Okay, regarding Demon-cracy's starting requirement:
James does not have to be dead, as someone else already pointed out.
The countdown for it starts the day you enter Winterfall; 5 days after, there will be an exclamation mark outside Nephlune where you'll get a scene with a courier who's looking for Aura. This starts the quest, where you'll continue by talking to Lord Nephlune to find that he's allied with Liliana to change things from the inside. You're then tasked with recruiting various new "cultists" for her, and after getting 3 of the 5, one of her opponent, the Shadow's, minions will appear to you the next time you enter Nephlune from any door/entry and ask you to corrupt them.
There was an earlier version that required you to be Intermediate rank at the guild, but that requirement was later removed.
You're then pretty much left to your own devices to continue recruitment, perform electioneering tasks for Liliana or the minion in the pub (including a new H-scene at Liliana if you've waitressed at least once), and effectively provide backing to whichever candidate you want to.
There were a few bugs with this on first implementation, including the crash from a page ago which was caused by something I did during testing that I forgot to remove, but that's now resolved. There was also a version where the Nephlune cutscene didn't progress to Liliana automatically, providing a window in which you could leave his manor via other means and break the sequencing. All of the major bugs here should be fixed as of 0.44.0.
There are still some changes to come to the quest, but for the most part it's complete now and should be feature-complete for you lot whenever you can access 0.45.0 or prerelease 3.