It’s been mentioned that we’ll also have the option to worship the Halassur gods, particularly if we decide that the Halassur method of infant Harrowing is the way to go.
Here’s a relevant post from 2018
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Thanks for finding that info for me. I had a feeling someone had already asked, but this thread is so long. Would’ve taken a long time to find that golden nugget of information.
Ignoring the moral implications of harrowing infants, isn’t that wildly impractical? I know that the blood and brain are the only bits that matter, but babies have underdeveloped brains and far less blood than grown people.
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It’s how they do it!
Also, the Halassurq have discovered that infant brains actually have much higher aether concentrations than adult brains. Furthermore, in their worldview, infants are far less valuable than people, and Harrowing every woman’s firstborn spreads the sacrifice among the people.
Of course, if you adopt this, you’ll have to deal with some questions from your band, who haven’t been raised and conditioned with this horror.
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Yeah I can’t imagine that going over so well…
So if that’s the case, do the elderly have lower concentrations of aether than say, a 20 year old? I wonder if we’ll find out why this is.
A bit of an odd question maybe, but @Havenstone, I was wondering if you had any book recommendations that you wouldn’t mind sharing?
I’m super fascinated by the real world cultural, political, and philosophical influences of the XOR world and would really love to learn more about them.
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I’m always up for book recommendations. 
Let’s start with fantasy.
Daniel Abraham, even more than his mentor and book club buddy George R.R. Martin, is an inspiration to me as a fantasy writer. I’ve only read his Long Price Quartet, but I think it’s an extraordinary piece of work – original (while cleverly commenting through its core magic system on just how hard it is to be original!), gripping, with enormous variation in scale and theme but somehow managing to cohere as a single unified epic story. I’m waiting to watch The Expanse, which he wrote, until I have enough free time to do it justice.
China Mieville is ferociously inventive. The Scar is much my favorite of his books, and definitely influenced some of the twists I want to work into XoR; but Perdido St Station, Iron Council, and Kraken are not too far behind.
I haven’t quite finished it yet, but I’m really enjoying Black Sun by Rebecca Roanhorse; it got my vote for the Nebula this year.
If you have any taste for short stories, Anjali Sachdeva’s All the Names They Used For God is a brilliant collection.
I’m a Max Gladstone fan. If you liked Choice of the Deathless at all, you should absolutely read his Craft Sequence. The first and sixth books in that are my favorites so far, but there wasn’t one that I didn’t enjoy reading. And his novella with Amal el-Mohtar, This is How You Lose The Time War, was terrific.
Speaking of sci-fi, some of my faves have been NK Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy, Liu Cixin’s Three-Body Problem and sequels, Chris Beckett’s Dark Eden, and Hannu Rajaniemi’s Quantum Thief. All mind-expanding.
Of the books I read and loved as a kid (and am now reading to my own), The Neverending Story, The Dark Is Rising, The Last Unicorn, the Earthsea series and the Chronicles of Prydain have all held up beautifully.
OK, now nonfiction that I read to inspire XoR… some of it’s been pretty dry, I won’t lie. But one of the ones I’d recommend in a heartbeat is Seeing Like A State by James Scott, and though I haven’t finished How Not to Be Governed, I’m liking it too. Terrific anthropological accounts of state-building, its shortcomings, and the people who manage to escape it.
Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror is a famously readable history of the 14th century which I thoroughly enjoyed – it’s a little early for XoR (which I think of as set in a more 16th century world) but so full of vivid and memorable narrative detail that I’m sure it still fizzed its way into the game. Religion and the Decline of Magic by Keith Thomas, God’s Philosophers by James Hannam, and The Beginnings of Western Science by David C Lindberg have all shaped my understanding of the intellectual climate of the Hegemony.
Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age is absolutely mammoth, but I loved it all the way through – it’s the kind of stuff I find historically and philosophically fascinating. Not everyone’s cup of tea, but very, very much mine.
I’ve read a lot of books and articles on revolutions, rebelliions, and insurgencies, historical and contemporary. Oddly, though, I don’t know if any of them stand out above the rest as recommendable. None of them leaps to mind. Ditto for the reading on empires and their dynamics – feels more like the homework I did rather than books I’d warmly recommend to others.
Anyway, there’s probably enough there to get started.
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First time posting here. I really love the the huge variety and replayability of Choice of Rebels. It’s awesome how many different end states there can be and I appreciate the depth of the lore. I was wondering how locked in we are to a given rebellion style after the first game? Will it be possible for an MC who starts off as high anarchy/violence in Uprising to reinvent the public perception themselves as their rebellion progresses from what’s basically a remote peripheral district to Grand Shayard?
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My intention is that you’ll be able to shift, but people will remember and the ones who care most about a given style will hold your switch against you.
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Thank you so much for taking the time to write such a thorough response!! So excited to dive into these 
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@Havenstone I haven’t seen you answering this question yet ( though it might be in the old thread, or I might just be blind ), but I was really curious to know what Elery would do if given the leadership of the band at the end of Game 1. I know there is a scene where she is asked if she’s ever had the desire to lead, and she replies with a mild ‘‘Eh, someday’’ .
I’m also wondering which lieutenant she’s most likely to pick as deputy ( if any ) , or if she’d be quick to try and hand it to someone like Breden.
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You’ll get to see in Game 2.
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Okay so, now that I’ve made the horrific foolhardy masochistic mistake of immersing myself in XOR again despite KNOWING VERY WELL that it will suck up far too much time and mental energy than I can realistically afford to give it while keeping a good work/social/health/school balance…
Now that I’ve done that to myself (again) I can’t stop thinking about the music in the world of XOR.
Is it correct to assume that the songs we’ve heard in game so far sound basically like Celtic trad songs? I assume, due to the fact that you can use theurgy to make your voice louder and more resonant, theurgically enhanced instruments are also commonly used in places like Aekos? Because of this, did music history and various musical movements advance more quickly than in Earth’s timeline? I understand probably none of this has much bearing on the story so if that lore doesn’t exist I totally understand! But I figured if we go ballcrashing, the music is likely to be super unfamiliar to us.
As a music student and composition nerd, I am super hyped by the idea of alternate music history —and magical alternate music history! Considering cultural ideals make themselves apparent in music, what do you think is the current musical movement in the hegemony? I feel like I could make a case for almost any pre-20th century movement being somewhat plausible in the hegemony, and with lots of weird and super cool alterations.
Idk. I just like to find ways of telling myself that the hegemonic elites to listen to basically prog metal but arranged for magically enhanced 16th century instruments. Also, I have started the Long Price Quartet.
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Sadly it doesn’t. I’m a nerd about an awful lot of things, but not about music – nor clothing/ costume, another area where XoR lore is underdeveloped. I don’t want to default to Celtic whatnot, but I don’t have anything more thought-out to put in its place – certainly nothing as awesome as blood-magic prog metal. The rhymes I’ve written for Carles and the greenwood celebration don’t have tunes. Anyone who wants to set them to music has my encouragement, whether you go for gamelan or throat singing or bardcore.
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Well what do you need help with? Though I am of course just a hobbyist in the subject I have always liked studying male fashion and costuming, including historical.
I assumed the Shayardene nobility to wear 16th/17th century French noble garb that, due to magic, is in some ways closer to the Hollywood interpretation and therefore more bling-y (and comfortable) than the proper, historical equivalent. 
I do remember we did once have a discussion about possible glove etiquette for the blood mages at formal events that may or may not be their equivalent of peace-binding their weapons. 
Can’t help you there though, I generally like most genres of music but I am a strictly social concert-goer from classical and opera to country line dance or heavy metal (well mostly Sabaton). If I have friends who have a good time with it, I usually do too but I am hardly a music nerd either.
That said something like the Boss (Springsteen) in bardcore would be awesome for my mc’s kind of rebellion, even if it would focus more on the plight of yeomen and the technically free urban poor than it would the helots. Though like the black slaves maybe the helots have their own kind of “soul” music.
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I went for a pretty generic folk sounding thing based off a lot of ambiguous rules from all over music history. I haven’t given a lot of thought to my theories about the specific styles that Hegemonic music are likely to be influenced by, and what paths those influences may lead down. If anyone does, this may no longer sound right. Mostly I was just trying to fit the scene I imagine in my head 
Thank you for giving me a way of not doing the arrangement I was actually supposed to work on tonight. The description of this song in the game said that it was played on a couple of pipes and drums. I wasn’t quite sure how to go about that, but I figured the pipes would probably be really simple woodwinds. Chords may not exist as a concept yet. If they do, they likely haven’t found their way into the type of folk song that a group of bandits in the wilderness would sing. So I added some simple harmonies and tried to somewhat avoid suggesting too strongly modern harmonic movement. The melody needed to stay simple enough that it could be easily learned and passed around. In the key of A because that’s easy for most people to sing, and stays within an octave. These voices are just octaves but there are some hidden harmonies in the woodwinds. Messy harmonies that break a ton of voice leading rules, but those rules may not have even existed, and I prioritized sound over following strict guidelines. The drum sounds in this program are so bad that I didn’t want to include them, but if I ever have anything else I badly want to procrastinate, maybe I will add them using actually tolerable VST’s --or do the Carles song, which is played on a lyre! I’ll be better at composing for that than for pipes anyway.
I can possibly advise should it ever be helpful.
Edit: dangit, just realized the last couple lines of the song were cropped out so you can’t follow along as easily. Probably should have actually watched the video before uploading it. The lyrics are “and weave us a bower of branch and fern, to shelter love ‘til winter return, my love o’ the greenwood is strong of heart, my greenwood love is strong.” Hopefully the melody is easy enough to follow along to!
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I just looked into this for the first time in YEARS, and I am very happy now. I thought there wouldn’t be a second Choice of Rebels, I’m so happy!
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Thank you so much! Beautiful and thoughtful. Really appreciate the time you put into it (and sorry it took you away from your other commitments…)
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