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[Lioness]

I’m still doing game stuff I just needed a break from documenting it and sometimes it flows better to explain entire story arcs in broad strokes. I thought I'd cover a place that's had enduring relevance to the events of my game.

Taeron

A city state in the southern Hundred Kingdoms, Taeron's geography is relatively unremarkable though well chosen by the people who settled the region in the wake of the twin calamities possessing natural barriers on three sides from dense woodland and a river.
Taeron owed its initial success to a trio of scholars who foreseeing...

[Lioness]

It also seems like something that could help people further distinguish the Eight Nations from each other. I notice that even after Compass: Autochthonia we're still prone to talking about the Octet like it's a monoculture. For example, Estasia's Half-Souled Amulets apparently originate from "gremlin-derived technology" which would be unthinkable if we were thinking about this in such general terms, so there's scope to be ideologically flexible here....

[Lioness]

Which is why I'd prefer them to come from further afield.

[Lioness]

My preference would be that any new Solars come from further afield having heard stories of someone like themselves fighting the Realm and his ability to live up to their expectations. It feels a more natural continuation of the story than fate throwing more and more Solar Exaltations his way....

[Lioness]

It depends. I've seen a lot of Dragon-Blooded games where PCs were absurdly well-connected due to the ease of taking a background/story merit to 5 dots in character creation....

[Lioness]

My problem with that circle is that it's always been presented as The Bull's Circle or simply "The Bull of the North" like there's one guy who just soloed the Tepet Legions. Most people can remember Samea but after that it becomes very forgettable in a way that seems wrong for Celestial Exalts, like the fact Ex3 felt able to kill off Fear Eater a character whose existed in the lore since 1st edition is a strong indicator of how much of a non-character he was.

So my personal solution for the Bull's circle is that his losses were predominantly among the Icewalker Solars...

[Lioness]

Mostly depends on how different you think Autochthonia is from Creation beyond the aesthetics.

It's pretty viable to treat that world as a giant industrial-looking cave inhabited by spirits that resemble robots and other forms of artificial intelligence, in which case most of the technology that's not provided by Alchemical municipal charms is a result of successfully requesting the aid of the AI spirits or tapping into whatever underlying systems they're part of. In some ways that represents a fairly realistic take on technology because very few people with expertise in a particular...

[Lioness]

I'm used to Bull of the North rants being more vulgar but it hits the key notes....

[Lioness]

Avaku's one of those Dragon-Blooded PCs who has this problem of being interesting in a way that's likely to be undermined by having too much to do with a sufficiently connected group of PCs.

That 2e core comic in particular is an incentive for someone with a Solar PC to want to find and recruit him as a minion, but getting him to jump ship like that would move the Denovah Household from minor to actively disgraced.

[Lioness]

As previously noted content creators moved towards Google Drive in the latter part of 2nd edition because it allows them to better control their content.
What we could do with in light of that is less a separate wiki content community and more an online archive to mitigate a purge of 3rd edition that could be brought about by variables such as Google changing their content policy....

[Lioness]

Hopefully there's not too much of a bottleneck....

[Lioness]

My instinct would be no.
If Enlightened Mortals could be said to have had a defining feature it was that despite whatever power was available to them, they were fragile compared to native essence users. In contrast to this, aura-users tend to absorb direct hits in a way that would be impressive to Exalts not focused on Resistance/Stamina....

[Lioness]

This is relevant to my thoughts on the matter.

Ultimately, the key difference between an auspicious sign and foolish superstition is power and privilege. A cadet house matriarch is in an interesting place for that because she's potentially very powerful in her own limited sphere but on the Blessed Isle they are likely to be reminded of their limitations. Back when the Scarlet Empress was around there might have been an additional incentive to have someone like this assassinated before they started to look like someone the Empress might want to adopt and groom as a future Great House...