Aleph: Hmm. There are different types of loyalty, really. By far the best, in Keris's opinion, is "love". If the person is grateful to you and loves you and
likes you and considers you to be a good person who they think is
worth following; that's ideal. That's what she has from the misbegotten.
Aleph: No, actually. They're not that anymore. The Gullites, heh.
Aleph: That's made even stronger if it's based on truth, which at the moment it isn't from them. Kuha is by far her strongest and most loyal follower who's not Kerisian herself, by that measure. She knows exactly what Keris is - well, she might not understand it all, but Keris isn't deceiving her at all - and she still loves her and is loyal to her.
EarthScorpion: Keris saved her life and cured her
and give her a flying demon pony. : p
Aleph: The second type is Money. You're paying someone, they stand to profit more from following you, turning on you would cause their personal prospects to dip and damage their own property or goals in some way. They may not like you, and it's not an emotional loyalty, but it's a pragmatic intellectual one. As long as it's maintained, that's nearly as good - Keris considers it slightly worse in most ways because of the possibility that a better offer might come along and also because it can be overridden by emotional things (at least in her paradigm). She's pretty paranoid about the emotional force of the Immaculate Faith, and probably assigns the prejudice against Anathema more weight than it actually has with most people she's had contact with.
EarthScorpion: That's why she loves Kindness Expects Repayment.
Aleph: Yes. Money is better in only one respect, and that's that someone who is Money-loyal to you is less likely to go off half-cocked if they think you're in danger. A head-based loyalty rather than a heart-based one lends itself to a more measured, cautious approach. That
might be a way to get House Sinasana on her side. Give them a better offer, and then rapidly get them deep enough that turning her in would get them executed by the Realm as Anathema-slaves as well. That one is also somewhat enhanced by honesty, in that secrets mean it's possible for a shocking reveal to lead to an emotional override. Basically it's a way of defending against Chrono's tactic versus Fate.
Aleph: The last form of loyalty, and the kind Keris doesn't really like at all, is Fear. If someone is more scared of you - or the consequences of disobeying you - than of whatever you want them to do, they'll do what you say. She doesn't really trust that to hold people with any sort of force, because Keris herself
loathes being trapped or intimidated, and her instinctive response to being backed into a corner like that is violence and scheming. She doesn't really understand cowards or people like Wormtail, and so she can't judge the careful balance of "scared enough that they don't dare disobey but not scared enough that they have nothing to lose".
Aleph: Sasi, I suspect, is a lot better at that balance. But yeah, Keris doesn't like that form at all for anything more than very short-term immediate loyalty; "get me into the camp or I'll gut you". She expects a knife in the back one night if she tries to maintain it. Or for them just to cut and run. It's what she'd do. That one is probably better without honesty, because of the risk of them blabbing to a perceived protector.
Aleph: Sasi might balance them all equally, and prefer combinations. She especially likes Money and Fear - they profit from following her and if they turn on her they lose
everything.
...
<re: Sasi's souls>
EarthScorpion: Sasi is, unfortunately, fucked up. So her souls have issues too. And Sasi is also rather more typical of how soul relationships will turn out, because Keris has invested huge amounts of time into her souls.
Aleph: : (
EarthScorpion: Well, also, they probably will be getting on better when they have more room. For example, most of the problems with Seresa in Kalaska's mind are caused by her being a) loud, and b) a screamer. She likes her a lot when she's being motherly, rather than when she's having threesomes with other souls.
Aleph: Keris is a paragon, somehow, of inter-soul unity and harmony of self.
Keris: "Wait, what?"
Aleph: Oh, Keris. You won't notice it for quite a while, but... resolving disputes between your souls and making sure they all
can get along at times (or at least don't loathe each others' existence) and spending family time with them and
humanising them...
Aleph: ... has actually had the result that you're remarkably stable and centred in yourself and can resolve internal struggles and conflicts
really well, by Exalt standards. Like, she's unintentionally pouring
vast amounts of time and effort into a regime of meditation and personal stabilisation that's probably on a similar scale to the regime of an Immaculate monk who's doing the same thing with a paradigm of asceticism and meditation and prayer.
EarthScorpion: ... huh. She probably should buy up Politics, actually. She's been training it up a lot with her children.
Aleph: Hmm. Yes, true. Oh, Keris. That's sort of hilarious, really. To things that detect, I dunno, "internal strife" or "imbalance in the self" at a fluff level, you read like an Immaculate master. Or a monk who spends half of every day in meditation and self-examination.
Aleph: Hmm. I could get Politics, or I could sneaky-buy up a Style that's basically "Can't We All Just Get Along"
Aleph: ... she'll get a lot of use out of that one.
EarthScorpion: Oh, Keris. She's got, hah, such self control that when her Principles clash sometimes they just resolve things through Rock Paper Scissors.
Aleph: lol
Aleph: Heh. Yeah, that's a big difference between Keris and Sasi. Sasi is wildly split in different ways, and has a lot of bundled up self-loathing and guilt, while almost every part of Keris is comfortable at least with the
existence of every other. Even Calesco and Rathan eventually find meeting points. She's, hmm. Secure in herself.
EarthScorpion: Sasi broke them up in worse ways. : p
Aleph: Heh. Yes. The way Keris bundles them up is a help. She has a knack for taking bundles of maimed Yozi psychology and crossing them over to produce healthy(ish) behaviours.
Aleph: Hee. It really is going to be a while before she figures that side-benefit out. Heh. It's possible it'll be one of her kids who's like "well yeah, mama. Of course they're more stupid than you. They don't spend as much time meh-di-tay-ting, so they don't like themselves as much."
EarthScorpion: But yeah, there's also the fact that Sasi's souls split up based on "aspects of her"
Aleph: Hmm. Yes. The different faces she wears.
EarthScorpion: While Keris' ones are elements of her personality made into personalities on their own.
Aleph: Yes. It means that Keris's are far more able to cooperate. They're parts that naturally form a whole.
...
Aleph: ... heh. It says something very alarming to the Althing - or would, if they knew the full extent of the Infernal soul hierarchies - that Sasi is loyal because a defining element of her personality and one of her Third Circle souls is defined by being submissive towards the Yozis and loyal to the Reclamation.
Aleph: While Keris is loyal largely because several of her souls are sympathetic to the the Yozis' plight - chief among them Haneyl and Vali - and because she loves Sasi and Sasi is loyal, and because they pay her a lot.
Aleph: Sasi is Love-loyal, or rather a mixture of Love and Fear of what it means if they're not in the right. Keris is... Love-loyal to Sasi and mostly just Money-loyal to the Yozis themselves. She sympathises with their situation, but she's already having doubts over whether the Unquestionable would be good rulers for Creation - or
are good rulers for Hell.
EarthScorpion: Well, with Sasi, it's also because the only way she could cope with becoming an Anathema was to decide that being an Anathema was a good thing and the Dragonblooded were the real villains. And so if she's an anathema, she'd rather be a princess of Hell than hunted by the Wyld Hunt
Aleph: Yes, that's the Fear aspect.
...
Aleph: Project System Concept:
State PROJECT
Base TURN is seasonal; can be shifted to week, month, year or decade by the circumstances and details of a given Project.
Identify and gather MEANS. Means are the things you need to complete the Project. Examples:
- Labour. People to do the work. (Construction crews to reroute a river, trained teachers to uplift a town to literacy, network of spies to build a profile of foreign nobles). Backgrounds like Followers, Contacts, etc.
- Research. Information that must be known. (Books of tax records to rewrite a city's trade laws, relevant occult texts to create a new spell, knowledge of a foreign country's customs and society to create a watertight false identity).
- Resources. Essential funds or seed capital. (Silver to fund the purchase of everything necessary for a master's workshop, land on which to build a new temple to Mela, food and supplies to provision an expedition to a new land).
- Tools. Specialist equipment needed for the job. (A Shogunate repair kit to fix the damage done to a war strider, kitchens of sufficient size to feed an entire garrison for a month, a ship capable of ocean travel to set up a new trade route).
- Access. A way to apply one's efforts to the project. (Regular audiences with the members of a council to be swayed, an excuse to regularly escape one's duties and work on a secret Artifact, a hidden route to smuggle loyal soldiers into a fortress).
- Various others.
Determine the DIFFICULTY. (???)
ROLL. If you meet the (high) Difficulty in one shot, the Project advances automatically. Otherwise, a complication arises that must be played through, and you add the next roll once you advance past it.
Aleph: So an explicit stage of "okay, what do I need for this project", and then something similar to the old extended rolls, except that instead of advancing time intervals it just encourages sessions of "resolve this complication". Which might involve sub-Projects, or might just need you to social-fu or sword something until it goes away, or may total the entire Project if you fuck up too badly. So Keris's Project to wean the Hui Cha off slavery (by building a Principle of "no slavery" in the organisation) might take a season, she rolls against a somehow-calculated Difficulty, and if she fails a problem occurs, like a group who make £££ off of slaves getting uppity so she has to go play out getting them to calm down. Or murder them.
EarthScorpion: Hmm. We want these Projects to be multi-player compatible.
Aleph: Well, this lets multiple players pool Means for a Project.
EarthScorpion: So we want to break them down into steps, and some steps can be parallelised if, for example, you have two PCs who both have some bureaucracy. Like, you remember how when she was designing the owl-riders, there was a design action, and then two experimentation actions.
Aleph: Yes. Hmm. Not sure how to standardise that.
EarthScorpion: Well, that's just a form of difficulty. How many successful checks the action is made up of, which serves to set a minimum duration. You just break the action up into discrete units. And it means that when a party does things, for example, part of the "research" phase can be a Night going and hunting down copies of a book, while the Twilight does active research and the Eclipse pulls their trade network to get the parts together. And they can all use their pertinent skills on the strategic scale and get three actions worth of research done in a season.
EarthScorpion: (Or, heh, Keris and Sasi can decide they're not talking to each other after a flaming row on the best way to research something, and can go spend a season off doing their own thing).
Aleph: Yes. : D
EarthScorpion: Hmm. I do think the Book of Three Circles' "this assumes 3 weeks of every 4 are being spent on full time research" is a useful ballpark.
Aleph: Hmm. So the Difficulty of a Project is set in Stages (number of). And yeah, that's fair. Though I think there should be Charmtech to allow you to run two
separate Projects in parallel, so that the sorcerer-king is capable of running his kingdom while doing mysterious and terrible research in his tower outside capital city limits. You can't double up on the same Project with it, though.
EarthScorpion: Oh, that's totally valid space for Eclipse-ness. Like, in the same sense as those flurry effects that demand that each flurry attack be directed at someone else
Aleph: Yes.
EarthScorpion: Echo asks when there'll be a Silence-In-Her-Wake-alike for organisation management.
Aleph: Lol
EarthScorpion: ... no, Echo, Keris can't manage every project she runs by.
EarthScorpion: ... the fact that you can doesn't change things
Aleph: She can
attack every Project she runs past, though! That's nearly as good! Better, even!
EarthScorpion: Heh. So if we assume that making a TCS spell is 4 actions, Keris just needs to get her hands on things that provides 2 actions worth of development, persuade Lilunu to work with her for an action, and put her own action of work in, and she can get the spell done in a season.
Aleph: Yay!
Aleph: ^_^
EarthScorpion: Keris: "What up, Orabilis my homedawg. I need to know things about how demons can possess mortals."
Aleph: So, hmm. A bunch of stuff about demonic possession from Orabilis's libraries is one, yes. Hmm. The fourth... heh. Get Dulmea to weigh in?
EarthScorpion: Ha, that is... true. Keris can actually pool her souls.
Haneyl: "Mama! Mama! Mama! Mama! I have a workshop for it!"
Haneyl: "I'm going to need lots of fake yous! And grandma is also going to be there and she knows all about how the yous work! I'm going to be doing genesis on the yous!"
Haneyl: "... does that mean I'm working with Lilunu? It does! It does!"
Keris: "... didn't you used to not like her?"
Haneyl: "Mama! I was just a baby back then! Now I'm older I see how pretty and stylish and good at art she is! And... and even if Ligier loves her, she's good enough for him!"
... so cute.
...
Aleph: ... oh shit.
Aleph: SUCCEEDED TOO WELL
Aleph: GOT ORABILIS'S DIRECT INTEREST
Aleph: WUH OH
EarthScorpion: : D
EarthScorpion: That's what happens when you throw so many dice into your deal-making and use a success doubler~
Aleph: Fffff
EarthScorpion: And then Orabilis is like "Hmm, a spell to get demons to sit inside cultists' heads and monitor them, how very useful"
Aleph: Goddammit.
Aleph: Well, on the plus side, it'll be a
really good spell. And this might get me the aid of a second Unquestionable.
Aleph: ... of course, it might also alter infernal cult dynamics across a fairly wide swath of Creation In Hell's favour. Dammit Keris.
Aleph: Sigh. Keris is, in some respects,
exactly what the Yozis were going for with coadjutors - she adores Dulmea and takes her advice and Dulmea has considerable influence over her. In other respects she's a disaster, because she's basically flipped Dulmea to be more on her side than the Althing's. And Dulmea is doing a
very poor job of limiting Keris's growth in power. In fact, precisely the opposite is happening. Instead of Dulmea dragging Keris down, Keris is dragging her up.
...
Aleph: o keris
Aleph: "Calesco - and I suppose I - suspect that the coadjutor is meant as a choke-chain for Infernals. So I'll just casually mention that it's working and that I'm dependent on mine."
EarthScorpion: If Orabilis had a goatee, he would be stroking it
Aleph: In satisfaction?
EarthScorpion: In pondering.
Aleph: Heh. Oh, Keris. You're not all that sure yourself of why your Gales don't seem to work as well as others. Bar maybe a quiet pondering if maybe the extent to which you've explored Pantheon Heresy might not have left you a bit dependent on a soul hierarchy of some sort.
...
Aleph: Hee. I do sometimes just giggle gleefully at the Keris pantheon and all their distinct and recognisable aesthetics. ^_^
EarthScorpion: What, you mean the way that the tsundere, the moe cook and the palladin class rep are the same person. : p
Aleph: Well, I actually meant the things like Vali's metal and lightning and stormclouds aesthetic and how you can spot a Rathanite temple from the sixty-handed idols and the orca and dolphin reliefs and how Calesco has her tar and her amber and her light. They're really clearly visually coded, the different areas of the domain. It'd be good for an anime.
...
Aleph: Oh, Vali. Totally going to make your kitten a prosthetic leg. Probably after he discovers automata.
Aleph: Hee. Copper-brass fur and iron teeth over flesh and blood. Strange little creature.
...
Aleph: ... heh. I do find it hilarious still that Echo has worked out things about Keris's metaphysical nature that Keris hasn't. I wonder if it might not be partly because she's irreverent as well as a genius, and so forbidden notions like "maybe Mama is even greater than an Unquestionable" don't get her to instinctively shy away from the blasphemy. A soul like La would never even be able to finish the thought.
EarthScorpion: La handles the world by forcing people into roles. The Yozis are too big for roles. : p
Aleph: : P
EarthScorpion: Well, heh. Echo also has the advantage that she can
feel she really isn't so different from the Csend. She's just littler, because she's still a baby.
Aleph: Hmm? How so? Oh right, because she's actually met her counterpart outside of Keris. Yes, true. That's rare.
Aleph: Oh, Keris. You're fully aware that your souls have "big siblings", you just haven't really followed that thought. Some instinctual survival reflex, perhaps.
...
Aleph: Hee. "Pay each man back in kind" works
so much better for Rathan than Get Revenge. Hmm. Can I change that now?
EarthScorpion: I think, hmm, she'd need four scenes to adjust it by Rules as Discussed on Skype (also known as Rules As Written Down Somewhere).
Aleph: Mmm. I'm just thinking back to the times she's tried to guide him away from being purely revenge. But yeah, there should be a few points of explicit shift.
Aleph: Oh, Rathan. If people love and idolise you, you perform and display for them and sign autographs and kiss babies and so on. If they criticise or insult you, you scorn them with caustic words and vitriolic counterattacks. If they
attack you, you burn them horribly with acid and set your hordes of followers to tear them apart and cut their hearts out to make crystal ornaments.
EarthScorpion: Unless they're your siblings. In which case things are more, uh, proportional.
Aleph: ... heh. He is, again, a healthier version of Ululaya, because he
does understand payback and deals, and so if someone loves you you'll love them back and give them a helping hand. Like, he's actually a pretty good patron.
EarthScorpion: The proportionality actually should be a thing for him
Aleph: Hmm. Yes. On the one hand, he does react fairly proportionally to his siblings. But on the other, he is the most, hmm, "noble" of Keris's souls, and... well, overreactions
are a thing for her.
EarthScorpion: Ah. Yes. Of course, it's a Keris thing. He's proportional by
intent, not by capacity.
Aleph: Hmm? Ahhhh. If someone tries to kill him, he kills them right back. If someone only tries to slap him, he'll hurt and humiliate but not kill.
EarthScorpion: If he thinks you're trying to destroy him, he'll act fully to destroy you. It doesn't matter if they're just a peasant with a knife that can't really hurt him. It matters that they're
trying to kill him. Likewise, his siblings send armies against him, but they both really know they're just doing it to take land or extract concessions.
Aleph: Hah. That's why the tidal raiders who try to overthrow him get crippled, emasculated and reduced to pathetic wretches that the others hunt. And yeah, at most, Haneyl wants to bloody his nose and make him cry and take his stuff. So he wants to shave her head bald and break her thumb and flood her art room.
Keris: "You two! Stop it!"
EarthScorpion: Heh. Rathan is more like Ululaya than he would ever admit. But he doesn't have the "I look like what you most want" stuff.
Aleph: Yes. And the big difference between Rathan and Ululaya is that he comes to understand the principle of "pay each man his due", and so even the leastmost of his worshippers do get a corresponding reward. Which is admittedly usually "basking in his beauty", but the thought behind it is different from Ululaya, who considers "basking in her beauty" to be a valid reward for even two Exalted in her service.
Aleph: If someone saved Rathan's life (or even acted to stop what they thought was a life-threatening event directed at him, especially if they did it at their own personal risk), he would decide that he really liked them and give them considerable support.
EarthScorpion: The core difference is that Ululaya is completely fine with people starving to death because they're caught in her awe field. While Rathan will make sure anyone who adores him is fed and housed.
Aleph: ... heh. Yes. The intent thing. Most of the people who worship and give gifts to him do so because they want his attention and pleasure. So he responds by giving them a little of his attention and demonstrating that he is greatly pleased.
EarthScorpion: Oh, Rathan, walking down the streets of the City with his followers handing out food behind him. Which of course means the poor of the City come flocking whenever he's heard to be there. Which he is juuuuuuuuuust fine with
Aleph: Hee. He is a rather good patron with this change. Still a Buddhist-vice-themed one who can be really sadistic to those he doesn't like, but if you genuinely try to help him, he rewards you in kind, and sincere loyalty to him means he won't just discard you at a whim. (Calesco maintains that he still doesn't care about people's lives as having their own intrinsic worth and is still fundamentally making it all about
him.)
EarthScorpion: ... huh. Rathan and Seresa alike understand that compassion is a vice. It's something you indulge in to make yourself happy.
Aleph: Heh. He and Zanara are, I think, the most classically demonic of Keris's Progeny souls, while Haneyl and Vali are her most human and Echo and Calesco are the... weirdest, really.
EarthScorpion: Eh. Calesco is an angel. A somewhat fallen one. : p
Aleph: Nah. The joke about Calesco is that yes, she's literally just an angel. An Old Testament one; terrible and agonising and all eyes and light and blood and pain. But who is nonetheless Good. That's something I always did rather like about that kind of angel; the fact that if you read between the lines they're basically the idea of this
kaiju or
monster showing up and yet it's on
your side, and is there to help you and do good things and serve the cause of right.
EarthScorpion: Hmm. Haneyl and Vali are really gods rather than human. That kind of polytheistic god
Aleph: Hah. Yes. Sort of fitting with Keris's relationship to Sasi.
Aleph: Hmm. Honestly, Echo could be an Old Testament angel as well, at a stretch. A wind of joy that brings freedom from suffering, who almost embodies "turn the other cheek" and "forgive and forget the sins of others". So Keris has two classical demons, two classical polytheistic gods and two classical angels.
Aleph: ... Calesco, no, don't call Rathan the Prince of Vice. He'll take it as a compliment.
...
EarthScorpion: Hee. Oh, Kerisian aesthetic arguments. When she's planning out a new artefact, it sometimes winds up as free-for-all warfare in her head as everyone tries to fight over varying aesthetics.
Aleph: : P
Aleph: Sometimes she just gives up and makes themed sets of eight [things] - like her paintbrushes - which sum up to A2 or so. Which makes everyone relatively happy.
Aleph: ... honestly, Kerisian family time is like a stereotypical Jewish family gathering. Complete with arguments, nagging, "oy vey!", "two Jews, three opinions", lively banter, lots of people and general chaos. Also
Immaculates people persecute them on religious grounds. : V
EarthScorpion: Also, bagels. There's totally bagels in Nexus
Aleph: Food and music in general.
...
<Re: the opal>
EarthScorpion: Oh, Keris. When she was a street thief, she actually got valuable hauls like this a few times. Every single time she blew it. The money vanished on nice things and on paying back debts and bribes and countless little things.
Aleph: She's much better at selling now. Though she doesn't quite appreciate that yet.
I'm still pondering over the exact details of the second option for what happens if your Fetich gets killed- any thoughts?
