General Exalted Thread

[Phigment]

Its possible the problem is rather that it is impossible to rule effectively because of more contingent factors. As an example I am not sure on, it may be that a strict division between the governance of Earth and Heaven isn't actually feasible for whatever reason but it was necessary given the means used to defeat the Primordials and the need to keep the Exalts happy. Or it could be that any one of Sol/Luna/the Maidens could rule effectively but because of the necessity of carving up and respecting their individual spheres, they made coherent rule impossible.

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OR, there really isn't a problem at all; it's all going exactly how the Ebon Dragon planned.

Of course, the Ebon Dragon loves only those things doomed to die, so his plan involves Creation and everything else dying, and it may thus appear to the unsophisticated viewer that there are problems. But that's because they lack perspective.

 

[horngeek]

The fact that Exalted as a game assumes characters will divorce their sense of morality from religious worship breaks my suzpension of disbelief

Actually for real, one of my most consistent issues in playing/running Exalted is the way PCs born and raised in Creation tend to treat Exaltation as a moment of 'actually gods are just dudes' instant realization and grant spirits no dignity or prestige or assumption of authority whatsoever, instead of building up to that. People who were once mortal shouldn't react to, say, a river god demanding judgement for a town who failed to pay due worship three years in a row because of a famine by going "wow, what a bully, fuck off and leave these poor people alone" without like, some backstory or character development leading up to that?

I think the game works better if Exalts start off the assumption that a river god is in fact owed a certain worship merely by virtue of being a river god and approach this as a negotiation between a legitimate grievance and a situation of emergency, or else go full on "You may be right but I am a bigger god than you and I like these people, therefore kneel."

i like it when fictional characters buy into their own culture while questioning its issues rather than immediately having a cynical distance towards it

Immaculate believers are a special case.

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Note that I'm playing a character in a solo Exalted/L5R game right now and even have logs of said game up on AO3 Kerisgame style (Show Chapter | Archive of Our Own).
And she does continue to buy into both her culture and worship and respect of her gods, while seeking to make improvements (gay marriage in Rokugan, for instance).

You know what? It is so much more fun than going 'screw you samurai society and screw you Fortunes' would have been.

 

[Sanctaphrax]

FWIW, I don't think there's anything unreasonable about utilitarianism in Creation. Sure, on Earth it's a fairly modern idea. But there's no rule saying that ideologies have to arise alongside the level of technological advancement that accompanied them in our history.

No reason not to have utilitarian cavemen, or animist astronauts.

And at the end he handed over the keys to the kingdom to his beloved heirs, he retired more-or-less because fuck didn't he earn that much at least? (And saying he's not entitled to at least some kind of respite and comfort after, again, a horrific war against the proto-Yozi and, again, being a literal slave-creation and only gets any kind of pass if, like, he sits in a cave and hibernates is A Take but alright).

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I mean, it doesn't have to be a cave. It can be a palatial mansion. Heck, it could even be the Jade Pleasure Dome, with the Games. As long as he's actually resting, and not ruling Yu-Shan into ruin.

I just picked a cave because I thought the idea of the Sun acting like a bear was funny.

Honestly I think the biggest thing that you can decisively lay at his feet as a pretty incontrovertible failure that he definitely should be blamed for is letting Heaven itself get as bad as it's gotten. His position as an Incarna and the privileges he enjoys come from that throne, that seat, but he's let everything around it rot in the face of his own addiction. He should be providing leadership and authority in that regard instead of just leaving a dusty, yellowed "back in 15 min" sign on his desk and fucking off.

But, then again, this is something that could/should be leveled at all the Incarna to a significant degree I think. Sol slightly more 'cause he's King but the Maidens and Luna have let the bureaucracy invert upon itself and turn deeply toxic.

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Yeah, that's basically what I've been trying to say.

His actions with regard to Creation are defensible. But what he's done to Yu-Shan is just plain bad.

 

[DayDreamer]

Reminder: Creation is post-post-post-post apocalyptic, in which there's been more than enough time for basically every philosophy to develop, catch on, and die out. Philosophies that justify rule by the personally powerful (Exalts, Gods, etc.) are probably the norm through most of Creation, but you've almost undoubtably got strains of collectivist thought in there, and communities or states based around more explicitly socialist/communist philosophies.

Utilitarianism almost undoubtably exists in some form or another: it's a convenient philosophy for divinely superpowered kings to use to justify making difficult decisions. It might be a utilitarianism based on the assumption that all are not equal—that the long-lived, powerful Gods, Spirits, Exalts, etc. are more worthy of consideration than a mortal—but it would be strange if it didn't exist in a recognizable form.

 

[Hakazin]

Yep, it so easy to derive that it only took 5000 years since the discovery of writing for someone to hit on the idea. Do see about having that character also derive communism from the bronze age economics and modern deism from some sort of Aristotelean Prime Mover philosophizing. (Well, to be fair God is an aspect of Nirguna)

To be less sarcastic, just like technology is not some sort of RTS tree where you are guaranteed to hit on certain technologies at a certain level of advancement so also are ideas almost all a product of the unique confluence of social and intellectual conditions of the time in which they arise. Relativity required non-Euclidean geometry developed by people like Riemann and Lobachevsky which in turn required new philosophies on the nature of space started by Newton and Leibniz and expanded by others. People don't derive complex ideas from the empty set.

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Have you heard the good word of Mazdak the Younger, my friend?

More specifically, yes, technological and sociological change results from the confluence of specific circumstance as opposed to hitting some sort of historical milestone. However, it does not exclusively require the specific circumstances found in our history in order to occur. I mentioned Mazdak, but you had an ancient Chinese equivalent to utilitarianism in Moism, and Deism? You could easily draw comparisons between that and the various Gnostic schools.

 

[linkhyrule5]

Yep, it so easy to derive that it only took 5000 years since the discovery of writing for someone to hit on the idea. Do see about having that character also derive communism from the bronze age economics and modern deism from some sort of Aristotelean Prime Mover philosophizing. (Well, to be fair God is an aspect of Nirguna)

To be less sarcastic, just like technology is not some sort of RTS tree where you are guaranteed to hit on certain technologies at a certain level of advancement so also are ideas almost all a product of the unique confluence of social and intellectual conditions of the time in which they arise. Relativity required non-Euclidean geometry developed by people like Riemann and Lobachevsky which in turn required new philosophies on the nature of space started by Newton and Leibniz and expanded by others. People don't derive complex ideas from the empty set.

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Have you heard the good word of Mazdak the Younger, my friend?

More specifically, yes, technological and sociological change results from the confluence of specific circumstance as opposed to hitting some sort of historical milestone. However, it does not exclusively require the specific circumstances found in our history in order to occur. I mentioned Mazdak, but you had an ancient Chinese equivalent to utilitarianism in Moism, and Deism? You could easily draw comparisons between that and the various Gnostic schools.

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Beat me to it - though actually I was going to quote Ovid at him.

 

[Exthalion]

Reminder: Creation is post-post-post-post apocalyptic, in which there's been more than enough time for basically every philosophy to develop, catch on, and die out. Philosophies that justify rule by the personally powerful (Exalts, Gods, etc.) are probably the norm through most of Creation, but you've almost undoubtably got strains of collectivist thought in their, and communities or states based around more explicitly socialist/communist philosophies.

Utilitarianism almost undoubtably exists in some form or another: it's a convenient philosophy for divinely superpowered kings to use to justify making difficult decisions. It might a utilitarianism based on the assumption that all are not equal—that the long-lived, powerful Gods, Spirits, Exalts, etc. are more worthy of consideration than a mortal—but it would be strange if it didn't exist in a recognizable form.

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And in all those apocalypses, how much actually survived to come through? The fact that X existed at some point in the past doesn't mean that people in the present have any idea what it was. Otherwise, we would have recipes for Greek fire and wouldn't have forgotten how to build the tech used in the Apollo missions. The Greeks forgot writing in an easier dark age than Creation went through.

More pragmatically, the "its been so long everything you are familiar with exists" principle as applied in games like Numenera has in my experience with such settings produced kitchen sink worlds without a really coherent identity. Conan had the same numerous forgotten prior ages + cataclysms, and no one was espousing Manicheanism.

Have you heard the good word of Mazdak the Younger, my friend?

More specifically, yes, technological and sociological change results from the confluence of specific circumstance as opposed to hitting some sort of historical milestone. However, it does not exclusively require the specific circumstances found in our history in order to occur. I mentioned Mazdak, but you had an ancient Chinese equivalent to utilitarianism in Moism, and Deism? You could easily draw comparisons between that and the various Gnostic schools.

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I had not heard of Mazdak! Thank you introducing something new!

Funny enough about Mozi, I was actually writing up a thing about him as a more relevant example than Relativity in my response but got distracted. I was going to point out that Mozi's impartial caring was historically looked down upon because they kept ending up on the losing sides of wars because they would support the weaker side. Similarly, the Romans were familiar with the aeolipile but they didn't have an industrial revolution because other precursors like better metallurgy and a profit motive caused by high cost of labor weren't there. So having close prereqs isn't quite enough to get over the line.

Definitely it doesn't always have to be the same conditions though. Writing, bronze, the wheel, and bows have been invented by multiple widely dispersed civilizations.


I was more bothered by people importing their personal favorite ideas into settings without the conditions that would give rise to those ideas.

 

[GardenerBriareus]

And then his kids go full mega-mengele except with more gold leaf.

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I think that a lot of this hinges on my steadily-mutating image of the First Age, which has a lot less pointless psychosis (ie, Desus was pretty much an unparalleled aberration that was immediately descended upon by hundreds of Celestial Exalted when his true nature was exposed) and a lot more reach exceeding grasp, the Deliberative as a more UN-esque, laissez-faire "gathering of equals" rather than a serried Creation-governing hierarchy (which led to shitty people being given a pass because hey, he's not letting the shit spill over his borders, and like twenty guys have lucrative trade agreements, let's just chill and release a formal statement that we're unhappy with his treatment of mortals for now), and paranoid fear of a second Ramethus-scale disaster driving things to the brink as much as sheer hubris.

Hence, Sol's descent into darkness is heavily influenced by the fact that his chosen didn't all collapse into cackling edgelordery, but instead set about steadily pushing reality closer to Armageddon through a tangled network of bureaucratic blind-idiot-god-ism, petty bullshit, ambition, and unwillingness to make a fuss. In a way, that makes the 'parent of drug-users' angle a bit stronger, since their exploitation of him would have started off seeming reasonable and justifiable.

The guy has one of the best reasons for not getting involved in Creation again out of almost anyone and ignoring that completely in favor of emphasizing his obligation to Everything and Everyone isn't really fair I think?

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I've definitely been overfocused on Sol's flaws to properly emphasize his past and the various tragedies that happened to push him to this point.

Edit:
Honestly I think the biggest thing that you can decisively lay at his feet as a pretty incontrovertible failure that he definitely should be blamed for is letting Heaven itself get as bad as it's gotten. His position as an Incarna and the privileges he enjoys come from that throne, that seat, but he's let everything around it rot in the face of his own addiction. He should be providing leadership and authority in that regard instead of just leaving a dusty, yellowed "back in 15 min" sign on his desk and fucking off.

But, then again, this is something that could/should be leveled at all the Incarna to a significant degree I think. Sol slightly more 'cause he's King but the Maidens and Luna have let the bureaucracy invert upon itself and turn deeply toxic.

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A good part of my handling of Creation hinges on this idea, actually, with Luna having long ago abandoned Creation entirely to wander the Outer Chaos with Gaea's primary jouten, and the Maidens... absent. Some people speculate that they're busy trying to keep the Loom from imploding on itself thanks to millennia of neglect and the damage done by events like the Great Contagion, the Balorian Crusade, and the Scarlet Empress shooting Creation full of holes with the Realm Defense Grid. Some think they were devoured by the Crusade's legions in a final, desperate stand to bar the bulk of Balor's armies from entering Creation. None know for certain, save perhaps the Pattern Spiders.

 

[Chehrazad]

Mazdak was not utilitarian and neither was Mohism and any attempt at calling or characterizing them as such is facile and a display of lack of understanding of either.

The fact that Exalted as a game assumes characters will divorce their sense of morality from religious worship breaks my suzpension of disbelief

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And in fact tied to this, both Mazdak and Mo derived the legitimacy and validity of their moral systems from the assumed existence of supernatural forces, not independently of them.

 

[Hakazin]

Mazdak was not utilitarian and neither was Mohism and any attempt at calling or characterizing them as such is facile and a display of lack of understanding of either.

And in fact tied to this, both Mazdak and Mo derived the legitimacy and validity of their moral systems from the assumed existence of supernatural forces, not independently of them.

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As it happens, I was using Mazdak to illustrate the possible early development of erstaz-socialism, not erstaz-utilitarianism. I know next to nothing about Mohism, however, so you do have me there.

 

[TenfoldShields]

I think that a lot of this hinges on my steadily-mutating image of the First Age, which has a lot less pointless psychosis (ie, Desus was pretty much an unparalleled aberration that was immediately descended upon by hundreds of Celestial Exalted when his true nature was exposed) and a lot more reach exceeding grasp, the Deliberative as a more UN-esque, laissez-faire "gathering of equals" rather than a serried Creation-governing hierarchy (which led to shitty people being given a pass because hey, he's not letting the shit spill over his borders, and like twenty guys have lucrative trade agreements, let's just chill and release a formal statement that we're unhappy with his treatment of mortals for now), and paranoid fear of a second Ramethus-scale disaster driving things to the brink as much as sheer hubris.

Hence, Sol's descent into darkness is heavily influenced by the fact that his chosen didn't all collapse into cackling edgelordery, but instead set about steadily pushing reality closer to Armageddon through a tangled network of bureaucratic blind-idiot-god-ism, petty bullshit, ambition, and unwillingness to make a fuss. In a way, that makes the 'parent of drug-users' angle a bit stronger, since their exploitation of him would have started off seeming reasonable and justifiable.

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Iiiiiiii...mnm.

Okay there's some stuff to unpack here. Wrt Desus I think the idea that- okay firstly I think that all the Desus stuff has the bones of a solid, unpleasant narrative on personal, very human abuses of immense power but that Exalted's often unable to handle stuff like that with anything less than, like, full on pig-fisting levels of hamhandedness so it blew up into this shitshow of sexual shockvalue, that kinda greasy "look how bad a dude he is, he's victimizing this hot lady" garbage that shows up in all kinds of media, plus an ugly undercurrent of commentary on Solar-Lunar dynamics, on top of one-is-a-tragedy-a-million-is-a-statistic and therefore Desus being viewed, as you say, as history's greatest monster. When the reality is that...the Deliberative's not going to care that he beat his wife man, that he was abusive and manipulative. Why would they? They're not going to descend on him like a plague of locusts even if they knew. Man, some of them probably did and just didn't think anything of it.

We do that today plenty y'know?

Which sort of ties into the other point: that I don't really think the fall of the Deliberative being a banal, bureaucratic thing really works. It feels important that the Solars were handed the keys to the kingdom and, finally freed to act without restraints, without any real check on their authority or ego; they created something utterly nightmarish. Something that turned the Dragonblooded against them, something that drove the Sidereals to consider the de facto nuclear option. Something that almost broke Creation. I think it's important that Solars explicitly be capable of large scale exploitation and harm and that the Usurpation was, in a meaningful sense, justified. That the Solars hurt the Dragonblooded deeply, the mortals and gods deeply. That they went farther than they ever should have. That they went bad. That they were decadent, jaded, impossibly powerful and monstrously cruel. Drunk on their own hubris and I think that's kinda the crux of it too, the tragedy.

That Creation could have been a paradise if the Solars hadn't fucked everything up for everyone. If they had broken the cycle of abuse. It's necessary, I think, to accentuate the fact that in a real, meaningful way Creation is still paying for their sins and that part of what being Exalted is is knowing that you're fundamentally capable of committing the same crimes. If that makes sense, I mean.

That there's that active agency instead of a kind of passive apathy in it.

 

[Exthalion]

[snip]

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I feel compelled to add that making it entirely bad is just as harmful. The Sidereal choice was supposed to be difficult and still questioned rather than the obvious right decision. There need to be "good" Solars whose DB stayed loyal and died with them for good reasons.

Making the Solars universally monstrous undermines their themes about returned kings bringing righteousness to a broken world.

(Sorry so short, cat on hand)

 

[Accelerator]

Cat on hand?

 

[Queshire]

Ah yes, the ancient technique used by first age Lunars to get their Twilight mates to leave the lab.

 

[Lioness]

I like to consider myself fairly well read, and this is the first time I've ever heard of Professor Mengele as anything other than a byword for cruelty and malpractice. Regardless of what knowledge was salvaged in the aftermath of his capture.

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He's a popular candidate for turning into a mad scientist, particularly since he managed to escape to South America. Most notably he was credited for the high rate of twins born in Cândido Godói, Brazil with a number of news articles in the 2000s until it was eventually debunked.

 

[ichypa]

Hmm, you know, if you don't like the Incarnae sitting around being useless and decadent but don't want them meddling with shit that maybe you want to meddle in, a good way in my mind is to just put them in their respective celestial objects.

Like, the UCS doesn't have enough time to fix all the world's problems because he's still busy making sure that the sun rises and sets every day. Sure, it's still a lot of work, but unlike back when he was a slave he gets to sit down and play the Games of Divinity at night, swapping out with Luna. Eclipses are when the Incarnae manage to arrange their schedules so that they can all get together for a game night. Or game day. You know what I mean.

 

[Phigment]

Hmm, you know, if you don't like the Incarnae sitting around being useless and decadent but don't want them meddling with shit that maybe you want to meddle in, a good way in my mind is to just put them in their respective celestial objects.

Like, the UCS doesn't have enough time to fix all the world's problems because he's still busy making sure that the sun rises and sets every day. Sure, it's still a lot of work, but unlike back when he was a slave he gets to sit down and play the Games of Divinity at night, swapping out with Luna. Eclipses are when the Incarnae manage to arrange their schedules so that they can all get together for a game night. Or game day. You know what I mean.

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Calibration is their once-a-year get together, where all the Incarnae meet up, kick back, and catch up on things.

Eclipses are when something so important happens that everybody needs to talk about it face to face right now, and Luna turns the moon around, pulls up next to the sun, and rolls the window down so they can chat.

In theory, you could have a reverse eclipse where the moon is there in the night sky and the sun suddenly cruises up next to it, but the Unconquered Sun isn't nearly as spontaneous as Luna, and the sun itself steers like a cow, so you don't see that happening.

 

[veekie]

You know, thats probably the most interesting part of the discussion.

How much work is actually running the stations of a god?
A lot of the outrage would be a lot more understandable if it was assumed that keeping the Sun/Moon/Fate running took maybe an hour or three of stamping and signing off on forms every day, with the rest of the time spent playing the Games.

If we instead ascribe a schedule like Louis XIV thats:
4 hours of informal socializing(amidst food, drink and other duties) where trusted courtiers and damily could access him and bring up issues not appropriate for formal council.
2 hours of formal council where the various department heads report on matters of their domain and bring up any decisions that needs his authorization.
4 hours of leisure time. Presumably Gaming.
4 hours of paperwork, a lot of which is reading and signing pre-written letters because like hell he has the time to write them himself.

That's a pretty packed day for a mortal, but Sol is also a Warrior-King and has to go chase off abominations unto Creation whenever they come poking.
And because he's First Amongst Equals with the Incarna, you need to add another 4 hours of politiking, wheeling and dealing to hash things out whenever their domains overlap, which is all the time.

So for him to make a big intervention is going to either need to put off the routine work and hope nothing goes wrong with matters left to the ministers to do their own thing for a year or two, or to acquire some powerful, outside resources.

 

[Accelerator]

Yes. But he's the UNCONQUERED SUN. PERFECT BEYOND IMAGINING.

When one of your powers is 'I succeed whatever I turn my mind to', just how much work is needed.

 

[veekie]

Note that:
1) He does not auto win against other Incarna. If they want something different from his perfect, glorious and orderly system he actually needs to offer up something.
2) He still needs to do those things. And theres a lot of things, even if they are done perfectly.

 

[Unbanshee]

Yes. But he's the UNCONQUERED SUN. PERFECT BEYOND IMAGINING.

When one of your powers is 'I succeed whatever I turn my mind to', just how much work is needed.

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Uh, if he wants to apply his perfection to heaven? more time than there is in a day. Cause if he wants to apply his perfection to every aspect of heaven, he personally has to do the work of every single job in heaven. He doesn't have speed reducers like in solar bureaucracy, after all.

 

[Shane_357]

Yes. But he's the UNCONQUERED SUN. PERFECT BEYOND IMAGINING.

When one of your powers is 'I succeed whatever I turn my mind to', just how much work is needed.

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Are you even reading the discussion or are you just skimming?

 

[Accelerator]

Are you even reading the discussion or are you just skimming?

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Currently reading. Answering one part.

I mean, he doesn't have to be there all the time. Just make it so that the censors know that there is a more than 80% chance that the unconquered sun would walk out of the Jade Dome this century, and kick their asses if they did anything shady.

It would help keep them in line. And... well, I'm not sure, but yes, maybe he doesn't have speed reducers. But he's still perfect beyond imagining. I mean, those succesess gotta count for something, right? If you have, like, 50 successes and no speed reducers, you're still going to accomplish a heck of a lot.

 

[Unbanshee]

Currently reading. Answering one part.

I mean, he doesn't have to be there all the time. Just make it so that the censors know that there is a more than 80% chance that the unconquered sun would walk out of the Jade Dome this century, and kick their asses if they did anything shady.

It would help keep them in line. And... well, I'm not sure, but yes, maybe he doesn't have speed reducers. But he's still perfect beyond imagining. I mean, those succesess gotta count for something, right? If you have, like, 50 successes and no speed reducers, you're still going to accomplish a heck of a lot.

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in 2e, Sol's perfection is a 1m second excellency that caps at +10 success for 10m (+ancillary benefits). He can perform Difficulty 5 actions (Legendary difficulty) with a minimum threshold of 5 successes (Phenomenal skill) on top of whatever he actually rolls. The successes he can get aren't the issue, any appropriately specced exalt can crank out the motes and virtue channels to hit that level of skill, it's the scope of what you're suggesting he does. He'd have to micromanage to an oppressive degree to apply that level of skill to problems in heaven, and doing that would eat up literally all of his time and it wouldn't make a dent.

I mean I've worked in places where the Head Honcho is micromanaging the people under them like he'd have to if we used your example. It's grossly inefficient and it's awful for everyone who isn't the power tripping boss. If he was that involved, the work of Heaven would grind to a halt because he's disrupting a functional (if unfair) system, and the essence from prayer would start drying up and heaven would legit revolt.

And during all of this, Creation would suffer irreparable harm.

 

[Sanctaphrax]

Thing is, the Sun could do much better than he does without spending much time or using much power. Ryzala's writeup says

while she officially answers to the Unconquered Sun, he has never corrected even her most gross displays of power.

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It's not plausible that he's too busy to police his top subordinate in even the most cursory ways. He doesn't correct her because he doesn't care, and she knows that, which in turn encourages her to behave worse.

Time constraints, power constraints, the interference of the other Incarnae...these might prevent him from doing an amazing job as King, but that's irrelevant because an amazing job is not on the table here. Doing anything at all would be a pretty major step up.