AmineHsu
A worm, not a man, scorned and despised.
- Location
- NoVA
Clearly what we should take away from this in the type of Hippo native to Creation is The DireHippo. Bigger, Stronger and somehow even more aggressive and murder-y.
General Exalted Thread
- Location
- Singapore
- Location
- Gladstone, OR
This is at my request a 'Mostly' 2e game. Here's the first session post.
So you have good suggestions (and I love Raising the Dragon's Bones exactly for that reason), but the main hurdle right now is lack of Experience and lack of time to spend that Experience. Having just finished session 3 (logs pending), I have reached my first chunk of downtime and will start really thinking about what to do/get.
Part of Sunlit Sands is a big wishlist/loveletter to everything I like about Exalted but never got to play for one reason or another.
As far as needs go, I actually as much want to fill out my ability dots and specialties/styles as I do want to buy new Charms and Spells. I have a depressing lack of Solar Bureaucracy, lack of mass dramatic project system aside.
- Location
- Library
Exalted the Book of Sorcery Vol 4: Roll of Glorious Divinity Ip. 108-110."mercury ants are frequently summoned
for their ability to transmute metals; cities with many citizen sorcerers, such as Nexus, often use mercury ants
to aid in their industries."
Interesting. Thanks for the link.
Ahhhh, yes.
I know that feeling. I've wanted to play an Exalted game for a while, but have never found anyone nearby who would run one. I have contented myself to jotting down random ideas and making a truly excessive number of builds when I'm bored. The most recent being the reason for my earlier question about howdah Charms, to support the glorious Lookshyian Laser Dinosaur Cavalry build my brain spat out mid-research paper.
- Location
- my house
I feel your pain
The Bayou of Worms
Demesne: Metagaos 2
Outside the muggy cities of the South West, there are malaria-ridden mangrove swamps and bayous hugging the coastline - far more than would be of interest to even the most obsessive cartographer. At the entrance of one north of the Wailing Fen is the mouldering, worm-eaten wreckage of a scavenger lord's ship that ran ashore after plundering a great treasure from a lost temple in the far South West. Wise men do not linger and are not tempted by the prospect of treasure, for this area is sweltering despite the eternal pall of grey clouds that hang over the swamp. Unwise men will find that the vicious rip-tide pulls their vessel ashore and so they must set off on foot.
Then they realise the mistake they made.
Within the heart of the bayou, everything - everything - is made of worms. Slick glistening trees leafless trees squirm and coil around each other, dropping their young into the water and sending out wriggling roots. There aren't any crocodiles here anymore; just things that are equally hungry with pale skin that wriggle through the water. There was once a village here, a little fishing village far away from any oppressive lords and cruel taxation. First they were worm-food; then they were worms too. Leech-mouthed men whose skin is always wet and gleaming wear clothes made from woven worms and offer their local squirming delicacies to anyone who comes through. Those who eat become them. Those who refuse are eaten by them. Either way, there's going to be a barbeque tonight.
The monstrous locals have dragged rocks and built a crude shrine that is slowly sinking into the soft mud of the bayou. At the heart of the bayou lies the statue of the god that the scavenger lord stole; a man and woman back to back, tied together with worm-gut. The man is obsidian and elegant in a Southern, princely way; the woman is a many-armed monstrous figure of ruby. Surely it is a treasure that anyone who ventured to the heart of this hellhole would want to keep for themselves.
There needs to be a "screams inwardly" rating.
*screaming inwardly*
*screaming inwardly*
The School of Belwoch
Manse: Lunar 3, Oramus 1
It is always night in Belwoch, sitting high in the mountains. Time flows strangely there; the sun-bright moon rising in the morn and then setting at dusk, leaving only black skies overhead. Sweet-smelling night-blossoming flowers coat the slopes, and there is always snow on the ground and on the peaks of the granite spires of the school. But the stained-glass windows are shattered and cold winds blow through the vacant hallways. The scholars never left this place, but their form is not what it once was and they care little for research now.
In the aftermath of the Contagion, a brilliant chosen of Luna snatched up the thaumaturges of the old school of Alwait who had survived sickness and the princes of chaos, and took them to a manse he had built high in the mountains. His devil's bargain was this; they would serve him, and in return he and his divine allies would set them free from the constraints of mortality. Of course they accepted. And for four hundred years many fell things were done in Belwoch - monsters made with the blood of the Yozis, men turned into beasts of war with bones coated in ghost-metal, even unspeakable experimentation on a young Dragonblood who fell into the Lunar's hands. The Lunar called upon the impossibilities of the Beyond, that terrible womb that had borne Luna, and because of that impossibilities took form.
But fortune is fickle and fate is cruel - especially when the chosen of the Stars have anything to say about it - and the Lunar was caught by hunters of the Realm led by a purple-eyed woman. Belwoch was left without its master, and the scholars could not restrain the fell things within. The rifts to impossibility poisoned their minds and in their dreams they listened to the whispers of Luna's father - the Dragon Beyond the World - and became other than they were. They dove too deeply and drank from the maddening well of thoughts that is Oramus and the scholars became self-inflicted subjects of this place.
The villages below know not to speak of Belwoch now, and they fear the monsters that crawl out of that place, spawned from the rutting of the once-human scholars or crawling out of the terrible flesh pits. Huntsmen know to fear when they cannot see the sun, and shepherds slay sheep that wander up into sunless uplands. This is now a harsh and fearful land, where every man and woman must be ready to fight against the nightmares that walk the walking world.
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The al-Anair River
Demesne: Journeys 2, Necrotic 1
Running through the Fire Mountains is the sacred river of al-Anair. It is said that once, when the world was young, the Maiden of Journeys thought to wander the world and at al-Anair she built herself a coracle from the pine trees of the upper slopes and paddled its entire length in a single day. Something of her power was left in the waters, which blossom with yellow-flowered lotuses, and those who know how to sail the currents can travel any distance down it in a single day.
Alas, what was once pure and sacred has been profaned by the spiritual corruption of death. For hundreds of years the villages by al-Alnair have floated their dead down the river, believing that by doing so the souls will be carried to their next life with great speed. Such a death rite was indeed efficacious at preventing the dead from rising, but such impurity has sunk into the living waters and now they are sick. The pale faces of the dead can be seen in the marshes around the river, and when a new corpse is committed to the waters the lotuses around it burn with pyreflame.
The water stagnates and yellow mosquitos and leeches infest the marshes. The al-Anair river now has a kinship to the rivers of death, its living essence poisoned by the corpses that generations have floated down it. It is a river that leads one to one's destination at great speed, but it reaps a toll from travellers in their span of years. The faster one travels along the path it grants you, the closer one comes to death - and those who reach the end of the span of their years on al-Anair hear the voices from the river and cast themselves into it and linger there forever more.
Up at the half-way mark stands the ruins of an attempt to build a manse-dam to draw powers from the al-Anair river. The white marble of the dam is covered in black weeds and the stone has been scored by countless claws. At the bottom of the waterfall below the dam can be seen a great arcane mechanism, a wonder of the Shogunate sunken into the river muck. Around the dam the mosquitos are so thick as to take the form of great clouds that an incautious man might mistake for smoke. The blood they take, they offer to the river and so contaminate its spiritual cleanliness further. Some day, if its degeneration is not checked, al-Anair shall become one with the Rivers of Death and be lost to Creation entirely.
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The Aesthetic Virtue
Manse: Solar 4
In the First Age, there were great cities in the Fire Mountains that make Gem look like a squatter's hovel. One such city was the domain of the Shining Dove Empress, she who elevated beauty as superior to compassion or valour. Aye, it was a city that has known few rivals, where every building was wrought from precious gemstones this vain Twilight made from infinite chaos and where every street was white marble. It was said that the Sun admired the beauty of the city so much that it was never cloudy there and that the Moon and the Maiden of Serenity danced in the streets for the joy of seeing it. The Shining Dove Empress knew that the city must be this wonder, for it would demean her to live in anything lesser. Like a sculptor she took her tools to the faces and the blood of her people, and reshaped them into a new race of men - a race without male or female, whose faces were identical to her own. When she walked through the streets she looked upon her city and her own face and she knew that it was beautiful.
Despite the work she had put into her city, the Shining Dove Empress did not dwell in it. The clamour of lesser beings disturbed her from her work. Instead, she carved her own face into the mountainside above Shining Dove, and within the mountain she built her retreat which she named the Aesthetic Virtue. White marble and good gold and countless mirrors filled the lavish fortress. Liquid sunlight was piped into the depths to illuminate baths of icy snowmelt while her human-faced tigresses freely roamed. Her courtiers - each reshaped to be a perfect facsimile of herself - sang sweet songs to lull their lady to sleep, while the archives were filled with her stunning dissertations on how to systemise aesthetics and the imperative of living life for it. And everywhere, countless hand-made paintings and sculptures of the woman who designed every square centimetre of this place stare out from the walls, a faint smile on their lips.
The Shining Dove Empress died at the Calibration feast, shielding her face from the goremauls of Terrestrial critics, and her city provided her no immortality. Terrible weapons of the First Age were unleashed when her followers chose to commit collective suicide rather than live without their creator-mother, wiping out the entire city and leaving the perfectly circular lake of snowmelt that remains to this day. Only the Aesthetic Virtue remained, the beautiful face on the mountainside staring out into eternity, a faint smile still on her lips. Inside the manse, it is as still as the grave and dust lies finger-thick on the surfaces. The road up to the manse fell an age ago, and to get to it now one would have to scale the mountain it is built into and descend down the titanic face, entering via the mouth.
- Location
- Canada
If you're still doing this, I do have some more ideas.
some form of greater dead or deathlord, with themes of overdose, general drug abuse, and enlightenment, as it believes it has understood some great truth that only those who undergo wretched drug induced visions as it has can learn.
The shadowland that is controlled by the result of the above prompt, where it attempts to cultivate a mix of Hegran and necrotic essence, so it can spread its enlightenment far and wide.
A Manse that had Octavian taskbound to guard it, resulting in additions and changes to the local landscape, cultures, and geomancy, as The Quarter Prince did everything he could within his power to leave it the most fortified and well guarded manse in Creation.
some form of greater dead or deathlord, with themes of overdose, general drug abuse, and enlightenment, as it believes it has understood some great truth that only those who undergo wretched drug induced visions as it has can learn.
The shadowland that is controlled by the result of the above prompt, where it attempts to cultivate a mix of Hegran and necrotic essence, so it can spread its enlightenment far and wide.
A Manse that had Octavian taskbound to guard it, resulting in additions and changes to the local landscape, cultures, and geomancy, as The Quarter Prince did everything he could within his power to leave it the most fortified and well guarded manse in Creation.
Ellf
Apprentice Wizard
- Location
- Virginia
This was great. Wasn't quite what I was expecting, but it was pretty awesome.
- Location
- Virginia
I really like al-Anair - actually I think I'd even prefer to use it in uncorrupted form.
So if this is still on, I'm thinking - low-dot demesnes for each of the Maidens (excepting Mercury which we have already)?
So if this is still on, I'm thinking - low-dot demesnes for each of the Maidens (excepting Mercury which we have already)?
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TenfoldShields
Lounging on a Hoard of Words
- Pronouns
- He/Him
isn't it though
isn't it kinda
(also yeah yeah cockblocked by my brain, have some demons, feedback is appreciated as always. rather be told it's dumb and stuff than slowly lather up my face with egg while nobody says anything ;v )
Spendarmad, the Serpent's Own Scripture
Messenger Soul of Winter's Rain
Demon of the Second Circle
Faith is the core of the community, the warden of tradition and the midwife to culture. The unspoken sixth pole about which all else turns. The lesser peoples of Creation may not worship as the children of the Dragons do, they may not question and probe ancient texts with the disciplined mind of an abbot, but it would be foolish to dismiss the depths of devotion that can be found in a simple farming town. Faith is a vital thing; beating, breathing, merging and melding imposed orthodoxy with local custom. Creating something syncretic, something personal, something new and old altogether. Faith is a center and it is in the nature of the Ultimate Darkness to see the center fall. Pieces once leashed so tightly spinning wildly into the hungry night.
Such a hunger may be found in all his parts, great and small.
Spendarmad takes the form of a wandering monk, a mendicant preacher. An aged man, his hair silvery and thinning. His body, once strong, given to seed and a touch of softness. He dresses humbly: sandals stained with the dust of the road, hem of his cloak caked in mud. In cities he is a firebrand, one of a dozen demagogues that line the street corners. In rural townships he is the traveler who comes just after sunset. He seeks the simple things of the communities he happens upon -sustenance, shelter, stories- and, like any good guest, he earns his keep. He fixes what needs fixing. Mends what needs mending. Should disreputable louts threaten his host he will send them retreating with strong blows and scornful words. Should illness befall his host or their kin he will see to it with homespun remedies. In all aspects and affects he is what he seems: a traveler, a man of salt and soil and long, wearying toil.
And a faithful man too, that should not be forgotten.
He preaches his gospel at night to small gatherings (they're always small at first) with fervor and intensity, his voice rising to the rolling, rumbling roar of the storm. He speaks to aching bones, to toughened hearts, and his words make the flickering, firelit darkness come alive with long forgotten wonder. Imparting lightning in the blood and brain, galvanizing his congregation to fury and passion. He tells them of a sixth Dragon, kin to the known five, who lives in secret places and sees the secret places of all. Who sees and does not recoil. Who knows and does not hate. A divine creature that understands men and loves them though frail, fallible things they are. Who offers an abiding, personal love if they but reach out and embrace it. Eternal damnation if they refuse.
The local monks or clerics or priests, the customary guardians, take issue with this (as they always do) but such poor souls find themselves thoroughly outmatched and outmaneuvered. Spendarmad has read all the great treatises, he knows the common doctrines and has penned no few companion pieces of his own. He knows the script and has seen a hundred, thousand productions of the same show. In the end the community only falls farther into his grasp. Learning at his knee as he teaches them ever more wondrous things. Sacred songs that stir the soul. Fierce dances that rouse the sinews. In time he will even begin to work miracles: curing the crippled, divining secrets, beckoning life-giving rain and, it is whispered, raising the dead.
He is holy to them. And they his children, his flock, willingly dance into the shadows with him by the end.
Notes and Abilities: His preacher-persona is only half-fabrication. The sentiment is, ironically, heartfelt and yet the speaker is monstrously inhuman. Should one peer past the visage, they will see eyes black as tar and iron teeth poking between bloodless lips. His body beneath the robes is akin to an enormous shell-less, scorpion. Pallid and slick, blending the features of a man with those of a crawling beast. The cock's crow pains him and sunflowers disrupt his disguise. Clever mortals may use such to expose him.
The Serpent's Own Scripture spends little time in Hell if he can help it. His place is in Creation, unearthing the infernal traces the Yozi have imprinted upon its flesh. Empowering their holy sites, waking their long-forgotten servants that sleep beneath the earth, and speaking on their behalf to the legions of the Dead. He shepherds his flocks with practiced care and the cults he founds endure where others may consume themselves or be crushed beneath armored boots. Sorcerers may summon him to please Khvarenah as a patron, to learn from him the oratory arts, or to procure his spawn. Hand-sized, scuttling things of knit white flesh that burrow into the brains of the recently dead. Donning degraded memories; puppeting the physical anatomy, growing muscular tendrils within the central cavity.
Spendarmad may walk Creation when a holy man of great knowledge and consuming pride challenges the darkness to defy him. Appearing to debate divine matters on the darkness's behalf.
Lilit, Fruit of the Ophidian Tree
Defining Soul of Winter's Rain
Demon of the Second Circle
Few creatures prosper in isolation. There is something in the thinking mind, the higher soul, that craves connection with others; that reaches out, blindly fumbling for contact, for approval, for understanding even as it is repulsed. Repelled. The burned hand reaching again and again to cup the flame. Khvarenah would scoff at the idea: he is Unquestionable, his flesh and being a portion of the unutterable darkness that is the Ebon Dragon. He needs no such thing. Others exist to amuse him, to be used by him. But it is his own smaller self that betrays him for Lilit desires little else.
He takes the common form of a younger man. His hair the silvery-white of Luna's face, his skin pale as unmarked paper. Features handsome if a touch sharp, cast with a hungry, nearly feral edge. Oil-black tattoos loop and whorl over his body. Bands of stylized serpents and icons of the Ebon Dragon branded beneath his flesh. He wears little but simple trousers that seem, on closer inspection, to be fashioned from black, geometric scale. The ignorant would say the Demon Prince is simply lazy and there is some truth to that for he does not behave as one of his station ought. He does not foster cults in Creation, he does not vie with his peers for territory in the Fallen Tyrant's metropolis-body, he does not even seem particularly invested in the plots of his kin (although he will aid if cajoled). But the more honest answer is that he does not care for such things.
He cares for few things really. Propriety, modesty, and caution were taught to him with great difficulty by his siblings. If left to his own devices he simply roams Malfeas, living as an animal might. Traveling where he will, acting as the notion takes him. He is not a soldier but is, in all regards, a fine fighter and so has little to fear for himself.
But he does fear for others.
There are precious, precious few that he cares about. His brother Sarvar, perhaps one or two of his other siblings, a river god in the North, a few of the moon's chosen. He desires nothing of them but their time and attention and would burn all the world if it meant their happiness. He is as simple and as true as that.
Notes and Abilities: The Fruit of the Ophidian Tree is possessed of a number of fine and desirable qualities. Among demons he is an apex predator, able to extrude dozens, if not hundreds, of ink-like serpents from his flesh on a whim. Shucking his human form entirely as it suits him and embracing the guise of a primordial wyrm; a war-beast of a forgotten Age whose mere passing ravages the countryside. He is an incubus, coupling with men and women, gods and mortals, alike. The fruits of such unions taking the form of alien behemoths and uncanny monsters, the lineages of his partners indelibly stained by the exchange. A race of sinuous river-dragons in the North bears his parentage as do several strains of carrion-crow Beastmen. Sorcerers may summon him to take advantage of such traits. Binding prompts his cooperation if not necessarily his enthusiasm and summoners are advised to keep mortal liquor on hand to calm him if he becomes agitated (he has a great fondness for the stuff but not the constitution to bear it well).
The Argent Witches, however, fascinate him and those he has befriended (or, at least, the heirs to their Exaltations) may count on his aid freely given. Their inevitable deaths devastate him, their eventual rebirths cheer him, and he keeps mementos from their time together so that he may always recall their varied incarnations.
Lilit may slip his bonds when demesnes in the domain of Wood and Water are injured by geomantic shifts, local Essence pooling beyond the ability of elementals to repair. As the great gardens become infested with creatures of night and ill-omen he is beckoned. Screech owls herald his arrival as he slithers through this wound between worlds.
- Pronouns
- They/Them
I SAY it isn't, and then for some reason, the first thing I see when I read that first word as "Spermadad."
Then I looked at it again, and realized that's not what it said at all.
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- Location
- England
A manse used in the first age by a war focused set of celestials to sort the wheat from the chaff in terms of mortal recruits
- Location
- Canada
Note to self, next Calibration, see if you can befriend this guy, or failing that, pay him to be your tatoo artist.
Muhkat Lomorki
Draconic Sorcerer
Is it bad I'm pretty sure there's at least one Exalted character who's into vore?
... It's not a Scourge of Metagaos, is it?
- Pronouns
- They/Them
Hrm, some sort of First Age fortress that was considered a 'perfect defense'/unbeatable fortress, but fell apart because in truth it was only 'unbeatable' as long as you assumed vast, infinite Solaroid resources and leadership?
And it's continued to have a legacy as a 'seemingly great' fortress that nonetheless sorta dooms everyone who tries to rely on it/is so expensive to maintain that it bankrupts (magically AND otherwise) anyone who owns it?
And it's continued to have a legacy as a 'seemingly great' fortress that nonetheless sorta dooms everyone who tries to rely on it/is so expensive to maintain that it bankrupts (magically AND otherwise) anyone who owns it?
"Learn to overcome the crass demands of flesh and bone, for they warp the matrix through which we perceive the world. Extend your awareness outward, beyond the self of body, to embrace the self of group and the self of humanity. The goals of the group and the greater race are transcendent, and to embrace them is to achieve enlightenment."
-Chairman Shen-Ji Yang
"Hahahahaha fuck that."
-The Shining Dove Empress
(the joke is that Alpha Centauri has a wonder called The Ascetic Virtues).
- Location
- Spain
*cough* directional Titans *cough*