That likely would and I’d happily pretend to do so to them but my position is more not harrowing people with captured blood being fair game. I think not harrowing anyone and teaching everyone theurgy has potential to be more efficient long term as people seem to be able to regenerate their own aether so this has aspects of not milking your blood cow dry. As well as the obvious moral benefits and the fact that it will be popular with the abhumans and helotry.
Horion has dialogue where he mentions that redistributing the noble estates would bring 20 million Shayardene helots to your side so I assume the number is in the millions.
less like NATO and more like a tribal alliance as NATO is a formal agreement between states and relies on structures and legal understandings that I don’t think would be codifiable here.
Maybe an inter-tribal council could be formed but mainly to arbitrate inter-tribal disputes. But I doubt a modern state as we understand it would be possible with widespread magical knowledge as it would be hard to enforce a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. Which is my motivation for downsizing into tribes as they would likely be a government structure that would actually be able to maintain order.
My MC’s goals here are to end harrowing and take the noble’s wealth for the helotry they aren’t especially concerned with being in charge after preferring to study their magic and help maintain the system. The Yeomanry will have to be happy with keeping the land they have a percentage of the land taken and not being taxed anymore, the merchants with playing pretty much the same role the abhuman merchants do and the priests i’m planning to bribe into not caring all that much about religious differences with the abhumans and also have them preach the new state of affairs
well as record keeping likely would remain not great they could probably get away with moving to another village where no one would recognise them. Law enforcement in the past struggled with identifying people in rural areas. Although as a decentralised form of warfare not punishing raiding against the hegemony or Hallassur so long as they didn’t raid fellow helots or interfere with trade with us might keep a lot of the violent crime on the right side of the border