- Location
- A nondescript grave
True, but it could just be that angel's intellectus specifically, those higher on the totem pole may not be ignorant.
Green Flame Rising (Exalted vs Dresden Files)
- Thread starter DragonParadox
- Start date
- Crossover Fantasy
True, but it could just be that angel's intellectus specifically, those higher on the totem pole may not be ignorant.
- Location
- Germany
This is Uriel. The Archangel.
There is none higher save Big G himself, and only 3 others are equal.
And if those he is the intelligence-specialist.
- Location
- Earth
Nice to see he is certain Molly will keep her word.
Else he'd never be in crown range.
Isn't delivering Gabriel's job?
Outside Fate is one hell of a drug.
Angels didn't f*cking know. They got it wrong. I think they thought we were a recolored Solar. (Beginnigs of) Devil Tiger apotheosis took them by surprise. I can 110% be sure that everyone else were also caught pants down with this. Mab, Odin, almost certainly Nicodemius. Maybe Walkers weren't, if they count Broken Winged Crane among their number.
We just did what exalted are meant to do - flip the game board of life over.
This gives us an opportunity. It also starts a whole new race for the exaltations of our future peers.
Also, I think we are getting a sit down with Uriel, as I am fairly sure we are now a part of a wholly different set of rules.
The delivery was caused by a instance of Free Will being invoked in a way that did not disqualify someone from holding the sword, but did mean he could not carry it around at the moment. Uriel may have taken advantage of that to have a conversation.
Well at least the explanation of how primordials work will be intuitive for her, once we get that far anyway.
Technically what he said is that he couldn't see our hell before we chose to form it, not that he can't see into it now. If he still couldn't then how would he know enough about our subjects to make ominous proclamations about them?
If they were that off base about how infernals work it makes me wonder how much they actually knew in the first place.
Guys... not all Infernals have heretical charms unlocked, World-Souls did not come automatically. Someone in the past of this Exaltation had to unlock them.
- Location
- Dallas Texas
I do at least hope we don't double down on infernal too soon, if other exaltations start being found and awakened I hope they run the whole list.
Ah so they didn't know this was the exaltation of a devil tiger. Usum pro o old knew subconsciously at least which is why he was so smug.
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Never played exalted. Can someone explain what a devil tiger is? What makes them? What they do and whatnot?
If I recall correctly, we got some hints an abyssal exaltation might have been active / accessible within the angelically reachable history. Even if I am wrong, it is very clear that they did not anticipate the Kingdom being a thing at all. I am not sure if they fully understand the actual metaphysics of it all (i.e. that it's not "merely" a world birthed by Molly's soul, but actual Molly's soul as a slowly gestating / awakening Primordial).
Wait, so in this setting not all infernals get access to the Kingdom charm? I thought everyone had potential.
Or are you hinting at what I joked about - that Molly got White God's exaltation from before they reached E10 and fully ascended?
The ones reachable without "break open the Black Vault" requirement are abyssals, infernals, and alchemicals, if those are a thing.
Not quite, what Broken Winged Crane says is that all of them have the potential, but you actually have to build towards them with insight, meditation and sorcery. Molly did not have to do those first steps, her soul naturally unfolded into an inner world when she called out for one.
- Location
- Earth
Maybe he'll ask nicely for rights of passage for the swords?
Who wants to give the Swords a tourist visa?
Ok, so, before everything (time, causality, direction, etc, included), within the primordial Chaos, Primordials emerged. They were concepts personified, with titles like Principle of Hierarchy, King of all Craftsmen, etc. Together, they made Creation, forging Laws that forever shaped existence. In time, they made gods. With more time yet, gods rebelled, and Autochton, the abovementioned King of all Craftsmen joined in their rebellion. He forged Exaltations - axiomatically indestructible weapons, capable of elevating mortals (specifically, mortal humans) beyond what they were, and granting them the capability of growth, and access to perfect effects. Wielding these weapons, humans overthrew Primordials, killing some of them (which had a lot of implications because a) Primordials didn't have concept of death, and b) Primordials didn't build mechanisms handling death to be capable of processing them). Broken, crippled and driven insane by their defeat, proud Primordials became Yozi - spiteful creatures full of demonic vitriol that were chained within the body of their greatest member - Malfeas, who was one Theion.
More time passes, and for Yozi get their hands on a number of exaltations. They are broken, crippled, insane, but they, in some form, are still architects of Creation, makers beyond peers. They need exalted of their own in order to break out of their prisons. The exaltations cannot be diminished or destroyed, and so Yozi build on top of them, warping their nature by expanding it. What they don't realize is that in the process they make something that is arguably far more than what it was.
Now, a mortal who bonds with Infernal Exaltation does not just become a human++. Instead, a new route is open to them. Within them lies the potential to transcend. To develop a metaphysical constitution akin to, and in fact surpassing that of not just Yozi, but Primordials in their prime. That is the path of the Devil Tiger - to shed the illusions of mortality and become so much more.
I can live with that. I wonder if he'll be offering Lash some manner of amnesty / deal maybe? Given the circumstances. Not Lasciel, but Lash. Remember, we are likely to have Harry with us.Maybe he'll ask nicely for rights of passage for the swords?
Who wants to give the Swords a tourist visa?
Ok, so imagine beings like the titans of Greek myth, the gods before gods. They are the primordials. They are extremely powerful, less having a statblock but rather simple rules like "never fails a roll". They (most of them) got sealed into the inverted stomach of one of their own members much like the titans of Greek myth. This was an inescapable prison. No primordial could ever escape. This is axiomatically true. The prison would never let them escape.
And so one of them devised a means of getting out. They just had to no longer be themselves.
And so fragments of these beings got broken off and sent out into the world to start anew. Broken enough to no longer be the primordial in question but not SO broken that they couldn't one day become the primordial again. They would be forever trapped still, but it wouldn't matter because they would also be outside their prison.
A devil tiger is one of the fragments that has begun the process of turning back into a primordial but not the SAME primordial that they came from, literally defining it's own existence on it's own terms. It's the same level of the beings that wrote the rules to begin with and it begins to rewrite the rules for itself. Our hell is a new act of creation just as the White God creating the world Dresden lives in was an act of creation. We are a being on THAT level, or at least we are growing into one.
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So, I'm guessing this is our cue to do something about global warning? This would be just his style to pass a mission for us through our mother as a part of small talk.
Establish a piece of sympathetic magic that transmits heat very broadly but in a controlled manner from the Earth's atmosphere and oceans and into the frozen wastes of our own Hell, slowly pushing both towards greater habitability.
- Location
- Germany
Mab would propably take care of it before it gets too bad.
And we have recently freed up some of her time.
Of course alternativly we could try to remake the Dragon of Air, but so far we don't even know if he had something mantle-like or if his power just ended with him.
I mean you can take it that way, but mostly it is Uriel not knowing how to human very well.
- What do humans do when they are waiting for something they do not have an exact timetable on? They make smalltalk.
- What is the most common source of smalltalk? The weather.
- What was the last weather related thing I concerned myself with? Global warming
- Oh hey, bonus complementing her decoration skills, that is extra human. Yay me.
[X] The Skull and Crossbones Club (Place where her favorite song is playing)
Also worth noting @xiosdestro11 that personified concept is very literal here. The wyld, which is the name for the primordial chaos they formed in, was a place of pure essence with no fixed rules and is the native state of Exalted's reality.
Essence, as in the same stuff Molly runs her powers on, is sort of like the stem cells of the universe. You can take it and shape it into whatever you like; doing so is how you get anything at all. Having matter and energy is entirely optional, and the rules by which they interact are programmed into the essence that supports their existence.
Getting back to the point, primordials weren't the first things to form in the wyld, just the "biggest" in the sense that they were each complete mythos. World titans that were essentially complete systems of physics/concepts on their own.
With some exceptions like time, which they invented in part as a weapon to fuck over the rest of reality and in part to ensure they couldn't be retroactively undone, if you kill one of them you're basically deleting whatever they represented from existence.
Which is probably part of why Molly's status as a larval primordial is a big deal to the white god.
Power is one thing but if she matures into a full grown primordial+ the mythos she builds herself now could end up shaping an expansion pack for reality that's nearly unimaginable under the current rules.
- Location
- Dallas Texas
To touch up on Devil Tigers specifically, from what I remember there are two paths for an Infernal Exalted- the first is the path of Imitation, of immersing oneself so deeply in the path and myths of a single Yozi that you can begin to embody there mythos and eventually take their form and power in truth as your own. The second, the devil tiger, comes from heretical mixing of the mythos of the Yozi until you find your own path, which back in the days of creation the Yozi probobly would hunt you down for. That's the path of becoming a primordial 2.0 with all the strengths and none of the monofocused weakness of Yozi that were literally unable to comprehend concepts outside their mythos.
Guys, the wastes in our soul are an entire ecosystem, stop trying to ruin it to get more room that we currently don't need.
Guys, the wastes in our soul are an entire ecosystem, stop trying to ruin it to get more room that we currently don't need.
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- Location
- Norway
Because Exalted is a very badly written series with multiple contradictory editors, almost as bad as Games Workshop despite having fewer people and less time to write,
I'm going to venture a different explanation to the ones posted so far. And I'm going to explain it backwards. (This is somewhat humorous, take it with a grain of salt.)The writers for Exalted have a habit of slapping on very flowery names with only the faintest connection to the function of a superpower. One of the charms for Infernal Exalted in second edition was called Triumphant Howl of the Devil-Tiger. (THotDT)
The mechanical prerequisites for this charm are: 1) must have the Excellency charm of any Yozi, 2) must have the Shintai charm of any Yozi, 3) must have the Sorcerous Initiation of any Yozi.
The first represents dice boosts when acting in a manner that the Yozi approves of, the second represents taking an extra-large dollop of the Yozi's power to change into Boss Form, and the third... doesn't actually exist because bad editing! But I presume it's a typo for the Sorcerous Enlightenment charm to cast large-scale ritual magic aligned with the Yozi. So, if a character takes this charm, it's implied he has been channeling lots and lots of Yozi power to get there.
The fluff says that THotDT represents taking bits and pieces from several different ones of the shattered, mutilated, crippled god-like beings called Yozis to forge yourself into something also god-like, but new and unbroken. The fluff is dumb because the charm editors forgot to specify that the three prerequisites must be taken from different Yozis, you can take all three from one Yozi as written, but it's implied by the charm appearing in the "Heretical Charms" section where every other charm in that section is written to have prerequisites from different Yozis (think of them as skill trees, which are usually separate).
The in-universe intent of designing Infernals was that they'd progress down one skill tree of Yozi Charms until getting to the capstone, Yozi Cosmic Principle, which gives you 1000 motes (spell points) and other massive superpowers, by effectively turning you into that Yozi, or a second instance thereof, or something along those lines. The metaphysics are vague. The Infernal player characters were designed to be humans given Yozi power to help the Yozi escape from the Prison Dimension and get back into the Material Plane where humans live, by instantiating the Yozis in the Material Plane.
One of the splatbooks for Exalted Second Edition introducted THotDT and other charms as optional, unknown bonus charms, having to be invented by your character, which nobody knew about before because they weren't real yet. IC, most people don't know they're possible. IC, most Infernals don't even know they're possible, let alone how to create them. They're hypothetical expansion pack alternatives - taking THotDT locks you out of taking YCP, and vice versa. This is "write your own homebrew" multiclassing of the Yozi skill trees, the multiclassing locks you out of the class capstone.
Because Exalted is written by and for special snowflake mary sue powergamers and THotDT was an opportunity to be the sue-est of them all by writing the Mary Sue Skill Tree that other people could learn to get their powers from you, lots of players jumped on the idea and there was a frenzy of homebrew skill trees and people fantasizing about their Devil-Tiger characters, treating this conditional-on-DM-approval option from a splatbook as though it were the default path for Infernals.
Also, THotDT is an Essence 6 charm, which requires your character to have either lived for a century (younger characters are limited to Essence 5) or taken one of the Yozi Mantle charms that makes your character so strongly aligned with a specific one of the Yozis that it makes little sense to take THotDT at that point.
Also, there's the IC practical problem that taking it would get all the Infernal loyalists and armies of Malfeas hunting you down, which is a problem because average Infernal starts out as an employee of Malfeas being hunted down by everyone else in the setting, and has to be real good at diplomacy to get out of this alive.
Didn't matter, players were all over THotDT anyway, and secondhand discussion often forgot the mechanical constraints. GMs have to issue reminders sometimes that the popular splatbook option really, really isn't a default. Thus:
Since an Exaltation is a plug-and-play power source that jumps from one human to another, the very short version of what's happened is that some previous human holding Molly's power source had taken THotDT.
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fictionfan
Please sir, may I have some Meows?
- Location
- Tempe, AZ
This is false Thomas did it.
Well Hell is often defined as a place separated from god.
Prayer Eating 3 does in fact scale with the number of people with prayers by word of the GM.