Choice of Rebels Part 1 WIP thread

Yes and there are many, many more where they came from and I bet that not too many of them will be willing to switch sides over the course of the next couple of games. So really I think we’re going to remain the magical underdog, even if we augment our arsenal with true Goety, right up until the beginning, or middle of the last game.

Nonsense. It is a sacred right of Xthonos to fulfill our Teloi as Makers of Change! The Thaumatarch has preverted Its will by taking humors from one and using their Teloi to power another’s. Theurges have beaten and blinded helots, yeoman, and nobles all the same, claiming that our Puropse is to work, serve, or even rule.

When the truth is we were meant to see all things in Xthonos’ will, both within and without the ephemeral. All shall see the lies of the Thaumatarch when looking at world through Xthonos eye’s. As Makers of Change we can truly see That Which Is.

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Sorry to be so anti-climatic but I suspect that, like the four elements, this is simply an example of something that is clearly not true in our world but is true in the game world.

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Certainly one of the possibilities although the less interesting one. I expect @Havenstone’s got something a bit more nuanced up his sleeve.

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I’m sorry but this has nothing to do with the lewd-ass heir, I just want sick tats. Look at those hands. As smooth as he is, I don’t care about doing the horizontal mambo with Mr. Papilla Corkscrew.

I’ve linked before to my old college D&D campaign write-ups. I stopped writing those just at the point where the campaign veered in the direction that would one day turn into XOR – where the party escaped from slavery in an oppressive empire and became heroes of the resistance.

There were plenty of things in that campaign that I’d love to port over but don’t fit the XORverse – the active role of Death as a major villain, for example; or the dramatic moment when the (much more activist) deity of that gameworld withdrew his blessing from every priest that continued to support the Xaimani slave system, leaving the rebellion as the sole providers of healing magic to imperial society.

But some stuff will definitely make the transition to XOR. Like the moment, years into the rebellion, when the idealistic party has to face the monsters they’ve inspired: rebel armies so busy tormenting and/or plundering their former oppressors that they’re making it impossible to rebuild anything in a civil war hellscape. Of course, in XOR you’ll also have the choice to be that monster yourself. :slight_smile: And with a range of views already represented in Game 1 as to how the rebellion should be conducted, you’ll need to be a diplomat of extraordinary skill (or an autocrat of extraordinarily successful ruthlessness) to avoid a major split in your rebellion over strategy and tactics at some point.

In the last D&D reunion game I ran, a decade or so ago, the players had to restore enough order in a major provincial city to successfully defend it against a massive external attack. Having narrowly succeeded, the game ended with them receiving notification from the Empire’s last great general – the power behind the rump Imperial throne in the capital, Tziwan – that he was about to institute a new form of slavery within his domain that allowed for emancipation and protections for abused slaves. He offered them one chance to join him in trying to make the new, reformed slave system work.

The party was profoundly split between its more idealistic and more pragmatic members on how best to respond to this offer. Especially as the new system seemed to be one in which priests could participate without losing the divine blessing; and because there were a number of external threats that could really use a unified response. (More so than we’ll ever see in the XORverse, my college gaming party spent much of their time trying and failing to patch up a passel of fragile Talismans that held back supernatural horrors… notably including the ancient sea elves and their blood mage overlord; the world-eating 'Ga of the plane of Chhaolu; the mind-possessing Horror of the Many beyond the southern mountains; Death and his estranged necromancer son; and, of late, the subterranean dragons and their pawns, vengeful desert elves who genetically control most of the Empire’s mages. It was collectively perhaps a bit over the top.)

Maybe one day I’ll be in a place to run one last game and see how the party dealt with the consequences of that offer. Regardless, an equivalent moment will show up in XOR… many, many years from now, at my current writing pace. But now I’ll have a forum post I can link to and say, “Hey, I was planning this way back in 2016.” :slight_smile:

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Interesting stuff thanks for sharing.

Will anyone but the high cha characters even stand a chance at preventing this, while also sticking mostly to their own vision?

Which is actually a fairly clever ploy, assuming those “protections” are not just empty rhetoric like they were in most of our world most of the time, even for serfs who weren’t technically slaves. Particularly if anarchy in your D&D game got as high as you say it did.
In any case being a “freedman” is often times a much less desirable state than even being a slave and to keep it somewhat on-topic, let me just say that my character would reject that status even if it were offered to him, then again that’s hardly surprising since he’d firmly reject “noble” status too.

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And incidentally,

Choice. It started as a typo that read like a good joke on a game which in a couple of prominent places uses the Greek chi (X) instead of the English “ch”.

It also helpfully distinguishes Rebels from Robots and Romance.

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I’m going to say yes, there will be a chance at preventing it even if you don’t invest in CHA; and for all who can’t or don’t prevent it, there will be plenty of ways to move forward without it crippling your rebellion.

I’d have expected nothing less from the good Chairman.

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If there’s a character that I model my less serious MC after it would have to be Grog Strongjaw who was born from a DnD game I’ve been following for the last few months.

Right listen up, if you have ale then you have a friend in Grog (the helot) Strongjaw. A goliath (for a helot) of towering height and size. This barbarian(rough helot) has two great loves in his life. Combat(2), women(cha 1) and ale…wait(int 0). Easily the brains of the group Grog is often consulted for his vast knowledge of shapes colours and heh, shiny things. Also ale.

Him in a nutshell.

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-sniffs the air- I smell the Laguz Emancipation Act. Which wasn’t really much of an Act as rich nobles just bribed their way out of it, the religious leader got murdered so that priests could profit off it by twisting canon in the power vacuum, all the senators participated in genocide because of it and it started years of blood feuding via piracy across three countries as revenge for the genocide it caused.

Oh, and the refugee hunts. Let’s not forget about those. Dank.

Please tell me someone in this topic has played Kingdom Hearts.

They’re gonna be useless protections, let’s all be honest here.

Even if it starts out perfectly, years of changing political and religious development and debate will eventually ensue that once again, even if not as badly as before, these people get the short end of the stick as they always had. Look at history; the proof is in the books.

I like this buff. Sounds like my kind of krogan. We should be friends. :wave: :slight_smile: [x]

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Aye. As is my custom we shall celebrate this with a test of bravery,endurance, and strength. We each will drink until we can hardly stand then pick a fight with the meanest looking person we can find. Bears,wolves and other animals work as a substitute should there be no people around.

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Well he isn’t, not just yet anyway, at this point in time he’s just an (over) idealistic young man.
Form a role-playing perspective let me again thank you for Ganelon as it is my mc’s “relationship” (okay to be honest likely mad crush on) with that boy that has convinced him that all of the nobility are irredeemable and the very concept of a “noble” class should have no place in the new world order.
Not only did he prove to be no true friend in the end, worse he proved himself to actually be a traitor and a torturer, every bit as bad as Hector Keriatou himself.
My mc’s vision on the future role and purpose of the nobility could have been quite different had Ganelon actually dared to join the rebellion from the start, particularly if he had been willing to suffer with the rest of us through that winter. I mean if he could have had him my mc would almost certainly have preferred someone he believed to be a childhood friend as a second over both Zvad and Breden.
He was always going to topple the Karagond religion with its corrupt ecclesiasts and its caste system that dictates that he should be a farm animal to be gruesomely sacrificed, that part was never in doubt. The rudimentary form of what ought to replace it though has likely crystallized in his mind mostly during and right after surviving that first winter, right when we were plagued by Hector and his Veneurs where Ganelon revealed himself to be the vile traitor he is, without any positive examples of the nobility to balance that out.

Of course they are, in time, we all know that. But for the scheme to work he has to be serious about them at the start. That’s how you get free people to become serfs you offer them “protection” and some concessions and for it to work it must seem the preferable option for free, but not all that powerful on their own folk. From how @Havenstone described his campaign world as “a civil war hellscape” by then, I guess the players there did go over the anarchy cliff to the point where even former slaves may have become a bit nostalgic for the “old order”.
After all the Roman system that on occasion did let former slaves rise quite high sort of worked for centuries.

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Whoa, thanks for this long and respectful response. It’s really kind of you.

But I was mostly just kicking thoughts arround, I had no idea of the plans in your old D&D campaign.

It’s not as though Ganelon ever made any pretensions toward allegiance. Just because he was nice to you once doesn’t mean he was ever on your side.

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Heh, although I can envision at least an MC or two who might even blame that outcome on their father. After all, things weren’t the same after dear old daddy drove Ganelon away, especially after blaming him of ruining the library…

And given dad’s eventual blow-up, it might be time to slow Harrow daddy…

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Well he did repeatedly slip us books and scrolls if we play a high INT character, so he was definitely (pretending to be) nice to us more then once. I also imagine my mc didn’t have many childhood friends (not many fellow helots would have wanted to associate themselves with the kid who was basically a troublemaker from the start) , Dann was probably the most important as well as his first crush and we all know what happened to him and then there was Ganelon who could have easily had us whipped half to death when he first discovered the high-int mc reading, instead he talks to us and behaves as much like a friend as is possible given the vast class differences. Of course, as it turns out, we were ultimately just a tool for his own amusement, but my mc didn’t know that at the time and likely foolishly developed both a crush on him and chose to believe he was a friend of sorts.
Whether he could have been a potential friend or even lover is moot however the bigger issue is that he made my mc seriously consider for a moment that maybe not all nobles are evil decadent oppressors, so when he ultimately turns out to be just as bad as Hector himself well that once again confirms all my mc’s negative beliefs about the nobility being nothing more then evil, decadent oppressors. Consequently he will never again entertain the notion that a “nobility” of sorts could ever have a legitimate place in a new world order.
Simon really joins too late and is too inconsequential to influence that line of thought much. In my games he is alive because of two reasons one being that he shows exceptional bravery in the face of certain death and the second being that he’s incredibly cute.

Again this reasoning is unique to my mc and nobody else needs to think that way.
It is also important to remember that for all the bits of self-taught education the high-int helot mc has picked up over the years there are likely still yawning gaps, particularly in some of the basics and I freely admit that some of my mc’s thoughts on the nobility and decadence in particular are riddled with fallacies, particularly of the cum hoc and post hoc kinds (the “fancy clothes” and horses cause decadence and evil being two of the more obvious ones) caused by a mix of very incomplete information and teenage emotions strung into something vaguely resembling a coherent theory of how the world works in that regard.
Good luck however to people trying to point some of those out in the later games however, particularly since the people both intelligent and knowledgeable enough to argue it with him are likely to be themselves either priests or nobles and by then he both has an even more formidable mind to defend the reasoning behind some of those fallacies with and he isn’t in a particularly receptive mood to be convinced by said people in the first place.

Helots don’t have libraries that only happens to the “noble” mc. If the helot mc’s dad knew about Ganelon he certainly didn’t let us know and aside from colluding with Hector somehow he wouldn’t have had the influence to keep any noble away from his “son”.
Of course should that turn out to have been true in the helot mc’s case that would likely cause both a spectacular amount of fury and a spectacular emotional breakdown for my poor mc.

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I’m curious if you would have allowed them to bargain with one, a few, or even all of those barbarians at the gate?

Do the sand elves hate the sea elves for instance or is Death fascinated by what he can’t kill like the Horror? Death comes for us all afterall and when he smiles at us all we can do is smile back… I guess I’m asking can’t we make a deal here?

Maybe that’s why the heir is apparently a potential love interest, though it will likely be a very bad and rotten one for helot mc’s that forces them right back into slavery or into a squalid “freedman” status with next to no rights that’s about as bad, or did you mean the players in the D&D campaign?

Of course this being, or at least becoming a heavily political game likely means that not only can we make deals with a myriad of factions and individuals we must likely make a fair few “rotten” deals with the despicable Talleyrands if we want to achieve anything that could be called more than just a Pyrrhic victory.

“But I make the best deals! Everyone says that. Ask anyone or just read my second favorite book after the Shayardine Codex. When I’m Thumatarch we’ll make deals so good, and so wonderful, you will all think ‘this is beautiful.’ When my rebellion succeeds, and it will 100% guaranteed, it will be non-stop winning all the time, believe me!”

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