This reminded me of another question I had, which might have been asked before I admit. Would, or could, these kind of "internalizing" artefacts, or even a "normal" wizard's staff, be "primarily-for-sorcery-artefacts", which were made to function as Spell-Anchors first with maybe some tertiary other functions, outside being a durable beating stick in the case of staffs, etc?
I second this.

Because ES often does not respond to small mechanics questions like this (possibly because he's able to answer them as they come up in game without difficulty), I will also give my guess and homebrew.

Sorceror-Engineer's Battle-Staff (Artifact 2)

Lookshyan Sorcerer-Engineers are among the best sorcerers in Creation, but even they have their limits. It is customary to carry a long staff of jade and emerald inscribed with a tale of glory with which to cast relatively minor battle-magic without interrupting prolonged engineering using the power of Lineage. These staves are simultaneously a device of wonderworking and proof of skill and devotion. They are earned by doing a heroic deed to benefit the Seventh Legion, which the prospective wai tan-junai will record on an emerald and which adds individuality to the staves.

These staves offer a 5 mote discount on spells which resonate with the heroic tale and with instantaneous Lookshyan battle-sorcery. This is half of the discount offered by a devoted Initiation, does not stack with mote discounts from other sources, and has synergy with itself if the heroic resonance resonates with the battle sorcery, also allowing the Sorceror to ignore the willpower cost of any such spell. You can assume that any Lookshyan Sorcerer-Engineer will have such a staff, and will get the full bonus on one of her battle spells which she used in her heroic tale.
 
Anyway, what other implicit Backgrounds does she have? .

Gotcha, thanks for the suggestions. I don't thinks Inks has Lineage, simply because she learned from the Salinian Working more than anything.

These are always fun to read.
Looking forward to seeing the results of that Best Bath sorcerous working; with Gem being as dry as it is, a new source of water(because I doubt Inks as characterized will be doing anything small) is likely to make more of a splash(heh) than would first seem obvious.
Especially if it's relatively accessible to the middle and lower classes.

Admittedly, the 'best bath ever' was actually intended to be a private affair for Inks's own pleasure- she's fairly hedonistic, and I feel like a lot of people play too selfless hero-archetypes in Exalted. Having said that, scaling up to a public bath is totally in-theme for Inks as well.
 
Elric of Melnibone couldn't just cast spells through the will and the word; he needed to contact the demons of Melnibone and invoke the power of lord Arioch to work his spells and summon mists to guard the isle. Moses couldn't just will water from stone, he invoked the divine authority of YHWH to split the ocean, call water from beneath and summon the plagues.
I don't know anything about Elric, but when Moses tried to invoke God's power (by trying to call water from a stone) without his direct permission, it backfired drastically. Using spirits as anchors makes the sorcerer subservient to the desires of the spirit in order to power their spells. If my character goes through the effort of learning sorcery, elevates his mind and essence and achieves a new plateau of power, I would not expect all that work to pay off with "now you need to kiss up to the local god of the field to grow your crops." I would expect him to form essence with his own power and cast the spell, because he just went through an incredible effort to gain that power.

Sorcery doesn't become less "awesomely powerful" if you actually need to get off your ass to use it; the Primordials needed to exploit the patterns they had woven into Creation from the beginning, the Solars used the Divine Mandate of Heaven and their supreme authority, the Sidereals use the secret designs of the Loom of Heaven and their allies among the gods to find the Lunars who draw on the power of Chaos and invoke the forbidden rogue gods and outcast spirits. The Dragon-Blooded Houses meanwhile draw on their manifold pacts with elemental courts (which are mentioned in the 1e core) in times of war, to turn the Inner Sea against their enemies and call storms and fiery mountains up.
You say "get off your ass to use it," but what I hear is "The way to make sorcery interesting is to nerf it and toss in a ton of chains and stipulations." This is looking to turn into the same problem as Craft: You have to go through extra work to get the same result that a simple charm would provide. If I were given the option between learning this method of sorcery and learning a new charm, I'd take the charm because this is not what I want to spend my time doing. Especially not when all this work adds up to nothing more than a few extra lines of fluff at best, and repetitive side-quests at worst.

Personal mastery over the world can go fuck itself, because it makes the magic of all sorcerers fucking identical and that's boring as hell;
This entire anchor system, and really a lot of the customization that's been proposed in this thread as of late, has followed the theme of "the way to make Exalted more interesting is to reduce power, add conditions and restrict freedom." I felt that the best condition for Exalted, and the one the game was sold on, was that you could do almost anything, but that you had to deal with the consequences later on.

I don't like it because 1: It takes incredible god-heroes and turns them into "traditional" spellcasters, 2: Two sorcerers need not know and/or use the same spells so identical casting styles don't matter, 3: requiring an ST to remember and enact multiple conditions per spell, per character is a ton of work, and 4: It further reduces the power of sorcery in comparison to simple charms, which was an issue that prevented 2e sorcery from really being worthwhile outside of niche conditions.
 
I don't know anything about Elric, but when Moses tried to invoke God's power (by trying to call water from a stone) without his direct permission, it backfired drastically. Using spirits as anchors makes the sorcerer subservient to the desires of the spirit in order to power their spells. If my character goes through the effort of learning sorcery, elevates his mind and essence and achieves a new plateau of power, I would not expect all that work to pay off with "now you need to kiss up to the local god of the field to grow your crops." I would expect him to form essence with his own power and cast the spell, because he just went through an incredible effort to gain that power.


You say "get off your ass to use it," but what I hear is "The way to make sorcery interesting is to nerf it and toss in a ton of chains and stipulations." This is looking to turn into the same problem as Craft: You have to go through extra work to get the same result that a simple charm would provide. If I were given the option between learning this method of sorcery and learning a new charm, I'd take the charm because this is not what I want to spend my time doing. Especially not when all this work adds up to nothing more than a few extra lines of fluff at best, and repetitive side-quests at worst.


This entire anchor system, and really a lot of the customization that's been proposed in this thread as of late, has followed the theme of "the way to make Exalted more interesting is to reduce power, add conditions and restrict freedom." I felt that the best condition for Exalted, and the one the game was sold on, was that you could do almost anything, but that you had to deal with the consequences later on.

I don't like it because 1: It takes incredible god-heroes and turns them into "traditional" spellcasters, 2: Two sorcerers need not know and/or use the same spells so identical casting styles don't matter, 3: requiring an ST to remember and enact multiple conditions per spell, per character is a ton of work, and 4: It further reduces the power of sorcery in comparison to simple charms, which was an issue that prevented 2e sorcery from really being worthwhile outside of niche conditions.
I also agree with a lot of this.

Most of the power-up that sorcery should get is by importing Sorcerous Workings into 2e, not from Anchors. The other thing that should increase the mechanical power is actually making and playtesting a long (book length) list of approved, balanced spells that can be modified into useable things. ES's system is a very functional way of turning flavorless spells into tasteful ones, but if you start from the already crappy 2e canon spells, you get basically no improvement for a hell of a lot more bookkeeping.

Similarly, a working Project system (which may or may not involve copy-pasting the 3e Workings stuff) would make Sorcery actually useful in the long term. It just hasn't been made, so no one can use it (except ES, because he's currently making it up as he goes along, which is good for him but doesn't help the rest of us).
 
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@Peanuckle is pinning down pretty directly on the issues I have with anchors as well- and I do like what they offer, so I disagree with the depth of his critique.

Functionally, Exalted (and most TTRPGs without a defined railroad premise) has the problem that players tend to optimize, and things that get in the way of Maximum Efficiency are ignored. You yourself are pointing this out with regard to 'learn sorcery with complications' or 'learn a Charm'. A lot of what ES is trying to do is prevent 'Box of Scraps' gameplay, where the sorcerer or crafter or god-king can turtle in his place of power and not engage the rest of the world.

Now, I think it should be made very clear that Anchors can be influenced by other characters- the point is to make them an actionable weakness so you can have second age exalts take on elders by attacking their sorcery-infrastructure- but the degree in which a given anchor... Okay in the case of an ally, it should be articulated that a spirit or demon either can't or won't revoke their permission, because frankly they're only contributing a small fraction of the actual 'stuff' needed to cast the spell. The Sorcerer is the one who's casting the spell after all.

Like, let's take the stormgod ally example. The storm god can raise storms as per his portfolio, sure. But he's also beholden to heavenly bureaucracy and his own web of contacts and allies. The sorcerer he entrusts with his word of power though? That sorcerer can call on storms whenever they want without limit. Well, without limit in-practice.

It's kind of like that one summon-spirit-boat spell from White Treatise, where it's technically Fakharu's boat that he loans out to sorcerers. If you've upset him, he can revoke the permission to summon the boat, and handled badly, it becomes a really strong disincentive to use the spell. It's not 'fail-forward'.
 
I think most of the issues with anchors can be fixed by some combination of:
  1. Eliminate or reduce Ally (and to a lesser degree Backing) as sources of anchors, as these quickly lead to really weird questions like "what happens if the Ally or Backing is oversubscribed, do I get bumped to the next flight?" and "why can't the Ally just use themselves as an anchor for their own spell, and can I use myself similarly?".
  2. Reduce the insistence that backgrounds are "occupied" by being anchors. An early example ES proposed was that a Spies background representing a ton of ravens that report back to you could be channeled into some kind of clairvoyance spell. But if this prevents you from using the Spies you get weird questions of, like, what exactly are the ravens doing? This gets even weirder if you are channeling something like Influence.
  3. Instead of anchors being mandatory, make them optional ways to reduce spell costs.
  4. Ditch 2E sorcery mechanics for 3E, and represent anchors like initiations, as conditional ways of getting extra sorcerous motes that get more oomph when used to power thematically appropriate spells.
Similarly, the desired goal of "sorcerers should want to collect bling" can be satisfied by importing Workings, reducing base Means, and expanding the possible sources of Means to include the bling you want sorcerers to collect.
 
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For my part, my biggest peeve about the Anchors system is that it isn't Occult-y enough, at least in comparison to Sorcery as it is presented in canon. Anchors Sorcery seems like something that would be associated with Eclipses, rather than Twilights, because Eclipses are bureaucrats, diplomats, and scholars, and so creating the infrastructure and network of allies need to use Anchors Sorcery would come naturally to them, while Twilights, who are scholars and engineers, would not find Sorcery something that came naturally or easily to them under this paradigm.

To me, Sorcery is not the power of privilege, or the will and the word, or personal mastery over the world; to me, Sorcery is just Thaumaturgy that is backed up by a Shape Sorcery action. You don't command the wind because you've made a pact with a storm god, nor because you have the power and will to simply reach out and make it so.

A Sorcerer commands the wind because they know the Sigils of the Hooded Eagle that allow them to emulate the Incarnae removing the hood the gods placed over the original Wind Master when they wish the winds to be quiescent, calling upon ancient habits embedded into the winds of Creation that cause them to know that it should ready itself to be commanded; because the Sorcerer knows the wind's true name, the winds will recognize the Sorcerer as one of its rightful masters, and come when they call; because the Sorcerer studied the war songs of the thunderbirds to find their underlying melody, he can command the winds -- who he has readied for action and made to recognize him as their master -- to defend him and/or his allies in battle, getting you a Personal Tempest.

To me, Sorcery at its most basic isn't and shouldn't be based on alliances and infrastructure or raw power, it is and should be based on the knowledge you possess.

  1. Ditch 2E sorcery mechanics for 3E, and represent anchors like initiations, as conditional ways of getting extra sorcerous motes that get more oomph when used to power thematically appropriate spells.
This. My ideal system for mystical stuff would be a combination of 2E Thuamaturgy and 3E Sorcery.
 
This entire anchor system, and really a lot of the customization that's been proposed in this thread as of late, has followed the theme of "the way to make Exalted more interesting is to reduce power, add conditions and restrict freedom." I felt that the best condition for Exalted, and the one the game was sold on, was that you could do almost anything, but that you had to deal with the consequences later on.
Honestly, I'd prefer if we retained the aesthetic effects and allowed for a boost to training effects by backgrounds (like shaving off three months to learn Total Annihilation if you steal that restricted pentacle or have Mentor: Ligier) but did away with the troublesome concept of Anchors entirely. This means that Sorcery gains potent benefits from networking, but isn't dependent on Allies/Backgrounds.

This does mean the Sorcerer isn't as involved with wealth and society like EarthScorpion intended, but it removes the most contentious parts and works fairly well.

Lineage could be retained as the benefits of the Initiation: like a Yozi sorcerous initiation would be Lineage 5 and give the same mote/wp benefits as 2e, while lower initiations give less broad boni.
 
2: Two sorcerers need not know and/or use the same spells so identical casting styles don't matter

Ah, but they probably will.

See, there is this smallish number of spells that are so incredibly good that any sorcerer will want regardless of circunstances (That is, infalible messenger, summon demon/elemental, banish demon, c. Also DOOB and invulnerable skin if you want combat magic.) Adding an aesthetic layer above this doesn't really change much.

You don't need tons of spells to be an effective sorcerer. You just need the god-tier spells. And honestly learning other, more esoterical spells is probably counterproductive given that you can probably learn a charm that does it better.

ES rules consistenly suffer from being patches over a system that works in different principles from what he wants. The whole thing would have to be redone from the ground to give good results.
 
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(That is, infalible messenger, summon demon/elemental, banish demon. Also DOOB and invulnerable skin if you want combat magic.)
Replace Banishment with Emerald Countermagic and limit summons to just Demons, and I believe you have the spells that are in every copy of The White and Black Treatise, Creation's Sorcery for Dummies.

Edit: Double checked, also replace Infallible Messenger with Stormwind Rider; but even so, a good chunk of the most useful spells available can be found in Sorcery for Dummies, which can be bought in any major city in the Threshold for Resources 3; not cheap, but not inaccessible, either.
 
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Thinking about it, i honestly think that spells in the anchor system shouldn't cost xp. After all, making your players pay xp for resources obtained in game is bad practice, and that is exactly what spells are in this system. If you go out of your way to learn a spell and secure a compatible anchor, why you should pay an extra cost over it?

(This has the advantage that it nullifies the competition between charms and sorcery).

This way you recalc how sorcery is a privilege, external thing to the sorcerer.
 
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I don't know anything about Elric, but when Moses tried to invoke God's power (by trying to call water from a stone) without his direct permission, it backfired drastically. Using spirits as anchors makes the sorcerer subservient to the desires of the spirit in order to power their spells. If my character goes through the effort of learning sorcery, elevates his mind and essence and achieves a new plateau of power, I would not expect all that work to pay off with "now you need to kiss up to the local god of the field to grow your crops." I would expect him to form essence with his own power and cast the spell, because he just went through an incredible effort to gain that power.
Cool! Maybe he has a staff that he uses to channel his power (Artifact), maybe he possesses supreme elevated status among the spirits as a bodhisattva (Status), perhaps he has a Cult of disciples through whom he can draw upon arcane secrets, or he has a Manse that lets him align it's sacred geomancy to his results. In some way I see your issue, because there is a finely tuned line between "DnD wizard who can do whatever he wants" which is undesirable and "boddhisattva who achieved enlightenment through supreme virtue and can dominate all worldly illusions", which should be doable with the Anchors system (but I'm unsure of how doable it is), so I'll have to page @EarthScorpion for the answer on that one.

You say "get off your ass to use it," but what I hear is "The way to make sorcery interesting is to nerf it and toss in a ton of chains and stipulations." This is looking to turn into the same problem as Craft: You have to go through extra work to get the same result that a simple charm would provide. If I were given the option between learning this method of sorcery and learning a new charm, I'd take the charm because this is not what I want to spend my time doing. Especially not when all this work adds up to nothing more than a few extra lines of fluff at best, and repetitive side-quests at worst.
Frankly speaking, if you're at the point of "should I take sorcery", the answer tends to be "no", because literally all your Charms are better unless you're talking about like Summon Demon of the Xth Circle or you're a Dragon-Blooded who needs large-scale effects. But like, if you don't want connections to the world, and you don't want to go through effort to do your Thing as a sorcerer then uh, I guess the Anchor system just isn't for you? Like, there's no shame in admitting it, it's designed for a specific playstyle and it's not like I and @EarthScorpion will enter through your window in the night and cut out your 2e book's sorcery system so we can replace it with Anchors.

(Either that or use some of my months-old Anchor Charms I wrote on Discord which ES criticized because they were contrary to the point of the Anchors system. :V)

This entire anchor system, and really a lot of the customization that's been proposed in this thread as of late, has followed the theme of "the way to make Exalted more interesting is to reduce power, add conditions and restrict freedom." I felt that the best condition for Exalted, and the one the game was sold on, was that you could do almost anything, but that you had to deal with the consequences later on.
Yes, but I was never introduced through that theme; I was introduced on the premise that I could play a demigod of Antiquity, a judge of the Bible, a Hindu avatar or a Taoist immortal. I was never introduced to the idea that you could do anything close to almost anything; I was introduced to the idea that I was blessed, given power from on high and now was given the choice of how to use it. And I think there is a fine-tuned line between those, or perhaps it is merely a result of being introduced through the Dragon-Blooded, but I think that those consequences and stipulations are healthy for the game, and healthy for the oft-neglected sorcery.

I don't like it because 1: It takes incredible god-heroes and turns them into "traditional" spellcasters, 2: Two sorcerers need not know and/or use the same spells so identical casting styles don't matter, 3: requiring an ST to remember and enact multiple conditions per spell, per character is a ton of work, and 4: It further reduces the power of sorcery in comparison to simple charms, which was an issue that prevented 2e sorcery from really being worthwhile outside of niche conditions.
Ah yes, "traditional spellcasters" as opposed to "walking swiss army knife"; I don't think there is anything particularly original with the Exalted system of sorcery, in fact I think it's a large conglomeration of cliches and attempts to be clever, desperately bundled together in the same bundle. Two sorcerers do in fact need to use the same casting styles, because you need Essence 5 if you want to change the look of your spells, and pretty much every sorcerer worth the name will have Summon Demon of the First Circle, Emerald Countermagic, Flying Gilloutine/Death of Obsidian Butterflies and so on.

Like, I think it's all valid critique of the Anchors system, but I don't think they're very large issues, perhaps because they appeal to my narrative (narrative as in narrative paradigm theory, not narrative as a story :V) and general style of play. But on another note:
Thinking about it, i honestly think that spells in the anchor system shouldn't cost xp. After all, making your players payxp for resources obtained in game is bad practice, and that is exactly what spells are in this system. If you go out of your way to learn a spell and secure a compatible anchor, why you should pay an extra cost over it?

(This has the advantage that it nullifies the competition between charms and sorcery).

This way you recalc how sorcery is a privilege, external thing yo the sorcerer.
It should be noted that this is how Theurgic Invocations in Godbound work; they're things with a bunch of training time, but don't actually cost XP. I think it's a good idea to remove the XP cost of spells if you add in Anchors, because it:
  • Serves to reduce the competition between Charms and sorcery.
  • Furthers that they are external to Charms.
  • Means that I don't have to spend five sessions for the privilege to spend my 8 XP. :V
Hmmm, I might actually experiment with this and implement it in Dilaragame when @horngeek learns sorcery.
 
Thinking about it, i honestly think that spells in the anchor system shouldn't cost xp. After all, making your players payxp for resources obtained in game is bad practice, and that is exactly what spells are in this system. If you go out of your way to learn a spell and secure a compatible anchor, why you should pay an extra cost over it?

(This has the advantage that it nullifies the competition between charms and sorcery).

This way you recalc how sorcery is a privilege, external thing yo the sorcerer.

It's not going to be free (because that produces nightmares in games where there's a lot of downtime), but there is going to be a notable cost reduction. Probably more like "Alchemical Charm" price, because the Background is serving as the equivalent of the "Charm Slot" in the mechanics, which should please @ManusDomine.

For my part, my biggest peeve about the Anchors system is that it isn't Occult-y enough, at least in comparison to Sorcery as it is presented in canon. Anchors Sorcery seems like something that would be associated with Eclipses, rather than Twilights, because Eclipses are bureaucrats, diplomats, and scholars, and so creating the infrastructure and network of allies need to use Anchors Sorcery would come naturally to them, while Twilights, who are scholars and engineers, would not find Sorcery something that came naturally or easily to them under this paradigm.

Feature, not bug. Twilights with their crafting and their occult lore have a path to sorcery (magic staffs, great manses to draw power from the land, arcane mechanisms, carefully calculated astrology and channeling rituals by groups of sorcerers) but they do not have the path to sorcery. Yes, you're right - the idea that Twilights are "the sorcerers" is something which I think needs to go.

Why should Twilights get favoured for a non-Charm source of power? When you strip out the legacy thinking and look at things from a mechanical level, that much becomes a lot more obvious. Hell, in-setting the original inventors of sorcery don't give a single fuck about "Occult" - they tie it to Essence. And Alchemicals and Lunars run it off Intelligence. So there's nothing innate to sorcery that links it to Occult.

The Twilight Charms should be entirely enough to support the caste on its own. If Occult is "too weak" without sorcery, the problem is with Occult's native Charms.

Thus, if sorcery is to be a non-Charm based avenue for advancement systematically designed to be in a sense the "elder" power, providing a means for advancement that allows large-scale changes to the world and which forces you to play the game of thrones, then Twilights mustn't get it by default - that just results in the same toxicity as we saw with 2e Occult and Martial arts where every Dragonblood and Sidereal if built optimally favours at least one of the two. Tie it to Essence alone, then let characters work out how to fluff their practice of reality warping - and yes, the fact that Solars get a non-Ability thing as they learn sorcery initiations just reinforces that sorcery is not a power native to the Exalted.

And thus, yes, the Zenith priests who call down the holy wrath of the Sun and the Eclipse diplomats who negotiate complex contracts with spirit courts have equal rights to sorcery as the Twilight crafters and scholars. And when you say that the Spirit Bomb and the Kamehameha are also valid forms of sorcery, the Dawns get to play too while Nights get to trick gods into marrying them so they can steal their hammers and con demons out of lore.
 
Two sorcerers do in fact need to use the same casting styles, because you need Essence 5 if you want to change the look of your spells
I've always felt that the Absorption Charms were something Cool, But Impractical, especially since you only get to select, IIRC, two out of the four abilities, and you can't even purchase the others later like similar Charms, like you can with stuff like Essence Arrow. The Absorption effects would have been better as mutually exclusive Merits anyone could buy, instead of a limited selection provided as part of an Essence 5 Charm.

Hmm. While I would argue that the Primordials being unable to cast spells that go against their themes, and thus outside of their ability to comprehend, and Lunars using raw intellect to understand the world instead of dedicated occult study does not exclude them from the paradigm of "Sorcery is based on the knowledge you possess," I do think I see where you're coming from, here.

It'd like if the power and DCs of spells in DnD was still based on a variety of Ability Scores like Wisdom and Charisma, but the number of spells you could know/cast was always based on INT, and only Wizards automatically got INT as their main spells caster ability. It'd be like "sure, you can still be a spellcaster without being a Wizard, but unless you waste time and energy optimizing you'll suck at it in comparison." And Wizards are powerful enough as it is.
 
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I kinda want to play a game with the anchor system now. Previously gathering loads of familiars would be something I'd have to balance against being a mad sorceress queen as they both cost xp. Now having familiar enhances the sorceress side. It may still impair the queen part.

Then again, I can probably strip out everything past with in that paragraph. Heh.
(I still have never played a game of exalted, whyyy :c)
 
I don't think the Neverborn created Oblivion, I think they just ripped open a passage to it.
My interpretation of Oblivion hinges into my handling of the Neverborn as a whole - that without souls to define their inner lives or joutens to express their outer facets, the slaughtered titans exist in a state where their unbound ex-Mythoi can, in theory, create or express anything they think of[1]​. The issue is that their minds are broken as well, the ordered chaos of a psyche managed by its own self-aware opinions perverted into a discordant ruin where individual clumps of memory, subconscious babble, and delusional introspection[2]​ all fight to be heard inside the echo chamber of the dead Primordial's tomb.

Oblivion is the one and only consistent, shared thought the Neverborn have: please make it stop. The Well is an imagining of unreality within the minds of dead titans, yet even that is mangled and ill-proportioned. Oblivion is a bleak end of all things, Oblivion is a mad apocalyptic fervor, Oblivion is this, Oblivion is that. Its particulars waver and shift like moonlight on storm-tossed waters, and the only consistent point is that it is best not interacted with.


[1]​ That's part of why the Solars decided it would be a good idea to strike open their tombs and plunder their corpses; after all, the idea of dozens of Primordials' worth of Essence that combines the infinite possibility of Wyld-stuff with the "solidity" and power of the Primordials is an incredibly useful thing, if you assume that it can be cleansed. The Neverborn are just too broken to wield it properly; stick a few Wonders into the tombs to control what's left of their minds and you'd have all the anything you could ever need, forever!

[2]​One of my earlier ideas, which still has some appeal to me, is that the Neverborn's current state is partially a final outcome of their prior natures.

What defines a Primordial? Their Mythos, the story they tell themselves and that is themselves, encapsulating what they believe and how they view the world around them. The Primordial itself serves as an overview of that story, providing the broad notes. Joutens and world-bodies examine the story by focusing on a single part of it, or expressing it in the form of a depersonalized setting. Unquestionables further break down the story into individual chapters or defining motifs, which they (and their subordinate souls) then critique and expound upon through their own actions. Each Primordial is a story and a setting and a running commentary of same, playing itself out again and again without ever contradicting itself. Act 1, Act 2, Act 3. Introduction, characterization, conflict, climax, resolution. A to B to C and world without end.

The Incarnate Rebellion took that conviction and inner surety and crushed it to powder. The Dragon Beyond the World was caged, Isidoros found a force he did not surpass, Cecelyne's laws were trampled underfoot, and even the Empyreal Tyrant was made to kneel before another. A to B to - nothing, no meaning, no Mythos-compliant outcome, just the lesser beings of Creation rising up against their masters like ants devouring a pack of wolves. That violation, more than anything else, perhaps even the killing of fetiches or the death of Unquestionables, is what made Yozis of the Primordials.

How much greater, then, was the agony of the Primordials who were killed before they could adapt (for the Yozis have adapted, even if only by coming to hate their conquerors), who could only stare in horrified incomprehension as the Exalted Host tore down the world-that-was-themselves? Without souls, without joutens, without sanity or clarity, crushed between living and dying, the Once-Primordials had only questions, but lacked the ability to produce any meaningful answers.

Yet what shreds of semisapience remained within the dead titans still tried to understand - how could the Crusader Worm, who feeds on conflict, who is conflict and the inevitability and the eternity of struggle, become a casualty? How could Qaf, who is wisdom and the search for truth and the voice of enlightenment, be silenced? How? How? How?

Without eyes or a functioning mind, the Neverborn could only seek answers in what they remembered of the past - but it did them no good, because the power that unmade them was without precedent, without foreshadowing or omen. The logic of the past was perfect, comprehensible, and yet somehow utterly wrong. So the pieces of the Neverborn that could still think turned to brute-force reasoning.

Have you ever twiddled the settings on a physics engine? Tried making certain environmental objects behave like they were on fire, or set all the dogs to have noclip so they just phase through everything? You change one thing, and the engine tries to integrate that change. The Neverborn started doing that with their grasp of reality, trying out every possible way that their memories of how things work could be altered in an attempt to solve their own murders. Except even a healthy, fully rational Primordial would get tired and worn out and confused trying to reason out the insanely complex interactions between Primordials and Creation and the Wyld and the countless inhabitants thereof, and it would still be an obscenely time-consuming and inefficient method of finding answers.

Of course, that last part doesn't matter, because the answer to how the Primordials could die is very simple: the Exalts killed them. The Exalted Host was strong enough to overwhelm their Mythoi and burn them to ashes, one soul at a time. Except it would never occur to the Primordials, because it would mean that they don't matter, that all their work and all their beliefs and all they ever did or felt means nothing against a being which happens to be properly armed. Even dead and broken, the Neverborn refused to accept that, refused to even think it.

Instead, they collapsed into a widening gyre of schizophrenic unlogic, their attempts to find an answer only degrading their grasp on what 'reality' used to be, until numbers can be anything and that anything takes place over a four-quarter day. Hence why the "mathematics" of the Labyrinth are more about proving what you want to be true than expressing any coherent stream of causation, and Necromancy can turn reflections into the real thing. Necromancy is an effort to express Sorcery through the rotting, insane perspective of the Neverborn, using that combination of solipsistic rejection of reality, mad desperation, and incoherence to try and do the impossible.
 
"boddhisattva who achieved enlightenment through supreme virtue and can dominate all worldly illusions", which should be doable with the Anchors system (but I'm unsure of how doable it is), so I'll have to page @EarthScorpion for the answer on that one.

Isn't it kinda the entire point of Anchors to be engaged with temporal concerns and the material world?
It should be noted that this is how Theurgic Invocations in Godbound work; they're things with a bunch of training time, but don't actually cost XP. I think it's a good idea to remove the XP cost of spells if you add in Anchors, because it:
  • Serves to reduce the competition between Charms and sorcery.
  • Furthers that they are external to Charms.
  • Means that I don't have to spend five sessions for the privilege to spend my 8 XP. :V

Mm, that seems like it would result in Elders being able to pull pretty much any spell they'd want straight out of their ass, given their centuries long lifespans and all. Not sure if that's a positive or negative in your book.
 
Isn't it kinda the entire point of Anchors to be engaged with temporal concerns and the material world?
Yes, but.

On a Doylist level, Anchors serve to make you go out and get to adventuring. On a Watsonian level, if invoking Ligier's name to get a fraction of his power can burn an city to radioactive ash, then he needs to be able to.

And if he can, then why is an Anchor required for your Enlightenment 10 Slayer to burn a city into radioactive dust? He's on the same level of enlightenment, he's got a hell of a lot of power himself. Why can't he?

Mm, that seems like it would result in Elders being able to pull pretty much any spell they'd want straight out of their ass, given their centuries long lifespans and all. Not sure if that's a positive or negative in your book.
Assuming you're killing Elder Essence raising caps, then you need something for Elder Exalted to actually do on a meaningful level, which player characters can interact with. Sure, the Elder himself is using the best possible set of buffs, what with his collection of spirit allies, wicked tattoos, and artifact daisy chains; you can still cut away at his support base by murdering all his allies and attacking him in the bath.

The thing is, most backgrounds require maintenance and you can only fit so many artifact tattoos onto one body. It's actually possible to resist an elder if you do it right and get lucky. That sure isn't true with canon.
 
Yes, but.

On a Doylist level, Anchors serve to make you go out and get to adventuring. On a Watsonian level, if invoking Ligier's name to get a fraction of his power can burn an city to radioactive ash, then he needs to be able to.

And if he can, then why is an Anchor required for your Enlightenment 10 Slayer to burn a city into radioactive dust? He's on the same level of enlightenment, he's got a hell of a lot of power himself. Why can't he?
I mean, a slayer probably can do it. The spells is for people who don't have access to those charms, or who don't want to pay the associated costs with getting those charms.
 
NPCs don't normally use XP anyway, so...

Sure, but it's an understood thing that the PCs are the 99th percentile of the 99th percentile of Solars so they have tons of XP relative to NPCs. That's not really true of time though so it doesn't work.

Yes, but.

On a Doylist level, Anchors serve to make you go out and get to adventuring. On a Watsonian level, if invoking Ligier's name to get a fraction of his power can burn an city to radioactive ash, then he needs to be able to.

And if he can, then why is an Anchor required for your Enlightenment 10 Slayer to burn a city into radioactive dust? He's on the same level of enlightenment, he's got a hell of a lot of power himself. Why can't he?

I'm pretty sure that's what E10 Shintai Charms are for. I get what you mean though, it doesn't feel as off hand as Ligier casually lending his power to glass a place to whatever sorcerors that need it.

Assuming you're killing Elder Essence raising caps, then you need something for Elder Exalted to actually do on a meaningful level, which player characters can interact with. Sure, the Elder himself is using the best possible set of buffs, what with his collection of spirit allies, wicked tattoos, and artifact daisy chains; you can still cut away at his support base by murdering all his allies and attacking him in the bath.

The thing is, most backgrounds require maintenance and you can only fit so many artifact tattoos onto one body. It's actually possible to resist an elder if you do it right and get lucky. That sure isn't true with canon.

I feel like maybe Elders should get something like an exclusive "Guanxi" background that represents the accumulated network of favours and relationships they end up enmeshed in over centuries. Kinda like a Lineage of one, though broader in applicability that most backgrounds.
 
Sure, but it's an understood thing that the PCs are the 99th percentile of the 99th percentile of Solars so they have tons of XP relative to NPCs. That's not really true of time though so it doesn't work.
I mean, Elder NPCs would have whatever spells the ST sees fit to give them, whether those spells would cost XP for a PC to buy or not. There is no change in that regard. If you take issue with the idea, then... congratulations? Get your ST to stat up every Elder with XP from the Elder table I guess.
 
I mean, Elder NPCs would have whatever spells the ST sees fit to give them, whether those spells would cost XP for a PC to buy or not. There is no change in that regard. If you take issue with the idea, then... congratulations? Get your ST to stat up every Elder with XP from the Elder table I guess.

Not really? I wouldn't expect an Elder to have too many of the spells in the corebook if they cost XP, whereas if it only costed training time, I'd imagine that they'd have picked up everything that would even be tangentially relevant.
 
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