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General Exalted Thread

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Blaque said:
I think that Solar Exalted were in-effect extinct for the last millennium and a half is something that 3e leans into quite a bit, and is something I have quite liked. It helps reinforce that Solars (and their derivatives) coming back into the world is like a complex multi-player game of some sort, and then someone decided to drop a bowling ball on the play space. It shuffles everything and and kind of just leaves a lot of shrugs.

Like, as bad as the world is without the Empress and the coming Realm Civil War, is like, one of those things probably folks hypothesized on, hoped to work against, or hoped someday to foster. But Solars coming back is just a big "Wait, what? What the fuck?" to everyone, including the Bronze Faction and Silver Pact, that I find quite fun.
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I would add in that it's not just the Solars coming back, it's the never-before-seen recolorings being tossed in as well. So it's more like someone dropped a bowling ball on the play space, and then threw a severed head through your window and a Molotov cocktail through a different window.
 
ichypa said:
I would add in that it's not just the Solars coming back, it's the never-before-seen recolorings being tossed in as well. So it's more like someone dropped a bowling ball on the play space, and then threw a severed head through your window and a Molotov cocktail through a different window.
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And what's this!? HERE COMES THE LOCUST CRUSADE WITH A STEEL CHAIR!
 
ichypa said:
I would add in that it's not just the Solars coming back, it's the never-before-seen recolorings being tossed in as well. So it's more like someone dropped a bowling ball on the play space, and then threw a severed head through your window and a Molotov cocktail through a different window.
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Something I found amusing is that the followers of the Immaculate Order and the general Dragon-Blooded host would actually have some preparation for responding to the Infernal and Abyssal Exalted because of how closely these two new exalted templates match the Immaculate Order's religious propaganda on the Anathema.

The "Ascensions and Transgressions: the Tales of Keris Dulmeadokht (Exalted game)" has some quite excellent scenes exploring this in the context of believers in the Immaculate Order who became Infernal Exalted and can neatly fit their new status in with their long-standing religious beliefs.
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Ascensions and Transgressions: the Tales of Keris Dulmeadokht (Exalted game)

So, this is a thread for Ascensions and Transgressions; my 1-on-1 Exalted game with...
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Gazetteer said:
They still have too much power in heaven for that, I think. Kejak dying is going to do a lot of damage to them and shake things up, but I think path of least resistance, they're not going to just go away on their own anymore than the Realm is.

As currently presented, the path of least resistance there is that the Realm mauls itself for a while before Mnemon or whoever manages to take the throne. Then she has to spend a century or more repairing the damages and solidifying her power and trying to retake rebellious satrapies. Bloodied, reduced, but still the largest single power in the setting.

The Bronze Faction is in a similar position on a much smaller scale, I think. Unless something plot shaped happens, like the Realm falling, or a bunch of Bronze sids dying at once, or the Gold Faction seizing on something to gain a decisive advantage, it seems pretty likely to just keep trucking for the forseeable future. Their position worse, but will with the largest part of the Fellowship behind them.

The greatest forces of imperialism in the setting will not simply defeat themselves.
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When I run, I enjoy having brief alliances of the Abyssals and the Infernals mauling the Sidereals and Realm so horribly that it causes that plot shaped wound, both imperiling much of the setting and giving the most antagonistic of the Abyssals and Infernals decisive advantages, but also killing the old world order for good. Combined with the new Solars, it's never gonna be what it was before, and that may yet turn out to be good!

sucks for a lot of the folks that have to live through the next century though
 
Kaiya said:
When I run, I enjoy having brief alliances of the Abyssals and the Infernals mauling the Sidereals and Realm so horribly that it causes that plot shaped wound, both imperiling much of the setting and giving the most antagonistic of the Abyssals and Infernals decisive advantages, but also killing the old world order for good. Combined with the new Solars, it's never gonna be what it was before, and that may yet turn out to be good!

sucks for a lot of the folks that have to live through the next century though
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I'm not really interested in taking a baseball bat to the existing world order immediately without getting to play around in it first, usually.
 
Perversely, this renders Gem one of the the most well protected locales in Creation, as it it being actually destroyed would render it unacceptably "no longer in impending peril."

This doesn't make living there any less a cause for anxiety.
 
What're the best low hanging fruit/charms as a whole in Solar Presence, Socialize, and Performances and are there any tripwires to avoid for mechanical reasons?
 
alexthealright said:
What're the best low hanging fruit/charms as a whole in Solar Presence, Socialize, and Performances and are there any tripwires to avoid for mechanical reasons?
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Presence-
Harmonious Presence Meditation is one of the best social charms in the game.
Poised Lion Attitude can end fights outright if your built for social and combat.

Socialize-
Intent Tracing Stare- Gets a lot of use depending on your ST.
Discretionary Gesture- Love me this charm.

Haven't done much Performance.
 
Honestly the Adamant Caste being a Prototype for the Auroral Exalts is another thing that makes me think that Alchemical Exalts should have each Favoured their Attribute combo and four Abilities relevant to the Exaltation they were a Prototype of.
 
alexthealright said:
What're the best low hanging fruit/charms as a whole in Solar Presence, Socialize, and Performances and are there any tripwires to avoid for mechanical reasons?
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As has been mentioned, Harmonious Presence Meditation is one of the best entry-level Charms in the whole Solar set, full stop. It's very hard to go wrong with it.

As for Socialize, Mastery of Small Manners can either be completely irrelevant or absolutely invaluable, depending on how often diplomatic scenes come up in your game and how much your GM is a stickler for protocol. (My unfortunate experience is that the kind of person who runs the sort of game where Mastery of Small Manners' 'this Charm prevents you from committing any major faux pas' functionality would come in handy is also the sort of GM who looks at the Charm and says "I'm houseruling this to not have that functionality", but your mileage may vary.)

A better and more universally useful pick is Shadow Over Day. This Charm is often shat on in fan discussions, but being able to bump your Guile to superhuman levels for a pittance is actually very strong in the sort of scenes that tend to come up in games a lot (as opposed to white-room theorycrafting). More importantly, the Mute keyword lets you use this Charm in conjunction with the excellency to dump 6m into a beefy +4 enhancement to your Guile without flaring anima, which should reliably stand up to even superhuman scrutiny. Provided your base stats are good enough, for just one Charm, you get better than even odds at foiling the attempts of an optimized, max excellency'd Dragon-Blood to sniff out your intent/Intimacies, at no risk of revealing your Anathema status. Very overlooked Charm, but easily among the best as far as I'm concerned - especially if you're not planning to go for the full 5 dots of Socialize necessary to grab Guarded Thoughts Meditation, the upgrade that arguably obviates this pick.

Alternatively, for a more martially-inclined character who was so busy maxing out Wits that they had no points left to grab a decent Perception, Motive-Discerning Technique is excellent. It lets you roll read intentions with Wits, which can realistically be as much as a +3 dice difference, and it grants double 9s - all for a measly 3m cost. The repurchase is also just super fun - you could make the argument that it's not as much of a high-value pick than the Charms mentioned thus far, but it shapes play in an interesting way, and to me, that's pretty much the high watermark of a Charm worth purchasing.
 
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Phyrexia Unbound said:
Honestly the Adamant Caste being a Prototype for the Auroral Exalts is another thing that makes me think that Alchemical Exalts should have each Favoured their Attribute combo and four Abilities relevant to the Exaltation they were a Prototype of.
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Why on earth would they be Attribute and Ability Exalted?
 
For real. Trying to support 34 entire-ass trees for six Castes feels like a recipe for a mess.
 
It feels a bit of a case of "different for the sake of different" to me, yeah. Either option can be good for an undefined Exalt type, but Alchemicals as a group have been defined by their artificial bodies and the powers this grants throughout the gameline, which means that the already-existing Attribute focus only fits better in 3e. They can be inhumanly skilled, but a big part of that is their TAU Charms and related pieces. They're capable because this enhances their dexterity, or intelligence, etc.

"Attribute and Ability" I could imagine trying to do for a very, very weird Exigent, but it'd be a handful of each, and... honestly, it still might be more of a trouble than my homebrewing talent could support, I'm afraid.
 
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Mixed Attribute and Ability make sense... for a one-of Exigent which is centered around it. I've thought of, say, a weapon Exigent, shaped around a single legendary weapon, where it'd make sense that they have the weapon Ability, and rather than trying to pick out a bunch of Abilities to loosely account for all the other things they might want, just give them Str, Dex, Per as Attribute trees.
 
... okay. In *theory*, Autocthon could've tried to do mixed ability/attributes as a prototype and realized "okay this doesn't work I need to focus on one or the other at a time" (pretending for a moment Autocthon knows about the game's mechanics). And that's kind of neat. Alternatively you could have Alchemicals acting as clear prototypes for the Exalt their magical material cooresponds to, meaning Moonsilver castes would coorespond to Lunar exalts and have attributes or Orichalchum would be super special ability types. So for a lore thing that's kinda neat.

But as far as actually playing them goes?

Charmsets for ability or attribute exalts are already massive when you're doing just one of those two options. Doing both? You need to make charms for *every* ability and *every* attribute and they *all* need to be viable and useful when combined which means you're going to be spreading yourself ridiculously thin.

And that's before taking into consideration that you want to mix these.

Ryang said:
Mixed Attribute and Ability make sense... for a one-of Exigent which is centered around it. I've thought of, say, a weapon Exigent, shaped around a single legendary weapon, where it'd make sense that they have the weapon Ability, and rather than trying to pick out a bunch of Abilities to loosely account for all the other things they might want, just give them Str, Dex, Per as Attribute trees.
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Yeah. This feels like a one-off idea, because at least that way you can build your charmset over time and focus on your 1 attribute and four favored abilities.
 
Ah, okay then.

The only other (bad) idea I've had about Alchemicals is that each Caste has some mechanical stuff they can do that relates them to the Exaltation they're a prototype of and also the Autocthonian Pole they're associated with.

A Jades Array gets bonus effects on Charms that are made with the same colours of Jade (the bonuses being the same as ones from Element Tag Charms Terrestrials can use)
Moonsilvers Can shuffle around their Attribute Dots, which doesn't effect what Charms they have installed, but it does effect the maths for what the charms do.
Orichaculms can "Overcharge" their Dice Rolls by running them directly off the Pole of Lightning.

I'm a bit stuck with Starmetal, Soulsteel and Adamant though.
 
I think that this kind of thing benefits much more from just letting the themes speak for themselves than it does from bending the design of Alchemicals unnaturally to have stronger connections to Creation Exalt types.
 
I thought it was cool in 2e how Alchemicals as the prototype Exalted resonated with their corresponding Exalt type and offered their counterparts certain advantages with their presence. Though if I was going to make that a more influential part of them, I'd probably do it in Exalted Essence rather than Ex3 because the focus on both mixed circles and on the Alchemicals left behind in Creation who are much more likely to interact with their corresponding to Exalt types and draw those parallels unlike the Champions of the Octet who may very well never encounter them.
 
Gazetteer said:
I'm not really interested in taking a baseball bat to the existing world order immediately without getting to play around in it first, usually.
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shrugs well it's the whole point for me, and we're talking about what we're doing/interested in, right? The existing world order is, to me, cool backstory, mostly, it informs how the pieces will fall when it breaks more than it entices me to run a game in the world as it is.
 
Kaiya said:
shrugs well it's the whole point for me, and we're talking about what we're doing/interested in, right? The existing world order is, to me, cool backstory, mostly, it informs how the pieces will fall when it breaks more than it entices me to run a game in the world as it is.
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I think the backstory is a cool backstory, and the existing setting and world order is an interesting world state to play around with and tell stories in and like, let it change in a way that feels natural with those stories.
 
In 3e I don't even really feel that they are even prototypes of the other Exalted, but more that the different materials theyd raw on say a lot of their respective Exalt themes. It kind of showcases the destiny of the material to the Exalts IMHO more than the idea of prototypes of the Exalted of the gods.

Kind of especially since to my understanding, Exaltation isn't quite "designed" in 3e.
 
Gazetteer said:
I think the backstory is a cool backstory, and the existing setting and world order is an interesting world state to play around with and tell stories in and like, let it change in a way that feels natural with those stories.
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If it didn't feel natural to me, I wouldn't be doing it at all, this is what feels natural to me: a series of rapidly spreading fires that becomes a conflagration. If I wasn't gonna start working on how the Solars, Abyssals, and Infernals flip the table (and of course the Lunars joining them in various ways as the other big block of Celestials with an interest in flipping the board who haven't been able to on their own yet) I'd set a game while the Empress was still alive.
 
Kaiya said:
If it didn't feel natural to me, I wouldn't be doing it at all, this is what feels natural to me: a series of rapidly spreading fires that becomes a conflagration. If I wasn't gonna start working on how the Solars, Abyssals, and Infernals flip the table (and of course the Lunars joining them in various ways as the other big block of Celestials with an interest in flipping the board who haven't been able to on their own yet) I'd set a game while the Empress was still alive.
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I am not talking about setting a story while the Empress is alive, I am talking about setting a story in the time period that the setting material describes, which is one in which rapid changes have occurred in a number of places, and the presence of Solars etc. threatens to shake things up more, but one in which there is explicitly still some question about how things are going to land and what the major factions are going to do. I care enough about Solars to use them when they're fun and interesting, but I don't think I care enough about Solars to assume that they just kick over the entire metaphorical table immediately, since like... I was still eating that meal?
 
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