Very interesting to see the various takes people have for their rebellion.
One thing I would look forward to see @Havenstone handles it, is how the other powers like the Hallasurq or the Abhuman Federation react to the ongoing rebellion. With a good portion of their resources devoted to quelling a rebellion, the Hallasurqs would probably take advantage of the situation, while the Abhumans could press for greater trade concessions.
Although, I’m sure the successful leader of a rebellion, interested in starting their own league as it were, would certainly stress the dangers of outside threats…perhaps even letting the Hallassurqs nip off parts of Errezia, for example, to rally others to their way of thinking.
It’s certainly true that Karagond’s theurgical advantage will need to be countered regardless of what path you take. It isn’t assured however that the disparity in theurgical capability will be completely resolved at the time Shayard initially becomes free, and that makes stopping the MC’s revolution at Shayard’s borders dangerous IMHO. Big, inefficient centralized bureaucracies like Karagond’s can be quick to underestimate a threat and then slow to mobilize against it once they do appreciate its severity. I’d rather not give Karagond time to fully mobilize some sort of overwhelming theurgic response involving epic blood magic that involves the deaths of tens of thousands.
I don’t think they will have any choice. Their blood economy is precarious enough with Shayard, the single most heavily populated territory in the Hegemony, without Shayard it will collapse far more rapidly.
Sure it will. If the MC doesn’t work to spread the rebellion to the other occupied territories, then that ruthlessness will keep the other territories from rebelling until they see the results of Karagond’s attempt to reconquer Shayard. Furthermore you will be giving the Thaumaturch time to blame the MC’s rebellion for the need to slaughter tens of thousands of helots to fuel huge thaumaturgic war rituals -and- incidentally to free up troops from having to watch those now dead helots.
As brutal as they were in their early days, the Romans and the Byzantines had no incentive to slaughter their own people for the magical power of their blood. As brutal as they were, they weren’t dependent on massive slaughter to keep their capitol floating in the sky or their government operational. Karagond is much, much worse than Rome or Constantinople ever were.
I think @Ramidel pretty much hit the nail on the head. The Thaumaturchy can’t afford Shayard’s independence. It must seek to reconquer it or it will collapse.
Agreed.
That’s the best sort.
Speaking of my personal in-game goals, oh I definitely plan to partition Karagond, and give some of it to Shayard which I will personally control as both King of Shayard and prostátis kai fýlakas (protector and guardian) of the freed peoples of the koinon, and very likely eventually hold the title of Basileus (King) or perhaps even Aftokrátoras (Emperor) as well. It’s part of my plan to thread the needle so to speak. A Winter Palace in Shayard and a Summer Palace in the former part of Karagond that is now in Shayard. Shayard nationalists can’t be too unhappy about territorial Shayard growing at the expense of Karagond and their own King also ruling the rest of Karagond’s territories. I would never allow anyone else to rule a united Shayard, but by ruling it myself as the emperor’s personal domain within the empire, I can spin this all sorts of different ways depending on who I’m speaking with…
To quote good old Louis XIV, “L’etat, c’est moi”. I have no need to fear a united Shayardene monarchy if it is my personal domain within the larger empire which I also rule, only with one or two less layers of bureaucracy.
I’m not going to stop until Karagond’s government is smashed, and a big chunk of its industry is going to go to Shayard, ie. my MC’s direct control, but not all of it. There will be plentiful rewards for those who play important roles in the rebellion’s success.
Agreed.
Agreed. Merchants have historically greatly preferred a single set of trade laws to deal with over a chaotic hodge podge of differing and often conflicting laws that make trade both more expensive and more difficult.
I don’t see why you can’t take command of the Koinon and in doing so put your own stamp on it. Might makes right as the old saying goes, and the MC with a horde of armed ex-helots who consider him their savior is going to to be very hard to deny anything by anyone. It’s just a matter of using that clout to place people you trust in the positions of authority.
OK, here’s a more detailed ramble on the game’s themes and what I’m trying to do with the stats. Come back at me where it doesn’t make sense.
“Any rebellion is defined by one choice, kuria: what to preserve, and what to tear down.”
– Horion Leilatou
Sharp-eyed readers will already have noticed the reference to the game’s title here. The choice of rebels is a choice of how much of the social order to keep. Your choice will vary based both on your overarching goal (are you a radical helot like @idonotlikeusernames who wants to destroy the caste system root-and-branch, or a devout, cosmopolitan noble who’d just like a rather more compassionate and just version of the current Hegemony) and on your judgement of how far you can tear things apart before your rebellion devolves into chaos, probably eats you, and at the very least dissolves your vision for a new social order in anarchy. The more radical your goal, the more you’re in danger of the latter outcome; but even less radically intentioned rebels could end up there.
So here’s the simplified arc of the XoR games: mobilize followers, tear down the old order, stop tearing down at the right point (before going off the anarchy cliff), and rebuild your new order. (And then see how you feel about it, and whether it’s justified all those unsavory compromises along the way.) National identity and religion are core stats because I think they have interesting implications for all of those steps; and while reality is more complex than the opposed stat, I think the opposition dynamic is close enough to be justifiable.
Because the Karagond order is cosmopolitan and religious, nationalism and skepticism are natural tools to mobilize people against it and break it down, as they were for the French revolutionaries. @P_Tigras, I do think the evidence suggests that their skepticism was a strong net mobilizer for them, tapping into intense and widespread anti-clericalism – even while it was also obviously a key reason they triggered intense resistance among some populations. It will be even more so in the gameworld, where the Nyr have made skeptical humanism a much better-known and less unthinkable religious option than it was in early modern Europe.
Of course, religion can be used to mobilize people against the status quo, too – even a religion like the Xthonic one, which pretty much literally divinizes the existing social order, has the flaw of compassion running through it. And for the early going of the rebellion, a skeptical cosmopolitan MC could fall back on a cult of personality (with high CHA) rather than attracting people to a specific idea or value – plenty of rebels have historically made that work, at least for mobilizing troops to the rebellion.
Cosmopolitanism isn’t a strong mobilizer of troops. WulfyK is right that you’ll get fewer Wiends and Nyr joining up if you have a reputation as a Shayardene nationalist, but I’ve no intent of fully balancing the early, mobilization-oriented games by treating cosmopolitanism as more than it is. There will be successful paths for most stat combos, but they won’t be equally easy. Nationalist (and to some extent devout) MCs will attract a bigger following. It’s in the later games, around stopping the collapse and rebuilding, that I envision cosmopolitanism proving more useful.
My model for cosmopolitanism isn’t contemporary Europe or coastal America, but Empires like the Qing (and many other Mongol offshoots) or the Hellenes, who didn’t raise troops on the basis of their cosmopolitanism but did just fine militarily. I’d also put Napoleon pretty solidly on the cosmopolitan side of the spectrum, by contrast with the strong nationalism from which he emerged. Most successful empires end up cosmopolitan, and many start that way. It’s a value that keeps multi-national empires together. Like I said back when:
It’s not just coffeeshop intellectuals; there’s a koine-speaking, Karagon-assimilated administrative class across the continent, mainly comprising low-level priests and nobility. They like cosmopolitan values and would dread the Hegemony’s disintegration into nation-blocs which lose their common language and high culture. Having them on board with your rebellion will be very helpful in keeping the Hegemony together more or less within its current borders (just as countless Central Asian conquerors found the Persian-speaking educated class indispensable, and over a generation or two generally ended up speaking Persian better than their original Mongol/Uzbek/Pashtun mother tongue).
Of course, you may not want to try to keep the multi-national Hegemony going, as @Protagonist said. It will be easier to restore internal order when you’re only trying in your little bit of the continent. But there will be more external problems. As others have suggested, Karagon and the other provinces will be desperate to retain access to Shayard’s food (and helot blood). And if one or more Wards drop in the fighting… well, Halassur’s a long way off, but the Shayardene Coast is much less rugged and more prosperous than Erezza. So if you just focus on liberating Shayard, expect a bitter fight on pretty much all your borders. Or do really, really well at making friends with everyone from the other provinces/countries over the next few games.
In Game 3, you’ll have the chance to see the Nyrish capital… which is overshadowed by a mountain that the Karagonds dropped on the former Nyrish capital. And if there’s one thing they’ve got plenty of in Karagon, even after the breakdown of interprovincial trade, it’s mountains.
What do you say to the idea of pan-nationalism? Does an MC who wants to appeal to a hegemonic nationalism fall on the cosmopolitan or nationalist side of spectrum? These states have been jammed together for centuries if I’m not mistaken, share a common language, and common cultural artifacts. To me this is like the multitude of successor states to the Roman Empire who all would try to appeal to that idealized past.
See, my character would just see that as wasteful decadence. For all his flaws, when it comes to austerity, he really does practice what he preaches, he doesn’t care about titles and palaces, in fact he despises them. Pomp and ceremony will be kept to absolute minimum under his rule. In his personal life he’d probably just wear very drab and simple robes with no footwear and beyond simply being clean he doesn’t care much about beautification rituals either.
One single “palace” will be difficult enough to deal with and even that will likely be fortified compound in some sort of brutalist style, with sparse and spartan decorations and furnishings, rather than an opulent palace.
The only part that would be even remotely impressive about it would probably be the library.
Regarding the personal job title(s), while my Greek is nowhere near as good as yours, the equivalent or “Mr. Secretary” will do nicely.
As for the personal domain, I agree there but I’d prefer to carve one out of bits of Shayard and Erezza, centered around Avezia. But again to rule much of anything as a (former) Helot the caste system needs to be broken first.
Whereas I plan to have a purely ceremonial and absolutely powerless “head of state”, with an appropriately long and pompous collection of titles, to take care of that minimum of pomp and ceremony for me. In fact, should he make it to the end, I plan to punish dear old dad with the position.
It may be very hard, but if you don’t completely smash the caste system and subdue the nobles, this seems precisely one of those very hard to deny things that they’re going to (try to) deny us anyway.
I also don’t like the fact that a Koinon of the kind Horion speaks of is more EU like, which means that the other member’s leaders are theoretically equal heads of state instead of small-time provincial governors competing for our favour.
On the one hand removing all of the industry of the successor provinces to Karagond would unfairly punish the helot masses living there, on the other hand Karagond can never be allowed to rise again and my mc likely does not trust even Karagond’s merchant class. In the end the compromise would likely be to let them only keep those light, civilian manufacturing industries that are not easily converted to military use.
The question with my specific form of rebellion then becomes are those people willing to accept that new, cosmopolitan order is going to be secular (with a fragmented and weakened Xthonic faith in open competition with the alternatives for the first time in centuries) and the loss of what titles and privileges they enjoyed based on birth alone in order to function in a meritocracy. In all honesty my mc might do better with the coffee house intellectual crowds who can be persuaded by a well-written manifesto.
I see I’ve got my work cut out for me as my mc would have to go down to one second before midnight when it comes to the anarchy cliff, in order to get something that is close to what he wants. And to do that his judgement has to be exactly on the mark here, with absolutely zero room for error. Easy peasy, right?
There’s also a very real limit to how much more just and compassionate the current system, that continues to depend on the brutal Harrowing of a blood cattle caste, can realistically get before it unravels entirely of its own accord. Then again that might be one of the things you mean when you said that even less reformist inclined rebels are in danger of leaping off the anarchy cliff.
Of course as much as Christianity has always had a theoretical undercurrent of compassion it was not in and of itself inimical to slave societies.
And you never did answer my question on what the Shayardene codex (and the old Shayardene church’s) exact viewpoints on slavery and its close derivatives actually were.
I hope outsmarting them with magic and more limited resources can also work.
Can the more cosmopolitan of us try to expand our rebellion beyond just Shayard sooner (by skipping over the more culturally Karagond Reach, for example) then a devout nationalist might, as I get the impression that Nyral and Erezza may actually prove more fertile ground for my mc’s message.
Not to mention that you’ll not only need to account for all the different stat combo’s but also the very real difference between the noble and helot backgrounds here.
Attempting to appeal to the koine nationalism that the Hegemony has created is cosmopolitan.
And if you focus on toppling the Hegemony…also expect a bitter fight on pretty much all your borders. Though that raises a point. Will it be possible to act anarchically outside of Shayard (throwing the Hegemony into Xaos right and left) while nurturing and defending order in Shayard?
(My gut says no. Even if existing order in Shayard wasn’t defined by the Hegemonic system, instability on your borders will spill over, as Europe has recently learned.)
Wait, I thought that the wars on the borders were only stemming from the occasional desire for conquest that the Hegemony gets? All offensive stuff, since the Ward blocks any armies from approaching the Hegemony due to all the weapons that any army not looking to get immediately slaughtered would bring. Does this mean that we’re not going to be able to have some group support the existing wards?
From what you just wrote, I either am right on track with what I wrote a few posts up with regards to structure or I am so far off, I have no chance at doing well in this series.
Just to bring forth something historical here: The German nationalism and liberalism responsible for galvanizing German Unification under a “Northern Germanic Confederation” as opposed to the Austrian “Imperial/feudal” unification model started in the Coffee shoppes in Berlin and other German cities north of Vienna.
I’m just saying, don’t discount the power of the coffee houses.
I used to be on this forum forever ago and CoR was one of my favorites. Now that I’ve returned I’m glad to see this is still getting worked on! Anyways, to throw my two cents in the “what to do when we win debate,” considering a large percentage of my rebels comes from Weind I would probably take that as a pan-Weind-Shayard nation. Considering my character, it kind of makes sense to create a new cosmopolitan Hegemony where Weind and Shayard are the new Karagond with less blood magic and more happy noble killing helots. Karagond central should probably have a “Temporarily occupy” option, where it then asks you if you actually want to follow through or not.
I’m still going all the way for my ultra-nationalist Shayardene Empire run.
Butcher every Karagond collaborator in their beds, throw their false priests and sorcerers into their own Harrowers, bring it all down! We’ll stop only when Aekos burns and the Thaumatarch begs for a mercy that they never gave, and shall not receive! A reforged Shayard, the Shayard that always meant to be, will be worth it.
By the way, @Havenstone, have you considered allowing noble characters with Karagond names to reject them and (try to) pick a new one?
Ooh, I really like this idea. I mean, a player can already pick a mixture of Shayarden/Karagond name. I can easily see a successful rebel leader perhaps changing one, or Shayardizing one, etc. to make it more palatable to their followers.
would you be able to make makeshift weapons like stone spears and axes they might not be able to do much against steel but its better then nothing and wooden shields sound slightly useful
It would be cool to see one of the regions or maybe the eastern empire being influenced by a significantly different culture that may or may not use it. I know in parts of Africa, there are knives made out of wood that aren’t extremely sharp but are really durable. Maybe if we ally ourselves with a faction that uses these type of weapons they can share their secrets.
I think the band already does that. I assume anyone who doesn’t have a good quality steel weapon (represented by the Arms stat) is probably wielding bows and stone weapons, or at the very least clubs and fire-hardened spears.
Though that raises a point. Will it be possible to act anarchically outside of Shayard (throwing the Hegemony into Xaos right and left) while nurturing and defending order in Shayard?