General Exalted Discussion XII: One More and Get a Free Deathlord

[Turalisj]

Opening the Gateway of Truth

[Lix Lorn]

I THINK the phrase was used in the series too, but yes. xD
(And tbh, Data is a terrible example since he's becoming less robotic, but I like the line. xD)

[golentan]

Escaping the Circuit Rampancy (cookie for reference)

[Amechra]

Marathon, mayhaps?

And Durandal is telling me that he'll take the cookie; should I be worried?

[Sith_Happens]

Opening the Gateway of Truth

Transcendent God-Devouring Technique

[golentan]

Marathon, mayhaps?

And Durandal is telling me that he'll take the cookie; should I be worried?

Have the cookie. You and Durandal can work it out between you who gets the larger piece. If you die during negotiations, I will send your piece to your next of kin of course.

[omegalith]

I wonder how many times you'd need to kill Cecelyne's Fetich before you got The Endless Party.

Just, an infinitely large nightclub full of demons in various rapidly outdated faddish outfits, frequently spaced bars selling expensive, ill-advised cocktails and sourceless, rapidly strobing lights everywhere. You have to spend five days dancing to utterly terrible yet incredibly catchy pop, hip hop and techno music before you can enter or leave Malfeas.

Crank it up, don't stop!
You can give it all you got!
Let's rock! don't stop!
You can give it all you got!
At the top! Top! Top!
You can give it all you got!
Whoa-oh! Whoa-oh! Whoa-oh-oh-oh-oah!

Adorjan has never hated anyone more.

[Amechra]

1. Develop new Cecelyne charms towards that end (I'm sure we can think of some way... maybe through the path of party music?)

2. Kill Fetich.

3. Be lucky.

4. ???

5. Profit!

Hell, you could probably do it through heretical charms, mixing up Malfeas and Cecelyne.

[The_Snark]

Adorjan has never hated anyone more.

And Ligier has never been more embarrassed in his life.

The one you really feel sorry for is Malfeas, though. Biggest party in the world right next door, and he can't come.

[Amechra]

Damn it, if only I knew how to write balanced charms... I would design a charm that let's Malfeas be in any party that he wants to.

Alternatively, let's you shove your will into a 1st Circle demon, thus letting you walk around with seriously curtailed power. Thus letting Malfeas go to the party. He still can't leave, but he can at least go.

[Yuki Akuma]

Alternatively, let's you shove your will into a 1st Circle demon, thus letting you walk around with seriously curtailed power. Thus letting Malfeas go to the party. He still can't leave, but he can at least go.

He can already do that.

[Amechra]

Excellent! Then he can make it to the party.

[Yuki Akuma]

I think he can only do it for, like, one day a year, though.

[Sith_Happens]

Out of curiosity, is there a Charm that would reasonably allow you to end someone's Limit Break prematurely by punching them really hard in the face? "LET'S SEE YOU GRIT THOSE TEETH!"

[Rikandur Azebol]

Yup, any charms that let you incapacitate a person.

[Doran]

Wouldn't the limit break just be on 'pause' while they were unconscious?

Also can you tell if you yourself are under limit break?

[Kobold-Bard]

Wouldn't the limit break just be on 'pause' while they were unconscious?

Also can you tell if you yourself are under limit break?

Would it pause? It lasts for a set amount of time, so I'd imagine if you're subdued it still elapses, but I might be wrong.

Could UMI force someone experiencing Limit Break to sit still/stop sobbing in the foetal position.

[TheCountAlucard]

Until one picks up Stubborn Boar Defense.

[Exthalion]

I suppose with something like berserk anger you could just remove their limbs, replace them with clockwork prosthetic ones, awaken the least god, give said least god a positive intimacy to the solar, and have to cut the power everything Truth Shines Through pings.

(Or do the same with some internal knockout agent artifact)

[Ifni]

... hey. My Solar with intelligent armor that has a positive Intimacy to her needs to learn Truth Shines Through. Then he can lock the joints of her plate armor whenever it pings! Thanks, Exthalion!

(Alternatively, I could trust the ghost in the armor to decide when her behavior is crossing a line, but I think he's also high-Compassion high-Valor - for example, when she went into Red Rage of Compassion and tried to punch a circle-mate who she thought was causing suffering, and then tore down a wall that was a symbol of slavery and oppression with her bare hands (which was kind of a happy coincidence, she was in "smash the furniture" mode and the wall was in her way), the ghost helped enthusiastically on both fronts. The wall-tearing-down actually got us a lot of credit with the local population; it was a weirdly positive Limit Break.)

[Exthalion]

... hey. My Solar with intelligent armor that has a positive Intimacy to her needs to learn Truth Shines Through. Then he can lock the joints of her plate armor whenever it pings! Thanks, Exthalion!

(Alternatively, I could trust the ghost in the armor to decide when her behavior is crossing a line, but I think he's also high-Compassion high-Valor - for example, when she went into Red Rage of Compassion and tried to punch a circle-mate who she thought was causing suffering, and then tore down a wall that was a symbol of slavery and oppression with her bare hands (which was kind of a happy coincidence, she was in "smash the furniture" mode and the wall was in her way), the ghost helped enthusiastically on both fronts. The wall-tearing-down actually got us a lot of credit with the local population; it was a weirdly positive Limit Break.)

You're welcome. The best part is that other UMI based mind screw tactics also stop working to some degree. Can be dangerous depending on the spirit, but nothing is perfect. You could try nano scale least gods in the blood, but that never quite got perfected.

[Dragnar]

And then someone uses UMI on your armor. Your armor, that cannot learn any sort of mental defenses. And that you have explicitly set up to be able to immobilize you. Have fun!

...Also Truth Shines Through is an awful charm. >.> (Or at least, the bit that interacts with Limit Break is. No one knows it exists! There cannot POSSIBLY be a charm that tells people you're being hit by it, because you aren't even allowed to know it's unnatural!)

[aetherialDawn]

...Also Truth Shines Through is an awful charm. >.> (Or at least, the bit that interacts with Limit Break is. No one knows it exists! There cannot POSSIBLY be a charm that tells people you're being hit by it, because you aren't even allowed to know it's unnatural!)

Er... It can interact with Limit Break.
However subtle it is - and a small handful of people DO know it exists - it is still a false imposition upon the Exaltation.
Solars have big themes against being imposed upon, and the "I am the ideal of myself" tendencies make it even more difficult.

Why the hell would the curses of the Neverborn be somehow MORE inviolate than the invulnerability of the Exaltations themselves? The fact that ONLY Solars get a charm to reveal this, and that it's not a supremely-common charm, is probably the best the Neverborn could have hoped for.

(After all, those curses might have been taught to them by the Ebon Dragon, though that might just be the Neverborn being insane. If they WERE taught by Ebby, the Neverborn got off lucky.)

[Dragnar]

On the one hand, I won't argue that revealing the curse in that way is unthematic for solars. On the other, the setting DEPENDS on no one being able to find out it exists. And the charm takes it from 'solars are stupidly powerful, and sometimes it makes them go a little crazy' to 'every single solar who knows this charm is randomly taken over by an outside force we have not identified'.

...At which point you're claiming every Twilight in the first age was unable to identify the curse, even KNOWING that it is there. I've got a harder time accepting that, than accepting that solars can't identify when they are being driven to excesses of their own virtues. (Their own virtues. The curse doesn't violate their ideals, it just warps them.)

[Andreaz]

Er... It can interact with Limit Break.
However subtle it is - and a small handful of people DO know it exists - it is still a false imposition upon the Exaltation.
Solars have big themes against being imposed upon, and the "I am the ideal of myself" tendencies make it even more difficult.

Why the hell would the curses of the Neverborn be somehow MORE inviolate than the invulnerability of the Exaltations themselves? The fact that ONLY Solars get a charm to reveal this, and that it's not a supremely-common charm, is probably the best the Neverborn could have hoped for.

(After all, those curses might have been taught to them by the Ebon Dragon, though that might just be the Neverborn being insane. If they WERE taught by Ebby, the Neverborn got off lucky.)

I'm quite fine with how it interacts with limit break too, because it doesn't hint at anything the Host didn't already know during the couple thousand years of the first age.
1) Only people who are really tied to you notice the Limit-specific signal.
2) They can't tell the limit-specific signal apart from any other.
3) The signal does not hint at what the influence's origin is.
4) It doesn't help when you get the odd solar whose behavior before limit break is pretty much the same during limit break.
And even without it, the entire host could see that every now and then a solar or lunar would go nuts (or were completely bonkers full time), to the point you had people researching into it at the time, and it didn't work.

On the other, the setting DEPENDS on no one being able to find out it exists.

That it does, but not that much. The usurpation would happen without it.

And the charm takes it from 'solars are stupidly powerful, and sometimes it makes them go a little crazy' to 'every single solar who knows this charm is randomly taken over by an outside force we have not identified'.

Not quite. As said not everyone will see it, but it will indeed bring some more prodding. How much, however, is not necessarily a lot.

...At which point you're claiming every Twilight in the first age was unable to identify the curse, even KNOWING that it is there.

Nope! The Host wasn't unified in that way. People were busy with their own affairs to care, and the own sufferers of limit breaks often dismissed it as spur-of-the-moment decisions, as they have always done before.

I've got a harder time accepting that, than accepting that solars can't identify when they are being driven to excesses of their own virtues. (Their own virtues. The curse doesn't violate their ideals, it just warps them.)

The curse is insidious like that.

[Rockphed]

(After all, those curses might have been taught to them by the Ebon Dragon, though that might just be the Neverborn being insane. If they WERE taught by Ebby, the Neverborn got off lucky.)

Obviously the Neverborn's curse is the one fetter that actually matters. Until they can forgive the exalted, they will never know peace. And once they destroy creation, they will circle oblivion forever with the exalted shards growing ever angrier and never knowing peace.

[Amechra]

Maybe the Great Curse actively resists being known about?

And, since it has infected an Exaltation (or, rather, most of them), it draws on the sheer awesome of said Exaltation to resist any attempts to be discovered.

[omegalith]

So, why do Yozis have such strong concepts of gender identity when they're effectively an entire pantheon or deities, a concept and one or more composite bodies generated from the sum of their lesser parts, many of which are entire planes of existence, all at the same time?

I don't think I've heard of a Primordial that doesn't identify as male or female, which strikes me as rather odd. Particularly when it's pretty arbitrary: What masculine characteristics did Adrian lose track of, and what feminine characteristics did Adorjan gain?

Or did they just have some group of bored first age Twilight researchers going around arbitrarily assigning them?

"Hey, Resplendent Crimson Lotus, would you say this Infinite Desert is a boy or a girl?"

"Girl, totally."

"And the forest of upside-down mirror trees?"

"That's a dude."

[Kobold-Bard]

So, why do Yozis have such strong concepts of gender identity when they're effectively an entire pantheon or deities, a concept and one or more composite bodies generated from the sum of their lesser parts, many of which are entire planes of existence, all at the same time?

I don't think I've heard of a Primordial that doesn't identify as male or female, which strikes me as rather odd. Particularly when it's pretty arbitrary: What masculine characteristics did Adrian lose track of, and what feminine characteristics did Adorjan gain?

Or did they just have some group of bored first age Twilight researchers going around arbitrarily assigning them?

"Hey, Resplendent Crimson Lotus, would you say this Infinite Desert is a boy or a girl?"

"Girl, totally."

"And the forest of upside-down mirror trees?"

"That's a dude."

Why is it Mother Nature and Father Time. Why do people assign genders to their cars, etc.

Humans are just weird like that. We personify things as a force of habit.

[Maugan Ra]

Because their fetich souls have gender identities. And the characteristics of the fetich influence the characteristic of the overall Yozi far more strongly than those of any other soul - hence why bad things happen when someone kills said fetich.

Adrian's fetich soul was evidently male. That one exalted who I cannot remember killed it, and the trauma damaged the other souls even as another was selected as the fetich. Then the Yozi was Adorjan, and she promptly fell in love with the guy who killed her original fetich, because she was now kinda insane like that.