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A Vision in Bronze; A Sidereal quest

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MiracleGrow said:
What really throws the entire fight for them is the Twilight getting ganked cause they couldn't take a hit. That tosses out any surprise demons they got hiding in their caste mark and any form of quick battlefield clear.
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As a longtime designated 3e ST (i could count the number of Exalted PCs i've actually *played* on one hand, and three of them would be Dawns or Dawn-equivalents), seeing someone get put in crash and then pinioned by a battlegroup whose damage has suddenly turned lethal gave me an overpowering sense of satisfaction. Not quite Trash Mobs when you've got no Initiative, huh!?

There's a lot that I want to say about this sequence, but I think what might be getting lost in the awesome action are Grace's Ambraea flashbacks. Man... reading those got me misty-eyed.
 
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[x] The rickety walkway, with any misstep threatening to send either of you plunging into the water below


Gazetteer said:
If you actually used it on a real PC, the player would be within their rights to beat you to death with the corebook, but this is the price we must pay, sometimes.
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But what if it's a pdf? Is there a sidereal charm that allows you to beat some fool with the weight of knowledge?
 
Kymme said:
There's a lot that I want to say about this sequence, but I think what might be getting lost in the awesome action are Grace's Ambraea flashbacks. Man... reading those got me misty-eyed.
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Same. I'm really glad it won. From the schoolgirl crush and hug to threatening to take the arm of a servant for striking grace, they were all emotionally charged and interesting moments, and I'm glad we got to see them. Also...
Gazetteer said:
You know of several ways to dislocate someone's arm from this position. You usually aren't tempted to actually use them.
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Gazetteer said:
One of your hands takes her by the shoulder, the other by the spear arm. Then you wrench her arm back and to the side using just enough force to very nearly pop the arm out of joint.
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I guess Grace was a little too tempted afterall.
 
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Randino Treviani said:
Same. I'm really glad it won. From the schoolgirl crush and hug to threatening to take the arm of a servant for striking grace, they were all emotionally charged and interesting moments, and I'm glad we got to see them. Also...
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This! Iam really glad we got to see more of Ambrea from Grace's perspective. And it seems that she blames Ambreas Earth Exaltation for her later emotionnal repression.
Gazetteer said:
You remember Lady Ambraea, an awkward, red-haired ten-year-old, throwing herself down onto her bed in despair. Not yet rendered strangely stoic and serious by her Earth Aspect Exaltation
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But Sola the Air- Asprect was just as badly repressed. Both her and Ambrea were performig the role of "ideal Dynast exalted woman" to sometimes their own detriment.
So maybe Grace is wrong here.
 
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    • Scheduled vote count started by Gazetteer on Dec 17, 2024 at 9:53 AM, finished with 69 posts and 37 votes.
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    • Batatos said:
    This! Iam really glad we got to see more of Ambrea from Grace's perspective. And it seems that she blames Ambreas Earth Exaltation for her later emotionnal repression.
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    Not entirely. Dynastic social norms were always going to dictate how they acted in public to a large degree as they got older.

    However, one of the quirks about Dragon-Blooded Exaltation is that your Aspect isn't selected based on your pre-existing personality or values or talents, it actively changes and shapes who you are. It alters the trajectory of your life and the person you become as part of the puberty/coming of age metaphor it has baked into it. Your Aspect is determined entirely by your parentage and a degree of random chance. If Ambraea had become a Fire Aspect like her mother, she would probably still be recognisably the same person, but she would have grown up to be pretty different. I would have written her as pretty different, if that had won the first vote.

    This is in contrast to Celestial Exaltation. They all work differently from one another, but you get chosen by the Incarnae in a way that reflects who you are. Becoming a Sidereal has changed Grace in certain ways, between Essence fever and the strange lives they lead, but she became a Joybringer because of specific qualities she always had that made her predisposed towards it, destined to Exalt from birth.
     
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    Edit: I know what about ism is the lowest for of moral though but I can't help but be curious...

    As morally outrageous as what the circle is? Was? Planning here was.

    I can't help but wonder what Singular Grace makes of her own factions acts of city destruction. Or the Realms.
     
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    Wait, the Empress is a Fire Aspect in 3e? I mean, it makes more sense than 2e making her an Earth Aspect, what with the name, but it's still interesting to learn.
     
    Ganurath said:
    Wait, the Empress is a Fire Aspect in 3e? I mean, it makes more sense than 2e making her an Earth Aspect, what with the name, but it's still interesting to learn.
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    Yes. A 2e writer made her Earth out of stupid contrarianism - I am completely serious that's all it was - but she was always Fire in 1e and has always been Fire in 3e.
     
    Her Aspect was never explicitly stated anywhere outside of RotSE deciding to be clever, so there's room to say something else, but Fire was the general understanding, especially with how she was written in 1e. This is why the 3e Dragon-Blooded book is called What Fire Has Wrought.

    She was explicitly a Fire Aspect in the Last Daughter, at any rate. It came up a few times.
     
    You know all this with how like Gilgamesh-ian the Solars are, as hero-kings able to see the injustice of the world set down by the Heavens but ultimately struggling to get out of their own heads and personal offended pride, and the grim design of how the Realm structures itself as a vast imperial collection of port-cities and temples and granaries and such and the real costs of breaking an empire, this all makes me really excited for that mentioned Lunar who was allied to the Circle. Someone who can very very easily fight the Realm from within the margins of society and from within the downtrodden masses, and can be Singular Grace's vengeful arch-nemesis.
     
    Gazetteer said:
    If Ambraea had become a Fire Aspect like her mother, she would probably still be recognisably the same person, but she would have grown up to be pretty different. I would have written her as pretty different, if that had won the first vote.
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    Especially different when you factor in that DCP wouldn't be her mentor, and the whole absentee outcast father, rather than the devoted prince of earth prasadi consort.
     
    Being vengeful over stopping people from wiping out an entire city is...

    It would certainly be in character for an immaculate fable.
     
    TBF, this is also some reaaaal police entrapment FBI encouraging you and sending you the materials to make a bomb before busting you for terrorism shit. Without the general connivance of the Bronze Faction Sidereals to arrange for the Circle to get to where Singular Grace can led them to ambush and plan for the last-minute failure of this plot instead of frustrating any notions of it from the beginning, then the Lunar's friends and lover would still be alive and the city would still be just as saved, and the warring factions could have merrily continued to play cat-and-mouse games. The Realm and the Heavenly patrons of the Realm's hegemony decided that seriously endangering their precious civilians was also worth it, solely for the benefit of murdering those this Lunar holds dear.

    That sure sounds like the start of a good grudging to me.

    EDIT: nevermind, it looks like this Circle was already good to go before the Sidereals intervened
     
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    zxzx24 said:
    Being vengeful over stopping people from wiping out an entire city is...

    It would certainly be in character for an immaculate fable.
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    Presumably she would be vengeful over that and Grace personally dispatching her lover Flotsam.
    bookwyrm said:
    That sure sounds like the start of a good grudging to me.
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    Another point to be made is that grace settled on this because she lacked the resources for any kind of elaborate scare the Solar's out of the realm or other options. This is the highest risk, best option for concentration of force approach, and in the end someone more senior than Grace is probably the one that floated it, given she has only 8 years of seniority in an organization with members whose service proceeds the founding of the realm.
     
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    bookwyrm said:
    TBF, this is also some reaaaal police entrapment FBI encouraging you and sending you the materials to make a bomb before busting you for terrorism shit. Without the general connivance of the Bronze Faction Sidereals to arrange for the Circle to get to where Singular Grace can led them to ambush and plan for the last-minute failure of this plot instead of frustrating any notions of it from the beginning, then the Lunar's friends and lover would still be alive and the city would still be just as saved, and the warring factions could have merrily continued to play cat-and-mouse games. The Realm and the Heavenly patrons of the Realm's hegemony decided that seriously endangering their precious civilians was also worth it, solely for the benefit of murdering those this Lunar holds dear.

    That sure sounds like the start of a good grudging to me.
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    If heaven had not intervened, there is a good chance that the Solars would have succeeded here, or been caught by a local Realm response that had less forewarning and was less organised. Grace didn't give them the idea to destroy the city, or encourage them to make a city killing piece of artifice, she just helped to arrange an ambush and made sure they ended up in one.

    She deliberately chose a location that is tactically advantageous, close enough to their goal that something could be improvised if they had to take another route, and away from ordinary people who could be caught in the crossfire. A different person might have had different priorities -- it probably wasn't hard to get the local representatives of the Immaculate Order on board with "let's avoid getting a bunch of mortals caught in the crossfire", even if Peleps might have needed more convincing.
     
    zxzx24 said:
    Edit: I know what about ism is the lowest for of moral though but I can't help but be curious...

    As morally outrageous as what the circle is? Was? Planning here was.

    I can't help but wonder what Singular Grace makes of her own factions acts of city destruction. Or the Realms.
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    Considering Grace literally works for the people who ended the world, she has to be pretty ok with some (high) level of collateral damage to preserve her goals.
     
    Discontinuity said:
    The full extent of the knock-on effects from the vision of bronze is yet to be complete -- we're two apocalypses in on things caused directly by the usurpation, and might be angling for a third here.
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    The Vision of Bronze does not exist in 3e, which this Quest is based on.


    [X] The rickety walkway, with any misstep threatening to send either of you plunging into the water below

    I like this as a basis for a fight scene a lot.
     
    beginning to think this fandom has a lot of strong feelings about sidereals!

    (there is a lot of history and mess there but the conflict in this scene is still I think one of the really strong core engines of the setting's conflicts; the riff of having sidereal spymasters looking critically at a party of solars being Very Player Character about things and seeing them pretty reasonably as a menace is something that was baked into the game from the start, in the ways it took the Returning Hero, Aristocratic Hero, and Old Wizard Mentor archetypes and set them up in this very specific triangle that makes real sense from every corner. this is the good shit. it's going to make this quest a delight even if we have a little to work through as viewers.)
     
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