Choice of Rebels: Uprising — Lead the revolt against a bloodthirsty empire!

Thanks! I’m going for a high intelligent low fighting play through. I can never get enough mules or food in time. Lol :joy:

Not to make light of this but I think that’s just our subconscious playing tricks on us. I mean I heard my late father calling to me not too long ago, but I think I must have only been semi-awake and those were the lingering effects of a dream. Some people here in Amsterdam purposefully seek out those experiences with a little chemical aid, though if you do beware of the bad trips too. :wink:
On a related note it is not only modern hipsters, college kids and old hippies who indulge themselves this way as in many religions the priesthood often had ceremonies that used mind altering drugs to help them communicate with their god(s). Oftentimes those priests then forbade the general population from using those same substances.

If my mc ever had good reason to think the angels were real in a d&d “gods” sense that would be his approach to them. As it is they seem a conveniently fabricated lie, first to justify the conquests and social order of old Shayard and then taken over and made more brutal by Karagon to justify its conquests and the imposition of its society and immutable caste system.

As it is what my mc believes of the Karagond religion is that it is a tool that seeks to misuse the spirituality of people to justify and more than that make sacred the abuses and social order imposed by Karagon. Thus as more or less directly stated in-game my mc is of the belief that the will of the “merciful” angels can always be divined simply by asking what would best suit the wants and needs of the Hegemony’s ruling elite.

Still my mc does recognize the power and dangers of religion but his tentative idea is to break the current hegemonic church of Xthonos and encourage other lawful faiths, likely including newly arising lawful branches of the Xthonic faith in a “free” religious market that gives people a chance to shop around to slake their spiritual needs.
The state itself will be secular though and it is probably no secret that for its top echelon’s my mc would greatly favour skeptics and even anti-xthonics and generally all manner of non-believers, such as himself.

Which would be another thing to potentially encourage in liberated areas. Anything that weakens and eventually breaks and shatters the nightmare church and its version of the religion is something my mc would be very interested in exploiting.

As always you know how to put it succinctly Mara. :wink:

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@Koda222

Try robbing the yeomen. You can get a lot of mules that way and you lose very few opportunities in the winter by pissing them off. Once spring arrives, sell your excess mules and use the money to bribe the yeomanry into loving you again.

Thaaaaaat’s politics!

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Thanks for the tip! Will that increase my anarchy stat more?

Just saying you could make a pacifist not anarchist run too. Not let violence fool you :wink:

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Has there been any major plagues in the Hegemony?

I was going for low anarchy I like flying under the radar mostly.

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To live the most different contrast from normal playthtrough I recommend you a exotic Mara run.
Noble Going to the Oppression of shayard with a nacionalist charisma main second intelligent and don’t engage with Breden and don’t interrupt the harrowing negate to do any violence or raid and use your no violent charisma without Breden in group. You will feel that is total a new game

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I’ll give that a try. Right now I’m a noble with high intelligence and mild charisma. He wants to free his home land and the helots. But he wants to keep the nobility intact maybe raise a few close allies to new nobility, I’m thinking I want to teach a few of the wisadry though.

To each their own.

@Havenstone - is Human blood the only way to make aetherial blood?

Also in Uprising, we have the choice to ask the Priest if he and his noble companion were… Ahem… Companions (wink). I wonder why that was.

Pretty much humans and abhumans only.

Well… Good bye then Abhumans.

I don’t know about that. There must be a reason the Hegemony hasn’t tried to enslave them all already.

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Fortunately we are moving as a character with knowledge that they are an Mc of a game called Choice of Rebels.

But seriously though, perhaps they were incapable of doing it? Or the blood came out wrong?

Nomads are notoriously hard to conquer, yes, especially when you already have another massive front with a rival empire. Though I wonder if keeping trade open with the Abhumans is important enough in itself to not bother with trying.

Or… @Havenstone, do the Abhumans ever sell prisoners to Hegemony?

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Also, @Havenstone “You’ve never met nor heard of anyone who’s willingly crossed that Ward.” But Huette and her kids could have willingly crossed the Xaos-Ward?

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Not really “willingly…”

First off, on spoiler policy: the only thing really spoiler protected on this forum thread so far has been the loredump I gave on the details of how Theurgy works. It’s been hard to sustain that–and I don’t fancy policing the thread to keep other future ideas and details spoiler protected.

Once I’ve posted Ch 1, all those Theurgy details will be common knowledge; following that, I don’t intend to share any more huge spoilers on the thread, just the broad framework and a few hints about future games. I don’t think we’ll need spoiler protection for that.

I’d like to be a little more discriminating on the wiki, which may attract more casual fans. If you’re adding material to the wiki, if it doesn’t come from the game, drop it in spoilers. I’ll move it over to the regular game lore section if I think it’s just interesting world detail rather than something likely to spoil someone’s enjoyment of a future game.

Religion is a famously odd category, with blurry and contested boundaries. It’s true that in the XoRverse, it would be basically impossible to deny the reality of teloi or the power than comes from reflecting on them; to that extent every Theurge is “religious.” But that doesn’t mean they need to think there’s a God, even an Unmoved Mover one like Xthonos, let alone that the Canon (or any other religion on offer) is the best articulation of reality.

Materialism has its teleologies too. Skeptics can believe that the fact that things have purpose (to fall, to rise, to cut, etc.) is a brute fact of the universe, not the result of any Supreme Being’s intention.

The stories about Angels in the Codex certainly have them presenting themselves in physical form to their Eclect. It’s an exceptional event even in the stories, though. Much as in our own world, the vast majority of believers get by without any flashy personal epiphanies. And I can confirm that the Rebels saga will never feature an unambiguous intervention by the Angels, the Forgotten Gods, Ummay and Kormuz, or the Theoi – no parting of the Red Sea, no Athena sending fog to protect Odysseus and then appearing to him for a chat. Does that mean the gameworld is one without gods? That’ll be up to the reader to judge, similarly to everyone in our world who lives without personally witnessing a “visible real effect.”

A plausible alternative explanation, as I said on those old threads. :slight_smile:

There is a tension here, if not a necessary trade-off. Religion (as the most widely proposed etymology implies) binds people together. Even in our own prosperous, relatively stable Western hegemony, it can’t be treated solely in terms of individualistic “spirituality.” In a centuries-old empire collapsing into chaos, you’re going to want some social binding factor if you’re going to establish any sort of new order.

But almost anything that binds people together also divides them from outsiders – even, as real-world history bears witness, philosophies that have love, compassion, tolerance, etc. at their heart. Keeping your compassion-religion or tolerance-religion (let alone justice-religion) from being a barrier to a shared life with those who believe differently is a full-time job.

A skeptic needn’t abandon the socially integrating function of religion; as you’ve noted, there are “religions of non-religion” that bind people together strongly, and Kenonism may become one of those. But the more you want to bind people together, the more you’re likely to alienate those outside.

Rape should be a Harrowable crime, and a lower-class person found to have raped a helot would be Harrowed. The consequences of a rape allegation by a helot against a noble would be punishment of the lying accuser.

Only the prestige that comes with a close family connection to a Theurge.

To protect the Theurgic secret, all children of Theurges are given up for adoption to aristocratic families and raised separately from their parents. Kleitos was the first Thaumatarch to declare that he would personally comply with this policy; though as far as anyone knows, he’s never had any children to give up.

In theory, Theurges select the helots for Harrowing by inspiration of the Angels, who don’t take appeals from aristos. The reality will be explored more in Game 2 Ch 2.

No. That’s something that Theurgy is very good at nipping in the bud, and human capital is too valuable to be wasted in that way.

As @Sneaks correctly assumes, if it were that easy, the Hegemony would have their Long War down south instead of Halassur.

Never. Completely unthinkable for them.

Yes. She was facing certain death at the Hegemony’s hands, and where others might have considered fleeing to the wilderness to join the bandits, that obviously wasn’t an option for her. In that extraordinary bind, she didn’t respond fatalistically or passively, but went for a slim chance of survival. That’s a reasonably rare choice in an established totalitarian state, even one approaching a crisis; it shouldn’t be all that surprising that the MC hasn’t previously met someone like that.

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Whatever the reason is it must be a pretty good one for a power as belligerent, blood hungry and nakedly expansionist as the Hegemony to maintain reasonably cordial relations with a neighbor.

Starting to get the feeling that’s going to bite us in the ass…

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It’s always struck me as odd that, while Christianity and Buddhism (to name two religions that I’m familiar with) are emphatically religions of tolerance, compassion and nonviolence, Christians and Buddhists are no more or less likely to be hateful, violent bigots than followers of other religions or atheists. Kenon and the Inner Voice are undoubtedly going to be no different; they may be religions of thinking for yourself, but they won’t actually discourage closed-mindedness unless the player actively pushes against it.

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