- Location
- Denmark
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Exalted: Out Of The Eater
- Thread starter TenfoldShields
- Start date
- Location
- Virginia
[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.
ZerbanDaGreat
Daemon Noble of D E M O G R A P H I C S
- Pronouns
- They/them
Very much seconding this. I think with how hard this prologue is leaning on the fact of "hey helots are so systemically broken down and abused and so consistently treated as subhuman that that really fucks you up and taints even the tiny spots of hope with the fact that you are worth less than shit and it could all be taken away on a whim or bad luck" I sssseeeeeeeriously doubt this all ends with "and then Alexius became a Solar and put on his Glorious Solar Pince-Nez and filed all the proper income tax forms and official complaints to the Bureau of Heaven and BullWurzHeyYouCanMakeAReligionOutOfThis.wav"
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.
Mark my words, this ends in blood and fire and the heaviest of metal.
Truth be told I got more Lunar/Infernal/Abyssal vibes compared to Solar ones - but otherwise? Almost any starting epic motivation for a helot Celestial Exalt is going to be screw Lookshy. The Dragonblooded are so oppressive that they basically focus a helot's entire life around their brutality. An Exalt might want to cause Lookshy to wither and rot before dragging it into the Underworld, or cleanse with the green fires of Malfeas and scour it with the winds of Adjoran or tear its military into bits in a tide of flesh and moonsilver or just build a shining golden city on a hill that will shatter Lookshy's armies in battle and turning it into a mere colony, its citizens toiling the fields, under the aegis of the Sun - but I don't see a helot!Exalted not having a screw Lookshy motivation.
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- Location
- madison
Normally, I like dipomancers. I like peopel who can talk things out, who can find a way to make taking the high road work.
[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.
after four updates of the sheer horror of what they do to the helots, I'm up for playing a villain protagonist intent on massacring every last man woman and child of the citizenry.
[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.
after four updates of the sheer horror of what they do to the helots, I'm up for playing a villain protagonist intent on massacring every last man woman and child of the citizenry.
Sounds like an excellent goal to me. This is the sort of bullshit that led to mortals joining the fey in the Balorian Crusade.
BadAtScreenNames
Killed a man in Reno just to watch him die
- Location
- the (currently) United Kingdom
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Preach.
[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 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
Congrats @ManusDomini your take on Lookshy is so grim that I don't even want us to do anything but burn it to the ground and salt the earth.
Congrats @ManusDomini your take on Lookshy is so grim that I don't even want us to do anything but burn it to the ground and salt the earth.
[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 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.
I choose respite, if only in a dream.
I choose respite, if only in a dream.
- Location
- Denmark
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Thanks, it turns out that it really changes a lot when you just give up on being original and copy/paste the historical Sparta and East Roman Empire instead.
One time, I was reading the First Edition books on the realm and commenting to a mutual friend of ours, @Crumplepunch, about how unrealistically evil they seemed. Then I remembered Sparta existed and went, "Wait, actually, I forgot, Sparta was actually worse than this."Thanks, it turns out that it really changes a lot when you just give up on being original and copy/paste the historical Sparta and East Roman Empire instead.
He responds: "Sparta was almost comically loathsome." And that is just the best summary of Sparta I've ever heard.
- Location
- Denmark
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Well, in modern consensus anyways. As I have undoubtedly mentioned and discussed before, it gets murky when our only source is Athenai. For example, we have two sources for the treatment of the helotry, with one source being Critias (the one I draw on) and the other being Pollux (whom canon Exalted has historically drawn upon). Critias depicts the helots as "slaves to the utmost", while Pollux describes them as occupying a place between free men and slaves. So it might get easy to simply say, "right, clearly Critias is simply engaging in portraying the Lakedaimonian state as evil", but this becomes more complicated when you discover that Critias himself was a Laconophile (i.e. obsessed with Sparta) and believed that Athenai should take on a more Spartan system of government, and even assisted the Thirty Tyrants in taking control of Athenai in a short-lived oligarchic coup. Today, I believe consensus has settled on Critias, although there is a notable vocal opposition who maintain that Sparta was just a normal, slightly militant polis most of the time which was completely unexceptional except for maintaining a slightly old-fashioned form of government, and that the period of Sparta we know of either did not exist as described, or was a relatively distinct and short period in Spartan existence. Regardless, I decided when writing Lookshy that it had too few problems, and I believed - and still do - that Exalted has failed to adequately engage with the morality of slave-holding polities. So that became one of the pillars of the Lookshy I wrote.
maybe Critias was the first Tankie
Aoinfinity
Unlimited Blue Works
- Location
- a blue Infinity
[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.
TenfoldShields
Lounging on a Hoard of Words
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Voting Closed.
Dreams of Freedom takes it, update tonight.
Dreams of Freedom takes it, update tonight.
- Location
- On the coast of Portugal
- Pronouns
- They/Them
Hoot! Update.
I wonder how much more Alexis can take. More and more he seems to be on the verge of just falling down. I mean, mad willpower until now, but I wonder if he's not reaching the bottom of his limits.
- Location
- Denmark
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Yesssssssss.
- Location
- Singapore
A question. Slavery was rife. How do we.... run a state, without it?
- Location
- madison
I do actually wonder if Lookshy has more issues with undead than other places. They don't just have chattel slavery, they have helliots who on top of working to death they essentially murder en mass for shits and giggles. In the realm, slaves are somewhat scarce and therefore are somewhat valuable. Even the most cold-hearted of realm slave masters likely feel that keeping your slaves fed is cheaper than replacing them, and would find the idea of killing a slave because they are strong or beautiful wasteful.
in Lookshy helliots are not scarce, in fact, they almost have too many. So they are wasteful and elaborately cruel. They are not merely worked to death, they are executed en mass whenever their masters have an excuse, they are subjected to random killings, any who stand out in any way are killed horrifically. It is likely the cruelest form of mundane slavery practiced by mortals en mass in creation. Undead are likely still rare, but I suspect that the per capita instances of ghosts and Shadowlands are a good deal higher in Lookshy than most places. Just one more horrible thing to kick in once it starts collapsing I guess.
in Lookshy helliots are not scarce, in fact, they almost have too many. So they are wasteful and elaborately cruel. They are not merely worked to death, they are executed en mass whenever their masters have an excuse, they are subjected to random killings, any who stand out in any way are killed horrifically. It is likely the cruelest form of mundane slavery practiced by mortals en mass in creation. Undead are likely still rare, but I suspect that the per capita instances of ghosts and Shadowlands are a good deal higher in Lookshy than most places. Just one more horrible thing to kick in once it starts collapsing I guess.
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Instead of asking questions like this, why don't you google "Historical states without slaves". Just...seriously. Google before you ask questions like this.
- Location
- madison
you noticed how the sorcerer and his elementals casually did like half a days worth of work after watching the slaves work all day? that's how. once you have stuff like that doing stuff that would need slaves you just build a society where the bottom rung is poor person rather than slave. That is by no means easy to do from scratch, but if it was easy it would not need a celestial exalted to do it.