Walker of the Yellow Path
Ho There!
- Location
- The Land of Memes
Is it? I get them mixed up. What are the Ishvara then?
General Exalted Thread
Walker of the Yellow Path
Ho There!
- Location
- The Land of Memes
That's boring.
samdamandias
Apprentice Plane Wizard
If it makes you feel better, it is implied that Ishvara are proto-primordialsThat's boring.
Walker of the Yellow Path
Ho There!
- Location
- The Land of Memes
It does actually.
Which was implied by Raksha.
Which means, it's roughly as trust worthy as the Joker's accounts of his past.
Does anyone have an answer to the second question there?
The idea of a super man is boring. Superman is not, because naturally there's more to him than that.That's boring.
Likewise, an Ishvara is more than a super-raksha. You could get that much (a super-fairy, that is) just by adding tons of XP until they were Essence 10 and loaded with Charms and Grace Artifacts, with an army of enslaved nobles.
No. If those super-raksha (the XP veterans) are the veteran heroic mortals of the Fair Folk, then Ishvara are the EXALTED of the Fair Folk.
Every Ishvara is unique, because each of them found, built and skyrocketed on a unique, universe-spanning Story.
Prince Balor convinced the universe that he was The One Who Would Destroy Creation. His narrative became so all-encompassing, so expansive, that he did the impossible -- he united the entire raksha species under his banner (ALL of those Essence 10 veterans became his bitches), turning them into an army that encircled Creation, ready to leap upon the opportunity to wipe it out entirely. Thus was the Balorian Crusade even possible, because simply letting down Creation's defenses would not have provoked such a unified, coherent and immediate response.
He also wrested an aspect of the Shinma themselves to use as a hunting beast -- Ishiika, the Grass-Cutting Scythe, embodiment of physical destruction. A lovecraftian Scorpion Monster so enormous that it personally could not attack any target smaller than one of Creation's entire cardinal directions. But there was also the swarm of smaller bug-monstrosities that lived, fought, killed and died across its impossibly vast body, so that anyone approaching Ishiika would be fighting for their life long before reaching its surface.
Before Balor, Prince Laashe became The One Who Would Die And Be Reborn As The Sun Who Replaces The Sun.
When the Unconquered Sun killed his master, Laashe won his life through fast talking. As if that wasn't impressive enough, he even managed to extract an oath from the god that the Sun would not kill him! An oath the fairy went on to abuse, deliberately provoking the Sun to break his oath and kill him...
Which the fairy survived, avoiding the blow and faking his death. More, it was a calculated gambit to make the Sun forsake his own invincibility in the act of forsaking his word. Rather than waste the opening attempting to strike the Sun dead, Laashe instead turned himself into a curse that clung to the god's back, where he hid until the Sun returned to the sun to rest.
While the god slept, the fairy prince snuck away and found the heart of the sun. There, he threw himself into the Daystar's fiery core, where he absorbed its essence and completed his ascension.
The Sun God awoke, but the fairy had already fled to Creation, where he gulped down the souls of dozens of mortals. When the Unconquered Sun came to slay him, the fairy played on his Compassion -- the Sun could not kill him without sentencing those humans to death and oblivion.
Holding to his Compassion, the Sun forsook his Valor. Bereft of his invincible shield and irresistible spear, the Sun was overpowered by the solar Ishvara, who began to erect jade walls to imprison the god, and took up the Sun's own spear to end his life...
Except Laashe had spent so long obsessing about the Sun that he was blind-sided by the Moon. Having waited until it was obvious the Unconquered Sun was about to become Conquered, Luna stepped in and used the impossibility of the whole situation against Laashe.
She banished him to The Beyond, Oramus's domain and her birthplace; a level of existence outside of the Shinma. She told him, "You were so rare and amazing that you didn't even exist." A lie no less real than his own Ishvara narrative.
Golden Lark
The First Fiction User
1. THERE IS NO PHYSICS. Exalted runs on concepts. It does not run on science. Source: opening paragraph of the forward to Exalted (1st edition).
2. The Unconquered Sun embodies perfection. Ergo, his personal weapon does the perfect amount of damage. That amount of damage is exactly the amount of power it takes to reduce the foe to ash, shaped such that no collateral damage occurs. Why? Because he wants to do that. How? Because he has nigh-infinite energy to apply, and perfect control over it. Bullshit? Yes. Broken in the setting? No, because perfect defenses exist.
A parry, by its nature, is deflection of the force of an oncoming blow with one's own weapon. A perfect parry is taking this idea to the absolute extreme of imagination; all energy of an anticipated attack is harmlessly dissipated in the form of light and sound once it strikes the defender's weapon. A perfect parry does not COUNTER force with equal and opposite force; it simply redirects that force, however large. A mundane weapon can only channel so much energy for dissipation before it shatters. Any magical weapon at all is enough 'in tune' with creation to be capable of channeling any amount of force without compromising its structural integrity.
As an example of how it could be described in Exalted occult terms, the least god of an artifact weapon directs the incoming blow's force into non-relevance; the least god of a mundane weapon does the exact same thing- then explodes, because he was not cool enough. As the god explodes, so does the object.
A perfect parry (or a perfect soak) is a temporary asymptotic instant of absolute entropic supremacy. It works because Exaltations were built with that capability in mind from the word 'go,' because the Primordials have the ability to snap their fingers and incinerate continents, and Exalted needed to be able to survive that, land on their feet, and keep running at the enemy.
Kylar
In Training Forever
- Location
- Canada
Blargle. Sorry, but I have long since hit the point of 'fuck this' for people trying to tie EVERYTHING into making the Primodials more awesome. Their cool, and a neat setting thing, but they are not the be all and end all of Exalted.
The rakasha work better as the Primodial's opposite number, the hordes of predators that the Primodials forged the greatest weapon ever made to fight in their stead (and in doing so, assured their own downfall). Could have the rakasha given rise to the Primodials? Maybe, but no one can say for certain, and really, who gives a flying fuck (ok, ST types looking for plot hooks, but that's their prerogative). 90% of time it, really does not matter in game or story.
And I'd rank the Ishvara as the Incarnate equivalent of the rakasha: something so far above the normal, the others don't even compare.
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So I'm a Compassion 5 BlueSid and currently looking for some effects to counter all those super duper badass hard-choice maker NPCs (and by that I mean, Compassion 1 Conviction 5 Valor 5).
The only thing in the setting right now that can make Compassion 1 asshole and douchebag cry is the Sidereal Resistance charm (Optimistic Security Practice) that make them erase one of their positive Intimacy every time they want to attack the Sidereal.
The only thing in the setting right now that can make Compassion 1 asshole and douchebag cry is the Sidereal Resistance charm (Optimistic Security Practice) that make them erase one of their positive Intimacy every time they want to attack the Sidereal.
Chloe Sullivan
Subdefective
- Location
- 1630 Revello Drive, Sunnydale CA
Ugh, what is it with jerks and wanting to bring physics into RPG's? Exalted is a flatworld, like narnia or discworld. Trying to apply IRL physics is nonsensical.
Things don't fall down because of gravity in Exalted - there is no such thing. Things fall down instead of up because the loom of fate says so.
re: high compassion Sid:
Crane style and Art of Victorious concession?
or just set up a scenario where the jerks have to constantly suppress their valor due to incessant taunt from people they cannot afford to attack.
Things don't fall down because of gravity in Exalted - there is no such thing. Things fall down instead of up because the loom of fate says so.
re: high compassion Sid:
Crane style and Art of Victorious concession?
or just set up a scenario where the jerks have to constantly suppress their valor due to incessant taunt from people they cannot afford to attack.
Kylar
In Training Forever
- Location
- Canada
Get Crane Style. Make them fear attacking your Compassion 5 Sidereal. Then slaughter them with words (you can use 'reason you suck' speeches as combat stunts using Crane).
I'm kinda prefer effect that make the enemy regret not raising their Compassion like a revised Majestic Radiant Presence (replace the Valor roll with a Compassion roll) or Heartless Fiend Insinuation (turn your social attack into UMI if your target have Compassion 1 or no positive Intimacies).
Chloe Sullivan
Subdefective
- Location
- 1630 Revello Drive, Sunnydale CA
speaking of Art of Victorious Concession (Compassion style), anyone know what Showring Foes With Friendship means when it says it grants you "full" actions?
The entire setting runs on the magic of "because the author said so". And said authors have historically had really shitty editing.
The entire "Perfect Defense" term is derived, not stated, from how the initial rules for Charms (aka magic) are setup 170 pages into the Core book. It isn't even the one of the explicitly stated core rules of the setting, just a conflict resolution rule almost given as a footnote.
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Although that post was a thing of beauty, and I'm sorry to be a bother here, but may you post this paragraph you speak of? I don't have any 1st Edition books, and it seems that there aren't any proper PDFs available, much unlike 2nd Edition's books.
Direction to an online copy, if possible, would be a fine alternative.
Matsci
Grash itsh griah! Rwar arr rawrrawrarar!
Transcribed from my copy.
1ed Exalted inherited a lot of the OWoD's antiscience bullshit.
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1. That's the back to the 2nd Edition Corebook. Are they the same?
2. That doesn't really show how concepts exult over physics.
- Location
- The sixth circle of Hell (second on weekends)
- Pronouns
- She/Her
At least from that description; physics is a lie. The rules you know about how "infinite energy" work are false. Assuming that an attack of given energy can only be stopped by a defence of similar energy is based on axioms that are simply not true.
I don't see where that's coming from. Here, let's look.
It's not actually stating anything outright. It tells us the worlds history is a lie- which isn't related to physics.
As for the rules of how infinite energy work... well, if they don't work as we know them, how do we know they work at all? If Exalted differs from the laws of physics as we know it in our universe, how can we quantify anything from it?
Would you like to explain to me how concepts can be chained to create a functional world/universe? I must have missed that physics class.
The same way nerds have quantified feats from characters like Superman, Flash, Goku, Godzilla, Santa etc etc. We assume the laws of reality are similar enough for us to do those kinds of calculations even though the characters blatantly ignore the laws of physics.
Is this suppose to be sarcasm or some kind of point? Because I'm not following.
But how can we do that for Exalted if the laws of physics don't even exist in the first place?
- Location
- Third planet from the star named Sol
- Pronouns
- He/They
It said outright to not believe Scientists, the guys who use physics as a basis for all of our technology.
We know the fundamental CONCEPTS the Exalted universe runs on are similar enough for physics to be a generally good guideline, so we use that. It's like how Newtonian physics are actually extremely incorrect, they just work well in most cases. But when you start getting towards relativistic speeds, the newtonian equations go out the window. We just use them because they're easier and accurate enough in day to day life.
It's the same for Exalted, we can use physics as a general enough guideline as we go. There are points where we will have to say 'yeah, this doesn't make sense' and need to use an explanation that fits the universe, but generally, it's easier to just use physics.
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