General Exalted Thread
- Location
- In you're house RIGHT NOW!
Thats logical, we cant have that!
but on another note, soulsteel is explicitely concious correct?
*wobbles hand*
It varies somewhat depending on which book you read. It generally ballparks in the vicinity of "I have no mouth and I must scream" - the ghosts it's made out of have lost pretty much everything about who they were apart from the capacity to feel pain. You can't talk to it or pump it for info or whatever.
And yes, that means a Compassion 3+ character basically can't get away with using soulsteel and probably should be getting the urge to find Mount Doom and throw the soulsteel into it.
- Location
- Singapore
Which in and of itself, is problematic.
Cause what makes you think that the ghosts stop feeling pain when the soulsteel is dissolved?
Maybe the they remain trapped in the melted down molten soulsteel, forever dispersed within the lava veins beneath the earth, everburning for all eternity, with no hope of escape, oblivion, or rescue.
*wonders if there are Exalts who made it their personal crusade to destroy all soulsteel in Creation and the Underworld*
Better hope he never discovers Autochthon or all those Soulsteel alchies will have a problem with him.
- Location
- Singapore
Actually, come to think of it....
Let's say a soulsteel alchemical faces a person. Is the person, like, really creeped out by the hands and screaming faces appearing on the alchemical's 'skin'?
Considering the low probability of any high compassion exalt finding out about soulsteel and making it their main concern plus the low probability of the Autochthonian first contact happening in the same geographical area (or at all), this scenario is probably not going to happen. I think.
On other topics, can anyone tell me about the official Immaculate dogma about Hell in the Realm? How many are actually even aware that the Yozis are the architects of Creation (aside from secret Sidereal masters and high-ranking monks), or do they just discourage people from inquiring deeper into such matters?
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Is the person the type of person that is creeped out by screaming faces appearing on someone's skin? If yes, yes; if no, no.
IIRC, Autochthonian soulsteel aren't human derived. They don't scream. Just whispers creepily in alien tongues.
- Location
- Singapore
Waitasec, I remember one half of the human souls are recycled. The other half are used by autobot for his processes.
This is, quite explicitly, the Soulsteel Anima power:
"Half" is a vast overestimation, its never specified how many souls are "eaten" by Autochthon annually, and/or lost in the Reaches. But whatever that number might be, its both so few the Nations never noticed the gradual dwindling despite being heavily devoted to soul-census and tracking, yet enough that it has lowered the population ceiling to dangerous levels now that 5000 years has passed.
He just eats the po soul for energy and stores the hun for later reincarnation. The soulsteel deposits in his world-body came from a pre-Primordial War era client race of his that tried to enslave him and got smacked down for their hubris. Their soul remnants that got eaten by Auto-kun forms the first recorded example of soulsteel. The human-derived variant came into existence much later.
The teachings of the Immaculate Order are pretty "real world religion" about Hell. Which is to say, "demons are evil, wicked, lying spirits who tried to take over the world, were beaten back, then the Anathema made a deal with them and used hellish power to conquer the world until the Dragonblooded defeated them". Yes, a sorcerer might hear from demons that actually demons made the world, but demons are liars.
This is one of the reasons sorcerers are somewhat shunned by polite Realm society, especially ones who overtly indulge in demonology. Sorcerers who too openly show off demons and don't act properly faithful probably have heard things from demons that they're not really meant to know - and if they doubt the Immaculate faith because of it, well, they're suspect. Especially since, remember, demons a) lie, and b) can be wrong. It's not like Hell is an environment conducive for first circles knowing the objective facts. Where did they learn them? In the libraries of Orabilis? And you trust that?
Remember, too, that Mnemon - who literally has Demon of the Second Circle - is a devout, genuinely believing Immaculate. Yes, she uses her faith for political power, but she actually believes too. Demons who were there for the creation of the world will have told her that the Yozis made the world, and she - like someone sensible - will not have trusted a lying demon. Because demons lie.
Also, do remember that the intricacies of soul hierarchies and the like are not something your character will know unless they're a knowledgeable demonologist or a Sidereal or something like that. You might know the name of the demon realm is Malfeas, and that the Demon King is called Malfeas and the demon prince is called Ligier, but as far as you're concerned, they're separate beings. The Demon King rules over a city whose name he shares, and his heir and prince is proud Ligier who wields the flames of the green sun. You will not know that Malfeas is the city and also its king, and that his heart is Ligier who is both a man and a sun.
- Location
- In you're house RIGHT NOW!
I'd try to make it so one could make ethical soulsteel or something dumb like that.
Or somehow try to make soulsteel without the soul
Exalted do the impossible they could probably find some way to do it.
Lealope
Not yet invincible
- Pronouns
- She/Her
I'm in two minds on this. On the one hand, I don't like undercutting the actual point of soul steel like this.
On the other hand, it would be pretty great if there was an ethical alternative* and people went with the horrible alternative anyway because the former is orders of magnitude less efficient**.
Thoughts?
*Sleeping soulsteel, maybe?
**Wow, turns out when you treat people as resources, it usually ends with you trying to squeeze out every last drop instead of actually treating them with decency. Who could have guessed?
- Location
- Spain
Or you could, like, make your artifacts with orichalcum or jade.
Ruminations on the subject of soulsteel: it is ethically iffy to use souls of humans or other sapient beings to make this magical material. Souls used this way retains a degree of cognition and capacity of suffering.
But what if the demands for soulsteel begins to outweighs such ethical concerns? One compromise that comes to mind is using po souls exclusively to make soulsteel. With lesser sapience and thus less moral value than human-equivalent souls, it might serve as an adequate substitute to be soulforged. I wonder what is the minimal sapience threshold for producing usable soulsteel is. Would souls of mice suffice? They both bred fast and does theoretically posses po souls after all. And are mostly vermin. Soulforging them might be of positive utility.
The other source might be less wise, but maybe more profitable materially and morally. The Neverborn are laying there in the centre of the Underworld rotting and empowering (either intentionally or unintentionally) existential threats to Creation. Depending on fanon, cutting up and recycling Neverborn corpus flesh into soulsteel alloy might break up any remaining cognitive functions (thus giving them a final rest) and/or transform their spiritually polluting remains into something more useful and less hazardous. I mean back in the First Age, didn't some Solars propose to turn the Neverborns into massive soulsteel walls girding Creation to keep the wyld out? Or did I confuse fuzzily-remembered fanon as canon?
Of course, there should be detailed, well-funded studies made to determine whether Neverborn-sourced soulsteel cause any side-effects like inflicting Whispers on nearby folks or tainting the dragonlines with necromantic/Oblivion-flavoured essence if used to build a wall around Creation. Or maybe such studies were done in the First Age and PCs can find copies of the relevant scientific literature while raiding lost tombs and manses.
But what if the demands for soulsteel begins to outweighs such ethical concerns? One compromise that comes to mind is using po souls exclusively to make soulsteel. With lesser sapience and thus less moral value than human-equivalent souls, it might serve as an adequate substitute to be soulforged. I wonder what is the minimal sapience threshold for producing usable soulsteel is. Would souls of mice suffice? They both bred fast and does theoretically posses po souls after all. And are mostly vermin. Soulforging them might be of positive utility.
The other source might be less wise, but maybe more profitable materially and morally. The Neverborn are laying there in the centre of the Underworld rotting and empowering (either intentionally or unintentionally) existential threats to Creation. Depending on fanon, cutting up and recycling Neverborn corpus flesh into soulsteel alloy might break up any remaining cognitive functions (thus giving them a final rest) and/or transform their spiritually polluting remains into something more useful and less hazardous. I mean back in the First Age, didn't some Solars propose to turn the Neverborns into massive soulsteel walls girding Creation to keep the wyld out? Or did I confuse fuzzily-remembered fanon as canon?
Of course, there should be detailed, well-funded studies made to determine whether Neverborn-sourced soulsteel cause any side-effects like inflicting Whispers on nearby folks or tainting the dragonlines with necromantic/Oblivion-flavoured essence if used to build a wall around Creation. Or maybe such studies were done in the First Age and PCs can find copies of the relevant scientific literature while raiding lost tombs and manses.
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Lealope
Not yet invincible
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Sure you could. Nothing mandates that you use soulsteel for Artifacts or magical infrastructure. It's just easier, cheaper and much more plentiful than any of the other Magical Materials.
Wyld Shaping, obviously.
Create your own at the borders of Creation or a Wyld Zone, and risk getting jumped by Raksha in the doing.
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- Location
- my house
How much of this do Infernal's generally now? I always assume they know at least the basics if the soul hierarchy.
greensun
You shall all burn beneath my light!!!
They'll be in Hell and they'll have access to both the Third-Circle Demons and the Titans themselves. So yeah, if they're inclined they can learn they'll get pretty much all of it upfront, or they can find out the secret stuff easier.
- Location
- Pittsburgh, PA
I mean, in theory all you'd have to do is find a means of lobotomizing the ghost before you render it down into soulsteel; keep the necrotic Essence matrix that allows soulsteel to be soulsteel, purge the part of the matrix that can feel and think.
This gets complicated when you consider that ghosts resist the pull of Lethe by having intense emotions & opinions, and the lobotomy would effectively purge all of their anchoring Passions. Hence, you either have to be able to immediately move from completing the lobotomy to conversion into soulsteel, faster than the ghost can dissipate into nothing without Passions to maintain it...
... or build the soulsteel factory inside some sort of geomantic and/or Sorcerously-imbued region that keeps Lethe's influence at bay, so that it can't snatch up the lobotomized ghosts before they're rendered for "ethical"[1] soulsteel.
[1] I mean, you're still murdering people to make this shit, and the addition of mass lobotomization facilities makes the whole thing even murkier from a moral perspective. About the only point most would agree on is that it's probably better than normal soulsteel production.
Source on that? Because it's not like the ore you need to make it is very easy to get since it needs to be mined in the underworld. I thought Jade was the most common MM by orders of magnitude.
