Green Flame Rising (Exalted vs Dresden Files)

What are the odds it's nazis again? They were a big part of that whole situation, and we didn't really clean up that group.

They really should be on the list, even if they aren't here finishing the job, because letting berserker nazi werewolves run around seems like a bad idea.

Hopefully we can just burn down some safe houses, maybe possibly hurl some of their middle managers off of overpasses, and they'll get the message to shove off.
The crown of eyes does allow us to destroy basically any group that we have the strength to beat in a fight so long as we can find one member. Kill or capture that member, ask the crown where his fellow members are, repeat.

Does have the problem that we would likely need to be somewhat murderous. Also fast travel if the group is widespread.
 
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You are now going to need to need to do construction work.
And do it in a place where you will need a fresh set of building permits to do that sort of thing. And fire code inspections.
And I dont know what the additional licensing scheme is for construction work in Chicago.

Somethings are just not worth the trouble.
You want to do that sorta stuff, do it underground at the Dragons Nest, where noone will complain.
Not in a poor neighborhood with a significant crime rate. I wouldnt feel safe locking ourselves in here.
If we were making a walk-in freezer, the simplest solution would be to buy one, and then reinforce it (buy I-beams, and weld them around the main frame). Quick google tells me that a commercial one should go for below 40k. If we wanted it cheaper, than buy a shipping container - two 40 ft large containers (place them side-by-side and cut a door from one section to the other would be less than 10 k. Reinforce those if Molly doesn't feel confined enough in those. Adding chillers to those should be easy with TTC. Yes, I think that would be the simplest solution.

As to feeling safe - you do realize that any reinforced room is also a safe room?
Somethings are just not worth the trouble.
You want to do that sorta stuff, do it underground at the Dragons Nest, where noone will complain.
We want to have workshops both above and below. The one in the dragon's nest for the more magical stuff, and the one above for the more mundane stuff. It's safer and more secure that way, and gives us even more cover for making diamonds.
Reasonable pecautions are cool.
Gloves wouldnt be at this time of the year.
Gloves as a fashion statement can be. And yes, we should call the cops once / if we discover a crime scene. Wearing gloves doesn't make it look like we were the ones to commit the crime. This is very, very reaching.
Isn't it raining? So Molly should already be wet?
It should, based on the previous vote and update, but there was some debate, so I decided it merited additional mention to reinforce the fact.
The crown of eyes does allow us to destroy basically any group that we have the strength to beat in a fight so long as we can find one member. Kill or capture that member, ask the crown where his fellow members are, repeat.

Does have the problem that we would likely need to be somewhat murderous. Also fast travel if the group is widespread.
Crown and the organization destroying charm combine very well, yes. And I am still curious how the charm's effect would look when dealing with someone who is a part of multiple targeted organizations and projects at once.
 
Crown and the organization destroying charm combine very well, yes. And I am still curious how the charm's effect would look when dealing with someone who is a part of multiple targeted organizations and projects at once.
You only target one organization per use. You could you a single person to target many orgs, but you have to pay the essanse for each one.
 
You only target one organization per use. You could you a single person to target many orgs, but you have to pay the essanse for each one.
Well, yes, but that's not an issue, really. Also, and importantly, it's "organization or project". So, for example, if we wanted to, we should be able to target "FBI", "Daedalus project" and "Investigating Molly Carpenter project" separately, in which case (I think), daedalus project investigating Molly Carpenter under aegis of FBI would be facing +6 difficulty adjustment. Which is basically "no, shut up and die" difficulty, where just booting up a computer in the office is difficulty 9.
 
where just booting up a computer in the office is difficulty 9.
Or more. Exalted difficulty caps at 9, but that is because they were made to do the impossible. I don't think that mortals get the same.

Have to say every time we spend XP and don't get Endless Torment Emanation I feel a little guilty. We could destroy the Red Court at any time saving so many lifes.
 
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Or more. Exalted difficulty caps at 9, but that is because they were made to do the impossible. I don't think that mortals get the same.

Have to say every time we spend XP and don't get Endless Torment Emanation I feel a little guilty. We could destroy the Red Court at any time saving so many lifes.
We really can't.
ETE is for one office or project.

At best we could try something like targeting their war-effort against the White Council and hope it's enough to make a difference before they manage to break the curse.
 
Or more. Exalted difficulty caps at 9, but that is because they were made to do the impossible. I don't think that mortals get the same.

Have to say every time we spend XP and don't get Endless Torment Emanation I feel a little guilty. We could destroy the Red Court at any time saving so many lifes.
Yeah, that's a good point. Also, forget Red Court. Targeting (Christian) Hell, Order of Blackened Denarius, Thule Society, and "bring forth the apocalypse" project (we actually might want to spend a question on something to get a list of Thule Society and Denarian projects) together... I wonder, what Thorned Namshiel would think when they start falling to tie their own shoelaces to go to work?
We really can't.
ETE is for one office or project.

At best we could try something like targeting their war-effort against the White Council and hope it's enough to make a difference before they manage to break the curse.
I think the question of whether it can stack is not one that has been answered. I.e., for Red Court, could we target "Red Court", and "War against White Council" separately, and would those stack?
 
We really can't.
ETE is for one office or project.

At best we could try something like targeting their war-effort against the White Council and hope it's enough to make a difference before they manage to break the curse.
Break curse? Sorry I don't understand you are talking about it like we are would be using mortal sorcery to do it. This is an exalted charm. If it had a way to break it then it would have mentioned that. I don't think even we can take it back.

Although I suppose if the Red Court was really on the ball and knew exactly what we had done they could dissolve the Red Court and then immediately reform as Red Court 2.
 
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Break curse? Sorry I don't understand you are talking about it like we are would be using mortal sorcery to do it. This is an exalted charm. If it had a way to break it then it would have mentioned that. I don't think even we can take it back.

Although I suppose if the Red Court was really on the ball and knew exactly what we had done they could dissolve the Red Court and then immediately reform as Red Court 2.
You can generally counterspell different splats.
It's usually more difficult than messing with your own type of magic, but possible.

There's a reason why ExWoD has a table to compare Essence to Arete/Generation/Gnosis for such purposes, rather than writing "Charms win everything forever".
Here's the quote:
What if a mage wants to try to use magick to rip apart a Charm, though? Or ancient sorcery spell? In general, the mage devises some sort of effect to disrupt or counter the Charm, then makes a contested roll against the Exalt's activation roll. If the mage gets more successes, the effect is disrupted. If there isn't an activation roll, then consult the Essence/Arete-equivalency chart in Chapter Two, and have the Exalt roll her effective Arete against difficulty 6 to establish a mark to beat
 
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Have to say every time we spend XP and don't get Endless Torment Emanation I feel a little guilty. We could destroy the Red Court at any time saving so many lifes.

I know the ritual isn't happening currently but if we can stack the charm and learned about it, I would be tempted to go for stacking *red court*, *war against white council* and *this ritual* and let them do it just to watch the fireworks.
 
So what happens when there is no activation roll? Because ETE doesn't have one. Many charms do. The ones that are meant to be beatable somehow.
If there isn't an activation roll, then consult the Essence/Arete-equivalency chart in Chapter Two, and have the Exalt roll her effective Arete against difficulty 6 to establish a mark to beat
So we'd roll 4 Dice.
 
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So we'd roll 4 Dice.
Well that's fairly pathetic not even worth buying the charm. No one worth targeting is going to even stay cursed for a week. Unless Prime is fairly rare rules say that it requires at least 3 prime to have any essence interaction.

In general, screwing around with an Exalt's Essence – and, by extension, screwing around with her Charms and other powers – always requires Prime. Seeing Essence in action takes Prime 1. Moving it around from place to place requires at least Prime 3, and transforming it into Quintessence (or vice-versa) requires both Prime 5 and Spirit 5.
 
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Well that's fairly pathetic not even worth buying the charm. No one worth targeting is going to even stay cursed for a week. Unless Prime is fairly rare rules say that it requires at least 3 prime to have any essence interaction.

In general, screwing around with an Exalt's Essence – and, by extension, screwing around with her Charms and other powers – always requires Prime. Seeing Essence in action takes Prime 1. Moving it around from place to place requires at least Prime 3, and transforming it into Quintessence (or vice-versa) requires both Prime 5 and Spirit 5.
Well, Dresden-Wizards are not quite pure Willworkers in the way WoD Mages are.
I would expect that it takes some research and spellcrafting before they can try to break a curse like this, unless they want to get really risky by casting without any clear plan.

Also the other thing, Arete 4 is pretty high.
The scale only goes to 5 for "normal" mages. I wouldn't expect anyone outside the senior council to have more than that.
 
Well, Dresden-Wizards are not quite pure Willworkers in the way WoD Mages are.
I would expect that it takes some research and spellcrafting before they can try to break a curse like this, unless they want to get really risky by casting without any clear plan.

Also the other thing, Arete 4 is pretty high.
The scale only goes to 5 for "normal" mages. I wouldn't expect anyone outside the senior council to have more than that.
And I guess they would be rolling at a plus 2 DC penalty from ETE for every step of the research process and researching an essence based curse when nothing else in the world uses essence would likely have a high base DC. Might even drive it to impossible.
 
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Adhoc vote count started by Yzarc on Jan 19, 2023 at 2:17 AM, finished with 61 posts and 11 votes.

  • [X]Plan Nosey Parker
    -[X] Activate All Things Betray: 1 WP
    -[X] Knock on the door. If noone answers, try to look inside through the open window. Then try the door to see if its unlocked, using a handkerchief or paper towel.
    -[X]Remember to check the murder site and asking the question before leaving
    -[X]STUNT: You stare at the open window for a moment, its openness at variance with -you check-every other house on the street that you can see. "Clippy" you murmur "Take a look at the DMV records for the Greenes, and find out what they drive.". With that you step out of the car, taking a couple sheets off the paper towel roll you keep in the front passenger seat. And as you walk up to the front door, you focus, and the world assumes c l a r i t y.
    [X]Plan Wet Nosey Gloved Parker
    -[X] Activate All Things Betray: 1 WP
    -[X] Get wet to activate Boiling Sea Mastery
    -[X] Wear gloves
    -[X] Knock on the door. If no one answers, try to look inside through the open window. Then try the door to see if its unlocked.
    -[X]Remember to check the murder site and asking the question before leaving
    -[X]STUNT: You stare at the open window for a moment, its openness at variance with -you check-every other house on the street that you can see. "Clippy" you murmur "Take a look at the DMV records for the Greenes, and find out what they drive.". You take a pair of fashionable leather gloves out of the glove compartment, slipping them onto your hands, and step out of the car into the light rain falling from above. And as you walk up to the front door, you focus, and the world assumes c l a r i t y.
 
The crown of eyes does allow us to destroy basically any group that we have the strength to beat in a fight so long as we can find one member. Kill or capture that member, ask the crown where his fellow members are, repeat.

Does have the problem that we would likely need to be somewhat murderous. Also fast travel if the group is widespread.
I think we can probably get away with breaking up the group by terrorizing their members and facilitating what I'm sure are a ridiculous number of past crimes catching up to them.

Anyone who can't be handled that way probably deserves a surprise visit from an angry infernal.
Well, Dresden-Wizards are not quite pure Willworkers in the way WoD Mages are.
That seems like it's underselling it by a bit. They're not just a little different, they're entirely different animals.

Look at this bit from the ExWoD FAQ:

How come mages get to screw around with Exaltation when that was always strictly off-limits in Exalted itself? Mostly for the same reason the Gurahl get to bring the dead back to life, even though that was a feat be- yond the power of even the mightiest of the Chosen back in Exalted: this is a different era and it plays by different rules. Mages have the power to at least attempt to rewrite reality according to their will, and I didn't feel it was Exalted vs World of Darkness's job to delegitimize what mages are. The Exalted are "guests" in the World of Darkness, albeit very unruly ones. They're crashing in on someone else's story. I didn't want this book to make the World of Darkness feel like a paper mockery of itself by just taking away any facts or features that might be troublesome for the Chosen.

A lot of these design decisions were made on the premise that mages are nascent demiurges that are on a path towards reshaping reality.

DF wizards can be powerful, but that isn't how they work or what they are. Which you can also see in how the senior council stacks up against archmages as the peak of human magical ability within their respective settings.

Not sure how DP will rule on this, but my thought is that it should take a lot more work for DF wizards to try things that WoD mages would take for granted.

Not that they're helpless, or that they don't have their own advantages, but they are definitely different and don't seem to muck about with the same scale or depth of forces as easily.
 
I think we can probably get away with breaking up the group by terrorizing their members and facilitating what I'm sure are a ridiculous number of past crimes catching up to them.

Anyone who can't be handled that way probably deserves a surprise visit from an angry infernal.

That seems like it's underselling it by a bit. They're not just a little different, they're entirely different animals.

Look at this bit from the ExWoD FAQ:



A lot of these design decisions were made on the premise that mages are nascent demiurges that are on a path towards reshaping reality.

DF wizards can be powerful, but that isn't how they work or what they are. Which you can also see in how the senior council stacks up against archmages as the peak of human magical ability within their respective settings.

Not sure how DP will rule on this, but my thought is that it should take a lot more work for DF wizards to try things that WoD mages would take for granted.

Not that they're helpless, or that they don't have their own advantages, but they are definitely different and don't seem to muck about with the same scale or depth of forces as easily.
I definitly agree with the general idea.
I would keep the Spheres capped at 5 and very few Wizards outside of Merlin( original not titel) should have more than 6 or 7 Arete.

The flexibility of Wizards compared to mages is already greatly reduced in that they have to work out spells for anything they do, rather than being able to do anything their Sphere-levels allow by default.

But with time and effort there seems to be very little Dresden-magic absolutly can't achieve and the White Council has a lot of institutional and individual experience, so things like breaking our curses would be well within their means.
 
I definitly agree with the general idea.
I would keep the Spheres capped at 5 and very few Wizards outside of Merlin( original not titel) should have more than 6 or 7 Arete.

The flexibility of Wizards compared to mages is already greatly reduced in that they have to work out spells for anything they do, rather than being able to do anything their Sphere-levels allow by default.

But with time and effort there seems to be very little Dresden-magic absolutly can't achieve and the White Council has a lot of institutional and individual experience, so things like breaking our curses would be well within their means.
I agree for most of the low level stuff, I just think the distinction is important because it gives them different hard and soft limits in addition to changing how they have to go about problem solving.

DF wizards can do a lot, but they work by exploiting how the rules interact rather than overwriting them. Which means they have more lines that it's just impossible to cross, though that doesn't mean they can't achieve victory by other means. It just requires them to know a lot about the specific thing they're trying to do.

Take curse breaking as an example. Harry actually knows how to do this to a degree. There's a story in Side Streets that has him clean up a bad luck curse on some old woman that was so weak he didn't know it was deliberate until the casters tried to jump him.

But he's also interacted with other kinds of curses that he didn't even consider the possibility of breaking; specifically the loup-guru thing. Which is a curse mortals can put together, but he didn't even consider the possibility of the white council taking apart.

It's probably possible to do it somehow, but figuring it out is likely more involved than having some powerful wizards putter around for awhile until they can wrestle it into submission.

They'd get it eventually, but I suspect that a 3 dot charm curse that doesn't allow any rolls to resist and doesn't anchor itself to a ready material target would involve a lot of legwork before they were allowed to make the contested roll in the first place.

Anyone without access to humanity's best magical minds or an equivalent body of knowledge would likely have an even harder time.
 
Merlin's construction of Demonreach is something of which a WoD Mage would be proud though. At the top of the scale they're immensely powerful.
 
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