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

I think doomsday is exactly where it will lead if K doesn’t have someone else working with them as they’re going to destroy the subsistence system that the whole continent has in place (which is very much based on the blood economy) and I doubt very much they have a replacement in mind.

3 Likes

yeah that’s fair they definitely shouldn’t be in charge but they also don’t have any actual intention of leading to that much collateral damage. And as the characters haven’t been on this forum we can’t expect them to fully realise the extent to which blood is necessary for the current system

3 Likes

The thing is, I’m pretty sure Phaedra ultimately supports as well as represents the continuation of the Thaumatarchy after Kleitos’ fall. Thaumatarch #4, just with less cruelty and to some extent less involvement of theurgy. She wants theurgy’s employment reduced, but we don’t know anything about eliminating it, or Harrowing.

2 Likes

I think I might have mentioned this before but what about making like, a plektos that generates excess tissues that collect to be harvested for rarified blood? Then we don’t need to harrow people (unless we’re already killing them).

3 Likes

Has been discussed, beware spoilers.

The important tissue for aether is human or human-level brain, not the blood. The eyes have some but not enough to matter. Making animals with non-brain aether-dense tissue would be…interesting, but you’d probably get some kind of sentience.

3 Likes

It’s practically guaranteed they’ll keep the caste system and helotry in place though, so that makes them as much of a non-starter option for my mc as the Laconniers.

So, at best he’s one of the “animal welfare” types like Olynna. My mc despises them almost more than the outright sadists like Hector. At least the latter are an honest depiction about what slavery and having no rights or legal personhood whatsoever truly means.

4 Likes

We know what friends/allies we might expect with high cosmopolitan or nationalist, or neutral MC. What about compassion meter? Who will have more positive attitude towards us if we’re ruthless, compassionate or fairly neutral on that field? @Havenstone

5 Likes

Have it produce human brain tissue in excess.

1 Like

I like that a lot. :slight_smile: We’re a good ways off from G5, but you can expect to see that as an ending.

You’d find a fair amount of support for the approach you describe.

K could just about respect a leader who was trying to be feared-but-not-hated… but they would get frustrated quickly if they saw you worrying too much about avoiding hatred. After all, K would point out, the current overclass has been doing just fine for centuries despite being hated by most of the helotry. Get enough power, and you can live just fine with being hated, pace Machiavelli.

Guest-right isn’t about “innocent bystanders” as such – nor is it just about people you invite into your home. As readers find out if you kill Horion and Linos on sight in G1 Ch3, travelers on the road have guest-right; you’re supposed to welcome them into your home, if you live nearby, and share a bit of food with them. The Whendward outlaws rob passing strangers, but don’t kill them unprovoked, as a concession to this deeply engrained cultural value. K, you’ll be unsurprised to hear, finds this a ridiculous inconsistency. Of course K is familiar with all the fables of how the Angels punish those who abuse strangers and guests…as well as the fables of how they punish thieves and rebels. K sees them all as stories made up by the powerful for self-preservation.

That’s just not how aristrocracy works, I’m afraid. Or at least, I’m not aware of anywhere in world history where a feudal aristocratic class voluntarily transitioned to being a merely economic elite. The difference between nobles and mere merchants is incredibly important to nobles–even most of the enlightened ones. Even if you succeeded in opening up the offices of state to a broader professional elite, as both the Brits and Napoleon managed following several decades of revolution and counter-revolution, that wouldn’t mean the nobles as a class would embrace the bourgeois value of “earning your living,” or see a demotion to e.g. innkeeper as anything resembling a concession.

It was not. :slight_smile: The surface similarities are there, but will mislead you if you run with them.

There’s no trade with the Dead, and no other known civilizations to the west of the Bloodless Reach.

As for the northeast, in the early centuries of the Hegemony-Halassur war, with the loyalties of the Nyr unclear, the Karagonds made sure that the riches of the Erezzan isthmus could all be borne south and conveyed to them via the ports, rivers, and canals of Shayard. The luxury trade of the trans-Halassurq states also runs in the southern seas. The wealth of the Nyr flows upriver to Karagon and Shayard, rather than across the seas.

So the cold ocean east of Nyryal has been turned into a backwater, where you’re more likely to be caught up in a naval clash between Halassur and Hegemony than to come across a merchant ship worth plundering. Umri’s glory days as a port of trade are centuries past.

The inland sea north of Aekos sees even less inter-provincial trade; the horse pastoralists on the dry, cold Nyrish plains do their best to steer clear of Karagonds, and have set up no major settlements on the border sea. The limited sea traffic of well-off Karagonds from Aekos and nearby seaside towns is much too cloely overseen by Theurges to provide scope for piracy. By contrast, the long, rugged coasts of southern Erezza and Shayard are hard to police even from the air.

I should be clearer: using CHA 3 to impress the nobility of Grand Shayard is a course only open to aristo MCs who adopt a fake identity. A helot-born MC will not be able to “fake it” as a noble – they simply haven’t spent enough time in the presence of nobles to know how to pass themselves off as one. (Their option to infiltrate the nobility, if they go that route, will be as a freeborn tradesperson – if they’ve taken more time to get to know people from that class in Ch 2, they can pass.)

Similarly, an aristo-born MC can’t hide their Rimmer accent or ignorance of courtly manners – you’re a bumpkin, no matter what. If you’re ALSO a known rebel, 90% of the nobiliity will want to see you destroyed immediately (at the stage we’re talking about in Game 2). Only a handful, like Abelard or Teren, are rebellion-curious enough to be trusted with your true identity. The senior de Firiacs are not among that handful, and no stat check is going to change that. (And trying to formally court/marry S would get them paying fatally close attention to your fake story.)

It’s not possible to increase the “ceiling” amount of aether in a human body, not even for Abhumans.

It should be possible to be both Eclect and a merchant prince, though that won’t remove the tradeoffs where priests and merchants want different things from you. (Thanks for the book rec!)

No. :slight_smile: And that’s all I’ll say on the topic for now.

No – the Laconniers have worked too hard broadcasting the fact that the Leilatou have no trace of royal blood to reverse course on that, no matter what documents you have forged.

Marrying a prominent Leaguer would come close to being a deal-breaker, but it might be possible to pull it off. Regardless, Teren’s courtship will definitely not look like the Odyssey – we’re a long way from that epoch.

Not a lot yet. When things fall apart and you have migrants coming across all borders looking for Shayardene grain, the yeomanry may well get defensive, and they won’t be the only ones.

I won’t give a comprehensive response on this, but as a brief sampler: Teren values ruthlessness; Abelard prefers neutral; Phaedrx values compassion.

No one has so far been able to do that in a way that actually increases aether capacity–if they had, the magic economy would look totally different than it does. Even the best-informed Theurgic tinkering with the brain has so far only reduced people to the level of animals, including permanent dissipation of their aetherial capacity, rather than producing some kind of macrocranial mutants.

9 Likes

Any chance the MC will be able to hire something similar to a voice coach at some point to help them learn to hide the regional accent as time goes on? Not imagining that for Game 2 mind but maybe later?

1 Like

Yes, that should be possible by Game 3.

7 Likes

Regardless, Teren’s courtship will definitely not look like the Odyssey – we’re a long way from that epoch.

Can you tell more what do you have in mind? Or rather what “not like the Odyssey” means in terms of romance?

I won’t give a comprehensive response on this, but as a brief sampler: Teren values ruthlessness; Abelard prefers neutral; Phaedrx values compassion.

So, would it be counterintuitive to romance Teren as compassionate MC? Does that mean Teren as a character is ruthless too?

2 Likes

“Not like the Odyssey” is a response to a specific mshan question (will you have to take up the bow of Horion etc.). I’m not going to share more of what I have in mind just yet.

Being compassionate won’t rule out a romance with Teren, any more than it does with Kalt/Kala, but it will complicate it. Yes, Teren is ruthless when they think the situation calls for it.

In unrelated news, @idonotlikeusernames and others may be happy to hear that I’ve changed my mind on having Ganelon Tarakatou never appear again after G1. As we speak, I’m adjusting some of the G1 stats to track Ganelon’s status.

13 Likes

Except there is nowhere obvious to go. There is no Canada equivalent and Hallassur wants to just enslave “freed” helots again. The abhumans don’t seem open to large hordes of refugees, neither do the undead, assuming anybody would be crazy enough to even try. That just seems to leave the Xaos Lands/remains of Brauracha, but that would only be marginally less crazy than the undead and far more dangerous.

To free helots, really free them you’d need to control significant amounts of territory yourself, preferably as a helot mc, the other warlords/contenders will probably go no further than animal welfare or maybe sharecropping/serfdom at best. :worried:

I mean he’s probably not wrong, but the guest right may also be one of the more valuable cultural norms to preserve.

That is one of the things that can change with the canal, hopefully. And fostering a better trading culture is one of the reasons why it could be useful to keep the guest right as a cultural tradition…minus the religious claptrap. Being decent to guests, even if ones from Halassur in particular will need to be watched very, very closely to ensure they are not spies, is as much enlightened self-interest as anything else. At least to my mc it is.

But either not to helots as they are not people, or worse he’s one of those “animal welfare” types, like Olynna. :unamused:

Wow! :astonished:
So what changed your mind? And what is next? The “noble” half brother of helot mc being real/ still alive …wait that is not Gan, is it? :fearful: :crazy_face:

5 Likes

Some of the Tarakatou loose ends I’d written took on new life, and writing around Ganelon was beginning to feel like more trouble than it was worth. :slight_smile: Plus a wasted opportunity.

8 Likes

Do hoirn and linous always die? I probably spelt that wrong.

2 Likes

Interested to see what comes of it, since by the end of game 1 this still basically sums up my mc’s

So, yeah, Ganelon is basically the kid my mc used to have a huge and forbidden crush on but whose actions also made him very wary of trusting pretty boys spouting pretty words ever again.

5 Likes

If you hold them hostage and then let them go late in Ch 4 (or also hold Simon hostage, until they all escape together) there are no stories of their deaths…

8 Likes

That being said Ganelon was the one who enabled any MC to learn theurgy a bit of irony I doubt he appreciates

3 Likes

Will a Helot MC be able to become literate outside of increasing INT? It seems like something even the dumbest MC will want to do before long.

3 Likes