Oh absolutely. Langley training coming in handy.
It’s been done, about as extensively as is possible. Remember that Glossary entry that you described as fascinating upthread?.. 
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@Havenstone Has anyone tried mining underwater or if needed draining the water from areas just for mining purposes?
I’m guessing that there is a probably a pragmatic branch of Hegemony Theurges that will then push for Harrowing children when things get desperate.
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Blah, blah all is okay and that Mara doesn’t care really. Except to propaganda vs Hegemony. Still the question could Mara destroy absolutely all blood culture and harrowings? And not have automatically a game over
@Norilinde: Underwater, yes, about as far as is remotely practical (i.e. not in the deep sea, which will have to await a future tech epoch).
And absolutely, when things get desperate, lots of things will become thinkable to the elites. But how much will be doable, when it flies straight in the face of rules and values you’ve spent 300 years instilling?
The Karagond caste system made itself socially tolerable by setting clear lines about who does and doesn’t merit Harrowing, and for what reasons. If the folks at the top start breaking those rules when they need resources that the rules previously put off-limits, it immediately puts the whole system at risk. It’s the kind of self-destructive decision that regimes often only make when things are falling apart anyway.
I won’t lie: it’ll be really hard. Aetherial blood is the main source of power (economic, military, political) in the world. Other factions both within your rebellion and outside of it will want to keep making the most of blood harvesting. You’d need to defeat them decisively to create a space within which you could lead a blood-free (or only organic-blood, if you don’t mind people being wizards by cutting their own hands) existence without being invaded by people still using industrial-scale Harrowing.
It will be a possible ending. But it would probably take a successful run either as a Genghis-level general or a charismatic Eclect/religion-founder. A high-CHA character can achieve a lot with a cult of personality alone, without meddling with religion… but I don’t think purging the world of Harrowing is an achievable goal operating on Charisma alone, without rolling out a new set of religious institutions.
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I will meddle with religion but not being declared by Linos alone… It seems pathetic. Maybe I should made the fire water mumbo jumbo i did once that was really funny… I am afraid that not accept Linos means broken that part forever or something.
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No – someone with your Charisma can do it without Linos’s help. And there will be chances again in Game 2, though obviously the sooner you start a religion, the wider it has a chance to spread…
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it is i want a Pope coronation like a new Messiah? and random dude in forest alone won’t do
@Havenstone How soluble is aether in seawater? If aether can dissolve in seawater, then even at much lower concentrations than in blood it might still be worthwhile to try to extract aether from seawater since there would be so much seawater available.
The concentration of aether in seawater is negligible–too low to perceive in Theurgic trance, which is the threshold for meaningful industrial processes in the gameworld.
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I might want to win the revolution, and magic ceirtainly could bring us to that goal without wasting so much innocent life. But knowing how it works now, i’m not so sure. Perhaps I could use the Blood/Organs of slain or captured prisoners. But even that’s really morbid. Perhaps use it solely for the revolution, and after stop the practice.
Maybe I should just go around it the hard way and try to secure a win without magic. Is gunpowder a thing in this universe? That could come in handy later.
Maybe the undead just eat people’s brains, like undead do. Since the brain is apparently where all the power is stored. I think it’s established the unquiet dead have a vested interest in nabbing the living. Right?
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I have been going for an Elect MC. He generally believes in the religion but is not sure if he really is the Elect (probably early on doing it more for politics) but as he gets more successful, I think he will come to believe it as he starts beating the odds 
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Well, I may not have had the how of the process down but I did get the theological why. That’s good enough for me. I can’t wait to scream Theurgic freedom for all people’s and promise a new order where all seek to become as the Angels intended us. Blood fueled power mad gods (emphasis on the “little g”). Praise Xthonos!
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Thank you for sharing this lore. Very interesting to read and consider the implications in the game world. My initial reactions and questions are:
How long after death does the aether subliminate once a person dies? Could you harrow someone after a natural death and obtain any meaningful amount of aether?
In light of this information the poor governance of the Hegemony makes a lot of sense. The Hegemony is actually the most direct form of kleptocracy. Essentially a colonial empire of our world it’s just that the resource they are harvesting with abandon is aether. The leadership of the Hegemony doesn’t care about good governance or even the prestige of the nation they care about about being personally powerful and able to perform therugy. Everything else in this society is designed to enable that goal.
To that end I wonder, how much do the line theruges of the Hegemony know about making aetherial blood and the mechanics of therugy? Is this a secret held by the most elite, or is it widely known?
Regarding the non-organic sources of therugy are they finite? What happens to aether once it is used to perform therugy?
The temptation to barrage you with questions is huge, but I’ll leave it there for now.
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I am torn about wanting to know. I personally love the lore however, I am afraid that damage the quality of role-playing as is based upon doing what a character will do even if you know the consequences.
Still I found all the Hegemony system interesting however I really think is undoubtedly inability to sustain everything long run. As they need more and more blood to just keeping going They will end reaching a break point sooner than later.
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I love these massive snippets of spoilery information. 
And yeah, I don’t think there is any way that my characters will be able to convince themselves to give up on Theurgy and Harrowing entirely. Too much power there, and our enemies are hardly going to give up on it either.
Is it currently known (in this thread) why the Hegemony is running out of “blood”? Lots of rebellions, or is the war ramping up, or do the magic walls require more than usual, or is the Hegemony wasting everything on creating blood-fuelled nuclear bombs?
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Of course, the Halassurqs may not call it slavery, but Halassur is a place that’ll really suck to be a woman. You know, “concubines,” as referenced by the Hegemonic tales, employed as baby factories from 13 to 45 before having what’s left of their aether Harrowed out of them.
I wonder if calling meteors through group organic theurgy is feasible in such a way as to generate an aether profit. Mining the stars as it were. EDIT: And I see that I got scooped on this question. Oh well.
Incentive to start a theurgic space program perhaps.
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Disadvantage of High CHA character is that , this character needs to involve in lots of preaching and public speaking, hence i would believe it will invite multiple assassination attempt … could it be that such character needs to manage his/her own bodyguards ( example number of bodyguards by side, number of guards in the roof or surrounding area ) in order to prevent an assassination ? Such criteria could add another managing criteria in the game
and assuming Breden is really an assassin , most likely Breden’s master will order the assassination of MC as well, such will give another dimension on where Breden’s loyalty really be… perhaps if we marry Breden or have high relationship , Breden will ultimately betray the master instead ?
Then for a High COM character , perhaps he/she can skip the public speaking part since conquer via brute force is the major plot
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I’m calling one theory, by the way: Abhumans are a result of attempts to theurgically hybridize humans and animals to create animals with aetheric brains. Since - as Halassur has pointed out - humans make terrible livestock.
Hm. If we learn more about biology and biotelos, maybe we can figure out how to grow animals with other forms of aether-dense tissue? Nah, that would mean that it was actually possible to fix the inherent evil in the world. 
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As you’ll see when you get to Grand Shayard, the nobility of your homeland is intensely factionalized. It might just be possible that a faction might “support” you in the sense of trying to wield you against an opposing faction.
Other than that somewhat wobbly basis for alliance, you’ll have to wait until your rebellion is actually the dominant force across a large swathe of country before your worst enemies begin caving in and preemptively offering you their money for their lives.
It requires a certain level of education. And yes, you could spread the word widely and educate your troops. MCs will have to decide how ready they are for a world in which every yeoman could potentially nuke you. (Of course @WinterHawk has already decided.)
Oh, absolutely. Your decisions as you encounter them will determine whether by Game 5 they’re your allies or rival factions in carving up the corpse of the Hegemony.
It is, but because of its volatile telos, it’s not very useful against Theurgy:
The rest of that post explains how the evolution of firearms was cut off in the gameworld, because “at short distances, or long distances with poor accuracy, firearms vs. Theurges is suicide.”
@cascat, in answer to your first question, aether sublimes very quickly from dead tissue. If you suck out someone’s living brain, you can capture quite a lot in the second or two before the tissue entirely dies. Every second you wait after death radically reduces the amount you can capture.
Grotesque speculation: It would be theoretically conceivable to have a sort of mini-Harrower wheeled to every deathbed so you could stick the dying person’s head in, keep a finger on their pulse, and scoop out the brain as soon as you’re sure the heartbeat has stopped…but it’s not something that I think anyone would consider feasible as a systematic measure? In the real world, it’s been a lot of work to get people to sign on to organ donation that at least leaves the face intact for funeral purposes. And the urgency of not being a second late would lead to a lot of situations where Theurges are seen to be shoving Grandma’s head into the wood chipper before her time.
It’s certainly an aggressively extractive colonial empire. But we shouldn’t overlook the fact that in their day (and considering the massive technologically-driven power imbalances many of them exploited) empires managed to be reasonably sustainable for a long time. It wasn’t until successful alternatives were modelled (and the tech imbalance reduced) that their governance flaws began to be consuming.
“Kleptocracy” to me implies a model that only works on the short term because you’re almost exclusively focused on looting. Extractive empires worked for longer because they’re a bit more strategic, with some sort of rule-based framework for long-term and large-scale plunder, and different rules for center, periphery, frontier, and foreigners. We do see the Hegemony at a moment when that framework is breaking down, but I’m trying to write a world in which it’s plausible that it had a pretty long run.
Low level Theurges aren’t taught that. They focus on learning about elemental manipulation, agriculture, combat…all the practical applications. They learn how to operate a Harrower but not what it does.
When a higher-level Theurge sees signs that their subordinates are actively questioning/ experimenting with this issue (or have figured it out), they make the call as to whether it’s time for that Theurge to be bumped up a Kyklos and formally inducted into the mystery, or time to extinguish the questionably loyal freethinker. This happens at higher levels, with deeper mysteries of Theurgy as well.
Sometimes they make the wrong call on who to promote, as witness Sarcifer, and Cerlota.
Yes, but slow-burning. You can get a lot done with a Talisman. Aether naturally occurs in the highest sphere in the cosmos; sublimation is its rapid re-ascent to that sphere.
The Wards are no thirstier than ever. Population growth and agricultural strain is part of the problem, but in the normal course of things, that might be manageable by aggressively stepping up the tempo of the Halassur war. A shift in battle tactics by the Empire has had a significant impact, though, as has a mysterious uptick in rebellions that are consuming more blood than they yield.
It’s a deeply horrific place to be a captive concubine from the Hegemony. (I should emphasize again that there aren’t too many of those.) Halassurq women themselves largely buy into the awfulness of their system–in large part because they’re keen to do all they can to avenge themselves against the murderous, centuries-long aggression of Karagon. You’ll have a chance to meet Erjan’s sister in Grand Shayard and hear a bit of this perspective.
I’m sure this is where some people will get off the bus, but…yes. To get to the aethereal realm, you’d have to traverse the empyrean (sphere of elemental fire), which is close to impossible. The only things known to survive that journey are the massive earthy missiles hurled upward by Xaos, to try to disrupt the ordered purity of the Angels’ aethereal home. (At any rate, that’s the acceptable Theurgic speculation about what’s going on with those meteorites falling “back” to earth bearing aether deposits.) I can neither confirm nor deny that an Ennearch is working on replicating this.
When you meet Mkyar a’Zerez in the Xaos-Lands late in G 2 Ch 1, you can ask her about your theory on Abhumans.
That’s the spirit.
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