarchy’s ideological control over Theurges is in trying to detach them from their former life: taking away their name, threatening the lives of their family, subsuming them into the power of the Hegemonic state. I think it’s telling that even Cerlota, whose nationalism is an outright bug in the system that resulted in her exit (not to mention that the inherent premise of the discussion as to whether her nationalism is sufficient motivation for rebellion), appears loyal to a romantic image of Erezza — its lands, its poems, its dangerous games — rather than a people, or her people. I’d argue that the destruction of national identity is as much a goal of Lykeion education as the study of motions and causes, so as to be able to trust the Theurges that emerge from it.
And ultimately, I don’t see a reason to believe that Cerlota believes this. She outright says, "I believe in time, had I not rejected that path, [Ennearch Ilaria Lacevra] would have recommended me to fill her role.” — that what stood in the way between her and having a good shot at becoming one of the Nine was her own actions. She’s still proud of that (the text preceding this statement reads, “Cerlota’s chin juts proudly upward”).
Though I also have my personal biases when reading the Thaumatarch’s actions: though Ennearchs are allegedly hand-picked by Kleitos, I don’t necessarily see a reason to believe he’d do much other than approve of his Ennearchs’ choice of successor. Whoever they pick, he could kill them with a thought; given that, might as well select the person specially apprenticed for the job. And it’d avoid the hassle of placating the other Ennearchs with the illusion of power.
And besides, Cerlota throwing away power makes for a more interesting story than Cerlota never having had a chance at power in the first place and jumping ship to get ahead.
I don’t know if she even needs to be discarded, having our own pet mad scientist may come in useful. Sure my mc might eventually eclipse her to become an archmage in his own right. Unlike her however he is also a politician by necessity (like many other archmages in lots of fiction ironically) and likely does not have the time to do lots of deep diving research himself. Besides in the case of my mc pure research is not his strength, his strength as a mage is creatively adapting research of others to the real world.
Yes, we may also have Yebben later on but Yebben seems to have a more rigid moral compass and besides two is better than one.
You forget one potentially crucial thing and that is what Cerlota is not, she is not Karagond or truly in the inner circle of the Thaumatarch or his vile heir. Even if high ranking Karagond theurges would have the freedom to pursue what she wants to pursue that does not mean that she does. As we see with technology there is a limit to what Karagond tolerates in the provinces even from their pet aristo collaborators and it is undoubtedly much lower than what they tolerate at home. So just as Karagond high technology is restricted to the homeland I do not find it unlikely that some of the deepest mysteries are restricted to there as well…particularly after Sarcifer broke away and “rebelled” if anything that would heave led to tightening of control even over (provincial) theurges.
It is unlikely my mc could or indeed would ever be able or indeed willing to give her the kind of resources the current top theurges of the Hegemony enjoy but that is potentially a moot point if she was restricted from ever joining their ranks in the first place.
I like the Sarcifer angle as an explanation for why her Xaos Storm research lead her to her particular kind of rebellion, but I think getting caught doing mad science was ultimately her “fourth harrowing.” The Hegemony still has a degree of moral framework, like not harrowing children, that is in defiance of pure efficiency. I think monkeying with whatever caused, is causing, or is emanating from Vigil is heresy too foul for even the most secular theurges.
*if sim
${simon} keeps ${zhis} singing low, but ${zhe} has a fine voice and knows the whole Lay of Samena off by heart. You listen with tears stinging your eyes; it’s your late mother’s favorite song, which you grew up hearing at least once a month.
*if intronat
You’d last heard it sung by Carles the jongler,
*if (intro_bad > 0)
nine years earlier; but after it got him killed by the Alastors, no one dared sing it again.
*goto simsing
*elseif (natl < 75)
nine years earlier.
*goto simsing
*else
when he visited you with Bethune in the early summer.
*goto simsing
I think these checks in chaos.txt need to be changed to use the new intro_bad = 2 value you created in startup.txt, like how you did here:
*if (intronat)
*hide_reuse #I retell a tale from Carles the jongler.
*set taletick +1
You’ve never forgotten the Halassurq tale of Katta-kack that Carles told in Iarla’s wineroom. Retelling it here, you do your best to echo the jongler’s performance, and the nomads listen with rapt delight.
*set xntrust +1
*if (intro_bad = 2)
When you flow smoothly into a second story Carles told during his time in the woods with you, they break into cheers.
*set xntrust +1
*gosub theirturn
I’m not a coder, but I think it should look something like this:
*if sim
${simon} keeps ${zhis} singing low, but ${zhe} has a fine voice and knows the whole Lay of Samena off by heart. You listen with tears stinging your eyes; it’s your late mother’s favorite song, which you grew up hearing at least once a month.
*if intronat
You’d last heard it sung by Carles the jongler,
*if (intro_bad = 1)
nine years earlier; but after it got him killed by the Alastors, no one dared sing it again.
*goto simsing
*elseif (intro_bad = 0)
nine years earlier.
*goto simsing
*else
when he visited you with Bethune in the early summer.
*goto simsing
@Havenstone is Theurgy more or less effective against targets that have aether in their blood? Can a theurge use the aether inside a target to fuel their changes?
All humans do but animals, rocks and plants don’t. They are often the intended target of changes like accelerating crop growth. I was wondering if theurges could make changes with blood from wounded enemy troops for example or if there was something about the theurgic trance that only made changes possible with your own blood if it isn’t refined.
Havenstone, I don’t know whether you has the time to release updates on Game 1, but if you do, I have a complaint. If you decide to ambush the Theurges in Game 1, you will get a choice between sending someone on a suicide mission and baiting the Therges into a trap. The way these are phrased is very bad. The bait choice does not mention the actual plan but that it “just might work”, which is too vague to sound like anything concrete. Meanwhile, the other option is starts with “I can’t think of anything”, which is sounds very negative. l sugest rewriting the bait choice to be less vague (by mentioning that you will try to draw the Theuges into a trap) and the other choice to NOT mention that you can’t think of any other option. This will make people less likely to ignore the second option.
This is a really interesting question, and I’m curious about the answer too, because I think we’d intuitively say that the experience of a Theurge MC is that for practical purposes, only our own aether supply is available. Our protagonists have, after all, wielded blood magic in the heat of battle, and given no indication of this possibility. But no matter what the answer is, there’s interesting speculation to be done about how and why it works that way. Though really it’s more a set of new questions that tie back to this one.
One being if the aether content of blood decreases over time after exiting the body. We know that this process occurs “Implausibly quickly” after death, when the “matrix of other elements” binding aether to the body breaks down. This binding ought to be present in blood taken from a living person, because that can be used to synthesise aetherial blood; but there’s some interesting language in how Cerlota describes the alchemy:
[Chalcanthum and nitron, calcined with quicksilver] is adequate to unlock the aether while preventing it from ascending. There are more elaborate processes which allow a more thorough capture and usage of aetherial potency; but they are also far more costly and prone to fail for all but the most skilled.
There are layers to this: first, the idea of unlocking aether, what does that mean? If it turns out that people have a natural affinity for their own aether, this could be the process of unlocking its use for any mage. It could mean unbinding the elements that held the aether before and rebinding it in some way — could the human body be actively inhibiting the power in aether? That’s one way to read the comment on aetherial potency. And given that aether is already prevented from ascending while in the body, is this alchemical prevention necessary because of the aforementioned unlocking, or because of some natural process that occurs after the blood is extracted?
And this question of aether concentration/potency after extraction from has potentially startling implications. If it’s possible to even just prolong the binding of aether by taking from a living host… what if somebody were to try that with other, more aether-rich organs? And what if a person’s death could be suspended long enough for this surgery to do its work: a different kind of Harrowing, so to speak, perhaps with a different way to consume that aether.
(I’m looking at you, Ghaesh)
But that’s enough conspiracy from me; it’s just one case of the kinds of rabbit holes this question can lead to.
Another adjacent question is something we could ask from the start: what’s the role of bloodshed in the first place. Because all throughout the process, we’re feeding off the aether already inside us, not just the blood shed in that moment. The fact that a Seracca like M’kyar still relies on this process (she has “palms pocked deeply with claw-scars”, along with the blood magic perk of menstruation), even after millennia of egye culture, suggests that it’s probably indispensable for the average person.
Applying this back to the original question, it does seem to suggest that being a natural aether reservoir isn’t enough; there has to be some catalyst. Doesn’t help with the question of using enemy blood from wounds, though.
I think this mechanism is likely to be symbolic above all else, representing a sacrifice of life for power… but on the off chance it isn’t, I bring it up.
So the first choice is “I’ve got a mad idea for a trap that just might work.”, which does mention the trap that you will try to draw the Theurges into. And it isn’t particularly concrete — it’s an inspired tactic but one that hasn’t been tested by your rebellion, against the most dangerous enemy faced to date. All we have then is theory. And it’s one that can fail, and for some rebellions will fail, guaranteed, and then you die in a blaze of sulfuric acid. If the plan goes wrong, it costs the life of one of our lieutenants (arguably the one best suited for war) to avert disaster, in a mad feat that’s almost certainly driven by love. As players, our meta-knowledge of how to avoid these outcomes and when not to go with this plan doesn’t affect the in-universe narrative of it being a mad plan that works in no small part because it’s unconventional and extremely risky.
It’s also one of those storytelling things. When you’ve got this intricate plan with multiple preparation steps and moving parts, you just start with “I’ve got a plan” and have things play out, to keep the audience in suspense and to avoid bogging down the pace. Explaining the entire plan beforehand shifts the suspense to whether it works, which can be exciting — but that relies on active threats to the plan, or even the derailing and subsequent improvisation. Especially since the text doesn’t seem to be written with the idea that readers would already know the plan going in. There is an interesting trade-off here in IF of whether a player ought to be told all the details so as to make a judgement for themselves, but imo the information given is fair: there’s a trap, it’s highly unconventional, and maybe it’ll work, maybe it won’t. I don’t think a scheme reliant on hitting small flying objects with makeshift whips attached to trees and chopping down trees to crush a magic person, which no one we know of has ever done before, can feasibly get a much better assessment than what the choice text gave it. It comes down to trusting the story.
The second option is “The only thing I can think of is trying to get a few good fighters into the Theurges’ tent by night—and they almost certainly wouldn’t be coming back.” — which is somewhat different from “I can’t think of anything”. This is a plan, just one that hypothetically has the lowest chance of success, because it’s basically betting on some infiltrators being able to enter the heart of an enemy military encampment and kill some people who can warp reality with their minds. It’s premised on convincing people to go on a suicide mission. It’s a plan for when no other plan seems to work. Again, our meta-knowledge that de Firiac or Elery sacrificing themselves would work doesn’t change the narrative that it’s a suicide mission with no clear path to success, one that otherwise always fails (though they do take out 6 Phalangites along the way).
And it needn’t be said that it’s an unpleasant power for a leader to wield, to convince, through ideology, a person to die. It’s not a choice that should be made without careful consideration of that power (or unless the character being played would see this trade of life as fine, if not rational — at which point I’m doubtful that the idea that this is “The only thing I can think of” is much of a barrier). Even then, from an optimisation standpoint, killing de Firiac or Elery there seems like an incredible waste compared to their future potential, and in-narrative, it’s even worse because nobody would’ve known that it’d succeed, as opposed to throwing away their life for nothing.
Nobody has an obligation to fight the reality-warping blood mages. Even some of my high Anarchy, violent runs (the 0 CHA ones) avoid them and only go for the supply lines because the trade-offs are too steep. Of course, there’s no expectation that players get this right from the start, so I would slot in a comment here that players ought to be allowed to back out of attacking the Theurges, to account for the possibility that they see the options and decide it’s a bad idea (a very realistic possibility). Would check atkboth2 to go to supplytrain, or otherwise go to week2harry.
There’s actually a pretty interesting thing going on mechanically with week2harry and Theurges while we’re at it, because this is actually the last time that mandatory casualties are taken from enemy Theurges. From this point on, you can make choices that avoid confrontation with the Phalangite army entirely; this creates an incentive structure where the penalties of being unable to kill Theurges without losing a lieutenant become more prominently felt on runs that insist on breaking the Phalangites in battle (it’s solely negative, because this conversely means that it’s always optimal casualty-wise to kill Theurges if it can be done without losing a lieutenant). A brutal calculus does emerge from this where the number of lives saved by a lieutenant’s sacrifice is variable — it can mean the difference between total victory and crushing defeat… or it could just mean 16 rebels. That’s the weight of a life we’ve chosen to value above the rest.
The last time that I read those texts was a month ago, so I misremembered the wording.
You changed my mind about the vagueness, but I want to add that “I’ve got a mad idea for a trap that might just work” sounds very positive. I associate vague plans are described as “risky/crazy/mad” in games/movies/shows with victory, but I don’t know whether this is common. As for what I said about the second choice, I would like to emphasize that it is written so pessimisticly that no-one takes it seriously. I doubt that even 1/5th of players that see this choice for the first time actually click it. SOMETHING about its wording must change for people to think that it is remotely realistic.
You’re right, and I see now that that does bring us down to the greater maneuverability – especially aerial – of Theurges compared to artillery as the core reason why cavalry aren’t going to be a significant combat arm on gameworld battlefields.
As @KZV and @cascat07 guessed, what I have in mind for the standard anticav Theurgy is a bit of elemental manipulation to abruptly make one leg float while another gets heavier. For any running creature, that’s going to result in a wipeout – and for a laden horse, that kind of fall at speed will almost certainly break its legs, especially since the Theurge can affect the angle of the leg in the fall.
Blinding someone is relatively easy in part because the rays of light emitted from the eye are easily perceived in trance. “Seeing” the organs involved in balance requires a lot more dedicated study before it’s possible at all. For Theurges who aren’t Plektasts, it’s easier to throw horses off stride with a little light elementalism than by attacking their inner ears.
Radical helot MCs aren’t the only ones who might conclude that.
The fact that Irduin has a tin mine with some played-out tunnels that no one goes in any more may be helpful on this front.
It certainly will be, yes – but I’m not going to go into much detail on that just now.
It’s an interesting question, I like @Azthyme’s thoughts in response, and I’ve said a few times that I intend to keep a certain ambiguity on the issue. The MC will I’m afraid always have more pressing matters to hand than conducting experiments to pin down the exact nature of gameworld physics. But there will be moments when specific questions become relevant enough to get an answer in-game, like:
It’s impenetrable to anything that hasn’t had its penetrating telos Theurgically enhanced. In the latter case, the amount of blood invested in each enhancement will largely decide the outcome. Even a successfully penetrating object will often be wrecked, like the spear hitting a Plektos’s enhanced bones.
They could do, though they’ve not in fact done so for various reasons. The top magi of Halassur and the Hegemony have more of a track record in all of the above.
I’m not sure whether the naval explorer epilogue will be open to successful faction leader/advisor MCs – they may simply have too much on their hands with keeping their victory from unwwinding.
It’s perhaps less about the number of troops and more about what kind of barriers are in their way. For unopposed transport, it’ll just about always be better to move your troops the old-fashioned way with a bit of Theurgic help with the supply barges. But if you need to get past a heavily fortified line (any line that isn’t a Ward, anyway), it can be handy to be able to fly your troops over it on a mountain.
For example, if you needed to get hundreds of thousands of soldiers past a difficult barrier like the Erezzan isthmus, along with enough food to supply them for six months while they establish themselves in the surrounding countryside…it might be worth investing the scarce resources into a flying mountain.
In G3, if you get the backstory of the Floating Palace, you’ll find it was originally made for this purpose under Hera, before being repurposed under Eosphora when the Wards went up. No flying mountains have been made ever since…even though the amount of blood the military spends annually on transport is 23 times the amount needed to keep the Floating Palace in the air. A lot of that blood is spent on tactical naval maneuvers, for which a mountain is no substitute; but still, it is a bit noteworthy that the Hegemony so utterly abandoned the tactic after the Wards went up. The Halassurqs have never known how to do it.
I think I’ve said upthread that non-contiguous domains aren’t really going to be feasible in the post-Thaumatarch chaos, especially when you can’t connect them effectively by sea. Even if you held on to the port of Corlune, it would be pretty much impossible to hold Erezza and Earlund together as an effective empire without conquering the Shayard Coast that separates them.
A Karagon that comes through G4 mostly intact is going to be strong enough to make Cerlota unhappy. She wants to see it as fragmented as Erezza is unified.
If you’d already found a convergence of interests and goals that was strong enough to win support from many Erezziano elites for a more unified governance structure with Shayard – or managed a conquest brutally effective enough to win widespread compliance – then marriage alliances could shore that up. They couldn’t substitute for it, though.
The strategic world where marriage alliances are centrally important to the fate of nations is a highly fragmented one, like medieval Europe, where much power is held at the local (i.e. family) level. For less fragmented polities, marriage alliances remain obviously important for the families involved but become less significant for the nation, because more national power is held in institutions above the family level. With every century that Europe got further from the medieval decentralization of power, royal and aristocratic marriages lost more significance in the continent’s diplomacy.
In XoR, you may well end up creating a fragmented world where, a generation or two on from your devastation, marriage alliances become central. But I’m afraid you won’t get to play in that world.
A trained Theurge can generally tell in trance whether a person has had some permanent Change made to their flesh, yes.
Incidentally, skimming over the Judith Tarr readthrough at Tor.com that I linked to before has reminded me just how big an influence Melanie Rawn was on me – and opened my eyes in retrospect to how much Rawn was one of the pioneers of many of the shifts in epic fantasy that are often associated with George Martin (e.g. detailed political worldbuilding, killing off beloved characters unexpectedly, “realistic” prose and plotting alongside the fantastic elements).
I kind of bounced off the Deryni books, so I have some slight excuse for leaving Kurtz off my list of influential fantasy authors (before @Eiwynn corrected me), but I’ve got zero good excuse for having left off Melanie Rawn. I loved her work as a teen, and learned a lot from her as a writer.
I think I got them all except the blade knuckles.
Definitely.
They’d like the irredentism of it, while being unhappy with it from a tradition perspective (and, for many of them, the more difficult journeys they’d need to make to get to Aveche for your Court Season). Not going to comment too much on this hypothetical, since there will be a lot of spoilery factors in play when it comes to the suitability of Grand Shayard as a capital.
The de Irde are a minor family who barely qualify as elites in Mesniel district, let alone the wider Southriding or Shayard. If you tried to put them forward as candidates for the throne, the response would be a resounding “who?” They’ve never been aristarchs, and rarely visit Grand Shayard.
That doesn’t mean the answer to your question is no…but whatever connection might have existed, it wouldn’t be the basis for a credible claim to the throne today. The de Irde just don’t have the political salience for people to get behind them.
The Laconniers are hardly a dictatorship, but it should be possible for an MC who’s trying to harness their vision to combine a revived Shayardene monarchy with more participatory reforms. If you’re wondering whether the MC can “worm their way” into the line of succession for the Thaumatarchy and then turn it democratic, no, that won’t be a thing.
A charisma character’s differentiating choices will be less pathos/logos (for my money, both are needed for any truly charismatic leadership to be effective) and more religion-founder v cult of personality. The combat character, I’ve got some ideas for but not ready to pin them down yet – ditto for the level of tactical questions that @maroder123 is interested in.
I decided a long time ago that we weren’t going to have Episcopes in the gameworld. The religion of Xthonos grew out of monastic communities, and its administrative ranks (which we’ll begin encountering this chapter) reflect those origins. Ecclesiasts and the Hegumens of monasteries can be ordered around by the district Rassophoros, who takes orders from a regional Polyomphalos (both names taken from their distinctive garb of office). The provincial Archimandrite can intervene at any level, and answers to Ennearch Thneton back in Aekos.
The priest-Theurge relationship is a somewhat fraught one, with the Ecclesiasts resenting the fact that the Chosen officially outrank them on the sacrality scale, while generally not taking the time to understand the sacred texts and rites as well as the priests do. It’s consistent with that for Linos to be upset with his new-minted Eclect MC getting out over their skis.
Good point – I may need to revisit those and make some distinction to recognize the <5s that have a high helcamp score. And thanks for catching my intro_bad error!
Let’s just say that the number of Muragnese wasn’t the deciding factor, and that changing it to 5,000, 50,000, or 500 wouldn’t have substantially affected Cerlota’s perspective on the massacre.
That is, in fact, Ennearch Hesychios’s whole mandate. He’s basically the archmage for DARPA.
While a body is alive, its aether belongs to it and can’t be used by someone else (unless it’s extracted and alchemically fixed). Theurgy can’t draw on that, even for someone who’s badly wounded and thus has aether evaporating out of their blood.
Thanks for the G1 feedback, @Vrangel_RIP – that’s always welcome! I think the contrast between the mention of the high-risk trap in option 1 and the mention of sacrificing a few good fighters in option 2 is clear enough from the text as it stands, when read closely. I’m not going to change it, but thanks for letting me know how it read to you.
That’s very sensible, especially if a theurge can affect the angle of the fall. My physical questions kind of stemmed from that - naturally a person would think that a theurge is applying force to cause the change and if he fights against the momentum it gets harder (levitating a charging warhorse is contending with a lot of force). But there’s actually nothing in the text to suggest that (as far as I can recall). It’s only telos of something that a theurge is ever struggling against.
Would that translate well to a regiment of cavalry though? Would a single theurge be able to imbalance a large number of horses simultaneously?
Mark Lawrence, some questionable plot choices but penmanship is rather exquisite, for the genre.
I feel like this is a rather significant metaphysical revelation. How does a body posses the aether? Does it have a telos conferring ownership? If I give someone a blood transfusion or they drink my blood is aether’s ownership changed?
