Truly Ancient Dragon-Blooded

Obsidian Soul

Obsidian Soul

Member
It seems to me that the Dragon-Blooded have the ability to live as long as the Celestial Exalted.  They have access to Hearthstones, the Gem of Immortality and the Gem of Incomparable Wellness to name two, that stop aging altogether.  There are Artifacts that raise Stamina and/or Resistance, therefore directly benefitting the DBs in their aging rolls, and there are Artifacts, like the one the Perfect of Paragon controls, that stop aging altogether.  One could design Terrestrial Charms that could benefit them in their aging rolls and one could theoritically design Terrestrial Spells that halt aging for a time, perhaps a month.  They can summon Elementals and First Circle Demons with the life extending version of Largess and have them use that Charm on them.  There are mortal talismans that would add dice to any aging roll, and there are mortal potions that will extend any entities life expectancy.  And, finally, there is the high die pool of a Dragon-Blooded who maxs out Stamina and Resistance, which would not be unreasonable for a warrior or martial artist.


The point is that truly ancient DBs could exist without any problem.  As it stands now, I would not be surprised if there were a talon's worth or three of Shogunate Era DBs running about.  They would be peers to the Emperess and enourmously powerful in their own right.  They have learned how to survive, and they would be of the architype of the ancient martial marts masters and keepers of lost secrets, both types looking for worthy students.  One could also expect a scale's worth or three of First Age DBs still mucking about.  They would be the last survivors of the Usurpation and would have personal memories of the abuses of the First Age Solars.  One might even be able to find a fang's worth or three of the Primordial Age DBs, the last surviving foot-soldiers of the Primordial War.  All of the above would lack the awesome height of Essence of elder Celestial Exalted, but they would make up in that depth, in some ways, a breath of experience that should make any Anathema pause in thought.  


I personally use a population of Creation of three hundred million (similar to the Earth's human population over the course of most of the last two thousand years) and a ratio of one DB per 10,000 inhabitants.  This is based from some figures mentioned in Sidereal and Outcaste.  This would mean that there are around thirty thousand DBs, only ten thousand of them Dynasts.  The rest are 'lost eggs', Lookshy being the largest community of them outside of the Realm.


I am currently designing a Shogunate Era DB to use as the dius ex machina in a DB game, and I was wondering if any on you all had thought much about the possibility of such entities?
 
You seem to be only factoring old age as a cause of death for Dragon-Blooded.


I believe the statistic given in the 2nd Ed. DB book is something like 4 out of 5 for how many Dragon Blooded die before they reach old age. If you couple that with the 9 out of 10 death rate during the Contagion... noting that Exalted are just as vulnerable as anyone... your numbers are already reduced to 5% of your original estimate.


Factor in the internal wars of the Shogunate, the invasion of the Fae and the sweeping slaughter of any dissenters when the Empress took power (noting that the eldest and most powerful DBs were most likely to try and resist her), and many of your figures for remaining elder Dragon-Blooded reduce to the level that none remain.
 
The key word is if nothing kills said dragonblooded, and such an old bugger WILL have ways of surviving most things...


It's in theory to have an old man on the mountain type Dragonblooded whose older then any other exalt... even a fabled celestial exalt.


To get HIM or HER as your mentor... isn't out of the realm of possibility.


We also know what happens to mentors of PCs if they're any good. The laws of drama states that after learning from the mentor and going forth into the world, when next they meet... the mentor will have had something happen to him. And you get to hold him as he lays gasping, dying... struck down by a low blow by your nemesis.  :twisted:


EDIT -


ergo, the wise old DB will be -smart- and NOT take up a stupid disciple ^_^
 
Becuase after all, the old man on the mountain knows the laws of drama, and chooses to avoid them. I don't know about that...I should think after living so long and fully, eventually many such will have the wisdom to realize that fate will eventually get them...and take the time to pass their wisdom on before fate catches them unawares. There is a whole bureau dedicated to ensuring people pass on at the proper time...
 
Not a bad plot point.  With the numbers I'm workin with, I'm thinking that 1% of the DB population in Creation is Shgunate Era or older, the Emperess was just the most politically powerful of them.  I figure that a mortal human population of 310 million would result in a DB population of 31,000.  1% of that would mean 310 truly ancient DBs.  250 would be Shogunate Era, 50 would be First Age and 10 would be Primordial.


Another possible archetype would be the ancient Anathema hunter whose obssession with hunting down and killing threats to Creation has allowed them to avoid most political entanglements.  Imagine an 800 year old DB.  If they were minimally active, around the equivalent of one session per year, they would have something like 3000 XP.  If they were more active than that, not unlikely for an Anathema hunter, they would have proportionally more XP.  Assuming that 40% of their XP went to Charms, they could have learned 80 Celestial Martial Arts Charms (120 if they favord Martial Arts) which would give them mastery over seven Celestial Martial Art Styles (11 if they favored Martial Arts).  As of PG, there were twelve Celestial Styles that a DB could learn: Celestial Monkey (only if their Virtues did not exceed 3), Ebon Shadow, Hungry Ghost, Mantis, Righteous Devil, Snake, The Five Glorious Dragon Paths, Tiger and Violet Bier.  Such an individual would be quite capable.
 
You also have to factor in the Empress Assassination Factor.


Don't you think that she might have added a few other targets to her list?  Or a few extra targets fed to the Wyld Hunt over the years, assisted by Sidereal fun to reduce possible rivals?


I think your numbers are still a wee bit high.  And just because they're old, it doesn't mean they like each other much--in fact, a few old DBs have probably killed each other over the years without any manipulation from the Empress.
 
I don't suppose more than a small handful would exist givin the way the world is laid out.  Especially since the kinds of things that easily extend life (manses, etc) would be well fought over.  


But what you'd laid out seems plausible from a story perspective if that's where you want to take your game.  Perfectly reasonable.
 
And pray tell what do you mean by that Safim?


This is Exalted.  The Solars are not the only Exalted.  They are not the best Exalted, just the most powerful.  They were, if the First Age, insane murderous god-kings that had to be put down like the rabid dogs they were in order to save Creation.  


The Dragon-Blooded are Exalted, even the ancient ones, so by developing a game where the characters meet a few ancient DBs, I am playing Exalted.  I like DBs, they are closer to mortals and therefore more understandable than the Celestial Exalts.  If I happen to like throwing a newly Exalted Solar in their way to keep them on their toes, so be it.  The Solars have come back and must be either tamed or eliminated.  They are too unstable to allow to go free.
 
I believe Safim was referring to your tendancy to take the underdogs of Creation - mortals, Dragon Kings, and Dragon-Blooded - and make them more powerful in various ways.


Extrapolating from that, I believe the "wrong game" comment is an attempt by Safim to communicate the idea that, if you want to play powerful entities, (he believes) you should either play the entities that are already given as being powerful in the standard setting, or play a different game.


These are not neccessarily the views of this station.
 
And there's nothing wrong with wanting to make the under-dogs a more fair fight, but twisting the rules and creating scenarios to tweak the power level is maybe not the way to go.


Jakk's worst enemy, his most pernicious foe is a Heroic Mortal. A very smart and well connected Heroic Mortal.  Not powerful, not particularly dangerous, but the Circle of Thorns worst foe got that way because he's smart.  Very smart. Very tricksy.  Not in a rule smashing sort of sense, but a good villain sort of sense.


I think it's far more interesting to have PCs defeat a foe by being smarter than him or her. I think it's far more interesting to be beaten, or at least humbled, not by some powerhouse who just crushes you in power, but who outsmarts you.  Who does something you didn't expect, and sometimes so simple that the PCs smack their foreheads and just say, "Damn."


With underdog games, you have to be smarter than your opponents.  Just plain smarter. It's much more satisfying than just pulling off the Uber Combo of Doom.


One of my favorite characters of all time was for a D&D game where we took 0 level halflings, and took them to war against Orcs and Goblins.  Our characters got caught behind enemy lines, and a band of six halflings, with the biggest and baddest having a whole 4HP, managed to nail better than a company of orcs and goblins--by being smarter and faster.  Not powerful in the least, but you don't need lots of power to rig a dead fall, to throw rocks from high places, to trigger an avalanche, or to hide and slip past the Orcs and steal a bunch of crossbows and build a halfling size baffled wagon to ride them down.  Just took a regular wagon, slipped some boards over the top, strapped some goblin shields to the top, and the sides, and we had an armored APC with a dozen crossbows and two halflings firing, two loading, and two guiding our warhorses.


Took time, took preparation, and it took some imagination, but we managed to actually be effective against the bastiches, because we were smarter than our foes who relied on pure brawn.


DBs rely on teamwork, and better intelligence. I'd rather see that used more, than trying to buff them up over and over.


Smarter, not harder.
 
No need to get defensive.


I'd just say for someone enjoying the underdog you always find pretty obscuse methods of buffing the underdogs to levels above ordinary celestial exalts which leads me to the question. why play the underdog at all if you are only looking for excuses to make him or her all powerful? which in consequence leads to my original question.


oh and spare me the "rabid dogs" propaganda I am not here to exchange fanboiisms.
 
Jakk, your description made me think a lot about DC comix with Lex Luthor and Superman.  In any concevable way, Supes has the uppper hand: Speed, Strength, Invulerability, etc.  But good ol' Lexie keeps him on his toes with brilliant plans and backup plans.


In my superhero gaming in Champions, I let a powerful hero know just how bad it is to be Hunted by the Police.  A bunch of pathetic, mere mortals ripped his life to pieces by simple and determined detective work.  In Exalted, a powerful villian could be a high-ranking Guild member with a grudge.
 
Actually luthor does not really survive by cunning back up plans, superman is just too much of a do gooder to do what is neccessary.
 
Safim said:
Actually luthor does not really survive by cunning back up plans, superman is just too much of a do gooder to do what is neccessary.
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To bring this back into the discussion, consider a Dragon-Blooded character who has long life thanks to the patronage of a powerful goddess.  Killing him outright (that is, outside of a combat he initiated or stuck around for) will anger the goddess and cause the characters no end of trouble in Heaven (think "keep the Bronze Faction intimately appraised of the Circle's every move and plan" and go from there).  But within that, she's willing to overlook what the characters and the DB do - "they're just playing", so to speak.


The Dragon-Blooded may not be potent enough to face a Solar Circle in battle, but he remembers the First Age in exacting detail.  He knows where the tombs are, he knows where the secrets are, he helped bury any number of powerful artifacts or disabled warstriders, and so forth.  He knows secrets of the characters' past incarnations (perhaps from working under their command).  He's in a good position to announce the PCs' likely plans to their other enemies in exchange for some kind of consideration, and he's more than willing to screw them up to serve his own inscrutable purposes.


What does he want?  Maybe he wants his old commanders back, and he doesn't like this current crop of know-nothings.  Maybe he wants vengeance on the Sidereals and is willing to get the Solars' help to do it.  Maybe he finds the Immaculate philosophy an insult to the truth he knows.  Maybe he has a grudge against the reincarnations of the mad gods he once suffered under.  You can think of all kinds of reasons for him to make life hell for the PCs that don't actually involve him hating the PCs themselves.


This gives you a character able to amass wealth and influence, oppose the heroes indirectly, and able to do so with an effective "get out of jail free" card.  The trick is to make him not quite obnoxious enough to make the PCs willing to off him and face the consequences.  To help with this, give the guy other plots and goals that don't necessarily intersect with the Circle.
 
So... a 1500 years old dragon blooded who knows it all, is favoured by some goddess so killing him would anger her and his only way of getting at the characters is by selling out secrets?


This sounds far stretched and boring to be honest.
 
Safim said:
So... a 1500 years old dragon blooded who knows it all, is favoured by some goddess so killing him would anger her and his only way of getting at the characters is by selling out secrets?
This sounds far stretched and boring to be honest.
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You're welcome to your opinion.  However, please attempt to be constructive.
 
Not sure how to be constructive about it. I think when taking setting, mood and drama into consideration this dragon blooded is about the equivalent of an invasion by pink elephants singing wagner operas and flinging poo.
 
The issue I have isn't necessarily the buffing of the DB. It's saying that such a DB is closer to being mortal than a Celestial Exalt. If this guy's been around since the First Age, he's no longer human. His Exaltation has been lost in antiquity. He's going to be just as alien to humans as the Celestials. I'd say even less so, if you're talking about a newly Exalted Celestial Circle. They're much closer to their human roots than the First Age DB.


Having said that, that may be a much more interesting angle to take with a DB player group. So they're sent to hunt down a newly Exalted Anathema, the big, bad, baby eater from legend, and then they run into Ancient Dragon Blood, who's more alien and, possibly, more insane than the 'Anathema.' Basically, what do you do with an Uber DB who's no longer under the Dynast's control?


One other point - you mention the Gem of Immortality and the Gem of Incomparable Wellness. Isn't there only one of these gems apiece? And even if there aren't, there can't be that many of them, because they're created from 5 dot manses. And there just aren't that many of those in Creation. I could see a couple of 1000 year old DBs existing, but 310? I just don't see it. If they did exist, they'd spend most of their time keeping themselves alive. But that's just my point of view.
 
Perhaps the Ancient DB is worried that if the Solars (and Lunars) come back one of them may remember a transgression, etc., or possibly seek to depose him of the power he has worked for over his exceptionally long life span.


Who wants to lose your 1500 year old power base to some decades old Celestial Exalt (as well as your Manses, Hearthstones, and Artifacts)?


Hell, he could be running his own Wyld Hunts to keep the Celestials at bay.
 
Van77Man said:
So they're sent to hunt down a newly Exalted Anathema, the big, bad, baby eater from legend, and then they run into Ancient Dragon Blood, who's more alien and, possibly, more insane than the 'Anathema.' Basically, what do you do with an Uber DB who's no longer under the Dynast's control?
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I hope you dont mind me stealing this! awesome!
 
Well, they never give a firm number on the exact size of Creation but, based on the scale given in the 1E Dragon-Blooded and Haltan books, Creation seems to be around 100 million square miles, 250 million square kilometer for all you all using metric, roughly half of the total area of the Earth.  Around 50% of this seems to be underwater, with 20% of what's underwater being covered in the Ice, so only 50 million square miles of land, 125 million square kilometers, around the same amount of land as the Earth.


In Savant and Sorceror, it says that Demenses average a five mile, eight kilometer, seperation (pp. 49-50, Demense Numbers).  This means that each Demense has an average area of influence of around 18 square miles, 45 square kilometers.  We will square the circle, just to make the calculations easier, which will give each Demense an average area of influence of 25 square miles or 64 square kilometers.  This would mean that there are roughly 2 million Demenses in Creation.  Of these, 95% are Terrestrial, 1.9 million, and only 5% are level 5, 380,000.  Of course, there are underwater Demenses at the same frequency, but they are of little concern to most of us.


While there are 380,000 Level 5 Terrestrial Demense on land in Creation, the vast majority of the one's outside of the Realm are undeveloped.  They were probably capped, unless there were extraordinary reasons not to do so, but their Manse were probably destroyed during the Contagion Wars or self-detonated due to lack of maintenance after most of humanity died from the Contagion and the Fair Folk invasion.  As the Blessed Isle seems to take up 6% of the land surface, it probably has no more than 23,400 Level 5 Terrestrial Demenses, all of them capped.  


The problem that the DBs of the Blessed Isle have is that their are blessed few of them capable of building a level five Manse.  It requires eight dots in Craft (Architecture) and Occult and seven dots in Lore, all three of which can be achieved with a high Essence DB with a modest artifact or two.  The problem is the Resource 5 per month construction cost.  One assumes that while the Great Houses could afford a hundred Resource 5 purchases a year, it would take some serious arm twisting to get them to spend 15% of their budget on one project.  Mnemon could do it, but anyone else would have problems.  If the Realm has difficulties doing it, it is unlikely anyone else could do it.


The level five Manses in the Threshold probably have not weathered the centuries well.  If more than 10% of them have survived, I would be surprised.  Of these twenty thousand or so very powerful Manses, they are probably occupied by the Realm or Lookshy, the homes of powerful gods or elementals or the property of very experienced and very powerful Outcastes.  A Shogunate Era DB who has survived to the Time of Tumult probably qualifies for the first and probably does not need the protection of anyone.  They would probably rule a small kingdom or, at the very least, influence the mortal rulers of a medium sized nation.  


Concerning uniqueness.  While it is true that every Hearthstone is unique, the effects need not be.  After all, there are hundreds of thousands of 2000 Honda Civics in the US and each is unique.  They each have a unique history, a unique look and unique quirks caused by minor imperfections due to unseen flaws in the manufacturing process and to less than perfect maintenance.  While they are all unique, they are still Honda Civic and, unless they have been very badly maintained or improved greatly, do the same damn thing.


I do like the underdog.  A DB who has survived eight centuries has probably been smart and lucky.  It is true that they become more elemental than mortal, but they are still closer to mortal than any Celestial Exalted of the same age.
 
One should recall, however, that there is a lot of variance between Hearthstone power levels. The Gem of Incomparable Wellness is at the higher scale of power even within the Level 5 range, and as such would only be created by unique areas, comparable to the the Seat of Pasiap or the Imperial Manse, places that are not Level 6+ only because the mechanics don't allow for it.


Besides this, there are clear elemental associations in what Manses do. To have a Manse that makes a stone that lets you control plants, you'd need a Demense based on wood, and a wood-aspected Demense must be in a forest or similar location. You can change a Demense, but the possibilities are limited.


Thus, getting a hearthstone that makes you immortal would require either Wood (giving you life), requiring a forest, Earth (Permanace) requiring a mountain or cave... the point being, the vast majority of Creation's environments, a significant factor in your calculations, cannot produce such a hearthstone, reducing the numbers significantly.
 
Oh I agree.  We have to look at the numbers though.  A Dragon-Blooded starts making aging roll at age 250.  The difficulty caps out at five when they reach 290 (1e, Dragon-Blooded, p. 282, Multigenerational series).  A DB should have around 1150 XP by the time they reach age 250 (230 years of experience after character creation).  An Earth Aspect should have Stamina+Endurance of at least 10 by this time.  If they are concerned about aging, they could have one as high as 17 for aging if they have an Essence, Stamina and Endurance of 7 and three dice in Aging specialty for Endurance.  If they are especially concerned about aging, they could design and construct a level three Artifact using the rules in Savant and Sorceror to give them a +6 Endurance, +6 Resistance, why not, and a +4 Stamina, all useful in other situations, but especially useful when resisting aging.  With a die pool of 27 to resisit aging, they would, on average, roll 13 successes and the likelihood of failure would be around .1%.  


Thus, any DB could use a modestly powerful artifact to help them survive old age for a long time, even if they did not have exceptional access to geomantic assets.  As DBs make aging rolls every 10 years, the cumulative likelihood of failure tells us that such a DB will not fail a roll, on average, until their 720th try, seven millennia from now.  They are highly unlikely to die from a natural disease or poison as well, so a very bad accident or violence are probably the only sources of death for such a   DB.


Of course, violence is a common end in the Second Age, so most DBs will not live a fraction of that length.  There will, however, be those who survive, which is why I say 1%.  If you want only .1%, .01% or 0%, it is equally valid, as there is nothing in the canon to tell you that you are wrong
 
And violence is very common when one of your gazillion enemy families learn that you are trying to craft things to make you live even longer and become even more badass ;P
 
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