As you’ll see when you get to Grand Shayard, the nobility of your homeland is intensely factionalized. It might just be possible that a faction might “support” you in the sense of trying to wield you against an opposing faction.
Other than that somewhat wobbly basis for alliance, you’ll have to wait until your rebellion is actually the dominant force across a large swathe of country before your worst enemies begin caving in and preemptively offering you their money for their lives.
It requires a certain level of education. And yes, you could spread the word widely and educate your troops. MCs will have to decide how ready they are for a world in which every yeoman could potentially nuke you. (Of course @WinterHawk has already decided.)
Oh, absolutely. Your decisions as you encounter them will determine whether by Game 5 they’re your allies or rival factions in carving up the corpse of the Hegemony.
It is, but because of its volatile telos, it’s not very useful against Theurgy:
The rest of that post explains how the evolution of firearms was cut off in the gameworld, because “at short distances, or long distances with poor accuracy, firearms vs. Theurges is suicide.”
@cascat, in answer to your first question, aether sublimes very quickly from dead tissue. If you suck out someone’s living brain, you can capture quite a lot in the second or two before the tissue entirely dies. Every second you wait after death radically reduces the amount you can capture.
Grotesque speculation: It would be theoretically conceivable to have a sort of mini-Harrower wheeled to every deathbed so you could stick the dying person’s head in, keep a finger on their pulse, and scoop out the brain as soon as you’re sure the heartbeat has stopped…but it’s not something that I think anyone would consider feasible as a systematic measure? In the real world, it’s been a lot of work to get people to sign on to organ donation that at least leaves the face intact for funeral purposes. And the urgency of not being a second late would lead to a lot of situations where Theurges are seen to be shoving Grandma’s head into the wood chipper before her time.
It’s certainly an aggressively extractive colonial empire. But we shouldn’t overlook the fact that in their day (and considering the massive technologically-driven power imbalances many of them exploited) empires managed to be reasonably sustainable for a long time. It wasn’t until successful alternatives were modelled (and the tech imbalance reduced) that their governance flaws began to be consuming.
“Kleptocracy” to me implies a model that only works on the short term because you’re almost exclusively focused on looting. Extractive empires worked for longer because they’re a bit more strategic, with some sort of rule-based framework for long-term and large-scale plunder, and different rules for center, periphery, frontier, and foreigners. We do see the Hegemony at a moment when that framework is breaking down, but I’m trying to write a world in which it’s plausible that it had a pretty long run.
Low level Theurges aren’t taught that. They focus on learning about elemental manipulation, agriculture, combat…all the practical applications. They learn how to operate a Harrower but not what it does.
When a higher-level Theurge sees signs that their subordinates are actively questioning/ experimenting with this issue (or have figured it out), they make the call as to whether it’s time for that Theurge to be bumped up a Kyklos and formally inducted into the mystery, or time to extinguish the questionably loyal freethinker. This happens at higher levels, with deeper mysteries of Theurgy as well.
Sometimes they make the wrong call on who to promote, as witness Sarcifer, and Cerlota.
Yes, but slow-burning. You can get a lot done with a Talisman. Aether naturally occurs in the highest sphere in the cosmos; sublimation is its rapid re-ascent to that sphere.
The Wards are no thirstier than ever. Population growth and agricultural strain is part of the problem, but in the normal course of things, that might be manageable by aggressively stepping up the tempo of the Halassur war. A shift in battle tactics by the Empire has had a significant impact, though, as has a mysterious uptick in rebellions that are consuming more blood than they yield.
It’s a deeply horrific place to be a captive concubine from the Hegemony. (I should emphasize again that there aren’t too many of those.) Halassurq women themselves largely buy into the awfulness of their system–in large part because they’re keen to do all they can to avenge themselves against the murderous, centuries-long aggression of Karagon. You’ll have a chance to meet Erjan’s sister in Grand Shayard and hear a bit of this perspective.
I’m sure this is where some people will get off the bus, but…yes. To get to the aethereal realm, you’d have to traverse the empyrean (sphere of elemental fire), which is close to impossible. The only things known to survive that journey are the massive earthy missiles hurled upward by Xaos, to try to disrupt the ordered purity of the Angels’ aethereal home. (At any rate, that’s the acceptable Theurgic speculation about what’s going on with those meteorites falling “back” to earth bearing aether deposits.) I can neither confirm nor deny that an Ennearch is working on replicating this.
When you meet Mkyar a’Zerez in the Xaos-Lands late in G 2 Ch 1, you can ask her about your theory on Abhumans. 
That’s the spirit.