Remove ads

General Exalted Thread

Reader mode
I honestly don't object to saving the demons of Malfeas. That is a laudable and interesting campaign goal for a circle of Celestial Exalts.

What I object to is this absurd idea that somehow saving the demons of Malfeas is easier than saving the mortals of Creation or that you get a better return on investment of time and resources out of saving demons than mortals. You really, really don't.

Solving the problem of Malfeas is late game hidden secret boss level difficulty. Exalted is supposed to support campaign goals for everything from freshly graduated naive Dragonblooded brotherhoods to elder Solar circles with First Age infrastructure at their beck and call. 'Saving the demons of Malfeas' falls more towards the latter category.
 
ManusDomine said:
This is an optimal plan.

It will not result in wacky sitcom-esque hijinks.

I swear.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

I'd say "sweet shipping to give Elloge a nosebleed" but...well, yknow :V

EarthScorpion said:
I dunno. I heard tales that Michael Cera is one of the masks of Balanado, the Prince of Leeches.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Look man I don't make the ritual rules. It quite clearly says that if you want to craft a quirky, lighthearted rom-com about a modern minded Infernal and a nuclear hellball you need a shy, fidgeting babyface. That means Cera or an offbrand.

And Eisenbergs lost some stock since BvS.
 
For a more serious answer;

Each of Malfeas' 23 souls represent a different major facet of his personality. You need to convince each of them to be nicer to everyone else. This will almost certainly require convincing each of their seven subsouls to also be nicer people. Keep in mind that each of them has a nature they can not change and which is enforced on the level of being an Unacceptable Order to bypass.

Almost certainly you will have to Ghost Eat a handful of them to bypass this restriction.

Alternatively you can induce him to develop new souls which represent nicer personality traits, then use a combination of military might and social influence to ensure these nicer souls gain dominance over the other pre-existing asshole souls.

Good luck!
 
Accelerator said:
On that note, how does one repair Malfeas' soul?
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Aaron Peori said:
For a more serious answer;

Each of Malfeas' 23 souls represent a different major facet of his personality. You need to convince each of them to be nicer to everyone else. This will almost certainly require convincing each of their seven subsouls to also be nicer people. Keep in mind that each of them has a nature they can not change and which is enforced on the level of being an Unacceptable Order to bypass.

Almost certainly you will have to Ghost Eat a handful of them to bypass this restriction.

Alternatively you can induce him to develop new souls which represent nicer personality traits, then use a combination of military might and social influence to ensure these nicer souls gain dominance over the other pre-existing asshole souls.

Good luck!
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
As I've said before, the main way would be for a late-game Infernal to somehow integrate themselves into the soul hierarchy of Malfeas - optimally, they'd have forged a sizable number of devas for themselves, so that they can then team up with whatever of the Demon City's TCDs they happen to like and crush the ones they don't like, while all those added Unquestionable-equivalents bleed their individual natures into Malfeas' soul so he isn't so HATEHATEHATEHATE anymore. If possible, the Infernal attempting this should have at least one other Green Sun Prince(ss) to help them out.

Assuming this doesn't go too far wrong, when the dust settles Malfeas will die and be reborn as a New Primordial, with the Infernal(s) responsible being dissolved into his being as a new fetich soul along with their own deva hierarchies.

However, I'd prefer to reenact a demented soul-melding version of "CECELYNE, GRIT THOSE TEETH!" instead, since at least there you're trying to restore a Yozi's faith in altruism and righteous rule instead of tackling the giant shrieking mountain of self-hatred, omnicidal fury, and continuous Paradox damage* that is Malfeas.


* Theion was the Holy Tyrant, he who is invincible and supreme. Even now, Malfeas is a being defined by those concepts of primacy and unquestionable rule. As a result, the fact he was beaten and agreed to sign the Surrender Oaths means that Malfeas is constantly violating his fundamental nature, which is less than good for a Primordial to experience even for brief moments.

Being Malfeas is suffering.
 
Aaron Peori said:
I honestly don't object to saving the demons of Malfeas. That is a laudable and interesting campaign goal for a circle of Celestial Exalts.

What I object to is this absurd idea that somehow saving the demons of Malfeas is easier than saving the mortals of Creation or that you get a better return on investment of time and resources out of saving demons than mortals. You really, really don't.

Solving the problem of Malfeas is late game hidden secret boss level difficulty.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Fortunate, then, that no one is suggesting to solve Malfeas. As I explicitly stated in my last post.

On the other hand, rule and defend an extended region of Malfeas, in a fashion analogous* to what Octavian has done since time out of mind by simple virtue of his ability to beat faces? Yeah, I'm thinking that "Do this as well as Octavian does it" is in the scope of what a Celestial Exalt can accomplish.

Or hey, maybe it's not! Maybe you have thirty reasons why Octavian is uniquely suited to rule a quarter of one layer, and perhaps their combined effect is that even an extremely ambitious Solar would be unlikely to manage more than a thousandth of a percent of a layer within a reasonable time-frame. If Malfeas is stupidly huge, that's enough.

The degree of special pleading required to retain Giant Malfeas, without admitting at least a potential moral concern, is just staggering. Are we really suggesting that a Celestial Exalt will need to wander in the desert for years in order to find a way into Malfeas?

* - Yes, Octavian is much more interested in the "rule" part than the "defend" part, but they aren't entirely separable. Hence analogous and not identical; if that's a bridge too far, well, make it a ten-thousandth of one percent of one layer.
 
Last edited:
ManusDomine said:
He might.

Finding your way into Malfeas is hard, unless you have Charms.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
That's a heck of a final clause.

Barring all options, opening a freestanding gate to another realm is an Ambition 3 Celestial working. That's... what, three to five months at the outside? So we're looking at that time or less; if we happen to have a friendly Sidereal in the party, it could be as short as a five-day boat ride.

Edit: And, again, it's fairly important that Malfeas be accessible, because it's otherwise a waste of setting for the actual game. If we're going to premise our arguments on, "You, Celestial Exalt, will never realistically get there, and if you do go there and ever try to do anything you'll die," then we might as well just delete it as a place. The point of having a terrible, wondrous realm of Demon Princes who host impossible treasures is to go there, bargain with the Demon Princes, and wrestle with how much you can afford to give up; making it inaccessible and almost certainly lethal preempts all that, because "Shall I pay this terrible price for my heart's desire?" is kind of hard to focus on while you're dying of thirst and/or getting personally shivved by a Yozi.
 
Last edited:
Reader mode
You must login or register to reply here.
Remove ads
Back
Top