General Exalted Thread

[Sanctaphrax]

Yes, like I said, that's not how Exalted has ever worked. But I think it'd be neat.

And being useless to the Bureau is, in fact, the point. I actually like the fact that Heaven is run by the goddess of paperwork, rather than the goddess of something grand. But those grand gods do still exist, and ought to be very powerful; shuffling them out of the way by making them into terrible bureaucrats seems fitting.

 

[Carrnage]

Yes, like I said, that's not how Exalted has ever worked. But I think it'd be neat.

And being useless to the Bureau is, in fact, the point. I actually like the fact that Heaven is run by the goddess of paperwork, rather than the goddess of something grand. But those grand gods do still exist, and ought to be very powerful; shuffling them out of the way by making them into terrible bureaucrats seems fitting.

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If they aren't good at berauceacy they'd be fired and replaced with one of the untold masses of feral gods, unless they are very good at office politics.

 

[Sanctaphrax]

As Forbidden Gods show, there are limits to the bureaucracy's ability to shuffle aside powerful-but-inconvenient divinities. If Han-Tha still has his power and his purview, why shouldn't the hypothetical beastly God of Violence?

I like that option better than most of the various alternatives, like inserting another level above E-Naluna or making Violence into a weirdly minor role or just declaring that it has no god. There are more unoccupied major purviews than there are "empty slots" in the upper ranks of the Bureaucracy.

 

[Exthalion]

Could always give those posts to Lesser Elemental Dragons who aren't affected by their job description especially.

 

[EarthScorpion]

Yes, like I said, that's not how Exalted has ever worked. But I think it'd be neat.

And being useless to the Bureau is, in fact, the point. I actually like the fact that Heaven is run by the goddess of paperwork, rather than the goddess of something grand. But those grand gods do still exist, and ought to be very powerful; shuffling them out of the way by making them into terrible bureaucrats seems fitting.

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When gods are managers, the goddess of paperwork is in fact someone grand. Especially when said paperwork is basically being used as a synonym for "adminstration".

Like, it's an on the nose bit of symbolism, but there's kind of a point being made there that the de facto ruler of heaven (or at least first among equals) is the goddess of the adminstrative process. Heaven's bureaucracy is being run to further the bureaucracy, not to efficiently manage the thing the bureaucracy is meant to be managing.

And as for your second point, I will remind you that officially equal to Ryzala as the head of the other Department of the Bureau of Heaven is Taru-Han, goddess of souls. Who is definitely one of those grand gods you think should be around.

She's just a nepo-baby who's really only interested in her hobby of soul collecting and uses her power to further her interests and delegates all the work she can. She's the furthest thing from incomprehensible because fundamentally she's very human in every way.

 

[Kymme]

I'm loving these deeb writeups, Omicron! They're fun, and more than anything they feel usable. I feel like you could easily snap some of these guys together and have a nice Wyld Hunt (or a chunk of a Realm Legion) going! It's also oddly affirming to my own sense of npc design to see basically no mention of elemental auras in any of them.

The God of Time probably has a sundial on his hat and uses a twin sword fighting style where his swords are clock hands.

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...Noximilien the Clockmaker?

 

[Sanctaphrax]

When gods are managers, the goddess of paperwork is in fact someone grand. Especially when said paperwork is basically being used as a synonym for "adminstration".

Like, it's an on the nose bit of symbolism, but there's kind of a point being made there that the de facto ruler of heaven (or at least first among equals) is the goddess of the adminstrative process. Heaven's bureaucracy is being run to further the bureaucracy, not to efficiently manage the thing the bureaucracy is meant to be managing.

And as for your second point, I will remind you that officially equal to Ryzala as the head of the other Department of the Bureau of Heaven is Taru-Han, goddess of souls. Who is definitely one of those grand gods you think should be around.

She's just a nepo-baby who's really only interested in her hobby of soul collecting and uses her power to further her interests and delegates all the work she can. She's the furthest thing from incomprehensible because fundamentally she's very human in every way.

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Yeah, I know. I just brought her up a few posts back. I'm not arguing that all gods with grandiose domains should be behemoth-ized. And I don't think anyone needs the symbolism of Ryzala explained.

Also: "that I think should be around"?

I thought it was widely agreed that there's a god for pretty much everything, great or small. Have I missed people thinking that the big domains are actually meant to be unoccupied?

I generally like big inhuman things so I'm inclined to fill gaps like this with them. For those who don't, or at least don't like them as gods: what do you imagine is going on with the huge unassigned domains like the five elements?

Could always give those posts to Lesser Elemental Dragons who aren't affected by their job description especially.

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"The God of Time caught the Great Contagion and died, and everyone who's even vaguely qualified for the job is hated by at least one of the many gods who can veto their appointment. So we've been making various mortals Provisional God of Time for a few decades each, while the God of Procrastination runs the Division of Temporal Affairs."

That could be interesting, honestly. Heaven has seen its share of casualties, and it's a mess administratively; if we want to justify not having a real god for, say, the human race as a whole, there could be various non-god "gods" filling chairs.

 

[Omicron]

Nitpicking time - you missed an e in "Direlance", and Ebony Spur Technique doesn't actually say how many dice it adds, just that it adds "+bonus dice".

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Will fix when on computer.

I'm loving these deeb writeups, Omicron! They're fun, and more than anything they feel usable. I feel like you could easily snap some of these guys together and have a nice Wyld Hunt (or a chunk of a Realm Legion) going! It's also oddly affirming to my own sense of npc design to see basically no mention of elemental auras in any of them.

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Thank you. "Under the hood," as it were, these are all written assuming they always meet Aura requirements for their Aspect's Aura and never meet Aura requirements for others. This is grossly simplified from actual DB rules (who have a limited ability to meet Aura from other Aspects but can 'fall out' of their Aura Aspect at bonfire to no benefit), just because... Like...

You genuinely cannot ask an ST to keep track of Aura shifts for multiple NPCs at the same time. It's an insane ask. The WFHW QCs seem to assume you will do that, which is absurd. Even if the Aura rules were good this would still be an unhinged tracking requirement for the ST. Stop it.

 

[Kymme]

Thank you. "Under the hood," as it were, these are all written assuming they always meet Aura requirements for their Aspect's Aura and never meet Aura requirements for others. This is grossly simplified from actual DB rules (who have a limited ability to meet Aura from other Aspects but can 'fall out' of their Aura Aspect at bonfire to no benefit), just because... Like...

You genuinely cannot ask an ST to keep track of Aura shifts for multiple NPCs at the same time. It's an insane ask. The WFHW QCs seem to assume you will do that, which is absurd. Even if the Aura rules were good this would still be an unhinged tracking requirement for the ST. Stop it.

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That's basically what I ended up doing for the Dragon-Blooded npcs in my Sidereal game. I was also pretty proud of an effect I thought up for Mnemon specifically - a Greater Hearthstone from her most important manse, The House of Marmoreal Glory in Mnemon-Darjilis. The stone serves as a direct conduit linking Mnemon to the vast geomantic network she built within that city, and similar geomantic networks she builds into every single architectural project she's ever constructed. Its mechanical effect is that so long as Mnemon is standing on or inside of a structure she had a hand in designing she counts as being in Earth Aura (in addition to whatever Aura she's already in). It might also cause her Earth Aura to instantly refresh every turn? I had some other ideas about ways she'd learned to use the stone to do various geomantic interfacing tricks and feng shui-empowered sorcery, but those didn't come up in that game.

 

[Lioness]

I could imagine some very old gods being designed more like behemoths and requiring a staff in order to function in the current iteration of Heaven, but I'd probably lean into a disability metaphor there rather than present it as a fundimental inhumanity.

 

[EarthScorpion]

Also: "that I think should be around"?

I thought it was widely agreed that there's a god for pretty much everything, great or small. Have I missed people thinking that the big domains are actually meant to be unoccupied?

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No, and that's a very strange reading of "look, the goddess of souls is a nepo-baby, rather than some great soul eating swirling vortex that drives you mad to look into it - that's a data point against what you're arguing for".

I don't understand why you even think that the God of Water isn't... just a senior god. Or, well, rather there's probably the God of Water in the Bureau of Nature who heads up the Office of Water which oversees all bodies of water in Creation and manages the Office of Rivers and the Office of Oceans and works closely with the rain gods and also the Bureau of Seasons and its own people. And there's also a separate God of Fluids in the Bureau of Heaven who argues that the whole section of the Bureau of Nature should be brought under him - and also probably a separate God of the Element of Water who doesn't like the God of Water, but fucking hates the God of Fluids.

The heavenly bureaucracy is vast and we have the names of very few gods indeed. We know there's gods of space, colours, etc, in the Bureau of Heaven but we don't know their names or their exact positions, because Exalted is not a game focusing on divine power politics. But assuming that the God of Space must be a squirming mass of fractured space who you can't interact with without risking getting smeared across his office (or whatever you'd make him) rather than a powerful god who often ends up chairing meetings that your Journeys PC has to attend to discuss a fate error where the shortest way between Harbourhead is not a straight line but is instead an elliptical curve and how to resolve it... well, it's a solution for a problem that doesn't actually exist.

Yeah, the God of Space exists. He doesn't have a write up because there's a strictly finite amount of space in the book. He's probably in a frenemies/exes-who-aren't-always-exes relationship with the God of Distance, who's also his underling. He's putting a lot of effort in stealing the Office of Cartography from the Bureau of Humanity. And so on.

 

[Sanctaphrax]

I didn't assume any of that. I didn't even argue for it - in fact, I went out of my way to make clear that it has no foundation in canon. The words "this is pure headcanon, but I imagine" seem pretty dang clear.

Here's the thing. We have a reasonable idea of who's who in senior management. We know who's in charge of each Bureau and we know various Division heads. So introducing other senior gods, especially ones with huge domains, can be a little fiddly.

When I asked about how strong Ahlat is, people started making lists of specific people. And the conversation made it sound like there's "only perhaps a dozen ish gods above Ahlat in combat prowess". I replied that "there ought to be a bunch of very powerful gods among the ones whose names we don't know", and proposed the eldritch abomination approach as one way to fit those guys in without muddling what we know about the hierarchy. I also proposed sticking a bunch of big gods in the Jade Pleasure Dome with the Incarnae but I don't think anybody commented on that. And it sounds like you favour adding a ton of Divisions to the Bureaus of Nature and Heaven, which could work too.

It feels like you're trying to convince me that the thing I introduced as "pure headcanon" lacks canonical support. Which it does, obviously.

 

[Omicron]

Yeah, I know. I just brought her up a few posts back. I'm not arguing that all gods with grandiose domains should be behemoth-ized. And I don't think anyone needs the symbolism of Ryzala explained.

Also: "that I think should be around"?

I thought it was widely agreed that there's a god for pretty much everything, great or small. Have I missed people thinking that the big domains are actually meant to be unoccupied?

Click to shrink...

I think some of them definitely are, because the Celestial Bureaucracy is a bureaucracy, and gods don't usually manifest to fill in an unoccupied slot at the like, cosmic level. It's entirely possible there are no gods of the Five Elements because the position used to exist but was seen by elementals as a way to rob them of some of their influence and so the lesser elemental dragon Censors lobbied to have the positions struck and the titles of "gods of the five elements" given to the five Elemental Dragons as honorary titles. It's possible there's a God of Time, but it's possible that there's a God of the Passing of Seasons who got "time" folded into her portfolio on the justification of "time" being part of "the passing of seasons" rather than the opposite you would expect.

It's also possible there isn't a God of Time just because nobody created the position of "God of Time" because it wasn't useful or was politically inconvenient.

It's like... In some democracies, cabinet positions are not mandated by the law but get shuffled around with every administration. Sometimes a new government is elected and they have a Ministry of Labor. Then next election, the "ministry of labor" gets absorbed into the Ministry of Economy. I figure a lot of the same thing happens in Heaven, especially after the Great Contagion through so much of the bureaucracy into disarray.

I think it's much more likely than there being a couple hundred Essence 8-9 gods who are as powerful as Ryzala or Wu Jan but don't appear in the books because they're too busy being Shoggoths or just staying in the Jade Pleasure Dome with the Incarnae and never doing anything.

 

[Imrix]

Honestly I already want more stuff like war gods who aren't worth spit in a fight and hold the position due to being really good at office politics, and gods of like, rando minor stuff like South-Western Coastal Birds who incongruously turn out to be contenders for gnarliest non-Exalted personal combatants of Yu-Shan, because practicing kung fu is just something they find really fulfilling in their off hours. A bunch of eldritch abomination gods is just kinda lame, not useful, and not what gods are for as far as I'm concerned. The setting already has plenty of eldritch abominations lurking in the margins.

 

[EarthScorpion]

It's also possible there isn't a God of Time just because nobody created the position of "God of Time" because it wasn't useful or was politically inconvenient.

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No, sir, that's quite impossible and I'm going to tell you why.

If there's no God of Time in the Bureau of Heaven, then the God of Clocks in the Bureau of Humanity gets to lay claim to that whole area. And there's no way that the Department of Abstract Matters is going to stand for that.

And outside the bureaucratic wrangling, "God of Time" is literally Abstract Matters doing what it's meant to be doing, like gods of colours and god of space - both examples confirmed from Sidereals as being so core to Abstract Matters to be used as the examples of what kind of gods work there. Time isn't BuHeav stealing things from BuHum, it's pretty much a core administration purpose.

(And finally, without a God of Time, you don't have someone who can report that some fucker is trying to build a manse where time flows differently so they can breed up a dragonblooded army and send the Sidereals to cut that shit out. So really the God of Time is the hero we all require and deserves a raise)

 

[GardenerBriareus]

I like the idea of "eldritch" gods primarily as a way of expressing how Exalted is the overgrown ruin of a much weirder setting (the Primordial Epoch), so that once in a great while you have to go deal with Old Forged-At-Dusk, a middling god who also happens to look like a crude cyclopean1​ humanoid statue, and his true form is a pile of self-assembling rocks (which he's molded into a semblance of the human form for appearance's sake) because his great-great-great-grandfather was a god that some long-dead Primordial race created for reasons long forgotten, and Old Forged-At-Dusk inherited the abnormal body plan.


1​ (in the sense of cyclopean construction, IE made from rocks of different sizes and shapes)

 

[ichypa]

I'm less certain about where a God of Space would fall within the Bureau, but no one can convince me that the God of Time isn't a fixture in the Division of Endings, diligently making sure each moment passes to make way for the next.

 

[HalfTangible]

I'm less certain about where a God of Space would fall within the Bureau, but no one can convince me that the God of Time isn't a fixture in the Division of Endings, diligently making sure each moment passes to make way for the next.

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The good news is that the forms only take a second to fill out.

The bad news is he's got a new form to fill out every second.

 

[Gazetteer]

A purview as broad as time could very easily have multiple gods associated with different aspects of it, working for different bureaus and having awkward overlap.

 

[Imrix]

A purview as broad as time could very easily have multiple gods associated with different aspects of it, working for different bureaus and having awkward overlap.

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Remember, despite the name, Enemies of Fate are the opposition, the enemy is that prig in the other department down the hall who keeps stealing our budget!

 

[SinisterPorpoise]

I'm less certain about where a God of Space would fall within the Bureau

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I think that Space would likely fall under something like Distance?

 

[EarthScorpion]

I'm less certain about where a God of Space would fall within the Bureau, but no one can convince me that the God of Time isn't a fixture in the Division of Endings, diligently making sure each moment passes to make way for the next.

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This is literally what the Department of Abstract Matters, in the Bureau of Heaven, is for. You know, before they started stealing things from BuHum:

The bureau consists of two departments — once separate bureaus, folded together during a First Age bureaucratic restructuring. In theory, the Department of Abstract Matters oversees concepts like color, space, and love, but as more and more offices have been wrested away from the Bureau of Humanity, the Department's definition of abstract concepts has grown increasingly loose, expanding to encompass the likes of games, weaving, and currency.

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Colour, space, love, souls [1], peace [2], war [3] - time falls into that kind of grand abstract and so should be located there.

There are probably other gods who have heavy interactions with time, but the God of Time is Bureau of Heaven in the Department of Abstract Matters.

[1] Taru-Han is the goddess of souls and the act of dying.
[2] The Division of Peace is mentioned as working closely with the Division of Serenity.
[3] The Division of War is mentioned as working closely with the Division of Battles.

 

[Imrix]

This is literally what the Department of Abstract Matters, in the Bureau of Heaven, is for. You know, before they started stealing things from BuHum:



Colour, space, love, souls [1], peace [2], war [3] - time falls into that kind of grand abstract and so should be located there.

There are probably other gods who have heavy interactions with time, but the God of Time is Bureau of Heaven in the Department of Abstract Matters.

[1] Taru-Han is the goddess of souls and the act of dying.
[2] The Division of Peace is mentioned as working closely with the Division of Serenity.
[3] The Division of War is mentioned as working closely with the Division of Battles.

Click to shrink...

See! See! Those prigs down the hall keep stealing our budget!

That's our payroll you bastards! This is why the coffee machine is always broken!

 

[Sanctaphrax]

I think it's much more likely than there being a couple hundred Essence 8-9 gods who are as powerful as Ryzala or Wu Jan but don't appear in the books because they're too busy being Shoggoths or just staying in the Jade Pleasure Dome with the Incarnae and never doing anything.

Click to shrink...

Is this specific to gods, or at least to the bigger ones?

Because there's definitely a couple hundred Third Circles who don't appear in the books. And a couple hundred Lunars who don't. Hundreds of Solar-alikes, thousands of Terrestrials, dozens of Sidereals, many Exigents. And who knows how many powerful elementals, behemoths, hekatonkhires, etc.

There are even conspicuously empty slots in the Deathlord list. Even though it's a short list.

I get not liking eldritch gods, or not being interested in the spirit courts that we've been told attend to the Incarnae. But it feels very weird to say that the major gods, and the major gods alone, are limited to what we see of them. The rest of the world sprawls beyond the limits of our vision, but in Heaven what you see is what you get.

 

[HalfTangible]

... So, maybe this is a bad place to try this, but I'm looking for some advice on STing because I always feel like I've done a poor job and also my games die a lot and often, long before they should actually end

One of my games just ended and I keep running into the same problems when I try to run a game

I rarely have fun as the GM for a number of reasons but I think the biggest one is that I can't keep my steam going.

Yet I can't find good games more than once in a blue moon unless I run them. And that's just something I'm not super good at or even really interested in. Like, I'll start out with a strong premise for a game, something I'm really excited about. The first story or two will go along fine. Then after a while, I end up petering out. The game stops being fun and I feel like I spend the entire time scrambling to try and keep up with the players and try to give them something fun. Even with players I friggen adore and gladly put in the work for it never seems to stay and I end up making everything up on the spot which is not conducive to long-term fun.

I'm very much a narrative guy over a crunch one, and I enjoy that aspect of Exalted. I feel like I've finally got a good feel for the game's combat, so that's something. But making it interesting and fun? That's more of a struggle. Most of the fights I've come up with have ended up as basically people fighting in an empty room with little dynamic or changing going on.

People tell me that it's better to have no games than to be in a bad one, but I don't think that applies to bad games, just bad groups. I'm fine with the occasional foray into silly dumb fun that ignores like 90% of the setting material or whatever but even these are hard to come by with Exalted.

I could use pointers.