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Gems in the Wastes (Exalted/Warhammer Fantasy/CK2)

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Alectai said:
EDIT: I hope the implication of it fleeing instead of being bound isn't suggesting this is an Essence 4 or higher Hearteater, because that's straight up an existential threat to the entire planet right now. A Hearteater can Pawn anything that isn't an Exalt by that point, and they're just a relative hop skip and a jump away from removing the cap on their maximum number of Pawns.
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hopefully it will go inflict itself on the dark elves or the followers of chaos, IE people who don't have exults to protect them and are evil enough that the exults won't care to save them or even bother to look too deep into them for the Hearteater , maybe it finds the local skaven presence and used their globe spanning tunnel network to go to another continent so someone else's problem far away from us
 
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mmgaballah said:
hopefully it will go inflict itself on the dark elves or the followers of chaos, IE people who don't have exults to protect them and are evil enough that the exults won't care to save them or even bother to look too deep into them for the Hearteater , maybe it finds the local skaven presence and used their globe spanning tunnel network to go to another continent so someone else's problem far away from us
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We live next to both of those, the last thing we want is for them to get organized because they have been puppeted.
 
mmgaballah said:
I figure they would tear themselves apart fighting the puppets and out of sheer paranoia because of the puppets
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The Druchi maybe if the Heart Eater gets too ambitious too fast, but most Chaos tribes would just get taken over. They don't know what it is, what it can do and they get taken over by Tzeenchians all the time. The Heart Eater is like that, but not beholden to a manifestation of cosmic treachery.
 
DragonParadox said:
The Druchi maybe if the Heart Eater gets too ambitious too fast, but most Chaos tribes would just get taken over. They don't know what it is, what it can do and they get taken over by Tzeenchians all the time. The Heart Eater is like that, but not beholden to a manifestation of cosmic treachery.
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Which will make the inevitable fight with said manifestation hilarious to watch because I doubt he will lets some outsider not beholden to it come in and turn his pawns into collectibles

Also there are no chaos tribes this far north , just pure warriors of chaos warbands and high level ones at that
 
…Well. Clearly we need to train our guard better, because, uh. "One of our guys shot first, so we didn't try to deescalate, took no prisoners, and also didn't tell the king this" is exceptionally bad.

Not, you know, bad in a way that I wouldn't expect of soldiers who haven't been in a war before, against people who look visibly non-human. Just. Bad.
 
Murloc said:
…Well. Clearly we need to train our guard better, because, uh. "One of our guys shot first, so we didn't try to deescalate, took no prisoners, and also didn't tell the king this" is exceptionally bad.

Not, you know, bad in a way that I wouldn't expect of soldiers who haven't been in a war before, against people who look visibly non-human. Just. Bad.
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The real issue is that a Hearteater's Pawn decided to start the fight, and at that point it was pretty much impossible to de-escalate even if there was a shared language and the other side wasn't drunk out of their ass.

A Hearteater's Pawn no longer has free will. Whatever else they might have been has been subsumed by happy subservience to the Hearteater, which becomes a magically enforced, absolute highest loyalty effect that always wins if it comes into conflict with other thoughts and beliefs, including self-preservation. It's not something you can resist, which is part of why Hearteaters are so terrifying. "An Exalt has to beat your Resolve once and then you're a Pawn of theirs, no further save allowed". The only limitation in their ability to Pawn people is A) Their capacity, which disappears at Essence 5, and B) You can't be an Exalt, just about everything else they can eventually Pawn with enough experience. Zombies? Ghosts? Elementals? Animals? The only limitation is "Do I feel like turning this person into my slave for just a few motes, and is this more valuable than the other slaves I have", and that's that. If you can't beat their uncomfortably large pool with your Resolve, you're now their Pawn and you can't ever throw it off on your own. Even that exorcism only removes the magically enforced part of the Intimacy and the Hearteater's ability to Assume Direct Control when needed and makes it actually possible to deprogram the victim instead of just an Automatic Failure no matter how good you are.
 
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Oh, no, I understand the pawn we couldn't do anything about. But, uh, the correct response when one of your guys attacks without orders isn't, actually, "well I guess we kill them to a man, and then hide the situation from our boss."
 
Murloc said:
Oh, no, I understand the pawn we couldn't do anything about. But, uh, the correct response when one of your guys attacks without orders isn't, actually, "well I guess we kill them to a man, and then hide the situation from our boss."
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In fairness, deescalation and even prisoner taking may have been attempted. It wouldn't have been mentioned due to the 'hiding from our boss' thing, and wouldn't have worked due to the nature of the druchii.

The hiding things is pretty bad, though.
 
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DeadmanwalkingXI said:
In fairness, deescalation and even prisoner taking may have been attempted. It wouldn't have been mentioned due to the 'hiding from our boss' thing, and wouldn't have worked due to the nature of the druchii.

The hiding things is pretty bad, though.
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Everyone who hid that information needs to be stripped of all military responsibility. As bad up as we are for military power soldiers that hide information from their commanders are in many ways worse than no soldiers.
 
So I've been thinking (I know dangerous hobby :V ) about how to deal with that Heart Eater. Correct me if I am wrong in any of my assumptions here, but the way I see it we have one relatively straightforward way to find and deal with the SoB:

  1. Capture one of their pawns
  2. Use sorcery to track them down, if it can be used to exorcise, it should be able to find and follow that link barring charms that protect from divination
  3. Take the Heart Eater themselves prisoner
Once we have them we have three options only one of which is remotely moral, but for the sake of completeness I'm going to mark all of them down here.

The Moral: Keep them a prisoner until all their pawns capable of exaltation are dead. If they have say ghost pawns that is fine, you can't glue an exaltation on one of those
The not so Moral Mind control them somehow, yes there are charms to prevent that but mote tapping is a thing and Solars can get pretty good at mind control themselves
The... it literally involves Yozis: Send them to literal hell as part of a deal with a powerful Demon. I'm sure the Yozis would love a mind controlling akuma and we could make it part of the deal that the Heart Eater is never allowed on this world and that all their pawns are removed from said world as soon as they are made akuma
 
Well, I'm glad to see things are going relatively okay now after I went to bed. I'm sorry for the... impromptu decision-making I did yesterday, I think I stressed myself out too much trying to make a situation perfect that I might have stumbled a bit. If you have any questions you'd like to ask or any feedback about how I can improve on things for the future, let me know. I need to get ready for work, I'll respond back when I can.
 
DragonParadox said:
So I've been thinking (I know dangerous hobby :V ) about how to deal with that Heart Eater. Correct me if I am wrong in any of my assumptions here, but the way I see it we have one relatively straightforward way to find and deal with the SoB:

  1. Capture one of their pawns
  2. Use sorcery to track them down, if it can be used to exorcise, it should be able to find and follow that link barring charms that protect from divination
  3. Take the Heart Eater themselves prisoner
Once we have them we have three options only one of which is remotely moral, but for the sake of completeness I'm going to mark all of them down here.

The Moral: Keep them a prisoner until all their pawns capable of exaltation are dead. If they have say ghost pawns that is fine, you can't glue an exaltation on one of those
The not so Moral Mind control them somehow, yes there are charms to prevent that but mote tapping is a thing and Solars can get pretty good at mind control themselves
The... it literally involves Yozis: Send them to literal hell as part of a deal with a powerful Demon. I'm sure the Yozis would love a mind controlling akuma and we could make it part of the deal that the Heart Eater is never allowed on this world and that all their pawns are removed from said world as soon as they are made akuma
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I know this likely sounds as cringe as a person new to 40k advocating for female spaces marines but I am new to exulted lore so I will do it any

Can we make peace with the heart eater ? And I don't know extract oath for not to enslave in exchange of us not trying to kill him for existing maybe even see if he would join
 
mmgaballah said:
I know this likely sounds as cringe as a person new to 40k advocating for female spaces marines but I am new to exulted lore so I will do it any

Can we make peace with the heart eater ? And I don't know extract oath for not to enslave in exchange of us not trying to kill him for existing maybe even see if he would join
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From what I understand no, they all have a compulsive need to mind control ever larger numbers of people. We can make peace with the Infernal absolutely, we do not really have beef with him, not like the Yozis are after this world. And we can make peace with the Fair Folk if we are careful and clever about it, remembering that they are very alien intelligence, but there is really no way to fix Heart Eaters, unless we want to sacrifice our Fount and they are not worth that.
 
DeadmanwalkingXI said:
Hmmm. Raksha trickery? Heart-Eaters? The Infernal? We have options...
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Oh yeah we have lots of options for bad things.

Randomnerd said:
We're weren't even here for a damn week and we already have a diplomatic incident. That has to be some kind of record.
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Well to be honest...

DeadmanwalkingXI said:
Eh. There's no need to get super upset...peace with the Druchii was never an option. Enemy action being involved is foreshadowing, not anything mechanically meaningful.
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This, very much this. From an in quest perspective it is very bad, but from a meta-perspective it is... still very bad just a different flavor of bad.

mmgaballah said:
hopefully it will go inflict itself on the dark elves or the followers of chaos, IE people who don't have exults to protect them and are evil enough that the exults won't care to save them or even bother to look too deep into them for the Hearteater , maybe it finds the local skaven presence and used their globe spanning tunnel network to go to another continent so someone else's problem far away from us
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mmgaballah said:
Which will make the inevitable fight with said manifestation hilarious to watch because I doubt he will lets some outsider not beholden to it come in and turn his pawns into collectibles

Also there are no chaos tribes this far north , just pure warriors of chaos warbands and high level ones at that
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I am having mixed feelings about that. On one hand bad people fighting each other can be rather funny, on the other hand I don't particularly like the innocent(ish) people that the Dark Elves have been enslaving getting caught up in such or the potential of what the Chaos gods (I.E. Tzseech) might learn from the Heart Eater's methods/techniques (or god forbid if they somehow bind it to their will).
 
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