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[LadyLens]

Agatae are fantastically beautiful, but in the way that gemstones and wasps are beautiful, not the way pin-up girls are beautiful.

Why do so few people seem to grasp this concept?...

[LadyLens]

Passing the Godzilla threshold means that the situation is so bad that there is literally nothing that can make it worse, so any plan with even the tiniest chance of working, up to and including the summoning of Godzilla, is on the table.

[LadyLens]

Enter the service of the Midnight Queen. We can fill a unique niche there, get paid regularly, and we'd have at least some protection. Moth's studies are just way too creepy, not to mention heretical.

[LadyLens]

I'll use a simple example: A terrestrial working, Ambition 1, that causes the stones of a village's fields, down to, let's say, three yards, to fly up, and arrange themselves on the paths of the village. Finesse 5, the stones just rise, and roll themselves on the paths, with the biggest stones serving as edging. They even make nice patterns! Finesse 3, no patterns, no edging, and maybe they bounce off some walls along the way. Finesse 1 it's downright sloppy. They cover the paths, yes, but they probably do some property damage on the way, and the surfoace is pretty uneven, and the edges don't...

[LadyLens]

Finally, the character might attempt to address failure conditions directly with her own Abilities and Charms, or through mighty sorcery. This is often an attractive option, given the prowess of the Exalted, but a leader off personally resolving problems may be neglecting other matters close to home.

This certainly reads to me as an encouragement of not using your characters' Abilities and Charms, especially with the entire rest of the section on dealing with failure conditions telling you how you "should" respond by applying your character's Merits....

[LadyLens]

That's the point of the passage in question: you're told not to use your character's actual Abilities and Charms....

[LadyLens]

I've not used the rules myself, but one thing that hugely irritates me is the section that basically says "Do not use your character's actual, personal abilities to deal with potential failures. You'll fall behind in the court scheming." In the example above, McCain should be using his Influence Merit, not Socialize. As you might imagine, this rather annoys me; what's the point of playing an anointed god-king, chosen of Heaven, if all you do is give orders any mortal ruler could give?

[LadyLens]

Very few first circle demons even have the potential to learn sorcery; they simply lack the mental scope for it. Most first circle demons are extremely monofocussed: The angyalkae, the harpists upon the strings of time, care nothing for anything beyond their music. The gylmine, the dancers before the saigoth gates, care only for the dance. The marrotes, the hopping puppeteers, desire only to build and rebuild constantly. And so it goes. If a first circle demon were to acquire sorcery and not be destroyed for it presumption, I would limit it to Terrestrial level.

A second circle demon...

[LadyLens]

We're likely best off either learning more about the occult, or starting a business of our own. Foreign trading takes a very long time to get established in, almost as long as we've been alive. So I think Business Management or Sacrificial Magic would be our best options. But human sacrifice is right out! Killing animals? We've done that; rats and pigeons are edible and disgustingly abundant.

[LadyLens]

Cleansing Flame of Pure Justice. And yes, that's probably a peasant rebellion getting quashed.

[LadyLens]

A headache? or perhaps a breakdown? (from point of view of the GM and the pattern spiders respectively) More seriously, Five-Fold Unity sound good to me.

[LadyLens]

Unknown. We don't have anything resembling a basis for speculation.

[LadyLens]

In 3e, sorcery works differently. You don't need a mote pool to make it work, you gather sorcerous motes via shape sorcery actions then cast the spell once you have enough. Apart from motes gathered through shaping rituals, sorcerous motes, if I recall correctly, and basically "use them or lose them."

[LadyLens]

In 2e, a mortal needed Occult 5 and to develop the Awakened Essence merit. In this edition, it's Occult 3, and the 5-point Merit "Shaping Ritual."

[LadyLens]

These are the shaping rituals from my version of the Salinian initiation:

A Salinan sorceror can draw strength from the bonds of family and friendship. Whenever she takes a shape sorcery action while within medium range of a character with a mutual Tie of love, friendship, or a similar emotion towards him, he may reap additional sorcerous motes equal to that Intimacy’s value (for example, four motes from a Defining Tie). A given Intimacy can only be tapped for motes in this fashion once per day, and the sorcerer cannot harvest power from unreciprocated feelings. Normally he may...

[LadyLens]

The purpose, however, was to make sorcery accessible to anyone who wanted to develop it. Not everyone will want to, any more than everyone wants to learn law, or medicine, or particle physics in our world. I've written up an initiation based on the assumption of a successful Salinan working for use in Ex3. Mortal sorcerors would be less uncommon, but sorcerors of any sort are still pretty rare, considerably less than one per village. I estimate, very roughly, at most one sorceror per thousand people, and it's probably closer to a tenth that many. Most sorcerors will only know one or two spells,...

[LadyLens]

Honestly, I'd call both Terrestrial, assume the changes are set on him (there's something about him that enraged sharks/causes sharks to not know he's there). Changing the natures of sharks is straight up Solar.

[LadyLens]

Thank you. The reference to the "fabulous" state of Creation made me wonder, given the well-established tendency to the ornate and heavily ornamented in Creation's aesthetics overall.

[LadyLens]

I'm not offended by your post in the least. I'm just puzzled. What do you mean by "gay" in this context?

[LadyLens]

On the Terrestrial level:

Pull the stones from a village's fields to the roads and paths.
Create high-yield grains.
Create dwarf conifers whose terminal buds are bioluminescent, for use in marking out paths.
Spin sunlight or moonlight or starlight into thread.
Enchant a spinning wheel so that it can spin almost anything into thread.
Create a wheel that turns perpetually of itself.
Make stones that glow as bright as a torch.
Make stones that are as hot as burning oak, or cold as ice from deep winter.