General Exalted Thread

[EarthScorpion]

So, for these Monster-Lunars who are set up so the easy path is to be a NPC-madman but where a PC can be playable with a group, I think a good starting point would be a full integration of Limit as an active resource. Taking the term "Limit Break" back to its Final Fantasy roots (and also touching on the original werewolf stuff, not Apocalypse werewolf stuff [1]), it's a source of power for them. You build up Limit which makes you crazier and eviller, and then you vent your crazy-evil to fuel effects. Your war form is something you access by going into Limit Break.

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Just retouching this point, hmm. I don't think you actually want to spend Limit to activate powers. Giving into your evil side and letting its power out shouldn't make your evil side weaker. So at the very least, your Limit should only decrease at the end of the scene, or possibly next time you wake up (for that whole 'evil rampage, pass out, wake up sane again' thing). You might even want a divide between Transitory Limit and Longer-Term Limit (because the term "Permanent Limit" isn't really appropriate for a splat who has their mechanical integrated around raising and lowering Limit), so you can raise your Limit by letting your evil side out for a little while for a combat, which gives you points of Transitory Limit and which also raises your Longer Term Limit.

Limit Break War Form is still totally sweet as an idea, though. Gotta have your 'letting out the monster' form.

So, this set-up doesn't seem very friendly for all-Lunar parties. Most Lunars are NPC lords of Chaos, ruling over the Wyld proximate to Creation (we can use this chance to utterly clear out and rework the Wyld while we're at it, like bringing in @Havocfett's Rakashasa). Even compared to an Abyssal Loyalist game, it doesn't sound very friendly to play to me, because - barring chaos-prince Lunar elders being a thing - getting a party of madmen-type Lunars pointed in the same direction sounds hard. So the splat should really be built up to enable the story of the kind of character who's trying to resist the evil power within - werewolves, the Hulk, Jackie Estacado, etc.

Sounds to me therefore that one of the big ways they have for venting Limit and keeping their evil side under control is positive connections to other people - like, say, other PCs. It'll be the opposite of an Abyssal Renegade thing. While Abyssals have to keep people at arm's length to avoid their curse hurting people, these Monster-Lunars have to find things, people and ideals to love and cherish and admire that they can use as a bulwark against their own madness. Their loved ones can plead with them when they're running full Limit to lower it, allowing sanity to take hold again. Someone can stroke their face and tell them that the woman they love is still in there.

And someone with a lot of friends and who values the cause they're fighting for? They can look an enemy in the eye and whisper "I'm always angry".

 

[Alexander89]

So. Hmm. How do you mechanically implement a splat as being very much about "power from madness" and "my power is an enemy within me - not a slow, corruptive, twisting enemy like Infernals, but one that if I slip - wham, now I'm the bad guy"?

Well, hmm, the closest we have to that at the moment is playing an Apostate Alchemical. You have tasty, tasty Charms that give you points of Limit and make you crazy, you have compulsions to be crazy, your special charms are more powerful but are nasty, etc etc. However, Apostates are basically NPC material - they don't play well in groups, etc.

We also have Infernals. As @Revlid has raised before, the Infernal Charmset works as a slowly corrupting force that combines carrots and sticks to make you act more like a Yozi. Kimbery has her carrot of "Look how awesome you are in the water, oh look why not get rid of that enemy by poisoning them because your poison is fucking sweet" and her stick of "If you want these things, learn the Intolerable Burning Truths and become a crazy person". But this is a long, slow, gradual corruption - and it's one that PCs are intended to "fight" by picking up multiple Yozis and becoming crazy in their own, unique way. Infernals don't have a monster inside them; they have a devil on their shoulder.

So, for these Monster-Lunars who are set up so the easy path is to be a NPC-madman but where a PC can be playable with a group, I think a good starting point would be a full integration of Limit as an active resource. Taking the term "Limit Break" back to its Final Fantasy roots (and also touching on the original werewolf stuff, not Apocalypse werewolf stuff [1]), it's a source of power for them. You build up Limit which makes you crazier and eviller, and then you vent your crazy-evil to fuel effects. Your war form is something you access by going into Limit Break.

And unlike other Exalts, you don't auto-vent your Limit at 10. So if you want to play "optimally", you walk around with high Limit all the time so it means you always have lots of fuel to spend if someone tries to hurt you. If you care about not being an evil madman, you have to pass up on the offer of power and keep your Limit low, relying on the harder ways to generate Limit for yourself in combat. These'll probably include things like "getting hurt", "being taunted by others", "watching things occur which violate your principles", "flaring your anima to draw on more power" - you know, basically just going through media which features "I'm fuelled by some kind of inner monster or curse or whatever" and seeing what makes them let it out.

The Lunar Charmset is therefore built and balanced around the idea that most Lunars will be crazy madmen and will keep fairly high Limit, which... hmm, high Limit imposes a warping effect on your principles for the whole "twisted reflection of yourself" feel for your evil form. Dark Link still cares about the same things you do, but everything about these things is twisted. Love becomes possessiveness, rivalry becomes hatred, admiration becomes envy. Of course, if your principles are already pre-twisted, they don't suddenly become good - if you internalise the monster, you become it. But you want people who try to stay as moral humans to feel tempted to let the beast out, because that's a rather different way of doing things from Infernals or Abyssals. They both have "my power does evil things, how do I abuse it to get my results". For this, you want more along the lines of "If I stay a moral person, I'm weakening myself - but if I unleash the evil within, it might destroy everything I worked for".

Although, hmm, for that, you do have to be careful not to make it as un-fun as Resonance can be.

Hmm. More thought needed.

That, or you just go down the Wraith path and have another player play your evil side and give some kind of bartering mechanic for you accessing your full powers.

[1] Because while Apocalypse werewolves are crazy and evil, that's just their own personal choice and their screwed up culture.

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Just retouching this point, hmm. I don't think you actually want to spend Limit to activate powers. Giving into your evil side and letting its power out shouldn't make your evil side weaker. So at the very least, your Limit should only decrease at the end of the scene, or possibly next time you wake up (for that whole 'evil rampage, pass out, wake up sane again' thing). You might even want a divide between Transitory Limit and Longer-Term Limit (because the term "Permanent Limit" isn't really appropriate for a splat who has their mechanical integrated around raising and lowering Limit), so you can raise your Limit by letting your evil side out for a little while for a combat, which gives you points of Transitory Limit and which also raises your Longer Term Limit.

Limit Break War Form is still totally sweet as an idea, though. Gotta have your 'letting out the monster' form.

So, this set-up doesn't seem very friendly for all-Lunar parties. Most Lunars are NPC lords of Chaos, ruling over the Wyld proximate to Creation (we can use this chance to utterly clear out and rework the Wyld while we're at it, like bringing in @Havocfett's Rakashasa). Even compared to an Abyssal Loyalist game, it doesn't sound very friendly to play to me, because - barring chaos-prince Lunar elders being a thing - getting a party of madmen-type Lunars pointed in the same direction sounds hard. So the splat should really be built up to enable the story of the kind of character who's trying to resist the evil power within - werewolves, the Hulk, Jackie Estacado, etc.

Sounds to me therefore that one of the big ways they have for venting Limit and keeping their evil side under control is positive connections to other people - like, say, other PCs. It'll be the opposite of an Abyssal Renegade thing. While Abyssals have to keep people at arm's length to avoid their curse hurting people, these Monster-Lunars have to find things, people and ideals to love and cherish and admire that they can use as a bulwark against their own madness. Their loved ones can plead with them when they're running full Limit to lower it, allowing sanity to take hold again. Someone can stroke their face and tell them that the woman they love is still in there.

And someone with a lot of friends and who values the cause they're fighting for? They can look an enemy in the eye and whisper "I'm always angry".

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I like this idea a lot. ES, do you mind if I try to integrate it into my attempt at a Oramus Charmset?

 

[Azrael]

I like this idea a lot. ES, do you mind if I try to integrate it into my attempt at a Oramus Charmset?

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...In what way does that fit in Oramus's thematics?

Not to mention this exercise is at least partially based in 'making antagonistic powers that aren't Infernals'.

 

[EarthScorpion]

I like this idea a lot. ES, do you mind if I try to integrate it into my attempt at a Oramus Charmset?

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I'd recommend against it. A splat would have to be built from the ground up for this kind of "inner monster, my power is a beast within me" thing - and Infernals aren't. It also contradicts the whole "shoulder demon" thing about Infernals, where the consequence of getting lots of Green Sun Nimbus Flare upgrades is that killing people with nuclear fire that gives them radiation sickness and subjects their soul to 10,000 years of torment is that that's a really handy and convenient power for solving all your problems, even the ones that probably shouldn't be solved with nuclear fire. You don't lose control to some evil side by killing people with green nuclear fire - it was entirely your own choice and it's your choice to do it again. Infernals don't have a monster inside fighting for control - indeed, it's telling that all the demon in their head can do is whisper to them and try to coax them into doing what it wants. And when you learn Infernal Charms which change your personality, that was something you chose to do. The Infernal path to hell is willing and they walk it with wide eyes.

It's also not great for Oramus' themes specifically, as well as generally being bad for Infernals. Oramus is an impossible horror, a thing of contradictions and madness and paradox chained within his own wings as only he can constrain himself. He is wild and free, beyond good and evil, and his madness is the madness of the Cthulhu Mythos, the madness of the unchained mind which has seen such vistas that you cannot understand. He doesn't struggle against madness - that's just what he is and men go mad to see such impossibility.

And finally, not everything works with Infernals, you know? I mean, hell, if you wanted "there's something in me, twisting my mind and trying to take control" and don't want to give it to Lunars, Abyssals are closer to that than Infernals.

 

[Alexander89]

I'd recommend against it. A splat would have to be built from the ground up for this kind of "inner monster, my power is a beast within me" thing - and Infernals aren't. It also contradicts the whole "shoulder demon" thing about Infernals, where the consequence of getting lots of Green Sun Nimbus Flare upgrades is that killing people with nuclear fire that gives them radiation sickness and subjects their soul to 10,000 years of torment is that that's a really handy and convenient power for solving all your problems, even the ones that probably shouldn't be solved with nuclear fire. You don't lose control to some evil side by killing people with green nuclear fire - it was entirely your own choice and it's your choice to do it again. Infernals don't have a monster inside fighting for control - indeed, it's telling that all the demon in their head can do is whisper to them and try to coax them into doing what it wants. And when you learn Infernal Charms which change your personality, that was something you chose to do. The Infernal path to hell is willing and they walk it with wide eyes.

It's also not great for Oramus' themes specifically, as well as generally being bad for Infernals. Oramus is an impossible horror, a thing of contradictions and madness and paradox chained within his own wings as only he can constrain himself. He is wild and free, beyond good and evil, and his madness is the madness of the Cthulhu Mythos, the madness of the unchained mind which has seen such vistas that you cannot understand. He doesn't struggle against madness - that's just what he is and men go mad to see such impossibility.

And finally, not everything works with Infernals, you know? I mean, hell, if you wanted "there's something in me, twisting my mind and trying to take control" and don't want to give it to Lunars, Abyssals are closer to that than Infernals.

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I was talking more about "there are Charms that require possessing a certain number of Limit Point as requisite", but I see your point.

 

[EarthScorpion]

I was talking more about "there are Charms that require possessing a certain number of Limit Point as requisite", but I see your point.

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That's what I mean about "you need to build a splat around it". Such a mechanic runs into the fact that the Malfeas Charmset already uses Limit as an alternative cost you must pay for some effects - like the option to spend Limit to reject Shaping - and considers Limit to be a bad thing. If another part of the Charmset then turns Limit into an asset that you want, that produces unwanted second order consequences.

 

[Happerry]

Though I wouldn't be surprised if Oramus could also spend limit to do certain things. (IE, use madness to spread more madness.)

 

[greensun]

Limit Break War Form is still totally sweet as an idea, though. Gotta have your 'letting out the monster' form.

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Hmm... Lets say a Lunar's warform has (x) amount of mutations points or what not to apply to their warfrom, but they also add (Limit) points as well. They get even more mutations when they're going through a full-blown limit break, and those extra mutations recede or are reduced if they fall to a controlled limited break. You have to embrace the maddness of the Lunar condition to be as powerful as possible.

As a base to work from I'd say keep with weaker in terms of full on power than say devil-tyrant avatar shintai, but far more flexible as you pick your mutations from your entire form-library rather than a largely static list.

I'm aiming for the idea that a given Lunar is more powerful as they embrace their inner monster, but it of course requires a robust system where a Lunar can gain Limit easily, but that makes it harder to shuck it off without consequence.

 

[Roadie]

I say this as a fan of diceless games, by the way, where there is no random numbers at all. I'm not arguing from my own position, so you don't have to convince me.

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On this note, I've been thinking about Exalted and Godbound and Nobilis, and thinking that an Exalted heartbreaker would really be prime territory for a diceless game.

Get rid of Attributes and Abilities, and just have a single set of traits rated on a 1-5 scale. If you have a rating equal to the difficulty or higher than your opponent, you do the thing. If you don't, you can spend motes to boost your rating for a single test 1-for-1, excellency style.

The math is effectively close enough to the current system, in terms of expected results, that I think one could eyeball-convert a bunch of stuff to work on a diceless system.

 

[Cosar]

Hmm... Lets say a Lunar's warform has (x) amount of mutations points or what not to apply to their warfrom, but they also add (Limit) points as well. They get even more mutations when they're going through a full-blown limit break, and those extra mutations recede or are reduced if they fall to a controlled limited break. You have to embrace the maddness of the Lunar condition to be as powerful as possible.

As a base to work from I'd say keep with weaker in terms of full on power than say devil-tyrant avatar shintai, but far more flexible as you pick your mutations from your entire form-library rather than a largely static list.

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I'd say you get Limit or Limit/2* dice to all actions(still limited by dice cap, so what their dice cap is informs what you should do). That's their IAM equivalent(or at least their combat one). It make having high long term limit attractive, while also meaning that they will get significantly stronger over time(as temporary limit increases).

Mutations are nice, but they're generally not going to be a huge combat factor. Or, if they are, they probably need to be harder to gain/keep up than current Exalted assumes.


* whoops, forgot that limit is a 1-10 thing, not 1-5 for a moment.

 

[TheLastOne]

On this note, I've been thinking about Exalted and Godbound and Nobilis, and thinking that an Exalted heartbreaker would really be prime territory for a diceless game.

Get rid of Attributes and Abilities, and just have a single set of traits rated on a 1-5 scale. If you have a rating equal to the difficulty or higher than your opponent, you do the thing. If you don't, you can spend motes to boost your rating for a single test 1-for-1, excellency style.

The math is effectively close enough to the current system, in terms of expected results, that I think one could eyeball-convert a bunch of stuff to work on a diceless system.

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Hmm, probably doable, but involves so much gutting and rebuilding that you would basically be making a system from scratch. I would be tempted to actually start with the third marvel rpg, the Marvel Universe Roleplaying Game. It has an interesting bidding system and recovery system that lets a respectable amount of tactics survive, which is nice because combat IS important in Exalted. You would have to build some standardized packages to represent charm paths, but that wouldn't be too gnarly.

It has a NASTY deathspiral though. Several solutions were floated to fix that, but I don't remember which were good and which sucked.

 

[Roadie]

Hmm, probably doable, but involves so much gutting and rebuilding that you would basically be making a system from scratch.

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Thus the mention of Godbound—the idea would be to put something together that feels kinda similar without worrying too much about exact mechanics.

I would be tempted to actually start with the third marvel rpg, the Marvel Universe Roleplaying Game. It has an interesting bidding system and recovery system that lets a respectable amount of tactics survive, which is nice because combat IS important in Exalted.

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Got any more info on hand about that?

 

[TheLastOne]

Thus the mention of Godbound—the idea would be to put something together that feels kinda similar without worrying too much about exact mechanics.


Got any more info on hand about that?

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Wikipedia has a decent explainaiton of the basics.

Marvel Universe Roleplaying Game - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

There's a bunch more to it, of course. Things like all stones are revealed at the same time during the turn, so you have to guess at how much attack you have to defend against. And that's not getting into things like powers that modified that order, like Spidermans, which let him allocate stones after everyone else, so that he could always spend the absolute minimum on defense and attack to achieve exactly what he wanted.

It's a simple system, but it worked really well, though some quirks and questions were only ever answered online.

 

[linkhyrule5]

Hey, doing a silly allusion thing - are there any canonical Lovecraftian demons in Malfeas? (Or rather, I'm sure there are, does anyone know their names off the top of their heads?)

I imagine some of Oramus' souls might have thematics like that, in particular.

 

[Quantumboost]

Hey, doing a silly allusion thing - are there any canonical Lovecraftian demons in Malfeas? (Or rather, I'm sure there are, does anyone know their names off the top of their heads?)

I imagine some of Oramus' souls might have thematics like that, in particular.

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SWLiHN looks kinda like Yog-Sothoth if you squint. And by 'squint' I mean 'look in her general direction and don't lose your free will in the process'.

 

[linkhyrule5]

SWLiHN looks kinda like Yog-Sothoth if you squint. And by 'squint' I mean 'look in her general direction and don't lose your free will in the process'.

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Ha. Someone a bunch of Nephandi could try to summon, though, and get a squamous tentacle piping flute music.

(Yeah I know there's not likely to be much left over after untold Ages, I just like my little Exalted references. If there's nothing I'll just go full Lovecraft instead.)

 

[Quantumboost]

Perroneles look a lot like shoggoths, come to think of it, though their thing is "being biological ablative armor" rather than anything that shoggoths were supposed to do.

 

[Revlid]

Hey, doing a silly allusion thing - are there any canonical Lovecraftian demons in Malfeas? (Or rather, I'm sure there are, does anyone know their names off the top of their heads?)

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Dancers at the Saigoth Gates are an excellent choice.

I mean, "Lovecraftian" is really broad, here. Are we talking Dreamlands? Fish people? Anything with tentacles? Cosmic scale?

 

[linkhyrule5]

Dancers at the Saigoth Gates are an excellent choice.

I mean, "Lovecraftian" is really broad, here. Are we talking Dreamlands? Fish people? Anything with tentacles? Cosmic scale?

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Mm... "Many-angled ones," is kind of the aesthetic I'm going for here. Dreamlands yes, Hounds of Tindalos yes, Cthulhu proper not really honestly, Cosmic scale maybe but even the Nephandi can only get their hands on so many sacrifices.

Honestly I don't really need that much to work with, this was originally just a silly allusion I wanted to throw in to play up the ancient history. Lemme go look up the Dancers.

 

[Pale Wolf]

The way I see it, the 'First Age revenge' aspect is a culture myth. The overwhelming majority of Lunars fight the Realm in some way, but it's because the Realm fights them - fought them before they had even Exalted. They fight the Realm because it burned down their sacred temple, exiled their tribe into the wilds, sold their family into slavery. And now that they have Exalted, it hates them even more.

So, the First Age revenge thing, it originated from elders for whom this was a fresh wound. That doesn't mean that these elders are manipulating the Silver Pact into fighting their pointless war, nor does it means they are the few sad lonely men who are the only ones to care about it still - it just originated from them. Then other Lunars to whom they told that tale absorbed it and read it through their own lens and twisted it in the retelling.

The entire Silver Pact shares the story of the fall of the First Age and the Usurpation, but that story isn't what drives them; what drives them is their personal issues, the slight the Realm has committed against them. Their culture story is half-myth, half-badly contextualized history, and it serves to justify their actions and bind them together. No Lunar is claiming vengeance for the shining spires of Greeting Dawn, First Age city lost in the Usurpation; but the legend of the fall of Greeting Dawn makes the very modern empire that conquered the lands of their own tribe into something more, something that transcends history, a greater evil that has broken the world, and imparts on their (personal) crusade (to get back the lands of their tribe) a sacral and transcendent aspect.

It also gives a sense of 'we're in this together' that allows you to more easily convince another Lunar that Your Fight Is Their Fight. It isn't, really, but they know that if they help you with this you will likely help them in return, and the shared culture-myth serves to present this as personal bonds and a grand historical work rather than a pure mercenary approach.

Humans like shared history (with the right people), they like to make their political enemy the avatar of a force whose crimes transcend history, they like tall tales, they like stories that tell them 'they' were once far greater than they are today (and can be so again), and they like communal histories that create bonds and allow them to treat tit-for-tat-you-scratch-my-back arrangements as something deeper and meaningful.

Thus, the righteous vengeance against the Usurpers.

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Yeah pretty much. Lunars work best as a collaberative coalition rather than anything truly unified. Also worth noting; three hundred Celestials working together is a world-shaking force... But so are the Ten Thousand Dragons.

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Bingo. Which means that if the Lunars are unified, the Realm is not hegemon.

Instead we have the Cold War between the United Prefectures of the Blessed Isle and the Silver Union.

We have two incredible power blocs tearing into one another. Everything in the world comes to be viewed through that lens. The war between them takes over the setting.

This is cool and it's evocative - it'd be one hell of a Modern Shard, where the Lunars and the dragonblooded are engaged in a millenia-long Cold War and maneuvering for position and influence, where if you play anyone outside those factions you're probably doing Middle Eastern style politics where you're currying favour with one of the big blocs, trying not to get swallowed up entirely, hoping one or the other group doesn't take an interest and decide to weigh in on your little regional conflicts...

But it doesn't really allow for base-level Exalted - you don't have to worry about the empire with its boot on the throat of the world because man, you can go to the Lunars for backing, and then either the Lunars and the Realm rip each other up a bit, or the Realm backs off and directs client states at you instead. Wyld Hunt? The Wyld Hunt can't deploy outside of Realm-held territory without getting eaten by Lunars.

And if the Lunars aren't capable of this as a unified force, then they're chumps. This is a 300-Celestial-Exalt force. It's Primordial War scale firepower. Facing off against maybe 10% to 1% of the Primordial War era Dragonblooded host. Not facing off against the forces of the Sidereals and Heaven - oh the Bronze Faction is DB-aligned but with a credible and active alternative to the Realm the Silver Faction is gonna be a biiig thing and the Gold Faction would weigh in out of pure spite. Heaven if anything is going to be Lunar-inclined, but let's just say they cancel out.

In the Shogunate Era it was different - there were enough Dragonblooded and controlled infrastructure that the Lunars could be considered a plucky resistance. But the minute the Contagion/Crusade was over, the Dragonblooded host was down to less than 1% of its prior strength and the Lunars refilled to full power within an hour as the Exaltations picked new people.

If a full Celestial host can't even break even against the remnants and shards that comprise the modern Realm?

Then either your five new Celestials aren't going to matter - they'll disappear in a rounding error unless you manage to get the full Solar host together too.

Or your five new Celestials are going to matter, and the three hundred Lunars are chumps for failing to accomplish in seven hundred years what your five Solars accomplished in ten.

And if they can be non-chumps, then the Realm is no longer hegemon, Creation is in a state of Cold War between two massive creation-shaking forces, and you're basically scurrying between the legs of those titans. I didn't use the 'silver Yozis breaking free' comparison lightly - a fully unified Lunar host is a huge thing that casts the entire setting into its light. Lunars, Realm, the conflict between them, it's the biggest thing going on, everything else's significance pales except in how it relates to this conflict.

To have space for everything else, the Lunars cannot be on a unified anti-Realm crusade.

 

[Anasurimbor]

Or your five new Celestials are going to matter, and the three hundred Lunars are chumps for failing to accomplish in seven hundred years what your five Solars accomplished in ten.

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Empresses Eaten:
Lunars: 1
Solars: 0

 

[Jon Chung]

A benefit to the "Lunars are the mad princes of Chaos" deal is that they now have a significant accomplishment: they ate the Shogunate.

 

[Sanctaphrax]

...the minute the Contagion/Crusade was over, the Dragonblooded host was down to less than 1% of its prior strength and the Lunars refilled to full power within an hour as the Exaltations picked new people.

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An hour?

Where did you get the idea that Exaltation is that fast?

I don't think the books ever go into detail about how quickly Exalts are replaced, but I'd always assumed that an Exaltation was likely to spend a fair while waiting for a good enough candidate. Irrevocably choosing a hero to grant divine powers to is a risky business, after all; no sense making it more so by rushing it.

 

[Quantumboost]

I don't think the books ever go into detail about how quickly Exalts are replaced, but I'd always assumed that an Exaltation was likely to spend a fair while waiting for a good enough candidate. Irrevocably choosing a hero to grant divine powers to is a risky business, after all; no sense making it more so by rushing it.

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A good enough candidate for the default criterion of "survived incredible odds" in the wake of the Great Contagion and the Balorian Crusade? I'm reasonably sure there'd be suitable candidates somewhere in Creation and meeting that criterion, given the sheer scales and events involved.

Now, it's not likely to be that quick, but that's because Lytek has to prune the memories and polish them up all nice and tidy before re-releasing them. He'd likely be very preoccupied at that point if there's a sudden influx. But that's a separate concern from "maybe the entire population of the world are having a sudden dearth of badasses".

 

[Jon Chung]

Lytek has to prune the memories and polish them up all nice and tidy

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This is something I consider a poor addition to the line: it introduces a single point of failure - a ridiculously easy to exploit single point of failure - to an otherwise well-designed autonomous weapon system.

Consider this from the POV of the Incarna. They are making a weapon they cannot control, that they have no way to control by design, because they are attempting to kill their creators, who have control over them. The weapon is to be deployed by giving it to the control of the weak and helpless prayer-cattle that hate the boss as much as they do, but are not under direct control (After all, what can cows do to a Primordial? Bleed on you?). Once the weapon is released, it will empower helpless prayer-cows into titan-killing weapons until the titans are dead, and the prayer-cows will do it out of their own free will.

This is sound logic, a working system. Even should the Incarna be commanded to turn off their weapons, they can't. Even if the Sun tells the Solars to knock it off, they can give him the finger and keep working. Nothing about the weapon system is under the control of its makers once released and there is no way to stop it without destroying everything and killing all the prayer-cows, that is the point of it.

The addition of Lytek as a necessary part in the operation of the system is actively detrimental to this, and gives the Incarna an enormous idiot ball, making them look like retarded morons for no good reason for building such an obvious flaw into their otherwise good idea. This even gets the Primordials in the AoE splash from the idiot ball being thrown: with such an obvious point of failure, why didn't they exploit it?