Winged Cat
Who are you?
It's a mote! It's a fruit! It's several campaign hooks.
Artifact 1
(In short: cumbersome low-dot mote-battery Artifact. If kept inconvenient, it works for most campaigns; with extensive infrastructure, such that potions can be made, it should be limited to over-the-top campaigns.)
The moteberry bush is among the oldest artifact designs in Creation, easily predating the Primordial War, even predating humanity. Some claim it was the first true artifact forged by less-than-godly hands, but this is impossible to know for sure. Its original designer was one of the Dragon Kings whose souls were destroyed as the Primordials fell, though it has been reinvented countless times since. Whatever its nature, it is closely tied with the Unconquered Sun and Creation, but Ignis Divine has no recollection of having created it.
It is an unassuming plant, with short green leaves and rarely more than a foot in any dimension. If left untouched, it grows five berries - one each at dawn, midday, mid afternoon, sunset, and midnight - which fall off 25 hours after budding as the next berry in its time slot buds and ripens over the course of 1 hour. If the plant spends at least 1 minute out of any 25 hour period outside of Creation - Elsewhere, the Underworld, Malfeas, Autochthon, beyond the Bordermarches, or even in Yu-Shan - or does not receive at least an hour of direct sunlight for 25 hours, it stops producing berries until 25 hours after the next time it receives at least an hour of direct sunlight while in Creation. It must be in good soil for the sunlight to count, although it uses no nutrients from the soil: a potted bush in the desert will keep producing until the soil in the pot completely dries out.
The berries wither away if not consumed or used up within 25 hours of leaving the bush, whether they fell off or were picked. (Thus, someone carrying a potted bush usually has 10 berries available: 5 that fell off in the past 25 hours, and 5 on the bush.) If consumed by an Essence user, each berry restores 1 mote over the course of 1 minute (roughly 60 ticks, or 1 long tick). A second berry consumed during this minute will not start taking effect until the minute is up (i.e., there are no previously consumed berries taking effect), a third would wait until the first two minutes have passed, and so forth (so for example, a commander in mass combat could recover at most one mote per long tick this way). Any Essence user who consumes more than 5 moteberries in an hour runs the risk of addiction: for each additional moteberry, roll Willpower+Essence vs. (the number consumed in the past hour - 5); failure incurs -1 mote/hour respiration rate for the next month to a minimum of 0, not counting external sources such as hearthstones and moteberries. It normally does nothing for a non-Essence user, although one version - the original version, some say - of Essential River Channeling involves eating one moteberry per hour for a day (requiring at least 2 bushes, with careful attention to the order the berries are consumed in; messing up this order, or the accompanying meditations to control the motes, has the usual effects of a failed Essential River Channeling as the motes get out of balance inside the mortal's body). Despite their nature as fruit, moteberry Essence is decidedly Solar-aspected.
Berries can be preserved via thaumaturgic rituals, making wines, whiskeys, and powders, though the rituals quickly approach the complexity of making artifacts - and indeed, several moteberries, fed in over the months it takes to make an artifact, can count as an exotic ingredient. These distillations are rare and almost never for sale; the few times they have been, were in areas and times where extreme Essence use was anticipated on a regular basis, such as the most Essence-intense First Age wars where kilomotes were regularly flung about. Many Exalts have written about how convenient it would be to simply carry about a ton of preserve, imbibing more motes mid-battle, but in practice that much preserve is never available outside of those areas and times. The very act of setting up the farms and presses to make significant quantities readily available tends to presage such a period, and history does not yet record any case where the other sides in local conflicts did not soon gain access to their own supplies. (Mechanically: moteberry wines and similar can only be purchased in over-the-top campaigns, or settings with enough infrastructure that more powerful wonders are routinely available. In these cases, the exact numbers should be tuned to the setting's needs; for instance, artifact cars or spaceships might run on distilled moteberries, and there might be large farms using moteberries to convert solar power to liquid fuel, in which case said fuel should be as cheap or expensive as the setting demands. In other settings, even Resources 5 can not buy them if they exist at all; setting up the infrastructure to make them involves significant industrialization with all the side-effects thereof, equivalent to setting up multiple factory-cathedrals.)
Based on the evidence of the First Age, it has been theorized that the sort of highly industrialized workforce that could reduce the cost of these consumable artifacts to a practical level, tends to lead to industrialized warfare conducted more by machines than people. As machines do not generate prayer, many gods have a problem with this. Most of them do not actively hunt down the remaining moteberry bushes - even moteberries have their own god, and he means well enough that few gods can stay angry at him - but it is a Severity 1 offense to openly display moteberries in Yu-Shan. The god of moteberry-fueled machines is usually locked away in a Yu-Shan sanitarium; any crafter in Creation that builds enough infrastructure to set him free, is often rewarded with dreams containing thousands of years of proven designs.
In general, unless kilomotes are at hand, the only such distillates an Exalt has will be ones the Exalt has made, which takes long enough to produce useful quantities that Exalts often have better things to do. (Preserving the juice of a moteberry is a Difficulty 2 Craft (Wood) action that takes 25 hours - starting the moment the berry is removed from the bush - and requires a basic workshop. The result is mechanically identical to a moteberry, but lasts a year and a day, and artifacts - specifically, anything that uses Essence but does not have Willpower and natural mote respiration (and thus potential for addiction) - may use more than one at once without the usual delay. A master's workshop lets one crafter tend to up to 5 batches at once instead of its usual bonus; a flawless workshop, 25 at once. A factory-cathedral or other ideal workshop is required for higher volume production. See above notes on setting-dependent Resource costs for the result.) For most uses, essence capacitors are far more practical than potted moteberry bushes: they can be placed inside things, still work if taken indoors/underground/to other realms (somewhat), are smaller and less fragile, and so on - and unlike distillates, essence capacitors don't use themselves up. (Even when they are cheap, 60 measures of juice per hour over several days tends to be more expensive than 90 level 1 essence capacitors and the mounts to rotate them every third of a day.)
Merely planting moteberries does not produce a new bush. The procedure to make a new bush requires a moteberry to be impaled on a carefully sculpted root structure of pure orichalcum, over which the berry's juice flows and blends to form a new plant if the miniature prayers to the Unconquered Sun were engraved correctly. If all goes well, branches and leaves grow over a few months, then berries begin to form once the plant has stopped growing.
Each moteberry bush is an Artifact 1. They can most commonly be found above Jadeborn cities, who grow them for sale and for ingredients. They rotate their farmers, aboveground at most one month out of every three so as not to accumulate Deviancy.
As they need assistance to reproduce, there is obviously no truth to the rumor that, after the Usurpation, they grew wild over suddenly-abandoned lands. Equally untrue is the belief that some of them were modified to grow Essence cannons powered by the moteberries of several bushes, to ward off predators. It is ridiculous speculation that there are literally fields of arms just waiting to be plucked. And it is absurdist fantasy to believe that some of them have been given sentience, mobility, and control over their unthinking fellows to enable these developments, waiting for the proper time to burst out of the ground and destroy humanity one city at a time, repeatedly killing any ghosts until they succumb to Lethe so as to leave no witnesses. It might be true that one sign of this is the lack of other types of plants in the area, the sentient plants having defoliated all competitors to promote their own kind, but surely all reports of that are just farms which of course have only one type of crop. Yes, even the cases of miles-wide farms where cities used to be: there are many more likely ways for a city to just vanish. There are no plans for the Jadeborn to use these as the gods used Exalts, to strike down their perceived oppressors without themselves attacking and violating their metaphysical bonds.
Artifact 1
(In short: cumbersome low-dot mote-battery Artifact. If kept inconvenient, it works for most campaigns; with extensive infrastructure, such that potions can be made, it should be limited to over-the-top campaigns.)
The moteberry bush is among the oldest artifact designs in Creation, easily predating the Primordial War, even predating humanity. Some claim it was the first true artifact forged by less-than-godly hands, but this is impossible to know for sure. Its original designer was one of the Dragon Kings whose souls were destroyed as the Primordials fell, though it has been reinvented countless times since. Whatever its nature, it is closely tied with the Unconquered Sun and Creation, but Ignis Divine has no recollection of having created it.
It is an unassuming plant, with short green leaves and rarely more than a foot in any dimension. If left untouched, it grows five berries - one each at dawn, midday, mid afternoon, sunset, and midnight - which fall off 25 hours after budding as the next berry in its time slot buds and ripens over the course of 1 hour. If the plant spends at least 1 minute out of any 25 hour period outside of Creation - Elsewhere, the Underworld, Malfeas, Autochthon, beyond the Bordermarches, or even in Yu-Shan - or does not receive at least an hour of direct sunlight for 25 hours, it stops producing berries until 25 hours after the next time it receives at least an hour of direct sunlight while in Creation. It must be in good soil for the sunlight to count, although it uses no nutrients from the soil: a potted bush in the desert will keep producing until the soil in the pot completely dries out.
The berries wither away if not consumed or used up within 25 hours of leaving the bush, whether they fell off or were picked. (Thus, someone carrying a potted bush usually has 10 berries available: 5 that fell off in the past 25 hours, and 5 on the bush.) If consumed by an Essence user, each berry restores 1 mote over the course of 1 minute (roughly 60 ticks, or 1 long tick). A second berry consumed during this minute will not start taking effect until the minute is up (i.e., there are no previously consumed berries taking effect), a third would wait until the first two minutes have passed, and so forth (so for example, a commander in mass combat could recover at most one mote per long tick this way). Any Essence user who consumes more than 5 moteberries in an hour runs the risk of addiction: for each additional moteberry, roll Willpower+Essence vs. (the number consumed in the past hour - 5); failure incurs -1 mote/hour respiration rate for the next month to a minimum of 0, not counting external sources such as hearthstones and moteberries. It normally does nothing for a non-Essence user, although one version - the original version, some say - of Essential River Channeling involves eating one moteberry per hour for a day (requiring at least 2 bushes, with careful attention to the order the berries are consumed in; messing up this order, or the accompanying meditations to control the motes, has the usual effects of a failed Essential River Channeling as the motes get out of balance inside the mortal's body). Despite their nature as fruit, moteberry Essence is decidedly Solar-aspected.
Berries can be preserved via thaumaturgic rituals, making wines, whiskeys, and powders, though the rituals quickly approach the complexity of making artifacts - and indeed, several moteberries, fed in over the months it takes to make an artifact, can count as an exotic ingredient. These distillations are rare and almost never for sale; the few times they have been, were in areas and times where extreme Essence use was anticipated on a regular basis, such as the most Essence-intense First Age wars where kilomotes were regularly flung about. Many Exalts have written about how convenient it would be to simply carry about a ton of preserve, imbibing more motes mid-battle, but in practice that much preserve is never available outside of those areas and times. The very act of setting up the farms and presses to make significant quantities readily available tends to presage such a period, and history does not yet record any case where the other sides in local conflicts did not soon gain access to their own supplies. (Mechanically: moteberry wines and similar can only be purchased in over-the-top campaigns, or settings with enough infrastructure that more powerful wonders are routinely available. In these cases, the exact numbers should be tuned to the setting's needs; for instance, artifact cars or spaceships might run on distilled moteberries, and there might be large farms using moteberries to convert solar power to liquid fuel, in which case said fuel should be as cheap or expensive as the setting demands. In other settings, even Resources 5 can not buy them if they exist at all; setting up the infrastructure to make them involves significant industrialization with all the side-effects thereof, equivalent to setting up multiple factory-cathedrals.)
Based on the evidence of the First Age, it has been theorized that the sort of highly industrialized workforce that could reduce the cost of these consumable artifacts to a practical level, tends to lead to industrialized warfare conducted more by machines than people. As machines do not generate prayer, many gods have a problem with this. Most of them do not actively hunt down the remaining moteberry bushes - even moteberries have their own god, and he means well enough that few gods can stay angry at him - but it is a Severity 1 offense to openly display moteberries in Yu-Shan. The god of moteberry-fueled machines is usually locked away in a Yu-Shan sanitarium; any crafter in Creation that builds enough infrastructure to set him free, is often rewarded with dreams containing thousands of years of proven designs.
In general, unless kilomotes are at hand, the only such distillates an Exalt has will be ones the Exalt has made, which takes long enough to produce useful quantities that Exalts often have better things to do. (Preserving the juice of a moteberry is a Difficulty 2 Craft (Wood) action that takes 25 hours - starting the moment the berry is removed from the bush - and requires a basic workshop. The result is mechanically identical to a moteberry, but lasts a year and a day, and artifacts - specifically, anything that uses Essence but does not have Willpower and natural mote respiration (and thus potential for addiction) - may use more than one at once without the usual delay. A master's workshop lets one crafter tend to up to 5 batches at once instead of its usual bonus; a flawless workshop, 25 at once. A factory-cathedral or other ideal workshop is required for higher volume production. See above notes on setting-dependent Resource costs for the result.) For most uses, essence capacitors are far more practical than potted moteberry bushes: they can be placed inside things, still work if taken indoors/underground/to other realms (somewhat), are smaller and less fragile, and so on - and unlike distillates, essence capacitors don't use themselves up. (Even when they are cheap, 60 measures of juice per hour over several days tends to be more expensive than 90 level 1 essence capacitors and the mounts to rotate them every third of a day.)
Merely planting moteberries does not produce a new bush. The procedure to make a new bush requires a moteberry to be impaled on a carefully sculpted root structure of pure orichalcum, over which the berry's juice flows and blends to form a new plant if the miniature prayers to the Unconquered Sun were engraved correctly. If all goes well, branches and leaves grow over a few months, then berries begin to form once the plant has stopped growing.
Each moteberry bush is an Artifact 1. They can most commonly be found above Jadeborn cities, who grow them for sale and for ingredients. They rotate their farmers, aboveground at most one month out of every three so as not to accumulate Deviancy.
As they need assistance to reproduce, there is obviously no truth to the rumor that, after the Usurpation, they grew wild over suddenly-abandoned lands. Equally untrue is the belief that some of them were modified to grow Essence cannons powered by the moteberries of several bushes, to ward off predators. It is ridiculous speculation that there are literally fields of arms just waiting to be plucked. And it is absurdist fantasy to believe that some of them have been given sentience, mobility, and control over their unthinking fellows to enable these developments, waiting for the proper time to burst out of the ground and destroy humanity one city at a time, repeatedly killing any ghosts until they succumb to Lethe so as to leave no witnesses. It might be true that one sign of this is the lack of other types of plants in the area, the sentient plants having defoliated all competitors to promote their own kind, but surely all reports of that are just farms which of course have only one type of crop. Yes, even the cases of miles-wide farms where cities used to be: there are many more likely ways for a city to just vanish. There are no plans for the Jadeborn to use these as the gods used Exalts, to strike down their perceived oppressors without themselves attacking and violating their metaphysical bonds.
Last edited by a moderator:
