Randomiser wrote:Larry, the basic understanding on Safehold is that God, through the Archangels, is beneficent, faithful and fair. To that end the Prohibitions clearly lay down how God's Children are to live and anyone who breaks them will get in trouble, up to and including getting smitten by the Rakurai. However the converse of that is also true, God will not punish people for doing things which are not Prohibited, because that would be capricious and unfair and undermine the understanding of God's character on which the whole society is based. The heros in the Vicarate may not play by those rules, exactly, but the Archangels did, because they understood the cost if they didn't.
There is a general suspicion of innovation, but it is not actually prohibited as such. Burning coal for heating and for various industrial processes, think all kinds of metal production and working, is clearly allowed. Burning coal gas is very little different. Playing Chemistry with the coal is quite different and may be covered by a proscription on the limited uses of acids etc. Or maybe not, since proscriptions that are too detailed lead to interesting lines of enquiry if one is so minded.
RFC in posts has indicated that various people in Safehold's history have started to play with electricity and have been hammered by the Inquisition for it.
The use of the Rakurai for smiting the ungodly is tricky.
If it was meant to be the Proscriptions ultimate enforcer, it's got to be set up so that the only things it smites for are things that are not possibly the result of anything but Proscription violations, as generous as the Church may have let them get.
If it's stricter than that and dumb, the Archangels would have invited a capricious God smiting people for what the Church ended up allowing.
If it's stricter than that and smart, it'd've blown away Tellesburg already.
Gas lighting is apparently okay. You can't prohibit using a lot of gas without prohibiting even a little, else God's capricious again.
Steam power too is apparently okay, because it's in use and no boom today.
This line of reasoning may break down if the Rakurai command system is (1) strict and smart but near-sighted, so it would blow away these violations if it detected them but hasn't yet, or (2) is a leftover from the War of the Fallen, isn't meant to blow away anything short of Terran Federation level tech, and shoots anything short of that down only as a kind of erring on the side of "caution".
(1) - "Blind Rakurai" - seems mighty unlikely, given how well it still sees through Federation stealth systems. Surely it'd notice Delthak. (The ship or the location.)
(2) - "Leftover Rakurai" - seems a real possibility. It doesn't leave the Rakurai to make any judgment calls that the Church can be trusted to make (or that Bedard's social engineering can be supposed to have pre-empted forever), and it's consistent with all the times it has not gone off so far and the times it has (specifically, under specific control against the Southern Enclave). The use of the Rakurai as a threat is fully consistent with this, when Safehold doesn't know what may set it off. In effect, Chihiro was bluffing that way - you could violate the Proscriptions for a long while before setting it off - but bluff's are fine when the other players cannot see any possible tell, calling your bluff may mean the wrath of God, and not calling it may leave you, eh, with somewhat riskier lighting.