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General Exalted Thread

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EarthScorpion said:
(Honestly, though, I'd suggest you just get them drunk. Get one party member to go to the bar where all the guards go, and coax them into drinking to excess. The most effective drug is one they willingly take.
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Yeah, that's exactly what I tried to do (well, one of the things, anyway), but 99% of them don't go to taverns outside the territory that they're protecting, their discipline is near-perfect, and their company leader (the one that leads the group relevant for our mission, anyway) has an MDV of at least 6 (so shut down my TID attempts because I couldn't buy a Socialize Excellency yet).

So thanks for the right ideas. But I was forced to ask about suboptimal options because circumstances prevented use of optimal ones; sorry about that.

Aleph said:
Remember that poisons only do 1 damage die per interval, which is rarely as short as a tick - action or hour are more common. That means that even with a non-lethal drug, they're going to be walking around, conscious and capable of screaming and yelling for some time after you dose them. If you're going for stealth with drugs, I'd recommend dosing them surreptitiously in a way they won't notice instead of relying on knocking them out in combat time or by laced weapons - spiking the water supply would probably be better than trying to drug the various guards.

I don't think there are any non-lethal poisons written up, but you could probably stat up something equivalent to chloroform that does bashing damage by looking at the actual traits and dosage of real-life chloroform.
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I was thinking of stuff that could be applied subtly, such as contact poisons applied by a touch with a projectile that can be mistaken for a stray bug (totally happens in Summer!). Or a needle that is thrown/spitted/blown. That's actually why I thought along the lines of Poison Dart Frogs.
 
Keep in mind that poison is largely a matter of dose. You just generally need a lot more servings of alcohol than of, say, rat poison, for the same level of damage. One can depict this through either a small amount of damage dice per serving or by inflicting bashing damage, which heals quickly and takes a while to roll over into lethal.
 
vicky_molokh said:
Yeah, that's exactly what I tried to do (well, one of the things, anyway), but 99% of them don't go to taverns outside the territory that they're protecting, their discipline is near-perfect, and their company leader (the one that leads the group relevant for our mission, anyway) has an MDV of at least 6 (so shut down my TID attempts because I couldn't buy a Socialize Excellency yet).

So thanks for the right ideas. But I was forced to ask about suboptimal options because circumstances prevented use of optimal ones; sorry about that.
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Then have one of your team's sneaky sorts find where they eat, and contaminate their food with disease (a fairly simple matter if you have a party member who has the Medicine to know how to spread disease). If half their men are pooping out their guts and throwing up on the night you're breaking in, they'll be short-handed, some of the people on-duty will be sick anyway, and everyone will be feeling rotten and ill-tempered and distracted.
 
EarthScorpion said:
Then have one of your team's sneaky sorts find where they eat, and contaminate their food with disease (a fairly simple matter if you have a party member who has the Medicine to know how to spread disease). If half their men are pooping out their guts and throwing up on the night you're breaking in, they'll be short-handed, some of the people on-duty will be sick anyway, and everyone will be feeling rotten and ill-tempered and distracted.
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Remember to pick the right disease- you don't want to cause a cholera outbreak or anything. :V
 
Hazard said:
Eh, proper quarantine involves secluding the infected anyway, right? Can't get a lot more secluded than dead and buried...
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Depends on where the outbreak is.

Proper 'treatment' might involve a bunch of people standing around the bed and preying, just perfect targets to be the vectors next hosts
 
vicky_molokh said:
I was thinking of stuff that could be applied subtly, such as contact poisons applied by a touch with a projectile that can be mistaken for a stray bug (totally happens in Summer!). Or a needle that is thrown/spitted/blown. That's actually why I thought along the lines of Poison Dart Frogs.
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I would honestly just use the stats for Coral Snake Venom and switch out the lethal for bashing. If you've got someone with Medicine, Survival, and/or Craft: Wood, it shouldn't be too hard to make just about any kind of poison you need or can imagine. Then you just make some special needle-arrows that do minimal damage and apply the poison and you're set.
 
Bursting Eagerness Soul said:
I would honestly just use the stats for Coral Snake Venom and switch out the lethal for bashing. If you've got someone with Medicine, Survival, and/or Craft: Wood, it shouldn't be too hard to make just about any kind of poison you need or can imagine. Then you just make some special needle-arrows that do minimal damage and apply the poison and you're set.
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I thought brewing poisons is Craft:Water (which my character has). But at one dot, actually making a proper poison seems problematic. Buying the right one on the market and avoiding fraudulent/ratty/etc. sellers seems to be within the lines of capabilities, though . . . I think.
 
Bursting Eagerness Soul said:
I would honestly just use the stats for Coral Snake Venom and switch out the lethal for bashing. If you've got someone with Medicine, Survival, and/or Craft: Wood, it shouldn't be too hard to make just about any kind of poison you need or can imagine. Then you just make some special needle-arrows that do minimal damage and apply the poison and you're set.
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Coral Snake is one of the deadliest and most powerful venoms in the setting - only arrow frog venom and supernatural poisons are worse. For balance purposes, I'd extend the interval time to actions instead of ticks.
 
Aleph said:
Coral Snake is one of the deadliest and most powerful venoms in the setting - only arrow frog venom and supernatural poisons are worse. For balance purposes, I'd extend the interval time to actions instead of ticks.
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These two have intervals of these two (Arrow and Coral) are 1 action each already, so there's no need for houseruling (aside from the bit turning Lethal to Bashing, that is).
 
Aleph said:
... um. Yes it did. Poisons sidebar, top of pg 131 in 2e core; "Arrow Frog Venom: Damage 8L/1 tick", "Coral Snake Venom: Damage 6L/1 tick". Literally right in front of me.
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Hmm. I see 8L and 6L. Also, it's more of a topbar than sidebar in my book. Either way, Errata set it to /Action.
 
Aleph said:
Coral Snake is one of the deadliest and most powerful venoms in the setting - only arrow frog venom and supernatural poisons are worse. For balance purposes, I'd extend the interval time to actions instead of ticks.
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Bluntly, I don't think you're going to have a fast-acting, non-lethal poison without active magic (like Kimbery's 'ha ha ha you won't die from this, you'll just wish you could' one) or non-trivial amounts of work at getting the dose exactly right. Look at the work that goes into anesthesia and how, despite the very controlled situations, people do sometimes die from it.

And that's with a trained medic under supervision providing a dose calculated for their body mass and their fat levels and not applying it via, say, blowdart.

Now, there's probably room for a Night who does have the Medicine to precisely calculate his doses of toxin on the fly so they give paralysis and unconsciousness, but don't kill the person they hit. But that's an active exercise in skill and probably won't work so well on the fly - it's suited for taking out a patrolling guard, but less good for an active battle.

If you want a paralytic poison, get a slow-acting lethal poison with a large penalty. They'll take a few points of lethal damage, maybe, but they'll also be incapacitated by the penalty for a long period. And if the poison is larger than their pertinent pool, they can't take the action - so you just need to get a poison that gives a large penalty and they won't be able to roll to raise the alarm because they're incapacitated by the toxin.
 
EarthScorpion said:
Bluntly, I don't think you're going to have a fast-acting, non-lethal poison without active magic (like Kimbery's 'ha ha ha you won't die from this, you'll just wish you could' one) or non-trivial amounts of work at getting the dose exactly right. Look at the work that goes into anesthesia and how, despite the very controlled situations, people do sometimes die from it.

And that's with a trained medic under supervision providing a dose calculated for their body mass and their fat levels and not applying it via, say, blowdart.

Now, there's probably room for a Night who does have the Medicine to precisely calculate his doses of toxin on the fly so they give paralysis and unconsciousness, but don't kill the person they hit. But that's an active exercise in skill and probably won't work so well on the fly - it's suited for taking out a patrolling guard, but less good for an active battle.

If you want a paralytic poison, get a slow-acting lethal poison with a large penalty. They'll take a few points of lethal damage, maybe, but they'll also be incapacitated by the penalty for a long period. And if the poison is larger than their pertinent pool, they can't take the action - so you just need to get a poison that gives a large penalty and they won't be able to roll to raise the alarm because they're incapacitated by the toxin.
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Definitely! Realistic 'less-lethal incapacitations' are always only that - less lethal but never 100% nonlethal. Luckily, Exalted is a game line that supports both (a) a cinematic style of campaigns and (b) magic available to low-key thaumaturges. The latter should be able to produce some sort of autoantagonist agent whose lethality hits diminishing returns faster than it kills the target (at least most of the time). I was hoping there's a canonical example, but it seems that the only one is in 1e (doing 10 bashing dice and produced by [al]chemists from the normally-Lethal form of Death Sap).

One thing I noticed about Exalted Corebook poisons is that they can produce huge dice penalties but never completely paralyze with incapacitation the way some other paralysis effects do in the system.
 
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About that Anima banner thingy: the mutation that i remembered was in Revlid's Mutation and Genesis revision, but there were some parts of the Scroll of Heroes that had similiar things. (A flaw that fuses together in a single Peripheal pool the essence pool of the exalted, and the fact that *Shudder* Half Castes *Shudder* have nothing but Peripheal essence.)

Anima Banner
Cost: 1pt; Keywords: Spiritual, Negative, Internal, Requires Enlightened Essence
The creature's mote pool is split into Peripheral and Personal pools, consisting of two-thirds and one-third of its motes, respectively. Expending motes from the Peripheral pool produces a glowing anima banner (though the creature lacks an anima power of any kind), at the same intervals as a Lawgiver (Exalted, pp.114). The aesthetic of the anima is not that of an Exalt; most fundamentally, non-Exalted lack Caste Marks (though equivalent sparkles of power flicker about them at the appropriate levels of anima flare). Pure mortals tend toward colourless auras of power, but they are vanishingly rare in Creation nowadays; some in the Bureau of Nature doubt that there is a single human in Creation who does not carry at least a drop of Dragon's blood, or remains untouched by Wyld taint, Lintha-strain, or genesis-meddling. Perhaps the hermit preserved in the amber-demesne of Mount Meru, but no-one else.
 
vicky_molokh said:
I thought brewing poisons is Craft:Water (which my character has). But at one dot, actually making a proper poison seems problematic. Buying the right one on the market and avoiding fraudulent/ratty/etc. sellers seems to be within the lines of capabilities, though . . . I think.
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That it is. I haven't looked at the 2e core in a long time. Still, my point of being able to homebrew it up stands.

Aleph said:
Coral Snake is one of the deadliest and most powerful venoms in the setting - only arrow frog venom and supernatural poisons are worse. For balance purposes, I'd extend the interval time to actions instead of ticks.
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Point. I was honestly just throwing that one in as a placeholder for "use a canon poison".
 
vicky_molokh said:
Definitely! Realistic 'less-lethal incapacitations' are always only that - less lethal but never 100% nonlethal. Luckily, Exalted is a game line that supports both (a) a cinematic style of campaigns and (b) magic available to low-key thaumaturges. The latter should be able to produce some sort of autoantagonist agent whose lethality hits diminishing returns faster than it kills the target (at least most of the time).
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No, see, this is where I disagree.

Thaumaturgy is what lets Creation have access to anaesthetics which work more like modern ones - which is to say, a trained herbologist can brew up something that, when measured precisely to their body mass and administered with great care, allows them to knock someone out while they reset a broken bone. It's a great step up from real life, where the equivalent was basically "get them roaring drunk before you smash their arm and reset it". That is the magic of thaumaturges.

But safe, reliable, near-instant knock-out chemicals are a big change to a setting with a large knock on effect that you're not considering. And then there's the metagame implications. To be blunt, Poison and unexpected attacks are powerful enough already. No, you don't get something that you get to use to reliably and silently take someone out with just a single blowdart, just from thaumaturgy.
 
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