Exalted Questions Thread
- Thread starter Chehrazad
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Or to create a wheat-eating pesticide resistant parasite.
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An Ambition 3 Terestrial level working is "Place a curse on a small region in a way that diminishes, warps, or blights its mundane aspects such as flora, fauna, or natural resources, making it all but impossible to make a livelihood off the cursed land" level. Celestial Ambition 2 is "Spread mutations throughout the mundane flora and fauna of an entire ecosystem" level. Creating a plague or parasite that breeds true that poses a worldwide risk is probably going to be Solar Ambition 1 level.
Depends on how you read it, depends on how you choose to interpret a more modern settings magical particulars. Certainly, creating a disease and personally infecting the entire planet with it is Solar.
"breed a specimen of an existing species with a minor supernatural power that augments its strongest traits."
From Terrestrial 3. Is a virus a species? I'd rule no.
A strain of bacteria? A germ? A tapeworm is certainly a species. Rules-as-written, it works. Make an exceptionally, mundanely deadly parasite. Find the worst ones that cause famines IRL. Give it a minor supernatural power that augments it, such as "resists pesticide."
Totally mundane parasites, bacteria, germs and bugs can do a lot of damage.
um, no. A working isn't a spell that wears off. If you create a new form of life, it's going to keep replicating. It's not a sustained magic that fades once it reproduces. It's...breeding a new sort of life and releasing it to reproduce in the wild.
Like, bluntly, I would demand a higher grade of finesse to make new life forms with sorcery not reproduce to avoid situations precisely like this. The system does not have baked in protections from fucking up by releasing horrible monsters into the environment, preventing that is on you.
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"A specimen" is singular though. The scope of terestrial level workings is not "create a new species".
Asexual reproduction is a thing. A pretty common thing. And yes. It pretty obviously is create new species, if you, you know, make something reproduce asexually.
Just make two...
or that, yeah. Like, we're not talking about a committed effect of magic, we're talking about a permanent alteration/the creation of new, stable life. Unless you make it sterile, life, uh, life finds a way.
god damn now I wanna run Jurassic park for Dragonblooded
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A question.
Add +4 to all mental attribute rolls for a scene.
Artifact 2 or 3?
Add +4 to all mental attribute rolls for a scene.
Artifact 2 or 3?
Catching up with this - no, by RAW. I might consider it legitimate in the first scene when it's been applied, but after that it's been absorbed as part of their psyche. You're going to need to work harder than that to keep your cluster of madmen for Oramus Charms.
After all, it can hardly be called mad to be in terrified awe of the Demon King.
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Conversely, would it be appropriate for an Infernal to concoct a Heretical Charm that crosswires FAA and the Madness-keyed Charms of Oramus to make people with Terrified Awe count as Mad (and vice versa) for purposes of the Infernal's Charms? After all, freebasing Malfeas and Oramus seems like it would work for creating an "I am a nuclear horror that demands obedience, the Emperor Outside who you cannot help but frighten and fascinate in equal measure".Catching up with this - no, by RAW. I might consider it legitimate in the first scene when it's been applied, but after that it's been absorbed as part of their psyche. You're going to need to work harder than that to keep your cluster of madmen for Oramus Charms.
After all, it can hardly be called mad to be in terrified awe of the Demon King.
"That's broken, you can't have it."
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Aw man.
How about a pipe meant to enhance deep thought and contemplation?
If it adds +a bunch of dice, it's broken. The dice curve in Exalted is fragile. The example artifacts in Ex3 that work like what you're saying are stuff like the Belt of Shadow-Walking, Artifact 3, +3 Charm dice to Stealth rolls, and you can pay a huge amount of motes to turn into a shadow. The Collar of Dawn's Cleansing Light, Artifact 2, offers +2 dice to resist infection as it cleans your wounds for you. And none of the higher level artifacts do more than this, because this is the limit, higher level artifacts do grand powers.
Both of these have primary magic powers (Shadow form and clothes+skin cleaning) that are the true point of the artifact.
Second Edition had tons of +ects but they varied from broken to useless, so just...don't design for Second Edition. If you want an artifact that just gives you passive more dice to something, you're better off writing a dice trick Lore Charm, and even then it won't be +4 to everything, because that's absurd.
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Even if you don't care that it's broken, having an artifact that just gives +Dice is so incredibly boring. Artifacts aren't supposed to be boring, they're supposed to be cool.
You want a mental artifact? Make a crown that gives it's wearer oracle-style evocations that allow them to divine the future so they can better plan. Make a dagger that sucks the emotion out of people, turning them into emotionless calculators by turning their social dots into mental dots and put them to work doing mental stuff.
When you ask about things, why not tell us what you want the artifact FOR, in addition to the mechanics? Short and simple, of course, but a little insight into the direction you want the artifact to take would help people know what to suggest to help you.
You want a mental artifact? Make a crown that gives it's wearer oracle-style evocations that allow them to divine the future so they can better plan. Make a dagger that sucks the emotion out of people, turning them into emotionless calculators by turning their social dots into mental dots and put them to work doing mental stuff.
When you ask about things, why not tell us what you want the artifact FOR, in addition to the mechanics? Short and simple, of course, but a little insight into the direction you want the artifact to take would help people know what to suggest to help you.
Hakazin
Serpent Admirer
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That assumes that he's thinking from a narrative standpoint in the first place, as opposed to coming up with a mechanical effect/goal and trying to find a descriptive shell. Which, you know, isn't necessarily a bad thing, but A: Adding dice is such a simple effect mechanically that it doesn't really narrow down the options for an in-universe effect, and B: the mechanics-first narrative-second design style rarely meshes well with Exalted's design principles. That's more a thing that suits simulationist/gamified systems like D&D or GURPS.
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No, not really, and I have no idea where the idea that you can change how the meta rules of Infernal Charmsets function with heretical charms. It certainly doesn't come from the text, because the example Heretical charms are things like "remove my armour quickly" and "Shaping defence".
If you're freebasing Oramus and Malfeas, then you need to find a way to work them together and combine Malfeas' "All shall fear me and obey" with Oramus' "Those with shattered minds see glimmers of my true majesty, and are drawn to me". And that's up to you. It's no more permissible than a Kimbery/Cecelyne Charm that goes "all deserts count as seas and all seas count as places of desolation".
QafianSage
Ascending Ape
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I have to say that, in my opinion - and this is an opinion, I make no claim to any kind of empirical truth - a central theme of heretical charms should be being exactly that - heretical to the mythoi of the Yozis. Not limited to creating 'a handy trick made by combining two Yozis' themes', but something that transgresses upon those themes and makes them into something new, overcoming the blinders and self-defeating spite of the Yozis with very human insight and ingenuity. The Infernals may be exactly that, but they're still Exalted and it's in the nature of the Exalted to do the impossible. I, personally, find that more interesting, and more worthy of the palaver and plots that the Heretical keyword implies. Why would Adorjan and TED care that you've made something that lets you take your armour off really quickly with Scale-Shedding Solution? Because they can't learn that charm? Again, why would they care? It's not like they use armour. But if the souls of the Yozis know that such charms are a gateway to overcoming their oversouls' inherent weaknesses, and they can't partake? That's a much bigger deal, and it'd be entirely... Well, reasonable isn't the right word but understandable for them to react badly.
Not to say that those kinds of tricks don't have their place, especially among 'loyalist' Infernals, but the transgressors, those looking to truly work beyond what they have been provided with, should be able to. Now, some things - like the hypothetical Kimbery/Cecelyne charm you used as an example - are too out-there, stamping all over the themes of both Yozi, but in places where themes are closer, like in the Malfeas/Oramus thing that @GardenerBriareus was talking about, I think it's definitely acceptable to develop such a charm. Although the thing you said about it not being madness to fear the Demon-Emperor is certainly valid. Perhaps the charm could instead use the Magnanimous Warning Glyph as a jumping-off point rather than the Intimacy, tainting the glyph with Oramaic essence and making it a conduit for Nosognosia?
I'd like to say that I'm not really looking for an argument or even really a debate here. I'm just intending to state my alternate point of view. I think that yours is perfectly valid.
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Yes, and there you see why I think it's a poor shortcut that's trying to use "learn a new Charm" to resolve something you could have done with just a little bit of lateral thinking. For example, their Intimacy of Terrified Awe lowers their MDV against your music. Et voila, you can just... get them to listen to you. And of course, you can keep the masses in Terrified Awe forming a functional state, while you make an elite inner circle of madmen a la Byrgenwerth who are your scientists and scholars seeking enlightenment in your terrible radiance (and thus they're kind of a bit unstable and don't make the best general workers).
Part of the fun of Infernals is arranging things so your organisation is set up so your weird mishappen Infernal Charms work properly. And exploiting synergies that the Yozis can't, like the Oramus/Malfeas example of keeping the peons in terrified awe while your inner circle are those you have enlightened.
That's the real "heresy" - blending atomic Charms to produce remixed playstyles, not inventing little Charms to try to bypass the flavourful constraints on your charmset.
QafianSage
Ascending Ape
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And that's why you're the respected one of the two of us.
I hate to sound greedy, though, but... Why not do both? That is, why not have the plot of constructing that weird societal structure, and then from that divine the shape of a Charm that helps you refine it further into something better? As you said, there's already the synergies that you're capable of without learning Heretical charms. Add the charms on top of that, and you can have the best of both worlds. At least to me that makes sense - the kind of people who become Exalts are rarely satisfied with 'good enough', and I see no reason why learning a charm can't be story-fodder in and of itself, especially if you're inventing an entirely new charm. I mean, look at anime. How many 'developing a new, original technique' arcs have there been?
Then again, perhaps I'm just not balancing Watsonian and Doylist concerns right.
Also 'atomic charms'? I'm sure that this is something obvious, but I'm missing it.
EDIT: Also also, while I have your attention, what does a person who is Mad 'sound' like to a warlock who knows Madman's Insight? The text says that Madness is obvious to the warlock, and I presume that's conveyed in terms of hearing, but I've no idea how to actually describe something like that.
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I mean, if you want to play an exalt who's charms all work together without any weird side effects that you have to decide between contorting your behavior into something weird to get the most out of them or accepting that not behaving weird is going to mean you have to sacrifice some potential use, then play a solar.
"my charms are weird and make me behave weirdly to get full use" is a selling point of infernal play. It's not something that should be shaved off by buying more charms.
"my charms are weird and make me behave weirdly to get full use" is a selling point of infernal play. It's not something that should be shaved off by buying more charms.
A lot, and I think that doesn't say what you want it to. Because those new techniques are often a way to inject false drama into a arc. So often these characters don't grow, don't change, don't develop. They just lose, go have a training arc, come back and win.
The other thing is that spending 9XP and spending (Min Essence) weeks inventing a new Heretical Charm is not a story. And changing the rules of how a Charmset interacts with itself will probably cause ISSUES. All in caps. Take Szoreny, for example - I know I built the poison-that-doesn't-count-as-a-Poison mechanic into him to force Szoreny players who rely on his Accumalation charms into a very specific pattern of behaviour. Start adding new ways to remove heartsap, and you've just broken that dynamic. Same for Oramus, and way that the easiest method he has for making people more vulnerable to his charms is to make them hysterical, which reduces their utility.
Atomic - inseparable. Charms taken as individual unchangeable units, rather than hacking them with custom charms.
It's Obvious to you. You can't mistake it for anything else. And yes, it's hearing based.
Just think of an appropriate way of conveying it for the character and their Charm paradigm, and for Oramus' themes.
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In that case, what should Heretical Charms do?
For example, there's a Qafian Charm that gives you mondo benefits for meditation, but makes every hour you meditate count as a scene eroding any Intimacies you have that relate to other people (as opposed to ideals or personal preferences). Should it be possible to create a Heretical Charm that modifies this so that you can select a small number of specific people to be immune to this by electing them as "advisors" to your enlightenment... but in exchange for still being able to give a shit about them, your MDVs against them are halved, and you eat Limit if you either sacrifice your ideals for their sake or sacrifice them for your ideals?