I know that there are at least a few places where the anarchy score can be lowered. One place is when Fedrel tries to kill you. If you exile him or have the moot decide his fate, then it will lower the anarchy score.
I am assuming that as our rebellion continues we will be able to make more decisions about how it will go, what it will accomplish, and who will be included in it. Hopefully, at least some of those decisions can lower your anarchy.
Low anarchy means that the people feel that someone is in control of the situation. In Book 1, “someone” means the Hegemony.
In later books, increasingly, that’ll be you.
you can let the others decide his fate? can’t exactly remember that. what’s their decision then? (just put it under the spoilers tag in case others might not want to see it)
You have to be running your rebellion by moot.
If you let the moot decide their fate, then I think that they will always choose to execute them.
my MCs would agree with them then. they may be compassionate but once you betray them, they’ll never trust you again. (which is why I’m worried for Breden 
)
If I remember correctly I was also able to lower anarchy when my COM2 mc exiled the guy who tried to stab her.
You mean CHA2. Releasing someone at COM2 means that they suffer an unfortunate accident via Alira.
…no I’m pretty sure it was COM2 since there was no mention of unfortunate accident🤔 course I might remember incorrectly
Apella works just as well. 
If the rebellion does win it also prevents having to burden young teenagers with politics most of them scarcely understand and in which the vast majority will have no interest anyway.
@Havenstone, I always was curious on how you the author would try to manage the varying administrative and governance ideas of the readers. Like, some people want to try to do a radically diverging system of governance that can create vicious backlash on a societal level. Whereas others plan on just reforming and coopting existing government structures and “fixing” the issues with the current system.
From a writing and world building level- how do you feel like you’d go about trying to get your narrative across and satisfy the demands of your base at the same time?
Because I can honestly see a very long and boring book on how you try to put a government together. But I don’t believe it would sell as well as a book that dips its toes into nation building to help enforce your narrative.
I myself am waiting eagerly to see how he touches on those issues and what options he gives us for working with them.
Yeah, I have the utmost confidence that however it is presented it will be done in a high quality way that makes us all happy. I just am curious to hear the scope he envisions so far.
Prioritize the narrative, first off. 
Spread out the governance choices across chapters and indeed games, so there’s not one big tedious government design section, but the cumulative effect of lots of choices embedded in long stretches of narrative.
Not make everyone 100% happy.
If anyone is 100% happy, then you’ve probably done it wrong. That’s the point of hard choices.
Nothing worth doing is ever easy.
Well…I’ve already quoted this one at @Havenstone before, but it is gonna be particularly apt in the later games once governance decisions and rebuilding some sort of functional polity are going to enter the picture.
“There’s nothing more difficult to take in hand, perilous to conduct, or uncertain in its success, than to take charge in the introduction of a new order of things.”
Applies particularly if you, like my mc, believe the current system is fundamentally flawed and well beyond any “fixing”. Then again my mc does have one single issue that he prioritizes above anything else. Maybe two if you count the gay thing as well.
The problem is that people tend to respond to that which they know over a radical system that has many glaring flaws in its structure. In your quest to tear down the Hegemony you are going to find yourself being as bad or worse than that you tried to destroy.
Which is an amazing dynamic, but doesn’t translate to effective governance. There’s also the pesky alternative that some aspects of what you want will make it into the game while others won’t for narrative purposes.
For your Comrade-Helots they haven’t stopped to think for a moment about the regime you need to build on the bones of the Hegemony. There’s a difference between spit balling this idea and actually seeing it through. There’s a reason why federalism is predominately used now a days with government stretching from a town to a nation. Administration is important for the functioning of a society and no MC is ready to set one up at this moment because we don’t have any practical experience in the Civil service or administration of a government.
It’s easy to go and say like I do that I want reforms made in the Alastors and basic administration of my new empire. The hard part is getting my bureaucrats, priests, alastors, and clerks to obey the new code. To get it spread across the Empire and monitor if it is being carried out and this is just taking what I have and adding basic reforms. Building a new society is even more onerous. There’s a reason why there is a basic structure that every western nation uses for their executive branch. Because it works and is proven.
Having it written down and proclaimed is one thing. There’s a reason why massive overhauls of government policy and procedure happen once a generation or so, it’s so that the new generation of bureaucrats, policy makers, and people can understand them. Reform is difficult because government is very difficult. Sometimes even the most well intentioned reform is destroyed in practice because of how hard it is to carry out. By destroying every aspect of the Hegemony. You are destroying the foundation of governance and are forced to create a new one from scratch with no fall back plan. There’s a reason why reforms are built upon the existing structure and not from the rubble of a nation without someone running the strings.
I think that is why so many revolutionary regimes become worse than what they replace. The revolutionaries know how to overthrow a government, but they don’t know how to run one. So they can let things break down and take a generation to truly recover, or they bring in members of the old government to work for them because they know how to run things, which can reinstitute previous policies and ways of doing things.
For example, at the end of the English Civil War, Cromwell pretty much became the monarch in all but name, to the point that after his death they just overthrew his regime and reinstalled the monarchy. Or the French Revolution created a regime that was even more centralized, oppressive, and dictatorial than the monarchy it overthrew. Even the American Revolution applies, as after cutting ties with England the newly formed U.S.A. instituted its own form of democratic government by the elites who had thrived under the previous system.
Not to say that these didn’t institute new directions that the countries went in, but it was slow and often different from what had been intended. Right now, the four subject provinces are ruled from Karagond, but with a lot of help from local elites. The question that we need to ask ourselves is the following: Can we use some of the previous elites to rule a liberated province, and if so, can they be convinced to reject certain policies and cultural institutions that were brought from Karagond?
And a hell of a ride storywise with Havenstone’s quality.
Well, at least with the Hegemony the current system has as many or maybe even more glaring flaws in it then even a radical alternative and what my mc is aiming for is fundamentally incompatible with the current, theocratic, system in any case and even the first game already lets me establish that my mc is bad at even feigning belief in the Xthonic faith.
A problem many revolutions and indeed many ossified and sclerotic systems unwilling or unable to change and thus triggering many of said revolutions have faced throughout the ages. If I had a universally good solution to any of it then it would have been criminal for me to ever leave politics.
My mc is far more intelligent but also probably far less knowledgeable then real-life me is and he’s basically trying to “wing it”, which is also not uncommon for rebel leaders in our actual history, particularly those who found themselves thrust into the role by circumstance rather then any coordinated plans for a coup.
Which is probably why @Havenstone has not allowed our mc’s to be in the position to basically instigate a coup instead (bloodless or otherwise) as that is a far easier way to obtain regime change but would also have made for a far less compelling story as even the “noble” mc here is a political greenhorn who knows next to nothing of governance.
Ah, the “Civil” service the enemy of good governance everywhere. 
Course in the case of the Hegemony it is more openly the “noble” service by and for nobles and even then most of it goes to Karagond.
Yeah, we’re only a band of brigands in the forest, so yes, no mc is ready to set up a government infrastructure at this moment in time, although it seems we can lay the earliest seed of one with the moot/apella decision.
Which is why my mc would abolish the Alastors they’re too tied up in the theocracy and they’re also basically nothing more then a bunch of abusive thugs and rapists who should be behind bars, not policing anything. With regards to the Alastors even if you just replace them with your own thugs it’d hardly be any worse and might be slightly better still because Alastors have currently got a lot of official and unofficial privileges that even the new thugs wouldn’t have. As an institution the Alastors at least are beyond salvaging.
Horion favours either that or the even looser Confederate model, for understandable reasons (being that individual federal republics could far too easily institute something akin to slavery) my mc doesn’t really believe in it and sees a Koinon as nothing more then a tool for some nobles and once he understands more of the resource situation it becomes even worse as then he’ll see it as a tool to keep Shayard in particular, pastoral, backwards and conservative instead.
Which is why my mc isn’t planning on using any alastors and certainly no priests. As for the bureaucracy that may be easier as it seems the Hegemony might have a lot of dissatisfied and under-utilized officials like Bleys (who lack the background and connections for anything better under the current regime) we might be able to make use of and who particularly despise the alastors as an institution almost as much as my mc does. If there are enough people like Bleys we might actually be able to run a system that differs significantly from the Hegemony precisely because a lot of its bureaucrats on the lower rungs are also fed-up with it.
The higher rungs would need to be purged in any case.
True, it does sometimes sort of succeed though, so we’ll just have to see.
Sure, though the Hegemony uses radically different fundamentals and is more like Iran then any western nation. In the case of the Hegemony our rebellion only stands a chance in the first place because the system is increasingly proving itself to not be able to work.
True, but retaining the caste system and the church would make one an apostate for even trying to do that, so if you keep the current system you don’t actually need to worry about the implementation phase because you’ll be slow-harrowed just for speaking it openly, never mind writing it down.
And we may or may not be right on time for it, guess we’ll just have to wait and see, but in many cases revolutions are built on the youth, particularly if they’re bottom-up grassroots ones, as opposed to regime changing coups.
This is true, but it is essentially the same thing Hera seems to have done in the backstory. I get your point about it being rather more difficult for the mc, but particularly if you’re from a caste not even seen as “human” a non-radical reform package is the surest way to either a Pyrrhic victory or to simply lose outright.
Yep, see the Machiavelli quote. On the other hand for my mc this is an existential issue so he has no choice but to take the riskier road here as the other one seems to lead to a virtually guaranteed slow harrowing for him anyway. You shouldn’t underestimate the sheer motivation that comes with that kind of desperation as my mc was always a dead-man or more accurately dead bit of livestock walking to the upper-castes of the Hegemony. Losing one’s life in a failed or even successful rebellion is almost guaranteed to be a more humane way to die then the process of Harrowing.
This has certainly been proven accurate more then once though even this,
would be preferable to the nightmare of the Hegemony.
But also ultimately more successful as it trialed and pioneered many of those basic structures of government almost every nation-state now uses or tries to in some way or another. Just count the small number of remaining monarchies versus how many (de-jure) Republics there are today, as well as separation of powers, separation of church and state (a fundamental issue for my mc in-game too, unless state skepticism proves possible) and many of the other things we take for granted when it comes to the basic structure of a modern, representative government nowadays. The ripple effects of the French revolution transformed Europe and even the world.
The French First Republic didn’t get everything right of course and was itself overthrown but the subsequent monarchical “restorations” never really stuck again afterwards and France is in its Fifth Republic now.
A question my mc, the Laconniers and even Cabel are likely to fundamentally and spectacularly disagree on. For my mc Shayard’s provincial nobility have proven themselves to always be willing collaborators to the Karagonds and are not to trusted. The Laconniers have lost whatever legitimacy they might once have had by losing their realm to said Karagonds in the first place.
Yes, probably, though in the case of Shayard’s provincial nobility I think they want to preserve aspects my mc is intent on doing away with and doing away with some of the very few things such as gay equality and non-bloodline inheritance/adoption for families my mc actually is intent on preserving.