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

Well…actually we might have to do something with all the useless jewelry of the former nobles…
So depending on how much the Shayardene nobility really loves their “bling” of war or otherwise…:stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

Would make paper currency much more viable too actually.

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Exactly Mara BankChurch empire firstaction will use checks and stocking actions in special paper money. Far more reliable for trained… AND MARA BLESSED sacred paper interchange in all Mara churches all the continent. Remember MARA BANKING churches are neutral ground sacred and destined to free trading.

It would be super cool. We will be peaceful traiders and suppliers of commerce interchange and religion. Angels praise prosperity and free commerce. And Kittens

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Is he a forger?

This is absolutely done in both Halassur and Hegemony, despite being punishable by death (and readily detectable by a Theurge). So is clipping. But it’s done for personal profit, not as a war tactic. Debasement of your opponent’s currency through large-scale counterfeiting is I’m pretty sure something that never occurred to anyone until the age of paper money.

In a world of successful alchemy, of course, you could have the experience of gold becoming as cheap as chips if one side figured out how to transmute it from base metals. But the history of that would probably be of that “lucky” side suffering an unexpected economic collapse and switching to using a genuinely scarce metal again, with its neighbors following suit as their gold coinage also became worthless…

The Hegemony must have mints outside Aekos – you couldn’t supply a continent-spanning empire from a single central mint. But every province uses the Hegemonic drachem and stater, not foreign coinage. Trade with the Abhumans and Halassur during peacetime uses ingots of metal rather than coin.

Theurges are the only market for aetherial blood, and they don’t conduct transactions with non-Theurges. Anyone who tried to sell to them or buy from them would find themselves rapidly turned into product.

I’m not sure. Like I suggested above, there’s an element of fakery in all fiat currency–a promise that’s only true as long as everyone keeps believing it, and falls apart when seriously questioned–that would make it hard for telos-vision to distinguish “real” paper money from a good forgery. It’s not quite the same thing as detecting a faked painting, or a tin coin pretending to be gold.

I made up “Iasoun Imprestor” as a hypothetical forger. You won’t actually meet him. :slight_smile:

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The question then is how much does the Aristocracy love its “bling” as the Shayardene one seems to have a big fetish for it. So melting it all down might we not have a big surplus of gold that might profitably be exported to halassur?

I’m not sure how plausible that is. One of the ideas behind coins is that the face value of a coin must exceed the value of its metal content (otherwise people would just melt them down). The difference in value is also a source of state revenue. So it should not be the case that what is being traded could be minted into coins at a profit.

Can coins even pass a Ward?

If Theurges lose their property rights, that is really all the more incentive for some of them to sell aetherial blood to anyone willing to buy it. Of course other Theurges would get the most benefit out of aetherial blood and it would take a Theurge or something equivalent to authenticate the product unless the buyer were willing to skip that. Still, I would be surprised if some Theurges weren’t willing to sell to the highest bidder if those Theurges thought they could avoid being caught. Considering that the Hegemony does not know how much aetherial blood is collected, that would make evading detection much easier. Even if Theurges were actually only willing to sell to those they believed to be other Theurges, the Rebellion might be able to fake its way past that at great risk or find leverage against individual Theurges. I think the biggest risk would be Hegemony sting operations if they even bother with those.

To what extent do Kryptasts and Theurges overlap? Are there any Kryptast Theurges? It seems like having spies with those powers would be useful but given that Theurges also occupy a religious position, maybe undercover Theurges would not be done for religious reasons. The Hegemony also might not like the idea of Theurges receiving Kryptast training that could be used for escaping the Hegemony.

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A question could be aetherial blood being tainted or poisoned to cause some sort of chain reaction that exploded in the storage of that kill mages.

and about paper as money i think that is believable as how started being used in Renaissance. As a promise of being paid in gold or silver in the bank for certain amount. to whomever it has the paper or a determined person .
If My theory of Switzerland Vatican or a Mega church bakers guild it has sense using religion as a authority that blessing the paper money to give it a trusted image and a church bank could have church delegations that change thepapers to local money…
Also who wont want a Mara paper Kitties and mules and angels and tulips

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Is chastity particularly expected of unmarried theurges?

On a completely different note to recent discussions, I realize it has been several months since the feasibility of an invasion of Halassur was discussed but I have been thinking about it some more and I had some more thoughts I wished to add.

Regarding ideological motivation among volunteers and conscripts, it was the First French Empire that invaded Russia not the First French Republic. In Napoleon’s words in 1800: “The Revolution is over, I am the Revolution.” I read once (I wish I could remember where so I could link it) an article speculating how things would have gone if Napoleon had promised to emancipate Russia’s serfs or promised the independence of Poland, neither of which he promised. Pugachev’s Rebellion, the largest peasant revolt in Russia’s history, had been crushed in 1775 so there would still have been those Russian peasants who remembered it. If Napoleon had actually championed the abolition of serfdom, perhaps his armies would have received more local support than the Russian armies. The Third and final Partition of Poland happened in 1795 so even more Poles would have remembered Russia’s role in that and promising to restore Poland could have gained Polish support. In order to judge how an actual revolutionary army would fare, in my opinion it is necessary to look at the early years of the First French Republic when it actually attempted to attract and initially received foreign popular support.

Regarding drawing conclusions about the feasibility of Operation Barbarossa (Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union in World War 2) based on Napoleon’s invasion of Russia, I think there is more to it than even what I mentioned earlier. In my opinion, the way Operation Barbarossa is typically discussed makes a huge mistake in (from what I’ve seen) usually only mentioning Napoleon’s example. Sometimes a particularly “detailed” work might also mention the failed invasion of Russia by Charles XII of the Swedish Empire in 1708-1709 during the reign of Peter the Great.

In my opinion, the most relevant example to Operation Barbarossa would be what would have been the most recent one and I do not think I did an adequate job of noting the German position in World War 2 compared to World War 1. From the perspective of German generals, beating the Soviet Union in World War 2 might have seemed quite doable. Why? Because those generals had been alive to see Germany defeat Russia during World War 1. That was with the British and French still fighting on the mainland continent and with Italy and Japan both in the Allies in World War 1. In 1941, France had already been beaten, the British had been expelled from the mainland continent, Italy was in the Axis and putting the Mediterranean somewhat in play, Japan was also in the Axis, and the Soviet Union had purged its officer corps in 1936-1938. If Japan had actually joined (I acknowledge that coordination between “allies” that each view the other as racially inferior is inevitably difficult but they were able to unite in 1940 forming the Tripartite Pact) in an attack on the Soviets instead of bringing the United States into the war, it could have tied up around 30 Soviet divisions in the east. So I think drawing the lesson from Napoleon that Operation Barbarossa could not work is a mistake for the reason that a successful invasion of Russia had already happened in World War 1 under less favorable circumstances.

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What do you people think of having a “Goals of the Rebellion” section in the menu? It could be a new page by itself, like the world index, and it would help players keep track of what their revolt stands for. I think it’d be especially helpful as the MC’s crew begins merging with other groups. That way, for instance, a compassionate skeptical could keep up with the fact that she now helps the Laconniers.

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Might be an idea from game 3 or so onwards. I think this only starts to matter once we reach Grand Shayard and all the faction intrigue stuff anyway. :thinking:
My mc, of course, would never ally with the Laconniers, he might have to stomach the Leaguers tho (but don’t expect that to last in the last game once the thaumatarchy has fallen.) As a weak confederacy led by Shayard would likely be utterly powerless to curtail, let alone abolish slavery and the caste system, assuming it is even willing being the natural home of the nightmare faith anyway. :unamused:
And anyway after Gann, particularly in the unmodded game without Simon my mc knows better than to trust pretty words from pretty boys (particularly non-helot and especially “noble” boys. )

@Havenstone do you think an Easter surprise could be in the forecasts this year?

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That’s what I had in mind. It’d be useful after other groups start breaking away from the Hegemony.

Ah, yes, how could I forget the endless rivalry between idlun’s helot MC and one of the most shadowy factions in the game. :grin:

I was going to suggest that maybe the Koinon would be like an almost feudal version of the early European Union, but I guess that wouldn’t please you a lot. Or, at least, it’d be like the French Empire and all the smaller states around out, especially if we go through the Homelander route.

I think I settled on making my noble, INT2 MC into a fierce reformer who wants to replace old, decadent instutions but is also too caught up in his own personal devotion and role as an aristocrat to be as radical as someone like your MC. I don’t think they’d get along, but playing a well-meaning but contradictory character should be fun.

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I was thinking more about the Confederate States of America, they also had a useless Confederate government that mainly existed to ensure no true reforms could ever take place and that, during the war, operated like a military dictatorship, concentration “pow” camps and all.

Even if you make it more like the EU it would be a giant mess. I mean with the recent push to install censorship and filter the internet in the name of copyright or anti-terrorism that might well crash the economy the EU, at present, may well be heading the way of the Soviet-Union. :unamused:

In any case, in case of the Koinon a body that vacillates between semi-fuedalism and flawed semi-democracy (but I would imagine that in Horion and Teren’s vision the democratic elements would be subject to a heavy poll tax and only open the freeborn wealthy. :unamused: )
Nevertheless, with every new country having a veto and even when they don’t veto every regulation would be implemented like EU directives, not regulations are, which means you get a mess of different interpretations that may take years or decades to be sorted out in the justice system.
In any case assuming it wouldn’t be vetoed outright just imagine trying to abolish slavery and the caste system by directive. You just know Shayard and Karagon are going to do their utmost to dodge any obligations and come up with an analogy that de-facto maintains it. :unamused:
And then there is the fact that whatever weak confederate or union government there might be in a Koinon probably utterly lacks any useful enforcement powers. Maybe, in the best case, it can impose a pitiful, useless fine upon the dissident states that they’d rather pay than abolish their slave economy.

Not that shadowy if Breden knows all about them and they have an unsubtle, sadist brute like Hector as a member.
Even if my mc had any sympathy for them they’d have to choose between him or Hector, they couldn’t under any circumstances have both. And since they’re an aristocratic faction you know what their choice would be. Really even for a homelander helot they don’t seem the right faction. Homelander helots might have more success with Cabel. Even my mc probably has to try for a genuine alliance with Cabel and hope we can get that faction to tone down on the Shayardene nationalism.

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@Havenstone Pre-G5, will the MC visit Erezza?

@idonotlikeusernames The Koinon isn’t a perfect analogy of the EU, I imagine you’ll be able to force abolition of slavery(less certain about the caste system, as that’s not really something that can be “abolished”) through.

How? One veto and it’s history, much like the whole Confederate States thing was a sham to maintain both the power and social structure favouring the white southern slavocrats and especially their “peculiar institution” the “Koinon” would default to being much the same I would think.
Even if it did de-jure abolish slavery how is it going to enforce that? By giving a stern lecture to any member country that does not de-facto comply? How will it even know the facts if it is forced to rely solely on highly suspect data supplied by the member countries?
You know that even the members de-jure comply they’re just going to replace blood cattle slavery by something that is practically the same, whether it is hereditary serfdom, a Kafala system or anything in between.

Anything can be abolished, you just need the strength and the will to do it. You can’t do it as a weak Koinon though as you can bet Shayard and Karagon will opt-out of any freedom of and from religion clauses and keep the nightmare church around as their state religion.

Also if you don’t abolish the caste system you really can’t claim to abolish slavery, just look at the increasingly bad situation of the Dalit in Modi’s modern India to see where a persistent history of half-measures gets you. Not that I believe the Koinon would deign to take even half-measures apart from some de-jure only things. :unamused:

Which all also means someone like my mc or indeed any helot would naturally have no place nor rights worth speaking of under the Koinon.

I don’t expect the Koinon to look like the EU in the slightest, other than being a vague confederation, I expect it to look like the (constitution of the) Confederate States of America, right down to a reference to “almighty Xthonos” in the constitutional preamble and a ban on political parties.

This is the kind of strategy that I think could only have occurred to people after a shift to paper money (or possibly a succession of major shocks similar to the Potosi Price Revolution) had begun to lay bare the arbitrary nature of currency. In a mercantilist era (i.e. when economic thinking was still fundamentally an extrapolation of commonsense household heuristics to the national level), the approach of “let’s hurt them by giving them all our gold” would have barely been thinkable, let alone politically feasible.

Also, because silver and gold are still used as currency in the gamewold, alchemy clearly can’t have succeeded in cheaply transmuting base metals. I’m going to suggest that while Hegemonic alchemists can turn lead into gold, the rare solvents required have a value higher than the resulting metal.

This is another area where I think we need to be careful not to retroject modern economic thinking into a premodern or early modern context. Yes, there was seigniorage in that age, but it amounted to the state’s right to debase its own currency a bit–to add a little lead to the silver, etc. That right needed to be used sparingly. There was a very strong assumption that the face value of a coin should be basically identical to the value of the metal–that the function of a mint was to give the State’s guarantee that the metal had not been adulterated (or not beyond a known, minute %age) and could thus be used for trade.

And for the most part, across the premodern world, those assumptions worked (in part because per capita incomes were broadly stagnant). Significant debasements had bad consequences and needed reversing. To the extent there was inflation, it tended to be very low and consistent. A massive influx of precious metal could throw the system seriously out of whack, bankrupting monarchies, because no one really knew how to analyze it or respond to it.

In a world still strongly shaped by those ideas and practices, I don’t see why Halassur would be willing to accept debased precious metals from the Hegemony, or vice versa, rather than insisting on bullion.

As I mentioned above, the merchants’ guild uses their exclusive knot-language for this, rather than paper. It helps keep the benefits of a non-specie money system confined within the guild, rather than taking the first steps toward a system that’s usable by any average citizen.

Since they’re not a weapon, and they’re not transmuted using Theurgy, absolutely.

Even the lowest-Kyklos Theurge lives very well on the income they get from the Hegemony plus the sale of legitimate services. They can make plenty of money safely by using any surplus aetherial blood they extract, for e.g. private healing and agriculture. Meanwhile, every Theurge knows that their massive economic, social, and political power depends entirely on people outside their circle not figuring out how aetherial blood works. And yes, they also know that Kryptasts monitor every black market in the Hegemony to see what interesting things are cropping up, and that any whisper of a market in blood would be investigated with all the Mystikon’s considerable resources. But collective self-interest, rather than fear of punishment, is what holds the system together.

From the demand side, aetherial blood is the sort of substance that it’s hard even to speculate about trading, given both its fundamental military/economic importance and the religious taboos around its production and use. It’s really hard to start a market in a substance that’s the equivalent of plutonium and the Blessed Sacrament.

This is unknown, and people speculate every which way about it.

It’s expected of everybody. But even more than with the top-tier nobles, it’s pretty hard for a Theurge to really render themselves unmarriageable, whatever they get up to before marriage.

@Norilinde, terrific thoughts on the feasibility of wars of liberation on a major landmass. :slight_smile: I think to the extent I apply them in the game, it will be to the grand project of unifying the Hegemony’s continent, rather than an invasion of Halassur, which I continue to think is an ambition too enormous to be realistic.

Let’s see how complex things get. If it seems necessary, I’ll write it in.

On current plans, you will have the option in three chapters of G3 and G4 to either visit a foreign archonty or spend your time in a nearby bit of Shayard, shoring up your rebellion there. So yes, Erezza will be possible early in G4. Details still very much TBD.

I’m afraid not. :frowning: Still working on it, but most of my time is sucked into the day job right now. Expecting things to get a bit lighter there from June onward.

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So then you are giving me the reason. It could no be paper but merchants are already giving similar steps than in Renaissance to a more market economy. So for me my idea of a Mega corporation bank church could have lots of sense. As born in a heavy Catholic place that have a medieval kingdom i could say that it was like that. As church in medieval Galicia worked a lot of a bank selling stuff and guarding stuff even lending money using orders as subsidiaries. (due in theory Church can’t let with interests. )
Living Near Santiago de Compostela de 3 site of pilgrimage after Rome and the Mecca… and all the story behind where church manly controlled Galicia and its economy during a millennia… Is quite obvious a idea of a church that operates similar a megacorporatiom

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This is good, as Erezza will probably be the most important part of my MC’s post-revolutionary state. Also, @Havenstone, where is the Shayard Reach on the map?

The Reach is much of northern Shayard – the area south of Veldrin, plus the hill range extending east to Aveche.

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Which is why I thought depending on how much jewelry junk the rebellion captures, what are we going to do with it? Except export it to Halassur to give them a right royal headache.
Pity that won’t be an option. So now what is my mc to do with all of the possibly worthless junk we might capture?

Which is what I would have liked to have done to Halassur, seeing as how our ability to wage conventional war on them would likely be much diminished compared to the Hegemony, nor would my mc have the stomach to fight anything other than a “cold war” with them. A scenario in which attacking their economic stability and the value of their coinage could have gone well.

Pity, because, again, since my mc wants to abolish the caste system we’re going to have a large increase in the number of “average citizens” who are part of the economy, rather than just being an economic object.

Yet somehow as more factions than just the mc’s emerge and the Hegemony continues to crumble it might well pop up anyway, particularly in places such as Nyral where the nightmare religion holds far less sway.

Seems Langley is really overworking you as of late. I wonder what the Trump administration wants with Nepal. :thinking: :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

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