That's some serious reality breaking power right there.
So, I don't suppose I can convince anyone to go with my voting option? DP confirmed that Harry worked on this for three days, so a $3,000 payment is not unreasonable, IMO, not when you consider the rarity of Harry's skill set, the short notice, time, trustworthiness, etc. Now also seems like a good time to force the issue rather than letting him continue trying to brush us off when we want to compensate him for his assistance.
[X] Yes
-[X] Offer Harry $3,000 for his consulting services, a thousand per day of his time invested in helping you. Do not take no for an answer. If necessary, explain that you feel disrespected and treated as a child when Harry refuses our attempts to fairly compensate him for his assistance. He is providing a valuable service and very rare skill set on short notice, the least he can do is act like he values himself as much as we value his contributions.
Sorry. I was too busy arguing and forgot
Im not entirely happy at your vote; never try to force money on an adult, especially when you are younger than the person. Its a good way to get their backs up. And you'd find it easier to get him to take fifteen hundred dollars than three thousand, because its closer to what he is used to charging as a PI.
Also, if you have to make an argument that someone isnt treating you like an adult, odds are you arent one.
Molly is still 17.
Legally she isnt an adult yet, and Dresden is old enough to remember her in middle school. That argument shouldnt work on Dresden, and I would expect it risksundermine a lot of the progress that we've made with him in the last two months.
I'll vote for it because its a little late. Just not really satisfied.
Mantles aren't new. Gods have always required active mantles to interact with the world. It's just those mantles require worshippers to activate them, and without sufficient worshipers those mantles don't work any more. In the pre-Christian era, those mantles worked fine, allowing them to manifest. See Arawn. It was a lack of worshippers that made is Celtic god mantle go inactive.
Modern gods have diversified which mantles they use (and possibly always have). Odin uses Santa Claws because lots of people believe in Santa Claus and not many in Odin any more.
1)Thats not true.
To the best of our knowledge, the only Mantles in this setting that we see, with maybe the exception of the Archive, in canon are linked to the Faerie Courts, and the Courts did not exist in their current form prior to the birth of Christ at the earliest.
Most divine power is personal power.
Zeus did not become the new Kronus after overthrowing his father; he just became Zeus.
2) Gods did not need mantles to interact with the world beforehand; this is explicitly established by the events of Peace Talks and Battlegrounds. It only became necessary after they were asked/voluntold to withdraw from the world or accept additional restrictions on their power.
Most of them withdrew rather than lose power.
Some madlads like Odin stayed, accepted dimishment in order to act in the mortal world under mortal limits, and assumed relevant roles or mantles to give them differing amounts of lattitude under differing conditions.
Ethniu cheated by withdrawing into the Fomor kingdom without actually withdrawing from the world, allowing her to attempt to loophole the terms
3)Power in the Dresdenverse does not appear to be based on your number of followers.
Certainly not in the current settimg.
My point is that the traits of the kingdom do not exist separate from each other in the narrative. If we take overpopulated and make a machine realm, then the overpopulation would have to manifest as lack of electricity and resources, not as lack of food. If we take advanced society, devils, advanced technology, and Eternal Suffering, and still take Overpopulated, then the problems caused by overpopulation cannot be ones that are solved by the advanced society (meaning that sophisticated societal order is not enough), devils (meaning that being superhuman is not enough), advanced technology (meaning that technology in advance of Earth is not enough) or Eternal Suffering (meaning that immortality in some form is not enough) combined.
No, thats a feature of the writer and how they choose to characterize things.
Its worth remembering that a lot of things are society-specific, and thats even more complicated when you have multiple species in the setting each with their own requirements.
Cybernetic lifeforms of one type might consider it overpopulation if they dont each have the equivalent of a matrioshka brain's worth of computing power to run on, compared to another thats happy with Pentium IIs.
A society with a significant dragon population might have different definitions of space requirements from one thats human only; hell, human expectations of space vary wildly by society.
Americans who average 120kg meat/person/year eaten per year would consider Indian levels of meat consumption (~3kg/person/year) to be a sign of the End Times.
Average UK house sizes are around a third the square footage of US houses.
Spiritkillers were originally made/developed to kill Primordials. Fairly sure that once you get past perfect defenses, Murder is Meat is as lethal to Uriel and White God itself (with a chance of leaving behind a Neverborn-like thing) as it is to Mab, Bane and Harry Dresden.
However, Sol Invictus was supposed to be canonically invincible unless they were somehow induced to take down their perfect defence. Which is, iirc, how they were killed in the Return of the Scarlet Empress scenario.
I dont have any comment on the White God or Uriel and his fellow angels and archangels.
Those are Plot-Device level elements of the setting, and I find it exceedingly unlikely that we have to worry about them as a combat problem, so I dont find it constructive to speculate.
You don't get to pick up negative traits than dismiss the actual negative effects explicitely laid out in the text of those traits. DragonParadox is an incredibly generous QM, but narrative and flavor are clearly important to how things are run (like Soul Rendering Practice causing psychological issues if overused, despite there being no mechanic effect in the text talking about it). Overpopulated is a 1 dot flaw, granting as many points as Slave Realm costs. So, it should take as much effort, approximately, to fix Overpopulation issues, as it would to remove Slave Realm trait effects from our kingdom. That's a very big undertaking.
I would much rather spend time learning martial arts under old masters, exploring the history of the society of our heart, hunting iron-shelled dinosaurs in the valleys, leading design and construction of grand ritual chambers in which we'll raise city spirits of our realm (who, in my kingdom idea, will likely bear at least some passing similarities to the Maidens, now that I think of it) so we get 2nd / 3rd circle equivalents (because a city god raised by an exalted charm from the substrate of exalted's world body is like a definition of a higher circle demon). Leading the first explorers out of the realm too, but not in a desperate Locust Crusade reenactment. Dealing with being a subject of a state religion. I don't want to spend a lot of time desperately trying to save a crumbling realm. I want Molly's world body to be as much of a striving gem as possible.
If this means setting aside Lord of the Land? That's how it rolls. Maybe we'll be able to get it once we hit essence 5 and start looking at custom charms. Narrative-wise "slowly developing control of one's soul" seems easy enough to put in. Mana Manipulation path likely should grant us some similar ability.
Thats not actually true.
IIRC, you characterize Eternal Suffering as functional immortality in your own setting. Thats a valid interpretation.
But its as valid as everyone spending half the year crucified on a cross to expiate sin, or as a notgazelle hunted by velociraptors, or as being undying but without accompanying youth or just simply reincarnating people over and over like the Buddhists say.
Thats just up to the writer to sell it.
Similarly, overpopulation is relative.
There can be space issues, like say a couple clans of lesser dragons requiring plenty of space compared to several million humanoids. There might be an ongoing requirement for imports of something or other from the NeverNever or from Earth.
There might be a looming resource shortage in months, or decades, or centuries.
The resources might be available but the Hell's spirit or elementals will not allow them to be touched. There might be a larger influx of souls than an outflow. There might be an ongoing leak of something important.
There is plenty of room for characterization, and I find your insistence that it must be the way you describe it unconvincing.
Great.
I have a different vision for Molly's Hell. A lot of it explicitly comes from elsewhere; the human population, if you go for an inhabited hell, explicitly has a history predating Molly showing up, and I would like to write a Hell whose history and reality reflects that.
Which I should really get around to finishing writing; at least you've finished yours.
Why do you think a hell without that particular downside is one that is incapable of improvement?
There are ways to improves it without any needs to create a previously nonexistent problem ourself, we'll already have plot hooks without taking that trait:
-Molly is now the queen of a new civilization, lots of plot here.
-How do we get our inhabitants to get out in the world and help, also plot.
-There is now an entire realm for us to explore, looks like plot to me.
-They potentially have advanced technology, maybe learning it could be a good idea? Still more plot hooks.
Let's be honest, overpopulation as a source of plot is completely and utterly redundant, just getting our hell is more than enough for quite a lot of time on its own.
1)I didnt say anything of the sort.
I have a different vision for Molly's Hell, and it involves Overpopulation as a feature because I think it makes an intriguing hook, one that makes callbacks to the settings that ExWoD draws from.
2)No, thats not actually true.
