I like that a lot. 
We’re a good ways off from G5, but you can expect to see that as an ending.
You’d find a fair amount of support for the approach you describe.
K could just about respect a leader who was trying to be feared-but-not-hated… but they would get frustrated quickly if they saw you worrying too much about avoiding hatred. After all, K would point out, the current overclass has been doing just fine for centuries despite being hated by most of the helotry. Get enough power, and you can live just fine with being hated, pace Machiavelli.
Guest-right isn’t about “innocent bystanders” as such – nor is it just about people you invite into your home. As readers find out if you kill Horion and Linos on sight in G1 Ch3, travelers on the road have guest-right; you’re supposed to welcome them into your home, if you live nearby, and share a bit of food with them. The Whendward outlaws rob passing strangers, but don’t kill them unprovoked, as a concession to this deeply engrained cultural value. K, you’ll be unsurprised to hear, finds this a ridiculous inconsistency. Of course K is familiar with all the fables of how the Angels punish those who abuse strangers and guests…as well as the fables of how they punish thieves and rebels. K sees them all as stories made up by the powerful for self-preservation.
That’s just not how aristrocracy works, I’m afraid. Or at least, I’m not aware of anywhere in world history where a feudal aristocratic class voluntarily transitioned to being a merely economic elite. The difference between nobles and mere merchants is incredibly important to nobles–even most of the enlightened ones. Even if you succeeded in opening up the offices of state to a broader professional elite, as both the Brits and Napoleon managed following several decades of revolution and counter-revolution, that wouldn’t mean the nobles as a class would embrace the bourgeois value of “earning your living,” or see a demotion to e.g. innkeeper as anything resembling a concession.
It was not. The surface similarities are there, but will mislead you if you run with them.
There’s no trade with the Dead, and no other known civilizations to the west of the Bloodless Reach.
As for the northeast, in the early centuries of the Hegemony-Halassur war, with the loyalties of the Nyr unclear, the Karagonds made sure that the riches of the Erezzan isthmus could all be borne south and conveyed to them via the ports, rivers, and canals of Shayard. The luxury trade of the trans-Halassurq states also runs in the southern seas. The wealth of the Nyr flows upriver to Karagon and Shayard, rather than across the seas.
So the cold ocean east of Nyryal has been turned into a backwater, where you’re more likely to be caught up in a naval clash between Halassur and Hegemony than to come across a merchant ship worth plundering. Umri’s glory days as a port of trade are centuries past.
The inland sea north of Aekos sees even less inter-provincial trade; the horse pastoralists on the dry, cold Nyrish plains do their best to steer clear of Karagonds, and have set up no major settlements on the border sea. The limited sea traffic of well-off Karagonds from Aekos and nearby seaside towns is much too cloely overseen by Theurges to provide scope for piracy. By contrast, the long, rugged coasts of southern Erezza and Shayard are hard to police even from the air.
I should be clearer: using CHA 3 to impress the nobility of Grand Shayard is a course only open to aristo MCs who adopt a fake identity. A helot-born MC will not be able to “fake it” as a noble – they simply haven’t spent enough time in the presence of nobles to know how to pass themselves off as one. (Their option to infiltrate the nobility, if they go that route, will be as a freeborn tradesperson – if they’ve taken more time to get to know people from that class in Ch 2, they can pass.)
Similarly, an aristo-born MC can’t hide their Rimmer accent or ignorance of courtly manners – you’re a bumpkin, no matter what. If you’re ALSO a known rebel, 90% of the nobiliity will want to see you destroyed immediately (at the stage we’re talking about in Game 2). Only a handful, like Abelard or Teren, are rebellion-curious enough to be trusted with your true identity. The senior de Firiacs are not among that handful, and no stat check is going to change that. (And trying to formally court/marry S would get them paying fatally close attention to your fake story.)
It’s not possible to increase the “ceiling” amount of aether in a human body, not even for Abhumans.
It should be possible to be both Eclect and a merchant prince, though that won’t remove the tradeoffs where priests and merchants want different things from you. (Thanks for the book rec!)
No. And that’s all I’ll say on the topic for now.
No – the Laconniers have worked too hard broadcasting the fact that the Leilatou have no trace of royal blood to reverse course on that, no matter what documents you have forged.
Marrying a prominent Leaguer would come close to being a deal-breaker, but it might be possible to pull it off. Regardless, Teren’s courtship will definitely not look like the Odyssey – we’re a long way from that epoch.
Not a lot yet. When things fall apart and you have migrants coming across all borders looking for Shayardene grain, the yeomanry may well get defensive, and they won’t be the only ones.
I won’t give a comprehensive response on this, but as a brief sampler: Teren values ruthlessness; Abelard prefers neutral; Phaedrx values compassion.
No one has so far been able to do that in a way that actually increases aether capacity–if they had, the magic economy would look totally different than it does. Even the best-informed Theurgic tinkering with the brain has so far only reduced people to the level of animals, including permanent dissipation of their aetherial capacity, rather than producing some kind of macrocranial mutants.
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