Oramus Charmset Project (DEAD)

[Alexander]

"In this world, there is no truth. The truth is made later on and overwrites what comes before it. Real truth doesn't exist anywhere." –Beatrice, Umineko

"For the first time, I felt honoured at being allowed to compete in this game of truth and error, and witches as a human. And ironically, that taught me that the truth is not necessarily only one when I believed that only one truth existed. By just broadening my field of vision a little, I can see a truth that is completely different. And no matter which one of the truths, if you can only see one of them, they will not be the right answer. Ah, in my life until now, I wonder how many truths have I turned away from because I was blinded by some trivial truth? This is, the truth, of the world." –Furudo Erika, Umineko no Naku Koro ni

"How can this be real?" I whispered. "I mean you... you... where you come from. Your world. It is so beyond everything I've ever known. And you would... you would take me to the Pumpkin Ball?"―Serra Elinsen, Awoken


ORAMUS, THE DRAGON BEYOND THE WORLD

Oramaic Urge (The Urge to Mystify)

====​

As from here. I welcome the volunteers:

The Great Me I have charisma
Crawling_Chaos Grant us forbidden wisdom, oh Transcendental One
Jarudazuigu Burn with the power of ten thousand fluffy suns
frozenchicken Never underestimate what an ice bird can do

We have discussed before about what this is about, so after necessary greetings between those who don't already know the others....

....

...Let's start. We shall begin with the words of the Immortal One, Revlid-sama:

Question: How should I go about developing a Devil-Tiger?

Well, first off is your Excellency. Describe the nature, personality and behaviour of your character, in the most archetypical, exaggerated manner possible. Try to hit somewhere between 200-300 words. Include an action it can always enhance, and behaviour that absolutely forbids use of the Excellency. Make sure it can be trivially applied in most situations, while banning certain specific approaches.

After that, you've got the rest of your General Charms. Sorcerous Enlightenment can be a little tricky, but if you just follow the cues of existing Yozi initiations you'll be fine - one kind of spell that gets bonuses or becomes cheaper, another kind of spell that suffers penalties or becomes more expensive. A similar assurance applies to Ascendancy Mantle, which just needs to make the Exalt's life harder or include some kind of obligation. Mythos Exultant is the hardest, because it's a stunt modifier, and the most obvious changes - more motes, more Willpower, even more dice (not recommended) - have already been applied. Ultimately, it's a thing that gives you resources, so work out what resource your Devil-Tiger needs and have the Mythos Exultant give it that - Kimbery can afford to spend health levels, Malfeas can afford to blow through motes, She Who Lives in Her Name can burn Willpower like joss paper, Theion has a bottomless supply of Conviction channels, and so on. If you go for a specific Virtue channel, recall that motes or Willpower are (in that order) far more vital than Virtue channels, so you don't want to duplicate Phoenix Renewal Tactic, because it's crap - ideally you'll get a Virtue channel in addition to your rewards, with some sort of mild restriction to balance it. Theion (and my own Isidoros) Mythos Exultant is a good example.

After - or more likely, alongside - that, you've got all your other Charms. The advice here is simple - two trees, one that describes how your Devil-Tiger understands the world, the other describing how he manifests within the world. The root Charms for these generally manifest as some sort of mental/sensory enhancer and some sort of physical enhancer, respectively. In the former category, Malfeas has "I know who is weaker than me", Cecelyne starts with "I intuit the nature of spirit-slaves", She Who Lives in Her Name has "I can tell truth from lie", the Ebon Dragon says "I understand darkness and lies", Adorjan has "I survive through murder", Kimbery gets "I know the proper nature of relationships", Theion has "I know the worth of my servants". I gave Isidoros "I understand that my whims are paramount". In the latter category, Malfeas is a thing of self-inflicted pain, Cecelyne is a being of desolation and desert, Adorjan is fast as the wind, the Ebon Dragon has no real fixed shape, Kimbery is a creature of water, and Theion is divine rulership embodied. She Who Lives in Her Name is made manifest only through her philosophy, and so gets just a single tree. I made Isidoros into a force of weighty destructive force.

Your Charms progress from there, with the vast majority sitting at tier-2 and tier-3. This generally manifests as a handful leading off each root Charm, with the more core tier-2 Charms spawning a bunch of upgrades and variants - only specialist effects go any deeper.

But first of all you want to do your Excellency, because the guiding principle of all Charms is "how does knowing this Charm make my character act"? If the answer, viewed as coldly and logically as possible, isn't "like the Excellency" then it's probably not a good Charm. This applies most obviously to Charms that forcibly alter the character's behaviour, by changing their definition of a Virtue (and take care to consider - does the Yozi have an alien view of a Virtue? Or just a low rating?) or applying some kind of compulsion or penalty, like Witness to Darkness (you are worse at telling the truth) or Murder is Meat (victims don't count as people), or Mother Before Daughter (I can never betray my loved ones or ancestors). Such Charms tend to be chokepoint Charms - placed in such a way that you have to buy them to get to other, more universally-applied or juicier bits of magic (though they should still be useful on their own), to force you to pick up more of the Yozi's nature in claiming their power.

However, it also applies to Charms that come with no such direct obligation - Mother Sea Mastery does not penalize you for staying out of the water, it just means that you've spent 8-10xp on being better at acting in the water. Therefore, you're more likely to spend time in the water, where the advantage is yours. This is something of a chicken-egg thing - why would you get Mother Sea Mastery if you didn't want to spend time in the water? However, it's also a temptation of sorts. If you have Mother Sea Mastery, you're wasting a purchase if you don't spend time in the water, and getting in the water is always an option, one open to you more than anyone else. It even applies to Charms that you activate - Green Sun Nimbus Flare is a really good offensive tool. It also causes horrendous sickness, leaves corpses twisted in charred agony, condemns slain foes to millennia of torment, and terrifies those who see it inflicted. If you use it, you are acting like Malfeas' Excellency tells you to. If you upgrade it, you are increasing your investment in acting like Malfeas tells you to. And why wouldn't you upgrade it? All the upgrades are so good.

Once you've got all that down, it's just the balance of individual Charms that should concern you. Avoid duplicating existing capabilities where possible. Compare to published Solar, Abyssal, and Infernal capabilities, but don't be afraid to make changes on gut instinct, and always try to switch things up in an interesting and characterful fashion. Ask yourself if you'd ever take such a Charm (since you're making this set specifically for your character, this shouldn't be a problem). Make sure to include a distinctive aesthetic. Edit, re-read, rewrite, compare, edit again. Best of luck.

......................

On the note given above - you know what's really good about Infernal Charmsets? I mean, unique to the way they work, not the fact that the published material was mechanically better written and more suited to the system than its peers.

It's that they produce, more than any other setup in the game, more than any setup I've seen beyond "have someone else RP the possessing entity", a powerset with its own motives. A Solar's powers will never fight him. A Sidereal's powers will never strain under her grip. A Lunar's powers won't do things he didn't want them to do. A Terrestrial's powers won't have their own agenda. An Infernal who picks up Malfeas Charms has to deal with the fact that his powers want to hurt people.

Not in the obvious, fight-for-dominance-in-a-metaphorical-mindscape sort of way, but in the sense that these powers were designed to be perfectly suited to a specific personality, and in some instances themselves work to shape and model that personality. If you are that personality, then the powers work perfectly, and at this point the Charmset has 'won'. Jackie Estacado has given in to the urgings of the Darkness. Ling's been eaten up by Greed. Siegfried's been taken over by Soul Edge. Johnny Blaze has surrendered to the insane drive of the Spirit of Vengeance. Negi Springfield's been consumed by Magia Erebea. Harry Dresden's reached an accord with Lasciel. Cletus Kassidy has found his soulmate in the Carnage symbiote. Ichigo Kurosaki has been defeated by his inner Hollow. Jaime Reyes has let the kill-instincts of the Blue Beetle run wild. You're still in charge, but you're doing exactly what the Charmset 'wants' you to do.

If you're not that personality, you have to wrestle the round peg into the square hole over and over again. You have to strain and adapt and compromise to do what you want, albeit the way your powers want to do it.

Infernal powers - unlike any other in Exalted - really have a life of their own. Out of a selection of character types whose only real common point is "I am awesome", the Infernal is the only one whose powers can be an antagonist within their own story. That's their most distinguishing point. If you have access to Kimbery's Charmset, you might as well have her as a siren-devil sitting on your shoulder, telling you to act like her. You don't have any such thing, of course (outside of stunted Essence-training-meditation), but you really might as well, because you, as a player and as a character, know that there is power to be had in acting like her. In doing what she wants. And the more of her Charms you pick up, the stronger that "voice" becomes, because there is more and more power to be found in becoming her. And it's entirely up to you, no Virtue rolls or Willpower expenditure or unnnatural mental influence involved, just pure player/character decisions. How marvelously clever.

That realization is what it would take for Metagaos to open his Charmset, I think, barring PC-level plot intervention. The understanding that, in doing so, he gets to infect the Exalted, make himself a part of them, in a way they can never ever defend against.

Click to shrink...

This is the Guide to structure Primordial Charmsets, the trend since 2014.

Even more, the man offered words of advice directly to the Great Me:

Very basic advice for Charms, to start off with:
1) Check similar effects to see how they were done. Don't be afraid to steal wording. Don't be afraid to completely depart from precedent if you feel it makes sense.
2) Be aware of how your effects combine with all the others available to your character, and account for it. Try not to devalue other effects, unless you're deliberately doing so because they're crap. Conversely, try not to create effects that can be overpowered when used in combination with another.
3) Obey basic cardinal rules. Don't fuck with perfects, don't allow mote-positivity, and so on.
4) Have a clear idea of what you want a Charm to do before you write it. A Charm that ignites a sword is one thing – but what does this do? Increase damage? Incite fear? Cauterize wounds? Set victims on fire? Choose, or your Charms will be muddled.
5) Rewrite your stuff over and over. Simplify wordings and iron out vagueness.

Next, for Yozis:
1) Have a clear image of how you want your Yozi to behave. Use characters from other media as templates, if necessary, but have a solid understanding of what behaviour and beliefs your Yozi promotes, and which they scorn.

1a) Use this to write the Excellency, which should be two paragraphs between 200-300 words total, the first focusing on the Yozi as a character, the second on the Excellency as a tool. It should have actions it can always enhance and actions it can never enhance – a personality is as much about restrictions as possibilities. Avoid too much reference to things you can't do without Charms – rather than telling us that Malfeas burns things with emerald fire, it's more useful to tell us that he obliterates his enemies with absolute cruelty, because that's something a person can do and emulate (as opposed to a purchase of Green Sun Nimbus Flare).

2) Make sure you have a strong aesthetic in mind. This is one of the things that separates Yozi Charms from many others – a clear image of what each Charm does and how it looks in action. Contrast to the Solar model of letting players customise their effects.

3) Split your Yozi in two. This isn't an absolute restriction, but it's one that most sets follow and works pretty well for this sort of set-up. One tree is rooted in "how the Yozi relates to the world", and the other is rooted in "how the world relates to the Yozi". Malfeas has one tree that starts with the power to tell if someone's weaker than him, which leads into Charms to punish people with eternal hellfire, order them around, brand them as his slaves, and so on. He has another tree that starts with the power to ignore pain by injuring yourself, which leads into Charms to warp his body in horrific ways, forgo sleep or real food, and armour himself in scars. Ditto with Kimbery, Cecelyne, and Theion.

4) Charms have a logic which follows on from the previous Charm. Each Charm is a statement about the Yozi, so each of the two trees starts with a statement about the Yozi – "what I am" and "what you are". A second-tier Charm - that is to say, one which only requires one of these Charms - is a statement that follows logically from a first-tier Charm. A Charm which requires that second-tier Charm follows logically on from that, and so on. Provided it suits the Excellency and logically proceeds from the statement made by its prerequisite, you're golden. This means that the statements Charms make can "drift" as you go on – particularly significant statements often become "bottlenecks" in the trees, which means that you need to buy them to access a great many subsequent Charms. If you notice a bottleneck, it's often worth it to include some characterful drawback or quirk that a) encourages the right behaviour or b) ensure that anyone who learns it is prepared to make that sacrifice for the Yozi. Nightmare Fugue Vigilance is an example – powerful Charms like By Agony Empowered are locked behind it, but buying it means you'll never sleep without nightmares.

5) Only gate very powerful or characterful Charms behind Excellencies. Most Infernals aren't going to have more than one Excellency - maybe two, if they're really wasteful. Adding an Excellency prerequisite to a Charm means you only want people who have seriously dedicated themselves to that Yozi acquiring the relevant Charm. This might be flexible Overdrive tech, or a tree that totally changes how someone plays the game – Cecelyne's wishing tree is a good example, the Ebon Dragon's Face in the Darkness isn't.

6) The nature of Yozi Charm sets, described above, means you'll often end up with "blobs" ("branches" sounds too distinct) of Charms that roughly streak into the same theme, with distinct blobs budding off from them at particular points. To put it in other terms, you'll write a Charm is a statement, and then lots of Charms that are merely expansions or elaborations on that statement (part of the reason why Yozi Charm sets have so many upgrades). It's only the one distinct-but-proceeding Charm-statement that actually branches off into its own blob. It's best to work out roughly what these blobs will be – and how they proceed into each other – ahead of time.

Click to shrink...

So, after reading that I think you would agree we need, first and foremost, come up with a "clear image of how you want your Yozi to behave". In this case, Oramus.

I know some of you have already an idea of Oramus, but just in case I am going to list which characters from other media may work as templates:

Master Therion (Demonbane)
Haermaus More (Elder Scrolls)
Q (Star Trek)
Discord (MLP)
Yakumo Yukari (Touhou Project)
Junko Enoshima (Dangan Ronpa)
Beatrice (Umineko no Naku Koro ni)

 

[Alexander]

Mystery
-Oramus as an incomprehensible being who loves to conceal for the sake of it.
-Oramus as a deliberately incomprehensible being who kindly conceals the Without so that we are not forced to view the horror and wonder of the other side.
-Oramus as an incomprehensible being who IS the Without, and does not bother to conceal, for his strange nature is its' own barrier.

Click to shrink...

I go for the third: all Yozi have a reason for being what and who they are, even if that reason is messed up. It's less "conceal" and more "being unable to understand" in Oramus' case.

I think it's time to crack open the (somewhat) large bag of notes and stuff I collected while studying Oramus. Please note I am listing the following just for the sake of completion, I am not saying everything is right and should be included:

Spoiler: Because it's a lot

-This is the charmset used for my quest on SV. Please note this was made for the sake of writing a good quest and it has several issues when dealing with official plays.
-The charmset (2) made by Arrghus during the times of White Wolf Forum.
-A beginning of charmset written by a fan of Umineko. Personally I would change a lot, like making "Confound" into "Mystify", but the general idea has merits.
-Octarine Angles of Impossibility: a SMA made for those who want to play as being an Eldritch Abomination or a Madoka Witch (sic).
-Eburnean Angles of Lacunae: a SMA made by Revlid. The Goddess Countless Purple Clouds is Yukari in Exalted, though the fandom mostly see her as a 3CD of Oramus.
-The Quicksilver Hand Of Dreams Style: sufficiently thematic to be good inspiration.
-The Isle of Daogu: EarthScorpion is fond of making random Exalted stuff.
-Gunstar Autocthonia Expansion The Realm of the Titans: Czernobog seems to like Star Trek.
-Kekkai: if Oramus governs boundaries, why not play with barriers?
-Xanichi the Eternal Maze (2)(3): a Devil-Tiger version of Tzeentch from Revlid. The man himself said he's okay with us taking inspiration from it.
-Terrifying Argent Witches: because come on, those are totally Infernal Lunars and everyone think the same.
-Ikanii: a homebrew Yozi from thinker. Could use a lot of work and rip-off Abyssals a little, but again good inspiration.
-Coruscant March of Constellations Style, Albicant Pursuit of Truth Style and Chalcedony Rhythm of Time: three SMA dealing with important concepts.

-The post of EarthScorpion that started everything.
-Prince of Brass (2) has some very interesting ideas.
-The Book of Ten Thousand Scorpions: look up Narrative Shredding Bolt, Dragon Breaks Reality and Walking Argent Impossibility


Oramus' Act of Villainy directly from Robert Vance's notes:

Reckless Devil Luck (but I prefer calling it True Chaos Stratagem)

Oramus is a creature of madness and passion, the firstborn child of chaos. So inscrutable and incomprehensible are his alien motives that they seem decided by little more than random chance to others. Whenever the Infernal uses a random method such as coin-flipping or dice-rolling to make a significant decision, roll her Conviction. Each successes removes one point of accrued Limit. The Infernal must face some risk of harm or significant consequences from at least one of the possible outcomes of her decision to qualify for this act of villainy, and rolls to remove Limit only after she has gone through with the chosen course of action.


Dialogues of Exalted Writers about Oramus:
Tales of Oramus
The Beyond of Oramus
Neph Talks Set Theory
Thoughts on Yozi Origins
The Beyond

My most recent versions of Oramus' starting Charms:

SENSES BEYOND SENSIBILITY
Cost: —; Mins: Essence 2; Type: Permanent
Keywords: None
Duration: Permanent
Prerequisite Charms: None

The mind of Oramus follows no logic that beings confused by mere contradiction can follow. Upon learning this Charm the Infernal gains the following benefits:

-She ignores all external penalties caused by insufficient or inappropriate evidence when performing Investigation rolls, Oramus' un-logic allowing for grand leaps of causation and correlation with exquisite grace. Note that this does not allow Investigation rolls to be made when they could not be taken.

-The mad are like open books for the Dragon Beyond the World to mould: all Derangements and active Limit Breaks are made Obvious to the Infernal with a successful Awareness roll; social attacks against characters with Derangements see the MDV of their target reduced by the derangement's mutation point total rating. In the case of targets suffering from Limit Break reduce their MDV by their Primary Virtue rating.

-Finally, the warlock's opened mind and its leaps of logic are hard for limited beings to follow: characters suffer an external penalty of (Infernal's Essence) to Read Motivation actions taken against the Infernal, and she suffers the same penalty to all efforts to explain her motives or the reasons for her actions. If the roll would have succeeded but for this external penalty, the other party is merely left with the assurance that the Infernal has reasons for what she does, though they are beyond their ken.

PATHS BEYOND WITNESSING
Cost: 2m; Mins: Essence 2; Type: Reflexive
Keywords: Combo-OK, Obvious
Duration: One action
Prerequisite Charms: Senses Beyond Sensibility

None have seen the secret routes through which the Dragon Beyond the World squirmed in the Time Before. Until now. While this Charm is active the Infernal can turn any active movement (generally represented by a Move, Dash or Jump action) into a stride through unknown realms, causing her to vanish and nigh-instantly reappear at her intended destination. She can be targeted as normal at the start and end points of her movement, but effectively does not exist between them, allowing her to avoid detection or pass between tight spaces, through treacherous ground or over empty space without issue. This does not let her move any further than she normally could, or "through" physical barriers that she could not normally bypass. Spaces warded against teleportation provoke a roll-off, with failure causing the Infernal to treat them as an impenetrable barrier for that scene.

A second purchase of this Charm allows the Infernal to extend its duration indefinitely, though this version of the Charm has a cost of (10 - Essence) motes. Additionally, she can take up to (Essence) willing or inactive characters she is touching with her on her impossible movements. Any character who does not know Senses Beyond Sensibility lose a point of Willpower from this journey as a Shaping effect, left disoriented by the eldritch paths behind reality.

(OOC: This Charm works as the Terrifying Argent Witch Charm Secret Path Step)

FORBIDDEN LORE SUSURRUS
Cost: 7m; Mins: Essence 2; Type: Reflexive
Keywords: Combo-OK, Illusion
Duration: Instant
Prerequisite Charms: Senses Beyond Sensibility

Within the demon realm the whispers of Oramus fill the blasted plain upon which he rests. To listen to them courts madness - but their secrets are beyond price. The Infernal uses this charm immediately after interacting with a target: she rolls (Manipulation + Lore) at difficulty 1 with an external penalty equal to the target's Temperance. If successful the Charm forces the player of the other character to declare the form of information that the character most desires to know - for example 'who killed my husband?' or 'where is the Scarlet Empress?'. If the Infernal later provides that information (which must be correct to the best of her present knowledge), the whispers worm into the target's head: as an Illusion effect he gains a Derangement with a rating no higher than the Infernal's degrees of success on the roll. As a second Illusion the target also gain an Intimacy of "Obsessive Fascination" towards the Infernal. The Illusions may be suppressed for a cost of one Willpower per scene each. They last until the character has spent 8wp on resisting this effect, or until the target finds the information to be false.


UNLIKE ANY OTHER
Cost: —; Mins: Essence 2; Type: Permanent
Keywords: None
Duration: Permanent
Prerequisite Charms: None

The Dragon Beyond the World is a paradox: he should not exist and yet does. Upon learning this Charm the Infernal's chakra realign in a configuration kin to the Beyond, suffering a single level of unsoakable Aggravate damage; thus channeled, his Essence becomes unlike anything seen in this world. The Anima is warped, of a color different from all that exist in Creation that cannot be described; the warlock's Caste Mark is undecipherable, appearing as a blur, a whiteout mark, a broken glyph and other mysterious signs. This Charm's effects protect against mundane attempt at reading the Infernal's nature, her Essence rating and the effect of her Charms. Against magical effects it provides (Essence) bonus successes to the roll-off. Charms such as All-Encompassing Sorcerer's Sight and Insignificant Embers Intuition return nonsensical results, such as unintelligible babble or broken words that cause headaches.

PRISMATIC PNEUMA EVOLUTION
Cost: 1+m; Mins: Essence 2; Type: Reflexive (Step 1)
Keywords: Combo-OK, Desecration, Obvious, Shaping, Sorcerous, Stackable
Duration: Instant
Prerequisite Charms: Unlike Any Other

The breath of Oramus consumes the simplicity of matter and replaces it with an infinite complexity of wonder and terror. The Infernal exhales a stream of mad radiance shinning with unrealized possibilities: this is a ranged attack with a range of (Essence) yards and aimed with (Willpower + Essence). When the Infernal activates this Charm she can pay one or more motes (to a maximum of seven motes per activation) and applies random positive physical mutations to the target based on the number of motes spent: pox costs one mote, an affliction costs two motes, a blight costs three motes, and an abomination costs four motes. These mutations are applied normally as a Desecration effect (though the Creature Of Darkness mutation does not count toward the cost of the Charm), and fade at a rate of (target's Essence) of mutation dots per day, rounding up if necessary, and starting with mutations of the highest value. The mutations themselves are Sorcerous and may be dispelled with the appropriate countermagic.

At Essence 3+ the Infernal may increase the cost of this Charm by one point of temporary Willpower to make any mutations applied by this Charm permanent, at the usual xp cost. Doing so prevents the mutations from being Sorcerous, making them immune to countermagic.

At Essence 4+ the additional cost to make mutations permanent is waived if the Charm is used on a willing target.

(OOC: This take inspiration from the Devil-Tiger Xanichi the Eternal Maze, from Revlid)

PS: there is more, but later.