- Location
- The end of all things
Though I have no clue why anyone would ever want to do something complicated like this when its vastly easier to simply locally alter the cycle of reincarnation so that your servants simply come back when they die.
General Exalted Thread
Dynamesmouse
Bzzzzzz
They tried that. They came back wrong. Some of them even had completely mismatching personalities and faces!
Don't be ridiculous; those chariots didn't use anything as mundane as leaf springs! It's much more likely that your bow was carved from someone's solid orichalcum diving board.
I was thinking that your glowing protective field artifact might have been the First Age equivalent of some sort of emergency spacesuit (Wyldsuit?)-it probably wouldn't have provided real protection against actual First Age weapons but oh, it was just fine for warding off minor inconveniences like Wyld natives with axes. Real First Age gear in this method would probably be represented as like, several artifacts, all of which had pretty significant maintenance costs. It'd be more of a plot point than a real thing you'd expect to get a lot of use out of.
"You find a suit of working First Age Celestial Battle Armor" becomes the Macguffin that lets your underdog Exalt challenge the far more experienced and better-at-fighting elder Exalt in a one on one duel and win-and then it's rendered useless until you disassemble it and forge it into a multitude of different components. Its helmet, designed to give a general the power to lead an entire army as a perfectly obedient, unbreakable hive-mind, becomes a crown that makes it hard for loyal followers to disobey the king wearing it. The cuirass and its essence-storage tanks become a battery you can use to power Shogunate-era equipment with. You can reshape the gauntlets which gave its wearer inhuman dexterity and precision into frames that surround the hands and provide a crafter with the ability to manipulate the smallest metal shavings and most precise machines by hand. You cannibalize the levitation stones in the legs for your new project, a flying bunker. etc etc.
Autochthonia, in theory, would have the capacity to produce this stuff in limited degrees but why the hell would they? They need to be efficient. They can't tacticool up your power armor suit and give you the Deliberative Multi-Weapon when their Not AK-47s and Vaguely Insect-Looking Power Armor works just fine tyvm.
Sucal
The Devil’s Cut
- Location
- Bottom of the barrel
This discussion really has me wanting to play in a more post apocalyptic style scavenger lord game, where the party of Twilights/Twilight alikes attempt to reason out what is the actual doomsday artifact the prophecies speak of and what is just a Lunar Hairdryer repurposed into a siege weapon.
Or just playing an Infernal with his collection of Helltech first age style artifacts and trying to balance their various urges and maintenance requirements with actually using the things!
Or just playing an Infernal with his collection of Helltech first age style artifacts and trying to balance their various urges and maintenance requirements with actually using the things!
Generally, I suspect Authocthonians just turn an Exalted or two into a mini-mecha when they need that sort of stuff.
My personal headcanon is that Autochthonian gear tends towards being insanely modular and able to serve tons of different purposes.
Like the example stuff MJ gave. It would all be designed so that it could be separated and reassembled at need. The power core can pop right out and be plug into something that needs it during peace time. The gauntlets can be quickly and relatively easily readjusted to better serve for crafting purposes when needed, etc.
Then if a Champion needs a set of armor because they've got a mission that takes them deep into gremlin country, those parts get popped out of whatever they're currently being used for, are put back together in armor form and the Champion is off.
Giygas
Cutest Sawk i could find. Lucario is a nice extra.
Like the Alchemicals themselves?
Maybe they have been wearing dead Alchemicals for all of this time, and nobody realized a thing!
Except for you Nervaqus987. There may or may not be a secret caste of ninjalchemicals ready to kill you for revealing such a secret, so, if i were you, i would run away quite quickly.
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Well, of course they're wearing dead Alchemicals.
Do you know how much Magical Material gets left over after an Alchemical gets killed by something?
Waste not, want not.
greensun
You shall all burn beneath my light!!!
Its pretty morbid when you think about it, imagine fighting a Solar who killed your past incarnation and made freaking sword out of your corpse?
Walker of the Yellow Path
Ho There!
- Location
- The Land of Memes
Better than the Abyssal who forges the ghosts of your past lives into a sword.
I disagree there - as I portray Autochtonia, it's fairly solidly on a parity with the mid-to-early Shogunate. It's never had the political unity or the resource surplus which enabled the High First Age, which was built in the Deliberative going full Alpha Centuari on terrarforming to optimise the geomancy and turning all of Creation into a systematic manse network for maximum power efficiency. If we're going into the Warframe metaphors, Autochtonia is the Corpus, not the Orokin.
(mind you, my Autochtonia is much more culturally diverse and fragmented than the canon version, because I detest Fantasy Cultural Stasis. The canon Octet in my Autochtonia is just the latest hegemon of vaguely unified peer powers claiming inheritance from the original founders. There are entire cultures who've only heard the current Octet through trade rumours. Alchemical cities are not immortal and thus many cities are built on layers of dead cities, new Alchemicals taking their place when the old city dies - and there are a metric fucktonne more non-Alchemical settlements. Yes, you have quasi-Fremen techno-barbarians in manufactured voidsuits moving between their sealed sietches through the Vacuum Wastes, seeking out mineral deposits and trading their locations to other powers in return for resources they can't make, for example)
Solar: "It's not like he was using it anymore."
True.
But unlike the Shogunate, Autochtonians do have semi-reliable access to Autobot's noetic archives for backup and retrieval, as well as examples of Primordial and First Age-level artifice.
Continuity of knowledge is a major boon for them, as is the fact that Alchemicals are Celestial-tier exalts, not Terrestrials.
Resource scarcity will hurt them, but is quite as likely to propel their tech tree towards efficiency.
That is, assuming they don't tick off a Divine Minister or two.
Yeah, see, this is bringing up a point which I believe I have reiterated repeatedly. I believe the entire canon set up for such things is stupid and burn it to trash, so any arguments based on "but canon says" can be discarded out of hand.
For example, Autochthon making Celestial Battle Armour? Dumb. Even if we charitably assume that WotL is not best used as kindling, Primordial manufacture should not resemble High First Age manufacture. Deliberative manufacture should be radically different from Autochtonic manufacture, and the armour which Autochton made the Exalted for the Incarnate Rebellion should only resemble High First Age armour in that... well, it's armour. And even then, Autochtonic armour may well be a living machine in its own right, inhabited by Autochtonic devas and hewn from magical materials which no longer exist in Creation, but which are common in Autochtonia.
Yes, I am saying that the crafts of the modern Demon Realm probably resembled the tools the Exalted used in the Incarnate Rebellion much more than they did the products of the High First Age, save when the veterans of the Rebellion deliberately aped the forms of the weapons of their youth.
And Alchemical manufacture should, likewise, be notably different from Primordial Autochtonic manufacture. Can Alchemicals make devas about as easily as a human makes hair? No? Then they can't make a lot of Autochtonic designs. Do Alchemicals have the People of Adamant to maintain their things? No? Then they are going to be confined to make things which the human mind can understand and work with using tools, rather than what inhuman earth-elves can use. Moreover, I will argue that Alchemicals simply cannot reach the peaks of Autochtonic craftsmanship - or Solar craftsmanship, for that matter - and that furthermore only Apostates can reach the peak of Alchemical genius, because they need that mad transgressive blasphemous spark which enables Autocthon to do what he does. Most Alchemicals are not Apostates.
(Also, to be blunt Alchemicals should be Terrestrial Exalted. They're potentially uncapped weaker Exalts who are fundamentally linked to pre-existing institutions. They have much more in common with Dragonblooded in the way they come about and their nature than the indestructible, reincarnating supermotes of the Celestials. But that's an argument for another day.)
Well, there's hope in this new Edition, with other pseudo-Terrestrial and pseudo-Celestial Exalted being printed, and less emphasis on "tiers".
But I really want a sobriquette for Exaltation that ISN'T Shard or supermote.
Supermote is just horrible, and "shard" calls to mind a broken off chip rather than a deliberately crafted miracle. Exaltations might have started off as shards, but so much work and love went into each of them.
You don't call a marble statue a "chip" of a larger marble block; you call it a statue, a sculpture, an edifice, a work of art.
Salty
Shadow Cabal Assumptor Supreme
- Location
- Sun, Moon, Talia
- Pronouns
- I/Me
As an aside, can I just say that I find the concept of Autochthon being able to craft anything that doesn't require maintenance to be absolutely ridiculous? I mean, yes he's the Great Maker and the Great Innovator and all that other tedious stuff, but you know what he also is? What are also his themes?
Decay. Death. Impermanence.
I mean, he's Cancerdroid. Nothing but nothing he makes is ever going to be perfect or not decay. He's absolutely incapable of it.
Decay. Death. Impermanence.
I mean, he's Cancerdroid. Nothing but nothing he makes is ever going to be perfect or not decay. He's absolutely incapable of it.
Those don't comprise the entirety of his thematics IIRC.
True, but it's a critical and foundational part of his thematics that he's always in need of, well, resources, for various things. And one of those things is to hold his robocancer at bay.
- Location
- The end of all things
That simple change would have pretty huge repercussions. What kind of lifespan did you give them?
Yeah, see, this is you using opinion to substitute for definition. Which is that? Some variation on 'no true scotsman'?
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azoicennead
Overly-Affectionate Zombie Squad
- Pronouns
- He/They
Closer. Better. But still not quite enough.
Torch or Lantern? Something very deliberately crafted to give light?
It's based off the shifts in geomancy and geology in Autochthon, as well as the metaphorical health of the city. A metaphorically healthy city, with plenty of natural resources and an active, healthy population devoting prayer to maintence will keep the Alchemical healthier.
But few cities last a thousand years without needing a new Alchemical to revitalise them. None have lasted two thousand. Autochthon's geomancy changes too much over long periods for them to survive the stress - and the massive essence flows of "being a city" linked into Autochthon's circulatory system slowly degrade the human soul. The longest-lived cities are in geomantically stable locations and never have to increase their essence flows excessively by - for example - going into full combat mode and being damaged in war. In an unstable location and under frequent attack, a city Alchemical is lucky to last five hundred years without "burning out".
(Notably, since the Alchemical Enlightenment range is 4-8, they don't auto-upgrade to cities or colossuses. It's always a choice to become one - a sacrifice for their people)