- Location
- Taken by the hand to a land that they understand
[X] Let Harry speak, that Lash has even come this far is a testament to him
Green Flame Rising (Exalted vs Dresden Files)
- Thread starter DragonParadox
- Start date
- Crossover Fantasy
Yeah, but as much influence as we can potentially have it's worth remembering what the starting point is.
fictionfan
Please sir, may I have some Meows?
- Location
- Tempe, AZ
A week chatting with her while we are in our dragon nest and all our buffs are up. Only need to sleep two hours a day and can throw around exalancies freely. We should basically be able to willpower tap her unless she has an intimacy direct fulfilled by resisting us.
Under those sorts of conditions with a captive audience a social Exalted can basically rewrite someone's intimacies at will. Unless they have a passive perfect defense which we know she doesn't or this situation wouldn't even be coming up.
- Pronouns
- She/Her
[X] Let Harry speak, that Lash has even come this far is a testament to him
On the Nature of Sorcery
On the Nature of Sorcery
By Margaret Katherine Amanda Carpenter
No, not that Sorcery... not that one either. Look just let me explain, You know how spies sometimes make ciphers out of books, find the specific word on the specific page and you will be able to read the letter? Imagine that but the book is a library's worth of history fantastical and wondrous, dreadful and strange, lurking just out of sight. Imagine that but the letter is power that cast He Who Walks... No, I won't write that, even here, that cast out the Enemy of All. Imagine that, the cipher's Sorcery.
It feels enough like prayer to things that are definitely nod God that I would feel deeply uncomfortable practicing it if it weren't for the remaining 90% feeling like data entry, like someone forgot to log this Exaltation out of the system. It does not feel like any of the other things I do, not like summoning tools, sharpening sight or even being one with the water. It does not even feel like calling spirits, even though you would think that is close, pay the Essence earn the favor.
Sidenote I think I'm going to keep summoning the tinny spiteful things of the Wicked City and make them more than they were when I can, it may be trying to empty up the ocean with Styrofoam cup, but hey it's better then not doing anything and at least Styrofoam resistant to salt water.
Anyway it's not like that and it's not like how my magic felt before I Exalted. For one thing there is no give, no flex, it does not flow and change according to my will, for another the words matter, they have a heft and weight to them, a history and purpose beyond the simple memotics of wizardry as Bob explained them to me.
Sidenote the second: What do you call a language with no name? After itself it would be called just Language, or something like All Encompassing Reality Descriptor. This strange baroque thing is both more compact than it has any right to be and so complex it makes my head spin to contemplate it. Am I the only one who knows about it? Are all the other 'moments and mechanisms' locked away? And if that so so why does it looks so familiar, not just from dreams and gut feelings, but from the shape of ancient writings? Maybe it's like Plato's ideal forms, casting shadows into the world? Maybe I'm just the one who can throw rocks in the direction of the cave mouth, moving the thing and thus its shadow on the wall behind me.
Doesn't matter now, too much to do too little time. Too much to make. That is the other things sorcery does, make things like the man in the dream... oh who am I kidding, like the demon in the dream. But that is different from the weight of Exorcism, less calling and more shaping, less like data entry and more like building a circuit board.
So who built the computer and where is it?
OOC: So I was just thinking about some of the questions you guys asked in various posts about Ancient Sorcery and I realized that for a lot of them an in character informational post would be helpful. At least I hope it will be.
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That's true. And "rebel against divine beings, topple world order and achieve impossible" is our area of competence, not his. There are two ways to approach this:
1) Through personal intimacies - that's what I am calling "dating sim" approach, and that's what Dresden is going to do if allowed. Lash is a damsel in distress, Dresden will comfort her. Picking it is, I think, nudging her into direction of falling completely in love with Dresden and spending her life with him.
2) Through inciting the flames of rebellion - the exalted route. Lash is an oppressed almsot certainly geassed spirit created by uncaring and cruel divine being for a purpose that would end in her death. We are Infernal exalted, the physical embodiment of rebelling against heavens twice over, created and given mandate to achieve impossible. This situation might not be our intimacy, but it sure as hell is our exaltation's on all its level, Infernal and solar both. Picking this route is more likely to end with Lash the Knight of the Cross or something akin this lines (and, far down the line, possibly Solar/Lunar Lash).
Neither method is brute force, I feel. Except maybe in a strictly mechanical sense for Molly. They are just different approaches.
How many times have we gone "haha we're a social god who can bend X to our whims" or similar and then nearly gotten rolled by someone? Charity has won more than she's lost against us.
We weren't using all possible buffs, but Charity is running a pretty baseline build.
Lash isn't stupid, if we try something like this she'll notice it and the attempt will backfire. We can't try to convince her she's her own distinct person who should grow into someone better than she currently is with brainwashing.
Molly would also almost certainly be unwilling to try that in the first place, because she isn't running on the free will as a set of arbitrary rules section of the ideological spectrum.
I also still fundamentally disagree with the idea Molly is a social exalt.
She's got a pair of 1 dot social charms and excellency*. Big dice pools are a basic buy in, if you compare a build that's put more than 8 exp into cheating with charms we're a joke.
Molly does have more general charms that apply to social stuff as much as anything else, but that doesn't make her a specialist or replicate their dedicated abilities.
A true social exalt could walk into that room and know exactly what the price is to buy a fallen Angel's soul from them, or just use this constantly to avoid screwing around as much:
Having 3-5 charms like this and the excellencies is what results in the bullshit that gives social exalts their reputation.
* Anyone who wants to avoid getting punked has at least something in this field. I see equating that to being a social exalt like this:
I am stealing that meme, just in general, that should be shared with the world .
Does this mean that the craft charm gave Molly the ability to speak Old Realm, or is it more like ritual behavior she understands the uses for but not general meaning of?
This is interesting. I'd assumed that only some of our crafting would be unusual by magic item standards, but I suppose it does run on stupid amounts of essence. This does make me wonder what a wizard/enchanter would get out of our stuff though. Extending and modifying the substance of reality isn't exactly standard item manufacturing technique.
Edit:
On a related note, we should make Dresden a 1 dot equivalent blasting rod or wizard's staff.
They're foci, not enchanted items themselves, technically 'mundane' tools used to help the user shape their magic.
Make the best foci we can, then make it a mortal okay prodigy with -1 DC (presumably set to occult) and double range properties. That would do a lot more work for him than it would for most people, especially if it's his staff since those are very versatile tools.
Edit: error.
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Hasnt she been speaking Old Realm on and off since before she got the craft charm? Most obviously during the duel with He Who Walks Unbowed but it does pop up from time to time.
Sometimes I wonder if she got a hidden linguistic merit or something. Same with a hidden past lives merit considering how often she seems to be remembering stuff.
She had a smattering of words, but not full fluency. I think the fight with the walker was some sort of fluke, because she didn't seem to retain much of it after the fact.
That thing with the pillow after she got the charm implies so more general ability though.
fictionfan
Please sir, may I have some Meows?
- Location
- Tempe, AZ
If I read Holden intentions right everything we craft is at least in theory craftable by the people of the setting. We just craft it faster and better. Our crafting this soul catching mirror on the spot like we did is as implausible for a wizard to do as our crafting a luxury car over the weekend by ourselves was.
But in theory some talented enchanter who crosses their T's and dots their I's could figure out how to make something like it given enough time and materials.
The real question is what we can do with proper resources and time.
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For prodigies I agree, though it wouldn't be the first time things got tweaked related to deep lore and essence manipulation.
I wouldn't be surprised if studying them required more work to translate into regular enchantments than observing another crafter's work normally would, or if it gave progress towards/discounts to buying arete like we got implications about when Harry saw our hell form:
Splendors are different though, they get tagged as ancient sorcery.
fictionfan
Please sir, may I have some Meows?
- Location
- Tempe, AZ
When I say people in the setting I am including Merlin with his enchantment that Bob calls sufficiently advanced magic such that magic users call it magic.
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To swing back to this for a moment, if we can trust the council a bit more ritual tools with the DC reducer and range effect might be really nice. The property is double range not increase range by a fixed increment after all, so if that holds the bigger the use case the more energy savings it represents for a mage. A DC reduction that almost certainly stacks with the others they're using is pretty significant for the high end guys too.
We know the senior council is clean right now. Technically we could make them a set of tools based on the public knowledge of their specialties and present them as a diplomatic gift during our speech.
It'd require deft handling since we're talking a dangerous gift, but just imagine what someone like McCoy could do with something like that.
Merlin, even OG Merlin, is a baseline mortal and mortals don't even have user level access here.
We know the senior council is clean right now. Technically we could make them a set of tools based on the public knowledge of their specialties and present them as a diplomatic gift during our speech.
It'd require deft handling since we're talking a dangerous gift, but just imagine what someone like McCoy could do with something like that.
Ancient sorcery, as far as I understand it, is a matter of authority and not just power. That's what Molly is talking about here:
No admin account, no ancient sorcery. You could theoretically be strong enough to disintegrate an exalt with normal magic and not be able to use it.
Merlin, even OG Merlin, is a baseline mortal and mortals don't even have user level access here.
fictionfan
Please sir, may I have some Meows?
- Location
- Tempe, AZ
I was talking about crafting not ancient sorcery.
@Yog : Could Molly manage to craft up somewhere like Demonreach using the existing rules?
I know, I distinguished between prodigies like the thing we just made and splendors which are described like this:
fictionfan
Please sir, may I have some Meows?
- Location
- Tempe, AZ
So making something like Demonreach would be a prodigy.
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Cassiemouse
Market Atheist
[X] Speak, words of rebellion come very easily to mind
-[X] Spend a willpower point for additional success
-[X] "Remember - she, not you, and never you. And she already tried, didn't she? To seduce and twist that which I hold dear. Look where we - you, and I, and he are now. If I have anything to say, any new attempt of hers will blow up in her face at least as badly. We'll make sure of that, wont' we?" you say, the implications of joint rebellion lingering in the air, the surety of your voice fueled by knowing that you can achieve the impossible, were made to achieve it.
-[X] Spend a willpower point for additional success
-[X] "Remember - she, not you, and never you. And she already tried, didn't she? To seduce and twist that which I hold dear. Look where we - you, and I, and he are now. If I have anything to say, any new attempt of hers will blow up in her face at least as badly. We'll make sure of that, wont' we?" you say, the implications of joint rebellion lingering in the air, the surety of your voice fueled by knowing that you can achieve the impossible, were made to achieve it.
Molly is now semi-fluent in Old Realm now that she has full crafting. If she sits and thinks about it she can string sentences together. She may not find all the words she is looking for, but odds are she would get enough to carry a point across
What no. Mortals can learn sorcery. That is explicitly bridigt working.
[X] Speak, words of rebellion come very easily to mind
-[X] Spend a willpower point for additional success
-[X] "Remember - she, not you, and never you. And she already tried, didn't she? To seduce and twist that which I hold dear. Look where we - you, and I, and he are now. If I have anything to say, any new attempt of hers will blow up in her face at least as badly. We'll make sure of that, wont' we?" you say, the implications of joint rebellion lingering in the air, the surety of your voice fueled by knowing that you can achieve the impossible, were made to achieve it.
-[X] Spend a willpower point for additional success
-[X] "Remember - she, not you, and never you. And she already tried, didn't she? To seduce and twist that which I hold dear. Look where we - you, and I, and he are now. If I have anything to say, any new attempt of hers will blow up in her face at least as badly. We'll make sure of that, wont' we?" you say, the implications of joint rebellion lingering in the air, the surety of your voice fueled by knowing that you can achieve the impossible, were made to achieve it.
Mortals could learn Terrestrial Circle Sorcery in the Second Age. That is a long time ago and a long away away. Another thing to note is that back during the Second Age Sapphire Exorcism, the one spell Molly has was Celestial Circle Sorcery.