Bursting Eagerness Soul
Threadwalking Rating Machine
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Looks cool as hell to me!
Err, no pun intended...
Err, no pun intended...
General Exalted Thread
- Thread starter Aleph
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I like this one a lot more @Unbanshee .
That being said the second one looks a little weak? I'm not an expert at balancing though so fi anyone disagrees I'm probably wrong.
That being said the second one looks a little weak? I'm not an expert at balancing though so fi anyone disagrees I'm probably wrong.
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I think it's flat out superior to Legendary Warrior's Curriculum, in that you end up able to train people in damn near anything up to 4 dots, and non-extras up to 5 dots (something that solar training charms can't - they're capped at 4 dots), and instead of giving bonus dice/successes in a specialty, you inflict that terrified awe intimacy on your students in addition to the regular training.
I need to figure out the wording to add into the base charm that says "you're gonna get casualties from this training, but probably not enough to reduce magnitude" though.
So, with regards to these:
- STD is just plain worse than TWT. It trains the same things, but it has a lethal health level cost and as it stands you could replace it with "this Charm works like Tiger Warrior Training Technique, but inflicts lethal damage on the trained". That's boring.
- MSM, on the other hand, is too good. It adds too many things, and the extra training thing is unnecessary.
By contrast, Malfeas is Sauron, Malfeas is every petty sadistic boss, and Malfeas is the dark lord. When using the Charm, you want to be encouraged to find reasons to use it to assert your sadistic dominance over people.
I would therefore suggest some of the following changes:
STD
- Get rid of the Drill thing. Inside, it gives everyone who benefits from this Training the Intimacy of Terrified Awe. Malfeas isn't making a close-knit team; he's making a horde more terrified of him than the enemy. It also means a good way to subjugate a village is to offer them training and then break them. This is one of the good dual use things that many Infernal Charms have - this turns it from a raw training Charm into an aggressive tool of domination.
- Reconsider your Abilities and Attributes to be more Malfean. The violence things are good, but Malfeas isn't a Solar and isn't thinking the same way. I'd certainly have Appearance and Performance in the base level of the Charm, because he wants pretty people who are good musicians.
- Don't let Malfeas train himself. It's just a fairly small fluff thing, but it re-focusses it as a "domination of other people" effect.
- Allow a repurchase at Essence 3 which has the whole "you can train any Ability or Attribute you can come up with a suitable training method for" thing.
MSM
- With that done, you can re-purpose this name for something which deviates more from the Solar template (or maybe not even keep the name). I'd probably make this a with a full on month of hard-core training, you can as a Desecration effect turn the people you train into demon-blooded of demons within your "library" (that basic concept that crops up in a bunch of Infernal Charms where you spend 1XP to learn to make a new demon breed).
- This means they're now CoD, and Natives of Malfeas - and there are some neat synergies there with other Infernal charms, quite apart from the benefits of you having demon-blooded servants. And then they can, with effort, raise their essence and turn into demons.
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For changes MSM what about replacing time with aggravated damage? I really liked the earlier charm and I fell like it could be slotted in here fairly well. Anyone who takes participates in the training takes X levels of aggeavated damage but the light of Malfeas means they heal back stronger.
It could even be made to be branch off to the first charm,making it so that anyone who takes x amount of damage from Green Sun Nimbus Flare becomes a demon blooded with an intimacy of terrified awe unless they spend one will power to reject.
I wouldn't let you produce significant number of demonblooded without a significant investment. Damage can be healed. Time investments are a real commitment.
If you were using my strategic action timescales, I'd make turning a group into demonblooded in that way as a Major Strategic Action, just to get an idea of the ballpark I'm using.
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See the way I viewed it was either you spend significant resources healing it or wait a significant amount of time, but having never gotten to actually play I dont know if this holds up
Besides, if your playing as Malfeas as Suraon, a time investment to grow your demon hordes means that there can be rumours of a shadow growing in the east, whispers of a nameless fear. (Plus, if you like, you can send out your minions to try and find out where the hell that ring-like artefact went.)
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Do you happen to have a link to those rules?
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Interesting suggestions. I'm mostly on board with the first set... though i think appearance as a base improvable thing is a bit much. Maybe trade out archery for performance.
My issues with making a charm that turns someone into a demonblooded is that... By Rage Recast + Fealty Acknowledging Audience already slaps mutations, DoD and Native of Malfeas on people. What does "you are no a demonblood" do for them that this other combo doesn't? Is it even necessary in light of that option?
Aggravated doesn't really matter to mortals, it heals at the same rate as Lethal. All Aggravated really does is bypass magic that gives lethal soak and remain resistant to magic that only heals bashing and lethal damage.
Quantumboost
Now with 50% more dots in Dimensional Science
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"You are a demonblooded" is very substantially different from getting a crapload of mutations and the CoD+NoM combination, because demon-blooded can learn appropriate Spirit Charms. Looking at what Malfeas himself would likely use (Blood Apes), we've got Excellencies for Martial Arts, Dodge, Athletics, Presence, and Stealth, Principle of Motion, Essence Plethora... basically your minions have more motes than usual, and can pump motes into being a lot better at fite. And that's just if you go with Blood Apes, rather than something like a Peronelle or a custom demon that fits your preferred combat aesthetics, or even non-combat demons. They can also eventually ascend into proper demons at Essence 4, as ES mentioned, rather than exploding into gorey chunks due to Too Much Enlightenment.
Also, with something like Sins Born In Blood, you treat them as demons, and Infernals have a not-insignificant amount of Charmtech that benefits from the people they're bossing around being First Circle Demons even if you only look in Cecelyne.
TL;DR, turning mortals into sorta-demons has all sorts of neat knock-on effects and makes them a lot better than any mortal can be at what that demon's meant to do.
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idk, if I'm being honest? i think that turning out armies of people who have spirit charms and excellencies is detrimental to the setting. As is, you can train them up and then hit them with supercancer that further trains them while they recover, and then warp the graduating class into monsters with a bunch of mutations when they swear eternal loyalty to you.
If you want demonic agents, there's already demon summoning.
Quantumboost
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That's an unrelated concern, but m'kay. Nobody's forcing you to write Charms you don't want in your game.
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I'd say that "sadism" is too... refined? Sadism has a built-in mental link to the Marquis de Sade, who was many things, but definitely wasn't Malfeas-like.
"Cruelty" honestly feels more fitting. He's not hurting you because he gets off on it, or because it makes him feel powerful, he's hurting you because fuck you, fuck your species, fuck everything.
Malfeas doesn't take knives to a person and laugh at their pain, he dunks their hand in a bucket of boiling water with one hand and punches them in the breadbasket with the other, all while screaming his rage and misery and hatred into their sobbing, terrified face until his vocal cords tear and his punching arm is a bag of pulped nerves and bone shards.
Then he starts headbutting them, because fuck this, he doesn't have time for knives or pain.
He's in pain, and he's sharing it.
In a more useful-to-the-thread vein, what do an Infernal's devas count as?
It's literally an italicised word in Malfeas' Excellency. So yes, it's a valid Malfeas theme - especially considered the themes and actions of Malfeas.
A small child burning ants with a magnifying glass is also sadistic, after all.
I mean, if you're using my things like Titanic Spawn Uncountable, then yes they're functionally and in every way that matters 1CDs who descend from the Infernal or their souls. So yeah, Cece's anti-demon tech fucks them over just as much as it does any other demon. As does Holy.
At a mechanical level, my Infernal demon tech is basically equivalent to demon summoning and that means making your own demons who descend from you is basically just... making demons.
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My understanding of the Creature of Darkness identifier is that it means your species/race/profession//whatever is on a list of things that Sol Invictus doesn't like. I'd been wondering if an Infernal who's gone full Devil Tiger and rejected his humanity to become a New Primordial would be automatically subject to the same judgment as the Yozis (due to being sort-of descended from them, in a manner of speaking), or if their apotheosis makes them count as an entirely new being which the laws of Heaven don't account for, in a similar way to how Infernal Exalts can eventually seize management of prayer directed towards them from the Bureaus of Yu Shan.
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They don't loose their CoD identifier, if they did it would be mentioned in the charmtext. IIRC the only way to remove the designation is by personally appealing to Sol himself (and even then sometimes you can't, Five Days Darkness is a CoD because his nature is diametrically opposed to his progenitor, despite being a cool dude).
Well, I mean, once again if you're talking about my houserules, I don't care about the canon Devil Tiger path so I don't do anything to support or enable it, and I've gutted it of its neat features and integrated them much more into the Infernal general experience.
Even barring their mechanical flaws, I feel Devil Tigers lose one of the neat thematic things about Infernals, which is that Infernals are caught in a vice between the past and the future. They're becoming other, but they're defined by their roots and they can't ever shed their feet of clay. They are titans, but they're also still fundamentally mortal men in the way any other Exalt is. They build new things, but out of the warped and twisted parts of the Yozis. And they, each and every one, are defined by that first titanic failure that got them their Exaltation, and in many ways every Infernal's story is how they come to terms with, indulge in, or violently reject that failure.
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Dual Paradox
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I've been waiting for someone to bring up Devil Tigers in this thread so I can post something I thought of a while back over on the SB Exalted thread.
I my opinion, the flaws of the Devil-Tigers have been pointed out in this thread and over on SV. But I won't deny that they are a truly awesome concept and one of the possible ends to the Infernals' tale, where they rise above all the limits that everyone thought they had, and stand as equals to their would-be masters. And from there choose a different path. But I know that the challenge of building an entire charmset by yourself is difficult for most, and not likely to see use outside of a very long running campaign, even with homerules to make the beginning of the Devil-Tiger path start in the E3-5 range.
And honestly, it cuts into the 'powers as enemy' themes that Infernals have going for them, where every day they must struggle against the impulses of the Denarian Coin, the Symbiote, the Darkness, the Scarab Unit, to take the powers that want to be used their way and use them your way. An Infernal who reaches E5 has probably developed a paradigm of their own, an equilibrium with the Charms of the Yozi and learned how to harness their power to their own ends. Unless you take a different view on the Devil-Tigers.
Say an Infernal walks the Path of the Devil-Tiger, and carve their own Mythos into reality. They begin to explore their new nature and powers, and they come easily to them. And why shouldn't they? The Devil-Tiger is the Infernal, writ large. Their power is their own in a way the Yozi's never was. And they blaze a trail through the world, great and glorious and wondrous in their new nature. And one day they turn to gaze upon the wonders they have made, and recoil in horror at the atrocities they have preformed.
For in becoming Devil-Tigers they have become themselves, but more.
Glorious and Monsterous.
Virtuous and Vice-filled.
Their greatest Strengths magnified and their inner-most Flaws internalised.
Savior and Destroyer.
They are Themselves, Pure and True and without the fetters of Humanity.
Now and Forever the Devil-Tiger must wrestle with their greatest foe, the one enemy that they can never truly defeat. The same foe who laid low the Solars in the First Age and besieges the Sidereals and Dragon-Blooded even now. They foe that doomed the Primordials so long ago. The one who dives them on to Glory and whispers Doom in their ear.
Their greatest foe now, was and ever will be,
Themselves.
And honestly, it cuts into the 'powers as enemy' themes that Infernals have going for them, where every day they must struggle against the impulses of the Denarian Coin, the Symbiote, the Darkness, the Scarab Unit, to take the powers that want to be used their way and use them your way. An Infernal who reaches E5 has probably developed a paradigm of their own, an equilibrium with the Charms of the Yozi and learned how to harness their power to their own ends. Unless you take a different view on the Devil-Tigers.
Say an Infernal walks the Path of the Devil-Tiger, and carve their own Mythos into reality. They begin to explore their new nature and powers, and they come easily to them. And why shouldn't they? The Devil-Tiger is the Infernal, writ large. Their power is their own in a way the Yozi's never was. And they blaze a trail through the world, great and glorious and wondrous in their new nature. And one day they turn to gaze upon the wonders they have made, and recoil in horror at the atrocities they have preformed.
For in becoming Devil-Tigers they have become themselves, but more.
Glorious and Monsterous.
Virtuous and Vice-filled.
Their greatest Strengths magnified and their inner-most Flaws internalised.
Savior and Destroyer.
They are Themselves, Pure and True and without the fetters of Humanity.
Now and Forever the Devil-Tiger must wrestle with their greatest foe, the one enemy that they can never truly defeat. The same foe who laid low the Solars in the First Age and besieges the Sidereals and Dragon-Blooded even now. They foe that doomed the Primordials so long ago. The one who dives them on to Glory and whispers Doom in their ear.
Their greatest foe now, was and ever will be,
Themselves.
Honestly even that isn't much of a limitation. I've yet to see the ST who doesn't go "Sure this homebrew Charm always existed in their set as long as it's thematic and balanced"
Dynamesmouse
Bzzzzzz
Speaking of Sidereals, how do you pronounce the word? Side-real, or Si-deer-e-al
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Several times.