I have the broad arc planned out (including tentative chapter names). In Game 2, Stormwright, the tide of rebellion will sweep across Shayard, and you’ll spend much of the game in the capital. In Game 3, Omphalos, after a brief return to the Rim you’ll begin visiting other provinces (if you choose – alternatively, you might visit other parts of Shayard to consolidate your authority there) and infiltrate the Hegemonic capital of Aekos. Game 4, Downfall, will lead up to the siege of Aekos and the collapse of the Thaumatarchy in its current form.
Game 5, Hegemon, will see you trying to consolidate some sort of post-Thaumatarchic order in relation to up to thirty other factions. The ambition of this plan has been noted. Your “big bad” by then will vary based on the choices you’ve made to that point.
Probably not, I’m afraid. Any time I do a name change, I have to store the old name, in recognition of the fact that not everyone will switch over to calling you by your new one. But you’ll be able to pick an alias, which many people will call you by. I hope that’s some satisfaction.
One question we’ve joked about on the Discord, but I’m dying to know: will you eventually be able to Harrow helots to obtain their aetherial blood for your faction?
I have some elitist Ruthless/Cosmopolitan Aristocrat builds that are creating low-anarchy rebellions based in the yeomanry and nobility that would be thrilled to do it.
Hello, everyone! I’ve been an extremely long-time lurker of the Choice of Rebels threads. I absolutely adore Havenstone’s writing and keep up with the updates posted here in the forum, but only recently has my work/life balance shifted enough for me to participate. Eager to be a part of the community!
@Havenstone
My partner and I are both fans of your work, and they had a few questions about helot elders they wanted me to pass on to you:
Hi Havenstone! I wanted to ask about how the Hegemony views/treats helot elders. I understand that the Hegemony culls older helots, and that’s why starting the game via the Rim Square uprising gives you a bunch of kids to look after. So then why haven’t Joana and the other helot elders you meet throughout the story been Harrowed yet? It seems like there’s a lot of child helots and young adult helots, a couple of old helots, and no middle-aged helots, and I was curious whether there’s an age threshold where, if a helot survives beyond it, they’re no longer likely to be Harrowed.
Also, I got the sense that helot elders provide informal governance/leadership/guidance for the helots as a whole. They definitely seem like community leaders, at the very least. Have I interpreted their role correctly and, if so, does the Hegemony know that they perform this social role and/or tolerate it? I can definitely imagine that the Hegemony might want young helots to emulate the probable traits of long-surviving elder helots (i.e. compliance, subservience), but I thought I’d ask to be sure.
Thank you!
I also had a question as well. I know you’re currently working on Stormwright, but I was curious whether you’re still accepting bug reports/feedback/suggestions on the original game. I noticed some wonky parts during a few recent playthroughs which I should be able to reproduce, but I don’t know the best way to send you that information. I’ve seen people occasionally post bugs in this thread, but I wanted to check just in case. I also don’t know the etiquette for non-bug-related feedback on finished games–is it okay to offer suggestions even though the game’s already published?
Sorry to have missed a few questions over the past couple weeks!
Yes–by the late games you should be able to have utterly betrayed your initial allies and reestablished a brutal replica of the current Hegemony.
Welcome, Silas and partner! Glad you enjoyed the game.
To get Harrowed before the age of 30, a helot pretty much has to do/say something threatening to the social order; even if they’re not breeders, there is a lot of hard labor the Hegemony can get at that age. A mouthy, angry helot like Kala or Breden would be considered likely to be Harrowed in their 20s. Most helots get Harrowed in their late 30s or 40s, whenever they’re considered to be getting toward the end of their healthy breeding age.
A few are allowed to live into their 50s, like Old Joana. To make that cut, an elder needs to be reported by the overseers to be respected by the other helots, and to have used that respect to keep order and ensure good work. Regardless, you’ll almost never find a helot older than 60; at a certain point, the risk of them dying naturally before they can be Harrowed outweighs their remaining value to the system of social control.
As community leaders, elders have a fine line to walk. If they collaborate too much with the masters’ oppression or are seen as outright spies, they are likely to lose the respect of their peers, and thus their value. To avoid a vicious cycle, the elders need to be able to win a reasonable measure of both concessions from the masters and compliance from their fellow helots.
Game 2 Chapter 2 will take place in a situation where the helot elders and local nobles had maintained that balance for a long time, before it was destabilized by word of your rebellion. You can engage with that and see how you feel about it.
Oh, absolutely. Still fixing bugs and wonky bits of continuity whenever I find them. Please do let me know whatever you can replicate/diagnose!
I’m also still happy to hear suggestions for improvements to Game 1, though I’d offer a warning note that I’m unlikely to implement them, however good they are–my priority right now needs to be Game 2. But if that’s not unduly discouraging, please feel free to give me your feedback. I certainly won’t be annoyed or put off.
Hello everyone, I hope you’ve all been keeping well and happy.
@Havenstone As ever, thanks for your hard work and talent. Might I ask if we’ll have chances to name our fledgling states as they arise from the ashes of the rebellion?
I’d quite like to become the Supreme Leader of the Democratic People’s Republic of Shayard - are customised / player-selected leadership titles and state / country names something that’s been tabled for the future?
Hello, I’ve been following your work ever since its release on Google Play
I’ve got a few questions for you if you don’t mind:
Will it be possible to promote some of the more renowned helot/yeoman followers into nobility, or will they be having none of that? Not to mention, have the social classes become very close-knitted for it to able to occur without strong repercussion much like in the High Middle Ages?
Do Karagonds from the lower classes within their home province enjoy higher privileges and/or are seen more favorably when they’re in other provinces?
While my MC has yet to get himself involved with the Laconniers, he has a reminiscient view of the pre-hegemony history and will probably find himself sympathizing with the faction in later games. He has been starting to develop an ambition in taking the throne for himself since the rebellion started, however. Will that lead to an inevitable conflict between them in the future?
Considering how my MC has endlessly defended Breden even when the crowd was overwhelmingly against her, I would say he’s been relatively open-minded enough to give her another chance even when the evidence was pointing at her in Chapter 4. Will that be enough for Elery’s anger to subside in future installments, or will she still hold it against him? I don’t want to be on the receiving end of both pro/anti-breden factions
How far-reaching was the influence of pre-hegemony aristo MC’s family in Rim Square? I’m guessing it didn’t reach to a great degree asides from being slightly more noteworthy.
Hello Everyone!
I just recently finished (after multiple playthroughs) this great game, and to make the years spent waiting on the next entries a little easier, I went out of my way to design the armorial my ragtag band of rebels will (hopefully soon) be using. External Imgur link! (Sorry, for some reason I can’t embed it!)
As you can see, it has a simple orange base colour with blue stripes, meant to symbolize dawn, and in this case the dawn of a new era and the end of the Hegemony. While very simplistic and straightforward, it follows the same line of reasoning as the broken shackles themselves - sometimes a simple message is the strongest.
But there is some practicality behind it as well: The orange colour is very easy to achieve as it simply requires leaves being rubbed on the cloth (At first, this might produce a brown colour - simply repeating the process enough times will yield a nice orange, though).
The blue, on the other hand, is a little harder to get hold off, but not impossible either: it can be produced with woad powder (Which is surprisingly Blue despite its yellow bloom!), and as such is used more sparingly than the orange.
The complicated embroidery would, of course, be missing from most standards and only be present on the leaders’ own standards - or potentially nobles that decide to join the rebellion.
I know this was a long and utterly silly post, but thank you for reading it nonetheless, I hope you have a great day!
Welcome, @Idon! Great to have you on the forums, thanks for the great questions, and sorry it’s taken me a few days to get to them.
The social classes are profoundly divided in the gameworld. Making it thinkable for a helot (or even a yeoman) to join the nobility would be a massive feat of social re-engineering – but hey, that’s what revolution is for, and you can certainly go for it. If you succeed, most of your helot and yeoman followers would accept promotion; only a handful would resist the chance to become a noble.
Upper-class Karagonds definitely do, but it’s a bit trickier with the lower classes. A helot is a helot, no matter where they were born or whether Koine is their native tongue. Free Karagond smallholder farmers or workers only have advantages around a cleruchy, a town or city where Karagond settlers displaced the original inhabitants. Karagon doesn’t settle many cleruchies these days; most of them are a century or more old. Elsewhere, Karagond peasants have only mild privileges.
Probably. But you’ll have a shot at convincing them that you’re the secret heir of the royal House…
Elery will not forever hold against you the decision to have someone other than Breden as your deputy.
About as minimal as a noble can get. You had the privileges of nobility, but next to no influence. Your Keriatou cousins had other favorites; people who wanted to influence them soon learned to go through their favorites, not through their humble cousin.
Absolutely. It will however come in useful a couple of times in the early chapters if you learned it in Game 1.
I don’t blame you. Saucy minx.
This is awesome! Thanks so much for sharing it with us. And welcome to you, too.
How many of you agree with me that anything other than a united Hegemony would be disastrous? I really believe that being a Shayardene nationalist is a path faded to fail. I don’t know if I can, but let me use an example of another game, Skyrim. You have the Thalmor who are just itching for the Empire to show a shred of weakness to strike. The Empire barely managed to hold them in the previous war with all their resources, manpower and coin. How does Ulfric think that he defeat the Thalmor without having 4 provinces, let alone controlling the shittiest province in Tamriel. A recipe for disaster. Only a united Empire has any hope to succeed.
Having said that, to those that want to split Shayard from the Hegemony, what would be your course of action should the Abhumans/Hallasurq attack? As far as I remember, the Hegemony spends a lot of blood and resources to hold the line at the frontier with Hallasurq, so I’m curious as to how you guys would hold the other empires while losing the resources of 3 other provinces.
A mutual alliance? Fortifying the borders of Shayard and hoping for the best? Theurgy? What are your thoughts about this?
Your “big bad” by then will vary based on the choices you’ve made to that point.
