- Location
- Versailles
Does anyone know of an homebrew of the shard Exalted: Modern. I know one about gunstar and another about heaven's reach, but that's all
General Exalted Thread
IIRC, the 'Flame' refers to Cytherea.
- Location
- Singapore
This is, like, hilarious.
I've just checked out the ranges of napoleonic era artillery. The maximum range of the largest one, from Russia, is a 12-pounder with a maximum range of 1800 metres, and an effective range of 825. Flight of the brilliant raptor has a range of 1800 yards, i.e. 1600 metres or 1.6 kilometres.
The range of the brilliant raptor is a spell that outranges Napoleonic era artillery.
Anyone marching up to a fort that holds a sorcerer is either suicidal, has good assets, or is just plain stupid.
I've just checked out the ranges of napoleonic era artillery. The maximum range of the largest one, from Russia, is a 12-pounder with a maximum range of 1800 metres, and an effective range of 825. Flight of the brilliant raptor has a range of 1800 yards, i.e. 1600 metres or 1.6 kilometres.
The range of the brilliant raptor is a spell that outranges Napoleonic era artillery.
Anyone marching up to a fort that holds a sorcerer is either suicidal, has good assets, or is just plain stupid.
- Location
- United States
I think that "how sexist should a culture be" should be a sliding scale that varies based on gaming group and game. There's a lot of story fodder that you can pull out of that kind of dynamic, but there's a lot of players who see that and get a bad taste in their mouth. So i think the most important thing to do is sit down with your players and ask if they want to use that for drama fuel, or not, and if they do, what do they want to get from it.
I would posit that you should worry less about the fireballs and more about the demons and giant nigh-invulnerable vine serpents they can summon as soldiers. Brilliant raptor is, after all, one cannon that can be fired once or twice a minute, up to three times for an Exalt spending motes. The Sorcerer won't wipe out an army with it. Indeed, you'd be lucky to force a battlegroup crash on size 1/2.
Ah, you may be talking 2e. In that case recall: Limited motes. An Essence 3 mortal Sorcerer has 30 motes, and IIRC that's a 15m spell. That's two shots. An Exalted Sorcerer ranges from 30-90 motes, IIRC, at E2 to 5. Give or take some from pool expanders. My Sidereal Sorcerer could have cast it...I think six times? Though the Exalt in 2e would be far better served just...walking down and killing all invaders themselves. Summon some demons to ease the process, but 2e defense values were bonkers.
greensun
You shall all burn beneath my light!!!
Let's face it, the Storm-Mothers exist so that your Red-haired, Orchalicum armored Solar Dawn caste can strangle them in their courts and seize their loot so you can live like a queen. (and/or destroy Gem)
Sure, but the setting generally isn't lacking in asshole gods to kill.
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Someone should go beat up the god of asshole gods.
I am unsure as to whether or nor there are Gods that have other Gods as a part of their portfolio, but I would assume there are not.
- Location
- Virginia
This sounds a lot more disturbing when you think of it in the context of, say, genocides or purges.
TenfoldShields
Lounging on a Hoard of Words
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Tbh and to get really dumb and pedantic over it: a god of divine assholes is, practically implemented, a "dude who monitors breaches of social etiquette in Heaven" (being an asshole is socially determined and shit). So they'd basically be like...a majordomo for the Bureau of Heaven? One of Ryzala's foot soldiers most likely. Keeps a list of who's being shit 'cause that kind of thing's useful for social pressure if you can nail people for regularly being impolite, rude, etc. or just figure out who they don't like or do like. Plus breaches of social etiquette are Events in and of themselves, a lot of Heaven runs on personal capital and connections. You trash that and what've you got going for you.
Personally I'd make him, like, one of the original divine Internal Affairs guys that nobody liked, were Solar lapdogs who enjoyed having power to get up all in the affairs of the gods doing gruntwork, and got fucking rolled after the Usurpation because of course they did. And he decided that he liked living more than he did going down with the ship so he groveled hard enough that Ryzala let him stay on some kind of a leash. Like...hrm, he might not necessarily be a bad guy exactly (or she I should say). But it's a workable origin for a deity that just has no good options. You could toy with it too, if you wanna make 'em more unsympathetic they did it purely to save their own skin and sold out their colleagues, craven but somewhat understandable. If you wanna make 'em more sympathetic they did it because they were afraid and this way they could save some of their friends and the staff who depended on them. Not exactly virtuous, considering how much they personally benefited, but not just "dude is a dick".
Tbh I do kinda like how Exalted's divines are people, good and bad and their personalities are not necessarily dependent on their work. A god who tallies the dead in mass graves could be a dignified noble or harassed tallyman just as much as they could be a weird slavering war-crime fetishist. It means you can get gods who are creepily into their station, gods who treat it as a means to an end for stuff they actually care about, and gods who don't give a shit.
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- Location
- Ekaterinburg, Russia
That's actually a canon god that's supposed to keep tracks of various cataclysms, in 2E.
And they have gotten much more powerful than they were ever supposed to be.
Considering that you think they probably work for the person that is pretty much in charge of Bureaucratic Corruption...
Yeah, I'm gonna say "dude is a dick" is likely more accurate than you would like to admit.
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- Location
- Singapore
Um. Sorry. I was thinking about 3e. I mean, sure, they haven't released the sorcery book yet. But being able to do stuff like gather motes means that you can shoot off a much larger number of artillery. Just make sure there's a bonfire near you.
TenfoldShields
Lounging on a Hoard of Words
- Pronouns
- He/Him
I'm not, like, a huge fan of "gods are all corrupt bureaucrats who are bureaucratically corrupt" tbh, where they're just corrupt because they're bureaucrats and they're bureaucrats 'cause they're corrupt and if you smash those two words together enough you get...sssoooomething idk. Corruption doesn't just emerge ex nihilo, I mean sure part of it is shitty people just being shitty people, but it's often a product of dysfunctional systems and a lack of social trust. And Heaven in Exalted is nothing if not dysfunctional and lacking in social trust because the nominal order has been a bad joke for centuries and if you want to get anything done you have to bend or break or circumvent some rules.
Like even something as simple as "I am a god of the rainy season and I need to requisition an additional storm from the Bureau of Seasons" runs into the problem of "if I don't have friends in the Bureau I'm gonna get kicked to the bottom of the list or my paperwork might just get fucking lost or used as a tea coaster 'cause they have a thousand other gods demanding the same resources" and "it'll be a lot easier to get a good storm if I do favors for a few gods there so they like me and know I won't just come when I need shit" and "oh wait isn't X my cousin, I could ask if he'd introduce me to some of them!". Playing purely by the employee handbook is asking to get fucked. Most corruption isn't just some dude slipping a briefcase full of money under the table.
To bring it back to the example: dude might not have a pleasant job and might not necessarily be well liked but it doesn't follow that he's personally petty, sadistic, or just a fucker in general because of his boss or working conditions. You could 100% play a character like that as a guy just trying to keep his head down and make it another day in Heaven without always living on the margins and I dunno why you'd say you can't really.
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notanautomaton
I've got 99 quests, I've finished one
I feel like it also draws from the trope of 'if everyone's corrupt, nobody is.' Where the entire bureaucracy is corrupt, so throwing in a few coins as bribe money is effectively just an extra fee.
Except that, again, Ryzala is in charge.
If there was any deity that currently outranked her, and wasn't spending the vast majority of their time in the Jade Pleasure Dome, then things would be different.
But there isn't, so it's not.
- Location
- Denmark
- Pronouns
- She/Her
That's dumb. Ryzala should not be synonymous with corruption and making the Divine Bureaucracy corrupt as hell in the style of a Western bureaucracy is not actually very clever or subversive at all.
EDIT: Like, it also smacks of these people having never worked with or in a bureaucracy because Yu-Shan doesn't seem to act like one anyways, so one might perhaps argue that this is, in the words of @EarthScorpion "fucking stupid."
EDIT: Like, it also smacks of these people having never worked with or in a bureaucracy because Yu-Shan doesn't seem to act like one anyways, so one might perhaps argue that this is, in the words of @EarthScorpion "fucking stupid."
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Imrix
Periodically Malevolent QM
Given the argument on Discord that raged about just this, you know this is a contentious opinion, so bluntly asserting it here as an objective fact feels... mm. It's a thing.
- Location
- Denmark
- Pronouns
- She/Her
When I say "should" it indicates normativity rather than positivity; I am making a normative statement based on my own preferences, not a positive statement that indicates objective observation. While the mirror to the Discord is funny, and has lead to a great many neo-platonic "as above, so below" jokes (though they're more like "as below, so below" really; we're all damned here), I don't actually think I should be prevented from making such a statement in the thread because we had an argument about something related on Discord, nor do I feel particularly inclined to drag a private chat into the public comings and goings of the thread lest it be seen as some sort of dumb shadow cabal.
I have my opinions, and I am stating as much because I am open to dialogue about the subject, but I'm not going to not respond to something I think is stupid because I just had the argument another place, my dude.
- Location
- Pittsburgh, PA
I wasn't there for this Discord incident, but...
I mean, cutting down on the number of evil villains who are villainous because they are evil has been a major element in Exalted fan rewrites, so it doesn't seem that contentious?
Imrix
Periodically Malevolent QM
And when you follow that with "making the Divine Bureaucracy corrupt as hell in the style of a Western bureaucracy is not actually very clever" that reads like an objective assertion.
- Location
- Spain
Can i see that argument? or is it restricted to the shadow cabal?