Green Flame Rising (Exalted vs Dresden Files)

Speaking of drugs, Exalts roll at -2DC to resist, meaning that Molly is rolling at DC4 even before anything else. And Transcendent Lord of Flies might well apply in this situation. Someone trying to drug her mundanely is going to have an interesting time.

We should get the anti-poison charm soon tho.

The Festival happens on the Ides of September and November with the November date being the less prestigious and the one associated with the plebeian games. Though mind this might not be an ordinary gathering depending on what Lara has in mind.

She's not really sheltered in that area?

She has taken drugs, been arrested because of drugs and seen her friends getting addicted.
All before exalting and the story start.

Her friends started taking drugs, one of her friends got pregnant and then she messed up her mind with black magic. Defaulting back to her childhood default of 'All Drugs Bad' is part of how she handled that, though now might be the moment when that shifts again.
 
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1)???
ITER regulations just say they will follow applicable national laws of the Host Nation.
Sorry about that, I forget that this isn't actually common public knowledge sometimes. Anyway, nuclear regulatory commissions don't know how to classify, certify, or regulate nuclear fusion, because it's not nuclear fission, which is what they are geared for. Yet, the need to regulate is recognized. So, how is this resolved? By negotiation. Take, for example, tritium which is a radioactive isotope of hydrogen weighing 3 atomic mass units. The limitations went from 100 grams of tritium in the device, to 300, to 700 with a further 300 grams error margin baked in. That was over the course of about a decade (it was "finalized" in ~ 2009). The changes were made as ITER was developed and we understood better how much we would actually get. There is actually a number of such things, with regulations being very fluid and subject to adjustment.

So, what ITER is basically saying is that it will follow the laws it wrote and negotiated for itself.
3)Youre forgetting industrial fire regulations for processes looking to generate and contain plasmas at 9-digit degrees worth of heat. Plus whatever is involved when you are looking to generate multiple teslas worth of field strength.
No, fire regulations don't work like that. You are looking at high voltage regulations, but the fire hazard regulations would be for flammable gases. Plasma itself, at least non-atmospheric plasma (i.e. stuff that's not atmospheric arc discharges) is not considered as a conventional fire hazard. It's important to understand, a typical working pressure of a tokamak is ~ 10^-7 of atmospheric pressure. And the heat that you are quoting is at the core plasma, not the whole volume.

Magnetic safety is a thing, but that's basically OSHA.
2)And no, I disagree.
You underestimate the role of everything from timing to politics in technology adoption. VHS vs Betamax. AC vs DC. The history of cellular technologies in the US. OS/2 vs Windows. The ideological opposition to EVs and solar/wind power in the US. The ideological opposition to vaccines in the US in the middle of a pandemic.
Frontend vs. backend is the analogy I would suggest. You don't go for flashy world-changing stuff first. You establish yourself as the backbone of the industry first, but one that's outside of public view. Advanced alloys, energy capacitors, etc.
1)You are making significant assumptions about the cross-applicability of stuff in our Hell with realworld Dresdenverse technology. Or that our Hell having RnD resources to spare. A coherent magic+technology techbase means that solutions that use technology IRL might have no equivalent in our Realm because a magic solution was simpler or cheaper.

For example, why would our Hell even have encryption/decryption stuff? It's a one world government without technological hostiles or large-scale crime. That stuff was driven primarily by military needs against peer opposition IRL.

There's a good chance that our Hell will be importing some solutions from the real world.
Not vice versa.
This is also an assumption on your part. While yes, our world, being our world-soul and not a part of Creation is likely to have different underlying physics, it also can have humans in it, which, I assume, wouldn't keel over dead after leaving. So, physics are the same on at least some level of abstraction. This means that at least some technologies, meaning ways to influence the world, would be the same, because form follows function.

For your encryption-decryption example, I would expect even a happy crime-free society with the government that enjoys a genuine 100% approval rating and that has somehow overcame the individual desire for privacy to have more advanced archival and data transfer algorithms than we have. And that ties directly to encryption-decryption. Almost certainly far better machine learning, machine vision, text recognition, text-to-speech and speech-to-text systems than were available in 2006. Unless literally everyone's OS is a cyberdevil, but that means a way to mass-produce cyberdevils loyal to their owners on a truly industrial scale.
2)I repeat:
A research establishment pulling out mature versions of technologies from multiple disparate sectors is wildly implausible. The combined research budgets of the G20 haven't managed it, but some johnny come lately concern run by a teenager will? And not just one, but multiple?
Yes. You start with material science, because we already have background there with Chicago Synthetics, and expand from there, offloading stuff to patsies. If need be, you use the Crown to find good patsies.
3)Technologies build on each other.
This is 2006; touchscreen smartphones havent even been invented yet iirc. We're still fuzzing around with 65nm lithography in computer chips, and software encryption is a significant burden on computation resources. A lot of the things you're talking about simply aren't viable because the real world lacks the capacity to use them commercially.
Not really. While 3D printers might be stalled, material science things won't. Nor would batteries and stuff like that.
5) This is a fantasy quest.
Of the three settings in play, both the Dresdenverse and World of Darkness are urban fantasy settings, while Exalted is high/epic fantasy.

Schemes about technological uplift are not actually what the quest is supposed to be about.
This is your preference. Mine is different. Autochton was very much a part of Exalted setting, and my favorite at that. Technocracy was a part of WoD. Your preference is perfectly valid, so is mine. But appealing to "this setting works on different themes" is wrong, because two of the three settings we are talking about have the themes in question.

From my understanding, and correct me if I am wrong, what you want as a result of Molly's actions is essentially the same world, but safer. Doylistically, a story of adventure and fighting with maybe some politicking, where the setting is the background and essentially actually stays pretty much unchanged, or at least not relevant, where our impact is significant cosmologically, but wouldn't actually be noticed by an average person on the street. What I am interested at least in part, is to see a positive change happening. Not just the same, but safer, but different and better.
I mean, to pick just one, do you realize what better batteries alone does for improving the viability of SSK conventional submarines against SSNs? Or the viability of cheap compact drone munitions in the hands of military and irregular civilian forces? And thats just off the top of my head.
Yes, and, frankly, probably better than you, no insult intended.
 
[X] She inwardly acknowledges that Thomas has a point and her present disdain for them is in part her attempt to shift blame for what she did to her friends
-[X] This, however, doesn't mean that drugs, when defined as addictive substances that cause negative long-term effects on the body and/or mind, are in any way good. She has seen where they can lead people
 
She's not really sheltered in that area?

She has taken drugs, been arrested because of drugs and seen her friends getting addicted.
All before exalting and the story start.
Point of order:
She has been arrested for drug possession at a party. And her friends were drug users. But we don't actually know if she has actually used them herself.

It's reasonable to assume she's tried something stronger than alcohol. But as far as I am aware, there is no canon statement saying she actually did.
The Festival happens on the Ides of September and November with the November date being the less prestigious and the one associated with the plebeian games. Though mind this might not be an ordinary gathering depending on what Lara has in mind
Fair enough.
 
Just to be clear the reason Molly uses it like that is because she is a (previously very sheltered) teenager, just like the reason Thomas has the opinions he has is because he is a man with a literal demon in his soul who has tried more substances than he can recall the names of to control it. He has never killed someone because of something he took, but his first interaction with his Hunger like that of practically all White Court Vampires was killing someone because of it.
That makes sense, though I was originally attributing it to American drug attitudes. That's just how it gets talked about, despite the clear differences between substances people can largely walk off and stuff like Fentanyl.
 
[X] She inwardly acknowledges that Thomas has a point and her present disdain for them is in part her attempt to shift blame for what she did to her friends
-[X] This, however, doesn't mean that drugs, when defined as addictive substances that cause negative long-term effects on the body and/or mind, are in any way good. She has seen where they can lead people
 
This is your preference. Mine is different. Autochton was very much a part of Exalted setting, and my favorite at that. Technocracy was a part of WoD. Your preference is perfectly valid, so is mine.
Independent of the thematics or practical issues of adding technology, I think you're jumping the gun more than a bit.

An uplift isn't something we start up to get some liquidity, it's something you spend stupid amounts of money and influence just to get started*. Whatever the precise mechanisms of the law are people are curious, greedy, and defensive of their own power. They'll poke around and find something, and they aren't ineffectual children just because they aren't exalted.

If we want to play with the big guys we need to be fairly well seated at the table first.

Getting our soul-world working, a more mundane financial empire set up, and working that into influence on both sides of the masquerade are prerequisites for trying the stuff you're talking about from my perspective.

Apologies if that was your intent, but your posts have read like you want to try financing our first big step past the diamond thing with fusion reactors and other bleeding edge technologies.

I just can't see that working out well, at least if we want to remain in control.

If the goal is just to get improvements rolled out we could partner with someone, trading away portions - probably large ones - of the power and benefits in exchange for immediacy. Which also carries the risk of getting gilded cage'd, but in some ways that can be easier to manage depending on our setup.

This would probably mean something like using the Library to leak fusion plans to DARPA as one example. Groups like that have the status to move in ways we can't in the systems we want to change.

Personally I prefer the idea of speed running Warren Buffett status and then using that to do more involved things, since it leaves us with maximum influence over whatever we try to do.

* Then get super rich on if it works.
 
[X] She inwardly acknowledges that Thomas has a point and her present disdain for them is in part her attempt to shift blame for what she did to her friends
-[X] This, however, doesn't mean that drugs, when defined as addictive substances that cause negative long-term effects on the body and/or mind, are in any way good. She has seen where they can lead people
 
Apologies if that was your intent, but your posts have read like you want to try financing our first big step past the diamond thing with fusion reactors and other bleeding edge technologies.
No, that's fair. The message was very muddled. The core of it was supposed to be "We could, and I am interested in, using the assets of our kingdom, including its technological advantages, as resources in the real world on a large scale. I am interested in seeing / reading about the world being changed by us through introduction of new and revolutionary things".
 
[X] She inwardly acknowledges that Thomas has a point and her present disdain for them is in part her attempt to shift blame for what she did to her friends
 
Apologies if that was your intent, but your posts have read like you want to try financing our first big step past the diamond thing with fusion reactors and other bleeding edge technologies.

Well, Yog already answered but for the exact quote on what he wants:

No, I used a fusion reactor as a possible example of what our kingdom might have. It wouldn't be the first thing I'd offer to the world as it is. I'll sell ever-increasing quality lithium-ion, then lithium-air batteries staying ~ 5 to 10 years ahead of the competition. If we have viable high temperature (meaning nitrogen or higher) superconductors, I'll sell those. I'll also sell chip architecture, then chip manufacturing technologies. X-ray lasers (again, for chip manufacture, that's a big thing). I would also capture the 3D printing market (even with what we have today, back in 2006 one could totally dominate the market and rake in billions). Depending on what we have access to, material science would be my next go to - advanced steels and other metal alloys, composite and meta materials (the latter ones synergy greatly with 3D printing), hydrogen storage technologies (as an energy storage system), etc. Everything that I listed in multi-billion profitable. All of these can be relatively easily independently tested and verified to be genuine. All of these are not over-regulated.

And it continues a little past that.

So, more *using the fact that we can have a futuristic kingdom* than just fusion reactors.

Anyway, vote:

[x] Yog

For the moment Molly sees weed as badly as meth, this needs some readjusting on how dangerous these are.
 
[X] She inwardly acknowledges that Thomas has a point and her present disdain for them is in part her attempt to shift blame for what she did to her friends
 
[X] She inwardly acknowledges that Thomas has a point and her present disdain for them is in part her attempt to shift blame for what she did to her friends
-[X] This, however, doesn't mean that drugs, when defined as addictive substances that cause negative long-term effects on the body and/or mind, are in any way good. She has seen where they can lead people
 
[X] She inwardly acknowledges that Thomas has a point and her present disdain for them is in part her attempt to shift blame for what she did to her friends
-[X] This, however, doesn't mean that drugs, when defined as addictive substances that cause negative long-term effects on the body and/or mind, are in any way good. She has seen where they can lead people
 
And it continues a little past that.

So, more *using the fact that we can have a futuristic kingdom* than just fusion reactors.
That's fair, guess I missed that one or lost it in the follow up.

That said I still stand by my point. What @Yog describes in that quote is significantly more reasonable, but it's still the sort of thing we should wait to do until we're already a proper player in the wider game than as a set up step.

The more we talk about the more compatible this seems with a stock/investing heavy baseline.

If we get rich on things like hedge funds we can move sideways into angel investing. Then rather than just putting our own stuff out there we can open a portfolio holding a wide variety of variably good looking tech investments across the planet and slip our own stuff into them. That way we can boost existing good ideas and put our own on the market.

Better, we can do stuff like take full/majority ownership of existing start ups then merge them and use that to slip "proprietary technologies" in that neither previously had in the shuffle.

Hide it as IP that prior ownership screwed the creators out of by excluding them from the docs. Which looks sketchy, but happens frequently enough unfortunately, it's also just a first pass idea so we could work up something better later.

No need to worry about "how did a teenager do this?" Questions. We can use the credibility of people in the business already as a cover.

If we want to double dip we could start it as a personal fund, then open it as a set of managed mutual funds sorted by risk, and get other people's money funding our chaff while we still maintain majority ownership of the good stuff.
We should get the anti-poison charm soon tho.
Yeah, and not just for us:

Fathomless poison haven (••)
With but a smile and a caress, the Infernal can
grant immunity to the ravages of the very seas of Hell. System: The Infernal touches someone she feels
affection for and rolls Charisma + Survival against difficulty 6. The subject becomes immune to any sort of harm from liquid for one day per success. This includes crushing, battering, drowning, boil- ing, and immunity to any sort of liquid poisons. The Infernal may target herself, if she desires.
It's not technically permanent but it has no resource cost, days/success duration, and affects anyone we can touch. We could pass out full immunity to liquid dangers to everyone we care to once a week for free.

The "any harm" clause is also an interesting one for practitioners.

My understanding of how DF wizards work is that when they want to use magic they have to gather their personal internal energy and use it to reach out and either take in power to shape or catalyze a reaction in their environment depending on what they're doing. That's part of what the willpower gathering step is.

The reason casting over water, or worse while dunked under a running source, makes magic difficult or effectively impossible is that it erodes their initial push before it gets anywhere unless you are a water specialist like Listens-To-Wind. In which case you can interact with its power directly.

Which is arguably a source of selective harm if their personal power still counts as connected to the caster.

If you get a primordial blessing that says "liquid is giving you a free pass this week. End of story" does that mean you would get to cast without the penalty as the water refuses to erase your power in passing?

That's an almost evil amount of cheating for a good thaumaturge. We could build a warded base at the bottom of the deepest part of the lake and have someone* shoot strategic rituals of various kinds at people we don't like.

Our targets and their allies would have to muscle through a stupid amount of resistance to even try finding them, much less have a go at our actual defenses.

* probably not Harry, though his skills are ideal for this.
 
It's not technically permanent but it has no resource cost, days/success duration, and affects anyone we can touch. We could pass out full immunity to liquid dangers to everyone we care to once a week for free.

The "any harm" clause is also an interesting one for practitioners.

My understanding of how DF wizards work is that when they want to use magic they have to gather their personal internal energy and use it to reach out and either take in power to shape or catalyze a reaction in their environment depending on what they're doing. That's part of what the willpower gathering step is.

The reason casting over water, or worse while dunked under a running source, makes magic difficult or effectively impossible is that it erodes their initial push before it gets anywhere unless you are a water specialist like Listens-To-Wind. In which case you can interact with its power directly.

Which is arguably a source of selective harm if their personal power still counts as connected to the caster.

If you get a primordial blessing that says "liquid is giving you a free pass this week. End of story" does that mean you would get to cast without the penalty as the water refuses to erase your power in passing?

That's an almost evil amount of cheating for a good thaumaturge. We could build a warded base at the bottom of the deepest part of the lake and have someone* shoot strategic rituals of various kinds at people we don't like.

Our targets and their allies would have to muscle through a stupid amount of resistance to even try finding them, much less have a go at our actual defenses.

* probably not Harry, though his skills are ideal for this.

FPH prevents harm from water, not harm from your own magic because you happened to cast it over water. There is a degree of separation in there unfortunately. Now if every time you cast there was a chance that water would rise up and try to drown you, that you would be protected from.
 
FPH prevents harm from water, not harm from your own magic because you happened to cast it over water. There is a degree of separation in there unfortunately. Now if every time you cast there was a chance that water would rise up and try to drown you, that you would be protected from.
Ah well, it was worth asking. The other benefits are well worth it even without that bit of cheating.

Though I am curious if a motivated wizard could build something on top of a charm blessing, or draw on it like Dresden siphoned power from the winter knight mantle in a way it isn't strictly designed to support.
 
Ah well, it was worth asking. The other benefits are well worth it even without that bit of cheating.

Though I am curious if a motivated wizard could build something on top of a charm blessing, or draw on it like Dresden siphoned power from the winter knight mantle in a way it isn't strictly designed to support.

My first instinct would be to say 'no' since the Exaltation would sense something trying to mote-sap it and react like the weapon it is, with extreme force. But if it is just the blessing which has been left there (and there is nothing that says FPH stops rarely if the Exalt is killed which would indicate that it does exist independently) then yeah a wizard could try to use the conceptual power of All-Giver-of-Life-as-Blessed-Poison to power their spells. That said it would take a hell of a mentally resilient wizard to wrap their head around it... and then unwrap it.
 
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[X] She inwardly acknowledges that Thomas has a point and her present disdain for them is in part her attempt to shift blame for what she did to her friends

Not only is this important personal character development of taking responsibility, but the view of drugs as inherently bad has inevitably lead to those in power feeling excused to use very heavy handed measures to stop their use, that are a worse cure than the disease ever was.

Molly was one of those people in power who fucked up, just that power was literal black magic, not the legal/justice system. And she is going to become even more personally powerful and is already in charge of an effective legal system over her minions.

That band-aid excuse needs to be ripped off clean now, with no "buts".

I find any compromise vote unnecessary, because at no point was Thomas saying anything even remotely close to "drugs are cool, you should totally do them."
 
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[X] She inwardly acknowledges that Thomas has a point and her present disdain for them is in part her attempt to shift blame for what she did to her friends
 
[X] She inwardly acknowledges that Thomas has a point and her present disdain for them is in part her attempt to shift blame for what she did to her friends

This seems like good character development. The drugs in Molly's backstory were bad for everyone involved (even if that's not inherently true of all drug usage), but Molly's own choices (made in ignorance) were what made everything go to shit, and emotionally dealing with that seems better for her overall.

Plus, Thomas is right. Killing a bunch of people is way worse than doing some drugs.
 
No, fire regulations don't work like that. You are looking at high voltage regulations, but the fire hazard regulations would be for flammable gases. Plasma itself, at least non-atmospheric plasma (i.e. stuff that's not atmospheric arc discharges) is not considered as a conventional fire hazard. It's important to understand, a typical working pressure of a tokamak is ~ 10^-7 of atmospheric pressure. And the heat that you are quoting is at the core plasma, not the whole volume.

Uh I'll butt in and say something not being a conventional hazard tends to result in "Stop, do not pass go, nobody do fucking anything until I get roughly a gazillion research papers and write ups from the designer about what the hell this is and why the hell I should let it happen."

Oh wait it's something that could be beyond just the scope of fire??? Great time to drag in every other discipline I can even remotely think of being involved in case they see something I don't that could result in vaporizing whatever poor fire crew would have to respond to this.

Like okay I won't say it isn't impossible to befuddle reviewers with bullshit but like everything you've said should cause anyone remotely familiar with typical regulations to realize this is waaaayy beyond what typical codes regulate/protect and thus waaaayyy more dangerous. For me personally I would not be an industrial or plasma safety expert but I see "plasma" and 10^7 atm--which starts approaching numbers where Tons of TNT becomes a better measurement--and start wondering what the hell are you building where. You could argue a reviewer would be ethically obligated to assume the worst.

Seriously "gas regulations can't apply this is plasma :)))" is answered by "great sounds even more dangerous and exotic to the point we don't have standardized ways to mitigate any damage, why the fuck should I not bin this immediately."

Tldr drugs are okay I guess

[X] She inwardly acknowledges that Thomas has a point and her present disdain for them is in part her attempt to shift blame for what she did to her friends
-[X] This, however, doesn't mean that drugs, when defined as addictive substances that cause negative long-term effects on the body and/or mind, are in any way good. She has seen where they can lead people
 
For me personally I would not be an industrial or plasma safety expert but I see "plasma" and 10^7 atm--which starts approaching numbers where Tons of TNT becomes a better measurement--and start wondering what the hell are you building where.
Ten to the minus seventh power, not ten to seventh power. One ten millionth of an atmosphere.
 
[X] She inwardly acknowledges that Thomas has a point and her present disdain for them is in part her attempt to shift blame for what she did to her friends
 
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