That's stupid, ugh.
General Exalted Thread
It's also used because IIRC Princess really hates her title.
Chloe Sullivan
Subdefective
- Location
- 1630 Revello Drive, Sunnydale CA
I was told that it was a literal rule in 'verse that you don't shorten the name or else
But the person who told me that isn't the most reliable so....
I can't discount that some idiot of a freelancer might've written something like that into some 2e sourcebook, sadly. It's definitely not something to assume will be common table to table, though.
Titles have always been shortened in the books since the beginning, sometimes due to word count but the rest of the time because reading a full phrase can easily lead to reader/editing confusion and this is how we end up with Shards Of Basalt To Her Army.
All examples from the 2e book. The title is used the first time in full, then shortened every time thereafter. Princess Maggie also has no recorded opinion about her title or anything else beyond their backstory and ambitions to escape the Lion.
All examples from the 2e book. The title is used the first time in full, then shortened every time thereafter. Princess Maggie also has no recorded opinion about her title or anything else beyond their backstory and ambitions to escape the Lion.
Your "if something bad happened it must have been 2e" posting gimmick still sucks.
Last edited:
I really and truly don't care, Dif. It was a crappy edition with crappy rules and worse fluff. All you nagging me will accomplish is me digging my heals in on how awful that edition was and how badly it needed a competent person in charge. I will not stop commenting about Second Edition's negative influence and general incompetence when an example of a crappy thing in Exalted comes up. There is nothing you can do that will ever make me stop. I am allowed to express my negative feelings about an edition that screwed up so much. If it bothers you so much, put me on Ignore.
I don't mind if you dislike it or not, there was a lot of problems. Just either stop being so gullible about what they were and chomping at the bit to vent your bile, or actually read those books and be actually certain what they did wrong.
If you can't even put in that minimal effort, your consistent negativity helps nothing, and certainly doesn't make anything you prefer look much better by comparison to things which do not exist and never happened.
- Location
- United States
2e Abyssals is 10+ years old. To be utterly and brutally fair, I think it's a little unreasonable to expect someone to either have encyclopedic knowledge of the entire text encyclopedia brown-style or comb over a decade's worth of books to figure out if the fluff confusion of someone else is based in "this is a thing some author wrote because WW has a long history of doing dumb oopsie shit" or "it's a fancannon error that's lodged in your memory for so long you think it's actual cannon and have done so for years now" thing?
2e is old and it introduced a bunch of bad fluff. It's not shocking and groundbreaking for someone to voice that in response to hearing a bit of setting dumb.
2e is old and it introduced a bunch of bad fluff. It's not shocking and groundbreaking for someone to voice that in response to hearing a bit of setting dumb.
Lealope
Not yet invincible
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Considering how the current core developer thought it would be okay and not at all the worst to have Raksi literally eat babies as a power move, I think we're just doomed to have every edition of Exalted end up with bits of incredibly stupid fluff sprinkled here and there.
Last edited:
You do realize she doesn't do that because 'lolbabies' right? She's a monstrous witch-goddess, drawing on figures like Baba Yaga. She's fulfilling a mythic archetype that's very much appropriate for a setting such as Exalted. The inhuman magic user deep in the woods where civilized folk never go, spreading blessings and curses and eating babies. The setting would be lessened for lacking a Baba Yaga, bluntly.
In the interest of clear communication, I mean lessened in the sense of, it'd lose an important mythic flavor that should be present in the fluff as an option. If it's not appropriate for a given table, it's easy to remove, but it should be a forward-foot thing for ancient monsters like Raksi. Monsters eat babies, this is a super common thing in myth. You can absolutely fuck up the presentation, but Vance and Minton are pretty good writers, and I suspect it will very much be in the tone of the Baba Yaga stories my dad would read me by the campfire, or on dark, stormy nights, about the iron-clawed witch in the woods who would steal unattended children away.
Not the only story like that that kept me up at night, either. The witch who eats children has a lot of places to explore, a lot of horror in it. The monster showing its teeth to you, red and dripping with blood, as you need to bend in supplication...there's promise in that. It's not inherently stupid, though it can easily be done stupidly. I've certainly read bad witch stories as well as good.
Last edited:
AmineHsu
A worm, not a man, scorned and despised.
- Location
- NoVA
I'm not gonna lie, literally baby eating feels like kinda twee 'horror', like edgy teenager type of stuff. I think it's really the sort of thing that can make things hard to take seriously for some people.
I don't mean this in any sort of "Ex3 ruined foreber" way, but it does come off, in the abstract... cartoonish. And it's one of those details that once you put in, annihilate any nuance the character could have. If you make a character a baby-eating monster, any further word count is honestly wasted cause they are already a baby eating monster, there is no way to put that in a light that doesn't make them a baby-eating monster. There is just no where to go from there, you can't walk it back, unless you're saying 'They were just pretending to be a baby-eating monster', at which point....
I'm not going to say it shouldn't be used or that it can't be used well, but I think I would probably prefer it be used in a different context, rather than a major Silver Pact leader sitting on a cool important location.
I don't mean this in any sort of "Ex3 ruined foreber" way, but it does come off, in the abstract... cartoonish. And it's one of those details that once you put in, annihilate any nuance the character could have. If you make a character a baby-eating monster, any further word count is honestly wasted cause they are already a baby eating monster, there is no way to put that in a light that doesn't make them a baby-eating monster. There is just no where to go from there, you can't walk it back, unless you're saying 'They were just pretending to be a baby-eating monster', at which point....
I'm not going to say it shouldn't be used or that it can't be used well, but I think I would probably prefer it be used in a different context, rather than a major Silver Pact leader sitting on a cool important location.
I don't want all the big important NPCs to be redeemable features by modern morality, from my end. Long before edgy teenagers wrote crappy horror, humans literally stayed all night awake in vigil, praying to God to save them from monsters like Raksi. I don't think Raksi needs to be walked back. She just needs to be strong enough that you can't trivially oust her, so that PCs are gonna die if you decide to overthrow her. The wordcount isn't wasted, as long as it paints the story of a horrifying witch-queen of a terrifying jungle nation that lives in awe and terror of their monstrous goddess.
Yeah, the simple fact is that Raksi is a monster. At the point you have her eating babies, the rest doesn't really matter, she's just a Tarrasque. You kill it if the players can swing it, and stay well out of its way if they can't. So making her one of the primary NPCs of a splat that looks to already be going to have issues with not coming off as worse than the world-strangling empire they're opposing seems kind of... just plain wasting wordcount?
That's just...not accurate? Like, some groups might do that, but at this point you're writing off vampires, witches, demons, all sorts of inspiring monsters that star in myths and legends throughout all of human history because they're monsters and thus just an obstacle. This just...isn't actually how stories work? People talk to Vlad Tepes, they make bargains with Baba Yaga, they sell their souls to Satan.
Your experience is nothing remotely like universal, is my point, and is really more of the exception than the role.
- Pronouns
- They/Them
Um... In some ways the Silver Pact is worse than the Realm. In others they aren't. This is Exalted, if you wanted designated 'good guys' you're looking in the wrong place.
yeah, like, the default ways Lunars get human forms is literally they eat human beings. It's been said there'll be ways around this, but like, not every Lunar will have them, or be capable of them, or even really care. Luna is not a nice goddess, Lunar warlords are not nice people. Raksi is among the most evil, but I would argue no centuries/millenia old shapeshifting warrior-witch should be a good person by modern standards.
grommile
nasty-minded old cynic
- Location
- NERV-Mercia
- Pronouns
- Traditional/Animate
Terrifying transmortal shapeshifting witch who can eat people to add their form to her shapeshifting inventory: this is good.
Terrifying transmortal shapeshifting witch-queen who can eat people to add their form to her shapeshifting inventory and has a human-sacrifice cult built up around her: this is better.
Terrifying transmortal shapeshifting witch-queen who can eat people to add their form to her shapeshifting inventory and has a human-sacrifice cult built up around her that involves her being given babies to eat: this is starting to be misguided.
Terrifying transmortal shapeshifting witch-queen who can eat people to add their form to her shapeshifting inventory and has a human-sacrifice cult built up around her: this is better.
Terrifying transmortal shapeshifting witch-queen who can eat people to add their form to her shapeshifting inventory and has a human-sacrifice cult built up around her that involves her being given babies to eat: this is starting to be misguided.
Violation of Rule 4 - You didn't need to make a post just to snipe at Dif and drag the whole thread into the argument further.
I don't know whether this is a cute attempt at irony or a textbook case of projection but surely you must realize you are a hundred times more guilty of this crap than literally any other poster in this thread, right?
Right???
We've been over this before, she eats babies because she likes to scare/intimidate important and "important" people that visit her, and/or because she is slowly going completely batshit.
Origami Clock
Right twice a day
- Location
- Brighton, UK
Never mind that this is the same logic that 40k nutters use when they say 'no the themes of 40k require that magical orphans are thrown in meatgrinders to their brain juices can be used to make extra killy bullets.'
Technically true, and yet...who decided that these themes would be written so in the first place? Especially, who decided that one of the most important members of a splat in a given direction would be rendered down into an edgy set-piece?
It would be like making The Bull of The North a sexual predator, or the Gold Faction a cult-conspiracy built on the backs of brainwashed solar attack-dogs. It's entirely valid, but it obliterates any nuance in the character and basically forces them into an antagonistic role, if only because very, very few players will want to work with them.
She could've built a religion around her akin to Aztec mythology, where she takes the strongest and most worthy into herself, to strengthen her for the apocalyptic future conflict with the forces of a twisted heaven to lost in their own grandeur to stop the world crumbling apart. She could've founded a guerrilla death-cult that seeks every advantage, taking the faces of their enemies to kill those beyond the reach of any but those they trust the most.
But no. She eats babies.
Last edited:
Imrix
Periodically Malevolent QM
Indeed it would.
Here's the thing though; as we established last time this topic came up, eating babies is not actually an important part of Baba Yaga's mythos. I checked. There's a bunch of stories about Baba Yaga, some of whom make reference to her appetite for eating humans in general, but they aren't epic myths where the Witch With The Iron Teeth's prediliction for child-flesh is an important plot point or anything. It's a threat that attached itself to her mythos as parents scared their kids by saying 'don't go out at night or the bogeyman will eat you!'
(Frankly, I kind of think Lilith maps better to Baba Yaga than Raksi does. She's a ferocious woman wandering through the setting, sometimes helping, sometimes hindering, always disconcerting. That's a much better foundation for a Witch With The Iron Teeth reference than the puerile shock value and deeply racist 'savage apeman jungle kingdom' stuff that's baked in at the root of Raksi)
That aside, even if baby-eating was an important part of Baba Yaga's mythology... so what? Exalted is not a game of blindly retelling ancient mythology, it is a game about interpreting those myths through a modern lens. Exalted draws heavily on Hellenic myth, but it doesn't blindly emulate how many of the people from those myths were rapist assholes, and when it portrays its own version of those classical heroes it generally wants to be deeply skeptical of their legend.
Yes, but you seem to be overlooking the point that people generally do these things because they are regular people faced with obstacles entirely beyond their means, who are thus forced to compromise their principles by seeking strength from evil powers. They are powerless underdogs. They are, simply put, not Exalted (although that may well be the story of how they became Exalted; hi Abyssals, hi Infernals, hi Akuma), because Raksi is not, never has been, and should never (hello Elder Problem, please go away) be far enough out of scale with her younger peers to fill that role. That's the kind of territory occupied by the Neverborn and the Yozis. Which means yes, it is accurate; to a character with the power of an Exalt, Raksi is just a tarrasque. A mighty and rapacious monster who you kill if you can and stay away from if you can't. Dull. The game is lessened for her simplicity.
Last edited:
It's really not like any of those things, but you are, of course, free to change things for your table however you like.
When you think about it, if she really disliked the title she could just put on different lipstick and change clothes. The full annoyingly long name probably wouldn't stick around if it didn't even make sense.
- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Today in Lunars and a continuation of "I am a monster (but this time so is everyone else)": we realize that our group of rebels trying to liberate An-Ten from the Realm's oppression are 90% composed of aristocrats born to temporal power and influence long before Exalting, and the most liberal ideology represented there can basically be summed up as "19th century bourgeois nationalism."
And all of that is just Ravaniyata and Nightshade
The "enlightened ones"
I am sparing you Yuu the Literal Queen, Quetzalli the Actual God-Princess, and Snowfall the Exiled Chieftain, who are even worse
And all of that is just Ravaniyata and Nightshade
The "enlightened ones"
I am sparing you Yuu the Literal Queen, Quetzalli the Actual God-Princess, and Snowfall the Exiled Chieftain, who are even worse
Last edited: