Its probably easiest to run with fanon from Naruto and go that the summoned beasts, when bound to a partner, receive Chakra/Essance every time they are summoned or the like. This explains why Gakimachi went from a normal sized toad to being larger than Naruto rather quickly because Naruto was pumping in gigantic amounts of Essence into him. Of course you could also tie it into the fact that Jiraiya, the source of the Toad Contract for Minato/Naruto etc was literally the Sage of that mountain where they lived. The contract wasn't really with Kohona but Jiraiya's students and then their students.
General Exalted Thread
Revlid
blob of bugs
- Location
- England
Of course, given that most elementals are essentially animals, these courts or clans are pretty much always going to be headed up – and in most cases absolutely ruled – by the most powerful and intelligent elementals, some of whom may be capable of spawning lesser elementals themselves.
Which means that a young House Cynis sorcerer who wants to make a contract with his family's contracted Wood Court needs to travel into a special Wood Demense they maintain for just this purpose, to meet with the giant mutant Deku Tree at the heart and gain the ability to call upon his mindless subordinate Deku Babas and the mildly more intelligent Deku Scrubs. You have to make a pilgrimage and offering to the Daitengu who rule Mount Zuina if you want to call on their elemental disciples.
And there's tension between those who maintain and protect a demesne as a dwelling for their elemental ally, and those who'd rather just cap it and use the resulting manse to churn out hearthstones for the war effort. And tension between Immaculates who believe that elementals are also children of the dragons and honouring them with sacred places is natural, and those who consider it untoward idolatry in the same vein as bribing gods with out-of-holiday prayer, clear evidence of the perfidy of sorcerers.
Sidereals are also decently suited to dealing with elementals – not just with specific Charms like Elemental Vision or Water and Fire Legion, but also general spirit-handling Charms like Terminal Sanction, which cause few-to-none of the bureaucratic consequences they'd normally face – and so it's very tempting to cultivate elemental courts as "off the books" Creation-bound allies, in lieu of relying on local gods. This does come with the caveat that such relationships are wont to end as well as they usually do when a first world operative bypasses official channels to buy local loyalty with trinkets and pocket change – namely, it pisses off their formal allies, disrupts the status quo, and always comes out in the end.
A spirit bought cheap will sell out cheap, too, and before you know it Mother Bog's wandering the East swallowing up whole villages to turn into her mudchildren, all because some young Shieldbearer thought it'd be fine to hide the giant swamp elemental off the maps so long as she acted as his private gaol and interrogator.
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- Pronouns
- They/Them
DAMN IT THIS IS WHY WE NEED TO RELEASE A SUFFICIENT VELOCITY FANBOOK.
- Location
- Scotland
In addition to negotiating with Courts, I think disrespectful, itinerant or desperate sorcerers should have ways to directly bind and steal elemental. This should be risky (and make the elemental courts hate you if you get caught), but Gargamel should be able to go Smurfs hunting if he wants! That should be a valid model.
Revlid
blob of bugs
- Location
- England
Most elementals are just dumb animals. So a sorcerer can absolutely bind a wild elemental into her service – hell, a non-sorcerer can go and break an fire elemental horse to ride, if they've got a fireproof groin. This won't particularly upset other elementals, because they're mostly animals. Go catch all the Pokemon you want. The issue is that the most powerful, knowledgeable, influential elementals tend to go out and dominate their lesser kin, and they're not very interested in competition.
So a local shaman might set a cage of feathers and bamboo to trap a draught-weasel when it sneaks into an abandoned house, then tame it with Essence to act as her familiar, using it to spy on her village and keep her house at a comfortable temperature. An issue arises only if that draught-weasel is the (nominal) subordinate/child/slave of Echo Gongzi, a grumbling greater air elemental who lives in a giant cave near the village, where it bullies newborn earth elementals. In that case, you've got an Elemental Court going, and Echo Gongzi will regard the taming of the draught-weasel as theft – or if it's a totally foreign elemental, as an interloper trying to undermine his territory.
So it behooves the shaman to first check out the lay of the land and discover if any powerful elementals live nearby. If so, she can placate them, guard against them, or bargain directly. There are forces she can leverage against such an elemental, if need be – local cave, animal, or even wind gods might well object to Echo Gongzi's presence, for example, depending on how much it causes problems for their purview without offering anything in return.
Or she could call on a hero, if one happens to be around – Echo Gongzi is, after all, basically filling the role of the local weird monster in a cave.
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As a thought sparking from this, we can compare and contrast that to the sorcerer-demon relationship and the demonologist-demon relationship.
From Creation, a demon is an isolated asset. If a demon is trapped in hell, it doesn't matter that you have it as an Ally, it's worthless to you for most things. You might be able to call upon its authority to summon lesser demons who serve it, but you can't directly use Gervasin's killing spear to make Death Of Lots Of Green Spears unless his power can reach you.
So if an elementalist goes out into Creation and makes pacts and alliances with the spirits of nature and tames firebirds and thunder-mice and so on, and a necromancer squats by shadowlands so they can draw up the ghosts they need, and a user of the Black Art tears monsters out of the nightmares of the Neverborn - well, a demonologist is basically operating at the end of a very long supply chain. A demonologist is encouraged to keep a lot of demons around, because you can't just call on the nearest Shadowland or draw power from the Dragonlines. Banishing spells can probably counter demon-anchored magic, too - and banish the demon too.
On top of that, I think while you might be able to anchor a spell in a bound demon, it's probably "worth" less because if the spell is an ongoing thing, it'll terminate when the binding ends. If you want to etch Ligier's name ten thousand times in the walls of your city so green fire consumes any attackers, you're going to need to summon him and not bind him so he'll invest his power in this. And sorcerers will want to get Demonic Familiars over using bound 1CDs, because a familiar is something you can invoke directly and which can crawl out of Hell when you want to use its power.
If you want to carry out a long duration Working anchored in a demon, you need to summon it and not bind it and negotiate things out yourself. Which is already a very good explanation for why sorcery and demon summoning are looked at with such suspicion - because there's a real incentive there to release unbound demons so you can anchor your workings in them. Morally dubious sorcerers acquire Demonic Familiars - very suspect sorcerers make arrangements with Second and Third Circles. And that's another reason for the Calibration Feast - you can anchor really, really powerful spells in an unbound Third Circle, with the tiny flaw that you're releasing a Third Circle on Creation you madman.
Hmm, this makes an interesting suggestion of why the Exalted can bind demons, while most cannot. It's a question of implicit Status - because of the Surrender Oaths, the Exalted have an implicit Status (Victors of the Primordial War) that make demons subordinate to them. Demons have accepted their authority by surrendering - and cannot un-accept it. Gods and mortals and the like do not enjoy that status. This clears up the anomaly of why the Exalted are allowed to bind demons when they didn't have sorcery at the time of the Surrender Oaths - it's not that they thought ahead, it's that they realised how to hilariously abuse the Surrender Oaths once they got their hands on sorcery.
This also explains very neatly the difference between Infernal demon summoning and Standard demon summoning. It's not tied under this model to what initiation you learn - it's tied to whether you're using your authority as a victor of the Primordial War or you're doing it under the Law of Cecelyne. Infernals can't bind 3CDs because Yozis aren't allowed to bind each other's souls - and so the status inherited implicitly by Infernals who cast sorcery through Yozi metabiology stops them doing it. And more interestingly, it suggests that Infernal demon summoning can be accessed by infernalists and demonologists who aren't Infernals. All you need is authority under the Law of Cecleyne to do so. Which means that if you serve a demon lord or a demon prince, they can offer you authority over demons so that you can bind them. This is a great thing, because it allows that good ol' trope of "a demon can offer you power to bind lesser demons if you serve them" to be carried out.
Of course, if you're binding demons through Mentor (Ipythmia) and she says "You have betrayed me, so I withdraw my gifts"... well, looks like all your demons are going free. Which provides the chance for hilarity by Nights and Eclipses working to plant evidence so it looks like the cultist-lord of a chunk of the West has betrayed his masters so they withdraw his authority and his empire crumbles.
Revlid
blob of bugs
- Location
- England
Aren't there already plenty of spells which call directly on demonic power? Total Annihilation uses the lost, secret name of Ligier to call down an emerald solar flare on your enemies. Rain of Doom seems to pretty clearly open a gateway to Kimbery's butthole. Cantata of Empty Voices could be air elemental sorcery in practice, but boy, "a choir of vaporous entities that sing in crystalline voices that bring intense agony and, eventually, death in all who hear them" sounds pretty Pyrian to me. Hidden Judges of the Secret Flame go without saying.
So while you might need to summon demons to create new demonic spells, learning to call on existing systems set up by your insane forebears seems a-OK.
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- Location
- Land of the Midday Sun
Well, this make sense. It's way harder to, say, build a new car model from sratch than follow an existing blueprint.
Remember that creating a new spell also means that you have to create an Essence pattern to invoke the spell, while an existing spell has the work already done for you.
Yes, but, hmm, how to put it? Basically, the idea behind the Anchor system is a) to soft-mechanise casting styles without just making it a Charm, and b) to make sure that sorcery becomes the "power as privilege" thing. Although the backing mechanics are the same, casting Total Annihilation through your Backing as the head of a Ligierian cult and calling on the lost name of the Green Sun in your chant is very much a different spell thematically to casting it because you possess an Artefact forged by his hand and using his lost name to draw his fire from that. One is the act of an Infernalist cultist, while the other is the act of a sorcerer-engineer.
Hence, when you invoke demonic power, it's not a question of whether it's demonic or not - that's basically just fluff when originally designing the spell and something softer when arguing over what's an acceptable Background to use as an anchor when learning it. What I'm arguing here is that when Ligier is trapped in hell, you can't use your Mentor (Ligier) or your Ally (Ligier) to cast spells (apart from summoning spells that use his leant authority), because the Demon Realm holds him fast. This is different from your Mentor (Luna) or Ally (Luna), because if you're in Creation you can directly invoke the moon and call on her power to turn your enemies into weasels or whatever. But if you summon Ligier, then you can call on his power directly using your personal ties to him.
And this is a limit of demons that's worse than elementals or ghosts, that shapes demonologist behaviour. They are incentivised to surround themselves with bound demons (making them creepy and suspicious), get their hands on the Artefacts of the Demon Realm (resulting in them having a weird workroom filled with demonic trinkets and strange brass swords and borderline blasphemous statues), and occupy Manses and Demesnes that are tainted with demonic essence. All of these things let them directly invoke demonic power with minimal jumping through loops.
I consider this to be desirable behaviour, because as it stands the game doesn't encourage sorcerers to be weird and creepy and suspicious like the Immaculate Order says they are, and hence the Realm's bias against demon-summoners seems overblown. But if the game is set up so optimal play for a demon summoner is to act like a fantasy demonologist (and a necromancer to hang around graveyards and shadowlands and rule over ghosts, and an elementalist to act like a pokemon trainer), then that's something that I think improves matters.
Plus, it's just plain fun for a sorcerer to grow themselves a fu-manchu moustache, carry a demonic dagger, and generally act like Ming the Merciless.
Of course, in the High First Age a lot of demon-commanding spells were built using Artefact or Status (Deliberative) or Status (Yu Shan) due to strange gizmos built by brilliant artificers [1] or treaties the Deliberative and Heaven signed with Hell, but these days many of these invocations are more... suspicious in origin. More like Mara wanted, in fact.
[1] I'm not saying I'm trying to explicitly justify Doom, but that's totally what I'm doing.
Hmm...that being said, I would argue being able to be Lina Inverse and call on the Demon Prince's power to Dragon Slave my enemies should be viable, without having Liger following me around. Now granted, Lina had Xellos following her around but she was calling on Ruby Eyes' power before she met him. I guess you could play up the 'Gems of the Demon Lords' that Xellos got her, or making swearing herself to Him / L-Sama.
Hmm..that said I like your design space of Demon Summoners having heaps of demons around, Necromancers hanging out at Graveyards and Elementalists going on whacky pokemon joureys where they keep fighting between themselves to prove that they are the best that there ever was at training these things.
Hmm..that said I like your design space of Demon Summoners having heaps of demons around, Necromancers hanging out at Graveyards and Elementalists going on whacky pokemon joureys where they keep fighting between themselves to prove that they are the best that there ever was at training these things.
Pretty much. You don't need him there in person, but you do need some justification. It just really is there so "the demons are trapped in hell" means something - and so sorcerers are prepared to kill for an Artefact emerald that traps some of Ligier's fire, because there are so many spells you can cast through that.
So for the case of someone who's taken some kind of pact with Ligier in return for his fire, maybe he's given them a "witch's mark" as an Artefact tattoo, or each use of the spell requires a sacrifice of a certain Resources worth of rare and exotic perfumes in his honour, or perhaps you need to maintain a Cult to honour him as long as you keep access to these gifts.
Hmm. Actually, maybe it's OK to use Mentor or Ally for something that directly references him and lets you summon his fire. I'm just playing around with working out how to get demons feeling different from other splats and like "they're trapped in Hell" is a real limit on their ability to affect the world.
- Location
- Denmark
- Pronouns
- She/Her
It's also a nice callback to First Edition where Dragon-Blooded possess long-standing agreements and magic to call on the power of elemental spirits.
This makes me wonder why the supreme Solars of the First Age went along with the Calibration Feast thing. For a bored millennia old circle of Solars releasing a Third Circle on Creation would likely be good fun.
- Location
- Quezon City, Philippines
Huh... this seems like a valid replacement/bonus incentive to use Demon Ink Tattoos. Under your sorcery vision, does that mean while a spell is active, said Demon Ink Tattoo does not provide its usual bonus?
- Location
- my house
@EarthScorpion Is there any chance that these differences will ever be mechanically coded? I'd really love to play your version of exalted
Yes. It'd be "committed" to the spell. Maybe it slithers off your body. Maybe it glows brightly like an anima mark. Maybe you literally pull the spell out of it.
Of course, that means that if you want to keep up a lot of sustained demonic sorcery using tattoos you'll need to cover yourself with the blasphemous art of the Yozis and trap demons into your body and profane yourself with the spawn of Hell. Feature, not bug.
(And on the other hand, it explains why Lunar New Moons are so fond of artefact tattoos. When you're a Lunar and you're operating on hostile territory, you need all the power you can get and trapping the north wind into your tattoos to release it later for a Stormwind Rider sounds like a very good idea when you're going in to rescue someone from the cruel satrap.)
Revlid
blob of bugs
- Location
- England
Remember that Sidereals can use Astrology to open a momentary portal into Adorjan, after all.
Does that also mean that when you use your Excalibur's Excaliblast spell, you can't use it as a sword for a while?
Although you did shift all of the basic swording functions to Resources. What would a FSN style Excalibur even look like under your system? Under the canon system it would be a daiklave with an Anti-Fortress option, which presumably costs a lot of motes. Under your system it would be a high-resource weapon made of actual magical materials (probably Orichalcum) with an activated effect that lets you kill a fortress.
Would the Excaliblast be a spell that Saber invented which she can use to blow up a fortress using the artifact as background support, or a built in effect by the Lady of Lake when she made (or crystallized, or whatever) Excalibur?
Hell, if you have an artifact with a given spell built in, could you attach a different spell to it, so you can use your Exalibur to level a fortress or just cut down an army on a level plain?
Happerry
Bat out of Hell
- Location
- Kanto
Personally I'm of the opinion that having Ligier as a Mentor or Ally is already enough of a downside to make up for those backgrounds letting you call upon his power, because if you're his ally he's eventually going to call in those favors you've been piling up when you set people on unquenchable flame to burn screaming for seven days and nights, and if you've got a mentor rating... well, 'my secret demonic mentor sets me blasphemous tasks to earn and learn his horrible forsaken knowledge' is already a trope, isn't it?
For a Solar already being hunted by the realm, does it really sound like that bad a deal to murder all those monks and pillage their temples and sacrifice their sacred relics to the Green Sun (thusly earning their new ally background by deeds done) in return for the transcendent cosmic power that they need to survive being hunted by the realm and maybe being hooked up with a local Ligierian cult when those monks were already trying to murder them? I mean, sure, sure, you're doing tasks for the evil yozi so on and so forth, but hey, one group here is trying to murder you, and the other is offering you great power for only a few tiny miny favors. Seems like a perfectly clear choice to me...
And I'm sure those equally minor favors that that dragonblooded sorcerer is doing to earn the power to blight her rival's satrapies with a drought borne on silver sand will never ever come back to haunt her, after all they're such minor things right?
Edit : I mean, look at Kerisgame and all the stuff that has happened trying to get a Ligier Ally background and what has to be done as upkeep for that and the trouble that having the Silent Wind as even a one dot Mentor has caused. You shouldn't need to let the Silent Wind out into creation to call up the power to do weather workings that mess with your enemy's sailing ships, when having that Mentor Rating means that Adorjan is going to be taking a personal interest in you. And equally, you shouldn't need to let the Green Sun out into creation to call upon his power when the price of his patronage is that you're already being sent on regular fetch quests.
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- Location
- Singapore
Isn't that called Protocols?
grommile
nasty-minded old cynic
- Location
- NERV-Mercia
- Pronouns
- Traditional/Animate
Because they didn't trust each other to not...
... do that.
Because they're a small minority and can't afford to just ignore the Solar Deliberative's decisions if they don't want to get into tons of trouble.
Does this mechanic means that it is totally possible for a sorcerer to invoke the power of an exalt if they have one backing them? Sort of like how a sorcerer who heads a Lunar-worshiping cult can draw on their patron's power to cast moon-themed sorceries or First Age Solar drawing on his Dragonblooded subordinates to cast elemental spells (and vice-versa)?
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Happerry
Bat out of Hell
- Location
- Kanto
I think the Protocols would be more the akin to the Authocthon version of casting with whispers, only replacing whispers with Authocthon's authority as the great maker and his innate nature verses the 'pesudo necromancy' of just casting with Authocthon flavored energy akin to powering normal sorcery spells with the energy of the underworld instead of being crazy and calling upon the whispers.
Personally I'd make Alchemicals invoke their Clarity to do Protocols, as that's the Authocthon infection of their humanity, also encouraging powerful Alchemical sorcerers to be strange beings whom plan their actions with a cold and alien logic.
But just casting with Cybertron flavored energy wouldn't be the Protocols, was what my point was meant to be.
If you have Mentor : Solar, X Dots, that sounds like a completely reasonable background to hang some spells on, specially when the Wyld Hunt shows up to ask pointed questions about those Glorious Golden Death Lasers you've been sniping ghosts with.
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