A Vision in Bronze; A Sidereal quest

[X] [Hari] Offer a painful truth that focuses on the positive
[X] [Info] Another Sidereal, whom you do not particularly like

That was a great time loop sequence!

[X] [Hari] Offer a painful truth that focuses on the positive
[X] [Info] Another Sidereal, whom you do not particularly like

Varder said:

People who know this setting, are we also the bad guys here? As in our faction, I mean.

As far as I managed to figure out, we're protecting an evil (?) Empire that does some bad stuff. And we do this because not doing so will lead to more deaths. And we care about this because we have a Plan for this realm?

But most of that was from a throw away comment of an ambushed enemy combatant on his last legs, so I don't particularly trust that.

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There isn't a clear "yes, this is the heroic faction" in Exalted. The Scarlet Empire, which is backed by the Bronze Faction of Sidereals (which includes Grace and which lends the quest its name), is a 'default' antagonist of most types of Exalts and many Exalted games. The Scarlet Empire (or the Realm, same place, different terms) is an evil empire, but it's not an empire which is evil. It's evil because it's an empire, and empires universally do evil things.

The Bronze Faction and the Realm, then, are never going to be spotless heroes. They aren't wholly without merit, though: they protect and educate and offer a society that countless mortals grow up in, relatively safe and happy and fulfilled compared to many other places in the setting. They fight other types of Exalts who have a strong tendency to be worse. Those Solars in the opening sequence? Cast it in a slightly more positive light, and you've got a fairly standard circle of Exalted PCs (Solars being the default splat to play) and several of them are, like, reasonably well-known archetypes. Even when not PCs, they have a tendency to have grand, sweeping plans that can end in untold misery for vast amounts of people. This was a reason why the Solars were defeated in antiquity: they always acted like this, and Sidereals and others decided to settle on a world that is "lesser, but safe". You won't have self-righteous unstoppable generals doing a massive war, you won't have inhuman sorcerers calling forth great demon-princes to handle comparatively small whims, and other lovely issues. And as for Lunars? They kill people specifically to eat their hearts and steal their appearance! They're monsters in a very clear sense, and one that many of them outright embrace.

If that's the alternatives, isn't it better to have a peaceful Realm ruled by a more normal aristocracy?

It's not hard to say "no", and in fact for most Exalted media, that's the default assumption. This isn't the land of Dark Lords and hordes of faceless stormtroopers who probably sprang out of holes in the ground, but it is bad. Do its merits outweigh its flaws? Is overturning it worth the loss of the thousands or millions who would die seeking another status quo? Maybe it gets tilted one way or the other when someone close to you is threatened by one side or the other of the argument. That's kind of what it is for Grace. The Realm is useful, and it's where people she loves, like the previous quest's protagonist Ambraea, came from and live in. This is an empire that does bad stuff, but would a tumult replace it with a less bad empire? Unclear. Even if it were clear, is it worth that human cost? Grace says no, at least so far.

Grace is far from a villain protagonist, but the antagonists of this quest have paradigms that aren't wrong, either. That's what makes Exalted fun!

Varder said:

People who know this setting, are we also the bad guys here? As in our faction, I mean.

As far as I managed to figure out, we're protecting an evil (?) Empire that does some bad stuff. And we do this because not doing so will lead to more deaths. And we care about this because we have a Plan for this realm?

But most of that was from a throw away comment of an ambushed enemy combatant on his last legs, so I don't particularly trust that.

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What can I possibly say that Mothematics has not already covered?

But, basically, the Sidereal Fractional divide, as it is currently written about, comes down to the politically dominant Bronze Faction trying to preserve the status quo that they've been working to uphold for centuries, versus the Gold Faction opposition attempting to oppose it.

That status quo is a strong, Dragon-Blooded ruled empire at the centre of the world, dominating and influencing the largest part of Creation through martial, economic, and religious means. Setting things up this way allows the Bureau of Destiny to plan and manage things more easily. It is intended to create less chaos and instability than you would otherwise have in the world. Planning and successfully executing on these things is important for the regular function of the world -- it reinforces the natural laws that govern Creation, and bad things happen if it goes ignored for too long.

This is a position that comes with some very deep moral compromises. The Realm is, as mentioned, evil in the sense that all empires are evil. It wages wars of conquest, it imposes its culture and religion hegemony onto its satrapies, it extracts wealth and resources from those same satrapies, it enslaves people and destroys lives. This is, to varying degrees, the norm for Creation -- slavery and forced labour in various forms are ubiquitous, and would not go away tomorrow if the Realm vanished. Monarchies and other authoritarian forms of government are the norm. Smaller empires are found all over Creation, doing all the things that empires have always done. The difference between them and the Realm is scale, rather than kind, though, and the Realm's crimes are something that the Bronze Faction is complicit in.

What the Gold Faction wants and ideologically believes in varies from Sidereal to Sidereal, and they are far less top down unified than the Bronze Faction, but they are a coalition that is more or less united in wanting to do away with the way things are, currently on an upswing in power and influence due to the chaos that is affecting the setting at the moment with the disappearance of the Scarlet Empress, the return of the Solar Exalted, and other unexpected events.

Grace was born in the Realm. She was raised there among their values and their religious beliefs, and spent most of her life in service to a Dynastic lady in some capacity. To her, the Realm is messy and imperfect, but it is her home, in a fundamental sense. The people of the Realm are her people, and she cannot bear a course of action that would seek to destroy it. This is also a moral compromise, and it's one that I've tried to have characters who disagree with this call her out on already, but I feel like it's a legible stance for a woman of her background to hold.

Part of the fun of running a Bronze Faction quest, for me, is that the Bronze Faction is one of the most powerful groups of antagonists and villains in the setting, from the perspective of most Exalted stories that focus on the Solar and Lunar Exalted. And how despite this, how closely they realistically work with their Gold Faction colleagues day to day, when Gold Faction Sidereals are so often allies, mentors, or even friends to the PCs in Solar stories.

[x] [Hari] Offer a painful truth that focuses on the positive
[x] [Info] A god from your own Division, whom you hate, but who holds a mutual interest with you in this matter

[X] [Hari] Offer a painful truth that focuses on the positive
[X] [Info] Another Sidereal, whom you do not particularly like

I want to see Grace being professionally catty to someone.

And I think encouraging Hari to try and embrace her family is a very interesting direction. Maybe not the wisest, but very interesting. And I like the idea that while it's painful to Grace at times, she definitely doesn't regret her mother being her.

Everybody has already praised the way you presented Emerald Gyre training, but let me join them. I particularly liked the detail of Grace fastidiously keeping track of the days, even as she spent some of that time zooted off her ass. And by Venus we have to get high with Saphiria we can't just leave her hanging in a timeloop.

Ganurath said:

There's always an ending.

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See this is actually what I was talking about when I voted Gyre: the Scripture of Eternity has a very very pointed intertextuality with the Scripture of the Expectant Maiden, corresponding to the Constellation of the Sword: Both deal with imprisoned maidens; One a maiden that never escaped, and the other one that will escape. They both deal with the concept of dreams and hope in a carcelary or stagnant context, but where one treats them as a form of escapism from the futility of escape she already knows; the other presents them as the inescapable prison itself, and therefore a source of illumination on the nature of her actions and limitations. And at the end of the Scripture of Eternity, Time reprises its role to fundamentally contradict the lesson it gave in the Scripture of the Expectant Maiden, and instead give a greater revelation.

The Scripture of the Expectant Maiden said:

Once, there was a maiden…
…who was always looking forward to the way things would be.
She said, "Someday, I'm getting out of this place."
"Someday, I'm going to kill that boy that put me here."
"And while I wait, I don't much mind,"
"'cause it's better to dream tomorrow than to be there."
"I'm holding at bay," she said, "what I know to be true."
"That I'll never get out. I won't let my dreams die!"
"I'll hang on to hope," she said, "until Time itself ends. But—"
"There's always an ending," said Time.

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The fact that the transcendent wisdom of the Sidereal Martial Arts can surpass or at least fall beyond the range of the wisdom and purview of their patrons is something that I consider fundamentally fascinating and very telling of the worth of the Exalted.

As for the vote itself:

[X] [Hari] Offer a painful truth as a cautionary tale
[X] [Info] A god from your own Division, whom you hate, but who holds a mutual interest with you in this matter

Unlike Lohna, Hari's children are at the start of their lives, and they are not in a position where they would trust or submit [for lack of a better word] to a superior. Her access to them is gonna be much more sporadic due to her own assignments, the level of closeness she's gonna be able to cultivate is limited and intrinsically ephemeral, and will be renewed each time, wounds reopening over and over again. She's gonna be treading a very torturous knife's edge, risking putting herself and her children through an spiral of twisted separation and suffering. I would recommend caution.

And on one hand, I really wanna see exactly what it would take for Grace to truly hate someone and how much she takes after her former lady when it comes to acknowledging her feelings and reactions towards others. And the dynamic of whether or not you are able to trust someone where there is beef but also you agree in a particular and gravely serious matter... delicious.

But also I want the juicy juicy office drama.

[X] [Info] A friendly goddess from another Division, whom you have mixed feelings about
[X] [Hari] Offer a painful truth as a cautionary tale

Haris family situation is not quite the same as Graces - her slave mother was in a quite poor position that required direct intervention. Haris family are relatively fine on their own, and Hari doesn't need to hurt herself to keep them safe.

[x] [Hari] Offer a painful truth that focuses on the positive
[x] [Info] A friendly goddess from another Division, whom you have mixed feelings about

[x] [Info] A friendly goddess from another Division, whom you have mixed feelings about

[X] [Hari] Offer a painful truth that focuses on the positive
[X] [Info] A god from your own Division, whom you hate, but who holds a mutual interest with you in this matter

[X] [Hari] Offer a painful truth as a cautionary tale
[x] [Info] A friendly goddess from another Division, whom you have mixed feelings about

[X] [Hari] Offer a painful truth that focuses on the positive
[X] [Info] Another Sidereal, whom you do not particularly like

[x] [Hari] Offer a painful truth as a cautionary tale
[x] [Info] A god from your own Division, whom you hate, but who holds a mutual interest with you in this matter

Gazetteer said:

Push Hari toward a more measured approach, not ignoring her family or abandoning them entirely, but guarding her heart in the process.

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Gazetteer said:

"Is it worth it, though?" Hari asks. "Seeing her as often as you do. Seeing her everytime you go home. Do you ever wish you could have done things differently?"

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I don't think "yeah it's worth it and you should do it too" is an honest kind of answer for Grace to give (or a kind sort of dishonesty); she should be up front about how hard it is for her and let Hari make the call for herself. The fact that Grace is dealing with a parent who has memory issues and will (almost) inevitably predecease her is, in one way, a relatively normal problem that she's facing in abnormal circumstances; for Hari to maintain ties with a child who will (misadventure aside) first outlive her other children and then die before her is a different sort of anguish.

I agree with the idea that seeing Grace deal with someone she outright hates but still has to work with is the most interesting facet to explore.

Gazetteer said:

No matter how far away you are, the blow still catches you at the same time every day.

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I enjoy the image of Sapphiria being delighted that Grace is finally letting her hair down and getting wasted, only for Grace's mentor-dad and Sapphiria's own boss to suddenly seem to burst through the window out of nowhere and knock Grace into next week (or rather, back to that morning). Like, god damn, those "just say no" ads weren't kidding, huh!

Varder said:

People who know this setting, are we also the bad guys here? As in our faction, I mean.

As far as I managed to figure out, we're protecting an evil (?) Empire that does some bad stuff. And we do this because not doing so will lead to more deaths. And we care about this because we have a Plan for this realm?

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Others have answered this in depth, but I wanted to comment on two things. One, as Gazetteer says, it's not that the Bronze Faction have "a Plan" in the sense that the Realm is a part of a larger project they're working towards, like "if we can just get them to conquer this last city we can complete the giant magic circle that will let us mind control the whole world!!!" or similar. It's that making planS in general is their (important!) job and seeing them pay off is necessary to keep the universe running on track. It's like... imagine if weather forecasters didn't just tell you the chances of rain tomorrow, but actually got karma points when their prediction turns out to be correct, so they look at the 85% chance and say "it will rain tomorrow", and then they go out to do strategically placed rain dances to make sure that happens. From this point of view, the current instability in the Realm and the threat of civil war is like climate change, while groups like that Solar circle are like someone going out and punching the Antarctic ice sheets so hard half of them melt to liquid, or building a self-replicating fleet of cloud-seeding drones to flood the Sahara: not only does it cause a lot of trouble directly and immediately, but it has knock-on effects that throw everything into chaos.

An interesting feature of this is that, while the Bronze Faction and the Realm can easily (and largely correctly) be seen as callously utilitarian in justifying mass suffering and atrocity as "worth it" for the sake of a nebulous sense of "order" or "the greater good", the fact that they have to pay attention to the fates and destinies of people all across Creation, at all levels from highest to humblest, in all aspects of their lives from birth to learning to journeying to fighting to loving to dying, in a sense gives them the widest and most inclusive view of what harms or benefits ordinary people, and the most incentive to pay careful attention to the consequences of their actions. By comparison, plucky underdogs or heroic revolutionaries (such as the folks who wanted to blow up a city) have the luxury of shrugging and disregarding the wider ramifications of what they do in the name of their cause, as not being their responsibility.

Hexxart said:

So, all the massive bloodshed required to overthrow the Realm would do is just change who precisely is oppressing the rest of Creation.

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Or even if the Realm isn't replaced with an equivalent imperial superpower...:

Gazetteer said:

"You're too young to remember the Shogunate... I remember what it was like. Hundreds of years of pointless war, the Dragon-Blooded murdering each other over who got to sit on a fancy chair that they kept moving around every few years, and trampling the world underfoot as they did so...

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That's from someone decrying the Scarlet Empire, but it still suggests that the single centralized Realm oppressing and bleeding the Threshold out as far as it can reach is in a very real sense strictly better than the already-explored alternative of many separate polities jostling for supremacy.

Mind you, the Shogunate was also Bronze-Faction-backed, and Wayward Prayer would and did categorise it as a dismal failure. Her Bronze Faction contemporaries would say that it's better than the alternative etc.

Doing my duty.

[x] [Info] A friendly goddess from another Division, whom you have mixed feelings about
[x] [Hari] Offer a painful truth that focuses on the positive

Besides all the imperial stuff and the likelyhood thereof. There is, you know, angry Titans escaping their prison and undead angry Titans complaining to the manager (oblivion).

Exalted is a pre-apocalyptic setting, the bronze faction work for the status quo, is, if not doomed, not looking good. Does it make it pointless? Ehhh, I guess all those solar generals will need at least some dragon blooded armies to stave off the steaming bag of shit Sol is ignoring.

SCO said:

Besides all the imperial stuff and the likelyhood thereof. There is, you know, angry Titans escaping their prison and undead angry Titans complaining to the manager (oblivion).

Exalted is a pre-apocalyptic setting, the bronze faction work for the status quo, is, if not doomed, not looking good. Does it make it pointless? Ehhh, I guess all those solar generals will need at least some dragon blooded armies to stave off the steaming bag of shit Sol is ignoring.

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This is not a late 2e quest. All default assumptions for lore etc. should be set by the current 3e material, where available. The Yozis are not breaking free of their prison, and while the Deathlords are a problem, they're definitely not going to destroy Creation like, tomorrow.

This is also like, a Bronze Faction quest which is the sequel to a Dragon-Blooded quest, which is set during the buildup to the Realm Civil War. This is not a work that is ever going to operate on an understanding of the setting that holds that Dragon-Blooded are just cannon fodder who exist to be foot soldiers for the real heroes. The Realm is weakened, currently but it is still very much the dominant power on Creation, and there is no guarantee that it won't still be after the issue of the throne is settled.

Yeah, 2nd edition (And to a degree, 1st edition) both have the perspective of "The sky's going to cave in any day now and we're just figuring out which of the omnipotent god monsters pulls the trigger first."

Third Edition is "Here's the pieces, here's what they want, play things out however you want." As part of the general reduction in the top end powerlevels across the board, it also means that you don't get the 2nd edition nonsense of "Any one of these god-monsters can singlehandedly take the entire setting down if they bother to make a move, and only Plot Devices can stop them because you sure as hell aren't beating them in a fight.", Even the Deathlords need to be worried about drawing the full attention of the Realm on a single one of them, even if its fraying state.

To borrow from an idiom that amuses me. "Even a starving camel is still bigger than a horse." The Realm is the camel, the Horse is the Deathlord. Yeah, sure, that camel will finish dying real soon, but until it does, it's going to turn you into crunchy munchies if you force the issue.