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General Exalted Thread

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Hazard said:
Yes.

That's true.

Well. No, not quite.

You see, all demons are part of the minds and souls of another, higher being, at the end there being the Yozi. And the Yozi hate the Exalted. They also fear them, yes, but they hate the Exalted to an extend that can't be properly expressed. Do not make the mistake of thinking that a demon of any Circle would not betray or try to destroy when bid to do so by those higher than them.
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Except it doesn't work like that in any way and has never done so?

First Circles are their own creatures.

Second Circles are souls of their Third Circles. Octavian will respect a dude who can beat him in combat (he'll just be back later), Mara loves the Exalted (because most of them are doomed), Sigereth is completely indifferent towards them and cares only for her games.

Third Circles are souls of their Yozis, representing specific emotions and desires. Like, Ligier doesn't hate the Exalted, Erembour doesn't hate the Exalted, Munaxes doesn't hate th- okay Munaxes probaby hates the Exalted. :V

Hell, Amalion was fucking married to one.

Your argument is based on so little evidence it might as well be nonexistent.

Broken25 said:
Leaving aside the other silly parts of your post (Already adressed).

This is, simply put, not true. There are a few thousand second circles. When you take in consideration Malfeas size, than means that you will have expanses of terrain a hundred times the size of the roman empire than haven't seen a demon lord in millenia.
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This is also relevant, because there is at most around four hundred to five hundred Third Circles in all of Hell. Let's say a quarter of them hate you specifically.

Now you have something the size of either a Dyson Sphere or less, and one hundred and twentyfive individuals who don't like you.

Oh the horror.
 
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Well no, because Liger is always there. This is not even getting into the fact that a murder wind keeps blowing through your empire, or the Ebon Dragon is the only shade from the constant green sun, or the giant black boar who wanders by and knocks over your towers...
 
Bel said:
Well no, because Liger is always there. This is not even getting into the fact that a murder wind keeps blowing through your empire, or the Ebon Dragon is the only shade from the constant green sun, or the giant black boar who wanders by and knocks over your towers...
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You can believe in the Yozi without believing in the Unquestionable, just like you can believe in the existence of the sun without believing in Ra.

Maugan Ra said:
And they were just celebrating the hundredth year of continuous peace and prosperity when Adorjan showed up.
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Sure.
 
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Bel said:
Well no, because Liger is always there. This is not even getting into the fact that a murder wind keeps blowing through your empire, or the Ebon Dragon is the only shade from the constant green sun, or the giant black boar who wanders by and knocks over your towers...
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Except it doesn't work like that either.

You can see Ligier, but you don't necessarily know that he is also a rather hot dude made of brass (heh hot), likewise if a murderwind kept blowing or the Boar kept walking through or some other Yozi kept doing their thing, everyone would be dead, luckily there is only one of all those Yozi, and you don't necessarily have the highest chance of meeting them.

See again: Malfeas is the size of a Dyson Sphere. This may or may not be bad, depending on who you are.
 
A: So if Malfeas is huge and full of constant apocalyptic destruction, then it seems like my Exalt's accomplishments in Creation are pretty minor and I could do far more good trying to mitigate even a tiny fraction of the horrors over there.

B: No see actually Malfeas is so big that most of it doesn't see these kinds of events for millennia at a time.

A: OK so if it's so big and doesn't see these horrible things very often then it probably has tons of huge organized civilizations that put the Realm to shame.

C: No you don't understand everywhere in Malfeas is full of constant apocalyptic destruction.

Maybe B and C ought to be the ones arguing with each other, rather than each arguing with A?
 
I feel like I should, at this point, mention the Priests of Cecelyne.

Who are not capped at the number of Second Circles that can exist, and who are specifically built to fuck up First Circles (and live at the low end of the 2CD ballpark, though without the resources and backgrounds and kingdoms that 2CDs have), and who go around committing acts of lawfare against societies that hold the weak up over the strong.

A society of 1CDs may not have seen a higher-Circle demon in centuries, but they'll sure as hell have seen a Priest.
 
Sanctaphrax said:
On a tangentially related note...I don't much like the way Dragonblooded breeding has been portrayed.

The whole "the master race has sullied its blood by breeding with its lessers" thing skeeves me out for obvious reasons, especially when the authors start implying that eugenics is good and it was actually morally wrong for First Age Terrestrials to have children with mortals. And it's kind of weird that if your Breeding 1 DB PC proves to be the greatest hero of their generation, their blood still won't be worth unusually much.

My solution is pretty simple. Breeding waxes and wanes each generation. Mostly wanes, these days. But a totally awesome DB will have stronger children than their less awesome siblings. When you evaluate the strength of someone's blood, you look at their deeds and those of their parents and ancestors. Including the mortal ones - no mortal is really going to strengthen the blood of a dragonblooded family, but an unheroic one will seriously weaken it and a heroic one won't.

Would emphasize the family-legacy aspects of Terrestrial-kind. And as an added bonus, it explains why the Scarlet Empress, previously a random Shogunate officer, is such a huge deal Breeding-wise.
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This is a great solution.

The way DB reproduction works canonically has been broken the whole time, as far as I can tell. The "thinning the blood" problem doesn't actually make sense when the Terrestrial Exaltation is basically genetic; you might as well have kids with a bunch of mortal women, that's not going to reduce the purity of your other, better-bred children. And if that's true, the society that encourages DBs to reproduce as much as possible, with mortals and DBs, is going to get the most DBs, and is going to have a huge advantage because of that.

This is really gross in a lot of ways, and also kind of boring. But if instead Exaltation chance is controlled by an accumulated lineage of heroism and virtue, instead societies that manage to encourage those things will be the ones that produce large stable populations of DBs. And "encourage heroism and virtue" is really hard to do reliably and stably over time, compared to "encourage Mongol-style conquest".
 
Encouraging Virtue is easy. The tricky part is making sure that your encouragement of Conviction does not result in your empire exploding in civil war, your encouragement of Valour does not result in your best and brightest dying young and childless, ...
 
Accelerator said:
How so?

Because she got upset, and the music reflected that?
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The implication was that since Angylakae music reflects the listener's satisfaction with their life, she was trying to distract her opponent with his own regrets. But she has more regrets than him, and he is mostly happy with his life, so in the end she was more discomforted by her summon than he was.
 
Azrael said:
1. First Circles are explicitly NOT the Yozi's souls.
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Except that First Circles may be possessed by their originating Yozi, like all other Circles. Except that First Circles can be summoned, like all other Circles. Except that First Circles are subject to the surrender oaths, like all other Circles. Should a Yozi suffer Fetich Death the First Circles will collapse into the whirlpool of Essence, like all other Circles.

No First Circle Demon is described in mechanics in any other way than as part of the Yozi soul hierarchy except for the bit of them not being part of the soul hierarchy. This seems incongruent with the other traits shown.

Azrael said:
2. We have examples of at least up to Second Circles defecting, to the point of being removed from the Yozi's soul hierarchy.
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Yes, and?

Azrael said:
3. The Third Circles and Second Circles (demons in general, really) follow their nature before anything else. It's why the Ebon Dragon can be betrayed by his own souls. This property isn't unique to him though. Don't think for a minute Ligier wouldn't ditch Malfeas, or at least certain parts of him, if he could.
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Part of a vast, complex being doesn't like said vast, complex being. How surprising.

ManusDomine said:
Hell, Amalion was fucking married to one.
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I know. Now ask yourself; why would part of a vast, complex being that doesn't always agree with other parts of the vast, complex being or even the vast, complex being itself do this?

A Yozi may be a singular entity but the vast array of beings that express its existence are not. That however does not mean that there isn't some overarching losely defined goal, nor that whatever is going is through some convoluted line of reasoning is supporting that goal.

And with Amalion, well, what makes you think she wasn't summoned to stay in Creation, and was commissioned to create a great many Manse, no few of which might perhaps be surprisingly easy to convert to Yozi Essence while Malfeas vicariously experiences Creation through her in the mean time?
 
Walker of the Yellow Path said:
The implication was that since Angylakae music reflects the listener's satisfaction with their life, she was trying to distract her opponent with his own regrets. But she has more regrets than him, and he is mostly happy with his life, so in the end she was more discomforted by her summon than he was.
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He also brings up her mother, which further distracts her since she has mother issues the size of Mount Meru and she remembers her interactions with Scarlet.
 
Aleph said:
I feel like I should, at this point, mention the Priests of Cecelyne.

Who are not capped at the number of Second Circles that can exist, and who are specifically built to fuck up First Circles (and live at the low end of the 2CD ballpark, though without the resources and backgrounds and kingdoms that 2CDs have), and who go around committing acts of lawfare against societies that hold the weak up over the strong.

A society of 1CDs may not have seen a higher-Circle demon in centuries, but they'll sure as hell have seen a Priest.
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They aren't as powerful as some 2nd circles.
However the Priests of Cecelyne are very hard to injure, let alone kill.
 
Kuciwalker said:
A: So if Malfeas is huge and full of constant apocalyptic destruction, then it seems like my Exalt's accomplishments in Creation are pretty minor and I could do far more good trying to mitigate even a tiny fraction of the horrors over there.

B: No see actually Malfeas is so big that most of it doesn't see these kinds of events for millennia at a time.

A: OK so if it's so big and doesn't see these horrible things very often then it probably has tons of huge organized civilizations that put the Realm to shame.

C: No you don't understand everywhere in Malfeas is full of constant apocalyptic destruction.

Maybe B and C ought to be the ones arguing with each other, rather than each arguing with A?
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Or maybe A might do well to engage with the actual arguments people are making, rather than the phantom arguments in his head.

@Aaron Peori's "Areas of Malfeas will go centuries without a truly cataclysmic event like two layers smashing together, which basically kills everything on the facing sides that can't cross over to the other side of their level fast enough" in no way contradicts my point that "Malfeas is a prison society with omnipresent violence, a rule of law which means more powerful people can fuck over anyone else at their whim with no recourse, and there simply does not exist the social stability or other such things that modern society relies on".

And that's even we get started on your "This problem persists even if you throw out hearthstones-as-oil, because they're going to produce something - you're going to get a thousand industrial revolutions, a thousand advanced (by Exalted's standards) societies that put the Realm to shame. " - which is, and remains nonsense. The Realm is built on stability and social harmony, which enables the kleptocracy of the Dragonblooded. It is reliant on to give just one example, any two commoners not murdering each other because one of them has a cow that the other wants.

By contrast, Malfean law is based on the principle that the cow is yours if you can take it from the other person.

And that's before we get into how demons are not mentally human, and pretending a demon is mentally human is a way for a summoner to fuck up. Blood apes live to battle, kill, and consume the blood of their enemies. Give your average blood ape a choice between a fortune, and killing the person offering the fortune and drinking their blood, and they'll pick the latter. They are far from unique there. First Circle demons have alien drives that, if we look at Games of Divinity as a representative cross section of demonkind, do not synergies well with what you believe is a natural conclusion - namely, let's re-emphasise this, "a thousand industrial revolutions, a thousand advanced (by Exalted's standards) societies that put the Realm to shame".
 
A society of blood apes is probably gonna look a little like low-key Warhammer orkz, really :p
 
Sanctaphrax said:
On a tangentially related note...I don't much like the way Dragonblooded breeding has been portrayed.

The whole "the master race has sullied its blood by breeding with its lessers" thing skeeves me out for obvious reasons.
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Well... yes. It's supposed to. Exalted is a world that is deeply unfair. It is a world where there are, in fact, biotruths. Some people are just better than others. The Dragonblooded are a allegorical take down of the entire idea of enlightened dictatorship. They are a scathing rebuke of imperialism in all its form.

They accomplish this simply; by giving the audience all the justifications which are throw around for every empire in history. The Dragonblooded are a special bloodline. The people they conquer and exploit are categorically lesser than them in every measureable way. Miscegenation does weaken them. They are literally better at governance and all it activities than mortals.

And yet... they're still an exploitive empire built on the backs of slave labor with indulgent assholes plotting for petty power and more interested in their own wellbeing than that of their supposed responsibilities.

Exalted puts lie of the myth of racial superiority by making racial superiority a literal thing that happens and then showing how it still results in a crapstack world.
 
The thing about Malfeas (Or, for that matter, Heaven) is that it's written in mythic style. The kind of style where Heracles taking the world over his shoulders and him beating a lion are two comparable heroic feats.

Myths can allow themselves such poetic incongruencies because, well, you don't need to take them literally.

In an rpg, where your players can walk around the jade roads of Heaven, this falls apart fast the second someone pulls out a calculator. So you end having to make strings of excuses to patch the obvious conclusions, like, "Praying gold into existence is easier that mining it".

And, what do you lose by scaling back and giving reasonable numbers? Basically nothing.
 
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