>>94872
Fancy in-universe terms. Deathknight means Abyssal. The Blasphemous are a popular appellation for the Abyssal version of Zeniths, the Midnight caste. Zenith Solars are the priests of the Sun by default, and theoretically leaders of the Exalted. Midnight caste Abyssals are an inversion of that, thus, blasphemy.

Would someone error check this Infernal Genius declaration before we use it later?
"As a courtesy, I will now warn you of what the truce and secrecy agreement does not protect from. The binding draws upon the attention, authority and will of the Yozi masters, so the very act of binding the secrecy agreement informs my masters of your secrets. They witnessed this meeting in order to serve as the authorities that will enforce oathbreaker penalties for violations of that oath. Because the agreement was between us five they are not in the slightest bit bound to its terms. Congratulations on trapping yourself in a pledge of permanent truce and secrecy that you can't break without suffering severe curses, and which does not constrain my family very much at all. To be honest, I was disappointed that you inflicted this on yourselves mostly unprompted."

>>94874
Rather save that for someone we actually dislike and aren't actively trying to seduce into marriage.

>>94875
All else being equal I'd agree, but if she doesn't suddenly become more interested in a date as a result of this meeting we should take what we can get. She's acted everywhere from disinterested to disgusted by us romantically so far, at some point it's time to give up and cut losses. It's also a chance to be bribed or begged to let them out of the deal, for an Agony-Savouring Mercy.

>>94874
Assuming our assumptions about the oath are accurate (and the Yozi aren't somehow using deva for doublethink compartmentalization so they're simultaneously ignorant and aware of the information we're keeping secret or something), I think that logic should work.

We certainly shouldn't say that until we've gotten all the information and anything else we want out of them, though. They may not be able to break the oath, but they'll stop cooperating at the very least.

(And there's the possibility we swore a null oath. If a key provision is unenforceable, does that make the entire oath meaningless? We'd be in trouble if they aren't bound to truce).

...and personally, I would leave out the stuff that's just an insult. The trap is enough in of itself.

I vote against. IGD sounds like it would be much more appropriate against an actual enemy you're about to kill.

>>94873
Oh, mixing Deathknight / Solar terminology. That's what got me.

>>94875
Are we even actively trying to seduce Sienna at this point? At best, it seems like we're having fun at her expense teasing her about dating. She seems categorically uninterested and/or disgusted with us.

Graceful Blossom or Feng seem much more likely prospects at this point.

>Infernal Genius Declaration
I wonder, since Amaranth's patron is She Who Lives in Her Name, what reaction would we get from preforming that? Would we earn points or respect for pulling it off, or she gonna be annoyed we one upped her on home turf.

Specifically, the Blasphemous is a term used by the Immaculate Order to refer to the Zenith caste, as they were priests of the Unconquered Sun. The Midnight caste has repurposed it as one of their own appellations, but due to how widely-spread the Immaculate Philosophy is, it would not be uncommon for a newly-Exalted Zenith to think of themselves as one of the Blasphemous.

>...and personally, I would leave out the stuff that's just an insult. The trap is enough in of itself.

I don't see what's unenforceable about the oath. It just has a great, gaping flaw because it only binds the five people present for the meeting and not the Yozi witnesses or anyone else. Oops, they cheated themselves by not taking us seriously when we warned them about the rest of our family being a big deal.
You're right that we probably don't want to piss off those folks, so here's a rewritten version with an agony-savouring mercy where we offer to let them renegotiate, for free.

"As a courtesy, I will now warn you of what the truce and secrecy agreement does not protect from. The binding draws upon the attention, authority and will of the Yozi masters, so the very act of binding the secrecy agreement informs my masters of our discussion. They witnessed this meeting to serve as the authorities that will enforce oathbreaker penalties for violations of the pledge. Because the agreement was limited to us five they are not in the slightest bit bound to its terms. This would leave you trapped in a pledge of permanent truce and secrecy that you can't break without suffering severe curses, and which does not constrain the rest of my family at all.
"Because I'm not trying to inflict a bad deal on you, I offer the opportunity to renegotiate and replace our pledge with a different pledge. I don't ask for a payoff despite being in a position to demand one. Just come up with a deal that isn't bad for any of us, please."

>>94894

Pledges sworn with the Eclipse/Fiend/Moonshadow Anima power cannot be renegotiated; once they're sworn, they're sworn until broken by their terms or by one of the oath-takers.

While it amuses me greatly how you're thinking, technically, swearing by the Yozis doesn't inform them of the terms. Edge would know this intrinsically as part of his powers. It's the same as an Eclipse swearing by the Sun - thank goodness, the Unconquered Sun isn't aware of all oaths sworn by His name, or I'm sure He would have turned His face away from Creation a helluva lot sooner than He did.

But, by all means, continue scheming.

Meyichi 2015/09/17(Thu)19:49 No. 94896 ID: 5a02f7
File 144254458540.png - (105.29KB , 452x750 , pinup2.png )

No update tonight in preparation for a big one tomorrow; here's a Myria to tide you over.

>>94896
Did she nearly die after getting hit by lightning? Natural or some air aspect's?

>>94897

That sounds like something you should definitely ask her, as tactlessly as possible.

It'll probably come up later in the quest.

>>94895
Now I'm curious just how they would know an oath of secrecy was broken to punish it if they didn't pay attention to the secrets. Gimme a hint?

It's less that Cecelyne herself is enforcing the oath, and more that the underlying cosmic structure that Cecelyne coded into Creation is doing all the work.

Of course, it never explicitly says the oath-swearing works through Cecelyne; it could just as easily (and more probably) could be the Ebon Dragon. He seems like the kind of guy that would make cosmic promise structures just so he could later subvert them.

>>94910
Let me see if I can translate this:
Cecelyne, The Ebon Dragon and all the other primordials were just developers, and the oathbreaker penalties are just one more part of creation that's still operating more or less as designed since it was first implemented in creation? If that's the case that sounds ridiculously complicated: We're talking authority that gets delegated down from the primordials, through the gods, to second order servants of the primordials which actually were weapons for kicking the primordials' asses. You'd think they'd have implemented better access controls to lock out features from rebellious underlings. Unless The Ebon Dragon was rebelling and corrupting and subverting so much he ended up kicking his own ass by accident during the usurpation....

>>94917
They did manage to lock out the gods from every doing anything to hurt the primordials. Mortals were overlooked, but completely powerless to hurt primordials because they had jack shit to use. The only reason they were able to win was because two primordials defected to the side of the gods. Gaia was seduced, and indirectly made the Terrestrials, giving them an actual army. Autocththon made the Exaltations themselves, giving them soldiers who were actually capable of hurting the primordials.

Even then, they only made the Exalts one step up from "harmless", and it took endless waves of Exalts dying and re-Exalting to stab the Primordials over and over before they had any effect.

>>94917

It's more that the Solars took advantage of structures that were already there.

Or maybe the Sun made them, and the Ebon Dragon's using them for his own ends.

It's not really clear, but I prefer to think it's a hard-coded Primordial thing that the Solars just hijacked.

>it's a hard-coded Primordial thing that the Solars just hijacked
You mean like the rest of creation? :V

>>94918 >>94925
Still doesn't make much sense to me as a system designer, whether you posit that it's a primordial autojustice machine or a divine autojustice machine: We're talking about access that should be on a white list with revocation. The neverborn and yozis stealing access credentials to a solar autojustice machine is iffy, unless they're using primordial access authority as a substitute post-usurpation somehow. It's trickier if we're talking a primordial autojustice machine since mortals should have never gotten onto those white lists until the gods won the usurpation and got full control. Either way, it makes much more sense to me to think of the relevant backers (gods, neverborn, yozis) getting called as witnesses since we're dealing with an animist cosmology where there's gods of everything. Witnessing an oath and punishing the oathbreakers would need an infrastructure for observation, memory, interpretation and punishment. The most plausible answer for what that could be is that the gods, neverborn and yozis themselves *are* that infrastructure, and that there is no autojustice machine.

Unless you use Occam's Razor, in which case, you get an auto-justice machine.

I think.

Putting aside universe mechanics:

*We know the oath applies to secrets spoken at this meeting
*We've learned things we didn't previously know (that Myria was rogue, Sienna was solar, etc).
*We've shared that information with our meta-audience

*Present-Edge does not appear to have triggered oath-breaking retaliation yet

Which means unless there's a delay or some other shenanigans in play, the other parties have to end up dead or agree to allow us to share.

>>94929

Note that the consequences of oath-breaking often lurk until a critical moment to strike. :V

>>94930
...well, phooey. Then we can't abuse paradoxes in our favor, since the critical moment will obviously be right as we reach the climax of the retelling. (Or more likely right before, ruining the end of the story for us at the worst moment as punishment).

That does mean we better make damn sure to get their permission and/or get the three of them killed (in a manner that doesn't trigger the not acting against them part of the oath) or we're screwed.

It would probably be optimal to get permission to back out of the agreement at some point.

Or maybe everyone else in the agreement dies!

>>94928
Disagree: My, hypothesis that there is no autojustice machine does not presume there is such a machine without any direct evidence for it, a simpler solution. Assuming there is one has to answer the questions of 1) who made it, 2) what's its access controls like, and most importantly 3) who is it because we're in an animist cosmology. Assuming there isn't one gives us answers that we already have that 1) primordials, who made everything, 2) they decide, and 3) they are.

Also, two more questions we need answers to if there is supposed to be an autojustice machine: -Where is it?
-Wow do we crack it, break it, cheat it or stop it before we get Edge smited by it?

>>94931
Or we decide we just don't care about Edge and that we expect him to get assraped by Cecelyne for a century as punishment for telling the story that we knew he was telling. Or The Ebon Dragon cheats things for us because he wants us to tell the story. Or we could be lying about this part of the story. Let's go with one of those because most of the players were crippled by not knowing, not understanding, or not caring about the world cosmology enough to make a sane decision about whether we would get the protagonist cursed for doing something we know he's in the act of doing.
Seriously, the world background in this setting is so deep I've been tripping over it and I have been paying attention since the beginning as well as trying to look things up on the internet. The bar to entry for making sane decisions in the game is OCD interest in a fictional game world with source materials that aren't legally available for free to look up and read over the internet. In strictly gamist terms it's not fair to beat the players over a barrel for making a bad decision when it's impossible, or pretty close to it, to make a good one. The usual advice over barrier to entry for participation in a quest is generally, "The player should need to know no more than the last three updates to make a useful contribution."

>>94936

I vote for that last bit.

Seriously, though, I'm not so sadistic as to punish the players for doing a thing only because there's a frame story narrative.

>The usual advice over barrier to entry for participation in a quest is generally, "The player should need to know no more than the last three updates to make a useful contribution."
I would contest that in... quite a lot of cases, actually.

>>94936
Personally, I'm pretty entertained we found an edge case where the narrative framing device actually interacts with the inner narrative. It's complicated and messy and fun. (And probably exactly the kind of thing the Ebon Dragon would be entertained by, who's favor we're supposed to be trying to win back).

And yeah, there's pretty much always going to be more information that you can possibly know in advance in anything based off exalted. I see it more as playing Xanatos Speed Chess than trying to pull off some grand plan from the start.

> Xanatos Speed Chess

If you aren't playing this as a Fiend, you're doing it wrong.

... but that's just my personal opinion.

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/XanatosSpeedChess for the uninitiated

>>94939
I've been trying, but it's really difficult when the other parties have an information differential advantage over you. My solution was to try and drag more players into the situation at once, but the results so far have been decidedly... mixed at best: Amaranth may well be severely annoyed with us even though he/she has been getting a lot more information out of this, and we're flying seat of the pants with a group of celestial exalts who might have come to town to hunt primordial enslaved-trash like us.

>a group of celestial exalts who might have come to town to hunt primordial enslaved-trash like us
I don't think everyone in there group is a good enough actor to fake the surprise they showed when we told them what we were. Whatever their goals are, they weren't here specifically hunting us (unless someone or something arranged it without them knowing their specific target).

So far, Sienna is a fresh Exalt who barely has any idea what's going on, Myria is a rogue seeking a stable base, and Crimson is presumably pursuing his own goals in the Silver Pact, a rogue, or trying to find his Solaroid mate.

None of them are likely to be specifically opposed to us.

>>94942
That interpretation only makes sense if you assume the other three exalts here are not already a group. It sure seems like they're a group.

>>94942
>>94943
There's no reason people in a group can't have separate motives.

For instance, Sienna is almost certainly with them due to inexperience / ignorance. In her position, she badly needs experience, allies, information so she doesn't run afoul of something and end up dead or worse. (Without any OOC sources or a hands on patron or peers like we had, she's even more behind in the basic information game than we've been complaining about, as players).

Myria taking her in could be anything from real compassion, to an intellectual desire to see blatant propagandizing undone, to exploitation of a useful resource (or likely some combination of motives). And Myria and Crimson could be working towards a common goal, or they could have separate goals that simply align enough or benefit from their cooperation.

Sienna's probably the only one we know well enough to be confident in assessing- we were speculating that her scam could indicate she was a newbie testing the waters on our first meeting.

Amaranth might be able to fill in some blanks later- she knows both of them better in their civilian identities, and she might be able to put some pieces together with the new information we learned here.

>>94943
>There's no reason people in a group can't have separate motives.
Pretty much, yeah. I mean, we're Infernals, look at all the infighting, even between Sky's Edge and Amaranth.

>>/quest/671157

Ha, it's true that "servants of demons who stole the power of the Sun" describes Infernals and Abyssals quite adequately.

What the DBs conveniently omit is that said power was stolen from THEIR stash of loot.

>>94963
To be absolutely fair, 99.99% of DBs know fuck all about this, they just believe what's been told to them for generations. They're suckers for the Immaculate philosophy too, especially since it tells them they're at the top of the heap. I think only the heads of the families and the ones that directly work for Sidereals might know the truth.

Update schedule change, due to an invitation to do regular social-type things. EBO is now scheduled to update every day except for Mondays and Thursdays.

Of course, I guess the update schedule was pretty loose in the first place, so this isn't much of change.

>>94966
OK, thanks.
...
What we need now is an animated PSA with the big flashing disclaimer "THIS IS WHAT DRAGON-BLOODED ACTUALLY BELIEVE"

>quests
>having an actual scheduled
An oddity, to be sure.

I think I'm pretty happy with how that went. We kind of messed up letting Amaranth be roped into that, although I think it might have actually helped us (I suspect they might not have revealed Crimson she hadn't called them out on it, and we looked stronger as two agents of the same power cooperating on a mission than one distant representative before three heros. It made us look more organized). Myria we nailed, though. She's ripe for exploitation, if we play it right.

Has Bulitar been quiet cause we're busy, or seem to be self sufficient, or have we impressed or baffled him into silence?

> Has Bulitar been quiet cause we're busy, or seem to be self sufficient, or have we impressed or baffled him into silence?

The original idea was that the readers were Bulitar, although things have moved to more direct control of Edge/Mirth. She'll undoubtedly show up again.

>The original idea was that the readers were Bulitar, although things have moved to more direct control of Edge/Mirth. She'll undoubtedly show up again.
Speaking as a dice & paper GM (of other games, obv) Bulitar seems like a textbook-simple method of delivering world-knowledge common sense that the players don't have, and second-guessing our more questionable inspirations.

Speaking of saving creation from collapse, I'm pondering whether that's reasonably possible. The short list seems to require (in increasing order of difficulty):
1) Stalemate the neverborn.
2) Repulse the fay.
3) Address the root causes of the usurpation that had most of creation and even some of the primordials working against all the other primordials.
4) Restore the defeated primordials from the yozis and neverborn.

Parts one and two seem like something the solars and lunars could (eventually) pull off if the empire and the bronze faction were helping instead of hindering them. The other parts are, er, kinda fantastic-level impossible I guess, and getting them done in the wrong order promises to collapse everything anyhow.

>>95013
To be absolutely honest, the Neverborn and Deathlords are incompetent. They already nearly destroyed creation with the Great Contagion, then ruined their own advantage when they invited the fey to spoil their contagion. Their biggest advantage was secrecy, and the Mask of Winters lost that in exchange for what amounts to nothing on a Creationwide scale.

The fey aren't a large-scale threat, since it's nearly impossible to unite them.

3 and 4 are unnecessary and based on dubious premises. The Primordials aren't needed to keep Creation going, and they're absolutely titanic jackasses. They're better off imprisoned and/or dead.

Regardless of if we try to make her a bride or not, I think we got a good approach for recruiting / corrupting Myria.

Continue to sell information, build rapport, convince her the Yozi aren't so bad, get her to sell out to demons for security and for all the yummy lore and secrets they can provide.

> 1) Stalemate the neverborn.

Better to banish the Deathlords (good luck doing that to thirteen Essence-10 ghosts) and seal away the Neverborn (again). See - more cleaning up the mess of the First Age.

> 2) Repulse the fay.

This is more something that's just going to have to be done continuously. With the Shinma lost, and no Primordials around to stabilize Creation, there's no way to permanently achieve this. Luckily, there almost certainly won't be another Baldorian Crusade.

> 3) Address the root causes of the usurpation that had most of creation and even some of the primordials working against all the other primordials.

The root cause of the Usurpation was the Great Curse. First obstacle would be finding that out, then getting rid of it - it'd probably take Autochthon personally scrubbing each Exaltation, and, well, that's not going to happen.

> 4) Restore the defeated primordials from the yozis and neverborn.

Agreed with the previous Anon - this is a terrible idea. Better yet to reinforce Malfeas and seal away the Neverborn.


But none of this actually has anything to do with the quest.

I think.

>>95018
Technically, you could also make every Solar and Infernal into an Abyssal, then redeem them. The Curse gets lifted when the Neverborn and the Abyssal have their face-to-eldritch-abomination, iirc. So having Autocthton do it is still significantly more likely.

And it should be noted that the deathlords are E10 ghosts hepped up on Neverborn Essence. Normal E10 ghosts are... well, formidable to the scope of normal games, but incredibly weak compared to anything else at E10.

>The root cause of the Usurpation was the Great Curse.
Wrong event, not the fall of the first golden age, the war of usurpation against the primordials. With the fay biting giant chunks out of creation and the neverborn and fay stealing souls that creation needs to reincarnate to keep working the whole system needs the primordials back to rebuild it. Yeah, most of the primordials must have been jackasses if the gods mostly hated them and they had no shortage of mortal volunteers for a pyrrhic revolt. Gotta fix that design problem with the way they ran creation that lead to it wanting to revolt.