General Exalted Thread
- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Some time ago we had kind of an argument around Exigents that I wouldn't want to drag up, but in the course of it @Sanctaphrax asked me this very good question and I got distracted by my own work and totally forgot to follow up on it:
Shala Assai, Chosen of Knives
Hadya, Chosen of Wounds
The March Lords, Chosen of Cartography
They all present really interesting and divergent perspectives on the Exigent experience, in my opinion.
The Chosen of Knives is a Celestial Exalt, with powers focused around a singular, coherent theme ("knives"), that makes her a deadly combatant, but in ways perhaps not as obvious as "swords" would be, along with surprising utility (knives, after all, are as much tools as they are weapons) and some conceptual expansion around the idea of "severing" things; it's a really fun look at what happens when you take a relatively narrow concept and expand it to a full-blown Exalt.
The Chosen of Wounds is also Celestial, but she's patchwork - her Exaltation was made using the power of several gods, and that power did not meld harmoniously. that means Hadya has a very broad range of abilities, with Attribute Charms drawing from several gods, each with their own purview, but all channeled through this common thematic lens of "wounds"; it also means her Exaltation burdens her as much as it empowers her, being a power both considerable and rooted in tremendous, inevitable pain, and she's a good example of an Exigent with an adversarsial relationship to her patron gods.
As for the March Lords, they're Terrestrial, so weaker in power than the other two, but also they're a splat rather than unique individuals; there are a number of March Lords, who are themselves patchwork Exigents of one goddess of cartography whose power mixed in with that of many lesser gods and warped by the Wyld, so they occupy a kind of position in-between where they have a strong "cartography" theme that's warped somewhat by outside influence. They have an uncharacteristically long history compared to most Exigent splats, and there's some weird stuff going on with their Limit.
I hope everyone gives them a look and finds them interesting.
As it so happens, today a preview drop that jogged my memory of said conversation, and so I come bearing gifts some of you have likely read but only one of which was posted in the thread: Preview pages for the three Exigent types featured in the upcoming Champions of the Divine Flame supplement! They're completely free and require no Kickstarter backing or anything, just following the links to the preview. They are:
Shala Assai, Chosen of Knives
Hadya, Chosen of Wounds
The March Lords, Chosen of Cartography
They all present really interesting and divergent perspectives on the Exigent experience, in my opinion.
The Chosen of Knives is a Celestial Exalt, with powers focused around a singular, coherent theme ("knives"), that makes her a deadly combatant, but in ways perhaps not as obvious as "swords" would be, along with surprising utility (knives, after all, are as much tools as they are weapons) and some conceptual expansion around the idea of "severing" things; it's a really fun look at what happens when you take a relatively narrow concept and expand it to a full-blown Exalt.
The Chosen of Wounds is also Celestial, but she's patchwork - her Exaltation was made using the power of several gods, and that power did not meld harmoniously. that means Hadya has a very broad range of abilities, with Attribute Charms drawing from several gods, each with their own purview, but all channeled through this common thematic lens of "wounds"; it also means her Exaltation burdens her as much as it empowers her, being a power both considerable and rooted in tremendous, inevitable pain, and she's a good example of an Exigent with an adversarsial relationship to her patron gods.
As for the March Lords, they're Terrestrial, so weaker in power than the other two, but also they're a splat rather than unique individuals; there are a number of March Lords, who are themselves patchwork Exigents of one goddess of cartography whose power mixed in with that of many lesser gods and warped by the Wyld, so they occupy a kind of position in-between where they have a strong "cartography" theme that's warped somewhat by outside influence. They have an uncharacteristically long history compared to most Exigent splats, and there's some weird stuff going on with their Limit.
I hope everyone gives them a look and finds them interesting.
FaeGlade Plural
Semper Legens
- Location
- Land of Bureaucracy
- Pronouns
- Plural/They
Okay Forma's Wandering Carriage is a really cool charm and I'm glad to see such an effect for Terrestrials.
- Pronouns
- she/her
I think in previous editions Gateway had too much exposure and the fanbase started to treat it like a chess equivilent despite the fact it'd been invented by a member of Cathak only about 300 years ago so while it has traditional weight among the Realm its probably not something a Lookshyan or Calanese Dragon-Blooded dedicates much effort to unless they're either very good at it and/or really enjoy hustling Dynasts.
- Location
- Denmark
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Okay, so I am going on this tangent now because I am on ADHD medicine and have just gained the power to focus, but not to decide on what to focus. I am an invincible goddess and I didn't sleep because I decided to lock in on writing instead, but the small disagreement with @Gazetteer led to a fun Discord conversation, and then to some reflection, and then to a task to find out what the hell is going on with the periodization here. The first goal here was to find out when the terms "High First Age" and "Low First Age" were introduced, which turned out to be correct on my first guess; namely Books of Sorcery: Wonders of the Lost Age. A lot of pre-Dreams of the First Age lore for the Old Realm in 2e stemmed from the Books of Sorcery, and their long, and meandering lists of artifacts, compiled from 1e. These lists were also interesting, because they were part of a subtle redefinition which had taken place towards the end of 1e and was now continued throughout early 2e, which was the shift from magitechnological aesthetics as representative of the Shogunate's inability to replicate the more "pure" magical wonders of the First Age, and now to being directly emblematic of the First Age itself.
In First Edition, the various kinds of magitechnology such as power armour (what was called Dragon Armor exclusively), were introduced exactly to portray the Shogunate as relying on half-technological solutions to match the power of the supreme magics that were commonplace in the previous editions. Subsequently, this was redefined in Oedanol's Codex and Wonders of the Lost Age, to instead be a sign of the First Age's technological and magical sophistication that they had mastered this integration of technology and magic. This subtle redefinition would end up having enormous effects on the aesthetics and themes of the line, as magitech was subsequently transformed into a superior form of crafts, indiretly laying the ground for 3e as a backlash, and also incidentally giving us a truly incoherent art style later down the line, but I digress.
Now that I had satisfied this curiosity, what next interested me was the periodization of the Shogunate itself, and what I generally see is that in First and Second Edition, the basic gist is more or less identical; the First Age represents a golden age, when men wielded magic far greater than the petty scraps they hold today. The First Age is popularly thought to stretch from the beginning of history to the Great Contagion, almost 800 years ago. However, most savants consider the murder of the Solar Exalted some six centuries before that to be the true turning of the Age.1 This is restated, more or less point-for-point in Second Edition, though with a small number of ultimately irrelevant changes of phrase.2 Both fundamentally and textually agree that:
In Third Edition, however, likely as part of the backlash, that I mentioned earlier regarding the initially subtle change in the position of magitech and its meaning for the narrative history of the game, the First Age is not only sequestered off clearly from the Time Before, which has its own definition as a nebulous span of time that includes all history from the dawn of existence to the rise of the First Age,3 but similarly defined to have been the golden age when men wielded magic far greater than the petty scraps they hold today. The First Age was raised up by the magic and genius of the Solar Exalted. It was an age marked by periods of enlightenment, peace, and discovery, but it ended in horror, murder, war and the Usurpation.4 This is an interesting change, and on many levels not the expected one. First and foremost, it emphasizes the role of the Solars very strongly, which is a deliberate shift in tone that one might nowadays not expect from an edition which defined itself strongly on the blurring of the adamantine power tiers of Solaroid, Celestial, and Terrestrial, and took measures to do so in the corebook, but it is fitting with a general shift in the role of the Exalted as subjects throughout Second Edition. Furthermore, the First Age is not only defined clearly to begin at the ending of the Time Before, but likewise uncontroversially treated to end at the Usurpation, with the Shogunate being established in the wake of that event, rather than an attempt to capture and wield the legitimacy of the Old Realm.
I must admit personally here that I much prefer the more nuanced perspective presented in previous editions; while characterizing the First Age similarly, that perspective avoids the central focus on the Solars as dominating the Old Realm, which is not necessarily wrong, but should not be stated so openly in my opinion. Furthermore, I find the political, historiographical element of the contested dating to be a much more interesting element, which adds to the political dimension that so fascinates me about Exalted, and the role that Creation's long history holds for its modern inhabitants, who use it for their own ends and purposes when it suits them. Finally, I spent a thousand words writing this, more or less otherwise pointless, post and felt the need to justify it with a conclusion. However, I think that this also, more broadly, betrays an insecurity in Exalted, but also more specifically the current, third, edition regarding the role of history, and especially of the Shogunate. When I was a teenager and lurking this thread in its first days, @EarthScorpion used to complain about the gameline's underutilization of the Shogunate and overreliance on the First Age, I am now 26 years old and have the second-highest amount of total posts across it, and I am now complaining about the gameline's underutilization of the Shogunate and its overreliance on the First Age.
In this regard, I want to make the case that the Shogunate is, first and foremost, a mirror. Unlike the First Age, or the Second Age, it does not have much substance, or even the illusion of substance, to itself. Instead, it functions as a kind of mirror against which the First and Second Age are held up, perpetually trapped in some liminal space between them, and bordered on either side by a cataclysmic event that reshapes the world in its entirety, the Shogunate is an absence solely defined by what it isn't. When the First Age is reflected in the Shogunate's mirror, the Shogunate serves the role of degeneration, representing a collapsing age lacking in the magic, the wonder, and the advancement and sophistication of the First Age. In Sidereal astrology, from the First Age, the Shogunate is the constellation of the Haywain in its descending aspect. When the First Age is reflected in the mirror of the Second Age, or rather the Realm, despite its greater command of artifacts, the Shogunate serves the role of disunity, representing a lack of central power and uniting animus lacking in order, governance, and restraint; a Hero-esque parable for the need for a powerful ruler unlike the ineffective Shoguns that preceded the Scarlet Empress. In Sidereal astrology, from the Second Age, the Shogunate is the constellation of the Captain in its descending aspect.
Regardless of which standpoint, the Shogunate is never itself, because the Shogunate has never quite been sure of what "it" is. Indeed, the gameline itself seems to have held a fundamental ambivalence on its role, seeing it as an always somewhat awkward transitory period. While it is not even mentioned by name in First Edition, a different perspective from what I will describe as a subsequently increasingly flanderized perspective presents itself: For deades, strife wracked the Realm as the last remaining Solars fought against destruction. Much of the glory of the First Age was lost then, and much of the knowledge as well. In the ruins, the Dragon-Blooded set up a military government and ruled for centuries. It was not the grandeur of the Realm's heyday, nor was it entirely peaceful, but it was devoid of the vast atrocities and terribleindulgences that had driven the Dragon-Blooded to regicide.5 Despite this, in my humble opinion, quite solid presentation, the Shogunate disappears completely from the narrative in several books of early First Edition, most infamously in Blood and Salt, where the narrative seems to jump directly from Usurpation to Age of Sorrows. And already five years later, from when Exalted was first published in 2001, its successor edition tells us that [the] Terrestrial Exalted now ruled in the Solars' place, establishing a Shogunate in place of the Deliberative. Yet as year followed year, the glories forged in the First Age failed and could not be replaced. For century upon century, Dragon-Blood fought Dragon-Blood for dwindling magical weapons and resources, hiding the true resources for their conflicts behind the ideologies of leaders long since lost to history.6 Thus, already by early Second Edition, a radically different view of the Shogunate had come to take place; why did this happen?
I believe that the unclear role of the Shogunate is a result of an essentially dialectical process—that is to say, a process by which the internal contradictions in the form of something propel that thing to evolve by their own resolution—which originated not internally to the Shogunate-conceptitself, but as a result of external processes in how the game was understood by those who wrote about it, and that exact, seemingly innocuous transformation of the meaning of artifacts and magitech, that I mentioned earlier. In Exalted we are told that the Shogunate was a military government, which preserved the Old Realm but not, according to many learned savants, the First Age itself. Over time, despite First Edition failing to include the Shogunate much, the edition nonetheless developed a relatively robust visual language for the Shogunate over the course of its run: This language was essentially based on elements of military modernism in combination with certain "animesque" aesthetics, such as warstriders, implosion bows and weapons reflective of mass use like shock pikes were common; linguistically, the Shogunate is curt, analytical and clipped, speaking in a tone reminiscent of military analysis, loudspeaker communication, and OSHA warnings. They freely make use of terms like broadcast, hypnagogy, clique, regime hardliners, military rationing, Laris Administrative District, maximum alert, telesensors, policemen (even!) and insurgents and counter-insurgency.
This relatively uniform and consistent language, however, was disrupted by changes towards the tail end of the First Edition, here referring to a subtle increase in the importance of magitechnological aesthetics, which I am personally choosing to attribute to Exalted: The Autochthonians, but could very easily be found earlier, perhaps beginning with Ruins of Rathess, or the Exalted Player's Guide, which brought Dragon King biotechnology to the fore. With this, a contradiction over exactly what magitech represented had been introduced, and this contradiction was resolved in favour of the First Age, which now came to incorporate the magitechnological aesthetics that had once belonged to the Shogunate and its successor Lookshy into its own.
Thus, with the appropriation of Shogunate's visual language of militaristic modernity, it came to be unmoored from its foundation, and the civic strife that had been a throw-away line initially had over time become a defining element of the Shogunate. By Dreams of the First Age, this appropriation is complete, and the First Age is now wholly defined as a modern-esque sci-fi quasi-dystopia, governed by God-Kings, who had more resemblance to the proceduralism of the Congress of the United States than a Gilgamesh, a Solomon, or a Jamshid, and whose internal conflicts concerned fundamentally mundane matters such as tax breaks, as much as they did grand proposals for revision to the soul itself. At this point, I hypothesize that the Shogunate instead takes up a metonymic role for modern military-industrial violence, which is represented through atrocities such as the infamous Marama's Fell, and its concentration camps, when it isn't actively in the process of fading out of the setting, with the increasing emphasis on the First Age and the highest of gods. This brings us to the end of Second Edition, and the beginning of Third Edition, which by the statements of its developers sought to initiate a sort of rebellion against the vision of Second Edition, perhaps best summarized with the (in)famous quote:
This was the unofficial mission statement for Exalted's Third Edition, but the execution of this "rebellion" betrays a fundamentally uncoordinated plan, which failed to systematically diagnose the problems that were prevalent in late Second Edition, likely a result of the direction for Exalted Third Edition themselves coming from a background of being ascended fans. Hardly an occurrence that had never happened before, but a quick look at contributors to Exalted: Third Edition reveals that the vast majority of the staff responsible for its production were previously fans. This was a product of the unique conditions of late Exalted Second Edition, at a time when it was thought the line was both capable and at risk of dying. The Ink Monkeys movement encouraged the creation of a socially mobile "class" of ascended fans who initially contributed on an ad hoc basis, but eventually produced quasi-official subjects, and then came to be given full responsibility. Ultimately, the approach that 3e decided to take was one that was ultimately guided by a sort of idealizing nostalgia for First Edition, which was also a prevalent aspect of culture in the late Second Edition fandom, and for this reason, they sought for the corebook to restore mystique to the setting. As a result, the 3e core refused to specify on the existence of multiple kinds of Exalts, and its discourse is not just strictly focused on the presentation of the Age of Sorrows, but also strictly anchored in that perspective, portraying the First Age and Shogunate with a rhetoric that staunchly refuses to rely on common shorthand terminology ("Primordial War", "Balorian Crusade"). With the general fandom consensus being that the monoculture of the First Age was bad, and a more controversial diagnosis that the over presence of magitech was harmful to the core principles of Creation as a setting for epic, Conan-esque adventure, the presentation of the First Age and Shogunate in Exalted: Third Edition superficially resembles a sort of modernized First Edition, with the element of civic strife going entirely unmentioned, the focus lying on the inability of the "military government", a term also likely borrowed from First Edition's narrative despite its general applicability, to maintain the grandeur and wonder of the First Age, but nonetheless also without the horror and madness that heralded its fall.7
Following the departure of the previous developers, John Mørke and Holden Shearer, their roles were taken by subsequent developers Eric Minton and Robert Vance, who likely were forced to reestablish order in the development-and writing pipeline at high speed to account for the loss of central direction, as well as quickly salvage several books that had been held up by the departure of their predecessors. Whatever vision, if any, that Mørke and Shearer had hoped to characterize Exalted with, would now have to be replaced by their vision instead, the result of which is Arms of the Chosen, and Dragon-Blooded: What Fire Has Wrought, a pair of highly well-received books at the time, that have since shown themselves to both be deeply compromised products. Without a clear, unifying vision of the First Age, Arms of the Chosen followed the diagnosis that the central problem had been the monoculture, and a compromise position that magitech should be no more than an aesthetic choice for certain artifacts. The result was a First Age, whose history was now largely conveyed through individual artifact descriptions and evocative era names; excellent for if one wants an age of epic tales and grand adventure, but with a fractured politics that contained little to say about the Age of Sorrows, and now ultimately completes the unmooring of the Shogunate. Without a unified vision of the First Age, or for artifacts and magitech, contradictions with the corebook's earlier notion of the Shogunate are introduced, and the only way to resolve the contradictions is to fall back on the vision of the Shogunate that had been formed in Second Edition; a transitory period of intermittent, internecine warfare.
Such a position, however, ultimately introduces contradictions of its own. If the Shogunate, inded was, as the admittedly somewhat later book Heirs to the Shogunate informs us, a period which was essentially fractured, unstable, plagued by internecine strife, wracked with intrigues and regular changes ot the power structure8 then it seems to bring only uncertainty, that we name this fractured period, which seems to have had little central authority after a mode of government meant to characterize it. The Shogunate has been essentially decontextualized, transformed from what I think is something that shares more historical with the Edo Bakufu, into an essential pastiche of the Sengoku Jidai. This is not a new project, and it has been discussed in this fashion in the fandom in a long time; as we see, this form had already taken an essential form in the core of Exalted Second Edition, but just to fully emphasize the completion of this contradictory transition, we are later told that [as] Dragon-Blooded kingdoms rose, flourished, and warred, the Sidereals watched from Heaven, bestowing blessings on daimyos and gentes they believed would serve destiny,9 and with a falling-back on the nomenclature of "kingdoms" rather than the previously impliedm essentially clan-based mode of warfare between hereditary gentes in a greater state-structure, the Shogunate is thus fully transformed from state to interstate system.
And hence the conclusion: The Shogunate, introduced in First Edition as an emergency military government following the violent coup of the Dragon-Blooded against the Solars who governed the Old Realm, changed with the game over time as a result of a series of contradictions that emerged as a result of changing attitudes to magitechnological aesthetics. These attitudes were, themselves, brought about by an increasing loss of vision and intentionality with the use of certain key elements in Exalted's cosmic leitmotif of successive, bloody usurpations. The contradictions that these changes induced in the notion of the Shogunate created a pathway where there was no way forward to balance both the legacy element of Exalted and keep the Shogunate intact, relative to its original presentation in Exalted (2001), and as a result successive generations of writers and evolving directions ultimately transformed the Shogunate from its original presentation into something more comparable to an interstate anarchy, with little relationship to what came before. I believe that the path forward, both for any ensuing editions of Exalted, should they come or for enterprising homebrewers dreaming of an alternate vision of the Shogunate, is to engage with the successive-usurpations-leitmotif with more intentionality, and figure out what you are trying to say with the existence of the First Age, the Shogunate, Second Age, and Age of Sorrows, rather than merely copying these and adjusting them to fit the changing facts of the setting. I also believe that the most fruitful avenue for the Shogunate's identity is the simple, original answer that was presented so many years ago in 2001.
1 Hatch, Robert; Grabowski, Geoffrey et al; Exalted, pg. 15, White Wolf Publishing, 2001
2 Chambers, John; Grabowski, Geoffrey et al. Exalted: Second Edition, pg. 17, White Wolf Publishing, 2006
3 Mørke, John; Shearer, Holden; Geoffrey Grabowski et al. Exalted: Third Edition, pg. 29, Onyx Path Publishing, 2016
4 Mørke, John; Shearer, Holden; Geoffrey Grabowski et al. Exalted: Third Edition, pg. 27, Onyx Path Publishing, 2016
5 Hatch, Robert; Grabowski, Geoffrey et al; Exalted, pg. 11, White Wolf Publishing, 2001
6 Chambers, John; Grabowski, Geoffrey et al. Exalted: Second Edition, pg. 24, White Wolf Publishing, 2006
7 Mørke, John; Shearer, Holden; Geoffrey Grabowski et al. Exalted: Third Edition, pg. 21, Onyx Path Publishing, 2016
8 Vance, Robert; Minton, Eric et al. The Dragon-Blooded: Heirs to the Shogunate, pg. 16, Onyx Path Publishing, 2021
9 Vance, Robert; Minton, Eric et al. The Sidereals: Charting Fate's Course, pg. 17, Onyx Path Publishing, 2024
Alright, if you have managed to read this far; I am first of all sorry that you had to read this poorly edited, meandering, and lengthy post regarding my usually-private musings on the Shogunate. I am an invincible goddess, and the armour that clothes me is the undefeatable strength of two pills of 30 mg lisdexamfetamine, a single breakfast of rice, egg and natto, and absolutely zero hours of sleep. This post was initially going to be little more than 500 words long, and was meant to be a post regarding the exact origin of terms like High and Low First Age, that used to be very common to see and have now more or elss disappeared, but then I started thinking about the Shogunate, and now we are here. Hopefully if you are all lucky, the ADHD medicine should beging wearing out in a couple hours, and you will not have to deal with this for long.
Is this analysis serious? Is this a shitpost? Are you high? These questions are not important.
In First Edition, the various kinds of magitechnology such as power armour (what was called Dragon Armor exclusively), were introduced exactly to portray the Shogunate as relying on half-technological solutions to match the power of the supreme magics that were commonplace in the previous editions. Subsequently, this was redefined in Oedanol's Codex and Wonders of the Lost Age, to instead be a sign of the First Age's technological and magical sophistication that they had mastered this integration of technology and magic. This subtle redefinition would end up having enormous effects on the aesthetics and themes of the line, as magitech was subsequently transformed into a superior form of crafts, indiretly laying the ground for 3e as a backlash, and also incidentally giving us a truly incoherent art style later down the line, but I digress.
Now that I had satisfied this curiosity, what next interested me was the periodization of the Shogunate itself, and what I generally see is that in First and Second Edition, the basic gist is more or less identical; the First Age represents a golden age, when men wielded magic far greater than the petty scraps they hold today. The First Age is popularly thought to stretch from the beginning of history to the Great Contagion, almost 800 years ago. However, most savants consider the murder of the Solar Exalted some six centuries before that to be the true turning of the Age.1 This is restated, more or less point-for-point in Second Edition, though with a small number of ultimately irrelevant changes of phrase.2 Both fundamentally and textually agree that:
- The First Age was a Golden Age,
- Magic and wonder was commonplace in great excess compared to now,
- It is commonly thought to end with the Great Contagion,
- Most learned savants consider it to have ended with the murder of the Solar Exalted.
In Third Edition, however, likely as part of the backlash, that I mentioned earlier regarding the initially subtle change in the position of magitech and its meaning for the narrative history of the game, the First Age is not only sequestered off clearly from the Time Before, which has its own definition as a nebulous span of time that includes all history from the dawn of existence to the rise of the First Age,3 but similarly defined to have been the golden age when men wielded magic far greater than the petty scraps they hold today. The First Age was raised up by the magic and genius of the Solar Exalted. It was an age marked by periods of enlightenment, peace, and discovery, but it ended in horror, murder, war and the Usurpation.4 This is an interesting change, and on many levels not the expected one. First and foremost, it emphasizes the role of the Solars very strongly, which is a deliberate shift in tone that one might nowadays not expect from an edition which defined itself strongly on the blurring of the adamantine power tiers of Solaroid, Celestial, and Terrestrial, and took measures to do so in the corebook, but it is fitting with a general shift in the role of the Exalted as subjects throughout Second Edition. Furthermore, the First Age is not only defined clearly to begin at the ending of the Time Before, but likewise uncontroversially treated to end at the Usurpation, with the Shogunate being established in the wake of that event, rather than an attempt to capture and wield the legitimacy of the Old Realm.
I must admit personally here that I much prefer the more nuanced perspective presented in previous editions; while characterizing the First Age similarly, that perspective avoids the central focus on the Solars as dominating the Old Realm, which is not necessarily wrong, but should not be stated so openly in my opinion. Furthermore, I find the political, historiographical element of the contested dating to be a much more interesting element, which adds to the political dimension that so fascinates me about Exalted, and the role that Creation's long history holds for its modern inhabitants, who use it for their own ends and purposes when it suits them. Finally, I spent a thousand words writing this, more or less otherwise pointless, post and felt the need to justify it with a conclusion. However, I think that this also, more broadly, betrays an insecurity in Exalted, but also more specifically the current, third, edition regarding the role of history, and especially of the Shogunate. When I was a teenager and lurking this thread in its first days, @EarthScorpion used to complain about the gameline's underutilization of the Shogunate and overreliance on the First Age, I am now 26 years old and have the second-highest amount of total posts across it, and I am now complaining about the gameline's underutilization of the Shogunate and its overreliance on the First Age.
In this regard, I want to make the case that the Shogunate is, first and foremost, a mirror. Unlike the First Age, or the Second Age, it does not have much substance, or even the illusion of substance, to itself. Instead, it functions as a kind of mirror against which the First and Second Age are held up, perpetually trapped in some liminal space between them, and bordered on either side by a cataclysmic event that reshapes the world in its entirety, the Shogunate is an absence solely defined by what it isn't. When the First Age is reflected in the Shogunate's mirror, the Shogunate serves the role of degeneration, representing a collapsing age lacking in the magic, the wonder, and the advancement and sophistication of the First Age. In Sidereal astrology, from the First Age, the Shogunate is the constellation of the Haywain in its descending aspect. When the First Age is reflected in the mirror of the Second Age, or rather the Realm, despite its greater command of artifacts, the Shogunate serves the role of disunity, representing a lack of central power and uniting animus lacking in order, governance, and restraint; a Hero-esque parable for the need for a powerful ruler unlike the ineffective Shoguns that preceded the Scarlet Empress. In Sidereal astrology, from the Second Age, the Shogunate is the constellation of the Captain in its descending aspect.
Regardless of which standpoint, the Shogunate is never itself, because the Shogunate has never quite been sure of what "it" is. Indeed, the gameline itself seems to have held a fundamental ambivalence on its role, seeing it as an always somewhat awkward transitory period. While it is not even mentioned by name in First Edition, a different perspective from what I will describe as a subsequently increasingly flanderized perspective presents itself: For deades, strife wracked the Realm as the last remaining Solars fought against destruction. Much of the glory of the First Age was lost then, and much of the knowledge as well. In the ruins, the Dragon-Blooded set up a military government and ruled for centuries. It was not the grandeur of the Realm's heyday, nor was it entirely peaceful, but it was devoid of the vast atrocities and terribleindulgences that had driven the Dragon-Blooded to regicide.5 Despite this, in my humble opinion, quite solid presentation, the Shogunate disappears completely from the narrative in several books of early First Edition, most infamously in Blood and Salt, where the narrative seems to jump directly from Usurpation to Age of Sorrows. And already five years later, from when Exalted was first published in 2001, its successor edition tells us that [the] Terrestrial Exalted now ruled in the Solars' place, establishing a Shogunate in place of the Deliberative. Yet as year followed year, the glories forged in the First Age failed and could not be replaced. For century upon century, Dragon-Blood fought Dragon-Blood for dwindling magical weapons and resources, hiding the true resources for their conflicts behind the ideologies of leaders long since lost to history.6 Thus, already by early Second Edition, a radically different view of the Shogunate had come to take place; why did this happen?
I believe that the unclear role of the Shogunate is a result of an essentially dialectical process—that is to say, a process by which the internal contradictions in the form of something propel that thing to evolve by their own resolution—which originated not internally to the Shogunate-conceptitself, but as a result of external processes in how the game was understood by those who wrote about it, and that exact, seemingly innocuous transformation of the meaning of artifacts and magitech, that I mentioned earlier. In Exalted we are told that the Shogunate was a military government, which preserved the Old Realm but not, according to many learned savants, the First Age itself. Over time, despite First Edition failing to include the Shogunate much, the edition nonetheless developed a relatively robust visual language for the Shogunate over the course of its run: This language was essentially based on elements of military modernism in combination with certain "animesque" aesthetics, such as warstriders, implosion bows and weapons reflective of mass use like shock pikes were common; linguistically, the Shogunate is curt, analytical and clipped, speaking in a tone reminiscent of military analysis, loudspeaker communication, and OSHA warnings. They freely make use of terms like broadcast, hypnagogy, clique, regime hardliners, military rationing, Laris Administrative District, maximum alert, telesensors, policemen (even!) and insurgents and counter-insurgency.
This relatively uniform and consistent language, however, was disrupted by changes towards the tail end of the First Edition, here referring to a subtle increase in the importance of magitechnological aesthetics, which I am personally choosing to attribute to Exalted: The Autochthonians, but could very easily be found earlier, perhaps beginning with Ruins of Rathess, or the Exalted Player's Guide, which brought Dragon King biotechnology to the fore. With this, a contradiction over exactly what magitech represented had been introduced, and this contradiction was resolved in favour of the First Age, which now came to incorporate the magitechnological aesthetics that had once belonged to the Shogunate and its successor Lookshy into its own.
Thus, with the appropriation of Shogunate's visual language of militaristic modernity, it came to be unmoored from its foundation, and the civic strife that had been a throw-away line initially had over time become a defining element of the Shogunate. By Dreams of the First Age, this appropriation is complete, and the First Age is now wholly defined as a modern-esque sci-fi quasi-dystopia, governed by God-Kings, who had more resemblance to the proceduralism of the Congress of the United States than a Gilgamesh, a Solomon, or a Jamshid, and whose internal conflicts concerned fundamentally mundane matters such as tax breaks, as much as they did grand proposals for revision to the soul itself. At this point, I hypothesize that the Shogunate instead takes up a metonymic role for modern military-industrial violence, which is represented through atrocities such as the infamous Marama's Fell, and its concentration camps, when it isn't actively in the process of fading out of the setting, with the increasing emphasis on the First Age and the highest of gods. This brings us to the end of Second Edition, and the beginning of Third Edition, which by the statements of its developers sought to initiate a sort of rebellion against the vision of Second Edition, perhaps best summarized with the (in)famous quote:
Article: I wanted to climb those mountains nobody ever had the guts to climb before, I wanted to stat what they said couldn't or shouldn't be statted. And we did. And looking back, I don't think it improved the game. [...] I looked up one day and the game was all about [...] Yozis and Solars hip-tossing people across the universe and characters hijacking the sun and flying it into the Ebon Dragon's face and it was like—this is not the game I fell in love with back at Scavenger Sons, what happened here? Where's the Realm? Where's Jubei fighting the Eight Devils of Kimon? Where's the Brotherhood of the Peach Orchard swearing to reform a corrupt and crumbling empire? Where's Conan carving his legend into the kingdoms of men in fire and blood? Where's Azhrarn, Prince of Demons, falling in love with a mortal man and taking vengeance when his heart is broken? When did everything become so noisy and gonzo and clumsy?
This was the unofficial mission statement for Exalted's Third Edition, but the execution of this "rebellion" betrays a fundamentally uncoordinated plan, which failed to systematically diagnose the problems that were prevalent in late Second Edition, likely a result of the direction for Exalted Third Edition themselves coming from a background of being ascended fans. Hardly an occurrence that had never happened before, but a quick look at contributors to Exalted: Third Edition reveals that the vast majority of the staff responsible for its production were previously fans. This was a product of the unique conditions of late Exalted Second Edition, at a time when it was thought the line was both capable and at risk of dying. The Ink Monkeys movement encouraged the creation of a socially mobile "class" of ascended fans who initially contributed on an ad hoc basis, but eventually produced quasi-official subjects, and then came to be given full responsibility. Ultimately, the approach that 3e decided to take was one that was ultimately guided by a sort of idealizing nostalgia for First Edition, which was also a prevalent aspect of culture in the late Second Edition fandom, and for this reason, they sought for the corebook to restore mystique to the setting. As a result, the 3e core refused to specify on the existence of multiple kinds of Exalts, and its discourse is not just strictly focused on the presentation of the Age of Sorrows, but also strictly anchored in that perspective, portraying the First Age and Shogunate with a rhetoric that staunchly refuses to rely on common shorthand terminology ("Primordial War", "Balorian Crusade"). With the general fandom consensus being that the monoculture of the First Age was bad, and a more controversial diagnosis that the over presence of magitech was harmful to the core principles of Creation as a setting for epic, Conan-esque adventure, the presentation of the First Age and Shogunate in Exalted: Third Edition superficially resembles a sort of modernized First Edition, with the element of civic strife going entirely unmentioned, the focus lying on the inability of the "military government", a term also likely borrowed from First Edition's narrative despite its general applicability, to maintain the grandeur and wonder of the First Age, but nonetheless also without the horror and madness that heralded its fall.7
Following the departure of the previous developers, John Mørke and Holden Shearer, their roles were taken by subsequent developers Eric Minton and Robert Vance, who likely were forced to reestablish order in the development-and writing pipeline at high speed to account for the loss of central direction, as well as quickly salvage several books that had been held up by the departure of their predecessors. Whatever vision, if any, that Mørke and Shearer had hoped to characterize Exalted with, would now have to be replaced by their vision instead, the result of which is Arms of the Chosen, and Dragon-Blooded: What Fire Has Wrought, a pair of highly well-received books at the time, that have since shown themselves to both be deeply compromised products. Without a clear, unifying vision of the First Age, Arms of the Chosen followed the diagnosis that the central problem had been the monoculture, and a compromise position that magitech should be no more than an aesthetic choice for certain artifacts. The result was a First Age, whose history was now largely conveyed through individual artifact descriptions and evocative era names; excellent for if one wants an age of epic tales and grand adventure, but with a fractured politics that contained little to say about the Age of Sorrows, and now ultimately completes the unmooring of the Shogunate. Without a unified vision of the First Age, or for artifacts and magitech, contradictions with the corebook's earlier notion of the Shogunate are introduced, and the only way to resolve the contradictions is to fall back on the vision of the Shogunate that had been formed in Second Edition; a transitory period of intermittent, internecine warfare.
Such a position, however, ultimately introduces contradictions of its own. If the Shogunate, inded was, as the admittedly somewhat later book Heirs to the Shogunate informs us, a period which was essentially fractured, unstable, plagued by internecine strife, wracked with intrigues and regular changes ot the power structure8 then it seems to bring only uncertainty, that we name this fractured period, which seems to have had little central authority after a mode of government meant to characterize it. The Shogunate has been essentially decontextualized, transformed from what I think is something that shares more historical with the Edo Bakufu, into an essential pastiche of the Sengoku Jidai. This is not a new project, and it has been discussed in this fashion in the fandom in a long time; as we see, this form had already taken an essential form in the core of Exalted Second Edition, but just to fully emphasize the completion of this contradictory transition, we are later told that [as] Dragon-Blooded kingdoms rose, flourished, and warred, the Sidereals watched from Heaven, bestowing blessings on daimyos and gentes they believed would serve destiny,9 and with a falling-back on the nomenclature of "kingdoms" rather than the previously impliedm essentially clan-based mode of warfare between hereditary gentes in a greater state-structure, the Shogunate is thus fully transformed from state to interstate system.
And hence the conclusion: The Shogunate, introduced in First Edition as an emergency military government following the violent coup of the Dragon-Blooded against the Solars who governed the Old Realm, changed with the game over time as a result of a series of contradictions that emerged as a result of changing attitudes to magitechnological aesthetics. These attitudes were, themselves, brought about by an increasing loss of vision and intentionality with the use of certain key elements in Exalted's cosmic leitmotif of successive, bloody usurpations. The contradictions that these changes induced in the notion of the Shogunate created a pathway where there was no way forward to balance both the legacy element of Exalted and keep the Shogunate intact, relative to its original presentation in Exalted (2001), and as a result successive generations of writers and evolving directions ultimately transformed the Shogunate from its original presentation into something more comparable to an interstate anarchy, with little relationship to what came before. I believe that the path forward, both for any ensuing editions of Exalted, should they come or for enterprising homebrewers dreaming of an alternate vision of the Shogunate, is to engage with the successive-usurpations-leitmotif with more intentionality, and figure out what you are trying to say with the existence of the First Age, the Shogunate, Second Age, and Age of Sorrows, rather than merely copying these and adjusting them to fit the changing facts of the setting. I also believe that the most fruitful avenue for the Shogunate's identity is the simple, original answer that was presented so many years ago in 2001.
1 Hatch, Robert; Grabowski, Geoffrey et al; Exalted, pg. 15, White Wolf Publishing, 2001
2 Chambers, John; Grabowski, Geoffrey et al. Exalted: Second Edition, pg. 17, White Wolf Publishing, 2006
3 Mørke, John; Shearer, Holden; Geoffrey Grabowski et al. Exalted: Third Edition, pg. 29, Onyx Path Publishing, 2016
4 Mørke, John; Shearer, Holden; Geoffrey Grabowski et al. Exalted: Third Edition, pg. 27, Onyx Path Publishing, 2016
5 Hatch, Robert; Grabowski, Geoffrey et al; Exalted, pg. 11, White Wolf Publishing, 2001
6 Chambers, John; Grabowski, Geoffrey et al. Exalted: Second Edition, pg. 24, White Wolf Publishing, 2006
7 Mørke, John; Shearer, Holden; Geoffrey Grabowski et al. Exalted: Third Edition, pg. 21, Onyx Path Publishing, 2016
8 Vance, Robert; Minton, Eric et al. The Dragon-Blooded: Heirs to the Shogunate, pg. 16, Onyx Path Publishing, 2021
9 Vance, Robert; Minton, Eric et al. The Sidereals: Charting Fate's Course, pg. 17, Onyx Path Publishing, 2024
Alright, if you have managed to read this far; I am first of all sorry that you had to read this poorly edited, meandering, and lengthy post regarding my usually-private musings on the Shogunate. I am an invincible goddess, and the armour that clothes me is the undefeatable strength of two pills of 30 mg lisdexamfetamine, a single breakfast of rice, egg and natto, and absolutely zero hours of sleep. This post was initially going to be little more than 500 words long, and was meant to be a post regarding the exact origin of terms like High and Low First Age, that used to be very common to see and have now more or elss disappeared, but then I started thinking about the Shogunate, and now we are here. Hopefully if you are all lucky, the ADHD medicine should beging wearing out in a couple hours, and you will not have to deal with this for long.
Is this analysis serious? Is this a shitpost? Are you high? These questions are not important.
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There called Getimians now.
Not officially of course, but yeah they share very similar idea space.
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Reminiscent Oasis has moved onto other things, the only person invested enough in the project was Dragonmystic who isn't a fan of Ex3.
I've looked into it and well, they're built on a first/second edition notion of what a new Exalt type should look like rather than a third edition one and I'm not sure how to steamline them without more input from people who played them in 2e and a better look at Getimians.
I wanted to highlight this, because it made me laugh, and it reminded me of a remark I read not long ago. You rightly stress the contradictory images with which we are presented, both within and between editions. Recently, I was looking through the Cambridge edited volume about the Six Dynasties period of Chinese history, and the introduction to the book said something that feels rather apropos to this:
As the authors note, the Han and then the Sui-Tang periods tend to be considered high-water marks of Chinese history, which sometimes means the near four centuries separating them are viewed, when the viewer is at their most uncharitable, as simply a chaotic, messy time of transition best passed over swiftly, and I can't help but feel like this is rather apropos all of a sudden. We have our beloved High First Age from which we have fallen, and the Realm and the Age of Sorrows that define our present, and a 'dark age' in-between, ill-defined and poorly understood.
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Does anyone know were the TAW lunar charm Moonlit Gate Practice can be found? I couldn't find it among the Imrix has posted, nor in the TAW PDF.
Also, a question regarding character design: How mechanically viable would it be to make use of the TAW charm Crushing Gorgon's Glare and the Terrestrial sorcery spell The Titan's Icy Breath as a starting character's main weapons forms of offense?
She has Thunder-Mocking Moon God for less direct attacks (not going to do much against an Exalt, obviously, but a giant blizzard or torrential downpour can easily halt an army of mortals in their tracks for a good while), and I plan on picking up some of the other "I manipulate the land" style lunar charms once she gets some XP, which will improve that further, and probably some but until then I want to make sure she's able to contribute combat-wise until then. Currently she has Boxing With Shadows, Umbral Ink Vanish Trick, Cloud-Obscures-Moon Method, and Impossibilities Arrival for defensive charms, if that matters.
Also, a question regarding character design: How mechanically viable would it be to make use of the TAW charm Crushing Gorgon's Glare and the Terrestrial sorcery spell The Titan's Icy Breath as a starting character's main weapons forms of offense?
She has Thunder-Mocking Moon God for less direct attacks (not going to do much against an Exalt, obviously, but a giant blizzard or torrential downpour can easily halt an army of mortals in their tracks for a good while), and I plan on picking up some of the other "I manipulate the land" style lunar charms once she gets some XP, which will improve that further, and probably some but until then I want to make sure she's able to contribute combat-wise until then. Currently she has Boxing With Shadows, Umbral Ink Vanish Trick, Cloud-Obscures-Moon Method, and Impossibilities Arrival for defensive charms, if that matters.
mothematics
How wide is the concept of "you"?
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The March Lords are looking good but I confess Hadya is still my favorite blorbo.
Imrix
Periodically Malevolent QM
I can't speak to combining CGG and TIB, but Moonlit Gate Practice is in Revlid's TAW Redux gdoc, which can be found through this elegant and finely-crafted link. It's in the Meditations charm tree, under Intelligence.
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A borbo, if you would.
I wouldn't use CGG and tTIB together, IMO change the spell for a minion or hazard maker, not an attack. CGG isn't great at combat alone because it's a single target stun and Damage-over-time, you are just as locked down as they are. The damage can't take a real threat out quickly and they can spend WP to break it, so use it as a stun so other things can do the work quickly. Demon of the First Circle is, as always, the best spell.
I've found Moonlit Gate Practice to be the most breakable charm ever. Get an Intimacy that can bind any fake being to want (I'd go with Moonlit Gate Practice: BWA HA HA HA!), something (Spirits are easy) to bring real Motes and WP in, and give them to the Bound Servant/Guardian(s) and you have access to every charm tree in the game, then add in Imbue Amalgam.
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Would Sprouting Shackles of Doom or The Spy Who Walks in Darkness work for that? For thematic reasons I'd rather avoid Demon of the First Circle, even if it is the most powerful option, as always.
What about a Minion Of The Eyeless Face?
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they fit better than Demon of the First Circle, but still are a bit more lovecraftian than I'd prefer. Is there a particular reason I should use them as opposed to the Spy Who Walks in Darkness or the Sprouting Shackles?
With canon spells SSoD doesn't kill only hold them, tSWWiD only works for the [Essence] days after the full moon. SinisterPorpoise's idea of Minions Of The Eyeless Face is good, or Hound of the Five Winds, or Summoned Elementals. Dance of the Smoke Cobras could work, but not well.
If you expect to have a Circle or background derived combat helpers then CGG and SSoD work fine. Just remember that you wouldn't "do" much yourself as you'd be playing a debuffer.
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The character does a 3 dot wolf lunar familiar and a 3 dot raven lunar familiar. I have no idea how useful such familiars would be for combat, although they do respawn eventually if slain; in terms of abilities, according to TAW, with my characters current essence and the number of dots in each familiar, each of her two familiars get 3 attribute excellencies and 6 spirit charms which fit their respective natures. Which is definitely not nothing
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Yeah, that's definitely true. Not sure if there is a terrestrial sorcery spell that would work thematically and also be able to deal with multiple exalted. Thunder Wolf's Howl seems promising at first glance, at least to my limited level of system mastery, since it ignores armor and cannot be parried or dodged, and also inflicts a -2 penalty to all actions for enemies caught within it.
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It mostly depends on what someone wanted Nocturnals to be, they were designed for 2e with its fanbases sensibilties about what a new Exalted host needed to bring to the table which was basically the kitchen sink- the Getimians are their closest counterpart but there's thematic overlap with Umbrals, Dream-Souled and to an extent even Hearteaters.
This is what I've noticed is worth salvaging.
- their dice cap is (temporary willpower), that's interesting.
- they can perform a babality on people, that's hilarious.
- charms where you roll a d10 to see what they do are (thus far) unique.
-Renewals have rich thematic potential even if it's an obvious Doctor Who reference.
I'm not sure how I feel about Fluctuations other than that the specific system they have in MoEP: Nocturnals should stay in 2e with Sidereals buying dots of individual colleges to perform prophecy/astrology.
HamSandLich
MEAT WIZARD
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There is, i feel, a bit of a Byzantine Empire phenomenon where the Shogunate is/was often viewed as sort of an inconsequential rump state of a greater polity as opposed to a thriving civilization in its own right. Though, noticeably, AT8D mentions more surviving useable Shogunate architecture and infrastructure than it does First Age infrastructure, which implies some interesting things about Shogunate engineering priorities.
The rulers of the Old Realm were not practical engineers, that much is clear. This is not to say that their works did not serve a practical purpose, but rather practicality was often a secondary concern. Starspires, flying palaces, cities built upon or within monumental statues carved into the sides of mountains. None of these are resource efficient projects, they serve to display the levels of fantastical artifice and abundance that the rulers of the Old Realm had access to, to show off the wealth, power, and prowess that they wield to keep these seemingly impractical constructions useable. Now that the ability to maintain these structures is gone, they are often decaying, ruined, and hazardous. Those structures that retain functionality often do so at reduced capacity.
The Shogunate's architecture however, while seldom described in much detail, often seems to retain its full functionality. The palaces of the First Age are often dilapidated deathtraps, haunted by ghosts and malfunctioning security constructs that make venturing within to pry the gems off the furniture a dangerous endeavor. Shogunate palaces however, are mentioned as hosting modern warlords, shogunate bridges still carry traffic, and shogunate dams still hold back rivers. While likely not as complex as First Age construction, you get the sense that Shogunate architecture was built to last. Its likely that this is an outgrowth of the Shogunate's nature as an emergency government/military dictatorship, lacking the engineering capacity of its predecessors, but it can also be read as a semi-voluntary shift away from the perceived excesses of the First Age, a conscious choice to embrace austerity and utilitarian aesthetics so as to distinguish itself more strongly from the reviled past.
I personally envision the Shogunate as a hegemony of roads and hubs, and of considered redundancies, wielding comparatively and increasingly weak administrative power over vast swathes of Creation relative to the governments of the Old Realm, but having very developed logistics. Shogunate power as i imagine it would have been centered around the personal holdings of regional daimyo and gentes, radiating outward into the hinterlands to enforce authority through a combination of force of arms and cultural posturing. An empire as a spiderweb draped over Creation. In between these hubs would have been narrow, but heavily defended transit corridors along roads and rivers. In the Early and High Shogunate, this would have kept the administrative burden of the government at low levels, the movement of supplies and soldiers concentrated around tightly controlled and well planned routes, while confining the conflicts of the daimyo to those "important" settlements instead of ravaging the semi-administered countryside. If any part of the network was disrupted, trade could be rerouted through other corridors and hubs until it was repaired, with the Shogun's daimyo empowered to act with wide latitude to restore order. Rather than the highly advanced, but brittle, supply chains and metropoles of the First Age, the Shogunate's economy would have been focused on modularity and efficiency, its urban centers individually less advanced but more agile in their ability to adapt to changing conditions, dependent of course on the cooperation of neighboring daimyo. In the Late Shogunate, increasing fragmentation of the government and the insularity fostered by the system would have made the Dragonblooded isolated from their own peripheries, unable to detect the creeping death of the Contagion or Raksha Crusade until it was too late.
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Not to interrupt this discussion too much but I've been planning on getting my game group to try out Exalted and I've been making my way through the game rules and have somewhat of a grasp on them. What I dont have is a good idea for an introductory adventure to introduce them to it.
I have Tomb of Dreams and while I've taken a look through it doesnt feel like it would be a good fit for my group as it seems too isolated and self contained to get them interested.
If anyone has some suggestions of another prewritten adventure I should look at or a good idea I could use as a launch point I'd appreciate the advice.
I have Tomb of Dreams and while I've taken a look through it doesnt feel like it would be a good fit for my group as it seems too isolated and self contained to get them interested.
If anyone has some suggestions of another prewritten adventure I should look at or a good idea I could use as a launch point I'd appreciate the advice.
The Sidereals chapter of the Essence PG has dropped, and the Sids continue to have the funniest possible Charms. I absolutely adore Unintended Application Prohibition and Prow Mocks the Shoreline.
Doesn't have the greatest first impression, though, given that Chains of Adorjan is like at least 3-4 different levels of "What? Why?"
Doesn't have the greatest first impression, though, given that Chains of Adorjan is like at least 3-4 different levels of "What? Why?"