Green Flame Rising (Exalted vs Dresden Files)

[BronzeTongue]

If we want multi attack the thousand swords shih power is better than the spell.

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It's significantly more expensive, takes training time to get to, and isn't available to us yet. That said, there are synergies for all of these available. 10 exp in exchange for doubling our damage output and removing scaling dice penalties for a scene is a pretty good deal, and adding other charms/powers in the same category just means we have one more attack to throw around per turn that doesn't cost anything more to use.

That's a significant savings in overall essence and in per turn bottleneck. Which is of substantial tactical advantage since we can get the attacks and use the full limit per turn on additional effects.

 

[Artemis1992]

If we want multi attack the thousand swords shih power is better than the spell.

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We also need to buy and entire tree of mostly useless abilities.

Quiao of the Shih:
Thousand Fists: Increase damage of a brawl-attack. Useless.

Spear Hand: Deal Aggravated damage with Brawl Attacks for the scene. Useless.

Burning Ghosts: Hit Ghosts and unmaterialized spirits for a scene. Not bad in itself, but we have Lydia, or the Akuma's sword to do that anyway.

Steel Body: 2 Dice extra soak and all attacks are aggravated. First part is nice, but pretty limited, for the price of 2 Essence. The second half doesn't matter for Molly.

Thousand Swords: Extra attacks each round, equal to successes on Strenght+Occult, lasts the entire scene. Costs 4 Essence and leaves use with attributes at 1 after the scene until a long rest.
That one is admittedly great, but not worth the 4 useless abilties we'd have to train before. It also leaves us pretty vulnerable to multiple fights in a row and is very expensive in terms of Essence.

If anything, I'd say it would make more sense for Lydia to learn that Art, since she profits from the Brawl-focus much more than Molly.

 

[BronzeTongue]

We also need to buy and entire tree of mostly useless abilities.

Quiao of the Shih:
Thousand Fists: Increase damage of a brawl-attack. Useless.

Spear Hand: Deal Aggravated damage with Brawl Attacks for the scene. Useless.

Burning Ghosts: Hit Ghosts and unmaterialized spirits for a scene. Not bad in itself, but we have Lydia, or the Akuma's sword to do that anyway.

Steel Body: 2 Dice extra soak and all attacks are aggravated. First part is nice, but pretty limited, for the price of 2 Essence. The second half doesn't matter for Molly.

Thousand Swords: Extra attacks each round, equal to successes on Strenght+Occult, lasts the entire scene. Costs 4 Essence and leaves use with attributes at 1 after the scene until a long rest.
That one is admittedly great, but not worth the 4 useless abilties we'd have to train before. It also leaves us pretty vulnerable to multiple fights in a row and is very expensive in terms of Essence.

If anything, I'd say it would make more sense for Lydia to learn that Art, since she profits from the Brawl-focus much more than Molly.

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The brawl stuff is true, but ExWoD explicitly grants exalts immunity to physical side effects of Qiao and DP confirmed a while back that those stat penalties count.

Anything like that stat reduction can just be ignored for our purposes.

 

[fictionfan]

Don't know if extra attacks is really better than just doing a big AOE*. Of course I am against getting personal combat charms in general. Getting allies is far more interesting.

*Death of Obsidian butterflies huge area and even more huge damage.

 

[DragonParadox]

Sure, I think we are all familiar enough with the system that we can do custom chrms without breaking anything.

 

[Yog]

From its passage scourging the Earth, to its association with the historical/mythological lands on the British Isles where Balor One-Eye was supposed to have had a presence, to the previous timing, to it being explicitly a weapon for a Fae lord.
We literally have Balor's Eye called by one of its cognomens in the prophecy.

Its not an Exaltation.
The themes in particular do not fit for it to be a Lunar Exaltation.

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That's your opinion, not "current speculation". An opinion you are ignoring the actual text in favor of a comment about the text to reach. Here's the text:

A great tumult there was over the land and a storm out of season light passing from west to east and the beasts of the fields were disturbed and in the lands of the Epidii and they spoke as though with tongue of man and once the wit had passed from them they went mad and bit out their own tongues in sorrow

Weep, for the world that is no more

One moon-turn ere the turn of the wheel of seasons there came into the sky a bright wanderer with a tail of fire and a bulging mad eye, lo and where it looked the fields of men turned fallow and where it wept there was hail and famine and where is fell calamity. The sea rose up to swallow the fallen seed and the sea was smote for its presumption for it was a seed not for fish to devour.

Weep, weep for the chair that lies empty

The earth groaned and cracked, it quickened as life in its mother's womb and yet the dream was stillborn, smothered in its crib by the one that should have nurtured it, warded off by false counsel. So does the father devour the sun and so is the passing of ages made delayed. Look ye deathless Gentry upon broken ramparts of the Empire of Wolves, like rotted teeth in gums of green and wonder what might have bee born of its death if folly was not called wisdom if the hungering wyrm had not been called blind and grasping

Weep, weep, weep for the Prince that is Unborn

The song, the lament, goes on to describe what you now recognize as a piece of... comet, a piece of cosmic ice and dust falling into the stormy waters of the sea off the coast of an 'island of flames by heaving ice bound'. Alas the text does not get much more coherent from then on:

...and so Prince Trucc battled the Wyrm of the sea for the whole of the moon-that-is-no-moon, yet he was overcome when he felt the one for which the treasure was meant fall to the whispers of ambition, hope-to-rule, and be undone. So the Prince took on the guise of a butterfly lost among the spray of white and he flew south and east to the shores of a more guarded sea where dragons do not swim and there I found him true as I now stand before you.

Sayeth he with ringing voice from the belly of the beast: "When your blood of fire is cooled and your bones dead stone that which you have hidden shall be torn from you. A Fickle Prince and a Good Steward, beware, beware the children of the moon."

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Here's the comment Archive makes:

"OK so I got these verses from an old poet that passed though here and..." you start your account. The more you speak the more attentive she grows, her expression darkening all the while from Lilly's account to verse, to your own speculation. Then her lips start to move, so minutely that no mortal eye could have discerned it, fractions of fractions of words unspoken: "Ware He of the Long Arm who across the Heavens threw a dart from west to east against the passing of the sun. Ware the bulging eye eye that bleeds. Ware the time of Sumner's dimming, Winter's glory." She offers a loud 'Hmm' for punctuation and again those barely-formed expressions. "Six years between, the number imperfect. "

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You are ignoring the text the poet made in favor of Ivy's comment. In the main text we have "a bright wanderer with a tail of fire and a bulging mad eye", which clearly refers to the comet. And the eye "wept", and " where it wept there was hail ". Wept and bled are quite close and what one poetic text describes as "weeping that brings calamity", the other can describe as "bleeding".

And we know that the content of the comet was meant for someone. That someone is called "The Prince that is Unborn". We know that this prince is someone for whom "the treasure was meant" and that they fell "to the whispers of ambition, hope-to-rule" and were undone. And that this undoing prevented the passage of ages. Exaltations have been clearly associated with the turning of the wheel and the passage of ages. The eye of Balor isn't, and its destined user hasn't been undone, as I understand it.

So, no, I disagree. It's clearly an exaltation.

 

[Yzarc]

[X] Fey trainers in one of the sorcerous arts for you or a person of your choosing up to Mastery level

 

[Artemis1992]

Sure, I think we are all familiar enough with the system that we can do custom chrms without breaking anything.

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Then I'd ask if this homebrew could be learned now?

Totally out of the left field, but here's some homebrew that's been spooking around in my brain for a while:

Reactor-Heart Transplant (••••) (Lanka)
The Infernal kindles the inner flame of mortals to burn with a fraction of her own brightness. Mortals may wither under this gift, but those strong enough to deserve it will survive.
System: The Infernal must spend a mote of Essence each day and roll Perception+Occult to implant it into a mortal or near- mortal (Sorcerers, Formori or Shih are options, Mages, Vampires or other fully supernatural creatures not). The target must make a Willpower roll (DC10 - Number of the Infernal's successes) to accept the Essence. A failure causes a level of unsoakable lethal damage, a botch interrupts the procedure permanently, making it clear that the mortal is not compatible with Infernal Essence.
After the Mortal has gained 15 total successes in his daily Willpower rolls he has successfully adapted the Infernal spark and burns with his own Essence, becoming an Enlightened Mortal. Whenever the Enlightened Mortal uses his Essence he shows minor signs of its Infernal origin, like a small flicker of hellfire in his eyes.
Interrupting this process for a day causes it to fail, though it can be retried later. During the procedure the mortal is feverish, in pain and barely able to rest, he has +2 Difficulty on all actions he takes outside of the daily WP-roll, plus one more if it takes more than a week.


Enlightened Mortal
This mortal has unlocked Essence of his own, most likely through the direct aid of an Exalted, though it is rumored that the secrets of Essence can be tought in mundane training and meditation as well, a process that would likely take years even for the most talented.
The mortal has a pool of Essence as shown in the table below and regains (Essence Rating) Motes each day at sunrise.
The Mortal may now learn Supernatural Martial Arts, Sorcerer Paths or Ancient Sorcery, though learning the last without an Exalted teacher requires twice the usual amount of XP as mortals are not well equiped to comprehend Ancient Sorcery, even if they have a book or another mortal sorcerer to learn it from.
Essence may be used in the following ways:

• Spend a mote of Essence on an automatic success, similar to temporary Willpower (can't use this on the same roll as WP)
• Fuel supernatural powers in place of Mana, Rage or Chi (For Sorcerers, Formori or Shih respectivly)
• While wounded you may spend one Essence per day to ensure a clean and scarless healing of wounds, even absent of medical help. This does not speed up the recovery, only ensures its success
• While sick you may spend one Essence per day to lower the difficulty of future rolls to resist the disease by 1, ensuring eventual recovery for any disease
• For the purpose of age-related penalties and the eventual death, add a decade to the lifetime per Essence-Rating

Essence Rating	Essence Pool	Essence/Round
1	3	1
2	5	1
3	6	2

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[Yog]

Splendor reagents are also potentially an option. A small number of low tier not murder ones, or single stronger one from someone we're pretty sure deserves it.

The red court is still full of assholes for example, and it'd be beneficial to the council if Maeve literally took the head of a duke/major count.

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Yeah, ok
[X] Write-in: reagent(s) for Splendor crafting

My reasoning is this: AP hell is real. We can't afford to get paid in things we have to spend AP to use. We are in debt with Archive and others in regards to splendor crafting. We need to either spend AP to get resources for said crafting, or acquire them in other ways somehow. So, get those from Maeve.

 

[DragonParadox]

Then I'd ask if this homebrew could be learned now?

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That could be done, but not to everyone. You would have to find Starborn for that, not necessarily wizards who are Starborn, but people under that fate.

 

[Artemis1992]

That could be done, but not to everyone. You would have to find Starborn for that, not necessarily wizards who are Starborn, but people under that fate.

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Starborn have the potential for awakened Essence?

Good to know I guess.

Makes the Charm relatively useless though, not like we could find enough Starborn to justify buying a 4-Dot Charm that does less for a mortal than the Formor-Charms do.

 

[DragonParadox]

Starborn have the potential for awakened Essence?

Good to know I guess.

Makes the Charm relatively useless though, not like we could find enough Starborn to justify buying a 4-Dot Charm that does less for a mortal than the Formor-Charms do.

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It is not very strong as a base but it is worth recalling that Essence is very high energy as a form of power. The ability to invest even one mote per day makes for terrifyingly powerful assistants for Ancient Sorcery.

 

[Cavalar]

On the topic of EXP spending: I want to remind people that Molly was really close to death in this arc, so maybe we should think about defense?

[X] Write-in: reagent(s) for Splendor crafting

 

[Tsotate]

[X] Write-in: reagent(s) for Splendor crafting

 

[Mithrill]

[X] Write-in: reagent(s) for Splendor crafting

 

[Odysseus2099]

On the topic of EXP spending: I want to remind people that Molly was really close to death in this arc, so maybe we should think about defense?

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The fact that we took basically no damage during the Dragon fight tells me we've got plenty of defense, we just chose not to use it then. Tactical error. Could use better healing to recover from that.

[X] Write-in: reagent(s) for Splendor crafting

 

[Azais]

On the topic of EXP spending: I want to remind people that Molly was really close to death in this arc, so maybe we should think about defense?

[X] Write-in: reagent(s) for Splendor crafting

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I agree with Odysseus, in which part of this arc did we come close to death? We were more injured against the robot Ra, but even so it was because we didn't defend ourselves and it attack was forming with energy aimed specifically against dark creatures. Even so, we could easily break it if we wanted.

What we need is the clone charm.

 

[Exmorri]

[X] Write-in: reagent(s) for Splendor crafting

 

[BronzeTongue]

The fact that we took basically no damage during the Dragon fight tells me we've got plenty of defense, we just chose not to use it then. Tactical error. Could use better healing to recover from that.

[X] Write-in: reagent(s) for Splendor crafting

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I agree with Odysseus, in which part of this arc did we come close to death? We were more injured against the robot Ra, but even so it was because we didn't defend ourselves and it attack was forming with energy aimed specifically against dark creatures. Even so, we could easily break it if we wanted.

What we need is the clone charm.

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I think they meant the Agg damage yeah, and to be fair our recovery time does hurt. More defense probably isn't the answer, but something to speed out Agg recovery might be.

As to the clone charm; remember they get passives charm effects only, we can't return them to their pokeball unless we're nearby, and nemesis hates Molly on a very personal level.

About five minutes after he realizes there's mortal versions of her running around he's going to try to kidnap them.

 

[Yog]

As to the clone charm; remember they get passives charm effects only, we can't return them to their pokeball unless we're nearby, and nemesis hates Molly on a very personal level.

About five minutes after he realizes there's mortal versions of her running around he's going to try to kidnap them.

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Just placing them within Molly's Sanctuary makes us safe, and lets us passively study stuff without expending AP. They start perfectly mundane, but they can learn stuff, like martial arts. They would be benefitting from CCC and BSM, so they should be quick studies.

 

[BronzeTongue]

Just placing them within Molly's Sanctuary makes us safe, and lets us passively study stuff without expending AP. They start perfectly mundane, but they can learn stuff, like martial arts. They would be benefitting from CCC and BSM, so they should be quick studies.

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Not sure if they get that sort of boost, thought it was more things like IPM's intimacy defense. Keeping them in sanctuary is good, but remember the no supernatural cross compatibility rule.

They learn the baseline mortal way to do things, not the exalted one, so skills we use differently are developed differently.

Politics, technology, science, and stuff like that should be fine but they can't learn the Qiao for us. Almost every ruling we've gotten has killed the things you guys want them for in the first place.

Incidentally, depending on how that homebrew remote vision charm works with this there might be more we can do here. If they're Molly and that homebrew is allowed to use them as targets even if they're out of range, perhaps limited to their immediate surroundings, then in exchange for dangling a weak point somewhere we could have a remote firing platform for our charms. Worst comes to worst we could fry the clone, but only after trying everything else if we don't want to earn a getting Malfeas'd.

This requires that charm to be approved and do a lot of work though. If it isn't allowed to tie together Molly's charm effects in a useful way then they're back to being remote researchers.

It certainly feels like how an infernal should go about cheating the limits on their charms at least, and with how solars are at everything it's barely even a blip on the radar.

 

[Azais]

Not sure if they get that sort of boost, thought it was more things like IPM's intimacy defense. Keeping them in sanctuary is good, but remember the no supernatural cross compatibility rule.

They learn the baseline mortal way to do things, not the exalted one, so skills we use differently are developed differently.

Politics, technology, science, and stuff like that should be fine but they can't learn the Qiao for us. Almost every ruling we've gotten has killed the things you guys want them for in the first place.

Incidentally, depending on how that homebrew remote vision charm works with this there might be more we can do here. If they're Molly and that homebrew is allowed to use them as targets even if they're out of range, perhaps limited to their immediate surroundings, then in exchange for dangling a weak point somewhere we could have a remote firing platform for our charms. Worst comes to worst we could fry the clone, but only after trying everything else if we don't want to earn a getting Malfeas'd.

This requires that charm to be approved and do a lot of work though. If it isn't allowed to tie together Molly's charm effects in a useful way then they're back to being remote researchers.

It certainly feels like how an infernal should go about cheating the limits on their charms at least, and with how solars are at everything it's barely even a blip on the radar.

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I don't want the clones for their supernatural abilities (and even then we can use darkness unleashed on our clones without any problems if need) but rather to do things like leave one inside our soul to start to really rule and ensure we have an extra life, go to school (now) or university in Boston (later) for classes and clearing that AP, going to Order of the Cauldron meetings, etc.

Things like that, that need Molly, but not necessarily just Exalted!Molly.

 

[BoredMan]

going to Order of the Cauldron meetings

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If they can be jacked by Nemesis doesn't seem like it's worth it if they are going to be deployed on Earth without Exalted stats.

 

[BoredMan]

Also I'm surprised people are voting for regents. We can get them so many other ways there's no point in wasting the favor on that.

 

[Yog]

Not sure if they get that sort of boost, thought it was more things like IPM's intimacy defense. Keeping them in sanctuary is good, but remember the no supernatural cross compatibility rule.

They learn the baseline mortal way to do things, not the exalted one, so skills we use differently are developed differently.

Politics, technology, science, and stuff like that should be fine but they can't learn the Qiao for us. Almost every ruling we've gotten has killed the things you guys want them for in the first place.

Incidentally, depending on how that homebrew remote vision charm works with this there might be more we can do here. If they're Molly and that homebrew is allowed to use them as targets even if they're out of range, perhaps limited to their immediate surroundings, then in exchange for dangling a weak point somewhere we could have a remote firing platform for our charms. Worst comes to worst we could fry the clone, but only after trying everything else if we don't want to earn a getting Malfeas'd.

This requires that charm to be approved and do a lot of work though. If it isn't allowed to tie together Molly's charm effects in a useful way then they're back to being remote researchers.

It certainly feels like how an infernal should go about cheating the limits on their charms at least, and with how solars are at everything it's barely even a blip on the radar.

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Even if they can't train magical martial arts for us (and that's arguable, they are still our subsouls), I think learning politics and finances and stuff like that at -4 DC discounts is good enough.