On one hand, we probably flipped Black Court. On the other, 4 abyssals, and possibly more awake Neverborn. On the gripping tentacle, Odin and his valkyries are one of the best positioned factions to grab abyssals. And he's one the side of good.
Green Flame Rising (Exalted vs Dresden Files)
- Thread starter DragonParadox
- Start date
- Crossover Fantasy
- Location
- Canada
Michael: How was your day Molly?
Molly: Well, I'm not sure if it was a day, considering how lost in time and space we were, but it had its ups and downs. Found Evil Bob, met another Fallen Angel (his redemption is gonna be long), fought some weird undead Mortwights (whatever that is), encountered a weird ancient child-thing that I recruited, woke up a Neverborn, and unleashed 4 more Exaltations kinda like mine but with even more evil vibes into the world.
Molly: Well, I'm not sure if it was a day, considering how lost in time and space we were, but it had its ups and downs. Found Evil Bob, met another Fallen Angel (his redemption is gonna be long), fought some weird undead Mortwights (whatever that is), encountered a weird ancient child-thing that I recruited, woke up a Neverborn, and unleashed 4 more Exaltations kinda like mine but with even more evil vibes into the world.
- Pronouns
- She/Her
We could try pushing her up the divinity ladder some?
Something like that, yeah, but, seriously, I expect Michael to already be on the way to deal with / help a new abyssal. Possibly via emergency Santa express, or via McAnally, or by Mab extending every courtesy to sir Knight. Because preventing an abyssal from falling to evil is very much something he would be sent to do. Sanya too. And I was not kidding about someone, possibly Murphy, getting emergency recruited for the third Sword.
The minimum needed to see what happened is the important part, not the maximum possible information available.
From the book:
Now let's compare some solar castes to abyssal ones to see what changed and the conditions they're bound to.
Vs.
Are you going to argue that the difference between these two things is solely that the target dies in one and not the other? That despite the majority of the cases being at best questionable that the exaltation is more likely than not to go for gritty misunderstood heroes instead of the general description of the caste of the bulk of its options?
Allies aren't sock puppets, and exalts will be people with agendas. Trying to manage so many at once is a bad plan. Especially since it gives up initiative on the ones that are choosing host right now.
We pop up on an E1 Moonshadow's lawn. They've got social excellency and have good base social stats.
They have excellency and among others, at least these two charms:
Their dice are now within less than five of us and has similar difficulty reduction. Anything else presses that advantage further.
Molly is a C+ social character on this scale. At best. She gets by on raw dice and a few general tricks, not the good social powers.
The counterpoint to this is that we're better at murder, but Molly isn't the type of character to just kill these people. On a social level we are exceedingly unlikely to be able to crush any of them, and the Moonshadow in particular is more of a danger than a target.
There is more to this than pure dice, but each of the exalts has the potential to be a major social challenge and a few of them are specifically designed to dominate that sphere.
Not minmaxed, built for their environment.
The Moonshadow at minimum has 1 dot charms for countering and matching our social suite fairly easily. Losing socials can easily mean not realizing there should be a fight at all.
In terms of combat, killing her outright is unlikely but being a serious threat from the start isn't. Abyssals are the murder exalts, they're the best killers in ExWoD. They will very rapidly make up the difference.
My argument with you was on the following:
1) This is a very bad thing for us and the entire planet.
2) Adding more exalts is an abysmally awful idea because it divides our focus even further when we can least afford it.
It is highly unlikely Molly can pop out of the walls and social these guys into joining our circle even if they aren't pure evil. There are reasons other than being an axiomatic bastard to be in opposition to us, and there will probably be a few of them who are assholes anyway.
More generally, even eventual victory doesn't erase the damage done during the fight go away.
I'd also like to remind you about how we threatened to make Mab kill us because it would set her up for recurring exalted opposition due to biased memories. We may have to do it, but expecting we can then steal it and award exaltations as we please instead of getting into a murder loop with the murder exalted is very optimistic.
They do not need equal essence level to outdo us. Abyssal charms are universally better at what they do for the price they charge.
We have scale via the FCF and a speed advantage. That's it.
The only canon dragonblooded transcension option I remember is Gaia personally turning Scarlet Empress into an Elemental Dragon. Not sure what we can actually do.
- Pronouns
- She/Her
I wonder if Murphy would pick up an abyssal exaltation? Hmmm
I meant more the Dresden verse deity scale… but maybe it's time to go build a new elemental dragon daughter and get their help to power up Lydia? Idk
You know what? Yes. Yes I will argue that. Because you cannot ignore other parts of the text too. Yes, mad and twisted geniuses. But mad isn't evil. And twisted isn't inherently evil too. Delvers into forbidden knowledge? We are one too.
How did you arrive to this number? I don't think it checks out. Also why would etiquette be the important factor here? Molly is likely to be running either Empathy or Intimidation, and Abyssal likely to be using Subterfuge. Molly is also likely to use CCC.
And all of this forgets that for the first several days abysssals do not get access to their charms at all. And this assumes they will be hostile. Or bent on being confrontational.
I will be blunt. I have read your opinion, you have read mine. Your arguments do not sound compelling to me at all, as they come from different fundamental premises then my own, including philosophical ones, like the base nature of Humanity, base nature of power, etc. So, for the sake of my continued mental health, I will proceed to ignore your opinions on this matter, and will campaign on going my desired way. Which is, to be clear - gather exalts into an allied faction, use the momentum to gather more exalts.I sincerely apologize for this.
I consider exalts overall to be a good thing, and no exalt to be automatically evil.
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Okay you right I do do that a lot making sure I'm not putting words in people's mouths because I fucking hate that I hate that a lot. So it's easier for me to give my own take on what they said with the premise of assumably I'm not putting words in your mouth but please feel free to correct me.
On the other things you're right we can't assume hypothetical world where we didn't get this covered and all that and when I said a favor from Odin I didn't mean we did end up owing him a favor like that is what I meant by that I don't know how else to say that getting a favor from someone is someone doing you a favor and you owe them later.
On the peer level opponent thing. That is my own reading of it we've never hit anyone who we know to be in a good position to be stronger than us and I think that's just the truth. Now I could be wrong on this but I think that's acolytes whole point and I did not disagree with it.
Though I disagree completely with the seeking that kind of shit out that is not smart Behavior. I also don't agree with it was getting boring I actually rather like us being strong it tells a strong story about what we do with our power even if that story is kind of muddled and kind of fucked up because of how much information we're sitting on at the moment ( White Court Epstein things, radio capable aliens, Linear B) it's still an interesting story to read.
So to be honest I wasn't really disagreeing with you but I did want to give a little bit of air and my own thoughts to acolytes opinion.
That is a strong worry yes. Her, or Butters, fulfill the requirements, I think, and abyssal shards can outright murder perfect candidate by animating a nearby cadaver, and Butters already works in a morgue. Marcone is a risk too.
BoredMan
Dinosaurs came in many flavors. Like potato chips.
I think you misread part of his post there.. At any rate it's a good idea to read the writing on the walls.
Two Exaltations were almost released as a result of Vegas, now four were released and all at once. There may be one sitting in a Dragon's stomach that Odin wants and Harry could probably release the two on Demonreach right now.
There were always going to be more Exalts running around, probably a bunch of them too, it's only common sense at this point to use our advantages and get them on our side if that's going to be happening no matter what anyway. As many as possible. The momentum argument makes the most sense at this point.
Just take them all. Literally all of them. Maybe not at the same time though.. Four at once is kind of plot derailing as is.
I acknowledge that there is a big danger, both watsonian and doylist in getting a number of exalts all at once. We probably won't get all of them, and if we do, some of them probably will be better off sent off training, or otherwise put offscreen mostly. I am afraid of this development - all such events are scary. But I think we should tackle it, and I think we should try to get the exalts on our side. I also hope it doesn't fully warp the narrative.
Exaltations at very least in Canon have no problem being side graded and apparently don't have an issue being upgraded but there are issues with how the exaltations function works. Due to the fact that the exaltation of the Dragon blooded was well their blood they can't exactly change the nature of it without that really negatively affecting them Dragons of a Different Color (Necromancer Dragonblooded who lost the ability to use sorcery) come to mind.
So the only way to upgrade their exaltation would be to chug down a source of Elemental essence large enough and directly Channel that energy using sorcery into their blood-based exaltation. All of that without killing them. Primordial Gaia is capable of doing it as she is the very template of Elemental essence.
The only way for a dragon blooded to do it would be to eat one of the elemental dragons or eat an elemental Pole. Any of which would be the chronicle of an epic and also insane and stupid if you want to continue living after you successfully manage to upgrade your exaltation.
Luckily there is no such restriction for Lydia. As an exalt of death channeling a strong enough source of necromantic energy, hell maybe even just killing a particularly powerful Abyssal because they are naturally immortal might be enough. So getting her up the Divinity ladder like say an Afterlife with souls and it might be enough as well. Heck if she had a poison negator and a environmental damage negator drinking this ocean of necromantic energy might be enough.
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BoredMan
Dinosaurs came in many flavors. Like potato chips.
Tackling it is the only option. What are we going to do, release several WMD equivalents with Free Will on the world then ignore them? I don't see this as a want thing, going after Exalted is a necessity.
Depending on the results with these four. Fuck with Godbot till he gives up the Solar. Then grab that one and it's twin.
Then way way later. Have Harry release the ones on Demonreach, jump them with an Exalt circle, use their corpses as regents and then use their Exaltations to add to our numbers.
Might want to spend a favor from the courts to have them help us track down the new exalted.
- Location
- Right Where I Am
This specifically? No. Anyone who knew that Molly was going to go poke something ancient could tell you that something big was going to happen though.
You're the one ignoring the context on this. Maddened and twisted geniuses with cosmic power aren't exactly friendly to the rest of society.
A straight social confrontation where we're trying to get them to do one thing and they want to do something else.
Wearing a bomb collar while out in the world remains a stupid idea, so I discounted it.
If you want other social effects, here:
Now they're on even ground again.
This is discounting the perfect mental defense against intimacy changes. So if anyone moderately insane person interesting enough to earn an exaltation happens to have strong convictions about something problematic the dice don't matter.
I'd also like to point out that Molly's exaltation was supposed to take three days. It happened in an instant to avoid interruptions because the spark didn't feel like waiting. This sort of operational rule is flexible.
Your prerogative, but I'm not sure what I'm supposed to do with "I don't like your opinions, so I'm simply going to completely ignore them" in a forum game where the basic form of engagement is debate. Or the implication that my perspective on people is so toxic that talking about it is harmful to your mental health.
For the record, the idea that most people are good is not incompatible with the idea that handing vast amounts of power at random is dangerous. I like my neighbors pretty well, they're good people, but I wouldn't leave loaded firearms lying around in public to test that. This is both because some people are assholes who ruin it for everyone and because good is as complicated and often situational thing.
Not all forms of sub optimal outcome are the same either. The reasons Marcone would be a problem are not the same as those of a Denarian cultist.
I will say that I strongly disagree with the base assumption that exaltations rebuilt to be weapons for bad shit should be treated the same as any other type over and above the rest of this.
frozenchicken
Does not have a custom title.
I genuinely don't think we'll get all the new Exalts on our team. That's not a Watsonian calculation, it's a Doylistic one. A Circle is usually only 5 people, it would pump up our power level to a potentially unreasonable level, and it's not like a story is going to be all sunshine and roses. That said, it is possible for the Abyssals to go to other factions without it being a terminal situation for us. If one person has nukes, everybody is scared. If everybody has nukes but also trust, things can simmer down to a Cold War situation. If Mab, Odin or the White Council got an Abyssal Exalt allied with them....it'd make things more tricky in some ways, but it would also make things more narrativedly interesting without being disastrous.
I guess what I'm saying is that if we were comparing hypothetical situations of Abyssal Exaltations being loose in the wind versus us finding all the Abyssals but having to share our fortune with other groups that we at least have working relationships with...well, I know what I'd prefer.
I guess what I'm saying is that if we were comparing hypothetical situations of Abyssal Exaltations being loose in the wind versus us finding all the Abyssals but having to share our fortune with other groups that we at least have working relationships with...well, I know what I'd prefer.
While I usually all for such experiments, in this particular case I think drinking the Black Ocean in which Neverborn swim dreaming sounds like a bad idea.
If Lydia is actually a modified dragonblooded lorewise, we might be able to do something with the corpse of Syriothrax and/or his spirit if such is present, i.e. with a dead Elemental Dragon, i.e. an Elemental Dragon whose essence has been aligned with death by, well, dying.
The easiest starting point would be to bind Arawn's realm to her, i.e. to get her to inherit and start getting power from it.
There's also a lunar one, and the dragonblooded ones.A Lunar with a friendly fleshshaping demon is super terrifying, because of this:
The Lunar draws down, tightening her muscles,
marshaling her will, and maximizing her potential.
When she finally strikes, it is like a thunderclap, an
avalanche, a god taking the first step of the dance that
ends the world.
System: The character spends an entire turn tak-
ing no action whatsoever – not even to defend herself
– and spends 1 Essence. On her next turn, the first
action she takes doubles her physical Attributes after
accounting for any shapeshifting.
marshaling her will, and maximizing her potential.
When she finally strikes, it is like a thunderclap, an
avalanche, a god taking the first step of the dance that
ends the world.
System: The character spends an entire turn tak-
ing no action whatsoever – not even to defend herself
– and spends 1 Essence. On her next turn, the first
action she takes doubles her physical Attributes after
accounting for any shapeshifting.
Maybe, yes. I want to hear what Michael and Sanya are up to first, and half expect Uriel to wait for us at the entrance to this tomb or something.
What is the motivation of a mad scientist? Do they want to cure world hunger? Maybe they want to end death as we know it? Perhaps they are so traumatized by society that they spent the last decade developing a benevolent AI?
How is the genius twisted? Do they dissect and stitch together corpses? Perhaps they blaspheme against natural order by developing cybernetics and experimenting on themselves? Maybe they kill puppies to test cures for cancer?
At most this makes them a peer. Not someone who overpasses us.
The implication I find hard to deal with is baked in superiority / exceptionalism complex that places Molly or, rather, on the doylist level, us players, on a pedestal that is better than the rest of humanity. No, we are not. No, Molly is not. She is a good person, but she's not a saint. We aren't making her a saint. We the players are not smart, good, or committed enough to play her and develop her as a character as a saint. Thus, the notion that Molly should be out there, but others shouldn't be given power is offensive to me on the base premise. That I am unable to properly communicate or demonstrate what I see as rank hypocrisy infuriates me. Not about you, but about myself mostly.
Dangerous =/= bad. That's another strong point of disagreement between us. Because I will always, always advocate that humanity, and humans, should be advancing, should be becoming more, should be getting more power. This is what I have built my life around - on helping humanity advance. This is why I advocate for Nuclear power, for genetic research, for AI. And I will keep this core belief here too. And I feel I am justified in this, based on the textual evidence of all canons we have.
Exaltations want heroes. While you keep telling me not to ignore the overall context, you also ignore parts of it. Canon ExvsWoD abyssal (Skull Girl) is allied with canon heroes. Treating abyssals as enemies from the start is a mistake, and a classical example of self-fulfilling prophecy.
I don't expect all of them to ally with us, and don't expect any of them to join our circle. I find it most plausible that at least one Abyysal will be connected to Red Court, possibly be an indoctrinated would-be member born into this. Another one I expect to be grabbed by Odin. And, oh, yes, Mab's Winter Knight. And Arthur possibly, depending on how his own exaltation works.
What we need to do is to prevent them from being denarians, or yama kings' slaves / worshippers.
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BoredMan
Dinosaurs came in many flavors. Like potato chips.
...are you talking about the damn Dragon thing? We asked the Crown what it was and it didn't say Exaltation and some bits of that story don't add up exactly. Like it being destined to go to a non-human. I'm not going to say that's what it is when it can just be something else.
Could I get a citation about it going to nonhuman please? The vagueness of what we saw with the crown is a point in favor of it being an exaltation, since the crown cannot see itself.
BoredMan
Dinosaurs came in many flavors. Like potato chips.
It wasn't trying to see itself. There was no roll saying anything to that effect either and we always get one with such a description when that happens. Go back to see DP's explanation on that Crown question.
As far as a citation goes. I was referring to the story Lily gave us. It was intended for the Fae Lord or whatever the non-human race was.
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Thankfully roads paved with good intentions famously only go to good places.
In the Dresden Files there's a necromancer named Kumori. She took up the practice with the goal of killing death. Immortality for everyone, just like Molly's wheel. Who could argue with that?
She was so committed to this idea she was willing to kill everyone in Chicago - nearly 3 million people - to make a god which would immediately help the reds win the war but might eventually help her with her goals.
That is what a daybreak is like.
Socially a moderately well built moonshadow would have secondary effects that make them better. Mind reading and the like. Most of the overpassing would happen in the near future outside of that.
That has never been the argument, it's a straw man you trot out because it's easier to argue against than the actual topic at hand. Here's me making that point in one of our previously passes at this:
You are the one making it about deserving in the first place. About people being owed cosmic power. That isn't the argument I'm making, it has never been. It's like my posts bounce off your forehead or something.
Nobody is owed the right to play god. One person ending up there anyway doesn't change that.
My problem with your logic is that you view a person and all of humanity as the same when this is not true.
When a billionaire gets richer it doesn't advance the wealth of humanity in any sense save perhaps the most technical one. Exalts are Autobot's cosmic nepo babies.
There is fundamentally no difference worth mentioning between being a peon for the white court and one for say Solar!Marcone. Being on team human doesn't make the boot he puts on your neck any lighter.
There are ways to raise people up other than unleashing 700 god-kings who will shape a world of 7 billion souls to whatever suits them above all else.
Last time we talked about this you were wrong by the numbers about what the word hero even meant in this context and tried to argue a canon Solar who waged an ethnically motivated war of imperial conquest was a good guy because he did it for his people.
This is not a fruitful line of argument.
At this point the cat is out of the bag, so we might as well make an honest try of some sort of cooperation, but I find the way you treat potential as certainty incomprehensible.
Honestly same for you. This insistence that every interaction with everyone is going to be hostile is insane for a variety of reasons not the least of which we don't need to talk to them it doesn't matter how good their socials are. We can ask their shoes any question we want and we can use naked Wicked Souls if we need to. If we can find them that is it we win they can't hide their intent or their heart from us.
Though on the other hand if you notice the philosophical bent yog was talking about genetic research AI Humanities future at least in his eyes if I understand it is in becoming human+, Human++, so on and so forth until you reach essentially the exalted. Inherently in that view there's no difference between the exalted and humans other than the exalted just have spiritual equipment taking them to the apex of their development.
Partially probably why they describe the mad scientist someone who works on cybernetics. Because a lot fields and science are taboo or non-functional outside of exceptional cases that could generate mad scientists up to and including 'cold' nuclear fusion.
That's why he's been saying if they're bad will kill them until there's one that isn't bad because on the whole humans are neutral leaning good (Form human reference points) because we're a social species.