Earthquakes and Volcanos solve everything!

cyl said:
Well, not be rude or anything, but I'd like to have a reference with that :)
I don't have my books handy, but I'll post it as soon as I find it. Hopefully someone will beat me to it.


Nevertheless, 1E Autochthonians makes an implicit statement to that effect, saying that Auto's 8 sub-souls are each more powerful than Gaia's 5ED.
 
cyl said:
He's not just the embodiment of fire, or the spirit of fire, or the heart of all fire. He is Fire. Every fire or flame or spark anywhere in Creation is Hesiesh.
Huh... not if you read RoGD. There are "just" the terrestrial gods responsible for maintaining the flow of essence at the elemental poles and through the dragon lines to protect Creation from the Wyld, but they are not the elements themselves... Hesiesh is not fire, the element fire exists without Hesiesh, but it is Hesiesh who slowly flows through the dragon lines of fire and maintain the elemental pole of fire... thus making fire a "living force". The element Fire exists with or without Hesiesh, Hesiesh only makes it work according to its function.
IIRC there was a time when a sixth element was proposed by the Primordials... I think that this means the Prims created the elements, then Gaia created the Elemental Dragons to maintain Creation with the elemental poles and the dragon lines, then finally the elementals were created by the incarnae. So the Elements exist without their Dragons, but the can't be functionning properly without them.
Correct on the essence that the Elemental Dragons are not the elements themselves, but the stewards of said elements. And where is this supposed sixth element thing? They did make the original elementals, but what's this about a sixth element? Page reference, sir.
 
Theion To, the vitriol element, which was abandoned when the Elements were created. It's in RoGD p. 73.
 
"Lenny" in this case being another name for "Malfeas"? I recall reading that Vitriol is one of his elements.
 
So to come back to the original questions:

Gaia woke those two dragons up again, wouldn't the resurgence of Earth and Fire essence throughout Creation work to severely reduce or even eliminate both the Wyld and the shadowlands?
The Wyld in Creation... sure.


The shadowlands, no, on the contrary, waking up the ED of earth and fire will only increase shadowland presence in Creation because mortals will die because of the natural catastrophies.


Even if a volcanic eruption, an earthquake, or a ravaging fire destroys a village, people will die... bodies will be burned but not buried, no burial ceremony will be made to ease the pain of the deads, so their souls are likely to remain here and cling on to their afterlife and become ghosts.


The barren land will be then marked by death, and the place should turn into a shadowland, unless something is done to ease the dead souls.
 
But in real life, volcanic areas are supremely fertile. A place that's covered in choking ash will, in just a few growing seasons, be a lush living paradise, with even more life than there was in it previously. Fire is destructive, but it is thematically linked in real-world mythology (which Exalted is based on) with purification and renewal - the way that death is supposed to be, in Exalted.


And if I recall correctly, natural disasters such as storms, floods and earthquakes cause "clean" deaths - that is, they don't cause nearly as many ghosts to rise as does war, disease and other "unclean" forms of death. Since shadowlands are formed by people becoming ghosts rather than just people dying (each passage of a soul to the Underworld is what tears the gap between the realities), they are quite unlikely to form as a result of volcanic eruption or earthquake. And if you make the case - as I already have - that the element of Fire is naturally purifying of the Underworld's essence, then the amount of shadowlands in Creation may well be reduced.
 
Oh, yeah!? Well I think this thread is merely you giving a good wank to one of your two loves: Gaia. :P Damned furries and their elemental agendas!
 
Shadowlands are created through great suffering and death. Most shadowlands are the sites of horrible tragedies. Great battles' date=' natural disasters, plagues and famines can all result in a shadowland, but they can be also be created by smaller, more personal tragedies.[/quote']
No other information has been published about the forming of a shadowland in the 2e corebook, not even MoEP: abyssals has enough information about it... We'll have to wait til the Underworld book comes out to have a 2e explanation of it.


But the 1e said natural disasters are a go for a shadowland.


Earthquakes and volcanic eruption create more shadowlands.


There can be a shadowland without ghosts actually... the shadowland is only formed by the presence of massive mortal suffering and death... regardless of the formation of ghosts. (but some souls surely will become ghosts in times of great suffering).
 
And Fire can only purify the spirit of the dead, the soul, not death essence, which is you will note released ONLY by mortals... no other living creature on the face of Creation produces death essence.


If Fire is the cause of death, and a shadowland is formed, then Fire is directly responsible for the shadowland.


I can't agree with you Juk, sorry... but this is just the way things were in 1e, they may change in the 2e (as with the Elemental Dragons).
 
Ok then...


But it would make sense if fire were naturally opposed to underworld essence.

This is a debate? That people care about!?
People don't need to care about it for it to be a debate!
 
Jukashi said:
Ok then...
But it would make sense if fire were naturally opposed to underworld essence.
I kind of like that, actually.


Despite it usually being attributed to the Sun instead, I've always liked to see pure expressions of the elements as "Holy"- even if in a lesser degree, I like Terrestrial stuff to have a strong connotation of purity.
 
Jukashi said:
Ok then...
But it would make sense if fire were naturally opposed to underworld essence.
I disagree again the two elements who are naturally opposed to Underworld Essence are wood and the element responsible for salt (wether you choose it's water or earth).


You don't cure shadowland by burning the land, but by rebuilding life over the land of the dead, salt only helps by preventing the shadowland from expanding.


EDIT: as for the Holy, I think all celestials at some point have a holy tag linked to a charm. So I guess it would mean Luna and the Maidens represent holiness as well as the sun.


It would be only logical since they were chosen to be the protectors of Creation.
 
Solars, or even Celestial Exalted, aren't the only ones with Holy charms, either. Dragonblooded include Refining the Inner Blade and Ghostfire Blade in their Melee tree, as Holy charms. (Though admittedly the latter doesn't say what this actually DOES...since not all Holy charms automatically do Aggravated Damage...) Life Swelling Sap Strike also is specifically a charm for fighting creatures of the underworld...if not an actual Holy charm. (Since it doesn't effect all Creatures of Darkness, but only a specific subset, and lacks the Keyword.)
 
cyl said:
EDIT: as for the Holy, I think all celestials at some point have a holy tag linked to a charm. So I guess it would mean Luna and the Maidens represent holiness as well as the sun.


It would be only logical since they were chosen to be the protectors of Creation.
So, "Holy" is just a tag that says "the high divine things in creation think you're bad, so you suffer from this tag"? It seems that holy isn't so much "HOLY" as it is "you're politically unfavorable".


Holy seems to work on demons (pieces of angry primordials) and the dead; why wouldn't Holy work on pieces of Auto-bot or Gaias souls?


If the incarnae and Autobot had a spat, would "holy" work on his 2nd and 1st circle, um, demons?


-g3 spouting nonsense-
 
Autobot went on a voluntary self-exile before the Solars got overly paranoid with him around enough to have him marked as an enemy of Creation, so I would say that Auto and his souls + Exalts would not be affected by the 'Holy' keyword.
 
Lets assume they wake up the ED of Fire and he manages to seal up all the shadowlands simultaneously....what then? Its not like he can do away with the underworld unless he can manage to cut the Neverborn up into chunks to go down the showerdrain of Oblivion. So, sooner or later a great deal of death will happen in one location and a shadowland will open up.


Likewise, I don't think that the ED of Earth can get rid of the Wyld whole cloth. Sure, he could beat it back to the utter borders of the original creation....but what comes after that? Its not like he can create more creation. Likewise, there are unshaped out there that are likely on similar powerlevel as at least the Incarnae.


It seems to me that the dragons are temporary solutions at best. If they really do cause that much collateral damage from being awake, then its trading shadowlands and wyld patches for every third city being Pompei.
 

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