I feel that only applies to sidereals of your own age group and overall department/faction. I will admit i am not up to date on all the 3rd ed changes, but to my knowledge the Sidereals are a mess of vipers. you can't trust anyone, potentially even yourself.
General Exalted Thread
- Location
- Nova Scotia
- Pronouns
- She/Her
The idea that the Bureau and the Fellowship is so awful and toxic that you need to constantly be on your guard and have to seek out all of your relationships elsewhere to have them be happy or fulfilling is something that the 2e really really played up, and that the 3e version has subsequently veered hard away from. They're still Sidereals — so, everyone low key thinks that they know what's best all the time, and everyone is primed to approach their relationships a bit manipulatively sometimes, I think — but it's not quite a "nest of vipers", and your mentors are not all inhuman monsters spending your life like it's nothing in order to advance their own agendas.
Like, elder Sidereals are still going to seem like inhuman monsters to a lot of people, but that doesn't actually mean that they're out to stab you in the back for no reason.
Having a close friendship or romantic entanglement with someone from another faction is fraught, and has gotten significantly more so since the Empress disappeared and the Solar Resurgence happened, but it's like... Intended play? No one on any side of this actually wants to start killing or politically destroying their cross faction colleagues in earnest, because once that starts it will not stop, and you're pretty likely to be closer with specific individuals who don't share your politics than you are to everyone on your own faction.
- Pronouns
- she/her
I think the main thing I'd like to addressed along the lines of facilitating Anathema being active on the Blessed Isle and the broader threat of the wyld hunt in-general is some out of character clarification on why Measure the Wind exists as a spirit charm, in-part because I still remember this from Keychain of Creation as reflective of the kind of paranoia that there was around the Blessed Isle at the time it's not as bad but I do occasionally encounter Ex3 players who think it's extremely unfair that a low level spirit charm gets to 'out' their character.
- Location
- Nova Scotia
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Measure the Wind fails against all magical disguises.
Imrix
Periodically Malevolent QM
Really, given how significant each Sidereal is and how close-knit the Fellowship is, if anything the greater danger is elder Sidereals being inhuman monsters backing you up against outsiders, in ways you might rather they didn't.
- Location
- Nova Scotia
- Pronouns
- She/Her
This is literally like, two of the examples Fangs at the Gate gives about how an attempt at bridging the gap between the Sidereal and Lunar Hosts keeps going wrong, too.
Article: HISTORIES OF BETRAYAL
Shortly after the Usurpation, a handful of Lunar and Sidereal moderates met on the tomb-isle Lament, hoping to broker peace. The summit became a bloodbath when Radhika Stormswift and her Circle, unwilling to forgive the Five-Score Fellowship, swooped in and attacked. The Sidereals, believing the summit had been a trap all along, counterattacked indiscriminately as they fled, slaying the lead Lunar peacemaker, Onuava Doom-Eye.
When a trio of open-minded young Sidereals began discussing peace with Stone Drum Nkembe, their mentor Honeyed Indigo — anticipating betrayal from the shahan-ya — accompanied them to a diplomatic summit, professing feigned sympathy with their cause. His preemptive strike fatally wounded Nkembe; two of Indigo's juniors fell in line, though the last fled and ultimately resigned from the Bureau of Destiny. Nkembe's surviving adherents still seek vengeance against all involved.
Upon learning of Rukhsara-Who-Remembers unlikely friendship with the raksha-hunter Key Spiral. Feather Drenched in the Blood of the Fallen saw an opportunity to thin the Sidereals ranks. She borrowed Rukhsara's face, lured Key Spiral into her confidences, and killed him.
To provide a quote for this, while I'm here:
Article: Measure the Wind enables a spirit to measure someone's "nature." This reveals, broadly, what the individual is—a mortal, a demon, another god, a denizen of the Wyld, and so forth. If an Exalt is scrutinized, Measure the Wind provides a strong "feeling" of their patron, allowing the Charm to tell a Solar from a Dragon-Blooded (and, incidentally, to tell what Elemental Dragon or Maiden a Terrestrial or Sidereal derives from, although the Castes and Aspects of other Exalts remain indistinguishable to the Charm). Measure the Wind can pierce mundane disguises, but not any deception created or reinforced by Essence, such as Solar Larceny Charms or Lunar shapeshifting
That last line means that it is incredibly easy to fool with as low a barrier as like, having spent so much as a single mote on a larceny excellency to disguise yourself, or using any charm whatsoever to blend in or make yourself seem like a mortal.
HalfTangible
Only half sane (it's less cringe)
- Location
- Valkyrie, Primus
*scribbles down notes, because one of my Sidereal characters explicitly wants to bridge the gap with the Lunars, at the very least to try and deal with (what he views as) Creation-scale threats like the Deathlords*
- Location
- Nova Scotia
- Pronouns
- She/Her
It's basically just like, all of the elders on both sides have been burned so many times and there's so much bad blood at this point from all ages that it's genuinely really difficult to make things work.
It's kind of like... You can show up there as a Gold Faction Sidereal and be like "we want to make peace"
But when the Lunars ask, can you get the Bronze Faction to stop killing us, the answer is "well, no". And if they ask, are you willing to help us kill your colleagues, the answer is probably also no. And the same is roughly true for the other side as well.
Which is why it's not a problem that's been solved already.
Reminds me of a Manse I created back in 2E that was meant to be the Lunar Equivalent of the Jade Prison. Basically Sidereals would hunt down Lunars, knock them unconscious, and use Eternal Crystalline Encasement to lock them away in a heavily defended manse outside of fate forever.
- Location
- Washington, USA
Alarm Wards can be beaten with magically-boosted stealth, or disguises that would conceal your nature from magical senses, or you could just tear a hole in some out-of-the-way spot with any sort of countermagic, bypass the warded area with some sort of teleportation (an agata's Portal charm, perhaps - which wouldn't even be all that suspicious if seen, in a place with lots of DB sorcerers and their allies often coming and going), or take advantage of the fact that the ward itself likely counts as an arcane link to distract or disable the relevant thaumaturge remotely.
Essence Flare Pillars can be beaten with the Night anima power, or a Veil of Fathomless Wickedness, conceivably various other ways, or simply popping the pillars' hearthstone out of its socket with sleight-of-hand - potentially from a distance, with the right larceny charms or telekinesis or whatnot. Probably aren't nearly enough of those to cover random stretches of wall, anyway, they'd be concentrated at checkpoints with either high traffic or high security.
HalfTangible
Only half sane (it's less cringe)
- Location
- Valkyrie, Primus
Yeah. Fury's idea was less "make overall peace" and more "get a diplomatic line in so we don't trip each other up on this problem in particular"
He's become obsessed with the deathlords and Abyssals since the fall of Thorns, viewing them as the one true threat to Creation that hasn't been contained as of yet. And several times the Convention's efforts to curtail the deathlords or learn about them has been tripped up by Lunars acting in the same area, when at least nominally we have the same foe. So the Silver Pact and the Fivescore Fellowship need a way to communicate when this kind of thing inevitably occurs.
Fury is not an idiot; he realizes that the bad blood isn't going to be scrubbed out any time soon, or likely ever, but his idea is to try and make peace between younger sids and younger Lunars that have yet to learn to hate each other. Ideally, he'd find a newly Exalted Lunar with a grudge against the Deathlords and prove himself a valuable ally in that struggle. Someone who hates them enough to take a risk on a stranger, and if they're already in the Pact, someone young/proud enough to ignore their Elder's warnings against trusting a vizier.
Arcane Fate and the Pact/Sid shared history of bloodshed makes this prospect dicey at best (also predicting Exaltation is hard) so it's less of an active project and more a long-term side hustle.
(Side note: one of the NPCs in the Convention with us was describes as a "Silver Pact Antagonist" so this was definitely going to backfire and I was looking forward to it)
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Blaque
Resident Catblob
- Location
- SLC UT
- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
For Lunar-Sidereal relationships, the probably pretty dated but still-stuck-with-me at least movie Body of Lies kind of always stuck-out to something of the sort of relationships that they have. With DiCaprio being a good example of how Sidereals thinking on different angles of a project trying cultivate sources on the ground, while Strong's character being a good analogy for an on-the-ground Lunar working between them. And how the cultivation of relationships between two fo them can be undermined by the interests of a third party, which is Crowe's character in this case.
I think it still presents something that is a tad too internally hostile for Sidereals as noted above, but is kind of the media example that stands-out to me at least of something there
I think it still presents something that is a tad too internally hostile for Sidereals as noted above, but is kind of the media example that stands-out to me at least of something there
- Pronouns
- she/her
I think the underlying assumption of Measure the Wind being used antagonistically is the core issue, the deception requirement is really small but it only takes one PC to fall short of it and that might happen because "what if the gods of the landscape are all spying on me?" is not something I'd consider a normal assumption of the game or setting.
- Pronouns
- They/Them
This is especially true on the Blessed Isle, in the heart of Immaculate power in Creation, with its axiom that gods should stay apart from mortal affairs unless DBs, monks, or preferably DB monks have a specific reason to act as a go-between. Gods wandering around sniffing at apparent mortals and animals are more likely to be told "knock it off" than "thanks for checking", especially since Measure the Wind can fail against any magic. "I found a Lunar infiltrator, or possibly a squirrel that's inquisitive" means you correctly identify about thirty-five hundred Lunars out of every 1 case of actual Anathema, so said god has gone way beyond normal "Boy Who Cried Wolf" limits.
- Location
- Many Places
(This is why you just smash every squirrel you can find in a place they're not supposed to go into, you'll know it's a Lunar if it shrugs it off and kicks you through a building.)
Alectai
Speaks Words of Wisdom... On occasion
Yes, all of this is true.
But that requires it not to be the ST using it as an excuse to railroad your PCs into doing what they want or to "Shake things up" by suddenly throwing your plans in disarray because they did a funni and set this up in a place you frequented without your knowledge (Because they wouldn't let you check for whatever reason.)
Some just look at this and go "Oh hey this says it detects you I can use this to herd the players or I can use it to force them out of their bunkers by revealing them publicly and thus forcing them on the run."
I've experienced that. My anecdotes come from experience and tragedy. I haven't even begun to tell the story of the PC beloved by the ST who cheesed his way to Infinite Motes through Thaumaturgy.