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General Exalted Thread

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Bloody hell writing the dialogue of a Boar-God is hard. I can't figure out if he should have a horrible accent, how I should write that without making it a cancerous blight upon the reader's eye and just how you write a bloodstained butcher speaking without it sounding dissonant to both him and the situation.
 
Gamerlord said:
Bloody hell writing the dialogue of a Boar-God is hard. I can't figure out if he should have a horrible accent, how I should write that without making it a cancerous blight upon the reader's eye and just how you write a bloodstained butcher speaking without it sounding dissonant to both him and the situation.
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Generally speaking, avoid 'phonetic' dialogue except as accenting; think turns of phrase or toss-off lines, not meaty 'meaningful' information.

"Ere we go, wot- i've business to take care of yeah? Punks, git- I've no time for you lot."

Punctuation, pacing of dialogue, how fast/well it reads can count for a lot, as well as describing around the dialogue. how thick or phlemghy is his voice, does he drawl, snort, huff? Fast or slow, muttered or clearly enunciated.
 
Shyft said:
Generally speaking, avoid 'phonetic' dialogue except as accenting; think turns of phrase or toss-off lines, not meaty 'meaningful' information.

"Ere we go, wot- i've business to take care of yeah? Punks, git- I've no time for you lot."

Punctuation, pacing of dialogue, how fast/well it reads can count for a lot, as well as describing around the dialogue. how thick or phlemghy is his voice, does he drawl, snort, huff? Fast or slow, muttered or clearly enunciated.
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Hm, thanks. He's gonna be snorty definitely, but I'm trying to preserve the sense of drama and seriousness I tried to build by him using a bunch of Charms (not explicitly - I prefer the organic 'non MA Charms aren't something that are explicitly evoked, the God can sense the Underworld taint inside someone by tasting their blood and recognising the flavour instead of just activating 'Essence Detection Charm'') to cloud the mind of the SI and run him through a suitably dramatic ceremony through the power of suggestion that has definite Mithraic undertones. Seems being all 'snort snort' would be kinda ridiculous after sacrificing a bull/rhino/mammoth/deliberately indeterminate thing in a barely lit basement-temple.
 
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Gamerlord said:
Hm, thanks. He's gonna be snorty definitely, but I'm trying to preserve the sense of drama and seriousness I tried to build by him using a bunch of Charms (not explicitly - I prefer the organic 'non MA Charms aren't something that are explicitly evoked, the God can sense the Underworld taint inside someone by tasting their blood and recognising the flavour instead of just activating 'Essence Detection Charm'') to cloud the mind of the SI and run him through a suitably dramatic ceremony through the power of suggestion that has definite Mithraic undertones. Seems being all 'snort snort' would be kinda ridiculous after sacrificing a bull/rhino/mammoth/deliberately indeterminate thing in a barely lit basement-temple.
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You seen Princess Mononoke? Channel Nago and Okkoto. Just like Moro is the model of a wolf shaped hunt god, they are boar shared mountain gods.
 
Shyft said:
Generally speaking, avoid 'phonetic' dialogue except as accenting; think turns of phrase or toss-off lines, not meaty 'meaningful' information.

"Ere we go, wot- i've business to take care of yeah? Punks, git- I've no time for you lot."

Punctuation, pacing of dialogue, how fast/well it reads can count for a lot, as well as describing around the dialogue. how thick or phlemghy is his voice, does he drawl, snort, huff? Fast or slow, muttered or clearly enunciated.
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Is the e're we go an example of something to avoid or an example of how to do it?
 
rogthnor said:
Is the e're we go an example of something to avoid or an example of how to do it?
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This example seems to be an example of how to do it right. Note that the "Ere we go, wot-" is at the start of the sentence. Everything is short enough that you can phonetically sound it out in your head quickly and understand what is being said, and it can thus serve as a 'primer' for the mind. You will have a certain voice inserted, so as long as you don't throw completely incongruous constructs (like having someone with that accent use 'incongruous constructs' unless you make the shift in tone to indicate that they are being somehow deliberate), you will keep the voice in your head. The occasional reinforcement will help, so sprinkle in a 'wot', 'roit' or other little verbal tic in a few, select places (usually as a form of punctuation at the end of clauses) and you will keep the voice constant in the reader's mind. Do not however overdo this. A single syllable insertion every two or three clauses is probably all you really need, and even that might be a bit much.
 
Academia Nut said:
This example seems to be an example of how to do it right. Note that the "Ere we go, wot-" is at the start of the sentence. Everything is short enough that you can phonetically sound it out in your head quickly and understand what is being said, and it can thus serve as a 'primer' for the mind. You will have a certain voice inserted, so as long as you don't throw completely incongruous constructs (like having someone with that accent use 'incongruous constructs' unless you make the shift in tone to indicate that they are being somehow deliberate), you will keep the voice in your head. The occasional reinforcement will help, so sprinkle in a 'wot', 'roit' or other little verbal tic in a few, select places (usually as a form of punctuation at the end of clauses) and you will keep the voice constant in the reader's mind. Do not however overdo this. A single syllable insertion every two or three clauses is probably all you really need, and even that might be a bit much.
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So what would be an example of doing it wrong?
 
Frakir's brother said:
You seen Princess Mononoke? Channel Nago and Okkoto. Just like Moro is the model of a wolf shaped hunt god, they are boar shared mountain gods.
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I mean, Nago is already a great blueprint for any number of Underworld horrors - Hell, the idea of a Terrestrial god (or godblooded) being shot with a thaumaturgically-enhanced arquebus, slowly dying as the wound goes septic and the bullet itself poisons him, and becoming a vengeful spirit out of sheer boiling hatred and outrage over being laid low by insignificant mortal flyspecks is essentially a premade story seed for Exalted.

Likewise, the response of the village is very Exalted-appropriate, too: wrathful undead god is dying on your doorstep? Drop everything, send in the village shaman to try and placate its spirit so it won't curse you more than it already has by spilling its rancid blood on the soil, or rise up from death a second time just to keep hurting you.

... Actually, just go watch Princess Mononoke, it's amazing.
 
GardenerBriareus said:
I mean, Nago is already a great blueprint for any number of Underworld horrors - Hell, the idea of a Terrestrial god (or godblooded) being shot with a thaumaturgically-enhanced arquebus, slowly dying as the wound goes septic and the bullet itself poisons him, and becoming a vengeful spirit out of sheer boiling hatred and outrage over being laid low by insignificant mortal flyspecks is essentially a premade story seed for Exalted.

Likewise, the response of the village is very Exalted-appropriate, too: wrathful undead god is dying on your doorstep? Drop everything, send in the village shaman to try and placate its spirit so it won't curse you more than it already has by spilling its rancid blood on the soil, or rise up from death a second time just to keep hurting you.

... Actually, just go watch Princess Mononoke, it's amazing.
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Actually, there's a funny story about when I first watched that movie. I grew up watching Totoro, watched it dozens of tones as a toddler. My parents knew of Miyazaki Hayao through that and Mirai Shonen Conan, so when thru heard he made another movie, they brought the toddler me to watch it in theaters in Japan. When the movie started, I saw the little Totoro that is Studio Ghibli's mascot and stood up and shouted 'Toto! Toto!' The movie started, and my parents quickly realized that Princess Mononoke wasn't a movie to show your toddler. They would have taken me out of the theater, except I loved it and fought them when they tried. Later, when Ashitaka and San were on Okkoto and were infested by the curse, I was wiping my arms and face, still completely enraptured by the movie.
 
Shyft said:
Here we go with Session 24 of Sunlit Sands. @Aleph presides as storyteller, with I, Shyft, as Twilight Solar Inks.

Hooboy, this was a big one.

Session 24 Logs

So, opening this up I must underscore that I have discussed the idea of a 'prisoner' plot. I have never played one as PC or ST. I however do believe that they're a valid and valuable tool in an ST's kit, so long as they're handled well.

We had a few discussions prior to the session itself about the use of ST authority and the separation of character, asset and trait.

For the sake of discussion, Exalted defines an attack as 'an action that would seek to harm the character's mind, body or traits'. This includes things like Intimacies, Virtues, Motivation and Backgrounds.

Last session, Hinna 'attacked' Inks's assets, but not her traits. The stomach bottle bug Inks had was not a Background, so it was not 'defendable' per se. This is an ege case mind- i would caution Storytellers against doing things like this, but it IS possible.

The other thing is that if Inks had not been a public demonologist, Hinna should not have tried her banishment trick without sufficient justification or investigation- she would have had no idea Inks HAD a stomach bottle bug. Now it's not to say that she couldn't have Guessed, but a storyteller guessing too much and too accurately leaves bad feelings.

What we discussed among other things was the Wovlerine Effect and the Worf Effect.

Wolverine Effect: A character who has a power (regeneration) is shown using that power often; done badly it makes them look bad- does Wolverine suck at fighting if he has to heal so much?

Worf Effect: A character is SAID to be tough but SHOWN to be a chump, to upsell the threat-of-the day

back to hinna and last session, the thought is that Storytellers often have an unfair information advantage over their players, and handled badly, leads to the opposition being full of gotchas and threats specifically tailored to attack the player's weaknesses.

Now, sometimes, the ST needs to attack weaknesses, to encourage the player to shore them up. This touches on however, the idea of reactive purchases. I've been trying to save for Essence 4, and if I in response to this session buy out a bunch of charms that prevent it from happening again, that's fine....

The problem then is if those Charms never come up again. This leads to the 'Tabletop' extension of the Wolverine effect: If a character is immune to something, does it ever happen to them again? Aleph has assured me that if Inks ever becomes immune to poisons and sickness, they will still happen. As advice to Aleph, the use of poisons and disease should tell me about my opponents, what does that say about them?

Anyway, moving on to the actual session-

In these first scenes, we are introduced to a neomah by name of Bidaha. I identified fairly quickly that this was another one of Aleph's tutorializing sequences, because Bidaha and by extension Hinna were meant to be an active example of Anchors rooted in demonic backgrounds like Backing, Ally and Cult.

Bidaha was interesting, and Aleph had a clear trajectory in mind for her character, which I noted, but honestly did not have the time to really focus on.

I can safely say that the first few scenes of the session, the pacing felt off. Neither of us had done a captured plot before, after all. With the benefit of hindsight, I would have actually started Inks off in the extractor device we see later.

Now, I as a player felt reasonably safe through this whole sequence- much safer than I thought I would, and Hinna continued to reinforce this impression throughout the session. For one, we're using the 2e corebook Twilight Anima, so at a certain point, I can tank damage at a level that vastly extends my lifespan in combat.

The main thing that threw me, I think, is that Aleph and by extension Hinna were almost too easy on me, but this was justified by Hinna not being 'prepared' to contain a Solar. Now, there is a judgement call here, what's FUN for the player? Inks being drugged to the gills, with her hands and feet cut off would've been 'safe', but sure as hell not fun for me.

I at the very least expected more poisons to force compliance or docility, but it ended up not being the case.

As the session goes on, a picture is slowly painted that Hinna is a member of an infernalist cult, who seek to steal the power of the Sun as the Immaculate Order declares the Solars did. There's a link in the logs for the actual writeup.

Her family is revealed, conninving and jealous, brutishly loyal, or crippled. Husband, Son, Daughter. Lots of demonblooded, unsurprisingly.

Above all else, Hinna is entertainingly wrong. Part of what makes Exaltation, the process, work so well, is that it's almost impossible to, from an in-setting perspective, pin down its objective traits. Someone can say they're Exalted, but most people only believe Dragonblooded are Exalts.

Now, here's my pacing critique of the 'first chunk' of the session. I fell into what I like to call 'respectful innactivity'. I clearly understood Aleph had a plan and wanted to go through it, and I was more or less at a loss as how to move forward- it's one of those tone mismatches which i think is underscored by a question:

Can a player be wrong? Unpacked more- can a player's strategy or tactic be wrong? The obvious answer is 'yes', but te more nuanced answer is 'depends'. The fact is, whenever a player chooses wrong, has a bad idea, that failure is magnified, compounded by the fact that their roll might have succeeded.

It's like saying 'you are facing someoen with impenetrable armor' and then you roll 20 successes on an attack- the attack does no damage becuase impenetrable, but you're left feeling dumb because you wasted that roll- now obvious, a properly signaled challenge shouldn't result in that.

The issue here is that the signals I was getting as a player were muddled by the gradually unfolding plot. There was a setpiece, a scenario, but I was not fully grokking how to engage with it. This is why you see me stunt partway through and then hard-abort it without a word- I quickly realized that my ideas were simply incompatible with whatever Aleph was planning.

So perhaps, if you look at it the right way, I was on rails- but not being rail-roaded.

Some of that incompatability was due to not having the right Charms and not being willing to spend XP on them just yet- but if I had pushed my thoughts further, I might have.

This is why at about the 3 hour mark, we both sort of agreed to do the seek-weakness montage, and I made a trio of pretty stellar rolls. This is another example where I felt like I was in a 'tutorial' zone. I wasn't being penalized, I did not need to watch my motes (as I was left alone every night and could regenerate at my leisure). This in turn made my successes that much more impressive.

This was not a bad thing, mind, but it was definitely easier than it could have been.

Having been presented with a cloud of options, I started now to more strongly drive towards one I wanted. Aleph was impressed by my stunting, my ability to gradually build up assets by describing what I did or acquired versus just straight 'Oh I make it up on the spot'.

The pacing kicks up to the positive here, and I think this underlines the session's weakest point- I as a player could not think of a goal that Aleph understood or could engage with. The moment I picked a goal she DID understand, she could more rapidly account for and arbitrate the results of my actions.

So a small part of me was a little frustrated that I could not concieve of a wholly original solution- I was however having too much fun filling in the wide blank spaces Aleph left in her offered aveneues of progress. Novelty is memorable, but it's not always Good.

Another note here is that Inks is Conviction 5 WP 10; for all of her personable, flirtatious quirks, she can be a terrifingly driven, focused being. Part of the beauty of the virtue system, is that it's fair. Inks is conviction 5 in everything she does. it makes it more difficult to build lasting attachments, sure, but it also means she guards those attachments and causes with even more fervent energy.

To be Conviction 5 is to stick to your job despite boredom, hunger, pain. To endure when weaker wills falter. The Task is Not Done- that is Conviction.

It was that she leaned on, commiting to her goal of seeing Hinna brought up by the very powers she bargained with.

Now, the other thing about this session, is that despite not being on camera, Inks's support network was both useful and involved, albiet distantly. It's a common problem for STs to treat NPCs as bumbling fools or incapble of holding the fort while the PCs are away, and it was not a surprise that Aleph instead had them be both competent and narratively supportive. I did not need a deus ex machina to get out of this.

The rest of the session proceeds as you see it in the logs, and until finally, all things come together.

The last two things I really want to touch on, are the +3 stunt, and Bidaha.

In the case of the stunt, I think this sequence underscores a better, more important metric for guaging stunt levels. A stunt that just describes something, no matter how long and flowery, is still just a description. A characterful stunt is nice, but the best stunts are the ones that describe risk. Inks could have failed! She gambled, hedging her bets of course, but still could have not rolled well and been in trouble! That was the root of the +3 stunt, not any artful phrasing or decadent prose.

Bidaha, finally, as I mention in-log, is interesting, because Aleph is again trying to tutorialize that Spirits can be falible. Maybe not in mortal ways, but still obviously changed or hurt- appropos for a doctor. I do admit Bidaha feels almost too tailored for Inks, but she is a neomah, so that's something of a given.

With that, the session concludes and we wait til next week!
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So! I definitely had fun this session! But I'm also a little dissatisfied with how I ran it in hindsight. Here's what I learned/concluded from it:

As @Shyft mentioned, I think I should definitely have had more drugs be used on her to try and keep her docile - which I'm ashamed to say didn't even occur to me, somehow - and also leaned harder on Inks' Conviction 5. If I could redo it, I'd definitely make a much bigger thing of the increasing sources of penalty - first from drugs, then hunger, then the beatings - and given her a chance to put her Medicine to use in treating herself. That could have prompted Shyft to debate whether to sacrifice some xp to learn Touch of Blissful Release and cancel a -3 penalty at will - which could have been critical to pulling off some of the sabotage.

Honestly, I really should have let her pull off that plan and try to escape down the shaft. I'd have set it to have very little chance of getting her out entirely, but it could have made for an amazing combat/chase scene climbing downward with lightly singed demon-spiders in pursuit and a clumsy fly ogre swatting at her from the door of the lab, culminating in Hinna herself pursuing her down in the elevator. And, you know. Then I could have had Hinna clap her in manacles to stop it happening again, as an additional obstacle to contend with. Really disappointed in myself for that - more on this later.

Related to both of the above; I need to trust @Shyft as a player more and try to be more comfortable throwing hardball challenges at him - at the moment I'm still being too "nice". Now, admittedly @EarthScorpion is self-admittedly "nice" to me in Kerisgame, and I really don't want him to change that at all (please oh cruel and malevolent ST-god, hear my supplications and have mercy). But I could definitely have introduced the starvation and the beatings earlier and made Inks display that Conviction 5 stuff without it getting too torture-porny. I think in some ways, I'm still so inexperienced an ST - remember, this is still only my twenty-something'th session ever run - that I'm worried about upsetting @Shyft if I'm mean to his character.

... which is of course absurd. Being mean to his character is what I'm here for. :V

That said, I also need to maintain a policy of keeping a range of options open and not narrowing things down to a single-track path, or of warping the game away from what @Shyft actually wants to do. Ultimately this is his game; Inks is the main character, and thus the plot should ultimately curve back to her goals and means and story no matter what. The whole Hinna subplot has given her a wealth of solar-storage tech she can use to reclaim El-Galabi, and if she does that she can basically set it up as her own personal town, which is directly in line with her Motivation. I think I'm doing well on that score; keeping things relevant to what Inks wants, but I toed the line here with "playing @Shyft's character for him". I really liked the idea of the ritual-sabotage, so I might have oversold that - in future, I should be more careful about letting what I want Inks to do influence the game. It worked out this time, but as I said - I should really have allowed that scale-the-volcano-shaft plan to go ahead.

On the plus side, I did allow @Shyft a fair amount of freedom in stunting and RPing Hinna herself - her dialogue and actions during Inks' backsass, for instance - which I gather from him is almost unheard of. I'm pretty chill about this because I respect @Shyft's skills as a roleplayer and felt I'd set up the situation enough for him to have a good idea of how to portray her. If he'd gone too out of line I might have stepped in and said "um, no", but I didn't expect him to and was proven right in that trust.

The note about Bidaha feeling tailored to Inks is actually amusing, because it was almost entirely an accident. The tower thing wasn't planned; and she was initially a neomah who I knew existed because Hinna had children, and who I wanted to be imprisoned to show that Hinna couldn't bind all demons like Inks can and had to resort to shackling some. I decided to give her the intellectual-temptation thing to make her more interesting than the average standard neomah template, but then it occurred to me halfway through that she wouldn't have been able to cough up her tower in a tight little space like that. And I was like "... awesome, let's throw in a sort of spirit-medical thing" (going back to that plot-elements-being-Inks-relevant again). Inks might be able to fix it with some sort of essence-acupuncture routine later, or Bidaha might cough up a brass-and-lust bezoar at some point, or she might just be permanently crippled from being forcibly prevented from externalising it for so long. The original intent with her was actually more to give Inks a potential inroad to opening trade with Hell, should she send Bidaha back and help her set up a stable position in Malfeas. Which may well not be possible now. We shall see!

I'm a bit disappointed that Hinna didn't hit that 10-success threshold, because I was totally going to rip her soul out and fling it into Hell as a bodiless spirit a'la Voldemort and leave her golden corpse for Inks to either scavenge exotic materials from or throw to the dogs as she preferred. Alas. @EarthScorpion suggested afterwards that he'd have had Inks roll to sabotage against Hinna's roll to summon, with Inks' successes subtracted from Hinna's, and if it took the total into botch or negative territory something horrible would happen. In retrospect... damn, that would have been a really good idea. Again, time pressure. Need to get better at thinking quickly.

Finally, I'm curious as to how @Shyft liked the demons Hinna was using and how well I portrayed that she was only able to bind the ones descended from her demon-lord patron, because of the Pact she was casting through. And also whether her entertainingly wrong "you've been through so many hosts you've forgotten you're a body-jumping demon and can't remember how you stole power from the sun" conclusion was appropriately amusing.
 
GardenerBriareus said:
I mean, Nago is already a great blueprint for any number of Underworld horrors - Hell, the idea of a Terrestrial god (or godblooded) being shot with a thaumaturgically-enhanced arquebus, slowly dying as the wound goes septic and the bullet itself poisons him, and becoming a vengeful spirit out of sheer boiling hatred and outrage over being laid low by insignificant mortal flyspecks is essentially a premade story seed for Exalted.

Likewise, the response of the village is very Exalted-appropriate, too: wrathful undead god is dying on your doorstep? Drop everything, send in the village shaman to try and placate its spirit so it won't curse you more than it already has by spilling its rancid blood on the soil, or rise up from death a second time just to keep hurting you.

... Actually, just go watch Princess Mononoke, it's amazing.
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Pretty much all Ghibli movies are perfect for adaption to Exalted.
 
Pompoko Tanuki is a bunch of little gods/elementals fighting against the expansion of First Age/Shogunate city, while Grave Of The Fireflies (I still haven't been able to get through it all; too much hurt) is the aftermath of the Shogunate invading a satrapy/the impact of a war between Gens on mortals.
 
Gamerlord said:
Pompoko Tanuki is a bunch of little gods/elementals fighting against the expansion of First Age/Shogunate city, while Grave Of The Fireflies (I still haven't been able to get through it all; too much hurt) is the aftermath of the Shogunate invading a satrapy/the impact of a war between Gens on mortals.
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Whisper of the heart.
Only Yesterday.
 
Commentary on the commentary, here you go @Aleph !

Yes, stepping up the 'coercion' would have been a way to go. You always graduate to higher tiers, instead of starting high. There is however a time and place for a 'Pow, punch in the face' sort of difficulty spike- this was not it.

So yes, drugs, starvation, beatings last. One thing you could have done was, if I was floundering, tutorialize how to approach this problem. A common issue with players in general is that they get tunnel vision, and can't think outside of their current conception. If I feel this is a 'Resistance' challenge, then you the ST are perfectly fine with reminding me of my Medicine 5. Conversely, if I the player decide to fight back with my specialty, then you arguably should allow it.

I completely forgot about Touch of Blissful Release, as well, and that kind of Charm was really a good one that I would have liked learning as part of the 'struggle' against Hinna. Alternatively I could have bought up Resistance 3, and then Body-Mending Meditation- imagine being able to heal from bashing wounds in fifteen minutes. If I remember the Charm correctly, a Solar who'd been knocked out in her incap level, can go from incap to 'Healthy' in two hours. I might be wrong on the specific execution, but it's still pretty damn fast.

And you did acknowledge after the fact that you ought to have let my 'crazy plan' happen, even if it would've been hard. Part of 'tutorializing' is being willing to put up a really tough wall and then being impressed/pleased when your players beat it. The ST's job is not to win, but to get their players fired up and thinking! Characters want to win, but STs win when their players win.

This leads to another key point- Hinna was always in control of how far she could take hurting Inks. There was always gradations- unlike combat, where the line between 'whiff/splat' is so frighteningly slim, we weren't using Join Battle. I would have definitely appreciated a roll to endure damage and keep myself from hurting a lot, up to and including acknwoledging the Twilight Anima (at the same time, we're using exhaustion rules, so just beat Inks up while she's unconcious)'

The other thing I want to underscore here, is that the most valuable resource in this whole endeavor is Session Time. Beyond that, the only completely precious, unrecoverable thing is death. You could have lopped Inks's arms and legs off, and while I would have been upset I admit, not so much in the sense of 'Oh god you traumatized my character' (though I'd feel pretty upset), it'd be more that you're forcing me to spend oodles of experience on a suite of medicine charms just to get out of this. Now I as a player don't really like torture-porn content. I made my alchemical explicitly to play up the 'superhuman regenerator' trope, and he's meant to get chewed up and spat out. Inks, bluntly, is an immaculately gorgeous hyper-idealized supermodel figure. I really don't want to imagine her covered in blood or scars. That being said, getting an arm lopped off in combat or whatnot adds spice and after a certain point, becomes a meaningful status effect vs a terrifying trauma.

Now, sometimes you want to do that. Sometimes it's important for a story to have those kinds of things, to push a player so hard they have to do something like that. The problem is, I was clearly and openly earmarking XP for Essence 4. If I had not had that as a primary goal, I would have been likely a lot more okay with 'Well I guess I'm buying a bunch of Medicine Charms now!' because the experience I'd been saving was just potential growth.

Another note is that this kind of 'sequence' is actually something you almost want to mark as a Storyline end- to refresh virtues and more freely give out bonus XP to offset any 'reactive' purchases that might've thrown the player off. Being a session or even two sessions (realtime weeks) behind on a plan is much less awful than being 4-5. Remember that in Sunlit Sands, I get about 1 mortal xp and 4 magical xp every session, as well.

Back to Hinna and graduating 'tension/control', the other thing, is that if you had inflicted damage on Inks, actual HLs of damage, without giving me a roll to resist, and I had remembered (because at the time I admit I was not paying attention, too enraptured trying to Escape), i would have had an issue. Always give a resistance roll, if for no other reason than to just show the player 'hey, something worth resisting is happening'.

Now you start bringing up Inks's Conviction 5- I think i touched on it already, but part of the genius of Virtues is that they are Always On. You don't get to choose when to be Conv 5, you just Are, 25/7. Part of Inks's 'lack of focus' is not because she doesn't pay attention (though more seriously it's because I forget and want to build my empire), it's because she gives everything she does or feels 120% of her attention. Friend, foe, lover or employee. Idle fancy or diehard cause, she can't not dig into that wellspring of commitment.

Now in practice, in roleplaying, Inks actually comes off a lot more light-hearted and flippant, but drive to her goals is a fundamental part of her character... and Hinna put herself in her way.

'Mean to my character'... that's an interesting thing to tackle. If you're familiar with the idea of 'friend or idol' decision, that's in my opinion the thing you want to avoid. Putting the screws to Inks, demands on her time, her morals, her health and so on is all part of the social contract of playing a game with rules to do those things to each other. I as a player generally want a fair, 'trust the dice' approach to this sort of thing, as well. The line you want to not cross is mean to the player. Mean-to-player is like constant surprise costs or 'gotchas'; or unreasonable burdens that hew into melodrama.

I think that's the important part- you want to be Fair. Hinna using drugs, starvation, beatings and so on to inflict penalties is 'fair', but it would have gotten unfair if you piled them on so high, I'd have had no chance of making even Difficulty 1 actions. Or you inflict a lot of penalties and keep the Difficulties very high. Making the characters weak raises the tension, sure, but it also can raise negative emotions and a certain, adversarial angle.

Like, I was felt like I was not playing against you Aleph, which is a good thing, but I also was not playing with you, either- also a good thing.

Okay I meandered a lot, but I finally gathered my thoughts re: Fire web plan-

Aleph, you haven't had a lot of experiences with setpieces like I have l. I live for setpieces. Grand venues to stunt off of and embellish details, vistas or intimate enclosures. A setpiece is akin to a highly speciaized, stuntable location. It is the place in which Chases happen, Duels occur, and so on.

Like, tossing this out- Where's the giant vat of chemicals I can dash at and tilt over, using Graceful Crane to dance along the tables and heads of dog-demons as they wail and melt in the face of the kimberian acids? Or maybe Hinna had bound demon spiders working like the movement gear from Attack on Titan, allowing her to hang from the ceiling, and force me to jump around dodging?

Now, Inks is actually very bad physically, stat wise. She is a sexy, sexy nerd, but she's got the stamina and athletics of one as well. (Amusingly though she is Str 3, so she is Fit, from heaving Chronicle around).

Having said all that though, I need to stress this for both you and the thread at large- Setpieces are not just about physical action. The Cuban Missile Crisis was a setpiece, that sequence from Jet Li's Hero, where he approaches the emperor in stages is a setpiece, rapid trading on the stock markets is a setpiece. Ostentatious, bold, colorful characters even if they're one-offs are part of the culture of Exalted I came from- so I do see things in those terms possibly more than I should.

Range of options- I think you covered what you should and should not have done pretty well here, but I want to say that while Inks is the player character, the Storyteller is as much a player, and both sides need to be respected. The ST's job is often many times more difficult than the PC's, after all.

Now you say 'curve back to Inks's goals', and I admit the outline you've drafted here sounds like a good idea... it almost sounds too good, which is in my mind always a concern about both the storyteller, and writing homebrew content for the game and a whole bunch of other related things. I think... the best advice I can give you is not describe purposes, but in term describe rules. Back in SNG, I had a one-off artifact that was a memory crystal show up. The PCs back then realized 'wait, it's not paper, so Ryzala, Lady of Paperwork can't read it!'.

I didn't tell them that at all. I didn't even intend it. I allowed it, because it made them feel good.

Now, there's a time and place to be permissive, sometimes you shouldn't allow something, no matter how logical or well argued, if it's unbalancing or athematic. This is why every time it comes up, I always tell people 'No, you cannot do Nanoha or Nasuverse style 'barriers' to prevent damage from happening to mortals or the countryside. You will break eggs making this omelette.'

So with regard to the sun storage crystals, I would have focused more on what they were and how they worked, and waited for me to 'remember' that Sunlight/Solar Essence is one of the key elements of cleansing Shadowlands. If you have to, tell me 'rethink what you have access to' or 'take another look at that'; both in character and out.

I should point out as well that in a multiplayer game, or even a game that has people discussing it between sessions without playing, means a lot of these things get noticed faster. Sadly, Sunlit Sands does not have a huge discussion base, so I don't get to workshop ideas or plothooks with many people, including Aleph.

I think a thing to avoid is the 'fall into your lap effect'. I felt like I earned Hinna's lab and all her works, but it's still somewhat convenient- I will admit though that I'm very gunshy about 'convenience' from other games I've been in, because I'm used to being appeased so that I stop arguing, which isn't what I want. Being given things undermines the goal of earning them. I have an irrational streak when it comes to some things, because I'm seeing them more as 'Wait, this completely invalidates my character arc' vs the intended opportunities like 'Wait, I can knock down mountains?'

You haven't been doing either of those things Aleph, but that's where I come from often.

I think the thing about Bidaha comes from the idea that I'm used to portraying demons as wanting to stay in creation, either by other STs or myself as player. The idea of sending a demon back to hell, even empowered as an agent of a Solar, seems strange to me. Hell is a nasty brutal place where you die in the gigadeaths and it feels unreasonable to even try to establish any persistent force there outside of an allied 2nd circle. So in this case, more tutorialization is needed. I am glad you clarified your intentions here, though I'm bemused that you might've outed your Master Plan for Bidaha a bit too early.

Now I know that there's a fair amount of evidence or homebrew push that demons want to get out of Creation too- the sunlight hurts them, for example, or their grasp of social mores alienates them from humans, and humans don't 'get' demons either, all sorts of things. See Hopping Puppeteers and their fascination with children.

Of course, the joke also is that clearly Inks is just going to have a full on harem anime cast living in her estate at some point. She's already got an Elemental, is working on the DB, likely an Abyssal Waifu (I haven't confirmed what Tatters is though), and now a first circle demon. There's a god-blooded bootycall on the side, Sulieman as her heroic mortal mancandy- all she needs are a few gods, a couple more Exalts and the other Circles and she'll have the whole set. (I am going to again remind you that honestly, Exalted don't fantasize about threesomes).

Mechanizing things like Hinna's comeuppance is often fun when you really dial it in- and like with many things, hindsight is 20/20.

I did like the demons and I did pick up quickly that aside from the anhules, (which were not clear as to how they were summoned/bound), Hinna only could have gotten her patrons' assortment of demons. I had actually read their writeups in the exalted thread an hour or so before the session, so when I first saw them described I was like 'Well clearly ES has been helping Aleph with the session today.' This is not a bad thing, mind.

I did touch on it in my original post I think that Hinna was 'entertainingly wrong'. I did like it. I can also say though that 'Exaltation solipsism' is one of the hardest things to get right and extremely easy to get wrong. People spend session after session hamming up the question of 'am I a good and just person? Am I a monster like my predecessors? Look at how noble I am for loudly speaking out how much i repudiate the people I had once been!" I've done it, I've seen a bunch of other people do it- it can be done well, but it's really hard.

This is partially why I play Inks as a brazen open solar, because I'm dead tired of the furtive, clandestine, on-the-run Solar. I wanted to play someone with an ego but not an asshole. I don't want to, as a player, waste time with doubt, when I could be doing things instead. It's not that I dislike melodrama, it's that I've had a lot of it.
 
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Vicero, the Wasteland Khan
Demon of the Second Circle
Wisdom Soul of the Blue-Glass Maiden

Swift Vicero has the noble poise of a prince. His wind-blown white hair is shaggy and his eyes are pupiless and ruby-red. He dresses in loose robes of fine demon-silk, and rides a sand-mouse named Tercero who - he brags - can outpace Adorjan herself. To his foes he has no pity, but to his friends he is the most jovial and generous of men. It is through his gregarious nature and his talent for picking servants that he surrounds himself with powerful sublimati and other demon lords captivated by his charm. By temperament he is peculiarly vulnerable to betrayal, for he is too trusting of those who convince him of their bona fides.

Within the Endless Desert his servants ride desert mice and snakes, seizing rare oases and ancient ruins. Countless bands of mounted demons patrol the silver sands. Those outsiders who encounter one of these groups are presented with the choice to pay him his dues and accept them as their guides, or be cut down where they stand. Vicero was tasked by his greater self to harry and cause suffering upon the border districts of the Demon City, so that none look out to the sands and hope to find freedom there. Sometimes he sends legion upon legion to scale the walls and sack and pillage whatever they find, dragging their plunder out into the wastes and leaving the survivors behind to bemoan the desolation.

If one were to accept the claims of Vicero, his empire exceeds even Octavian's in scale. Such immensity is hard to verify, though, for his domain is one of salt plains, silver sand and mountains of glass. The Wasteland Khan is the lord of an expanse of where Cecelyne touches her younger brother, with the great basalt rib-walls forming the common border of his holdings. He makes his capital on the living salt-plain Rhom, in parched Azh-Vul - once of Creation, banished to Hell by its Solar master for its sins. Those who venture to this waterless city where they drink only blood and milk find that it is stacked high with the treasures of Malfeas. Some naive infernalists who have sought to venture to Malfeas have mistaken Azh-Vul for the Demon City - a misapprehension that Vicero takes endless amusement from and seeks to encourage.

Sorcerers call upon Vicero as a general and a leader. Though his personal skills at management are merely passable, his ruby eyes can unerringly pick out the most desirable underlings to promote in an organisation. The Wasteland Khan prefers to sack cities than hold them, and in war he leads cavalry in daring maneuvers which harass and slice apart baggage chains. Betrayal by his friends (or his binding sorcerer) does terrible things to his mind - roll his Conviction and he gains that number of points of Limit. Viscero can escape from Hell whenever a sandstorm subsumes a city of wealth and repute, riding out of the storm at the head of a formation of his demon-servants. When the storm ends, though, he and his army retreat with it.
 
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