Roadie
A plate full of blins and a cat nearby.
Are you sure?
General Exalted Thread
The point of saying that one views it like a nation state is that one views it like a nation state. So you don't get the easy path to ignore 99.999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999...999% of America. You have to Talk to the National security apparatus, the irs, the military, etc if you want to get a really good idea of what America as a whole is doing at the moment. Or you can get a good enough view by talking to some of those, or just talk to another group. Or just observe what's going on.
They interact in the same way nation states interact: on the level of individuals you see parts of them interact with you as an individual(CIA goons, etc). But America can interact with France on the level of nation-states. They're not sessile at all.
And the Neverborn are more similar to Primordials than they are to others, so presumably the Ebon Dragon would interact with them in a similar manner to how he interacts with any of the other Yozi.
Aaron Peori
Rest in Peace
The message delay is also important because if you're chilling in An Teng all plotting the assassination of the local satrap and a frenzied looking demon shows up with a message from your akuma seneschal advising you that Erembour is marching on your stronghold you have that sinking feeling of knowing the message is at least five days old.
NonSequtur
a body
I think that if one wanted to push the 'think of Yozis as nations' idea, you'd have to radically change how Third and Second Circles interact, because it doesn't seem to fit the model as far as I am aware. So, for instance, there wouldn't be 'pissing off Ligier', there'd be 'piss of enough Second Circles associated with/lead by one called Ligier and they can pool their resources to bust out vitriol murder machines of impeccable craftsmanship'. Fighting a Third Circles is hard not because they're a single super tough dude but a gang of fairly tough dudes with good synergy. Killing a Second Circle diminishes Ligier because it deprives him of that Second Circle's skills, knowledge etc. Killing one of Erembour's means she's lost a bandmate.
Malfeas dropping a nuke on you would be getting enough Malfean Second Circle groups to agree to use a leyline network that covers a lot of their different territories to nuke you, straining the geomancy in the process. Or the Ligierian branch decides to use martial law and go it alone, having to later justify it to the other groups.
This makes coordinating between full Yozi even harder, but I don't see that as being a bad thing.
Malfeas dropping a nuke on you would be getting enough Malfean Second Circle groups to agree to use a leyline network that covers a lot of their different territories to nuke you, straining the geomancy in the process. Or the Ligierian branch decides to use martial law and go it alone, having to later justify it to the other groups.
This makes coordinating between full Yozi even harder, but I don't see that as being a bad thing.
vicky_molokh
Posthuman spidery thingy.
- Location
- Kyïv, Ukraine
Oookay, morning forum binge . . .
I do get the 'corporations' comparison, but the fact that Jouten are a thing and that they do apparently talk to each other, make deals, decide to steal exaltations etc. seems to indicate that the software analogy goes further: treating Yozi/Primordials as top-level objects with second-level component-objects (third-circles), and also third and fourth-level-down component-objects (2nd and 1st circles), such that many of the important function implementations are encapsulated in the component-objects. I mean, the Brass Dancer walks around and dances and all that!
In general, though, Peanuckle probably said it more comprehensively:
I think I like the software example: nobody actually programs in zeros and ones for big projects, yet understanding assembly-level language for at least one type of processor (and ideally, for the type of hardware one is coding for, or for the appropriate virtual machine) is something that is recommended. In addition to knowing the appropriate high-level language. Because it makes one capable of factoring and maybe sometimes exploiting the finer nuances of the relevant hardware/VM that one codes for. And the difference between someone being good with high-level language and someone capable of factoring in the fine nuance of the lower-levels seems to compare well to the difference between merely a powerful entity and a true demiurge like the Primordials.
I do get the 'corporations' comparison, but the fact that Jouten are a thing and that they do apparently talk to each other, make deals, decide to steal exaltations etc. seems to indicate that the software analogy goes further: treating Yozi/Primordials as top-level objects with second-level component-objects (third-circles), and also third and fourth-level-down component-objects (2nd and 1st circles), such that many of the important function implementations are encapsulated in the component-objects. I mean, the Brass Dancer walks around and dances and all that!
In general, though, Peanuckle probably said it more comprehensively:
vicky_molokh
Posthuman spidery thingy.
- Location
- Kyïv, Ukraine
Exalted are capable of doing the impossible. They block infinite-energy attacks and parry black holes with one-dot artifact chopsticks (or with wooden chopsticks, but only once), and change the mores of societies by talking for a few hours to a janitor, and recalibrate shinmaic-scale principles across the universe, among other things. The book tells us to pick up an epic Motivation. I say that rehabilitating Yozis instead of executing or incarcerating or merely releasing them is sufficiently epic as an end-goal for a Compassion 3-5 circle. And in fact, I'm not the only one - in fact such an idea is mentioned by the game's authors themselves in the Scarlet Empress. Yes, it won't be easy - if something is easy, it's not a worthy challenge for Exalted.
Okay, I'm trying to condense the unorganized thoughts here:
I like the overal soul-structure of Primordials and the Unshaped. I kinda want to keep that for the big cosmic entities of my own setting, but copying it 1:1 would be bad for all sorts of reasons. So the first change I thought of was to get rid of the assumption that such hierarchies are fully self-contained; instead of Primordials spawning third-circles spawning second-circles spawning first-circles, I think I can go for the idea of integrating characters already-living characters into such hierarchies, with some sort of binding effect going in both directions between the new member and the old hierarchy. I'm also thinking of some sort of hybrid between the idea of manses, of primordials-as-places, and of the LoadBearingBoss trope - my current thoughts are along the lines that in order to ascend and become a cosmic entity, one needs to build a manse of sorts, and invest a significant part of one's power in said manse, and that destroying one of the two will significantly hurt and diminish the other (again, sort of the Malfeas-the-city and Malfeas-the-brass-dancer relationship).
I'm also thinking of making at three different ways of forming such a cosmic entity:
- A strictly hierarchical one, where the cosmic-ascending individual has a pyramid of underling-entities, each of which accepts a role of sorts. Probably the simplest to understand, most corporation-similar etc. An important note is that the hierarchy cannot be 'taken over': if the leader is deposed, the construct collapses and needs to be built from scratch (whether from same individuals or not); the cosmic principles just will not accept swapping the leader for another leader!
- A hive-colony-like one, where anyone joining (willingly or not) is significantly altered by the experience, where leadership can rotate (kinda like with the Unshaped), and people take on aspects of the rolls they're forged into.
- An emergent one, which can probably be described as a society of Kami taking up some territory and interacting, which, through emergent properties, becomes greater than the sum of its parts, as long as the society contains enough different Kami to fill all the necessary niches, and as long as there is relative harmony within the society (e.g. nobody tries to dominate the others). The lack of a discernable decision-making mechanism and of a social ladder are important aspects of this type of system that distinguishes it from the other two.
vicky_molokh
Posthuman spidery thingy.
- Location
- Kyïv, Ukraine
You can, unless you houserule to eliminate all the canonical methods of instant communication with Malfeas' denizens.
Uh, out of the four literary works listed as inspirations, the very first one has no fewer than two resurrections, both of which go 100% successfully and end well for both the resurrectees and the resurrectors.
Sucal
The Devil’s Cut
- Location
- Bottom of the barrel
There was that very public break up with England
vicky_molokh
Posthuman spidery thingy.
- Location
- Kyïv, Ukraine
Not as an agent. As a non-agent, the wheel has affected the world quite a lot, but nobody writes a technothriller about the wheel. It also apparently isn't bound by oaths either, unlike Primordials.
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- Location
- East of the Sun and West of the Moon
Unless you're Heracles, in which case you absolutely can defeat death by giving him a noogie until he decides that nobody actually needs to die today.
Though, granted, preventing a death isn't the same thing as undoing it. Still, not gonna turn down a perfectly good opportunity to bring up Herc literally wrestling death into submission.
Came up in the storytelling chapter of Infernals, as well.
azoicennead
Overly-Affectionate Zombie Squad
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This is not a very good defense for your claims that this should be viable.
Nobody is saying you can't try, and freeing the Yozi shouldn't succeed (and is a really, really bad idea).
vicky_molokh
Posthuman spidery thingy.
- Location
- Kyïv, Ukraine
If variants of actions related to freeing Yozis cannot be defended using references to books about freeing Yozis, I'm not sure there are any bases to have an opinion one way or another about anything in Exalted.
Or perhaps I misunderstood you.
Wheels aren't Nations. I didn't think someone would have trouble with this, but let me repeat: wheels aren't nations.
And if you talk about nations, well, people do write technothrillers involving nations, and nations are often described as actors: the Russians are doing x, for instance. And even outside of that, people generally describe actions to nations as a whole: America fought in WW2. Nazi Germany commited the holocaust. France Allied with Britian.
And your last comment is bizzare. First off, viewing yozi as nations is supposed to be a metaphor. They don't map perfectly to them, which makes sense, because if they did you wouldn't have yozi, you'd have nations. Secondly, of course nations are bound by oaths. They're called treaties.
vicky_molokh
Posthuman spidery thingy.
- Location
- Kyïv, Ukraine
Nations are described as groups of agents, even if they're described as sort-of-actors: 'the Russians are doign x' but no 'Russia thinks y'. You can't have Russia walk and dance down the central street of Moscow the way Malfeas can.
No, that's treaties aren't actually binding, that's the thing. They're a legal fiction that does absolutely nothing if nobody is there to stand around with a big stick and hit those who break them over the head. Malfeas stays in Malfeas because he's still bound by the oath he's taken, not because the current president of the dæmonic Allthing decided that it's still useful to follow the Treaty-of-staying-out-of-Creation for the next four years until the next election (but the next one decides to pretend that staying out of Creation was not what the signed treaty meant).
So yeah, it is a metaphor, but it's a metaphor that misses some of the more fundamental differences, so risks being misleading rather than enlightening.
azoicennead
Overly-Affectionate Zombie Squad
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Referencing Return of the Scarlet Empress about the Reclamation runs into the issue of it being one of the big examples of how the Reclamation warped the metaplot around itself in late 2e.
Nobody is saying freeing the Yozi can't be your goal, just that it's a bad idea and shouldn't succeed.
Nobody is saying rehabilitating the Yozi can't be your goal, just that you probably won't succeed.
... Because the oath is enforced by magic and violating it requires altering his nature so he is no longer bound by the oath - i.e. he will "be hit on the head with a big stick", as you put it.
Malfeas can't walk on the streets of Malfeas any more than you can walk on your sternum. A part of Malfeas can (i.e. a component soul, i.e. one of the things people are saying you can interact with on a personal scale), but Malfeas as a whole cannot.
The Brass Dancer is only a part of Malfeas.
Aleph
Princess of Stabbity
- Location
- The sixth circle of Hell (second on weekends)
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Awesome. Houserule it, and you do you. Personally I'd say that you're absolutely nuts and that such a thing is never going to happen in a million years, but your game, your rules.
If it's canonically impossible to free the Yozis? Houserule it, and then tell a happy little story about how you convinced the Dyson Sphere of maimed, tortured nuclear hatred and solipsism into a friend to all living things who has tea parties with small woodland animals and sings Disney songs with the dudes that crippled him. But as long as it is canonically possible to free the Yozis, no other plot in the setting matters and every game must revolve around that fact because your intricate political scheming to assume shadow control of House Nellens through an elaborate system of proxies doesn't matter for shit when Adorjan gets loose and ten seconds later every mortal in Creation is dead from her Agg damage aura.
And no, that's not an exaggeration; given her speed and the sheer size of Malfean setpieces, she can potentially cover the entirety of modern Creation at once, and she does enough environmental damage to kill extras in a single action. Ten seconds after Adorjan gets loose, the only living things in Creation are people with environmental defences, a shitload of health levels or a sealed chamber with sufficient soak to keep her out unless she pays attention to it. Game over.
vicky_molokh
Posthuman spidery thingy.
- Location
- Kyïv, Ukraine
I still get the impression that RotSE is largely the WWII-equivalent of Exalted: it looks as an out-of-left-field plot tumor if you're unwilling to accept it as part of a setting, and seems inevitable and hinted-at very early in retrospect if you look at it from an accepting PoV of late 2½e.
So, what will happen if he breaks the oath? He'll roll ten botches on some ten future actions of great importance? I get the impression that the mechanics of the oaths for Yozis aren't sufficiently detailed. Even in RotSE we only get a small glimpse of the oaths' strong and weak points.
"One other word, jouten, might be particularly useful for a visitor to Malfeas. It designates an actual Yozi body: Malfeas the dancer might be pointed out as jouten, as might Malfeas the Demon City." Notice they're both Malfeas, that's the thing. They're not 'Malfeas and his Liver'. Kinda like Legier is both the green sun and the humanoid craftsman running around Creation when summoned. (This kind of simultaneous colocation and comorphology is fascinating and alien, and probably a bit hard for humans to accept, which only makes it all the more cool.)
First, it's a metaphor for how to view them, so there's going to be differences. Russia can't physically dance anwhere, but essence doesn't exist here.
Secondly, I do see stuff like "Russia does x or y" thrown around, so they are described as actors in their own rights.
Really? "Treaties aren't inherently binding, oaths are!"? That's your argument? You realize that treaties are essentially oaths made between nations, right? If nobody is there to to stand around with a big stick and hit those who break them over the head, oaths do absolutely nothing.
The point of the surrender oaths is that they have the backing so that they are meaningful. So your straw nation is utterly irrelevant to the discussion.
So... it's misleading if you don't treat it like a metaphor and treat oaths as inherently binding for no reason at all? That doesn't sound like a problem with the metaphor. I mean, you might not like the metaphor, but that's different from it being bad.
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azoicennead
Overly-Affectionate Zombie Squad
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Um... I'm not sure why you're comparing it to WWII, but basically you're arguing that its stance on the possibility of Yozi escape is good, and most of the other people are arguing it's bad. Saying "it's in RotSE" is not a good argument against "RotSE's stance on the Yozi is bad".
In a philosophical sense, Malfeas is dead. He basically has to commit suicide and fundamentally alter his being to break the oath - which is the big stick.
Malfeas the Yozi is a giant city. You cannot meaningfully interact with him on a personal scale.
Malfeas the dancer is a part of Malfeas the Yozi that you can possibly meaningfully interact with on a personal scale, but doing so is not interacting with the whole of Malfeas the Yozi. It is interacting with Malfeas the dancer.
Revlid
blob of bugs
- Location
- England
Worse than dumping a black hole into the Solar system, because at least the black hole isn't actively an asshole.
vicky_molokh
Posthuman spidery thingy.
- Location
- Kyïv, Ukraine
As I said, you do see 'RF does x' thrown around, but you have to squint really hard to have 'RF thinks x' to be taken as anything close to a literal statement. You said yourself that RF can't dance. Malfeas can (see below, the paragraph on self-including sets).
I'm comparing them because I largely see the RotSE Reclamation as equivalent to WWII in our world: it's a part of the setting history that just is, and it doesn't care about whether five out of billions of people try to prevent it; it definitely doesn't care that those five exalts don't like it - in fact it is in its very nature not to be liked. But I don't think that on a meta-setting level anyone ever said something like 'Duh, it is bad that our history had WWII as one of the more epic conflicts; it totally should have had a world war between China and USA instead'. (No, C&C:RA is not an example, because it's all about enabling wunderwaffle technologies out of this world, as opposed to choosing between the various threats in this world.)
Now, the meta-setting thinking of 'player X dis/likes setting element Y' once against makes me wonder:
given so many 'element Y is bad' thoughts floating around, let's say we discard . . . aww, I'll just quote myself:
This is not a rhetorical question - I'm actually curious about the answer as seen by people.
I find it interesting that Malfeas accepted such a 'death' once in order to be imprisoned, but is unwilling to do it a second time to escape. This also brings another interesting considerations regarding comparing Yozis to nations: from such a philosophical PoV, all nations die many times over relatively short timespans (on the order of decades at most, months at least).
As for the equivalence:
it appears that the dancer is the city is the many-soul hierarchy lead by Legier is the prison where the Yozis are. That's why the book entry says "Malfeas the dancer" and not "Malfeas' subsection in the shape of the dancer". Primordials' ability to be a non-empty set that also includes itself (several times) is fascinating.
At least that's what I have to conclude based on that entry. And the self-set-inclusion seems like a sufficiently weird phenomenon to be worthy of the Primordials, and seems to fit quite well with the other science puns regarding them.
Aleph
Princess of Stabbity
- Location
- The sixth circle of Hell (second on weekends)
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Uh, I should clarify here. At least as I see it, the oaths are not treaties. Nor are they escapable. They're written into the Yozis metabiology; literally part of their identities, carved into their legends. It's probable that like Autochthon's sickness, even fetich death wouldn't rescind them; merely make another chained Primordial.
Seems kind of pointless to me to play a game where you can't win. Unless one wants to see how good an absolute failure they can be.
Fortuna
Graceful Topiary Artist
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- She/Her
Ah! This is an interesting point, actually, so I'm just going to jump on it and nibble at it a little bit.
It seems to me that the best way to think of the Brass Dancer is not as a subset of Malfeas, nor as the totality of Malfeas, but rather as a perspective on Malfeas. In much the same way that I display different traits in different circumstances - joking, formal, awkward - and none of these represent either a subset of me nor the totality of me, but a perspective on me. Except that Malfeas, being a Primordial, can and does express these multiple perspectives separated by space rather than time, and they are at first glance more wildly divergent.
Which means, yes, it's in principle possible to hold a conversation with Malfeas, although as I understand it the Brass Dancer is not given much to conversation. On the other hand, there's no guarantee or even reason to believe that such a conversation will be comprehensible to you, because the jouten you're talking to will reflect changes in the total Primordial through its own particular idiom, and (along with all the other jouten, and the pseudo-jouten which is the Primordial's soul hierarchy) will also reflect its own changes back into the total Primordial.
To tie this back to the larger discussion, it seems to me that the nature of a Primordial is such that 'nation', 'terrain' and 'person' (for a certain value of 'person) can all be true perspectives on the entity - but, as all perspectives necessarily are, each is incomplete, and impinges on and is impinged upon by each of the others.