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Coconut Pouncer
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>>121618
> As far as questions go, I'm interested in where the name Ledaal comes from / what it means.
Bit of in-setting context needed for that. Somewhat more than 750 years ago, the world was in the process of being destroyed by the Great Contagion (a 90%+ lethal disease which was so virulent it ignored species barriers, and could even be transmitted by esoteric means, such as astrological study of it's progress), along with a simultaneous invasion by Prince Balor of the Terrible Gaze and his numberless armies of chaos. One woman, now known as the Scarlet Empress and by no other name, wiped out both of those existential threats at a single stroke with a stolen superweapon known as the Sword of Creation, or the Realm Defense Grid. A few years later, she used it again to stop a group of more conventional warlords known as the Seven Tigers, but the collateral damage from that incident was too severe to justify routine use, so she built up a conventional army and navy and so on of her own, and a dynasty of Dragon-Blooded Exalts to staff the upper echelons of the mechanisms of empire. She's been unquestioned ruler of the Blessed Isle (which has approximately the land area of Russia, but with far better soil and climate, plus an 800-mile-high mountain at the center serving as the Elemental Pole of Earth) from when she first seized control of the Realm Defense Grid and used it to announce that fact to everyone, up until about five in-setting years ago when she disappeared under excessively mysterious circumstances. Much of the rest of the civilized world is the Realm's tributaries and client states, which are now being overtaxed and/or preparing for open rebellion as everyone tries to figure out whether the Scarlet Empress is really gone (Dragon-Blooded normally die of old age after 250 to 300 years, without strict personal cultivation and/or anagathic drugs, and seldom make it to 500 even with such efforts; the Empress was seemingly young when she started, and never showed the slightest sign of aging even after more than seven centuries of very active rulership, but it's conceivable that whatever secret magic she used to prolong her life finally wore out, or turned against her) or just working on some secret project or playing an elaborate prank as a test of loyalty, and if she IS gone, who should take over. The "regent," a worthless little man named Tepet Fokuf, is a strictly short-term compromise.
The Scarlet Dynasty is over ten thousand strong, but far from cohesive. There are currently eleven Great Houses, generally named after their founders: the Empress's spouses, consorts, or direct offspring. Sometimes lesser Houses rise in status, and Great Houses can fall due to mismanagement. Over the years, two have been deliberately destroyed due to treason, though remnants of both remain, in varying degrees of secrecy. Eagerness to seize near-absolute power over the majority of known world is tempered by fear of becoming a third such 'object lesson.' Nobody but the Empress herself has ever been known to operate the Defense Grid, or even enter it's main control room without her permission and active assistance, so a successor would need to either duplicate her greatest accomplishment (about which little is known except that she thoroughly researched the matter beforehand, in libraries now lost, and went in with at least four companions, none of whom made it back out) or else make do without that ultimate trump card, the true keystone of her rule.
Ledaal was the Empress's fourth child to survive to adulthood, and the Great House which bears her name carries on both her bloodline affinity for elemental Air and a cultural tendency toward relentless intellectual curiosity, which tend to reinforce each other. I could go on about the four elders leading the house (Ledaal Kebok Omeger, Ledaal Catala Gamam, Ledaal Caros, and Ledaal Cycel), other notable descendants, the port city of Arjuf on the Blessed Isle's south coast, various assets both near there and off in the Threshold which the house controls, how and why the Catala household's study of sorcery is kept separate from the Heptagram, alliances and rivalries with other Great Houses, etc., but it'd mostly be copypasta from Manual of Exalted Power: Dragon-Blooded or Compass of Celestial Directions: The Blessed Isle. Any house can potentially produce an exalt of any aspect (as exemplified by Cynis Mond, the Windtamer) but of the two predominately Air-aspected houses, scholarship and adventures in search of secrets of the lost age seemed like a better focus for Ji's family than House Tepet's current political agenda, which is mainly focused on staving off their oncoming collapse in the wake of the loss of five of their six legions - a good chunk of the Realm's overall military force - in a campaign against some anathema in the far Northeast threshold.
>Also, do the mentor or henchman have names?
Not yet. I figured I'd sketch out mechanical necessities, and then let you fill in more of the characterization stuff. I've got a premade Abyssal and Lunar who could be plugged in as the lich-queen Astius and your Mentor, respectively, but the former was more of a theoretical optimization exercise in figuring out how to use Abyssal charms to stun-lock defenders and wipe out a city with minimal direct offensive action, while the latter actually started as a joke (expy of a well-known videogame character), and the power levels are a bit off, so it might be preferable to work from scratch instead.
Haven't got stats for the henchman at all, beyond the standard parrot-beastman mutation package and some vague concepts, but generating heroic mortals can be very quick and straightforward, since they've got no charm trees to be concerned with.
Having a Lunar as your sifu in Crane Style is super heretical, btw. Could change that, make it safer, or even respec for a completely orthodox set of starting charms, but this way might have more fun story hooks. The Immaculate Order, official religion of the Realm, says CMA should only be used to emulate the Elemental Dragons, which makes Crane Style itself heathen idolatry at best, Willing submission to an Anathema in any capacity is, of course, horrid blasphemy AND treason, has been since long before the Empress, all the way through the Shogunate, ever since the Great Uprising... even though it feels so good, so correct, as if the whole world finally makes sense on some soul-deep level. Several DB charms build off of that effect, of which the most easily accessible might be Tireless String-Plucking Meditation, which requires only Performance 4, Essence 3, and one other charm (a hide-in-plain-sight effect). By itself, it negates fatigue from, and other internal penalties to, Performance-based actions, and also makes the user's fingernails grow slightly longer, sharper, and perfectly manicured. When performing at the direct request or command of a celestial exalt (known to pious immaculates as Anathema), such actions don't merely fail to increase fatigue, but actually count as sleep for all purposes. So, if Ledaal Ji learned that charm, he could spend eight hours every night dancing across rooftops and trees, practicing Crane Style katas according to a schedule his mentor set, and then be perfectly well rested, ready to pack the remaining seventeen hours of the day full of other productive activities.
On the subject of heresy, those Path-Carving Boots are a product of the demon realm rather than wholesome elements of Creation. This isn't quite as bad as it sounds, since Realm sorcerers summon and bind demons all the time for various utilitarian purposes and that's fine with the Immaculates as long as they keep things under control, but it might still look bad to the sort of person who knows the implications. The boots function is to transmute whatever they step on into an inch-thick, yard-wide basalt roadway. On a solid floor, or even something like quicksand, that path persists indefinitely; across unstable surfaces, up to and including bridges or spiral staircases resting on empty air, there's a range limit (after which the boots can't carve more path until back on solid ground) and part of the magic fails at the end of the scene or when deliberately smashed, allowing inadequately supported sections to crumble into black gravel. Between that effect, Crane Form's perfect balance, and actual flight with the Transcendent Phoenix Pinions, he's got little to fear from unstable terrain despite lacking Athletics skill.
Lightning Box has two functions. When empty, an left out under the open sky during a thunderstorm, it attracts a bolt of lightning, which charges it up and might cause considerable damage to anything it happens to be touching. Once charged, it can be used to recover 30 motes, nearly as much as four hours of rest or meditation in an instant - but also inflicts serious injury in the process, since you're essentially jamming a canned lightning bolt up your nose. Air-aspect Dragon-Blooded gain the same benefit without injury risk, since their anima can naturally absorb lightning. If you're lucky enough to have an action scene during a suitable sort of storm, a lightning box might be charged and drained repeatedly, inverting the usual battle-economy dynamic of DBs having relatively limited mote pools.
>I'm not sure if you've read ISSTH
Sadly I have not. Don't know where to find it, nor am I adequately fluent in any language other than English. If you'd be so kind as to point me at an adequate translation, though, I tend to read both quickly and thoroughly - when I have the time and energy to do so at all, which is less than certain lately, but even so I'm very interested in the subject.
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