Not necessarily. Remember how the Hegemony deals with rebellions - they encourage them! A rebellion that succeeds for a while is what they’d call a “good” rebellion - it spills around, breaks things, gets the various orders all pissed at each other and then is easily mopped up when the Phalangites come, ending in a massive Harrowing that provides fresh blood for the war machine. If Breden’s a Kryptast catspaw, they wouldn’t necessarily be telling the locals anything - that’d kill the rebellion too quickly.
That said, the one I’m certain is a Hegemony agent is Sybla. Follow the bouncy ball - if Zvad runs off to rejoin her, he spills intel to the Hegemony, and her training was just enough to get your people confident that they can fight, without giving them a serious chance. What the Hegemony wants is for you to fight and lose - and if you win that, it’s because the Hegemony underestimated you somehow.
Yep, Sybla certainly is suspect, though I’m not as convinced as you are, after all neither she and Zvad were there at Rim Square, she may well be a Hegemony agent, but she isn’t the primary traitor/embedded Kryptast that most concerns me.
From the next game onwards the headaches will only increase and my mc at least will probably need to start to worry about the Laconniers and possibly Cabel too (depending on exactly how helot-friendly his brand of rebellion is and whether it will be possible to co-opt them). In any case there’s no co-opting the Laconniers for my mc.
Here’s the thing. Once you get rid of Breden during chapter 1, there isn’t much talk of having a traitor. And the poisoning scene doesn’t show up if Breden is long gone.
I doubt that Breden is the actual traitor. That just seems way too simplistic. I think @Havenstone is leading towards eliciting an emotional response from the player over their decision to kill/exile Breden or not which will probably means that is some type of deal where technically Breden is a traitor but also technically isn’t st the same time. One thing is for sure Breden is somehow connected to the traitor in some kind of way, if albeit not the traitor herself.
And when this becomes revealed players who killed Breden will have to deal with the fact that they killed an innocent member of their band, but in doing so also protected the band. Also Im guessing if you kill her then whoever the real traitor/enemy is going to use her death against you most likely to hurt your public image.
And those that didn’t kill Breden will get the satisfaction of not having killed an innocent member of the band. But because of how she’s linked to the traitor I’m guessing the band will be calling for her execution/exile. And then you will have decide whether to execute/exile an innocent member of your band or allow her to stay in the band and try to break whatever connection she has to the traitor but in the process hurt the band and simultaneously hurt your leadership position in the band. So basically it’ll come to down to either Breden or your followers and you having to choose.
I’m guessing it’s something along these lines because if it was actually Breden deliberately doing traitorous acts everyone would just replay part 1 of the game and do a play through where they kill Or someone else kills Breden.
Although the only any of this would be viable I think, is if Breden is somehow being mind controlled or something like that (Which I know others have suggested as well). That or maybe she secretly stole something that is allowing the Hegemony to spy on the camp from afar or something. Or maybe theurges did something freaky to her mind to where she thinks that by betraying those closest to her that she is actually helping them? There’s no telling really.
I did a playthrough yesterday with getting rid of Breden before raiding
a noble estate
and i still come back to Zvad and tell him they
new we were coming.
Also at the end when you fight, even though we didn’t get poisoned
without Breden when you choose to stand and fight
all your scouts say they know too much.
The way I do see it, the most likely candidates of the traitor would have to be Breden, Radmar, old Joana, the MC’s father or Sybla. Of course we do have the option of getting rid of Breden and the father gets killed by a Plektoi but if the sequel still speaks of the traitor then it has to be one of those three. I’d have a hard time believing it was someone else than those I listed as the candidates but unless there is solid proof, we don’t know for sure but I probably wouldn’t budge from saying it is Breden because there’s too much situations that paints Breden in a pretty bad way.
There is, like i said before if you raid the nobility you still get the
sceen where you
tell Zvad that they were warned and when you choose to stand and fight
all of your generals say they know too much.
Was it the first time that you raided a noble farm? If so, then Zvad might be that guy. In fact if you choose to fight back, he runs away to Sybla. But as I said, we don’t know for sure yet.
My best guess is that Breden is the traitor, possibly a Kryptast whose job was to incite the rebellion; if the rebellion didn’t start when it did, she’d probably have been assigned to another camp in a different region to try again. I also think she is very upset about this but resigned to the belief that everyone who stays in the woods will die.
That’s why her plan is to divide the rebellion into dozens or even hundreds of separate groups, because if it’s successful it gets almost all of the rebellion out of harms way, and ensures the rebellion cannot be crushed with one fell swoop as the Hegemony wants. Eliminating the rebellion now would take months, if not years, and doesn’t give the Hegemony the bloody display of power that they need to demoralize everyone. Further, the fact that she can give you a working up-to-date Kryptast code demonstrates this. She’s sure that everyone in the woods is going to be captured or killed, but wants to give you, the rebel commander, one more chance, which she likely wouldn’t want if she was a fully loyal Kryptast.
Even the poisoning seems very restrained. A nonlethal poisoning that only affects a third of the band despite there only being one cookpot? If she wanted to kill everyone, or even to incapacitate everyone for easy Harrowing, then she likely could have obtained a more potent poison in the months leading up to the attack. And if you went with her plan in Chapter 4 and it was as successful as she hoped it would be, then she is only poisoning a dozen or so people, possibly not even that.
I also have an alternate, somewhat less likely theory for how the poisoning could require Breden’s presence without her being the traitor. It’s possible that the actual poisoner only acted because they knew Breden was cooking and that she was already a suspected traitor, and that they were hoping that it would lead to infighting among the group, or simply hoping it would keep the rebels from suspecting the real traitors.
There’s also the Hanlon’s Razor approach. Breden could have had nothing to do with the poisoning, but that she is simply negligent with security, and if she wasn’t on cooking duty then there wouldn’t be an opening for the poisoner to strike.
There are actually only two major members of the rebellion. The MC and their father. Everyone else is either a separate personality of the MC, or one of an increasingly confused group of helots who got bored and followed them into the woods.
Thanks for helping me understand it better.
If that’s so then I don’t like the choices here. I don’t think that either the helots or the aristocrats would do a good job. I think the aristocrats would just continue to be the way they are now and the helots could see it as an opportunity to get revenge. Maybe a third party would be needed for this. I know a third party could be bribed but still I think that would be the closest to just judging.
Edit: Other than this I really like this game. I’m playing this ever since it got released and it’s still interesting. It actually makes me think, especially when I get to the part when the MC talks with Horion about what they imagine about the result of a succesul rebellion (actually I would even say that this is my favorite part in the game).
To phrase the question another way, “do you mean that the helots could take their masters to court, or do they have to get other nobles to stand up for them?”
Winter is hard, cheese and rice!)