Ascensions and Transgressions: the Tales of Keris Dulmeadokht (Exalted game)

It is mildly amusing that Calesco has all the surface imagery of creepiness (spiders, darkness, entrapment) whilst actually being the kindest of her souls (not surprising, given she's literally the manifestation of Keris' Compassion). Babybat Calesco is pretty great (even if her horses aren't actually that good at dealing with anything but physical pain appropriately, at least their fuckup of trapping people in dreams isn't malicious)
Look, there is a reason that Calesco is my personal favourite of Keris's souls, and it's not (just) because she would get along with Teen Titans!Raven.
 
Since Calesco is literally Arael I find this somewhat unconvincing. :V

Thing is Calesco is genuinely nice. And understands that people seeing her hurts them, so she hides herself under veils because she understands the average shmuck Demons don't deserve to have their moral failures constantly shoved in their face. She'll show herself to the powerful and callous, but she doesn't accept hurting the weak. IIRC she has a problem whereby she continually limit breaks and goes into depressive episodes because she refuses to obey her own limit condition because it would hurt the people around her.

Look, there is a reason that Calesco is my personal favourite of Keris's souls, and it's not (just) because she would get along with Teen Titans!Raven.

TT!Raven was fantastic and that just makes me like Calesco more.
 
Hmm, traps and weaves the light from stars you say?

Calesco, what did your mother say about how dangerous it would be to try and steal the stars of Malfeas? So why are you experimenting with demon breeds that could help with that?

Damn Compassion is going to get her in trouble again.

Thinking on it some more, I'm expanding this to ALL the demons she made this time round, as if you think about it, they all fit into things you'd want if you were planning what Calesco is.

As I already said, starlit sentries seem like something that would come about if you were experementing on how to directly effect stars.

If you manage to pull someone out off a horrible torture chamber, one of the first things you're going to want to do is help with the pain they're in, which shadow steeds are perfect for.

Once she gets them away, that's where the tar-balls and the raiment skins come in. The tar-balls might not be the smartist demons, and can be tricked when guarding locations or objects, but directly protecting someone from physical assault is what they're made for.

Meanwhile, hiding a fugitive when the person looking for them has eyes absolutely everywhere is something raiment skins would be great at, especially since it would take Orabilis himself (or someone else with suitably high essence or obsession with truth) to actually see the fugative hiding in plain sight (the fact that they and the peronelae hate each othor, when said demons are designed to be subtle informants for Orabilis is just more damning evidence).
 
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Honestly, I think the reason I most like Calesco for is the fact that she is a cynical, bitter, depressive, dark, gothish character who can't help but see the ugly realities of the world, throws biting, vicious critique at the powerful and is an expert at using painful truths as a weapon.

And unlike almost all such characters, if she actually met - to take an example at random - Usagi Tsukino?

Calesco would love her. Quite possibly literally. She'd take one look and immediately adore her. Because the vast majority of Usagi's flaws are surface things, and deep down she's a truly good person, while Calesco's scorn is directed at people who are smooth and impressive on the surface and flawed or hypocritical deep down. She's not one of those cynics who goes "idealism is naive and pathetic"; she cherishes and admires the hell out of people like Usagi and Madoka and Kara Danvers, and wishes she could be like them and not cursed (as she sees it) to cause pain and misery and suffering unless she hides herself with lies.

I just really love the fact that she looks at a glance like the kind of person who would look down on that sort of "idealistic messiah" character, when in actual fact she'd look up.
 
So, I didn't realise quite how important an ally Echo is and will be for Keris till this update. I mean, I knew she's going to be a murderous combat monster, but I didn't realize that when she puts her mind to it she can do social that well, either. She just successfully wrangled a limit breaking Keris.

Is it just me or are Echo's main weaknesses her horrible ADD and destructive touch? I'm not sure if she's been actually stated to be BAD at anything that doesn't require sustained focus or not destroying on contact.
 
So, now that her souls are becoming Demon Lords, will her souls start sprouting baby sub-souls, like Keris sprouted baby souls before she actually had them?
 
So, I didn't realise quite how important an ally Echo is and will be for Keris till this update. I mean, I knew she's going to be a murderous combat monster, but I didn't realize that when she puts her mind to it she can do social that well, either. She just successfully wrangled a limit breaking Keris.

Is it just me or are Echo's main weaknesses her horrible ADD and destructive touch? I'm not sure if she's been actually stated to be BAD at anything that doesn't require sustained focus or not destroying on contact.

Echo is incredibly, painfully intelligent - but she's not learned. She can make incredible, radical leaps of logic and devise incredibly detailed explanations for things she sees, but those things are usually her own observations and conclusions. She's not like Haneyl and Rathan, who try to read every new book Keris drops into her soul and so have gathered an eclectic mix of knowledge from random sources. Echo likes books, but they have to have a narrative and preferably pictures or she loses interest quickly.

Basically, as soon as petal-cherubs and clay-cherubs working together invent the light novel, Echo will be all over that - but until then, she gets a few pages into a book of Shogunate poetry and she starts wondering how to do something else with the details.
 
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Echo is incredibly, painfully intelligent - but she's not learned. She can make incredible, radical leaps of logic and devise incredibly detailed explanations for things she sees, but those things are usually her own observations and conclusions. She's not like Haneyl and Rathan, who try to read every new book Keris drops into her soul and so have gathered an eclectic mix of knowledge from random sources. Echo likes books, but they have to have a narrative and preferably pictures or she loses interest quickly.

Basically, as soon as petal-cherubs and clay-cherubs working together invent the light novel, Echo will be all over that - but until then, she gets a few pages into a book of Shogunate poetry and she starts wondering how to do something else with the details.
So you're saying that Keris just needs to get someone to write "Cartoon Guide to X" type books to get Echo to be a legendary polymath?
 
@Aleph @EarthScorpion when making Keris' souls, did you use any guidelinesuggestions? Trying to make some for my game but having quite a bit of trouble
In general, choose an important aspect of the character's personality (If you're using Principles, those rated 4 or higher), a charm, charmtree, or two (possibly from different Yozis) and at least one 'Pantheon' Charm.

You then create the basics of the Soul's personality and worldview through what those things say. For example, Haneyl is Keris' 'Greed', she is based on Self-Seed Infestation (which is the 'make others part of you' charm), and she also has the Green Sun Nimbus Flare tree (for fire, and Crowned By Fury and such).

The result is a soul with Plant/Fire aesthetics (because Metagaos/Malfeas charms), who is greedy and wants things (because she expresses her higher self's greed), and who has themes of rulership and intense emotion from the Malfeas stuff. These all come together into the basic shape of 'Haneyl', who is then further fleshed out as Aleph and ES please.

She would look incredibly different if her root charm was, say, Crystal Facet Thoughts or Carmine Mantled Emissary.
 
@Azrael has things pretty much right, but there's one extra thing I like to do with demons, whether they're Yozi-demons or Infernal-demons, and that's that there should be something about them that should be, in some light, "classically" demonic. Haneyl is a demon of avarice, glutton and envy, proud and capricious, whose rages destroy acres of land. Rathan blames everyone else for his problems, and he's a heart-breakingly pretty bishie who's growing horns. Calesco is a dark angel in her normal form.

We see the same with Sasi's souls.

Wikpedia's page on the Ars Goetia is useful inspiration if you're going to be writing demons: List of demons in the Ars Goetia - Wikipedia
 
We may well find out certain things about the letters between Haneyl and the Lawgiver before Calibration is over.

...

shit

They've totally been secretly conspiring against their greater selves in some sort of elaborate plot. (Also I hope the Lawgiver hasn't changed her name again because Kalaska is fantastic name.)

I'm...assuming the rest of Keris' souls will finish evolving pretty quick and we'll be seeing most of them escape into Malfeas over Calibration.
 
Given comments I've seen before, what's probably actually going to happen is Keris will learn that Kalaska's living conditions are kind of poor and there will be much drama.
 
Given comments I've seen before, what's probably actually going to happen is Keris will learn that Kalaska's living conditions are kind of poor and there will be much drama.

They sort of...can't be poor? She's one of Sasi's souls and she can shape the the environment she lives in pretty well as she pleases. Like, you could say she wishes Sasi paid her more attention, but that's a) unlikely, b)all it could be.

It's not like she could be starving in the streets or not have anywhere to sleep.
 
They sort of...can't be poor? She's one of Sasi's souls and she can shape the the environment she lives in pretty well as she pleases. Like, you could say she wishes Sasi paid her more attention, but that's a) unlikely, b)all it could be.
She has a single room in what is essentially an apartment sized for normal people, while the others who are awake include Sasi's belief that being like the Immaculates describe Anathema is a good thing. That's the only one I remember offhand, but the others are just as grating. And while she can change what is in those rooms, she can't make them bigger or smaller, and it's almost literally war to hold on to what she has.
 
So, we've seen quite a lot of @Aleph's Keris and her soul pantheon, but Keris is not the default for an Infernal using the soul pantheon rules I've devised. She's effectively devoted vast amounts of time into working on her pantheon, and spends hours daily meditating to interact with her souls, keeping them friendly and well-inclined to her. Amusingly, since what Keris is doing is mechanically meditation, the time she puts into playing with her souls is actually a form of personal therapy little different than the time that an Immaculate monk spends meditating to control his desires and focus his mind. What Keris does by focussing on her desires and her wants and her drives and getting them to play nicely together and not pull each other's hair is effectively time spent getting her mind and her desires in order.

Most Infernals are not going to spend so much time focussing on their own psychological stability, and so their soul pantheons are going to be rather less cooperative and useful. They're also going to be more "classically" demonic - which is to say, they're not going to all be little (sometimes) adorable (usually) bratty children and are instead going to resemble normal Exalted demons more.

As an example, here's what Sasi's nascent soul pantheon looks like. Which says rather more about her than she'd like others to know.
Damn, Sasi is more messed up than Keris, and that's saying something. Now I'm wondering what Teslogah's soul pantheon would look like, if he had one.
 

So I missed all this. I mean I read through the thread, but that was before all the stuff from other threads got collated here and uh, wow.

Like I knew Sasi had issues? I just didn't realise they were ISSUES. Sasi...

I realise she was kind of suicidal when she Exalted and she cobbled together a philosophy that let her...accept her new state, but uh...

She's a mess and she's pretty obviously not dealing with stuff properly.
 
So I missed all this. I mean I read through the thread, but that was before all the stuff from other threads got collated here and uh, wow.

Like I knew Sasi had issues? I just didn't realise they were ISSUES. Sasi...

I realise she was kind of suicidal when she Exalted and she cobbled together a philosophy that let her...accept her new state, but uh...

She's a mess and she's pretty obviously not dealing with stuff properly.
Keris looks like a mess on the outside but is actually incredibly stable and well-balanced and has enviable inner harmony and control over her conflicting desires on the inside, because of how much time she devotes to meditation and peacekeeping between her souls and mental health maintenance.

Sasi is the polar opposite of this in every respect.
 
Gotta remember that Keris's wacky slice of life comedy with the Devas of Nebulous Circles also doubles as therapy.
 
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