- Location
- Gladstone, OR
You're the one who made the character who was a beautiful (mafia) princess with a pet tiger.
You opened this door, not me.
But how do you square the princess w/ pet tiger having as much in common with the sorcerer vizier?
General Exalted Thread
But how do you square the princess w/ pet tiger having as much in common with the sorcerer vizier?
- Location
- Wörms, the half continent
Because everything got flipped right upside down.
That's why the princess is the sorceress, the chubby and slightly silly man is the romance interest (at least in his eyes), and the prince who wouldn't be adverse to her hand is a trickster genie.
EarthScorpion: Probably a silly question, but with your description of Creatures of Chaos and their relationship to 'Titles' (such as the aforementioned Prince, or as you mentioned a few pages back the 'King of Rats' and how he would change if he ate the 'Imprisoned Ice Princess'), does this in any way brush up against the way that the powerful in almost seem to accumulate titles or descriptions?(aka 'Scarlet Empress', 'Bull of the North', 'First and Forsaken Lion') Or am I just reading to much into it?
- Location
- my house
So I don't have the best grasp of sorcery and you definitely have a better grasp of game balance for exalted. It seems weird to me that an emerald sorcery spell is being balanced against an E3 celestial exalt charm. It feels like it makes sorcerers much stronger if their first levels of spells are equal to an Exalt E3 charms.
Also I'm still confused by anchors. If I cast this spell with Backing I can still use backing as I normally do correct? Or can I not use it for anything else while this spell is in effect
- Location
- Gladstone, OR
That's pretty standard point of balance, an 3-dot artifact is roughly equivalent to an essence 3 solar charm or terrestrial circle spell. It's not quite as equal at Essence 5 Solar = Solar Circle Sorcery = Artifact 5 though.
Anchors are basically Backgrounds you have to hold onto and channel your sorcererous power through- you can't just pay motes and cast spells anymore. The idea is that ES wants to encourage Sorcerers to act in a sorcerer-like way by connecting their powers to concrete things that can be engaged with or invoked.
According to ES's model, with some exceptions, when you invoke an Anchor, you are committing it for the duration of the spell's effect. This is is to encourage you to cultivate hoards of backgrounds and use them as spell-charges. To keep things relatively sane, he limits anchors along thematic or potency lines. This is why under his model Resources can't be used as an Anchor as it's not 'potent' enough, but 'my authority as king (backing/followers' can, because the sorcerer is channeling the power through his Background.
In the case of the Followers/Backing channel, the idea is that while the spell is working/being cast, the 'background' is committed and can't be used. In-practice, Followers don't magically dissappear and the kingdom does not cease to exist. Instead those backgroudns can't be used for any other meaningful dramatic-scale action. You can still TALK to your followers, but you can't order them to build a dam- that's what you're using Sorcery for.
Now, ES specifically wants it so that you buy a spell wtih a specific anchor in mind, not a class of anchor. In Inks's case, she can only cast Invulnerable Skin of Bronze through her bronze-skinned tiger-familiar. It was that or her daiklave, and I basically told Aleph "As presented, I can either have defensive magic but no weapon, or a weapon and no defensive magic'. I can accept needing more backgrounds to incentivize sorcerer behavior, but there's a fair amount of Exclusivity involved.
On that note, @EarthScorpion I think what might help Anchors is if you approach them as more of a carrot than they currently are. As I mentioned previously, they as much feel like the hearthstone tax-but-not-as-bad. What might work better is if Anchors were presented as bonuses you seek out to make your spells better in some way. Sure you can cast without an anchor, but you're rewarded for doing so with one. Some exceptions can still require an anchor like the demon summoning and so on.
Iirc, if the source of those resources is thematic enough, you *can* use it, but it requires a continuous expenditure of those resources- the example @Aleph gave to me, iirc, is that to keep Haneyl anchored, you have to continuously cut down and burn a specific type of rather valuable tree.
- Location
- my house
So the everything is just a balance point I wasn't aware of, good to know.
To be clear, most of the time if a background is commited to the spell you can't use it for anything else correct?
Exactly this. EarthScorpion raised the possability of keeping Liger around but you would be draining super valuable green gems by the second, enough that even a Scrooge McDuck expy would be going bankrupt fairly quickly...but Scrooge would probably use his Cult background (The Richest Duck in the World), or some of the Artefacts or allies he has picked up in his many adventures rather than his pure monetary resources.
- Location
- Gladstone, OR
Correct, beyond obvious exceptions/specific cases. The most recent spell he drafted for example explicitly allows you to hunt 'alongside' your Familiar instead of it vanishing as the focus of the spell.
Most importantly, a background can't be used as a background while the sorcerer is casting a spell through it. So like, if there was some unique Dramatic-Timescale Background Action a Familiar could perform (most Familiars are on-camera characters instead), casting a spell through it would prevent you from taking that background-based action.
I think it's worth noting that a lot of sorcery is supposed to work at Dramatic Scale and that instant-scale castings don't fit into the anchor model that well...
- Location
- Pittsburgh, PA
Apropos of nothing, how much punishment would you say a physical-focused 3CD could take? Like say, if he threw himself into the Green Sun, would that kill him, and would it be just the usual discorporation or is 3CD-v-3CD playing for keeps?
Asking to figure out how many suicide attempts one of my Ylagran Unquestionables could potentially survive.
Asking to figure out how many suicide attempts one of my Ylagran Unquestionables could potentially survive.
Zero: he just needs to learn the Sorcery Spell that auto kills the user. If a Third Circle demon wants to kill itself than it can do so.
As for the rest, in canon only a spirit killing charm can kill a 2nd/3rd circle permanently. So being engulfed by Liger wouldn't do the job. Throwing himself into Oblivion would.
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On the other hand, it should be noted that Radiant Fury Dissolution lives in the Ligier tree of Malfeas, so it's possible that his fires do in fact perma-kill if they burn the body to ash (and leave a victim shadow).
More generally though, yes, it's... not really something that works for "I'm trying to kill myself and can't" in Malfeas, home of "everything is trying to kill you, starting with Adorjan and moving up". If you wanna die, go stand somewhere silent and wait for Addie-chan to show up and bring death.
I think you would need to put some kind of action to do with the love of the mother really. Yeah, the mother's love is thematic but just loving somebody isn't enough. You need the mother who loves her daughter so much that she is doing things to anchor her daughter to the realm, like taking part in profane rituals. Something you can prevent the m other from preforming.
ES noted a fair while ago that the main idea for the anchors was that it gave people things to interact with. You can strip the Sorcerer from his staff and he can no longer call fire from heaven. You manipulate the court to enfeeble the King...and suddenly he can't use his authority as King to cast spells.
in this case I guess you could 'make the mother disown her daughter' but I kind of feel like "You prevent the mother from bleeding out the stranger she has chained to the basement, whose blood is mixed into a tonic that prevents her daughter from being dragged back to Malfeas".
ES noted a fair while ago that the main idea for the anchors was that it gave people things to interact with. You can strip the Sorcerer from his staff and he can no longer call fire from heaven. You manipulate the court to enfeeble the King...and suddenly he can't use his authority as King to cast spells.
in this case I guess you could 'make the mother disown her daughter' but I kind of feel like "You prevent the mother from bleeding out the stranger she has chained to the basement, whose blood is mixed into a tonic that prevents her daughter from being dragged back to Malfeas".
grommile
nasty-minded old cynic
- Location
- NERV-Mercia
- Pronouns
- Traditional/Animate
Unless you're involving neomahs somewhere, surely those children would be demonbloods rather than demons?
- Pronouns
- They/Them
I figure Kimbery cultists would have some sort of ritual or breeding program to make full demons, it fits their themes to a t.
grommile
nasty-minded old cynic
- Location
- NERV-Mercia
- Pronouns
- Traditional/Animate
If I was going to use Innsmouth as inspiration in Exalted, I would probably go with demonbloods under the "raising your Essence far enough turns you into your non-human parent species" principle, which fits the thing where the Innsmouth children can remain apparently-human even into what would for a human be old age ("Old Man" Marsh had not yet fully transformed at the time of The Shadow over Innsmouth).
- Location
- Spain
1st circles don't require anchors.
That's because he wasn't a hybrid, I should note - he's one of the old people, who made a big deal of never taking the oath of the Order of Dagon which, if you read between the lines, is the one where you sleep with the fishies. Non-metaphorically.
Mmm. Technically speaking, it's a thematically cohesive class of Anchors that you should be able to use the spell with. Like, for example, if you have DOOB linked to your Artefact weapon, you should be able to cast through any artefact weapon you pick up. The sorcerer should just be able to cast through it, because as a concept the spell is "I turn my will into a weapon using the weapon as a channel". On the other hand, if you have a special blade made of butterfly obsidian that you specifically linked the spell to, that's probably what you rely on because that's probably shit like "the sword turns back into butterflies and slices people apart" so you can only use it with swords made of butterflies.
So probably something akin to oMage's "Unique focus" thing should be there to reward people who take singular Anchors. Probably a small mote discount or a WP discount, akin to a Yozi initiation in its area of speciality.
However, the exclusivity is a feature, not a bug as I see it. A background-poor sorcerer should feel limited and constrained by their material and social resources. You should be driven to go out and make Allies with spirits, because spirits are excellent ways to empower your spells. You should go take over organisations for Backing and go find Manses and Demesnes for power. Essentially, axiomatically sorcerers have to play the same kind of macroscale game that a general or a Bureaucracy-focussed character has to do. They're playing Warcraft 3 when a wandering swordsman is playing WOW. It's a stick, telling your sorcerer they must construct additional pylons.
This does, however, suggest I need to provide Project rules to a level that sorcerers can do the Project to alter a spell's parameters (which means you can convert a useless spell you find which requires Backing (Solar Deliberative) to a much more useful one that can be cast through Ally (Elemental Court)).
grommile
nasty-minded old cynic
- Location
- NERV-Mercia
- Pronouns
- Traditional/Animate
Barnabas "Old Man" Marsh was the son of Onesiphorus Marsh (the full-human son of Obed Marsh, the Order's founder) and a Deep One. It's Zadok Allen, the town drunk who spills the beans to the narrator, whose family avoided taking the vows.
Ah ha. I stand corrected.
I'd reckon that, particularly in cases where the Background you're anchoring a spell to is a... singular thing, so to speak (so, not Followers or Cult, but Ally or Artifact), the casting of the spell should probably require direct involvement in the ritual of the spell. Which might cause issues if an Ally-anchored spell worked on the Project timescale, especially depending on what exactly the nature of the 'direct involvement' might be. Allies aren't at your beck and call, after all, and you're asking someone to take a season out, potentially doing stuff they might find degrading.
Carrnage
Human
- Location
- New Zealand
Which may feed into a favour economy among the powerful players of a region.
Or the Ally shares your goals in casting the spell.