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General Exalted Thread

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Frakir's brother said:
So I removed the article format, and until I get to a computer with a couple hours free that's as much as I can do. That help, or do I need to break up the paragraphs some more?

Thanks for being willing to help me improve.
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Whitespace. Empty lines between paragraphs. A solid block of text is really hard to digest, no matter whether it's an article or not.
 
Kaiya said:
Then I'd just...let you pick your limit break, or not put you in situations where you gain tons of limit :p Like I said, it's about knowing your players.
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Limit always feels best, to me, when it flows naturally out of the excess and madness the character. The way it gets described as 'if this gauge fills up your ST can have your character randomly flip out and slaughter a bazaar full of people' is just bleh.

Given, I think thatis more a flaw in how it's written than entirely in concept.
 
AmineHsu said:
Limit always feels best, to me, when it flows naturally out of the excess and madness the character. The way it gets described as 'if this gauge fills up your ST can have your character randomly flip out and slaughter a bazaar full of people' is just bleh.

Given, I think thatis more a flaw in how it's written than entirely in concept.
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Berserk Anger is a reference to Hercules, and is like the big mythic influence for the Great Curse, hence its inclusion. But this is what I mean when I say you gotta trust that your ST won't do that if its not appropriate to the character. If your ST does so, just, tell them that its wildly inappropriate and give them advice on a better break. Or ask when you hit Limit 7 or 8 "Hey, so, I'm worried about the limit break, here are some hard nos I wouldn't have fun playing". Like, I've spoken to STs and nixed Deliberate Cruelty outright, because even if its super narratively appropriate it wouldn't be fun to play, and so I tell them ahead of time to avoid any issues.
 
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Rook Homebrew: Smiling Ape Confronts The Cosmos In Glorious Combat
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    • Blame/credit to this goes to various people who know EXACTLY WHAT THEY DID
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    Smiling Ape Confronts The Cosmos In Glorious Combat

    Nothing is greater in life than a good fight; the same holds true into death and undeath. Such is the truth of the weirdest of Deathlords, Smiling Ape Confronts The Cosmos In Glorious Combat. All he desires is worthy opponents to fight, and now he has an eternity to do this in. What more could he ask for?

    Once in the pre-history Smiling Ape was a beastman from dank sulfuric swamplands of the Southeast. Early in life he found his true love: Smiling Ape lived for a good fight. Then a crest of gold kissed his brow, and he found himself thrust into the greatest fight of all, the great war that first sundered Creation. Smiling Ape became known as a pugilist without peer. The war was hard-fought and many a battle was saved by his presence alone - none could say for sure there was a greater martial artist among the Solars than him.

    When the war ended, the Sun's god-kings began to build great things and lead Creation into a golden age. Smiling Ape whiled away the time by leaping from jungle tree to cloud to mountaintop, affably challenging glorious Exalts and mighty divinities to honest fights. He did this for some time, but no matter what he tried, he could not find anyone who matched him - or if they did, he would train with obsession and soon outstrip them. He felt that nothing could match the old fights against the Primordials. Nothing gave him joy like he had during the war that carved Creation again.

    Smiling Ape soon tried to pick fights with the Incarnae and Sol Invictus. He tried to pick fights with whole legions at a time. He would battle raksha for a hundred years and return home frustrated and dissatisfied. Soon, there were few beings left that would accept his challenges. He was too powerful, or had burnt through his good will. And whenever his challenges were accepted the results were catastrophic. Ax kicks gouged canyons from mountains and throws flattened mesas into inland seas. A punch could desolate a whole princedom.

    At some point, his family left him. He did not notice, because he was preparing for his next fight. His peers confronted him; eager as he was to let loose, he accidentally destroyed them, underestimating his power. He had nothing left. No where in the world would he find a good fight.

    Therefore he would fight the world.

    He challenged Yu Shan and the might of the Deliberative, and the elemental legions of dragonspawn. He challenged the gods and the rakshasa and he challenged the flower and the gnat and he lost. What happened next is a matter of some debate, but this much is certain:

    Smiling Ape, the indomitable, was dead.

    His hun and po raged as they sank through the Underworld. There they continued to fight. Time passed, limp and frustrating epochs, and Smiling Ape - or something like Smiling Ape - found himself before a vile thing that bubbled and decomposed, that rotted what remained of his intelligence by merely existing. It was a way to more power. It was a way to a better fight.

    Smiling Ape drank, and he grew, and he solidified, and he became rank and putrid. Eight arms, six eyes, and a great fanged smile stuck in a sea of grotesque and pallid muscle. A shape almost like a man. A hairless, skinless being with more power in his pinky than in any thing under the sun. A perfect fighter. He is almost ready for his rematch against everything at once.

    This time he will win.

    Smiling Ape as Liege: Smiling Ape curates good fights. All of his five Abyssals are warriors that he believes will one day provide a worthy fight. He is simple of mind and agreeable in demeanor. He is motivated primarily by what will be the best fight, either for him or his pupil Exalted. He will accept any challenge, and should you survive it, he will provide you time to train again for another fight. He will gladly let opponents improve themselves, but only up to a point.

    Regularly he clashes with the First and Forsaken Lion, his only martial peer; to Smiling Ape, they are favored fighting partners. The First and Forsaken Lion regards him as a deeply infuriating nuisance that he must occasionally humor and will eventually destroy.
     
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    • Kaiya said:
    Berserk Anger is a reference to Hercules, and is like the big mythic influence for the Great Curse, hence its inclusion. But this is what I mean when I say you gotta trust that your ST won't do that if its not appropriate to the character. If your ST does so, just, tell them that its wildly inappropriate and give them advice on a better break. Or ask when you hit Limit 7 or 8 "Hey, so, I'm worried about the limit break, here are some hard nos I wouldn't have fun playing". Like, I've spoken to STs and nixed Deliberate Cruelty outright, because even if its super narratively appropriate it wouldn't be fun to play, and so I tell them ahead of time to avoid any issues.
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    I get it, and it'd certainly work for some characters but it's such a... extreme of extremes. I wish they'd given a few examples so there was something that felt... less adversarial to reference as well.

    As is, the thing feels, to me, like it's be this sword of Damocles you have no control over and kinda stink.
     
    Rook said:
    There are now as far as Smiling Ape is concerned. Change it to great sentient ape or whatever if your Creation doesn't work that way.
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    ...Apes with human-ish Souls works.
    Although I wonder if Smiling Ape, as a member of what almost has to be a Primordial Race, faced any prejudice on that front.
    Anasurimbor said:
    Beastmen come from a variety of sources, including deliberate design, so there certainly were. What makes you think otherwise?
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    The fact that the sources I'm aware of either don't exist or didn't get rolling until after the Primordial War, so an exalted one couldn't participate in that.
     
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    Sydonai said:
    ...Apes with human-ish Souls works.
    Although I wonder if Smiling Ape, as a member of what almost has to be a Primordial Race, faced any prejudice on that front.
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    Well, as it is, Smiling Ape is physically just a more cheery Asura (from Asura's Wrath) drawn by Rob Liefeld, with the deformed animal-fanged smile of Goku. Metaphysically he was entirely human.

    I don't think playing up the "I was actually an animal" thing works that well as just an incidental facet - that deserves its own great story. Perhaps an orangutan that's basically the Unseen University librarian. I think there's lots of room to play around with "I was a Primordial Race" to justify bringing in weird, closer-to-fantasy-races things. Certainly you could write something of a Gorilla Grodd, a great ape with a hun and po stuffed inside it, cursed with intelligence and deep hatred for the world that birthed it.

    At that point I would mix it up a little though - "I am a giant sentient gorilla" is great pulpy fun, so it's totally a valid place to work out a Deathlord. I think it works a little better to make Kong: Skull Island happen though. If you're going to do a Deathlord, you should mix things a little more to get something more iconic.

    This is me saying a hyperintelligent magical freaky megafauna* (of some kind) from long-forgotten civilizations and a deep and abiding hatred of humans is delicious and deserves to be written.

    Of course, you can do whatever you feel like. I post things for people to use, so just do whatever works for you.

    *Regular megafauna of course being already all over Creation, such as giant bloody stags in the east, feathery dinosaurs all over, and terrifying aquatic dinosaurs of all sizes all over the west. Because dinosaurs and old extinct animals are the shit. Primordial races have to be a little weird, so just saying "freaky megafauna but intelligent and mildly humanoid" doesn't quite cut it.
     
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    In the modern era, the story is probably apocryphal anyway. So it doesn't really matter if it fits into every little bit of the lore.

    Edit - Like, if you have a legend of The Inevitable Leopard Cataclysm, a sage who stalked the foes of creation by night in the shape of a gigantic snow leopard back in the mists of prehistory, that might be a lunar, or another exalted with a particular anima banner, or a behemoth, or something else.
     
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    GardenerBriareus said:
    I didn't actually get that vibe. Really, it feels a lot more like the Exalted version of Sun Wukong - without a Buddha to beat some sense into him, he just escalates and escalates until the world finally gets fed up and crushes him.
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    Yeah, see, Son Goku is literally just how the Japanese refer to Sun Wukong. So, it still fits. :p

    This is the thing to remember about Goku- he's not actually a good person, despite the best efforts of the dub to portray him that way. He's perfectly willing to take a course of action that endangers the earth, just so he can't get a good fight.

    I mean, hell, look at the Tournament of Power in DBS, where Goku actually causes the destruction of multiple universes- and, as far as he knew, Zeno had no intention of letting a wish for them to be brought back to stand.
     
    AmineHsu said:
    I get it, and it'd certainly work for some characters but it's such a... extreme of extremes. I wish they'd given a few examples so there was something that felt... less adversarial to reference as well.

    As is, the thing feels, to me, like it's be this sword of Damocles you have no control over and kinda stink.
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    Yeah, it's come up before. A great part of it is not helped by how Berserk Anger is basically just not a very good Virtue Flaw - it has mythic resonance, but it's not very playable, and it never has been.
    Omicron said:
    Berserk Anger in a marketplace is like...

    Age of Ultron had many flaws, but Hulk flipping out and having to stop him from levelling half a city in a battle with massive collateral damage (but no on-screen casualties) was a very cool moment. And it is the kind of moment that a game like Exalted is begging for, but that players on their own are unlikely to go for out of a fear of exasperating the group, or simply because they themselves would rather just keep pursuing mostly-rational goals. Limit helps with that.

    But Exalted ia also a very lethal game which eschews comic book conventions in which you can evacuate a city block in 30 seconds, and in which anyone who hasn't visibly died on screen hasn't died. So if you run the Hulkbuster scene in Exalted, 1) Hulk seriously risks dying, 2) Iron Man seriously risks dying, 3) civilians will die.

    Ex3 mitigates 1 and 2 with its combat system, but doesn't help that much with 3. And in like maybe 90% of the games I've been in (not counting for two-pages-and-dead PbPs), having one character kill a whole bunch of civilians in a fit of anger would straight up end the game. At the very least we'd lose a player.

    So, this isn't very satisfying.
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    Imrix said:
    Honestly, I feel like the problem in this case is just that Berserk Anger is... Not a very good Virtue Flaw. It's too overt, too indiscriminate, too in-your-face about things. This kind of thing works in a solo narrative when the author can carefully control the fallout of a furious rampage, but in a cooperative story that's written as it happens, it's just too explosive.

    I feel like a better way of framing it would be something like that segment from one of the old Genevieve stories where the antihero cop gets fed up with the investigation stalling, hypes himself up on some really hard magic steroids, then stomps from barfight to barfight, pummelling everybody he finds while roaring that the beatings will continue until helpfulness improves. It's a similar sort of thing in that it's an overt, violent rampage, but it's still goal-focused and sort-of discriminating. It has purpose, and in that it continues the story rather than derailing it.
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    Fortunately, I also rewrote it.
    Imrix said:
    Hair-Trigger Temper
    Finally driven beyond patience, the Solar makes violence her first solution to all obstacles. Her efforts needn't be totally disproportionate; she may shove people out of her way to get through a queue rather than kill them all, but her attacks are always physical, so anybody who objects to her cutting in line can expect a punch rather than an insult. Should characters to whom she holds at least a positive Major Tie oppose her, she may always choose to let them off with some bruises, no matter how staunch their opposition.

    Duration: Session. Hair-Trigger Temper may be ended prematurely if the Solar spends at least a Scene without being provoked to violence.
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    I feel like Berserk Anger is in there still basically because it has to be in there. It's just, like, a thing that's there. It'd be weird to have a Limit Break section without it, even if no one has ever used it ever. That's not a good reason, but like, it's my best guess.
     
    Rook said:
    Primordial races have to be a little weird, so just saying "freaky megafauna but intelligent and mildly humanoid" doesn't quite cut it.
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    Again, I offer up my idea of a Primordial race that reproduce by sacrificing one of their own positive Intimacies and were once considered friends to mankind - because humans barely live any time at all, so you can just enjoy them while they're around, then carve out your feelings of attachment to them once they die to make a child. All the good parts of having a friend/sort-of-pet, none of the grief!

    They reacted very poorly when a sizable component of humanity suddenly started trying to tear down the Primordials and were expecting their aid in doing so - in much the same way many people would react poorly to their pet tarantulas suddenly trying to enlist them in a global conspiracy to unseat humanity as the dominant species on Earth.

    Almost all of them were exterminated, with a few survivors who fled into the Underworld or got dragged into the Rebellion on humanity's side through misplaced affection, terror of being killed for refusing, or Exalted social mastery.

    The Underworld-dwellers degenerated into horrific living Sin-Eaters, their means of propagation twisting so they now needed to harvest positive Passions from the mortal dead (thus damning them to become ever more stained in necrotic Essence with each generation, and ever more bitter over their fall from grace). By the Age of Sorrows, their horrifically degenerate progeny had claimed a web of fractious city-states in the depths of the Underworld, ruling through the trade of soulsteel, ghostly slaves, and what resources can be extracted from the Labyrinth (whose corruptive influence they enjoy a slight resistance to, in comparison to most ex-human explorers - although their harvesting operations still suffer stiff attrition rates, which further drive their need for stolen Passions.)

    Many of those who chose to serve the Incarnae died in the war, and others were killed by Exalts outraged at the perceived exploitation of their ancestors. Efforts to repopulate left many of those who remained bitter & despondent, their hopes and dreams burnt to birth the next generation - who knew nothing of the world that their parents saw die, and often drifted away from them to become surrogate children of more familial Deliberative members. By the time of the Usurpation, their original culture was all but gone, with only a tiny handful of wizened elders even recalling secondhand accounts of their forebears (and largely exiled to reservations where they were kept as patronizing reminders of the "savage prehistory" of the world; the rest were long since assimilated into the new order, eagerly serving as nursemaids, assistants, majordomos, and test subjects for their Exalted masters.
     
    Rook said:
    Primordial races have to be a little weird, so just saying "freaky megafauna but intelligent and mildly humanoid" doesn't quite cut it.
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    Ah, no. Primordial Races are all forms of non-human sapient life that predated the Primordial War.
    Many of those would no doubt be very strange and eldritch...but some were just a little bit odd, like those bird people with long necks that always looked up.

    The original Lintha were almost literally "Humans, but better".
    Albeit because they were designed that way so that ones probably more of an outlier than anything else.
     
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