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Is there a limit on the amount of shintai a primordial can have? Most of the yozi charms I've seen had one or two shintai, but a devil tiger charmset called "Madhuvanti" had six shintai. Is it due to the mutilation of primordials into yozi or is it something deliberate by the charm maker?
 
daddycool101 said:
Is there a limit on the amount of shintai a primordial can have? Most of the yozi charms I've seen had one or two shintai, but a devil tiger charmset called "Madhuvanti" had six shintai. Is it due to the mutilation of primordials into yozi or is it something deliberate by the charm maker?
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A good shintai eats a lot of wordcount and is a form charm fighting with others for the slot. Shintai are also not exactly bread-and-butter charms, rather having the role of a thematic capstone or pillar. As the devs have far stricter wordcount limits than homebrewers they reasonably only made a few.
There are no real limits that I recall outside of thematic constraints, and quite frankly the Yozis themselves do not have the same relationship with shintai as Infernals do, due to their ability to be in multiple shapes at the same time, even recursively (Malfeas as dancer and the city in which he dances).

That said, too many shintai might evoke the feeling of a clumsy sort of power, bound by either-or forms rather than a cohesive whole. If the shintai are spread over multiple Yozis, as they are, that feeling is a good thing, as you are drawing upon disparate powers, but within a single charmset things might get awkward. Gut-feeling wise I would be wary going above 3-5.
It is one of the reasons I abstained from a City-Shintai while brewing up Malfeas City Body charms years ago.
 
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Prince of Brass said:
A good shintai eats a lot of wordcount and is a form charm fighting with others for the slot. Shintai are also not exactly bread-and-butter charms, rather having the role of a thematic capstone or pillar. As the devs have far stricter wordcount limits than homebrewers they reasonably only made a few.
There are no real limits that I recall outside of thematic constraints, and quite frankly the Yozis themselves do not have the same relationship with shintai as Infernals do, due to their ability to be in multiple shapes at the same time, even recursively (Malfeas as dancer and the city in which he dances).

That said, too many shintai might evoke the feeling of a clumsy sort of power, bound by either-or forms rather than a cohesive whole. If the shintai are spread over multiple Yozis, as they are, that feeling is a good thing, as you are drawing upon disparate powers, but within a single charmset things might get awkward. Gut-feeling wise I would be wary going above 3-5.
It is one of the reasons I abstained from a City-Shintai while brewing up Malfeas City Body charms years ago.
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Aww,man. A city shintai would have been amazing.
I found a oramus shintai called "The crimson king", which is really useful against a group of opponents, so I've been thinking of having a guest character use it to save the protagonists from an army. They'd be like, "This is our last stand," and the infernal would be like, "Hold my beer, kids" and go full on oramus' weirdness.
 
I've heard it said that Malfeas's city-self is part of his crippling, and thus any city-form charms would be similarly painful and limiting.
 
Inspired by / rebuilt from somebody else's ( Yozi Charms - ObsWiki! ) Malfeas earthbending charms:
Urban Hell Renovation
Cost: 3m (+1wp)
Mins: Essence 2
Type: Simple or Reflexive (Step 2)
Keywords: Combo-OK, Obvious, Shaping
Duration: Instant
Prerequisite Charms: First Malfean Excellency, Scar Writ Saga Shield
Malfeas is the Demon City. It is his flesh and bones. The shape it takes is determined by his will alone. With this Charm, the Infernal can transform any area deliberately developed for habitation or use with the wave of a hand. Roads branch or crumble with a glance. Walls extend and recede with a gesture.
This charm transforms or creates (Essence) cubic yards of inanimate material that the Infernal can perceive. The material created is 'grown' from existing structures, and retains the same properties such as soak and hardness. However, everything shaped by this Charm takes on an obviously hellish appearance. Metal becomes brassy and tinged with verdigris, stone turns black and rough, and wood takes on an unnatural metallic sheen.
Basic use of this charm creates simple structures (walls, roads, pillars, openings, etc.), but more complex creations can be made using a (Charisma + Craft[Earth]) roll with a difficulty set by the Storyteller. Basic doors, stairs, and short bridges are typically difficulty 1, while working portcullises, bridges capable of spanning wide rivers, and long narrow catwalks that defy gravity can increase the difficulty as high as 5 and may require multiple uses of this Charm.
Adding a point of Willpower to this charm's cost makes it reflexive (Step 2), allowing barriers to be raised response to an attack. This provides up to 75% cover and can only be done once per tick.
At Essence 4+, the Infernal can purchase this Charm a second time to enhance his mastery over the shape of the city, increasing the amount of material affected to (Essence x 10) cubic yards and cover to 90%.
Monolith-Raising Might
Cost: 10m, 1wp (+ variable ahl)
Mins: Essence 3
Type: Supplemental
Keywords: Combo-OK, Obvious, Shaping, Touch
Duration: Instant
Prerequisite Charms: Urban Hell Renovation
Malfeas grows mighty edifices as a tribute to his glory, commanding structures to burst forth from green fields with his imperious gestures and commands. He does not trouble himself with the needs of those lesser beings who may someday dwell within. This charm supplements a Craft action to expand an area developed for habitation or use, as defined by the Imperfection of the Demon City, and can only be activated while touching the edge of such an area. It removes the need for tools (counting as a basic workshop), laborers (counting as a workforce with Magnitude up to the infernal's Essence), and optionally even raw materials.
Each aggravated health level paid reduces the Resources cost of materials needed for the project's current interval by one, potentially all the way down to resources zero materials supplied with the prerequisite charm. However, any future attempt to conceal the structure's infernal origin suffers a -1 dice penalty per health level, which persists indefinitely in the Demon Realm or the Underworld, but decays by one per century inside fate, including in Creation, Shadowlands, or the Bordermarches or Middlemarches of the wyld.
This charm is only usable for new construction of fixed objects and structures, not modifications, maintenance, or repair, nor anything mobile or conveniently portable.
A repurchase at Essence 4+ makes it count as a master's workshop, and adds applicability to geomantic terraforming. Such a project must still involve expanding an area developed for habitation or use while standing at the relevant border.
Third purchase at Essence 6+ makes it count as a flawless workshop. Can also be used to reduce the roll interval for demesne engineering from years to months, but this adds the Blasphemy keyword.
Unbreakable Gates of Malfeas
Cost: —(+3m or +3m, 1wp)
Mins: Essence 4
Type: Permanent
Keywords: Obvious
Duration: Permanent
Prerequisite Charms: Ablation of Brass and Fire, Urban Hell Renovation
The Demon City protects Malfeas, for Malfeas is the Demon City. He sacrifices the lives and homes of his inhabitants to protect himself. This charm enhances and partly combines its prerequisites. The Infernal may opt to pay a three mote surcharge when activating Ablation of Brass and Fire, extending its duration to "One tick or until failure to resist knockback." Roof shingles cascade down to block a volley of arrows, pillars topple to impede a charging foe, and cobblestones even rise from the streets to block an attacker's strike.
Infernals with Essence 5+ can pay an additional one willpower, in which case the blocked attack is instead resolved against any object within (Essence) yards of the Infernal, as if it were the original target. Until that object is destroyed, or removed from the infernal's vicinity, or the infernal's DV refreshes, the infernal is considered to have full cover behind it when resolving further attacks from the same source.
Objects owned by or in the possession of another character are exempt from this effect, unless the other character in question bears a brand from the infernal's previous use of Magnanimous Warning Glyph or Fealty-Acknowledging Audience.
I liked the themes but felt mechanics needed fine-tuning.
 
Tracking down the legendary Hundredfold Facets of Enlightenment with a simple search... this only goes to show why it was so imperative for the infrastructure of the Deliberative to be destroyed.
 
I see that Plague of Hats genuinely went all-in on the 'becoming a city'-thing with 'Hell-Body Kingdom', which I was too cautious to do. I must admit I am still pretty torn on the concept, though impressed by the attempt.

Permanent transformation of the character into a location strikes me as something deeply problematic for the flow of many a non-solo game. I also worry about the game's rules collapsing under the strain of it.
At the same time a merely temporary Shintai would take away some of the draw of a city-body to begin with, as a city requites some degree of inhabitation and permanence. It far too easily becomes a Pile-of-Rocks War-Form.

Conversely my attempt was frankly too cautious and, for example, lacks any combat application besides irradiating people with Green Sun Wasting.

Of course the painful truth is that Exalted rules-wise struggles to operate on the scale of the Primordial War, and any attempt at a World-Body Charm that is not an inner world is literally an attempt to quantify a Primordial as a genuine actor.
 
IMO, one of the big problems with "becoming a location" charms thematically is how that's not really something Yozi's do so much as something Yozi's are, and that's a whacky design space (even if that's supposed to be one of Infernal's things). It's both too broad and too fundamental for specific charms. Thematically, something like this should be in front of other charms, not as a capstone. You could maybe do something like that as a general charm ala First Excellency or Ascendency Mantle or whatever.

It almost feels like it wants a system more akin to what the Fey Folk have, but then you run into the problem of "now we're not interacting with the setting on the level of Exalted anymore." Which is already a risk with Infernals.

Conversely, I dig Urban Hell Renovation et al. since they keep the focus on what you can actively do.
 
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Prince of Brass said:
Permanent transformation of the character into a location strikes me as something deeply problematic for the flow of many a non-solo game. I also worry about the game's rules collapsing under the strain of it.
At the same time a merely temporary Shintai would take away some of the draw of a city-body to begin with, as a city requites some degree of inhabitation and permanence. It far too easily becomes a Pile-of-Rocks War-Form.
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Maybe put the city shintai behind the multiple bodies Charms?

Prince of Brass said:
Of course the painful truth is that Exalted rules-wise struggles to operate on the scale of the Primordial War, and any attempt at a World-Body Charm that is not an inner world is literally an attempt to quantify a Primordial as a genuine actor.
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In general, I think the key to making the really really big side of Exalted work is to ensure that almost every really big thing is made up of smaller things that you can actually interact with. When you against a world, it shouldn't involve the continental plates standing up to punch you. It should involve making war against the countless inhabitants of that world.

On the smartest things Exalted ever did was giving the Primordials soul hierarchies. Demons fit much better into a game than their oversouls do.

So I think all the "you are now the size of a planet" magic should come with serious agency reductions. If you want to do something quicker and more precise than a tsunami, you should have to act through other bodies or personal-scale minions. Your oceans should not be as nimble and as broadly useful as your hands.
 
Sanctaphrax said:
I think all the "you are now the size of a planet" magic should come with serious agency reductions.
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Rather than wedging that restriction into a series of special-case charms I've been working on a set of general rules for size categories, how far up or down the scale actions can normally reach and so on. Nowhere near complete - I'd hesitate to even call it a rough draft - but some progress has been made: Size Stuff Also, an elegantly simple approach for single actions hitting several people at once (potentially all the way up to "Malfeas slams two layers together, crushing millions of rando demons") would be to invert the usual relation of attack roll and DV. Attacker's dice pool becomes a static value, defenders roll individually to get out of the way.
 
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Half Moon said:
And here is EarthScorpion's take on it.
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Yeah, my version of it was basically a statement that I wasn't going to make a full-on shintai for a playable character, because turning into a city is a fail-state. You've internalised too much Malfeas that his cursed, twisted nature is immanent in you.

(It's my headcanon that it's possible for Infernals to Bad End themselves by taking certain Charms, though those Charms aren't written for PCs because there's no point in writing a Charm that basically ruins your ability to be a playable character. But, for example, an Infernal that's become a twisted Malfeas-tumour of brass and basalt, sprawling out to consume a city in Creation, is a great end-stage for your campaign as you go to stop their hellish incursion / fulfil your promise to a friend who's lost themselves and put them out of their misery)
 
Kingfisher said:
It almost feels like it would want a system more akin to what the Fey Folk have, but then you run into the problem of "okay, we may have rules for doing this thing but now we're not interacting with the setting on the level of Exalted anymore."
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I think Exalted would benefit from an expanded general 'living places' ruleset, which could cover Wyld, major Elementals, haunted/possessed locations, parts the Underworld/Labyrinth and of course the Yozis. Infernals and maybe Alchemicals could interact with it directly, Sorcerers and Necromancers by binding related entities.

Unfortunately Exalted would also benefit more from countless other systems, so...

Sanctaphrax said:
Maybe put the city shintai behind the multiple bodies Charms?
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Maybe. Honestly I just feel that locations and shintai are not a good mix. We might simply need a different charm category/methodology for that scale of existence, if we even want to use a singular charm at all.

Sanctaphrax said:
So I think all the "you are now the size of a planet" magic should come with serious agency reductions. If you want to do something quicker and more precise than a tsunami, you should have to act through other bodies or personal-scale minions. Your oceans should not be as nimble and as broadly useful as your hands.
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On his I agree. From my view there are a number of approaches to this, and there is the matter of...let's call it 'direction'. You can either:
  • Turn the character into a location. They now have limited/grand scale modes of operation and are reliant of minions or avatars for smaller scale things. Mechanically the Exalt is no longer a 'character' and requires a sub-engine to calculate their interactions. Plague of Hats went that way with Hell-Body Kingdom. It is a fairly drastic change with permanent consequences. It is far closer to fully emulating a Yozi than any other approach, but effectively runs on a separate sub-ruleset.
  • The character keeps their main body, the city-body is a separate 'growth'. This is the approach I took, albeit clumsily. As your modes of interaction with your city-body are defined through Charms they are inherently limited, as you can only do what the charms permit. In addition the architecture of the charm-tree can be used for an arguably more organic development. You still need a rule-engine for defining your city-body, as well as landscape and building alteration, with me having used Revlid's and EarthScorpion's (and perhaps some of Aleph's?) work as a base.
    A risk of this approach is that you can end up with too much precision in the city-body parts of oneself due to charm interactions.
Thinking this through I still think that keeping the 'original' body separate as a main-Jouten/Fetich equivalent is a mechanically safer and more organic approach.
 
Occurs to me this comic http://www.viruscomix.com/page450.html is also fairly relevant to the subject of Malfean architecture.
Prince of Brass said:
I think Exalted would benefit from an expanded general 'living places' ruleset, which could cover Wyld, major Elementals, haunted/possessed locations, parts the Underworld/Labyrinth and of course the Yozis. Infernals and maybe Alchemicals could interact with it directly, Sorcerers and Necromancers by binding related entities.

Unfortunately Exalted would also benefit more from countless other systems, so...
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That's the direction I've been aiming for with my houserules. Existing mechanics for e.g. Mother Bog in mass combat, or Unshaped Raksha engaging in Mandate of Heaven actions, imply the designers were imagining such a scale of action, but the base rules for it aren't properly defined. So, I've started defining them: working out systems for what villages, towns, and cities do when their normal daily routine isn't being disrupted by war or calamity, while keeping it all closely tied to the existing personal-scale mechanics.

Part of the problem right now is there's a gap - what you can do on a scale of seconds or minutes is well-defined, but action over hours starts to get a bit vague, and anything longer is "downtime" with no clear centralized whose-turn-is-it system to fall back on. So, before downtime can proceed, every single player has to agree that they're done with adventuring-timescale actions, which many of them are reluctant to do because that foggy lack-of-mechanics is like staring over the edge of a cliff and being asked "are you ready to jump?"
So, I figure the solution requires building a sort of staircase, general rules and lists-of-options at the hourly, daily, weekly timescales, including explicit conditions and methods to more or less unilaterally force the narrative to shift to a different scale of action. Tracking contest and chase-scene mechanics on a scale of hours will then serve as a bridge in both directions between week-interval bureaucratic "court-scale" action, and minutes or seconds of personal combat. Court-scale equivalent of landing a hit through somebody's DVs is arranging a face-to-face meeting with them, the equivalent of raw damage / soak then being a whole scene of normal personal-scale action which could be used for realtime social influence and/or an assassination attempt. Tracking contest is one of the ways to force such a meeting to start, and invoking the chase-scene rules is one of the ways to end it.

Can't physically attack somebody during a chase or court-scale action, under my houserules, and only sort-of can during a tracking contest - threshold successes can be spent to steer an opponent into pre-existing environmental hazards, or unfriendly third parties, as an alternative to meeting with them yourself. Usually less efficient, certainly slower, but it provides a mechanical path for Luminata, or Arad the Hunter, or various others to win by being "better at hunting" and have that be meaningfully different from "better in a stand-up fight."
Hopefully. developing systems for all that should address some fundamental "paranoia" problems. Chejop and friends can't just hop out from behind a bush any time they like, got to win some rolls against scouts and perimeter security first. If those are part of an organization you're leading, you can improve patrol scheduling with appropriate charms.
 
Hmmm.... I don't have much of a head for mechanics, but I think it'd be cool to have something that changes how your anima banner works so that parts of your world body or whatever overwrites the reality around you.
 
EarthScorpion said:
Yeah, my version of it was basically a statement that I wasn't going to make a full-on shintai for a playable character, because turning into a city is a fail-state. You've internalised too much Malfeas that his cursed, twisted nature is immanent in you.

(It's my headcanon that it's possible for Infernals to Bad End themselves by taking certain Charms, though those Charms aren't written for PCs because there's no point in writing a Charm that basically ruins your ability to be a playable character. But, for example, an Infernal that's become a twisted Malfeas-tumour of brass and basalt, sprawling out to consume a city in Creation, is a great end-stage for your campaign as you go to stop their hellish incursion / fulfil your promise to a friend who's lost themselves and put them out of their misery)
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I think it's interesting to compare this to the Shintai's in Xefas' mythos homebrew for Dungeons and Dragons 3.5, which take a similar sort of inspiration and head in a wildly different direction with it. They each push you away from what would be considered 'typical dnd player character' playspace and towards something altogether strange and impossible - Angel of Death Shintai forces you to be present at the moments of people's deaths as an impartial arbiter; Sojourner of a Thousand Lives Shintai breaks all your connections to other people as one lifetime of relationships is drowned out by 999 lifetimes of indifference; Untamed Apocalypse Shintai makes you very mad, etc. Whether or not you could actually make a game of Dungeons and Dragons work after one or more of the PCs pick up powers like this is up in the air, but these mechanics challenge you to consider it.

In some respects these powers ruin a character's ability to be a viable player character, but what strikes me most about them, now that I've scraped around other ttrpgs for years, is that 'player character playspace' can be so varied. Like, I dunno, you could have a game of Nobilis where the party consists of a living brier, a spider-shaped mass of scythes the size of a hurricane, and a guy who drive car good. You could play a game of Glitch where characters can casually rearrange the stars or pluck the moon from the sky but are constantly shown up by someone who remembers to pick up groceries on the right days. Can you play a game of Exalted where one of the characters becomes a living Demon City spreading across creation in waves of cancerous architecture? Presumably the rest of their circle would consist of an Alchemical who has turned themselves into a space ship, a Sidereal who uses SMA to exist across the dreams of a small cult of star-blessed martial artists, and a Dragon-Blooded with a very large gun. It think there's something really interesting in the idea of Charms that exist to sort of tempt, to taunt, to encourage people to look at a limit of the game they're playing and dream, if only for a moment, of breaking it.

This may or may not be the reason I wrote a base class for D&D about being a house.
 
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Ayyyyyy, Nobilis. Have a like for that.

Mmm, I think at some point you need to look at the mechanics of the game and see what sort of play that supports though as well as make sure all the players are on the same page.
 
Hmm... I think there is sort of room for a city inspired shintai, however not one that turns you into a location. I could easily see something where you rip piece of a city up around you to build a Giant out of (see video 1:06 but more medieval). Then give the shintai the ability to raise walls/towers, throw houses, make big sweeping attacks with a belltower, etc etc. Thematically Malfeas as the city's wrath, functionally a combat engineer for mass combat.


View: https://youtu.be/eyW5KMMDjZw?t=66
 
Kymme said:
I think it's interesting to compare this to the Shintai's in Xefas' mythos homebrew for Dungeons and Dragons 3.5, which take a similar sort of inspiration and head in a wildly different direction with it. They each push you away from what would be considered 'typical dnd player character' playspace and towards something altogether strange and impossible - Angel of Death Shintai forces you to be present at the moments of people's deaths as an impartial arbiter; Sojourner of a Thousand Lives Shintai breaks all your connections to other people as one lifetime of relationships is drowned out by 999 lifetimes of indifference; Untamed Apocalypse Shintai makes you very mad, etc. Whether or not you could actually make a game of Dungeons and Dragons work after one or more of the PCs pick up powers like this is up in the air, but these mechanics challenge you to consider it.

In some respects these powers ruin a character's ability to be a viable player character, but what strikes me most about them, now that I've scraped around other ttrpgs for years, is that 'player character playspace' can be so varied. Like, I dunno, you could have a game of Nobilis where the party consists of a living brier, a spider-shaped mass of scythes the size of a hurricane, and a guy who drive car good. You could play a game of Glitch where characters can casually rearrange the stars or pluck the moon from the sky but are constantly shown up by someone who remembers to pick up groceries on the right days. Can you play a game of Exalted where one of the characters becomes a living Demon City spreading across creation in waves of cancerous architecture? Presumably the rest of their circle would consist of an Alchemical who has turned themselves into a space ship, a Sidereal who uses SMA to exist across the dreams of a small cult of star-blessed martial artists, and a Dragon-Blooded with a very large gun. It think there's something really interesting in the idea of Charms that exist to sort of tempt, to taunt, to encourage people to look at a limit of the game they're playing and dream, if only for a moment, of breaking it.

This may or may not be the reason I wrote a base class for D&D about being a house.
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Agreed. It can be game breaking, but that's part of the challenge. Part of the fun. It forces you to consider new avenues of play and even if that fails it's worth attempting
 
Let's be real here, most homebrew is not actually played. And that goes double - or triple! - for something like a Malfeas Charm that turns you into a city. The most-played edition doesn't even have Malfeas Charms.

This is writing for the sake of writing. And I don't mean that as a criticism.
 
I have been contemplating what elements would be derived from Oramus if he had a set of elements. Ether, Light, Scale/Shell, and Foam make up four of the five oramesque elements missing only an Earth analog. I kind of want to jokingly say Cheese because of his connection to the moon but that is a little silly.
 
The thing with Oramus is he's got a theme on the number seven. I think the issue is you start stretching things pretty thin unless you are digging into like, Pokemon-level of "elements" to get there though.
 
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