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Old 06-24-2011, 12:51 AM   #13
Acolyte
 
Join Date: Dec 2008
Location: Seattle
Default Re: Where do Geases come from?

This was a very interesting topic I missed, so BLAM! Resurrected!

First off, is rolling for Discord actually that common? I have never done so, instead choosing appropriate ones.

Quote:
It will take me some time, but I WILL come up with a plausible in-game reason why it should be assumed that a "naturally occurring" Geas will only be owed to someone selfish enough to make good use of it...
Here's my take: dissonance is a very, very bad, temporary problem. Converting it into Discord is turning into a permanent problem that is only very bad. As an analogy, think about an animal caught in a trap. That's dissonance. It can stay there and wait for the hunter, or it can gnaw off its leg and wander off--that's the Discord, carving off a piece of yourself to otherwise improve the situation.

Pouring your dissonance into a Geas Discord is hacking off a piece of your self control and handing it to someone else. I would rule that the Geas could only be owed to someone with opposing (or at least orthogonal) goals, because giving it to someone with the same goals isn't really giving up anything. And if you're not giving up something, you're not converting your dissonance.

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I don't think that Geases are in any way a Lilith-only (or -focused) thing. I think Geases existed before her and (should she die) would exist after her. What makes her special is her special ability to manipulate them (easily explainable as a "Word-bound Uberattunement"), specifically the ability to create beings which can also manipulate them. There are plenty of Ethereals that can utilize Geases (given the stories; the faerie bazaar thing was a really inspired idea, Jason), and any Superior worth his salt can do so. Access to the Lilim resonance (or Bright) isn't really a precondition in my mind.

What is more interesting to me is plumbing WHY Lilith has this special ability, since handwaving it into her Princely Coronet isn't exactly pleasing to me. Is it some weird human overlap (her human soul is less plugged into the Symphony)? My personal guess is that it has more to do with the bizarre circumstances of the Eden experiment--she was created for the experiment with a God-level Geas wrapped into every fiber of her being, and when she said no it was stripped away. Since we know the stripping process rearranges other things, perhaps it rearranged her in a way nothing had been before, has been since, or will be again unless God gets a lot more active.
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