No, definitely not – it’s 100% at the discretion of the Thaumatarch. That said, as the Leilatou demonstrate, a family that does well in the role may be chosen to continue in it.
Of course.
Too late for that. 
No, just to confuse it, in situations where similar teloi abound – for Game One example, where an airborne Theurge is scanning a forest for signs of life. As long as you’ve not added too much blatant artificiality to the landscape, humans will tend to blend in with the life around them.
Miners’ powder is indeed used for mining, but not much used in battle, in part because the only war of note for centuries has been carried on in heavily Theurge-ridden areas and across a Ward. Besides not being Ward-crossable, black powder is ungainly (very little tech development has gone into it as a weapon, for reasons explained on the WIP thread) and conspicuous – it’s too hard to keep Theurges from sensing it while it’s in transit to wherever you want it.
Once you’ve got it off a cart or ship and into a tunnel, it wouldn’t need to be all that deep to escape most Theurges’ telos-sense. Twenty feet deep, maybe, to avoid the notice of a sensitive Theurge who was actually walking over it? But Theurgic warfare doesn’t really lend itself to heavily fortified positions anyway; it privileges mobility.
In a civil war/ insurgency scenario, the tactical uses of miners’ powder will somewhat increase, as there will be walls you want to blow up in places that aren’t crawling with Theurges.
Once the aether’s out of it, meteoric metal is good for the same things in this world that it is in ours.
Would be awesome. We’ll see.
I figured there would be at least a few players who had that reaction…
Or limit it to a reasonable range of MCs. There’s no way that anyone beginning the series in Game 2 will have anything like the range of possible outcomes that you could have at the end of Game 1…the recap won’t walk you through every choice!
The Telones have all the negatives of being sell-outs to Karagon and none of the prestige. You mention aristos and Phalangites, but centuries of culture have gone into making those seem grand and glorious. You’ve got to be a pretty hard-headed radical helot to be completely unmoved by all the propaganda and not be at least a little subconsciously chuffed that your revolt has attracted “the better sort.” There aren’t any social scripts telling you to be thrilled that a quisling like Bleys has joined you.
Architelones don’t accept taxes in (human)kind.