- Location
- Canada
How would we actually know? Castrating their ability to express themselves as multitudes was one of the last things he did before going into a self induced coma. He hasn't had a personality to shift in about 5000 years.
General Exalted Thread
How would we actually know? Castrating their ability to express themselves as multitudes was one of the last things he did before going into a self induced coma. He hasn't had a personality to shift in about 5000 years.
- Location
- Ottawa
Pretty sure I remember something about each Yozi losing a 3rd Circle during their surrender.
I like Glories. My head remains intact and attached.
Typo in the cost of Fairness of Uncaring Law. Missing bullet point in the definition of a Criminal; also, I think it'd be better to move the exclusionary condition outside the bulleted list. Extra line breaks in The Last Argument of Kings and Charged With False Crimes.
Minor edits aside...it's been a while since I did anything with 2e so take all this with a grain of salt.
Counter-Pronouncement of Enthymemic Law looks pretty good. Setting aside all setting metaphysics, I think this take on Cecelyne is more game-able than the utterly cynical one.
I don't like Laws from on High. Canned stories make for bad Charms; better to make laws by making laws.
Fairness of Uncaring Law seems too good. Doubling successes is a little much, you know?
I really like the concept of Charged with False Crimes but the details look a little hinky. Can the Infernal resist their own attack? Which Attribute is used? What does it mean by "extra" successes? Is commitment some kind of 2e-ism I've forgotten? How much does it cost to reject outright immediately?
I don't think The Last Argument of Kings should let you customise its stats like that. Recipe for broken-ness, that.
I thought of that! That's why the mechanic applies to PCs, but is not in the players' hands. The ST is in charge of interpreting the destiny's scope, so it'll never turn into "everything I want to do". As a player you can and should word the fates you create (or choose to have at chargen) carefully, but ultimately their implementation is not in your hands.
As for barbecue's work, there's some good stuff there. But I think approaching from the other direction is a mistake. It leads to over-systematisation on the back-end where you need flexibility and vagueness onscreen where you need clarity.
There are two key things I want from a destiny system that aren't provided by that approach.
First, I want prophecies that can twist like snakes. If a Destiny has its own list of landmarks, that means it'll never be fulfilled in a way that surprises everyone. It should be possible for everyone, ST included, to be angling for a prophecy to be fulfilled in one way, only for surprises and changes of mind to lead to another fulfilment.
Second, I want guidance on how hard it is to fight destiny in practice. If destiny says that the Wyld Hunt will kill me today, how does that affect the fight between them and me? How much "luck" should the Hunt get?
- Location
- my house
Thank you so much for the feedback! It's nice to know someone cares enough to do so. Will post responses later tonight
That works a lot better, especially since there's a clear escalation in the benefits as you spend more points.
The point is that, similar to how Infernal allowing the Yozi the possibility to escape, the escalation to cosmic scale stuff tends to devour everything else if given the chance and not reigned in, something that Worm didn't do. Street level worm works fine, but when discussing/writing worm you have to put at least some effort in steering things away from the cosmic stuff.
Phrasing it like "castration" and "self-induced coma" seems like kind of a needlessly dour and proscriptive way to cast Autochthon's non-adherence to the explicitly-busted Yozi soul-model out to be some kind of negative, when there's already so much wrong with the guy. What the Divine Ministers are intended to display is that unmaimed Primordials have far more nuance and control over their internal hierarchies, something arguably necessary for the oft-touted "uniqueness" shown between them. All the pieces are still fundamentally there, in roughly the same places and articulated in the same ways (though not necessarily by the same actors) to illustrate the same systems insisting "this is how Autochthon, the Great Maker, exists as an incarnate being."
Mostly this all just comes back to us not knowing nearly as much about primordials themselves as we like to imagine we do after applying the traits used for classifying "Yozis" onto them. If you decide to take a nap in a dark room after a long day, has your altered consciousness "castrated" your daily activities?
- Location
- Canada
I use "Castration" and "Coma" because (At least in 2E, which are the only books that I actually have) those are the words used to describe what's going on in Canon.
According to those books, what Autocthon did wasn't some nuanced alternative for how he could express himself, it was several moves of desperation all taken at the same time, because one of his ministers got out of control and made him paranoid enough to think taking himself off his medical treatments and hiding out in Elsewhere in a coma on basic life-support for a couple thousand years sounded like a good idea.
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The 2e books are also a regretfully reductionist take on both Autochthon's character motives and the setting he turned himself into, and tries to boil down or shove everything previously established about or within Autochthonia into convenient little boxes already laid out by Infernals when the two never should have interacted in the first place. So I don't tend to take it as anything but material written for people who view the guy as a plot-setpiece to a Solar-directed story and glossed over when the time comes to turn focus back to Creation.
Its a really bad standard to hold Autochthon too when trying to gain any insight as to "how Primordials function," whether it is canon or not.
I strongly disagree on the topic of "Autochthon is super special and doesn't have a soul hierarchy that works like other Primordials". No - the refusal to treat the Divine Ministers as regular Third Circles was just a failure of 1e's writers to understand Primordials as per GoD and/or the endless desire and tedious to make Autochthon super special. It's not enough that he's a Primordial who sided with the gods and made the Exaltations, no, he's got to have special souls, and not have any 2CDs or 1CDs, and indeed lack pretty much every Primordial trait you care to mention as defined in Games of Divinity.
2e was chained by 1e's silliness there - that's why we get those inelegant retcons design to try to work around bad old legacy code.
In my opinion, people are better off just ignoring that and giving the Divine Ministers their own 2CDs - and, indeed, declaring that metaphysically the lesser spirits of Autochthon are First Circles. Making Autochthon super special with regards to his soul hierarchy serves nothing. The Divine Ministers should have Second Circles, because they're the souls of a Primordial and they're too big to contain their souls within one form. First circles are servitor races, so the servitor race spirits of Autochthon should be first circles. Oh, they're better designed, less chaotic servitors who aren't made on a whim by the greater spirits (who no doubt have all kinds of planning committees for "do we need a new race to help maintain the integrity of steam pipes by eating corrosion off the inside, or do we have an existing breed, and can we improve efficiency and phase out the old model?") but that just means we get to see first circles in a 'natural' environment, rather than the deadly prison of Malfeas.
2e was chained by 1e's silliness there - that's why we get those inelegant retcons design to try to work around bad old legacy code.
In my opinion, people are better off just ignoring that and giving the Divine Ministers their own 2CDs - and, indeed, declaring that metaphysically the lesser spirits of Autochthon are First Circles. Making Autochthon super special with regards to his soul hierarchy serves nothing. The Divine Ministers should have Second Circles, because they're the souls of a Primordial and they're too big to contain their souls within one form. First circles are servitor races, so the servitor race spirits of Autochthon should be first circles. Oh, they're better designed, less chaotic servitors who aren't made on a whim by the greater spirits (who no doubt have all kinds of planning committees for "do we need a new race to help maintain the integrity of steam pipes by eating corrosion off the inside, or do we have an existing breed, and can we improve efficiency and phase out the old model?") but that just means we get to see first circles in a 'natural' environment, rather than the deadly prison of Malfeas.
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- Location
- Pittsburgh, PA
My (admittedly limited & fragmentary) knowledge of the lore makes a strong argument for Autochthon's attempts to "fix" the problems with Primordial soul hierarchies only resulting in something even more dysfunctional.
The Primordials are dynamic entities; their thoughts are people and so the process of decision-making, of choosing how to prioritize those thoughts, takes the form of discourse, intrigues, duels, contests of skill, and open warfare.
Autochthon essentially locked down his thought-people and banned them from taking individual action, while simultaneously sealing off the Second Circle souls they used to express their own individual natures. In the soul-hierarchy-as-thought-process analogy, that's... nothing good. At best, it's Autochthon hammering down fistfuls of downers to silence his inner discourse (by silencing all activity, period) in a hilariously irresponsible attempt to self-medicate. At worst, it's Autochthon more or less lobotomizing himself, destroying the ability of his "brain's" individual compartments to communicate and thus eradicating the greater whole that should arise from their interactions.
None of the things happening in Autochthonia indicate that what he did was in any way beneficial, and if his soul structure was always this badly gridlocked then he'd never have been able to do much of anything, much less mastermind the downfall of Theion's rule.
No, it seems much more likely that the Great Maker, faced with the wholesale genocide of his People of Adamant at Exalted hands, succumbed to terror and despair and did the Primordial equivalent of locking himself in the bathroom & chugging a bottle of painkillers.
Imrix
Periodically Malevolent QM
I echo Revlid: This is super cool and I want to play here. It feels sort of settled Viking meets magitech AI overlord.
Speaking of Autochthon I've been thinking about how would one play one of the mortal Autochthions who exalted as a Solar or Luner. I only read the bits in Savege Sons thus far, and that one really good bit of fanfiction about the Locust Crusade, so I'm wondering what some of the more experienced hands thoughts are on this. I'm also wondering what you think would the best splats to read on the subject.
(And I know @ManusDomine already has some stuff to say about it 
)
)
greensun
You shall all burn beneath my light!!!
Oh no... What'd it do the Dragonblooded this time...(And I know @ManusDomine already has some stuff to say about it
Here is the thing, the "Autochthon Sucks and shouldn't be Special" narrative simply feeds into the same flawed mindset of over-codification that you claim to hate so much. He IS special to an extent that he is different, the only example we have been given of a foreground-acting, undamaged primordial existing as a whole setting unto himself. This in direct contrast to Gaia, who is entirely nebulous save for confirmations that she and Creation are not the same thing, and Malfeas, who is so bent up it is impossible to tell where he ends and the Surrender Oaths begin. So yes, Autochthon has something going for him that does not apply elsewhere among the primordial-equivalent things we are aware of, and rather than trying to work that difference into the established "yozis are crippled primordials," it seems like a total dearth of imagination to attempt to spin that back into "therefore primordials are just yozis with more souls because they lack victimization metaphors."
I mean, shit, "a yozi is nothing but a bunch of demons on three distinct levels, a personality-charmset, thematically-redundant Jouten and nothing else of real consequence" is broadly held to be the absolute nadir of 2e-isms, so the fact that Autochthon nevertheless defies this classification in a few critical ways should be fucking welcomed here. He's an opened door, another example of what a primordial can be shown as and how that structure can organize itself, not necessarily the same exact thing we see in Malfeas but with a huge and glaring Cannot Summon This Shit stamp planted on it. Could it be written with a closer eye towards justifying itself to folks who are still riled up about how much focus he got in late-1e and desperately want a "universal classification system for allegedly-unique cosmic godbeasts"? Maybe, but I think that effort is better put towards defining how Autochthon's internal consistency fleshes itself out (which the 2e book did a piss-poor job of getting across) than trying to pry-bar everything into a Demon-Summoning shaped hole.
Autochthon is not a Yozi, so I see no reason to posture like he should be treated as one, or that his current state is some sort of Mistake to be Corrected, when it could easily be the out which everyone has been looking for in the attempt to broaden the definition what "primordial" entails.
Look, Autochthon is more than just a collection of concepts and a backstory, he's also a setting which has to stand under its own weight without collapsing. So in this respect, either you have Autochthon be sickly and dying as a result of his illness, or you have him irreparably damage himself through complete and unforeseen incompetence, because Autochthonia as a setting cannot coexist with both.
If not only are gremlins out of control but ALSO his subgods have no authority to actually maintain his life and health like they are supposed too, the whole thing crumbles into itself. How exactly a mortal society is intended to survive these kinds of circumstances for several thousand years is beyond the pale, let alone suspension of disbelief. Because even setting that enormous handwave aside (no doubt trying to say the Alchemicals somehow keep the sky from falling in when they're primarily designed to manage mortals and anti-spirit operations), if you Could somehow fix everything gremlin-related, the whole thing will eventually go to shit anyway due to Minister-infighting without either a common enemy or top-down leadership to make sure everyone avoids working at cross-purposes.
The more you try to make Autochthon suck, the more it undermines the viability of using Autochthonia as a worthwhile place to run games to begin with.
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No, that simply doesn't follow at all. You can assert it all you want, but it's nothing more than a blank ungrounded assertion. Much like your argument that Autochthon being super special by having his souls work differently isn't just Autochthon being a super special and unique snowflake - which is something the line is known to be very prone to, along with giving him credit for everything.
Games of Divinity lays down the groundwork and structure for how Primordials work - they are creatures so vast that not only do their souls take on their own form, but their souls have souls. It's a mark of their metaphysical immensity and the fact that the Divine Ministers don't basically simply matches the way that the line wants to act like they're high ranking gods, not Third Circles. From such a pantheon are born their servitor races - and likewise, the simple fact is that Autochthonia's "machine spirits" (who act just like gods) and "oh look at our new elementals" (literally copy pasted elementals to new elements) are copypasta of how things work in Creation. The structure isn't something new, and it's not something that can contrast with how things work in Creation - not really. Autochthon is not served in any meaningful way by making him super special and being substantially different from the other Primordials we know of - indeed, it directly negates some of his story if he is not a rebel Primordial, but is instead a different class of being.
If you want to challenge assumptions about what a Primordial is, you don't make the already super special one even more super special. You've already released the unicorn in the garden for that one. You take a Yozi, and then you play with one of them - like Kimbery and the fact that she displays Progenerative souls as a kind of 2CD. Perhaps Metagaos's hunger and cosmic consumption means that the boundaries between 2CD and 3CD are much more fluid than for other Primordials, and his second circles constantly fight and devour each other to get enough power to take on a third circle and win - like a cosmic 80s Wall Street firm with even more literal cannibalism. Or maybe it's something else. There's far more interesting things that can be done than what they did with Autochthon.
Let's not even get started on the fact that the changes to Autochthon from the base Primordial structure just go on to make him less distinctive and unusual, because the GoD Primordial is a much more unusual being than the generic "fantasy powerful being with aspects" - and that's what Autochton resembles. So, no, I'm not willing to cut credit there when it's actively making Autochthon more bland and cutting out what makes Primordials unusual in fantasy fiction.
The fact that Autocthon essentially does not meaningfully display any of the traits of a GoD Primordial is not really "challenging assumptions" and it's not a brave and bold move. I'm not sure whether it's a simple failure to comprehend the point of a GoD Primordial or whether it's another of the "Oh, look how special he is" that late 1e and early 2e were full of, but either way, it's not impressing me much. You can throw disingenuous comments about 2e all you want, but that doesn't actually mean anything when I'm comparing his failure to live up to the structure described in 1e - and how despite your protests that it "challenges assumptions", I'd considering it more "failing to live up to standards".
"All primordials must adhere to this exact, preset template in every possible representation they can be shown in, but no really they are all unique creatures and everything" is exactly what you are spelling out. To be honest you sort of overplayed your hand, by having more of an issue with Autochthon apparently Existing within the setting at all since 1e made such a hash of his metaplot-relevance than you do over how he's been classically portrayed, canon or otherwise.
Games of Divinity lays down the groundwork of the Yozis, because they are a collective group with more in common with eachother than (largely unspecified) primordials elsewhere. Nowhere is it spelled out in there how much they had been changed at this point, simply that they were maimed and lesser, nor was Autochthon a major element in the story yet. Everything we understand about primordials from this is largely reading tea-leaves from what we are shown via the yozis, and what works for the Demon Realm does not necessitate that anywhere else built out from the body of a primordial-scale being needs to be Malfeas 2.0: This Time It's Industrial.
The Creation-comparisons you are drawing mostly come down to the fact Alchemicals 1e was a Very, very condensed book to make room for the three enormous campaigns no one ever cared much about. There are all of 39 pages of setting-text in that book, and a scant 14 past that dedicated to outlining not just Autochthon's soul-hierarchy, but every spirit and elemental inside him. Considering that was all the information we ever Had about Autochthonia, while every new demon or embellishment about the Demon Realm added even more detail onto the growing pile of "stuff about the yozis which everyone takes as gospel about primordials altogether," I think it is fair to say there's an unequal standard being held here. That the writers they got to work with that threadbare outline for 2e bodged it up worse is a mark against those writers, not that the premise they were given had no value to it.
The Ministers are set-up to be Incarna-alikes, but largely because laying out the means that they could interact with the setting at-large without being overly commanding of it would demand way more than just two paragraphs devoted to each, let alone the kind of justifications needed to spell out how and why the Core works as it does as his Fetich. The elementals technically should display some of the strange and altered domains their respective machine-elements hold, but they went for the most block-standard examples they could while those domains were secreted away into a tiny table on the ass-end of the nominal Sorcery section.
Elemental Oil, the Water-analogue, has associations of "diplomacy, cooperation, discovery, friendship, recreation," which makes it plainly apparent it is neither a copy-paste or a retread, but something which Could have been embellished on but sadly was not. I'd be the first person to tell you the book suffers from how much it has to curtail in its breakneck race towards Adventures no one paid much mind towards beyond the fact one statted a Deathlord. This is potential for good material, which never materialized through no fault of not being "like everyone read between the lines how primordials should operate."
So I'm going to ask you to simply make up your mind here, is Autochthon TOO different or is his biggest failing not being different Enough? Because you seem to be arguing from both cases and really, I don't think making Autochthon into the MechaYozi you Really wanted to going to make his presence any more tolerable for you.
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Actually he was squeeing over KARAVA, THE WALKING DEVIL TOWER
Which can be summed up as 'we evangelion now'
greensun
You shall all burn beneath my light!!!
Good news for a change.
This section cuts to the core of your argument, because either I'm not being clear or you're not grasping my point.
Autochthon is already the Special Primordial because he's the one who 100% sided with the Incarnate Rebellion, made the Exalted, and has been handed credit for countless other things. Therefore as he is already special, the fact that 1e went and for no good reason didn't abide by the rules for how Primordials are meant to work doesn't add anything with regards to making him distinctive. It just makes him more boring, because rather than exploring how his first circles work they just copy-pasted Creation's gods and elementals into him and made his Third Circles into Incarna rather than being proper Third Circles.
Let us go to the space of metaphors for a moment to explain how a character can be both "more special" and "more boring". Consider an urban fantasy series where all magic comes from familiar spirits. Every character has their own set of familiar spirits, who the characters must interact with and form both an exploration of their character (based on what kinds of spirits they attract) and a display of their personality (with how they bargain with their spirits and the kind of price they're willing to pay).
Then we've got a character. He may well have black spiky hair and a bland inoffensive personality. He's probably bullied by the other mages and spends his time helping others and he believes in friendship or something. Regardless, he doesn't have to bargain with the spirits. He's just got powers that he can use with no cost, like a thinly veiled D&D wizard. He is undoubtedly special. He's also more boring, because he doesn't display one of the most interesting traits of the way things work in that world.
In the metaphor, that spiky-haired blando is Autochthon. He's special, because he doesn't follow the rules everyone else does. He's also more boring, because he's lost something distinctive for that setting element and replaced it with something more common in the overall genre).
Autochthon is already special, because he's the rebel Primordial who made the Exalted and who remains free to this day. His soul model is also less distinctive and simplified - literally it's lower resolution. It doesn't make him more interesting; it just makes him less of a Primordial, because a Primordial is defined by certain things that make them distinctive in the genre and the "I heard you liked souls, so my souls have souls" is just about number one of their unusual traits.
Calling him a "mecha-Yozi" as an insult doesn't make me inclined to give your argument any more credit, because your axiom that "only Yozis have soul hierarchies" is something utterly unsupported. Games of Divinity gives nothing to indicate that the soul hierarchy was something forced on them by their imprisonment and that'd be a pretty important detail. Giving him a proper hierarchy just makes him what is more accurately known as a "mecha-Primordial", to which I respond "Yes, that's the point, he's a Primordial and I want to see what a mostly intact Primordial looks like in the wild, not some lazy cut and paste job of Creation's set up with gods and elementals". The fact that Exalted: the Autochthonians was so scanty there because it was trying to be a campaign book and a Scavenger Sons-alike and a splatbook just means I look at it and go "Yeah, that's just a sketch and so when the sketch gets more details just draw in the missing details like the rest of the soul hierarchy - who may well have just been left out because they couldn't spare the wordcount to explain how Primordials work and they didn't assume people had read GoD".
And for everyone else in this thread, who is no doubt getting as bored with this conversation as I am...
A Doorway to Death
Price: 10m; Circle: Emerald; Anchor: (Any) 2+
Target: Ritual object
Spell Duration: Concentration/Until Dawn; Casting Duration: Emerald/One Hour
Essence Aspect: Necrotic, Lunar, Autochthonic; Favoured Aspect: Necrotic
Those sorcerers who dabble with the fell Dead know secret paths to the places underground where they dwell. Within graveyards and on old battlefields, these corpse-witches pass from the lands of the living to the grey lands of the Dead.
Ritual: As part of an hour long ritual that invokes their Anchor, the sorcerer creates a symbolic doorway to the Underworld. The ritual site must be out of direct sunlight and must be in a place of death - for that reason, such spells are often cast in underground crypts or catacombs.
Mechanics: A successful (Attribute) + (Ability) roll at Difficulty 5 is required to successfully open the doorway. The following modifiers to the Difficulty apply (min Diff 1):
Each permutation of this spell has an applicable Attribute + Ability combination for the roll that must be made. One that involves singing so sweetly that the gates of death open might require (Charisma + Performance), while one which involves painting an intricate rune on the doorway might require (Dexterity + Craft (Air)).
Effects: At the culmination of the ritual, the door opens and remains open as long as she concentrates. In all cases, the passage involves a descent - a ritual circle may become a black portal which characters must lower themselves into, while a prepared door leads to a narrow spiral staircase down to the Underworld. Should any sunlight fall on the doorway, it automatically closes. This includes the anima banner of a Solar.
When the sorcerer casts this spell at night, she may choose to instead give it a Duration of 'Until Dawn'. The doorway must be counterspelled or exposed to sunlight to be closed before then. If making use of a doorway previously constructed by this spell, the sorcerer can instead re-open a doorway where the world is already thin with a Casting Duration of Emerald. She must either have participated in the creation of the doorway, or be using the same class of Anchor.
The doorway usually opens into the shallowest domain which reflects the location in the living world, though a sorcerer should be wary. The casting of the spell creates a reflection of the door in the Underworld, which can be used for the sorcerer's return as long as both it and the doorway in Creation remains intact. While this spell is active, the doorway is two way. The Dead can enter Creation through such a gate just as easily as the living can pass to the Underworld. When using a doorway to return to Creation, it always involves ascent.
If the spell is cast with an Anchor of Whispers, the necromancer may instead choose to open the gate to any Cyst or location in the Labyrinth they possess an arcane link to. However, this option does not create a reflection of the doorway. Their path back to Creation is left as an exercise to the reader.
Price: 10m; Circle: Emerald; Anchor: (Any) 2+
Target: Ritual object
Spell Duration: Concentration/Until Dawn; Casting Duration: Emerald/One Hour
Essence Aspect: Necrotic, Lunar, Autochthonic; Favoured Aspect: Necrotic
Those sorcerers who dabble with the fell Dead know secret paths to the places underground where they dwell. Within graveyards and on old battlefields, these corpse-witches pass from the lands of the living to the grey lands of the Dead.
Ritual: As part of an hour long ritual that invokes their Anchor, the sorcerer creates a symbolic doorway to the Underworld. The ritual site must be out of direct sunlight and must be in a place of death - for that reason, such spells are often cast in underground crypts or catacombs.
Mechanics: A successful (Attribute) + (Ability) roll at Difficulty 5 is required to successfully open the doorway. The following modifiers to the Difficulty apply (min Diff 1):
- Favoured Aspect (Diff -2)
- The sorcerer makes an offering of animal blood to the doorway (Diff -1) or human blood (Diff -2). The offering must be at least one lethal health level's worth.
- The ritual involves a human sacrifice (Diff -4, only when opening a doorway to the Underworld)
- The sorcerer conducts an extended ritual which takes at least three hours to complete (Diff -1)
- The location has known death recently (Diff -1) or the deaths in this place were long ago or infrequent (Diff +1)
- The sorcerer is casting the spell in the Underworld and is attempting to make a new doorway rather than reopen an existing one (Diff +2)
Each permutation of this spell has an applicable Attribute + Ability combination for the roll that must be made. One that involves singing so sweetly that the gates of death open might require (Charisma + Performance), while one which involves painting an intricate rune on the doorway might require (Dexterity + Craft (Air)).
Effects: At the culmination of the ritual, the door opens and remains open as long as she concentrates. In all cases, the passage involves a descent - a ritual circle may become a black portal which characters must lower themselves into, while a prepared door leads to a narrow spiral staircase down to the Underworld. Should any sunlight fall on the doorway, it automatically closes. This includes the anima banner of a Solar.
When the sorcerer casts this spell at night, she may choose to instead give it a Duration of 'Until Dawn'. The doorway must be counterspelled or exposed to sunlight to be closed before then. If making use of a doorway previously constructed by this spell, the sorcerer can instead re-open a doorway where the world is already thin with a Casting Duration of Emerald. She must either have participated in the creation of the doorway, or be using the same class of Anchor.
The doorway usually opens into the shallowest domain which reflects the location in the living world, though a sorcerer should be wary. The casting of the spell creates a reflection of the door in the Underworld, which can be used for the sorcerer's return as long as both it and the doorway in Creation remains intact. While this spell is active, the doorway is two way. The Dead can enter Creation through such a gate just as easily as the living can pass to the Underworld. When using a doorway to return to Creation, it always involves ascent.
If the spell is cast with an Anchor of Whispers, the necromancer may instead choose to open the gate to any Cyst or location in the Labyrinth they possess an arcane link to. However, this option does not create a reflection of the doorway. Their path back to Creation is left as an exercise to the reader.
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Parabola
Divided Loyalties Librarian
- Location
- The Destination of Fate
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Arms looks great. I love how Sun's Brush, an orichalcum grimcleaver, also functions as a writing brush. You can write stuff on enemies Zorro-style, and one of its evocations allows you to brand a target with a mark that shines like a Solar caste mark. Depending on which effect you choose, it increases in intensity if the target lies (Falsehood), gives a penalty when they attack or opposes someone with higher intelligence (Ignorance), or marks someone as a creature of darkness (but only if they actually are one) (Wickedness).
Imagine applying the first or second to a Dynast. Imagine the bullying potential.
Imagine applying the first or second to a Dynast. Imagine the bullying potential.
- Location
- Denmark
- Pronouns
- She/Her
All of it. It's a fucking good book with items such as Mistweaver; a shogunate-era reaver daiklave with command over the mists, made by a scavenger who failed his third return from the fog-shrouded Valley of Golden Needles, to Mela's Coil, a set of armour forged in the early days of the shogunate to glorify Mela, now used by the Wyld Hunt a thousand times through history, a venerable relic of the Immaculate Faith, disappearing on one fateful Wyld Hunt, it's final resting place unknown, to the great concern of Lookshy and Dynasty alike.
It also contains genuinely powerful and useful warstriders like Emerald Chevalier, again built in the Shogunate by the young daimyo Ghashara Steel-Petal, it's upper body like a beautiful woman of jade and it's lower body four-legged and equine, now lying in some unknown grave waiting for someone to reforge it or Karvara, the Walking Devil Tower; an ancient god-beast imprisoned in an armoured prison of Moonsilver, it's spine carved in to make way for fuselage and controls woven with the threads of it's nervous system.
But that is not all! There are siege weapons like the lightning ballistae or implosion bows! Ancient automata like the Brass Legionnaires or the Jade Steed! Mighty ships of the line like Horizon Endeavour or a long-lost Chariot of Aerial Conquest.
It is a very good book and it is absolutely worth your money.