The point of dropping the mountain on the MC’s city would be to forestall those subsequent uprisings from picking up enough momentum to actually succeed. It’s an act of terrorism by the state against its own populace. ‘This could be your city too if you rebel’ is the message.
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The issue there is the timetable. Can they get the blood (not to mention the mountain itself) for their mountain drop before other rebellions start picking up momentum?
A Ponzi scheme is the wrong analogy, here. It’s a simple failure to make revenue meet expense, forcing tax hikes and service cuts, which both end up depressing future revenues.
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The issue here is the simple fact that none of this is theirs to begin with. You are literally stealing from Peter to pay Paul on a national level. The big thing is that most Ponzi schemes start as what you said and then they evolve into the Ponzi because of what you said. I’m sure it was organized and well managed but something happened that triggered them to begin to haemorrhage and they never were able to fully catch up.
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Note to self, make Grand Shayard temporary capital so Hegemony will nuke enemies for me. Then use WMD event to whip up more popular frenzy and justify death (harvesting) sentences for key Hegemony supporters (mostly nobles and church hierarchy). 
Indeed, well let’s trick em into making use of it on the “wrong” city. That will only weaken them, not us, or at least no by much and certainly at that point by much less then it is costing them.
So it’s the casino blood economy, eh? 
Not seeing it, this isn’t a radiation weapon. If they do this to the wrong “rebel” city at the wrong time it is likely to backfire spectacularly for them. By its very nature that only seems like something they’d do if they are beyond desperate as.
It is and the mc’s rebellion on its own isn’t serious enough right now and if they nuke Grand Shayard as soon as it looks like it might fall into rebel hands they might possibly be doing my mc a huge favour with all the top provincial noble and Laconnier supporters they are going to kill for him.
Soil depletion and maybe a big, insidious feedback loop between the Xaos Storm and the wards where the Storms may be siphoning energy from the wards somehow, which causes more blood to be needed to strengthen the wards, which in turn makes the storms stronger until the Hegemony cannot afford to keep up the ward any longer as suggested by @P_Tigras some time ago.
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I don’t see how. The blood is theirs, the power to tax the helots is theirs, the army is theirs.
I was thinking about what could be a real victory for Mara. That will be a pure max charisma possible. And it will be a concept of Victory different. A borg victory through ideology. Imagine that more of them when i arrive will believe in me and my mumbo yumbo and will sabotage the city. oh… Imagine their own army change sides in battle. It should be so due there is no other way Mara win
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@Havenstone
I just remember that some days back while playing the chapter 2, at the end my Anarchy level dropped to the negative side. Well it remained as -1. Lol
So what does it mean by having a negative anarchy?
Is it that people start believing that we rebels are dead in this hard winter because there seems to be no chaos in the Rim?
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All right, back from the food poisoning… (Nothing to do with street vendors, idnlun–I think alas it was parma ham from a very good Italian restaurant, at which we’ve eaten several times before with no ill effect.)
I’m glad that’s been spontaneously suggested; I was worried that no one would see it as a meaningful option at all.
In response to your other questions, regrowing an eye takes more aether than an eyeball contains, and also more than any one Theurge could burn in “organic” blood without passing out, so there’s no industrial-scale blinding/regrowing solution. You really don’t want a collaborative process of eyeball-regrowing; it’s impossible to coordinate that kind of Theurgy with precision. Having four mages each trying to regrow a quarter-eyeball would result in something blind and bubbly.
No Theurge can use someone else’s living blood to make a Change, however close the proximity. There is a finite amount of aether in each person; it’s quickly run down during Theurgy, and once you begin to draw on your brain-supply rather than just your blood-supply, you pass out. But as long as you don’t make a suicidal push to burn all your aether, it will regenerate over the course of a few days.
Finding the most efficient practical applications of Theurgic insights does involve a fair amount of experimentation, and grasping a thing’s telos involves a great deal of study (sometimes empirical). So I wouldn’t call the Hegemony entirely unscientific.
But as with gunpowder weapons, the development of engines running on combustible fuels has been completely sidelined by Theurgy; there’s just been no reason anyone would develop something so fiddly to drive a loom or a sawmill when blood does the trick. Waterpower is widely used, but when there isn’t a good stream available, there’s not a lot in the Hegemony’s technological imagination that could take the place of blood.
Just a note for those who weren’t with us on the WiP thread: air rifles are a thing in the gameworld (as they were from a surpriisingly early point in ours), and have been mentioned obliquely in Game 1 as an anti-Theurge weapon:
“You’ve spent many an hour mentally running through other things that might work in theory [to defeat Theurges in Ch 4]. Things you’ve only heard of from listening to conversations in the agora, and can barely imagine: ${erretsin} wind-spitters, or a ballista, or a catapult loaded with hot sand.”
A few “wind-spitters” (ventisputori) will indeed show up in Grand Shayard in Game 2. They’re not produced on an industrial scale, nor really anywhere outside Erezza… but they’re one possible tool for a high-COM rebel and her trained band to take out Theurges from cover.
Overwhelming numbers of mages? No. But please don’t expect any army of mindless zombies to lurch out of the north across the Ward either. My George Martin homage only goes so far. 
I don’t believe anything I’ve said so far about them connotes shambling, unthinking hordes, or “converting the locals into Deadheads.” The main one Archlich Ghaesh will be interested in converting is you, and in more of a Richard Dawkins way than a Richard Matheson way.
Which doesn’t necessarily make them less of a threat. But we’ll get more detail on that later in Game 2.
Absolutely. Cyclical and predictable change (of e.g. seasons or generations) is no inherent threat to the eternal and unchanging Order of Xthonos–it’s just one manifestation of that Order at our muddy little tier of reality, far removed from the perfect immobility of Xthonos Itself. Change does carry risks, of course (any ordered change is to some degree a Doorway to Xaos) but it’s not inherently disordered.
When Xaos has succeeded in getting things seriously off track, the Angels may need to initiate change to bring human lives back into Order. This last is basically the category where the Thaumatarchy would put the Changes made by Theurges: empowered by Angels, necessary to battle Xaos, and thus part of Order. (And it would be the category for the sort of doctrine I think you intend to promote in reforming Xthonism.)
The Xthonic creation myth is a bit like our world’s Gnostic one, with Xaos playing a role somewhat like Ialdabaoth in a less populated (and much less gendered) version of the Apocryphon of John. The Ecclesiasts would definitely claim that Xthonos came first, not Chaos or change. But as Xthonos contemplates Its own Ordered perfection, Its thought generates various emanations, lesser levels of reality, like echoes or mirrors of Xthonos’s glory. Those emanations take aetherial form in the Angels, and then are manifested in the more flaw-prone matter of the rest of the known universe.
Xaos is the first emanation to become sufficiently flawed to cut itself off entirely from Xthonos and seek to create an independent “order” of filth, jealousy, and blasphemy on its level of creation. All rightly ordered beings, including the Angels, naturally oppose this unnatural violation.
Unlike the Gnostic myth, the official Xthonic one doesn’t attribute an actual divine spark to human souls; we are wrought by the Angels out of flaw-prone matter (fire and air, and aether for those in the know for our souls, plus a blend of all four for our bodies). Humans were designed to be the main proving-ground on which Xaos will be defeated and the glory of Xthonos confirmed. The reward for righteous humans is for our souls to be raised as close as we can ever come to Xthonos Itself–to Elysia, a realm of perfect matter, beyond the reach of flawed and bitter Xaos.
Yes, @idnlun and other skeptics are free to counter all this with a mass singalong of “Imagine.”
As the largest major cities near the war frontier, both Moncesano and Otsamor are kind of awful. Their main industry for centuries has been war; they’re heavily fortified, and thick with spies, soldiers, and speculators. You’re equally likely to be murdered by infiltrators or killed by your own side for being a suspected traitor.
If you did somehow manage to unite Empire and Hegemony (and let’s be clear, I’m not sure that’s a remotely thinkable ending), given the particularly intense mutual loathing between Erreziano and Halassurqs, you might do just as well with a capital in Aveche anyway–or Aegre in Shayard. The former Imperials wouldn’t consent to be ruled from Soretto (the current Erreziano capital), and nobody wants to live in Moncesano. Sea routes to Halassur are much faster than road travel along the isthmus anyway.
So do the Karagonds–but crop rotation only does so much when you’re doing other things that massively disrupt the soil ecology. Crop rotation still works fine for the yeomanry. But the big plantations are what feed the masses, and they’re needing incrementally more blood every year to get the same yields.
The thing with a wall, of course, is that if it doesn’t cover all sides, the outsiders can just walk, sail, or fly to the nearest gap…
All good speculations, by the way–not incoherent at all. And your “enormous gamble” will definitely be one road a rebellion can try to go down.
Ah, you’re talking about Chapter coughcoughcough.
It means that you have reduced the total anarchy in the realm. Congratulations! You have rebelled not only against the Hegemony, but against everyone’s expectation of what a rebel should be like.
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Nothing like desperation to fuel a bit of innovation, particularly when most of the critical, underlying stuff is already known and we’re just talking about application and development.
Expanding non-theurgic research and development has been one of my priorities pretty much from the outset though and the post-Hegemony regime won’t exactly have the same priorities and restrictions the Hegemony does, encouraging non theurgic research is an explicit future goal of the education system, though I recognize it may not bear that much fruit in the timespan of the games.
But since over-reliance on theurgy and putting all their eggs in that basket has proven to be a possibly critical flaw of the Hegemony if and when the rebellion wins the post-rebellion regime isn’t going to repeat that mistake if it’s up to my mc.
Not yet they aren’t. Could a high int mc dedicate time to reverse engineering and starting to produce them for the rebel army, or will they just be few stand-alone toys limited to high-com mc’s?
Because like the Austrian air rifles of our world or indeed rifles in general they are what would enable to transition from a stratified “warrior culture” to citizen soldiers. Something my mc vastly prefers as he is not on good terms with the current warrior castes.
Whatever the heck did my mc do to earn that kind of attention? If it is power and knowledge the lich seeks shouldn’t they be after prince nippletwister instead, or did they long ago give up on nipples?
In theory they’d have less blood and brainpower available to them, unlike Hallassur they also don’t seem particularly interested in invading the Hegemony as a way of life.
So once again the Grand Canal, if ever realized really would make Avezia into the most valuable city, though if a Union Capital that is separate from all other national or provincial capitals is needed, I suppose some sort of Brasilia -esque thing could be built alongside the canal or at its northern terminus, since Avezia would lie at the south end of it. If the canal is ever completed I suspect some village at its northern end is highly likely to evolve into a true city anyway and not having any significant history of its own could also make for a good capital eventually. 
Tell me he gets a hidden achievement for that!
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I also support this idea. At first I truly loathed harrowing of new borns. But after knowing the secret behind this aether, now my MC would definitely choose the Hallasur law than the current Hegemony law.
Thanks for the suggestion, @Gforce! I think the gameworld’s religions are going to remain more akin to the Greek/Middle Eastern model than the South Asian. Adding a Hindu-esque option would bring the game closer to the richness of reality…but there’s only so much I can do in one gameworld, and I’m interested in exploring/critiquing variations on more exclusivist theisms.
Which of course would require all of them to adopt some new, important meta-beliefs which had not previously been any part of their belief system. Hinduism/panentheism makes a plausible and attractive offer… but I’m afraid from the perspective of many people raised in a monotheism, it will unquestionably be “creating a new religion.”
A metaphysic that can claim to include both kenon and Angels will bring harmony among those who accept it, while others reject it as a betrayal of one or both. And in the gameworld, the overwhelming majority would fall into the “rejecting” category. A new faith attempting to include all others obviously wouldn’t bring harmony with any Ecclesiast who held anything close to the current, rigid Xthonic orthodoxy, nor with the passionate Halassurq followers of Ummay and Kormuz. The Abhumans, who are polytheists of a sort, wouldn’t agree to an accommodation with kenon, which they would see as a needlessly reckless, destructive creed. The Nyr skeptics are quite adamant that they won’t share a banner with Xthonos-followers.
A high-CHA rebel introducing a Hindu-esque metaphysic could potentially overcome some of that resistance, but at the end of the day we could still expect a holy war. As we can with the religion of the Common Angelic Voice.
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In the old beta i think once I get -20 or so anarchy. Lol good times
I had a long discussion with Mara and we decided asking you a thing. Could we create a new religion and sell it as is coming from Angels as new version of Shayard codex because old one was so corrupted by Karagon? Or We have to choose Mumbo yumbo vs Orthodox Sahyardene codex?
Yeah, definitely, I think you would love to know more about this phrase “Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam”.
And a Holy war is inevitable.
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I think I missed something…how does Halassur law differ from Hegemony law in blood economy?
Good point. I imagine you would have to cut off the head of the snake in that case, intercepting the aetherial blood supply to the mountain (which will probably be a lot easier than dueling the Theurge pack controlling it).
We just call them religiously motivated insurrections/terrorism, depending on the severity of the incidents.
I’m just going to go for skepticism and a secular state (though of course the upper echelons will hugely favour skeptics) with freedom for all lawful religions. Which in practice means the ones that do not permit slavery or advocate for a caste system and/or repression of homosexuality so long as they do not get too large and powerful, in which case they have to be curtailed in the name of freedom of religion.
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Well, I haven’t read all the posts in detail. But I will tell you in brief.
So in the Hegemony adults as well as teens are picked up randomly(sometimes the Canon breaking ones) and then harrowed.
But in the Hallasur Empire, mothers offer their first new born child to the Harrowing.
As the final goal is to acquire aether as much as possible, it is better to harrow new borns.
Somewhere our author has already mentioned that aether content is highest in the new borns and then it gets reduced gradually until adulthood and remains stable afterwards.
So I think it is far better to harrow a few new borns(only the first child of a mother) than harrowing a lot more adults having families and friends.
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The Inner Voice is a new religion of sorts. At least as much as Protestantism is (and I honestly don’t see much in common between Catholicism and strict Calvinism if it comes to that).
Hmmmm. Perhaps the Inner Voice could be reconciled with Abhuman polytheism. (Proselytizing religions are very good at hoovering up local polytheism by syncretism, if they choose to work with the local beliefs instead of against them.)
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