Slaves of the Throne

[thenate]

The Exarchs are nasty tyrants that all tend to chew up souls to create their servant's servants.

Perhaps some of you have come up with other special purpose tools of the Seers and would like to share.

One I was considering:

1000 yard legion

The General makes servants out of soldiers. He can
make soldiers out of civilians, too, but that must have been already
done, including blooding them, before he can create a "legionnaire".

The magical recipe that creates a legionnaire requires a blooded
combatant who is attached to a larger unit killing in a cold-hearted
manner while facing likely death. Then, and this is the part where no
magic is helpful or required, they have to choose to do something
vicious to someone or something that they deem an enemy to their
group. (That needn't be under orders or even an external entity) A
variation exists where they can demand a person destroy a loved one to
blood them. This also works.

If the proper spells are active on the subject when this occurs, they
make all their rolls for Clarity as normal for the act, excepting only
that if they fail, they don't degenerate as normal, they lose Resolve
instead of Clarity. Their Clarity increases, but the triggers decline
and Composure increases by the same amount. (as a magical bonus) If
they degenerate to Resolve of 0, they finish the transformation and
lose their soul. As long as they are obeying orders, they suffer no
degeneration, however, as their mind is bolstered by the will of the
General and his servants.

Thousand Yard Legionnaires are clear in purpose and very obedient, even
to the point of walking into a hail of bullets.

[ArcaneArts]

I seem to recall someone once came up with a Chancellor based servitor that was a very disturbingly good take on "people are commodites." I should see if I can find it and link it here.

[21C Hermit]

I seem to recall someone once came up with a Chancellor based servitor that was a very disturbingly good take on "people are commodites." I should see if I can find it and link it here.

I think it's this?

https://forum.rpg.net/index.php?threads/mage-the-awakening-the-man-comes-around.591295/post-15629940

Though it's a roleplaying Actual Play post, and not a 'mechanics excerpt' post. (Unless I missed a post back there; I haven't followed that thread)

[KaiserAfini]

Some time ago I wrote an Exarch cult of the Chancellor that focuses on monopolizing the minds that create bleeding edge technology by transforming them into commodities. Its composed of 3 sub-cults, because they have structured it like an assembly line, each taking care of processing the unfortunate scientist into a different type of resource at each stop, before sending them off to the next.

They produce servant AIs, unknowing sleeper agents (via replacing the mind of victims with biochips) and brains in a jar atop cyborg spider bodies (like a twisted version of the B'omarr Monks from Star Wars).

[Isator Levi]

The Exarchs are nasty tyrants that all tend to chew up souls to create their servant's servants.

Perhaps some of you have come up with other special purpose tools of the Seers and would like to share.

One I was considering:

1000 yard legion

The General makes servants out of soldiers. He can
make soldiers out of civilians, too, but that must have been already
done, including blooding them, before he can create a "legionnaire".

The magical recipe that creates a legionnaire requires a blooded
combatant who is attached to a larger unit killing in a cold-hearted
manner while facing likely death. Then, and this is the part where no
magic is helpful or required, they have to choose to do something
vicious to someone or something that they deem an enemy to their
group. (That needn't be under orders or even an external entity) A
variation exists where they can demand a person destroy a loved one to
blood them. This also works.

If the proper spells are active on the subject when this occurs, they
make all their rolls for Clarity as normal for the act, excepting only
that if they fail, they don't degenerate as normal, they lose Resolve
instead of Clarity. Their Clarity increases, but the triggers decline
and Composure increases by the same amount. (as a magical bonus) If
they degenerate to Resolve of 0, they finish the transformation and
lose their soul. As long as they are obeying orders, they suffer no
degeneration, however, as their mind is bolstered by the will of the
General and his servants.

Thousand Yard Legionnaires are clear in purpose and very obedient, even
to the point of walking into a hail of bullets.

Is this a thing for Changelings?

Not experiencing degeneration risks seems like a bit of a minor benefit compared to existing servitors. Unless it's meant to say that being under appropriate orders means they can act like they have a Resolve?

[thenate]

It was intended to be a minor side effect, more than anything. The benefit is simply that they become a part of a larger whole, like a drone. That could use some polish, clearly.

The idea is that, where the other Ministries make 1 or 2 servitors, these guys convert warriors in the grinder steadily. Thus, they build up servants easily in wartime and immediately use them to control the flow of a war and gain potential tools later on.

Maybe: As the spells scour the souls of the warriors, they tend to lose sight of self. This makes them easier to convince to do things that harm them, as they decreasingly care, but as this continues, the group to which they belong becomes paramount. All effects that would normally be enhanced or limited by self are transferred to the group. Just before complete loss of soul, the group is more important than life. After, the group is the self for any practical purposes, so the warrior responds to anything understood as harmful to the group as if that was directly harmful to the self i a normal mind. (Meaning powers that are limited by self harm, for instance, are so bounded regarding harming the group and not the warrior.)

While obeying orders from the group, the subject gains a 3 die concentration bonus and the 9-Again property. If the order is a combat function, improve that to the rote quality. The servants of the General can claim authority over military groups and issue commands, provided some sort of rationale is provided for any orders that seem detrimental to the group explaining how the group benefits.

(Souls may not be utterly lost in this condition. Touchstones might be able to call back to what remains of the person.)

Dunno. still bouncing around the back of my head, I suppose. Clearly some pieces of the notion remain a bit unclear and need polish.

[ArcaneArts]

The Exarchs are nasty tyrants that all tend to chew up souls to create their servant's servants.

Perhaps some of you have come up with other special purpose tools of the Seers and would like to share.

One I was considering:

1000 yard legion

The General makes servants out of soldiers. He can make soldiers out of civilians, too, but that must have been already done, including blooding them, before he can create a "legionnaire".

The magical recipe that creates a legionnaire requires a blooded combatant who is attached to a larger unit killing in a cold-hearted manner while facing likely death. Then, and this is the part where no magic is helpful or required, they have to choose to do something vicious to someone or something that they deem an enemy to their group. (That needn't be under orders or even an external entity) A variation exists where they can demand a person destroy a loved one to blood them. This also works.

If the proper spells are active on the subject when this occurs, they make all their rolls for Clarity as normal for the act, excepting only that if they fail, they don't degenerate as normal, they lose Resolve instead of Clarity. Their Clarity increases, but the triggers decline and Composure increases by the same amount. (as a magical bonus) If they degenerate to Resolve of 0, they finish the transformation and lose their soul. As long as they are obeying orders, they suffer no degeneration, however, as their mind is bolstered by the will of the General and his servants.

Thousand Yard Legionnaires are clear in purpose and very obedient, even to the point of walking into a hail of bullets.

I suppose my two questions are 1) Why these when there are the Myrmidons, who do much the same thing but with magical punch to back them up? and 2) why the emphasis on the soldier's having to make a choice to become this? Part of the idea behind Servitors is that there are some things that are too horrible to be done to people no matter who or what they were except to a mind that only prizes the utility of they become, the ultimate commodification of peoples and persons. For as horrible as the actions and results of a serial killer are, for example, them getting turned into a Grigori is, even for the most unsympathetic, disturbing to consider.

I think it's this?

https://forum.rpg.net/index.php?threads/mage-the-awakening-the-man-comes-around.591295/post-15629940

Though it's a roleplaying Actual Play post, and not a 'mechanics excerpt' post. (Unless I missed a post back there; I haven't followed that thread)

I think someone made a post mechanizing this, or something David said.

[ArcaneArts]

A quick idea to poke later:

The Millstones, Servitors of the Kyrian Ministry
At the end of the day, humanity on the whole are the accessories of the Exarchs, as anyone lesser than the Great Men and Women of the history are merely there to add flavor to their grandeur-even their enemies exist only to highlight their power and glory. The King is the robes they wear, the crown they bear-and the servants they command. The Peasant are the rags they wear, the hunger they bear-and the pitiful fellows who need their help. A secret to power to remember, though, is that a True King is truly the King without these things, and that man who prizes their accesories too much is worn by them, burdened now until they too become ornament. Of course, what is a weakness in one way can be strength in another, and it's to this end that the Millstones are created.

The Kyrian Ministry maintains and takes advantage of social stratification and stagnation, enforcing castes, classes, inborn wealth, gender roles to prevent any sort of mobility. They keep the kings kings and the peasants peasants, and they are most interested in making sure no billionaire gets a conscience and donates their entire wealth to charity and become a monk, or that a luden truly rises up and out of their poverty-or, even worse, brings their community with them. They employ a wide array of means to this end, but when dealing with individuals who threaten to demonstrate weaknesses in the system, taking advantage of social connections is a particularly big tool in their box.

Millstones are people who have had their Fates ripped out of them violently by a particularly odd Ochemata of the Ruin, who then weaves the whisper of what they could be into a reflection of a target's fate, creating a cursed destiny that makes them a part of the target's reality. They quickly find a way into their life, and eventually become entangled in their interests, desires and themes. The Millstones allow their targets to be more of who they are now, making the highs of their life seem all the more worth it and making the lows seem all the more bearable. Most importantly, the Millstone's struggles and concerns become important to the target-and Fate conspires against the Millstone in such ways that the target will always feel a pressure to aid them, or bring them along with their own interests. Anytime a person gets a really good investment plan that'll help them move out of their parent's house and into their own apartment, the Millstone has some kind of financial crisis. The wealthy socialite who sees a cause to pour themselves enough wholly has a Millstone who suddenly find's their social life under threat, who needs their support in the elite spaces if they're gonna hope to be metally and emotionally okay.

The tragedy of Millstones is that without a target's fate being attached to them, they're never really going to be okay or get things to work out for them-they can't actually have a future they can work for or reach just by keep going forward, or even much of an idea of who they are in the moment, let alone who they could be in the future. Their time between employment is an ongoing rootless misery where nothing seems worth commiting to or abandoning, only finding color and flavor in life when the Seers in charge over them pin them to new targets. They never think it odd that when the things that make up who they are eventually seems to back around to one person who shows such promise, if only it weren't for the people in their life. Sleepers and Sleepwalkers have to struggle with the fact that their way forward to their own desires eventually have to cause some kind of harm to the Millstones, and Mages who realize what's going on with them aren't in that much of a better place-even the most unscrupulous of them who might try patching their soul with other souls will find that the metaphysical stitching eventually unravels and falls apart. All the better for the Kyrians, on the whole- anyone who does manage to break a Millstone off of their own fate, even by sheer force of will, are likely to walk away with a new selfishness and jadedness is all the more likely to be helpful in keeping them from considering mysteries that would lead to awakening or building a world just that much harder for the Exarchs to grasp.

(hmm, we'll see how I feel about it after some time.)

[The Kings Raven]

I feel the obvious solution to a millstone is to find them a symbiosis with someone who is already happy right where they are and finds fulfilment in helping others.

More generally though. I don't find the idea that horrific, when I think for a parallel I think of parents who gave up their personal ambitions and got a full time job to provide for their kids. Its quite common for them to have zero regrets.

[orathaic]

I feel the obvious solution to a millstone is to find them a symbiosis with someone who is already happy right where they are and finds fulfilment in helping others.

More generally though. I don't find the idea that horrific, when I think for a parallel I think of parents who gave up their personal ambitions and got a full time job to provide for their kids. Its quite common for them to have zero regrets.

Rather opposite, i feel so disgusted by this i don't even want them in my game... Parasitic entities which need to be killed but happen to be human; put them all in a pocket dimension and be done with it!

[TempleBuilder]

The duality of humanity, indeed. Personally, I like their concept. If there is any game where their themes can be explored well, it’s mage. After all, what separates them from children, and the elderly? Is passing them off to people who want to be caretakers really a moral choice? Aren’t we all at the end of the day parasites, that survive off the destruction of other life? Could Life itself be considered parasitical, by speeding up entropy, and slightly speeding up the eventual Heat Death of the Universe? All very interesting questions. I would note though if these Millstones appeared in a game with personalities similar to friends and family, I would have…concerns.

[ArcaneArts]

One of the things to remember about Servitors, asides from expanding the types of antagonists that a Storyteller can throw at players, is to challenge people who wield infinite cosmic power in regard to how they use that power by presenting clearly exploited and damaged people and asking whether it's worth the effort of trying to undo it.

From a certain perspective, any Grigori formed from a Sleeper wrapped in a Shroud of Observation is basically just a metaphysical case of victim-strapped bomb defusal-and if you know any EOD specialists, they'll tell you the easiest way to deal with a bomb is to blow it up, which is why victim-strapped bombs are the general nightmare, because the military generally tries to avoid needless casualties in those scenarios. Bringing this over to Mage, unwrapping a Grigori sleeper deprives the Seers a potent spy, and, hell, technically gives you a tool. All you have to do is kill someone. By contrast, you can try unraveling an Imperial work of magic while interested parties are probably seeking with an excess of resources both material and physical, all for....what, just a life?

Servitors tempt you to think in Seer terms by effectively rendering states seemingly unconquerable and not worth the effort, by commoditizing people. No matter what you do for a Myrmidon, the oath tongue still controls them. No matter what you do for a Hollow One, they still don't have a self. No matter what you do for a Hive Soul, they're (probably) still held hostage by a smart Seer. They want you to give to give up on them, because every time you do, you get that much closer to seeing the world the way they want you to. And it really is contrasted with how minimal the returns for success are, because it is a lot of work for not a lot of returns. The Pentacle usually just shrugs, accepts the tragedy of it all, and then murder away. That says something.

Anyways, on the Millstones themselves, while I reject the notion that there's no horror to the scenario, I will admit there's something anemic in the current form. They're a social obstacle with an effective basis for a Fate-based Wasteland sort of mechanic to employ, and borrowing some ideas from Loyalty Touchstones from Deviant feels like a thing to happen, but there's definitely a lack of pizzazz. In a way, they're basically just another flavor of Hollow One, and while they work for the Seers long term planning and manipulation, they lack a certain level of way to be engaging for player characters (though again, their presence can Fate-blight a player's attempt to persuade certain figures certain ways-and boy howdy, does that very scenario invite you start thinking of the world in terms of great people who can actually effect change versus those who are not and thus can't). But then again, Kyrian as a Ministry is primarily a group of sociological engineers and repairfolk, reinforcing barriers and calcifying social structures. To a certain degree, their Servitors are always going to be a social stop gap and anchor.

I dunno, it needs something. I'm not sure what, though. I might try modelling them in Deviant (yes, that has become my go to for designing Servitors in theory before redesgning them with Mage mechanics, can you blame me) and see if something pops out at me. I feel like there's something in "Millstones have the shadows cast by the Destinies other people have."

[TempleBuilder]

Horror personal horror tends to not be so horrible from on high. My best advice would be to make it personal. Make them frighteningly aware of how they've become black holes of human effort. People tend to like those that help them, and it hurts to know that those you care about would absolutely be better off if they didn't put the time and effort into you. Have them run away, as far as they can before they fall apart, only to find that through an incredible chain of unlikely coincidence, they managed to make things even worse than before. Have them shout and scream, and do anything they can to not hurt their target, only for it to all end in tears. Even death shouldn't keep them from being a burden, with their grave constantly needing to be protected and cared for.

Secondly, don't have them obey Seers. In fact, make them do everything in their power to hurt or kill those that did this to them, and have them watch as their every effort hurts those they care about, without the Seers lifting a finger. Maybe, maybe if they cooperate with their target, they might be able to hurt the Seers, but more likely they will just end up as a damsel in distress to them.

I don't know, seems like it has a punch to me.

Edit: I approve of modeling in Deviant, great theme synergy.

[ArcaneArts]

Secondly, don't have them obey Seers.

Uh...I hope you can appreciate how I run into a spot of trouble in trying to reconcile how a hypothetical Servitor of the Seers of the Throne...should not obey Seers.

Out of the four main examples, only the Hive Souls have anything resembling typical Sleepwalker agency, and they're controlled by the dual forces of having a gilded cage and smart Seers keeping a body in their ready presence to afflict the whole of the person. Otherwise, free will is a question mark for Servitors.

[TempleBuilder]

Uh...I hope you can appreciate how I run into a spot of trouble in trying to reconcile how a hypothetical Servitor of the Seers of the Throne...should not obey Seers.

Out of the four main examples, only the Hive Souls have anything resembling typical Sleepwalker agency, and they're controlled by the dual forces of having a gilded cage and smart Seers keeping a body in their ready presence to afflict the whole of the person. Otherwise, free will is a question mark for Servitors.

Unlike the other examples, you are playing with Fate themes. It doesn't matter what they want or intend to do anymore, they have ceased being important people whose choices matter, except to be a burden to someone greater than them. If they do contently obey the Seers, nothing has changed from when they don't. They will fulfill their role now, no matter what they do. Why put in the effort of providing comfort to tools if they will do what you want no matter how you treat them?

Edit: I don't know, it makes sense to me. It's basically my insecurities regarding free will made manifest. If it's not a good suggestion, I apologize.