- Location
- my house
I agree with this, and it part of why I don't think they should be able to act
General Exalted Thread
HamSandLich
MEAT WIZARD
- Location
- Somewhere in NOVA, possibly, maybe, presumably
- Pronouns
- He/Him
I've had an idea for an Abyssal with a similar theme, though her initial conclusion is "existence is suffering, therefore, to end all suffering, I have to end all existence", gradually evolving into (as she goes from anti-villian to sort-of hero) "find a way to heal or soothe the pain of the Neverborn, because its the right thing to do"
As for the Yozis, i've always had an idea of their Infernals growing on them after a while(and sufficient effort on the part of the GSPs), letting them experience humanity by proxy.
Strictly speaking, the Neverborn act through their Nephwracks, the Neverborn answer(that's what the Whispers are), but Mardukth will never again hear the answer "You Are Mardukth" (which was basically the entirety of his existence and only real source of stability) because Mardukth is Dead and there is only Who Holds in Thrall, now and forever. But the Neverborn aren't actors like the Yozis are, they rely wholly upon Hekatonkhires, Deathlords, and spectres to enact their will.
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- Location
- my house
Right, I was saying they shouldn't act through them. They should just sit their and decay, and have their decay corrupt the world.
As for bettering the Yozi, that's certainly a win state for this infernal, but I imagine he'll go the "believe in the ideal not the idol" route
If anyone is interested, a big focus of his faith is suffering, and how it teaches kindness and humility. That only those who suffer can really understand the suffering of others
HamSandLich
MEAT WIZARD
- Location
- Somewhere in NOVA, possibly, maybe, presumably
- Pronouns
- He/Him
I mean, personal preference, but I really like the idea of them having some influence through the Whispers, they're not roaming around in Jouten-bodies setting agenda and killing/torturing things for fun, instead, their horrible impossible WILL just automatically bleeds out of the Labyrinth and remakes ghosts in their image. Much like the Darkness from Destiny they don't do things themselves so much as drive people insane and convince them to do things for them. The Neverborn themselves don't act directly, but spectres have so wholly sacrificed themselves to the Neverborn that they exist as vessels for their unconscious will.
AmineHsu
A worm, not a man, scorned and despised.
- Location
- NoVA
... There was a weird moment while reading this it was turning into some really dark Doctor Who fanfiction in my head...
Then I realized it was Mardukth.
Edit: It's really good, by the way.
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MiracleGrow
Miracles for only $19.99 [They/Them]
- Location
- DOOR STUCK DOOR STUCK PLEASE I BEG U
I think I'm kind of splitting off from the threads opinion on this.
But I always seen Abyssals as being very much potential based exalts. As in most of them were basically nobodies of no renown before they exalted.
Pardon my dumb head canons
But I always seen Abyssals as being very much potential based exalts. As in most of them were basically nobodies of no renown before they exalted.
Pardon my dumb head canons
HamSandLich
MEAT WIZARD
- Location
- Somewhere in NOVA, possibly, maybe, presumably
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Seconded, both Abyssals and Infernals have some very compelling themes about second chances. Though the idea of a powerful individual "dying" and returning as an Abyssal has its own appeal. Most of all, Abyssals have the whole "my fate was cruel and unjust" deal about them. Infernals failed through their own personal weakness, but Abyssals got the shaft because of the actions of others.
Most often, for those Abyssal Exaltations that are not under the control of the Deathlords, the shard itself wants to work just like a Solar shard. It wants to find its way to a hero on the cusp of greatness and then give them the boost they need to succeed. It's just that, being corrupted by the Essence of the Underworld, it can't go to a living person. So the shard lingers, until the worthy mortal ends up killed due to them never receiving that push. Then the shard makes contact, and offers the worthy mortal continued life in exchange for their names.
The Exaltation is still actively seeking heroes, it's just not able to reach them in a timely fashion. Though, ExWoD has shards sometimes find individuals who are so great and excellent that the shard isn't willing to just wait around for them to die, and possesses a corpse in order to bring its potential owner to the brink of death by its own initiative.
It's great and I love it. Free-range Abyssals are way more interesting then the ones selected by the Deathlords, who have an unfortunate tendency to select mainly for high functioning murderous sociopaths.
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I think that the Neverborn would be more interesting if they were dead-dead, not shackled to in some limbo by their attachments to Creation, but fully deceased. While Gaia being Creation means we can't have a full on creation-by-conflict origin mythos, they would still evoke Tiamat and Apsu, Pangu, Ymir, Cipactli, and so on. God-monsters who were slain and then had the world wrought from their remains.
The Neverborn are dead, although perhaps in an alien way that would still allow them to create the Abyssals and such. But their corpses remain, and those corpses rot. And regardless of what they were in life, they do as corpses do. They draw scavengers, monstrous alien carrion feeders come to gnaw on mountainous bones and drink stagnant mythos. Vermin and pests burrow under mummified skin and lay eggs among muscle sand sinew, which hatch into ravenous swarms that leave wastelands in their wake. Fungi and disease breed in the books and crannies, spreading into Creation and the Bordermarches through Shadowlands.
I would like the Neverborn to be a setting more than antagonists, even distant ones.
That actually makes it fairly easy to make a martyr-deity of some kind. YHWH gave his life to turn his son into Kung-fu Action Jesus, and all of his worshippers from then on believe they have a part of the Holy Spirit within them.
The Neverborn are dead, although perhaps in an alien way that would still allow them to create the Abyssals and such. But their corpses remain, and those corpses rot. And regardless of what they were in life, they do as corpses do. They draw scavengers, monstrous alien carrion feeders come to gnaw on mountainous bones and drink stagnant mythos. Vermin and pests burrow under mummified skin and lay eggs among muscle sand sinew, which hatch into ravenous swarms that leave wastelands in their wake. Fungi and disease breed in the books and crannies, spreading into Creation and the Bordermarches through Shadowlands.
I would like the Neverborn to be a setting more than antagonists, even distant ones.
Two perfectly benevolent reasons for that off the top of my head: one, it potentially undermines the the religious unity and vigor that had the Empress keep the Immaculates on a leash, and if the Realm feels it can fully apply the boot to Fajad's neck then worship of the One God would still be banned, but it would drag everyone else with it; two, it could potentially be a front for the worship of less savory beings, because evil cultists could just wave off the fact that they aren't worshipping the prophets by saying they're worshipping the One God directly.
3e pretty firmly spits in the eye of the idea that all gods are manipulative and selfish. Ten Sheaves gave his life to empower Janest in order to protect his people.
That actually makes it fairly easy to make a martyr-deity of some kind. YHWH gave his life to turn his son into Kung-fu Action Jesus, and all of his worshippers from then on believe they have a part of the Holy Spirit within them.
Secret is best Abyssal. She was probably my favorite part of Keychain of Creation.
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HamSandLich
MEAT WIZARD
- Location
- Somewhere in NOVA, possibly, maybe, presumably
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Exalted needs more Dying God figures, especially the Ten Sheaves kind. Its an interesting way for religion to evolve independent of godly oversight that doesn't involve some isolated yokels dreaming up a god that doesn't and has never existed(though close to the Wyld that "god" might actually appear).
Azrael
Sakura Saber
- Location
- Throne of Heroes
This isn't necessarily the case at all. Its entirely possible for an Infernal to be sabotaged or set up to fail, just as its possible for an Abyssal to be entirely responsible for their own death, or else die through complete happenstance. A plague that spreads through your village that you get sick and die from isn't you being shafted by the actions of others, its you being unlucky.
HamSandLich
MEAT WIZARD
- Location
- Somewhere in NOVA, possibly, maybe, presumably
- Pronouns
- He/Him
I'll concede that Abyssals can be reponsible for their own deaths, but in Creation, "happenstance" generally means that the Bureau of Destiny decided you and everyone you know are a number on a spreadsheet and sent a plague in your general vicinity because it furthers the inscrutable goals of the uncaring Maidens.
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MiracleGrow
Miracles for only $19.99 [They/Them]
- Location
- DOOR STUCK DOOR STUCK PLEASE I BEG U
Elaborating on what I said before. I run with some homebrew and head canons with Solars that make them a lot scarier. As in their shards always go to someone who is ambitious in some fashion. Including I draw upon way more mesoamerican themes than from anything else. I need to get around to typing my views on them up. But basically, Solars become more of the renowned or infamous person they were before. They were already going 11/10 hard on things, there exaltation shoves that up to 1000000/10.
But Abyssals? Nobodies the whole lot of them. Their shard is much more likely to go to a random baker whose family and herself was slaughtered in a bandit raid. Rather than a heroic gladiator who died to a rigged match. When it comes to Abyssals. They are basically just really average normal people who had this power quite suddenly thrust upon them. Once some baker, now a death god who serves a terribly bitter relic of the past who expects you to carry out their grudge.
Also no redeeming back to solar mechanic, you are what you are.
But Abyssals? Nobodies the whole lot of them. Their shard is much more likely to go to a random baker whose family and herself was slaughtered in a bandit raid. Rather than a heroic gladiator who died to a rigged match. When it comes to Abyssals. They are basically just really average normal people who had this power quite suddenly thrust upon them. Once some baker, now a death god who serves a terribly bitter relic of the past who expects you to carry out their grudge.
Also no redeeming back to solar mechanic, you are what you are.
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- Location
- my house
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In my games Infernals are almost always failures of character, not ability. The soldier who follows bad orders and then drinks themselves into a stupor, the visionary who refuses to aid and thus dooms their village, the coward who flees and let's the wall be overrun, etc
In ability, and often times even strength of character they are as good as any Solar, but they broke when it mattered
Speaking of headcanons.
In my games Infernals are almost always failures of character, not ability. The soldier who follows bad orders and then drinks themselves into a stupor, the visionary who refuses to aid and thus dooms their village, the coward who flees and let's the wall be overrun, etc
In ability, and often times even strength of character they are as good as any Solar, but they broke when it mattered
HamSandLich
MEAT WIZARD
- Location
- Somewhere in NOVA, possibly, maybe, presumably
- Pronouns
- He/Him
I often envision Infernals having a huge complex about those moments of weakness and tend to overcompensate/overcorrect as a result of it.
- Location
- Ottawa
Primordials are often worlds unto themselves; the corpse of a world is still a world.
If I was writing this game, the Neverborn would be sub-settings.
Labyrinth could use some sprucing up, anyway.
If I was writing this game, the Neverborn would be sub-settings.
Labyrinth could use some sprucing up, anyway.
IIRC the current forms of the Neverborn are that of giant tombs/graves/mausoleums, with at least one of them being broken into and explored/plundered by the First Age Exalts that would go on to create Necromancy.
So yeah, you could easily have Spooky Ghost Adventures inside of a Neverborn....although that's likely to piss it off, at least as much as they can be pissed off.
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grommile
nasty-minded old cynic
- Location
- NERV-Mercia
- Pronouns
- Traditional/Animate
Infinity + x = infinity for all x <= infinity
- Location
- Pittsburgh, PA
Actually, it might be interesting make a religion predicated on my version of the Wanderer in Darkness: the man who, to misquote Mark Twain, said "Who weeps for the Never-Born? Who, in all the untold Ages of the world, has had the common humanity to offer compassion and aid to those who need it the most?"
He's a vagabond preacher and a wandering scholar, spreading his ramshackle gospel wherever he goes even as he searches for the knowledge to bring it to fruition. The Neverborn are the original sin of mankind, an atrocity from which all other atrocities were born - and only when it is atoned for will its lesser offspring be conquered. Given his own instability, the conclusions and correlations drawn from this thesis tend to change from one sermon to the next, but the desperate, quiet, guilt-ridden intensity is always there, the sense of seeking forgiveness for the unforgivable.
Violence isn't in his nature, but frustration is, and the two come close when he's at his lowest, when the futility of his quest falls heaviest on his broken-and-rebuilt shoulders, when the black blood of his dead brothers and sisters (he thinks of the Neverborn that way, in his heart of hearts, and condemns himself for his presumption) seeps thick and steaming from around the cold nails that pin his corrupted flesh into some semblance of a human form. When even his 'meditations' in the Labyrinth, trembling with head in hands as he reminds himself of the pain he must see ended, are not enough to rekindle the fragile grey ember where once lay a heart.
Then, he strides up the Rivers of Death with terrible purpose, and roves Creation in search of something (anything) that might kill, or heal, or soothe* the butchered titans beneath his feet, at his back, in his head, always there and always begging. These fevered 'pilgrimages' leave a trail of bodies and proselytes in equal measure.
* (Or simply silence; he hates his own weakness but at times he wishes only for his secondhand pain to stop - make it stop, make it stop! - even if it means leaving the Neverborn to their agony)
My approach is that there are certain Neverborn who have been identified, or at least assigned names, and an individual Neverborn's tomb-body tends to have, if not reason, then some amount of rhyme to what it does to those who partake of its putrefying Essence. However, they're not individuals you can have a conversation with, at least not without an entire campaign building toward achieving it.
They're the many-in-one nature of a Primordial's Mythos and soul hierarchy gone unspeakably wrong - the beings they were have been smashed to pieces and mixed together into a great teetering pile, each individual shard's desperate, inchoate spasms and shrieks drowning out all the others so that whatever scraps of sapient thought or coherent expression might slip out are lost in the jumble. Even if you isolate one particular fragment, it's just that, a fragment of something that was once whole, a fistful of brain scooped out of the skull and forced to try and function on its own.
Any information you gain from studying it or trying to communicate with it (probably a bad idea) is going to be two-thirds gibberish to one-third coherent data, but that data isn't correct or useful, it's just word salad and frenzied mumbling instead of just wordless shrieking. Trying to reverse-engineer something that the original Primordial knew or recreate some aspect of themselves from that mess is a fool's errand.
Ingesting the rancid blood and flesh of their butchered remains can imbue you with a warped shadow of what they were, but shadows don't look much like their owners, and by doing so, you've infected yourself with the fear, hate, pain, confusion, anger misery despair grief pain pain pain make it stop makE it stoP MAke iT Stop mAKE IT STOP MAKE IT STOP MAKE IT STOP MAKE IT STOP
Suffering on a scale that mortals couldn't even begin to comprehend, much less survive, and you've just welded a nice big chunk of it to your soul. It bends you, then breaks you, and then the broken husk of what you were will wander the Labyrinth forevermore, one more nephwrack in a great throng of the lost and damned. The deathlords are only different in that they managed to retain more than just scraps of who they were before, and even then it drives them all mad as hatters.
Most of the "direct" products of the Neverborn, the hekatonkheires and cysts, are just fumes of broken thought and mangled memories boiling off of the Primordial carrion pit that is the Labyrinth, almost literally nightmares and dreams made life - and about as accurate and coherent.
The closest thing the Neverborn have to identities is what the Dead have ascribed them, the cults and fiefs and congregations trying to deduce intentions and desires from the mute corpses of divinity. Sometimes, their dogma has some amount of corroboration with records from the High First Age, and sometimes it contradicts, or conflates multiple Primordials together - or, all too often, no records remain which can determine the truth either way, and so legions of ghostly petitioners plead to the husk of something that would have only had contempt for them in life, and Whisper-crazed berserkers offer plasm and blood to the carcass of a Primordial of peace and compromise.
- Location
- Ottawa
They have tombs, but I don't think their tombs are their bodies.
In any case, the tombs have never been differentiated from one another or developed in a way that would make players want to be there.
Have the social character try to talk down or persuade one of the enemy's allies to either stand down or flip to their side mid-battle, while the warrior/general covers him. Maybe this persuadable person is a hired gun open to better offers, or an ally of convenience at best.
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- Location
- Library
Depend on the system/hacks, but when in my group there was invincible sword princess and others that didn't have combat focus, I always planned that others will take care of underling/extras. Say, they fight murderous tornado spirit, but there are half dozen air elements as additional fodder.
Or the demon lord that took over the palace have palace guards enter in first few rounds of combat, so that the other characters switch to preventing them from stabbing everyone in the back.
ect. ect.
Salty
Shadow Cabal Assumptor Supreme
- Location
- Sun, Moon, Talia
- Pronouns
- I/Me
5 mortals with sledgehammers
- Location
- Texas
Ninjas and archers. Or ninja archers. Or ninja archer catgirl robots.
Basically, mooks who aren't all that threatening to the combat-speced character, but are moderately dangerous to the social-spec character. Their goal is to threaten or injure the social character enough that the combat character has to back off and protect him or flee before he can finish crushing their general. Maybe turn it into a hostage situation. Or get schooled by the social character, who can then feel good about contributing to the combat.
Imagine this is an episode of Xena: Warrior Princess. Your social character is Gabrielle. Set up the situation so that being Gabrielle is fun.