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

Well Havenstone has to his credit always cautioned people they might not find an RO they like and this isn’t primarily a romance game.

From the answer you quoted it would seem that Horion and like-minded nobles are willing to consider that a smart helot, which also presumably means the high int mc is smarter then a dumb noble, not that we’re genuinely smart, even by noble standards. So that still doesn’t seem very respectful to me.

Which means somebody else would have to see to young Poric’s tongue, for my mc that still means he probably isn’t going to be able to get rid of the whip scars because he’s not very likely to trust his fellow mages tampering with his body.

This is certainly valid, but consider they are also far more power-hungry and more likely to steal the band out from under us during our enforced absence in the Xaos lands. Unlike with Simon my mc also wouldn’t trust Kalt enough to take him with us. Kalt after all can already kill the mc depending on choices made.

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I highly doubt that. I mean even comparing fucking Mao to a fantasy antagonist is fucking asinine. Mao was responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of people, the descendants of which are alive today.

Calling him mild or benevolent is even worse. It’s disrespectful to anyone who suffered under him.

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I should have also included the INT 2 helot quote from Chapter 3. Horion in any case seemed to my MC to be entirely capable of “pretty big shifts in conventional wisdom”. Below is the quote for an INT 2 helot talking to Horion.

“Aha! Now there’s a prospect to bring twenty million Shayardene helots behind your banner—and unite the nobility of every province behind the Thaumatarch.” Horion laughs, sounding remarkably unshaken. “You know, two centuries back, the Nyr philosopher Aygul objected to the rule of aristocrats over the helotry. The distinction between helot and free is one of law only, not nature, she wrote, and being counter to nature is thus unjust. I’d been wondering if you were one of her followers.”

“Never heard of her. But it sounds plainly true.”

As the words pass your lips, your ingrained childhood terror returns in a rush—but you defy the urge to avert your eyes from the Leilatou. “There’s nothing a noble can do, milord, that a helot with the same learning couldn’t. Perhaps fate gives some folk a nature better suited to lead—but if so, it appears among noble and helot alike.”

“And in you, Captain, we have a chance to see that much-debated principle proven.” Horion beams with what seems genuine enthusiasm. “Did you know that in some of the free cities of old Karagon, helots could become citizens if they committed feats of sufficient bravery?”

“What?” You struggle to imagine the Karagonds, of all people, allowing any blurring of the line between helot and free.

“Unthinkable, unnatural, yes, yes. But read between the lines of the old histories, and it’s clear enough.” Horion is clearly enjoying your astonishment. “While in other cities, they declared war on the helotry once a year and encouraged young nobles to kill them by stealth. The Krypteia, they called it. Some of the less kindly bits of the Codex were written in those cities; and it’s their vision of what’s natural that’s been passed down to us.” He shakes his head. “Well, that helps me envision the shape of your future realm, Captain Thresher. Many thanks. One more question, if you’ll humor me: how big is it?”

@LanaRose I do not think that @idonotlikeusernames was calling Mao mild or benevolent, and I do not believe that any disrespect to those who suffered under Mao or their descendants was intended.

This phrase suggested to me that a government that has murdered tens if not hundreds of millions in the most painful way possible over centuries is simply worse than even the dictator responsible for more deaths than any other in human history. That was my personal interpretation anyway.

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Being honest here- I don’t think the hegemony is near millions yet. The only nation that could claim the millions of people you think they have in IRL terms is Imperial China and even they struggled with killing millions of their own until Mao.

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We know from Horion that the Hegemony currently has 20 million Helots. I was under the impression that Harrowing is how most Helots meet their end so tens of millions is certainly plausible. Hundreds of millions depends on how the population has changed over 3 or 4 centuries.

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Good thing for magic agriculture eh? Also the fact they probably have the helots give birth to like 8 kids to try to beat the odds and keep a positive birth rate. Which means they have to have the population of China at this point.

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From the subjective perspective of my mc he didn’t, since my mc is not an adherent of Aygul of Nyr but of the anti-Xthonic philosophers of old Erezza.

"“Your philosopher meant that law can change, nature can’t. But everything changes. Even what we call nature.”
“All things are in flux, and flux is the deepest nature of things. The more something resists change, the more likely people will give it the name of Nature…but nothing resists change forever. Ask any Theurge, or anyone who has faced the Plektoi.”
Everyone’s heard tales of the Twisted Ones: hounds, horses, or humans transformed by Theurgy into lethal armored giants. “A dram of blood makes only a brief change in nature, but a Harrower-full can change a Plektos’s bones to iron. Bleed a province, and you can turn air into an impenetrable Ward or make a mountain float in Aekos. Spend enough blood, milord, and you can change anything.”

“‘All things are flux’? Sounds like the anti-Xthonic philosophers of Old Erezza.” Horion sound flabbergasted at hearing the line from a helot—and uneasy. “They’ve been condemned even longer than Aygul of Nyr.”

“And they’re all the more likely to be true for it.”"

Despite his obvious enthusiasm, you decide not to sidetrack the conversation into theology. “Returning to the point: even should there be some difference in nature between helots and nobles, who’s to say that makes it immutable? The Order we call Nature is harder to change than the Order we call Law. But if there were need to change it, we would make a way.”

The ${delelle} looks slightly queasy but impressed.

From comparing your bit and mine I still see Horion falling very much within the niche I’ve described before, sure he might believe smart helots beat out dumb nobles, however prove to him that you’re both smart and do not agree with him as a helot and it is fear, not respect, you’ll get out of it.
Horion seems to only respect Helots who at least partially agree with him (thus putting them on the level of a dumb noble, as Havenstone described) and in Horion’s vision that, given his emphasis on the cities on the losing side of old Karagond, that he’d go no further then @P_Tigras and some of our other forum members in making helot manumission (not elevation to the top, manumitted helots still wouldn’t exactly be nobles) theoretically achievable.

You’re thinking too small, it is Shayard alone that already has 20 million helots. The population of the Hegemony as a whole is larger still

China without the one child policy and a relentless natalist drive (that tramples on gay helots even moreso then their straight peers) instead. The current Thaumatarch alone has likely overseen the butchering of tens of millions of helots already and the way the Hegemony is set up it practically requires every subsequent Thaumatarch to go for a higher body-count in butchered helots and the natalist drive to keep expanding the helot population to lead to the slaughter in order to keep the Hegemony’s system going. So, in the Hegemony Deng would have had to surpass Mao’s body count just to keep going.

Yep, that was the intention, since you really have to consider that Harrowing is intended to inflict the absolute maximum amount of suffering they can wring out of another person’s death. They then repeat this on an industrial scale as a matter of routine policy, instead of horribly misguided at best but ultimately still one-off projects like the “cultural revolution” and “great leap forward”.
Even discounting the Harrowing the life of helots can be as bad as that of people in forced labour death camps from China to the gulags of Russia to North Korea, only the Hegemony has a far larger percentage of its population in those circumstances then any of those.

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I disagree.

This line suggests to me he does respect your MC and if anything may actually be worried that your MC is correct about something that even he may not have seriously considered before.

That was a very neat quote by the way so thank you for posting it. I had never seen that one before. There is so much to this game including things that I still haven’t seen.

Considering that Simon/Suzane admitted during the sheep raid in Chapter 3 to murdering for trespassing someone who was probably hunting out of hunger, Horion would seem more deserving of the benefit of the doubt than Simon/Suzane to my MC.

From the interactions with Horion, I considered Horion far more than merely “fairly open-minded”. Horion also mentioned something along the lines of there being nothing more dangerous than a charismatic person on the wrong side. So there is probably an equivalent for intelligent people on the wrong side. The fact that Horion may fear your MC does not rule out him respecting your MC as well.

Yes, thank you @idonotlikeusernames for the correction. It is kind of embarrassing considering that I had personally posted the text mentioning that the 20 million referred just to Shayardene helots only 2 posts earlier. I need to pay more attention apparently.

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Teren isn’t Horion and if anything their youth would make them more rash and cocky and less likely to respect (or fear) helot mc’s then their uncle. Thus making them fall more firmly in Havenstone’s paradigm where they would believe a smart helot is at best equal to a dumb noble. But I guess we’ll see when Havenstone finally gets around to hopefully letting us test the second part.

I’m not so sure, unless Simon is a much better actor then I’m giving him credit for he doesn’t seem all that much of a schemer to me, unlike Horion and presumably Teren as well.

No they struggled with it until industrialization came along. Unfortunately for the Hegemony both industrialization and magic are present. If you scroll down Wikipedia’s list of dictatorships by death toll linked by @Norilinde linked you’ll see “Mass killings under Chinese Nationalist Government” in fourth place. Even a more humane, if also more regressive China under Chiang’s KMT would still have made rivers run red with the blood of anti-leftist purges and probably operated mass forced labour “prisons”.

The scale at which China’s regimes could do things, including political repression and ill-thought out social reforms, even with only very limited industrialization and modern communications., would always have been astonishing to the rest of the world.

I’ll use fantasy examples from now on, less hassle and less risk of me inadvertently hitting myself on the thumb with the rhetorical hammer, even though most fantasy regimes and antagonists are often based on real-world ones.

Still as far as fantasy regimes and societies go the Hegemony is probably one of the worst ever devised.

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First, to clarify, both Teren Leilatou and Prince/ss Nip–aka, the Diadoch Phaedra/Phaedros, for anyone interested in a more dignified name–will share Breden’s sexual orientation (i.e. toward whatever gender the MC is) and gender (i.e. whichever is the MC’s own primary preference…though I feel like maybe I should spoiler that out to keep authorial intent from further disturbing the reading of the I’m-straight-for-Suzane crowd). Kala and Simon are at present the only romance characters who are set to be the opposite sex from a non-bi MC’s orientation. That’s not a dynamic I feel any need to write for more than two potential interests.

Well, yes, from the POV of Enguerrand. But wouldn’t Enguerrand’s story be more interesting if you the reader/co-author decided he would fall head over heels for the foreign agent? :slight_smile:

@Kuria_Aliki, responses like yours make the whole seven year writing process worthwhile. :slight_smile: It means a tremendous amount to have a reader engage so thoroughly with my work and enjoy the game enough to try out so many ways through. I hope I finish Game V before you’re middle-aged and I’m retired. But regardless, I’m not abandoning it–don’t worry!

This is a writing flaw of mine, which my friend @Eric_Moser also pointed out ages ago. (Btw, you should go read his Community College Hero if you haven’t already, it’s excellent.) The difference in idiolect between helots and aristos should really be greater, as should the difference in language between a CHA 2 and CHA 0 character (besides in the flavor text when the latter is specifically failing a stat check). All I can say in my defense is that I do want to finish this series before I die, and writing significantly different dialogue would have added a lot of time that I felt could be better spent on finishing the game.

Coding in some special responses for readers who choose to give themselves names that already exist in the gameworld would be fun; maybe I’ll do it one day. But again, I’ll probably decide to put that time into finishing the game. :slight_smile: Or trying to write all those future romance options I promised a few days ago.

I’m using a bit of authorial prerogative here to suggest that even non-arrogant aristos will often think of their comrades with that qualifier. Not because they’re people of ill will, but because they’ve grown up in a culture in which the “helot” category is all-important, and there’s only so much we can do to escape the mental categories we grow up with.

I think there’s a reading of the story that’s consistent with that, and it’ll become even clearer in Game 2, when you can start moving the focus of your rebellion away from helots if you choose to.

@Ramidel’s responses to 5-8 are spot on. Not every choice will come with a prior indication of the risk involved, and not all skill checks lead to good consequences. Like life, XoR is not always fair, and occasionally awful.

While that would add realism, I’m putting a low priority on coding in responses to players who are essentially messing with the game. If you make a silly choice, you’ll get a silly-sounding story–which to be fair is one of the less-appreciated pleasures of CoG. (Heroes Rise gives many of my favorite opportunities for this–though picking “You and me baby ain’t nothing but mammals” as my parents’ wedding song proved unexpectedly poignant in the end, a sort of comment on the limits of superhero-dom.)

Later, you may be able to get away with this, if you go down the charismatic religious leader track. (It’s a likely sub-plot for Game 3 Ch 1.) But if you tried it now, you’d just fail.

I felt that a comment on the final outcome of the literacy lessons fit better at the beginning of Week 10 than it did among the stuff at the end. It flowed better. In-game, perhaps you can assume that the happy advent of spring has left no one able to concentrate much on something as dead boring as alphabeta practice.

12-13: I refer you to @Ramidel.

Your band wouldn’t take it well if you tried to turn someone away just because they were harsh on the nobility. When someone’s made their way all the way out to the wilderness, wanting to join the Whendward Band, it would be a huge deal to turn them away, massively scandalizing outlaws and helots alike. I’m comfortable saying that your MC has a sense that it would go badly, and so doesn’t seriously consider rejecting Kalt.

Changing your first name as well as your last name would be one more headache to code. I appreciate that it would be satisfying, but I don’t think I’m going to implement it.

You make a good point with 16…and it’s worth some further speculation on what might be going on there. :wink:

On 17, you’re right that this is incongruous; I really should at least add a line in there echoing Ramidel’s defense (“there’s a moment of hesitation as people remember all the deaths of the winter…but those who were completely disillusioned with you left then, and those who remain want desperately to believe”).

If you have Linos proclaim you Eclect, it does limit how badly you can treat him. I’m comfortable not giving every terrible-for-morale choice (especially as having “bad options” is against CoG game design doctrine–a doctrine I obviously break at times, but I don’t want to become wanton in doing so).

I’m afraid writing the helot MC as having had a past fling with Calea would add too much work; but as has been mentioned, it will be a possibility to have a new one in Game 2.

That would be nice to have, but I’m not sure it’s going to be a priority to add.

Sadly, that won’t work with the flow of the story. Is there a reason you wouldn’t sell those mules and buy arms back in Ch 2?

The Hegemony draws on different bits of Greek history–some ancient, some Hellenistic, some Byzantine. And the surnames are a modern element in that mix. The Hegemony’s campaign to give people surnames as part of their schema of social control will feature more prominently in Game 2.

They’ll usually look for a child from a noble family rather lower in the social hierarchy, who sees the name-swap as an opportunity. As the noble MC’s father at one point tells Horion, “My mother’s sister and brother desperately sought adoption into larger Westriding Houses—and when they succeeded, forsook every connection to the Rim. Meanwhile, Mother hunted for years to find a husband from a weaker House to keep the ${orig_lname} name alive.” They could adopt from a non-noble free family, and Houses of lower social standing will sometimes do so.

It’s theoretically possible.

No short name. :slight_smile: It’s the Truth, it’s the Canon, and from the Hegemony’s perspective it doesn’t need any other name. Nor do its rivals, other than “heresy” and “blasphemy.”

It’s kind of hard to rank magic-tech by era. Plektosis doesn’t have a tech equivalent in our world–I’m not sure we’re going to be there by 2040. :slight_smile: But yes, Grand Shayard should feel a bit Dickensian, as will Karagon.

The countries in the gameworld are a mix of features I find interesting from real-world cultures. So Whendery is a bit like Poland overlaid on Afghanistan. Nyryal and Halassur are more Turko-Persian, but wildly remixed against a fantasy background. Shayard is Anglo-French. Erezza is Italianate. All of them have South Asian elements, since I grew up in South Asia, currently live and work there, and continually run into things that I find interesting and want to work into the books.

No, that’s definitely Choice of Robots. :slight_smile: XoR did have the best first-day sales at the time it was released, and has I believe been holding up a bit better than usual in terms of continuing sales. I’ve got my fingers crossed for a nice review somewhere on a gaming website that gives it a second wind…from what I understand, that’s part of how Metahuman Inc. became another CoG bestseller! But since I’m writing sequels, I also take the long view; if the series gets more widely discovered in Game 2 or 3, that would be just as delightful. :slight_smile:

A companion book will I think not be a priority until I’ve finished Game V, if then. I’d rather channel my energy into the story rather than a pure world-building supplement. If anyone wanted to start an Infinite Sea-style wiki based on what I’ve said in the forum threads, however, they’d do so with my blessing. :slight_smile:

Please don’t! Even when I don’t implement all of them, I still appreciate them. And in particular, please keep an eye on the forums for when I finally start the Stormwright thread, and start feeding back on that game while it’s still in progress.

I think English is definitely our world’s Koine–and you write it extremely well!

Indeed.

Fair point. I’m not sure I’ll change it now to add that choice–especially since every time we update the app, it effs up a whole bunch of people’s games-in-progress–but it’s still a good point.

Sexist and pro-natalist (just about any empire has to be the latter in a blood-fuelled world), but not otherwise homophobic. And comparing themselves to the Hegemony, Halassur takes pride in their lack of slaves.

Hmmm. Well, maybe I got my vision for Elery and Yebben confused, and she’s straight and he’s bi. We’ll see when I get to writing it.

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Something I’ve been wondering, did the Halassur develop their blood-fueled magic independently of Karagon, and how do they compare to each other? By that, I mean do they also harrow for aetherial blood, or do they have a different method?

On an unrelated note, as I am thinking about magic in your game world:

  1. Are the abhumans a species, or a different set of magic users? Is Theurgy (Or Wisardy, depending on the language) the only form of magic in your game world?
  2. For MCs who are self-taught Theurges, what kind of opportunities will they have in the future in order to further hone their skills?
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You could certainly get some interesting mileage out of it. Although I can’t help but feel that playing a protagonist who bridles their passions to avoid dishonour presents something of a road less travelled (at least in modern literature).

Realistically, I’m sure I’ll play and enjoy whatever you write (and you’ve got an impressive range of characters already). That said, the “Drazen” route of conservative nationalism seems a popular one, and it might be interesting to allow the player the option of courting a compatible female character at some point in the series.

After all, “do you want your character to strike up a relationship with someone who challenges their fundamental beliefs, or with a kindred spirit,” presents a different sort of choice to “do you want your character to strike up a relationship with someone who challenges their fundamental beliefs, or with no one at all.”

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The INT stat should probably also influence it, as particularly during my time as a political aide, I knew and worked with some of the highly skilled if often a bit over-specialized people performing highly technical tasks for the government and while a great many of them would be shy and stutter and put their foot in their mouth in public or even in gatherings with many people they did not know, when in more relaxed settings or with only people they knew some of them could become loquacious and eloquent verbal waterfalls who would hardly shut up.
Then again monitoring the introvert extrovert axis would be another hassle. But good looks and charisma are not the sole determinants of how people speak. I’ve known painfully shy people with model good looks and more than a few charismatic yet plain-spoken politicians of rather plain appearance.

Yep, because in later games when the mc gets more skilled as a politician you’d also have to provide for adjusting your language, tone and sophistication to the audience, for those who desire to do so. Again more than a few politicians taking lessons to lose or sometimes to gain an accent, for example.

In any case the language my high int helot uses felt appropriate in most cases. Though I suppose when he was still enslaved he probably avoided using big words, or letting it slip he could read by avoiding referring to anything he could obviously only have learned from a book to any free persons (except Gan) he talked to.

How would that work? A more formal version of the informal practices of Spanish nobility as our own Mara used to recount them. As in you can have sex and relationships with guys all you want just as long as you marry and father at least two kids too?

I did notice references to the Hallasurqs that they apparently practice concubinage and those have usually been slaves in our history. Though I suppose they could simply be lower class citizens. In any case would an upper-class gay man be allowed to have whatever the male equivalent of concubines are called in addition to his presumably obligatory opposite sex marriage in order to have a more formal relationship with his male lover(s)?

Wonder if that will remain so should they succeed in their strategic objectives and conquer Erezza and anschluss Nyral or if they will suddenly revive their apparently time-honoured tradition of making slaves out of their conquered new subjects?

I simply assumed our band looted any valuables and did whatever they pleased with the corpses. It’s not my preferred path to follow compared to hitting the Keriatou in their wealth, where it really hurts them. But when I did my mc at least wasn’t really in the mood to tell his band what they should (or shouldn’t) do with the Veneur corpses and any valuables on them.
Though I suppose it would be ironic that on the Veneur path my mc more heavily blames Gan as the direct confrontation and his trying to shank the mc brings that into clear focus. Whereas if Hector made the poor kid the scape-goat and kills him off-screen, his killing and possible torture of Gan would add another huge reason for my mc to loathe Hector and by extension most other Shayardene “nobles”. As without that direct confrontation I think that deep, deep down my mc still has that crush on Gan despite everything and very much against his better judgement.

Meanie! :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

Indeed, I already wonder about the concubines and apparently Hallassur likes to get its blood from children and I’ll wager those would be primarily the children of de-facto slaves, maybe the concubines.
It could also be they practice some form of fantasy eugenics and cull the weak or something for their blood supply. Guess we’ll learn more in due time.
Still I’m somehow glad my picture of Hallassur as a Magitech/steampunk version of the Republic of Gilead with an Ottoman overlay is not quite correct.

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I’m going to go out on a limb here and suggest that their lack of slaves is more theory than practice. There’s still going to be a caste that gets fed to the Harrower or the Halassurq equivalent.

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Thank you so much for the clarification!

Everybody else post is concentrated on the political aspect of XoR and here I am just happy that the above has been clarified.

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Thank you very much for your thorough answer! I feel very honored to have such a supurb writer talks to me!

The reason I don’t sell mule at the end of winter is because I want to keep them for a summer. Bad things happen in Chapter 3 if I have no mule. But when Chapter 3 is over (maybe before we meet Yed), I want to sell mules and buy arms, so that it would be easier to convince my band to stand and fight.

I’m deeply pleased with the option to be a religious leader. In real life, my belief is something essentially the Inner Voice of the Angel. I feel darkly satisfied when looking at the code and find out that the kenosis protagonist who tells his followers that angels do not exist will always fail, no stat check here. In real life people are more tolerated, which is, after all, a good thing. But when I enjoy my private fantasy (like playing Choice of Rebels), I want to see heretics burn.

The writings about the “Inspecting the Harrower” sequence is really spectacular, like it’s written by a Greek Muse herself and not by a mortal. Not that the other parts are of lower quality, I just haven’t read anything that disturbingly graphic in my life before. And that makes me wish to know, in the context of the game, do Angels exist? Would Harrowed helots go to Elysia? Although I enjoy the dark stuffs in the game, it would be just too bleak and hopeless to think that those helots …just die. I’m not condone the Harrowing here, but the fact (or the belief?) that the Harrowed go to Elysia provides some small consolation for me.

Kurios Havenstone, you seems very well-informed about many countries and its history (also, considering how you write eloquent passages and how you’re able to depict battles and strategies realistically, you’re like a XoR protagonist with stat cheats). Is some of your realm (including the part we haven’t seen yet) inspired by Ptolemaic Alexandria? I’m in love with that country (and I have played Choice of Alexandria many times). I suppose Karagond would have some form of research institute, and I think of them as something akin to Alexandria’s Museaum and its Library. How Ptolemy invented the god Serapis also reminds me of Karagond rewritings of Shayardene Codex.

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One issue with this is that you have to guess how many troops you’re going to have in Ch. 4 and how many are going to bring their own maces, because how well-armed you are before the moot has a lot of bearing on the band’s favored course of action.

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The Halassurqs (like their cousins, the Brauracha and the Nyr) had an independent magic tradition back when no one had yet figured out how to use other people’s blood as fuel. The alchemical basis for aetherial blood was devised/discovered in Karagon and figured out a few decades afterward by Halassur–just in time to allow them to put up a decent defense against the Karagonds.

As for Harrowing, the Halassurqs harvest blood primarily from their firstborn children rather than from a slave caste, so the infrastructure (social and mechanical) is very different. More details soon to come in Ch 1 of Stormwright.

Yes. And more details will be available in Ch 1 of Stormwright.

Ultimately, yes–though there are a few rather different ways of taking advantage of the fundamental principles.

Very true, and yet more different dialogue I’d need to write to properly differentiate the clever from the charismatic. :slight_smile:

Yep, basically. And yes to your next question about concubinage (i.e. formalised relations other than marriage) too.

They could indeed be expected to revive the old tradition. Your relationship to them may determine how they intend to treat Shayard in that forthcoming invasion.

The evidence presented in-game will not be conclusive either way, I’m afraid. And Ptolemaic Alexandria is a setting I actually know very little about! Thanks again for the encouragement and ideas…

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Where have all the slaves from their old conquests gone though? Were they all manumitted or is there a law akin to Brazil’s “abolition” of slavery, as in a “born free” law so the slaves die out eventually, replaced by new underclass but nominally “free” citizens?

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one of my MCs is pretty similar to yours and i also wonder the same thing. if we wouldn’t be able to lower our anarchy, i hope that we can at least keep it from going up. and i hope we can convince other nobles to join our cause.

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