Graypairofsocks
What is Grammar?
- Location
- earth
I have been instructed to inform you that a massive amount of 1st circle demons have taken offense to this. :lol
General Exalted Thread
I have been instructed to inform you that a massive amount of 1st circle demons have taken offense to this. :lol
ganonso
Compulsive Quest Starter
- Location
- PACA France
First Circle Demons are people too!
- Location
- Denmark
- Pronouns
- She/Her
That was kind of the point I think.
They might be people and have families and loved ones and like puppies and whatever.
The point is that nobody cares about them because they're dead and the're just Serfs.
They can be replaced in a heartbeat, an instant.
Because after all, they are merely Serfs.
They might be people and have families and loved ones and like puppies and whatever.
The point is that nobody cares about them because they're dead and the're just Serfs.
They can be replaced in a heartbeat, an instant.
Because after all, they are merely Serfs.
- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Yes, but I can guarantee you that huge swaths of Creation's elites - gods, Dynasts, even perfectly mortal nobility - have the exact same outlook on mortal serfs.
Frakir's brother
Goodbye.
- Location
- The Sea of Trees
- Location
- Denmark
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Sure they do.
But Creation doesn't have a Creation-wide set of laws that justify and encourage this, as well as natural disasters on an hourly scale.
- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
They're people dying by the billions, which is a tragedy. If we accept Malfeas's scope as being so large the whole world could pass through its arches, then such disasters are tragedies on the scale of the destruction of all of Creation, happening over and over. This isn't very complicated.
Octavian's empire, a mere quarter of one of the "over a hundred, less than a thousand" layers of Malfeas has always been on the scale of a Direction.
Malfeas has always been a cityscape that's described as being densely populated with terms like "teeming hordes" being used.
We can look at IRL "cityscapes" for population densities. Hong Kong - 6544 / km^2. Singapore - 7,697 / km^2. Mexico City - 6000 / km^2. If we give Malfeas half the population density of Mexico City (we'll say half of it is lifeless silent wastes because of Adorjan), Malfeas only has to be around the size of Iran to have a population equal to that of Creation.
Except we know a quarter of one layer is Directional in scale. You could fit a lot of Irans into the East. And as per Sidereals, the population scale that is "Directional" is around 100 million, giving a population of around 0.5 billion for Creation. It's not a densely populated place at all.
Games of Divinity is entirely consistent - Malfeas is massive compared to Creation, and densely populated compared to Creation. The Malfean population is vast compared to Creation, even if you ignore the quotes which give it the "you could lose Creation in his outer layers" size. And you can play around with my numbers a fair bit, and you're not going to easily get a demonic population that doesn't massively outnumber the humans in Creation.
Of course, you know what else has a population that substantially outnumbers Creation? Heaven. Yu Shan is the size of the Blessed Isle, and it's cityscape too. Creation is not a densely populated world - even its biggest cities like Nexus only have a population of around a million. And deliberate parallels have been made between Yu Shan and Washington DC (population density, 4,251 / km^2).
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- Location
- Gladstone, OR
Another thing worth noting is that we're looking at this as external observers- consumers of fiction, as opposed to internal actors who experience it day to day.
It may've been mentioned before, but it's worth noting that in Creation (and Malfeas, but let's focus on Creation for now). There is no cultural or society-level pervasive belief in the sanctity of life. I mean that in the sense of how our modern world is... Well I don't want to say trying to promote this ideal, but generally speaking there are a lot of people who buy into the idea of 'inalienable human rights'. One of which being 'Right to Live'.
In Creation, a given mortal does not have a right to live. This does not mean that their life has no value, but it's value is not inherent in being alive.
I'm pretty sure that, just as part of Creation, people know about reincarnation, that 'The Next Life' is a thing. I'm sure there are cultural variances, interpretations and so on, but I feel it's safe to say that everyone knows that when you die, some of you lives on in Creation. This is especially true in the Immaculate Dogma regions.
So, while death at the personal level is seen as a direct and dare I say tragic or mournful thing, there is a certain sense of 'they will continue'. This however does not give murderers or warlords carte blanche to throw their troops into a meatgrinder.
Because, the value of life in Creation is not in being alive, but in one's unique skills, experiences. The value one can contribute- even potential value. If the local wisewoman is slain, that is a big deal, because suddenly a vital and necessary body of knowledge is gone. And- if anyone is at fault, they would be punished.
Same as if one killed a farmhand, who works hard to feed a community. Now- as you obviously get more complex social orders like towns, kingdoms, etc, you have more rule of law and social contracts to keep the peace.
Secondly, even killers or murderers in Creation make a point to not let their victims suffer too much. Those who indulge in more heinous practices invite Hungry Ghosts... and most hungry ghosts are deadlier than they are.
It may've been mentioned before, but it's worth noting that in Creation (and Malfeas, but let's focus on Creation for now). There is no cultural or society-level pervasive belief in the sanctity of life. I mean that in the sense of how our modern world is... Well I don't want to say trying to promote this ideal, but generally speaking there are a lot of people who buy into the idea of 'inalienable human rights'. One of which being 'Right to Live'.
In Creation, a given mortal does not have a right to live. This does not mean that their life has no value, but it's value is not inherent in being alive.
I'm pretty sure that, just as part of Creation, people know about reincarnation, that 'The Next Life' is a thing. I'm sure there are cultural variances, interpretations and so on, but I feel it's safe to say that everyone knows that when you die, some of you lives on in Creation. This is especially true in the Immaculate Dogma regions.
So, while death at the personal level is seen as a direct and dare I say tragic or mournful thing, there is a certain sense of 'they will continue'. This however does not give murderers or warlords carte blanche to throw their troops into a meatgrinder.
Because, the value of life in Creation is not in being alive, but in one's unique skills, experiences. The value one can contribute- even potential value. If the local wisewoman is slain, that is a big deal, because suddenly a vital and necessary body of knowledge is gone. And- if anyone is at fault, they would be punished.
Same as if one killed a farmhand, who works hard to feed a community. Now- as you obviously get more complex social orders like towns, kingdoms, etc, you have more rule of law and social contracts to keep the peace.
Secondly, even killers or murderers in Creation make a point to not let their victims suffer too much. Those who indulge in more heinous practices invite Hungry Ghosts... and most hungry ghosts are deadlier than they are.
- Location
- Denmark
- Pronouns
- She/Her
What a tragedy is, is relative.
I could not care less about a billion First Circles dying.
Meanwhile billions of mortals in Creation is another thing, because Creation isn't very densely populated and has just suffered two apocalypses.
Yu-Shan has a larger population that Creation, Malfeas has a larger population than Creation, the Underworld has a larger population than Creation, hell I think Autochthonia has a larger population.
- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Which is being presented here as a problem?
The issue isn't the actual relative moral values of make-believe persons, the issue is player disinterest when the place they're supposed to care about is cast in contrast with the ridiculously larger, more populous place that sees the apocalypse you're spending a campaign preventing every other week.
This is the same issue as the Thousand Dooms; "why should I care about unseating the corrupt ruler of the kingdom you designed for this game when all of Creation is in peril due to some nefarious demon plot/raksha invasion/deathworld scheme?"
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- Location
- Denmark
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Sure.
To be honest, this is the first time I have ever encountered this attitude.
I cannot honestly see why one can't care about Creation because it has a smaller population.
Shouldn't this exactly make it mean more? With so few people, there is so much more to fight for.
Creation has a larger variety of locales than any of these other worlds, which is why you go to them when you want to experience the locales and experiences that they have to offer, while you stay in Creation to play a viking raider in the frozen reaches of the North or a conquering king in the forests of the East, or a terrible sorcerer-lord in the high halls of Ysyr.
Meanwhile I go to Malfeas to play KSBD-simulator and have kung fu duels with
I can't see the similarity.
Like, they are entirely different worlds and you can very well do a game where you never encounter even a trace of Yu-Shan or Malfeas or the Underworld or whatever. I can easily care about the kingdom next to me, because the kingdom is in the same world as me instead of somewhere I require specialized magic or knowledge to enter.
I can care about the kingdom I'm conquering, because it is the kingdom that I'm conquering instead of some far-out place in Malfeas.
- Location
- Virginia
There's no question that the game line has been consistent on this point. The complaint is just that stuff like "creation could fit under one of Malfeas's arches" or whatever is poetic, it's also really offputting to a subset of players.
Yes, maybe you can not care about the constant gigadeaths or whatever but I find the idea that Creation is basically irrelevant to be a huge buzzkill.
If Malfeas is as big as claimed, I don't care how much constant churn and evil and whatever is going on there, it's clearly big enough to contain almost any story you can tell in Creation and more. The law of large numbers is going to win. Or if you somehow make Malfeas so uniform that the law of large numbers doesn't work - then what's the point of its size? If you could delete 50, 90, 99% of Malfeas and still have it be basically the same, why not do so?
Why do it in the first place?
Personally I have no issue with the size/population of places other than Creation being bigger than Creation, and I'd have no problem playing a campaign that took place solely in Malfeas or Yu-Shan or wherever. Just because the possibility exists doesn't mean you have to follow it to its logical (illogical?) conclusion.
One answer among several: because "a character that values intelligent life, whether human, demon, or other," is not exactly an extreme implausibility in Exalted. And if Malfeas's sneezes are worse than the worst of Creation's apocalypses, that character is going to ultimately find Creation a trivial footnote compared to what's happening in Malfeas, of necessity.
And that's bad, because Creation is where the game is.
Like, in actual real life, we as finite human beings say, "Okay, I can't stop World War X, but I can take a cup of soup to my sick neighbor." Our humanitarian deeds don't get swallowed up in the immensity of tragedies we're unable to prevent, because they're too big for us. But Exalts don't get to just say, "Oh, nothing I can realistically do there" - the heck you can't. Maybe you can't fix Malfeas, but if you could make orders of magnitude more difference by creating any improvement at all...
I mean, maybe you're not obliged to be optimal, but that's a pretty awful distraction. "Yeah, I saved the entire east. But with that same amount of effort, if I had protected a single layer of Malfeas, I would have saved ten thousand times as many sapient beings with hopes and fears and dreams of their own. Go me."
That's not going to bother everyone, but for people that it does bother, it's, uh, going to be a pretty big problem with enjoying the default setting. To which the follow-up seems to be: so if we can remove this awful distraction for a category of player/character types, what do we lose by having Malfeas only be, say, as well populated as Creation itself - merely a half-billion or so inhabitants? What narrative space does that close off?
- Location
- Denmark
- Pronouns
- She/Her
But fixing that problem requires the Yozis to not be the Yozis.
Like "hey Adorjan could you just stop killing everything you to- GAAAAAH IT HURTS" or "hey Malfeas could you stop crushing layers togethe- *CRUNCH*"
Like "hey Adorjan could you just stop killing everything you to- GAAAAAH IT HURTS" or "hey Malfeas could you stop crushing layers togethe- *CRUNCH*"
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- Location
- Spain
Yeah, i know all that. I just don't like the conclusions if you take that literally.
And since you mentioned this, you know the conclusion i get from Yu-Shan population? Than a god with a single dedicated peasant worshiper is basicallty a billionary, given how that absurd population of gods is fed by a mere few hundred million worshippers.
This.
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- Location
- Denmark
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Well, Yu-Shan has always been absurdly luxurious.
"oh woe is me"
"there is barely room for you my honored guests"
"Your living room is larger than my palace"
"WOE"
"oh woe is me"
"there is barely room for you my honored guests"
"Your living room is larger than my palace"
"WOE"
Aaron Peori
Rest in Peace
I think a lot of people forget one thing about the Yozi. They are cosmic horror, with an emphasis on the cosmic. That is why they are all patterned after literal astrologically large phenomena.
Part of this is that the scale of Malfeas is huge to the point that Creation looks insignificant in comparison. All of the stories of human beings since their beginning are nothing more than an eyeblink to a Primordial, all of their lifespans combined a rounding error in their calculations.
The Yozi are the vast, hostile, incomprehensible universe of Lovecraftian horror. You are supposed to behold the teeming masses of Malfeas and fall into existential despair about your cosmic insignificance. Your Immaculate Priest is supposed to learn forbidden truths which distort his worldview and lead him to Yozi-worship because... because what else matters than the Yozi? The Infernal Exalted are supposed to be able to lay a convincing case that they are righting an injustice so horrific that all the injustices that happened in Creation since its inception are like candles next to the (green nuclear hate filled) sun.
Confronting the multitudes and scale of Malfeas is to confront nihilism. You are supposed to tell stories about overcoming it or surrendering.
The Loom of Fate is there, it will always matter. By definition.
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I'd prefer it if the size and population of Malfeas was just never specified beyond "it's huge", not to mention that it's probably always changing. Does the game really need more than "Malfeas is big enough you can put down a 2CD empire somewhere no problem" and "there's enough first circle demons you will never ever run out of demons to summon, ever."
That's the "stupid useless compassion" viewpoint that ES and Aleph joke about with Kerisgame. Being so wrapped up in philosophical morality that you're incapable of fixing what's actually in front of you. People who play as perfect actors are missing the point of exalted, which is regular humans having tremendous power.
And besides, if Joe Solar went to Malfeas to try and set up a FCD reserve, he'd either get killed or akuma-ized because the Yozis are insane god-monsters who had their better parts surgically extracted in order to make the Yozis their own jailers.
Intrigue between Unquestionable as your character tries to negotiate the political situation to their benefit without provoking a catastrophic war, the "suicide mission" to destroy the gateway through which hordes of
Having tons of faceless mooks lets you do things. And if you want a realm that's less populated then just stay in Creation. The Exalted don't care about demons beyond their use as slaves. If they did they wouldn't have been so thorough with the Surrender Oaths. Even Sol, the very picture of Compassion, didn't involve himself in improving the daily lives of demons before turning entirely to the Games.
- Location
- Spain
That only makes the problem worse.
if the worship of the half-billion humans in creation is enough to cover the roads of Yu-shan in jade, the logical conclusion is that a prayer is worth half a talent.
(The Technocracy invented math to fuck up the gods, apparently).
No, i disagree. What makes things matter is people, nor vague cosmological things.
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Are you trying to argue for economic and social equality in Creation?
Because the only place you'll find that is Oblivion.
- Location
- Spain
Nothing farther than that!
i just want to know how many worshippers do i need to cover my capital city in gold.
Edit: actually, let's calculate it:
5*10^8 humans are enough to cover 15 millions of km2 in jade.
Therefore, five hundred dedicated worshippers should be enough to cover 15 km2 in gold.
^ This is very much not the conclusion i want to see my players arriving to.
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- Location
- Denmark
- Pronouns
- She/Her
This is not how it works.
Jade does not rust away, nor does it erode. Yu-Shan was built like that by the Primordials.
Jade does not rust away, nor does it erode. Yu-Shan was built like that by the Primordials.