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Dodge Charms posted:times, I'd expect at least some of them to come to the conclusion that holy crap, there is no evidence to point to even partial success, maybe I should just summon a neomah and order in tonight. Ghosts themselves are evidence of partial success. Remember that they weren't around for the vast majority of existence. You die, you are immediately scrubbed, your soul gets recycled into someone else. That's how it *was*, how it was meant to be. Then Primordials start dying and the entire system gets shitcanned and there's this weird rear end intermediate option. In the grand scheme of things people haven't had all that long to really delve into higher order necromancy and higher order reality warping. It's only at the end of the First Age that the Solars were making little proto-Creations to power their massive sentient sex toys or whatever, and before the Abyssals there wasn't really a class of being that could work the highest levels of Necromancy. Are you going to quit *now*, when there might finally be enough power and information to make a real difference in kicking death's rear end? NOBODY EXALTS A QUITTER [Except all the people that do]! quote:And that's what I'm complaining about : the small number of very samey-feeling origin stories. There's a bunch. There's just batshit crazy with grief, there's mad genius, there's pure experimenter [Who is very different than the mad genius. The passion of a pure experimenter can be very cold, but no less all consuming], religious extremist, actually informed on Liminal actor, actively misled by false example stooge [Be it demons/fae/whatever pretending to be people, ghosts riding a body around and going 'Yeah, I'm totally alive', or even weirder things]....there's all sorts of folk that would try to raise the dead. The ones most likely are, in fact, the most powerful and informed. They know that all of reality is just a toy of vast and powerful forces. Souls work the way they do because they were made that way. All you need to change that is enough power. And the Exalted know their power is functionally infinite. Fail today, maybe. Fail tomorrow? I wouldn't count on it.
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Jun 3, 2013 09:04
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Boogaleeboo posted:Ghosts themselves are evidence of partial success. Remember that they weren't around for the vast majority of existence. Liminals started showing up during the Shogunate. Boogaleeboo posted:There's a bunch. There's just batshit crazy with grief, there's mad genius, there's pure experimenter [Who is very different than the mad genius. The passion of a pure experimenter can be very cold, but no less all consuming], religious extremist, actually informed on Liminal actor, actively misled by false example stooge [Be it demons/fae/whatever pretending to be people, ghosts riding a body around and going 'Yeah, I'm totally alive', or even weirder things]....there's all sorts of folk that would try to raise the dead. 2 - Mad scientist (hubris?) 3 - Differently mad scientist (also hubris?) 4 - Religious extremist? 5 - Informed, deliberate creation. 6 - Uninformed, creation by trickery (ultimate cause is an informed, deliberate creator but that entity tricks someone else into doing the dirty work). Giving you the benefit of the doubt on 2/3 and 5/6, I still need nine more. IMHO the most interesting is 5(&6), since the motivation of the creator entities could be interesting and varied, and some Liminals could find a place serving their community as ... necrotech Alchemicals?
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Jun 3, 2013 11:39
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Dodge Charms posted:Giving you the benefit of the doubt on 2/3 and 5/6, I still need nine more. So, is there a particular reason you need fifteen distinct ones? I mean, really, you only need enough interesting backstories for the number of players you have, right? If one guy was deliberately created by some people who wanted a Shadowland sheriff, and one guy was deliberately created because the Bronze Faction needs the password for some DOOM MANSE built in the First Age so they dig up Kal Bax's preserved corpse to make a Liminal, isn't that ok?
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Jun 3, 2013 13:11
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Boogaleeboo posted:Ghosts themselves are evidence of partial success. Remember that they weren't around for the vast majority of existence. Of course, it could be that resurrection could require a similar degree of "breaking" Creation. It could be the sort of thing that was written in long ago to ensure the Neverborn couldn't return to Primordial status. It could be by making it possible for somebody you want to come back, you could enable the possibility of something much worse coming back, be the Primordials or any other sort of horrible thing put down in ages past. Or you have to sufficiently Wyld-taint an area to make that sort of thing possible or similar "this would be a lot easier if Creation weren't in the way!" solutions.
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Jun 3, 2013 13:15
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Dodge Charms posted:Ghosts have been around since human history began, during the Primordial War. The Primordial War actually comes well after the beginning of human history, best guess. The entire setting as we know it does. The Solars ruled for a few thousand years [What is it, like 3500 years?], and we don't even have over two thousand years since that to the 'present' of the setting. The Primordials ruled Creation for orders of magnitude longer than that. There's a certain timelessness to descriptions of how things flowed at that point, but there's every suggestion that the status quo of humans as tiny Essence batteries and toys herded by Dragon Kings went on for a really, really long time. The Exalted barely had a drop in the bucket to try their hand at things before turning it to poo poo, compared to the millions of years the Primordials had or whatever. And the Solars were *just* starting to figure out the big picture stuff when their Golden Age got knocked the gently caress out. And for that matter while many things were easier or more advanced in the past, wide scale understanding of necromancy may very well not be one of them. There are actually a bunch of places regular mortals can go to learn about it now, that have the 'benefit' of the recent upswing in necromantic experimentation and the like. There has never been a better time to be a corpse botherer! quote:2 - Mad scientist (hubris?) Insanity of that sort isn't always about hubris, but yeah. It's the most likely motivator of that type. quote:3 - Differently mad scientist (also hubris?) Not at all, the hallmark of this one is more amorality and curiosity. It's not about thinking you *know* the answer in spite of all evidence, it's about pure understanding. It's not driven by always having to be right, or proving anything, or even any specific act itself [Once you did figure out resurrection, you just move on to something else] but wanting to grasp how the world works. This person can be entirely rational, entirely logical. They are unlikely to even care that something truly *is* impossible, as long as they get to learn the underlying mechanics of the impossibility. "You can't raise the dead because you can't" wouldn't satisfy them. Truly understanding every aspect of life and death would. The mad scientist is goal oriented and driven by that goal or obsession, the pure researcher is just in it for the process itself. quote:4 - Religious extremist? Ah you know, your death cults, your messianics [Boy do they go together a lot]....those with a slightly different understanding of life and death, with perhaps a strong attachment to individual figures. It's not you need a leader, you need The Chosen Leader[tm]. Your Chosen Leader[tm] has died? Maybe you find his reincarnation....or maybe you need *him*, as is, and accept no substitutes. Maybe transgressing the natural order *is* their form of worship, and anyone will do. Bringing the dead back to life shows their devotion. Faith provides hope where stark evidence denies it. Everyone having failed in raising the dead before you? They just didn't believe enough. In a setting where anyone with a community college understanding of essence can tell you belief *is* power, maybe they are even right. quote:6 - Uninformed, creation by trickery (ultimate cause is an informed, deliberate creator but that entity tricks someone else into doing the dirty work). Not exactly. Lets say you "know" that resurrection is possible because you watched as Lei Wong the grocer got his entire family back by performing some sort of odd summoning ritual. The fact you are mistaken, and Lei Wong actually just has a shitload of demons impersonating his family [Probably because he killed them, this Lei Wong guy sounds like an rear end in a top hat] doesn't change very much. You think it's possible. You are wrong as poo poo, but drat if you aren't going to give it a college try. This can have elements of some of the others [Maybe you actually decide to make your attempt out of grief, or for the power of being able to do it, or because you told the wrong person and now they want you to perform this half remembered ritual for them], but it's defined more by it's ignorance more than it's operation. It's someone that doesn't know how impossible what they are trying to do is, and gets a result in spite of how everyone knows how things work. quote:I still need nine more. Nine [Or more accurately here 15] is more motivation types than most players include in their games, period. If your group even bothers to do more than "Talky, Smashy, Smarty" in variations you've cleared like a good number of all rpg groups in the world. If they clear that and "Brooding anti-hero" or "shining boy scout" you've cleared the variations of like 70% of all rpg groups in the history of time. If you weren't keeping count, that was five defining characteristics. There are still a lot of people that do go for some real depth, but just setting the stage of a character? Yeah, for a lot of people it ain't all that complicated. They pick one big idea and they hang a character around it, and as much as they talk it up it's not often that complicated an idea. Which is fine, because it's what you start with and the character gets fleshed out from there. Reductionist groupings are easy to understand and then you can define it more as you grow into it. In reality I'd just put resurrections them down to two real groupings. Personal and ideological. Those that are driven by the individual they are trying to raise, and those driven by what raising someone means. Everything else is just window dressing. Important to individual stories and motivations, but not definitionally going to be all that different. I mean the person driven by grief to raise the daughter they love is basically the same as the person driven by hate to raise the daughter they feel they own. It's two entirely different stories, but the same basic drive. They aren't fundamentally different characters. They are different from the person that has an attachment to idea of resurrection itself for some reason, but not from each other. If you feel you need more window dressing to buy an idea, well, that's cool.
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Jun 3, 2013 13:24
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GreenMetalSun posted:So, is there a particular reason you need fifteen distinct ones? (There's no kill like overkill.) GreenMetalSun posted:one guy was deliberately created because the Bronze Faction needs the password for some DOOM MANSE built in the First Age so they dig up Kal Bax's preserved corpse to make a Liminal, isn't that ok? Can Liminals testify in Celestial court? Boogaleeboo posted:The Primordials ruled Creation for orders of magnitude longer than that. Do you have a citation? Boogaleeboo posted:In reality I'd just put resurrections them down to two real groupings. Personal and ideological. Those that are driven by the individual they are trying to raise, and those driven by what raising someone means. Everything else is just window dressing. Important to individual stories and motivations, but not definitionally going to be all that different. I mean the person driven by grief to raise the daughter they love is basically the same as the person driven by hate to raise the daughter they feel they own. It's two entirely different stories, but the same basic drive. They aren't fundamentally different characters. They are different from the person that has an attachment to idea of resurrection itself for some reason, but not from each other. From that perspective, there's also a third option: those driven by NEED for a champion or protector. Neither personal nor ideological, but practical. - "The barbarian mutants slaughtered our fifteen greatest warriors! We will stitch their remains into five whole champions, and pray to our ancestor spirits to animate them!" - The shadowlands sheriff thing. - The Emissary of Nexus?
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Jun 3, 2013 13:49
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Dodge Charms posted:Can Liminals testify in Celestial court? I don't see any reason it wouldn't work if you could somehow get your hands on the corpse of a First Age Solar. ('We need to know the EXACT wording of the deal the Neverborn made with Larquen Quen before he became the Mask of Winters!' 'What's the password to your doom manse?!' 'Where did you hide all your tomes on Solar Circle Sorcery!', etc.) Can they testify? I don't know. Maybe? I think there's something about the breaking of the Mask also destroying all evidence that the Sidereals were involved in the Usurpation, though. So at that point it becomes, 'I say they were in on it!' 'We say we weren't!'
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Jun 3, 2013 13:59
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GreenMetalSun posted:I don't see any reason it wouldn't work if you could somehow get your hands on the corpse of a First Age Solar. ('We need to know the EXACT wording of the deal the Neverborn made with Larquen Quen before he became the Mask of Winters!' 'What's the password to your doom manse?!' 'Where did you hide all your tomes on Solar Circle Sorcery!', etc.) Pretty sure the preview says that the new Liminal is in no way the person who originally owned the organs and limbs that make them up. They don't inherit any memories, personality traits or what have you. Still, I could see someone trying to bring a dead person back for their secrets and being very disappointed in the result. (Also, here's another origin - someone suffers brain death, is in a permanent coma, doctors try more and more experimental treatments until one's out-there enough to create a Liminal).
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Jun 3, 2013 14:24
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Counting Dreams as canon, it's been almost exactly 5,000 years since the surrender of the makers of the world (with countless lost eons before that, obviously.) I think the writers have implied they're throwing Dreams out wholesale, though.
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Jun 3, 2013 15:40
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Flavivirus posted:Pretty sure the preview says that the new Liminal is in no way the person who originally owned the organs and limbs that make them up. They don't inherit any memories, personality traits or what have you. Still, I could see someone trying to bring a dead person back for their secrets and being very disappointed in the result. The preview seems to imply that this is not the case. Liminals Preview posted:You don’t know who you are. As you realize this, memories rise up to present themselves. But they’re not your memories — you know that immediately. There’s no sense of ownership or identification. It’s like remembering a character you read about in a book, or heard about in a story. Perhaps it’s only one set of memories. Perhaps it’s several, jumbles of lives and events haphazardly stitched together. Maybe these secondhand memories are enough to tell you where you are. How fragmented a new Liminal's memories are and what they retain is definitely in question, though.
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Jun 3, 2013 15:40
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Ah, sorry. I guess I was getting confused with Promethean. No idea why 
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Jun 3, 2013 15:57
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Flavivirus posted:Ah, sorry. I guess I was getting confused with Promethean. No idea why TBF, I think you're mostly right. They don't inherit personality traits or anything else, but reviving the corpse of a First Age Solar to try to glean information from their memories is something that, let's say my Sidereal players, are just dumb enough to try.
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Jun 3, 2013 16:00
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I guess Liminals are supposed to "feel" like a beta fork? (To use the Eclipse Phase terminology.) They are NOT the person from whom they're copied, they know it, and they may know bits from that person's history but they never mistake it for their own. Or maybe Liminals are supposed to "feel" like a new person, a blank person, who happens to have a beta fork of his or her ... constituents?
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Jun 3, 2013 16:05
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It's funny you go off into an entire other game when you have a perfectly fine example in the game in front of you. It's a variant of Past Lives. Celestial Exalted pick up some of the memories attached to the exaltation that they have, Liminals pick up some of the memories of the bodies they are attached to. They aren't those memories and it's not their body. Much like the Celestial isn't their exaltations memories and it's not his 'soul'. Maybe it'll get more complicated on top of that [Because, of course, Liminals aren't stuck with the body they start with. They can upgrade that thing! Whose to say they can't snag memories from new parts?], but it's an aspect Exalted has been dealing with since the beginning.
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Jun 3, 2013 16:11
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Boogaleeboo posted:It's funny you go off into an entire other game when you have a perfectly fine example in the game in front of you. It's a variant of Past Lives. A Celestial lives for a while, has normal human memories, and then gets this other batch stuck in him. He's GROUNDED in his previous identity by his normal memories (unless he's a Throwback). Being a Liminal means you aren't grounded. You are more like a brand-new AI with a beta fork, than you are like a Celestial Exalt with the Past Lives merit. I guess you could say a Liminal has Total Amnesia + Past Lives (but not Throwback)? That's a bit unwieldy.
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Jun 3, 2013 16:21
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They do have needs and desires outside their past memories though. They aren't just one shots entirely on their own in the world with no greater meaning, there is more to them than that. It's not entirely clear what the hell is up with them and Mother and all that, but they aren't total amnesiacs with some body memories. So, like I said. It's functionally not all that different from Past Lives. You have some memories from the body you are in, but they aren't you. Much like you have some memories from the exaltation in you, but you aren't it.
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Jun 3, 2013 16:36
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I'm surprised that nobody's suggested a spontaneous, Solomon-Grundy-style origin for a Liminal Exalted. Sometimes things just happen, you know?
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Jun 3, 2013 16:44
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Boogaleeboo posted:It's functionally not all that different from Past Lives. Infernals 2e, Past Lives background posted:when a Green Sun Prince of barely 20 summers calls upon the life experiences of a First Age luminary more than 10 centuries old, there is a grave risk that the younger mind may be subsumed into that of the elder (...) If the Infernal's player ever botches a roll augmented by dice conferred by this Background, the personality of the First Age Solar may emerge and seek to influence that of the Prince for a number of hours equal to the character's Past Life Background rating. Worse, the Solar personality may also seize control if the character succeeds too well on a roll augmented by this Background. Spiderfist Island posted:I'm surprised that nobody's suggested a spontaneous, Solomon-Grundy-style origin for a Liminal Exalted. Sometimes things just happen, you know?
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Jun 3, 2013 17:34
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Boogaleeboo posted:It's funny you go off into an entire other game when you have a perfectly fine example in the game in front of you. It's a variant of Past Lives. Celestial Exalted pick up some of the memories attached to the exaltation that they have, Liminals pick up some of the memories of the bodies they are attached to. They aren't those memories and it's not their body. Much like the Celestial isn't their exaltations memories and it's not his 'soul'. Maybe it'll get more complicated on top of that [Because, of course, Liminals aren't stuck with the body they start with. They can upgrade that thing! Whose to say they can't snag memories from new parts?], but it's an aspect Exalted has been dealing with since the beginning. It sounds closer to Eidolon than Past Life, given that Past Life is a previous Exaltation, complete with resurgent personality and etc, while Eidolon is more in the realm of things you remember that aren't exactly your own memories. While Alchemical memories all come from their own soul, they come from many different people, different people with different life experiences, and the impression I get of the liminal Exalted sounds closer to that, just another step removed (that is, not memories from their own soul.) Unless the devs added something new in about how the liminals occasionally get their brains overridden by their bodys' memories and channel them for extra dice or something and I missed it.
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Jun 3, 2013 17:56
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The more we hear about them, the more I get the impression that Liminals are an attempt to port aspects of Alchemicals to something more in-genre for creation than an army of civil service robots.
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Jun 3, 2013 18:25
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A_Raving_Loon posted:The more we hear about them, the more I get the impression that Liminals are an attempt to port aspects of Alchemicals to something more in-genre for creation than an army of civil service robots. I am personally hoping stuff like this is used so they are not all "The Frankenstein Exalted." While Frankenstein's a great book, I hope Liminals also can be used to tell stories of "The crafted perfect super-soldier" or "The veteran brought back from the grave, but not quite right." I do think that the developers are probably trying to give us the core vision now, and later open up with a variety of appearances, power sets, and backgrounds for Liminals; Promethean was pretty good in the regard of definitely evoking the themes of Frankenstein with the product pitch and some of the core elements, but also including other things, like the Jewish Golem. Do they have to be all fleshy? Can they ever be stone? Metal? Wood? Dirt? I suppose I'll find out sooner or later.
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Jun 3, 2013 18:36
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Maybe it's because of a complete ignorance of Promethean (I don't play NWoD), but Liminals put me in mind of somehow-living versions of nemessaries. It's probably the notion of upgrading and swapping out body parts that's doing it. But drat if the idea isn't appealing.
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Jun 4, 2013 00:06
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taichara posted:Maybe it's because of a complete ignorance of Promethean (I don't play NWoD), but Liminals put me in mind of somehow-living versions of nemessaries. It's probably the notion of upgrading and swapping out body parts that's doing it. All I can think of now is a munchkin Liminal who takes all the best parts from the best person in every field and winds up horribly mismatched like a grotesquely-overoptimized WoW character.
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Jun 4, 2013 00:33
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The next stretch goal should maybe be something about better forum server support and software so that it doesn't take them a week to fix poo poo or break when someone sneezes. Half the stuff on the forums is either always broken or turned off because it makes other poo poo broken.
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Jun 4, 2013 10:29
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Thesaurasaurus posted:All I can think of now is a munchkin Liminal who takes all the best parts from the best person in every field Sounds kinda like a one-man Borg, or the bad guy from season one of Heroes.
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Jun 4, 2013 11:28
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Dodge Charms posted:Good potential villain. I always knew Megaman was the bad guy.
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Jun 4, 2013 11:31
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Vadoc posted:The next stretch goal should maybe be something about better forum server support and software so that it doesn't take them a week to fix poo poo or break when someone sneezes. Half the stuff on the forums is either always broken or turned off because it makes other poo poo broken. Onyx Path should seriously set up some dedicated forums at this point, because it's clear whatever CCP underling is in charge of keeping white-wolf.com rolling seriously doesn't care. I don't get why they haven't-- the "forums" on their site are pretty much a joke.
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Jun 4, 2013 15:55
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Nightskye posted:Onyx Path should seriously set up some dedicated forums at this point, because it's clear whatever CCP underling is in charge of keeping white-wolf.com rolling seriously doesn't care. I don't get why they haven't-- the "forums" on their site are pretty much a joke. I'll admit that I don't know much about the costs of running a forum, but does anyone have an idea what it might cost to run a forum the size of WW? Would they have to have their own servers, or could they pay to use a forum provider's servers?
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Jun 4, 2013 16:03
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I don't know why you guys want the White Wolf forums back up, because the people posting there are awful. If they put up a "we'll never host White Wolf forums again" stretch goal I'd even consider backing the project.
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Jun 4, 2013 16:47
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Mikan posted:I don't know why you guys want the White Wolf forums back up, because the people posting there are awful. If they put up a "we'll never host White Wolf forums again" stretch goal I'd even consider backing the project. Look man I just want to read more posts about why Homestuck is more epic than Gilgamesh. Is that so wrong?
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Jun 4, 2013 16:58
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Mikan posted:I don't know why you guys want the White Wolf forums back up, because the people posting there are awful. If they put up a "we'll never host White Wolf forums again" stretch goal I'd even consider backing the project. I suggested this on the Kickstarter comments yesterday and was told I was overstating the problem. I was told this by someone who self-identified as the OP of multiple brony threads in the very same comment.
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Jun 4, 2013 17:20
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Attorney at Funk posted:Look man I just want to read more posts about why Homestuck is more epic than Gilgamesh. Is that so wrong? Not just Gilgamesh, but every story of myth ever told! But, every time I work up some sympathy for the Exalted writers because of the poo poo they clearly have to put up with, they go and do something stupid too.
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Jun 4, 2013 17:25
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Attorney at Funk posted:Look man I just want to read more posts about why Homestuck is more epic than Gilgamesh. Is that so wrong? Those posts are seriously the greatest joy I derive from the White Wolf forum.
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Jun 4, 2013 17:28
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There's a couple people I enjoy following because they have good ideas, I just ignore the others.
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Jun 4, 2013 17:46
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Mikan posted:I don't know why you guys want the White Wolf forums back up, because the people posting there are awful. If they put up a "we'll never host White Wolf forums again" stretch goal I'd even consider backing the project.
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Jun 4, 2013 22:02
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Oligopsony posted:Think of it as a sort of Jade Prison. but instead of containing shards of awesome power, it contains ww forum posters
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Jun 4, 2013 22:09
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quote:At $575,000 of contributions, our EX3 Dev Team will collaborate to create the Official EX3 Anathema Character Management Toolkit. This free software has evolved and grown with the development of Exalted, but now it is our aim to collaborate with the Anathema team for an EX3 version that releases with EX3 itself.
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Jun 4, 2013 22:38
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kthegreat posted:Well that could be pretty cool.  I am on this like white on rice. Anathema made running 2E immeasurably easier.
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Jun 4, 2013 23:53
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Kenlon posted:
I just hope they make it a lot more adaptable to house rules.
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Jun 4, 2013 23:57
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Tyrant lizard statblock didn't seem to be posted, so...quote:Tyrant Lizard
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Jun 5, 2013 01:28
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