Depends on like, whether or not this takes the creative based view, as in, the state of the instrument has undergone change and thus has been “recreated” by the act of filing therefore it undergoes a change in Purpose because it undergoes a change in default State.
or
If this is the like, stricter view, yeah. Like, because it is only a part split off from the original instrument, and the creation serves no purpose on its own by just existing as a fragment. If you fight with a sword and it shatters, the sword itself no longer exists, but the pieces do, which can serve no other purpose until repurposed, and exist in no other state except as pieces of what they were. They “remember what they were” so to speak. Like a Schrödinger’s… sword?
Whatever. I’m too drunk to philosophise. Going to bed.
Okay you and @Havenstone and @poison_mara have just convinced me and more importantly my character that state-sponsored sports including, sigh, extravagant games every couple of years where the best athletes compete in their natural state might be worth it. Still there will be no equestrian events where the “athletes” get to compete in fancy clothes and boots though, as that would defeat the spirit of equality and be counterrevolutionary. Unless of course we can integrate equestrian things into combined events only and those “athletes” do compete in the other parts in a more acceptable state. It all depends on how many concessions my poor mc would need to make to the despicable “horse lobby” I suppose.
Hmm… that brings up another consideration, given how relatively gender-egalitarian Hegemony society is does that mean (naked) male and female athletes would compete directly against one another, separated only by objective standards such as boxing’s weight classes or would a gender separation for almost all of the sports (save equestrian, which any games my character sponsors won’t have) still make more sense?
I don’t remember who it was but I believe one of the characters themselves speculated at one point that it was the suffering of the harrowing that was integral to the whole process. Either in the creation of aetherial (spelling?) blood or in maintaining the wards. Or both.
It would make sense. After all, even the most depraved thurge would have a hard selling these machines as a necessity without a compelling argument.
There are also a lot of ways to drain the blood out of a person. The Harrower seems designed to be particularly painful and horrifying. Considering the Harrowers are seen culturally primarily a form of religious sacrament rather than punishment I must assume there is something to the way the blood is collected that is important to its future use in therugy.
This is why they have the caste system, if so they’ll mostly use it on subhumans and can keep their, conscience squeaky clean. The vast majority of the Hegemony’s “free” population, even those city slum-dwellers are brought up and indoctrinated to believe helots are at best only barely human anyway and that their unchangeable “telos” is to live a miserable life and then be sacrificed in a most gruesome manner anyway.
Because of a game where empires get random names I was always planing on allowing each country exept karagon that land will be split among the 4 countries to be ruled by an elected official in a allied system called the groovy confederacy
True, but it had to start somewhere. You can’t just conquer a new land that has different beliefs and start harrowing. Was there a compelling reason, or did the current system evolve over time? And if it evolved what steps were taken to deal with the Xaos storms prior to the current method.
Do we know precisely when in the timeline the storms began? Could be that the current system was already in place when the storms started, its purpose prior to the wards being to fuel war and the harvests.
Havie has said stoems started just when Hegemony appeared. Suspicious I find. Also about Harrowing I think this is like some other rpg when Pain and terror make blood more powerful.
Supports my idea that the Hegemony directly started the storms (whether intentionally or not) through some action they took or some action taken against them. History books seem to indicate the latter as someone pointed out earlier, but we all know history is written by the victorious. The fact is that they seem to have had the wards ready to go up before the storms started, which would indicate the former.
The fact that the rise of the Hegemony and the storms coincided also seems to majorly discredit your theory Mara. After all, blood magic and telos manipulation was in use for a very long time before the invention of theurgy so why didn’t that cause the unintentional butterfly effect you describe to occur long before the Hegemony?
The loredump mentions that “the Broracha’s infamous Goety catastrophically backfired, creating the Xaos-Lands.”
Any INT 2 characters will know from the history they’ve read that this is the official Hegemonic explanation: the natives of Brorach were degenerates whose Xaotic natures and dabbling with Goety eventually produced the storms that consumed their land.
There’s a legend that the Broracha King summoned Xaos Incarnate to attack the Karagonds, but when the Angels defended the Hegemony, Xaos fled back to the one place It had been given as a foothold in our world: the capital of the Broracha. It consumed the King and began hurling out storms from the Palace of the Damned toward the Hegemony.
So it’s possible for your MC to know that the Hegemony did not have Wards for the first, expansive century of its existence, and that the Wards went up in the years immediately following the Xaos-lands’ creation and the assassination of Thaumatarch Hera:
Incidentally, while lore retcons are still easy, I’m considering changing “Brorach” to “Braurach” to avoid the potential distraction of having “Bro” as the first syllable. Thoughts?
ha HA… HAHA HA[quote=“Havenstone, post:5587, topic:1601”]
291 years BP the Xaos-lands came into existence, and 290 BP Thaumatarch Hera was assassinated, causing her successor to turn inward and create the great Wards.
[/quote]
Wait, but this means for at least a year there was no protection?
Rather more. I’ve not pinned down yet how long it took to build the Wards, but even with full mobilization it would have been hard to do it in a single year.
How did that go, I wonder? I mean, everyone was just getting battered by these storms or what?
I’m starting to think, what with all the… you know, you have a desert society, mother goddess, kingdom of Halassur. Like. The Kingdom of Halassar in Summoner 2, like, the final boss is just a giant storm made up of all the unbalanced and chaotic energy in the world and it’s called the Tempest (and it’s rlly rlly creepy)… have you been watching me, Havie?
Like, XOR bears too much resemblance to the games I grew up with. Too much. Creepy much. The Abhuman Federation’s territory is basically Gallia, too… /eyes Sneaks/
I figured it would take a while to set them up, which caused me to assume they went up in preperation for something the Hegemony knew was coming. Obviously that isn’t the case now that I look at a more precise timeline.
Now I’m thinking either the story promoted by the Hegemony is based in truth, or they did something to cause the storms, but didnt know what the end result would be and thus didn’t prepare beforehand. Hard to say without knowing more but I’m leaning slightly toward the former.
