Deathknights, doing the math...

crashmurdoch

crashmurdoch

New Member
So I was thinking about a new campaign featuring a Deathlord as the major antagonist for the campaign (yep, Mask of Winters). While thinking about that I thought back to the figures on where the various Solar Essence shard went when they were freed from the Jade Prison.


There were originally 300 or so Solar Exalts before the usurpation.


150 got loose and returned to creation to be reborn


75 Got taken by the Neverborn to create Death Knights


75 Got taken by the Yozis to create Akuma


This doesn't take into acount the 14 Solar Shards that created the Death Lords themselves.


Going by those figures the Death Lords had roughly 75 to split among them That makes about 5, a full circle, for each Death Lord. Does that sound right?


I only ask because it seems like some Death Lords, such as Mask of Winters, appears to have more. I know the Princess only made one, and he rebelled, and she's trying to keep him a secret from the First and Forsaken Lion, so that frees up a few....


I know there are no hard fast numbers in Exalted, but I thought I would bring this up and get some feed back.
 
Some (Lover, in particular) also corrupt existing solars, rather than use the shards from the prison breakout.
 
Just a couple nitpicks.


One: The Deathlords are just ghosts, not Solar Shards. They're the angry higher soul left after the solar in question got murdered. Granted, they're uber ghosts of doom endowed by the Neverborn with powers far beyond a ghost normally could ever have (like the ability to use Void Necromancy and all their Charms from life and such)...but they're still ghosts. Their old shards are still cycling out there somewhere...


Two: Only 50 got given to the Yozis, not 75...100 Deathknights, 50 Infernals.


I will concede their numbers don't take the dozen or so shards of those few Solars that managed to survive past the Usurpartion for a while (like those in the Invisible Fortress) into account with the Jade Prison business. Those dozen or so never got put in...yet they still say there's 300 Solars, and there were 300 in the prison. Go figure there. However, they cycled through reincarnation for centuries, giving the Wyld Hunt something to do...they didn't become the Deathlords.


But...on to the meat of the discussion...I'm pretty sure that not all Deathlords have the same share of the shards. Like has been said, the Lover has corrupted herself a few Solars into Abyssals...though she does seem to like to keep Solars as Solars, just her loyal minion Solars. The Dowager has a mere one Abyssal total (Shoat of the Mire), and so I assume that the others squabbled over the rest of her share, since she's obviously not about to use them...I suspect First and Forsaken Lion took Princess Magnificent's share (though she's managed to sneak a few away from him)...and so forth.
 
Which sort of begs the question, really, of what might happen if a Deathlord ran into (or more likely, discovered the existence of) their old Solar Soul Shard, complete with memories, ensconced in a shiny new Mortal Host? What if they found more than one? What if they found an entire circle of Exalts who had the shards of existing Deathlords?


Wouldn't that make for an interesting chronicle?
 
As Dracogryff said, with a bit of add-ons:


The monstrous managed to grap about half of the shard in the Jade Prison (with no number mentioned), so that leaves less than 100 shard to share between the 13 Deathlords.


Also, The Dowage is just not using the rest of the shards - yet. All her Shoat of the Mire versions has just been experiments on the way to make a full circle of Shoats.
 
The Lover Clad in Rainment of Tears seems to have been Bright Shattered Ice. At least she acts just like Bright Shattered Ice. AND she captured Arianna in the W/B Treatise. We have yet to see what she does about it.


But where do the books specifically mention that there were exactly 300 Shards in the Emerald Prison of Jade?


I think there were 13 Solars in the Invisible Fortress, plus two from Rathess, a Dawn died in Yu-Shan a few hundred years after the Usurpation and the Emissary might be one as well (so 16 or 17 total). Quite a number more were in other places that also got away (Pressed Beyond the Veil of Time kept a good number out of the Prison, plus many Nights got away, some of them were even from the big party). So a total of as few as 16 to maybe as many as 50 that weren't in the Prison. That's eight to twenty-five Abyssals down from the 100.


In my games, there are a variable number, usually on the larger end, of Solars that escaped. One of them is the main NPC in my current game (a First-Ager that actually took his whole city with him) who is helping/using the group as they try to straighten out Creation and drop-kick the Dragon-Blooded Realm (as well as a portion of the Bronze Faction) into Oblivion.


Unknown number of Solars (half of the Jade Prison's Shards, plus those not captured).


Unknown number of Abyssals (half of the Jade Prison's Shards, minus the 50 Infernals).


50 Infernals.
 
The Abyssal book is fairly clear. When the Deathlords broke open the Jade Prision, a good portion of the Exaltations escaped, but the exact percentage that got away was never given. The Deathlords snagged exactly 150 Exaltations from the Jade Prison, handed 50 off to the Yozis, and made the rest into Abyssals.


This is confirmed in the Lunar book, where Ingosh Silverclaws final vision numbers them. "Five score is the number of the dead princes. Two score and ten is the number of the green sun princes that break the world." For those who don't know what a score is, it means 20. 5 x 20 = 100.


If we assume an even distribution of Exaltations between Deathlords to start with, 9 Deathlords get 8 Abyssal Exaltations to work with, while the remaining 4 get only 7 deathknights.


Any Solars that escaped the initial purge are part of the 150 Solar Exaltations still untainted.
 
Except deathlords have already been corrupting solars (see Silver Prince and the Knight). We do not know for sure how many solar were corrupted, but there is a possibility that more or less 5 to 10 deathknights have been created this way.
 
I seem to recall that one of the early books noted the Bodhisattva and the Lover have more Exalts (rogue Solar as well as Abyssal) working for them than any of the others. That might have changed, I know there's been more detail about the DLs worked in since then.
 
Can anybody sit down with the Underworld and Abyssal book and write up a list to clear this up? Most of the Deathlord entries in the Underworld book are fairly specific as to how many they have. All I can recall is the..... dammit, the guy who lives in Bonetree and his three Abyssals.
 
I'll grant you that at least half of the canonical Deathlords have well-established Abyssal counts. What about the rest? The Silver Prince, Lover, First and Forsaken Lion, and possibly others (MoW or WiD) have multiple Abyssals of unspecified number. And once you include the Deathlords that aren't spelled out in canon...the numerical ambiguity is intentional, I should think.
 
From what we know of MoEP:A, there are 23 DK.


Unaligned deathknights:


- Fallen wolf of the Cutting Sea, Midnight, rebel from the Silver Prince (ex solar... so that's 101)


- Raiton, Moonshadow


Deathlord & Deathknights:


Bishop:


- at least one midnight apostate,


- Celebrant of Blood, Daybreak


- Harbinger of the Ghost-Cold Wind, Moonshadow (corebook abyssal)


Silver Prince:


- Ebon Siaka, Dusk


- The Knight of Ghosts and Shadows, Day (spy from the Lover)


Dowager:


- Shoat of the Mire, Dusk


Eye:


- Chorus at Midnight, Day


- Scar of Uproar, Dusk


- Red Famine (undetermined)


FFL:


- Walking on Laughter, Dusk


- Meticulous Owl, Day


- Shatterer of the Way, Moonshadow


Lover:


- Martyr to the Last Rest, Midnight: first born among abyssals


- Exquisite Pain, Day


- Melkin Fool in Red


Mask:


- Apostate in Tatters, Midnight


- Typhon, Day


- Prince Resplendent in the Ruin of Ages Dusk


Princess:


- Son of Crows, Moonshadow


Walker:


- Shard of Basalt, Dusk


- White Bone Sinner, Midnight


Is all I coud find.
 
Well there's the numbers that we can verify. You can easily use the known deathknight numbers to work out the proportions of the remaining 60-70 in your game. :D
 
Well, they are Ghost given access to their old powers and more by the Neverborn, as well as given part of a dead Primordial's self to give them power. Ghosts they certainly are. And they certainly lack Solar shards within themselves. But...just, perhaps is stretching it.
 
I've wondered what ever happened to the Prince of Shadows and his crew? They appeared the first novel trilogy ("Trilogy of the Second Age" I think?), which starts with "Chosen of the Sun" and features a circle of Abyssals serving the Prince of Shadows. It was never clarified for certain, but it was implied that PoS was a Deathlord with at least 3 Deathknights. Has there been any mention of these characters since that trilogy?
 
The novels never made it clear, he could be a deathknight, but if so, he's way more powerful than the other Abyssals working under him.


In those books he had powers that went beyond normal Abyssal charms, the other deathknights were afraid of him, and he even punished an Abyssal by changing his title to "Ratcatcher" and forbidding him to speak for like, 3 months. Not iron-clad proof of Deathlord status, but he was certainly made out to be more than just an "average" Abyssal.
 
I don't think an Abyssal's title is important to either the Deathlord he serves or the Neverborn and not itegral to the Black Exaltation. It's merely something to call the Abyssal when you order him out to the next nation to destroy.
 
Well, he does seem to be Lover's favorite Bishonen style pretty boy. Maybe she taught/gave him some extra tricks to play with. That and he does seem to like paying visits to the Neverborn directly to worship, now and again...which may also have...consequences.
 
Yep, plus IIRC said Ratcatcher was dead at one point and became a nemissary and got killed again (by the siddy Holok), and then was finally reborn again as an abyssal... not very canon :roll:
 
The early novels especially not only did not follow canon but had the unfortunate effect of warping the setting. One came out before the 1st ed DB book release, and falsely gave a lot of people the impression that a newbie Solar all but treated DB's as extras.


People took it as a given, then the book was release and some people were bitching(especially about the Dragon Styles) about wtf DB's should not be this powerful!


Much hilarity ensured.
 
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