Thus Spake Zaranephilpal/OntheYozis
(From a longish Infernals thread on rpg.net.-MeiRen)
Re: Infernal Exalted - Any ideas?
Quote:
Originally Posted by Charlequin
Although I recognize that the Exalted were, at a fundamental level, created to slay the Primordials, I disagree that that is "what they do." From the evidence available, it seems to me that they were created with the post-war "rule the universe" job firmly in mind -- otherwise, it would make far more sense for the social and constructive abilities of the Exalted to be purely tuned towards large-scale war, when many of them are actually better tuned towards (say) leadership of a peaceful nation-state.
Well, the Exalted were given the dominion of the universe as a consolation prize while the gods got the X-Box. It turns out that a lot of those powers work well for civilian use, too. Solars were designed to be super-leaders, so they turned from generals and ultra-savant stratego mages into emperors and brilliant architect leaders. Lunars went from the ultimate infiltrator-special forces-bodyguards to secret police and consorts of the shining god-kings. Sidereals went from tactical councilors and ninjas to bureaucrat ninjas who deal with managing the future in a way that is a constant suppression of open cosmological warfare. Dragon-Blooded went from footsoldiers and battlefield support engineers to well, soldiers and support engineers. They upheld the hierarchy until they overthrew it and took over. In giving the Exalted stewardship, the gods garrisoned the world so that their enemies could never retake it.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Charlequin
A Solar at Essence 2 can come to perfectly understand the motives of any being and know precisely the price at which anyone will do their bidding. Neither Charm proscribes against use on the Yozi; neither even has an Essence cap on targets. At higher levels, the Solar capacity for discerning the inner workings of others' minds would only become greater and more detailed, I'd imagine.
You see a box inside a box, with dots of light floating at asymetrical points through its matrix in an array of colors that chime in seven billion part harmony. "This is what it wants?" you ask in astonishment and confusion. "Yes, precisely so!" the Storyteller answers with complete sincerity. "But I don't understand that." The Storyteller shakes his head in affirmation, waiting for the point. He then realizes the player is unsatisfied. "Oh, well, you would if you were a Primordial. It makes perfect sense to them." Angered, you retort, "But that isn't fair. I used the Charm. I should know what it wants!" The SToryteller pauses in reflection, and answers quitely "And you do. You just don't understand what that means. The information is gibberish to you."
I realize that may be an extrapolation that bends the spirit of the Charm. It's also perfectly viable as an answer. You could get even weirder with Know the Soul's Price. Or you could decide that you want your Primordials to be less alien. It's your game.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Charlequin
I don't understand how you can reconcile the concepts of heroism in the Exalted corebook with a picture of Exalts as very flashy thugs.
Why? Because I'm deliberately framing their actions in a context I do not personally hold, but which is closer to how these actions appear from the perspective that the Primordials are the only beings allowed to have free will and be in charge. If you're a human, then Exalted are supermen. They are radiant, smart, heroic. They come to liberate you, guide you and inspire you. They can overcome and destroy any monster, build an empire and terraform the madness beyond the borders of the world so you can grow crops there. They are wondrous, glorious, peerless. Being a human, I would so very much love to be one or at least pretend to be one.
But then, if I were a Primordial, I'd see things differently. You spread a picnic down and the ants come. They do that, those ants. Not to worry, you can squash the ants. But ack! Something is wrong! They have spiders and the spiders are biting you and you are helpless and now they are wrapping you in a cocoon and the ants are crawling all over your picnic and eating it and you can't do anything about it. Damn the bugs! Damn them all! You wish you could squash them, but you can't. You hate them. You hate them all. The Exalted aren't heroes, they're just bugs with nasty venom. They all need squashing or taming into completely harmless pets... yes, train spiders to kill spiders. That will show them!
Quote:
Originally Posted by Charlequin
My issue is that I find one-dimensional beings which can only be dealt with through violence to be drastically at odds with the game of Exalted as I understand it. Exalted is about the clash of epic heroes -- the tragedy of one hero falling to another's blade, the smell of victory over another as great as you, the holy wars and ten thousand year rivalries launched over a single rose. A villain who can't speak (at least not from conviction), who can't love, who can't hate -- victory over that is hollow. It's not epic, it's not heartwrenching or exalted (in the lowercase-e sense) or anything. It's just pest extermination.
The world of Exalted is big enough to hold the variant ideologies of the Exalted, even though the ideologies themselves aren't big enough to do so. The utopian Solar empire dream has no room for backroom muckety muck bureaucrats who pull the strings, nor does it extend to tribes of howling barbarians gnawing at the infrastructure. It definitely can't exist alongside the broze epoch "good enough" Realm of the Dragon-Blooded. But as divergent and contradictory as these ideologies are in their ultimate scope, they have a basic idea in common which is what you identify as the basic theme of Exalted as a game: heroes can make the world a better place for its inhabitants. The akuma plan isn't really the akuma plan. It's the Yozi plan, which says "All of you are wrong. The setting is wrong. The universe is wrong. The war ended wrong. We made this. We should be in charge. Now, stop rebelling. Get off my damn picnic and give me back my Gameboy, you damn, dirty bugs!" Now, the problem with this philosophy is how extreme it is. It leaves no room for compromise, except in the short term. A Yozi can help a Solar overthrow the Realm through the proxy of an Infernal Exalt, but the Yozi is doing so because political instability will help it seize more power. In the end, do not harbor any illusions. It wants to enslave you, make akuma of all the Exalted and crack the world so it serves the Primordials more thoroughly than the Yozis currently obey the Exalted. The Yozi plan IS drastically at odds with the game. That's the whole point. If the Yozis win, it means that the heroes are beaten and heroism itself is beaten. If the heroes win, it will be by ensuring that the fate of those stupid enough to give themselves to the Yozis does not befall the world. If you're upset that the akuma perspective isn't fun to play, I understand that, because I wasn't aiming to make them playable unless you had very exotic and somewhat twisted tastes. If you object because it's philosophically at odds with what you believe, then good. Oppose them. Destroy them. Meet these wretches on the field of battle and dispatch them, for they are abominations against absolutely everything you stand for. When you kill an akuma, you are striking a blow against a monster that wants to enslave you and make you into something like that... hollow, broken, obedient. You can call that eeeevil if you want, but it isn't. It's a fundamentally incompatible ethos, which is very different indeed. From your view, that may be pest extermination. From the Yozi view, every Exalt killed is pest extermination. We can't live with them. We can't share with them. We can't play nice with them. They want it all, and that means our freedom and self-determination, too. We want to have self-determination. Hostilities ensue. It is simple. It is profound. It is Us vs. Them. It's ugly, dirty and at the end of the day, beating an akuma is only heroic because you trimmed the claws of the world-gnawing dragon so that it can't hurt you as badly.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Charlequin
The difference here, I suspect, is that I'm not arguing this on a cosmological level, but on a game design level. I can easily grasp the cosmology in which the entire structure makes sense (and have played in games that use it, or a close variant thereof) but I find it to be an actively unhelpful element of the Exalted setting, because it creates entities that actively interfere with what I consider to be the game's core thematics. As such, I prefer the interpretation of the cosmology - supported by what was canonically available to readers before the Players Guide - that doesn't inject morally null beings into the universe.
And again, I say that they are not morally null. Far from it. The akuma are the most moral beings in the universe, the ultimate exemplars of sainthood. When the Primordials are always right, then beings who always obey them never sin. They have ascended to such moral supremacy by doing what is expected of all beings: unconditionally surrender to the creators. Again, I say I do not agree with this. I find it offensive. I find it evil. But I'm a human being who is quite biased in favor of a humanocentric (or at least human-interested) existence. I don't want to be a puppet. I find that an abomination. If I were a Primordial, no doubt I'd feel differently.
Re: Infernal Exalted - Any ideas?
Quote:
Originally Posted by metasynthie
Oh, come on. If it can be written as a concept which can be communicated and understood, it can be roleplayed. I don't care if it has seventeen shards of being with their own independent thoughts, motives, and desires, all of which are totally bizarre and alien from a human point of view; I don't care if they encompass entire facets of reality with their very being (e.g. Nobilis, minus the human side) or if their consciousness is like gigantic icebergs, only one tiny facet of which is present at any one time. If a writer can communicate the concept to a bunch of players and a ST, then the players can get across the same concept, as a character, through roleplaying. It may be really, really difficult. It might be so difficult that most of us would throw up our hands and say "this isn't really feasible." It might be difficult in such a way that poor attempts are utterly cheesy. ("I do something random because like, I'm unfathomable.") But that's different from being impossible.
You know what? It's also impossible to *really* roleplay, in the inside-the-skin-of kind of way, a completely psychotic mass murderer with fourteen personalities, most of which suffer from schizoid delerium. Most of us have not been there, and never will. We just have some idea of sort of what that kind of person acts like, and is perceived by others to be like. But would we say "oh no, you can't play that character at all, ever?" Probably not. Most of us are aware of the kind of limitations and pitfalls that kind of character could have -- in the sense of, can they interact with others, is it going to be horribly cheesy in a Malkavian kind of way, do I want to deal with that in my campaign. But that's different than saying "oh no that's impossible." Which frankly, yeah, is kind of annoying and strikes me as a bit d3wdish. "No way, man, because like, they're so totally out there that like, it's never gonna happen. They are BEYOND US ULTIMATELY TO THE MAX."
Then perhaps there is a miscommunication. I'm saying that you can't possibly play them, but then I explained how you could fake it. I'm saying that as a writer, I can't possibly convey what I imagine them to be. I can't imagine what I imagine them to be, because as soon as I do, they have to be bigger and more unknowable than that. The moment I draw a box around it and say "This is a Primordial!" it pokes a tentacle through the box to remind me that I missed a spot. So I follow that tentacle and I discover it goes on forever. The function of a Primordial is to be bigger than you and bigger than you can grasp. That doesn't make it invulnerable, just beyond understanding. If you play it, you're playing the tip of the iceberg that is relevant to the matter at hand and that's ok. You can play that tip, that extruded mask, because it's compressed down to a scale you can work with. Akuma make nice compression masks. It's why I originally complimented StephenL for noticing that fact. You can't play a Primordial, because in order to play one, you need an infinitely bigger mind than you have. But you can play the part you need and not worry about what the rest is up to except to realize how utterly insignificant this little piece is next to the whole. By all means try to capture what they are like. The farther you get, the better you narrate. But you'll never get there, never capture the final bit of what it means to be Primordial, because that IS what it means... to transcend your awareness of it.
Exalted get that delightful privilege of looking at all that vastness, noting it for a couple minutes as the tentacle of possibility recedes into the infinite horizon from their eye and getting bored. Then they say "Fuck it!" and beat it into submission anyway. Exalted don't care if you are an infinitely complex and unique snowflake. They just break you, because they can. True understanding isn't necessary. Just sufficiently brutal violence coupled with just enough understanding to aim that violence. It's like saying you don't need to understand a man's life experiences and dreams in order to know that if you shoot him in the heart, he will die.
Quote:
Originally Posted by RedFox
So an Exalted could outsmart a Primordial, because a Primordial wouldn't divert all of its attention on the matter at hand whereas the Exalted is thinking of it from all angles and possibly possesses knowledge the Primordial doesn't? But an Exalt can never have the vast gulfs of understanding that a Primordial does, because it's not within human capacity to?
i.e. the Primordials are limited by hubris and a difficulty of focusing on the pinprick scale that the Exalted operate at?
There is evidence that happened at one point. The Primordials set up a Geas that bound the mighty and the great so that the mighty and the great could not rise up and threaten them. So instead, the Celestines turned to one of the weakest races upon the earth, a subsidiary slave race of the Dragon Kings, and imbued their finest with such power as could do the impossible. Thus did the Exalted rise up against the conception of the Primordials, who simply couldn't imagine that a weapon could be so deadly when it had such humble origins. I don't presume for a moment and never have presumed for a moment that you couldn't beat a Primordial or outsmart it, nor that they are omnipotent or omniscient. As people have noted, this game doesn't assume that anything is so big that the epic heroes cannot vanquish it. Having a mind of infinite complexity doesn't mean it knows what you know, simply that the structure that could know that piece of information is more elaborate.
I keep emphasizing over and over that unknowably infinite doesn't mean that it is better than you or unbestable, but rather bigger. Only bigger, in the way that it is always the nature of elephants to be bigger than men.
Possibly not something for here, but..
>>Quote: >>Originally Posted by Charlequin >>A Solar at Essence 2 can come to perfectly understand the motives of any being and know precisely the price at which anyone will do their bidding. >>Neither Charm proscribes against use on the Yozi; neither even has an Essence cap on targets. At higher levels, the Solar capacity for discerning the inner workings of others' minds would only become greater and more detailed, I'd imagine.
MeiRen posted one way to deal with this kind of power against the primordials, but not the only way. It's important to remember with such charms that knowing the price at which someone will do your bidding and knowing the motivations of something is not necessarily the same as being able to pay that price or manipulate those motivations. For Joe Creationer or Joe Exalt or Joe God, it may be one thing.... But the yozi by and large have motivations like 'Horrible screaming revenge on all creation' and Soul's prices like 'Kill every exalt slowly over a thousand years of hellish torment while I eat the world, and then I'll think about what I'm going to do to the traitorous gods', and honestly, you didn't need a charm to know that. It's worse when you try to understand the motivations of the slain primordials - The neverborn's motivation can be summed up as 'kill everything' and the soul's price for you to gain power over them is 'Die, betray your name, become my abyssal servant and I shall empower you (as my slave)' and you can talk to the Abyssals about how well that works. And still worse if you tried to use it on the two living primordials: Gaia's motivation would probably be a summary of everything that lives in creation. You understand it perfectly, but it's all contradictory and there are so many of them, and Autochuton's soul price might be something to the effect of 'build me a perfect 1:1 scale model of creation of my very own'. Gamlain
