Choice of Rebels Part 1 WIP thread

Or you can somehow make use of that and write the eight rays as the eight virtues of the Canon.

Like compassion, honor, blah…blah…

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I’m so excited that a suggestion of mine is managing to worm its way into this work!

I’d assume that it’d be set up so that the nationalistic choices are the eight-rayed sun and the threshing flail while the high anarchy symbols are the threshing flail and the bloody hand? With the broken chain probably corresponding to a low anarchy, low nationalism rebellion?

I can be totally off on this, of course. The flag/coat of arms of the Country Tyrone in Ireland is pretty indistinguishable from a bloody hand, and that sort of use would definitely fall in line with a more nationalistic image if there’s a local tradition for it. I only think that the threshing flail could be a nationalist sort of thing because if I recall correctly the Shayard is a more fertile and easy to farm environment than most of the areas in the rest of the Hegemony.

It’s obvious our love for you has grown or our need to rebel and overthrow something has. It is possible those are the same thing. DEUS VULT! :smiling_imp::back::on::top::innocent:
The time for revolution is coming for the helots! As soon as we figure out who the traitor is.

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@Golgot: What I love about the broken chain symbol is that it could symbolize a rebellion against just about anything, and its a symbol that nationalists and non-nationalists, devout and non-devout can all rally around and see what they want to see in it…

It could also just as easily represent high anarchy as low anarchy, although my personal preference is for low anarchy.

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At the moment, your sigil choices are your family crest (if you’re an aristo – a new feature), the sun, the flail, the Gryphon, and [input_text].

If your band has low morale, they’ll refuse to adopt your suggestion. You can then let them pick their own; if the band is high-anarchy, they’ll pick a skull wearing a broken diadem (decided I liked that one too), if the rebellion has a nationalist flavor and you didn’t suggest it, they’ll pick the gryphon, and if neither of those is true, they’ll go with the broken chain. Because like the man said,

I’m going to save the bloody hand for later. No points for guessing who might end up successfully promoting that as the sigil of the rebellion, replacing whatever you pick here. :slight_smile:

Anyway, now back to my repeated playthroughs until the new Ch 2 (a) stops breaking and (b) feels streamlined enough to offer to you all…

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Which would make it a religious symbol of a religion my MC wants to have absolutely nothing to do with.
Eight virtues? The reason, among other things, that we’re even rebelling is that the Hegemony and the Karagond Codex nonsense they use to justify it has got next to no virtue at all and the Shayardene Codex is, or was, even worse as it lies at the root of the Karagond one (at least that’s what my MC would say).

He’d be fine with either the broken chain (his favourite) or the bloody hand. The eight-rayed sun, in as far as it’s supposedly tied to the Xthonic faith, even the Shayardene version of it would be wholly unacceptable to him and the threshing flail would be a constant and uncomfortable reminder of his origins as what amounts to farm equipment.

Yep, I agree, it’s perfect.

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But it’s not, as I explained above. Quite the opposite. Xthonos isn’t a sky-god.

I should add a bona fide Angelic symbol to the list, though. Pilgrimage of Grace style, as someone suggested above. A sacred helix or some such.

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Of course it doesn’t really matter to my mc how the Ecclesiasts view it, but if his own followers see it as symbolising the supposed virtues of the Shayardene Codex that could be a big no no to him.
The symbolism of the “new dawn” is universally powerful though, maybe it could be a second-tier symbol we could change to later on, much like the bloody hand?
Although in that case it might be better to picture it as half of the sun rising over a line representing the horizon.


It would be a deceptively simple symbol too, even I could draw it.

We’d also have effectively created the game-world equivalent of Japan (if you keep the Imperialist Hegemonic structures) or the possible left-wing version of it in my case.

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The rising sun symbol isn’t necessarily imperial in nature. It could simply represent the dawn of the bright new future your MC is fighting for, one in which the caste system he so hates no longer exists.

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That is true and it is about as far away from the current Xthonic and Hegemonic symbolism as we can possibly get according to @Havenstone so it would have some definite attractions.

Of course my mc will fight for that regardless of symbolism.

Of course. I never doubted it.

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Three more symbols I think need to be included (not as choices but for world building purposes like the Greek naval representing the Hegemony) is whatever is generally accepted as the symbol for xaos, for the church, and for thrugy.

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Well, I’ve taken my simple MC stats and encumbered them with a complex system of interlocking story-related stats (morale, notoriety, anarchy, credibility, arms, etc.) in the hopes of making the battle in Ch 4 satisfying both for gamer-types trying to claim the difficult achievement of beating the Phalangites/Theurges in the field and story types happy for a more realistic outcome.

I’ve also made Ch 2 more elaborate to try to reclaim some of the original spirit of winter as a marathon of tough choices.

Time will tell whether this latter was a terrible idea that drags down the story, or merely an idea that has slowed my own writing down more than I’d anticipated. :frowning:

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[quote=idonotlikeusernames]
And here I actually thought XoR had a relatively simple stat system…[/quote]

@idonotlikeusernames: crazed maniacal laughter (to somewhat blatantly rip off @Cataphrak because imitation is the sincerest form of flattery…). XoR has some of the most complicated branching code I’ve ever seen in a choicescript game, and I’ve read through scores of them over the past few years.

@Havenstone: A bit of a tangent since they have only a small effect on the convoluted branching your dealing with, but since your use of opposed stats was mentioned, I just wanted to pipe up that I’m not a fan of opposed stats in general. All too often it seems like authors are trying to force opposition when in real life things are far more slippery. So instead of enhancing the game they end up detracting from it. As a result authors (Zach among them) tend to bounce back and forth between making opposed stats meaningless and overly limiting on character choices. You’re trying hard to straddle the divide, but perhaps non-opposed stats or even plot variables would be a better tool to accomplish what’s needed than a pair of opposed stats that don’t distinguish between a character’s true beliefs and what they want others to believe. They also imply a false equality, and quite frankly I don’t believe that nationalism and “cosmopolitanism” are equally proficient in motivating people to sacrifice their lives for the cause. The same goes for faith and skepticism. Huge armies have been built on nationalism and/or faith. When has a huge army been built on skepticism? or cosmopolitanism?

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Fo sho… Even when I’m looking at the code for strangers I have no idea what is going to happen when I make a choice. Some of the indents are like 10 tabs in or something???

All in the interests of making it a challenge to sort out who the traitor is, of course. :wink:

Thanks to your earlier thought provoking feedback, in the upcoming version of the game, it will be absolutely clear that from the point the rebellion gets going, the opposed stats represent how you’re perceived, not who you really are. We’ll see what you think of the transition between the establishing chapters and the rebel leader ones.

As for the implied equality, there’s a lot I could say about that, but because I am trying not to get too sucked into the rabbit hole right now… let’s just say I wholeheartedly agree they’re not equal, but I think they’re of value at different points in a revolution, and for different strategies, and I want to play that out.

(The French Revolution spawned some pretty big armies with their version of skepticism. Which was of course also ultimately a weird religion, and that version of skepticism is obviously going to be possible in XoR.)

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I still want to create a multi-cultural Imperium that has the religion on terms as the Byzantium Empire (Eastern Roman Empire for purists) had with the Orthodox church.

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@P_Tigras While emphasizing religion and nationalism should allow one to rally their supportes, it would also alienate many people who might have oherwise supported the rebellion. It should have been unequal if there was a single opressed group, but this is not the case. Why should Whends believeing in old gods and Nereish skeptics fight to replace their Karagon opressors with Shayardene ones? They would stay home and the total army size would probably stay the same, the stats would affect the composition, and some NPC like anarchy determines if K. or S. joins the band.

@Havenstone But wasn’t the French Revolution also a highly nationalistic thing? And according to @poison_mara’s stories these nationalist and anti-religious attitudes backfired when they invaded Spain and the people there resisted Napoleon’s troops.

Btw, @poison_mara, are you still working on your game?

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The French revolution is a complicated era; no one army composition. Napoleon’s core was indeed the revolutionary armies of the earlier revolution but his empire and armies ultimately were reformed by him and his staff.

Spain and others’ reaction to Napoleon really was as complicated as the army composition - some reacted to the revolutionary reforms, some the Neapolitan reforms and some to such things as putting a relative on the Spanish crown.
The Spanish/English peninsular campaigns were more anti-Napoleon than anti-French revolution.

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Can you explain what it means, please?