Stunts around anima flare is about all I can think of.
Green Flame Rising (Exalted vs Dresden Files)
- Thread starter DragonParadox
- Start date
- Crossover Fantasy
Stunts around anima flare is about all I can think of.
In fact, I think the plan was made originally to take advantage of that?
Anima's already up, so probably can work it in a stunt.
[X] Agree to a mock battle before dawn which leaves Eiko 'unable' to aid the Will of Kakuri yet which leaves her in shape to recover rather than leaving her out in the sun or worse
- Location
- Germany
[X] Agree to a mock battle before dawn which leaves Eiko 'unable' to aid the Will of Kakuri yet which leaves her in shape to recover rather than leaving her out in the sun or worse
Nope. Screw that. There are way too many ways this could explode, it's almost a mirror of what Anawn did with Kemmler. I don't want to be party to the consequences of letting her learn all the exaltation stuff she'd have to discover to make her comparison in the first place.
That's just the consequences to the world at large too, the personal ones could be dire. No one knows enough to really fuck with Molly's power source right now, but with deep access people (or primordials at least) have managed to screw with them before.
Closest I'm willing to get in inverting the deal. We study our exaltation, she smuggles us data we might be missing on the corrupted end, and then we pass clean Kakuri stuff back to her without Autobot's greatest hits mixed in.
Just as an aside, Emma-O's timeline is totally screwed up. The authors of the various books couldn't be bothered to do even basic research.
As a result, we have the statement that Emma-O was originally an Ainu deity who became a Yama King after his people were conquered and assimilated by the Yamato people. Now, that's fair enough, but the little detail they missed is that this conquest happened in the fourteenth century CE, not way back in pre-history, and their forcibly assimilation happened in the early nineteenth.
This would make Emma-O one of the more recent Yama Kings, probably a later arrival than Mikaboshi.
Unfortunately, we're also told that he was one of the ringleaders of the overthrow of Yen Lo back in the 3rd Age; and the greater akuma of his that defected did so in the thirteenth century.
You essentially can't reconcile it.
I think the mention of the mystery of his origin in the Bone Flowers Dharma book might be a allusion to this.
As a result, we have the statement that Emma-O was originally an Ainu deity who became a Yama King after his people were conquered and assimilated by the Yamato people. Now, that's fair enough, but the little detail they missed is that this conquest happened in the fourteenth century CE, not way back in pre-history, and their forcibly assimilation happened in the early nineteenth.
This would make Emma-O one of the more recent Yama Kings, probably a later arrival than Mikaboshi.
Unfortunately, we're also told that he was one of the ringleaders of the overthrow of Yen Lo back in the 3rd Age; and the greater akuma of his that defected did so in the thirteenth century.
You essentially can't reconcile it.
I think the mention of the mystery of his origin in the Bone Flowers Dharma book might be a allusion to this.
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Anima is up, so we can have all our demon aspects active. Flight and a sword covered in green hatefire are pretty scary by most standards. We also have inhuman reaction times and speed passively via WBS, which makes things look flashier.
You could change things around a bit and inject some new events. Make him an Ainu god that does afterlife things for them that got in a fight with the creature that used to own Kakuri.
He wins, assimilating the place and technically becoming a Yama King while sticking to his old duties and maintaining a split lifestyle like Odin does now. Maybe even throw in the flavor of him moderating the hell he took control of as much as he could while still doing the job.
Then the fall of the Ainu happens and he goes off the deep end, embracing the evil he'd previously been balancing out.
In a way that makes more sense, because it sets him taking over a hell at a time when he should have been strong rather than after what should be a crippling defeat and gives him a corrupting source of power to draw on when he was really hurting.
So he was a Yama King for all the events he needs to be there for, but he wasn't primarily one until his home burned down.
It's still rough, but massaged that way it at least lets the timeline happen. It "just" requires either more work explain why he was an asshole before he went crazy if you want to maintain the tragic sympathy to his origin or dropping that entirely in favor of him always being a dick.
He just wasn't unstable and doing stuff like hiding from his incarnate conscience or having his servant flay him several times a week until after he cracked in the latter case.
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There are some interesting places to take his motives in this hypothetical.
For the tragic downfall path, where he's doing the wrong thing but he's supposed to be sympathetic while doing it, I'd be tempted to write it as a conflict over souls. From what I see on Wikipedia, the Ainu seemed to believe everyone went to the same place after death. I know nothing about their faith, but what I can find doesn't show anything about punishment systems or similar. You just go live with the gods.
So maybe Kakuri's old operator started muscling in on the Ainu soul cycle on the technicality that they were sinners even if they didn't answer to his pantheon. Emma-O takes exception and brutally murders the guy, but had to take over to stop him from reforming or catastrophically empowering another demon lord.
Then hook him into further and further infernal politics based around trying to clean up Kakuri into something fair that still does it's job and keeping other hells from taking Ainu souls, because the others pick up on the loophole that caused this mess in the first place.
He gets grayer and grayer until he's neck deep in regular demon politics, but always led into it by the idea of saving Ainu souls. Then they get destroyed in a way that he can do nothing about, and all he's left with is the sins. Cue mental breakdown.
In the "just a dick" route make him an unrepentant hyper nationalist who gets pissed off by the same instigating event, someone stealing souls, but keeps pressing of his own initiative because he wants to screw over future threats and shape other nations for his convenience.
Which would make everything going to shit because of various backfiring plots darker and turn him into a spiritual ancestor to the CIA.
For bonus points, make the fall of the Ainu something he could have stopped if it weren't for a consequence of his actions or some distraction related to acquiring personal power. Cue mental breakdown.
For the tragic downfall path, where he's doing the wrong thing but he's supposed to be sympathetic while doing it, I'd be tempted to write it as a conflict over souls. From what I see on Wikipedia, the Ainu seemed to believe everyone went to the same place after death. I know nothing about their faith, but what I can find doesn't show anything about punishment systems or similar. You just go live with the gods.
So maybe Kakuri's old operator started muscling in on the Ainu soul cycle on the technicality that they were sinners even if they didn't answer to his pantheon. Emma-O takes exception and brutally murders the guy, but had to take over to stop him from reforming or catastrophically empowering another demon lord.
Then hook him into further and further infernal politics based around trying to clean up Kakuri into something fair that still does it's job and keeping other hells from taking Ainu souls, because the others pick up on the loophole that caused this mess in the first place.
He gets grayer and grayer until he's neck deep in regular demon politics, but always led into it by the idea of saving Ainu souls. Then they get destroyed in a way that he can do nothing about, and all he's left with is the sins. Cue mental breakdown.
In the "just a dick" route make him an unrepentant hyper nationalist who gets pissed off by the same instigating event, someone stealing souls, but keeps pressing of his own initiative because he wants to screw over future threats and shape other nations for his convenience.
Which would make everything going to shit because of various backfiring plots darker and turn him into a spiritual ancestor to the CIA.
For bonus points, make the fall of the Ainu something he could have stopped if it weren't for a consequence of his actions or some distraction related to acquiring personal power. Cue mental breakdown.
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You'd also need to drop the bits about him being the killer of Yen Lo back in pre-history and things like that, but this kind of change could work.
You'd probably also want to make it so that his long conflict with Mikaboshi, whose basically a representative of the suffering caused by cultural change was part of what drove him to take more and more extreme measures.
The way I reconcile it is 'history over supernatural' so it was done in the 14th century and he is recent. It's more interesting to me that he is a fallen god than him being old.
Mikaboshi would be an excellent first opponent for him to get entangled with after taking Kakuri. The relationship would have a lot more flavor to it if the rivalry was partially fueled by Emma-O's good intentions turned bitter.
I think you could keep the assassination depending on how you set it up. If you decided to make Emma-O an asshole from the start it could be his "CIA overthrows a government, makes huge mess" moment that bites him in the ass and sets up his further fall.
If you're going with the tragic descent path, maybe set it up so that it's one of those obligation traps like Dresden got caught in and he has to do it to pay back a critical favor he needed earlier. Or have it be a moment of hubris, where he blames Yen Lo for the stuff the Yama Kings get up to on the side.
He sees him as a two faces bureaucrat that enables the Yama Kings, and convinces himself that if he dies they'll be too weakened organizationally to be a problem anymore. Then he has to deal with the fallout of killing him.
Edit: as to the Ainu existing or not that far back, he had to be doing something at the time. Maybe the Ainu as we know them weren't around yet, but his job was related to a particular people that he's followed down through the ages as their culture grew and changed.
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Note that conquest and Japanese assertions of overlordship started in the fourteenth century. The forcibly assimilation of the Ainu only happened at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Until then they retained their own distinct culture and internal autonomy.
Yen-Lon seems to have been overthrown a long time earlier, back in an earlier age, well before Emma-O was a Yama King in your proposal.
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I'll have to look into that more to define just what the point of the Fall was but I stand by what I said. It's a compelling narrative to have him be a fallen god, far more so than 'he's super old'.
Oh, I agree with that. Him being an older god who gradually fell in stages over centuries makes for a better story, and even explain why shikome who may be old enough to remember when he was significantly less corrupt might want to redeem him. They may even have entered his service when he had a much less hostile relationship with the Wan Kuei, more of a rival kingdom in the afterlife than a bitter enemy and existential threat.
After all, being a Yama King is job title for an entity that rules a Hell. There's still at least one of them that mostly follows the Mandate of Heaven, possibly more, and him almost completely abandoning his duties may be a pretty recent development.
After all, if he was fighting Pika Don and Mikaboshi for centuries, it might be quite easy to justify why you too need to draw on the energies of the sinners you're meant to torment. After all, they're a deserving target, and it would be worse if your enemies were to win and take them. Particularly if you initially start by restricting yourself to the even easier targets of being committing atrocities against your own people, and then to regular sinners from that ethnic group, etc.
It's a parable of him becoming 'dehumanised' as he dehumanises the souls in his care.
In terms of time line, if he was an Ainu deity he could still have been incorporated into the Japanese pantheon as the judge of the dead as a result of the trade that precedes most conquest.
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I think I wasn't being clear on the direction I was trying to go. The idea was to split Emma-O taking over Kakuri and technically becoming a Yama King from the fall of the Ainu, then move that far enough back to allow him to be involved in his entire personal timeline.
To maintain motives and create a cohesive character arc the Ainu/the people who would become the Ainu stay a critical part of his motive to do that, but it turns more into a slow moral erosion that ends in a snap when the Ainu are conquered.
It could also help with the 14th vs 19th century discrepancy in the end. Set it up so that he can see the inevitable subsumption of his people is coming from the 14th century date, but whatever he's done has already screwed him in a way that stops him from helping.
The thematic fuel for his final descent would be his inclination towards patience and solitude curdling due to helplessness and isolation.
But DP is going another direction with this, so I suppose we don't really need to workshop out how the fanon the timeline into something that actually makes sense.
fictionfan
Please sir, may I have some Meows?
- Location
- Tempe, AZ
Not really if the other person is throwing we can just use passives.
I now see where you're going, but one of the interesting details about Kakuri is that unlike many other Yama Kings, Emma-O didn't conquer/steal Kakuri. He brought it with him into Yomi, it's legitimately his own:
During this period, the Yomi remained little more than a loose collective of stolen realms bordering one another, and it was relatively easy to metamorphose one domain into another. While doing so resulted in more conflict with other Japanese Yama Kings, it took very little for Emma-o to turn his simple underworld, Soko no Kuni, "the Deep Land," into Kakuri, the dark and icy hell he now rules.
Easier just to cut his involvement in the murder of Yen Lo and say another Yin aspected Yama King, possibly a now dead one, did the deed.
Or, if you want to keep Emma-O's involvement, say he went to war against Yen Lo before he was a Yama King. Back in the day when the Yama Kings were less bad and there were quite possibly Ainu on the mainland, there might be plenty of reasons for an unfallen Death God of a culture on the East Asian periphery to have quite good reason to team up with the other Yama Kings to go after the Lord of the Chinese Hells, given that there may well have been Chinese cultural or imperial influence on those mainland Ainu.
Could even be a funny scene considering what we have as a passives. Like one of those prison break scenes in a movie where you need to leave someone behind.
Eiko: One last thing I need from you; hit me.
Molly: What?
Eiko: The Hot Topic carebear will invent entirely new ways to violate my soul if he learns a bout this, so I need you to make it look like I lost. Make it convincing
Molly: * Lights up her universal Agg sword*
Eiko: … Have I mentioned I'm really glad we talked about this first?
It's almost too bad that she doesn't have a few loyalist minions we need to kill. I'd like to test the reach of MiM.
It was rebuilt specifically so that we could use it to make dying stick, so this seems like it would apply since even Akuma who have no means to return still get to report home and are therefore still in the game. We still need to test that though.
Greater akuma do, lesser akuma just die when they're killed hard enough to make a regular Wan Kuei suffer final death, or if they suffer the little death, their souls roam the local spirit world until their body repairs itself, just like a normal Wan Kuei.
Note that neither regular Wan Kuei nor the Greater akuma made from them aren't ghosts or spirits, so as written it's impossible to trigger the vortex that inflicts perma-death effect on them.
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We could walk through mental attacks if they are against our intimacies?
We need to make it believable, so we probably want at least a melee excellency. Definitely not shintai, obviously, but we need to make it plausible for her.
...
Would mock battle be Melee or Subterfuge? And would DPE apply to it? It's sorta social.
fictionfan
Please sir, may I have some Meows?
- Location
- Tempe, AZ
We are peak human sword skill with a flaming sword. At that level it would take an extremely skilled observation to tell the difference between peak human skill and inhuman exalted skill.
Remember that even lesser akuma can quite easily have inhuman skill levels. Even a single investment can give four cap breaking dots in an ability, and a second two in an attribute. As the average akuma should have about nine investments, as that's required for them to lose their soul, then it would be quite normal for them, as even lesser akuma are usually recruited from Wan Kuei with a century of unlife, for a completely normal akuma to have a dice pool of fourteen, and so will have that level of skill.
Lesser akuma are only lesser compared to greater ones, each one is a high order supernatural. Even one that has invested moderately in combat is more than a match for most inexperienced Exalted. They're not mooks.
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That is interesting. I wouldn't want to mutate him too much, but if I was revising this I'd probably insert something here to alter that a bit. It seems more important to mean to maintain the what, why, how, and roughly when of a character during a tune up like this.
Have 98% of Kakuri be his, but warf a namless Yama King with a vaguely similar theme to give him just enough toehold that he has to be involved in more stuff that progresses him down his arc.
I can see how that might be a bit too much to swallow in some regards though.
Yeah, but the point of the charm on a meta level is that if you kill something it gets banished from play and doesn't get to screw with you anymore. Dead Akuma presumably go to their owner's hell on death even if they can't get back up, and if the afterlife is in play still and the targeting restrictions are myopic enough that they slip through then it defeats the point of having it. With no direct alternative in the charmset to deal with this we'd more likely that not inject it as homebrew later, and MiM was modified to short circuit that.
I'm not saying it's guaranteed, but I think there's decent odds it does work that way in this sort of scenario.
The Infernal Charmset has no perma-death charms whatsoever, and this is clearly deliberate. It only has banishment charms, and until you get your own Hell those charms banish your enemies to a place where they're under the control of your enemies.
Infernals thematically aren't meant to be destroyers in ExWoD, they're corrupters. That's why they're incapable of permanently destroying things with their native charmset, but have lots of ways to capture or corrupt them or otherwise force them into service the meta level is that infernals don't get to permanently remove enemies from play. They have them turned into something worse, either personally or by handing them over to a Yama King to play with.
DP has partially changed this here by changing how MiM works, but it's not how ExWoD Infernals are meant to operate. They're not solars or abyssals.
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fictionfan
Please sir, may I have some Meows?
- Location
- Tempe, AZ
Yes, but they don't ignore 1s which means that their plausible performance can be very much worse then ours. Also are we wet?
Edit: More importantly we have allies here. So Molly and Eiko can have a flashy swordfight using up all our actions well our allies do the actual damage.
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