notanautomaton
I've got 99 quests, I've finished one
I feel like I've missed something. How are the ribbon ponies and the tree-ponies with dead bodies on their backs a debate? And how do the water-ponies continue it?
General Exalted Thread
- Location
- The sixth circle of Hell (second on weekends)
- Pronouns
- She/Her
God knows - actually no, not even Keris knows and she's probably in a far better position to than most gods - but they certainly seem to be comparing their different horse-breeds and designing them to reflect what they respectively consider important and valuable. Echo posits that the best traits are to be able to go super-fast and run anywhere you want, while Haneyl contends that being able to make yourself better and working as cavalry knights are superior. Rathan, apparently, argues that looking pretty and fearsome ugly rage are the qualities that are to be desired in a breed of demon-horse.
They may be using horses as a metaphor for something, though I suspect asking them what is not going to get any useful answers. Echo might be able to articulate their reasoning best, but she is, uh... Echo. And would thus be aggravatingly cryptic instead.
Basically, this is the sort of "weird demon stuff" that probably only makes sense to baby Unquestionable, and which they may not actually have put much conscious thought into. (And out-of-universe, it's one of the weird organic emergent traits that arose spontaneously as so many plot elements do in my and @EarthScorpion's writing.)
NonSequtur
a body
Hmm. I wonder if the po soul has horse armour in its hoard. Or, heh, even just the rumour of it might be enough to spur desperate angel-water-demon-horses to undertake a near-suicidal quest for redemption.
samdamandias
Apprentice Plane Wizard
If the Caelpans are based off of KSBD Liquid angels, will Rathan make similar demons that correspond to Vapor and Plasma angels?
And maybe they aren't arguing about what qualities are desirable in a demon horse, but what qualities are desirable in how one interacts with the world?
And maybe they aren't arguing about what qualities are desirable in a demon horse, but what qualities are desirable in how one interacts with the world?
At least according to Rathan, they conclusively prove that Haneyl is a stupidhead whose horsies are stupid and dumb and can't even swim properly.
To which Haneyl is preparing a counter-argument consisting of pointing out that Rathan's horsies are stupid and they aren't even real horsies, stupid, so that makes him even more stupid than his stupid horsies that are so stupid that you can't even ride them without damaging their stupid armour which is stupid because armour is for protecting you.
Echo wishes to raise the point that nah nah nah, her horsies are faster, you can't catch them.
Dulmea has prepared a treatise of so help me, if you don't all shut up I'm turning the car around right now. And yes, Echo, that includes you. When you're told to shut up, that includes no teasing miming gestures.
Giygas
Cutest Sawk i could find. Lucario is a nice extra.
So the Kerisian souls are both rabid Pokemon and My Little Pony fans?
...May someone have mercy on the souls of the rest of Creation/Malfeas/Autochthonia/Yu-Shan/The Underworld and maybe also the Wyld, as long as you find something with a soul inside it.
...May someone have mercy on the souls of the rest of Creation/Malfeas/Autochthonia/Yu-Shan/The Underworld and maybe also the Wyld, as long as you find something with a soul inside it.
- Location
- The end of all things
It'd really shake things up, to say the least. Twilight Lex Luthor will start making all kinds of crazy inventions far beyond the capacity of a mortal human... Well, he'll be able to use his incredible charisma to influence the political process and be elected president...
Er, moving on, Night Caste Catwoman could steal absolutely anything, even her archenemy's heart. Oh. As for Batman, being free from the shackles of human limitation will enable him to meaningfully fight alongside Superman...
Ok, I give up. But at least they'll glow now.
The entire fabric of the comic book universe would collapse into nothingness, caused by the way that some characters now have a way to kill people and ensure that they stay dead.
- Location
- Virginia
Not if it's Ex3 and they have Glorious Solar Doombot!
- Location
- The end of all things
You fool! Now we have to deal with undying horrors like He Wasn't Really That Funny Anyway.
Last edited:
meianmaru
The Devourer of Fiction
Vague Omnipotent Forces of the DC Universe: "Nearly everyone is dead again? How did that happen this time? Oh well, time for another reboot I guess."
Solar Exaltations: "No."
Vague Omnipotent Forces of the DC Universe: "Wha-"
Solar Exaltations: "No backsies."
Vague Omnipotent Forces of the DC Universe: *Rolls eyes and waves hand*
Every one is alive again.
Solar Exaltations: *Sulks*
- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Frankly, Celestial Exaltations in the DC universe will just be a few more high-powered heroes. They would barely affect the global scale, and be a blip at best on the cosmic scale.
I mean, you think Social Charms would be an usual and dangerous power that could affect things? One of the DCU's yearly crossover events involved a god of evil simultaneously possessing half of the Earth's population.
That was a subplot to the main story.
And a few years after there are few if any lasting consequences of that.
No one will care about a few Exalts.
I mean, you think Social Charms would be an usual and dangerous power that could affect things? One of the DCU's yearly crossover events involved a god of evil simultaneously possessing half of the Earth's population.
That was a subplot to the main story.
And a few years after there are few if any lasting consequences of that.
No one will care about a few Exalts.
Last edited:
So there is two things here though.
First, the above contributions still require being made in the context of an apocalyptic conflict of unprecedented scope, which means there is no single mortal army big enough to fight the Primordial host and win. Because any such army must encompass ALL of living humanity without exception, down to every man, woman and child. When you introduce mere mortal beings into the equation, like what happened with the Dragon Kings, the all-or-nothing stakes at work at such magnitude mean it becomes a war of fight-or-die imminent extinction for those below a given innate level of godliness.
Once a mortal force becomes a link in the chain of the Exalted war machine, it can assuredly assumed to be the weakest, and therefore a consistent priority target for everything which can be thrown at it. If the Primordials could not kill the Exalted directly, then they certainly could cut out everything underneath them and annihilate their spiritual/social infrastructure and future hosts en-masse with a blink of an eye. Because that is how Primordials fight, not on the ground with armies and ideologies, but across whole species and concepts. And unlike naturally finite humanity, they will always have More to draw from. When a world rises up against a universe, the universe has an edge.
Secondly, none of what you said actually contradicts any of what I laid out either. The context of a Dawn wielding a mighty army in total war towards a facet of existence does not preclude that army being largely as impactful and superficial to that conflict as the number of fingers on her right hand. It simply means when placed against the sheer enormity of the enemy she is facing, that she has adapted the circumstances of her focuses into a battlefield of her own designs. Instead of leaving it to the will of her foe to alter favorably or unfavorably as it wills, or to the neutral and inert environment which has no meaningful applications on such a scale.
You cannot abstract the Primordial war up into a more meaningful conflict by attempting to contain it, you can only reduce it down into being a border skirmish along given values of infinity.
Last edited:
Giygas
Cutest Sawk i could find. Lucario is a nice extra.
You merely need more exalt! Add a bit of Elders around, and Tah Dah! Now the fabric of reality is 99% percent more swiss cheese flavoured.
And also full of holes, i guess. But mostly cheese tasting. Sheogorath would be proud.
... And now i have a question i dread to ask: would it be worse putting the Exalted in Nirn, or putting the Dwemer in Creation? Merely hypotetically, mostly because the Dwemer exploded themselves out of reality. (Maybe)
- Location
- Virginia
I agree with this.
But I have problems with this, especially the bit that I bolded.
Maybe you are presuming the Exalted all have a set of Charms that immediately no-sell this kind of widespread annihilation. Protect-My-City-From-Destruction Prana or something. I don't like this because it cuts away all of the themes of the actual splats into "they just have an anti-Primordial button". There's no feeling at all from such a charm that expresses transcendent skill, or elemental mastery, or whatever theme Lunars are supposed to have.
But without a set of charms like that, how does guerrilla war even become possible? Once you've killed all the humans there is nowhere for the guerrillas to hide. Even if some are shielded through Solar magic - well, nuke everything outside that protection, and you compress the Exalted into a smaller and smaller space.
I prefer the idea that the Primordials would have actually had to actually exert themselves to extinguish humanity as a whole. That a city attacked by a Third Circle was doomed, surely, but that it might be saved something other than a Dawn with a sword and a hundred Dragon-blooded at his back. Maybe the demon is a creature of the night, a vicious serial killer that would destroy the city by driving its people to despair - and a Night Caste saves the city by meeting it in the darkness and slaying it. Or maybe another attack would be a supernatural form of corruption, causing the city to fall to pieces as its institutions crumble - parried by the Bureaucracy charms of an Eclipse.
There's one setting element in The Wheel of Time that I'm somewhat taken with (despite my poor opinion of the series overall): a city that opposed the villain, but whose ruler decides to fight evil with evil and is so consumed by his own malice that he becomes a monstrous mist and swallows up all his citizens. Thereafter the ruins are so corrupted that even taking a single pebble from them can drive the carrier to madness. I think some of the attacks of the Primordials would take that form, rather than an overtly military attack, and that this front was equally important in the Primordial War.
The thing is, this can't really work if the Primordials can effortlessly level any city - because why bother? The war would necessarily be one of pure defense on the part of the Exalted host, were the rest of humanity quite so vulnerable.
Uh... Third Circle Demons are city-killers. Literally every single Third Circle Demon in Games of Divinity is one. Ligier flash-boils armies. Orabilis makes it rain molten glass. Munaxes is a giant chasm that displaces terrain over which she moves. Erembour turns everyone who listens to her enchanting music into monsters. Even Jacinct can flatten a city by having his roads crush it.
Considering that the Primordial War was a war of mutual extermination, why would there be things like overt human civilian cities? Every single human was part of the war. There were no civilians, because for a human to exist made them a potential respawn point for an Exaltation. And that means that any overt human concentration of force has to be strong enough to fend off a determined extermination attempt - and that means the mortals either reside around the Exalted, or within secret safe locations hidden with all the genius and cunning of the generals and sociologists of this time. Which implies that we're not talking about cities, here.
We're talking about Fremen. We're talking about Sardukar. Most of the human population that isn't with the Dragon Kings or the People of Adamant or the Exalted hiding not out of cowardice but because the entire population is part of the military machine and that makes them a target. Sietches hidden under desert sands of the South, or in hidden fortress cities built in the depths of the earth by the People of Adamant. Training camps integrated into the sanctums of the war-gods. Convoys of food moved from hidden farms around the pole of Wood born by messenger-gods to where it is needed. Great workings of Fate to optimise every action, and Sidereal astrologer-saboteurs laying signs within the mythoi of the Primordials to allow hidden camps even within the sands of Cecelyne. Everyone has a role and must be the best they can be, which means every mortal is either a Tiger Warrior or a civilian-trained polyglot. Everyone must be a hero, because to be a hero is to do your duty which is to be worthy of Exaltation. You must be prepared to give everything, because if you do not do so everyone dies.
Honestly, in that we can indeed compare that to modern Autochthonia and realise that the human population there indeed retains cultural artefacts of the society-as-a-machine society that won the Primordial War that have been lost in Creation.
And we know what happened to the Dragon Kings. They got devastated by the war, and their species has a fixed population of essence-using super-dinosaurs. Humans are much, much squishier and undoubtedly died in vast amounts.
Not sure if there's much a point.
Thus far, the various states of Angels(Plasma > Vapor > Liquid > Solid (Metamorphic, Igneous) > Crystal> Neutron) correspond to age rather than anything discrete. White Chain is a Liquid Angel, Delicious a Vapor, and Juggernaut Star an Igneous, but there hasn't seemed to be any innate differences between them.
Jon Chung
=][=
Instead of trying to directly port Charms, I'd look at however the system you're using works and write a Charm tree to suit that. Reuse names if something you come up with vaguely looks similar to the intent of one of the original Charms. Directly porting Charms is useless, as the Charms were made to interact with a system that you are replacing wholesale.
Something like "Solar generals are really good at command and control, communication, battlefield awareness and information gathering, enforcing drill and maintaining morale. How do I represent this in my new system framework?" would be more appropriate than "How do I port 1:1 these Charms into my new system framework?".
For example, If morale is abstracted into command and control in your new system, then, you can simply throw out the concept of morale charms entirely. What would be the point of having them?
Last edited:
vicky_molokh
Posthuman spidery thingy.
- Location
- Kyïv, Ukraine
Hmm. And Heroic Mortals are just Hero units of a small troop strength?
True, in case of a major rework, reinventing a Charmtree is inevitable. But I was looking for ways of easily adapting existing War Charms to a different framework.
That being said, here are some ideas on how stuff can be handled for a 'deeper' conversion:
Charm effects need to be split between active ones and passive ones.
It seems inevitable that the most powerful active Charm would be the War Excellency used for a Strategy Roll, arguably followed by Excellencies for the skills that are used to replace Administration (almost surely Bureaucracy) and Intelligence Analysis (I'm thinking making it Larceny would be fair, for flavour and balance reasons) and Leadership (I know War looks like the default choice, but maybe Presence and Performance are better). The other active effects would be primarily those of War Charms of the force's commander. I'm also thinking that some War Charms should be a tolerable substitute for Larceny in this context (just like Socialize has a Charm that is a subsitute for Investigation . . . or two).
The passive Charms would be those that affect the properties of the units which are composed of one or more owners of such Charms. E.g. a Hero Unit with a Glorious Solar Railgun will count as a unit with the Firepower special class, Adamantine Skin Technique would provide the Armour special class, Eagle Wing Style would grant the Slow Air mobility type (yes, Slow), Obsidian Butterflies would make a unit Artillery or (Artillery), and the Lunar who's a Yeddim would add the Transport class. Since Solars would tend to have high Troop Strength on their own (being Hero Super-Soldiers of Élite quality and with often with Very Fine Equipment, for starters), this will tend to automagically provide the game-mechanical oomph behind the synergy of tactical Charms combined to raw combat power.
I'm inclined to believe that C3I should largely be boosted through active use of Charms, either by the commander or by named heroes. Recon . . . I'm not sure about the Recon phase yet. After all, I largely skipped over the whole 'how do I map a 3d6 roll-under MoS result to a success-roll result'. How much of that is even drafted, @samdamandias?
ganonso
Compulsive Quest Starter
- Location
- PACA France
Crossover questions!
How would you rank Magic the Gathering's Planeswalker (old and new) compared to Exalted Demons?
For that matter would it be more appropriate for the Yozis to follow the Five Colors of Magic or to have each its own system of Colors and thus being pretty much mind-boggling for your average Planeswalker.
How would you rank Magic the Gathering's Planeswalker (old and new) compared to Exalted Demons?
For that matter would it be more appropriate for the Yozis to follow the Five Colors of Magic or to have each its own system of Colors and thus being pretty much mind-boggling for your average Planeswalker.
No. Stop.
Take this to VS if people really want to keep on asking about this kind of VS debate material.
Jon Chung
=][=
Stop. That's crazy. Charms are mechanical widgets. They are supposed to do specific mechanical things. Porting Charms to a different system makes no sense whatsoever. Make new mechanical widgets to fit the new context.
ganonso
Compulsive Quest Starter
- Location
- PACA France
@EarthScorpion
Ok, I understand. To me VS was purely to discuss fighting scenarios, not fanfic ideas and concepts.
Sorry
Ok, I understand. To me VS was purely to discuss fighting scenarios, not fanfic ideas and concepts.
Sorry
Last edited:
- Pronouns
- They/Them
Scenarii.
Scenarii.
...Scenarii.
This is why we can't have nice things.
Scenarios.
Now, you're not a native-born Englishperson, you're French...
Which doesn't have Scenarii either, so that's not actually an excuse.
I don't know why, but I have a nit and I'm going to pick it.
Also, pick, like, a scenario-idea and run with it. I'm sure I'm annoying some people in the WOD thread with my continued ASOIAF/Mage stuff, but at least I'm developing one idea. Not five.
Last edited: