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General Exalted Thread

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vicky_molokh said:
Why is it assumed that entities enormously more powerful and intelligent than humans are so poor at properly manipulating 50 heavily brainmodified (based on their needs) human-like persons into doing what they need? Especially TED, granddaddy of all them Darth Palpatines?
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1) The overwhelming majority of Infernal games ignore the idea that Infernals are brainwashed by their Exaltation, on the basis that it makes no sense for the themes of the game or splat, and is extremely deprotagonizing. You can argue it's canon, but so is Lilun and Abscissic Limit and mandatory Yozi rape and god knows what else.

2) I am vastly more intelligent than a mouse, but that doesn't mean I'm any good at training mice. I'm immeasurably more intelligent than a virus, which by my standards might not even qualify as a living thing, but it can still kill me and I can't persuade it to do otherwise.

3) Infernals do not interact with The Ebon Dragon. He is the night sky of Malfeas, a wandering wall of sibilant shadows stolen from everything that ever knew death, the Dusk Of Scales that overcasts the Green Sun. Insofar as any speak to him, they do so through seductive nightmares and rare omens of shadow. No, Infernals interact with Erembour, whose piping music drives men and women to madness, or with Abatjo'ur, whose caverns lead deep into the damp depths of death that he covets, or with Taradidil, whose very existence is an omitted truth and so violates pregnant pauses with his or her own cuckoo-eggs of thought. Or more likely with Mara, who tempts willworkers into dark lusts for power, or Makarios, who buys all dreams and sells everything else, or Alveua, who works the world into dark and glittering shapes.

4) Yozis are assholes and Infernals are an offshoot of a weapon literally designed to resist and murder them.
 
horngeek said:
How good are you at manipulating ants?
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I am not a transhuman post-singularity-equivalent entity that is advanced enough to make those ants from scratch, let alone understand fully how they tick, so me vs. ants does not compare to Primordials vs. humans.

Broken25 said:
Perfect social defenses. Acept no susbstitute.
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Do Infernals have many of those, and do they have them at the point in time when indoctrination occurs (likely soon after emerging from the crysalis)?
 
Long story short: Any game that has the players regularly interacting with the actual central conciousness of the Yozi's themselves, as in the actual Malfeas or Ebon Dragon are quite radically missing the sheer scale they operate on. The Yozi's are far more locations than they are singular entities, locations with a will and a conciousness, and it is the various aspects of their psyche broken up into component Souls, the Third Circles, that make up the interactions with them.
 
vicky_molokh said:
Do Infernals have many of those, and do they have them at the point in time when indoctrination occurs (likely soon after emerging from the crysalis)?
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Broken Silence Laughter Defence is E2, Tier 2. Keris could have started play with it and been able to literally laugh off anything the Yozis told her. And the only thing able to "indoctrinate" an Infernal after they emerge is their Coadjutor (which may not have much interest or ability to do so), and the Yozi's ability to get the Infernal to come to Malfeas for more intensive social influence is limited to... fuck-all, except giving the Coadjutor orders to nag at them. Keris only got there after an entire arc of fucking around in Nexus, and that only because she'd run out of things she could easily accomplish with her assets at the time (and also because the Emissary was starting to nose around looking for whatever was causing all the omen weather).

And @Revlid makes a very good point re: talking to a virus. That's what humans are, to Yozi. That's what Yozi are, to humans. They're not an endboss you interact with - they're the Unquestionable. The Yozi is the video game level as a whole. It can't speak to you in person, or even interact much bar a few who have certain types of personal-scale interaction in their thematics (and even then, they're strictly limited in what they can do on such a minuscule level).
 
notthepenguins said:
Primordials are not no-limits post-singularity entities. They are, in fact, extremely limited, far more so than humans.
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Hell the entire point of Primordials/Yozis is that if you catch them outside of their limits they are dumber than a sack of bricks since they can't even conceive of acting outside of the central themes they divined for themselves. It's the entire reason why Autocthon is such a freak of nature compared to his siblings.
 
Broken25 said:
Err, didn't the Exalt-basic pack you were using included a PSD from the start? I saw that mentioned somewhere.
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Yeah, but we weren't using that at the start of Kerisgame, which is in fact largely a guinea-pig game meant to test a lot of our homebrew, such as the anima hack.
 
vicky_molokh said:
I am not a transhuman post-singularity-equivalent entity that is advanced enough to make those ants from scratch, let alone understand fully how they tick, so me vs. ants does not compare to Primordials vs. humans.
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Just because you can make something from scratch, doesn't mean you understand how it works. I've worked in a Pharmaceutical laboratory, I've made multiple different types of medicines in different forms. I could still do so now with the right ingredients and equipment. That doesn't mean I've got any clue on how the medicines actually work, that just means I know how to make them.

Its also to note that unlike in many games, dealing with demons in Exalted is quite unlikely to bite you in the ass, especially in the political style games like above, where Infernals act as the go between for the Unquestionable and the rest of creation. Especially when the reclamation is physically impossible. Summoning a demon to do your bidding, or using Thaumaturgy to beck an apparition to bargain with isn't some Faustian pact that will immediately DOOM YOUR SOUL FOREVER.

The vast majority of demons, even amongst the Unquestionable wouldn't even know what to do with a soul if it was offered to them. Sure, some might claim they do, or that vast torments will be yours after death, but necromancy is a fundamentally wrong thing that scares the shit out of them. This isn't a setting where there is an benevolent omnipotent dude in the sky who will grant you riches and salvation if you follow his creed, this is a setting where passing on to have your soul recycled might be one of the best things that can occur after death.

This is a setting where the difference between 'Demon' and 'Elemental Dragons that are the five forces keeping creation stable' happens to be political. Well unless your solariod tier anyway, in which case the Unquestionable are more likely to help you out for a favour. Exalted is a game where the big bad of other settings are potential friends, mentors, pets, poker buddies or even lovers. One game you might have Princess Starscream as a BBEG looking to throw Great Forks into the abyss, and another where your working to 'win' her love by reclaiming her heart from the First and Forsaken Lion.

Seriously its one of those things that I have to remember myself at times.

The_Reptile_ said:
Hell the entire point of Primordials/Yozis is that if you catch them outside of their limits they are dumber than a sack of bricks since they can't even conceive of acting outside of the central themes they divined for themselves. It's the entire reason why Autocthon is such a freak of nature compared to his siblings.
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See, I am REALLY beginning to hate this particular charm/themebot incarnation of the Yozi. Mostly because it reduces them to two bit sterotypes rather then the HOLY SHIT THAT'S IMPRESSIVE beings they really are. An encounter with a Non-Adorjan Yozi should be something terrifying yet wondrous, with an air of tragedy based around both its beauty and its uncaring destructive capability. (Adorjan of course is different because if Adorjan is in the room and your not dead, then chances are you've earned her personal attention')
 
On a side note - how does breaking the five-day thing get you causality violations? If I can send a message to Andromeda instantly that doesn't get me time travel, I need the target to be in a different reference frame so its time axis is tilted relative to mine.
 
linkhyrule5 said:
On a side note - how does breaking the five-day thing get you causality violations? If I can send a message to Andromeda instantly that doesn't get me time travel, I need the target to be in a different reference frame so its time axis is tilted relative to mine.
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That's because Demons (For some reason) start traveling five days before they are summoned (So that they arrive at the same time of the ritual)
 
notthepenguins said:
Primordials are not no-limits post-singularity entities. They are, in fact, extremely limited, far more so than humans.
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They seem capable enough that they can spawn progressively smaller 'manipulators' in the form of X-circle dæmons, from the top-down, as opposed to the normal biological bottom-up selection, and they were able to modify themselves into their current froms back in the Wyld, and they were able to create Creation, humans etc. in accordance with their wishes and needs, with the only 'oh sh#!' moment occuring after many orders of separation and as a result of essentially screwing up safety protocols due to overconfidence.
All that gives a way more agency-possessing impression than typical single-domain deities.
 
The_Reptile_ said:
Hell the entire point of Primordials/Yozis is that if you catch them outside of their limits they are dumber than a sack of bricks since they can't even conceive of acting outside of the central themes they divined for themselves. It's the entire reason why Autocthon is such a freak of nature compared to his siblings.
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i thought that was because sickness, violation, and death were a part of his themes which made him quite alien to the Inviolable titans.
 
vicky_molokh said:
They seem capable enough that they can spawn progressively smaller 'manipulators' in the form of X-circle dæmons, from the top-down
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They do not choose to form Third and Second circles, any more than I choose for my heart to beat. Those are just a fact of their nature.

vicky_molokh said:
All that gives a way more agency-possessing impression than typical single-domain deities.
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They possess a great deal of agency, and immense potency, but they are not people. They can't understand humans, really, because they are so massively different from them, and far narrower despite all their power.

Their demons get closer, of course, but that's a different matter.
 
Sucal said:
Just because you can make something from scratch, doesn't mean you understand how it works. I've worked in a Pharmaceutical laboratory, I've made multiple different types of medicines in different forms. I could still do so now with the right ingredients and equipment. That doesn't mean I've got any clue on how the medicines actually work, that just means I know how to make them.
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But you're working on from the most basic of building blocks of the universe like they do (Essence in their case), you're working with a crude understanding of bigger blocks. Something like their equivalent of Wyld-Shaping, where they turn Wyld essence into the needed type of essence and build stuff out of it, doesn't seem to be equivalent.
 
vicky_molokh said:
They seem capable enough that they can spawn progressively smaller 'manipulators' in the form of X-circle dæmons, from the top-down, as opposed to the normal biological bottom-up selection, and they were able to modify themselves into their current froms back in the Wyld, and they were able to create Creation, humans etc. in accordance with their wishes and needs, with the only 'oh sh#!' moment occuring after many orders of separation and as a result of essentially screwing up safety protocols due to overconfidence.
All that gives a way more agency-possessing impression than typical single-domain deities.
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Eh, demons (of third and second circle) are less "manipulators" and more "my soul is so big that it splits into smaller souls/parts to maintain itself". And those are only a small part of the Yozi, maybe an important part, but in the end, only a part of the whole.

And the desires of a third or second circle demon might not be the exactly wishes of the yozi. Look at Ligier, Malfeas most important soul. And he dislikes that Malfeas dances* and temporarily forgets his pain. They're more the subconcious given form.

*Unless I misremember?​
 
notthepenguins said:
They do not choose to form Third and Second circles, any more than I choose for my heart to beat. Those are just a fact of their nature.
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To me that sounds like anthropomorphising the Primordials too much, because we have fundamental trouble imagining an entity that uses a top-down 'metabiology' which also happens to be able to manipulate the most basic building block of the universe.
They're supposed to be (or at least definitely having been) able to manipulate phenomena so advanced that we can't imagine them, even eliminate such phenomena (SWLIHN did) to the point of making us incapable of even theorising about them after such an elimination. That sounds cosmicly, inhumanly advanced and more nuanced.
 
vicky_molokh said:
Do Infernals have many of those, and do they have them at the point in time when indoctrination occurs (likely soon after emerging from the crysalis)?
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Of note, there's essentially nothing to stop a fresh Infernal from bursting out of the chrysalis, taking one look at the demonic welcome wagon come to meet them, flipping them off with a smirk and running pell-mell over the horizon. At one time, that was actually a fairly common background element you'd find among Infernals.
vicky_molokh said:
They seem capable enough that they can spawn progressively smaller 'manipulators' in the form of X-circle dæmons, from the top-down, as opposed to the normal biological bottom-up selection, and they were able to modify themselves into their current froms back in the Wyld, and they were able to create Creation, humans etc. in accordance with their wishes and needs, with the only 'oh sh#!' moment occuring after many orders of separation and as a result of essentially screwing up safety protocols due to overconfidence.
All that gives a way more agency-possessing impression than typical single-domain deities.
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Primordials don't do that. Primordials, as a fact of their being, unconsciously spawned a heirarchy of souls for themselves; this has been fairly explicit and consistent throughout their depiction. First Circle Demons are the only ones that were deliberately created, and they're usually made by Second or Third Circle Demons. On the rare occasions they're made by Primordials, it's probably a vanity project, or just dicking around - and there are a whole bunch of those projects that failed. Some of them, the ones that kind of work kludgily well enough to sort of survive, are still around in the form of the Darkbreed.

Also, we don't know that Primordials were able to modify themselves into their current forms - we don't know if they had any other forms, Exalted Open Soul Surgery notwithstanding.

Primordials have only had a few "oh shit!" moments, yeah, but that's mostly because when they did screw up, which was often, they were and are so vastly powerful that they just... didn't care. They'd shrug, and go do something else. Look at Autochthon and the Mountain Folk for an example; Autochthon is one of the Primordials that most closely resembles a functioning person as we understand it, and it still took him three tries to socially unfuck them into something like a functional society.

EDIT: Yeah, there's actually a couple of quotes by Holden on this.
Holden Shearer said:
Consider Autochthon and the Mountain Folk. It took the dumb bastard three tries to produce a functioning race. He made the First, and was like "cool" and wandered off. And then much much much later he ran into the First again, who was sitting there despondent without a purpose, and Autochthon was like "uhhh… make more dudes." Because, hey, it made him happy. So the First made more dudes, and then they all sat around kind of despondent not knowing what to do. And they finally got ahold of Autochthon again, and what was his suggestion for their Grand Purpose? Why had they been brought into existence? "Uhh… make stuff." Hey, it worked for him. He was God to these people, but he had no interest in purpose. He just liked making stuff. His bliss was in the building. He liked humans because they used his three favorite inventions (faith, dogma, tools). He didn't even care what they did with them, he just liked that they used them.

And he's probably the most functional of the bunch.

...

Historically, the Yozis are pretty good at fooling themselves. Remember, the entire reason the Primordial War worked is that they assumed humans were too weak to be worth safeguarding against in any way. They never anticipated that Autochthon might go postal (although a ten-year-old human child could have predicted that). They never anticipated that they could die. Please understand, these are very binary beings. Where they are not utter transcendental geniuses, they are often completely mentally incapable. Malfeas isn't stupid. He's dauntingly smart. But he's almost physically incapable of stopping to consider your point of view as in any way valid. It actually makes him mentally ill to do so, even briefly. So yes. Sometimes he will do something and it will blow up in his face in such a way that a five year old could have seen it coming. But he can't. Not because he's stupid, but because he can't.

I mean what I said—before the Primordial War, the Primordials essentially had no 'predators' that existed on their scale. There was nothing to really enforce the consequences of their blind spots on them. Sometimes they'd just try to do something and it wouldn't turn out right. So they'd toss it aside and do something else. They'd shrug. This is where the darkbrood races mostly came from. The Primordials are not and have never been infallible; they simply never had to face any real consequences for their mistakes.
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Indeed, not everything about a Third Circle is a direct reflection of a Yozi's personality in an outwardly obvious manner. Ligier, for example, is the embodiment of Malfeas's self-loathing by being a reminder of the gloriousness he had as Theion, being radiant, magnificent and self assured in all things instead of a broken, hateful wretch.
 
vicky_molokh said:
To me that sounds like anthropomorphising the Primordials too much, because we have fundamental trouble imagining an entity that uses a top-down 'metabiology' which also happens to be able to manipulate the most basic building block of the universe.
They're supposed to be (or at least definitely having been) able to manipulate phenomena so advanced that we can't imagine them, even eliminate such phenomena (SWLIHN did) to the point of making us incapable of even theorising about them after such an elimination. That sounds cosmicly, inhumanly advanced and more nuanced.
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Just because a person is really good at one thing doesn't mean that they're good at another thing.
 
Imrix said:
Also, we don't know that Primordials were able to modify themselves into their current forms - we don't know if they had any other forms, Exalted Open Soul Surgery notwithstanding.
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Masques 20-21 said:
Those who were not content engaged in strange practices and wrestled away the rights to certain secrets from the shinma who kept them. They learned how to do more than simply create; they learned how to create toward a purpose. They learned how to create in cooperation and toward a unified goal. They learned how to create in such a way that their creations would last, never changing and never coming undone. Those who were content with existence ignored the others, which demonstrates the poison of contentment. Those who were not content re-forged their identities, purged their ancient natures, constructed hideous shapes for one another and became the Primordials.
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This is, of course, not to be taken literally, but definitely is grounds for being on the lookout for the Primordials' ability to self-modify.

(And that's it for tonight. The discussion is quick, insightful and fascinating, but I'm not able to continue it anytime soon, and I fear that by morning it will advance too far for me to reply to everything that is interesting.)
 
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vicky_molokh said:
This is, of course, not to be taken literally, but definitely is grounds for being on the lookout for the Primordials' ability to self-modify.
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It's not to be taken as anything but a pretty story the Raksha tell themselves. Raksha are, I remind you, lying liars who lie, and are made of lies. Yeah, they'd like to believe the mighty Titans who surpass them were once one of them - why wouldn't they like to believe that? It doesn't make it true, and Graceful Wicked Masques explicitly says that the history recorded therein is no more than a story told among the Raksha.
 
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vicky_molokh said:
But you're working on from the most basic of building blocks of the universe like they do (Essence in their case), you're working with a crude understanding of bigger blocks. Something like their equivalent of Wyld-Shaping, where they turn Wyld essence into the needed type of essence and build stuff out of it, doesn't seem to be equivalent.
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Yes it is.

The Primordials can't use their version of Wyld Shaping technique to do things outside of their thematics. Only Autocthon can, and thats because of his nature... its also killing him to do (and if he could remove it entirely, he wouldn't be slowly dying). Even he had to go and break apart some of Kimberlys stuff (the Lintha, which she made due to her themes of motherhood and reproduction) to create humans however. For an analogy, look at programmers. There are very few computer programmers that can make large and complex programs directly in binary code (I'm not sure there are any, but I'm being safe here). They instead interpret their skills through the languages they have been trained to use, giving the stuff they design different qualities and features based off what that particular language can do.

vicky_molokh said:
To me that sounds like anthropomorphising the Primordials too much, because we have fundamental trouble imagining an entity that uses a top-down 'metabiology' which also happens to be able to manipulate the most basic building block of the universe.
They're supposed to be (or at least definitely having been) able to manipulate phenomena so advanced that we can't imagine them, even eliminate such phenomena (SWLIHN did) to the point of making us incapable of even theorising about them after such an elimination. That sounds cosmicly, inhumanly advanced and more nuanced.
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No, we don't. Thats the thing, the Yozi themselves are simply giant set pieces. They are bits of terrain that are so massive and so inhuman, they are unable to keep their thought processes in their head. It is very very rare for a Yozi to actually 'decide' to do something. You don't go to Malfeas and ask for a sandwich, because you are so insignificant amongst the multitudes he contains that you can't actually attract his attention. The Yozi can't be anthropomorphized because they shouldn't really be interacted with directly. Instead you go to the Unquestionable that is manifested as the part of his 'brain' that represents the thing you want. You don't go to Malfeas if you want a shiny new daikliave, you go to Liger and please your case to him directly. If you want to alter the geomancy slightly to better fuel your new manse (or want a manse in general) you go to Amalion and chat with her.

Do you know what they call a disagreement between the Yozi, or even within Malfeas himself? For a human, if your hungry side wants a cheese burger but your responsible side points out your on a diet, you think about it for a few seconds then make a decision. For a Yozi on the other hand, such a disagreement would be settled by having Liger declare war on Amalion and their armies clashing. The 'winning' impulse would then be the action taken by the Being known as Malfeas.

The best analogy I think was made by Earth Scorpion, Aleph or Revild. When dealing with Primordials, you shouldn't consider them as beings. You instead approach them as Corporations. If you have a disagreement with the primordial known as Walmarts hiring practices, you can't punch out Walmart itself, you go to its CEO (the fetich) and plead your case that way. Or if that doesn't work, you go to the board of Executives (the other 3cds) and try and have them overrule the CEO.
 
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Sucal said:
Yes it is.

The Primordials can't use their version of Wyld Shaping technique to do things outside of their thematics. Only Autocthon can, and thats because of his nature... its also killing him to do (and if he could remove it entirely, he wouldn't be slowly dying). Even he had to go and break apart some of Kimberlys stuff (the Lintha, which she made due to her themes of motherhood and reproduction) to create humans however. For an analogy, look at programmers. There are very few computer programmers that can make large and complex programs directly in binary code (I'm not sure there are any, but I'm being safe here). They instead interpret their skills through the languages they have been trained to use, giving the stuff they design different qualities and features based off what that particular language can do.
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There are a couple versions of this. Generally, I see the story have that humanity was made, and then Autocthon investigated the Lintha as part of the process to make Exaltations, though it likely wasn't a direct expansion. This version generally has the Linaha be a human sub-species, produced by the combination of humanity+Kimbery. Essentially, they'd be primordial god-blooded.


Oh, and no one really codes directly in binary, though they might make very slight alterations: low level programming(which basically preserves the format of how a computer processes things while relabeling things so that it's not just strings of decimal/hexadecimal numbers). This is as opposed to high level programming languages, which use more human friendly syntax, that needs to be translated into computer language (this is less efficient in terms of run speed).
 
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