Crake
I AM THE STORM THAT IS APPROACHING
- Location
- USA
Hard to gauge that. Most of these people have kept their cards close to their chest, so teasing out the direction they will vote in the early votes and deciding when to make our play will be important. We shouldn't neglect our background assets, but it is admittedly difficult to determine how to get them hostile to each other without making it obvious we are only using our involvement in our Dywen guise to keep them squabbling. If Lucan actually plans to forge an Alliance with Kyle using my posited suggestion of allying with the Fey, fully intending on betraying them if necessary later as the Seven did with the First Men, then he is trading a lot of social capital on supporting Kyle in hopes of getting his own votes supported in turn. In which case, spending most of our attention on ensuring Kyle is either spurning Lucan (conflict of interest or just implicating him in something not in his interests) or else torpedoing the Fey votes by using the other extant factions would be best.
This won't work if every other faction is allied with Lucan, or willing to compromise with Kyle.
It's unfortunate that we don't know for sure where the Traditionalist Block will swing, because if we could get them fighting both Lucan and the Fey we could use them for Wedge votes.
Fact of the matter is we need to abuse our IC knowledge of Theological lore because we don't have any knowledge OOC, unless someone actually directly addresses us having an argument to dissect.
This effectively hamstrings our write-in bonus, but on the other hand we don't need to worry about making our items win on the floor, we only need to concern ourselves with getting people to act certain ways, say certain things and vote certain ways. Which often opens up opportunities for write-ins. Theology is effectively a dead duck. We're also basically Satan. Viserys shows he holds more regard for Lucan as a worthy opponent than as a holy man, because Viserys isn't filled with the same awe or sense of purpose that Lucan and Mel are when they try to advance their Gods' goals. The only goals that concern him are his own, which makes him poorly suited for anticipating how they will act or react. They aren't driven by ego or ambition, but will literally do the objectively best thing possible to advance their deity's goals and mission statement.
We can run circles around people. Even Mel can be made to doubt. But that was in private. In the worst possible setting she could have set herself against us. Someone like Benerro we've always maneuvered around by being honest and getting him to do what he would do anyway by promising to act as a restraining bolt against the group that wants to remove him.
So Benerro's weakness is that he loves the people. Mel's weakness is her isolation, both things which we properly exploited.
We need to exploit Lucan's weakness, and we won't be doing it by out arguing him in theology, though we can certainly give a good effort at it if the stakes are sufficient and we actually understand what we're arguing for.
Also, you could argue simply memorizing religious tracts and thesis may give us archival and encyclopedic knowledge of the Faith, but again, without being able to do things like pop open a Bible and start yanking junk straight out of there to support our arguments, we are relying on flat bonuses rather than our usual strategy of giving our opponent enough rope to hang himself with and making him argue himself into a corner, and then making it impossible for them to talk their way out of it.
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