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General Exalted Thread

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Am I the only one bothered by the idea of having the Second Circle Demons be outnumbered by the First Circle Demons by several orders of magnitude? It just seems a bit strange to imagine the Second Circle Demons existing in a position of unquestioned authority and power if their are millions of First Circle Demons for each individual Second Circle Demon. The power gap between the circles is large but it doesn't seem nearly large enough for them to be able to overcome such a vast numerical difference. In the face of such relative scarcitiy of Second Circle demons I would assume that the majority of First Circle demons would need to develop and belong to their own organizational structures or polities.

In light of this would anyone care to speculate on the types of societies and states that would arise among the innumerable hordes of First Circle Demons?
 
Ct613hulu said:
Am I the only one bothered by the idea of having the Second Circle Demons be outnumbered by the First Circle Demons by several orders of magnitude? It just seems a bit strange to imagine the Second Circle Demons existing in a position of unquestioned authority and power if their are millions of First Circle Demons for each individual Second Circle Demon. The power gap between the circles is large but it doesn't seem nearly large enough for them to be able to overcome such a vast numerical difference. In the face of such relative scarcitiy of Second Circle demons I would assume that the majority of First Circle demons would need to develop and belong to their own organizational structures or polities.

In light of this would anyone care to speculate on the types of societies and states that would arise among the innumerable hordes of First Circle Demons?
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I suspect it happens this way because Second Circle demons are to First Circles as the Exalted are to mortals. (i.e. They've got all the magic)

Also, Cece.
 
Ct613hulu said:
Am I the only one bothered by the idea of having the Second Circle Demons be outnumbered by the First Circle Demons by several orders of magnitude? It just seems a bit strange to imagine the Second Circle Demons existing in a position of unquestioned authority and power if their are millions of First Circle Demons for each individual Second Circle Demon. The power gap between the circles is large but it doesn't seem nearly large enough for them to be able to overcome such a vast numerical difference. In the face of such relative scarcitiy of Second Circle demons I would assume that the majority of First Circle demons would need to develop and belong to their own organizational structures or polities.

In light of this would anyone care to speculate on the types of societies and states that would arise among the innumerable hordes of First Circle Demons?
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The size of Malfeas has always been a fuzzy point of Exalted canon. Its fundamental source of inspiration is the Flat Earth cycle, in which "hell is a city" is taken to mean that it is a city, not a planet-sized urban landscape; later depictions of Malfeas introduced the idea that it contained arches vast enough that the whole of Creation could pass between them, implied or outright stated that demons outnumbered humans by an order of magnitude, and generally made Hell into a full-blown dimension that was greater in scope than Creation itself.

I personally have issues with this on account of how I prefer the geography of Malfeas to be tighter and more geographically concentrated for my own convenience, but it's not like my position has any canon backing or anything.
 
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Ct613hulu said:
Am I the only one bothered by the idea of having the Second Circle Demons be outnumbered by the First Circle Demons by several orders of magnitude? It just seems a bit strange to imagine the Second Circle Demons existing in a position of unquestioned authority and power if their are millions of First Circle Demons for each individual Second Circle Demon. The power gap between the circles is large but it doesn't seem nearly large enough for them to be able to overcome such a vast numerical difference. In the face of such relative scarcitiy of Second Circle demons I would assume that the majority of First Circle demons would need to develop and belong to their own organizational structures or polities.

In light of this would anyone care to speculate on the types of societies and states that would arise among the innumerable hordes of First Circle Demons?
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I believe most first circles are technically not sophonts. They have inteligence but no ability to pick their own path, with those that achieve self agency becoming Citizens And that is very rare.
 
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Omicron said:
The size of Malfeas has always been a fuzzy point of Exalted canon. Its fundamental source of inspiration is the Flat Earth cycle, in which "hell is a city" is taken to mean that it is a city, not a planet-sized urban landscape; later depictions of Malfeas introduced the idea that it contained arches vast enough that the whole of Creation could pass between them,
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This particular bit was actually from the original depiction in Games of Divinity, in which the outer layer was stated to have arches large enough that worlds could pass through them.
 
Anasurimbor said:
This particular bit was actually from the original depiction in Games of Divinity, in which the outer layer was stated to have arches large enough that worlds could pass through them.
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Yeah, when I said "later" I didn't mean "second edition" (or I would have said that). Games of Divinity fleshed out Malfeas a lot from its original concept which was basically "you see the Flat Earth demon-city? This but with the baboon-demon from Phoenix On The Sword in it." And while Hell getting more developped and unique and divorcing from its source material is great overall, I happen not to like that specific part of it.
 
I find that having Malfeas be nice and huge has two very good effects:

1: It allows me to ignore most of it. I mean, there are a lot of Yozi and demons and so on. Not even getting into first circles, we have 23 Yozi, at least an order of magnitude more Third Circle demons, seven times that number of second circles, a large number of Behemoths and other horrors and monstrosities sealed away at the end of the Primordial War. Given the scale these beings operate at, its fairly easy for me to do stuff like have all my plot happening way over there away from any NPCs I don't want to deal with. I can have all sorts of hidden stuff in there, entire societies that exist isolated from the rest of Malfeas and that nobody has ever heard of. Vast tracks to explore.

2: It touches on the ultimate futility of trying to conquer/destroy it. Octavian is noted for his feat of managing to conquer one quarter of one layer of Malfeas and he's supposed to be one of the settings big badasses. Hell is this giant messy, horrible place full of slaves and abusers and you are such a tiny part of it, even as a mighty Solar. How can you hope to fix this massive thing? This plays into my favorite interpretation of Malfeas... you shouldn't use it as a evil empire, you should use it as Fantasy Iraq, a subaltern nation broken and subjugated by Creation, full of all sorts of horrible in fighting and atrocities of all types that Creation milks for valuable resources and which occasionally inflicts ultimately useless acts of terrorism on Creation.
 
Legion1771 said:
So a Primordial has an indeterminate amount of third circle souls of which there is no definite limit?
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Malfeas has 23 Third Circles. No other Yozi has more. Autochthon has 8, and the Ebon Dragon has 11. No other Yozis have fewer.
Ct613hulu said:
Am I the only one bothered by the idea of having the Second Circle Demons be outnumbered by the First Circle Demons by several orders of magnitude? It just seems a bit strange to imagine the Second Circle Demons existing in a position of unquestioned authority and power if their are millions of First Circle Demons for each individual Second Circle Demon. The power gap between the circles is large but it doesn't seem nearly large enough for them to be able to overcome such a vast numerical difference.
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When you factor in the Priests of Cecelyne, it gets a bit more understandable, since they a) aren't First Circles, b) are scary and c) are numerous enough that they can be found pretty much anywhere in the city. Any First Circles that do try and rise above their station have a tendency to get slapped down again. By THE LAAAAAAAAAAW(giver).
 
Salbazier said:
Gaia? (yes, not a Yozi but then neither is Auto)
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Is unclear and not specified, but TED and Autochthon are said to have had the fewest souls. At the very least she presumably has a fetich we haven't seen, since none of the Elemental Dragons qualify, so there are presumably a few more to represent her occasional genocidal urges, etc.
 
Aleph said:
Malfeas has 23 Third Circles. No other Yozi has more. Autochthon has 8, and the Ebon Dragon has 11. No other Yozis have fewer.
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Correction, Malfeas had at least 23. His 23rd soul was executed to make him Malfeas. Present Malfeas has at least 22. We do not know if this was the total number, although thematically it makes sense that Theion's fetiches were numbered first and last, the alpha and the omega.
 
Carrnage said:
Speaking of, have Yozi ever spawned another soul without the death of a current one?
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Unclear. It's likely that if they could, they haven't felt the need to do so. It's most likely that they have no conscious control over the process: Autochthon tweaking his own souls was regarded as the equivalent of a person performing brain surgery on themselves.
 
Say, does anyone have any data or ideas on the subsidiary demons of Mardukth? Of all Circles.

Because I've had this urge to flesh out He Who Holds In Thrall for a while now, but I'll need Hekathonkhires, Spirits gone Underworld-native, plasmic races, and the like for that, and having something to base those on would help.

I know that he was survived by one of his 3Cs, Granalkin, Archer on the Silver Pass, who according to TvTropes is now a god in service of Luna.
 
Gnarker said:
Say, does anyone have any data or ideas on the subsidiary demons of Mardukth? Of all Circles.

Because I've had this urge to flesh out He Who Holds In Thrall for a while now, but I'll need Hekathonkhires, Spirits gone Underworld-native, plasmic races, and the like for that, and having something to base those on would help.

I know that he was survived by one of his 3Cs, Granalkin, Archer on the Silver Pass, who according to TvTropes is now a god in service of Luna.
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I would advise against fleshing out He Who Holds In Thrall himself; dude's dead. He's a dreaming tomb in the depths of the abyss, eternally screaming and moaning in agony. He is not a Yozi - neither an individual actor nor a living pantheon made up of the collective of its souls. There may be monsters and ghosts and hekatonchires descended from him, but this would be a shared distant origin and would not really contribute to making HWHIT a character in his own right.

What do you need him for?
 
Omicron said:
What do you need him for?
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Just for fun/out of interest in doing so. Also, I already have quite a few fun ideas.

And yes, I'm aware the dude's dead. Or as close as Titans get, anyway. Wasn't planning on making him a self-aware actor with charmset and all that, but rather to treat him, similar to how every non-Infernal sees his still-living siblings, as a piece of geography that you otherwise interact with primarily via his inhabitants.
But I need something to base said inhabitants off of for that to work, and while I already know what I want to do with the Ghosts and Spectres, that's far from exploiting the full potential of our titanic set-piece.

And while may not be a Yozi anymore, he has been one at a time, and should still be defined by that, similar to how Ghosts are defined by the Passions of their former lives, only that said passions are distorted by death.
 
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Gnarker said:
Just for fun/out of interest in doing so. Also, I already have quite a few fun ideas.

And yes, I'm aware the dude's dead. Or as close as Titans get, anyway. Wasn't planning on making him a self-aware actor with charmset and all that, but rather to treat him, similar to how every non-Infernal sees his still-living siblings, as a piece of geography that you otherwise interact with primarily via his inhabitants.
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I'm not sure the dead Primordials should be allowed to remain living even as geography.

I mean, it's your game so obviously they can if you want, but I feel like that doesn't fit the themes of the game.

Specifically, the themes that death matters, dead is forever, and actions have consequences. Like, the dead Primordials didn't just move one dimension down and set up shop again. They don't get to keep participating in the same way they did while alive. This guy was geography, but now he's dead: so the geography is gone forever. The world is reduced, lessened by that death.
 
jerkface said:
Like, the dead Primordials didn't just move one dimension down and set up shop again. They don't get to keep participating in the same way they did while alive. This guy was geography, but now he's dead: so the geography is gone forever.
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Not completely gone, as evidenced by the fact that you can enter the Labyrinth and walk their corpses.

Their Jouten are the bodies of the Primordials. Kill a human, and his body still remains. Likewise, a Primordial's corpe should, and apparently does, remain even if the mind animating it is largely gone.
 
Malfeas is a demon city whose heart is its sun, but he is also the King of the Primordials, raging endlessly in spiteful fury against a prison made of himself. His layers crash against themselves; his descendants wage war to conquer the streets of his kingdom that are his arteries; the serfs and denizens of his world-body build as he does and rage as he does and kill as he does. He dances in the streets, a colossus of brass unmindful of the baleful gaze of his first-born son, his heart, his holy son that is a part of himself; all who wander his streets know the shame and glory and horror of Malfeas, the demon-prince, who is the cage in which he is a prisonner.

He Who Holds In Thrall is a towering ziggurat of black stone, and that ziggurat screams and moans with a chorus of a billion agonies. Some creatures find home in his corridors; some mad ghosts make sacrifices on his forgotten altars; some terrible beast, white-furred and heavy-tusked, sometimes looks up from afar, its eyes aglow with the dim remembrance of a different time. But the ziggurat is dead; its chorus reaches out in Whispers to warp the ghosts that approach it, but without purpose; its depths may be plundered for treasures and power at a price, but the price is not purposefully enacted; it is simply the towering gravity of the corpse-god that crushes lesser minds and leaves those who escape it not unscathed. There is no will, no purpose, no identity; only a death that never ends and taints the abyss with its suffering.

Long ago some fallen hero of a golden age ended too soon climbed the stairs, and reached the altar, and shed his blood on the blackstone; and the ziggurat answered, but its answer was not born of will, but the reflexive throes of a great beheaded snake. The fallen hero spoke to the depth: "Give me power." The depth answered: "Kill the world." The hero agreed. Does the depth remember the hero? Does the hero desire to kill the world? Will he ever accomplish the promise he made? No. Imputing a password into a computer is lying to this computer, making it believe that you are who you are not; but the computer does not understand or care for the truth or the lie, and it does not understand or care what you will do with the information you steal from its drive. Imput receives output. Promise to kill the world and receive power; but the corpse-god does not act, it merely answers stimulus in its broken, erratic, mindless way.

If you choose to think of the Primordials as states, nations, or corporations, then the Neverborn are the ruins of Prypiat. Yes, there are streets there, and buildings, and animals wandering the deserted radioactive fields; but a city without its people is not a city, merely a collection of oddly-shaped rocks.
 
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Gnarker said:
Their Jouten are the bodies of the Primordials. Kill a human, and his body still remains. Likewise, a Primordial's corpe should, and apparently does, remain even if the mind animating it is largely gone.
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That's not really accurate, though.

A living human body does things like:
- Laugh
- Eat
- Grow
- Talk
- Give birth to children
- Create new art

A dead human body does things like:
- Decompose

Dead bodies are not the same as living bodies. A dead Primordial should not function the same way as a living Yozi. In my opinion, anyway.
 
Omicron said:
Snip
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Yeah, pretty much what I thought. Only thing you forgot is that no corpse is safe from scavengers and carrion-eaters, and flies will lay eggs into flesh so their maggots can feast on it, even as they are enthralled by it's smell.

jerkface said:
Dead bodies are not the same as living bodies. A dead Primordial should not function the same way as a living Yozi. In my opinion, anyway.
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Of course not. But it'll nonetheless still be there, and even decomposition is a kind of activity even if it's not the sort that still-living people usually get up to.
 
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Aleph said:
Malfeas has 23 Third Circles. No other Yozi has more. Autochthon has 8, and the Ebon Dragon has 11. No other Yozis have fewer.
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...I thought Oramus only had 7?

Anyway, I brought something up in Divine Administration, and I wanted to make sure I was understanding it correctly. All-Encompassing Endowment is an E5 charm. Using it to give someone anything requires a minimum essence of three, or the minimum essence of the charm if it is higher. Does this mean it can be used to bestow itself, and can the being that obtained it maintain its own blessing of that charm by using it? Also, am I correct in thinking that charms that have been bestowed through the use of Endowment can be used even if the target's essence isn't high enough.

Finally, does a mortal who has been bestowed with a dot of essence beyond their maximum as an E5 use of Endowment need the motes to be committed, or do they count as their natural essence of 1?
 
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