It remains to be seen if that’s a plausible feat using raw blood, is what I’m saying. Stretching the human body’s telos in an unnatural direction would require a potent change and it takes months for a person to fully recover from blood loss. Assuming you have several mages collaborating to regrow the eye, that’s however many mages effectively taken out of commission to produce what might amount to a minuscule quantity of aetherial blood. At that point, it’d be more efficient (not to mention far less ghastly) to just harvest and refine the blood itself.
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More of an incentive to massively accelerate conventional, technological development including a space program in the very distant future as alternatives to theurgy.
My mc has always wanted to make more use of conventional technology and is utterly fascinated by it. But with the new information we know now that second pillar of my mc’s tentative vision is likely to become vastly more important in the mid to long term.
Depending on how advanced the “Steampunk” of Grand Shayard and Aekos is tech could be made to take over many things that are currently done with theurgy.
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Make friends in Wiendrj. With different trade laws than the current ones that restrict exports of textiles and other milled goods from the provinces, you could shift a fair amount of industry to run on Wiendish waterpower.
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Encouraging vastly more trade with everybody (except maybe Hallassur) is one possible goal for my mc’s post-rebellion regime to help with the rebuilding and further development. The Grand Canal if it gets build serves just that purpose to facilitate (maritime) trade, including between the former provinces. In addition depending on the state of the Steampunk tech my mc would also champion railway and telegraph lines as that would make communication and the transport of goods and people vastly easier in addition to allowing for more and more effective government control and oversight.
And of course the more things we do with conventional tech the less we’d need to do with theurgy so we can gradually lessen the dependence on it.
My mc already has enticed a couple of Wiends, so it doesn’t seem impossible. It also helps that the Laconniers and other Shayardene nationalists seem to disregard the potential of the other provinces and peoples of the Hegemony. Plus economic development in Wiendrj is good.
There are hints that the Hegemony is sitting on significant amounts of Steampunk tech that it is currently not exploiting to anywhere near its full potential. Probably since every task you automate and make easier means you need less people for it, particularly if you mechanize agriculture to a significant extent so you’d no longer need the helot slave caste in the place.
It’s certainly a much better and far superior system for non-firstborn men. On the other hand both our aristo and helot mc’s being first-born and only children of their mothers would not have lived in Hallassur.
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Mechanize how? Steampunk implies a coal based economy. That would definitely reduce some of the requirements for blood, but shifting the fuel sorce of any entire economy is not something you can really pull off on command. Whatever existing coal enhanced tech they currently use is almost certainly primarily fueled by therugy.
You can only do the things you can think of. I’m not sure many will be able to conceive of a coal powered economy given the unscientific frame of reference that currently exists in Hegemonic society.
There are a ton of problems with this idea, and I would welcome an alternative that would be otherwise sustainable in a free post-hegemonic society that still relies on blood. The more I think about it the more I believe the society I’m proposing would have to transfer power to women. There is no way to be certain a man has made the sacrifice.
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Among our backwoods rural helotry and yeomanry or even its “nobles” perhaps not, but among the urban poor, the merchants and skilled craftsmen it may be a very different story. The more pressing question is would my mc reasonably trust the idea if one of them were to propose it? I think the answer to that depends on how much he knows by then about the true cost of theurgy and how desperate he is for anything that seems like it might reasonably work to reduce some blood demands and pressures on the post-rebellion economy.
In-game it would not be an original idea of my mc, but given that he is fascinated by non-theurgic techne too the chances that he’ll grasp at the suggestion if it is ever presented to him are fairly good even in-spite of his paranoid streak.
All I can say about that is that, based in part on a cryptic answer to one of your own questions is that it might not be as unscientific as you assume. It is also that until recently their society and economic system worked well enough for the Hegemony, whereas my mc post-rebellion and even during it is desperate for just about anything that lets him reduce blood/aether/magic usage and dependency.
While my mc is a believer in the equality between the sexes of the Hegemony over those aspects of the Hallasurq system that degrade women he is obviously not a supporter of matriarchy either.
You be controlling territory and a population before the Hegemony is defeated. Unless you can compete with them militarily they’ll just nuke you.
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Yes, but apart from outlawing the Karagond Codex and abolishing the caste system and providing rudimentary education in literacy and numeracy to the kids most other radical reforms, including the possible "Energiewende"probably have to wait until the Hegemony is decisively defeated.
Except perhaps insofar as coal and water power are immediately useful to conserve blood or power such things as air rifle factories that are immediately necessary to prevail against the Hegemony.
I’m not ruling out using some areas as test beds for future reforms once we get more and more secure territory though, but the truly grand projects like the possible canal and mass industrialization that require intensive and sustained investments probably do have to wait until the Hegemony is truly defeated and the most notorious other troublemakers such as the Laconniers are quashed too.
Doesn’t mean we have to be exactly like them or fight how they expect us too or even go toe to toe with them on most occasions.
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Certainly not. In fact trying to go toe toe is suicide. My point is that unless you can pose a credible military threat to them post-nuking…they’ll nuke you. I don’t see a way to that without full powered therugy.
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It’s certainly one reason why my mc would like to be able to create his own Xaos Storms.
Still the primary strategy is to use air rifles and more mages than the Hegemony dares train itself, but who are mostly limited to using their own blood. In this we are fortunate the Hegemony is extremely restrictive regarding who they allow to learn theurgy.
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I’d sure like to know where you and your merry band of forest hoods are going to find air rifles in BFE, but otherwise I think you may be on to something…
Still think we are going to have to either harvest blood or significantly curtail the Hegemony’s access to blood just to survive (probably-definitely both…)
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Probably, hopefully somewhere on the road to Grand Shayard as it seems we won’t need to really control a significant amount of territory or population until after that point anyway. As a somewhat inferior alternative I suppose the crossbow might do too. As long as the primary weapon lets us overwhelm the phalangites in situations where we can muster superior numbers and requires relatively little training it will do. Though the air rifle would seem to be the most ideal weapon for it, since grunts can be trained with a couple of weeks of boot camp as opposed to the years of investment it probably takes the Hegemony to train a phalangite and the months for one of their more elite alastors.
The non-elite ones can already be pretty reliably overwhelmed or even beaten one on one by our more hardened survivors in possession of our more decent weapons at this point.
Of the two this would be the tactic my mc would most favour and if their core territories have less of an exploitable blood reserve then the backwoods of rural Shayard that only works to our advantage.
Or the b stuff anyway. Compared to cutting off Hegemony supplies it is definitely something my mc is more reluctant about. But I suppose order must be kept once we control territory and there won’t be a lack of criminals and counter-revolutionaries. Still for propaganda purposes my mc would still prefer a different process than using the Hegemony’s harrowers.
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I concur on both counts. My initial reaction to the air rifles was “WTF are we going to find those?”, but I also agree that @idonotlikeusernames is onto something with the idea of training up far more theurges than the Hegemony is willing to train itself, and then throwing them at the Hegemony. It naturally follows from some of @Havenstone’s wonderful infodumps the other day that this is a viable strategy, but @idonotlikeusernames gets credit for jumping on it first.
Shayard is the Hegemony’s breadbasket, and by extension, it’s “bloodbasket”. I’m fairly certain that the Hegemony will have difficulty meeting its blood needs once existing stockpiles run out if they are no longer able to harrow Shayard’s helots. The spread of rebellion into the other conquered territories will only make things even more dire for the Hegemony. In desperation, they would likely be forced to extreme measures that would undercut their legitimacy, such as harrowing Karagond’s urban poor.
Since they exist there are probably going to be a few in Grand Shayard. From there it is a question of reverse engineering and manufacturing the things and of course equipping or non-theurge/mage grunts with them.
In the end these weapons also seem like they’re going to be vital to keep some of our mages or post rebellion mage criminals in check by given ordinary people a decent chance at a ranged theurge kill. Particularly in overwhelming numbers.
Only relying on relatively large numbers of mages risks unbalancing the situation, although I’m sure the Hegemony and maybe the Laconniers would see arming the ordinary population with weapons that stand a decent chance of killing theurges at range in the same light.
The widespread use of the air rifles by the new security forces at a minimum is a key component in making handling a vastly increased number of mages manageable in the longer term when there is no longer a constant war on.
It just goes to show how dark this world is that the dismemberment of infants is being discussed as a preferred alternative…
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This was discussed in November 2017.
Based on the lore we have now seen, I currently suspect the newly revealed lore answers the question of the extent to which my MC’s rebellion will need POW camps. Specifically, it may not…
It is too early to worry overly much about the post-rebellion blood economy because by then we’ll also know about the Unquiet Dead and the nature of Xaos storms.
Oops. That was during my hiatus. Looks like I missed this bit. So I take it the credit should go to you then… 
I’m not so concerned with the post-rebellion blood economy atm so much as the Hegemony’s blood economy during the rebellion.
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Mmmwell, since we’re thinking ahead to a post-Hegemony world, it’s worth noting that other powers may recently have become less restrictive in their tactics, and they’re one of the primary factions you’ll be contending with in Game 5.
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Indeed.
Also it does allow you to get rid of the pervasive slave caste who must spend their whole lives as farm animals and in misery, which is traded for inequality for women and the sacrifice of infants who barely get to live at all. For anyone who is not a first-born or a woman, meaning mostly non-firstborn men the Hallasurq system does seem to be superior by far and for most helot women who are already (sexually) abused the grim reality is probably that the horrors would merely be different instead of better or worse.
The ultimate weapon, if my mc had the knowledge and ability to create and harness those, well that is the sort of power that would really make him feel secure enough to train unlimited numbers of “ordinary” mages, even barring that desperation is a great motivator for taking (increasing) risks especially when unwilling to trust later Hegemony “defectors”.
Meaning Halassur, as I don’t think the undead are likely to be a faction to rely on overwhelming numbers of mages. Shambling, unthinking zombies might be another thing. And the Abhuman Federation has been established as being (far) less populous then the Hegemony in the first place and you yourself did say you didn’t have much plans for extensive involvement of the possible powers based on the other continents. Though I suppose that might yet be subject to change. 
Though saddling them with their own revolutions while we rebuild would be the sweet spot as it would get them off our backs at least.
In any case I suppose that is when being able to create a Xaos Storm or two ourselves might come in handy to put a bit of fear into them that would hopefully deter them from foolish, overt invasions at the very least.
It also makes possibly exporting the revolution to Hallassur much more of priority too, although my mc will likely never be as excited about a possible revolutionary Hallassur and a union with it as @Norilinde 's mc seems to be. Particularly since that Federal government might well decide to stick him with the position of (figure)head of state, which might just be the one thing he dislikes even more then his old life.
Well once we actually control significant territories it seems foolish to not run a few tests to ascertain the viability of various possible reforms before general implementation.
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Pick the atrocity you hate least and continually inflict it on your people. uggh…
I’m not certain that Xaos Storms would be easily deployed against individual or small groups of mages, but we won’t know until we research it.
I’m just glad that Erezza is long and mountainous. That should buy us a bit of time in stopping them.
It’s not impossible, especially if the wards in the Ice Lands drop and the Ungrateful Dead invade Nyr, converting the locals into Deadheads in yuge numbers.
That is another possibility.
I suspect that due to the vast cultural differences it likely will be even harder than the US turning Canada against the Brits during the War of 1812…
It will certainly create fear, but I’m not entirely certain it will be the right sort of fear. I have a greater interest in learning how to harness the energy in the existing storms and also learning how to terminate them.
Uniting the Hegemony and Empire would be an incredible feat and do much to ensure future peace if it’s achievable.
Agreed. I’m not going to wait until we travel to the opposite end of the Hegemony in Book 4 and meet the Ungrateful Dead on the far side of Nyr to start implementing the post-hegemonic order.
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