When the Demiurges had their big council meeting, I thought I was literally looking at a meeting of the Deathlords.
Also, the author of the comic looked into Exalted after all the comparisons between his comic and the setting, and seemed into it! 8D
General Exalted Thread
When the Demiurges had their big council meeting, I thought I was literally looking at a meeting of the Deathlords.
Also, the author of the comic looked into Exalted after all the comparisons between his comic and the setting, and seemed into it! 8D
- Location
- Denmark
- Pronouns
- She/Her
yesssssssss
Not really sure if he's into Exalted.
The only post on the matter that I could see was him mentioning it got recommended to him, he took at the system and walked away with no idea how anyone makes a character.
@Revlid I was looking over your custom SWLIHN charmset and have to ask, what is your reasoning behind the Every Last Detail tree? judging by their respective first Excellencies that should be a Cecelyne charm tree rather than a SWLIHN one (Cecylene is unable to react well to things outside of her plans whereas SWLIHN acts quickly to create, maintain, or restore order)
The canon SWLIHN flaw if invulterability is that she has to pay extra to defend against things she hasn't seen before. Being caught by surprise is one of her canon weaknesses. She does planning. Cecelyne's thing is more hoarding resources for an overwhelming action later rather than detailed planning.
He popped up in the /tg/ Exalted thread.
Graypairofsocks
What is Grammar?
- Location
- earth
You mean you weren't going to do that in the first place?How can Scroll of The Monk be shit if it incentivizes you to wear disco mirror pants?
Recently?
Graypairofsocks
What is Grammar?
- Location
- earth
You do the same thing solars do besides gaining limit, and glowing all over the place.
IIRC the fluff wasn't really that confusing
I looked at that comic recently, and I am certain she doesn't have a harp.
- Location
- Singapore
Sorry. I got no idea why I thought there was a harp.You do the same thing solars do besides gaining limit, and glowing all over the place.
IIRC the fluff wasn't really that confusing
I looked at that comic recently, and I am certain she doesn't have a harp.
EarthScorpion Ghost Homebrew: Shades
Credit for this basic idea goes to... someone. Probably Revlid, knowing how much of his original Underworld Revision I've internalised.
In essence, though, these shades basically exist to smooth over the fact that given the nature of ghosts in my revised deathly stuff, you are not going to have ghosts that are happy to be farmers. Ghosts be cray-cray, yo. A society of ghosts is about as divergent from a living society as a society of demons.
Now, that's not entirely desirable. We do want ghosts to be strange and weird, but it's probably not a great idea to make every deathly society into Sadako, Alma, Beetlejuice, and the Woman in Black locked into a box. But I don't want to allow "I'm a ghost and I'm happy to be a farmer". Hence, the solution is to use the connections between the Underworld and memory to make a class of scenery-people (also, scenery animals).
This has the added advantage that if they're memories of Creation, they're going to spawn mostly close to Creation. Which incentivises conflict in the Underworld, because the powers in the lands of the Dead are older ones - like all those 700 year old Shogunate ghosts. Hence, there's a good reason for them to invade the shallower domains and take their shades as tribute.
Shades
The Underworld is a land of memories as well as a land of death. Its geography is made of recollections and nostalgia. But a location is more than its physical description; a location is its people and its society and its feel. Therefore, just as an Underworld forest is filled with the memory of trees, so too is an Underworld town full of the memory of people. These walking, moving memories are known as shades.
Shades are not ghosts. Ghosts are the lingering souls of once-living beings, held to the mortal coil by a refusal to die - or by fell magics that bind them. A shade exists because the living and the Dead remember a location as having people dwelling in it. They are mobile scenery, part of the pallid imitation of life the Underworld pretends to. A shade does not think, does not feel, does not love or laugh or cry. They are the teeming masses in the background, the recollection of being surrounded by people and of seeing animals in the fields.
In some domains, one can walk through the lands of the Dead and see very few Dead. Shepherd shades herd shade sheep. Faceless villager shades pick at the ground, harvesting pomegranates and pale grapes from orchards. When the lords of death and the greater Dead war over domains, the shades within are part of the landscape, to be seized by the victor. Lesser Dead capture and corral them like beasts, selling them to other domains or taking them for their own personal use. The shades do not care, as long as they can do what they must. They are the ultimate downtrodden masses; without will and without want.
Shades are one of the key indicators of the proximity of a domain to Creation. A healthy domain has fresh shades coming into existence, for the memories of mortals shape the land. Once a domain is cut off from the living world, however, this flow slows to a trickle, as now only the pallid and distorted memories of ghosts bring them into being. The shades that do come into being are warped and twisted - memories of memories of people, rather than memories of people. And this cycle continues as a domain sinks lower and lower, and the shades grow more and more warped. These domains must resort to trade or invasion to take fresh shades from more healthy settlements, and this is a major cause of wars in the Underworld. The Shogunate powers of the lands of the Dead are buoyed up by countless shades taken in tribute, forming a mismatched underclass from many modern societies.
If it were not for shades, the society of the Dead would likely lock up. Ghosts only linger when they have some great driving urge that allows them to hold off the lure of Lethe. They all have great and terrible wants; the need to get revenge on their killer, the need to protect their children, the need to drag young men down to drown in stagnant water. This is not a mindset conducive to subjugating one's desires to another's. Shades, on the other hand, exist to fulfill whatever recollection brought them into being, and so clean floors, rebuild structures, and maintain the slowly mouldering memory-realm.
There is much necromancy and deathly thaumaturgy that invokes or draws on shades. Perhaps the most famous are the lavish sacrificial rituals of thanotic kings, that ensure that an abundance of shades that wear the face of the sacrificed men and beasts form in the Underworld. When a necromancer would animate a corpse without binding a ghost into it, she crams a shade down its throat to get a shambling, stupid servant. Shade servants are sent to carry messages to a target or bear a carefully crafted curse.
Shade Mechanics
Shades no not have true Attributes or Abilities. Instead, they have a small number of Style dice pools, almost always rated at 5 or less. Shades cannot take actions outside their Styles. A soldier shade might be able to fight, but it cannot fix a barn or herd sheep. Shades cannot learn and do not gain XP, and only have a sense of self-preservation if it is in-theme for one of their Styles. They are always Enlightenment 0.
In essence, though, these shades basically exist to smooth over the fact that given the nature of ghosts in my revised deathly stuff, you are not going to have ghosts that are happy to be farmers. Ghosts be cray-cray, yo. A society of ghosts is about as divergent from a living society as a society of demons.
Now, that's not entirely desirable. We do want ghosts to be strange and weird, but it's probably not a great idea to make every deathly society into Sadako, Alma, Beetlejuice, and the Woman in Black locked into a box. But I don't want to allow "I'm a ghost and I'm happy to be a farmer". Hence, the solution is to use the connections between the Underworld and memory to make a class of scenery-people (also, scenery animals).
This has the added advantage that if they're memories of Creation, they're going to spawn mostly close to Creation. Which incentivises conflict in the Underworld, because the powers in the lands of the Dead are older ones - like all those 700 year old Shogunate ghosts. Hence, there's a good reason for them to invade the shallower domains and take their shades as tribute.
Shades
The Underworld is a land of memories as well as a land of death. Its geography is made of recollections and nostalgia. But a location is more than its physical description; a location is its people and its society and its feel. Therefore, just as an Underworld forest is filled with the memory of trees, so too is an Underworld town full of the memory of people. These walking, moving memories are known as shades.
Shades are not ghosts. Ghosts are the lingering souls of once-living beings, held to the mortal coil by a refusal to die - or by fell magics that bind them. A shade exists because the living and the Dead remember a location as having people dwelling in it. They are mobile scenery, part of the pallid imitation of life the Underworld pretends to. A shade does not think, does not feel, does not love or laugh or cry. They are the teeming masses in the background, the recollection of being surrounded by people and of seeing animals in the fields.
In some domains, one can walk through the lands of the Dead and see very few Dead. Shepherd shades herd shade sheep. Faceless villager shades pick at the ground, harvesting pomegranates and pale grapes from orchards. When the lords of death and the greater Dead war over domains, the shades within are part of the landscape, to be seized by the victor. Lesser Dead capture and corral them like beasts, selling them to other domains or taking them for their own personal use. The shades do not care, as long as they can do what they must. They are the ultimate downtrodden masses; without will and without want.
Shades are one of the key indicators of the proximity of a domain to Creation. A healthy domain has fresh shades coming into existence, for the memories of mortals shape the land. Once a domain is cut off from the living world, however, this flow slows to a trickle, as now only the pallid and distorted memories of ghosts bring them into being. The shades that do come into being are warped and twisted - memories of memories of people, rather than memories of people. And this cycle continues as a domain sinks lower and lower, and the shades grow more and more warped. These domains must resort to trade or invasion to take fresh shades from more healthy settlements, and this is a major cause of wars in the Underworld. The Shogunate powers of the lands of the Dead are buoyed up by countless shades taken in tribute, forming a mismatched underclass from many modern societies.
If it were not for shades, the society of the Dead would likely lock up. Ghosts only linger when they have some great driving urge that allows them to hold off the lure of Lethe. They all have great and terrible wants; the need to get revenge on their killer, the need to protect their children, the need to drag young men down to drown in stagnant water. This is not a mindset conducive to subjugating one's desires to another's. Shades, on the other hand, exist to fulfill whatever recollection brought them into being, and so clean floors, rebuild structures, and maintain the slowly mouldering memory-realm.
There is much necromancy and deathly thaumaturgy that invokes or draws on shades. Perhaps the most famous are the lavish sacrificial rituals of thanotic kings, that ensure that an abundance of shades that wear the face of the sacrificed men and beasts form in the Underworld. When a necromancer would animate a corpse without binding a ghost into it, she crams a shade down its throat to get a shambling, stupid servant. Shade servants are sent to carry messages to a target or bear a carefully crafted curse.
Shade Mechanics
Shades no not have true Attributes or Abilities. Instead, they have a small number of Style dice pools, almost always rated at 5 or less. Shades cannot take actions outside their Styles. A soldier shade might be able to fight, but it cannot fix a barn or herd sheep. Shades cannot learn and do not gain XP, and only have a sense of self-preservation if it is in-theme for one of their Styles. They are always Enlightenment 0.
- Location
- Pittsburgh, PA
See, I could see a community of full ghosts who diligently tills the land. However, it would be a unique occurrence where the deeply devoted worshipers/subjects of an agricultural god saw their culture destroyed and their lands seized by Realm expansion, with their divine ruler slain by Immaculate priests for daring to profane their own vision of the natural order. The survivors died ignominious deaths in the wilderness, weeping as even the comfort of prayer was denied them.
Thus, their ghosts till fields of ash and orchards of strange, sinewy trees that bear no fruit. They go about their 'lives' dressed in the antiquated, boxy robes their culture prescribes for mourning, and each is wrapped in a yellowed vellum prayer-scroll - their own skin, stripped and treated and inked with tearful eulogy to their fallen god. In all things they are quiet and solemn and contrite.
Yet for all their seeming peacefulness, the pain of losing their lands and their god and their lives eats away at their half-souls, and when the village calendar falls on days where once they feasted and reveled and offered prayers, they unwind their scrolls and hang them from the eaves of the great barren tree at the center of their village, before walking forth from their unmarked grave in the wilderness to avenge themselves on the foreign filth who now live in their houses and till their soil. All who venture forth on such unhappy nights are either fools or skillful exorcists, for the skinless dead will find them and make offerings of their woven hair and carved bones.
In other words, 'farmer ghosts' made along the same "what horror story are you trying to tell?" rubric you recommend - a mixture of "dead natives seek vengeance on the men who seized their land", "creepy murder-based religious rites" a la Fatal Frame, & "ghost heretics obsessed with worshiping their god".
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Heh. Well, that's what I get for speaking in absolutes. Yes, that's totally valid - although I would observe that they're not exactly ghosts who are "happy to be farmers", as much as they are ghosts who aren't going to give up what the fucking Realm stole from them - their lives, their culture, their land.
Hmm. Interestingly enough, mass death seems like it'll produce more normal ghost societies than normal day to day life, which I suppose makes sense. Mass death means you're getting a more normal cross-section of population dying all at once, with some big cause that'll cause more ghosts to linger. Hmm, yeah, that makes sense - after all, in normal times, you're getting murder victims and the like leaving ghosts, while during mass deaths, you're getting everyone getting a chance of it.
Also helps explain why the Contagion Ghosts are still a massive power block.
Hmm. Interestingly enough, mass death seems like it'll produce more normal ghost societies than normal day to day life, which I suppose makes sense. Mass death means you're getting a more normal cross-section of population dying all at once, with some big cause that'll cause more ghosts to linger. Hmm, yeah, that makes sense - after all, in normal times, you're getting murder victims and the like leaving ghosts, while during mass deaths, you're getting everyone getting a chance of it.
Also helps explain why the Contagion Ghosts are still a massive power block.
- Pronouns
- They/Them
Silly ES, don't you know that only Sith deal in absolutes?
You've clearly fallen to the dark side.
You're still heroic by Exalted's definition of heroism, though.
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I thought it was more that "Some people deal in absolutes, and some of them are Sith".
Revlid
blob of bugs
- Location
- England
Yeah, they were intended to deal with the paradox of a) ghosts only stick in around in response to trauma or desire or oaths, b) the only interesting ghost stories revolve around this anchor, as do the then-new mechanics for ghosts, c) we have a big fat stack of mechanics for ghosts having spirit superpowers, d) the vast majority of ghosts seem to be normal people who do the same shit they did in live, just pointlessly and a bit goffikly.
- Location
- Singapore
Ok. What can the alchemical exalts offer the dragonblooded, in the case that the alchemicals do invade Creation, other than artifacts?
- Location
- Denmark
- Pronouns
- She/Her
"Hello, we are an entire power bloc of Exalted who sympathize perfectly with the idea of serving society for a higher cause, we are also versatile as fuck, and lacking in enough resources that a war with you would be too expensive."
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Graypairofsocks
What is Grammar?
- Location
- earth
I had a "Brilliant" idea. Has anyone ever done something like this:
"Romedy" or sitcom starring the Ebon Dragon.
"Romedy" or sitcom starring the Ebon Dragon.
Its probably not as Exciting of a plot point as you're probably hoping, but the one thing the Eight Nations have going for them is they are extremely effective at people-management and the organization and support of large-scale infrastructure planning. Which is something that the Dragonblooded on the Isle have had immense problems with, insofar as maintaining their First Age/Shogunate-era technology stockpile should it be needed, and keeping their far-flung satrapies in line and paying the proper tributes. The society of Autochthonia is built atop several thousands of years of formalized scheduling, construction projects, crisis-management and information control, while the Realm has had barely 800, all supplied by one woman with a plan.
Maybe not as flashy as brokering the designs for advanced powered suits using economically-viable materials, but "we can help optimize your society to more optimally benefit both your ruling class and your people, without needing to rely on labor-camps enforced by drug addition and mass-slavery" is a sure way to endear themselves to at least one of the various factions A) looking for any alternatives to civil war, and/or B) wondering how they will rebuild once the war ends and they stand as the victors of a land filled with corpses and broken streets.
- Location
- Denmark
- Pronouns
- She/Her
It has happened!
Chiming Minaret has met an Exalt that doesn't try to murder her.
She has also gained yet another artifact (or Wonder as we call them), in the form of an animate shawl made of pseudo-fancloth that she can drape herself in!
This is the first session in which being Chiming Minaret is not sufering.
Amazing.
Chiming Minaret has met an Exalt that doesn't try to murder her.
She has also gained yet another artifact (or Wonder as we call them), in the form of an animate shawl made of pseudo-fancloth that she can drape herself in!
This is the first session in which being Chiming Minaret is not sufering.
Amazing.
- Location
- Singapore
Who is the woman?I had a "Brilliant" idea. Has anyone ever done something like this:
"Romedy" or sitcom starring the Ebon Dragon.
Scarlet empress?
Cecelyne litterally can't use her excellency if taken by surprise, SWLIHN just has to overpower her PD when dealing with something she doesn't know well enough to finesse away
And my main question was about the planning part, which is not supported by any of SWLIHN canon stuff, while being one of the 'always on' conditions for Cecy's excellency... which I may not have explained well enough in my question.
Wrong. I don't know where you're getting this from.
overwhelm
strong over the weak
arbitrary
capricious hypocrisy
reverence
terrifying and wondrous miracles
insightful
desires and failures
sudden
shocking
punish
amass
jealously protect
endure unrelentingly harsh conditions
... as well as resist challenges to their long-term plans
If you can't use these words together to take out something that takes you by surprise, you shouldn't be playing with Cecelyne.
(For example, sudden shocking rage to punish someone who's trying to stop you is basically always allowed. As is capricious hypocrisy to change your plans based on new information, doing what you promised you'd never do)
- Location
- Denmark
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Like, insightful is literally one of them.
insightful come on
insightful come on