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

Choice of Games games
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4533

This is definitely the single most distinctive advantage of my gameworld’s evil empire. It has no real analogue in our world, and it affects the viability of many rebel tactics, both violent and non-violent.

But like any society, the Hegemony still needs skilled labor and knowledge, not Theurgy alone, to sustain plenty of its vital functions.

If essential workers collectively stop or slow their participation, Harrowing the lot of them not only risks launching a revolt too big for easy suppression – it also narrows the pool of people with their skills, and makes the regime more dependent on the cooperation of the rest.

If enough merchants around the empire are willing to sacrifice a significant share of their own personal profit to collude in the circumvention and undermining of Hegemony-wide trade systems, it becomes ever harder to deter them. You can convert only so many of your competent bankers and traders into high-octane smoothies before you crash your economy, even as a totalitarian state.

If enough of the priesthood become dissatisfied with their role as hype men for a Theurgic caste that holds all the real power without consistently living up to the Angelic ideal, the regime may not only find itself with a more limited pool of effective propagandists; the ideological system it’s spent centuries honing may swing slowly against it, creating a space where more and more people start looking for opportunities for non-cooperation.

If the Archon can no longer find a competent noble willing to serve as aristarch, they’ll get an ass, or a Karagond colonial administrator who may take years to realize who his enemies really are and how they’re circumventing his intent.

One of my key goals for the back half of Book 2 and Book 3 is to write some really satisfying and plausible ways to mobilize people against the Hegemony without violence. As they take shape I look forward to all of your feedback!

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Choice of Rebels: Stormwright (XoR2 WIP)
4534

And that is why I plan to become allies with every faction in the game except the priests

Also, are there random variables that make it change the number of causalities in specific battles? I’ve played this game so many times I basically have every choice I make during the winter down to a science to get the perfect play through. I raid the Architelone every time, but the number of causalities I’ve had has increased every time. 4 play throughs ago I had 4 deaths, then I had 6 deaths after that, then I had 7, then most recently I had 10. Is there a way to prevent this from happening? Each time I brought all of my leaders and cut my hand to make several unnoticeable changes to the enemy.

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4535

Yes, there are some random factors, especially in wintertime.

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4536

Thanks for the quick response! Guess I’ll just have to get lucky then

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4537

Can we set up magic circles like the ones in dragon age after the rebellion. Baciacly a fancy prison where mages are forced to stay and are constantly monitored and any one who practice magic outside it is hunted down and killed.

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4538

It wouldn’t make much sense. The Circle is only a thing because magical ability is inborn as well as dangerous, and mages need to be trained and prove they’re strong enough to avoid possession.

Since anyone can be a theurge (if they have the equivalent of a college education before they even start) and there isn’t a Templar-equivalent, you’re better off restricting access to theurgic education. As the Thaumatarchy does.

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4539

Then how about branding all theurgy as heresy and establishing a religious order to hunt any one who practice it while also claiming that our own theurgy are miracles and blessing from God to monopolize it’s usage.

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4540

So…exactly like the Thaumatarchy?

That’s what they do. Theurgy is the divine power of the Angels given to mortals to serve Xthonic Order. Goety is the result of dark pacts with Xaos. In fact, they’re both just blood magic.

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4541

Could work for a noble, helot-hating Sharyardene super-patriot MC.

Or an MC that suffers severe motive deterioration over the course of the story.

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4542

I wonder what it was about the Shayardine religion that was so compelling that they felt it was the tool best suited to the purpose? Was it just because Shayard was the first place they conquered. Surely the Karagon’s had their own religious beliefs that predated the conquest. Why couldn’t they be adapted instead? Adopting the religious beliefs of the conquered must have been hard to sell back home.

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4543

Shayard was the continental hegemony before Karagond united. I imagine that they’d adopted Shayardene Codex Xthonosis long before they turned it into the Karagond Codex to justify their empire.

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4544

Political and religious hegemony don’t always track, but it seems sensible. I don’t think Karagon was directly ruled by Shayard though prior to Hera’s rise to power. Perhaps the original elite of the Hegemony were just particularly irreligious. I suppose learning and mastering something as profound as blood magic for the first time could cause quite a crisis of faith.

4545

Karagond wasn’t directly ruled, but they were influenced, both politically and culturally.

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4546

Doesn’t Horion briefly mention how some of the nastier bits of the eventual Hegemonic codex were written in pre-conquest Karagond city states? It gives the impression it was fairly wide spread past Shayard’s borders by then.

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4547

Is there still a discord for this? Id like to follow along

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4548

There is. Right here.

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4549

Peaceful rebellion……yeah ngl I think a fair number of people here like myself ain’t even going to think about that. While yeah it could technically work with martial pacifism of only fighting when attacked but in raids, establishment attacks, infrastructure destruction, people are going to get hurt in this. Best to at least aim the destruction at those causing the most pain, cause you can still not piss off factions by just targeting their worst.

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4550

@Havenstone Just finished a playthrough and something happened that I’d appreciate your perspective on.

So, I’m playing for low anarchy and have a very compassionate aristo MC. Due to this, I’m able to recruit Simon/Suzanne, who is enamored by what a kind and merciful person the MC is. After having the MC declared Eclect, I choose to mess with the wealth of House Keritou to respond to their attacks on my caravans. During this mission, I bring de Firiac along for their skills as a fighter. After coming across two shepards, I have them killed to prevent word from getting out. Up until this point, I haven’t done anything noticably violent, but this feels like an exception. Operation goes off without a hitch, but de Firiac is understandably pissed at me. When the Thaumatarchy attacks, I choose to fight back and we win, which earns his grudging respect. However, I now need to enter the Xaos-lands to escape the Plektos hounds. Since I have no skill in combat, de Firiac begrudgingly accepts to come along as my protector.

Now, for my question: How could this relationship develop from there? Will there be an opportunity to discuss this incident? Maybe even gain some of that lost trust back with a frank discussion? This is an interesting dynamic that I hadn’t experienced yet. I’m curious where it could potentially go.

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4551

I’ve not really written the game to facilitate a “perfect playthrough” – that’s philosophically incompatible with the series’ premise. :slight_smile: Indeed, the core reason for the random element in Ch 2 is to prevent there being a guaranteed perfect outcome for any one path through the winter. But you’re welcome to try.

So far, your in-game sources on this have all been Shayardene. Let me add some lore to give a bit more of the Karagond perspective. :slight_smile:

The Reach had for centuries been heavily influenced by Karagond culture, though not under the dominion of any one city-state/polis (nor prosperous enough to generate city-states of its own). Its population spoke both Shayarin and Koine long before the Hegemony forced the rest of the continent to accept its language.

The fast-expanding Shayardene empire laid claim to the Reach, and no Karagond polis (or koinon of multiple poleis) was able to contest that claim. But one reason the monarchs of Shayard never tried to conquer Karagon is that they would have had trouble projecting real force across the dry, rugged Reach; their grasp on it was always a loose one.

So the fact that the religion of the Angels was initially revealed to the prophets of the Reach didn’t make it feel particularly foreign in either Karagon or Shayard. The Reach was a peripheral but well-known part of the Karagond cultural sphere (a “Karagon” that had never to date been under unified political rule, and thus didn’t have a clear in-out boundary), and the new revelations built on concepts of Xthonos and Its Order that came from Karagond philosophers and were already the dominant belief system in most city-states. The revelations received in Shayarin were immediately translated into Koine as a matter of course, and prophets in the city-states soon began receiving Angelic revelations as well.

The revelation of the Angels of Compassion had become the majority interpretation of Karagon’s religious philosophy before Hera came to power. Under her rule the Codex took canonical form – with a focus on the revelations that could constitute a law, many of which were the latter ones, responding to the concerns of city-state dwellers – but Hera was harnessing a tradition that was already popular, widespread, and perceived as indigenous.

Violence in self-defense is entirely understandable and ethically defensible… but it’s not non-violence, and as a label for it I think “martial restraint” (or “just war,” to draw on the longest-standing Western tradition of thinking on the matter) would be less oxymoronic than “martial pacifism.”

Absolutely. Non-violent resistance doesn’t assume that people aren’t going to get hurt – in a repressive state, people getting hurt is a given, regardless. But the individual risk of getting hurt is substantially lower from participating in non-violent disruption than from taking up arms against the authorities, and so a wider coalition of participants can generally be built by sticking to non-violent rather than violent responses to repression.

Don’t worry: there will also be violent options, both in self-defense and in disproportionate offense. The choice to win like the Taliban will be on the table.

@BlaiseB , there are a number of times the main character can resort to violence in ways that upset de Firiac. I haven’t tracked them individually, to keep the coding manageable. But the game does track whether de Firiac is upset at you for your brutal tactics, and you will have the chance to talk through this in the Xaos-lands – without reference to specific cases like the shepherds, but on the question of what level of violence against innocents will turn you into the kind of monster you’re theoretically rebelling against. And there will be options to regain de Firiac’s trust or to lose it entirely.

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4552

Alright lads time to nuke the capital with my circle of trained mages in the rebellion

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