Really enjoyed Aelradir's post. It's very interesting, especially as someone who had some power in Heen back in the third invasion. There actually was a strong effort to make Martana cut you adrift and turn on Sint for their alliance with daimonry but she managed to weather the storm and stay the course. She wasn't ready to risk daimonic assault and even as the invasion finished, she wasn't interested in punishing invasion transgressions.
It's also very interesting to see Tom's post about the daimons. Glad to know I wasn't wrong in opposing daimons from the Third Invasion but Beluaterra as a whole wasn't all that worried about daimonry. In the time between invasions I spent a lot of time decrying dragon worshippers and trying to help people see why Sint ought to have gone the way of Vlaanderen too but didn't get far. It was really frustrating to see Mesh talking about the Blood Cult and daimonry whilst forging an alliance with Sint, who had had daimon lords walking among them. Mesh seemed to be striking the wrong enemies and Sint's friends ought to have abandoned her. When daimons turned up again, I flexed every sinew in Bara'Khur to make them see daimons were the true enemy and that Bara'Khur had to work for the good of all human realms but ended up going into exile after failing utterly.
Even now, I stick to the view that the daimons were the real enemy, or at least no more a friend of humanity than any other faction, but most people seem to think I'm slightly mad. To some extent though, I wonder if the daimons had it easier due to the time between invasions. In some areas, there seemed to be surprisingly few veterans of the Third Invasion and even then, unless you were in the north-west the daimons weren't as life altering or fearsome as perhaps they could have been. What I remember and experienced of daimonry in the Third Invasion just didn't chime with the experience some people were having of daimons at the start of the Fourth and so it was very easy to write off those opposing daimonry as being ridiculous very early on.
Though with all due respect, Tom isn't the leader of the Blood Cult, nor does he play any of the elders it had, as far as I know. The Blood Cult were not servants of the daimons, though they were frequently allies of circumstance (example: Mesh persecutes the Cult and taunts the Daimons when they return. The Cult therefore turns to the daimons to have Mesh whacked. Result: Everyone's happy.).
The Daimons did leak propaganda through the Cult, but the Cult also managed to influence the daimons on many levels. And the Cult did *not* want the daimons to reign supreme, it simply tried to profit of the daimons' rampage to take care of many long-standing opponents. "Keep your friends close, your ennemies even closer" was a pretty dominant philosophy: "We'll rid ourselves of the daimons when we see the chance, but we'll profit from their presence to take care of all those that have been causing us such a pain for so long". It was payback time, really. The Cult always played with and against all sides.
