No because starmetal only requires you to kill gods in 2e so we can happily ignore this and move on. Using the metal of fallen stars is perfectly ethical.
My impression was always that if the night sky is a readout for the Loom, then starmetal is the alloy used for the star-beacons in it. For whatever reason, part of the nightly readout includes a who's-who of significant personages in Heaven, with each Celestial god being assigned a star, which are then arranged into constellations to model the various Bureaus and other bureaucratic assemblies.
Sometimes, a god dies or gets fired, and in that case the starmetal beacon used to represent them in the readout is jettisoned and falls to the ground, with a new one being installed once someone is chosen to fill the vacant position. Often, mortals and Exalts will track down the falling star-beacons and harvest them, because the material they're made of - starmetal - is only produced by the Loom's dedicated manufacturing centers* for the express purpose of installation in the Dome of the Sky, and thus nigh impossible to obtain by any other means.
What was the 2e canon?
* I assume that there's essentially an entire infrastructure, located either somewhere in Yu Shan and/or inside the Loom itself, which helps procure/produce, refine, and then ship whatever the Pattern Spiders need to do their jobs wherever it's needed, when it's needed. Said infrastructure is one of the few things that remains largely free of divine corruption or excessive budget cuts, due to only containing a few actual deities, all of whom were hand-picked by the Maidens for their lack of ambition and interests beyond their duties; the rest of the work is handled by various Maiden-crafted behemoths (possibly along with Primordial creations that defected or other such oddities - no one really knows much about what goes on in there), which spend as much time as possible in the Loom and avoid interacting with others.
Also, of course, because the Pattern Spiders can, will, and have done unspeakable things to those responsible whenever someone fucks up their supply lines.
On an unrelated note, is there any real information on the Great Contagion's in-universe mechanisms (i.e., what it was, how it spread, why it was so lethal)? I decided, in the name of getting at least some sort of creative writing out, to start writing up a variant setting, and the Contagion is fairly significant in the early segments of it.
On an unrelated note, is there any real information on the Great Contagion's in-universe mechanisms (i.e., what it was, how it spread, why it was so lethal)? I decided, in the name of getting at least some sort of creative writing out, to start writing up a variant setting, and the Contagion is fairly significant in the early segments of it.
There's a statblock of the 'modern' strain of the Contagion in MoEP Abyssals... page 159
Basically it starts as a super-flu, you lose 1 dot of stamina per day, and 1 dot of dex/str total. When you hit Sta 1, you turn green with weeping sores and you're effectively a dead man walking. Note that the version in the book is only what the Abyssals can muster as part of their Charms. It's explicitly weaker than the original. The original Contagion iirc managed to infect a sidereal through the disease's own thread of fate.
the implication from the book actually suggests that contagion breakouts happen often enough that people have procedures for dealing with them, albeit very simple ones.
On an unrelated note, is there any real information on the Great Contagion's in-universe mechanisms (i.e., what it was, how it spread, why it was so lethal)? I decided, in the name of getting at least some sort of creative writing out, to start writing up a variant setting, and the Contagion is fairly significant in the early segments of it.
There's a statblock of the 'modern' strain of the Contagion in MoEP Abyssals... page 159
Basically it starts as a super-flu, you lose 1 dot of stamina per day, and 1 dot of dex/str total. When you hit Sta 1, you turn green with weeping sores and you're effectively a dead man walking. Note that the version in the book is only what the Abyssals can muster as part of their Charms. It's explicitly weaker than the original. The original Contagion iirc managed to infect a sidereal through the disease's own thread of fate.
the implication from the book actually suggests that contagion breakouts happen often enough that people have procedures for dealing with them, albeit very simple ones.
Well crap. My best guess had been that the Great Contagion was more like a form of pseudo-Essence which could be absorbed by mortals during natural Essence respiration, but couldn't be processed for energy and would grow by devouring/displacing existing Essence stores[1], eventually starving/clogging their hun-po structure and killing them.
When infected mortals beseeched the gods for help, the Contagion-Essence would get transmitted along the link and infect them when they next drew on their quintessence reserves, and elementals got poisoned because it would pass through the dragonlines before dispersing into the atmosphere.
The only bright spot was that the Great Contagion couldn't spread from one host to the next outside of those vectors - it was dependent on a steady influx of "live" Contagion-Essence oozing up from the Underworld and out through shadowlands to avoid burning itself out.
The idea is that this prompted some bright spark to propose carving the Underworld free of Creation and letting it plunge into the Outer Chaos, which would devour it and thus stop the plague at its source.
[1] In detail: let's say the average human needs to respire X units of Essence each day to stay healthy. They're exposed to a unit of Contagion-Essence, which 'looks' enough like normal ambient Essence that their system tries to respire it - except once the Contagion-Essence gets inside, it resists any effort to break it down or expel it, so now there's 1 unit's worth of Essence space effectively going unused because the Contagion-Essence is hogging it.
From there, the Contagion-Essence starts devouring the body's stockpiled Essence, as well as a portion of any new Essence drawn in for respiration, growing each time to fill the space its most recent meal took up: the more the Contagion grows, the fewer units' worth of space there is in the victim's spiritual organ structures for storing the Essence it pulls in and the harder it gets for it to process the Essence it still has space for. Eventually, there's so much Contagion-Essence that the victim can't respire Essence at all anymore, and at that point they're screwed.
Hello nerds. For all you fellows who want to ask questions about Exalted but feel there is insufficient space for it or that you do not get answered, use this officially staff-approved Exalted Questions Thread, where no answers are stupid because so is everyone else!
There was only room for the basic suite. There's like...I wanna say 50-70 spells total?
Book of the Emerald Circle
This is a collection of all the 2e Terrestrial Circle spells, homebrewed to not suck in that system. The mechanic won't work for Ex3 obviously, but you'll have an idea of what they do, and translating them to 3e wouldn't be particularly hard.
Okay, so here's the big thing about the Well of Udr that you may not have realised because of the fondness of fanfic writers using it as a plot device.
The Well of Udr is nothing important. It's a plot hook attached to a single Deathlord. It fundamentally doesn't matter to the setting at large. It's just a McGuffin linked to the Dowager, that builds into her schtick. It's basically just mentioned in a sidebar and a few places in her write-up. No one will be able to tell you how it works or what it is, because no one knows. There's a suggestion that maybe it let her pull the Great Contagion out of another timeline or something, but fundamentally, it's just a Plot Thing rather than an axis of the metaphysics or something.
Exalted 3 Update. Its looking like the Dragonblooded 3E kick starter is going to be late march/early April. I believe Dragonblood and The Realm are both text complete, and nearly all Dragonblooded Art has come in (not sure about 'The Realm' art). With the Kickstarter going, and the books being so far in development who the hell knows how long it will be after the KS is finished before the book gets put in our hands though.
Exalted 3 Update. Its looking like the Dragonblooded 3E kick starter is going to be late march/early April. I believe Dragonblood and The Realm are both text complete, and nearly all Dragonblooded Art has come in (not sure about 'The Realm' art). With the Kickstarter going, and the books being so far in development who the hell knows how long it will be after the KS is finished before the book gets put in our hands though.
It's our intention to link to chapters of Dragon Blooded during the Kickstarter in backer-only updates, so that backers will be able to read through the nearly complete text for the book by the end of the KS and make backing decisions accordingly. This method has worked really well for us during our past several Kickstarters and think it is a great way for backers to be informed and assured that their books are well on their way to completion.
It doesn't change much, but if you're bullying some poor mortals who can't jump, then you're obviously impossible to melee. The ST may throw in some circumstantial dice benefits and penalties to ranged duels with a height advantage.
Many thousand's of words have been spent on why Cecelyne's wish granting charms (and I agree with them for the most part.) But my question is has anyone redone them so that they're of better use? I'd be very intrested in them.
And speaking of Cecelyne... So The Problem(tm) with Demonic Primacy of Essence is that it's supposed to be one of those charms that has powerful effects and side effects, for example Malfeas's radiation charm, Adorjan's hearing enhancer and.Witness to Darkness, but it falls flat because it's entirely relient on Essence and your Slayer beatstick suffers -2 to their social defenses against a Teodjiza by RAW. Said Slayer could literally pick a Jade-Lion up and beat about dozen more of them to death with it's corpse.
It doesn't feel like something you have to weigh the costs of developing like those other charms; Witness to Darkness is fairly useful and the Ebon-Dragon's fairly nasty offensive tree and memeory manipulation charms are behind it, and Malfeas's radiation charm is fairly useful, if horrific, and the charms behind it are wicked.
But all that's behind Cecelyne's DPE is more demon and god control stuff. Which is take it or leave it tbh.
So, I have an idea for a fix;
Cost: — Mins: Essence 2 Type: Permanent Keywords: Servitude, Social Duration: Permanent Prerequisite Charms: Hellscry Chakra
The law of Cecelyne binds the will of inferiors to their natural masters. First Circle Demons reduce their MDV by the Infernal's Essence, they are cowed by both the Laws of Cecelyne and the Infernal's obvious superiority. Second-Circle Demons are peers, at least at first, and as such they are not effected by this Charm, and Third Circle Demons are the Unquestionable Lords of Hell, and instead the Infernal deducts own MDV by difference in Essence. (E.g Ligier has an Essence score of 9, as such an Essence 3 Infernal would be at -6 to their MDV)
At Essence 4 this charm automatically upgrades, it now applies the penalty to Second Circle Demons and at Essence 5 Third Circle Demons are now their peers in horrific, hellish glory and they now longer effect the Infernal's MDV. Warlock's who also know Wayward Divinity Oversight (see p. 118) apply the MDV reduction to social attacks against gods of lesser Essence, but none of the other benefits or drawbacks of this Charm apply with such beings.
The theory behind this is that while an Infernal is still young they are just peers to the Demon-Lords and the Unquestionable's are, well, unquestionable. But once they grow to the Essence score where they could be theoretically summoning and binding them, they start to get the advantage.
Cost: 5m Mins: Essence 3 Type: Simple Keywords: Compulsion Duration: Indefinite Prerequisite Charms: Demonic Primacy of Essence
The Yozis transcend all lesser aspects of themselves. While active, this Charm exerts an unnatural compulsion against all beings who would have their MDV's effected by this chram's prerequisite, preventing them from making any physical attacks that would knowingly target or risk obvious immediate harm to the Infernal, even in self-defense. The compulsion does not deter demons forced to attack by sorcerous binding, however. Hostile demons can work around this Charm to an extent. An area attack that encompasses the Infernal's location is forbidden, since this would cause obvious immediate harm, but attacking a cliff to catch the Infernal in a rockslide is acceptable, since the rockslide is an indirect consequence of the attack that triggered it.
Once an Infernal has Essence 5+, the cost to activate this Charm reduces to zero motes.
Not much of a change, outside of getting rid of the whole Essence 6 and 8 thing going on and making it fit the whole direction I'm going for.
Essentially, breaking down the whole Essence - MDV penalties to some degree, because haha, people have lives to live and requiring Essence 6 or 7 to not be at fairly bothersome disadvantage to Second-Circle Demons, who by canon are peers to the Infernals within the hierarchy of hell is something I want to get rid off.
Now, I'm not going to do a whole rewrite for Cecelyne's Demon-Tree, but I'm fairly certain of the idea. Even if it might need work.
I agree with you that some of Cecelyne's charms need some tweaking. I wouldn't have thought of making the charm auto-upgrading like that, but it makes the charm a lot more worthwhile than the canon version.
The idea I hit upon for the rewrite I'm doing is, instead of applying an mdv penalty based on Essence, the Infernal adds her Essence to her Appearance, which subtracts from the target's mdv. I'm not sure which benefit to give for games not using Appearance yet.
For the drawback of the charm, I've found that I like increasing/reducing the number of scenes that the Infernal needs to build or erode intimacies towards demons/valid spirits. The idea was that because Essence matters more to the Infernal because she took this charm, it's harder to care about lower essence demons and easier to forget about them because they don't matter as much of the Infernal. It also gives Third Circle demons an advantage social over Infernals without making them want to avoid Third Circles entirely until they're high enough Essence.
I actually have a bunch of re-written and half re-written Cecelyne charms somewhere around my hard drive, so if you're interested, I'd be happy to post them.
Can someone help me understand how exactly does Perronele work? So reading its description, the demon's main schtick being a puddle that slide over your body and enhance your soak.
But does in encase only the neck-down (2) or is it a full-body armor (2a)? And if it's full-body, how can the wearer uses any of his senses?
And I'm not really sure what does it mean to have flesh-color tinted with ebony or pale, not a native English speaker so when I read the word flesh I thought it's those pinkish thing under your skin, but the text seems to imply that it's actually skin colors, ranging from African to Nordic?
The paragraph about spotting the demon being pretty difficult and it giving the wearer a sick appearance is weird too. Let say that a dark skin Exalted summons a Perronele and wears it, does it look like 2 or 2b/3? Since to achieve those effect the demon must be slighly transparent, since I can clearly see that dude neck and his head are two different colors...
Can someone help me understand how exactly does Perronele work? So reading its description, the demon's main schtick being a puddle that slide over your body and enhance your soak.
But does in encase only the neck-down (2) or is it a full-body armor (2a)? And if it's full-body, how can the wearer uses any of his senses?
And I'm not really sure what does it mean to have flesh-color tinted with ebony or pale, not a native English speaker so when I read the word flesh I thought it's those pinkish thing under your skin, but the text seems to imply that it's actually skin colors, ranging from African to Nordic?
The paragraph about spotting the demon being pretty difficult and it giving the wearer a sick appearance is weird too. Let say that a dark skin Exalted summons a Perronele and wears it, does it look like 2 or 2b/3? Since to achieve those effect the demon must be slighly transparent, since I can clearly see that dude neck and his head are two different colors...
A peronelle is basically a gloopy tar-shoggoth thing that's human skin-coloured. That means they come in a range of skin colours. A dark-skinned sorcerer is going to want to summon a dark-coloured peronelle; a paler sorcerer is going to want to summon a paler peronelle. Unless you're using it for a disguise, of course.
The "sickly appearance" thing is something I've assumed to mean that it's never quite going to match your natural skin colour, and so people go "Oh, he's looking pale, I wonder if he's ill?" when your peronelle is slightly paler than you are. It also might look slightly waxy or clammy or something - the point is that a peronelle isn't perfect at hiding itself.
The peronelle can cover up as much of you as you want it to. Given there's nothing that says you can see/breathe (etc) through it, I've always assumed that most sorcerers leave eye/mouth/ear holes, etc. You can totally just wear a peronelle "ballistic vest" under your clothing and leave your head unprotected, but you're going to need to let the peronelle have some places it can sprout eyes from so it can see attacks incoming and harden itself appropriately.
A peronelle is basically a gloopy tar-shoggoth thing that's human skin-coloured. That means they come in a range of skin colours. A dark-skinned sorcerer is going to want to summon a dark-coloured peronelle; a paler sorcerer is going to want to summon a paler peronelle. Unless you're using it for a disguise, of course.
The peronelle can cover up as much of you as you want it to. Given there's nothing that says you can see/breathe (etc) through it, I've always assumed that most sorcerers leave eye/mouth/ear holes, etc. You can totally just wear a peronelle "ballistic vest" under your clothing and leave your head unprotected, but you're going to need to let the peronelle have some places it can sprout eyes from so it can see attacks incoming and harden itself appropriately.
Yes, IIRC you can ask for anything as long as it isn't "A Demon that knows Sorcery".
Including "This specific demon I know who happens to be a Sorcerer".
Although just because you ask for something doesn't mean that thing exists.
