That's not really a function of the Yozis' size though, that's the surrender oaths.
An unbound Yozi could just push whatever part of itself was full of troops up against Creation and disgorge them en masse.
General Exalted Thread
An unbound Yozi could just push whatever part of itself was full of troops up against Creation and disgorge them en masse.
Aaron Peori
Rest in Peace
Once again, the demons are not bound by the surrender oaths. The Yozi keep the demons in Malfeas, because the Yozi can not stand that their subsouls would be more free than they are. It is spite that keeps the second circles bound. If Octavion attempted to cross Cecelyne with his army he would find it flensed by silver sand for the affront.
The ability for demons to escape Malfeas has more to do with their nature than the oaths. A demon prince can no more forgo his nature than he could commit suicide even for, especially for, the commands of their overself. Even then, they often find themselves quickly returned to Malfeas because the Yozi's notice.
The ability for demons to escape Malfeas has more to do with their nature than the oaths. A demon prince can no more forgo his nature than he could commit suicide even for, especially for, the commands of their overself. Even then, they often find themselves quickly returned to Malfeas because the Yozi's notice.
- Location
- Virginia
And as mentioned we should ignore this because it's terrible, not just for the reason @Broken25 mentioned but also because if we are supposed to treat 1CDs as "people" then Creation becomes insignificant. (Also it really makes the Primordial War confusing, why didn't they just drown all of Creation in those demons?)
- Location
- Pittsburgh, PA
Partially because Creation was almost 100 times bigger, and thus had more mortals/Dragon Kings/Mountain Folk/etc. to throw into the meat grinder. However, it should also be kept in mind that the Exalts were running the show during the First Usurpation - the "ordinary" troops just had to hold the line long enough for a Solar/Lunar/Sidereal to spirit-kill the enemy commander, at which point the opposing army either routs or ceases to exist.
Likewise, the war was won by taking down the Primordials themselves, because the Primordials were the actual threat. If they tried to fight the hordes of deva that the Architects of All could churn out, they'd lose, because the Primordials could just clone-stamp out as many of those as they wished. It was a "cutting the ring from Sauron's finger because the actual body is invincible" kind of deal.
- Location
- Denmark
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Sanceline: <3
- Location
- Spain
Indeed.
As i see it, either Malfeas is actually of a reasonable size, or most of those "trillions" of demons aren't actually people. Just, you know, empty cardboard cuts without neither real personality nor true existence. It's not like they have a source of essence to feed themselves, after all.
Otherwise, Malfeas would be way more important than Creation, and honestly, that isn't the conclusion i want.
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Giygas
Cutest Sawk i could find. Lucario is a nice extra.
Your GM is a sad little man and he has my pity.
Wait, are you the GM? Because i take back everything i said about you.Are you kidding, those were hilarious. I had to scrub a lot of plot because of them, but they were great.
Man, that was a fun game. Shame I burnt out on it
.... Even if it isn't like the other Exalted splats' abilities don't break plots by their own.
I need also to ask a question: is ritual cannibalism practiced in large scale in any direction of creation? I would think the east would feature a bit of it, but how much?
Why i am asking this? Two day ago an idea for a ghostly allegory for Prion illness: essentially, a ghost of a person eaten without the right placating rituals (Or the ghost of a person eaten in a place where cannibalism is prohibited, that works too) that can both directly poison/make mad peoples that ate human meat, or "Poison" other kind of meat to cause the same thing.
Is it valid design space for a ghost? I think it is, but it is better to be save than sorry.
- Location
- Denmark
- Pronouns
- She/Her
West yo.
The direktion with the shark-goddess.
The direktion with the shark-goddess.
Pierced Horsemen
Lesser Dead
Dead by Impalement
A caravan travelling on an Imperial road late one foggy night comes across the rotting corpse of a bandit, impaled and left to die by the side of the road. And then comes the attack, by an inhumanly skilled rider on a skeletally-thin horse. He ran through one of the caravan drivers with his lance and made off with a wagon. And the ones who saw his face saw his dead eyes, his gaping bleeding mouth - and the fact that his face was that of the dead bandit.
Within the judicial code of the Realm, bandits who assault messengers on an Imperial road are to be impaled as to warn others of the consequences of such an offence. The corpses are left in place until they fall from the pole, and so it is little surprise that many of these bandits do not rest easily. They return from the grave riding a grave-horse of the Underworld, and even death does not hold them from their criminality. Their death has given them a sadistic glee for impaling others, and they string the corpses of their victims upon trees.
Pierced horsemen are skilled body-thieves, and can snatch the bodies of those who intend to repeat the same crimes they were executed for. Otherwise, they can take solid form on misty nights. As a result, a bandit will repeat their crimes time and time again on the same stretch of road. The stigmata of their impalement forms on their victims. The pain of their deaths fills any lance or spear they carry, and those they run through suffer greatly.
Necromancers call upon pierced horsemen as scouts and light cavalry. They are skilled riders, and their curse means that the horses of the lands of the Dead answer their call. They are however, prone to inveterate criminality and all the vices of their life, as well as a sadistic joy in impaling others. Most right-thinking exorcists shun such ghosts, seeking only to lay them to rest.
Lesser Dead
Dead by Impalement
A caravan travelling on an Imperial road late one foggy night comes across the rotting corpse of a bandit, impaled and left to die by the side of the road. And then comes the attack, by an inhumanly skilled rider on a skeletally-thin horse. He ran through one of the caravan drivers with his lance and made off with a wagon. And the ones who saw his face saw his dead eyes, his gaping bleeding mouth - and the fact that his face was that of the dead bandit.
Within the judicial code of the Realm, bandits who assault messengers on an Imperial road are to be impaled as to warn others of the consequences of such an offence. The corpses are left in place until they fall from the pole, and so it is little surprise that many of these bandits do not rest easily. They return from the grave riding a grave-horse of the Underworld, and even death does not hold them from their criminality. Their death has given them a sadistic glee for impaling others, and they string the corpses of their victims upon trees.
Pierced horsemen are skilled body-thieves, and can snatch the bodies of those who intend to repeat the same crimes they were executed for. Otherwise, they can take solid form on misty nights. As a result, a bandit will repeat their crimes time and time again on the same stretch of road. The stigmata of their impalement forms on their victims. The pain of their deaths fills any lance or spear they carry, and those they run through suffer greatly.
Necromancers call upon pierced horsemen as scouts and light cavalry. They are skilled riders, and their curse means that the horses of the lands of the Dead answer their call. They are however, prone to inveterate criminality and all the vices of their life, as well as a sadistic joy in impaling others. Most right-thinking exorcists shun such ghosts, seeking only to lay them to rest.
- Location
- Virginia
Wouldn't Immaculate doctrine nix this (doesn't it have plenty of stuff about proper disposal of remains)? More generally, you'd think that if these ghosts were a regular problem then the Realm would learn to change the policy.
At some point, you have to compromise between theological correctness and being an oppressive imperialistic colonialist empire that wants to make a very unpleasant example of criminals who attack people on Imperial roads.
Yes, this is not exactly a theologically sound punishment, but it's a judicially sound one.
Or, to put it another way, my vision of the Realm very much has room for the local abbot complaining to the local satrap about how he's ordered twenty rebels burned alive together, and for the abbot to be going "This will spiritually taint the land! They must be executed, yes, but separately!" and the satrap to be going "These rebel scum must learn! We must make an example of them!" and for both to be able to validly cite things in Imperial law vs Immaculate doctrine.
(then they resolve things with a kung fu duel)
EDIT: Also, it should be noted that most hun ghosts are only Enlightenment 1-2, so that means that enlightened Immaculate monks can combat them on basically equal terms. You don't need Dragonblooded for this - you just need a few exorcist-monks to banish (and probably punch) such a ghost when it shows up.
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- Location
- Denmark
- Pronouns
- She/Her
(Also people aren't perfectly rational actors.)
- Location
- Denmark
- Pronouns
- She/Her
This could bear to be remembered more by SV members, I feel.
Indeed.
@Aleph has internalized this, judging by Kerisgame.
The thing that people aren't quite twigging onto for demon numbers is the fact that Malfeas is an unbelievably unstable and deadly place for that population, whatever actual size it happens to be. Beyond the normalized violence and predator-prey interactions between standard demons, or the callous rampagings of one yozi or another depopulating incomprehensible swathes of his shells at one time, Malfeas also has a tendency towards straight-up sending them colliding into eachother because he can, typically crushing everything without the smarts, freedom to travel or forethought to evade the catastrophe as a planetary extinction-level event. The Demon City's population might be astronomical in-theory, but so is the potential bodycount of even one of these, let alone the fact that such maliciously-motivated die-offs are a known regular habit of the primordial.
Because the Demon Realm is quite literally Outer Space as far as the vantage point of Creation is concerned. Demons are the weird and curious lifeforms of indeterminable cosmic origin, existing somewhere in great numbers, perhaps doing something we can recognize as 'living,' but ultimately meaningless in passing save being visible to us at this far distance only as the slow-motion remnants of light reaching us from billions of years ago as their home galaxy was engulfed in a supernova magnitudes larger than our ability to comprehend. Perhaps if we ever met one, spoke to it and learned how it lived and thought, things would be different, but for now they are afterthoughts as rays of gamma radiation scour whole reams of the universe barren outside of our bubble of habitable security. Each crumbled shell of Malfeas is a lifeless rock in the night sky which could have held promise, but never had the chances we did.
It makes it so that First Circles are quite literally a disposable teeming of masses, and any attempt for a sorcerer to try and form a healthy rapport with one who is not even a notable Citizen is doomed to failure when that undistinctive informant is thrown into the cosmic meatgrinder along with literally millions of its fellows. Each one might be a unique and special individual when parsed through the personal experiences of a mortal in Creation, but in the sense of the yozis greater being, they will always be eyelash mites and white blood cells. The only thing which stops any of the given species from being exterminated entirely is the stability formed by the domains of Third and Second Circles to express their natures, much like the Exalted defense/mobilization of humanity during the Primordial War, and the sheer size of the place itself working against it. Being spread across every shell insures that even the worst of the yozis self-inflicted atrocities could not possibly kill all of them.
This doesn't render Creation a less significant place any more than Autochthonia having literally millions of attendant automata-spirits managing his titanic continent-organs does, or the Underworld playing host to a population of literally every willful dead since the end of the War which spawned it. Because if nothing else, Creation is where stories happen foremost. The Demon Realm is ruled by the mad whims of the yozis, where, again like the void of space, death is a statistic and pervasive background noise to anyone seeking to derive some meaning out of it, so a story may only be found if you are willing to expose yourself to it. Such a thing renders itself insignificant by the sheer vastness of the distances and inapplicability of its nature to anything outside itself, not when there are things like wars being waged and livelihoods to be secured right here in our own backyard.
A species of endangered owl dying out from being driven out of its habitat is too big to grieve for long when you've still got electrical bills to pay, and trying to conceptualize the magnitude of the fluctuating amount of demons within Malfeas is no different.
Because the Demon Realm is quite literally Outer Space as far as the vantage point of Creation is concerned. Demons are the weird and curious lifeforms of indeterminable cosmic origin, existing somewhere in great numbers, perhaps doing something we can recognize as 'living,' but ultimately meaningless in passing save being visible to us at this far distance only as the slow-motion remnants of light reaching us from billions of years ago as their home galaxy was engulfed in a supernova magnitudes larger than our ability to comprehend. Perhaps if we ever met one, spoke to it and learned how it lived and thought, things would be different, but for now they are afterthoughts as rays of gamma radiation scour whole reams of the universe barren outside of our bubble of habitable security. Each crumbled shell of Malfeas is a lifeless rock in the night sky which could have held promise, but never had the chances we did.
It makes it so that First Circles are quite literally a disposable teeming of masses, and any attempt for a sorcerer to try and form a healthy rapport with one who is not even a notable Citizen is doomed to failure when that undistinctive informant is thrown into the cosmic meatgrinder along with literally millions of its fellows. Each one might be a unique and special individual when parsed through the personal experiences of a mortal in Creation, but in the sense of the yozis greater being, they will always be eyelash mites and white blood cells. The only thing which stops any of the given species from being exterminated entirely is the stability formed by the domains of Third and Second Circles to express their natures, much like the Exalted defense/mobilization of humanity during the Primordial War, and the sheer size of the place itself working against it. Being spread across every shell insures that even the worst of the yozis self-inflicted atrocities could not possibly kill all of them.
This doesn't render Creation a less significant place any more than Autochthonia having literally millions of attendant automata-spirits managing his titanic continent-organs does, or the Underworld playing host to a population of literally every willful dead since the end of the War which spawned it. Because if nothing else, Creation is where stories happen foremost. The Demon Realm is ruled by the mad whims of the yozis, where, again like the void of space, death is a statistic and pervasive background noise to anyone seeking to derive some meaning out of it, so a story may only be found if you are willing to expose yourself to it. Such a thing renders itself insignificant by the sheer vastness of the distances and inapplicability of its nature to anything outside itself, not when there are things like wars being waged and livelihoods to be secured right here in our own backyard.
A species of endangered owl dying out from being driven out of its habitat is too big to grieve for long when you've still got electrical bills to pay, and trying to conceptualize the magnitude of the fluctuating amount of demons within Malfeas is no different.
Graypairofsocks
What is Grammar?
- Location
- earth
There was a second group of Lintha that survived the Primordial War, and hid on an island they called Refuge.
They didn't get their blood diluted like the ones in bluehaven, but we don't know what happened to them during the Usurpation.
What would you guess as most likely to have happened to them?
My guess is they got wiped out, or (less likely) the protections against scrying are still hiding them.
They didn't get their blood diluted like the ones in bluehaven, but we don't know what happened to them during the Usurpation.
What would you guess as most likely to have happened to them?
My guess is they got wiped out, or (less likely) the protections against scrying are still hiding them.
- Location
- Spain
Yeah. Except, you know, outer space isn't unhabited as far as we know.
Earth is more important than a hundred million stars. Simply because there are people here. A sun that warms no-one is lesser than a kitchen fire.
The moment you give Malfeas a cosmological-scale population, i start to wonder why should i care more for an empire than spans the whole south than one that spans a sliver of a layer? Why is Creation more important, then?
Correct. The thing is, i want my stories to happen in a place than matters.
Eh. The people of Creation may not care, but i certainly do. It warps my perception of the setting.
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- Location
- Denmark
- Pronouns
- She/Her
I care for my country even though it is just Denmark.
China has a larger population, thus I cannot care for Denmark and should instead care for China.
China has a larger population, thus I cannot care for Denmark and should instead care for China.
- Pronouns
- They/Them
- Location
- Denmark
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Paging @MJ12 Commando
I knew that my mention of China would cause something like this to happen.
- Location
- Spain
I just want a setting where the destruction of Creation would be a tragedy greater than the impact of two Malfean layers.
If you prefer otherwise, i have no problem with that!
- Location
- Denmark
- Pronouns
- She/Her
What makes a tragedy greater or lesser?
- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
We can philosophize all we want about the complexity of the value of life and the importance of one's point of view and the relativity of tragecy and whether any person or given person is important, but "why do I care about this tiny place when it's actually just a tiny dot in a sea of bigger stuff" is absolutely a thing that crops up in fan conversations if you allow it. The question of Malfeas's size and population is less about the philosophy of the value of life than it is about message control.
Frakir's brother
Goodbye.
- Location
- The Sea of Trees
It already is, even if my calcs are canon. In the collision of two layers, how many citizens are there? Every other serf can be replaced with another serf of the same species without blinking.