Green Flame Rising (Exalted vs Dresden Files)

"Ahem," Peabody sounded peeved, not the usual reaction to four Wardens leveling their swords. "Kill me and poor Aleron goes with me, I linked my life force to his. Now of course if any of you feel like unpicking a life weave where the merest error could kill you are welcome to attempt it."
So how does one go about unpicking a life weave? Now obviously main Molly can manage it with ancient sorcery Sapphire Ritual of Exorcism and a hour, but I am hoping for a better option.
 
Last edited:
Lydia thinks they're Black Court vampires made through necromancy. But Lydia has low Occult.

Arawn was there when Lydia met Nathan Cobbler in Vegas, and as far as we are aware, he didnt freak out over that.
So given as he is explicitly freaking out worse over this than anything before?
I get the impression that whatver this is, its worse than a vampire.
I think he's talking about the Author's Note at the end.
Yeah, @BoredMan has it. This is what I meant:

OOC: Not going to lie, I was stocked when you guys decided to send Lydia down to deal with the tremors. Peabody's been a busy boy. What's worse than a fake vampire attack? A real one... of the worse vampires made from old bones that shouldn't from the Council's understanding of necromancy be able to do that. Of course the Council's understanding of necromancy is much like that of mind magic, hindered by the Laws.

They're vampires made with necromancy.
"Ahem," Peabody sounded peeved, not the usual reaction to four Wardens leveling their swords. "Kill me and poor Aleron goes with me, I linked my life force to his. Now of course if any of you feel like unpicking a life weave where the merest error could kill you are welcome to attempt it."
The description of the setup doesn't make clear where he is in this scene. He's a senior council member so it seems like containing Aleron should be noticeable.
 
The description of the setup doesn't make clear where he is in this scene. He's a senior council member so it seems like containing Aleron should be noticeable.

You cannot see him.... though the Sight should be able to follow the connection.

So how does one go about unpicking a life weave? Now obviously main Molly can manage it with ancient sorcery Sapphire Ritual of Exorcism and a hour, but I am hoping for a better option.

You can do it with Entropic magic (water magic as the council says it) but it's risky.
 
"Ahem," Peabody sounded peeved, not the usual reaction to four Wardens leveling their swords. "Kill me and poor Aleron goes with me, I linked my life force to his. Now of course if any of you feel like unpicking a life weave where the merest error could kill you are welcome to attempt it."
This is what I meant earlier about this not being canon Peabody. He certainly didn't display life force linking capabilities in the books.
 
I am more interested in / worried about "daughter of dust" and "true self" comments. Because "Lydia is a result of Kemmler messing with Abyssal exaltation(s)" is still my go-to theory of what she is.
Well, the alternative is that it is one of those Exaltation shards that allow you to build new custom exalts. It was just build by necromancy and Neverborns, not by the gods of Creation.
 
Sophia has paint with flesh doesn't she? We don't have to kill him to make him harmless if she can get ahold of him.

The dice on this aren't the greatest, but it's worth considering how Lydia could potentially disrupt things here:
Authority of the Psychopomp (•)
The Exigent is clad in the mantle of Authority over the dead, they respect and fear her instincivly.
System: Whenever the Exigent deals with a restless dead (both ghosts and physical dead such as Black Court Vampires), she permanently reduces the difficulty of all social actions (including the activation roll of powers to suborn the will of such creatures) by two.

Command the Dead (•)
Exerting the combined pressure of Essence and will, the Exigent may order the bodies of the fallen to stand and do her bidding.
System: The player spends 1 Essence and rolls Charisma + Leadership. If attempting to usurp control of a zombie or similar mindless corpse-servant from another necromancer, the difficulty is the controlling character's Willpower. If attempting to exhort a corpse to stand up and serve her, the difficulty is 6. A zombie created or commandeered with this Charm will obey the Exigent's commands to the best of its very limited abilities. Zombies animated by Command the Dead lose their animation after one cycle of the moon unless stationed within a Dragon Nest, whose power may sustain them indefinitely

These guys aren't mindless, but they are bound to the control of a necromancer. If she's allowed to attempt to steal Peabody's end of the binding it almost doesn't matter if it works, he can't afford to let her sit there and try. Which puts him in a nasty predicament where he's got to juggle losing control of some very nasty monsters, Sophia trying to Cronenberg him, and the Wardens breaking his toys.
 
Sophia has paint with flesh doesn't she? We don't have to kill him to make him harmless if she can get ahold of him.
Ah the old "He only mostly dead." Or "You would be surprised what you can live though" Actually Morgan likely has a few dozen techniques like that considering that he has been bringing in warlocks without killing with magic for over a hundred years.
 
I am more interested in / worried about "daughter of dust" and "true self" comments. Because "Lydia is a result of Kemmler messing with Abyssal exaltation(s)" is still my go-to theory of what she is.
My theory is still that her mother was an earth caste dragon blooded and Lydia's exaltation was given the opportunity to take a lot of power because Arawn's portfolio provided a link between its themes and a straw stuck into a functionally endless well of death energy.

I mean, terrestrial exaltations are still exaltations. Leaving them alone with claimable power is like leaving a golden retriever with a plate of freshly cooked bacon. They just have a harder time of it than solars because they're weaker and work on narrower concepts.

I strongly believe that it should be full stop impossible for someone to just recreate an exaltation. Not from making powerful blessings or attempting something similar, but full fat exaltation is a primeval miracle and it cheapens the whole concept if they can just be recreated by something short of that.

The guy was good, but nobody should be that good. Even if for some reason it was possible, Kemmler's actions are important history to the setting. If he had exaltations to play with he would've done things differently and the setting wouldn't be the same.

Kemmler somehow cracking the code, then only using it to Rube Goldberg an exalt into existence as a child of someone who hates him most of a mortal lifetime after he had finally died would be nonsensical multiple times over.

Accidentally setting things up for a budding terrestrial exaltation to learn how to do the cosmic power version of this makes way more sense:

 
My theory is still that her mother was an earth caste dragon blooded and Lydia's exaltation was given the opportunity to take a lot of power because Arawn's portfolio provided a link between its themes and a straw stuck into a functionally endless well of death energy.

I mean, terrestrial exaltations are still exaltations. Leaving them alone with claimable power is like leaving a golden retriever with a plate of freshly cooked bacon. They just have a harder time of it than solars because they're weaker and work on narrower concepts.

I strongly believe that it should be full stop impossible for someone to just recreate an exaltation. Not from making powerful blessings or attempting something similar, but full fat exaltation is a primeval miracle and it cheapens the whole concept if they can just be recreated by something short of that.

The guy was good, but nobody should be that good. Even if for some reason it was possible, Kemmler's actions are important history to the setting. If he had exaltations to play with he would've done things differently and the setting wouldn't be the same.

Kemmler somehow cracking the code, then only using it to Rube Goldberg an exalt into existence as a child of someone who hates him most of a mortal lifetime after he had finally died would be nonsensical multiple times over.

Accidentally setting things up for a budding terrestrial exaltation to learn how to do the cosmic power version of this makes way more sense:

I also don't think he was able to create an exaltation from scratch. However I can buy him figuring out the process analogous to how solars were turned into abyssals, but for a dragonblooded exaltation. As to his activities... We don't really know his motivations to judge what and why he did and didn't do.
 
[X] Shoot Peabody with an electrolaser set to stun

[X] Re-Kill the talking corpses while they were busy trying to tempt the kid to the Dark Side


I am not sure how serious I am with the first vote. Harry should have the gun, and I am fairly sure it can be set to stun. And Peabody is unlikely to be prepared for it. Plus, this is an opportunity for Harry to pull off an Indiana Jones impression.
 
[X] Shoot Peabody with an electrolaser set to stun

[X] Re-Kill the talking corpses while they were busy trying to tempt the kid to the Dark Side
 
I also don't think he was able to create an exaltation from scratch. However I can buy him figuring out the process analogous to how solars were turned into abyssals, but for a dragonblooded exaltation. As to his activities... We don't really know his motivations to judge what and why he did and didn't do.
Why? The people who modified exaltations without a kit provided by Autobot to do so were all primordials. This is firmly out of the scope of mortal anything.

You're talking about looking at an exaltation deeply enough to understand the internal mechanics, reverse engineering how it was changed from a hypothetical state he'd never actually seen and almost no lore exists on, understanding how that change works well enough to generalize a tool from it, then copying the actions of primordials to force the change on an exaltation.

Which he'd have had to hunt down and trap, before modifying it to lay dormant in a god and pass to mortal children he had no way to know would actually be born.

Worth remembering what DP said about Ancient Sorcery:
Mortals, like plain old vanilla humans? No, non-Exalted supernatural beings, maybe. The thing is unlike mortal magic Ancient Socery starts from the premise of 'I have authority over this thing of my own intrinsic nature' and then continue with *hacks the N patches ago source code of the universe*. Putting power behind one of those things as a mortal wizard will kill you, both might just write you out of existence. Now could some unseen genius have found a way around that technically... again maybe. It would take a lot of time, a lot of skill and no small amount of luck.

It is not something you guys should even anticipate teaching a mortal.

Just the entry level of simplest related tools is so horrifically dangerous and difficult that it might not technically be impossible, but a willing Solaroid who knows how to do it and a good amount about mortal magic besides couldn't make it happen even with strenuous effort.

Getting to the part where he could consider trying to start at an initial study of this is three to five sublime miracles past the edge of mortal ability.

Appealing to not knowing his motives is a poorly grounded argument. Not having contradicting evidence is different than having actual support. Given what we know about what he did and when it makes no sense for him to have done this if he had the ability to do so. We'd have to learn something that turns the whole situation on its head for any of this to even begin making sense.

Especially since the disciples Kemmler actually cared about have seen Lydia. Corpsetaker rode around in her head and didn't react anything like they would have if she'd been that sort of Kemmler project.
 
Why? The people who modified exaltations without a kit provided by Autobot to do so were all primordials. This is firmly out of the scope of mortal anything.
This is pretty firmly not true. The only primordial that ever actually pioneered anything to do with exultation is Auto every other primordial 'engineer' is cribbing off of exalted work (Yozi & Neverborn) Or in the case of the neverborn, just acting as a battery, while the ghost of the exalted, actually do the work.

The exalted are pretty much the only group that has a stable population of people that can mess with exaltations. From solar ghosts, being able to build N/A artifacts able to contain them. To the Lunar exalted being able to break the castes. Never mind The starborn's construction of the Jade prison.
 
Last edited:
If Lydia's exaltation is the result of a modified exaltation then I doubt that it was something done on purpose. More likely a Exaltation spends few eons in the land of the dead or something and chances it flavor.
 
This is pretty firmly not true. The only primordial that ever actually pioneered anything to do with exultation is Auto every other primordial 'engineer' is cribbing off of exalted work (Yozi & Neverborn) Or in the case of the neverborn, just acting as a battery, while the ghost of the exalted, actually do the work.

The exalted are pretty much the only group that has a stable population of people that can mess with exaltations. From solar ghosts, being able to build N/A artifacts able to contain them. To the lunar exulted, being able to break the castes. Never mind The starborn's construction of the Jade prison.
What are you talking about? The Solars tried to mess with their exaltations but never managed to. I've never seen anything that implies the Yozi or Neverborn copied exalted homework to make their servants.

Trapping an exaltation in place is not the same thing at all as remaking one in your own image.
 
What are you talking about? The Solars tried to mess with their exaltations but never managed to. I've never seen anything that implies the Yozi or Neverborn copied exalted homework to make their servants.

Trapping an exaltation in place is not the same thing at all as remaking one in your own image.
The Fallen primordials selfish and uncreative beings one and all were unwilling to pay the price, unwilling to do the work to make the exaltations greater hell they weren't even willing to form the alternate exaltations themselves.

Black Mirror Revelation
Cost: —
Mins: Occult 5, Essence 4
Type: Permanent
Keywords: Avatar (1), Mirror (Unconquered Hero's Faith)
Duration: Permanent
Prerequisite Charms: Labyrinth Circle Necromancy or Occult Essence Flow

This grim Charm was originally developed by ambitious Solars in the final years of the First Age. Frustrated by dead-ending in their study of necromancy at the Labyrinth Circle, they recklessly attempted to forge onward. Those researchers never did break through to the Void Circle. Instead, they found… something else.
This Charm permits a Solar to learn and use Abyssal Charms as though she were an Eclipse Caste. Additionally, she may accept a point of Limit to activate the Abyssal Mirror of a Solar Charm she knows, with the same limitations as Unconquered Hero's Faith (see The Manual of Exalted Power—The Abyssals, pp. 140-141). As a final side effect, she is guaranteed to linger as a ghost after death, rather than passing on into Lethe.
The Charm's Avatar keyword indicates that the character must possess the Whispers Background at a rating of at least one dot to learn this Charm. Black Mirror Revelation may be learned only through meditation within the depths of the Labyrinth. In the First Age, its only acceptable prerequisite was Labyrinth Circle Necromancy. In the Second Age, perhaps due to the actualization of the Abyssal Exalted, Solars find it easier to let the whispers of the Neverborn guide them to a core of dark power nestled within themselves, and may also use Occult Essence Flow as an alternate prerequisite.
This Charm may never be learned by non-Solar Exalted under any circumstances. As a point of clarification, its Abyssal Mirror, Unconquered Hero's Faith, may never be learned or used by any character who possesses Immortal Malevolence Enslavement.
Furthermore, Deathlords are incapable of learning Unconquered Hero's Faith or any other Charm based upon fundamental elements of Abyssal Exaltation.

Primordial Principle Emulation
Cost: —
Mins: Occult 6, Essence 6
Type: Permanent
Keywords: None
Duration: Permanent
Prerequisite Charms: Solar Circle Sorcery

This bizarre Charm was innovated in the High First Age by the Solar Queen K'tula. After warping her body into a cephalopod horror through sorcerous manipulation, she found that she could not innovate new Solar Charms that acknowledged the terrible, inhuman capabilities of her new form. Pressing at the outer boundaries of sorcerous understanding, however, she was able to discern a set of cosmological principles more amenable to the thing she had become: the acrid Essence-flows of Kimbery.
Upon learning this Charm, the character names a single Yozi. She can henceforth learn and use that Yozi's Charms as though she were a member of the Eclipse Caste, save that she needs no tutor. Primordial Principle Emulation may be purchased a total number of times equal to (Essence – 5), with each purchase covering a different Yozi. The character gains a point of Limit the first time she invokes any Yozi Charm within the scope of a scene. The Yozis are aware of this Charm, having used certain of its principles to help guide the formation of their Green Sun Princes. It has historically pleased them to dispatch their Solar akuma to suppress knowledge of the Charm. The Ebon Dragon especially enjoys the bitter regret of his gilded slaves when they realize they bartered away their souls needlessly.
Thanks to the taint of the Great Curse upon their Exaltation, Solars may use this Charm only to unlock the secrets of the mutilated lords of Malfeas. It is possible that a Solar who was somehow cleansed of the Great Curse could also unlock the principles of non-Yozi Primordials. Thankfully, the Abyssal Exalted and their Deathlord masters have never discovered a Charm building off Void Circle Necromancy to gain access to the magics of the slumbering Neverborn. The most well-informed gods of the Division of Secrets hope such a thing proves impossible.
This Charm may never be learned by non-Solar Exalted under any circumstances.
This before the fact that the Yozi are eternally sore losers incapable of the feats of creation they could perform before their imprisonment ant the Neverborn are literally an incoherent pile of wailing corpses screaming eternally in agony nearly incapable of doing any thing other begging for the pain to stop.
 
This before the fact that the Yozi are eternally sore losers incapable of the feats of creation they could perform before their imprisonment ant the Neverborn are literally an incoherent pile of wailing corpses screaming eternally in agony nearly incapable of doing any thing other begging for the pain to stop.
Weird charm errata that contradicts everything prior to it is shaky ground to stand on for this sort of argument. Especially since those charms were clearly added to let solar players use mechanics from other solaroids with a poorly considered hand wave.

Even if you accept that premise, solars imitating primordials in various ways isn't the same thing as re-engineering an exaltation. The exalted made charms based on what they saw around them all the time, very rarely did that actually mean anything to their successor. Neither of those two charms appear to be one of those exceptions.

This is the difference between seeing someone dive into the water and successfully developing a gene therapy to turn them into a mermaid.
 
Weird charm errata that contradicts everything prior to it is shaky ground to stand on for this sort of argument. Especially since those charms were clearly added to let solar players use mechanics from other solaroids with a poorly considered hand wave.

Even if you accept that premise, solars imitating primordials in various ways isn't the same thing as re-engineering an exaltation. The exalted made charms based on what they saw around them all the time, very rarely did that actually mean anything to their successor. Neither of those two charms appear to be one of those exceptions.

This is the difference between seeing someone dive into the water and successfully developing a gene therapy to turn them into a mermaid.
You Are the one making assumptions about who made what those are mainline charms, not Corrections, or against any previous sentiment about the line. You just don't like it, which is fine, but yeah, please don't pretend it's anything other than that.

Never mind the fact, it's explicit that the death lords are solar ghosts that Possessed. Black Mirror revelation and made both the Montranses and the Abyssals With no input from the Neverborn beyond using them as batteries.
 
You Are the one making assumptions about who made what those are mainline charms, not Corrections, or against any previous sentiment about the line. You just don't like it, which is fine, but yeah, please don't pretend it's anything other than that.

Never mind the fact, it's explicit that the death lords are solar ghosts that Possessed. Black Mirror revelation and made both the Montranses and the Abyssals With no input from the Neverborn beyond using them as batteries.
Binding an exaltation isn't modifying one, so the monstrances are tangentially relevant at best. Even then the primordials clearly did a lot to expand on the original concept in multiple ways. I'm also skeptical of the idea that the Abyssals were a purely Deathlord design.

For one thing, they operate very similarly to how the deathlords themselves are built, and the Neverborn designed that on their own. For another, the solar ghosts that cut those deals could not modify their exaltations prior to making them and I don't see a source about how precisely the design process worked for the spells actually used to perform the ceremony.

It looks to me like the deathlords are reproducing what the Neverborn did to them and getting away with it for the same reasons Autobot's Alchemical pit crews do - they're leaning hard on the backing of a primordial's essence and involvement to make things work.

More relevant to the actual point we were discussing; a mortal wizard living in the post-post-post-post apocalypse isn't the ghost of a first age Solar with equipment re-engineered by primordials to facilitate a ritual their patrons will actively back.
 
Back
Top