- Location
- Denmark
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Looking into the relationship Iran had (and kinda has) with its own Achaemenid past may prove fruitful here.
General Exalted Thread
HalfTangible
Only half sane (it's less cringe)
- Location
- Valkyrie, Primus
I imagine that randos on the street just assume that Deebs made it in an age long past, it's not like your average peasant farmer knows Deebs can't make the giant robots they pilot around (if they know the robots exist at all). Some might wonder why they're so rare, but shrug and assume there's a reason they're not privy to.
But then you get slightly more educated people who actually dig into it. Most information on the first age is lost, but not all of it is.
Like, it's implied in what canon we have on the Immaculate Philosophy that they teach humanity Dragon-Blooded came about at the end of the first age to bring an end to the rule of demons over the world and create the Shogunate. But they also have artifacts and weapons from before that time period, most prominently in Lookshy and/or the Sword of Creation. If the Dragons only came about at the end of that age, then they couldn't have made all those wonders, since they didn't exist yet.
Or I might've missed something and am talking out of my ass.
But then you get slightly more educated people who actually dig into it. Most information on the first age is lost, but not all of it is.
Like, it's implied in what canon we have on the Immaculate Philosophy that they teach humanity Dragon-Blooded came about at the end of the first age to bring an end to the rule of demons over the world and create the Shogunate. But they also have artifacts and weapons from before that time period, most prominently in Lookshy and/or the Sword of Creation. If the Dragons only came about at the end of that age, then they couldn't have made all those wonders, since they didn't exist yet.
Or I might've missed something and am talking out of my ass.
- Location
- Nova Scotia
- Pronouns
- She/Her
I'm pretty sure you're misremembering that. Maybe you're thinking of this passage?
Article: Popular myth states that the Immaculate Order was born when the Elemental Dragons incarnated to lead the Dragon-Blooded in glorious rebellion against the demonic Anathema, raising the Dragon-Blooded to their rightful place as Princes of the Earth. This view of history suffices for most lay mortals, and even for incurious Dragon-Blooded, whose station doesn't demand the full truth. Once a monk has received sufficient spiritual preparation, she learns a more nuanced history: that the Immaculate Order was founded during the Dragon-Blooded Shogunate, that the Immaculate Dragons' great deeds are allegories condensed from dozens of historical Dragon-Blooded across various time periods, and that the Solar and Lunar Anathema are Exalted themselves, though doomed to insanity.
Like, even in the popular mythology as presented here, it's specifically the Immaculate Dragons who were incarnated to destroy the Anathema and allow the Dragon-Blooded to take their rightful place as rulers of Creation. The implication is definitely not that Dragon-Blooded didn't exist prior to that.
HalfTangible
Only half sane (it's less cringe)
- Location
- Valkyrie, Primus
Ah. I was misremembering; I was under the impression the Immaculate Dragons were said to be among the first Deebs and exemplified their greatest virtues, but from here it seems I was misremembering the 'founded immaculate order' bit.
... and come to think of it one of my current characters has an artifact weapon whose legend goes completely against the idea that Deebs didn't exist before the usurpation >.>
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So with all the talk of Artifacts and the Immaculate Faith, that makes me wonder, what's their view on Alchemicals? Do they know they were created by Autochton and not care? Do they have some kind of party line on what they're supposed to be, especially the Orichalcum and Moonsilver castes? Do the Alchemicals left in creation know the "truth" of the High First Age, and is that a further complication? Is Optimus Prime an Orichalcum caste, or what?
UrsaTempest
Don't Panic!
As far as I know, Immaculate has no contact with Autochthlonia, so anything goes, really. It's not terribly hard to justify any direction you want, from friendly to opportunistic partner to hostile, etc.
If it's scattered Alchemical leftover on Creation, presumably it won't be treated much different than Exigent, so case to case basis.
If it's scattered Alchemical leftover on Creation, presumably it won't be treated much different than Exigent, so case to case basis.
- Pronouns
- They/Them
That's correct. To expand on it a bit more, in first edition Alchemicals were introduced as part of the Locust Crusade, where Creation is attacked by an outside force. Until this happens (if it does in your game), there's no room to know about them. Second edition, most of the material presented is to allow Alchemicals to adventure in Autochthonia, so while you can still have the Locust Crusade, or some other form of contact, the two worlds are unknown to each other by default.
It's only with third edition that they suggested that buried prototypes might exist in Creation, and the third edition books covering the Immaculate Philosophy don't mention Alchemicals at all. Unless you're making some unusual assumptions for your game, they're not common enough to really have a unified voice; the idea there is really just creating enough Alchemicals to allow for them to be PCs/antagonists with your game, not a case where thousands were buried and a few get activated every few decades, so savants have a reason to know generalized things about them.
Generally, you can make assumptions about how Immaculates will react to a given addition by expanding it out from existing principles. Is it based on some existing doctrine? Probably not, because they're a basically-unknown type of Exalt. Without doctrine, go by what principles they would follow. An Alchemical is likely to latch onto a community and try to serve them, which by default is going to conflict with Immaculate doctrine on how close mortals and Exalts should be. Likewise, they can make a middle ground where an Alchemical could be accepted as an ally as long as they can get integrated into the Perfected Hierarchy.
This ends up being about the same place as most Exigents. It's also much the same place as Liminals and Getimians, both of whom weren't active until late enough that Immaculate texts were already written. Over What Fire Hath Wrought/The Realm/Heirs to the Shogunate combined, Liminals are mentioned a few times, mostly in the context of being someone to hire or a potential ally, but not really anything too explicit. Getimians are only mentioned in one paragraph in "The Realm", where how the Immaculate Order and Sidereals interact shapes something a little different than other cases: Sidereals have an obvious interest in helping their DB allies to find and destroy Getimians. Alchemicals don't have any mention at all, so it makes sense to model Immaculate reactions based on extending these thoughts.
It's only with third edition that they suggested that buried prototypes might exist in Creation, and the third edition books covering the Immaculate Philosophy don't mention Alchemicals at all. Unless you're making some unusual assumptions for your game, they're not common enough to really have a unified voice; the idea there is really just creating enough Alchemicals to allow for them to be PCs/antagonists with your game, not a case where thousands were buried and a few get activated every few decades, so savants have a reason to know generalized things about them.
Generally, you can make assumptions about how Immaculates will react to a given addition by expanding it out from existing principles. Is it based on some existing doctrine? Probably not, because they're a basically-unknown type of Exalt. Without doctrine, go by what principles they would follow. An Alchemical is likely to latch onto a community and try to serve them, which by default is going to conflict with Immaculate doctrine on how close mortals and Exalts should be. Likewise, they can make a middle ground where an Alchemical could be accepted as an ally as long as they can get integrated into the Perfected Hierarchy.
This ends up being about the same place as most Exigents. It's also much the same place as Liminals and Getimians, both of whom weren't active until late enough that Immaculate texts were already written. Over What Fire Hath Wrought/The Realm/Heirs to the Shogunate combined, Liminals are mentioned a few times, mostly in the context of being someone to hire or a potential ally, but not really anything too explicit. Getimians are only mentioned in one paragraph in "The Realm", where how the Immaculate Order and Sidereals interact shapes something a little different than other cases: Sidereals have an obvious interest in helping their DB allies to find and destroy Getimians. Alchemicals don't have any mention at all, so it makes sense to model Immaculate reactions based on extending these thoughts.
I'm listening to the latest Systematic Understanding of Everything podcast about Malfeas, and they're stating a bunch of things as fact which I thought had been errata'd with prejudice. Things like the Yozi's being able to control time and the like. Was I mistaken about all that, or is the implication that they're bringing (or have brought) this stuff back?
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Imadaman
Has no clue, but keeps going.
- Location
- Finland
I mean, people calling their headcanon as canon or crossbreeding canon between editions is nothing new anywhere, so I'm not surprised they do it occasionally as well.
Then again there hasn't been a book detailing Malfeas in 3e so there isn't much to draw on yet, so it's completely reasonable to lean on previous editions on the subject.
- Pronouns
- she/her
There's no printed retraction for it or really any 2nd edition lore. The closest thing we have to that for any 2nd edition lore is a clarification that animals can't canonically Exalt as Lunars.
But yeah this is a gameline that once decided that the solution to having two different origins to the Kukla was that there were actually two Kuklas.
- Location
- my house
I've been thinking that one of the ways to make necromancers unique is to remove their ability to create undead. At least through magic.
The basic idea here is that one of the things that make undead cool and spooky is that they are the product of specific events. The revenant that comes back for revenge after it's murders walk free. The unquite spirit of a sailor lost at sea, her burial rites never performed, etc.
And I think it would be really interesting if a necromancer can't just make those undead. If she wants them as minions she either has to go out into the world and bind them, or deliberately cause those specific deaths to create those undead.
That way you can still have good necromancers, but evil necromancers are always going to have the advantage in variety, and so you are incentived to be evil
The basic idea here is that one of the things that make undead cool and spooky is that they are the product of specific events. The revenant that comes back for revenge after it's murders walk free. The unquite spirit of a sailor lost at sea, her burial rites never performed, etc.
And I think it would be really interesting if a necromancer can't just make those undead. If she wants them as minions she either has to go out into the world and bind them, or deliberately cause those specific deaths to create those undead.
That way you can still have good necromancers, but evil necromancers are always going to have the advantage in variety, and so you are incentived to be evil
- Location
- Denmark
- Pronouns
- She/Her
i don't feel like the problem is whether or not necromancy is unique, i feel like the problem is that sorcery is just Better because its less restricted and far more general
- Location
- Nova Scotia
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Taking away one of the few things that necromancy is actually better at than sorcery (raise army of trash literally from the ground), which also very much plays into the most common necromancer archetype, would be a strange way to make it "more unique". Being able to make cheap undead should not be gated behind Abyssal charms and off limits to everyone else.
- Location
- my house
I actually agree, which is why basic undead (zombies and skeletons) would be easy to make. Just rip the PO from any creature and bind it to a corpse
- Pronouns
- They/Them
The problem here is that it doesn't make it more appealing to anyone who was previously interested in necromancy, nor does it really make it more appealing to anyone who was on the fence before, and actually works internally at cross-purposes. Making a system of "you need to track down unique undead creatures and bind them to you" isn't a bad one (I could see a game inspired by Old Kingdom books by Garth Nix that made use of that), but it's an invisible and close to meaningless thing when it's NPCs (it doesn't matter, mechanically, whether the boss monster spent three centuries preparing ritual components or whether it's easily available when it's the same stat sheet in the combat), and most PCs are at least nominally heroic. So... this combines something that incentivizes it being a main story thing for PCs (you have to hunt down your undead allies and recruit them) while also incentivizing it being an NPC thing (villains are more likely to perform the evil actions needed to recruit some of them).
I actually like current necromancy, based on the FatG sidebar and the Essence write-up on it. Given that first-circle sorcery gives access to a wide range of demons and elementals to summon, restricting variety and power of allies for necromancy isn't a solution that solves any problem I'm experiencing.
I actually like current necromancy, based on the FatG sidebar and the Essence write-up on it. Given that first-circle sorcery gives access to a wide range of demons and elementals to summon, restricting variety and power of allies for necromancy isn't a solution that solves any problem I'm experiencing.
- Location
- Nova Scotia
- Pronouns
- She/Her
You will forgive me if when you said "necromancers can't just make those undead", I assumed you meant it.
This is still massively more inconvenient than what you currently can do to get a bunch of low power skeletons -- Raise the Skeletal Horde in Essence just makes a temporary battlegroup out of corpses at Ivory Circle, and the Shadow Circle version can pull up a small army for you. And crucially, no one has to have their soul bound to a corpse, which is important if you want to keep this villain coded as opposed to outright evil.
Sorcery is an outright better option for calling up powerful bespoke spirits to do your bidding, too, so it's like... Ease of summoning (time of month/year doesn't matter) and the capacity to call up actual canon fodder in large numbers is kind of all necromancy has going for it here. Aside from the aesthetic, which is always important.
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- Location
- Germany
I mean, it could work to some extent, but quite frankly it reads like something better handled narratively, if those on the table want it.
Generally it seems to me like an iteration of the 'Decker-Problem', forcing Necromancer-PCs to play Edgy Pokemon on the side to function, while sorcerers have to find a grimoire or inscription at best and are otherwise set to summon away. I would argue that what Necromancy actually needs is more breadth of unique themes, perhaps access to wide reaching curses and self perpetuating corruption, maybe a few 'like sorcery but just better (at a cost to somebody)' spells, not another thematic shackle.
Generally it seems to me like an iteration of the 'Decker-Problem', forcing Necromancer-PCs to play Edgy Pokemon on the side to function, while sorcerers have to find a grimoire or inscription at best and are otherwise set to summon away. I would argue that what Necromancy actually needs is more breadth of unique themes, perhaps access to wide reaching curses and self perpetuating corruption, maybe a few 'like sorcery but just better (at a cost to somebody)' spells, not another thematic shackle.
- Location
- Pittsburgh, PA
I already was operating on the assumption that you can't make ghosts without either thaumaturgically/Sorcerously "marking" a living person's souls to make them rise after death, or performing a Procedure where you kill someone in a manner which resonates with the desired sort of ghost, much like how thaumaturgically beckoning minor demons involves ritualistically invoking their release condition. The only alternative is to find an already extant ghost and either convince or coerce it into serving you (the fact that "ghost-breaker" is one of the terms I often use for such occultists should tell you which option sees more use; it's generally both difficult and risky to try and talk a ghost into helping you of its own accord.)
Now, @QafianSage and I also have a separate category of things which are Dead, but never actually lived, which could likely be 'made' in the same fashion as an elemental or automaton - ctonian beings. It's a deliberately vague category, meant to encompass a dizzying variety of strange things that are united only in that they're creatures of the Underworld (and Creatures of Death, mechanically speaking) that actually originate from there rather than becoming Dead after a prior existence as something else, be it a god, demon, animal, mortal, or Wyld-thing. Weird squirmy centipedes seemingly made out of viscera that get cultivated as a source of leather in the Deep Underworld, a wrathful crocodilian horror of black soil and white mist which crawled from the gullet of the River of Drowned Earth, strange manikin-things with twisted limbs which are caged and used as divining rods due to the way their faceless heads always stay turned toward the nearest exit to the domain they're in. Hekatonkheires are arguably cthonian as well, and if so they are the most direct and blunt form of them, being clots of Neverborn Essence galvanized into an alien form of life by the inchoate murmurings of the dead titans.
Ctonians could likely be 'made', but it wouldn't be any easier than coaxing the Elements of Creation into producing a specific sort of elemental, or smelting Cecelynean sand to blow into a servant-creature, or collecting droplets of starlight from the constellations of the Crimson Panoply over the course of years to create a red-clad Soldier of Mars to lead your armies.
EDIT: Having read @Gazetteer's post and remembered that spells like Raise the Skeletal Horde exist, I'd say that those are perfectly legitimate. Sorcery is fundamentally a matter of forcing your will upon reality, and even if you were to argue that Necromancy was somehow fundamentally different, gathering motes of necrotic Essence to infuse into a bunch of soulless bones and animate them into skeletal Dead servants sounds a lot like making bespoke ctonians.
Now, @QafianSage and I also have a separate category of things which are Dead, but never actually lived, which could likely be 'made' in the same fashion as an elemental or automaton - ctonian beings. It's a deliberately vague category, meant to encompass a dizzying variety of strange things that are united only in that they're creatures of the Underworld (and Creatures of Death, mechanically speaking) that actually originate from there rather than becoming Dead after a prior existence as something else, be it a god, demon, animal, mortal, or Wyld-thing. Weird squirmy centipedes seemingly made out of viscera that get cultivated as a source of leather in the Deep Underworld, a wrathful crocodilian horror of black soil and white mist which crawled from the gullet of the River of Drowned Earth, strange manikin-things with twisted limbs which are caged and used as divining rods due to the way their faceless heads always stay turned toward the nearest exit to the domain they're in. Hekatonkheires are arguably cthonian as well, and if so they are the most direct and blunt form of them, being clots of Neverborn Essence galvanized into an alien form of life by the inchoate murmurings of the dead titans.
Ctonians could likely be 'made', but it wouldn't be any easier than coaxing the Elements of Creation into producing a specific sort of elemental, or smelting Cecelynean sand to blow into a servant-creature, or collecting droplets of starlight from the constellations of the Crimson Panoply over the course of years to create a red-clad Soldier of Mars to lead your armies.
EDIT: Having read @Gazetteer's post and remembered that spells like Raise the Skeletal Horde exist, I'd say that those are perfectly legitimate. Sorcery is fundamentally a matter of forcing your will upon reality, and even if you were to argue that Necromancy was somehow fundamentally different, gathering motes of necrotic Essence to infuse into a bunch of soulless bones and animate them into skeletal Dead servants sounds a lot like making bespoke ctonians.
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- Location
- my house
So yeah, this is basically what I was thinking, just worded better.
The only thing I would add is that making the Unquiet Dead should by and large be a bad thing. You don't get a ghost from a peaceful death after all. And that should be something necromancers must confront.
- Location
- Nova Scotia
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Has summoning actual ghosts ever been presented as making them? It's a spell, or in the case of Essence a ritual, to call up a ghost you either know of specifically or that fits a broad category, similar to how demons are summoned. The only types of undead you're usually physically making tend to be, well, the physical kind you're making out of corpses.
This feels needlessly restrictive. People become ghosts for a variety of reasons that aren't necessarily caused by a violent death, and classically one of them is things like Rune of Sweet Passing, which is included in the small number of spells we have so far in Essence as an alternate mode for Gentle Call of Lethe. Whether or not someone coming back as a ghost is a bad thing in a universal sense is not something that I want the game to hold a strict opinion on. It's a morally dubious thing when you're forcing it without someone's permission, and it opens the way for some abuses, but this is true of many things that Exalted characters can do.
Imrix
Periodically Malevolent QM
Point of order; while shunting necromancers off into their own special limited subsystem is certainly some kind of problem, it's only a decker problem if doing so means they take up time at the table that nobody else can take part in.
GhanjRho
Acanthus
The only thing they said that I've heard was getting definitely retconned was the toxic atmosphere of Malfeas. For this one, I'd say it's a combination of Terry doing the research this time, and nothing yet being published; Hell, the miasma made it into the ExEss draft. You have to be pretty actively plugged in to the Exalted fan community to have heard about the coming retcons; again, someone who got paid to write about Malfeas didn't know. Though incomplete background knowledge was apparently a bit of a recurring issue in ExEss development. One of the Alchemicals writers IIRC was working off of 1E material and didn't include the Adamant Caste in their first draft.
Couple that with Infernals (which will be the Malfeas book) not coming until at least 2024...
- Location
- Pittsburgh, PA
I'd say that the Sorcerous example you gave is about the only one that doesn't necessitate immoral action. There are indeed ghosts who didn't die violently, but the dead become capital-D Dead because there was something they cared about enough to resist Lethe and break free of it by absorbing the Essence of the Labyrinth.
You could absolutely find someone who's that dedicated to protecting his country, or finishing his research into a cheaper cure for malaria, wait for them to die, and then spawn-camp their tomb (although you'd probably also need to mess with the grave goods just to be sure), but that's not so much "making a ghost" as it is exploiting a naturally occurring one.
In order to 'make' a ghost born more of an obsession from their lives than the manner of their death, you would have to take a living person and then find a means of inducing that obsession. Nations would do it by having a special clade of heavily indoctrinated soldiers/civil servants/occultists/etc that are deliberately calibrated for the sort of fixations and will that make undeath more probable. Less well-off occultists would do it through either prolonged manipulation of the target or some flavor of MKULTRA style induced delirium, confinement, and psychological torture.
Either you inflict a horrible death on someone, or you twist their mind into a pretzel before 'humanely' suffocating them with a pillow. The only other ways of going about it are Sorcery (which lets you force reality into the shape you desire of it through main spiritual force), complex Procedures intended to prime a living person's souls for ghosthood (likely through infusing them with necrotic Essence while still alive, making it easier for them to break free of Lethe; mortal communities in shadowlands and the Underworld proper have a radically higher incidence of ghosts due to their environment providing the same rough effect[1]), or explicitly Deathly cultivation paths (such as @EarthScorpion's famous example of people who learn to turn their po into a pseudo-Stand.)
[1] My personal means of keeping this idea without allowing easy production of basically-sane ghosts is that this method of creating Lesser Dead can result in ghosts with bizarre behavioral tics, delusions, and other abnormalities, because they lack sufficiently strong Passions to unify and cohere the incoherence of Neverborn Essence around a single solid point. Sometimes this results in someone who wouldn't be out of place in Halloweentown, sometimes this results in borderline ghost dementia, and sometimes it results in the ghost becoming VERY VERY VERY focused on something they cared about in life to a typically Deathly degree, with little an occultist can do to control the precise outcome.
- Location
- Nova Scotia
- Pronouns
- She/Her
If there's already one example from necromancy like Gentle Call of Lethe, then presumably there will be other similar rituals or effects in the world, albeit maybe not ones that are as simple or reliable. 2e had the Persephone thing, where if you eat food from the Underworld it ties your soul there after death, which I still kind of like as a point of curiosity. As for societies living in shadowlands having higher numbers, I really don't see any compelling reason why the ghosts coming out of such a culture would need to be any more or less fucked up than ghosts that came about through other means. Not all ghostly or Underworld essence is "Neverborn Essence", and it's more interesting to me to treat that as more of a case by case thing. What is a given society's relationship with death and the dead like to begin with? Engineering an entire culture like this is not what I'd call "easy production" of ghosts.
Talking about this in terms of "production" feels a bit wrongheaded to begin with, to me. We're talking about a fundamentally arcane and mystical event, not like... Just a purely mechanical feature of the world a player is gaming to get a ghost army like this is Minecraft or something. There is an Abyssal charm for training a bunch of people until they drop dead and their ghosts keep going, which is characteristically not very nice under most circumstances, but that kind of thing feels less special if you're treating all methods of making sure someone leaves behind a ghost as being primarily a method of military recruitment or something.
Talking about this in terms of "production" feels a bit wrongheaded to begin with, to me. We're talking about a fundamentally arcane and mystical event, not like... Just a purely mechanical feature of the world a player is gaming to get a ghost army like this is Minecraft or something. There is an Abyssal charm for training a bunch of people until they drop dead and their ghosts keep going, which is characteristically not very nice under most circumstances, but that kind of thing feels less special if you're treating all methods of making sure someone leaves behind a ghost as being primarily a method of military recruitment or something.