https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/289741/Adversaries-of-the-Righteous-Unrelenting-Aton--The-Pillars-of-the-Last-Bastion-Cult-of-Aton?src=also_purchased
This guy is like Furry art for me. I get the appeal, and understand it, but not for me.
That being said, this guy is really freaking cool. He's an elemental from... oh I don't know, the dawn of time! He was part of a group of giant sixty foot tall stone men who balanced the world and kept earthquakes at bay. Then the Exalted went wacko and killed off all of his brothers. Now's he's a crazed doomsday prepper with an underground fotress and cult.
The key is really to just throw as many buzz words into a description as you can and call it a day.
See, he perceives time the same way mountains do. So where humans see the last seven hundred years as being relatively stable, he's sees it as one continuous cataclysm. Society is collapsing, the environment is out of wack, and we're all doomed! I've never related to a npc so much. So the reason he's a adversary and not a hero, is because he chooses to hide himself away in his underground fort rather than try and DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT! I'm sure he just thinks a solar is just going to slam dunk a rhino through his skull if he pops his head above ground.
Ironically after my last review saying Ashana may have the best numbers in the game, this guy comes up with 15 dice, and puts that to rest. Plus he has extended melee reach, and a ranged grapple, and he can double his parry while giving himself cover, and he can call meteors down from space, and, and and. The guy is a monster. Finally a worthy opponent. I'm not that hot with mechanics and even I can tell he's a beast.
His best ability lets him turn his followers to stone to imbune them with extra power. They slowly turn to statues over the course of 20 years, before... becoming immortal, unmoving statues... forever. That's freaking tight, dude.
Well how about the fact that he keeps track on everything he thinks can end the world. Sword of Creation(.net) check, exalted check, an awesome bald guy with a magical city check, that guy with the suspicious looking cow? Check, and check. If that's not a plot hook I don't know what is. This guy is from the first age, he knows exactly what kind of scary stuff is buried and where. "The Solars built a fountain that does WHAT?" "It seemed like a good idea at the time."
There's so much cool stuff about this guy... I'd just never use him. For some reason I'm just not interested in underground adventures. Shame cause this guys awesome, and drow are cool. I prefer flying castles, which is why you reskin the guy into an air elemental.
If there's any thing bad I can say about him, it's that he doesn't seem to be very active. Maybe I'll learn more when I cover his cult next time. I really just try to take these writeups as they are by themselves. He's huddled in his cave peeing into bottles, I don't see why that's the player's business. Where I think the writeup is trying to lead you is that the players need something in his fort, work with them, and then he crazily betrays them before they can betray him. I guess, I dunno. I wouldn't be excited for that to be the plot for such an interesting character, but oh well.
A very cool character only held back by the fact, that his presence as a villain seems pretty nebulous.
I give Aton 7/10 Fallouts Shelters.
Now I'm sure I'm not the only one who read Aton's description and immediately thought of Walter Benjamin's Thesis on The Philosophy of History. Benjamin describes an angel, much like Anton and calls him "The Audience To Our History." He goes on to say "A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress."
1. Cloverfield Lane. Aton is going to save people, even if they don't want it. In the midst of this apocalypse he kidsnaps anyone he can to bring them to safety. Most recently an entire town has gone off the map. Can the players save them? Aton won't be too happy with someone trying to lead his charges to their death on the surface.
2. The three titans that hold up Palaquin are actually three of Aton's older brothers. Once he learns of their location, he's going to want to try and awaken them, even if it means them dropping an entire city.
3. Aton is the last pillar in a vital structure within creation keeping seismic tremors from ripping the whole thing apart. Either the players learn of this before defeating him, forcing them into a nonviolent solution, or they only learn of this after he's dead. Now they have to find a way to replace, or revive Aton before all of creation sinks into the wyld.
4. Aton's cult's worship is really working! He's been growing stronger and stronger over the centuries. After working with him to put a stop to a doomsday weapon, the players being to notice Aton developing dragonic elements. How will they react to this unstable elemental's transformation into a dragon?
5. Aton is so paranoid that he predicted the eventual return of the solar, and has planned for it, confident that they will come for him just as they did his brothers. A player's old tomb? Robbed, trapped, and it's not the only one. All of the solar tombs have been robbed! News of anathema vanishing from creations is everywhere. Some strange being seems to be targeting the players, their families, it seems to know everything about them. All of this to gather them to Aton's stronghold where's he's created a great urn to contain the souls of the solars.
