I agree. I would switch, probably, but people have voted for me. Hopefully Leadership excellency applies and buoys us to be seen appropriately.
Green Flame Rising (Exalted vs Dresden Files)
- Thread starter DragonParadox
- Start date
- Crossover Fantasy
[X] Present a united front. You may lead, but the alliance of great powers is backing you up. You are willing and able to deal with the servants of Kakauri, no matter who they are or how many of them
-[X] Leadership excellency to make others give a better "united front" impression; Etiquette excellency for talking, All Things Betray for safety
--[X] STUNT: "If it isn't too painful for you, yes. Introductions will probably go better if you are there" you say gently, before you move, slightly in front of others, to the entrance, your movements in sync with theirs which can only be achieved by years of working together or, well, by magic.
-[X] Leadership excellency to make others give a better "united front" impression; Etiquette excellency for talking, All Things Betray for safety
--[X] STUNT: "If it isn't too painful for you, yes. Introductions will probably go better if you are there" you say gently, before you move, slightly in front of others, to the entrance, your movements in sync with theirs which can only be achieved by years of working together or, well, by magic.
[X] Yog
Yzarc
The Spark of Madness
So going through the Update for ExWoD, I found this gem.
View: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1tAaGf30-M8c1ZZHMbn8-A2E_-4EwU9M3/view?usp=sharing
If Blight was not canon, it is now.
Arcana
Arcana are magical servants, slaves, familiars, or companions. They are magical creations capable of independent motion and action. Where Prodigies are enchanted items, Arcana are enchanted beings.
Arcana vary widely, depending on the sort of Essence used to give them a semblance of life. As a result, different sorts of Exalts may create different varieties of Arcana.
Infernal Exalted are able to build golems, design simulacra, and are the only Exalted who may craft emanations.
Phantasms are artificially-constructed spirits, anchored to a physical keystone. The most common sort of phantasms, ephemera, are mostly designed to operate in one of the otherworlds, with limited capability to physically influence the mortal world. Others are emanations, with
greater agency to act in material reality but still not natively part of it.
View: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1tAaGf30-M8c1ZZHMbn8-A2E_-4EwU9M3/view?usp=sharing
If Blight was not canon, it is now.
Arcana
Arcana are magical servants, slaves, familiars, or companions. They are magical creations capable of independent motion and action. Where Prodigies are enchanted items, Arcana are enchanted beings.
Arcana vary widely, depending on the sort of Essence used to give them a semblance of life. As a result, different sorts of Exalts may create different varieties of Arcana.
Infernal Exalted are able to build golems, design simulacra, and are the only Exalted who may craft emanations.
Phantasms are artificially-constructed spirits, anchored to a physical keystone. The most common sort of phantasms, ephemera, are mostly designed to operate in one of the otherworlds, with limited capability to physically influence the mortal world. Others are emanations, with
greater agency to act in material reality but still not natively part of it.
Yeah. God forging is kinda what we do (minor g gods are emanations, if I understood the text correctly). When the time comes I would probably argue that in a higher energy setting even 5 dot crafting shouldn't destroy dragon nests (especially the ones in our soul), but otherwise, it opens up a lot of possiblities. Even if you need a 5 dot artefact keystone to truly maximize a 5 dot emanation's power.
What, did anyone think I was joking about using kilomotes to reforge the Maidens?
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Just to take one last swing at this, a united front isn't unworkable but it sort of defuses focus in a weird way.
Molly is the strange, threatening, and weird thing here. Our goal is to convince them that those properties are useful and pointed at a mutual threat, with the stretch goal of convincing them that we're actually worth knowing and working with long term.
Micheal and Divisimar unquestionably help with that, but there's only so far emphasizing their presence can take us.
The white god is a good reference to have, but we don't know the nature of the people we're talking to or how they regard him or his servants. Having mixed feelings about his faction isn't unusual or even necessarily indicative that someone is evil. Supernatural politics is complicated, and it's possible for someone to be perfectly nice but still be salty about losing to his influence to name one example.
Divisimar is good because he's more familiar with these sort of spirits than we are, but that's a relative thing. He isn't actually from the same background they are and is only more familiar because his home country is in the same region. Not exactly the sign of a special relationship.
Even if he did, his old job was hunting creatures like this when they acted up. Not exactly an implicitly positive place to start.
They're decent references, but their presence is enough to establish our credentials without leaning too hard on the specifics of their relationships and the framing space would be better spent on addressing the arch devil in the room.
Think we could use that shell for this? It's not exactly a perfect fit, but as part of a flesh sorcerer's body taken in battle it seems like it could have enough emotional value to someone or material value as a reagent to anchor an emanation.
If this gets taken into the quest it'd very much make the weird exalted crafting charm worth the exp. God crafting is tempting itself, but lesser spirits we could design to suit our purposes with relatively simple requirements would be amazing.
It'd also be an interesting thing to extend via homebrew for our hell.
Specifically I'm thinking about using it as a bottleneck mechanism for our hypothetical demon armies. Being able to throw gobs of them around on a temporary basis seems like it should be available since it's classic, but having 50 billion people to draw unique and powerful minions from is hard to balance.
Setting it up so that for anything beyond the temporary and generic requires us to forge an emanation to serve as a channel to the material world, granting the subject some perks but also limiting how much of their native abilities they can channel through it to whatever our investment level was, seems reasonable.
It's even fun thematically with the DF stuff because that process sounds very similar to how mantles work here according to Ankou.
Fluff wise we could frame it as the hell being real, but foreign in a way nothing else is because it was created independently of the rest of reality.
So while fey have a dual citizenship with the mortal world, and most nevernever critters have a passport and can get temporary visas as long as they have the resources to exploit an opportunity, our guys would have to keep their stays very short and light footed even by demon standards or get well forged IDs to interact with the mortal world.
Thoughts?
A god's seat is their physical domain, while an emanation is sourced from outside the material.
Molly is the strange, threatening, and weird thing here. Our goal is to convince them that those properties are useful and pointed at a mutual threat, with the stretch goal of convincing them that we're actually worth knowing and working with long term.
Micheal and Divisimar unquestionably help with that, but there's only so far emphasizing their presence can take us.
The white god is a good reference to have, but we don't know the nature of the people we're talking to or how they regard him or his servants. Having mixed feelings about his faction isn't unusual or even necessarily indicative that someone is evil. Supernatural politics is complicated, and it's possible for someone to be perfectly nice but still be salty about losing to his influence to name one example.
Divisimar is good because he's more familiar with these sort of spirits than we are, but that's a relative thing. He isn't actually from the same background they are and is only more familiar because his home country is in the same region. Not exactly the sign of a special relationship.
Even if he did, his old job was hunting creatures like this when they acted up. Not exactly an implicitly positive place to start.
They're decent references, but their presence is enough to establish our credentials without leaning too hard on the specifics of their relationships and the framing space would be better spent on addressing the arch devil in the room.
Think we could use that shell for this? It's not exactly a perfect fit, but as part of a flesh sorcerer's body taken in battle it seems like it could have enough emotional value to someone or material value as a reagent to anchor an emanation.
If this gets taken into the quest it'd very much make the weird exalted crafting charm worth the exp. God crafting is tempting itself, but lesser spirits we could design to suit our purposes with relatively simple requirements would be amazing.
It'd also be an interesting thing to extend via homebrew for our hell.
Specifically I'm thinking about using it as a bottleneck mechanism for our hypothetical demon armies. Being able to throw gobs of them around on a temporary basis seems like it should be available since it's classic, but having 50 billion people to draw unique and powerful minions from is hard to balance.
Setting it up so that for anything beyond the temporary and generic requires us to forge an emanation to serve as a channel to the material world, granting the subject some perks but also limiting how much of their native abilities they can channel through it to whatever our investment level was, seems reasonable.
It's even fun thematically with the DF stuff because that process sounds very similar to how mantles work here according to Ankou.
Fluff wise we could frame it as the hell being real, but foreign in a way nothing else is because it was created independently of the rest of reality.
So while fey have a dual citizenship with the mortal world, and most nevernever critters have a passport and can get temporary visas as long as they have the resources to exploit an opportunity, our guys would have to keep their stays very short and light footed even by demon standards or get well forged IDs to interact with the mortal world.
Thoughts?
I don't think emanations are the same. They seem more like god flavored constructs than anything else.
A god's seat is their physical domain, while an emanation is sourced from outside the material.
Yzarc
The Spark of Madness
That is horror forging, to use living or dead flesh.
Horror forging is making an entire zombie. We're talking about using a shell as an anchor for a spirit, which seems like an edge case. Using a fancy wooden desk to make a paperwork processing spirit wouldn't fit a horror, despite it technically being an anchor made of dead material. Same with a beautician spirit attached to a comb carved from ivory.
There's probably a grey area here to work with.
COMMENTARY
-I get the impression that the other spirit guardians are almost certainly different types of spirit than the senri.
-Similarly I doubt those fears of
Shades of high school/college age cattiness between young adults.
And unlike young adults, immortal spirits have all the time in the world to nurse and cultivate grudges.
-It also does imply that there's a lot more interested spirits than there are human candidates.
If you have a lot of single and searching spirits, a limited supply of interested and capable humans, and then senri who are fortunate enough to get a human partner shorten the life of the partner and then show back up on the market....you can see how that might generate some....reputational issues in the local spirit community.
Even if all senri do consensual, informed relationships.
-Tuzi does feel pretty young for a senri.
Talks young, reacts young, is treated young by other spirits; I suspect that other spirits would be a lot less willing to talk smack or impose conditions to an older, more powerful senri, even if they had the same opinions.
And an akuma would probably have steered clear of the companion of an older, more powerful shen.
Then again, the older shen present in the material world are probably back in Asia where they have history and roots.
Not here, in North American cities less than two hundred years old, with Asian communities maybe a hundred, hundred and fifty year history tops.
Im betting almost every shen here is a youngster. Hence everyone is running scared of the presence of an emissary of Emma-O.
-No known patterns of a ritual, eh? Hmm. Gonna need that gravesite.
Still loling at Lydia's shock at the cattiness of spirit society; I get the impression she expects a lot more gravitas among quasi-divine spirits than this episode suggests.
-Going to note that Lydia could probably invest enough power in a companion to mitigate, if not eliminate, that issue of control that Tuzi appears to have. The 4 dot charm Companions of the Hunter would do it; so would a Tier 4/5 Familiar bond.
Or Molly could do it, using any one of several methods, from charm to artifice.
Depends on if she ends up in someone's entourage long enough to be worth the investment to us.
-Molly has Etiquette 5 and Leadership 3, both Key Abilities.
She should be able to interact with strange spirits in a formal setting just fine, regardless of her chosen approach.
Her approach is just likely to have future implications about reputation in the local and broader community.
Hmm. 11 successes on Persuasion is just Molly things now when she puts in the effort.
Interesting that while a creature associated with death, she isnt a Creature of Darkness, even if she can be perilous to touch in the grip of strong emotion. Then again, thats always been as much a political definition as it is a metaphysical one. If you look at the ExWoD table, neither Mummies nor Wraiths are Creatures of Darkness either, even though they are associated with death.
In the Dresdenverse, I dont think Summer Fae, or a lot of Wyld Fae are CoDs.
And Im pretty sure some of Winter's affiliates, like the Miksani, and Kris Kringle, probably arent either.
Thats because it is.Reminds me of this.
Leanan sídhe - Wikipedia
en.m.wikipedia.org
Might be worth developing a version of maggot mana plague without the mind control. Against the nature of our hells or not.
Edit: @Yog Thats... not a magic secret? It's a secret about their relationship.
IIRC, the Leanansidhe, Mab's right hand woman, got a lot of her initial power from interactions with artists and musicians and the like. And Butcher deliberately drew inspiration for her from that myth.
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Yzarc
The Spark of Madness
Regarding Keystones, here is the advantage.
If the emanation's master has learned The King and the Kingdom: The Thousand and First Hell, the phantasm may treat its master's Hell as a keystone.
Add to that.....
If the emanation is slain, it may reform one hundred years later within its keystone. Each point of Essence fed into the keystone by its master quickens this recovery by 10 years.
So we can make a decent amount of familiar spirits and simply feed them essence and have them recover. Why is this broken?
Here....
Select either the Umbra or the Underworld. This is the emanation's native home. It may roam freely in its native realm, where it enjoys the natural ability to converse with the other native denizens and to navigate without undue difficulty (in the Umbra, this amounts to having the Charm Airt Sense, while in the Underworld it amounts to having several dots of Argos). The phantasm may manifest in the physical world only while within one hundred yards of its keystone, or within ten yards of its master. It must pay one Willpower to remain manifest for a scene. It may pay one Willpower to immediately teleport to its master's or keystone's location.
If the phantasm's master the emanation's name, the Arcana hears her words wherever it may be. If she commands the ephemera to attend her, it may teleport to her master's location and manifest without paying any Willpower.
So Molly is now a Pokemon Master. Gata catch them all.
If the emanation's master has learned The King and the Kingdom: The Thousand and First Hell, the phantasm may treat its master's Hell as a keystone.
Add to that.....
If the emanation is slain, it may reform one hundred years later within its keystone. Each point of Essence fed into the keystone by its master quickens this recovery by 10 years.
So we can make a decent amount of familiar spirits and simply feed them essence and have them recover. Why is this broken?
Here....
Select either the Umbra or the Underworld. This is the emanation's native home. It may roam freely in its native realm, where it enjoys the natural ability to converse with the other native denizens and to navigate without undue difficulty (in the Umbra, this amounts to having the Charm Airt Sense, while in the Underworld it amounts to having several dots of Argos). The phantasm may manifest in the physical world only while within one hundred yards of its keystone, or within ten yards of its master. It must pay one Willpower to remain manifest for a scene. It may pay one Willpower to immediately teleport to its master's or keystone's location.
If the phantasm's master the emanation's name, the Arcana hears her words wherever it may be. If she commands the ephemera to attend her, it may teleport to her master's location and manifest without paying any Willpower.
So Molly is now a Pokemon Master. Gata catch them all.
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As far as Molly is able to 'remember' thanks to Usum Ye Olde shamans back in the Shang period all had personal relationships with the spirits of the land in one way or another, generally these were conceptualized as familial or romantic relationships because this was before the Celestial Bureaucracy. Layer than onto modern society where you do not have all the complex clan relationships and you get a lot of spirits dating shamans.
- Location
- Germany
That's propably true, though I think an elder Wan Kuei Akuma coming into town with his posse would be a big scary thing even with greater older spirits.
They might react differently to fear, but they would still be afraid.
Similar to the Malks in Undertown, who were also scared as hell, but chose not to show it easily.
Its not part of its body though? Fomor sorcerers are humanoid.
This is Molly's description of a Fomor sorcerer/Cantrev-lord from the Bombshells short story in Brief Cases
And this is Marcone's from Even Hand
And they apparently leave bodies when killed.
Rhys the Ragged, who we got the shell from?
Was nothing like this. He didnt look like that, and his body dissolved after death.Given its demonstrated expertise with flesh sorcery, it probably turned itself into a magical cyborg thing because Reasons.
With all the gossamer it was running through with , it certainly had the resources for what would normally be fantastically expensive sorcery. So Im guessing that would not be its body. Closer to armor for it, if I had to guess.
That said?
The former possession of an evil Fomor sorcerer? Doesnt really seem like it has the appropriate resonance for magic crafting of anything thats supposed to be human-safe and non-malicious.
Significant amounts of polyamory then, with some shamans having human and spirit significant others.
And works with the myths of spirit-wives in some mythologies.
So a whole lot of jealous/possessive spirits guarding "their" humans from poaching by the spirits with a reputation for running through a lot of humans in succession.
Yup, just like high school/college.
Afraid, yes. Yama Kings are serious business.
But the reaction would be a lot more like the malks than the apparent way everyone appears to have run for cover.
And Emma himself would have sent someone a lot more circumspect.
The lesson of Ravana, who was one of the major Yama Kings until he pissed off enough Powers and they dispatched one hengeyokai to literally burn his Hell to the ground? Comes to mind.
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fictionfan
Please sir, may I have some Meows?
- Location
- Tempe, AZ
The actual limiting factor is that the rules say that we can only actually use our essence level worth of motes per tick (often translated to heartbeat). So no matter how many billion mote are coming our way we can't use or store them fast enough.
If tickis a heartbeat (roughly 1 to 2 seconds), then we can use up to 300 motes per minute at E5. Up to a hundred if tick is 3 seconds. This gives us a kilomote to play with at least in 10 minutes. That's assuming that we can't preserve it in essence storage devices, that our priests can't participate in whatever grand working we are doing and using essence in parallel to us, and that splintered gale incarnation with inner devils unleashed can't channel essence with us.
So, still kilomotes.
The concept of a time before the Celeatial Bureaucracy is interesting. The Wan Kuei would probably have us believe that it predates recorded history, and that the likes of Emma-O, who I think Usum was created to serve were functionaries in the Celestial Bureaucracy before they went rogue.
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Theoretically, Solaroids have precedent-charm for waiving away that limit. Not for everything, but for one specific charm.
fictionfan
Please sir, may I have some Meows?
- Location
- Tempe, AZ
With our hell, wonder crafting and prayer eating we can likely build Gaol that are sufficiently good. Still that is a few arcs away and a lot of XP all put together.
Yzarc
The Spark of Madness
What are you referring to? Can you link?
I mean, isn't Bane an emanation? And it's a god.
It's the one you provided quotes from. I forgot the name. The craft rules book, there's a link in the thread somewhere, I was able to find it once, and have the pdf saved, but can't find it now. The one with Prodigies, Gadgets, Arcana and Splendors classification.
True. Still, something to look forward to.
Yzarc
The Spark of Madness
Those do not use motes for crafting though?
Vote closed, lets see who you meet this time around.
It's these parts:
Yes, it says "potential of Dragon's Nest", etc, but, honestly, that's nonsense in the paradigm we were playing. Dragons nests are convergences of Leylines, places where power flows. When we made Bane we used essence to imbue a ritual and it's from our essence it was born. The world itself is, at the most fundamental level, essence, as per Exalted cosmology. It's reasonable to think that we should be able to use massive quantities of essence from large scale rituals to catalyze wonders.
Dumping a megamote of essence into a localized area should damn well create an N/A rated Dragon Nest right there.
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fictionfan
Please sir, may I have some Meows?
- Location
- Tempe, AZ
Or we get VEE and set about mass granting wishes for the people of our kingdom. The 5 mote cost of VEE can be a bottleneck.
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Prayer Eating and Prayer Granting work well together. Lead a religious ceremony where the participants express their wishes. Use prayer listening to hear those, and essence gathered by Prayer Eating to grant them.