TenfoldShields
Lounging on a Hoard of Words
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Lord, recommending stuff is always kinda dicey because Your Creation May Vary and there's good odds that you might end up looking at me just going "what the fuck are you on about Tenfold" so I intro this stuff with the caveat that, like, this is entirely up to personal taste of "things that I think would be interesting but may or may not do it for you".
Something that might be interesting to consider is deep sea gigantism. Shit grows Large in the deep and the dark, and if you have communities of squid-eel-crab-anglers-etc people it's pretty plausible that, if you dragged them out of the abyss, they'd stand head-if-not-shoulders-if-not-torso over most of their pelagic counterparts.
Also frill sharks are fuckin' rad and are mostly deep sea dwelling iirc, and you can definitely riff off of the idea that there are just a lot of primordial Things in the deep. That have lived on, largely untroubled and unchanged by the events in the surface world (or, alternatively, usually largely untroubled but pretty hideously mutated or altered by the surge of Wyld energies in the crusade or who died from the Contagion.) Play it with a touch of pulp y'know? A bit of horror. Colossal sea monsters and all that jazz.
I think my biggest rec in general would be...I've always liked the idea that the Underworld is close to the skin of the living world in Exalted. That if you dig down deep enough, or descend far enough, eventually you'll just hit spots where Dead Realms bleed into the rock and tunnels. And in the deep sea it's- the Sun destroys the undead but the sun's light doesn't reach that far, it's never reached that far. And the Moon inhibits the undead but Luna's light's never been able to penetrate that far either. And flowing water and salt are supposed to scour the undead but that's honestly not a guarantee, and it doesn't hold true in all cases considering how many die at sea and then come back.
The end result I feel is very...have you ever read the Junji Ito bit The Thing That Drifted Ashore? I super recommend it in general lol but there's a few bits that feel particularly appropriate.
There are Things in the Deep I think, unclean things that crawl up from the ocean trenches where the barriers between worlds have completely eroded away. Things from a world of black mud and falling whale corpses and a sea-floor seething with lampreys. And if you're a sedentary community the defenses you have against it are all important. Whether it's a half-overgrown First Age installation that's still intact enough to be a refuge or a city carved into an undersea mountain range. A network of volcanic vents that provide heat and a little light. Or some kind of consecrated ground that the things avoid. I'll freely admit that I trend pretty hard towards horror in some parts of my Exalted lol, but I do think there's something pretty powerful in the imagination in terms of just...how dark and deep that part of the ocean is. Vast and almost lightless and cold, with so many massive things that you can't see passing over head, with all the weight of that water on you. In those conditions I feel like community and just the sheer drive to not be alone would be a big deal for the settlements there.
'Cause that shit's scary.
