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- They/Them
Please think for five seconds.
General Exalted Thread
Please think for five seconds.
- Location
- Singapore
I did.
It seems..... fair enough. I guess. I suppose you can give penalties for stacking, such as more xp costs, or more chances of botches, or, say, needs more successes?
Enough for you?
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- They/Them
No. Stop trying to break the setting on your knees and thinking you're doing anything cool or interesting by doing so.
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- They/Them
Okay, among other criticisms, the whole premise itself is stupid. It assumes that the working makes things "Three times more efficient" or whatever, rather than, "This much more efficient, which is three times more so than how it started." The assumption that you could stack something like that to get 10,000 times more efficient crops isn't really borne out when you don't think of the world as a series of numbers games.
- Location
- Wörms, the half continent
... In the 1860s, crop yields were 20 bu/acre. I can't find any earlier data, so let's assume that the bronze age had a tenth of that. (Someone got better data, please tell me) Current yeilds are 180 bu/acre. (This is for Wheat)
The increase you are proposing is a 300 fold increase. That is three times the increase that has occurred in the last four millennia. So no. That's not enough.
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I'd actually be interested in seeing what Creation's Halloween is like. IIRC, in at least some traditions people made Jack O' Lanterns to scare off evil spirits that would come around during the time, so I could see there being some sort of tradition of creating knock-off wards to repel ghosts and demons during the time -- probably Calibration -- with the rich, powerful, and knowledgeable having genuine wards and occult fetishes.
To abruptly change the subject for a bit, does anyone know of any official/semiofficial/unofficial means of crippling or greatly restricting an aspect of a Primordial/Yozi as represented by a Third Circle Demon besides permakilling said 3CD? I've looked through the Scroll of Divinity and the Malfeas setting book, but I didn't find anything; though I guess I could have missed something.
To abruptly change the subject for a bit, does anyone know of any official/semiofficial/unofficial means of crippling or greatly restricting an aspect of a Primordial/Yozi as represented by a Third Circle Demon besides permakilling said 3CD? I've looked through the Scroll of Divinity and the Malfeas setting book, but I didn't find anything; though I guess I could have missed something.
- Location
- United States
An ambition 1 terrestrial working is going to ward the fields of a town from pests and blight, not magically increase it's yield a hundred fold. An Ambition 3 terrestrial working is going to ensure a bountiful harvest in one field, and while 'bountiful' isn't quantified it certainly isn't going to let one field do the work of a hundred or even ten. These are explicit examples from the book.
The kind of results you're going to get with a Ambition 3 Terrestrial Field Blessing are going to be like, no spoilage or loss for anything planted in the field so everything that comes out of it is of the highest possible quality and volume. Which is amazing.
Okay, I know that's not the plot of Spirited Away, but I'm also sure this is a reference to something.
- Location
- Pittsburgh, PA
Sorry, I must have made an inference based on something I read here - I'll take @Revlid's word unless he comes in and says he's changed his mind on the matter.
Still - and I've been meaning to say this for a while - the "scientists" that dwell in the more stable pieces of Calculated Abhorrence of Life probably aren't trying to usher in the Age of Metal. After all, clanky metal automata are a very small sliver of phenotypes in the massive, sprawling, index of things you could make with enough applied thaumaturgy, Sorcery, and Charmtech. They'd probably just want to kill mankind (destroying the Exaltations themselves would probably be put off as a "long-term" problem) and replace it with something better, something that could soothe the endless hate of their ever-dying godhead further.
Something none of them can agree on any details of, since Abhorrence of Life as a coherent being kind of doesn't exist beyond "HATE HATE HATE HATE", so all they have to go on are the opinions of his various hekatonkheires, most of which are completely insane now and none of which would have agreed even before, just like Ligier and the Scar of Empires would have trouble agreeing on what would make Malfeas happy - or alternatively, sifting through the various cyst-spawn, strange behemoths, and other mangled thoughts-made-flesh that spill forth from the death wounds of Abhorrence of Life's corpse, which is even more fruitless because you have no way to determine what the actual Neverborn's opinions on these funhouse-mirror atrocities might be, even disregarding his response would realistically just be something like "HATE HATE HATE HATE HATE".
So what you'd have is a bunch of Byrgenwerth motherfuckers fighting over what particular flavor of nightmare is what their master really wants, while failed/escaped experiments in creating The Perfect Being haunt the byways around their enclaves eating travelers.
More specifically, Mardukth ---> He Who Holds in Thrall because the Neverborn are degenerations of their Primordial selves. By killing the Unquestionable souls that represented the length and breadth of their inner natures & beliefs, the Exalted Host robbed the dead Primordials of their moral and ideological complexity. Mardukth, who encompassed concepts like vastness, belief in higher powers, observation bias, and the ideal of the man-made-myth, was pared down until all that remained was the most insulting, shallow interpretation of his fetich soul's ideal that "the strong naturally gather weaker beings under their leadership": a faceless oppressor forcing the weak into mindless servitude.
Hence why, in the interest of making the Neverborn and the Labyrinth carry at least a little nuance, I would set things up so there are behemoth-like beings in there that capture some of the nature of their former 3CDs, whether because they're unusually clear recollections of a Neverborn's lost souls or massively weakened splinters of the dead Unquestionable. Likewise, you would have (relatively) benevolent, or at least sane, memory-behemoths from less painful instances of Neverborn recollection.
Of course, you'd also have things like "Autochthon, as the Neverborn imagine him in their darkest screaming nightmares" or "the Exalted Host, fuzzily remembered as a shining horde of cannibal monsters eating the Neverborn alive" roaming around down there...
Nah brah.
It's basically just Spirited Away, with the tale warped so the bathhouse owner and the dragon are the same person.
(Lunar!Chihiro is out there, and she is not to be fucked with)
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- Location
- Spain
Killing all the 2CD's of a 3CD cripples him temporally.
(This is actually quite convenients if you can summon such 2CD's
GOD said:
The exact effects of this, and what extinguising means (IE, normal vs permadeath of the 2CD's) is left to the game master judgement.
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If Yubaba is a Dragon, then the plot of Spirited Away includes Chihiro first reclaiming her name, then aiding and abetting the theft of her baby, then "stealing" her contracted dragon.
Just, yannow, she also makes friends with Yubaba while doing it, so she mostly gets away with it
.(Oh gods, Lunar Chihiro. That would be an amazing story. Though I tend to like her as a mortal thaumaturge with lots and lots of little shaman-gifts and favors owed from spirits -- just, uh, not so much in Exalted, where that'd make her basically irrelevant >.>. Got the idea from one A Strange Adventure with Mrs. Nakamura the Safety Consultant, which is also amazing.)
So would No Face be a Rakasha or a behemoth?
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Thanks! That'll works perfectly.
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No Face is a Ghost.
In the Spirit of making the Labyrinth as many-faceted as possible, there propably are going to be some science-cults that intend to replace flawed flesh with GLORIOUS CYBERNETIC PERFECTION, actually. But yes, those won't be all of them.
Some are going to be the stereotypical Neverborn cultists that just want everything - Creation, Malfeas, the Wyld, even the Underworld - to just all die. Others will say that the big problem that needs fixing is human free will, and are propably going try to work alongside the souls of the Principle of Hierarchy on that, if they can get past the latters instinctive reaction of 'Ick, dead thing. Purge it!'. Others again may not even have some kind of big overarching vision, but will simply use occult scrying rituals to make a big compendium of every transgression and sin commited by people all over Creation (worth a try to seek them if you want blackmail on someone or are investigating a crime), will stew in self-loathing and hold self-flagellating 'atonement' ceremonies, or something else entirely.
Hmm. An initially shy being, but who only understands through consumption and takes on the worst aspects of other things he consumes. He's not human or ex-human, certainly, and Exalted gods are very human so that's ruled out. Indeed, he's an exile and outcast from the society of the spirits.
Well, not a Raksha, because fuck the Raksha and the way they monpolise the Wyld design space, but certainly a Wyld creature of some kind.
That description actually makes him sound like some newborn cross of Metagaos and Szoreny: someone who's only view onto the world is through consumption and imitation, and who desires to eat not of itself but as a way to understand the world outside it. It could be a Wyld-based "shadow"/phantasm of the locked-away Primordials, or perhaps a behemoth that came to exists on the border of the two. (In fact, actually, that mirror-bright sea that we last see No-Face on...)
Nope. Just a wyld thing. Nothing to do with Primordials. Just a hungry thing that understands nothing about the world, but wants to learn and is in its own way a blank slate.
When you tell the Raksha to fuck right off and remove their hands from the throat of the narrative space of "things in the Wyld", you can just put things like that in it.
Or the demons from Tanith Lee's Tales of the Flat Earth, which are a seminal inspiration for Exalted.
- Location
- Pittsburgh, PA
I'd actually agree - although my pre-pre-alpha fluff rewrite of raksha makes the term more of a catchall for "sapient Wyld creature that uses an assumed identity to infiltrate Creation" than a species or culture.
Speaking of which, what would you guys' impression be on what would happen if a Wyld creature tried to subvert the Loom in a Wyld Zone, replacing Creation's Fate in the affected region with its own chosen narrative genre? It's kind of the hinge part of my rewrite turns on.
Amen. Even ghosts have more meaningful variety and distinction than the Rakasha. Hell, the Warp over in Warhammer probably has more meaningful variety and distinction.
Mmm. That's precisely the opposite direction I want to go with them - the things you occasionally see mentioned in my stuff as "chaos princes" or "princes of chaos" are what I lean towards them. They are very much a specific species, and indeed they're also largely a culture. They're an aristocracy of the Wyld, creatures that possess things that are basically Titles out of Changeling: the Lost - and they fight over the titles, things that are strictly finite in number and are constantly diminished as they're lost to Creation.
They're not endless. They're basically stranded aristocracy, beach creatures caught between the endless formless wyld; trapped and yet empowered by the fragments of Shape that their titles are. The Prince of Rats is trapped by his nature as a lord who rules over ruin and rot and vermin, and yet it empowers him and means his inner narrative takes shape. The Lady of the Weeping Tower is doomed to endlessly pine over a lost love, but her sorrow makes her more beautiful, a trap that calls those with nobility in their heart to her. And should she tear out the heart of the Prince of Rats, she becomes greater than she was, but now her kingdom is only rot and ruin and those called to her may have nobility in their heart, but as her subject they too become only rot and ruin and vermin.
And so, no, a Wyld creature can't subvert the Loom in an area. What they do is they exile it - and a prince of chaos, once they have freed the space from the Loom's dominion, can spread their title over the space and now it plays by their rules. The Loom is their bane and the thing that stops them doing as they wish, but it's also where they must venture to get things that they need.
With the princes of chaos as now a very distinct type of creature, then, there's a lot more space for other things. Giant turtle-like creatures that venture in from endless chaos to the Far West and lay their eggs, their young eating things in Creation before heading off into the Sea of Chaos? Sure. Men who lose themselves to bloodshed and war, until all they do is fight and all they think of is violence and they become living legends, feeding off the emotions invested into their story by their followers? A meaningful opponent to a young Dragonblood fighting a Wyld incursion. At least as many of the creatures in the regions around Creation were once Creation-born, taking chaos into their nature, as they are creatures of chaos who have become Shaped.
(the comments about magicians by the Traveller in Black may be appropriate here; it is in the nature of men to try to use chaos to their advantage)
To be fair if it were 3CD of the Ebon Dragon being light on uber painful fire by the light of the Sun I'd be going "Man that's hilarious and appropriate", but Ligier getting burned by the sun just doesn't work for me.
My preference lies with 3CD struggling against the oaths and vows they swore (as represented by willpower) as they slowly get dragged back into Malfeas vs being burned to a crisp.
At this point its a matter of personal preference however since I really do think the under lying mechanic of unsupported demons get tossed back into Malfeas is a strong one
- Location
- Library
I have a question: who wrote first fiction piece in Exalted 3ed book? One with Eastern Star and Sabriye?
The Wyld, to me, feels like being handed a blank sheet of paper and being expected to be excited about it. Sure, I can draw anything I want on it, but until that happens its a fucking blank sheet of paper. I'm not getting excited.
And that's not getting into the problems presented by my sub-par drawing skills.
The Wyld and the Rakasha are, at best, suffering from similar problems as the 2e Abyssals, where the setting and mechanics provide genuine support for a wide variety of ways to play only 2 1/2 different narratives.
And that's not getting into the problems presented by my sub-par drawing skills.
The Wyld and the Rakasha are, at best, suffering from similar problems as the 2e Abyssals, where the setting and mechanics provide genuine support for a wide variety of ways to play only 2 1/2 different narratives.