The Tepet Legions being crush like insects by the Bull: The Worf Level of this is...?

[Jen]

Well ? Is the Tepet being defeated by a porn-stache Solar a well-written piece of fluff ?

This thing involve so many retcon like the Realm wanting the Tepet to lose, the unnamed Solar who defeat the Tepet Legion is later revealed to be the Bull, Sudden Sidereal involvement!, Demon Pact with Jacint, Treesuetopia Halta out-of-nowhere (it's no surprise that Sue like the Bull and Halta manage to find each other despise being thousand of miles apart), I mean, they even manage to drag Lyta into this mess (one of the book mention a Solar killing all the Immaculate Monks who are on their way to help the Tepet when she escaped the Isle).

I mean, 4? newly Solar slaughter hundred of experienced DB, and later book try so fricking hard to justify this just make me so annoyed somehow. So yeah, do people still want to see this whole thing (include the Lyta accidentally help, Samea having Solar Circle Sorcery, Treesuetopia,...etc) being ported to Third Edition.

[DrLoveMonkey]

I think it's a great example of why you don't let Solars get a power base, amd why you don't fuck with Solars in general. The only time I think it goes too far is when somebody says something about it being a bloodless/flawless victory for the Bull. The Tepet legions were alone, hungry, afraid, tired and cold. They were cut off from supplies and attacked by an army lead by Solar exalted, I would not expect them to win no matter how good they were or what they did.

But like I said, the idea that hundreds of terrestrial exalts leading multiple armies didn't put much of a strain on Yurgen's forces takes it a little far.

[Lundgren]

I can actually buy the Bull of the North crushing the Tepet Legions, if...
* The size of the tribes he managed to collect was strong enough (might be a few DBs and "half bloods" in those tribes as well).
* The Bull is just the mentioned front figure of a Circle.
* A few Lunars helped them, not only in the battle itself but as mentors for the Bull and any other Solar.
* The Legions were attacked when they were at a disadvantage (think the Roman legions being wiped out by the Germans when they were walking single file through a large forest).

This:

This thing involve so many retcon like the Realm wanting the Tepep to lose, the unnamed Solar who defeat the Tepep Legion is later revealed to be the Bull, Sudden Sidereal involvement!, Demon Pact with Jacint, Treesuetopia Halta out-of-nowhere (it's no surprise that Sue like the Bull and Halta manage to find each other despise being thousand of miles apart), I mean, they even manage to drag Lyta into this mess (one of the book mention a Solar killing all the Immaculate Monks who are on their way to help the Tepep when she escaped the Isle).

Perhaps how it is described after it had passed through word of mouth a few times, being "improved on" at every step. As the actual event... Not so much.

[Lioness]

The single biggest problem about the Tepet Legions debacle is MoEP: Dragon-Blooded saying that House Tepet lost 2/3rds of its Dragon-Blooded in the conflict and turns the body count from dozens to hundreds.

[Murcushio]

It's hard to blame later writers for wanting to shore things up.

I mean, the Tepet legions being crushed were already established as a big, important event. As well they should be! I don't know who came up with it in the first place, but that single event by itself does a lot of work. It shows how a big, powerful, militarily-oriented House can suddenly totter, it shows just how dangerous a Solar who gathers a circle can be, it shows that, in the absence of Scarlet, suddenly things that before would have been expertly run, nonpolitical affairs (Scarlet took beating down Anathema really seriously) suddenly became horribly botched, very political affairs indeed. It sets up the Roseblack and a lot of her plotlines. It does a lot of work and it does it without a lot of page count.

But let's leave all that aside. Let's say you think the Bull crushing the Tepet legions was a very bad idea. Even if you think that, if you come in after MoEP is published, it is still something you have to deal with. So you start looking at all the ways it doesn't work, the ways it seems stupid, and try to correct course. And you try to do that in a way that preserves verisimilitude, because verisimilitude is important.

So if it turns out that hundreds of Dragon-Blooded had to die, you grit your teeth and drag in the kind of power levels that would let the Bull and his Circle do that without all of them being Essence 5 badasses who have completely optimized their combat Charms. And it grabs a lot of cruft to itself that kinda-sorta makes sense but also makes it an increasingly ridiculous affair. Sidereal involvement? Okay, sure, makes sense, this is the kind of event they'd be involved in. Then you start dragging in high-powered demons and the Haltans and all of sudden you're at the bottom of a pit, and every step you took to get there seemed so right and necessary at the time but you're still in a pit.

... come to think of it, an apt metaphor for a lot of 2e, really.

I don't blame the writers so much as the editors. 2e was, if we believe the stories, not controlled very well at the line development and editorial level, which let stuff like this happen a lot more than it should have. Thankfully, the current team of devs and editors are heavily invested, borderline psychotic individuals who pay crazy attention to detail.

[Zelbinnean]

This isn't really Worfing imo at a baseline, though added details pushed it in that direction. As was said above its a great example of why DBs are desperate to kill Anathema before they grow into their power and form alliances and sway many people to their banner, and definitely before they learn to wield strategic-level SCS. That absolutely makes sense.

Though Samea getting to SCS level Essence REALLY DOESNT

[unnatural1]

An important thing to remember is that the Bull didn't defeat the Tepet legions in a single battle.

There were multiple engagements. A couple of which the Bull even lost. He wore them down and finished them off in a big, final battle.

The Bull also wasn't fighting alone. Not only did he have a circle of Solars backing him up, he also had some Dragonbloods on his side, not to mention allied forces from Halta, who know how to fight in a forest in a big way. Plus, Samea summoned at least two Second Circle demons to fight on their side, and she had Celestial Circle spells to throw at the Tepets. Most DBs have never even seen Celestial Circle spells before. Much less know how to fight them.

Dr. Love Monkey is correct. The Bull won because he had the chance to do the one thing that allows Solars to truly show their power: he had a full power base at his command. He had a large, well-trained army, allies who knew the terrain very well, and supernatural support on a scale that no one had seen in centuries. That is EXACTLY the kind of circumstances that allow Solars to truly be all they can be.

[Tikor]

We should critique by creating.

If the portrayal of the defeat of the Tepet legions has been unsatisfactory so far, we can fannon up a better one.

A borderline antisocial Dragaon-Blooded general with disloyal subcommanders more interested in the political gains from military service than being students of war or even good soldiers marches out past his supply lines at the orders of a figurehead ruler who couldn't strategize his way to victory of a casual gateway match against player half his age gets massacred by a Solar Circle and their armies blazing in the afterglow of Exaltation in the fervent belief that their cause is both holy and just.

Sounds about right, even if the forces weren't evenly matched in white-room simulations. I admit that hundreds of Dragon-Blooded dying even in this scenario is hard to swallow, so I suggest we say they were under-staffed DB-wise with various unExalted dynasts filling military positions that should have been Dragon-Blooded for that type of campaign. In the Realm view of 'more pure Dragon-Blooded, not many Dragon-Blooded' even losing a few high-Breeding Exalts would lower the Tepet stature in Realm political circles even with the vast majority of their low-Breeding Dragon-Blooded membership intact.

[Jen]

I wouldn't mind The Bull so much if there are some kind of fallouts from his battle with the Tepet, either all icewalker tribe having a schism in their rank, or the bargain he made with demons is beginning to bite his ass. Either that or made it so that he has never exist, the so called Bull of the North is just a tale made up by the once united icewalker (or Mirror Flag).

[Tikor]

Doesn't Compass: North have a sidebar with some alternatives on the Bull's identity/nature? Maybe it was another book...

[Zelbinnean]

I wouldn't mind The Bull so much if there are some kind of fallouts from his battle with the Tepet, either all icewalker tribe having a schism in their rank, or the bargain he made with demons is beginning to bite his ass. Either that or made it so that he has never exist, the so called Bull of the North is just a tale made up by the once united icewalker (or Mirror Flag).

I think it's been noted that there is some internal fallout in the Bull's confederation. Especially considering nobody in the Bull's circle has actual governance experience on the scale now necessary. Being a tribal chieftain or village headman is cool but now we're talking about empire.

Also lets discuss how it makes no sense for Haltan forces to operate so far west!

[Lioness]

The 2/3rds number is bad beyond number inflation to make the Bull of the North look impressive.

A Great House getting decimated by external forces should be the sort of thing that should make Realm close ranks in the face of an external threat and worry about who gets the throne later.
The situation we currently have is like Game of Thrones (simpler to go by the series than the books) if The Wall had fallen to the White Walkers in the first episode and everyone still cared more about who fathered Cersei's children.

[Murcushio]

The 2/3rds number is bad beyond number inflation to make the Bull of the North look impressive.

A Great House getting decimated by external forces should be the sort of thing that should make Realm close ranks in the face of an external threat and worry about who gets the throne later.

To be fair, Lioness, there's a fair amount of evidence that Realm is actually sociologically incapable of doing this on a macro scale. You can make the argument that Scarlet, who I think we can all agree thought she was going to live forever, designed the Thousand Mazy Paths too well; that the social structure of the Realm promotes so many people who are more concerned with political infighting and playing the great game then actually ruling well into positions of power that it will actually take an event far in excess of the Tepet defeat to make them unite. The unifying factor in the face of something like the Bull would, previously, have been the Empress imposing unity and actually making the Realm function. In her absence, it will not.

There's other evidence to back this up. Mask of Winters razed an actual important satrapy to the ground and is a quick jaunt across the Inland Sea, and not only is the Realm doing jack shit about it, people are actually trying to use it to their political advantage. The Bull is further away and less obviously powerful than Mask, so why wouldn't they react to him the same way?

Getting the Great Houses to unite in the face of an external threat is a high bar to jump over. I personally think it only happens with an outright invasion of the Blessed Isle or an explicit anti-Dragon-Blooded ideology managing to conquer a significant chunk of a direction. And even in the latter case, they probably ignore it if the civil war has already started.

[DrLoveMonkey]

The 2/3rds number is bad beyond number inflation to make the Bull of the North look impressive.

A Great House getting decimated by external forces should be the sort of thing that should make Realm close ranks in the face of an external threat and worry about who gets the throne later.
The situation we currently have is like Game of Thrones (simpler to go by the series than the books) if The Wall had fallen to the White Walkers in the first episode and everyone still cared more about who fathered Cersei's children.

That's inteesting, I never thought of it that way before. I always assumed because it was far away and they were rivals that people didn't really care so much. Thinking about it more though, what happens when the boats full of the broken wounded soldiers come back into the Imperial City with horror stories. Would the other houses still be saying "hah, stupid Tepet, glad that could never happen to us. Now let's get to work tearing apart their houses holdings!"

[Erinys]

It would make more sense if it was changed to losing a couple dozen Dragon-Blooded, including non-Dynast adoptees, rather than 2/3 of the House.
But the Tepet wouldn't have fielded an incompetent, inexperienced general when they had Arada.