Meanwhile, in the Abyss
Well there’s one lingering question answered. It looks like the interaction of BBEG’s resurrection scroll with Demon Queen’s hell portal has caused a full-on body swap episode! No doubt our resident catgirl and demon lord will discover it’s not so easy to walk a mile in one another’s hit dice. If I know my tropes, they’ll learn to appreciate each other’s unique challenges, then become better friends for the misadventure. Either that or the planar cosmology will collapse.
Character development is all well and good, but the present storyline brings certain canonicity issues to the table. I mean, I was under the impression that demons were souls. How can you body swap with that sort of entity? And how is a mortal supposed to suddenly fill a vacant seat at the cosmic entity table? Wouldn’t all the world’s demon-worship energy still get directed towards the original Demon Queen, now imprisoned Naruto-style in Magus’s frail catfolk form? And that’s to say nothing of the “gee, they must be idiots” followers of this pretender. Surely that adorable white spider demon can sense the change in its mistress? I mean, how could you hope to string along an entire layer of the Abyss (some of whom are hyper-intelligent) with fast-talking skills consisting of the word “AAAAAAAAH”?
When you’ve got such an unconventional plotline running through your campaign, some or all of these questions might bother you. And if noodling with the answers is fun for you, then be my guest. Noodle away. Internal consistency and plausible explanations are generally good things. But every once in a while, I think it’s OK to stuff a sock in your inner setting purist.
Just think about the rational scientist character from every movie ever. “That’s impossible!” they mutter, removing their glasses and staring slack-jawed at the thing that just friggin’ happened. And in that moment, the resurrected character or fresh-minted superhero or evil twin doesn’t say, “Oh, my bad. I guess I’m stretching plausibility here.” They get on with it, turning the tide of the fight, punching the villain, or quipping at their goody two-shoes twins.
What I’m saying is that, if you really need that plausible explanation, you can always post-hoc that jank. Your players will likely go along with your setting without fuss. And if they do pause to ponder, they will probably guess at explanations themselves. When that happens you can always pull the old GM trick: “You guessed right! That’s exactly what I’d planned all along!” But regardless of which way it shakes out, my bottom line is this. When you’ve got a balls-out crazy pants story to tell, that nagging sense of this-couldn’t-happen-in-the-official-setting will only hold you back. Deal with that internal censor on your own time. Do the cool thing now. The rest will follow after.
Question of the day then! When did you decide to make a major break from official canon? Did you change the cosmology with one of your own invention? Get rid of alignment? Nuke the afterlife? Tell us all about your most drastic setting changes, slaughtered sacred cows, and dramatic breaks from tradition down in the comments!
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Well. That explains that. And opens several new cans of worms!
I figure that yes, demons are souls – or spiritual essences, anyway – but they do manifest physical forms to interact with the material world. Forms that reflect their inner nature, unless they’re deliberately shape-shifting.
DQ’s soul probably is receiving all that worship-energy, which means she’s growing stronger day by day… and Handbookworld is in danger.
As for Magus… Lots of crazy randomness happens in the Abyss. Let’s hope DQ’s hosts chalk her screaming up to that, and her “failure” to escape through the Abyssal Blood Covenant.
My big break with setting is, honestly, to just create my own. ^^;
When it comes time to finally figured out my own plot many months from now, I look forward to returning to this thread to pick and choose which comments “guessed correctly.” 😛
It’s a treat to be part of the creative process. ^_^
It’s too bad about copyright. I hear that a lot of film and TV try to isolate their staff from moments like this so that fans don’t sue.
“Your writing staff used my creative idea without permission or credit! Gimme the money!”
And coming from the TRPG tradition, I think that’s a shame. Building cool stuff with other people is what it’s all about. I mean, you should have seen Laurel’s face when I told her about Zarhon’s “Woolantula the Servile” comment further down the page. A user by the name of Ramsus named Rouge the Eidolon in the same way. I love this stuff, and I’d hate to have to do without it.
Heck, I’m cool with some acknowledgment of my input. ^_^
I request a visual aid on Laurel’s expression.
There she is in the background: https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/parody
I’m sure Her Majesty, Queen Scratchypaws of the Demon Web Pits (HMQSotDWP) will quickly adapt to a plane full of webbing designed to restrain and capture. If the other handbook is any indication. At which point, her servants might not even care if they figure out her predicament.
Her Majesty, Queen Scratchypaws of the Demon Web Pits will mellow down once she’ll realize that all them threads can be balled into something not unlike a ball of yarn.
…that poor woolly spider doesn’t know the true terror that is about to befall it…
I cannot tell you how amused I am to wake up this morning and see everyone writing out ‘Her Majesty, Queen Scratchypaws of the Demon Web Pits.’
You’ll be less amused when the joke gets old, and the abbreviation becomes cumbersome to write up. :p
“Writing it out”?
Surely n your line of work you’ve heard of copy/paste? It makes putting “Her Majesty, Queen Scratchypaws of the Demon Web Pits” into every post super-easy, barely an inconvenience.
Oh this opens up a plethora of plots. Predictions time!
– Her Majesty, Queen Scratchypaws of the Demon Web Pits ends up being a better boss than Bad Cat was, or otherwise causes a cascade of betrayals of her minions.
– Bad Cat learns the numerable hardships of not having inherent DR/good and other mortal quirks (like hairballs and ‘that time of the year’).
– Magus adopts the wooly spider (whom I’m naming Woolantula the Servile). Or Ranger does, in the course of recovering Her Majesty, Queen Scratchypaws of the Demon Web Pits from this predicament.
– Her Majesty, Queen Scratchypaws of the Demon Web Pits boldly invades the plane of slow mice and cream with her arachnid army.
– Bad Cat contacts Drow Priestess for some spider-cult shenanigans.
– Her Majesty, Queen Scratchypaws of the Demon Web Pits enjoys the luxuries of infinite power and wealth/magic offered by a high CR.
– Bad Cat has ‘minor’ issues with keeping her overwhelming aura of evil hidden from the mortals who can sense that stuff. Likewise Her Majesty, Queen Scratchypaws of the Demon Web Pits had issues hiding her kitty aura.
Come to think of it, now you mentioned the aura of overwhelming evil, the timing for Paladin to lose access to detect evil could not have been more dramatic.
Well done, Colin Stricklin!
I’ll take a bit of a gamble and bet that Magus uses Woolantula the Servile as a living yarn ball.
“Woolantula the Servile” is now canon.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hi2e-ViuGJ0
I’ll await my writer royalties. 😀
I wonder what’ll happen if DQ-in-Magus meets Succubus.
Given Succubus’ feud with Thief, I thought they must each descend from rival Abyssal factions, and demons might be able to detect DQ’s presence. If Succubus starts trying to tell everyone about DQ or even attacks her in her weakened (?) state, she’d soon find herself in Cassandra’s unenviable position!
Wait, who? 😛
I was about to write out the whole “history of Succubus,” but I realized I can’t recall it. I think we established someplace that she works for Demon Queen (though somewhat less directly than Antipaladin), but I’m not sure where I’d have written that down.
I honestly thought Succubus must be allied with an enemy of DQ, given that the queen had big plans for Thoef, yet Succubus was a-feudin’ and a-fightin’ with her.
I swear I meant to type ‘Thief’.
Stupid small phone keyboard…
I mean… https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/unhallowed-rites-part-3-martial-responsibilities
Yeah, there is that.
In hindsight, maybe Succubus’ job was – ironically – to try and ensure that Thief remained “largely unspoiled” for the Abyssal Blood Covenant. Pity she tried to do it by keeping Thief too annoyed to engage in a meaningful relationship… :p
Post-hoc rationale anyone? 😛
Feel free to use it if you like. 😉
I propose we title this event/arc the ‘Feline Friday’.
Speaking of which, I love the touch of Her Majesty, Queen Scratchypaws of the Demon Web Pits having some of her catness in her new body. Is that an actual visible change or just there for the viewers to identify them?
Will Bad Cat have equivalent artistic changes that Her Majesty, Queen Scratchypaws of the Demon Web Pits lacks in this strip (e.g. horns, multi-eyes)?
while Bad Cat didn’t have the multi-eyes of of her former self. when exposed the iris did change into a version of it.
kinda hard to notice since both have gold colored iris.
When you’ve got the body of a cosmic powerhouse, your form is informed by your will. No doubt Woolantula et al. are used to variations in their boss’s appearance.
Catfolk, on the other hand, have no such powers. My interpretation is that the red light / creepy eyes from Monday’s comic were non-diegetic, or else representative of Patches’s animal instincts.
…and now I know the word “diegetic”. Thanks; it’s a very cool word!
Cheers! I had to ask for a definition when I got to grad school. A lot of the video game designers were throwing “non-diegetic” around, and I felt like a bit of a rube. 😛
That’s because they got tired of ludonarrative dissonance so had to come up with a new phrase no one else knows instead of just saying “thing that’s not from within the story’s world”.
Huh, didn’t expect Bad Cat to have a direct connection/domain portfolio/theme of demon spiders. Was this hinted to before, outside of the multiple eyes?
Do Magus & Sorcerer also have arachnid traits/origin we haven’t seen yet?
Is Bad Cat / ex-Demon Queen also the spider-centric-legally-distinct-from-Lolth entity worshipped by the Drow (or at least, Drow Priestess) in this case?
Check out Demon Queen’s bio:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/role-call
I haven’t gotten to run this scenario/campaign just yet, but the huge break from canonicity is that the material plane is gone. Not like Starfinder gone where there’s plenty of other planets to explore. Whole plane, center of the multiverse, place lots of outsiders want a stake in because it’s neutral/uncontested ground. Poof, gone.
Now the remnants of all the various species are left on earthbergs in the various elemental planes, with the plane of earth now serving as the new underdark. You’ve got pirate lords scouring the new drifting archipelagos of the plane of water, scorching deserts being the more hospitable places in the plane of fire, caraveneers recruiting young adventuring types to carry stuff and act as guards as they do coordinated freefalls from one floating island to another in the plane of air.
If all goes well, I’ll get the chance to paly (actually play!) in a Pathfinder 1e game set in a “flying islands in a planar soup” setting. I love it when a campaign has a built-in excuse to take you anywhere at any time.
Allow me to propose an explanation for why Bad Cat’s former body could be possessed. It’s simple really – she’s not actually a Demon Lord. She’s a mythic tiefling that picked up the Divine Source path ability a couple times. Sure, it took a while before her claim was accepted, but if you murder enough Balors eventually the rest will take a hint. These days, the worst she gets is some mildly racists comments during the annual Demon Lord get-together.
a more reasonable idea would be that both the ritual performed (which was meant to meld Bad Cat’s former duel soul+body into thief’s soul and body – probably banishing or consuming her soul) and the reviving scroll worked -but interfered with each other.
when magus got tangled in Bad cat’s former form hair, and knowing how a cats can STAY tangled , it probably continued all the while from the moment the ritual got smashed and up to when the revival scroll was used. so while Magus’s soul was trying to mess with bad cat’s old body+soul and the recall of magus’s soul to her body was setting that door open. the left overs from the merging ritual allowed the soul part of bad cat to cross over, leaving her body for magus’s soul to take.
you had 2 souls (in the nether realms) and 2 bodies (one on prime material other in nether). the revival was meant to puts magus’s soul in magus’s body. being tangled and using a ritual that was meant to combine the soul+body to the body (of thief) net up with both succeeding somewhat and failing somewhat.
for the scroll part: it got the soul form the netherworld got into the body.
and magus soul also got into a body. the ritual which was meant to combine bodies got them mixed.
for the ritual part: the old soul+body of Bad Cat got merged into a body(magus’s) and a soul (again magus’s) but since one part was in the nether world and another was in the prime material the soul+body had to split.
and there you have it.
Well, one way or the other, I’m sure Colin’s got a perfectly reasonable and entirely RAW answer for us. We just have to wait until he decides the time is right to reveal it, which he’s ofcourse already planned well in advance. I mean, what’s the alternative? Just throwing in a “freaky friday” flip cause why not? That’s ridiculous.
<_<
I’m pretty sure Bad Cat refers specifically to Demon Queen after she took Magus’s body. You have Magus and Demon Queen, then you have Bad Cat and Her Majesty, Queen Scratchypaws of the Demon Web Pits.
^ This wyrm gets it.
http://www.quickmeme.com/img/12/1227c32e4c9eccafd355175bcf6174adbb35b9e9120c627d0251b44532e50bf2.jpg
For a Star Wars Clone Wars Era game, I had planned to include female Clone troopers amongst the Bad Batch (clone troopers with additional gene mods) to allow the ladies of my gaming team to play. Though its not really a sacred cow anymore after the most recent season of the Clone series basically made it canon for me!
Hell yeah! This is exactly the sort of break-with-canon I’m happy to see. Same deal with female 40K space marines. On the one hand, there are well-established lore rules why that can’t be so. On the other hand, fuck ’em. 😀
Exactly! Sisters of Battle are a poor woman’s Space Marine and I have no issues just ignoring the made-up science of 40k, if it means ALL my players feel equally included.
‘Proper form’ is a great pun in this respect.
High praise from the Lord High Punmeister himself!
I did have plans to startle my players with an evil plot, once. We were playing a Star Wars 5e game set in the Old Republic – and since my players and I are all veterans of The Old Republic, the game, we had a pretty good grasp of what the setting would be like. There was an in-built expectation that we were playing in the canon setting, and the state of the galaxy would be relatively static to set up the events of the game.
Unfortunately the game died before I could pull this off, but the first arc was going to end with the BBEG successfully destroying Nal Hutta, wiping a major planet off the map and revealing that we were playing in a vastly altered timeline. The rest of the plot would have followed the party chasing after the villain as they continued to muck up canon.
https://rlv.zcache.com/seal_of_approval_sticker-r32a6bed370aa4c8fba1ff48ba92dfa48_0ugmp_8byvr_704.webp
I think it’s healthy when you establish that “there are no sacred cows in our game world.” You give yourself the freedom to play your own campaign, and that’s the kind of mindset you need to let the whole “RPGs are an outlet for creativity” thing become true.
Agreed! I had a similar revelation to that effect quite recently. My main campaign has reached the final chapter before the fake final boss, with only one piece of the macguffin left to collect. With the characters having mopped up most of the minor villains on their various quests and only a pretty trivial heist standing in their way, the stakes were starting to get pretty low. So I thought to myself, how can I shake things up, impress upon them the urgency of their mission and put the fear of the GM back into them?
So I blew up the moon. A major recurring motif in the game, a significant part of the world’s ecosystem, and the alleged home of their patron deity. It’s rubble now. This wasn’t arbitrary; it’s not only symbolic, but once they discover just a bit more lore they’ll realize how utterly screwed this makes them. A simple fact that they had always relied upon is now gone. Sacred cow slain.
I would argue that there should be SOME sacred cows. Early on in the campaign, one of the players adopted an egg that later hatched into a baby, and close to five years later we’re about to celebrate that baby’s first birthday. One of my players has been very up-front that if anything bad happens to Baby Luna, they will leave the game. This has always seemed perfectly reasonable to me, and I’ve had no difficulty writing around it. Sometimes it’s the addition of a player’s lines and veils that make the cow sacred in the first place.
Oh sure. And I’m not suggesting that “break the laws of the setting willy nilly” is good policy. It’s just that you can become a slave to “what the setting is supposed to be” rather than “what you need it to be for this story.”
Canon? I tend to subscribe the Black Library school of tought “Everything is canon, but not everything is true.”, and with some games their stance on multiverses makes it easy to fudge on details, like savage worlds.
Love the quote, but I don’t know the reference. What’s the context here?
The context is that GW is terrible at keeping a coherent lore between the various novels and codices (codexes?), so they just do a cop-out by saying that everything is canon lore but if something is contradicted by something else then someone was lying/being-manipulated-by-Chaos/misinformed.
Or imperial propaganda depending on whonis made to look bad.
It is also used by one of the worst writers over there. Look I like my grimdark and hate space elves but Goto disturbs even my depraved soul. At times his writings makes Goblin Slayer and Berserker seem tame by comparison.
But simply put it’s kinda like how Star Wars uses Expanded Universe (what is this Legends nonsense) but for Warhammer.
Just have to act evil and nobody will suspect a thing.
https://youtu.be/PbtW58x08GE
I actually like sticking with established continuity in the books because it gives players who know said continuity an innate understanding. That said; I despise the Forgotten Realms for that exact reason: Too much continuity for anyone to keep track of.
I’m not sure the handwashing would play in this case. Magus has a hard time suppressing that grooming instinct.
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/psychedelic
It’s almost as if you’re expected to pick the parts you like, ignore the rest, and build your own continuity. 😉
Wow this is the most this comic has had a plot. Not that I’m complaining!
I love me some gaming tropes. But 667 comics is a long time for anyone to write, “Lol, murderhobos, am I right?”
I agree
Just bbe careful to avoid the ol’ Cerebus Syndrome.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CerebusSyndrome
Thank you! I’ve been trying for ages to remember what that was called!
And yeah, it is an issue with long-running comics that I’m trying to avoid. The charm of Handbook is its archetypal characters and casual continuity. You can enjoy the jokes without having to worry about complex backstory.
…
Most of the time
Even if a demon’s soul and body are the same thing, that doesn’t mean their mind is part of the same package. According to this model, Her Majesty, Queen Scratchypaws of the Demon Web Pits, does not have the soul formerly associated with Magus, only her mind.
And while the hyper-intelligent spiders are highly perceptive, they’re not educated in the finer points of soul-mind duality, and hence assume that since “Demon Queen” has her original soul she must just be having a bad day.
That’s theoretically impossible!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i99jMtnE4vw&t=130s
I wish they’d made more seasons. I really enjoyed that series…
I think I will enjoy this arc.
I like having explanations for ME. From the other end, my players like feeling most things in the universe actually *do* have an explanation, unlike reality. Sorry-not-sorry if too meta.
As for the QotD, probably 2006. I really never liked Greyhawk, and Forgotten Realms feels a little too crowded with Dark Elves and Arch Wizards. But I had no end of getting people interested in my setting… so I went back to Ravenloft and Rifts, and considered how Palladium’s megaverse might interact with something like the demiplane of dread.
In any event, it works when I let people ease into it, and they *generally* like it a lot. But just going for it was too much buy in for lots of people I’ve gamed with.
It’s tough. When you go to off-the-rails you wind up with Dungeons: the Dragoning 40,000 7th Edition:
https://1d4chan.fandom.com/wiki/Dungeons:_the_Dragoning_40,000_7th_Edition
It’s all about picking the time and place to poke at the established order, not ignoring it completely. “Learn the rules so you know how to break them” and all that.
Never got even a minor break from canon 🙂
I make the canon and every thing that could arise i already thought of it 😀
I initially misinterpreted this one as showing Demon Queen’s new “lair” inside Magus’s head (which might not have had as much free space as she thought). At least the switch was with a demon, rather than a devil – minions of Chaotic Evil entities are probably used to bizarre mood swings and new orders to build sections of the Abyssal realm out of slow mice and fresh cream. Or maybe that was “devoted to slow mice and fresh cream.” Oh well. Same difference.
I don’t have too much in terms of radical continuity restructuring (other than the Golarion history rewrite about the 10,000-year secret elf/alien/drow conflict for my Second Darkness+Iron Gods campaign), so instead I will talk about body-swapping in games.
Recently I’ve been plotting out an adventure that integrates a bunch of the Pathfinder AP book “Curse of the Lady’s Light” (SO SPOILERS FOR THAT AHEAD I GUESS). The book has a trap so infamous that the Return of the Runelords AP has a campaign trait option, where the PC set it off before the campaign began. It functions like the Phantasmal Killer spell (make a WILL and FORT save and pass one or die), but a slain character is automatically revived in a spare clone body of the wizard lady who built the place. That is a cool idea (and the book repeatedly discusses how various enemies and challenges react to this, especially since there is more than one person claiming/appearing to be that wizard running around), but as written it runs into a few issues. The big one is that it’s kind of agency-seizing for the GM to permanently alter a PC’s appearance, race and physical sex without the player’s consent, with the only real fix at that level being suicide+Reincarnate, which leaves the character with a randomly-rolled race (and perhaps still with a changed sex, if the GM rules Reincarnate bases that off the previous body and not the soul’s identity) and not their starting appearance. I suppose that’s not all that different from the PC dying of death poisoning and being brought back with Reincarnate, but I can still see a player taking it personally, especially if the GM changed things enough that they aren’t in a position to hide behind the “the book made me do it!” defense. The second problem is that in addition to the possibility of detecting/disabling the trap, the saving throw DCs aren’t all that high for that level (a PC with no bonus from ability scores passes on an 11 or 14 depending on their class, and they only need to pass one of the two rolls), in which case nothing happens and the players never learn about the cool thing or engage in any of the roleplaying schemes it offers. (Technically, if the victim failed the first save but passed the second and then later dies, they go in the clone if the party didn’t already shank it as a precaution, but the only way to know that in advance is a nearly impossible Spellcraft check.)
My thinking for using this concept better is to up the save DCs but make the victim’s original body be inert rather than dead, similar to a Clone spell. Within a few rooms of the trap, the PCs can discover a magic gemstone connected to the clone with a variant of the Magic Jar spell. After some finagling, the PCs will be able to switch the PC between their original and clone bodies with a minute or so ritual, and could even swap in other willing souls (such as other PCs). I envision this as a fun gimmick for the dungeon where the party comes up with elaborate schemes about who will put on the clone before they go into the next room to try and bluff the enemy (with PCs borrowing each others’ bodies as a part of totally sensible plans). Later parts of my version of the adventure feature a ghost and a cursed undead the party needs to free, so the party having one more body than they have souls also opens up some interesting opportunities there. (“Dammit! The ghost ran off with my body! Get it back!”)
*Checks the science* Yeah, this all checks out. It was established that Magus’ incorporeal form could interact with Dairy Queen meaning they were of similar consistency. We can assume that the failed ritual created some form of backlash that resulted in the two mixing (akin to say oil and water). Normally a being of such presence as DQ would reject the essence (or more likely, devour it) but the backlash weakened her self-awareness (the closes thing a conceptual entity has to a soul). Now what the long term effects would’ve been i can’t say for sure. But the Raise Dead was meant to siphon the (using the metaphor) water from the oil-water mixture back into the receptical (Magus’corpse). Instead, whether DQ intention or not, it siphoned DQ’s oil essence. Of course, that much conceptual power could probably not all fit in the body, so some of it was left behind, giving Magus’watery essence an oily sheen. Whether Magus’ will be able to manipulate the power waits to be seen, but while it’s possible to create the tide and waves in a kiddy pool, it’d be much harder to in a lake of energy. With game mechanics, I’d explain this away using the Corruption Rules from Pathfinder’s Horror systems. Love those rules and really wish I had some games I could throw them into.
I mean, if you really need mechanical justification, I think you can use the Magic Jar spell on a demon lord (or have a demon lord use it), regardless of body/soul duality. This is basically a more extensive, permanent(-ish) version of that.
We had played D20 Modern a few times, and we were all pretty much done with the setting after our 3rd or 4th postapocalyptic milieu. Someone meekly suggested more Urban Arcana in the mix, rather than Future or Past. I decided to take a crack at it, and immediately ditched 90% of the rules.
Our (sadly) short-lived superheroes campaign started everyone with 4 hit dice and a fixed number of build points to create stat bonuses, attack bonus, saving throws, AC, initiative, and purchase everything from Skills to Feats to class-features to spells to mutations. We pulled from everything D20-based for people to build their powersets from. It was chaotic, but it worked! Everyone was able to pretty-much build the meta-human they wanted, and all at roughly the same power levels. No classes, prerequisites, race limitations–the only limit I put on anything was that no single bonus could be straight-out bought at a level higher than your HD+3 (to try to prevent folks from dumping all their points on one stat and forget to buy any superpowers).
Sure, it was a mixed bag of gritty loners, masked mystery men, psychic detectives, and shining speedsters, but we had fun and kept the Rocket City safe! (Except for that Easter incident–we don’t talk about the parade incident.)
“Question of the day then! When did you decide to make a major break from official canon?”
Since before this ‘canon’ you speak of existed… technically. I’ve been gaming since before any of the canon existed (unless you point to the old myths, and then they’re so convoluted they break their own canon anyway), so I’ve always done my own thing, which is “Setting Mash-Ups”! My favorite is to smush Fallout into other genres, and it usually works well for me. I’m still pushing letters around into lines for my latest Gamma World/Fallout/Arcanum mashup…
“Canon” is a bit non-specific. I’m talking about breaking one or more of the rules of your universe. The includes obscure Forgotten Realms nonsense, Star Wars movies, or your own lore that you established last week.
I’ve never liked the “Solars are just plain better than everyone” part of Exalted (although I think this was changed in 3e?) so whenever I run the system the type of Exalt you are determines where you start but any exalt has the potential to be equally great.
Best use of “Zeal” I ever saw was convincing one of the Neverborn that Creation had been destroyed. With fetters broken, the big bad ghost winked out of existence.
SOLARS ARE SUPERIOR!
This. TBH, so much is wonky with current Exalted that I recommend you use the thing as inspiration and play Godbound and/or revise that system.
In the Original Traveller Universe, it is canon that the advanced FTL technology hop drive (which makes FTL 10 times faster and thereby trivializes certain otherwise-near-impassible interstellar barriers) does not reach the world of Regina (so far as the general public knows) until after Regina independently invents it in the 1800s.
In the campaign I am running now, it is 1136 and the PCs are flying a hop drive ship to Regina. The mere knowledge of this technology (not necessarily how it works, just that it is possible) at Regina, this early, could have massive repercussions.
Slight spoilers, in case any of my players read this: anyone who has seen Final Fantasy VII Remake is familiar with the concept of precognitive destiny shaping, although I am not using Whispers, just multiple equivalents of Aerith and Sephiroth.
Ima be honest:
https://c.tenor.com/5a70jiVvQvEAAAAC/i-know-some-of-these-words-mhmm.gif
Traveller-verse is one I’ve actually worked into the local multiversal group in my campaigns.
Omniversal civilizations making first contact (with the PCs playing the role of the contacters) is one of my standbys.