Shining Lotus Sage
Avatar of Vanity
It Is the Tide
On the east wall hangs a scythe. Its blade is red with probably-rust, and the grips have fallen out of the snath as the wood rots and withers. The scent of pig shit has faded almost entirely, but the breeze that followed you in through the doors of the old barn is stirring up the first hints of something far worse. Ki-lan said the arsonist had fled into the barn and never emerged. Now that you're here, you understand why she and her guards had waited outside. Even before your eyes adjust, while the heap of bone-white in the corner is just indistinct mass and color, you can tell that this place is unclean.
"Mother's piss," hisses a young man as he stumbles. The layers of leather and pewter hanging too loose for him serves mostly to add weight and catch on roots. There hasn't been a real threat for it to save him from since he first put it on, but metal armor makes him an official soldier. Since the real ones all pulled up stakes one night and vanished over the mountain pass, the symbol of authority is as important for keeping order as the ability to use it. That's the idea, anyway. The scout who pulls him out of the mud this time might have a different impression.
A dozen stocky foreigners sit hunched around a camp stove, trying to wring enough heat for beans out of soggy mangrove planks. They could have used a few of the inland trees, but haggling with locals over which ones have spiritual significance never goes well. Better to take scrap along, says the quartermaster. The porters scratching at embers probably wouldn't agree, but they're not paid to have opinions, as the caravan's complement of fairy-eaten labor serves to remind them.
It Is the Tide is a story about making do. About the suffering that can't be escaped, because the world is flawed and broken. About the necessary sacrifices between now and tomorrow. It's also about the things that creep out of the broken parts of the world to make wholly unnecessary sacrifices, and what you want to do about that.
You can be a hero, if you find the strength. The world certainly has room and need. But if it were easy, there would be more of a crowd. People do what they have to, and the Night Mother grows fat and powerful on their sacrifices. Especially the unnecessary ones.
This will be a forum-based game using large swathes of Exalted's setting. Familiarity will help, in so much as you will be able to make a lot of assumptions about the world. It will use almost all of the mechanics from Legends of the Wulin, to really capture the kind of cinematic action and passion-centric drama I like to work in. Familiarity will mostly help me, here, but I'll teach the system to anyone who's interested. It tends to the crunchy, but the numbers are just abstractions to help establish narrative power.
I'm looking for 4-5 players. Up to 2 tricksy shape-shifters, if you like. The remainder will be glorious, demented, hideous, or macabre, but uniformly Excellent. Pray that mere excellence is enough.
(Trigger warnings all over this motherfucker. I'll be enforcing fade-to-black standards for both sexual and violent content as the site and social norms demand, but I have a lot more leeway with dead bodies than I do with the living. When the curtain comes back up, the evidence might be ugly.)
Paging Drs. @Grey and @Random Word
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