Okay, so what we need to do is replace the Guild with a non-slavery org and kill the shit outta the God of Slavery / Raise the Cult and Essence ratings of this God of Abolition to the level that nobody short of E9 Gods or Incarna can gainsay him? Sounds like a nice endgame Motivation to me.
Does he have a tolerable disposition? I'm sorry about asking you to do the research, but I don't know which book he's in and also don't possess either Games of Divinity or CoCD : Yu Shan.
I don't really see the point of having "buff the God of Abolition" as a motivation (which isn't really a thing in 3E anymore).
We're a helot. We've been brutalized by Lookshy, and its particular form of slavery. We have had zero exposure to the rest of Creation and its various forms of slavery, even if we are intellectually aware such exist. At this point, any issues we have with slavery are limited to our own context.
Sure, its very likely we'll have a very strong intimacy against slavery and slave-using societies, but from here to having our mission in life be some specific plan about getting some other god to do something about it on a Creation-wide basis... that's practically centuries in the future. At least decades, and even then, we'll probably start with taking over some country and see what kind of system we want to replace slavery with.
On a more thematic note, finding someone else to do what we want done is a Sidereal thing to do. It is possible for us to Exalt as a Sidereal... but I kinda doubt it.
If we can interact with high Essence Gods, we can do something real about that. Well, an Exalted can do lots of stuff without Heaven, but since we chose the Divine Path as a theme to colour our character I want to integrate it somehow.
With enough heavenly approval, we can get major Gods to decry slavery as a part of their religious tenets (like Ahlat or some other famous gods), which should discourage slavery among their faithful. We could get the followers of the God of Abolition organised into a militant Knightly Order that fights against slavery. We can try to get blessings or interventions in favour of escaping slaves - since most Gods dislike the Realm/Lookshy, they may be tempted to hurt them in little ways by letting escapees pass unhindered through their territories.
We'll probably have to do a lot of bribery / Cult building, but getting Heaven on our side is a pretty large advantage. If we're a infiltration specced high Essence Celestial, we can probably even directly assassinate the high Essence Gods supporting slavery in Yu-Shan, so that the faction that dislikes it can begin working on ending it (this needs us to dodge Sidereal intervention, hence infiltration spec).
We're a helot. We've been brutalized by Lookshy, and its particular form of slavery. We have had zero exposure to the rest of Creation and its various forms of slavery, even if we are intellectually aware such exist. At this point, any issues we have with slavery are limited to our own context.
Sure, its very likely we'll have a very strong intimacy against slavery and slave-using societies, but from here to having our mission in life be some specific plan about getting some other god to do something about it on a Creation-wide basis... that's practically centuries in the future. At least decades, and even then, we'll probably start with taking over some country and see what kind of system we want to replace slavery with.
This is why I'm saying it should be an endgame motivation. I'm aware of our lack of IC awareness on Creation's affairs now - but I'm sure we can learn about the world as we grow in power, and using that knowledge to operate changes on the world is useful.
He doesn't even need to know much - just that, say, when X God says crap in Yu-Shan, his millions of mortal followers listen. And that a God of Slavery (or multiple?) exists, who is probably propping up the system that crushed him in some way.
We have anyway chosen the Divine Path, so our character will be involved with Gods in some way or other. This is a satisfying way to incorporate that while also dealing with his hate for slavery by attempting to discourage the practice across all Creation - which is definitely dramatic enough to count as a Motivation.
I'm loving it so far, but the despair fest is starting to drag a bit. I'll stay with it as far as it goes because I love Exalted, but I hope it moves on from helotry is terrible soon. Unless helotry being terrible is the whole point.
Okay, so what we need to do is replace the Guild with a non-slavery org and kill the shit outta the God of Slavery / Raise the Cult and Essence ratings of this God of Abolition to the level that nobody short of E9 Gods or Incarna can gainsay him? Sounds like a nice endgame Motivation to me.
Does he have a tolerable disposition (ie: no raping kids or blighting beautiful women for giggles)? I'm sorry about asking you to do the research, but I don't know which book he's in and also don't possess either Games of Divinity or CoCD : Yu Shan.
I can't remember much either. AFAIK, he was only mentioned in relation to the God of Slaves and thanks to the Guilds vast power (and thus the gods invested in them), the poor guy gets audited to within an inch of his life.
But getting him empowered will be a lot of work given just how widespread slavery is.
Exalted as a setting doesn't really support the things that led to the end of slavery very well either.
This will not happen. If you Exalted as the strongest Solar who has ever lived, it still won't happen. One Exalt does not tear down a city-state full of Exalts. This is not how Exaltation works.
I'm not saying it isn't, just that the near-constant focus on how awful it is has begun to drag on. Tenfoldshields is an excellent author, but the emphasis of a helot's life being despair isn't gripping me as much as at the beginning.
Besides one of the faint silver linings with Lookshy's massive structure of terrorized helotry and slave plantations is that with her decline the decadent cruelty, the inhumanity of the oppression has been greatly exacerbated... the, the sharpness of her abusive extraction economy has never been so razor-fine and glittering with darkness. When Lookshy had more to hold on to then sheer blue blood the Helots where likely not so tightly bound to their allotments, niches of human life and warm could be carved into the system and help perpetuate it's less stark evil. Now that the Archons squeeze the Helots for lack of anything else to grasp, if the Helots ever for even a brief single moment where able to just fuck off into the bush or the highlands or what ever and just live any kind of life at all then the whole of the apparatus would be leaning on... nothing. Nothing but the cold and cruel emptiness of want straight into oblivion.
This will not happen. If you Exalted as the strongest Solar who has ever lived, it still won't happen. One Exalt does not tear down a city-state full of Exalts. This is not how Exaltation works.
I can't remember much either. AFAIK, he was only mentioned in relation to the God of Slaves and thanks to the Guilds vast power (and thus the gods invested in them), the poor guy gets audited to within an inch of his life.
But getting him empowered will be a lot of work given just how widespread slavery is.
Exalted as a setting doesn't really support the things that led to the end of slavery very well either.
It is going to be hard, but I believe it is doable. At least, we should try.
Once we get strong allies and start a cult, we can begin spreading the word (possibly as a merry band of masked rebels who incite rebellion), and then dedicate the attention that is coming to us to him by saying we're acting in his name.
Maybe we can also act as a mercenary who runs missions for anti-Guild organisations? They're a big supporter of slavery, anything that hurts them is fine by me.
If we can get a position of influence in other kingdoms and slowly rehabilitate the rescued slaves into it, that's even better. Will need some way to avoid dragoblooded surveillance or have king who doesn't give a fuck, so maybe we'd have to negotiate with other Exalts / Anathema. This will require our character to reject the Immaculate Philosophy and be very powerful, so is a Long Term goal for when we're E4 or something.
I think it's more important (and easier) to directly kill the God of Slavery when we have a chance to do so. Sure, they will get replaced, but that'll take time and in that window their opponent faction of Gods could seize some advantages. It would probably be nice and cathartic too.
It is going to be hard, but I believe it is doable. At least, we should try.
Once we get strong allies and start a cult, we can begin spreading the word (possibly as a merry band of masked rebels who incite rebellion), and then dedicate the attention that is coming to us to him by saying we're acting in his name.
Maybe we can also act as a mercenary who runs missions for anti-Guild organisations? They're a big supporter of slavery, anything that hurts them is fine by me.
If we can get a position of influence in other kingdoms and slowly rehabilitate the rescued slaves into it, that's even better. Will need some way to avoid dragoblooded surveillance or have king who doesn't give a fuck, so maybe we'd have to negotiate with other Exalts / Anathema. This will require our character to reject the Immaculate Philosophy and be very powerful, so is a Long Term goal for when we're E4 or something.
I think it's more important (and easier) to directly kill the God of Slavery when we have a chance to do so. Sure, they will get replaced, but that'll take time and in that window their opponent faction of Gods could seize some advantages. It would probably be nice and cathartic too.
Or you can...not start a cult. Why, exactly, do you think this is going to end anywhere good? What you're describing is pretty much an amazing start for the villain who creates a horrifying theocracy in the name of their ideals. Why not just...try to help slaves with economic power and spreading education and founding institutions of learning and expanding on your principles, instead of trying to game Exalted's magic system to brute force the problem?
Like, none of your suggestions are really going to actually work as solutions, save when you brute-force the situation with Exalted power.
Or you can...not start a cult. Why, exactly, do you think this is going to end anywhere good? What you're describing is pretty much an amazing start for the villain who creates a horrifying theocracy in the name of their ideals. Why not just...try to help slaves with economic power and spreading education and founding institutions of learning and expanding on your principles, instead of trying to game Exalted's magic system to brute force the problem?
Like, none of your suggestions are really going to actually work as solutions, save when you brute-force the situation with Exalted power.
Hey, most of my proposed solutions (get a position of influence in a kingdom, use it to rehabilitate slaves, act as a mercenary against the Guild) don't rely on Exalted's magic system and are pretty much entirely mundane (as much as using Exalted skill is mundane). I think you are mischaracterising my argument, since the large part of the post you quoted was strictly nonmagical.
The only part where it even got a little bit of involvement with spirits was the "dedicate fame gained from rescuing slaves to the God of Abolition to hopefully strengthen him", which isn't really the actions of a villainous theocrat?
My previous posts do talk about the magic system, but magic is tied so deeply into Exalted's setting that we should account for it. Even most of their solutions are not actually using magic - they're more like "convince these Gods to say slavery is bad and followers shouldn't do it" or "organise a militant order that rescues slaves". This is in no way interacting with the magic system. It does not use Sorcery, or magical rites, or whatever. It is purely building a power block through human means and Exalted skill.
I imagine there's a couple of Underground Railroad type organizations already in place based around the various Scavenger Lord clients of Lookshy's many enemies similar to Messene and Megalopolis digging into Sparta's Lakonia or the Beyliks and Emirates pushing into Constantinople's Anatolian Themes. Who doesn't like free labor and statist recruits that can never afford to fall into the hands of your enemies?
Hey, most of my proposed solutions (get a position of influence in a kingdom, use it to rehabilitate slaves, act as a mercenary against the Guild) don't rely on Exalted's magic system and are pretty much entirely mundane. I think you are mischaracterising my argument, since the large part of the post you quoted was strictly nonmagical.
The only part where it even got a little bit of involvement with spirits was the "dedicate fame gained from rescuing slaves to the God of Abolition to hopefully strengthen him", which isn't really the actions of a villainous theocrat?
My previous posts do talk about the magic system, but magic is tied so deeply into Exalted's setting that we should account for it. Even their solutions are not actually using magic - they're more like "convince these Gods to say slavery is bad and followers shouldn't do ti" or "organise a militant order that rescues slaves". This is in no way interacting with the magic system. It is purely building a power block through human means and Exalted skill.
The cult part is what is worrying me, and I may have mixed you up with someone else who earlier suggested abusing investitures to create an Essence 8/9 deity, when investitures were one of the worst mechanics of second edition and tended to be banned from actual games due to the perverse incentives they created.
Making a cult of people is definitely a big red warning sign for villains, though, particularly since, well. It's not your genuine faith. It's a political move to empower an ally. If you are starting a religion based on the power it can grant you, rather than because you believe in the tenets of this faith and want to help others by doing so, it's way, way easier to slide into abusing the people following you. There's a reason I tend to refrain from starting cults when I play Exalted.
Definitely funding abolitionists and engaging with spirits in debate to sway them to your point of view is effective, but that leads me to my next concern.
Does @TenfoldShields want to run a game about abolishing slavery and realpolitiking with spirits? Because this quest, as it was pitched to me, doesn't seem much like it's aimed at the sort of game people are talking about here. A big thing about playing Exalted is kinda keeping in mind the themes your GM wants to explore and write for, and developing the character with that in mind.
> everyone talking about how we need to buff ???? the Possibly Extant God/Goddess of Abolition so the oppressed underclass can have an object of worship that cares for them and will love them always
> me sitting over here "Y'all Helots need Kimbery"
The cult part is what is worrying me, and I may have mixed you up with someone else who earlier suggested abusing investitures to create an Essence 8/9 deity, when investitures were one of the worst mechanics of second edition and tended to be banned from actual games due to the perverse incentives they created.
I did suggest Investitures, but that was a one off line in a post and there were a lot of other solutions included. I believe we should approach the problem from all ways, though if Investitures are as bad as you say I won't support their usage.
Making a cult of people is definitely a big red warning sign for villains, though, particularly since, well. It's not your genuine faith. It's a political move to empower an ally. If you are starting a religion based on the power it can grant you, rather than because you believe in the tenets of this faith and want to help others by doing so, it's way, way easier to slide into abusing the people following you. There's a reason I tend to refrain from starting cults when I play Exalted.
I'm not worried in us not believing in this - I think our character ahtes slavery enough he'd try and stop it using every way he can. Religions can be spread for a purpose, to combat a social problem, especially when Gods can actually cause real change.
I think a nice middle point would be to have the character gain hope at some point and genuinely believe in freedom, and then associate freedom with a god, or examine how some god wants everyone to experience the joy of freedom. This may lead to legitimate religious belief.
Mundane ways are obviously easier, but Cult is not just stock evil - I think that by the standards of Exalted, even the belief of Tokyo in the Phantom Thieves would count as a Cult Rating. The Incarnae also have Cult ratings, so it seems like something that's morally neutral?
I'm thinking up a response to your point re: theming, will respond later.
I did suggest Investitures, but that was a one off line in a post and there were a lot of other solutions included. I believe we should approach the problem from all ways, though if Investitures are as bad as you say I won't support their usage.
I'm not worried in us not believing in this - I think our character ahtes slavery enough he'd try and stop it using every way he can. Religions can be spread for a purpose, to combat a social problem (Islam was spread in part to combat a bunch of social problems in the Middle East like polytheism and lack of unity, though there was also a large religious part).
I think a nice middle point would be to have the character gain hope at some point and genuinely believe in freedom, and then associate freedom with a god, or examine how some god wants everyone to experience the joy of freedom. This may lead to legitimate religious belief.
Mundane ways are obviously easier, but Cult is not just stock evil - I think that by the standards of Exalted, even the belief of Tokyo in the Phantom Thieves would count as a Cult Rating. The Incarnae also have Cult ratings, so it seems like something that's morally neutral?
I'm thinking up a response to your point re: theming, will respond later.
I'm not saying everyone with a cult is bad, it's just...it's super, super easy to fuck up when you do stuff like that. It's the job of the ST to explore all the ways it's likely to go horribly wrong, and starting it from a position of power, the head of the cult, kinda worries me, in the same way people talking about establishing a secret police would. It's not inherently evil, but it's just...I genuinely cannot imagine it becoming anything other than awful, given the context we have.
> everyone talking about how we need to buff ???? the Possibly Extant God/Goddess of Abolition so the oppressed underclass can have an object of worship that cares for them and will love them always
> me sitting over here "Y'all Helots need Kimbery"
Yeah, like the primary force of faith in a slave religion is going to be an unspoken and unheard and invisible, yet somehow still undeniable, feeling of like profane injustice, of indescribable wrongness in the current dis-order. The tension between their lives and a just world creating the feeling that there should be some sort of karmic resolution and restoration- how dare the earth not cry out from the desecrating blood spilt upon her, how dare Sol not cast away his face from the terrible sight before him. If any Primordial floats their name out there I think most are ready to sign the fuck up.
Plus this way the Helots are not merely the poorest and most downtrodden of Lookshy's protohistory but conquered kings and servant of kings; with their ancient birthright stolen by foreign tribes and the walls of their primeval glory torn down by the false usurpers.
well that's... that's not gonna stay with me tonight. nosiree bob. yeesh.
[X] You dream of something furious and forbidden. Armored bodies mounted on polearms, wrists and ankles bound; a Dragonblooded of Sextes Jylis, spitted and still twitching in the very center. Sacred blood slowly dripping down.
we all come into this world the same way. naked, screaming, covered in blood. the fun doesn't have to stop there o.o
Like, if you have mechanical advancements like the cotton gin to turn complex and valuable jobs into something doable by rote unskilled labour then slavery can be profitable (for a while, at atrocious moral cost), but in the kind of environment Lookshy exists within, slavery is strictly inferior to skilled labour. Again, look at what those thaumaturges did in a few minutes of ritual work. Lookshy does not maintain a slave caste out of a desire for profit, it maintains a slave class to free up its citizen class to be a terrifyingly huge military with which to dominate its neighbours, a practice which is now cracking at the seams and causing them to double down even harder on brutalising the helot class to maintain control over what they have. This is pretty explicit in ManusDomine's Lookshy writeup, which this quest is based on.
This is also, incidentally, why any plan that's rooted in getting divine backing is basically a non-starter; because the Goddess Lookshy is enough of a bigshot that she answers to nobody, and she is deeply invested in maintaining and perpetuating her power base, which is itself deeply invested in maintaining and perpetuating a slave class. Any attempt to build up a divinity with the express purpose of opposing her is the sort of thing she will try her damndest to strangle in its crib - possibly literally, if the opportunity arises. Like you're assuming that the vote to think about gods is the most literal sort of vote for the future, but this is TenfoldShields we're talking about. It could just as easily be a vote about what sort of person Alexius is (intimacies?), or heck, maybe it's just background. We don't know yet.
The job of the ST is to tell the story with the players. Often, that means generating plothooks from the consequences of player action. Not just, "you Did A Thing, now let's see how it all goes wrong."
This will not happen. If you Exalted as the strongest Solar who has ever lived, it still won't happen. One Exalt does not tear down a city-state full of Exalts. This is not how Exaltation works.
Sure, a Solar isn't gonna one man army their way through the whole of Lookshy, crown themselves the new Archon and then hand out social-fu enforced mandates to overhaul the system. But, "lone hero quests to overthrow the corrupt order of a mighty empire" is absolutely the kind of story an Exalt tells. A lot of it will be about building up a power base with which to do that. Given the way things are going, I'm expecting an awful lot of Underworld infrastructure and ghost armies, liberally inspired by @Omicron's writeups from earlier.
Given the way things are going, I'm expecting an awful lot of Underworld infrastructure and ghost armies, liberally inspired by @Omicron's writeups from earlier.
I said this kinda flippantly earlier, but the idea of this machine of blood and iron falling to the onslaught of the very corpses it built itself on is just hitting me right in the "Yes. This, and more of this."
Pretty much If your sins were not so great, we would not have come to punish you.
[X] You dream of something furious and forbidden. Armored bodies mounted on polearms, wrists and ankles bound; a Dragonblooded of Sextes Jylis, spitted and still twitching in the very center. Sacred blood slowly dripping down.
Cast down the slave owners! Scatter their legions, scourge their officents and lynch them from the trees! There can be no peace while even one soul suffers under bondage!
[ X ] You dream of something that could be called "freedom". You've only been swimming a few times in your life but you imagine it's something like that. Floating, drifting weightless. Suspended in the blue above everything else.
Adhoc vote count started by TenfoldShields on Nov 10, 2018 at 3:40 PM, finished with 73 posts and 33 votes.
[X] You dream of something that could be called "freedom". You've only been swimming a few times in your life but you imagine it's something like that. Floating, drifting weightless. Suspended in the blue above everything else.
[X] You dream of something furious and forbidden. Armored bodies mounted on polearms, wrists and ankles bound; a Dragonblooded of Sextes Jylis, spitted and still twitching in the very center. Sacred blood slowly dripping down.
[X] You dream of something between lust and love. Arms around your waist, the hands on your hips changing from one heartbeat to the next; from things of ash and smoldering ember to Jason's, just as calloused and worn as yours.
