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Green Flame Rising (Exalted vs Dresden Files)

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Nyarky said:
You know what would make her ritual even harder than fucking with this?
Being right next to her and killing her.
Best way to stop her plan is to stop her plan, not fall for a distraction on the road.
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We have zero idea what her full plans are, or how they are supposed to work.
Dont assume that her plan's success requires her survival.

Summer Lady Aurora's backup plan when her original plan failed in Summer Knight involved dying on the Stone Table.
Dresden's plan in Changes was to have himself assassinated after retrieving his daughter. Deirdre Archleone's plan in Skin Game was to die to give her father the chance to claim the Grail.

Just for one potential contingency, Sandra's death could activate multiple thralls programmed to continue the final couple steps of the plan. Which would be entirely in theme for someone with mind-control magic.
And we'd have no idea who they are.

Hell, her unwilling death at this stage might be used to fuel a summoning ritual as a distraction.
The lady has had six months to plan.

Nyarky said:
Actually, I just thought of a very good reason we shouldn't leave for even a second:

The entropic curse.
Its very nature means that no matter when we leave, no matter how ling we do so, it will be the worst possible time and our allies will need our help at this very instant.

Just kill Sandra, the best crowd control is always death.
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1) Thats not how entropic magic works. If Sandra could cast a spell that powerful, we would already be fucked.
We would attack at the worst possible time, into the strongest possible defenses, and our rolls would be the most awful they could be.

2) Molly has an anti-shaping charm active, and has since last night.
 
uju32 said:
We have zero idea what her full plans are, or how they are supposed to work.
Dont assume that her plan's success requires her survival.

Summer Lady Aurora's backup plan when her original plan failed in Summer Knight involved dying on the Stone Table.
Dresden's plan in Changes was to have himself assassinated after retrieving his daughter. Deirdre Archleone's plan in Skin Game was to die to give her father the chance to claim the Grail.

Just for one potential contingency, Sandra's death could activate multiple thralls programmed to continue the final couple steps of the plan. Which would be entirely in theme for someone with mind-control magic.
And we'd have no idea who they are.

Hell, her unwilling death at this stage might be used to fuel a summoning ritual as a distraction.
The lady has had six months to plan.


1) Thats not how entropic magic works. If Sandra could cast a spell that powerful, we would already be fucked.
We would attack at the worst possible time, into the strongest possible defenses, and our rolls would be the most awful they could be.

2) Molly has an anti-shaping charm active, and has since last night.
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You know that would be true if we didn't have a way to immediately Divine the whole plan from her corpse or rather the scene of us standing over it.
 
[X] Tell Harrowmont to get away from there now
-[X] Have Clippy arrange for an anonymous bomb threat to be made on campus to encourage a rapid evacuation.
 
Degorium said:
You know that would be true if we didn't have a way to immediately Divine the whole plan from her corpse or rather the scene of us standing over it.
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The scene is one focus. Its not granted to be available.
Her body surviving her death isnt something we can take for granted either.
She's had six months to do a lot of plotting.


If at all possible, Id prefer to take her alive.
Not just for the intelligence, or to please Maeve. But also because as we've seen with the Blampires, there are entities who can lay claim to a person's soul after their death.

And as far as I can tell, Sandra is mortal enough that Murder is Meat wont work on her.
 
Even if Sandra's plan continues after her death, it's infinitly easier to unravel a passive plan over one that is actively adjusted in response to your actions.

See it like playing a a game, do you want to play against the good AI, that reacts to what you are doing, or against the one following a pre-programmed script?
 
Artemis1992 said:
Even if Sandra's plan continues after her death, it's infinitly easier to unravel a passive plan over one that is actively adjusted in response to your actions.

See it like playing a a game, do you want to play against the good AI, that reacts to what you are doing, or against the one following a pre-programmed script?
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Will it be static? Like I said, she's been a mind-control happy agent thats been here for almost six months.

Can she do a limited personality engram/overlay on her thralls? Its not like she cares what happens to them afterwards.
I know its canon that the Stygian Sisterhood, also called the Ladies of the Dark from the Thomas POV short story Backup could do something similar, and modded themselves that way.
Backup said:
"You know about the Prosthanos Society?" I asked.
"Buncha lunatics in the Baltic region," Bob replied immediately. "They lop off their bits and pieces and replace them with grafts from inhuman sources. Demons and ghouls and such. Patchwork immortality."
I nodded. "The Stygian Sisterhood does the same thing—only with their psyches instead of with their physical bodies. They slice out the parts of their human personalities they don't want, and replace them with pieces torn from inhuman minds."
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I just dont know enough to be able to make a reasonable estimation of Sandra's capabilities.
But the Stygians worshipped demon-goddess/Old Ones too, and the one we see onscreen ultimately didnt show anything on the scale of what we've seen Sandra do in this quest thus far.
 
uju32 said:
Will it be static? Like I said, she's been a mind-control happy agent thats been here for almost six months.

Can she do a limited personality engram/overlay on her thralls? Its not like she cares what happens to them afterwards.
I know its canon that the Stygian Sisterhood, also called the Ladies of the Dark from the Thomas POV short story Backup could do something similar, and modded themselves that way.
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I mean, even a plan engraved in mind-controlled thralls is still pretty static compared to one guided and adjusted by a willing mind behind it.

If we stop any of Sandra's actions right now, be it one of her little act of terrorism or whatever is in that hole, then she can continue on the main-project and likely adjust for the failure.
Once she is dead there will be no more adjustments, just the plan running on until it is derailed or succeeded.
 
Artemis1992 said:
I mean, even a plan engraved in mind-controlled thralls is still pretty static compared to one guided and adjusted by a willing mind behind it.

If we stop any of Sandra's actions right now, be it one of her little act of terrorism or whatever is in that hole, then she can continue on the main-project and likely adjust for the failure.
Once she is dead there will be no more adjustments, just the plan running on until it is derailed or succeeded.
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The time frame is too short for it to matter.
If I put a snapshot of a person's personality to run on new hardware, I'd expect them to make pretty much the same decisions under the same conditions for the first week.

Wont have the same magical capabilities of course, but I expect skills would carry over.

===
And like I said, she's apparently mortal enough that MiM doesnt apply to her.
If her patrons are paying attention, given what the Archive said about being killed then interrogated its entirely feasible that they grab her and stuff her back into another mortal body.

After all, both Abyssals and Solars can do it.

Non-zero possibility that its happened before, and that Sandra isnt the young to early middle age woman she appears to be.
In which case I really want to take her alive.
AND prevent her from suiciding. If she gets the chop, let it be somewhere they can make sure she passes on.
 
The worst case scenario is that whatever it is that is set to break the local Outer Gates open is on a deadman's switch. Because if so, chances are we'll have to contend with the Outsider and an Abyssal Sandra. Yes, right out of chargen, but how long do you think her patrons need to boost her power post-exaltation?
 
One thing you guys might want to consider is what to do with the mid level white court vampire and the mortal sorcerer of significant, but highly specialized skill. I mean they would not do to well in the tunnels.

Anyway, good night guys, see you tomorrow with more not-so hidden war in Sin City

Yog said:
The worst case scenario is that whatever it is that is set to break the local Outer Gates open is on a deadman's switch. Because if so, chances are we'll have to contend with the Outsider and an Abyssal Sandra. Yes, right out of chargen, but how long do you think her patrons need to boost her power post-exaltation?
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The Abyssal shard appears to have landed in the South Pacific. It is Molly's hope at least that no one meddled with that and she has not sensed anything like that in her immediate vicinity.
 
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Artemis1992 said:
I don't think a detour like that will stay at literal minutes.
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Given how just briefing our fireteams already took way more time than what uju told, seriously doubt it too.

uju32 said:
We have zero idea what her full plans are, or how they are supposed to work.
Dont assume that her plan's success requires her survival.
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That way lies shadowrunning and never doing anything for fear of running into one of her *contingency*.
 
DragonParadox said:
One thing you guys might want to consider is what to do with the mid level white court vampire and the mortal sorcerer of significant, but highly specialized skill. I mean they would not do to well in the tunnels.
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Get Mutt to guard Mr Adkin, and get mr Adkin to investigate physical evidence to support information to the Library to help with the cover up?
 
Here's a particularly stupid idea: have our cyber devils attack the emergency broadcast infrastructure for Las Vegas
And then use that to hit the entire damn city with Molly's social suite as she urges the population towards faith and camaraderie and temperance in the face of chaos
 
Sandra is a high enough level agent of the Outsiders that they where willing to prevent Harry Dresden from being able to track her, despite having good quality links. That is not a minor thing, its no selling a wizard in their personal specialized magical skills.

She could well be their biggest agent on the entire continent. Find her Kill her and use her corpse to unravel all their plots.
 
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mastigos said:
Here's a particularly stupid idea: have our cyber devils attack the emergency broadcast infrastructure for Las Vegas
And then use that to hit the entire damn city with Molly's social suite as she urges the population towards faith and camaraderie and temperance in the face of chaos
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Unfortunately that would likely be an expression roll. Unless we are declaring our dominance of the city then it would be leadership.
 
[X] Go alone with Rendered Villain Dispersal
-[X] Tell Harrowmont to get out of there immediately and you'll meet him outside the room/building
-[X] Crown question: Focus boiler room scene: Significance/connection of this to Sandra's plans

Yog said:
Does this still hold for this iteration of Creation?
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Nope. Our nostalgic instincts have thought about how everything down to individual snowflakes used to have their own spirit/god, and we noticed the difference with how things are now. I'm pretty sure it was when we made Bane that we thought about it.
 
I think we need to max out fortune sorcery if this is the scale of the challanges we are going to face.

Because frankly our charms aren't strong enough to help us here. We need to master at leart a few diciplines of magic.

Summoning and warding for our troops, fortune, mana and divination.

We are not equipped to deal with mass magical warfare at its current level right now.


How much does it cost for an exalted to equire 5 dots in a path.

Also martial arts. One of the players in my game used thousands blades and got like 10 extra attacks.
 
Acolyte said:
We are not equipped to deal with mass magical warfare at its current level right now.
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We kinda are.

We can't play the big ritual game, but we can personally resist damn near everything and just cut through things until we get at the ritual caster, who is in 99% of cases no match for us in close combat.

Molly is not Merlin, but she is the Terminator who can also call on a bunch more cyborgs for aid.
 
Degorium said:
34 XP for five dot paths for us. 44 XP for everyone else.
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Whats our EXP haul looking like this arc??
Artemis1992 said:
We kinda are.



We can't play the big ritual game, but we can personally resist damn near everything and just cut through things until we get at the ritual caster, who is in 99% of cases no match for us in close combat.



Molly is not Merlin, but she is the Terminator who can also call on a bunch more cyborgs for aid.
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Our personal invulnerability doesn't help our goals.

We need strategic capabilities
 
Acolyte said:
Our personal invulnerability doesn't help our goals.

We need strategic capabilities
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We can definitely leverage our personal power into strategic impact.
We don't have to be good at everything, just find a way to play to our strengths.

Our current strengths include personal combat power and extremely good maneuverability.
So using those to get to the person using strategic rituals and murdering them is an excellent solution, if we could stop falling for distractions.
 
Artemis1992 said:
We don't have to be good at everything, just find a way to play to our strengths.
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We do tho, we are evidently floundering before strategic magic right here.
Artemis1992 said:
Our current strengths include personal combat power and extremely good maneuverability.
So using those to get to the person using strategic rituals and murdering them is an excellent solution, if we could stop falling for distractions
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Those distraction cost peoples lives. It would be better if we could bless the entire city with good luck in retaliation.
 
Acolyte said:
Those distraction cost peoples lives. It would be better if we could bless the entire city with good luck in retaliation.
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Abstractly yes, it would be better if we had a perfect counter for everything an enemy with a year time to set up could throw at us and our environment.

But that's not realistic, this is a game, not the story of Molly winning everything forever.
So losses, like those we accept by going after the primary target, are inevitable.
 
Artemis1992 said:
Abstractly yes, it would be better if we had a perfect counter for everything an enemy with a year time to set up could throw at us and our environment.

But that's not realistic, this is a game, not the story of Molly winning everything forever.
So losses, like those we accept by going after the primary target, are inevitable.
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It's not so much that it's just that we never seem to actually go after the primary target anytime any kind of diversion presents itself immediately we have to go do it rather than telling anyone or even just saving it until the primary threat is dealt with.

The lost lives sting especially hard because we just are incapable of dealing with large-scale magic and never actually move towards killing the thing projecting it or a very least guiding it even now I think we might still not be moving towards Sandra we're going to go on a diversion to a hole in the ground that is definitely going to be either a 3-minute distraction or 6 hours of work with no in between either we fill it in with concrete using our craft charm or that is going to be something we're going to be dealing with until fucking sunrise.
 
Artemis1992 said:
Abstractly yes, it would be better if we had a perfect counter for everything an enemy with a year time to set up could throw at us and our environment.

But that's not realistic, this is a game, not the story of Molly winning everything forever.
So losses, like those we accept by going after the primary target, are inevitable.
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No i accept that. I just want to be prepared the next time. It is a game and we do need to be challenged but it would be a deliberate handicap for us not do do anything to protect us from an avenue of attack. Its lazy. And its not like getting the sorcery path would trivilize the challenge, we would just be equivalent at best, probably worse, than our current enemies.

[X] Tell Harrowmont to get away from there now
-[X] Have Clippy arrange for an anonymous bomb threat to be made on campus to encourage a rapid evacuation.
 
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