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Exalted Questions Thread

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Accelerator said:
A purely hypothetical question.

Let's say you build a building. Well ventilated. Well lit. Put in a bunch of beds. Stock it with food.

Summon a bunch of aideara and stomach bottle bugs. Give them the command. "Heal anyone who is inside."

Anything that can go wrong with this? Demon behaviour that can go wrong? Some obscure clause that I didn't read of? Will the stomach bottle bugs explode from too much poison?
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In the words of Aleph, those aideara also rack up Limit whenever someone flirts with them. They are also inhumanly beautiful. You are going to have problems as soon as a patient fails their Temperance roll.


Edit: also, its a demon hospital. Your average peasant is going to be suspicious of it at best, run to the nearest monk at worst. Demons mean sorcery, and sorcerers have bad PR.
 
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Also some idiot is going to smuggle one "miracle healer" out at some point. And then it has an interesting conundrum if its unable to get back to the hospital building and would either do stuff it wasn't bound NOT to do(like pig out on alcohol on the way back until it explodes into more bugs)...or go back to the hospital by any means necessary(i.e. bloody murder)
 
emeralis00 said:
In the words of Aleph, those aideara also rack up Limit whenever someone flirts with them. They are also inhumanly beautiful. You are going to have problems as soon as a patient fails their Temperance roll.


Edit: also, its a demon hospital. Your average peasant is going to be suspicious of it at best, run to the nearest monk at worst. Demons mean sorcery, and sorcerers have bad PR.
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So basically, cover them up?

Then rumours start about the healers in the hospital, who never show their appearance. What horror lie beneath that robe?
 
While the Salinan Working has yet to be mentioned in 3e, it has been discussed by the developers. TLDR: Like The Ebon Dragon or SWLIHN, it's closer to the 1e version.
Vance said:
When discussing the Salinan Working, it's necessary to distinguish between its First Edition and Second Edition presentations.

In First Edition, the Salinan Working was a vast undertaking to preserve sorcerous knowledge, encoding the lessons needed to initiate into each circle of sorcery and a vast library of spells into Creation itself, leaving signs and clues in the patterns of the natural world that guide aspirants to spirits geased with sharing that information to those who ask in the appropriate way. In this manner, a great deal of sorcerous knowledge survived the Usurpation.

In Second Edition, the Salinan Working, in addition to preserving sorcerous knowledge, also warped fate and causality such that any aspirant who desired to seek sorcery would inevitably come to encounter the five stations of initiation, and was but the first step to Salina's vision of making all circles of sorcery available to all sorcerers.

In Ex3, we're going with the First Edition presentation of the Salinan Working.
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Vance said:
It won't guide you to any random initiation. There may be a specific initiation it can provide to those who follow the signs, in addition to storing knowledge of spells.
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Okay guys. There are animals in mythology, that can be slain, eaten, them resurrect themselves the next day.

How does one make this interesting?
 
By letting you cross an uninhabited region devoid of human-consumable foodstuffs with one's inner retinue without having to deal with the logistical equivalent of the Tsiolkovsky equations.
 
Phigment said:
Open a restaurant?
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grommile said:
By letting you cross an uninhabited region devoid of human-consumable foodstuffs with one's inner retinue without having to deal with the logistical equivalent of the Tsiolkovsky equations.
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No no no, you misunderstand, what i mean is, I know what it does.

I mean, the myths had thor with a pair of goats that could be killed, prepared, then eaten, each day. Then in the morning, they would come back.

there are seven pigs in Irish mythology that ressurected themselves after being eaten.

But just making an animal that reproduces itself after being slain and eaten seems... boring. I mean, its likely either celestial, or terrestrial. Resurrecting an animal should be celestial. Yet, getting food is a terrestrial spell.
 
They're only interesting if there's not legions of them. When they're a unique thing, then they're cool. When you try and make the resurrection of animals a inherited trait, then it's not cool.
 
Accelerator said:
No no no, you misunderstand, what i mean is, I know what it does.

I mean, the myths had thor with a pair of goats that could be killed, prepared, then eaten, each day. Then in the morning, they would come back.

there are seven pigs in Irish mythology that ressurected themselves after being eaten.

But just making an animal that reproduces itself after being slain and eaten seems... boring. I mean, its likely either celestial, or terrestrial. Resurrecting an animal should be celestial. Yet, getting food is a terrestrial spell.
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...if it's boring, just don't include it. Plenty of myths just aren't a thing in Exalted, and plenty more just won't be workings, and won't be based on Sorcery.

The answer to "This seems weird and not mappable to Sorcery, what do" is "Don't map it to Sorcery".
 
Self-recurring pigs and such are more in line with Spiritual Panoplies- Octavian for example has his acorn that does... something for him I can't remember but it recurs itself fairly clearly. Same basic idea. Not everything in Exalted needs to be fully rationalized and iterated out into a 'standard technology base'. Some things can be and are more fun for it, but doing it to everything is obnoxious.
 
My instinct is to say that goats which reappear after being eaten sound like Raksha shaping wackiness.

Then the question is whether the character with those goats is a shaped fair folk, or whether that character went adventuring into the Wyld and stole, was gifted, bargained for, fought for, or what, those goats.
 
Phigment said:
My instinct is to say that goats which reappear after being eaten sound like Raksha shaping wackiness.

Then the question is whether the character with those goats is a shaped fair folk, or whether that character went adventuring into the Wyld and stole, was gifted, bargained for, fought for, or what, those goats.
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Here's a better idea.

The one that went into the Wyld was transformed into those goats.

The one eating them is the Raksha.
 
So I have a question for the Question Thread; I hear all the time that 2e 'Overexplained' Exalted, and to a certain extent I don't even disagree with this, but my question is this: I want examples. I want people to point at things in the actual printed books ideally with page numbers or at least some kind of reference point. Then, if possible, I want to see why you believe it is an over-explanation. It probably is, but I still want to see it elaborated. Ideally, the more specific you can be the better- some of this is going to be subjective as anything of course, so bear that in mind.

I'm asking largely because I for the life of me cannot remember any of the really egregious ones. It's all blurred together.
 
Anasurimbor said:
While the Salinan Working has yet to be mentioned in 3e, it has been discussed by the developers. TLDR: Like The Ebon Dragon or SWLIHN, it's closer to the 1e version.
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That kind of sucks unless there's some other way to go hedgemage. I guess you could say Occult 3 = enough to figure out sorcery

Shyft said:
So I have a question for the Question Thread; I hear all the time that 2e 'Overexplained' Exalted, and to a certain extent I don't even disagree with this, but my question is this: I want examples. I want people to point at things in the actual printed books ideally with page numbers or at least some kind of reference point. Then, if possible, I want to see why you believe it is an over-explanation. It probably is, but I still want to see it elaborated. Ideally, the more specific you can be the better- some of this is going to be subjective as anything of course, so bear that in mind.

I'm asking largely because I for the life of me cannot remember any of the really egregious ones. It's all blurred together.
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The Daystar would probably be the biggest setting piece I could point to and say "they overexplained it". It gives a very well defined answer to a fairly big question of "What is the sun?". While the answer it gives is pretty neat (sun robot spaceship kung-fu doggos are cool) it takes away a creative space that had been left open in a way that other setting pieces like say Nexus or Gem don't really do. The existence of Nexus doesn't deny the existence of other big important trading cities and creation certainly has the space for them, Creation only has one sun though. The Daystar answers what the sun is and in doing so means that it can't be anything else. It's exclusionary in a setting that usually leaves big questions open so they can match the genre you're going for.

Generally I find exclusionary design, things that don't expand the setting or lay groundwork for expanding it but rather give a specific answer while denying a whole bunch of other options to be the overexplained bits. Celestial Direction:Malfeas is okay because it tells you the general layout of hell and gives some examples to use as landmarks through creating your own sections of it. Th Daystar meanwhile is big enough to eat an important setting space but not big enough you can really build more setting off it.
 
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Shyft said:
So I have a question for the Question Thread; I hear all the time that 2e 'Overexplained' Exalted, and to a certain extent I don't even disagree with this, but my question is this: I want examples. I want people to point at things in the actual printed books ideally with page numbers or at least some kind of reference point. Then, if possible, I want to see why you believe it is an over-explanation. It probably is, but I still want to see it elaborated. Ideally, the more specific you can be the better- some of this is going to be subjective as anything of course, so bear that in mind.

I'm asking largely because I for the life of me cannot remember any of the really egregious ones. It's all blurred together.
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CoTD: Scavenger Lands, Halta chapter
Nanobot artificial gods made by a FA Twilight to counteract the Great Curse (which said Twilight didn't really know about) that have produced swarm intelligence bigger gods.
In Return of the Scarlet Empress, the now Infernal reincarnation of that Twilight uses the nanobots to mind control the populace.

Mount Metagalapa is now a FA directional titan which is also a big plot point in Return of the Scarlet Empress
 
Exthalion said:
CoTD: Scavenger Lands, Halta chapter
Nanobot artificial gods made by a FA Twilight to counteract the Great Curse (which said Twilight didn't really know about) that have produced swarm intelligence bigger gods.
In Return of the Scarlet Empress, the now Infernal reincarnation of that Twilight uses the nanobots to mind control the populace.

Mount Metagalapa is now a FA directional titan which is also a big plot point in Return of the Scarlet Empress
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I'll tack "everything with there being Least Gods that can be prayed to and influenced" onto these, which also each bugged the hell out of me when I read them.
 
Both of those are pretty dumb in my opionion but I don't think they quite meet the criteria of "Overexplained". Overexplained is where they add a setting detail but do it in such a way that it effectively locks out a big chunk of stuff. The Three Spheres Crisis is one of these because it's basically a sign that says "NO RUNNING PRIMORDIAL ERA GAMES". Twilight Nanobots don't stop Twilights from having other cool toys, it just means one of their toys is kinda dumb.

Devil Tigers also qualify as over explaining, trying to quantify the slow metamorphosis into a Primordial through a couple of charms rather then just allowing it to happen through roleplay by the combining of Primordial charms and by slowly building off and breaking out of their themes. Instead it introduces a mechanically broken mess and basically tells you to restart your charm cascades with a bunch of essence 1 stuff. It locks out better and more natural approaches to the whole question of Devil Tigers.
 
Peanut-007 said:
Both of those are pretty dumb in my opionion but I don't think they quite meet the criteria of "Overexplained". Overexplained is where they add a setting detail but do it in such a way that it effectively locks out a big chunk of stuff. The Three Spheres Crisis is one of these because it's basically a sign that says "NO RUNNING PRIMORDIAL ERA GAMES". Twilight Nanobots don't stop Twilights from having other cool toys, it just means one of their toys is kinda dumb.

Devil Tigers also qualify as over explaining, trying to quantify the slow metamorphosis into a Primordial through a couple of charms rather then just allowing it to happen through roleplay by the combining of Primordial charms and by slowly building off and breaking out of their themes. Instead it introduces a mechanically broken mess and basically tells you to restart your charm cascades with a bunch of essence 1 stuff. It locks out better and more natural approaches to the whole question of Devil Tigers.
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Chaya, the firetrees, and the effect on the populace already existed in 1E. nanobots was what cut out the potential for other things.

Same with what Mount Metagalapa was.
 
I'd therefore put "Primordials are their Charmtrees" itself under that heading, then - while the idea of Primordials as living bundles of ideas and capabilities along a theme is pretty cool, actually trying to say "also, we've written down everything that a Primordial includes and pinned them to these particular Charms" is going a little too far. "Primordials are their Charmtrees and these are very explicitly a small fraction of their Charms" would at least have worked significantly better.
 
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