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General Exalted Thread

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Aranfan said:
Sidreals are so esoteric holy shit. Why are these social charms in melee!?

This is great.
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They've always been like that. Dragonblooded are a bit, too. Back during 2e when we were writing TAW, we'd joke that the weirdness wasn't out of step for the game at all, since it's really just Solars whose charm trees work on straightforward 'I'm a Melee charm so I Melee good' logic rather than esoteric theme associations.
 
Imrix said:
They've always been like that. Dragonblooded are a bit, too. Back during 2e when we were writing TAW, we'd joke that the weirdness wasn't out of step for the game at all, since it's really just Solars whose charm trees work on straightforward 'I'm a Melee charm so I Melee good' logic rather than esoteric theme associations.
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And Alchemicals had the "I'm strong because of my robot arms so I punch real good" and "you wouldn't believe how many hits this chassis can take" and "I've upgraded my reaction speed so much just call me David Edgerunners" Attribute -> effect line down, yeah.
 
Hey guys. So, a long while ago, you may have been remembering when OPP was publishing bite-size snippets of what was a effectively a monster manual. These were combined into a combination book Hundred Devil Night Parade, covering all the strange monsters and creatures your exalted could run into.

Alongside this, they were also making bite-sized pieces of more human opposition covering both mortal and exalted adversaries. These two have been combined into one compilation labelled 'Adversaries of the Righteous', which is now on sale at DRPRG.

I've had a quick glance at the index, and there are some entries for mortals, spirits, Dragonblood, Solars, Sidreals, Lunars, Liminals, Abyssals and Exigents. It went on sale today I believe.
 
Kaiya said:
It's mortal level magic, obviously it sucks compared to shit like Sorcery. Being able to make free bread, start fires without fuels, and the one good one on the Exalted level, tea reading, are all pretty great, with the last one being good for most anyone. Exalts get Charms to have a bunch of minor magic tricks to do nonsense with, but if you want meaningful thaumaturgy on the Exalted level, Sorcerous Workings are right over there.
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It's mortal level magic yes.

But when a charm can give you up to 9 merit dots worth of value and has options for repurchases to get even more and I still can't find any reason to take the thing, it suggests the system is just flat out shit. Especially when the charm has options to repurchase it for even more value. It's a charm they expect people would want to take, otherwise they wouldn't have printed it in the first place.

Espeically when you can just get the merit bundled for free with sorcery anyway. They had a perfectly good system for it previously even, which is why this one being so disappointing sucks.
 
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Kaiya said:
It's mortal level magic, obviously it sucks compared to shit like Sorcery. Being able to make free bread, start fires without fuels, and the one good one on the Exalted level, tea reading, are all pretty great, with the last one being good for most anyone. Exalts get Charms to have a bunch of minor magic tricks to do nonsense with, but if you want meaningful thaumaturgy on the Exalted level, Sorcerous Workings are right over there.
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The problem is that it's not something you learn, it's just a... random damn miracle you get at birth for unclear reasons. It feels utterly disjointed with the rest of the setting. I've toyed with the idea of instead ruling Thaumaturgy as 'access to Ambition 1 Finesse 1 Terrestrial Sorcerous Workings, which must have a stunt AND an Occult Introduced Fact (basically meaning you can use Occult instead of Lore for supernatural stuff) grounded in the laws of Creation'.
 
I don't really like the rest of the stuff that much, but some of the additions like closed rites in the Dark Ages Companion, which I believe were updated in the second edition of Mummy: the Curse with Pillar Points swapped out for some arbitrary amount of motes of Essence, and similar things would probably work well in Exalted.
 
Shane_357 said:
The problem is that it's not something you learn, it's just a... random damn miracle you get at birth for unclear reasons. It feels utterly disjointed with the rest of the setting. I've toyed with the idea of instead ruling Thaumaturgy as 'access to Ambition 1 Finesse 1 Terrestrial Sorcerous Workings, which must have a stunt AND an Occult Introduced Fact (basically meaning you can use Occult instead of Lore for supernatural stuff) grounded in the laws of Creation'.
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"Sometimes people in a magic setting are born with minor miracles" isn't really something I consider a flaw? But I'm also generally just _wildly_ opposed to stuff like sorcerous workings via understanding Creation, to the extent that most of my love for thaumaturgy as it stands is that it isn't that sort of thing now, so I'm pretty obviously the specific target audience for how it is now.

Sucal said:
It's mortal level magic yes.

But when a charm can give you up to 9 merit dots worth of value and has options for repurchases to get even more and I still can't find any reason to take the thing, it suggests the system is just flat out shit. Especially when the charm has options to repurchase it for even more value. It's a charm they expect people would want to take, otherwise they wouldn't have printed it in the first place.

Espeically when you can just get the merit bundled for free with sorcery anyway. They had a perfectly good system for it previously even, which is why this one being so disappointing sucks.
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That said, "magic fire from nothing, bread from nothing, and fortell the future" are magic tricks I'd nab for those background dots. All the moreso for "hypnotize animals into being your best buddies" and "control the chaos of Wyld Demenses", for more recent thaumaturgy stuff, so. Especially as a mortal.
I do kinda wanna have them be able to be passed on, but would need to find a way that makes clear you can't set up a fucking school of thumaturgy for it to be worth writing up a proper houserule.
 
Dead Spouse defence is delightful.

'Yeah that attack did nothing. Oh by the way, that cute waiter at the cafe we went to for lunch…"
 
Kaiya said:
"Sometimes people in a magic setting are born with minor miracles" isn't really something I consider a flaw? But I'm also generally just _wildly_ opposed to stuff like sorcerous workings via understanding Creation, to the extent that most of my love for thaumaturgy as it stands is that it isn't that sort of thing now, so I'm pretty obviously the specific target audience for how it is now.
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For me it removes so much of the wonder from the setting when instead of academies of divination that advise dynasties and orders of mortal exorcists, you instead have 'hey random bozo, you have X magic from sheer happenstance'. I really dislike 'magic' that is presented as a superpower, not something learned. The Sorcerous Working thing was more attempting to create a lightweight rules patch than it actually being a Sorcerous Working.
 
I prefer to just treat it like folk tales and folk knowledge. Ultimately outside of the central Realm in a lot of the setting it doesn't make sense for magic to be taught in schools or anything.

If it's something that you heard in historical legends that wise men and women could do but it isn't so powerful it goes into the feats of heroes then it's common magic. I think precisely oversytemizing it makes it less magical. I also agree that magic as a superpower is boring.

My preference is common magic as tradition, relationship with the sacral and passed down knowledge, not something just to learn in a school or know innately. Exalted magic would be a bit different, obviously.
 
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Cetashwayo said:
I prefer to just treat it like folk tales and folk knowledge. Ultimately outside of the central Realm in a lot of the setting it doesn't make sense for magic to be taught in schools or anything.
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Like, perhaps a tale of knavish magi, associated with Chaldean and Babylonian wisdom, and the use of divination to ascertain the most auspicious location and time for a new settlement?
 
JoergenJetsam said:
Like, perhaps a tale of knavish magi, associated with Chaldean and Babylonian wisdom, and the use of divination to ascertain the most auspicious location and time for a new settlement?
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Yes, or selecting particularly promising chicken bones to predict certain fortunes, and so on. All the good stuff you get in the wondrous world of historical beliefs in magic and its attached miracles. This stuff is built to be relatively mundane and not worldbreaking, and yet much of it is still pretty interesting and flavorful and can fit into an actual magical world seamlessly.
 
Please keep in mind my original complaints is more about wanting a better mechanical system to use it then wanting academies or whatever. A lot of my complaints are with how the system itself works
 
Academies were just an example, drawn from the idea of that one city-state that is obsessed with astrology and forces everyone to live by it.
 
Cetashwayo said:
I prefer to just treat it like folk tales and folk knowledge. Ultimately outside of the central Realm in a lot of the setting it doesn't make sense for magic to be taught in schools or anything.

If it's something that you heard in historical legends that wise men and women could do but it isn't so powerful it goes into the feats of heroes then it's common magic. I think precisely oversytemizing it makes it less magical. I also agree that magic as a superpower is boring.

My preference is common magic as tradition, relationship with the sacral and passed down knowledge, not something just to learn in a school or know innately. Exalted magic would be a bit different, obviously.
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I don't really imagine most of Creation as having schools for anything, really - but I absolutely imagine there being a ton of masters with a gaggle of apprentices learning the trade, or maybe a local trade guild at the upper end, and sometimes that trade is pewtersmithing or herbalism, and sometimes it's warding against ghosts or reading the stars for destiny, and each of these are about as mystical and significant fields as each other from the perspective of antiquity.

That's a perspective that makes sense in the 2e model of thaumaturgy where it's a set of skills and knowledge that can be taught to anybody willing to apply themselves to their mentor's lessons, but not so much in 3e where it's an innate gift that you either have or you don't, and I maintain that the change is for the worse. Exalted as a setting has long sought to play up that blending of the mundane and magical, which is to its credit as one of its more evocative elements.
 
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Hell even if Thaumaturgy was just something one was born with that wouldn't mean schools or school like places wouldn't exist. Places like the Realm would spend a decent amount of effort finding people that and convincing them to be on their side. And part of that would probably be teaching them how to use said powers.
 
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Honestly, I feel there's room for both "Thaumaturgy as a learned skill" and "Thaumaturgy as an inborn ability" in Creation.

Like, I could see a list of Thaumaturgy Merits, most of which just represent the time and effort your character put into learning this or that thing. Some of them are tagged with "Innate" and you can only purchase those at charagen or after ST approved circumstances like Power Questing or Sorcerous Workings.

Something that handles both "I'm a shaman and learned how to ward away ghosts and appease spirits from the shaman before me, just as he did before me" and "That girl's always had a touch of Second Sight."


Should there be literal schools of Magic? Eh......Like, even leaving aside the canonical ones like the Heptagram or the Raiton Academy, I do feel there's plenty of room for things like that. If you want to tell me that @Omicron's Black Garda School can't exist, then I'm sorry but we just can't be friends.

Now, that said, I don't think Hogwarts should be found in Creation. Perhaps there was a time when august and admired schools of sorcery stood where masses trained and studied, but if so that time was long ago. But there should still be places of learning that you can travel to and learn from, be that as a student or by prying their dread secrets from their cold dead hands.
 
I generally think this is something on which the line has wildly overcorrected. You don't need metaphysical limitations to keep people from setting up a ton of magic schools, because that's fundamentally a limit posed by society, not a math problem. You don't need to enclose the mystical commons to keep enlightened mortals from popping out of assembly lines there, because that's just not how enlightenment or power needs to work.

Magic that can't be grounded in cultural traditions is rootless and pale. Let there be more, and let it blend together messily. Connect sorcerous initiations to regional and religious practices, create asymmetric overlaps between the High and the Low.

But I am also relatively skeptical of, if not actively burned out on, "magic must be mysterious and unexplainable." You don't need to do a full sanderson and/or give everything the encyclopedic treatment, but it's okay to let things have shapes and properties.
 
I think rpgs in general are a weird place to try for mysteries and unknowable magic because any form of magic one dreams up will need to interact with the rules preferably in a clear and predictable manner. The player should not need to puzzle out how their powers work.
 
My preferred take is that Thaumaturgy isn't something separate from skill or siloed in Occult, but something that comes into play for the higher levels of skill. Part of becoming a master blacksmith is learning how to propiate spirits of metal, fire, and air, just as becoming a master butcher involves learning how to keep the attention of disease gods away from stored meat so that it doesn't spoil. These examples aren't taken out of the air either, since blacksmiths and travelling butchers were considered to have magical knowledge.
 
3e Thaumaturgy is bad on its own merits, regardless of what you think about the philosophy of mortal magic. It could be a lot better even as an implementation of the exact thing that it currently is.

The main thing stopping me from rewriting it is that I'm not sure what I even want mortal-level magic to look like.

Potato Anarchy said:
But I am also relatively skeptical of, if not actively burned out on, "magic must be mysterious and unexplainable." You don't need to do a full sanderson and/or give everything the encyclopedic treatment, but it's okay to let things have shapes and properties.
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It's worth noting that historically, magic has been significantly less mysterious and more explainable than physics or chemistry.

Even today, nothing quantum makes any real sense. Relativity's not much better. Trying to explain advanced or semi-advanced physics to a layman just makes you sound insane. Nobody would take this stuff seriously if it wasn't demonstrably true, and even the people who've dedicated their lives to it have to admit that there are massive holes in their knowledge that will probably be there until they die.
 
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