On another note, I was just discussing "writing spirits" with a friend who wants elemental Eevees (in turn sparked by the comment that GIANT ROCK CENTIPELEMENTAL was sort of like an Onix), and came up with some guidelines, which I see no reason not to post here.
Basically, a spirit writeup should answer two main questions.
Everything in the bio should be in some way related to answering those questions. They can basically be summarised into two things: "what is it?", and "what can I do with it?"
The first of these questions is different depending on what type of spirit it is, but the rundown is:
- DEMON: Demons are living tools created for a purpose. What is the purpose of this demon? What is it a tool for? This will have almost nothing to do with its Yozi, but will rather be dependent on the Second or Third Circle that made it. It will probably be designed so that it is naturally inclined to do its job - see stomach bottle bugs, which are made to clean up filth and thus love eating filth.
- ELEMENTAL: Elementals are immune responses to sudden or natural elemental changes. What is this elemental a response to? A surplus of an element or a deficit? What form does the response take? How does it act in light of that? They're naturally physical, and will probably have a form somehow related to their element, and it will probably also be related to whatever it's supposed to do to fix the imbalance.
- GHOST: Ghosts are tied to the world by attachments and fetters and passions. What bound this ghost so tightly to the world that it refused to let go and slip into Lethe? How do those chains manifest in its behaviour and corpus? It may well have modified its body - consciously or unconsciously - to reflect and better enact its fetters and passions.
- GOD: Gods are bureaucrats that report on and oversee the various working parts of Creation. What is this god's job? What powers does it have in light of being a bureaucrat and overseer of that job? (Note: not an embodiment of it). How will it act to keep its job, and how dedicated is it to doing it?
The second question is the more important one, because it's invested in player agency, and essentially boils down to "
why do I want to summon this thing?" What is in it for me? What can I do with it? What abilities does it have that I can make use of? Are there any fun or cool ways I can use it for things
outside the original design intentions? What are the drawbacks of summoning it; its upkeep? Why do I want to summon this, rather than something else?
So, to take
a demon at random from my
Csend writeup... konyevlo. What are they? They're tools made for use in bureaucracy; sorting and recording stuff. They're designed so that they naturally want to do their job - the finder wants to find things, the assessor naturally assesses things and the recorder automatically records everything. They're alien in the manner of most demons in that they're kinda freaky platypus-stingrays that eat least gods and have three bodies and a really weird psychology.
What can I use them for? Obviously their intended purpose; finding stuff and deciding what's valuable and what's not. I can use them to sort through huge amounts of boring stuff for rare valuable bits. Or I can cheat a bit and use them to sort and manage
people, meaning that if I have a load of factories or businesses, I can feasibly train them to manage my assets for me. (That was actually why I made them; for Keris, who is
shit at that sort of thing.) What are their drawbacks? A good balancing point for useful or powerful spirits - especially demons - is to give them fairly common phobias or weaknesses, like luminata's allergy to certain kinds of wood, etc. In this case, konyevlo are terrified of cats, so that's something you need to take precautions against.
Now, you may note that I included gods up there, despite them not being possible to summon. That's true, but it's still a good formula for generating them - just replace "summon" with "interact with, make plot hooks from, include in games, etc". To use Revlid's example; Dogs of the Unbroken Earth
[Exalted 2e, pgs 296-297] are, in fact, gods (a fact I remember entirely due to this point). They are specifically bureaucrats in charge of reporting on ground that has not been cultivated or used by humans for more than a century. This means that if some human
does come along and use it, the Dogs of the Unbroken Earth are, uh, out of a job. So they will object to people trying to do so. Strenuously.
This is the big difference between elementals and gods of elemental phenomena in Revlid's model - elementals, be they elementals of surplus [element] or deficit [element], will
respond to an elemental imbalance or shift, sometimes by furthering it and sometimes by opposing it, but always with the goal of
bringing the elemental essence of the environment back into balance, whatever that means (it could mean replanting a forest after a fire, but it could also mean moving winter forward into spring by melting all the snow). Gods will act to
maintain and
spread their domain so as not to be put out of work, though often while doing as little actual work as possible. They will often act in favour of
imbalances to give themselves a firmer power base and prevent their domain and paycheck from being reduced or taken away.
