Which is why I´ll bet the original Shayardene Codex would deem contraceptives to be illegal.
If so might be worth considering for those who seem desperate to embrace ¨traditional¨ Shayardene values, with the likely addition of some form of slavery by another name to keep up a caste of people to be harrowed. 
When mullow was first invented, the supply would be very low so the price would be very high (law of supply and demand), but I am skeptical mullow could be worth more than something that leads to more aetherial blood particularly if the Hegemony was at war at the time. Rather than comparing contraceptive sales to drug money, a more appropriate comparison might be comparing contraceptive sales to nuclear reactor fuel sales for a civilization that relies on nuclear reactors for electricity.
I do not think we have enough information to say much about the “original Shayardene Codex” save that if it is like many real world religions, there may have been more than one version even before the Karagond invasion.
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I doubt the original Shayardene Codex addresses contraception at all. I suspect the church’s position would entirely hinge on how contraception is perceived to affect societal order. This is something that could be argued either way. Sex out of wedlock is seen as disordered so contraception is likely perceived as encouraging disorder. OTOH a strong case could also be made that in a properly ordered society all pregnancies should be planned, and unplanned pregnancies increase disorder. An MC who is declared Elect or otherwise takes control of the church would likely have some wiggle room here. The real issue is the current Karagond-enforced status quo that many have bought into, not some hypothetical reversion to an all but forgotten uncorrupted codex which the MC will be able to put their own spin upon.
The thing about “traditional Shayardene values” is that after 300 years of karagondization, almost no one knows what “traditional Shayardene values” are any more, so the MC has the ability to define them anew. The Laconniers may quibble on some points, but if you’re intending on smashing them any way, what they think doesn’t really matter.
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Exactly Mara is pro Shayardene and pro monarchy but is not stupid. And knows most they will defend is bullshit so mara will ditch them because they want maintain slavery and maintain a status quo with other owners. Mara wants a region in Shayard where there is no slavery not use of blood magic and a economy based in culture and free market and banks and special artisan that make art clocks and all that. Farms of course but without use of blood magic and using a feudal -cooperative system In mara bank church fields farmers will work in exchange a salary or choose be in a rental system where Mara church lend a big agricultural land to a group of ex helots and make them do a cooperative then give Church a percentage of money or products. Church could give them a infrastructure of commercial distribution wares and lending money as part of banking merchant part of the Church.
I think is far better than being a slave and being harrowing. Also free mullow and free education.
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And I’m pretty sure the game will also address the MC’s behavior and how it will afect their rebellion. “I like Shayard and respect foreigners” and “Shayard is good nation of hardworking people but foreign elements are dragging us down” are both systems of belief that exist in the “Homelander” scale, and giving players a chance to dial down on the more chauvinistic elements or embracing them seems like a good touch. But that’s te stuff of future games, if Havenstone chooses to go that way at all. 
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I was being flippant when I said what the Laconniers think doesn’t really matter if you’re planning on crushing them. They, the Homelanders, and possibly the MC too will all be competing to define what “traditional Shayardene values” means in the game. Whether that means “mom and apple pie”, “freeing the helots as old Shayard had none”, “kicking out the Karagond imperialists”, and/or “kicking out all the rest of the smelly foreigners too” is really dependent on the leaderships and goals of the power groups competing to influence public opinion.
I agree, I was just using your post to talk about a particular expectation of mine when it comes to the personality stats. Sorry if I came off as brusque 
Not invented in the gameworld. I don’t want to echo Robert Jordan on this one. 
Metallic aether, including Talismans, cannot cross a Ward. Mullow and shrub yams can, as it’s been thousands of plant-generations since the original landraces were tampered with. Mullow was indeed developed first, with shrub yam following only when the demand for blood began to exceed the readily harvestable population.
The equator would not show up on the world map – it’s well to the south. The continent is in the northern hemisphere.
Sure you can! You can be one of many flavors of authoritarian, including the idealistic kind. I’m just not trying to write any of those flavors as the natural, optimal, or divinely appointed outcome.
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I only read this article today and I have not read the referenced book so I cannot comment on the analyses, but the article seems relevant and interesting. According to the book’s description, the time covered was from 1900 to 2006.
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Well, given the nature of players…Actually, I think that makes for a good question!
How does your main MC govern their rebellion?
- MC alone
- Council of Elders
- Moot
- Apella
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voters
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I think mine is a council with the combination of Elders and younger generation such as Alina, Elerny , Biden and Suzane 
Apella. His idealism commands it…(that totally won’t bite him in the back ever, right? 
).
Curious that the cosmopolitan “democratic” option of the apella seems to be the most popular right now while the more traditional moot is at the bottom and does not even manage to beat out the council of Elders (future oligarchy?). Another factor would be that in most of our modern and slightly less modern societies at most 1.5% was ever structurally involved in the “deep state” or security apparatus of the regime. We already know that the Hegemony employs a disproportionate number of soldiers and law enforcement that goes way beyond the numbers ordinarily involved in state security in our world. So here 3.5% of the population, even if we take the pervasive caste system out of the equation, may not be enough to make the elite quake in their boots the same way it would in our world.
Given the other regulars I’d have expected mc alone to be the most popular followed by the council with the more “democratic” options dead last.
We shouldn’t underestimate that factor, as well as the fact that societies like China, where leaders have less qualms towards industrial scale brutality weren’t covered. Let alone the nightmare society that is the in-game Hegemony.
Nevertheless @Havenstone seems committed to giving a non-violent/pacifist option to “rebel”. I still don’t see how trying to be Ghandi could succeed in something like the in-game Hegemony.
Particularly since the only people who have a voice would be the nobles and the current theurges. Therefore even if the 3.5% metric could/would work in the Hegemony it would probably have to take the caste system into account and you’d need that 3.5% to come from nobles and theurges, which might be a viable way to go for some…but we all know my main mc is not the kind of guy who’d champion the interests of a faction of the nobility.
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I will like them dare to try take the power from Mara being The super Pope bank CEo
… Except 'f is Mr Pumpkins I will let mr pumpkins vote of course
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Ah, yes, Biden. The one rebel who thinks the Karagonds will have a change of my heart when the Thaumatarch is out of the picture. 
And, by the way, @idonotlikeusernames, what do you think are some of the biggest drawbacks of the apella. For me, the fact that it took our world a good couple centuries to figure out how to make wide democratic countries is one of them. I’m guessing philosophers in the Rebelverse mostly see democracy as a democratic city-state.
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You’ve basically already said it but the world of Rebels has had much more limited experience with such things as democracy, sefl-governance and popular sovereignty then even our world had at the period of roughly comparable technological progress and what democratic traditions there used to be from the Shayardene moot to the Nyrish merchant/aristocratic republic were all cut short by the Hegemony as were the traditions of the more democratic Karagond city states of old. Which means that when it comes to these things we’d basically be reinventing the democratic wheel in a period of post-civil war instability.
Which for the kind of reforms and society my mc wants would mean it would be easy to fall into the trap of the “vanguard revolutionary party” and democratic tutelage on one side of the coin.
On the flipside would be that, should the system my mc designs for the (grand) apella prove itself robust enough and provided he does not go the route of the vanguard party and focus on the rule of law above all else the gains of the revolution could potentially be “hijacked” by less friendly parties, with the Leaguers being the main suspects. This might then possibly lead to an even more dysfunctional mega-India if politicians who only pay lip-service to advancing helot rights, or worse, were to rise to prominence.
I think I’ve already said my mc does not much fancy becoming the game world’s Dr. Ambedkar.
And the even more depressing thing is that both examples above are still fairly rosy scenarios for the aftermath.
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Well, the poll is now headed that way.
I did not realize that. If China is not covered by the study, then that is horrible reporting by the BBC which even mentioned Tiananmen Square in the article but never mentioned that event was not included. I would be initially inclined to say that not covering China would make the study worthless. However, if the most populous country in the world is not included, then the study may be worse than worthless to the extent of being outright deceptive.
@idonotlikeusernames Do you happen to know of a list of which countries and events were covered by the study?
I too do not see how a non-violent path could actually succeed in the Hegemony.
My MC thinks Horion was delusional in declaring that if the Hegemony Harrowed 10% of nobles, then the Hegemony would lose the support of the rest forever. My MC suspects the other 90% would happily turn on the 10% in exchange for receiving the lands of the 10%. Even if all of the current nobles turned on the Hegemony, my MC would say the result would then be the Harrowing of the other 90% followed by the creation of new nobles just like new nobles were created when the Karagonds first invaded Shayard. The nobility just does not seem suited to asymmetric warfare and does not seem capable of winning a conventional war against the Hegemony.
If Biden is representative of a rebellion’s younger generation, then that rebellion is in serious trouble.
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I am the official evil Gandhi of the forum lol. And I don’t even know how in hell a pacifist could win in a million of years but Havie has promised tons of times that Mara could win.
The big lead is blood magic as it seems that to conquer all land i needed. Reason My canon Mara won’t gain all territory and will remain a small neutral place . So maybe is mind control blood magic? Or Maybe mr pumpkins and me create the first mule rebellion
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What ? Why ?? :-)
I don’t think so, in my playthrough Breden enjoy a very good relationship and chemistry with Suzane or Simon, they both share the same strategy in the final chapter , i don’t think Biden tried to undermine my leadership by attempting to over rule me, it was Biden’s right to challenge for my decision as in a democratic group, although i always win in the end, but i would tell them that it was a victory for Democracy , not me alone since ultimately everyone is in the same boat once the dust is settle …
If i went along with Breden’s plan, you can see the genuine joy and enthusiasm in both Biden and Suzane or Simon 's face as they truly felt happy without malicious act …
Hence i am very confident with Breden, Elery , Alina, Suzane and Pin’s young faction :-)
Edit : My apology for mistaken Biden as Breden :-)
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Puff How happy I am of having all those lame helots dead in my playthroughs except judas breden Live is far easier withoutwhiny helots crying each five seconds about justice also kids… totally annoying kids place is not a revolution
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It kinda fits, as Biden seems to think working with the Republicans and bipartisanship will again be suddenly, magically possible once Trump is out of the picture, when in reality you’d need to Republican party to be dominated by a wing of people like our own big tiger, as to most of the Republicans “compromise” seems to be a dirty word. Not that the Democrats are entirely guiltless in the current state of US affairs, but at the moment it is clearly the Republican Party that has gone entirely off the rails.
Breden seems to be given to the same sort of fallacious thinking, albeit in much more dire circumstances. Breden conveniently forgets that even with the current Thaumatarch out of the picture there is still prince(ss) nippletwister and the nine arch-mages to contend with, at the very minimum.
China is purportedly covered but the accuracy of China’s census information the authors use is questionable at best. Which may not be entirely their fault as even our own Cata will go on and on that even today China’s census and the Communist Party’s actual government control of the country, let alone their census keeping in China’s vast interior is spotty at best. But how much actual control the government has seems not be a variable that was looked at very closely.
Therefore don’t believe the data set on China meets the same scientific standard as the others.
I’d say this is a problem for India too, which also has a problem with keeping a truly accurate census and has a lot of issues with actual law implementation and enforcement as many of the more high minded laws used to simply go unenforced in the countryside and even today there still is a problem with filling all the affirmative action jobs with “qualified people”.
Now obviously Columbia University and the authors would disagree with me, but based on their data set I don’t think we can conclude this hypothesis as universally proven.
What I think the study does prove is that in a society largely based on our western, institutional model of governance it probably applies. But it is noteworthy that China and today Russia too explicitly reject our model of the “social contract” with China even trying to go 1984 and form mr. Xi’s “total control” society.
The last point I already mentioned but the time period examined, 1900 to 2006 matches poorly with the game world as the game world at present does not even have mass circulated broadsheets for mass media nor does it have much enlightenment thinking and philosophy, save what people like the mc or Horion and a handful of others are only now starting to formulate.
Needless to say those ideas have not had much time to trickle down and permeate society, yet.
The only area the game world seems to be ahead in is possible atheism or at least anti-clericalism. But that alone does not solve most questions of democratic governance.
@Ramidel I see the poll has now reached the state I instinctively predicted at first with tyranny and oligarchy in the lead, except that the apella still ranks higher than the more traditional moot. But that is likely because most of those trying democratic reforms are more likely to lean towards cosmopolitanism over nationalism to begin with.
When I first looked some regulars like Empress @Eiwynn, @cascat07 or even bryce probably hadn’t voted yet. 
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