You have the irritating tendency to wander into this thread periodically to do nothing but yell at people to stop discussing the nuances and internal-consistency of the lore of the game despite the fact that the nuances and internal-consistency are what either drew a large chunk of people to the game to begin with or got them to stick around once the shine of "big anime superheroes" wore off. So I don't suspect this is the huge debate problem-solver you like to purport it as, and instead time and again simply comes off as attempting to stifle any mention of the things you do not specifically like in the most repetitive, unthoughtful fashion you can muster. Its pretty tiresome, because you haven't made a single worthwhile argument in favor of your position and keep repeating "Stop it! It's dumb and I don't like it!" and "The new Devs agree with me that it sucks!"

The only problem that exists with detailing things like the cosmologies, magic systems and descending-order hierarchies of reality and the interplay of those things upon the street-level setting most players interact with, is the perennial White Wolf problem of new writers either misunderstanding or misrepresenting the work of previous authors and choosing to add on things which don't fit the proposed model without care or oversight. This is nothing new here, and nothing new to even tabletop RPGs, but I don't think anyone points at the failures of things like the Lunar or Sidereal 2e books and comes to the conclusion "clearly the problem was having Lunars and Sidereals to begin with. Stop overthinking the Solar vs Dragonblooded conflict." It simply means that the subject was not handled with the kind of care that subject required, and the blame is on the authors for bodging up something that formerly engaged with readers and worked generally pretty okay in practice, not for people talking about the ways this aftermarket graft influences the rest of what we know.

In a perfect world we would have writers capable of following up on established work and either embellishing or repurposing the useful ideas contained inside it without having to resort too "this is too complicated a subject for us, so we opt to say it doesn't exist or matter anymore and so should you." Its the kind of uncritical creative malaise we had come to expect from the Last Edition, where we are not even getting the same information parroted in a less interesting manner, but that information stripped down with false airs of superiority over the fact its now an Infinite Canvas of Unrealized Possibility, as though the one thing standing in front of most people playing this game was religiously adhering to the established canon in the first place. The canon was never the problem, the lack of good examples of how to expand, replace or adapt things which mesh well with it was the problem, and "blank check, do whatever I guess!" doesn't resolve any of that anymore than creating increasingly more convoluted layers of Capitalized Structures of Metaphysics does.

"Make shit up/don't think about it" has never been the solution to Anything.
 
So I was thinking, and EarthScorpian's work on firedust in the SouthWest inspired me.

What would South Eastern firedust be like? Napalm, sticky and longer burning? Firedust crystals trapped inside wood, so that it detonates when burnt, but can be made into potent artifacts? Would Fire and Wood synergize mutate plants into an ever-growing, constantly spreading mass to be fought with earth and salt? I want your opinions.

So, the question there is what you want to use it for.

See, I made South Western firedust because I wanted to enable rocketry and cannons without enabling arequbuses. Hence, I made South Western firedust have properties that mean you can launch fire arrows and they're barely short of inventing the cannon (so PCs can do it), but the steam pressure and things like that mean you can't easily make a man-portable version because it'd be too heavy for easy use. Also, scalding steam in large amounts around them also discouraging man portable use. SW Firedust is basically built for Age of Sail naval stuff plus pre-gun Chinese blackpowder stuff.

So think about what you'd want to have stories about, and build it from the ground up to enable it.
 
You have the irritating tendency to wander into this thread periodically to do nothing but yell at people
I'm being perfectly civil. You're the one going on thousand word rants because someone has an approach you dislike.

And I maintain. Make shit up/ignore inconsistencies is objectively the best way to deal with it. It's destiny, don't overthink it. Problem. Solved.
 
That'd be great if sidereals where NPCs but they aren't, they're supposed to be playable.
They can still be playable. Give them future sight powers because they're the Destiny Exalted and their patrons do Destiny stuff. Give them mechanics to do things but don't overthink the how, anymore than you should go indepth on how, precisely, a Solar uses Adamant Skin. If there's a Loom of Fate, keep it distant and don't have it literally be used to weave destinies by Sidereals. They have powers that work. The exact details are unimportant.
 
They can still be playable. Give them future sight powers because they're the Destiny Exalted and their patrons do Destiny stuff. Give them mechanics to do things but don't overthink the how, anymore than you should go indepth on how, precisely, a Solar uses Adamant Skin. If there's a Loom of Fate, keep it distant and don't have it literally be used to weave destinies by Sidereals. They have powers that work. The exact details are unimportant.
And to this, I would like to bring up the now infamous post by Kukla about Poisonous Ideas. Because maybe you aren't actively espousing the idea that "understanding destroys wonder", and we should all try to avoid figuring out how the powers work, but it sure sounds like it, and it remains as offensive and provoking a claim as ever.
 
And to this, I would like to bring up the now infamous post by Kukla about Poisonous Ideas. Because maybe you aren't actively espousing the idea that "understanding destroys wonder", and we should all try to avoid figuring out how the powers work, but it sure sounds like it, and it remains as offensive and provoking a claim as ever.
Kukla's post was obnoxious offensive nonsense that compared people not into hard sci-fi to wife beaters and fanatics. I find it far more offensive that you bring it up than you find me dislike of your setting aesthetics, believe me.

And, bluntly, yes. Understanding magic does destroy the wonder it holds for many people. It's an aesthetic preference, and you don't get to demonize them for not liking the exact fictional nonsense that you do.
 
Kukla's post was obnoxious offensive nonsense that compared people not into hard sci-fi to wife beaters and fanatics. I find it far more offensive that you bring it up than you find me dislike of your setting aesthetics, believe me.

And, bluntly, yes. Understanding magic does destroy the wonder it holds for many people. It's an aesthetic preference, and you don't get to demonize them for not liking the exact fictional nonsense that you do.
Then it seems like your objectively best solution only applies to the subset of people who don't want to understand what's going on. That's rather like going to a chess match where people can't remember how to castle and suggesting the objectively best solution is to play checkers; I think your enjoyment of checkers might have some part to play in that recommendation.
 
Then it seems like your objectively best solution only applies to the subset of people who don't want to understand what's going on. That's rather like going to a chess match where people can't remember how to castle and suggesting the objectively best solution is to play checkers; I think your enjoyment of checkers might have some part to play in that recommendation.
I actually agree. "Objectively" was a sarcastic reference to a common trend in this threads to call certain subjective things objective.
 
Kukla's post was obnoxious offensive nonsense that compared people not into hard sci-fi to wife beaters and fanatics.
As the person who brought that post to this thread, and who was there to see the context in which it was first made: No. That was not the comparison being made. Nor do I think it's fair or accurate to characterise Dif's post at the top of the page as an uncivil "thousand word rant because someone has an approach you dislike." when I took it as a decent unpacking of my own point about laying the blame of thread-pulling going to bad places at the feet of bad writing rather than a bad approach, which added at the very least a couple useful points of comparison.

Like... yeah, frankly, the root of Sidereal power has been kind of a problem for a long time now in Exalted. You can root it in the Loom or in some nebulous idea of Destiny and it doesn't actually help much when the central problem is that the unreliability of destiny has been a recurring statement throughout Exalted's publication. Sidereals are unique in Exalted as the only Exalt type so intimately tied up in the setting's metaphysics - and that's a good thing, as witnessed by the great attraction Sidereals have held to their fans because of the weird and wonderful perspective it evokes about their lore and powers. But it also carries the consequence that they're the only Exalt type whose powers carry the implication of being rooted in a force which is not only external to themselves, but also particularly fallible to both the Exalted and several of their historic enemies. It's not an insoluble problem, but from a game design perspective it's one worth thinking about.
 
So, the question there is what you want to use it for.

See, I made South Western firedust because I wanted to enable rocketry and cannons without enabling arequbuses. Hence, I made South Western firedust have properties that mean you can launch fire arrows and they're barely short of inventing the cannon (so PCs can do it), but the steam pressure and things like that mean you can't easily make a man-portable version because it'd be too heavy for easy use. Also, scalding steam in large amounts around them also discouraging man portable use. SW Firedust is basically built for Age of Sail naval stuff plus pre-gun Chinese blackpowder stuff.

So think about what you'd want to have stories about, and build it from the ground up to enable it.
I'm going to go with a Greek fire type of thing, where it isn't as hot but clings to whatever sets it off until it burns out, which can take a long time because the Eastern Firedust carries its own fuel within it.

Aesthetics of clinging roots and climbing vines barely visible inside the fires that produce huge amounts of thick tarry smoke.
Seige and naval weapon yes, but also idiot-proof and water resistant fire-starter that can be pruned into giving off one type of smoke.

Thanks for the advice, I'll come back to the thread when I finish writing it up!
 
Sidereals: Our power run on Fate! That makes us natural stewards of reality. And really the true lords of Creation
The infinite horrors from beyond time and space and meaning: So. Uh. What about places that explicitly are not covered by fate, and those over which Fate Holds No Sway?
Sidereals: ...
The infinite horrors from beyond time and space and meaning: ...
Sidereals: ...
The infinite horrors from beyond time and space and meaning: ...
Sidereals: ...
The infinite horrors from beyond time and space and meaning: Soooooo...
Sidereals: AVOIDANCE KATA!
 
Hmm. I think at a foundational level, there is a notion to consider:

I, personally, support the idea of setting consistent and internal logic, and the idea of drawing conclusions or pulling threads as previously mentioned. I think what alienated a lot of people was how it became mandatory, an obligation. All PCs had to be In the Know. All Twilights had to speak in terms of Motonic Physics, and so on.

So ideally, you want the writing to allow for wonder- many forms of wonder, instead of hewing to a single, structured kind.

Wonder, awe, etc, can rest in idealized ignorance or unawareness. But it's also cheap wonder. It's wonder that says the writers are too lazy to think through their ideas, or to develop something to a conclusion, implied or explicit. There is an art to the idea of writing something that's open-ended, but vagueness if the enemy. Wonder in writing is a product of specificness. Not necessarily regimented, categorized, period-table-of-magic codification, but consistent logic and rules.

If you have a sword that lights itself on fire, then logically it should be able to ignite other things unless explicitly stated not to. Alternatively, that same sword could be less 'it is fiery' and is instead 'the metal glows cherry-red hot', which has it's own connotations for 'how hot is Steel when it's cherry-red?' and so on.

The mark of decent writing is knowing when to say you have a steel-melting sword, versus saying the sword reaches the melting point of steel in degrees and you have math to back it up.

How and Why can be sources of wonder and intrigue, of adding to something's legend in a manner that isn't just cruft of history or vagueness. I've totued this out before, but take a read of The Fortress Unvanquishable Save for Sacnoth.

You look at the idea of how Sacnoth (the sword) was made, and it is an experience full of wonder and grandeur, but it is specific and thought-provoking, as opposed to a muddlesome blank canvas.
 
How and Why can be sources of wonder and intrigue, of adding to something's legend in a manner that isn't just cruft of history or vagueness. I've totued this out before, but take a read of The Fortress Unvanquishable Save for Sacnoth.

You look at the idea of how Sacnoth (the sword) was made, and it is an experience full of wonder and grandeur, but it is specific and thought-provoking, as opposed to a muddlesome blank canvas.
I made @Omicron read a book which has a bow being slowly made out of a person and I think it's appropriately mythic and mildly relevant to Exalted :p
 
I am 100% certain a Deathlord has done that. It's too perfect for them not to have.
Nah. I'll just excerpt parts of it here. I might have (heh) shaved off a line or two without intending to. Here it is, under a spoiler cause it gets graphic and a lil freaky:
page 16 of The Vorrh by Brian Catling said:
The bow I carry with me, I made of Este.

She died just before dawn, ten days ago. Este had foreseen her death while working in our garden, an uncapping of momentum in the afternoon sun. Este was born a seer and lived in the expectancy of her departure, a breeze before a wave, before a storm. Seers die in a threefold lapse, from the outside in.

Her long name was Irrinipeste, and she had been born to Abungu in the Vorrh, the great brooding forest that she said was older than humankind. We said goodbye during the days leading to her night. Then all of my feelings were put away; there were more important rituals to perform. All this I knew from our first agreement to be together as it had been described, it had been unfolded.

I stood before our wooden table, where her body lay divided and stripped into materials and language. My back and hands ached from the labour of splitting her apart, and I could still hear her words. The calm instruction of my task, embedded with a singsong insistence to erase my forgetfulness. The entire room was covered in blood, yet no insect would trespass this space, no fly would drink her, no ant would forage her marrow. We were sealed against the world during those days, my task determined, basic, and kind.

She had explained all this to me while I tried to serve her breakfast in bed on a rare rainy morning. The black bread and yellow butter had seemed to stare from its plate with mocking intensity, the fruit pulsing and warping into obscene ducts and ventricles. I perched on the edge of the bed, listening to her simple words glide with the rain, while my fear turned them into petrol, burning into my oxygenless, hidden core.

I shaved long, flat strips from the bones of her legs. Plaiting sinew and tendon, I stretched muscle into interwoven pages and bound them with flax. I made the bow of these, setting the fibres and grains of her tissue in opposition, the raw arc congealing, twisting, and shrinking into its proportion of purpose. I removed her unused womb and placed her dismembered hands inside it. I shaved her head and removed her tongue and eyes and folded them inside her heart. My tasks finished, I placed the nameless objects on the wooden draining board of the sink. They sat in mute splendour, glowing in their strangeness.

For three days I lived with the inventions of her and the unused scraps, the air scented by her presence, the musk-deep smell of her oil and movement.

The pile of her thick, unwashed hair seemed to breathe and swell against the bars of sunlight that turned the room towards evening. These known parts of her stroked away the anxious perfumes, the harsh iron of her blood, and the deeper saturated smoulders of her unlocked interior. On the third day I buried her heart, womb, and head in the garden in a small, circular pit she had dug with her very hands a week before. I covered it with a heavy stone. I obeyed with perfection, tearless and quiet, picking up the arrows that she had made and walking back into the house for the last time.

The bow quickened, twisting and righting itself as the days and the nights pulled and manipulated its contours. There was a likeness to Este's changing during her dying, although that transition had nothing in common with all the deaths I had witnessed and participated in before. With Este, an outward longing marked all, like sugar absorbing moisture and salt releasing it. Every hour of her final days rearranged her with fearsome and compelling difference. Every physical memory of her body, from childhood onwards, floated to the surface of her beautiful frame. I could not leave her. I sat or lay next to her, fascinated and horrified, as the procession gently disgorged. Her eyes waxed and waned memory, pale transparency to flinted fire. She was dimly aware of me but able to instruct and explain the exactitude of the living object she would become. She did this to dispel my anxiety and pain; also to confront the ecstasy of her control. In the evening of the third day, the memory in my dreams began to show itself. It refined our time together, the constancy of her presence. Since leaving her village, we had never been apart, except for those strange weeks when she had asked me to stay inside while she dwelt in the garden day and night. When she returned, she was thin and strained.

The bow is turning black now, becoming the darkest shadow in the room. Everything is very still. I sit holding the two wrapped arrows in my hands. Out of their turnings come hunger and sleep, forgotten reflections of my own irredeemable humanity. From the cupboards and the garden I juggle anticipant food, flooding my senses with taste and smell. Citrus and bacon rise in the room; sage and tomatoes, green onions and dried fish, unfold.

My hands tremble holding the bow, the arrows between my teeth. The moment has come. The two arrows that Este made are white, an infinite, unfocused white without any trace of hue or shadow. They absorb the day into their chalky depth and I grow sick looking at them. I lift the bow, which I must have strung in my sleep, and nock one arrow into its contrast. The other is wrapped away and saved to be the last. She said it was for another to shoot, a bowman who would come after me. I will make all the other arrows.

This was her last instruction. I draw the bow back with all my strength and feel this single gesture brace every muscle of my body, feel the tension lock in as the grace of the string touches my lips. I feel as if the world stops to hold its breath. I raise the bow skywards.[...]
It's actually rather religious.
 
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I made @Omicron read a book which has a bow being slowly made out of a person and I think it's appropriately mythic and mildly relevant to Exalted :p
It's also a book in which a young African man sees the British soldiers' radio shack, and tries to emulate them by building a hut with an antenna made out of a branch and headphones made out of coconut halves, and when the British soldiers see this they laugh their asses out, and the kid laughs with them, and offers them the coconut headphones, and they put them on still laughing, and then they don't laugh anymore and they become very pale and still and order the hut burned with the young man still inside.

The Vorrh pretty much thrives on the unexplained, the implied, the things whose source is not understood. It posits a world at the edge of science, where men think they understand things, but ultimately what matters is not any of the physical or chemical principles behind any process, but the emulation of their form, their outline, their motive, the human drive behind them. In which one pioneer of photography drives himself insane trying to capture the essence of motion in a picture, and attempts to recreate a machine designed by a physician despite lacking any background in medicine and having only seen it once, by essentially building a lookalike of what he remembers of it. Where the aforementioned physician somehow induces anorexia into poor women in order to study the human condition. Where a cyclops sleeps with a blind woman and she wakes up having regained sight, but when later she slaps a blind man in contempt all that happens is that horrible eye-like holes grow in his face.

It is, so far (I am only 3/4 into the first book), a story about cargo cults. A story about how the world is moved by unknown, perhaps unknowable forces and laws, and men prod blindly at the outcomes of these forces, and without understanding of them, emulate them in shape and form, hoping to repeat a result whose truth they cannot fathom.

So, in essence, the exact opposite of a world of Motonic Physics and Thaumaturgy As Science.
 
How and Why can be sources of wonder and intrigue, of adding to something's legend in a manner that isn't just cruft of history or vagueness. I've totued this out before, but take a read of The Fortress Unvanquishable Save for Sacnoth.

You look at the idea of how Sacnoth (the sword) was made, and it is an experience full of wonder and grandeur, but it is specific and thought-provoking, as opposed to a muddlesome blank canvas.
The Doom That Came to Sarnath is a huge inspiration to me, and I think it also illustrates the exact stuff I'm willing to spend my time on when writing Exalted; architecture, wealth, history, politics. The supernatural interests me but I really just want to detail a wealth of cultures and mythoi; I am really far less interested in the Exalted, the gods and the dead than I am what people think and how they act around and about them.

Also Soldiers and Ghosts by J. E. Lendon, I suppose.
 
The Doom That Came to Sarnath is a huge inspiration to me, and I think it also illustrates the exact stuff I'm willing to spend my time on when writing Exalted; architecture, wealth, history, politics. The supernatural interests me but I really just want to detail a wealth of cultures and mythoi; I am really far less interested in the Exalted, the gods and the dead than I am what people think and how they act around and about them.

Also Soldiers and Ghosts by J. E. Lendon, I suppose.
read gormenghast
 
It is, so far (I am only 3/4 into the first book), a story about cargo cults. A story about how the world is moved by unknown, perhaps unknowable forces and laws, and men prod blindly at the outcomes of these forces, and without understanding of them, emulate them in shape and form, hoping to repeat a result whose truth they cannot fathom.

So, in essence, the exact opposite of a world of Motonic Physics and Thaumaturgy As Science.

I can understand completely why that kind of writing is attractive and entertaining- it's for much the same reason I like the wonkiness of Wh40k and similar... but I cannot carry that into Exalted. I find it frustratingly athematic, because it presents unsovable challenges. And for me, Exalted has always been about problems that can be solved, but your solutions matter; as do their consequences. It makes me think nothing I do matters, because I'm in a vast uncaring world that mocks my existence and forces me to sit and huddle, to be afraid of things.

I mean, it's a pretty core setting statement that nearly every problem in Exalted can be solved with violence. History is full of problems solved by violence. They weren't good solutions, usually, but they worked. That's the point. (That you can have bad solutions, not that you want it to be all violence.)

Like... One of the fundamental structural flaws of the Nasuverse (and please don't get into a big tangent about it) is that almost all of it's setting and worldbuilding is in service to the central premise of 'All problems are resolved via spectacular battles'. There's no real symbolic or thematic celebration of ingenuity or diplomacy or a whole host of anything else that could be awesomely dramatic... in anything other than a shonenfiteshow.

Exalted commits to this same central premise that at the end of the day (at least in 2e), you are presented with a magical toolkit that at least in part lets you throw down with the architects of reality, to force them to fight on your level. But, more broadly, that toolkit lets you engage with such challenges on Your level. You can challenge the incarnation of corrupt obstructive bureaucracy and force a confrontation that happens in a timescale and form that you as players and characters can understand.
 
Like... yeah, frankly, the root of Sidereal power has been kind of a problem for a long time now in Exalted. You can root it in the Loom or in some nebulous idea of Destiny and it doesn't actually help much when the central problem is that the unreliability of destiny has been a recurring statement throughout Exalted's publication. Sidereals are unique in Exalted as the only Exalt type so intimately tied up in the setting's metaphysics - and that's a good thing, as witnessed by the great attraction Sidereals have held to their fans because of the weird and wonderful perspective it evokes about their lore and powers. But it also carries the consequence that they're the only Exalt type whose powers carry the implication of being rooted in a force which is not only external to themselves, but also particularly fallible to both the Exalted and several of their historic enemies. It's not an insoluble problem, but from a game design perspective it's one worth thinking about.
I think the critical issue is less of how it functions or where it comes from exactly from a metaphysical perspective; its the issue of the balancing of act of making Sidereals cool without diminishing other splats agencies that tend to have a strong theme of well, defying destiny as a big theme.
 
And, bluntly, yes. Understanding magic does destroy the wonder it holds for many people.

I don't think the conflict is really about understanding. Understanding magic isn't really on the table; none of 2e's motonic physics talk actually brought us any closer to understanding what happens when Panther spends 3m on the First Survival Excellency. More to the point, I don't think any of the motonic physics talk was meant to help anyone understand.

This is, I think, an argument about aesthetics and underlying philosophy.

It is, so far (I am only 3/4 into the first book), a story about cargo cults. A story about how the world is moved by unknown, perhaps unknowable forces and laws, and men prod blindly at the outcomes of these forces, and without understanding of them, emulate them in shape and form, hoping to repeat a result whose truth they cannot fathom.

So, in essence, the exact opposite of a world of Motonic Physics and Thaumaturgy As Science.

That sounds an awful lot like actual physics and science.

The real world is moved by unknown and perhaps unknowable forces and laws; the great project of the sciences is to form an approximate understanding of those forces and laws by prodding at their outcome.

But I still think you're right to call this the opposite of Thaumaturgy as Science. Science works by reductionism; the broad concepts we work with day to day are broken down into "smaller" concepts that are better defined mathematically and less rooted in human intuition. It replaces things that make sense with things that don't, because the things that don't make sense are true. You explain vision through the physics of light and the anatomy of the eyeball and brain (all profoundly counter-intuitive), and that lets you analyse and predict the properties of vision more accurately. Or maybe, in Exalted, you explain prophecy through the workings of a magical computer.

In the examples you list, the process is going the opposite direction. Our everyday concepts are still "wrong", they still need to be replaced with things that make less sense, but the replacements are "bigger" and less mathematically defined. It's anti-reductionism. I don't know what new fields of study would explain the cyclops-banging-blind-man-maiming woman, but I'm confident that their relationship with the common idea of vision would be pretty close to the opposite of the conventional scientific one. And maybe such an approach would allow you to build a computer with workings that are explained through prophecy.

...

I hope the book that actually exists corresponds to the one I've constructed in my head from your description of it.

For what it's worth, I think Exalted should move freely in both directions. Reductionism for the mystical and mystification for the mundane.
 
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So, in essence, the exact opposite of a world of Motonic Physics and Thaumaturgy As Science.
No, that's still compatible with motonic physics. By emulating the form of something that exists, and infusing that form with the Essence of your willpower and passion, you encourage the patterns which exist within the thing you're emulating to assemble themselves within the effigy.

Sufficient effort and time allow the qualities of transmission and reception which fuel the radio station to eventually rest within the coconut-and-branch effigy. Had the boy not been burnt alongside his creation, others might have been able to determine the precise means by which he accomplished this feat, and that understanding would fuel further innovation.
 
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