- Location
- Spain
Nah, ordering it to have their upmost care (AKA, use a willpower) is enough.
General Exalted Thread
Nah, ordering it to have their upmost care (AKA, use a willpower) is enough.
Graypairofsocks
What is Grammar?
- Location
- earth
Unless I am missing something, couldn't they make a baby from 1 person and get like a 98% chance of success?
- Location
- The sixth circle of Hell (second on weekends)
- Pronouns
- She/Her
... you seem to have misunderstood my point.
The Exalted view of demons does cool and original shit with them. It makes them more than just one-dimensional Chaotic Evil things. But it is still rooted in the concept that demons are scary, dangerous things from Hell, which is a nasty, bad place, and gives nods to classical views of them at first glance. Which is why Ligier is an arrogant hellish prince who refuses to even fight in person unless there's an army of Dragonblooded or something equally worthy of his might. And why Erembour is a dark temptress who corrupts men to wickedness and sin and leaves them forever altered and unable to return to the light. And why neomah are sensual, seductive creatures that will commit carnal acts with any being that comes to them. And why blood apes are brutish, violent creatures who rip mortals limb from limb and feast on their blood and bones.
If you look closer, you will find that there is more to them than that - that neomah are actually braver and more honourable than the average human, that Erembour will bless generals who conducts their military endeavours exclusively at night, that gilmyne have this weird religion that's more like real-life ones in that there is no evidence it is true (look at that; a religion in a fantasy setting that isn't necessarily based on something real). Because Exalted demons are more than just the stereotypes; they're weird and wild and wonderful. But a large number of them are made so that from the point of view of an uneducated peasant; someone who knows none of these things and has only rumours and "common knowledge" and a pool of maybe 2-3 in the relevant areas, they look like the stereotypes.
That's what makes demonologists weird and freaky and disturbing. Because they say things like "no no, they're actually just misunderstood, they're just leeching colour and don't hurt things deliberately and you can stop them doing that by lining your doorways and windowsills with tin" to people who know that passion morays are freaky gelatinous near-invisible monsters who suck treasured memories out of men's skulls, kill plants where they touch them, turn blood to water and devour the eyes of animals to leave only horrible gaping empty sockets.
Yeah, no, that's gameified. For one, we could argue whether a random neomah you summoned is an extra, or whether you can actually order a demon to spend willpower, or other such things. I don't think most 1CDs have the "protagonist privilege" of Willpower, for anything less than their own survival or their Motivation. To put it another way, if you assume mook demons can spend willpower for such rolls, I'd add +1 difficulty to all those values because I think those values are given as the baseline that the GM should be rolling.
But the more pressing issue beyond any arguments of "are random demons you summoned to do something an extra" is that fact that Creation is not based around the idea that neomah are an easy or casual way to make babies. "We'll get a neomah" is what desperate people or decadent sorcerers do. The failure rates you'd allow make it safer than having a baby the old fashioned way (for the mother, if nothing else). That's bad. That's like the ox plough rule - "In a fantasy setting that looks like an agrarian society, no more effective way of ploughing the fields can be provided than an ox pulling a plough" - only in this case, the ploughing is of another form.
Therefore the integrity of the setting demands that neomah are not safe or more reliable than mundane pregnancy. And a one-in-ten failure rate for even basic reproduction is good for that. And that's why the "well, just order the demon to do it properly" idea must be barred and risk must be kept in to doing it this way - because neomah baby-making should be less safe than doing it the regular way.
(If you are a Solar Exalt sorceress who used a neomah to have a kid with your girlfriend, you may well have the medicine Charms to help treat your poor weak-boned child or know the way to help smooth their malformed soul so they can feel Compassion properly. But that's Plot, and that's good.)
- Location
- New York City
Anyone written up any new cultures or city-states in Creation recently?
Graypairofsocks
What is Grammar?
- Location
- earth
Aren't their charms that allow you to aid other people on their rolls?
- Location
- Denmark
- Pronouns
- She/Her
I have the writing of an Exalted-ified Denmark in the works!
Following this discussion, I just wanted to point this out ES. You call this out for gameification, when your previous argument about percentages was based on dice-rolls and ability scores. That's pretty gamey too.
If you're going to base an argument on a stat-base, then you have to be open to methods of altering those stats. And as for only being able to spend willpower for their survival or motivation, well, making babies according to a contract is their motivation. So that's a non-issue.
Graypairofsocks
What is Grammar?
- Location
- earth
There are also the Tomescu. Unlike the Teodozjia, they don't react badly to Zeniths, but IIRC they still try and infulence things towards the will of the yozis (it isn't part of their primary motivation though).
- Location
- New York City
Interesting! Is there a particular period of Denmark's history that's inspiring you? Are you playing around with mixing in any other inspirations for the place?
- Location
- Pittsburgh, PA
Sorry, I did misunderstand your point - I thought you were denying the idea that the classical demon stereotyping is supposed to be something in-universe that disguises the actual complexity of demons.
Or, as another instance of Plot, you have to explain what the hell is going on with a society that they'll accept those odds - survivors of a community rendered sterile by Wyld contamination during the Balorian Crusade, for example, might end up using neomah just because that's the only option they know of/can get hold of, and now 800 years down the line there's a strong tradition of "giving back the child"[1] among the artificially assembled descendants of those people.
Alternatively, a fucked-up enclave of Yozi-worshiping demonbloods (or even some radically degenerate group of Shogunate-era Dragonbloods left to sink into madness in some far corner of Creation) might deliberately whistle up neomah to try and make chimeric superbabies for them because only strong children are worthy of bearing their blood, and thus you have a "society" of insane, crippled, nonsapient, or otherwise undesirable offspring sent into the wilderness near the main settlement to act as a deterrent for outsiders.
And of course, you have the idea of arrogant chieftains or other Frontier potentates calling forth one of Hell's nursemaids and telling her, "make me a son[2] worthy of my name!", only to bitterly regret their hubris.
[1] I couldn't find the specific manga page I was referencing for this, but the gist is that the character in question came from a poor community where it was common to abandon excess children in the wilderness so there would be more food to go around - practice referred to obliquely as "giving back the child."
[2] Or daughter, depending on local gender standards.
This isn't entirely an argument against what you're saying here, but you do need to have a neomah around in the first place before this even becomes a consideration. If you're part of the vast majority of Creation's population (i.e. not one of the Exalted and/or a sorcerer), this is a pretty high hurdle in and of itself. You either need to seek one out (a non-trivial endeavor) or find someone who can summon one (ditto).
I don't have hard data on period-appropriate infant mortality rates on hand (and my current player group is such that, if they summoned a neomah for personal reasons, I probably wouldn't even bother getting out the dice because the implications of that roll failing do not beget the sorts of plots they're interested in), but I'd probably be willing to say that the safest task you could ask of a neomah (making a child from two parents) should at least be in the same ballpark as the mortality rate of traditional pregnancy. The barrier to entry and the fact that a failed roll won't necessarily even be discovered for a while ought to balance out the advantages.
- Location
- Pittsburgh, PA
Blerg.
I've had an idea for a city-state made from the ruins of a Shogunate-era factory complex, inhabited by descendants of both menial laborers who worked there and Contagion survivors who took shelter in the remains, and ruled by the complex's gods, creating a vaguely AdMech-ish civilization predicated on keeping the forges running and the motonic lights on at any cost, with things like burnt-out tank husks and smashed-up gunzosha armor being treated as divine relics (which eventually helps elevate said relics' least gods to sentience and adds to the litany of deities which rule/maintain the city.)
The overall themes/hooks centered around the fact that the inhabitants' work had managed to let them wring out a higher standard of technology than most other Second Age societies, but not a higher quality of life, because at this point sustaining that standard means Autochthonian levels of community effort, frugality, and sacrifice - even the gods are living like paupers, because they need to spend Essence like water to generate raw materials for the forges, make the insane Craft checks necessary to fix some of the more complicated gubbins, help streamline some of the thornier thaumaturgy involved in manufacturing the more valuable tools/weapons/etc, and supplement the stocks of sundry basic necessities for their devotees to use, because it's hard to sustain a population their size when you've pissed off most of the local weather god "associations" and the soil immediately outside the walls is fairly poor to begin with.
- Location
- Gladstone, OR
Today, Sunlit Sands Session #13!
@Aleph and I spent last week hashing out expanded Resources rules as to better handle the granular nature of MERCANTILE EMPRESS INKS, but we put that on the back burner for today'se actual Session- the Baths.
Session 13 logs
The Baths
Terrestrial Working
The baths take the form of a basin made of both smoothed river stone and rough-hewn rock, sourced from lakebeds or other sources of water. A fragment of Black Jade serves as the anchor for the sorcerous enchantment, which results in water both hot and cold flowing from the highest spires- both taller than a man standing upright. Other enchantments ensure the water is clean and drinkable, though the baths only produce enough water to sate twenty five to fifty people a month.
More importantly however, are the blessings of health and wellness on the baths themselves. Characters who bathe in the waters suspend all ongoing wound, sickness, poison and exhaustion penalties. They may roll their full pool to shake off infection or venom. An hour in the bath extends this therapy for one whole day, allowing a character to count as rested for the purposes of healing injuries.
@Aleph and I spent last week hashing out expanded Resources rules as to better handle the granular nature of MERCANTILE EMPRESS INKS, but we put that on the back burner for today'se actual Session- the Baths.
Session 13 logs
The session begins with an opening narration, something that I think a lot of games should do- if for no other reason than to remind the players of what's going on and keep them abreast of the situation. Exposition is an important aspect of storytelling and running games- doing so effectively is another question.
Now, I strictly speaking did not need to use Speed The Wheels here- there was no actual indication that extra time would be taken to meet with the Despot, but I'd rather roll my charms than not. Aleph was good about giving me the benefit of invoking the charm and spending the motes.
And then I rolled ten successes on Difficulty 1, threshold of 9. Now, strictly speaking, you are not supposed to give boons or bonuses based on charm-derived actions unless the charm says so. A lot of people misunderstand 'perfect success' in a similar way. Perfect success mechanics do not describe the quality of success, they describe that it cannot be made Unsuccessful without extenuating circumstances.
Graceful Crane Stance does not make it so your balance rolls always result in positive outcomes. It just makes it so you can't fail your balance rolls.
I actually brought this up with Aleph after the game and she agreed that by reading, StW has no 'bonus' for excess successes, but I rolled so well she felt it deserved a reward, which prompted the next roll of the session.
Now, Inks is Perception 5, Investigation 1, whch qualified me for an excellency that I happily used to blow through the 'murder rumors' plot that Aleph presented. In the interests of time and pacing, I and Inks stayed focused on the Baths, but I did not forget the plot.
Rankar today was quite flush with success, and while I can't say Inks took advantage of it, she certainly knew things were easier today than they could have been. Further, The Despot knows that water is power in Gem, and here, almost like the Golden Goose, Inks has provided a new means of expanding that power. I'll provide a writeup of the actual Baths themselves at the end of the postmortem.
Convincing Rankar was not particularly difficult, but his interest in the potential was obvious, and I predicted that he would want a bath of his own at some point- the concession that he 'borrow' Inks's bath (and get to leer at her) was easy to predict up front. I can't speak to how many App 5 people there are in Gem, but the Despot has a controlling interest in the number of attractive slaves.
The muder plot is interesting from what we've heard so far, in that it seems to be motivated by a moral or ethical crusade- the victims were all killed by, if not irony, than some aspect of their professions and crimes. My current theory is that it's Inks's Mysterious Ally...
Now, amusingly, Inks is still from Nexus, where corpses are left in the gutters until floodwaters wash them out. Even though she was a spoiled mafiya princess for years, Inks all too aware of death and decay.
Aleph points out as well, that Rankar is implicityly letting Inks profit on the use of the baths as a facility or similar, so long as she doesn't sell the drinkable water. I could in theory make a public bath house that you pay to use, and he'd be fine with that.
What follows is a brief montage covering the six months of creating the baths itself. A Trivial action to refine the horn- and here I expose a minor weakness, in that I have trouble naming things when I'm not the ST. I feel like I don't have the authority to 'put named things in' to the setting, so I speak more vaguely about what I'm interacting with.
I still enjoyed the father and son gag.
Achieving a threshold of one, Inks now secures a mass of Black Jade, and as Aleph herself points out, declares that Pure Magical Materials should be a Big Deal, description wise. I approve.
Constructing the basin and researching the expanded spell was a Major Action, on top of other commitments to other interests like her agreement with House Sahlak as a doctor, or House Bhalasus's consultancy gig.
Carsa's personality is... not snarky. Soon she will learn.
Today I continue to Roll Exceptionally Well, and Aleph has to continue to improvise boons and bonuses for my success. Having secured a threshold of 6, she gives me an enduring +1d bonus to all water-spell based reserach actions I'll make moving forward. Feels Good Man.
Now, lastly we consecrate the baths to Venus. I personally feel like the gods both great and small are not invoked enough in Exalted- mostly because the extremes of behvaior in how they're used make for awful tone mismatches. Incarnate deform the game around them when they're too present and personable. Lower gods are not important enough to remember or characterize.
Now, Inks being Inks, decides to go big or go home in true solar fashion, so she seeks out the blessing of Venus. I should emphasize that the names of the incarnae and their rough themes are fairly common knowledge, it's the specifics of their behaviors and auspicies that require education or research.
I was particularly proud of hiring astrologers for the right 'days' to do the consecration, as that feels very in-theme for the concept.
Now, through all of the modifiers Aleph pre-calculated for me, the roll for this final step was Difficulty 3. I rolled 10 successes. As you can see in the logs, the results were... impressive.
On that note, the session concludes most positively, and so ends Session 13, Sunlit Sands!
Now, I strictly speaking did not need to use Speed The Wheels here- there was no actual indication that extra time would be taken to meet with the Despot, but I'd rather roll my charms than not. Aleph was good about giving me the benefit of invoking the charm and spending the motes.
And then I rolled ten successes on Difficulty 1, threshold of 9. Now, strictly speaking, you are not supposed to give boons or bonuses based on charm-derived actions unless the charm says so. A lot of people misunderstand 'perfect success' in a similar way. Perfect success mechanics do not describe the quality of success, they describe that it cannot be made Unsuccessful without extenuating circumstances.
Graceful Crane Stance does not make it so your balance rolls always result in positive outcomes. It just makes it so you can't fail your balance rolls.
I actually brought this up with Aleph after the game and she agreed that by reading, StW has no 'bonus' for excess successes, but I rolled so well she felt it deserved a reward, which prompted the next roll of the session.
Now, Inks is Perception 5, Investigation 1, whch qualified me for an excellency that I happily used to blow through the 'murder rumors' plot that Aleph presented. In the interests of time and pacing, I and Inks stayed focused on the Baths, but I did not forget the plot.
Rankar today was quite flush with success, and while I can't say Inks took advantage of it, she certainly knew things were easier today than they could have been. Further, The Despot knows that water is power in Gem, and here, almost like the Golden Goose, Inks has provided a new means of expanding that power. I'll provide a writeup of the actual Baths themselves at the end of the postmortem.
Convincing Rankar was not particularly difficult, but his interest in the potential was obvious, and I predicted that he would want a bath of his own at some point- the concession that he 'borrow' Inks's bath (and get to leer at her) was easy to predict up front. I can't speak to how many App 5 people there are in Gem, but the Despot has a controlling interest in the number of attractive slaves.
The muder plot is interesting from what we've heard so far, in that it seems to be motivated by a moral or ethical crusade- the victims were all killed by, if not irony, than some aspect of their professions and crimes. My current theory is that it's Inks's Mysterious Ally...
Now, amusingly, Inks is still from Nexus, where corpses are left in the gutters until floodwaters wash them out. Even though she was a spoiled mafiya princess for years, Inks all too aware of death and decay.
Aleph points out as well, that Rankar is implicityly letting Inks profit on the use of the baths as a facility or similar, so long as she doesn't sell the drinkable water. I could in theory make a public bath house that you pay to use, and he'd be fine with that.
What follows is a brief montage covering the six months of creating the baths itself. A Trivial action to refine the horn- and here I expose a minor weakness, in that I have trouble naming things when I'm not the ST. I feel like I don't have the authority to 'put named things in' to the setting, so I speak more vaguely about what I'm interacting with.
I still enjoyed the father and son gag.
Achieving a threshold of one, Inks now secures a mass of Black Jade, and as Aleph herself points out, declares that Pure Magical Materials should be a Big Deal, description wise. I approve.
Constructing the basin and researching the expanded spell was a Major Action, on top of other commitments to other interests like her agreement with House Sahlak as a doctor, or House Bhalasus's consultancy gig.
Carsa's personality is... not snarky. Soon she will learn.
Today I continue to Roll Exceptionally Well, and Aleph has to continue to improvise boons and bonuses for my success. Having secured a threshold of 6, she gives me an enduring +1d bonus to all water-spell based reserach actions I'll make moving forward. Feels Good Man.
Now, lastly we consecrate the baths to Venus. I personally feel like the gods both great and small are not invoked enough in Exalted- mostly because the extremes of behvaior in how they're used make for awful tone mismatches. Incarnate deform the game around them when they're too present and personable. Lower gods are not important enough to remember or characterize.
Now, Inks being Inks, decides to go big or go home in true solar fashion, so she seeks out the blessing of Venus. I should emphasize that the names of the incarnae and their rough themes are fairly common knowledge, it's the specifics of their behaviors and auspicies that require education or research.
I was particularly proud of hiring astrologers for the right 'days' to do the consecration, as that feels very in-theme for the concept.
Now, through all of the modifiers Aleph pre-calculated for me, the roll for this final step was Difficulty 3. I rolled 10 successes. As you can see in the logs, the results were... impressive.
On that note, the session concludes most positively, and so ends Session 13, Sunlit Sands!
The Baths
Terrestrial Working
The baths take the form of a basin made of both smoothed river stone and rough-hewn rock, sourced from lakebeds or other sources of water. A fragment of Black Jade serves as the anchor for the sorcerous enchantment, which results in water both hot and cold flowing from the highest spires- both taller than a man standing upright. Other enchantments ensure the water is clean and drinkable, though the baths only produce enough water to sate twenty five to fifty people a month.
More importantly however, are the blessings of health and wellness on the baths themselves. Characters who bathe in the waters suspend all ongoing wound, sickness, poison and exhaustion penalties. They may roll their full pool to shake off infection or venom. An hour in the bath extends this therapy for one whole day, allowing a character to count as rested for the purposes of healing injuries.
Please note that Demon Beckoning is a Thaumaturgical art, and while that method of obtaining a neomah means that they're free to indulge in making Chimera out of the local wildlife and leftovers from their clients, it at least gets you one. If you are a community rendered sterile by the Wyld, well, you probably already have a thaumaturge, it's not too unusual for a thumaturge to already have enough knowledge of the Demon path to be able to banish a demon, and Neomah are one of the best known breeds. It's unlikely any given village would have both the need for one and a Thaumaturge who knows enough to figure out how to Beckon one, but with how much the Balorian Crusade altered, one or two instances of that plot in all of Creation is believable.
That's edition-specific, but sure. I'm not arguing it's impossible; I'm saying that it's sufficiently difficult that it's not going to be a widespread procedure. Your thaumaturge is rolling against difficulty 5 to bring that neomah through, which is no mean feat, and while you only need to hit that target once, you do need that knowledge and the materials to perform the ritual (possibly repeatedly). If you're not a skilled enough thaumaturge to do that yourself, you also need to provide them with an incentive to take six hours out of their life and perform a difficult ritual that has a small but meaningful chance of causing mishaps.
These obstacles aren't insurmountable to the determined (or the desperate), but combine them with the fact that neomah-aided childbirth has its own set of side effects, and even if the successful birth rates are very favorably comparable to natural childbirth, it'll still be something you do because you're in real need. (Or because you're a sorcerer with a reason that seems compelling enough.)
No, it should be higher. You're enabling pregnancies that couldn't otherwise happen. You're also getting a reproductive rate way higher than normal - it takes a neomah less than a day to make a fully formed baby, while it takes a human woman nine months, many of which are bloody annoying. All those things are advantages that should make it higher risk as a cost.
Not to mention, neomah are a trump card in small-d dynastic games. You can manufacture bastard children and use them as a tool to press your claim on noble titles, or discredit people. That's another use and that means they need to have ways to go wrong at an appreciable rate - because what "it's as safe as a normal pregnancy" means that it's very unlikely you'll be caught out by that, while with a 10% chance it has a good rate of happening.
The barrier to entry is low for PCs and even educated societies in-setting - TCS or thaumaturgy. The benefits are high - compact 9 months of pregnancy into a short time period, no maternal mortality, the fact that neomah want to do it and so it's not a question of bargaining them into it. Yes, it should be riskier. Yes, for the player-led case where - for example - a gay couple wants a child, you can waive the roll, but in the setting as a whole it should have an appreciable failure rate.
When it comes down to it, you can't design around the player best case. And "two people in love making a child using a neomah to have the baby they wanted but couldn't have" is very much the best case for the setting impact stuff.
Now, of course, if you wanted another demon that's a flesh-alchemist who'll mix things up and leave the ingredients brewing for several months and requires you to find some unusual ingredients to make a human child, then that's a completely different kettle of fish from neomah, and that's something that could be much lower risk. It's much more expensive than a neomah (needing ingredients like sugar, spice, and all things nice, or slugs and snails and puppydog tails) and it also takes months. But that's not the circumstances of the neomah.
(An "about 10% failure rate" is good because it's a failure rate that a lot of people will go "you'd have to be really unlucky for that to happen", but if they do it repeatedly as part of a dynastic ploy or to quickly make a population boom or do all the things that players always tend to do given a tool, the problems really add up quickly)
- Location
- England
Personally, I think that using demonic methods should be superior to what a random mortal has available. Once you get onto godblooded, spirits and exalts, there should be methods of ensuring childbirth that make using neomah more of a desperation option than something that you'd go for initially, but mortals shouldn't have those options.
Demons should be useful in there primary functions compared to mortals, to the point that you want to use them.
Using a crew of builders rather than hopping puppeteers means that you have to take less precautions around them, but its going to take longer unless you specifically invest in the charmtech to make them competitive. Even then, you could just use the charmtech to make the puppeteers more efficient.
DB can use them to ensure that their child has high breeding, at the cost of making them basically mortal as far as further generations are concerned. Celestials, spirits, and xxx-blooded, to give birth to childred to any pairing regardless of the parties involved at the risk of mutation. Even though I think they should have some kind of medicine charms to eliminate any risk to the mother, and/or restore fertility without involving demons.
But a mortal should find that using the neomah is safer and better than going about it the natural way, even with that 10% chance of tragedy if you ask them and get then to agree on just you and your partner being parents. With the only way to improve this being a celestial, or sworn circle with the right charmtech, taking sufficient interest in their lives to be mid-wives.
I think that the ideal kingdom for a sorcerer king in terms of any kind of efficiency should be one full of demons. I mean they're not a threat to you personally if you take precautions, they are much more easily handaled than a pissed off exalt if you're plans harm their sensibilities, so whats the harm?
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Bursting Eagerness Soul
Threadwalking Rating Machine
- Location
- Wisconsin
Wait, did you accidentally Venus for a moment? Wow...
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- Location
- The sixth circle of Hell (second on weekends)
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Yes. Yes, Inks did indeed accidentally Venus. I genuinely did not see that coming, but like I say near the end of the pastebin; Inks's threshold successes basically constituted a successful full-Difficulty prayer roll to a heavenly god in and of themselves.
I lol'd hard, I am not afraid to admit. Actually, I wouldn't mind some feedback on what people thought of the Venus manifestation there. And also I'd like to hear about @Shyft's reasoning in assuming that the murders are ~Mysterious Ally~, if he's willing to go into detail and the reason isn't just "it seems like Plot and ~Mysterious Ally~ hasn't overtly shown up yet".
The baths were fun - despite it being Unlucky Session 13, Inks wow'd the rolls and made out like bandits with threshold successes. I would have liked a bit more "sorcerous research stuff" in the middle stunt, but that's probably because I'm a geek who spends time thinking about what dissertation and thesis papers would be titled in magical universities ("an analysis of the effects of the lunar phase on three Enduan tidal blessing rituals", etc). I'm certainly pleased I got to show off the more self-indulgent side of the Despot, and amused that Inks totally called his demands in advance. : P
- Location
- Denmark
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Yes, actually! A combination of the 800s early medival Danelaw period combined with the neolithic period and bronze age of sun-worshippers as well as the high medieval Queen Margrethe I to get a country of feudalistic sun-worshippers with ancient heroes set to rest in barrows who will rise to defend the country in times of need.
- Location
- Gladstone, OR
Yeah, the paucity of detail... how to phrase this. I'm always wary of overdoing technobabble and jargon, because I want to not bog the game down in details or justifications? It's not to say that you as ST would do that to me, but I'm gunshy? I'm still trying to find my feet in the 'vocabulary' of your Creation, so a lot of my classic 2e-ist phrases I've tried to curtail.
Like, I want to write Inks's actions with an eye towards comprehension, as opposed to ornate, florid description? You understand what she's doing.
Bursting Eagerness Soul
Threadwalking Rating Machine
- Location
- Wisconsin
I liked it! It was impressive and flashy, but without being overly so or hijacking the scene from it's main focus. It mostly seemed like a solid plot hook for later on that just came up organically.
- Location
- Gladstone, OR
Also to actually answer @Aleph 's question re: Mysterious Ally- the reasons for the murders aligned with Inks's morality and ethics. She has nothing against prostitution as a business, but everything against unsafe or unsanitary working conditions. The reason why the water farmer was put to death is currently unclear, but there is a hint of a pattern in exploitation. A manager in a day-labor business in one of the harshest, most labor-unfriendly nation-states in Creation is beaten to death? Why wouldn't such a thing happen?
So my theory, unsupported as it is, is that the Mysterious Ally has picked up Inks's morals by observation, but is executing on them differently. Of course by the same token, I should acknowledge that the Ally has its own life and causes independent of Inks- I only have a vague idea, that out of character, Inks did something before arriving in Gem that made this person or being really want to support her, if from afar/the shadows. So far the only other action the ally has taken on Inks's direct behalf is defending her townhouse while she was visiting El Galabi.
So my theory, unsupported as it is, is that the Mysterious Ally has picked up Inks's morals by observation, but is executing on them differently. Of course by the same token, I should acknowledge that the Ally has its own life and causes independent of Inks- I only have a vague idea, that out of character, Inks did something before arriving in Gem that made this person or being really want to support her, if from afar/the shadows. So far the only other action the ally has taken on Inks's direct behalf is defending her townhouse while she was visiting El Galabi.