I remember, I was just quoting greensun.
Derp. Yeah, as it first appears, the Forest is fairly Metagaos; although I would say its still more Gaian, as it is more productive than consumptive. Its a fine line, possibly irrelevantly so, but the forest grows and expands, it does not devour.
Resonance is garbage, though, and if you haven't discarded it entirely you should at least use the alternate mechanics for it given in Shards of Exalted Dreams.
I... did not know that. Huh.
That's the good shit right there. Who needs drugs when I have this kind of stuff to keep me going?
Huh. I remembe contributing to that thread.
The other option is to use @EarthScorpion's rewrite of the deathlords, and have Abyssals as the daywalker servants/allies/pawns/slaves/students/lovers/etc. to the corrupted pseudo-Unquestionable lords, ladies, and abominations which dwell in the depths of the world. Any one Abyssal is likely to differentiate massively from another, because who they're working for, why, and to what end ends up defining large swathes of their behavior. They're the envoys of the deep deep dead, the Stygian realm that could previously be ignored by the living; their masters push them to seek out (or destroy) ancient knowledge, fulfill grudges unsatisfied since the Great Contagion, resurrect lost traditions, and/or retrieve people, goods, or entire kingdoms so they may be brought away into the night, never to see the sun again.
Nausicaa in general is great inspiration for Exalted, but the God Warriors are particularly juicy - I once had a writeup where a First Age Solar made one as his son , growing him from a core of Solar Essence blended with stored cultivars of Ramethan, Theionic, and even Metagoian Essence to create a being that could match his own power, and thus be worthy of being his heir - an unconquerable titan of the sort unseen since the Primordial Era, who would claim a kingdom for himself from the lesser Solars, just as its father had seized dominion from the hands of the Primordials.
Nago was the arrogant godblooded son of a boar-god who tried to challenge the might of Iron Town and the Sorceress at its head, only to be driven off and die slowly as the lead slugs lodged in his flesh poisoned him. His outrage and hatred consumed him, and gave rise to a vengeful yidak which then attacked Ashitaka's village in a blind fury. Given the corrosive, toxic qualities of both his own rage and the lead bullets that killed him, his ghost manifested a power to corrode and poison all that it touched.
What about the other boar, though? Whether or not he would qualify as a God outright aside, he wasn't dead when he turned into a demon.
The impression I had is that he was, in fact, dead by that point, but because he's a supernatural being he literally "died on his feet" and seamlessly moved from living to Dead from one step to the next - or that he was demoning up inversely proportionate to his waning lifeforce.
I'm not familiar with the term "cannibal god", but it certainly sounds nasty, and I remember the old boar being a pretty decent guy when he was alive.
I mean, Iron Town did invade his mountain before he challenged them. Also, shaking off arrows like water is not something godblooded can do.
*shrugs*
Article: DEIPHAGES
Although the threat is exaggerated in safer neighborhoods, there are groups of divinities who have gone feral lurking in the more remote and abandoned neighborhoods of Yu-Shan. They are often referred to as ghul. A god is wedded to its domain in a way a mortal cannot be, so when it loses its position in Heaven—especially because its domain was destroyed or diminished—its mental stability suffers. Gods do not control their domains, but their spiritual lives and domains are tied together. Remove the domain, and the god sometimes snaps.
The Usurpation left countless gods diminished. Some of them merely lost their positions, but many saw their domains wiped out entirely. Many of their psyches were forever shattered by the experience, and the damage done has varied from mild derangement to outright homicidal madness. Of the latter, thousands have turned to what amounts to spiritual cannibalism, using Charms to hunt down and absorb the Essence of the unwary.
Such creatures often end up haunting the empty quarters when not invading more inhabited areas. Many of them are unintelligent brutes, but once in a while more intelligent examples of the class arise, some of which are capable organizing the weaker and less intelligent deiphages. In the last 500 years, there have been three riots where small bands of cannibal divinities invaded civilized portions of Heaven, only to be driven off by troops of celestial lions. For a brief time afterward, the lions will purge known haunts belonging to the ghul, but inevitably the gods scatter, and it eventually becomes a waste of time.
The real concern of the lions is not that these gods exist—Yu-Shan has had centuries to get used to that fact of urban life. No, what concerns the celestial lions is that not all of the gods who went mad or had domains destroyed were functionaries—there are gods as powerful as the masters of the various Celestial Bureaus out there, lurking in the sewers and the empty quarters, and many of them managed to hold onto a significant amount of their intellect.
I've been toying with the idea of a major Abyssal overhaul to make them into the torchbearers of a dead shard, an alternate Creation that was unequal to the threats it faced and was destroyed. Using the resonance of their dead world, which was sliding into the mouth of the Void, and Creation's necrotic Underworld they have traversed the unspace between shards. Bearing the souls of billions of mortals as desperate refugees in their soulsteel panoplies, they draw upon the power and knowledge of their world's fallen and lead armies of specters for whom they are both commanders and shepherds. Their goal is to prevent the complete loss of their people by integrating them into Creation's cycle of death and rebirth, allowing those they could not save to live again.
It's supposed to be "no impossible" in the sense that it takes an entire campaign's worth of attention devoted to nothing but working towards that goal and more than likely ends with your death.
Or somehow has a high Soak.
I think it's a perfect Defense. If you watch the scene, none of the arrows sink in. Then he shakes it off like rain.
Hardness boosting/granting Charms?
Or just having a really hard/strong hide.
IIRC, there was a developer commentary on the subject of Solars, Abyssals and Infernals that compared the former two to two sides of a coin, and the third to paper money. In other words, it's the Infernal exaltation which has been most warped out of its original form, whereas an Abyssal Exaltation has merely been 'inverted', so to speak.
I remember some speculation once that the Great Curse acted as a Solar Flaw of Invulnerability.
...Wasn't that flying mountain in the East (Wood Direction) actually a forgotten First Age Directional Fortress Superweapon, complete with a sunlight-focusing lens as a main weapon?
I was under the impression that (in 3e at least) Mount Metagalapa, as well as the giant hawks, was the result of Wyld weirdness during the Balorian Crusade - the mountain just upended, and didn't un-upend when the Empress used the Realm Defense Grid to drive the Raksha back. That might have been what it was in 2e, though. And that would be cool.
Yeah, the whole thing was apparently some Solar's very elaborate attempt to hate-flirt with Metagaos.
