Remove ads

General Exalted Thread

Reader mode
No, no, I'm not that stupid. It was this great guy I met down the pub, his name was 'notSzorenyHonest', which I thought was a bit of a strange name but he was telling me about all these incredible things Szoreny had done.
 
Incidentally, I'll note that just like @Revlid wrote Isidoros with no time for the "Brozi" interpretation, I wrote Szoreny with no time for the "Oh, he's not so bad and we could let him out maybe" interpretation.

Yes, it's perfectly reasonable for characters in setting to hold that he's the least dangerous Yozi. That just means they're falling for him, because he's a subtle, wasting toxin that affects your judgement and feeds your vanity. If you go "maybe we could let Szoreny out", you're either a fool or you've been fooled.
 
Some pondering about the sorcery rewrite...

As far as resources being used as anchors/channels and how easy it is to get resources, its not the resources but rather the background which is the anchor/channel. A possible way to balance how easy resources are to attain is to either require that it is a purchased background to be valid (ie: doesnt matter how much gold you yoink, you have to be spending your capital to import/find expensive and rare reagents needed for the spells which takes active long term effort) or, for resources that you get from charms and such, that you have to anchor the spell to the charm itself (so for instance with MHM you would actually take that charm offline due to it being fully ocupied shaping/maintaining the essence needed for the spell)

Thoughts?
 
Last edited:
EarthScorpion said:
Incidentally, I'll note that just like @Revlid wrote Isidoros with no time for the "Brozi" interpretation, I wrote Szoreny with no time for the "Oh, he's not so bad and we could let him out maybe" interpretation.

Yes, it's perfectly reasonable for characters in setting to hold that he's the least dangerous Yozi. That just means they're falling for him, because he's a subtle, wasting toxin that affects your judgement and feeds your vanity. If you go "maybe we could let Szoreny out", you're either a fool or you've been fooled.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Quite.

The only Yozi it is potentially practical to release is She Who Lives In Her Name, because her particular brand of crazy leaves room for her to accept oversight by someone who could supplant Malfeas' position of Supreme Authority within her conception of the Perfected Heirarchy. Who would then have to micro-manage her constantly, because she is exactly as bad as she looks.
 
Each of his snowflakes is covered in tiny grasping hands. He is hard to strike, for like fog he disperses in the face of an assault only to reform elsewhere. When the whim strikes him he forms a body from his snow and walks through Malfeas, to indulge as he will. In human form he is a corpulent man of the Realm who looks remarkably like the Slug, whose snow clouds veil his bald head - an affection of vanity.


The One Above All Others is vain, and knows no shame. He will lie to the face of anyone who speaks to them, and then take great insult if called on his mendacity. His temper flares like fire and lingers like acid, and those who have fallen into his disfavour remain objects of his ire for years, the target of petty insults and revenges. On the other hand, flattery soothes his prickly nature and those who find themselves drawn into his council will be greatly trusted - at least until they fail him or insult him, at which point they become his greatest foes.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Holy shit dude
 
GardenerBriareus said:
That's a bit similar to my own personal musings on it; I posited Adrian as being about grudges and obsession, but also being able to psychoanalyze others' fixations and wipe them away (to replace with your own, which are explicitly immune to any such Charms you possess). His charmset would be built around making you into a sort of Captain Ahab figure - clearly obsessed and deranged ("I'd strike the sun if it insulted me!"), but somehow able to draw people into your orbit and turn them into weapons against your chosen nemesis*.


* Probably including the ideas of blasphemy and transgression from Moby Dick itself, where Ahab conducts his own version of the Eucharist with the three harpooners to symbolically bind them together under his banner of madness.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
To elaborate.

Adrian was called the River of All Torments, and a good part of my thoughts on his nature & what a theoretical Infernal charmset on him would be like was filtered through that idea.

My original interpretation was that he represented pain and the passage of pain - suffering existed within him like pieces of flotsam in a river, but at the same time rivers are, by definition, in motion, and so carry their contents downstream. Thus, I imagined his Mythos themes as being about the idea of surviving hardship and growing stronger as a result, along with river metaphors and a melange of psychotherapeutic jargon. The Infernal archetype I had at the time was essentially a riff on Hannibal Lecter (the Mads Mikkleston version): Adrian's charmset would encourage a sense of imperious detachment and assumed superiority[1]​, along with incentivizing you to find screwed-up people and "fix" them - but between Adrian's Primordial (i.e., inhuman) nature and the precise ways in which you had to wrangle his themes into psychotherapy, his "therapy Charms" are more about artificially suppressing their Virtues or reshaping Intimacies to make them stop feeling guilt or regret about what's troubling them.

Except even then, Adrian removes pain by carrying it away in his waters, not addressing its source, so none of these are permanent. Your patients would become dependent on you to keep treating them - returning to the banks of the River of All Torments again and again to cast off their ever-accumulating emotional burdens. There'd probably be a Charm to give patients an artificial Intimacy of Guilt or Self-Loathing that only activates once their latest "treatment" from you wears off, making them gradually incapable of functioning without you there to take their pain away. Then you end that branch of the charmset with a Charm that gives "patients" the permanent cure they've been waiting for: transformation into Adrianic 1CDs, because the only way they can be free of their pain through Adrian is to metaphorically become part of the river.

While I've firmed it up a bit in the course of writing this post, I ditched that interpretation about a year ago because my ideas for it at the time were way too Ramethan.

@Peanuckle's idea of Adrian as the Dawi Yozi hit a chord, though, which is what prompted the post I'm now expanding on. That version of Adrian would be that he's obsessive, petty, and obsessed with avenging every last perceived slight against him, which has a vague Kimberian air to it now that I'm writing it down. His "internal" Charms (to use @Revlid's outline) would be about recreating that sort of oppositional, reactionary mindset in Infernals dipping into Adrian's Charms.

The first Charm would probably be something that makes negative Intimacies fueled by someone insulting, injuring, ignoring, or outdoing you/your interests form faster and be stronger right off the bat, so you become prone to vendettas (potentially even by having the Charm slap you with a point of Torment if you try to unilaterally forgive someone who slights you, or otherwise attempt to suppress your Yozi-imbued mean streak). It probably also auto-suppresses Compassion rolls made regarding people you have negative Intimacies toward, as the Hellish hate you hold toward your rivals overwhelms whatever sense of empathy or forgiveness you might possess.

(I'm actually a little ambivalent on the Charm idea @Peanuckle mentioned; being good at taking vengeance on your enemies seems like it would already be covered by Adrian's Excellencies, and I don't know enough about Exalted mechanics to gauge whether or not having a second Charm to pump in even more dice to your bloody path of retribution would be game-breaking, even if it carries a penalty to non-revenge-related actions. If it is balanced, it probably comes second in the tree.)

That leads into a Charm built around working out what other people like & dislike, which works best against people you dislike, so you can quickly assemble a cheat sheet of who your nemesis loves, who they hate, and what places/objects/institutions they value, so that you have ways to hurt them before you close in for the kill.

Subsequent Charms continue in that vein, making you better and better at hurting people you despise - my ideas for that section are fairly vague and scattered:

- You can immediately gain a strong negative Intimacy toward people who get in the way of your vendettas, which means you can apply all your "fuck anyone who slights me" Charms & Excellencies to them, in exchange for needing twice as much time as normal to form positive Intimacies toward others (as part of the general "Adrianic Charms make you a salty asshole who hates everyone" aesthetic)

- UMI based on infecting other people with one of your negative Intimacies via a social attack (Wrathful Mob-Assembling Invective), which then gets upgraded by a subsequent Charm to give people affected by it a portion of your own dice bonuses against your nemeses - which might be where you include the "commensurate penalties to non-revenge actions" to represent how the mortals you've subverted are being run ragged and driven half to madness by the Yozic hate you've poured into their skulls, making them twitchy and distracted when not actively working to further your goals.

- Survival Charms that lets you ignore hunger/fatigue penalties when in the presence of one of your nemeses, "feed" on acts of vengeance (so burning down a rival's warehouse or beating up his best friend becomes the equivalent of eating a hearty meal and getting a full night's sleep) - and obviously there's on to let you resist environmental hazards & extreme conditions when in pursuit of enemies so you can become the implacable pursuing force dogging a protagonist through rainstorms, desert heat, or Arctic blizzards, eyes fixed unswervingly on his quarry[2]​.

I'll write up my ideas for the "external" charmset next.



[1]​ Since I imagined Adrian as being somewhat of a megalomaniac, convinced that he was the sort of inscrutable, incontestable god-being that Hannibal envisioned himself as: font of suffering and soothing, giving & taking each as he so desired, beyond mortal judgment or morality. To quote the show: "Typhoid and swans, it all comes from the same place."

Hence, if you made an Adrian-brand Murder is Meat Charm, it would probably let you respire motes by either causing or relieving pain in others - but the latter has mostly become about feeding your pseudo-Yozic nature. Seeing others in pain no longer prompts you to roll Compassion, and you have to spend Willpower (or possibly roll Conviction) both to kill those who are in pain and to provide long-term relief to such people, because Adrian wants people to keep feeling pain and seeking relief as part of his Primordial nature, and if they're dead or content they stop doing that.

This has the side benefit of pushing Adrianic Infernals to the fringes of civilization, where suffering is plentiful and they can more easily arrange for the communities they feed on to remain in a state of "sustainable misery" - just like how Adrian himself lived on the edges of Creation and preyed on the things that lived there.


[2]​ Which completes the intended incentive package of the survival Charms - it's supposed to encourage PCs to get excessive and persistent with their need for revenge, because now their hateboner for a given target directly fuels their efforts to screw said target over. Also, it means players will eventually realize that they can improve their travel times by forming a "quickie" vendetta with another traveler heading the same way and then chasing them to their destination. Or to put it another way, Adrianic Infernals have mechanical encouragement to become the unhinged nutbag (hook hand optional) who starts hunting the viewpoint character of a campfire horror story across hill & dale over a tiny-to-nonexistent insult.
 
Imrix said:
Quite.

The only Yozi it is potentially practical to release is She Who Lives In Her Name, because her particular brand of crazy leaves room for her to accept oversight by someone who could supplant Malfeas' position of Supreme Authority within her conception of the Perfected Heirarchy. Who would then have to micro-manage her constantly, because she is exactly as bad as she looks.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

What problems does she cause?

Throwing temper tantrums when things aren't in order?
 
GardenerBriareus said:
him
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Your ideas are good, but I think they're still too Kimberian in that they revolve around negative intimacies and incentivizing enemies. Adrian was a more transcendental form of violence; I don't think she'd bother to focusing on a single individual or group unless they were what she was focusing on at the moment.

Also, Adrian was female. She has a few entries in Ink Monkeys that gives a bit of insight to her nature.

Without copying text directly from a copyright source (and transcribing from a highly romanticized account), we know that she "could never be arrested" and always moved in one form or another, as a river up Szoreny's roots, into the air as vapor and then rain down again. Her motto was "Freedom is all" and explored the furthest out of all the Primordials. It was she who discovered the eventual founding spot of Creation.

She also found the cries of battle and pain to be sweet music, so she spent plenty of time butchering raksha. She also enjoyed being cut into herself, as her own pain was another form of music to her.

Other accounts describe her as being flighty but focused, intensely involved into a thing only to abandon it for another. So much so that the other Primordials were surprised at how attached she got to the Games of Divinity, and she would rage and ravage Creation in a tantrum when it wasn't her turn.

Because of all this I think it would be more accurate to develop a charmset that incentivized a hyper-focus on a single thing, but allow the character to shift that thing fairly easily.

As for dealing with others, I think Adrian would tend more towards a solipsistic viewpoint. She is very focused on herself and her own expressions and enjoyments. Lesser beings exist only to fuel her attachments or to add their pained cries to her music.

Physically, the charmset would encourage rapid, freeform movement, high damage output and incentivize being wounded yourself.

An idea I just had for such a charm: Many Yozis have a gateway charm that imposes negative effects in return for powerful ones. Perhaps an early Adrian charm might bar the Infernal from ever wearing armor, or put a cap on her soak and hardness. A following charm could remove a percentage of suffered damage and add it to the Infernal's attack value. This would incentivize very risky, painful gameplay, which is exactly what Adrian looks like to me.
 
Last edited:
Now, lets say you wish to have an artifact that boosts strength and gives you hardness and soak.

Thing is? The more you use it, the madder you get. How do you put this down in mechanics? Commit a willpower to access, and then roll against temperance + integrity, where using it more than once increasing the difficulty, until a week has passed and then it resets?
 
Graypairofsocks said:
I think many characters would be fine with that.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
The thing with a cooperative SWLIHN is that she's every bound demon problem writ large and amplified.
Every rule and instruction you set can and will be taken to their logical extreme, good intentions inflated to unrecognizable levels.

And all she wanted was to help sempai so badly....

...think devoted hypercompetent yandere.
 
Where are the rules for clinches and for feats of strength? Because Holy Shit, Szoreny is stronk!
@EarthScorpion
Let me just bring up this charm real quick:

WEIGHT-EXAGGERATING EGO DENSITY
Cost: 2m; Mins: Essence 2; Type: Simple
Keywords: Combo-OK
Duration: Indefinite
Prerequisite Charms: None

The Black Boar is the centre of his own universe, his every action granted a dreadful, glorious, and all-too literal weight. The Exalt increases his weight by a factor of (Essence). This does not affect his personal ability to move or jump, though it does increase the load on a mount or vehicle, and may prevent him from being dragged or lifted if his new weight is too heavy. He reduces the distance he can be thrown by any Knockback effect by (Essence x 10) yards, to a minimum of zero, adds (Essence) automatic successes to any Blockade Movement or Control Clinch rolls, and increases his effective (Strength + Athletics) for Feats of Strength by (Essence x 2).

Note that fragile surfaces may break beneath the Exalt's tread – cosmetic damage in his wake reduces the difficulty to track him by his (Essence) over surfaces where he had this Charm active. Surfaces he lands on after jumping suffer more seriously, immediately taking (Essence x 2) dice of lethal damage.

It stacks nicely with Szoreny's charmset, giving a massive boost to clinches.

BACK-BREAKING BOUGHS
Cost: (+2m); Mins: Essence 3; Type: Permanent
Keywords: Accumulation, Crippling, Obvious
Duration: Permanent
Prerequisite Charms: Branch-and-Root-Protrusion

Those who would look at the beauty of the Silver Forest should not step too close, for fear that they will be snatched up by many hand-like roots and wrung like a washcloth.
This Charm enhances Branch-and-Root Protrusion. If the Infernal commits two motes and takes a dose of quicksilver heartsap as per the Accumulation keyword, his tree-like limbs become fuelled with terrible force for the remainder of the scene. Damage from clinch damage becomes lethal, he adds (Essence) dice to all pools to inflict, maintain and control a clinch, and he adds (Essence) to the damage of clinches. Should a single clinch inflict more damage than the target's Stamina, he may inflict a single Crippling injury listed on p152 of the Exalted corebook.


ENDLESS PHARMACEUTICAL SOLUTIONS
Cost: -; Mins: Essence 3; Type: Permanent
Keywords: Obvious
Duration: Permanent
Prerequisite Charms: Race-Winning Aid, Insensate Bark Tincture
When the Thousand Recursion Prince finally reaches the end of his patience, he bursts into alchemically-fuelled motion.
This Charm permanently improves the Infernal's capabilities. Whenever he takes a dose of quicksilver heartsap (including making use of Charms with the Accumulation keyword), he may choose to enjoy the following benefits for the rest of the scene:

He adds (Appearance + Essence) to his Strength + Athletics total when calculating feats of strength
He adds (Essence) in yards to his base movement and dash distances
He adds (Essence) in yards to his vertical jump distance, and (Essence x 2) to his horizontal jump distance.
While the effects of this Charm are active, his veins and arteries bulge with thick, dark metallic blood and his heart beats like a hummingbird's wings.

Basically, add Appearance + Essence*3 to your feats of strength for basically nothing but a little mercury poison. For some reason, I think the cap for Feats of Strength acts a little differently, but I don't know why. If it doesn't, you still go around at MAXIMUM POWER! for the scene, juggling hippopotamuses while you just walk through the castle walls at no mote cost!

Even scarier is your clinching capabilities. Add your essence in dice to start a clinch, and successes + dice to controlling them. You have multiple arms to clinch with, and a large enough bonus to safely flurry control clinches. Worse, you can horribly maim people.

Hermetic Substitution Technique is really scary, since it can steal an Exalted's favorite stabby sword or blocky armor and leave something useless in its place.

Doppelganger Genesis Evocation is frankly, horrifying. It turns people you have perma-killed into copies who are demon-bound loyal to you.

I like how Envious Heart gives you a powerful way to manage your accumulation, by making you act like Szoreny himself.

Best of Friends Fire is hilarious, turning that Solar Swordsmen trying to kill you with his backup sword into Nearly Headless Nick.

Pseudobulbar Affections lets you poison people by talking to them, but only with heartsap. That is a dirty trick, which fits Szoreny well.

I want to see how Adoring Fans Biomagnification works when used on another character after some surgery. Maybe an option for Outer Self Alchemy?

Immortal Emperor Benediction seems very expensive, XP wise, especially considering the mote cost for OSA.
 
Peanuckle said:
Your ideas are good, but I think they're still too Kimberian in that they revolve around negative intimacies and incentivizing enemies. Adrian was a more transcendental form of violence; I don't think she'd bother to focusing on a single individual or group unless they were what she was focusing on at the moment.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Err...

Peanuckle said:
Also, Adrian was female. She has a few entries in Ink Monkeys that gives a bit of insight to her nature.

Without copying text directly from a copyright source (and transcribing from a highly romanticized account), we know that she "could never be arrested" and always moved in one form or another, as a river up Szoreny's roots, into the air as vapor and then rain down again. Her motto was "Freedom is all" and explored the furthest out of all the Primordials. It was she who discovered the eventual founding spot of Creation.

She also found the cries of battle and pain to be sweet music, so she spent plenty of time butchering raksha. She also enjoyed being cut into herself, as her own pain was another form of music to her.

Other accounts describe her as being flighty but focused, intensely involved into a thing only to abandon it for another. So much so that the other Primordials were surprised at how attached she got to the Games of Divinity, and she would rage and ravage Creation in a tantrum when it wasn't her turn.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
This sounds pretty garbage, to be honest. It's Adorjan in a trenchcoat & fedora, especially with the "freedom is all" nonsense and being an unstoppable, largely intangible force; there's nothing there that addresses or inverts the themes of what Adrian became, and what little is changed from The Silent Wind's description just makes "her" sound like a stereotypical bratty kid.

Peanuckle said:
Because of all this I think it would be more accurate to develop a charmset that incentivized a hyper-focus on a single thing, but allow the character to shift that thing fairly easily.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
My issue with that is that I don't see any real hooks to give the charmset a properly Infernal "archetype".

Like, with Adrian-as-Hannibal, the Charms short-circuit your empathy and encourage you to cultivate others' suffering the way a farmer cultivates crops, using Adrian's themes of pain and pain's passing to manipulate and control and force others to orbit around you. It's built to make it so the easiest, most effective route to doing something is to be a sociopathic narcissist who feasts on the tears of mortals from behind a mask of kindness & understanding. You have to actively fight against your own power to avoid drowning in Adrian's waters and becoming as cold and detached and self-absorbed as he is.

With Adrian-as-Ahab, you can end up hyperfocusing on your grudges to the exclusion of all else, becoming insanely petty to the point you'll invoke the wrath of Hell on a town for not offering to stable your horse when you arrive, or both, and there's no third option where you can have all these powers and not be fucked up and mentally warped, because Adrian is a Yozi and the Yozis are fucked up and mentally warped.

If you can just scoop up all your bonuses and plop them down as you please with no drawbacks, then the charmset doesn't have any teeth.

Peanuckle said:
As for dealing with others, I think Adrian would tend more towards a solipsistic viewpoint. She is very focused on herself and her own expressions and enjoyments. Lesser beings exist only to fuel her attachments or to add their pained cries to her music.

Physically, the charmset would encourage rapid, freeform movement, high damage output and incentivize being wounded yourself.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
I actually agree on the solipsism; the two versions of Adrian I came up with are both very much lost in themselves. The first styles himself a Hindu god, wielder of creation and destruction, while the second is so caught up in his own sense of personal morality that he goes apeshit over the tiniest insult.

I actually had entirely different ideas on how to do the external charmset, though; I'll try to write something more extensive tomorrow, but it was built on the idea of forcing enemies to come to you instead of you coming to them. It'd use a lot of metaphors about boats being drawn helplessly into whitewater rapids, the idea of "sending away" your wounds on the currents of Adrian to heal while in combat (almost certainly with some sort of complicating factor), fucking up the landscape to better accommodate you and funnel enemies into your kill zone (like how rivers carve channels into the land), and just generally being this advancing force that drags in and crushes everything it doesn't like. Reaching out a hand toward distant enemies and shouting "Kurozu!" as the tides of Adrian pull them into range of your daiklaive might also be on the table.
 
GardenerBriareus said:
This sounds pretty garbage, to be honest. It's Adorjan in a trenchcoat & fedora, especially with the "freedom is all" nonsense and being an unstoppable, largely intangible force; there's nothing there that addresses or inverts the themes of what Adrian became, and what little is changed from The Silent Wind's description just makes "her" sound like a stereotypical bratty kid.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
However, when you contrast Malfeas with his previous form, you get that the changed primordial is still them. Just with the heart ripped out and the rest forced to change to remain functional without it's core.

Personally I think Adoration, Motion and Freedom might well be part of Adrian from the start, but Adorjan's obsession with Death and Silence causing their interpretation to change came as a result of how close she got to death. But thats just me.
 
veekie said:
The thing with a cooperative SWLIHN is that she's every bound demon problem writ large and amplified.
Every rule and instruction you set can and will be taken to their logical extreme, good intentions inflated to unrecognizable levels.

And all she wanted was to help sempai so badly....

...think devoted hypercompetent yandere.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Unconquered Sun: I never asked for this.
 
Reader mode
You must login or register to reply here.
Remove ads
Back
Top