The solution I implemented was to remove "undetectable" and "orbital":
- Sidereal astrology makes things get Hero, with the world itself going all Hero and warping to favour the colours of the destiny. If someone curses an an army with Ending, then the fields they march through will blossom with lilacs and lavender, they'll find their red flags turning purple when they're rained on, and they'll wind up having to live off plums when plundering the land. As a result, Occult rolls allow people to go "Hey, the Maiden of Endings's hand lies heavy on you, you're doomed".
- Sidereals have to go around doing History Monk / Traveller in Black things to set up a Destiny. You can't do it safe from Heaven; you've got to actually implement the five point plan you've filed with the spiders and go around setting up strange arrangements of stones, writing graffiti on the walls, pretending to be a fortune teller and foreseeing doom for Caesar, and other such thematically appropriate things. This is both a time commitment and also something that makes you vulnerable to, for example, Caesar going "Foresee this, bitch" and stabbing you.
The effects of sidereal astrology can already be detected with thaumaturgical astrology, which even unenlightened mortals can use. Not that I'm at all opposed to such heavy-handed omens as you describe, when the situation warrants it! Point two is also already covered by the rules, at least in part:
MoEP: Sidereals said:
Once the Sidereal has created the destiny, it hangs on her pattern, inactive and contagious. Transferring the destiny to the target is a Touch effect (see Exalted, p. 183). Once transferred, the destiny activates. A Sidereal may carry only one contagious destiny at a time. If a single destiny affects multiple beings of Essence 2+, she must touch each one.
Only 'from orbit' option I'm aware of requires the addition of Predestined Delivery Shaping. At long ranges, that's slow on the order of months, giving adequate opportunity for the target to notice incoming trouble thaumaturgically; closer, and it can be back-traced by mundane Investigation. In either case, the cursed item will be clearly magical under Essence sight thanks to that active charm, so precautions could be taken similar to those of real-world people who worry about receiving unsolicited explosives or bioweapons through the mail.
Even if defensive measures fail, sidereal astrology can't inflict damage directly, compel behavior, or do anything else that qualifies as an attack. At most, it can slant probability and provide incentives, creating outcomes that would otherwise be improbable but logically possible. When those modifiers become intolerable, hanging out somewhere beyond the reach of Fate is a hard counter (quickest option being the shadowlands circle necromancy spell Piercing the Shroud), and a full year 'off the grid' forces the sidereals to rebuild all those schemes from scratch. An elite warrior in full armor might be defeated by an otherwise cowardly child armed only with a stick, but the kid still needs to roll dex + melee to hit, and the stick still needs to be sharp at one end if it's going to deal lethal damage, so conventional defenses still apply.
Can't stack more than (target's essence) ascending or descending destinies on the same individual, so loading up enough modifiers to achieve anything unreasonable requires targeting regions or social groups - making the effects easier to notice, and easier to counter simply by getting additional essence-users involved. The unexpected arrival of, say, a team of three blood ape bodyguards, is enough to cut the duration of any such area or group effect down to zero from any level that wouldn't risk censure; an actual platoon could tear through dozens of successes on the effect roll just by doing their jobs. Raksha work equally well, or exalts, or enlightened mortals, or even gods and elementals if they're behaving in a manner inconsistent with the laws of Heaven. Even without any of those more refined options, someone with a single dot in Occult, access to a grave, and some fresh blood (possibly their own) could mangle unsupported Sidereal astrology simply by botching the thaumaturgical procedure to summon a mob of ghosts.
I
am not saying the rules as written are perfect, or without flaw, or sufficient to all situations, or even particularly adequate. There are sections which need to be substantially revised, others which are best discarded outright, and nearly all of it could stand to be better organized for clarity. I am proposing an alternate approach toward the decisions of which parts to salvage and which to discard, toward a game which in some ways ends up looking less like L5R or Wushu, and more like a variant of Call of Cthulhu where Great Old Ones are playable characters. If that doesn't sound like a game you would want to play, that's fine. Perhaps we should come up with some terminology to distinguish between the forks and thereby minimize confusion.
Point to me where in a book it says that.
Oadenol's Codex said:
The examples provided below give typical time intervals, time investments, and so on for each level of maintenance difficulty. They aren't automatically applied to every manse needing that scale of maintenance. Players should feel free to invent equally drastic forms of maintenance instead.
Key words being "equally drastic." A manse with drawbacks means a design which has been optimized for performance (in whatever form those points were spent on) at the expense of convenience and/or stability. Good sanity-check is, could you describe the manse clearly and precisely enough in strictly IC terms that all the OOC point allocations would be apparent? That's true for all the example manses. The Ink Monkeys even provided an example of a bound servant force satisfying a maintenance requirement, for the Pit of Perfected Sand - but with the non-trivial downside that said servants are overwhelmingly hostile to anything they perceive as imperfect, including but not limited to anyone injured, possibly even each other.
