SolarCraft/IanPrice

Phantom Craftsman Assembly</b>
<b>Cost: 10m, 1wp
Minimum traits: Craft 5, Lore 2, Essence 4
Type: Extra Action
Keywords: Combo-OK, Obvious
Duration: Instant
Prerequisites: Craftsman Needs No Tools, Crack-Mending Technique

This charm allows one Solar craftsman to become a small squad of himself, creating phantoms of Essence to assist in a crafting project. This charm supplements a dramatic crafting action, reducing the time required immensely. Alternatively, the phantoms may work on multiple different projects, allowing the same period of crafting to produce multiple wonders. Either way, (Essence) Duplicates are created. As with the usual Extra Action combo rules, all the duplicates must use the same charms for the duration of the dramatic crafting action. Also, this charm effectively creates a "magical flurry" with the dramatic action, so the longest action in the bunch determines the length of this charm, and no phantom can change its task or make more than one roll during this time.

Thronging Phantom Workforce</b>
<b>Cost: None
Minimum traits: Craft 5, Lore 4, Essence 5
Type: Permanent
Keywords: None
Duration: Permanent
Prerequisites: Phantom Craftsman Assembly

This charm permanently enhances Phantom Craftsman Assembly. The number of phantoms created is now (Essense x 5).

Excellent Phantom Workforce</b>
<b>Cost: None
Minimum traits: Craft 5, Lore 3, Essence 5
Type: Permanent
Keywords: None
Duration: Permanent
Prerequisites: Phantom Craftsman Assembly

This charm permanently enhances Phantom Craftsman Assembly. It now no longer counts as a charm use, and thus need not be placed in a Combo to use other Craft charms along with it. This means different phantoms may use different charms, though only one charm or combo each, and all costs are paid from the Essence and Willpower of the original.

Harmonious Phantom Workforce</b>
<b>Cost: None
Minimum traits: Craft 5, Lore 5, Essence 5
Type: Permanent
Keywords: None
Duration: Permanent
Prerequisites: Phantom Craftsman Assembly

This charm permanently enhances Phantom Craftsman Assembly. Any Craft charm paid for by the original once will enhance all phantoms by an equal amount without extra expenditure of Essence or Willpower. This also explicitly allows Wyld-Shaping Technique to enhance all phantoms with just one expense.

Comments

A very innovative way to apply Extra Actions to Crafting. I just may have have to steal this for my Twilight!
--DarkWolff

I appreciate the compliment! If you want a dramatic way to learn these charms, I recommend what I'm going to be doing in an upcoming game: have your Twilight seek out the hungry ghost of his former incarnation to re-learn these potent techniques, requiring you to bargain for favors with your old soul. - IanPrice

Many things.

• ) One: Your method of learning these charms rules.
• ) 2: From the way I read it, the first charm in the tree explicitly notes that "...all the duplicates must use the same charms for the duration of the dramatic crafting action.", and is of type Extra-Action. Thus, the last charm in the tree enhances it so that all actions in the flurry receive the benefit of charms, which must only be paid for once. This is a huge savings when we're talking a magical flurry of between 4 and 20 actions.
• ) 2#0011#: By the time you pick up the second charm, there's really no way you can afford to activate even a single charm 25 times. I mean, maybe you can activate a 2-3 mote charm, but that's about it - certainly no CNNT, for example. ... Ah, never mind.

-- GreenLantern

You seem to have perfectly grasped what I was indending with these charms... talk more? - IanPrice

Alrighty. The third-tier charm concerns me, as it breaks a fundamental rule of Exalted 2E Charm creation: it renders previous comboes useless. In particular, if you had this in a combo before, that combo is now lessened. You've just lost XP for buying this charm, in some way. Perhaps giving the charm some sort of bonus in the case that you actually use it in a combo? For example, combos incorporating this charm (and only Craft, Lore, and Occult charms) don't have to pay the Willpower cost to activate? Perhaps halving the cost of charms activated by some motes? For example: "Duplicates may activate their own charms or combos. Every time a duplicate activates a charm that has already been activated by the Exalt in this tick, reduce the cost to activate the duplicate charm by 1 mote." That would not overwhelm the hight cost of combos, but would allow a slight reduction in cost for large teams of duplicates... -- GreenLantern, still just talking

Or, You could say that, at Essence 5 the first charm simply adds the "Flow" keyword, (See my custom keywords page) or put it as a second function of the second charm. Also, Unless I am misreading the, chars with an extended duartion should affect all, right- Azurelight

Replying to both of you at once: the intention of this tree was to be seen as a whole. Nobody should be putting Phantom Craftsman Assembly in a combo if they ever intend to purchase Excellent Phantom Workforce. The existence of the second charm shouldn't be secret or anything. So, much like in the base rules: if you create your attack + defense combo before getting HGD, you have to make a new combo and waste XP. Similarly, if you can't wait for Lore 3 and Essence 5 to buy the following charm, you waste XP by buying a combo. I am thus comfortable with making combos obsolete, because that happens to combos.

When taken all together, the character is intended to be able to work many times faster with only the initial activation cost as extra. For the character I invented these for, these charms will probably be used to replace demonic labor with a "do it yourself" attitude, to avoid the problems brought on by demons.

At the same time, I don't want to build it into the original charm at no cost. Thus I made the "flow" function a seperate charm which would cost XP on its own. In my mind this replaces the XP cost of various combos.

Finally, it is of note that there's only two tiers of charms here, as all three of the permanent charms require only the original charm, despite varying levels of trait prerequisites. Therefore, if any of these charms still bother you despite my explanation of rationale, it's easy to remove the offending charm from the tree for your use and replace it with something you favor more. - IanPrice, not really seeing a problem.

I'm going to be using this shadow clone jutsu thing, and what level of assistant would this replace as a work force? liquidspeaker "loven it"