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General Exalted Thread

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Grytorm said:
Hmm. What would be a good epithet for a glacier yozi who is stand offish, sad, and associated for darkness and rotten ice?
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[insert Yozi name here], The Valley of Desolation?
[insert Yozi name here], The Frozen Flow of Frost?
[insert Yozi name here], Mount of a Thousand Despairs?
[insert Yozi name here], The Plain of Separation?
[insert Yozi name here], The Ever-Festering Rampart?

I think the problem here is that it's a glacier, specifically, since there's not a lot of poetic epithets for them.
 
Also too many Exalt types?! Looking at the antagonists section, I say not enough Exalt types!

UNLEASH THE SPOKEN!

SPOKEN! SPOKEN! SPOKEN! SPOKEN! SPOKEN! SPOKEN! SPOKEN! SPOKEN! SPOKEN! SPOKEN! SPOKEN! SPOKEN! SPOKEN! SPOKEN! SPOKEN!
 
Chris McNeil said:
I'll simply say that I'm coming from a position of many, many years of being a writer and that sometimes less is more, and more restrictions can actually improve settings. Sometimes it's necessary to cut cool ideas because they just take away from the core of the story or the setting. ...
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So to me, this is actually a bit of why more Exalted is nice. I think that to an extent, the origianl Exalts at times felt bloated or unfocused. Abyssals with trying to pull the "All flavors of undead", and Lunars with illusion stuff that was ultimately dropped, every shapechanging power under the sun, and then every book besides them having to have textbox justifying why they are shapeshfitersw without encroaching on Lunar themes.

Abyssals are a kind of undead in 3e, namely the more "apex master of the dead" sort, like a vampire, lich, or necromancer, rather than trying to also capture revenants, ghouls, or zombies. Lunars are a kind of shapeshifter in 3e, namely skin-thieves, monsters, tricksters, and witches, rather htan Reed Richards, Poison Ivy, or Alex Mercer, with stapled-on Ravnos magic while at it. This is space that is just kind of taken out to focus and that space still serves as valid room to build-up other Exalts like with Liminals and Infernals. I think the big thing is that less is more is being applied for some splats, but it doesn't change the option space. It just lets things focus.

Exigents to an extent, are a pretty minialist add too. The whole idea of them is that provide architecture to allow kind of more niche stuff that would be too afield for themes of a bigger Exalt, without having to later the setting radically to account for htem. The Flame of Exigence as a catalyst, its limited abilty to make repats, and the assumption of its rarity in genral let the setting kind of be the same, but not do a lot of upheaval. It's a bit why I think them being there is better than not in particular, since it's nice to have something to allow for that instead of it stapled-on to an existing Exalt (I feel a lot of splatterpunk and zombie stuff for Abyssals), half-assed into some other subsystem (I still hold Quicksilver Hands of Dreams is a misc. oneiromancy tree shoved into Martial Arts), or bolted-on wholesale to an existing Exaltt to its detriment (I feel Devil-Tigers kind of overtime ovewelmed Inferanls, who themselves to me could be said to be a Spare Powers Bin Exalt at times.).

Chris McNeil said:
..I would also note that your assumption that "no new Exalt types" equals "setting is in a holding pattern" is an assumption you probably ought to examine more closely.
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I think in their case though, that was 2e in a way. It was kind of fossilized. Most everything was detailed. We knew what the splats were. And we knew what they could do. There was no real wild card in them themselves, and th setting had this sense of teleos to the way the splats "should be" due to how they were designed to setup ordained roles that didn't allow for a lot.

Wild card elements like Exigents, the late arrival of Liminals and Getimians over hsitory, and such are there to kind of add dynamism to something that by the end of 2e was kind of complete by most accounts. Even if we never got 3e, Liminals were coming, and we were probably going ot get complete rewrites of Dragon-Blooded and Lunars. It's just kind of the way long-running settings that are written to fill in lore result in I feel.
 
Lioness said:
The most compelling difference between Exigents and god-blooded, for me at least, is that god-blooded are typically born that way, which can really has an impact on the aesthetic and modus operendi of the characters involved.
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God-bloods also have the element of the god granting that power doesn't get diminished, and there's some things they're not narratively obligated to that Exalts get. It's helped that being Exalts ahve resulted in folks writing them as their own thing, which 1e and 2e conditioned a lot of folks as to seeing god-bloods as looting their parents for spare change and often kind of underwelming mechanics.
 
I like how the streamlined Dream-Souled and Umbrals go into the book. I like htem both as-is and look forward to now in games pressuring if I get in one to play one of those or a Sovereign :)
 
I appreciate that one of the ways you can build Liminals is just, the limb monster.

You show up like "never fear, I have come to save you from the hungry ghosts" and you're a sesquipedalian, hundred-handed, four-headed, three-eyed patchwork thing
 
akoboldskobold said:
Which then feeds into my confusion of why people are, to this day, refusing to move on from 2e.
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As a 2e holdout most of the people I know who still care about 2e mostly do so though mechanics, not fluff (I may have self selected into this type of group). The removal of Borgstromancy and general charms, addition of dice tricks, and the choice of new combat system are all things I strongly dislike at best, though I don't recall hearing why others don't like 3e. Do to how I engage with Exalted (read the charms, then maybe the surrounding rules, don't count on me ever reading fluff chapters) I can't read though 3e books because of all the "WHY WOULD YOU DO THIS!?" going though my head. I have tried reading 3e core, Fangs at the Gate, and Essence (whose charms I find too generic to be interesting so Essence is a bad system for me).
 
Chris McNeil said:
Which is of course fine, it's a subjective thing.

I could make the argument that that illustrates my point, because why shouldn't Abyssals be all those things and more, why shouldn't Lunars be all those things and more? Solars are certainly not obliged to be a kind of anything, and accordingly being "focused" is thus not actually something I feel that benefits them (indeed, my main issue with both Abyssals and Lunars is they were too focused in 2e as it was, albeit for wildly different reasons).
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You can, I'm sure, imagine that their being more thematically coherent in their design and setting elements are not something that benefits them, but I, having the advantage of actually having read and played both 3e Lunars and Abyssals, feel very confident in disagreeing. Like, we can sit here all day with you speculating about how you assume certain changes in books you haven't read are bad, and reacting second or third hand to people trying to describe those changes -- god knows, we have some people in this thread who seemingly have that as literally their only engagement with Exalted material at all and yet still feel entitled to people respecting their opinions -- but I'm not sure it's a productive use of your time.

Exalts are few. Even with Dragonblooded most people will live their entire lives without seeing one, and the others are vanishingly rare. All Exalts shake the world by their passing, at least if given half a chance and not ganked by a Wyld Hunt immediately (sometimes even then). They're titanic, epic heroes that shake the world by their passing and nothing will ever be the same again. They are the Chosen of the greatest of the gods and Gaia, and even the greatest of the great ignores them at their peril.

It just waters that down to add "Oh, and there's also these guys, and these guys, and these guys, and those guys". And as you yourself said, it makes the existing ones "more focused", which is also to say it places them into a smaller conceptual space. You think that's a good thing, which is perfectly valid! But that's exactly why I said even a cool idea can still be weakening the core concept the game was built around. We disagree on that, and that's cool. I appreciate you saying that less is more could apply to a splat rather than a game as a whole, and it's a valid way to look at it.

Would I think differently if I was introduced to the game now, instead of 24 years ago? Possibly! But of course, so might anyone whose formative experiences with a game are changed drastically.
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Part of the problem with you trying to stake out a position about material you have not read based on the bad version you imagined would be written ten or twelve years ago, is that like, you end up making arguments that are trivially easy to dismiss because they're like, wrong.

There are tens of thousands of Dragon-Blooded in the world. For three editions, there have always been tens of thousands of Dragon-Blooded in the world. The rest of the Exalted Host on Creation still clocks in at, I think, under 1000 individuals. Even with the changes 3e has made, adding a few hundred additional Exalts, most of whom, being Liminals and Terrestrial level Exigents, are similar in scale to Dragon-Blood, does approximately nothing to change how common Exalts are in the wider setting. It's barely even statistically significant.
 
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Seeing the current discussions, I have done my darnest to assemble a report card of books people have gone through.

I fully admit I haven't actually read Abyssals and I need to get around to it.
 
Quite apart from numbers, let's look at "and there's also these guys, and these guys, etc." in terms of "there are too many Exalts now" from a story telling/play experience perspective.

Suppose your characters encounter another Exalt. Said Exalt is a schemer from behind the scenes, pulling strings to put obstacles in the characters ways. When faced in combat, that Exalt literary fights through Puppets, sending them in to fight and pulling their strings just as she did for social purposes.

Does the existence of said Exalt make it feel like there are more Exalts?
The characters of an Exalted story/game are bound to run into other Exalts, encountering a singular one that opposes them isn't unusual. Is it really different whether that Exalt is an Exigent (she is, one of the example ones) or a Solar, Lunar, Sidereal, or Dragonblood? You certainly could try to do an Exalt like that with any of the latter splats - though you'd have to add a bunch of stuff on top that add nothing to the core theme of the character.

Let's imagine you do her as a Solar instead. You could argue that running into a Solar every time you need an Exalted Antagonist without Shapeshifting (Lunar), Arcane Fate and Ties to Heaven (Sidereals) or Elemental Powers (Dragonbloods) creates an effect of "oh, there's just Solars all the time", actually making it feel like there are too many of those.

Sure, it's possible to create a story where you run into too many Exalts, making it feel like there are too many of those. But you can do that regardless - it is maybe a bit encouraged by having a larger diversity of Exalts to choose from, so the storyteller is less likely to go "okay, this time I'll pick a God/Behemoth/Fae to spice things up".
But that is of course not what 3E is actually doing.
 
Chris McNeil said:
That doesn't surprise me very much, and ofc as I said all I'm saying is from a 1e/2e perspective. To be clear, I share with Grabowski a very cynical view on Empire, but also a very cynical view on revolutions. I think that "what to do about the Realm" is a fundamentally and deliberately similar question to "what to do about the Solar Hierarchy" and indeed "What to do about the Primordials", and that was a deliberate parallel, and missing that parallel is Missing The Point (in my view of the setting). In all cases there are great reasons to go "let's stick those mfers with my daiklaive", both because they were unquestionably guilty of horrific crimes and because conveniently that's what Our Heroes in each situation happened to be very good at.

The RESULTS of taking that choice the first two times weren't uniformly great, however.
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It's similar but it's not identical and the distinctions are very, very relevant — the Primordials, and to a lesser extent the Solars, were individual actors. They did not have infrastructure, social structures, and hegemony, they were infrastructure, social structures, and hegemony. The Scarlet Empress may have wielded more power than any individual entity in Creation has ever had, but she was not and could never have been her empire in the same manner that Theion in his might was both the king and the kingdom.

Killing the right people can (and has been, I would argue) the right thing for people to do at various points in Creation's history, but the problem now is that it is not enough. Lasting progress isn't in combating bad people but in changing the circumstances and incentives that produced them.


Thankfully, I have perfect confidence that my latest world altering sorcerous endeavour will make everything better for everyone for all times, if only I can collect enough abandoned orphans to power it all...

edit: oh dang like 70 other posts happened that I missed because I didn't scroll down enough. Uh, was not trying to be a jerk like this, sorry. :/
 
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Chris McNeil said:
Some people here have a real problem with understanding the difference between critiqueing an idea and critiqueing writing. I have not said a word about 3e's actual writing. I am not imagining that it is bad or good. I genuinely have no predisposition to assume it was bad. That is your projection and not related to anything I said.
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Right, but you don't understand the idea, how it was thought about and presented by the people who actually wrote this content, or how it was actually implemented, so your critique is not useful or insightful and is, as previously mentioned, trivially easily dismissed. You very literally do not know what you're talking about. I don't say that to be mean or insulting, I just say that because it's self evidently true, by your own admission.
 
Chris McNeil said:
Exalts are few. Even with Dragonblooded most people will live their entire lives without seeing one, and the others are vanishingly rare. All Exalts shake the world by their passing, at least if given half a chance and not ganked by a Wyld Hunt immediately (sometimes even then). They're titanic, epic heroes that shake the world by their passing and nothing will ever be the same again. They are the Chosen of the greatest of the gods and Gaia, and even the greatest of the great ignores them at their peril.
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As the person who said 'the best thing about Exigents is that now DBs have peeers to play with', it doesn't really matter that Exalts are rare conceptually - the setting and mechanics leads to Exalts finding each other anyway. Magical girls are rare too, but all nine magical girls in Tokyo will inevitably meet each other, plus the five evil magical girls. That's how it is.

Unfortunately, that created problems for Dragonblooded (because they were, by concept, weaker than the other Exalts) and Sidereals (because they were suppose to vanish from other Exalted's lives). This is why it's a great thing, actually, that there's a slew of Terrestrial Exigents out there who can interact with DBs as a peer, both to add colour to the kind of meaningful antagonists you can have and to give options for people who want to play at the DB tier without being a DB. It means Sidereals can have an equal an opposite enemy at the fields they, and only they care about, without having to explain why a tenth of the five-score fellowship went rogue.

The idea of preserving the purity of the Exalt types is nice, but it falls flat in the very real aspect that it made the only Exalt type allowed to have multiple peer options (Solars) effectively the lead, and I think that's been born out through 2e very clearly. It's a very real problem.
 
If the Spoken cannot be unleashed I will begrudgingly accept their ghosts in a future Ex3 suppliment, I think not calling their ghosts the Spooken was a serious missed opertunity.
 
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Say, are there Heart-Eaters in this new Essence book? If there are I'm probably going to have to actually read the essence book I already have and then pick up the new one
 
I think the biggest thing that Pillars has done is to fill in some holes in the Essence core that sorely needed to be filled. Lunar Fortitude Charms that felt Fortitude-y instead nearly all of them directing you back to the Finesse and Force Charms where they'd already appeared. Getimian Charms you can actually take as an E1 starting character. I almost wept with joy when I saw that only one of the new Hearthstones forced you to put it in a weapon. I liked how many Charms there were for gaining concealment and making it harder for people to track you, so that the new and preexisting Charms that let you bypass concealment or made you better at tracking felt like they had some counter play. I'm not quite sure if I'm understanding how Embodied Charms work, but regardless Dragon Kings are pretty much as awesome as I'd hoped. I'm not really an Infernals fan, but I'm glad to see that those who are get their full Unwoven Coadjutor experience in Essence again, along with the whole pantheon of head-demons you guys seem to like so much. I remember the lack being a pain point during the original Kickstarter.

It's all very, very good, and I'm mostly very, very pleased with it.



However, there is no Gunzosha Armor in this book.

1/10, what a waste of time waiting for this smh
 
ichypa said:
However, there is no Gunzosha Armor in this book.

1/10, what a waste of time waiting for this smh
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Having finally gone through my copy, and in similar words:

No Empress Lives For All, then it's not my Scarlet-Patterned Battlefield, 1/100

All that being said, I do wish there was a bit more word count devoted to the locales, but I do understand the need for making use of what space they had and getting the book out in a reasonable time. Zen-Mu is interesting but at the current moment is still too vague for me to actually utilize in my games and quests. I know it's kind of supposed to be that way, so that ST's can fill in the gaps how they please, but it does make it difficult to create locales without a more defined framework holding it up.

One thing I did find curious is how the Architects have been reimagined to being more mobility/city builder based compared to 3e's more "representation of the city" style. Like, some of that's still there, but a lot of it has been replaced in Essence with "I just made a bridge out of nowhere, ain't that neat?"
 
Jarovan said:
I really like the idea of military awards that are Artifacts on their own right without being just, like, Artifact weapons or armor or such. One addition I'd suggest is an award or a set of awards given not to an individual but to a Sworn Kinship, granted for great deeds done together and specifically ones pulled off through teamwork and coordination rather than individual heroics. That'd seem fitting to me.
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That's definitely a good idea.

I imagine most of the Realm's really big accomplishments were made by groups of DBs. And maybe something analogous to an ancient Roman triumph would be fitting in those cases. A huge parade celebrating the accomplishment, with the people who made it possible in the place of pride.

For the medal itself...maybe one big medal, broken into pieces, with each person wearing a piece. But what would it do? Giving it abilities to help the wearers work together would make sense, but why would DBs need a medal for that when they have Terrestrial Charms?

It could be specifically linked to a place, I suppose. A nation that you conquered or saved, generally. But what might that look like, specifically?

Omicron said:
That's actually less constructive than you'd expect!

You see, when someone makes a post, and you reply to that post, but then you also add 500 words of homebrew, it drowns out the initial reply, attempts a subject shift, and breaks the continuity of the conversation - a hypothetical average reader following the thread is now having to follow multiple conversation threads at the same time. That's disruptive! If we all did it, maintaining multiple threads of conversation through quotations while producing "signal" every time to make up for the "noise" that accumulates over time, the discussion would swiftly become unreadable.

You understand this, of course. You're well practiced at forum posting. This kind of posting pattern only works if people regularly drop out of the conversation amidst the increasingly confused static of criss-crossing conversation and leave someone else with the last word. If someone were, hypothetically, very confident in their ability to tire out the other posters, though, that would make it a very effective way of getting people to stop posting and stop disagreeing with them.

If one were uncharitable, one might suggest that the purpose of such a topic shift is to crowd out other users, obstructing their ability to continue disagreeing with you by signaling "and now, if you continue this trivial argument instead of discussing The Good Content which I just posted, you're the one coming across as disruptive," in order to cow the people disagreeing with you into disengaging with you and giving you the last word. Not that I would ever accuse someone of doing that on purpose, of course.
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No need to darkly theorize. I'll tell you straight up, it is meant to strangle the bad conversation. That's the point, and it's not meant to be hidden. Most people will absolutely give up on the argument and be happier for it.

It's not some scheme to steal the final word, though. People like you and me can't actually be dissuaded that way. But I don't want the last word so much as the next word - an unanswered point itches at me. And I think you're the same. By bundling the discourse with useful conversation, that unhealthy instinct of ours can be yoked to a wheel and put to work.

Omicron said:
Anyway, as a show of good faith and in the spirit of following your ways of doing things:

I'm curious which Exigents people are most excited to read about in Miracles of the Divine Flame and Champions of the Divine Flame. Post here about your most anticipated Exigent!
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You know, I'm honestly not sure what to expect in those, beyond the obvious. I assume the hints are in the KS updates I'm not getting.

Where should I look if I want to know more?

Amidatelion said:
I'm sorry to drag you back into this whole affair, Sanctaphrax, but I'm pretty sure that the biggest issue people have with you during the Kickstarter is that you feel the need to comment on the content of the manuscript purely by getting secondhand information of other forum posts, caused by your apparent blood grudge against Exalted Kickstarters by which gazing upon the manuscript itself, for free, is an unclean act.
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You'd think!

But even when the text is available without backing, so I can read it directly, or the comments are being made by someone else, the same dynamic repeats.

akoboldskobold said:
But, also… I, personally, am a really really late arrival to Exalted as a gameline. I've known about the game (through Keychain of Creation, natch) for a while, but my interest in the game was really sparked just after the Sidereal Kickstarter ended, IIRC.

...

I can't say anything about 2e because, TBH, I haven't read any mainline 2e material that wasn't copy-and-pasted into a wiki, and from reading the discussions of people who I respect, everything I've seen makes me want to avoid it like the plague. What it seems like is that all the cool stuff is bogged down by even more cringe shit from authors who were doing things to be edgy. Which then produced books that aged real poorly. Which then feeds into my confusion of why people are, to this day, refusing to move on from 2e. But I was not part of the White Wolf forums. I was not a part of the discussion of the game during its heyday. Those days are gone and I don't feel anything because I was never there. Yet it seems like for some people, that's what drew them to the game to begin with. I don't think I can blame them for that.
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It's good to hear from someone who actually joined recently. Sometimes it feels like the doors are locked, and nobody ever comes in.

But as for Ex2, well, most of those same people who complain about it either joined during it or played through it. If it was that bad, they wouldn't be here. It has a lot more going for it than the chatter lets on.

And it should be plainly obvious why some people don't "move on", even people who'd probably prefer Ex3. You know full well just how much reading it takes to move onto a new edition of this colossal game. You don't need a reason to not read many large books. Which is, by the way, why I'm not telling you to read Ex2.

Though, if you have the books available, reading through the chapter comics and checking out the art is actually very quick and easy. Might be worth doing; some of those comics stick in my mind to this very day.
 

Dramatis Personae - Martial Artists I

Two of the Clan Best Forgotten's elite killers, Southern Rat and Northern Toad are masters of their respective styles and the art of secret murder. Rigorous cultivation has granted them more than just martial prowess, each now has supernatural traits channeling the animal for which their style is named. Southern Rat, the finesse of the duo, is a master of disguise and of courtly intrigue, and is rumored to be able to summon swarms of vermin to do their bidding. Northern Toad, a stout brawler, is said to be able to jump three stories and meld into muddy earth. The two work as a team, covering for each others' weaknesses. Though neither is exalted, they have a handful of outcaste kills to their names, using ambushes, poison, and traps to compensate for their comparatively weaker grasp of essence. They are renowned within Calin's Five Shades for their prowess and their high tolerance for absolutely terrible food and drink.

The Immaculate hermit Pearl Gardener is over a hundred years old but looks forty at the oldest. This would be unremarkable if she were an exalt but she bears not a trace of the Blood of the Dragons nor the exaltation of any other divinity. A grandmaster of Snake Style, she retreated to the wilds of the Blessed Isle long ago to commune with the essence of Sextes Jylis and of nature. Pale white scales can be seen on her flesh when the light hits them at just the right angle, and in the few times she's had to use her martial arts in earnest, her foes find that she sports an unnaturally long reach and unnerving flexibility. Gardener is known to nearby Immaculate monasteries and respected as an authority on martial arts and theology.

The wild eyed killer known only as Manslayer Kijin, is a scary story told around the campfires of the Hundred Kingdoms. They say he was once a practitioner of Single Point Style who became obsessed with perfecting his swordsmanship. Leaving the dojo to hone his craft as a sellsword, he soon grew bored of mercenary contracts and enamored of the beauty of spilled blood. One moonless night, he butchered his comrades and employers in an orgy of violence, subsuming his ego within the sword arts. Finding enlightenment in the annihilation of the self and of others, Manslayer Kijin is said to stalk the battlefields of the Hundred Kingdoms, slaying soldiers on every side, ignoring wounds that would incapacitate an ordinary man and drawing power from the blood that drenches every inch of his battered armor.

Famed within Iscomay, Zeffir, "The Khoja of the Ramparts" is a war-chaplain and student of Bear Style wrestling attached to the Imperial Janissary Corps. During his clerical initiation, Zeffir was challenged to a ritual bout of wrestling by a Huraka wind elemental and triumphed, gaining supernatural strength and lung capacity. Fanatic in his devotion to The Book of The Bear, the herculean cleric eschews the scholastic life typical of most khoja and preaches the holy word in the heat of battle, motivating troops with booming sermons of Iscomay's divine right to conquer. Not content to merely stand behind a pulpit, Zeffir often wades into the fray, clad only in his robe of office and armed only with his fists, knocking aside armored men like toys and wrestling war horses to the ground.

Assassin and master spy, Lady Curare is one of the White Veil Society's deadliest unexalted agents, infiltrating courts across the East and killing princes in their sleep. A mithridatic diet of poisons renders her blood toxic, while rare oils applied to her hair let her use plucked strands as garrottes. Curare's method of cultivating essence, taught to her by her handlers, destroys her emotions and early memories in exchange for power; she remembers no life beyond that of an assassin. Unknown even to Curare is that she's merely the latest in a line of Lady Curares, each crafted in the image of a perfect agent by the mysterious doyens of the White Veil Society.

Dionostes the Berserk is a pilgrim guard for the Shining Way, escorting elderly believers across the northwestern wastes to the Hidden Tabernacle. A warrior mystic from one of the Shining Way's forbidding monasteries, hellish austerities have opened his chakras and granted him great skill at the Hungry Ghost arts. Dionostes fights only in trousers and an iron mask, painting eye-hurting symbols over his bare flesh before he enters his sacred axe frenzy. He fights without fear of death, convinced that the ecstasy of non-being awaits him should he die in the service of his faith. When he sleeps, his own hungry ghost boils out of his shadow to keep watch over him and his charges.

Sinma the Noon-Monk hails from the Tsavo Cities, part of an order of warrior-exorcists and demon slayers. She meditates for hours within mirrored chambers meant to focus sunlight upon their occupants, imbibing and cultivating the essence incandescent in order to practice the Golden Janissary style. Founded long ago to fight off raiders from Dajaz and incursions from Grand Apkoro's ghost legions, today the Noon-Monks primarily take coin from Scathe's slaver-lords or the Despot of Gem to serve as mercenaries, diluting their mystery in the absence of any real otherworldly threats. Secretly, Sinma is hesitant to use the full might of her devil-burning fist on slave revolts or mortal bandits, and lets more than one foe run away maimed when she could have killed them. She craves a true monster to hunt, as in the days of old, and is considering trekking to distant lands to find one.

Lintha Dara-Seid Palasing is a third-kur Sword Prince of the Lintha Family and practitioner of Devil-Prince Sword Style. Lacking the divine features that the modern Lintha extol, he compensates with sheer ferocity and dedication to the blade, daring other Lintha to deride him as a thin blood. Palasing's fanaticism has not gone unnoticed by the lords of hell, and one night a daiklave forged from a still-living demon appeared in his quarters. Convinced of his destiny, Palasing set out on a great quest to write his name in blood across the south-west, searching for sunken temples to Kimbery and sea monsters to tame. Lintha pure-bloods, contemptuous of Palasing's rise against adversity, send assassins after him, whom he slays and adds to his list of triumphs.

Rebel hero of Ixcoatli's northern frontier, Ruiner Macaw practiced the Swaying Grass Dance for years in secret before inciting a bloody uprising against the provincial dyarchs. Though their forces have been defeated in battle several times, Ruiner Macaw themself has thus far been able to outrun any theomilitary elites sent to kill them. Eyewitness reports state that Macaw can run up vertical surfaces and walk on the thinnest of branches, skills which they use to great effect when executing ambushes on imperial patrols. Ixcoatlitzlim intelligence suspect that Macaw has a foreign backer willing to shelter them, while the empire's much oppressed undercastes whisper their name in awe.
 
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