Ally, possibly, friend, no. Some accommodation might have to be reached with the Cabel rebellion, the Abhumans and even what’s left of Broracha in the Xaos lands. Alliances with other non-nationalist rebellions in the provinces are also possible, as long as they do not insist on the retention of the caste system as a conditio sine qua non for such alliances or coalitions.
Hallassur though will always be problematic as unlike @Norilinde my mc would distrust it even in the highly unlikely event it succumbs to its own similarly minded revolution and becomes a fellow revolutionary state. Which would, imho just produce tensions comparable to those between then Maoist China and the Soviet Union.
If any regime of my mc were to ever support “revolutionaries” in Hallassur that support will be carefully calibrated to make them a nuisance as large as possible but stop short of actually supplying them with the weapons or intel they’d actually need to win.
As my mc’s strategic goals would be to keep Hallassur off balance and too preoccupied to actually invade but he has little stomach for an ideological battle/contest with a possible revolutionary Hallassur either.
All of them presumably the most die-hard Hegemony supporters.
Not sure where my Paul Atreides-style plan falls on the revolution/reform scale, but it does sound like I’ll have a use for all those extra helot mouths: whipping them into an army of conquest. They aren’t the Fremen, true, but the by the order of their new prophet, we’ll impose a proper peace.
Well, helpfully no one in XoR is prescient (that we know of). Paul is the main inspiration, but the main goal for the character is a military-minded self-proclaimed Messiah, come with a sword. If he gets a bad end, good: it’ll be fun.
Ya, fair point with the noble republic. As much as I hate it, I fear destroying the entire cast system will do more harm than good I do hope to at least bring an end to helots though. Make the lowest tier as free people (so not slaves tied to the land), and make it much less of a codified system.
but then you have to stop harrowings so no blood agriculture and no blood industry etc… End the Harrowers andfree helots sounds cool but that will bring a lot of deaths and suffering.
So if you don’t want break the system you will have to keep Harrowings and slavery
Is there a way to extract blood without killing people? Do it so it does not really affect people for very long? Maybe they have to rest for a few days or so afterwards? If there is, then a sorta blood tax which everyone has to donate the same amount of blood might be possible then.
I think I’m just gonna wait and see if my mc will discover something utterly mind-blowing or wait for more information before figuring out this whole Harrowing thing without having to sacrifice countless people. One problem at he time that’s my motto
I wonder how Xaos-lands came to be so corrupted were they like that before the Theurges put the Ward? Probably not?
Ya, I agree. Hopefully there is a less mass murdery way to keep most of the benefits of blood magic. It is very helpful to society but right now the cost is so high…
People are citing the wrong revolutions as examples of a cosmopolitan revolution. Think instead of the French Revolution of 1789. Many times foreign commoners welcomed the arrival of the French Revolutionary armies as improvements over the previous regimes. My noble MC would prefer to export revolution across that entire continent to any hostile or oppressive governments. I suspect the Hegemony and possibly Halassur both have a great deal of unused military potential in the sense that neither is actually training and fielding anywhere close to everyone who could learn wisardry. The situation for the regular non-wisard part of the army would be even more extreme in favor of the rebellion. This means that when the rebellion’s recruits eventually get experienced enough, the rebellion may be strong enough to beat the Hegemony and Halassur combined much as Revolutionary France defeated all of its enemies combined.
If those are the best terms to which Halassur would agree, then it would definitely mean war between my MC’s rebellion and Halassur though the timing of that war could vary. If Halassur is sufficiently oppressive, then there would be war with my MC’s rebellion anyway.
Ah nice! Then I guess blood drives, and if that is not enough, my blood tax might work! Also, 100% down for fantasy French Revolution. I would prefer not to drag my people into a long, bloody series of wars, content to leave the foreign powers in peace if they leave us in peace, but if not, I guess my new Hegemony (for the lack of a better word right now…) might have to go to war!
I agree but for my mc it is even more simple, Halassur supports the Laconniers, which means they have already declared themselves to be the enemy and in the best case there will be a cold instead of a hot war.
It never did completely defeat Russia. In any case it seems my mc might still be more catious with spreading actual magic, though at present the plan is to let anybody or at least any helot, drudge or yeoman who wants to learn about magic learn it but the secret to processing blood will have to be much more tightly kept. But you are right that even limited to their own blood a couple of hundred mages might give the Hegemony and Halassur both pause.
It might Havenstone has hinted that once refined that blood is less potent with any known techniques then the stuff the Hegemony currently gets from Harrowings, so we’d need to signifcantly increase the volume.
But combined with cutting out the plektoi, wards and luxury spending it might do for the essentials.
In the mid to long term making such a system last and increasing the potency of blood thus harvested will probably turn the process from the meth-cooking analogy the Hegemony seems to rely on at present to a more industrialized process more akin to refining oil. Which would suit my mc’s industrialization theme, but is probably also going to require vastly more infrastructure to make it last in the mid to long term.
This is true, the problem is that the Hegemony alone is a mind-boggling enough scale for my mc to cope with and he wouldn’t trust in forming a union with revolutionary Hallassur or the “federal” government that might be the result of such a process.
Paul cracked. His visions became a crutch and when he was unable to find a way forward acceptable to him, he dropped the ball of rulership on his poor spiritually challenged sister and walked off into the desert where he became a shadow of his former self only to eventually lose his life in a fit of poorly thought-out ranting.
Paul comes back? LOL. I suppose it’s possible given all the times Duncan Idaho was brought back to life as a ghola, or perhaps he pulled a Baron Harkonian and possessed one of his descendants.
I’ve only read the original novels written by Frank Herbert. They were getting repetitive and going downhill so I stopped reading after Chapterhouse. I never picked up the later books written by his son in collaboration with Kevin Anderson.
Dune ?? Which Paul ? I think the original Paul 's legacy is the best story… but the following books are getting weird especially with regards to his heirs , it is becoming too complicated and stressful, totally took away the joy of a good story
As pointed out by @Norilinde, this is not in fact the case. However, that doesn’t mean that blood drives will do the trick.
The bit of Game 2 Ch 1 I’m working on right now will make the dilemma clearer. For anyone who wants to wait until then to find out, I’ll put the reveal in spoiler tags: pain isn’t necessary, but for aetherial blood to be potent enough to be useful, something that rhymes with “pain” is. And anyone who took the full “sabotage Harrower” path in Game 1 should be able to guess what that is.
I wrote a bit about the history of the Xaos-lands here, for reference. The Brauracha who live(d?) there are cousins to the Nyr and Halassurqs, and were pioneers of Theurgy/Goety. The Xaos-storms preceded the Wards, but not by long.
I do hope to at least bring an end to helots though. Make the lowest tier as free people (so not slaves tied to the land), and make it much less of a codified system.
were they like that before the Theurges put the Ward? Probably not?