Are you saying that you want to be spoonfed a map filled with cities and locations that would crowd out anything custom you could make? Because that sounds like the heart of your issue with the 3e map.
I'm going to point at the 3rd edition map. We know that the map got larger, more importantly, we ALSO know that the Realm only has 4 cities on it; The Imperial City, Chanos, Juthe, and Arjuf.
Outside of those 4 cities listed on that map, the place is giant continent of pastoral grounds and forests. Because nothing else is listed beside the imperial mountain.
Kind of like "the empty fucking desert" to the south.
That's not true, in that going by 1e, 2e, the Blessed Isle has numerous cities and locations of interest. But scale is an issue, especially when they expanded the map.
I'm going to link a map that someone made from 1e/2e as of 2005 that lists known locations even if some of them are uncertain.
Yes, you are absolutely correct. This is why the Blessed Isle map of 3e is completely empty:
Wait shit, it's actually full of stuff. The real reason the map doesn't look like that, is because the 2e map you are linking to is an unofficial product made after years and years of new releases, not because 3e removed a bunch of locations.
You are almost never going to easily be able to peg something from other media into Exalted and have a perfect match. Superman's themes are more in line with the ideal Zenith than anything else in exalted. His mechanics are more in line with a mishmash of 2e infernal stuff.
Are you saying that you want to be spoonfed a map filled with cities and locations that would crowd out anything custom you could make? Because that sounds like the heart of your issue with the 3e map.
It's absolutely not what she's saying and I don't know why you're reaching to construe her that way. It's clear her issue is that on the map there used to be gameable content and it's all been wiped away in favor of sand dunes
I'm going to point at the 3rd edition map. We know that the map got larger, more importantly, we ALSO know that the Realm only has 4 cities on it; The Imperial City, Chanos, Juthe, and Arjuf.
Outside of those 4 cities listed on that map, the place is giant continent of pastoral grounds and forests. Because nothing else is listed beside the imperial mountain.
Kind of like "the empty fucking desert" to the south.
That's not true, in that going by 1e, 2e, the Blessed Isle has numerous cities and locations of interest. But scale is an issue, especially when they expanded the map.
I'm going to link a map that someone made from 1e/2e as of 2005 that lists known locations even if some of them are uncertain.
Are you willfully obtuse or just not reading the thread? I addressed all of this a few pages ago and why it's a meaningful problem, and Kaiya's very clearly continuing in the vein of that as an established facet of the conversation.
A solid, like, what - sixth? - of your playable area of the entire world and a huge chunk of one direction is just 'flat, featureless sand dunes' because fire means lack of water, variations of elevation and other shit, apparently?
What's galling about this especially is that you can still have a massive fuck-off desert like the Sahara without it being the only thing of note for the majority of the area. All you would need to do is make it, like, a third of its current size and then put other things around and in it - maybe there's a massive inland lake somewhere, or the Western Sea cuts in, or you have literally any other kind of desert beyond "lots of fucking sand dunes" - because there are countless kinds of deserts and badlands. Within semiarid, hot-and-dry, coastal and cold and polar deserts, you have a massive amount of variation. To whit:
- Gravel plains like on the Rub al Khali, which are more rock and dust than sand
- Semi-arid post-glacial areas with piles of sediment strewn around like old clothes of giants like southern Iberia
- Montane deserts at elevation, like up in the Tarim Basin
- American Southwest-style badlands where there's just a little vegetation and everything else is rock, carved and swept by the wind into fantastic painted shapes
- Salt-flats of any kind
- Places that are arid all the year round before monsoons get to them (hello India how are you today) and so are only partially desert
And that's not even getting into all the desert-adjacent climates. If this is the Sahara why is the Sahel over way to the east? Does it just go from 0 to 100 on the sand dunes literally every directioon?
I know screaming about actual geography and weather patterns in a fantasy setting is a sucker's game but I'm so tired of people equating Arab with desert and desert with "flat sand dunes completely unlabeled", because people will see the lack of cities and features of any kind and do nothing, because they've been given no material other than "do something with nomadic cultures I guess"? It's just a huge waste of time and game design space. Would it have killed the people behind the map to at least be like, "yeah you have cold winds come in off the Inner Sea and then a massive rain shadow of aridity on the Southwest on the other side of An Teng's mountains"?
"Empty space" isn't really the issue here. "Literally featureless except for largely inhospitable sand dunes for an area a little over half the size of the Sahara" isn't empty space, it's space that begs the imagination to not conceive of things aside from Generic Vaguely Arab Desert Ruins and Basically Bedouins (which the people playing this game basically know nothing about, let's be real) and crowds out what else could be there.
This problem doesn't exist with a slice of that land that has, say, a series of inland seas carving peninsulas, because there I can go nuts. I can establish major populations and large cultural confluences, I can have other people want to come in, I can vary the terrain and elevation and history, I have reasons for state-level actors to be doing things and to be showing up. So when you compare the Blessed Isle - an eminently fertile and populated area - to The Burning Sands I'm just left wondering what you're doing aside from failing at being catty, because one of these is, while left largely unlabeled, largely populated, and the other is a gigantic wasteland of sand dunes.
The map as is paints an inherently restrictive environment that's a lot bigger than it actually has to be. And while I'm all for diving into it being the Sahara of the setting - because culture did and does flow across the Sahara and it's a beautiful, harsh region of the world - it's just too much as is, and the corebook doesn't really help either.
Please try actually engaging what people are saying rather than just sneering down your nose at paper-thin caricatures of what people are saying. They're likely to blow away if you so much as sneeze at them.
Being an Infernal means you've (in a sense) accepted a deal with the devil. You've been given immense power... but your benefactors have a task for you, they will not be pleased with you if you ignore it, and they have some degree of ability to hurt you if you ignore it.
Being an Infernal means your powers have complications that affect your outlook and behaviour. Adorjan "improves" your hearing by basically giving you hyperacusis. Ebby makes you super convincing, but only when you're being a conniving bastard. Malfeas lets you grow back limbs, as long as you don't mind the replacements looking like they're made of brass and basalt instead of meat.
Supes doesn't fit that mold, by my reckoning.
His powers are the innate consequence of "is a Kryptonian who lives on a planet orbiting a G2V main sequence star", and they don't come with behavioural catches. He's not "strong if he acts like a terrifying tyrant", he's just strong. He doesn't have hyperacusis, he just has absurdly good hearing.
That being said trying to make Superman as an Infernal would be a fun thought exercise.
I'm actually thinking Malfeas/SWHLIHN since I'm reading the john byrne run and it goes with the short range telekinetic force field explanation for his strength
Are you saying that you want to be spoonfed a map filled with cities and locations that would crowd out anything custom you could make? Because that sounds like the heart of your issue with the 3e map.
I'm going to point at the 3rd edition map. We know that the map got larger, more importantly, we ALSO know that the Realm only has 4 cities on it; The Imperial City, Chanos, Juthe, and Arjuf.
Outside of those 4 cities listed on that map, the place is giant continent of pastoral grounds and forests. Because nothing else is listed beside the imperial mountain.
Kind of like "the empty fucking desert" to the south.
That's not true, in that going by 1e, 2e, the Blessed Isle has numerous cities and locations of interest. But scale is an issue, especially when they expanded the map.
I'm going to link a map that someone made from 1e/2e as of 2005 that lists known locations even if some of them are uncertain.
I don't give a shit about the map. My anger was with wasting wordcount on pointless details about pre-history on why a location was useless for a game, instead of writing something useful for a game.
Or, rather, I do give a shit about the map, because the desert is a waste, but I wasn't complaining about the map, I was complaining about doing nothing to fix it, and instead worsening the problem with inanities about ancient disasters.
Reading that post, I really have no idea what you think you were replying to, and I kinda suspect you grabbed the wrong person's post to argue with.
That being said trying to make Superman as an Infernal would be a fun thought exercise.
I'm actually thinking Malfeas/SWHLIHN since I'm reading the john byrne run and it goes with the short range telekinetic force field explanation for his strength
Why do you think he can suddenly gain massive power boosts whenever he goes tyrannical or stops caring about collateral damage? Clearly the reason there's constant attempts to make horrific weapons to dissuade him from taking over the world is that anyone who succeeds at a basic occult roll can figure out that he's trying to use the charms of the Star Tyrants of Krypton to fight crime.
Why do you think he can suddenly gain massive power boosts whenever he goes tyrannical or stops caring about collateral damage? Clearly the reason there's constant attempts to make horrific weapons to dissuade him from taking over the world is that anyone who succeeds at a basic occult roll can figure out that he's trying to use the charms of the Star Tyrants of Krypton to fight crime.
The reason he uses the police is that he hasn't figured out how to bring anyone back from wherever using Phantom Chastising Oubliette on people sends them.
Wait shit, it's actually full of stuff. The real reason the map doesn't look like that, is because the 2e map you are linking to is an unofficial product made after years and years of new releases, not because 3e removed a bunch of locations.
It is an unofficial map, yeah... but that is literally every thing listed in the books from 2001 to 2005 in terms of locations. As in someone took the books and listed maps, the locations and such listed there from the 1st edition and put it all on one map. 2nd edition (2006-2012) expanded on the locations and such, but I don't think they added all that much more.
The complain from what I could see is "fucking empty desert", this is a 2 part issue.
One is scale... even in the unofficial map, the grids are 500 x 500 miles. The 2e map (in the core book) has a scale of 800 miles to the inch (roughly). Even on the 3e map, the ruler is set to 500 miles per inch (roughly), I only kickstarted for the PDF so I can't say how large the map physically is in terms of the 500 miles ruler. I would dig out my 1e core book for the map, but that requires me going into my storage for that and I'm too lazy to do that just to look at the map.
You can easily lose entire geographical landmarks and environs on that scale. There are countries in real life that are smaller than 1 of those "size" boxes and would disappear in there.
The 2nd part is word count. Words equals money. I know it sounds horrible to put it like this. But word count determines how many pages any given book is, which determine cost of print, which determines cost to buy. How much are you willing to pay for the maps to be filled up with ruins and long lost cities and lush landscapes? Which if overdone would result in no narrative space to do custom things in.
And before you say that what is shown is just barren landscapes, I'm going to point at the 1st edition Time of Tumult book, which was basically an adventure module/kit book. Which included the Expedition to the Invisible Fortress, in the north east, lots of description of forests, mountains, empty plains/valleys. The PDF costs $10 now, but the expedition is a good quarter of said softcover book, and when that came out, it was $20 I think... I could be wrong.
I don't give a shit about the map. My anger was with wasting wordcount on pointless details about pre-history on why a location was useless for a game, instead of writing something useful for a game.
Or, rather, I do give a shit about the map, because the desert is a waste, but I wasn't complaining about the map, I was complaining about doing nothing to fix it, and instead worsening the problem with inanities about ancient disasters.
Reading that post, I really have no idea what you think you were replying to, and I kinda suspect you grabbed the wrong person's post to argue with.
Sorry... I probably shouldn't be posting while distracted or sleepy... -_-
I'm not defending the fact that the 3e map looks sparse, because it is sparse.
I think it's not fair to say that the map is sparse and that therefore the environment is uniform. Because all that is out at the moment for 3e is the corebook, they haven't released any of the location books or the other exalted books yet.
Even in 3rd ed core, you had pages 95 to 100 to describe the south, and the "south" has a general descriptor of "Along the fertile coast, tyrants and priest-kings look down from glittering citadels upon city-states built on the backs of slaves. Farther south, where green valleys give way to dry plateaus encircling a vast sea of sand—and beyond, to the ultimate blaze of the Pole of Fire".
The far south has "The land grows hotter and water scarcer inland. Hill tribes engage in brutal wars amid the maquis. Horse-archers ride across the sweltering steppes, alert for game beasts or the dreaded Lion Folk. Nomads and merchants meet under oaths of hospitality in towns along the green banks of rivers and the shores of inland seas. Farther south, the last vegetation gives way to the many faces of the desert: barren ridges, stony plains and salt flats encircling a vast central sea of sand speckled with emerald and sapphire oases.
The farther south one goes, the richer the cities and tribes are in precious metals, gemstones, incense, ivory, spices, firedust, and silk, while fresh water becomes rare and valuable as jade."
"Sea" doesn't mean that there aren't islands and mountain ranges and such in it. It does. But the key thing is a lack of water, abundant sun and sand... in most people's minds that means desert.
It is an unofficial map, yeah... but that is literally every thing listed in the books from 2001 to 2005 in terms of locations. As in someone took the books and listed maps, the locations and such listed there from the 1st edition and put it all on one map. 2nd edition (2006-2012) expanded on the locations and such, but I don't think they added all that much more.
The complain from what I could see is "fucking empty desert", this is a 2 part issue.
One is scale... even in the unofficial map, the grids are 500 x 500 miles. The 2e map (in the core book) has a scale of 800 miles to the inch (roughly). Even on the 3e map, the ruler is set to 500 miles per inch (roughly), I only kickstarted for the PDF so I can't say how large the map physically is in terms of the 500 miles ruler. I would dig out my 1e core book for the map, but that requires me going into my storage for that and I'm too lazy to do that just to look at the map.
You can easily lose entire geographical landmarks and environs on that scale. There are countries in real life that are smaller than 1 of those "size" boxes and would disappear in there.
The 2nd part is word count. Words equals money. I know it sounds horrible to put it like this. But word count determines how many pages any given book is, which determine cost of print, which determines cost to buy. How much are you willing to pay for the maps to be filled up with ruins and long lost cities and lush landscapes? Which if overdone would result in no narrative space to do custom things in.
And before you say that what is shown is just barren landscapes, I'm going to point at the 1st edition Time of Tumult book, which was basically an adventure module/kit book. Which included the Expedition to the Invisible Fortress, in the north east, lots of description of forests, mountains, empty plains/valleys. The PDF costs $10 now, but the expedition is a good quarter of said softcover book, and when that came out, it was $20 I think... I could be wrong.
Sorry... I probably shouldn't be posting while distracted or sleepy... -_-
I'm not defending the fact that the 3e map looks sparse, because it is sparse.
I think it's not fair to say that the map is sparse and that therefore the environment is uniform. Because all that is out at the moment for 3e is the corebook, they haven't released any of the location books or the other exalted books yet.
Even in 3rd ed core, you had pages 95 to 100 to describe the south, and the "south" has a general descriptor of "Along the fertile coast, tyrants and priest-kings look down from glittering citadels upon city-states built on the backs of slaves. Farther south, where green valleys give way to dry plateaus encircling a vast sea of sand—and beyond, to the ultimate blaze of the Pole of Fire".
The far south has "The land grows hotter and water scarcer inland. Hill tribes engage in brutal wars amid the maquis. Horse-archers ride across the sweltering steppes, alert for game beasts or the dreaded Lion Folk. Nomads and merchants meet under oaths of hospitality in towns along the green banks of rivers and the shores of inland seas. Farther south, the last vegetation gives way to the many faces of the desert: barren ridges, stony plains and salt flats encircling a vast central sea of sand speckled with emerald and sapphire oases.
The farther south one goes, the richer the cities and tribes are in precious metals, gemstones, incense, ivory, spices, firedust, and silk, while fresh water becomes rare and valuable as jade."
"Sea" doesn't mean that there aren't islands and mountain ranges and such in it. It does. But the key thing is a lack of water, abundant sun and sand... in most people's minds that means desert.
I wasn't arguing any of that, though. I was saying that making the desert about an irrelevant titan throwing a temper tantrum 10,000 years ago instead of doing something gameable with it was a hack move, and something 2e does a lot. Making the text about the past, instead of about the now, when the game is actually taking place.
This kind of thing is annoying enough when novels digress from the current story to "world build" for pages, but it's really annoying when it's a game wasting print on the amazing cool location that you're not allowed to play it because it was wiped out forever ago and is a desert now. If they were gonna do something with Malfeas, why not put a group of nomads who worship The Brass City as a heavenly destination on the infinite horizon or something because their people's wandering patterns drift in and out of Cecelyne, lead by a Dragonblooded born to their people a century ago, and here's some stuff you can use this for in your game?
Anything but "PRIMORDIAL WAR WOOO also there's nothing here you can possibly use for your game but LORE YEAH".
You're thinking of Lodestar from 1st edition Creatures of the Wyld. A scorpion behemoth/construct from the first age that is still around and still giving rides and guiding people in the north.
I wasn't arguing any of that, though. I was saying that making the desert about an irrelevant titan throwing a temper tantrum 10,000 years ago instead of doing something gameable with it was a hack move, and something 2e does a lot. Making the text about the past, instead of about the now, when the game is actually taking place.
This kind of thing is annoying enough when novels digress from the current story to "world build" for pages, but it's really annoying when it's a game wasting print on the amazing cool location that you're not allowed to play it because it was wiped out forever ago and is a desert now. If they were gonna do something with Malfeas, why not put a group of nomads who worship The Brass City as a heavenly destination on the infinite horizon or something because their people's wandering patterns drift in and out of Cecelyne, lead by a Dragonblooded born to their people a century ago, and here's some stuff you can use this for in your game?
Anything but "PRIMORDIAL WAR WOOO also there's nothing here you can possibly use for your game but LORE YEAH".
It is an unofficial map, yeah... but that is literally every thing listed in the books from 2001 to 2005 in terms of locations. As in someone took the books and listed maps, the locations and such listed there from the 1st edition and put it all on one map. 2nd edition (2006-2012) expanded on the locations and such, but I don't think they added all that much more.
The complain from what I could see is "fucking empty desert", this is a 2 part issue.
One is scale... even in the unofficial map, the grids are 500 x 500 miles. The 2e map (in the core book) has a scale of 800 miles to the inch (roughly). Even on the 3e map, the ruler is set to 500 miles per inch (roughly), I only kickstarted for the PDF so I can't say how large the map physically is in terms of the 500 miles ruler. I would dig out my 1e core book for the map, but that requires me going into my storage for that and I'm too lazy to do that just to look at the map.
You can easily lose entire geographical landmarks and environs on that scale. There are countries in real life that are smaller than 1 of those "size" boxes and would disappear in there.
Let's take a look at the canon Exalted Second Edition map from the corebook, shall we?
That's directly from the corebook of Exalted Second Edition, it's without scale, without compass and without many defining features. There is a total of thirty-one cities on it, and no I didn't crop the Coral Archipelago like that, that's how it is in the book. It's also heavily compressed; the Yanaze reaches far wider through the East rather than snaking deep through the direction. In the bottom are a bunch of vaguely visible volcanoes, and on the top, the Great Ice is visible. On it are a number of names we will never see again, or had never seen before: Fella and Sdoia come to mind.
But you can all see that, where am I going with this?
Let's take a look at the Sahara Desert.
It's not the best picture, but I believe it makes my point quite well. It's full of colours. There's browns! Greys! Gold and sand! Water and vegetation! Looking at this from above, it's quite evident - obvious, even - to any onlooker that there's a lot more than just sand there. The imagination is tantalized, could there be mountains? How does that look to an onlooker, or someone lost in the desert? If you slapped a few random names in there, it would tantalize the imagination. It doesn't require much, really. Greg Stolze's Reign does it already:
It's full of things. Cities not explored, locations not detailed - and what does it do? It fills the map with statements and hints, always enough to tantalize and leave you wanting more. What does "Ruled by changeling boy" mean? Reign doesn't even detail anything called a changeling in the first place. "Always haggle", haggle with whom? Or with what?
But as you said, the great desert of the south is vast - incredibly so. From Dajaz to Ember, there is approximately 5600 miles, and from Gem to the Lap there are approximately 1900-2000. Huge, impossible to detail in the same way.
Then let go, I say.
You don't need to detail, but matter of fact is that when you leave a vast, completely untouched area which doesn't even bother differentiating the map's texture so it just looks like a single stretch of fucking sand, people aren't going to think "what could I put in there?" They're going to skip over it, because that's how the human brain works. Just like you're not going to think of all the Eastern rivers that could be on the map unless specifically given a reason to - because the map is there to inform you about the setting and if something isn't on the map, it gets progressively harder to think about it. There could be thousands of rivers leading into the East, but let's be real here:
We're thinking about the Yanaze, and we're going to keep doing that.
You can change things up, use different colours, vary your palette, leave cryptic statements, throw in names, anything, leave trade routes on the map... You have a whole host of tools.
But they are unused.
And the map feels empty as a result.
The map is usually not the territory, but when the territory is within our mind and our mind alone, the map does in fact serve to create and shape the territory.
Erm... no. That map is cropped. Here, let me help you with a screen shot of the map from the PDF, I have cropped out my RL name and order # from the screen shot thou, and combined the 2 pages that make up the map.
As you MAY notice, there IS a compass, it has a scale.
Erm... no. That map is cropped. Here, let me help you with a screen shot of the map from the PDF, I have cropped out my RL name and order # from the screen shot thou, and combined the 2 pages that make up the map.
Yeah, that makes sense, I suspected it was just an issue of cropping.
That said, I actually almost prefer this map, it makes Creation feel smaller - more like the Mediterranean area it was once envisioned as, with strange, unknown things at the edges.
Is it just me, or are a lot of the images ManusDomini posts broken? I can usually see it by right clicking, but not always. Like the one of the pdf just looks like a thin white line.
Is it just me, or are a lot of the images ManusDomini posts broken? I can usually see it by right clicking, but not always. Like the one of the pdf just looks like a thin white line.
Is it just me, or are a lot of the images ManusDomini posts broken? I can usually see it by right clicking, but not always. Like the one of the pdf just looks like a thin white line.
Manus has been posting imgur page links, not image links.
And the difference is that page links will automatically load this viewer iframe thing which does not like spoilers at all.
A city filled with death from the first age or shogunate... erm... you could easily take Denesor and file the serial numbers off or Gethamane under city.
Having double checked my research, I have realized that I was confusing Denandsor with that city that Lookshy was built on top of; so yeah, Denandsor with the serial numbers filed off could probably work as an Exalted!Pompeii.
On an unrelated note, Did You Know?: pagodas and marionettes are eternal rivals!
The reason he uses the police is that he hasn't figured out how to bring anyone back from wherever using Phantom Chastising Oubliette on people sends them.
And that's the end of the first arc, in fact- next session we're starting with Sakura's coronation/enthronement, and then hurling her right into the thick of things.
Three things this session. Firstly, we get to meet Sakura's nominal (although not direct) liege, Doji Hotaru.
Who, uh, I forget to say Sakura was sending anything to and therefore got caught completely off-guard by this whole mess.
Whoops. And I was OOC going 'I hope she doesn't actually order Sakura to go through- well, shit.' to @Maugan Ra. Fortunately, it was just a test of character, but still.
Next up, Hida Kisada. Champion of the Crab. That Guy Who L5R Players Would Bet On Over A Solar Exalted.
Given that Creation doesn't really have areas for pure mortals to get that badass, Maugan and I decided to make him a Dragon-Blood. And... yeah, honestly, that went about as well as expected. The Crab are (understandably tbh) resentful of the rest of Rokugan, given they have to stand up against the forces of a Lord of Death without thanks and often to open hostility from the rest of Rokugan. Main problem in the future in that area will be, frankly, to try and make sure Kisada doesn't march on the Crane and Scorpion lands *anyway*.
Finally, Togashi is giving out cryptic bullshit. This is not quite Peak Memetic Togashi, but it's not too far off.
Well, ok, also finally Yuzuki has some ideas for how to help Sakura relax. The next session, Sakura starts her reign- I'm not quite sure what Maugan's going to throw at me first, but it should be... interesting.
