[X] Non-masquerade breaking assistance
-[X] Write in (No more than 10 people)
-[X] Two masters of Mana Manipulation
-[X] Two masters of the path of Fortune
-[X] A master of the path of Healing
-[X] A master of (Qiao Long Ling) Great Wheel Reflection
-[X] 4 Amythst Hand agents.
--[X] Break, the wizards are confident they can contest it, power against power
With the Mana manipulation experts they'll have an increased likelihood and help in busting down the spell. With the path of Fortune they can help with the assistant of busting spells and help our rating party get better rolls. Path of long Ling is a way to put the fear of God into the Sorcerers. Amethyst hand known agents that can work in the mortal world without blowing cover.
I'm not so sure that trying to outplay wizards at magic directly is the best idea. Not that we shouldn't use sorcerers at all, but that deploying them alone isn't using our advantages.
I mean mathematically it is i think. Because the more people that can counter spell, the more there is a chance that any particular wizards spell just fails outright. I mean our own counterspelling basically neutered that ambusg imagine if there is 10 more people doing it. There sre only about 35 evil magi and they are unlikely to be concentrated. They also roll 10 dice to counterspell i would hope.
by the way is anyone else curious what the highest dot a martial artist or sorcerer from our hell has gotten in their paths ever might be? Because we do have people over 5000 years old who might of gone past 6 dots.
After all human blood was a valuable reagent in his potions and he had more work than ever supporting the True Magi on their was to inevitable victory.
[X] Non-masquerade breaking assistance
-[X] Write in (No more than 10 people)
-[X] Two masters of Mana Manipulation
-[X] Two masters of the path of Fortune
-[X] A master of the path of Healing
-[X] A master of (Qiao Long Ling) Great Wheel Reflection
-[X] 4 Amythst Hand agents.
--[X] Break, the wizards are confident they can contest it, power against power
I'm going to complete this build then, so we have it around for later if nothing else. Making the full stat blocks for the arcana is kind of a pain. Please let me know if I overlooked something that'd work better for the point distribution.
3 dots, because going to the high end might be asking too much for what we're doing.
• Simulacrum (Artificial): Artificial simulacra (those made of inanimate materials, or androids
assembled out of advanced robotics) can soak lethal damage, but not aggravated. Androids are
generally either outwardly of perfectly human appearance, or so close to human that they can
hide any inconsistencies with heavy clothing. Most golem-style simulacra are blessed by a
shroud of Essence that makes them look and feel human. Those rare androids that do not have a
human or near-human chassis can generally project a formed-light illusion of a mundane
appearance around themselves. In either case, this false-seeming may flicker or fail when the
simulacrum is subjected to intense stress or physical disruption (moments of terror or anguish, or
when the Arcana is roughly flung about or engages in violence).
Expertise: The Arcana gains seven additional dots of Abilities, which may be used to raise
them above three dots. Taking this Feature additional times provides only five bonus dots.
Hardened Form: The Arcana's body is made of tougher stuff than others of its kind. If the
Arcana could normally only soak bashing damage, it can now also soak lethal damage. If the
Arcana could normally soak lethal damage, it can now also soak aggravated damage at difficulty
8.
Manifold Limbs: The Arcana possesses a multitude of arms and/or legs. By spending a point
of Willpower, it can take an extra action at the end of each turn.
Superior Body: The Arcana gains three additional dots of Physical Attributes, which may
increase its traits to 6. Taking this Feature a second time provides only two bonus dots, but raises
the permitted cap to 7.
Technopathic Integration: The Arcana has most likely has a machine-mind, though it might
also have some other quirk like a technological spirit having been bound into it during its
creation. Whatever the case, the difficulty of all the Arcana's Computer rolls are reduced by two.
No Mouth (2 pt. Flaw)
The Arcana lacks the necessary anatomy for easy communication. It can still understand speech,
and it could speak if it possessed the proper facilities to do so, but alas, it doesn't. It can still
communicate effectively with its master through pantomime.
Telepathy: The Arcana can project its thoughts into the minds of other nearby people to
communicate with them. It can communicate with its master across up to (Arcana rating x 100
miles) of distance. By spending a point of Willpower, it can also receive communications from
someone… or, to put it another way, it actively reads their surface thoughts for the rest of the
scene. The target can always sense this, and can shut the Arcana out by spending a point of
Willpower.
Fast: Perhaps the Arcana has inhuman legs. Perhaps it is a dozen torsos stitched together and
speeding along on a dozen sets of arms. Perhaps it is propelled by an elemental wind. Whatever
the case, its movement speed and is doubled, or tripled if this Feature is taken twice.
Insensible to Pain (5-pt. Merit)
Your character might be made of steel, or just hopped up on drugs (although you should also take the Addiction Flaw if such is the case), but whatever the cause, he doesn't hurt no matter how wounded he is. You ignore all wound penalties until your character is finally killed
Ambidextrous (1pt Merit):
You are equally skilled at using either hand. You do not suffer the normal two Trait penalty for performing actions with your off hand. In addition, you do not need to have the prerequisite number of Ability levels appropriate to a weapon in order to get the advantage of using two weapons (or a
shield) in combat.
Acute Sense (1pt Merit):
You have a particularly sharp sense (specify which one). In all tests with that sense, you are +2 Traits on challengeresolution. You may have multiple Acute Senses, but you may only take this Merit once for each sense.
Fluff:
The War Weaver is an old and highly recognizable combat frame, somewhat akin to how the pump action shotgun is on parts of earth, making its mark in a number of wars leading up to unification.
Durable, precise, and surprisingly perceptive, a war spinner is rarely without recourse regardless of the battlefield.
The classic image is of a sleek tocatiloid cast in bright brass and dull silver, a sword in one set of arms and an electro laser in the other. Typically deployed in clusters of 5, coordinating in utter silence via their encrypted telepathic network.
Though they can only wield a pair of weapons at a time, most sutra using this platform prefer to carry a pair of ranged weapons to switch between depending on the expected encounter while keeping their melee weapon in hand in all but the most extreme conditions.
Fairly murderific over all. Excellent support Terminators and not something I'd be enthusiastic about fighting in a dark alleyway.
And yes I know the stat block formatting is a little wonky. I did this on my phone so I'm just happy it roughly works.
I mean in fairness all wizard usually have their niche even if they can expand past it. even top tier wizards usually are shit tier in certain areas of magic. Also we apparently have people with 6 in their paths. I wonder what the very very best anybody has reached in our hell in a magic path.
I mean mathematically it is i think. Because the more people that can counter spell, the more there is a chance that any particular wizards spell just fails outright. I mean our own counterspelling basically neutered that ambusg imagine if there is 10 more people doing it. There sre only about 35 evil magi and they are unlikely to be concentrated. They also roll 10 dice to counterspell i would hope.
There's plenty of magic you can't counterspell on the spot, like being set on fire. They've also put prep work in here to defend themselves. I'm not convinced that curses and mana manipulation are going to carry the day.
The huge size of our hell's population doesn't mean that people with 5 dots of path magic and fistfuls of counterspelling dice at this stage of their lives are just sitting in offices waiting for the call. If they're that skilled they're probably out in the world doing stuff most of the time and need to be recalled. At the earliest point we could have warned them to be ready for this particular situation they'll have had maybe an hour at most.
Not saying they don't exist or that we couldn't get their help, but asking we're basically asking for the equivalent of ten world class surgeons in various specific disciplines to come to our palace on the spot. If the best mana manipulation guys tend to spend their time out in the wastes/jungles dealing with gnarled leylines or something they could easily fail to even hear the call until the window has closed.
I'd argue that if we had a day those guys would definitely make sense, but on this sort of notice it's harder to swallow.
Even the sorcerers we do get will need some blender support so they can focus on their jobs anyway.
So? There's a lot of wizards here and a huge advantage of the spheres is that they're better at flexible casting than linear paths.
There's plenty of magic you can't counterspell on the spot, like being set on fire. They've also put prep work in here to defend themselves. I'm not convinced that curses and mana manipulation are going to carry the day.
The huge size of our hell's population doesn't mean that people with 5 dots of path magic and fistfuls of counterspelling dice at this stage of their lives are just sitting in offices waiting for the call. If they're that skilled they're probably out in the world doing stuff most of the time and need to be recalled. At the earliest point we could have warned them to be ready for this particular situation they'll have had maybe an hour at most.
Not saying they don't exist or that we couldn't get their help, but asking we're basically asking for the equivalent of ten world class surgeons in various specific disciplines to come to our palace on the spot. If the best mana manipulation guys tend to spend their time out in the wastes/jungles dealing with gnarled leylines or something they could easily fail to even hear the call until the window has closed.
I'd argue that if we had a day those guys would definitely make sense, but on this sort of notice it's harder to swallow.
Even the sorcerers we do get will need some blender support so they can focus on their jobs anyway.
i mean we're not enemies of said many we're enemies of the few. also in fairness for availability our palace probably has people with that stuff just there.
Also when everyone is immortal the amount of people with 5 dots has to be relatively high. like we have millions upon millions upon millions of sorcerers. If even 1 in a million have mastered their craft we'd still have hundreds with 5 dots. Also those with 5 dots in this stuff aren't the best they'd be masters but the best would be above 5 dots and we're not asking for that.
There's plenty of magic you can't counterspell on the spot, like being set on fire. They've also put prep work in here to defend themselves. I'm not convinced that curses and mana manipulation are going to carry the day.
With active counter-spelling a Sorcerer/ Mage/ Thaumaturgist can literally counter spell a fireball. High levels of Mana Manipulation allows direct addition of dice to counter magic rolls.
With active counter-spelling a Sorcerer/ Mage/ Thaumaturgist can literally counter spell a fireball. High levels of Mana Manipulation allows direct addition of dice to counter magic rolls.
I thought combat effects were excluded so that you wouldn't end up with two mages awkwardly staring at each other in combat because no one can do anything.
In any case, I maintain that we probably can't get people that quickly at that skill level. In the case of the Qiao those are specifically an earth tradition that it's been noted IC we have a whole different style for. I don't think we have anyone who can do that.
[X] Plan Strong Right Hook
-[X] 5 War Weavers to act as muscle
-[X] 3 Combat sorcerers.
-[X] 2 Hand Agents
This is more subtle than 10 master sorcerers randomly displaced from their jobs with little warning, supposing we could do that in the first place. The terminators have good stealth, which isn't disguise but does mean they can keep hidden under the direction of the hand agents who know more about the environment.
It also offers a considerable amount of flexible fire power to provide cover to our Wizards and murder things that are best solved with significant amounts of violence without costing us more essence.
I'm keeping the combat sorcerers more generic for practical reasons; someone has to build all these and DP can't possibly have every permutation of magic user we might want to play with sitting in a folder somewhere. If there's something appropriate already there we can just use that. It honestly makes more sense for something with a quick turnaround like this event anyway, when we can't spend days combing the applicants looking for the tailor made person to solve a particular problem we have.
We have four very effective wizards with us already, I think our party synergizes better if we use them for that role while we handle more of the blender side of things.
We have four very effective wizards with us already, I think our party synergizes better if we use them for that role while we handle more of the blender side of things.
Yeah that makes more sense to me. We have some of the strongest casters in setting in our party right now. It makes more sense to bring in troops to cover their weak spots and give them more time to cast. The fact that wizards are terribly squishy and one fatal mistake is usually it for them could be compensated by brining in brutes. Also if we bring more bruiser types we should conserve more essence in theory.
I like the War weavers and think bringing muscle for the Wizards is a really good idea but I don't like how your nerfing what we can bring out for whatever reason. Degorium's plan doesn't ask for anything unreasonable. It's not out of the question that those he's requesting aren't relatively 'nearby' because the Five Courts are obviously aware that we call for people on short notice and they must have hundreds if not thousands of what he's asking for. It's a relatively small amount of people and it was noted that we do have people on standby at all times for this sort of thing.
Edit: Molly is the undisputed (ignore those rebels over there..) monarch of a world. What exactly constitutes as unreasonable assets to have on standby?
@Degorium Do you mind adding more muscle here preferably something like the War Weavers to cover the spell slingers? Molly can't cover everyone while also taking the initiative, especially with her essence where it's at.
Also unrelated but we really should do as Uju suggested later and have Sophia bring a rainstorm in to fuck with whatever magic the Warlocks have set up.
Tens of Thousand if not hundreds of thousands of literally immortal sorcerers which make this both their art and trade which are masters (●●●●●) not legends(●●●●●●) are somehow more rare than Terminators (press X to Doubt).
Terminators more subtle in what way? Nevermind being walking Masquerade breaches. Heavy metal Frames are loud as fuck if they move extremely slowly maybe you wouldn't hear their Hydraulics expanding or Contracting or their metal struts hitting the floor loud enough to be heard from a block away though considering they have fast I imagine they are really fast and really loud and how fast their probably massive struts hit the floor. if they are person sized or greater they weigh a fuck-ton. They have no resistance to Basic magic liquefying their limbs (Matter 2) or flash heating their Motors (Force 2). Do Nothing to help nullify the spells in the area and on top of all of that no even suggested bring 10 Sorcerers you have 2 less than I do.
To be honest that's just the ki based martial art that I wanted to have that particular martial artist the keyed off of I have no clue on what the styles of our world actually manifest as but considering that whole art is about getting spirits and other Supernaturals to fuck off and the material conditions are right for our hell to have a variation of it felt like the best one.
Do you mind adding more muscle here preferably something like the War Weavers to cover the spell slingers? Molly can't cover everyone while also talking the initiative, especially with her essence where it's at.
Barring some thing strange happening like they're being more warlocks than we've ever seen Wizards (In the Field) in one spot our amethyst hands agents taking suppressing fire and our Wizards also casting spells while we get up in the shit should be enough to literally cover everyone. Never mind there was also a master martial artist I wanted to bring along with Sophia who is also a crazy Bruiser up close.
The 'strange' thing here would be whatever the Warlocks have prepared for squishy wizards who refuse to kill Warlocks with magic. We know one of them had Hellfire, a time magic trap was also mentioned elsewhere, along with whatever shook the building. It just makes more sense to me not to rely on two (three?) tank types who can't be everywhere at once and have limited pools to draw from. Your supposed to plan for the unexpected if possible.
Remember the Artic Ambush when the enemy squad leader got behind our troops while we were stuck on the front lines and got eviscerated by all the brutes we brought right after? We don't know what to expect and a lot of the troops your bringing in are of the squishier variety (compared to what we could be bringing in) as well which gives the party more soft points to be covered.
War weavers are particularly at least as far as I can see being mostly robots vulnerable to any level of magic that fucks on material things. Which means most entropy magic most Matter magic most Force Magic. At least our sorcerers can very specifically dampen or outright delete incoming spell fire. The thing that shook the building was a Force spell.
A shout of something Latin turns into a hammer of force coming not though the door as you'd anticipated but from the ceiling. The light breaks, wires flying, hissing sputtering. It sounds like the whole floor above's coming thundering down.
It just makes more sense to me not to rely on two (three?) tank types who can't be everywhere at once and have limited pools to draw from. Your supposed to plan for the unexpected if possible.
There is also the fact that Morgan isn't going to hide behind us nor is Dresden and while Dresden moving out from behind us is not good because he's not actually a particularly good fighter up close he's not going to stay behind us or behind any bot.
They're going to pop the spell and then move into their preferred ranges of combat which for Morgan because he wields a sword is melee and he's going to be murderous simply because Wizards despite being comparatively fragile aren't actually all that fragile in the scheme of things not with force and matter spells to protect them from most forms of incoming damage.
There is also the fact that Morgan isn't going to hide behind us nor is Dresden and while Dresden moving out from behind us is not good because he's not actually a particularly good fighter up close he's not going to stay behind us or behind any bot.
They're going to pop the spell and then move into their preferred ranges of combat which for Morgan because he wields a sword is melee and he's going to be murderous simply because Wizards despite being comparatively fragile aren't actually all that fragile in the scheme of things not with force and matter spells to protect them from most forms of incoming damage
I think your ignoring the point I'm trying to make here.
McCoy one of the strongest wizards in setting was still seen running from some Rampires and outsider mooks in story and was nearly screwed by a pack of Cornerhounds in canon which the Black Council brought in.
The fact that Wizards are human is relevant here and what the Warlocks will likely be gambling on. Whatever we bring in is most likely what we will have for the majority of this not just this one altercation. Think of it like an RTS game, when you bring in more caster types you usually cover for them with beefier units of some sort to minimize causalities. During the Arctic Ambush we brought out tank types with the mages partially to cover them since we didn't know what to expect. I think that applies here.
Edit: Your basically gambling on our Hero units drawing the worst of the aggro and not being too preoccupied when we have other options.
I mean I agree with some of bronze tongues assertions but masters should not be nearly as rare as they suppose. We have possibly hundreds of millions of sorcerers in our hell maybe even over a billion the vast majority of our population has at least some low level magical abilities. There's also a population limit and constant reincarnation so I assume the majority of people are over a century old if not more. We have plenty of people millions likely several centuries old. Not to mention the rare legendary people thousands of years old some as old as 5000+. If 5 dots is even as rare as 1 in a million we are still talking hundreds if not a few thousand people with 5 dots in whatever path their good at. Not to mention the truly rare people who've broken their limits at 6 dots and beyond. There's no way the palace doesn't have at least a few of those people who broke their limits much less people who are merely masters.
I'm kinda curious what the stat and skill and path cap is for people over a thousand in our hell.
