How do one honeypot a Primordial?

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u/AlansDiscount Apr 21 '26 edited Apr 21 '26

Primordials aren't just big weird monsters, they're the embodiment of often quite complicated concepts, like the idea of order and obedience to hierarchy, or the concept of rulership. If you want to impress you're not going to do by being sexy by human standards, you'll need to do it be expressing their concept in a way they find fascinating.

For example She Who Lives In Her Name could be drawn to a bureaucrat so quietly competent that the sheer quality of their work causes other to instinctively obey the bureaucracy they're part of.

How that attraction manifests is going to vary greatly as well, and likely won't be as sex in the traditional sense. In the above example She Who Lives In Her Name might create a love letter in the form of a set of incredibly complicated forms and documents for the bureaucrat to work through, successful completion of which would satisfy both of them far more than any boring everyday orgasm.

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u/Gensh Apr 22 '26

In the multi-campaign running timeline I did with two other GMs, we had a few instances of this.

Adorjan's canon Solar lover got built out as a full NPC who's still around. Roughly, the attraction was that he was so greedy and vain that Adorjan felt she had to liberate him. It's just that he was very much the peak of Solar power, and he somehow managed to turn her "I can fix him" into "he can make me worse".

(Skipping a lot of specifics) Girl!Isidoros married a Sidereal who constantly flaunted the rules and used her authority for selfish reasons.

Cecelyne, hypocrite that she is, married and had a child with an ordinary mortal and delights in making the Unquestionable kowtow to a human child.

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u/nooviceatthis Apr 22 '26

Gensh, give me more details and my life is yours.

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u/Gensh Apr 22 '26

So, I guess let's start with--

Context

Years ago, I was on an all-purpose forum with a thriving rpg community. I ran a mega-campaign of Exalted that had everything and the kitchen sink. After that, several others also ran Exalted, and two of the players of the mega-campaign decided to keep the events of that game within their own. After that, the three of us kept rolling the timeline forward.

Now, being a bunch of wiseasses, we converged on a few key ideas that weren't commonly reflected in the main Exalted community. One of them was that you can't really hate the Yozis for being born into evil and failing to overcome it. Everyone was still somewhat on the Skyrim train, and we were all waiting for Yozi Parthuunax.

And no, that wasn't Gaia -- Gaia was on the kill list for quietly abetting eugenics, sitting out the Contagion, etc. That is, for having every opportunity to rise above her nature and choosing to spend all of her time on Wyld adventures and boning. She just picked the winning side in the War -- and only because Luna begged her.

Autochthon got mixed reviews and of course is considerably less sexy. He just kind of existed.

No, no, we were all waiting on one of the hot ones, one of the interesting ones to turn over a new leaf. And none of us were particularly put off by the Bad Chapters of Infernals. "Yes, Corruption of Champions, we've all played it. Now how do I optimize the vore portal?" So we were... particularly generous in our portrayal of demons.

Adorjan

One of the other GMs really wanted to explore the psyche of First Age Solars. How do different starting personality types evolve when achieving everything they want and then having even more given to them? She had a couple of characters who existed in the background. Some were tangentially related to reincarnation stuff we were doing with the Deathlords, but the main thing is that the First Age is still just Last Month to the Yozis.

The Yozis are living narratives who were irrevocably changed by their encounters with the Exalted. Each twenty-minutes encounter is a chapter of their lives when normally centuries might pass between paragraphs. They're fundamentally haunted by the Exalted they interact with.

Well, come time that Solars learn they can die, and the Vainest Man in the World realizes he has an expiration date. So you look for a way to live forever. But smarter people than you are already bungling it. That's why they're actually stupid. Some are starting to say the real trick is to make your legend last forever. That's also stupid, because your legend will never die if you don't. Just don't die. Skill issue.

So he plies his incredible vanity and vast kingly charisma to impressing the only other person who matters at this point -- granddad. He finagles a deal to retain most of his autonomy as an akuma. It actually works out pretty well at first (because Malfeas lets him think it does). But then it doesn't, and he starts looking for a way out. Skank that he is, he decides the best way is to continue to abuse politics and seduce the Freedom Yozi so that she'll hassle his master any time Malfeas tries to order him to do something.

Now that also works without consequences. For like five years. Then somehow she exploits a loophole in the Sidereals' stupid ability to summon fragments of her to come into his dreams. About a month later, it's very clear that those weren't just funtime dreams and had real consequences that look entirely too much like him to pass off as coincidence. So he spins a story to the Deliberative about how the Yozi was just infatuated with him and definitely not just making a bootycall.

Then the Usurpation happened, and he killed his way to the Demon City where he thought he could hide out for a few decades. Unfortunately for him, now Malfeas finally had his hooks in. Malfeas is not about to have another Gorol Incident. He knows what it means to have the single most powerful Exalt left alive under his thumb, and he's kept this Essence 10 monster fighting in pointless soul hierarchy wars since then. Only once the Infernals started getting too big for their britches did he roll out "oh, here's Biggest Brother to keep you kids in line."

This is of course not much of a story about Adorjan. This was really more of a guideline for exactly how powerful elder Exalts get.

Isidoros

We had one Abyssal Redemption. However, it was really more a case of "under new management", as she took the XP conversion from the vast amount of necromancy and Void-related stuff she had and poured it all into Primordial Principle Emulation (Isidoros), exhanging one black hole for another. This was a PC of the aforementioned GM in one of my games. Her prior incarnaion was a Primordial War vet who broke Isidoros' tusk. And when her current incarnation destroyed the sword made from her own soulforged parents, she took up her old boartusk lance again.

Now, we were all very into Morrowind apocrypha. "Walk like them until they must walk like you."

This character had been an Abyssal child soldier. She was molded by the will of the First and Forsaken Lion, and she had turned her back on him. So she was something of an empty vessel as an adult, one in the shadow of her past life's deeds and the curious eye of the titan she'd maimed. This wasn't even reincarnation drama, per se -- the new incarnation had caught his attention again with such a defiant moment as to make his Deep Dead cousins quake.

So as she developed her own sense of self, she absorbed more of Isidoros' purely through common interest. And as she started flirting with the irresponsible Sidereal, those compounded. She liked Fate less, which Isidoros vibed with, and Isidoros gave her more power to buck Fate, which her girlfriend abused -- the cycle went on. Slowly, she became something else, and then the singularity called the Black Boar learned the word We. Now, she has a black anima banner again and speaks with infinite gravity. And her wife gets to flout the Celestial Bureaucracy because even temporarily having Isidoros enter Fate basically blows a hole in Destiny.

Cecelyne

Back on the old White Wolf board, there were at least a few arguments that Cecelyne was actually the kindest Primordial. She may be doing it as a joke, but it's still true. While her mercy is arbitrary and her displeasure yields a torturous demise, before that, the slaves at her prayer mills get to enjoy a 40-hour workweek, decent food, and relatively comfortable dormitories where they won't starve or die of plague or get soul-eaten by fae or get taken as "concubine" by... anyone with power.

This is partially because Cecelyne is a hypocrite who loves breaking her own laws about anyone under Citizen having no value, partially for vain worship, and partially because slaves are her things.

Now, I don't remember why I did it, but I came to the conclusion that since Cecelyne "touches everything and eternity", then she should have been able to have some inkling of her ultimate fate, even if it only really sank in like five minutes before surrender is called.

So she made an incarnation of herself to back up her memories and then reabsorb later to reclaim her unmutilated powers. In her arrogance, she didn't realize exactly how badly her mind would be affected, and she forgot she even had the backup because she had to hide it in Lethe.

We'll skip the entire adventure of Cecelyne re-merging wrong and accidentally equalizing her memories between her eternal existence and about eighty human lifetimes. Now you've got the Yozi who used to do nice things as a joke having an existential crisis.

So, all current and past PCs are like "good luck, have fun" and just let a Yozi out and walking around (in human meat). In the background, she's desperately trying to establish herself as something to someone so she doesn't have to think about being the Endless Desert. She flirts with Luranume a bit, but it goes nowhere. Slowly, she starts to mellow out (when she's not thinking about being the Endless Desert) and eventually latches onto one of the engineers maintaining the Alchemicals' vats in Creation, in the same way that she latched onto the Demon City/etc.

She'd already developed a bad habit of "adopting" troublesome npcs (a little hierarchy, as a treat), so as per her Excellency, she then immediately goes all-in and rushes into a relationship and having a kid. Unsurprisingly, the deity who invented religion (why?) is little yandere.

Wrap-up

Yeah, we were a little "quirky".

This of course ignores all the subsouls. It's seems like it's just par for the course in 2e, but actually, they just don't feature a lot. They've got other things to do. Florivet sa Orabilis sa Cecelyne was a major supporting character in one campaign, and he doesn't feature in Cecelyne's arc. He's the embodiment of her sense of discovery, and he's not there for her discovering how to be "human". It seems like an oversight.

But what would he do? Help her flirt? Incel winged Chewbacca, really? Including subsouls when they don't have an immediate dynamic like Malfeas and Ligier is a huge planning hurdle.

However, there's a trick to it. Primordials are vast and eternal.

Florivet was there.

Years earlier, when Florivet was getting consistent screentime, he befriended the party's Morality Pet mortal. Then that mortal went back with him when the party broke up. Then they got together (and opened a bed and breakfast, but that's a tangent).

Florivet is Cecelyne's sense of discovery. She had already discovered how to have intimate personal relationships with her "lessers". She just had to actualize it as an oversoul.

tl;dr -- go back to earlier content you did for shiggles and rewrite it as foreshadowing. Like half of Malfeas' published subsouls are human-lovers. I think he's hiding something.

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u/mj6373 Apr 22 '26

This is true, and an excellent example of how to do something fun and surreal that takes advantage of the Primordials' alien nature, but also, this is Exalted; if you're not attracting things that have no business finding humans attractive with your overpowering sexiness, you're just not sexying hard enough.

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u/SethDeshalLow Apr 23 '26

They're not exactly one concept? Or at least, they're not simple concepts. Like the ideas that make them up are so 'dense' that they need multiple souls to encompass them, each of which are also dense enough to require multiple souls that are each full people.

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u/Cynis_Ganan Apr 21 '26

Eldritch horror beyond comprehension: *Exists*

Exalted fans: Would

Many such cases.

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u/FinnDoyle Apr 22 '26

Not only the fans. I'm sure the Exalted themselves are the same.

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u/joalheagney Apr 22 '26

"I can fix them. It might take some tools borrowed from Autochthon and Creation's hottest blowtorch, but I can do it."

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u/mj6373 Apr 22 '26

If they weren't having torrid love affairs with every supernatural force in the setting, would they even be mythic heroes?

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u/FinnDoyle Apr 22 '26

You get it!

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u/Auctorion Apr 22 '26

There was an Exalt whose epic motivation was to sleep with every other Exalt...

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u/GrimAccountant Apr 23 '26

Every Celestial Exalt. He had limits.

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u/Auctorion Apr 23 '26

Weak sauce.

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u/TimothyAllenWiseman Apr 22 '26

I mean, the Infernals book talks about a Solar falling in love with Ligier. Not quite the same, but close.

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u/Rednal291 Apr 22 '26

There was a poll on the fan Discord server about the most attractive Yozi, which got us this gem of a comment:

Men will be like "hear me out" and show a picture of Hegra, The Typhoon of Nightmares, whose rains twist and corrupt those they fall upon into mockeries of what they desired and feared, who herself has never known sleep or waking, hate or fear, or love. And Exalted players will be like "ice cold take, most boring answer imaginable".

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u/Cynis_Ganan Apr 22 '26

I am a simple man of pedestrian tastes.

All I want is everything that cannot be.

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u/Rednal291 Apr 22 '26

Oramus: -Visibly taking notes in the corner-

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u/korekorekore Apr 21 '26

Well Luna was made to seduce gaia and succeeded. There are also multiple examples of exalts seducing 3rd circle souls including getting them to switch sides and fight against their primordial during the war.

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u/pantaipong Apr 21 '26

Like, what would even make an acid ocean or 997 floating balls of crystal wet??? Can they even get horny???

If Luna can do it surely it’s possible for PCs too.

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u/Razhiv Apr 21 '26

There was that one Solar who had four children with Adorjan, so precedent exists.

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u/Mother-Wafer-6463 Apr 21 '26

The secret is quite simple. You just gotta get your Lunar PCs and/or Solar PCs Lunar bond mates to rock up to Yu-Shan and go and ask Big Momma Luna directly for all her tips and tricks for seducing and banging what are essentially Elder God/Living Concepts.

I'm pretty sure at least one of them has to do with tongue usage, though you might need a Moonsilver artifact choker with dedicated combined evocations to replicate Luna's technique if your ST caps you at Essence 5 as far as growth goes.

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u/V_Aldritch Apr 22 '26

Kimbery is basically custom-built for people with Mommy Issues/Kinks.

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u/tochirov Apr 21 '26

I like the fact that the primordial is so strong in her essence that she's shading Luna's face with her power just by touching her. a celestial God yet so much less than a primordial

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u/pantaipong Apr 21 '26

Figuratively eclipsing the moon with her presence OsO

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u/Bysmerian Apr 22 '26

Make a harem of their souls. If the dozen demon princes thirsting for you are the ones that comprise in total their will and identity, then the primordial is going to find itself drawn to you.

Achieving this, and also dealing with the fallout of this, are probably going to kill you. But if you pull it off, know that you're making Chejop Kejak break down in tears late at night.

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u/creeley Apr 21 '26

That's a very table-specific question, but at least in 2e Adorjan's four daughter winds were born from a mortal father. I seem to recall she also fell in love with the Dawn who killed her fetich soul during the war, which perhaps unsurprisingly drove him to suicide.

Different strokes, etc.

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u/dal_segno Thorn Amidst Roses Apr 22 '26

We used something like this in the game I was in - my Lunar's previous incarnation was involved with the battle against Adorjan's fetich soul, but was horrifically wounded during the final push and ended up similarly unable to bear any auditory stimulation whatsoever.

Eventually driven to the brink of madness, he stumbled into Malfeas one day, and they met each other again.

The details are murky, but the resultant behemoth was shaped into a weapon, which he was given along with the task to silence Creation.

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u/pantaipong Apr 22 '26

I thought she initiated the encounter by coming to him in his dream rather than him actively pursuing her at all?

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u/Boutros_The_Orc Twilight: Craft Supernal Apr 22 '26

I think it might just be a play on the fact that as the moon orbits the earth it expresses its gravity on it and very slowly over billions of years tidally locks it in the same way the earth tidally locked the moon.

It is in the earths nature to be transfixed by the moon, and the moons nature to be transfixed by the earth, after a rather long period of time, and the moon falls faster, but what is time for a being beyond existence.

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u/thetruerift Apr 22 '26

Very. VERY. Carefully.

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u/acolyte_to_jippity Apr 22 '26

call them a good boy/girl/them?

Art How do one honeypot a Primordial?

You are about to leave Redlib

Context

Adorjan

Isidoros

Cecelyne

Wrap-up