(not) Noticing the great curse.

P

Persell

Ten Thousand Club
I'm playing solars and our circle has been in the field long enough that we're all starting to break our limits. Here's my question: the great curse is, by all reports, supposed to be this subtle corrupting influence and therefore near-impossible to detect. So much so that even in the first age it was unknown. But these are the clues I have:


-One day you wake up and you're a solar. By all accounts this means you are evil, even though it doesn't seem that way.


-As time goes on you realize that long ago the world was ruled by solars and that they were probably not the nicest of people (we found a cook book that contained a recipe for mortal in brown sauce. Thanks 101 book titles list).


-You meet a dragon blooded who has been frozen out of time for a few centuries. She expresses surprise that you are all so (apparently) reasonable. Saying that solars are known to be prone to fits of passion.


-Shortly thereafter you and your circlemates begin to fall prey to very sharply defined bouts of human weakness. Your dawn caste for a period of pretty much exactly three days becomes exceptionally cruel (intentional cruelty) and comes out of it on the fourth day convinced he has been living in a nightmare (having watched one of our retinue be devoured by a hungry ghost etc.). Not long thereafter my character (a twilight) got hit by her limit which revolves around cynicism and brazenly marched away from a battle, even though a circlemate had just died, and rapidly became even more entangled with a second circle demon who basically was the one responsible for her circlemate's death. All without a shred of care. Both of these cases go sharply against what my character would expect from these two people.


Certainly this is not enough to be like "hmm. I know! the primordials must have cursed us" or perhaps not even to know that something supernatural was at work. But if we go on long enough for this to happen to all of us how does a character with an Intelligence of five not suspect that something is indeed wrong with the solar exaltation? It seems a lot easier to figure out than it's supposed to be. Any ideas?
 
pev said:
It seems a lot easier to figure out than it's supposed to be. Any ideas?
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I don't think it's supposed to be any great mystery that the Solars can be a bunch of huge assholes. However, I think it was always assumed that this was just part of their natures, not some external influence. If one assumes that the effects of the Curse are inherent to Solar Exaltation, then there is really no point in looking for a "cure".


-S
 
What Still said.


Yeah, it's always seemed like an overblown case of "That's just <insert ridiculously long and poetic Solar name here>. That's how he is sometimes. We deal with it."


Noticable, but rather difficult to trace back to the source.
 
To further expand on the idea, I think a since Solars tend to be larger-than-life types, with exaggerated personalities, it doesn't seem that odd to most folks in Creation that they also have exaggerated character flaws.


Quoth Silvio Dante from The Sopranos:


"A lot of top guys have dark moods. That winston Churchill, drank a quart of brandy before breakfast. Napoleon, he was a moody fuck too."


-S
 
Birds got to fly. Fish got to swim. Wolves have to eat things that bleed and kick up a fuss about the process. And Solars are crazy, crazy, crazy mofo's. Everyone knows that.  As far as everyone knows, you were cursed from the moment that you had that kooky Solar Shard slide into you.


Yes, it grants you all sorts of nifty powers, but it also drives you insane. Everyone knows this. Not a new concept, especially from the folks at WW who make it pretty much di rigor that anything that gets nifty powers has to deal with bouts of crazy as a price for the nifty powerz.


The Dragon Bloods, by virtue of their being touched by divinity, don't suffer this sort of madness. That the Solars go crazy after a while...that's a sure sign that they aren't Good.  Easy for the common folk to grasp. And, since your characters were all raised up on these stories, it's just assumed that Solars are Anathema for a reason. They are crazy bastiches with lots of power, and little control.  Being crazy is considered to part of the whole thing, not seperate.


And from what the stories tell, it just gets worse as you get older and more powerful. A virtueous man, raised in the Realm, would just ask forgiveness, and kill himself, rather than be used by powers like the Anathema.  It's a test. If you can resist the siren call of power, and just throw yourself off a cliff, you might be able to come back, maybe even as a Dragon Blood one day...but if you don't: you will succumb to the Ebbil that are the Anathema, and it will be a road paved with good intentions, which will make your betrayal of all that you love even more terrible...
 
Harsh :)


Sounds like my Solar needs to come out of her superhero phase and face the music. A circle-wide "I will kick your ass if you step out of line provided you return the favor" contract may also be in order. Assuming of course I can even get back to my circle without the dawn caste deciding to kill me. But that's another story.


On the other hand it seems like it will be fairly reasonable for a solar to blame this sort of thing on the shard rather than inherent flaws or at least try to. Not that anyone else will believe them.
 
Limit Breaks interact real closely with roleplaying.  Most of my players are fairly sedate sorts, and so Limit took a back seat in my campaign.  But one of the players, who's running the Zenith, was a harsh and hardcore enough PC that nobody would really NOTICE when her Virtue Flaw kicked in.  The behavior was just more extreme than usual.


I've found that Limit only really stands out when the PCs aren't really being larger-than-life personalities.  If they are, that's fine, that's how the default game is tooled.  If your PCs are all clear-thinking, 21st century rationalist types like most of the players doubtlessly are, then yes, suddenly snapping for a few days looks distinctive.
 
Just tell them "Hey, we're Anathema for a reason..."


Nobody said saving the world and stuff was going to be easy...
 
Limit Breaks interact real closely with roleplaying.  Most of my players are fairly sedate sorts, and so Limit took a back seat in my campaign.  But one of the players, who's running the Zenith, was a harsh and hardcore enough PC that nobody would really NOTICE when her Virtue Flaw kicked in.  The behavior was just more extreme than usual.
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This is a good point. In my circle so far usually it's only the character who broke their limit that really notices. When our dawn cast went into intentional cruelty most of us indeed thought he was just being unusually dark for a few days. I fully expect the circle will think my character ran away simply out of emotional trauma (or because they think she's an evil bitch, depending on who you ask). It's unusual behaviour but not inexplicable.


But the internal environment for the character is still different enough to leave them pretty confused about what happened to them for a few days that caused them to act in ways that don't seem like them. Unless of course they are not self-aware enough to realize this? Maybe this is the way a good solar should be?


I suppose the best fictional analogue would be when Hercules was sent into a rage by Hera and slew his family. He certainly didn't say "It wasn't me, Hera did it" even though he probably knew it was different enough behaviour that something was up.
 
pev said:
A circle-wide "I will kick your ass if you step out of line provided you return the favor" contract may also be in order. Assuming of course I can even get back to my circle without the dawn caste deciding to kill me. But that's another story.
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Wow - imagine an Eclipse sanctifying this as an oath.


"If any of us begins acting in a way that would threaten the success of our mission or endanger the lives of our Circle or those we protect, it is the responsibility of all to see that he is subdued, restrained, or incapacitated until he has again returned to his senses."


Or something like that. Trying to find a good IC way to express: "Y'all restrain me if my limit breaks. I'll do likewise for you"
 
pev said:
But the internal environment for the character is still different enough to leave them pretty confused about what happened to them for a few days that caused them to act in ways that don't seem like them. Unless of course they are not self-aware enough to realize this? Maybe this is the way a good solar should be?
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People do this every day in the real world.  People pick fights with their spouses, break up with their girlfriends, get into fistfights with their buddies, and so forth, and sometimes, these are actions very unlike their normal natures.  So they rationalize them, saying to themselves things like "they had it coming" or "I was under a lot of stress" or "I didn't really mean that, and they know it".


People don't like confronting the reality that they flipped out.  To maintain their sanity, their minds actively work to construct scenarios where it was normal, expected behavior.  I would imagine Solars do the same.  They may be heroes, but they are still human.
 
The bigger they are, the harder they fall.


And it works for vitues too, the higher the virtue the quicker it will lead to limit. The bigger the hero you are, the more you're gonna fall and the harder too, on top of that, high virtues mean more essence than someone of comparable essence score with lower virtues.


Nope, no one ever said it was going to be easy.
 
It's not just Limit you need to fear from high Virtues. Virtues dictate your behaviour. Eventually, you're just going to have to act the way your Virtues compel you to act because you just can't afford to spend the Willpower to go against it. Even if you don't have the Great Curse, Virtues rule you.  


Feels cheap, though, that you're essentially sabotaged to play anybody with high Virtues when high Virtue stuff is the stuff all of the epic shit they want us to do with the game is made of. And well . . . the return on high Virtues isn't exactly great. Spend a point of temporary Willpower under certain conditions to get at the most 5 extra dice.


If you play it like they want, you're fucked. You're not a hero, a human, or anything other than a Limit Break waiting to happen. You'll spend more time holed up in a cave crying or lost in some berserk rage than doing anything else if you improve those Virtues.
 
My PCs have Limit Broke about once in two years of game play.  The players aren't really well-suited to frequent limits, so I simply made it less of a focus.  I DID house-rule how Limit works to compensate, and my version (where Limit Breaks are pretty rare, but each Break drops your maximum Limit boxes by 1....) leads to the downward spiral of madness that we call the Usurpation.


Limit is tool for the Storyteller to enforce theme and characterization.  If he doesn't want to screw with it, he'll make challenges to Virtues fairly rare.  If he wants a game of epic tragedy where the heroes are driven to madness, he'll have things like: "You see a beggar on the street asking for spare scrip, roll Compassion or spend Willpower."  "Motherfucker..."


Some people dig this sort of gaming.  Some people like Michael Moorcock.  Not everyone does, and how severe a situation has to be before the ST calls for a Virtue check is a really good throttle on how often the PCs flip out.
 
My PC's have all broke once or twice now, and are edging up on trying to justify their characters having suspicions of "something's odd in Solar-town". This doesn't really bother me, but I do try to make it very clear that, in my game at least, this isn't like frenzy - There is no predatory monster taking control, this is them.  The Great Curse is essentially Epic Level Overreacting, and when the suspicious Eclipse brings it up to other solars or his gold faction handler, the answer is always, "Well, you have the weight of Creation on your shoulders, you're hunted, despised, anathema. I'd be a little fucked in the head too," or "Maybe it was something you ate, or some tainted essence."


I think canonically, it's pretty much impossible to figure out the great curse without some outside hints, but my PC's want to be the one's, so no biggie - Once they figure it out that's just the beginning of their problems.
 
I definitely have to agree that the Limit breaks are more just exagerations of virtuees already represented int he character.  Normal humans have the stuff happen to them all the time.  The saying Power corrupts absolutely applies ot humans and I would say even more so to 3000 year old beings of god like power.


Haven't had any of my Solars limit break yet, although 3 are near it.  Given what you all have described I think it will be interesting to see it happen because i don't really see any of my players but 1 playing there character that close to the virtue flaw they choose.  2 are compationate, and one of the 2 outright tried to kill a man with an arrow 200 yards away across a river as a premtive strike to threat of force if they didn't surrender.  Not exactly what I woudl consider compationate as the virtue flaw the player chose.
 
psychoph said:
2 are compationate, and one of the 2 outright tried to kill a man with an arrow 200 yards away across a river as a premtive strike to threat of force if they didn't surrender.  Not exactly what I woudl consider compationate as the virtue flaw the player chose.
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Unless the character did it with extreme reluctance, and out of the utmost practical need, I'd guess it's probably just bad roleplaying.


-S
 
Yeah it was definitely neither of those things.  Me and another one of the players discussed it the next day and both of use were like WTF?  


The character is playing an ex-vermillion legion scout, turned mercenary, turned wander who exalted as a Zenith.  I think I probably pushed to hard for him to consider being a Zenith, the concept I think he wanted to fit more as a night caste.  He works kind of funnily in the head sometimes imo because he still could have picked another virtue as the primary didnt' have to be compasion.
 
Don't have my books handy, but did he pick based on which virtue's break would be easiest to handle?


If the primary virtue that he chose doesn't fit the way he wants to play the character, there are two paths I can see taking:

  • If he didn't realize that the virtue would play a role in his character's decisions (new to the game, or such), allow him to swap the dots in Compassion and the virtue he feels should be his primary. Have him pick a new limit break, too.

  • If he knew the in-game effects of virtues well enough beforehand that he should have known better, enforce his virtues when he takes action outside of them. Even if it gets him killed. Let him know why you're having him roll dice to be mentally and psychologically able to perform actions, before it gets down to whether or not his attempt succeeds, then enforce the ruling with regularity.
Just my 2 chips.
 
Limit breaks don't happen often in the games I play in, but more often in the games I ST in. My first group is moe into the epic heroics of an Exalted game, and the second group is more about telling a comprehensive, multi-layed hero story, complete with moral gray areas.


However, those few limit breaks we've had in our first group have all been extremely dramatic. Two characters hit their limit break at the same time. They both had deliberate cruelty as their limit break. Our Night caste, whose limit broke, refused to aid anyone of out Circle as we were fleeing from an angry Behemoth towards Wood. When the Night was finnaly wounded, horribly, out Twilight, the only one with any of the Medecine charms, and those only other Member of the Circle who kept up with our Twlight REFUSEd to treat him, and murdered the Night in cold blood for having betrayed his Circle in a time of need.


Limit Breaks make things happen. I love 'em. Our characters just accept that people under constant pressure do strange things. It doesn't seem like a curse to them.
 
A limit break can be extremely nasty if it happens in the right (or, wrong, depending on your view) situation. In a higher powered game, our twilight was hit with Heart of Flint, as the rest of the circle was dealing with a 3rd Circle Demon. So, without emotion, he chose the most effective way to destroy the demon. A Total Annihilation spell, regardless that the rest of the circle was within range. It's far more than just an emotional breakdown or outrage, it's to a degree where you really aren't in control anymore.


Especially with the Solars considered Anathema, Limit Breaks can cause them to easily reveal what they are. There's plenty of ways that a limit break can go against a character, and, depending on the circumstances, is a very noticable thing.
 
When my Compassion flaw goes off it will most likely kill my character and some of the party with him.  I have been really good about helping as many people as possible, but there are times when nothing can be done, like when the daemons are tearing them apart to get us to break the Eclipse truce power.  So, when it finally breaks (half-way there now), I will attack the things that we were not sure of surviving, and when the party tries to restrain him, he may use Memory Reweaving Technique on them to have them aid in killing them.  Red Rage of Compassion is a bit vague on if Charms can be used while gripped by it, since it says you may not think to draw a weapon, but if being restrained by a Lunar I would think that throwing a few Charms to 'convince' them that 'they must all die' would work.
 
It's not easy playing a Dawn Caste with a grand daiklave and Berzerk Anger as your Virtue Flaw... I use this system, which I think is fairly equitable.


When the character breaks, he uses whatever he has on hand, and he doesn't go in with overwhelming force.  He'll pound on whatever's in his way, and if it doesn't break, he'll get out something bigger and heavier.  This means that if he's in a tavern and his sword's at his belt, it'll stay there until he can't get something or someone with fists.  At that point, he draws.  If the sword isn't working anymore, Daoyang emerges.  And if THAT isn't enough, he starts invoking Charms.
 
While I understand the reasoning behind that, I think it undermines the spirit of the flaw. It's not supposed to be a tantrum where the charatcer lashes out in the least damaging way possible, it's a psychotic break where the character is filled with, and driven by, rage.


The sword coming out might cause a lot of RP headaches and consequences, especially when the entire patronage of the tavern winds up murdered, but hey, it is the Great Curse.


-S
 
Stillborn said:
While I understand the reasoning behind that, I think it undermines the spirit of the flaw. It's not supposed to be a tantrum where the charatcer lashes out in the least damaging way possible, it's a psychotic break where the character is filled with, and driven by, rage.
The sword coming out might cause a lot of RP headaches and consequences, especially when the entire patronage of the tavern winds up murdered, but hey, it is the Great Curse.


-S
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The spirit of this particular flaw is a mindless violence that destroys everything around the character.  Nowhere does it say that he must use full force right from the start.


This particular PC has a strong affinity to water, and I wanted things that represented that - implacability, strength that grows to match the demands of the situation, the idea that a small tide grows into a mighty wave - to even be part of his Flaw, since it IS basically stemming from who he is.


So let's pretend he's in a tavern in the Haslanti League, having a drink, someone insults him harshly enough to check Valor, and he Breaks.  Leaping over the table, with one hand supporting the leap, he sends his two ironshod boots cracking into the necks of his detractors.  They fall down.  Men move to run away.  He leaps at them like a tiger, fists pummelling them unconscious.  The bartender drops behind the bar, grabbing hold of a crossbow.  The man fires, but he catches the arrow in one hand, spinning and tossing it again - the bartender finds himself impaled through one eye and drops noiselessly.  The PC finds the bar empty, and in a rage starts kicking out the support poles.


The place is coming down around him.  He destroys the walls methodically, the bar, the ceramic containers  behind it.  Wood falls into the fire-pit at the center, and alcohol-seeped wood lies dangerously near.  The ceiling comes down, but he punches straight up through it.  The fire catches; what's left of the place will become an inferno soon.  And the city guard are coming.


They come at him, swords drawn.  He punches one squarely in the face, then grapples him and uses him as a human shield against the blades of the other long enough to bring the man down over his knee, spine-first.  Crack.


He gets cut.  He punches - but his knuckles connect against a steel breastplate.  He draws his sword...


Tell me, is this in the spirit of the Flaw?
 
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