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A Vision in Bronze; A Sidereal quest

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HBInquirer said:
God she really was raised right alongside Ambraea wasn't she.
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I think this is the other way around really. Grace has said before that she was never as young as Lew, and her portrayal both before and after exaltation was one of a girl inclined to a self imposed rigorous propriety. If anything, I would say Grace rubbed off on Ambraea.
Batatos said:
But most importantly it is the one that seem the most interesting.
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I don't know. It ties Grace down to monitoring the Nori & Wilim situation, which is less interesting than her being free to divert effort towards sussing out the Lunar or ensuring nothing happens to disrupt the marriage.

I also like the idea of the in disguise Lunar getting hit indirectly by the curse because Wilim flirts with her. That would be hilarious.

Lastly, if grace isn't throwing herself at Nori, it creates the potential for someone else interested and more interesting to throw themselves at her.
Some_guy_161 said:
[X] Distract Nori

Sorry Grace but right now, you're going to need to be heterosexual for a bit.
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But if we have some patience, funnier, more interesting pairing might arise in service to seeing the wedding through or even hunting down the solar. Let's keep our options open.
 
HelioA said:
So, I've been back reading the thread after catching up on the quest, and there's been a lot of interesting discussion on the morality of the Bronze Faction and the Realm. Something that I've really come to appreciate after reading through some of the setting books is that that discussion is relevant in-character essentially only for Sidereals.

No matter how good an argument you have for why it should be done, the Lunars and Solars are hardly going to allow themselves to be slaughtered en masse, and while you can probably find quite a few Dragonblooded who would go against the Realm, it would be ridiculous for them to therefore say that they should hand over the mandate of creation to the Solars. Leave aside the morality of the issue, there's just no reason that the vast majority of Dragonblooded would give up their own rule even when they disapprove of the specific current rulers. It's only the Sidereals who are trying to keep Creation stable and ask "okay, whose leadership would be better for Creation?" No other Exalt group would plausibly go against their faction en masse.

And obviously even within these factions different Exalts conduct themselves with different levels of morality, but the base question of "Who should rule over Creation?" isn't answered initially on the basis of morality, it's either "these guys want to kill me" or "being the elite class of an empire benefits me," and then later they decide how to conduct themselves. So at the end of the day, the nicer Dynasts who don't abuse mortals are roughly on the same side as the guys with the monopoly on the slave trade (we can see that right this very update) while being closer to them than even the most careful and least bloody Silver Pact member, and the same is true for that Silver Pact member with the Lunar who runs around opening Shadowlands in Realm satrapies.

I think this all this leads to a very dynamic and enjoyable setting, since everyone is mostly acting for their own benefit, and when they don't, it's for interesting personal reasons. There's no set "good" faction, it's possible to look at the setting from any given faction's side and cast everything in a new light.
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More generally than my previous post, since I'm at home now:

This is one of the things that I think about a lot in relation to the traditional framing of the Sidereal Factions, especially with how they tend to appear in stories about other Exalt types. The Bronze/Gold debate is only a debate because of their far remove from the material conditions of Creation and like, the extreme isolation that the particulars of arcane fate and Sidereal Exaltation create. And this is a really hard thing to articulate to anyone with actual like, direct skin in the game here.

Using my characters as an example, we know that Scattered Silver has been involved in guiding and protecting Solar Circles under certain circumstances, that he'd probably help them fight off a Wyld Hunt, that he's sympathetic of attempts to fight back against the Realm and the Immaculate Order and disrupt their imperialism in the Threshold. But he works with Grace, who was raised Immaculate and is Bronze Faction with genuine conviction about its project, who has an emotional attachment to the Realm and cares about certain members of the Dynasty. Any Lunar or Solar in the world would be very justified to view Grace as, at best, an enemy combatant. She is someone who is, without apology, willing to consign them to persecution and death, because she feels the world is better for it.

And like, Silver finds her very frustrating, he fights with her a lot, he finds her failure to recognise the deep moral failings of the institutions she supports to be genuinely disappointing, but like... he doesn't want her dead, or even hurt. He knows her, he trusts her at his back in a crisis, he will put himself on the line for her, and assumes she'll do the same for him. I think it's very natural for him to feel this way about her, given what they are to each other. You can't feel disappointed in someone who you don't care about to begin with.

How would he explain that to a Solar that he's allied with, even friends with, though? Yes, I am your friend, yes, you can trust me, but no, I am not willing to go all out against your worst enemies, because in a lot of ways I'm still closer to them than I am to you? It's not like that can't break another way -- canonically, we have Red Osprey and Sad Ivory as an example of two Sidereals, even two Sidereals who care very much for each other coming to lethal blows over literally this. The fallout of that is very illustrative, though, I think. No one in the Fellowship wants what happened there to happen again, the Factions don't want to kill each other.

I don't think this is a strictly admirable thing about the Sidereal condition, but it is a very compelling thing, to me.

It does also make me really enjoy the prospect of Grace having to try to explain to Ambraea that, yes, she does work with people who think the Realm is evil and wield their vast influence in Heaven to try and bring about its downfall, but you see--
 
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Distracting Nori option has the problem that there is a fair chance that at some point we might end up having to go toe to toe with a Lunar. And if Nori is at that point desirous of us, he might be encouraged to be nearby, which is dangerous for the mission and dangerous for Nori. Social collateral damage is better than an increased risk in an extra corpse.

[X] Curse Wilim's social skills
 
Gazetteer said:
I don't think this is a strictly admirable thing about the Sidereal condition, but it is a very compelling thing, to me.
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I think a lot of it comes down to the fact that the Bronze and Gold factions, despite their very different approaches/views, ultimately want the same thing. They just disagree on the best tools for the job. Part of this is that they recognize that murdering fellow craftsmen (opposed sidereals) hampers the intended goal and so it takes a lot to make it an appealing option. At the end of the day, they are co-workers on the same grand project rather than working towards opposed goals.

Gazetteer said:
It does also make me really enjoy the prospect of Grace having to try to explain to Ambraea that, yes, she does work with people who think the Realm is evil and wield their vast influence in Heaven to try and bring about its downfall, but you see--
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Indeed. The discussion over whether the stability of the Realm and the stability of Creation are synonomous or not is sure to be very interesting as a reader. I wouldn't want to be one of the participants though.
 
I want to say that I'm absolutely floored by those fun letters and reports and missives that started off this latest post. It really immersed me in the narrative of a Sidereal beginning a mission in earnest, and communicates a ton about their role in things, the context of their mission, the massive confluence of twisted plans that surrounded even something as seemingly simple as 'sabotage a relationship before it can get started.'

Exalted needs a dedicated epistolary phase of play, is what I'm saying.
 
iledian said:
I think a lot of it comes down to the fact that the Bronze and Gold factions, despite their very different approaches/views, ultimately want the same thing.
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I Think it's about the loneliness of Arcane Fate at least as much.
The forcible severing of previous ties, and the difficulty of forming them outside of the Fivescore Fellowship, the loooong lifespans, all mean that long term every Sidereal will personally know ever Sidereal in heaven. For most people that makes it a lot harder to be willing to do physical harm to each other, and the extreme difficulty of forming any community outside of heaven means the social consequences for doing so are extra devestating.
 
Orbmorb said:
I Think it's about the loneliness of Arcane Fate at least as much.
The forcible severing of previous ties, and the difficulty of forming them outside of the Fivescore Fellowship, the loooong lifespans, all mean that long term every Sidereal will personally know ever Sidereal in heaven. For most people that makes it a lot harder to be willing to do physical harm to each other, and the extreme difficulty of forming any community outside of heaven means the social consequences for doing so are extra devestating.
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Focusing on this is one of the better decisions that 3e made regarding Sidereals, I feel.

The older version had Arcane Fate be something that the Sidereals did to themselves on purpose in order to hide their "crimes" during the Usurpation and was usually framed mostly in terms of it being useful for spy shit, with the personal tragedy of it being secondary.

The current version has it be a curse that they got hit with more or less by accident, and the focus is much more on the life destroying horror of it, the way it breaks people and then binds the Sidereal Host together through shared trauma.

2e in particular was so incredibly cynical about the Fivescore Fellowship that it more or less treats it like it's a collection of WoD style inhuman, sociopathic elders ruthlessly manipulating their younger colleagues to spread their dominion over Creation, in a setup that felt so utterly hopeless and miserable that a significant portion of the fan base became convinced that the only reasonable choice was to say fuck heaven and go be a hero on Creation, because that's the only way to actually do any good (leaving aside that 2e was also really good at convincing people that anyone not immediately getting onboard with uniting the Exalted Host behind the Solars in order to let them fight million apocalypse that were bearing down on Creation was at best wasting their time or at worst actively hastening the end of the world).

The current version of the Fellowship feels a lot more like an actual fellowship. They're still manipulating each other and playing political games, because they can't not do that, but there's a genuine bond there that the worsening Factional divisions are threatening. You can understand why most of them would want to cling to that even when it's not expedient or they'd not want to have anything to do with each other while they were mortals.
 
[x] Distract Nori

The argument that this is undesirable because it requires the most active attention is a good one, but I'm still opting for it for a couple of reasons. One, I think it'll be funny. Two, it seems the cleanest / most elegant option: we have a destiny that makes us a desirable object in the guise of a (at least partially) pleasure slave, so this just requires using the tools we've already set out for ourselves, rather than adding new ones to the mix. At the same time it doesn't entail any obvious collateral damage - Nori just acts as he's already known to act, and nothing comes of it in the end. Three, it directly addresses the issue by tying up one of the problem participants, while cursing Wilim comes with the possibility of Nori taking an interest in him regardless, and twisting their relationship comes with a similar risk but darker if Nori decides he likes a boy who's scared of him.

Shogeton said:
Distracting Nori option has the problem that there is a fair chance that at some point we might end up having to go toe to toe with a Lunar. And if Nori is at that point desirous of us, he might be encouraged to be nearby, which is dangerous for the mission and dangerous for Nori.
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While this is a risk, I don't think Nori or his survival have any particular importance to our mission, and while we'd rather avoid anyone getting caught up in a fight with a Lunar if we can manage it chances are good that someone will be in the blast radius no matter what.

Also if Nori does die we get to say "beautiful sushi roll too good for this world, too pure" which to me is pure upside.

Randino Treviani said:
I also like the idea of the in disguise Lunar getting hit indirectly by the curse because Wilim flirts with her. That would be hilarious.
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See, to me this calls out the danger that the curse might get Wilim into trouble inimical to his survival per item 1b on our briefing.

Gazetteer said:
...the marriages of Sesus Ambar to V'neef Ambraea...
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I can't believe Ambraea found a handsome young man to settle down with before her niece. The mutual teasing must have been indescribable.

Gazetteer said:
"He's Peleps Nalri's older brother," Ambraea says, speaking up for the first time. Her eyes skate over you to look at L'nessa as you finish your work. You don't recognise the name — someone they went to school with, perhaps?
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Fun to see Grace be the one at a dramatically ironic disadvantage for once.

Gazetteer said:
You bow your head respectfully, putting the last plate on the table, and stepping back. For just a moment, she freezes in place, as though something is bothering her. It passes, though, and she looks back to L'nessa.
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Aw man. She recognized the body language but doesn't know why.
 
kamikasei said:
See, to me this calls out the danger that the curse might get Wilim into trouble inimical to his survival per item 1b on our briefing.
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The Lunar dislikes killing except by necessity. A bit of poor flirting on wilim's part isn't going to get him killed unless it was already part of her plan. Romantic involvement with Nori that may see him follow us at an inopportune time and get rapped up in a battle between grace and Bitter Cherry is far more likely to see him become collateral.
 
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[X] Curse Wilim's social skills
Seems like the one with the lowest delta between "It goes smoothly" and "It goes horribly awry", which feels important to manage given that we'll also have our hands full with a Lunar.

AMETI CAMEO!!! All is right with world.

On an editorial note, L'neesa is described as both "Matriarch V'neef's youngest daughter born of her own blood" and "first of [her] trueborn daughters".
 
CallousCrafter said:
On an editorial note, L'neesa is described as both "Matriarch V'neef's youngest daughter born of her own blood" and "first of [her] trueborn daughters".
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First of her trueborn daughters to marry. V'neef S'thera is older, but not married yet (because her fiance died at Futile Blood and she's been obstinate and uncooperative about getting another).
 
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