Absorbing the proving grounds is part of how they got the Wan Kuei. The hells may only have been only been able to take them because of heaven's curse, but that's one step up the chain.
Green Flame Rising (Exalted vs Dresden Files)
- Thread starter DragonParadox
- Start date
- Crossover Fantasy
Absorbing the proving grounds is part of how they got the Wan Kuei. The hells may only have been only been able to take them because of heaven's curse, but that's one step up the chain.
VOTE
[X] Follow the strange cat shen, if it is power it bends to you have that aplenty
-[X] Activate All Things Betray
Molly has Perception 2, Investigation 0, but Charisma/Manipulation 3, Empathy 4, Etiquette 5.
She is going to be a lot better at getting information from people than canvassing a crime scene for clues.
Also, the night club and the DJ's effects will still be there, even if just to use it as a Crown focus.
The shen might not.
[X] Follow the strange cat shen, if it is power it bends to you have that aplenty
-[X] Activate All Things Betray
Molly has Perception 2, Investigation 0, but Charisma/Manipulation 3, Empathy 4, Etiquette 5.
She is going to be a lot better at getting information from people than canvassing a crime scene for clues.
Also, the night club and the DJ's effects will still be there, even if just to use it as a Crown focus.
The shen might not.
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I don't see anything talking about this being part of the backstory in the ExWoD book. Do you have a citation for it?
Breaking out of hell isn't as simple as braving a dangerous environment. The jades have to do and learn a lot of stuff, act against actual demonic opposition, and then do something to actually get back to their bodies. There aren't a lot of them, so the hidden hyper heresy seems closer to how you'd escape Kakuri than any of the other four in my estimation.
The other hells have themes that influence who they can take. I don't think we'd automatically end up with our own slice of the river of souls, but the nature of the afterlife would likely influence how that relationship is formed when/if it does.
I don't think that's a concern.
The setting is still broad enough to fit our hell into even at its largest, it just gives us new ways to interact with what's going on. It lets us interact with the setting in more ways without really taking anything away on a personal level.
It will change things, but it kind of should. We're playing an exalt in DF, not a wizard. Being a grand and terrible brick thrown through god's windshield is part of the idea.
We can't spend all the time there, which is good. It'll certainly add a lot to the narrative, and will probably be a source of several arcs worth of plot at some point, but I don't think it'll overshadow the DF setting.
This was a bloody terrible precedent to set.
But I didnt have the spare effort to argue people to not send a Whampire after children.
High school freshman-age, sure, but still fucking children.
Also, Shih master monks are not easy food.
An akuma on a mission is not going to risk getting ganked, mauled or banished by a senior monk by diverting from its primary mission. Its boss would not be pleased.
COMMENTARY
1)Brother Devsimar had a bad experience with senri? Or maybe its just his order?
Given that they are still searching for the bones of their dead, I see a story there.
2)Senri in mythology are, from what I can find, the Chinese origin of the Japanese nekomata myth; leopard cats who grew old enough and wise enough to get divine powers and become immortal shapeshifters. Often, if not always female.
I dont know what they are in WoD; dont have the relevant books yet.
However? That its walking here, where a sorcerer/talent died, is more likely to be linked with the shaman-DJ than with the akuma currently in town.
Akuma have very little reason to haunt the workplaces of people they already killed, or to have minions do so. And those minions would not expose themselves to the attention of possible hostiles.
Associates, co-workers or loved ones of the dead? Do. So do investigators.
And Molly calls this a guardian of the dead.
3) Noting that its described as a guardian of the dead, and of the threshold of worlds, but is not a creature of darkness.
And yet its not acting scared of the Infernal. Part of it is probably because its a cat by ancestry, and its union rules to not be impressed by anything but I wonder what the other part is. Our dad? Reputation getting around?
4)We should have brought Lydia here with us.
We're investigating the dead, which is right up her thematic alley.
And the senri would have recognized her authority.
There is no such thing I can find.
Thousand Hells pages 14-18 state that the Yama Kings stole chunks of the Yin and Yang World to make Yomi Wan as a collective effort, and its since continued growing, both inadvertently, like when a Great Dragon unintentionally displaced a bunch of spirit realms into Yomi Wan, and as the aftermath of events in the mortal world, like after the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
However. There is no link between the growth of Yomi Wan and the Wan Kuei. The Wan Kuei curse is as far as we know a curse from the August Personage in Jade due to their abandoning/perverting their purpose. There is no machinery producing Wan Kuei in the Hells; its not how it was setup to work.
The YKs have never been powerful enough to mess with stuff on that level anyway.
Else they would have bent their efforts to controlling it and spamming agents to send into the material world.
1)Waste of a major artifact component.
2)Dead body of a sapient, and thus major ethical issues with desecrating the body of one.
3)Dead body of a sapient with seriousface kinfolk.
There's maybe half a dozen Great Dragons still extant, and the greatest of them Ferrovax is explicitly a peer for Mab.
As in, one of a handul of people potent enough to 1v1 Mab without support.
That they do not object to his being killed for breaking the rules is not the same thing as watching his body be desecrated after his death. Look at how Brother Devsimar's order are still hunting for the looted bones of their predecessors.
Arawn, Lydia's dad spent the last century running from Mab's displeasure.
Lydia has negative interest in reenacting that by drawing that sort of aggro from Powers on Mab's level.
She's only Terrestrial-equivalent.
Its not.
ExWoD says to use the Thousand Hells sourcebook for a lot of that stuff, but Alratan is misremembering the details.
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He rolled a legendary success, I'd like to point out.
Yeah, that's our bad. When investigating murders, bringing a psychopomp is a good idea.
No idea why the first two votes are not counted together, but in any case vote closed.
Not really happy about it either, but didn't really want to argue the point because the new information didn't factor into why. It'd just be relitigating.
Might be a best practice thing for encountering strange supernaturals. You don't show fear if you can at all help it.
See those Malks; most of them would have died fighting us even if they won, but they still showed up to poke at two exalts and tried to play games when they felt like they had to anyway.
So he did.
But he rolled 5 dice on that Int + Occult roll, which means he's Occult 2 or 3.
And Molly's Occult 5.
So he rolled better for IDing the entity.
But Molly's Occult 5 is likely to translate to more comprehensive understanding of what the creature is.
Spilt milk, I guess.
Oh sure; a poker face is de rigeur.
It was the whole rubbing against Molly's legs that raised my eyebrows. You dont usually do that unless you have confidence that the person will do you no harm.
- Location
- Germany
I don't think that's how it works.
When you roll a knowledge-ability you roll for how much about that specific creature, spell or other thing you know.
Since Brother D rolled higher, I assume he knows more about that cat.
Of course we still have more occult lore in general, and a higher chance to know more than him about any given subject, but in this case we don't.
Or we've encountered a cat version of Isabella, and the Senri is banking on the idea that the novelty will protect them better than groveling.
Given SV's everything they might even be right. Sass can alarmingly high on the recruitment priority list around here.
For DF there were exactly five proper Dragons. I'm pretty sure that Ferrovax and Pyrovax are the only two that are still alive.
- Location
- Germany
Barely younger than her.
She is not an old monster yet, unlike most vampires of any color we have met so far.
She is a girl from a weird environment and with a strange education and she is not as innatly superior to these stupid kids as she thinks she is.
And even if she were, she would still have to take her time and understand the people involved to avoid causing more harm than allowed.
This is an opportunity for her to learn something about her almost-peers, as much as hanging our with our friends is, maybe more so snce she has a task here and seems ambitious enough not to want to fuck it up on principle.
Eh.
A senior Shih helping an Exalted and a Knight is a danger.
A senior Shih being hunted alone by an Akuma and some Wan Kuei minions is dead meat.
This is not his homeground, he was not aware of the threat before we mentioned it and in a straight fight even a good Shih is no match for either an Elder or several decent trained fledgelings, nevermind both.
So, I know enough latin to tell that those are Iron and Fire elemental dragons. I don't actually know enough to tell what element Siriothrax was. But that's probably important.
Not sure it helps with that. What we're doing is encouraging her to see her immediate peer group as food and target practice. That isn't necessarily going to predisposed her to think better of them, especially since feeding feels so good.
Some people shake it off, but it's worth remembering that feeding for them is a little more involved than just getting nutrients. It's good sex, a hit of your drug of choice, a glass of water after a long day under the sun, and a hot meal after coming in out of the cold. That's for all of them, not just the Raith, and it's a serious part of what screws them up.
Those guys aren't going to teach her humility, they're going to whet her appetite and help her justify her rationalizations about eating people.
Edit:
Ferrovax is named iron, but his element is earth I think. Siriothrax was probably wind.
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Best I can find is the root word for Sirius, which means scorcher. Though mentioned Light as another possibility.
Depends on what elemental wheel we are using. It could be water wood fire earth metal. It could be Air, Water, Fire, Earth, Wood. In the crossover setting, it's probably that one. This likely means that Ferrovax is Earth. Interesting point is how Ancient Sorceries "Most Epithet Blessing of the Elemental Dragon" work. I'll provide the quote for Most Resilient Blessing of the Earth Dragon.
That pretty much has to be True Name which you can use to conjure by. The question is - is the name we'll be getting Ferrovax's true name, or a name of some sort of his cosmic predecessor? And in any case, what kind of power over him and his domain does it give us?
I think it'll work the same as some of the dragon style martial arts.
One day a brick of radioactive infernal essence wrapped in a note addressed to Ferro's old office building reading "here mote, gib magic" will get tossed through his window and land on his table while he's having his morning coffee.
Sorcery is in exalted basically inbuilt effects. Just because you base a spell on someone, does not mean the spell has any connection to them.
I think that's dependent on what exactly you're doing. Charms are essentially always inspired essence shaping, but exalts in general and solars in particular got up to a lot of god/elemental bullying by virtue of power and position.
When the spell text says stuff like this:
I think it basically equates to the exalt doing this:
If I understand correctly, Sorcery is basically us calling up reality's console and using our admin rights to call up various effects. Dresden, who is basically a player character in Reality: The MMORPG, no matter how high leveled he is, won't be able to do it. Mab, for all that she is a local community moderator, probably won't be able to use most of those either. In this metaphor, an Elemental Dragon is a software tool we'll be running to get the effect.
- Location
- Germany
The way she described "licking spoons" it seems more annoying to her than actually satisfactory.
So far she gets by micro-feeding and if she continues that it's as far from "eating people" as vampiric feeding can be, which is generally speaking a good thing. The more she gets used to being fed and full in her power without having to drain a suicidal cop to death or what she would be doing without us, the better.
Being able to just life and thrive without killing or even seriously harming people must be something of a relief, no matter how indoctrinated she is by now.
Last week she propably thought her only alternative to being a proper murdering vampire was to end up like our Skavis goons in Undertown (and propably also kill people on accident anyway).
Arc 6 Post 10: To Follow a Feline
To Follow a Feline
2nd of October 2006 A.D.
What the other patrons might think of the three of you following a cat out you cannot say, perhaps they do not even see the spirit beast among the shifting lights, though the same cannot be said of the people out in the streets. Whatever else a seri might be it's clearly a member in good standing of the tribe of 'cat' from the way it runs right between the legs of a shirtless guy with a bear tattoo sprawling on his chest as he was trying to impress the girl on his arm with a story of that time he had been mounteenering. You feel a little sorry about the way he jumped ruining his pose an earning him the wrong kind of laugh... but not that sorry. He is wearing shades after dark.
The cat takes a confusing number of twists and turns on ever narrower streets until you have to walk in single file under a mesh of clotheslines, festooned with clothes in every color of the rainbow all fluttering in the breeze, there at least your quarry stops... crouches and then pounces right into someone's good whites.
In a whirl of white linens and twisted space the cat is gone an in its place is a girl wrapped in the sheet. Short, more than a foot shorter than you and slight of build, though no one could mistake those curves for anything but a woman. Her hair is spotted tawny and black like the pelt of the cat and her eyes are double stilted like a cross.
"We must have lost it," the shape-shifter says, less with conviction and more with desperate hope.
"It?" Though you'd sharpened your senses you had not seen anything following you.
"The dark that rides the wind, If I knew its name I would be dead. I don't know if it was into you, but I had to make sure if I was going to talk to you."
"Wait, we were running from something you did not know for sure was there?" you ask bemused.
"If you only run when you know its there you die," she replies again, with chilling certainty.
"What should we call you?" your father asks, compassion as much as curiosity clear in his voice.
"Bùshì tùzǐ," the shape-shifter replies. Before you can ask what it means the old shih laughs, translating: "She calls herself Not a Rabbit, better humor than the last of your kind I met, a better end to the meeting as well I hope."
"I hope so too, there is evil abroad for those who follow the Excelent Archer to slay, one that fears neither living nor dead, one that moved with the tapestry of chi and yet is not of it, one who has killed and killed again, until all of the old blood in this city is spent."
"To steal their places of power?" you ask, frowning. That does not feel quite right. Unless Emma-O is blind indeed to what you have become any servant of his who might be a danger to you would have no need for the boon of rooting her power in desecrated soil.
"Death is the act and death is the reason, more I cannot say, but..." the spirit takes a deep breath. "I know where three can be found which have not been devoured yet. Their guardians do not know that I know and they would not thank me for leading such as you to their door, even in such company as the Hunter and the Guardian. But lead you I shall. The song of my joy is lost, why should their chosen hide away and be safe beneath the prayer scrolls." The more she speaks the more her breath seems to hitch until at least she is weeping.
She had been much more than just a friend to the DJ at the Pink Swan, that much is obvious, but it feels wrong to take advantage of her grief to reveal others that are hiding out. On the other hand it might give you a clue as to what's going on in Chinatown and what the akuma are after.
What do you do?
[] Follow Bùshì Tùzǐ to where the other hidden shamans are
[] Try to convince her to introduce you to those other spirits, you are going to do this properly... even though it might be a little obvious
[] Write in
OOC: No rolls for this one since they would contain spoilers