[X] Yes, after all he may not know it, but you can find out a lot more about him
Better IMO to be honest and straightforward wherever possible, especially when letting people "trust, but verify".
@DragonParadox, for the purposes of this divination, would every lifeform that has ever been in our world soul count as our "children"? Including non-sapient or even microscopic organisms? If so, does such a divination risk "overloading" Merlin with extreme quantities of information about each and every "child", or even just the sheer varieties our offspring come in - thus (at least from the outside) appearing as if we are attacking him through some kind of mental DDoS and thereby potentially harming our diplomatic efforts and the friendly image we seek to convey? Or would such a preliminary or board divination just report back a hilariously, absurdly huge number if those born in our world soul count as children? I'm pretty sure based on how Merlin described it, it would be the latter case, but I figure its better to be certain lest we give Merlin a literal brain aneurysm instead of a metaphorical aneurysm.
Molly does not know how this would interact with her world-soul though she does know the magic will just fail rather than breaking his mind, spells are more remote from the wizard than something like a soul-gaze, that is why he is doing it this way, or part of it at least.
I don't think the total count of all citizens in the history of the FCF is going to be more than double the number alive now. I could be wrong, but I expect that when anything other than careful ritual suicide at a particular location will result in you coming back from the dead, most people won't perform that ritual.
Enough generations have passed to give them a past lost to time, multiple languages to evolve, and multiple states to form then merge after a war.
It seems to me that either there's a lot more suicide going on than you're suggesting, or that after some period of time the oldest go to the back of the line the next time they enter the wheel.
Without a vast majority of the population being relatively young most of the time the factors we're seeing are highly unlikely to emerge.
Ten strenght or damage 8 cannons are meaningless if you don't hit, that's why Dex is the godstat.
And countermagic is also meaningless, because the Naagloshii doesn't primarily attack with magic, but uses physical attacks for the most part.
If it is attacking in melee then they can grapple it. That roles strength and brawl. They would be rolling 13 dice for that.
And it doesn't matter if if their dice pools are only 6. There are 12 of them and one of them will hit through probability alone. Its the same reasons we are vulnerable to massed enemies.
If you have to make a comparison between between what a Wizard can do to hide and what a single Formori-power or technical gadget can do to detect, I'd give it to the caster every time.
Not necessarily at all. How a wizards achieve its thing definitely has an effect on what can beat it. Like spells have flaws in them all the time.
Its viels certainly aren't perfect because it speaks while veiled and hears so some level sound permeability is there.
And as for that thing about a veil always beating hedge magic potion, thats absurd. This isn't true magick despite the mechanics used. Its all the manipulation of the same energies just in more specialized forms.
Then our friends are safe as when he retreats they can call for more reinforcements and we can be summoned as well. Or move to a more secure location.
Hell our people could have a reaper kind of drone in the air by the time it comea back and the next attack will see a hellfire missled ro to its face from 3 km away.
If it is attacking in melee then they can grapple it. That roles strength and brawl. They would be rolling 13 dice for that.
And it doesn't matter if if their dice pools are only 6. There are 12 of them and one of them will hit through probability alone. Its the same reasons we are vulnerable to massed enemies.
Not necessarily at all. How a wizards achieve its thing definitely has an effect on what can beat it. Like spells have flaws in them all the time.
Its viels certainly aren't perfect because it speaks while veiled and hears so some level sound permeability is there.
And as for that thing about a veil always beating hedge magic potion, thats absurd. This isn't true magick despite the mechanics used. Its all the manipulation of the same energies just in more specialized forms.
Yes, it's not perfect, but it's much more adjustable.
Once a Wizard knows how an enemy's senses work, he can adjust his veil to better cover for sound, heat or other visible factors, while the people with the sight-upgrade are stuck with that one thing.
Then our friends are safe as when he retreats they can call for more reinforcements and we can be summoned as well. Or move to a more secure location.
Hell our people could have a reaper kind of drone in the air by the time it comea back and the next attack will see a hellfire missled ro to its face from 3 km away.
Yes, it's not perfect, but it's much more adjustable.
Once a Wizard knows how an enemy's senses work, he can adjust his veil to better cover for sound, heat or other visible factors, while the people with the sight-upgrade are stuck with that one thing.
They can have multiple sensors. Different cyborgs can have different items or different methods. Its not a fixed one for us or them. They can have spirit binder support or drones with sensors.
I mean if he comes back to soon then our people are still ready and alert. Ambushes only work once. It only takes a turn or two to grab the vip and bring them to a more safer area.
Yep, if its to protect our family thats fine with me. We can use vee to make them allies if we need to damn the rest of the supernatural world hearing about it.
I mean, I expect his divination to give dual results. One for mortal Molly, one for Primordial Molly. With height in thousands of kilometers, place of birth being Malfeas / Autochtonia, etc.
"Height in the thousands, place of birth: inside herself... number of inhabitants? Average climate? That's not the reading of the one before me, stop trying to hide and let it do its work"
"Actually, that seems legit, you just aren't reading the correct part."
I mean, I expect his divination to give dual results. One for mortal Molly, one for Primordial Molly. With height in thousands of kilometers, place of birth being Malfeas / Autochtonia, etc.
People have been inside Molly's world-soul and they seem fine. If anything the fact that you have one now should make soul-gagzing marginally easier to do as the wizard sees the very much comprehensible soul-scape with shapes and colors, landmarks and cities and not the inner workings of an exaltation and how they interact with the memories, hopes, dreams and fears of the Exalt
Rosie and Nelson, Molly did change their minds for them, Rosie came out the best out of it and she has a derangement related to drugs, specifically a phobia.
Unlikely it seems to go by mundane milestone in collative consciousness which magic isn't. Also more importantly if there was an objective measurement of what is or isn't black magic that could be determined by a divination then there would not be all the edge cases, arguments and trials.
We have seen in the books that if something is or isn't blackmagic in a legal sense is often a judgment call in DF which it wouldn't be if there was a divination that just said yes/no.
Edit:
When he does this divination on us I wonder if he will just get nation statistics? Population, weather, GDP etc. Because Molly is now human/nation.
Keep in mind that Uriel explicitly canonically has enough power to annihilate galaxies. And may or may not provide a direct through-line to gazing directly upon the White God
Story-wise that's propably true, but mechanics are not perfect.
Rolling high, rolling low can all happen, the Naagloshii can presumably not take unlimited multi-actions to dodge, unless he goes full defence and does nothing else.
So if too many people shoot at him there will be a point at which he has to take it without active dodging and if he then rolls bad on soak, or the attacker high on damage, it will leave wounds, aggravated ones that few things can heal in combat-time.
So for the same reason why we should be careful about a dozen people with high-powered weapons, he must too.
And again, that doesn't mean he looses, just that he would have to be careful and occasionally break contact to avoid testing his luck too much.
Thing is, it has either combat healing or combat regen (I hope it only has combat healing) on top of its already horrifying capabilities, so if you scratch it, that damage goes away real fast.
In close quarters combat, you can only be attacked by 4 or 5 people in melee at a time, because space constraints are very much a thing. Ranged is better for concentrating force if you can get clear sightlines.
Fluff? Remember this scene:
I lifted dazed eyes to see the security guy from the entrance hall come around the corner, that little machine gun held to his shoulder, his cheek resting against the stock so that the barrel pointed wherever his eyes were focused. When he saw the skinwalker, uncovered from its veil, he stopped in his tracks. To his credit, he couldn't have hesitated for more than a fraction of a second before he opened fire. Bullets zipped down the hall, so close that I could have reached out a hand and touched them. The skinwalker flung itself to one side, a golden-furred blur, and rebounded off the wall toward the gunman, its form changing. Then it leapt into the air, flipping its body as it did, and suddenly a spider the size of a subcompact car was racing along the ceiling toward the security guy. At that point, he impressed me again. He turned and ran, sprinting around a corner with the skinwalker coming hard behind.
"Now!" someone called, as the skinwalker reached the intersection of the two hallways, and a sudden howl of thunder filled the hallways with noise and light. Bullets ripped into the floor, the wall, and the ceiling, coming from some point out of sight around the corner, filling the air with splinters of shattered hardwood.
The skinwalker let out a deafening caterwaul of pain and boundless fury. The gunfire reached a thunderous, frantic crescendo. Then men began screaming.
I tried to push myself to my feet, but someone had set the hallway on tumble dry, and I fell down again. I kept trying. Whoever had made the hall start acting like a Laundromat dryer had to run out of quarters eventually. By using the wall, I managed to make it to my knees.
I heard a soft sound behind me. I turned my head blearily toward the source of the noise and saw three pale, lithe forms drop silently from the floors above through the hole that the skinwalker had made. The first was Lara Raith. She'd torn her skirt up one side, almost all the way to her hip, and when she landed in a silent crouch, she looked cold and feral and dangerous with her sword in one hand and her machine pistol in the other.
The other two women were vampires as well, their pale skin shining with eerie beauty, their eyes glittering like polished silver coins—the sisters Justine had mentioned, I presumed. I guess I'd arrived in the middle of the night, vampire time, and gotten some people out of bed. The first sister wore nothing but weapons and silver body piercings, which gleamed on one eyebrow, one nostril, her lower lip, and her nipples. Her dark hair had been cropped close to her head except for where her bangs fell to veil one of her eyes, and she carried a pair of wavy-bladed swords like Lara's.
The second seemed to be taller and more muscular than the other two. She wore what looked like a man's shirt, closed with only a single button. Her long hair was a mess, still tousled from sleep, and she held an exotic-looking axe in her hands, its blade honed along a concave edge instead of the more conventional convex one.
Without any visible signal, they all started prowling forward at the same time—and it was a prowl, an atavistic, feline motion that carried what were very clearly predators forward in total silence. Lara paused when she reached me, glanced over my injuries with cold silver eyes and whispered, "Stay down."
No problem, I thought dully. Down is easy.
The screaming stopped with a last stuttering burst of gunfire. The security guy came staggering around the corner. Blood matted his hair and covered half of his face. There was a long tear through his jacket on the left side. His left arm hung uselessly, but he still gripped the handle of his miniature assault weapon with his right. He wavered and dropped to one knee as he spotted the three vampires.
Massed automatic weapon fire.
He charges through it, massacres all the security people, smacks Lara and her sisters around in melee, then parries Dresden's magic and uses it to smack Lara around some more.
AND it appears to have combat healing, because the superficial fire spell damage we saw it take from Luccio earlier in the scene is gone. Luccio's fire spell generally cuts things in half; on the naagloshi it just burned hair and blackened some flesh.
On a narrative level, a naagloshii is horrifyingly deadly.
And its capabilities dont appear to diminish much, if any, if modelled mechanically.
I would bet on it over a battalion of HITMarks in close quarters.
And if it actually chose to fight like a soldier instead of a inhuman eldritch monstrosity, it would just stop and drop lightning or acid or fire or shadow on them from above with impunity. It outranges them with magic.
Are you really ignoring the 10 strength or the innate countermagic or the 8 damage agg plasma cannons or the armour.
And before you say he will be veiled they could easily be equipped with that cream that pierces illusions. Or have sensors that are not effected by viels like echo location or seismic sensors.
Liie it will die in 2 or three shot hitting it. I pretty sure it won't be able kill a dozen guys without being hit.
Also they could just as easily be hit mark 10s. So higher skills and abilities to use solid equipment and like 12 armour die.
1)As has been pointed out, Dexterity is the godstat in combat.
Strength means nothing if you cannot hit the target. And even Dexterity is limited by Perception; if you cannot actually see what you are fighting, you have a hard time hitting it.
When the Technocracy made HITMark Xs to replace the HITMark IXs, they dropped Strength from 10 to 6, and increased Dexterity from 3 to 4, and Perception all the way up to 5.
Thats how important it is.
2)Innate Countermagic explicitly does NOT defend you against direct damage magic.
You can have all the primium you want and it wont defend you against a fireball or lightning strike or force strike or a mage who is using the magic to enhance themselves into a transhuman murderblender or to shapeshift into a magical bear with a primium hide, plasma breath and lightsaber claws.
3)Similarly, the plasma cannon is Damage 8, Range 100, Capacity 200.
Thats the same damage as a rifle, or a shotgun; the only difference is that its aggravated damage.
A shotgun has Range 50.
A rifle has Range 200. A dude with a rifle outranges a HITMark IX's internal weapons on open ground, and does the same amount of base damage, just lethal instead of agg.
Naagloshii have aggravated soak; we see Shagnasty soak Luccio's firespell at close range, dodge, and then regen the damage by the time he shows up again. Seeker's not going to be particularly impressed by plasma cannon. Nor will his kin.
Not when they eat wizards.
4)One:
If you are giving your proxies preptime to be equipped with gear, you are also giving the naagloshii preptime to prepare for things.
You dont want to give a Senior Council-tier caster preptime before a fight.
Two:
The Gatekeeper's ointment was for seeing through Fae glamor. Not through veils. There is no ointment I am aware of for seeing through veils; we know this because if there were, Dresden would have brought some to Chitchen Itza during Changes for his nonmagical party members.
5)We see this scenario you are talking about in the book Turn Coat, where Shagnasty walks directly into a crossfire of automatic weapons fire by around a quarter to half the security staff of Raith Manor.
He charges through it and physically beats the gunmen to death and incapacity.
He didnt duck out and come around like he did with the wizards. He didnt even bother casting magic.
He just charges into the gunfire.
Dude was vibing.
6) This is a HITMark X from M20 pg 626
HIT Mark X – "The Invisible Soldier"
Today's standard HIT Mark model, the Mark X looks like an ordinary human who's strong, fast, and extremely deadly, with a limited face-shifting ability that allows it to make cosmetic changes to its features, gender, and skin tone. Without internal examination or magick, a Mark X remains indistinguishable from a muscular, if somewhat taciturn, human being. Such machines are no better at social banter than any previous HIT Mark model, but they're smart enough to know how to conceal this weakness; given the decline of social graces in recent years, such concealment isn't difficult.
Like its previous iteration, the HIT Mark IX, the newer model X employs a complex integration of nanotech and lab-grown organic tissue which creates a literally flexible bio-machine. To counteract the Paradox issues of earlier iterations, the newest HIT Marks are more like super-soldiers than death-dealing war machines. Even so, they're exceedingly effective and can take a lot of punishment.
Suggested Attributes: Strength 6, Dexterity 4, Stamina 6, Charisma 1, Manipulation 2, Appearance 3, Perception 5, Intelligence 2, Wits 4 Suggested Abilities: Alertness 4, Brawl 4, Firearms 4, Melee 4, all other Skills & Knowledges 3, with the exceptions above. Willpower: 6 Health Levels: OK, OK, OK, OK, OK, OK, OK, OK,-5, Terminated Armor Rating: 6 (12 dice soak, total) Attacks/ Powers: A Mark X unit lacks the internal firepower of previous models, but it can use human-sized gear and hypertech. A smaller claw array (damage: 8/L) gives this model an innate hand-to-hand component that – thanks to movies and comic books – remains essentially coincidental in technological reality zones. Beyond the usual sensory array of previous models, the Mark X has
wireless Internet access and internal cell phone capability, plus five concealed USB ports, two high-capacity internal flash drives, and a VDAS datacrawl.
A Mark X that loses its last health level automatically self-destructs. Technocratic technicians can also set one to self-destruct if it's captured or incapacitated. Normally, this self-destruct function just fuses and melts all internal components into biomechanical slag. A skilled technician, however, can also cause the Mark X to explode, inflicting 8 dice of lethal damage upon everyone within four yards of the Mark X.
Countermagick: Four dice of Primium countermeasures. Image: Though bulky and muscular, the Mark X looks unsettlingly human – a bit thick, perhaps, but not nearly as obvious as previous iterations had been. Roleplaying Notes: Like a professional solider, you've been trained and conditioned to do whatever must be done. That said, you've got something approximating free will... not much of it, but enough to blur the line between human and machine to a degree that your creators would find truly unsettling.
Attack dice pool of 8. Soak 12. 10HLs.
The only internal weapons being a concealable set of claws; it has 1 extra HL, but the plasma cannon are gone.
Its not going to help.
Like @Artemis1992 said, you need an ATLAS-equivalent at a minimum. A lot of them.
HITMarks are terrors against low-level PCs and NPC victims.
A naagloshii is not a low level victim.
