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Originally Posted by
Cirrylius
Ah. I misspoke. It's not a mental reboot, it's a mental reinstall. A Contingent Mind 4 or 5 copy of his own mind, designed to restore "I Am" in the oneirus, to give him a glimpse of the Supernal before restoring everything else. Of course, if the Ocean affects the soul as well as the mind, the whole thing is moot, but that'd be one of the first experiments he'd perform, using a mote or two. The whole thing is supposed to be a kind of piecemeal approximation or dry-run of a Death 6 effect based on Suppress Own Life, but affecting the mind instead of the body.
I'm not stating that I don't think it'd work based on your choice of magery. I'm just saying I don't know what the final fate of people who go swimming in the ocean actually is, because it's left deliberately ambiguous. Do souls who go to the bottom of the ocean merge with the World Soul? Do they cease to exist? Do they just float, totally devoid of any thought or will right above the ocean floor? It seems like what happens there could affect whether or not you've got something to reinstall to, or whether the reinstall retains the experience.
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Misspoke again. Let me clarify. Whatever else Leviathan is, dead god, cosmic principle, Deathlord, Neverborn (Primordial? UGH), in the book it is treated solely as a Kerberos. Whatever else he does in the deeps, the only time he ever interacts with characters is if they break the Laws, and it does so in a predictable fashion. Whether its behavior is just personal preference, some kind of cosmic geas, or just complete indifference to anything outside the Laws of the Dominion, as long as you mind your p's and q's, Leviathan don't intervene. I'm sorry if you'd prefer something else, but the cold fact is that Leviathan is (or at least acts like) the Ocean's schoolmarm. The only thing I can suggest is writing an angry letter to WWP. If I had to guess, I'd say it's written like that because having it exhibit more complicated behavior in that Dominion... well, a spirit that deep in the Underworld, that powerful, might smack too much of direct, arbitrary, ham-fisted ST intervention, because a spirit that powerful will succeed at virtually whatever it does, with no chance of failure, unless the ST decides so, and if it does fail, by ST fiat, that violates verisimilitude for the spirit. No-win situation. That's entirely conjecture, of course, and I'm not really interested in discussing the why of Leviathan.
The problem is that other Kerberoi do, in fact, do things aside from enforcing the laws. Orcus makes soulsteel, Yama judges souls (and even sends emissaries to the living world to hunt people down), Clockwork and Dominus battle each ther for some esoteric reason, the inhabitants of the Junkyard compete in ghostly Battlebots tourneys to see who gets to be the Kerberos, and Enoch... is a librarian (they can't all be awesome, I guess). Leviathan isn't described as doing much, but that could possibly be attributed to the fact that there isn't much to do in the Ocean of Fragments. Aside from the Boat to Nowhere, the floating memories you have to risk your own memories to get access to, and the sweet release of annihilation, there is
nothing there. Leviathan's probably gone through all the really interesting memories by now, it has a truce with the Freighter for whatever reason, and it's obligated not to bother people trying to destroy themselves. The lack of action on Leviathan's part could be lack of interest, yes, but it could just as easily be lack of opportunity.
For that matter, there's at least some evidence that Leviathan considers annihilation a good thing in the form of Xolotl, the "guide" that sacrifices its victims to Leviathan by throwing them in a river leading to the ocean. Xolotl
could just be crazy, but if it's even slightly sane, that implies that Leviathan isn't just passively guarding its domain; it has agents actively seeking beings to destroy.
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Don't mistake my reaction for the character's. The character is a student of forbidden and horrifying lore; even after determining that the Leviathan won't do anything to polite swimmers, you couldn't pull a pin out of this Moros' a** with a tractor if he thought Leviathan were around. If I seem dismissive of Leviathan, it's only because I'm here addressing it as a potential threat for the purpose of communicating why it's (contextually) safe to go swimming with a primordial god-fish the size of a large city block. I wouldn't go out of my way to taunt the damn thing, or even draw its attention so my character could get a look at it; finding a reason to interact with Leviathan outside the bailiwick of the Laws would be bats**t. I'm not trying to smirk over the fact that I've found a way to rules-lawyer safety in the depths of the underworld; it's just something that has to be addressed if I actually want this character coming back.
And I respect that. My argumentative nature aside, you actually seem like the kind of guy I'd enjoy having as a player in one of my games. It's just that when I'm running a horror game, I like there to be some actual trepidation at the part of the players. Doesn't have to be full fledged terror (and it would be difficult to get that reaction from dice anyway), but I at least want to inspire uncertainty and nervousness. In my experience, it's led to better horror-based RP, more immersion. You may be awesome at RPing someone scared out of his wit while having the metagame knowledge their your victory is assured, but I haven't met many people like that.
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That is still staggeringly arbitrary. Just the preparations for this attempt would be harrowing in the extreme. He'd be looking at months and months of research, bargaining for favors, consulting with other Mages, summoning dozens and dozens of ghosts, building up traveling supplies, artifacts, and Mana, just to prepare for the real work Down Below. While a Master of Death is more at home in the Underworld more than anyone except a Geist, the fact remains that the vast majority of his research and prep would be taking place on a plane of existence which is inherently inimical to human life, and swarming with creatures dangerous, untrustworthy, and outright insane. It would require multiple trips, across multiple Underworld rivers, interviewing and wrangling with other Kerberoi, months of research in the Aethaenium (which would be particularly dangerous to a scholar whose Vice is Lust for unhealthy forgotten lore), and then in the Ocean itself, experimentation on his own sense of identity in the waters, interviewing and Unveiling that beachcomber guy, the sailors, and the Admiral. At the end of all that, a Mage whose will and sense of self have always been an unassailable fortress will dive into the Ocean, and over the course of months of meditative sensory deprivation will have his ego stripped to the core, and for a brief moment functionally cease to exist. So forgive me if the thought of a ST taking all this into account and saying, "... on the other hand, the Mysteries and perils of the Underworld are never-ending, so... *rolls dice* ...OM NOM NOM" makes me see red. Especially considering that all this stuff is, strictly speaking, a thematic consideration in a world where any potential Archmage can do all the research and prepwork in a much safer place and manner, and just develop a single spell to do the job.
It's that arbitrary. You'd be hard-pressed to find a katabasis in actual myth that didn't suck in some way for the protagonist, with the exception of a couple of really simple ones like "and then they went to the upper part of the Underworld, spilled enough blood to give a ghost the ability to talk to them for a few minutes, and found out that they should have taken a left turn instead of a right at that last uninhabited island." Even
Geist basically says "Yeah... you probably should have a good reason for this, because it's gonna suck."
I wouldn't just say "OM NOM NOM" on a less than exceptional success either. It would be more interesting to let you succeed, but inadvertently cause something I could spin into another storyline. Maybe you ascend to godhood, but your momentary merging with the nothingness at the bottom of the Ocean of Fragments connects you to Leviathan in a way you hadn't anticipated, and the Kerberos is able to use you as a sort of anchor to return to the living world ("All oceans are one ocean"). Now you have to search the supernatural world for lore that would possibly lead to the King of the Children of Pride passing on for good, maybe even need to hunt down the AWOL Sky Father to figure out what Leviathan really is and how it can be stopped for good. Meanwhile, a seagoing Gozer the Gozerian is reenacting some of Final Fantasy X's more outlandish cutscenes using the US Eastern Seaboard as its stand-in for Spira.
If you're still seeing red... well, I don't really care. It's a horror game, or at least it's supposed to be, and the Storyteller is under no obligation to let you triumph over all adversity. The game where s/he
is does in fact exist, and it's even made by White Wolf, but it's called either Exalted or Scion depending on the setting you use for it. Also, the mere fact that reality-warping
Batman wizards exist in what is otherwise consistently described as a bleak, low-key magic setting makes me gnash my teeth in rage. I generally make it clear that mages as described in Mage don't exist. I hate it so hard that I am homebrewing my own splat for when I need powerful-but-not-omnipotent magicians that vaguely fit the wizard archetype. Actually describing the journey to nigh-omnipotence as simple and/or safe makes my eyeballs bleed. :smallfurious: