Graypairofsocks
What is Grammar?
- Location
- earth
If they don't work on you, then may be kind of strange mentally.
General Exalted Thread
mothematics
How wide is the concept of "you"?
- Location
- the bottom of a coffee cup
- Pronouns
- She/Her
I was not referring to that. I meant what the tactics are similar to.
- Location
- Denmark
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Exactly.
Because, to the great happiness of literally everyone except for cult leaders, abusive spouses and con artists, persuasion isn't magic, and doesn't allow you to control people like puppets.
These tricks have to be tailored specifically to personality, and often lead to unintentional hilarity when they fail.
For example: one of my friends found herself in a cult (luckily she got out after I got it through her incredibly daft head, that they were not nice people to associate with) where she was an attempted victim of love bombing repeatedly, but due to her issues to connecting with people, it just kind of annoyed and confused her, and probably did more to convince her to leave than I did.
Because again, they aren't magical powers.
Gasping Babe
Yidak
Dead by Stillbirth
A mother strains in labour, but all for naught. The child never draws breath, and is cold and blue. The parents weep and bury their child. Yet wails are heard in the night, blood seeps from the walls, and their next child dies in their crib, burned by an unseen fire. Exorcists know to abandon such cursed houses and ring the room of the birth with salt. Otherwise, more children will die from a jealous monster that never got a chance to live.
Birth is a risky process, and occasionally tragedy strikes. The baby's lower soul gets lost on the way to its body, and so arrives too late for the child's first breath. The child dies - and sometimes the po that should have been theirs lingers. Such an unusual misfortune mostly occurs in shadowlands, where the violet threads of new life are murky and ensnared by the substance of the underworld. Established shadowland communities know rites to ensure that such a soul passes on, but they are not always reliable.
Gasping babes are a rare breed of yidak that have never known true life and so quickly become monstrous. In form they resemble wisps of pyreflame with a faint similarity to skeletal monkeys, and they crackle and inhale, endlessly trying to take their first breath. They lurk within the earth by day, but crawl out during the night to steal milk from cows, goats and nursing mothers. Their toothless gums burn flesh, which is one of the signs of their presence along with their wailing and their choking attempts to breathe. They are most feared, though, for their jealousy of children below the age of three. They crawl into cots of children left unattended and try to steal the breath they lack, leaving their victim's faces horribly mutilated even if they survive.
A lower soul that has never lived has considerable mystical power, and they are prized by necromancers who can acquire such specimens. Interred within a lead coffin or bone-ash china jar they can bring unnatural life to potent undead abominations. More virtuous exorcists seek only to lay such unfortunate souls to rest when they have the misfortune to encounter one, and there is a dedicated task-force in the Division of Endings under whose jurisdiction such defects in the reincarnation process falls.
Yidak
Dead by Stillbirth
A mother strains in labour, but all for naught. The child never draws breath, and is cold and blue. The parents weep and bury their child. Yet wails are heard in the night, blood seeps from the walls, and their next child dies in their crib, burned by an unseen fire. Exorcists know to abandon such cursed houses and ring the room of the birth with salt. Otherwise, more children will die from a jealous monster that never got a chance to live.
Birth is a risky process, and occasionally tragedy strikes. The baby's lower soul gets lost on the way to its body, and so arrives too late for the child's first breath. The child dies - and sometimes the po that should have been theirs lingers. Such an unusual misfortune mostly occurs in shadowlands, where the violet threads of new life are murky and ensnared by the substance of the underworld. Established shadowland communities know rites to ensure that such a soul passes on, but they are not always reliable.
Gasping babes are a rare breed of yidak that have never known true life and so quickly become monstrous. In form they resemble wisps of pyreflame with a faint similarity to skeletal monkeys, and they crackle and inhale, endlessly trying to take their first breath. They lurk within the earth by day, but crawl out during the night to steal milk from cows, goats and nursing mothers. Their toothless gums burn flesh, which is one of the signs of their presence along with their wailing and their choking attempts to breathe. They are most feared, though, for their jealousy of children below the age of three. They crawl into cots of children left unattended and try to steal the breath they lack, leaving their victim's faces horribly mutilated even if they survive.
A lower soul that has never lived has considerable mystical power, and they are prized by necromancers who can acquire such specimens. Interred within a lead coffin or bone-ash china jar they can bring unnatural life to potent undead abominations. More virtuous exorcists seek only to lay such unfortunate souls to rest when they have the misfortune to encounter one, and there is a dedicated task-force in the Division of Endings under whose jurisdiction such defects in the reincarnation process falls.
Last edited:
mothematics
How wide is the concept of "you"?
- Location
- the bottom of a coffee cup
- Pronouns
- She/Her
WELL that's horrifying.
- Location
- Denmark
- Pronouns
- She/Her
- Location
- Spain
Talking about this, is there any good source describing underworld mortal comunities?
(I am thinking to port Alhambra to Exalted for a game someday).
The logic behind this is quite simple - stillborns are cold, right? Well, clearly their heat had to go somewhere. And so for this case, where they're stillborn because their soul got lost trying to find them, the soul takes the form of a little vaguely Casper-like flickering flame. And since it's a ghost, it's obsessed with something - in this case, "trying to breathe", which also works well with the fire themes.
But yeah, this basically exists for little horror story vignettes. A starting bunch of Solars might have some problem with one of these before they get spirit-cutting Charms, but they're more a lure for very bad necromancers who want to turn a tragedy into an opportunity.
Remember, every ghost should contain a ghost story in its basic concept. This one is a story of "the tragic consequences of a birth gone wrong".
Mortal Underworld communities aren't really a thing. Mortals can't eat the food of the Dead and it's not healthy down there, I think.
I think there's Shadowland stuff in... the necromancy book for 1e, I want to say? Or maybe Abyssals 1e?
- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
I don't think there are any in canon, and there are logistical problems with it.
That said, I did write one up ages ago.
Look its just turning lemons into lemonade. You say horrific abomination, I say self heating furnace.
- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
You write a lot of great undead, but I think this is a good example of where your approach starts to strain.
The ghost of a stillborn child, hungering for breath and fruitlessly trying to take it from other infants, is a cool story. It's a cool one-off story, a singular vignette of horror. You could write a short story around it, or indeed as you say an early Solar adventure.
But instead you make it an undead "species," so to speak, a broad category. You're describing an entire category of dead stillborn babies who go around mutilating even more babies; these are systematized enough that necromancers actively go around hunting them for use as occult component, and I quote "many" necromantic construct have an internal dead-baby engine.
This isn't horrifying. This is so over-the-top it's tacky. This is comical, not in that it is inherently funny, but in that it is impossible to take seriously.
Remember that "It's powered by a forsaken child?!" is a line from a comedy show.
- Location
- Spain
Oh, nice. You should add that to your threadmark post.
(And yes, of course there are logistical problems, but those aren't insalvable so long as you have a way to harvest tribute and Essence).
Revlid
blob of bugs
- Location
- England
...out of curiosity, does anyone have access to rates on pre-modern stillbirths?
I can't find them, but I suspect they're high.
- Pronouns
- They/Them
That doesn't really address his point, though.
- Location
- Spain
Last edited:
There is a long and storied history of such things in southeast-asian myth, taken dead-seriously, and this is one area where real life is wilder than any fiction.
Now, whether its tasteful or not to bring into a game, that might be a better discussion worth having.
Last edited:
- Pronouns
- They/Them
Note, as far as I can tell, looking at Wikipedia links (which, you know, don't tell that much), none of that involves the more comical translation from 'a source of magical mojo' to 'Let me literally make a dead baby engine, I'm sure that comes off as scary and not just over-the-top.'
It seems better to make them less common, and just mention that sometimes Necromancers can use the powers of these dead babies as fuel in their dark rituals (maybe gives X Essence or whatever). Rather than having this image of them running around with Pokeballs trapping dead babies in coffins as part of necromantic engines.
I mean, ES's write-up already uses the phrase 'some' so you could just as well say, 'Some is rare enough that they're not this constant trade/fuel source, but if a Necromancer comes across one, he'll use it for dark and evil purposes because that's how he rolls.'
Last edited:
- Location
- Spain
There is.... a bit of a difference between using a bound ghost to steal things for you and using it as the battery of your necromobile.
- Location
- New York City
Just double-checking for my own sanity, what happens when you use a spirit-cutting attack to fill a ghost's health track with lethal damage? Are they permanently destroyed by default, banished to the Underworld or just temporarily discorporated?
I know to kill a Hungry Ghost you have to burn the corpse they reside in, but similarly if you fill their health track do they just reform in their corpse or are they destroyed? Any edition's answer will do, I'm just looking for the general idea.
I know to kill a Hungry Ghost you have to burn the corpse they reside in, but similarly if you fill their health track do they just reform in their corpse or are they destroyed? Any edition's answer will do, I'm just looking for the general idea.
- Location
- Spain
Same that all other spirits. They are temporaly destroyed, and can reform if you didn't use a spirit killer.
(Note that "can reform" doesn't mean that they will, and in most cases, weak, unworshiped ghosts won't).
Revlid
blob of bugs
- Location
- England
That's still 25% in the 1750s, at the low end – I doubt most of Creation is much better, though the Realm almost certainly has access to more skilled midwives than we do today.Not as much as you may think:
(First week mortality is much higher).
In any case, it seems ES agrees, since he's removed the offending line – though using coffins and urns as necrotech batteries is actually imagery I'm going to steal the shit out of.
Imrix
Periodically Malevolent QM
Back in the 1400-1500's though, the figure could easily be as bad as a 1 in 4 chance to reach 5 years old. It's questionable how true this would be Creation however, since this was largely a consequence of poor medical knowledge, whereas Creation supposedly has pretty good medicine, relatively speaking.Not as much as you may think:
(First week mortality is much higher).
Last edited:
- Location
- Spain
2.5%
That graph is deaths per 1000 births.
This is specifically stillbirth deaths, not early infant deaths.
As i said, first week deaths are more frecuent.
Last edited:
- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
I feel a bit ambivalent about it, frankly.
1) It's not very well written, and a lot of aspects that are clear to me are ambiguous or badly conveyed in the text.
2) It assumes giant orichalcum and soulsteel rails, nephwracks being treated as "diplomats from a disliked but powerful foreign nation," and the Deathlords as pretty much their canon incarnation, all things I would strive to avoid if I were writing this today.
3) It's nearly ten thousand words spent on a Princess and the Frog joke.
Last edited:
I have tweaked it to clarify that by my intent, these ghosts are the result of a rare kind of stillbirth where "the soul got lost" (ie, something mystical with no parallel IRL that's especially a risk in shadowlands [1]), rather than more regular kinds, and reduced the detail, but I just want to address that specific point.
You're misreading it. It says that many can use it, not that they do. The format presents "why would a necromancer summon one" because that's what the format is there for - the last paragraph is the "why would your necromancer PC want to use one" section. Because this format is to a large extent there to remedy the tendency for necromancy to be pointed at and laughed at by demonologists, who get tonnes and tonnes of things that always have a use for a prospective summoner.
[1] Which honestly are very rarely handled interestingly at all, for all that there are giant swathes of the map that are shadowlands.
Ghost tales follow a logic. A death in a certain way tends to reliably produce a ghost with a certain nature. Murder victims are rage-filled and spiteful and want to punish their killers, drowning victims want to drag others down into the depths, mothers who sacrifice themselves for their children are guardians and protectors. Ghosts in myths do form species, because ghost stories are often precautionary tales.
This is a certain subset of stillbirths, but yes - they will be a species, by the logic of ghost stories. Especially since, bluntly, "lost souls that didn't find a body" are going to be a lot more similar than adults, because at that age the list of desires of a newborn are going to be very narrow indeed.
But there's far less difference between that and using a never-born soul to bring life in a twisted parody of its purpose.
After all, the po soul in Exalted is meant to animate things. It is the vital, life soul - and its absence is seen keenly in Autochthonia. Using the po soul to animate things is very nearly working by design. So, yes, a lot of undead monsters should be animated by having a po soul bound into them.