Good question. Maybe you’ll get a chance to ask him in future games.
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To be fair- one way or another we’ll prove him right or wrong. If we tear down the Hegemony and assume its rule or create a new state from its ashes or whatever- to him he’ll be proven right. At the very least- we’re a very useful rallying point for delegitimising the state the more victories we win and the longer we survive.
Of course if we die- I guess we weren’t it.
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@Havenstone I was thinking of asking about the Hegemon Military. Just how BIG is their army? If they mustered 500 soldiers over about 6 months, then they must not have a total manpower pool of more than 10-20k, right? What I’m trying to get at is, just how many people live in big cities?
The scale of Hegemonic forces (and cities) will come up later in Game 2. For now, I’ll just note that most of their army is out east battling Halassur, and that the scale of the forces sent after you had more to do with the perceived scale of the threat you pose (and your distance from anything of strategic significance) than with the total military capacity of the Hegemony. There would have been major arguments over the cost of sending significant numbers of Phalangites to scour the wildnerness for a petty rebel.
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I take it that they are mostly garrisoning key positions and doing the occasional armed sortie?
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The lucky ones are in garrisons. There are also a lot of troops on patrol on the Errets side of the Ward; there’s an extensive no-man’s land on both sides, plus an even wider incursion zone where the Hegemony tries to settle people despite Halassurq raiders often coming across with improvised weapons and mages using their own blood.
Hegemonic sorties happen with reasonable frequency, in the name of pacifying the Halassurq side so they can’t trouble the innocent Erretsin settlers. And every couple of years there’ll be a big push somewhere to try to build a new loop of Ward and encompass a bit more of Halassur into the Hegemony before the Magi arrive to interrupt the wall-building. Those are where the majority of casualties take place, but patrol duty is a close second.
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How long do successful generals live? I don’t think the Hegemonic structure is kind to generals who do too well. Popular generals are a double edged sword since they can rally popular support.
Mmm, not so much. Without the support of the Theurgic establishment, a general’s coup is doomed, and theurges won’t accept a non-theurge general as Thaumatarch. The threats to the Thaumatarch are more likely to be Ennearchs than generals.
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There’s a somewhat higher attrition rate among provincial-born than Karagond-born generals. However, there are enough long-lived and conspicuously loyal provincial generals that the people who are aware of this differential tend to attribute it to a higher rate of disloyalty.
Yes. The Thaumatarch has an insurance policy on this front; so far only Sarcifer has figured out a way around it.
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How did Sarcifer break the kill switch? I know this is a spoiler, but I just want to raise the possibility. I doubt Hera’s heir, when he created this system, thought it was a good idea to give functional immortality out without a failsafe in place.
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It’s in his area of Theurgic specialization. I’ll say no more than that.
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Hi, @Havenstone
First off, I’ve come to thank you for creating such a great game. I’ve spent most of the week either playing it or catching up on threads here or replaying it again - and still I believe I’ve explored only a bit of content. I love it all, the writing, the characters, the themes. For me, XoR is one of the best and most interesting dark fantasy worlds currently. Thank you for its existence. 
Reading this (and some other) XoR forum threads was an exploration all of its own. 
And (inevitably, perhaps), I’ve started to generate questions of my own. They’re minor, actually, but I keep coming back to them so I’ve thought I’ll give them a shot, anyway. If they’ve been asked & answered earlier and I just missed it (I might’ve) and you can point me to them, that’ll be great too.
Cut for length
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You’ve said somewhere on this thread that mullow (or its contraceptive qualities, specifically) was created intentionally by Theurges - and I keep wondering why would they do that. Creating such a widely accessible contraceptive seems to go both against practical needs and religious dogma. To elaborate: the way I see it, there are roughly three main groups of population in Hegemony - helots, nobles and free people (yeomens, merchants, artisans and so on).
Helots are the majority, but they are obligated to reproduce. The use of contraceptives or, actually, any birth control for them is (should be? what’s the situation with abortion in gameworld, btw?) prohibited. So, the existence of a contraceptive they have easy access to only makes emposing this rule all the more difficult.
Then there are the aristos, for whom chastity before marriage is a big deal, hence, contraceptives really come in handy. But, control over such substances gives additional influence to those who can produce them and having additional means of influence over those in power is never a bad thing. So it’s more useful to create, idk, some kind of mullow-based medicine, refine it and keep track of those who come to you for it, than just let them access the source.
And free people neither have enough in numbers nor hold enough power to warrant creating a new plant just for them, especially since making Change a hereditary one is not an easy task.
Am I entirely off base here? Am I missing something really simple (I tend to, when an idea gets stuck in my head)? I’m basing all this on what’s known of Hegemony, of course, and it might not have even existed at the time of mullow’s creation, but I can’t see that it would have been much different in any other society you’ve described so far (save for Abhumans, probably) or any that preceded them.
… I guess what I’m trying to ask in so many words is: what made them decide such a thing as easily accessible contraceptive was necessary? This seems like a rather modern idea and not universally supported even in our days. -
When talking about nb-characters you’ve mentioned that in Nyrean (am I getting it right?) language there are no gendered pronouns. That got me thinking about other ways the gender can be expressed by grammar — most simple ones, at least, I’m no expert in linguistics. But it’s interesting even on such a superficial level. E.g. English has gender distinguishes but they only become relevant when someone else is talking about a person. It is entirely possible to talk about oneself in English and never make your designated gender (or lack thereof) obvious. Alternately, in Russian (which is my native language) this is much harder to do, due to gendered flections and adjective-noun concord and other stuff. And then there are other languages, like Spanish or Italian, for example, that assign grammatical gender to most concepts but still allow to avoid it when talking about onself. This might seem like a minor difference which, linguistucally, it probably is, but it shapes a rather different reality in subtle but numerous ways.
(I most often come across it in translation - both as a reader and a dabbler in the field. For example, in Martha Wells’ All Systems Red the gender of MC, I believe, is never definitely stated. Which is natural, because, you know, a bot, and opens up an interesting line of self-exploration for MC. But when it came to Russian edition translator was forced to make a choice which at the very least broke the ambiguity of the MC’s perspective.)
So, back to gameworld. 
Nyrean has no grammatical gender category. What about Koine? It has some gender-related conventions, like flexible flections (I assume, kurios/a is a Koine word?), are there any other? What about Shayarin? The language of Abhumans? Other languages, maybe? Analogues from our world will do, naturally. Or some general discussion, I dunno.
I guess this turned out to be more a reflection than a question, sorry about that.
- And the last one. You’ve mentioned somewhere on this thread that, although you know who the traitor is, it’ll stay ambiguous in-game. Would you mind elaborating on that a bit? I’m honestly only curious about your reasons for such a choice. It seems risky: most “writer-reader” conventions would require to resolve a mystery that weighted so much on the plot. And after spending all this time on XoR I’ve no doubt you do have a reason to do it this way, so I wonder what it might be.
Of course, there’s no need to answer if you for some reason don’t want to. It’s just that I love learning how people create their stories only a bit less then learning the stories themselves, so I just couldn’t help asking.
Oh, and while we’re on the subject of artistic choices and autor’s intent, I just remembered, there’s one more thing I wanted to thank you for, specifically. It’s the way Breden was introduced and their overall storyark in relation to MC. I love the point it makes: that we all have feelings and impulses we cannot control (such as feeling attraction to a physically compelling person) and that, this first impuls notwithstanding, we still have free will (and ability) to decide what to do about it later. Feeling physical attraction to someone doesn’t make you obliged to follow through or even like them as a person on closer acquaintance. Neither does it make any deeper feelings you mighy develop for them as you get to know them better any less real. It is just what it is, an impuls, no more and no less. The really important part - your actions - comes later.
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For all Linos knows, he’s bullsh*tting. I’m not sure what the truth is, but my hypothesis is that XoR follows Game of Throne Rules on this: magic exists, but it’s very doubtful that deities do.
That said, if you lose the battle in Chapter 4, you have a chance to ask the Angels to help you. I won’t spoil what happens, but it reminded me of the joke about God, the Boat, and the Drowning Man.
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@xellga, thank you for the kind words and for taking the time to articulate so well what you enjoyed and your questions! I’ll do my best to answer.
Mullow is in part testament to the fact that Theurges don’t design things entirely from scratch, but amend the natures of existing things. The plant with the closest properties to what they wanted was a fast-spreading weed, and changing that aspect of its nature to make it harder to cultivate would have been one more challenge and cost.
That said, the aristocratic Theurges who created mullow weren’t troubled by the idea that it would be widely available. They saw society as a raft, where the free classes were kept “afloat” by the sacrifice of the unfree classes. This would work best, they thought, with as few of the former and as many of the latter as possible.
The preferential Harrowing of childless helots creates a strong disincentive for their mullow use (while they’re also fed shrub yams, which secretly have the opposite effect). Meanwhile, the fact that everyone else can access mullow easily will keep the numbers of free folk manageable.
There have no doubt been subsequent Theurges who questioned the wisdom of this analysis. But once the altered mullow was released into the wild, there was no going back.
As for religious dogma, the fact that mullow makes it easier to pretend that the upper classes are living up to the chastity ideal is a bonus. Halassur is pro-natalist and has a strong religious aversion to contraception; the Hegemony does not.
I agree, but I’m barely qualified to play with it even on that level. 
Let me chew on the idea and get back to you!
It is risky, and we’ll see whether I still feel that way when I’m wrapping up the later games. I reserve the right to change my mind and have a big explicit reveal. But we often have to make the most important decisions in life based on incomplete and ambiguous evidence, and I’d like the Breden plot to reflect that, even after multiple playthroughs.
Thanks for expressing so well what I was trying to convey with that dynamic–and I’m glad you liked it!
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Thank you for your answers!
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How vital is shrub yam as a staple food?
In Theurgic propaganda or in reality? 
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While I find both interesting my mc would be mainly interested in reality. At least it was not implied to feature heavily among the foodstuffs we looted from the tithe barns during the winter, if I recall.
Note to self: export sales to Halassur to be prohibited in new trade legislation. 
Though if my mc gets his continued cold war footing any trade or events concerning Halassur will be very closely monitored regardless.
And in general: Shrub Yam to be priced at a value (far) above Mullow, at least until the population excess levels off to sustainable levels post-war.
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If it were really vital, it would be stockpiled for people other than helots.
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So Halassur has everyone eating as much shrub yam as they can get…