The outsider big thing is it can change the nature of static beings. It fully possible it at least partially subverted because they hadn't. Rashid should have been notified by the sin eater so he could intervene long ago.
Green Flame Rising (Exalted vs Dresden Files)
- Thread starter DragonParadox
- Start date
- Crossover Fantasy
Or it was just hungry and wanted more food than it needed. It'd be odd for the people who set this up to pick something that would inevitably fail due to energy loss.
Don't get me wrong, it could be a move of desperation provoked by some change in the prior situation, but there are other reasonable motives.
Either way I smell desperation. The outsiders are notoriously psycho and a bad idea to work with; just see Iku getting stabbed in the back and left to a face pissed off infernal alone.
We are infinitely more trustworthy, and have clear motives for not doing horrible things to it if it doesn't make us.
If it's seriously thinking that Sandra is a good business partner working for us would be an amazing deal by comparison.
It might even be cheap for us depending on the reading of a few things:
I don't have a cite for it, but I think DP limited this to once a scene. That said, it's still a full refill of exalted essence. Per that other ruling for using this on wizards unless we put HS on this it will try to feed the owner real deal nuclear hand grenade essence when it goes off. If we want maximum control we probably want HS anyway do we can grant it without losing ownership of the item, but if it can benefit from real essence then it's worth thinking about skipping it.
Either way, that's a full refill of supernatural power whenever it fulfills its nature regardless of how that happens. I'm assuming this basically means intimacies for our purposes, but I wouldn't be totally surprised if it had one for leading people into sin.
Which would mean that it either gets a full refill on the spot every time someone sins in Las Vegas or a minimum of once in every 15 minute interval of the same.
If it doesn't have a useful one and is really looking for any port in a storm we can also just give it one:
Set to guarding the gates of reality. Causing it to refresh its resource pool at every scene change from now till the end of time as long as it doesn't quit.
If intimacy isn't the right mechanic for this there are other options, but I suspect they'd be harder sells.
Side note: could we feed vamps this way? They can pack away a lot of food, so we make a HS item that gives a temporary super easy to fulfill new trigger for willpower renewal and keep it on them long enough to stuff down their full practical pool into spiritual fat reserves a few times over, then turn it off and stick it on another one.
They can literally keep centuries of food in reserve so a day or two where they eat as much as they can physically hold in their active blood point pool equivalent then pack it away using whatever mechanics we have for that* then do it again every scene till they're full enough to last a while.
However it works this is almost certainly the most efficient and effective way to feed them. It fills their pool regardless of size, so they probably aren't even capable of feeding themselves at this rate under even ideal conditions.
I don't recall us discussing this before, but that might just be my spotty memory.
* Assuming it's not something crazy like not having a blood point pool cap, which is sort of how canon treats it. Cause then turning this on might accidentally instruct an Ancient Sorcery grade effect to give a vampire fueled by a hunger demon infinite food. Which could have consequences.
BoredMan
Maintaining the Agenda is our top priority
How would it have done that? The Sin-Eater uses the Dragon to interact directly with Earth and the Dragon is a traitor.
- Location
- Earth
the vote has a typo.
Fixed, thanks.
Later problem. First need to stop this ritual.
- Location
- Germany
And I won't tire of saying that we are not totally sure it's a gate, rather than a singular Outsider trapped in or very close to reality.
Might still be possible to solve the problem permanently and leave Vegas without the need for permanent guard.
Might still be possible to solve the problem permanently and leave Vegas without the need for permanent guard.
BoredMan
Maintaining the Agenda is our top priority
Rather than guessing if we talk to the Sin-Eater it may be willing to just tell us.
Maeve's hard evidence has been accurate.
Maeve's speculation, on the other hand? We have no evidence for one way or the other.
And until there's some supporting evidence for it, Im gonna file it under "speculation".
Especially since the wizards and magic workers who set up this seal would definitely have taken that shit into consideration when they were setting it up.
This thing has been here for thousands of years after all, and for most of that time had no city to tap for power.
And like I said, I've been wondering if the public story in this AU hasnt gotten things wrong.
Deliberately.
Not buying it.
If the Sin Eater wanted to leave the job and the people who set up this thing had no provision in the contract for it?It would have sent emissaries to the Council or the Courts to that effect, and arrangements would have been made. PRECISELY because you dont want someone who doesnt want to be there, and can be bought guarding a key portal into reality's defenses.
Not to mention that the Outsiders have a reputation, as do their masters.
Even the Hell Kings, for all their malevolence and rapacity, want the Earth to exist; they just want to rule it.
They keep their deals, when you can get them to make one.
The Outsiders want to destroy the Earth. All of it. And will backstab whoever they can if they can get away with it.
Ask Iku-Turso.
I doubt it.
Its been more than five thousand years. Its not going to have been the first time some bright spark has tried to subvert the Sin Eater. And I find it...implausible that the people who installed a guardian to guard a seal leading Outside wouldnt have either hired a spirit that couldnt be subverted that way, or installed safeguards against that even.
There's other prisons on Earth for Old Ones, like the one in the Pacific with the Sleeper.
That one doesnt rate a spirit guardian. Neither did Iku-Turso's prison in the NeverNever.
Im pretty confident this one is a Gate.
Again, assumptions. We don't know enough about the setup to know if it could get out in a way that was acceptable to it without Outsider help.
And yet, people and whole organizations keep dealing with them. White Court deals with them. Red Court deals with them. In the story Iku-Turso dealt with them. Various warlocks, including classically educated ones, who really should know better, deal with them.
BoredMan
Maintaining the Agenda is our top priority
So let's talk to it and gain some insight then we won't have to make so many assumptions and go in blinder for it. It wouldn't need an agent if it could mess with us directly and Sandra very likely already knows we are here. The potential gains are astronomical if it's cooperative or desperate enough to make a deal to maintain its cushy job that it's upheld for millennium.
Like father, like daughter!
Making this work in a general way for vamps that doesn't take up our time is a bit annoying, but if we're willing to pay a little more for it - two red elders should do it - I think there's a loophole to exploit.
This splendor takes the form of an old and unusually large Maine Coon. Its dark fur is crisscrossed with the silver thread of scars, and one ear has a notch from what would have been a particularly bad fight, but its most striking feature are its eyes.
Their sharp green color is of an almost immediately recognizable shade, and when especially active they burn with power clearly enough to see in a well lit room. An effect it takes an appropriately feline amusement from using to surprise people with.
For most the cat is just a cat, but at its discretion or that of it's owner it may brush up against someone and grant them a temporary new intimacy related to caring for the cat in an immediately appropriate manner. Each time they satisfy this intimacy in some way until the cat chooses a new target they regain one willpower as normal and have whatever sort of supernatural resource pool they possess completely refilled.
Not immediately relevant, but we will probably get a good chunk of new vamps from this so it's worth having an idea spelled out for it.
An appropriate alternative to the cat would be a golden retriever named Sol Inbitchtus.
Edit:
[X] Try to contact the Sin Eater before confronting Sandra and potentially the Dragon
Incidentally, if we did make Sol the trigger condition should obviously be related to playing great games with them.
This splendor takes the form of an old and unusually large Maine Coon. Its dark fur is crisscrossed with the silver thread of scars, and one ear has a notch from what would have been a particularly bad fight, but its most striking feature are its eyes.
Their sharp green color is of an almost immediately recognizable shade, and when especially active they burn with power clearly enough to see in a well lit room. An effect it takes an appropriately feline amusement from using to surprise people with.
For most the cat is just a cat, but at its discretion or that of it's owner it may brush up against someone and grant them a temporary new intimacy related to caring for the cat in an immediately appropriate manner. Each time they satisfy this intimacy in some way until the cat chooses a new target they regain one willpower as normal and have whatever sort of supernatural resource pool they possess completely refilled.
The form of primal nature can be designed so that the animal benefits instead of or in addition to the owner of a splendor if you choose to make it one. Technically one of HS' benefits is that it can be used to tap someone with a splendors effects without charging them anything or particularly requiring consent.
So make the splendor an animal that boops vampires and makes them into fawning cat people for a bit, feeding them like they just ate a packed concert every time they scratch the right spot behind its ear or play with it.
We turn it on, cat poofs into existence, then it wanders off to autonomously feed anyone who needs it.
That breed of cat is known for being incredibly social and affectionate, so it shouldn't be a problem. Presumably we can push things in that direction and get it to basically be one of those cats that brings you dead things because it thinks you need help hunting, but for supernatural juice that it just gives you.
It's also really funny.
So make the splendor an animal that boops vampires and makes them into fawning cat people for a bit, feeding them like they just ate a packed concert every time they scratch the right spot behind its ear or play with it.
We turn it on, cat poofs into existence, then it wanders off to autonomously feed anyone who needs it.
That breed of cat is known for being incredibly social and affectionate, so it shouldn't be a problem. Presumably we can push things in that direction and get it to basically be one of those cats that brings you dead things because it thinks you need help hunting, but for supernatural juice that it just gives you.
It's also really funny.
Not immediately relevant, but we will probably get a good chunk of new vamps from this so it's worth having an idea spelled out for it.
An appropriate alternative to the cat would be a golden retriever named Sol Inbitchtus.
Edit:
[X] Try to contact the Sin Eater before confronting Sandra and potentially the Dragon
Incidentally, if we did make Sol the trigger condition should obviously be related to playing great games with them.
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*squints*
Nah. Wouldnt have worked under the circumstances.
She literally had one of Luccio's absurdly broken magic-disrupting swords in the body she was wearing(so broken that Butcher immediately made sure Dresden couldnt get one); it would have disrupted any ritual prepwork on the body, while making it significantly harder to cast magic
Not to mention she'd be tussling with a two-hundred-ish year old wizard for control of her own body, in a setting where its been established that the older you are in your own body, the harder you are to affect.
Whatever works for your game, of course. But I would have called foul.
Better to pretend it didnt happen at all, or to offscreen it and provide no details, than to tell me that Corpsetaker bodyjumped a conscious, alert and aware master wizard who came prepared for Kemmlerites in general and her in particular, in the middle of active combat while impaled with a magic-disrupting magic sword.
At that point Im either looking around for the Incarna responsible, or going "Thats Archmage shit."
You dont get to ignore onscreen feats and capabilities because you find them inconvenient.
1)No, nobody on the Council side had heard of him prior to this.
Grevane and Corpsetaker sure; Corpsetaker even used to be a White Council member, according to Dresden, though I dont know if he ever tracked down which one. Cowl apparently came out of the blue to the forces of order, something that Dresden's later access to White Council intel files confirms.
2) The point about a secret archmage? Is that if one exists, they'd be SECRET.
If they restrict the use of high end Rotes to times when they arent under observation and simply use low-end Rotes with increased efficiency, how would you know?
In Blood Rites, Madge Shelly was the prime mover behind the coven of porn star witches blatantly murdering their way through Genosa's entire porn studio, and Dresden literally met her and couldnt tell.
And we've deliberately tried to keep some capabilities hidden so that noone can tell.
The first time she met Molly =/= she's not been using her abilities around the supernatural community.
If you genuinely believe that ever since evading Monoc surveillance around 1988 that she's not been using the abilities that she murdered three Valkyries for?
I have a bridge in the Nigerian Delta to sell you.
Besides?
Kattrin was detected by an Exalt, and not because she was using magic, but because of who she visited and who she resembled. Magic had nothing to do with it.
1)Shagnasty was hired to find and disappear Morgan, not to kill him. Bounty work, not assassination.
Working down the known supernatural homicides in the series at this point of the timeline:
- Maggie LeFay was murdered by an entropy ritual by Lord Raith.
- The loup-garou was killed by Dresden.
- Bianca got murked by a zerg rush of angry ghosts.
- Simon Petrovich was murdered by a zerg rush of Rampire mooks.
- Ronald Reuel was murdered by Lloyd Slate with the aid of Summer Lady Aurora
- Aurora was killed by a zerg rush of iron-armed pixies.
- Grevane and Corpsetaker were shot by Ramirez and Dresden respectively.
Preferably by surprise.
2)A Life 6 mage =/= a lab mage.
Spheres do not determine your aptitudes. Someone with Life 6 could just as easily be an Akashic Brotherhood monk or an Euthanatos assassin as they could be a Progenitor lab director or a Verbena hippie or Ecstatic.
3)When it matters enough that you care, you send the very best.
Especially when that idiot kid is the daughter of a Knight of the Cross, and family friend of a Starborn wizard with a distressing history of unexpectedly fucking up the plans of your bosses.
Damn right we should.
If you dont recall, in Summer Knight it was a repeated problem that Dresden had with members of Aurora's retinue where he would cast magic at them and half of the time it would bounce. Its not an issue he's had with any other Fae before or since.
That would be true if you had a wizard cult leader.
Just because a person is a wizard does not translate to aptitudes in teaching or recruitment.
Furthermore, Sandra is not a cult leader as far as we know. She's a field agent.
Her apparent aptitudes lean her towards being an independent field agent, not a recruitment and training cult leader. Outsider HR apparently is competent enough to know not to attempt to force a square cube into a round hole. Unlike some human orgs.
WoD Mages work in a reality whose rules are largely set by mortals, and fairly malleable.
This setting has harder rules.
There are much bigger independent actors whose ability and willingness to act are not reliant on how the mass of Humanity happens to feel on a given decade. There is a Heaven here, and its a lot more organized, benevolent and interventionist than any of the spirit courtss in any of the WoD settings.
And frankly, there's explicitly archsphere effects in play here, if you were representing Dresdenverse events in Mage terms.
Dresdenverse wizards(at least, Elder Dresdenverse wizards) can and do have Horizon Realms in this setting according to the RPG, the creation of which are Spirit 7 effects.
Rashid explicitly has one past the Moon's NeverNever correlate.
Time travel is explicitly possible, and is the subject of a future book: Time 6-7 depending on whether Dresden is simply going into or affecting the past, or Time 8 if he's going to an alternate timeline. And we know Demonreach was created using time travel. If its banned, its because its possible.
What we know of the background says it was recruited, it was not compelled.
Assuming this is accurate? Recruitment is not enslavement.
There would be protocols of that sort in play.
You see the same shit with the akuma and Yama Kings.
There's always some new dude who thinks they can nibble the bait without getting caught on the hook.
And only the Red Court did it openly, with their druggie Red King at the helm.
See all the other organizations who have steered clear of them.
Even the White Court as a corporate entity doesnt deal with them; Lord Raith did. Vito Malvora did.
(In this quest) Duke Skavis did. But not the White Court as a corporate entity.
Critically, the Sin-Eater has been here since prehistoric times, and a lot less restricted than something like Iku-Turso.
The Dragon is only the latest regent its had in more than five thousand years.
Its had freedom to act. Assuming it was willing to risk a shanking.
And I am not aware of any loyalty oaths or bindings.
Or why any such thing would apply to it but not to its contracted agents.
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- Location
- Germany
Yeah, that's the issue with modeling stuff.
Dresden Files fits surprisingly well into the mechanics of WoD, but not perfectly.
So sometimes you run into situations where you can't accuratly model something and have to bend the rules a bit.
So it's either "Corpsetaker can do this one specific canonical feat she shouldn't be able to do by mechanics, but is otherwise workable as a Spirit 3-4, Mind 4 Mage" or "Corpsetaker can do this one feat that requires Mind/Spirit 6, so she should get the full abilities of an Archmage".
The former fits better into the story and was a more reasonable antagonist against BabyExalt Molly, so I stand by that solution and at the time it was greenlit by DP.
It's not that they're inconvenient, it's that you're painting the wrong context in. An archmage can blow up a volcano by essentially snapping their fingers. A master mage can do something similar but with a lengthier ritual with more requirements.
All the big strategic things we hear of McCoy seem to happen from his lab, so the most reasonable assumption is that he's not just doing it so he doesn't need to leave his comfy chair.
No fear you've described requires a more general increase in ability like this, and adding it causes problems in a lot of other places. There's a reason WoD of all gamelines traps those guys in horizon realms 99% of the time.
Nope. He was an associate of the black council and Vittorio Malvora of all people under that mask. His exact name wasn't known, but he couldn't operate without exposure to the community.
Her magic is what made her immediately identifiable when we took the story to Gard. She was explicitly lying low and after her association with Kemmler and this was one of her first big acts recently.
Potentially, but shagnasty could still do the job, and Naagoloshi are probably the premier experts at taking mages alive if it was "just" a disappearing.
Which of those do you send to trick a 17 year old with no idea how magic works into making the most common warlock creating mistake?
Sure the lab isn't the place for all mages all the time, but your prior examples are all lab work and if you were right her skill set would lean towards vampire abomination making and cult leadership.
Confining this to the person we're actually talking about for a moment; if Sandra could do this then it would be a waste of her time to have pulled that job instead of sending a smooth talker and going straight to handling bigger jobs.
Even if you hide how you work in particular or from a specific person your actions are still traceable. I don't think you could raise an archmage in a box where they don't use their powers to do anything and then just activate them on the fly as a surprise to everyone else.
Taking control of something doesn't require making it, and given that we don't see any other powers that sphere would imply in play it seems to me that this is one of those things that DF wizards can just do better than WoD ones.
You claim higher powers and harder rules, but have taken away all the ones that actually apply to the powers you're talking about and are leaving it in the wind. Apparently they selective give a shit until it's time for the archmages to screw with the plot or something.
Fucking with time is something they warn young talents off of because it's possible to break things as a scrub. That implies time magic is way easier to do way earlier in your development.
This is stupid for the same reason that the poorly written Akuma powers that let them blow up cities if you rules lawyer them the wrong way but somehow don't stop them from losing in lore are.
Edit:
Dropped word.
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Even primium the counter magic metal cannot full on negate the ability to do magic having a powerful enough ritual or backing to perform an action will allow you to escape.Even mechanically corpsetaker could be capable of those things by the number one method of getting things that are out of scale for Mages interacting with an umbrood or Spirit entity. Which we know as a Necromancer in this quest is really probably what they actually did. You don't need to look for a incarna to escape a magic nullifying sword because no matter how powerful it is unless it's instant death it's not enough to actually stop a sufficiently powerful spell from going off. Especially if that spell is prepared ahead of time.
Horizon Realms are created using Spirit 5 matter 4 and Prime 4 at no point do you need any arch spheres to make a horizon Realm. Source void engineers
Yet again you do not need Archsphere to do time travel you can bodily move backwards in time with Time 5 you do not need time 7 or 8 to go backwards in time.
Good night guys, see you in the morning as Molly faces an old friend.
- Location
- washington
So random thing about corpse taker someone asked butcher if they could steal the magic of those they take over. The answer was actually yes but the result would be something that wasn't really corpsetaker which gets more complicated if it was done to someone really high willed like Dresden the result wouldn't really be them anymore so it's be a sort of death.