General Exalted Thread

[Blaque]

Generally, I think that regular gods are more than enough to cover most needs.

If you want something more eldritch, but don't want to get a demon involved though, I do think it could be possible to have those in Yu-Shan. They wouldn't be gods proper, not in the way Ahlat or Ryzala are. Just something weird and bespoke, something that the Primordials made for a specific purpose. Whatever they are or do, they sided with the gods and the Exalted in the war and were rewarded for that. They may have official position with the Bureaucracy, but if they don't spend their time in the Jade Pleasure Dome like the Incarnae they're probably focused on whatever they were made for. ...

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I kind of think to an extent, the Incarna themselves have a bit of that and are notably retired.

And on some things, I think it's okay to just consider that the Bureau can't do a lot actionable on some things, so doesn't bother. There's not a God of Fire since it's kind of just not something that needs maintaining or which can be managed that way, since it's one of the five building blocks of the universe, which seems to extend beyond Creation itself. I'm not sure what such a god even would do. Save maybe be the one you go to as a go-between between it and the Dragon of Fire (the latter of which I kind of headcanon long ago as being the gods of their elements on paper, and kind of the Platonic Embodiment of "Being Made from that Element" in another).

... Likely, the Celestial Bureaucracy has a number of unenviable positions and jobs that mostly entail keeping those things happy and out of everyone else's hair.

I would stress though, that these things should be rare if they appear at all. While I do like reminders that Yu-Shan was made by the Primordials for the Primordials and their souls, the gods have spent thousands of years taming the place. They'll never get rid of every remnant of the Age of Glory, that doesn't mean they haven't made a very spirited attempt at just that.

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I think notably, the gods aren't seemingly meant to be where that kind of eldritch stuff lives. That's more the realm of titanic spirits I think. Hell, souls of Gaia are out there still. Nothing really stops them from being all cosmic horrory. Kind of honestly would be interesting if the Door of the Temple of Metamorphosis was a Gaian spirit as I think on it.

 

[Lioness]

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.

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So in what way are you not keeping up with your players? Identifying exactly what's making running the game stop being fun for you seems important.

 

[Kaiya]

She's more of a very large, very unpleasant environmental hazard in her regular shape and it feels weird to compare her against like, a guy with a sword or something in the state.

Her weaker human shape can like, participate in combat, but like... Not reliably beat a combat Exalt. She doesn't necessarily need to beat you to tag you with infinite suffering Venom or something, but that's not like, disputing the point.

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This is on the money on all counts, yeah.

 

[Mosshadow95]

I was wondering how far would the Silver Pact go to defeat the Realm/Immaculacy.

For example a Circle finds some ancient remote control station for part of the Realm Defense Grid that if activated would generate a massive Tsunami in the inland sea; so they start sending out messages in meetings saying something along the lines of : " With this weapon we can wipe out all of the realm's major port cities with a great wall of water, sink nearly every ship in the inland sea and inundate the various DB held cities such as Chiaroscuro, Lookshy and Calin. Even better, triggering this will probably disable the RDG in the blessed isles and cause untold devastation in the interior. With nearly of the Realm's fleets not at Wujian sunk almost none of the garrisons can be resupplied and the merchant fleets will be gone, not to mention that the farm land around the coastal cities will be spoiled with salt water. In a few decades our armies can march towards the Inland sea as the Realm withers and the threshold can be ours. All we need is some help in breaching the control station and artifice to repair it in a few years while the Realm gets on with its civil war. "

Is this an amount of mass death lots of Lunar elders would accept? I would think people like Raksi and MHS would be fine with that, they've been fighting the realm forever and their empires would be safest. Ul is an absolute no since he wants to surgically kill the DBs. Sha'oka probably a yes because that would cripple the Realms efforts in the Caul as everyone who is a DB probably abandons the war to run home to find out what is left of their House. Leviathan, probably a no? Aqadar absolutely, probably rushes in himself and tries to take over the project, probably turns everyone off if he gets control because they think he would over do it. Shadow Fang Vanguard, probably a yes. Amatha No. Golden Leaf also no.

I think this would cause a deep young Lunar vs elder split as I would think the young people would be less keen on wiping out lots of cities to destroy the Realm when they are more interested in keeping the Realm away from where they live.

 

[SentientPebble]

I suspect such a discovery might tear the Silver Pact apart more than anything. Someone discovering such a powerful weapon and proposing its liberal use would become one of the single most important situations in a heart beat, and there would be multiple people Wanting it for themselves, Wanting to prevent its use, Wanting to destroy it, etc. Multiple mutually incompatible elder lunars suddenly gaining a new number 1 priority and heading to the same place at the same time.

I also suspect that infosec could not be maintained on this for long, and various other factions would also immeidately make it their number one priority.
Edit:
It really doesn't help the Silver Pact that they're not really an organisation that comes to universal consensus. Everyone does their own thing and supports each other as desired/as necessary, and as long as you're not actively obstructing or sabotaging another elder, you're mostly free to do whatever you want. This would fly directly in the face of that, and very few Elders could take an attitude of 'live and let live' with this artifact.

 

[akoboldskobold]

In 3e, Smiling Rat was expelled for opening up shadowlands across the North, though I could see someone arguing that it was a tactical issue rather than a moral or ethical one.

The Pact is still not above fucking over a lot of people in order to get their revenge—half of Radimiel's Seat is fucked due to Lunar sabotage, for example.

The Pact, as ever, remains loose and heterogenous—and a scenario on the scale that Mosshadow is proposing might cleave the Pact in two, permanently.

 

[Walker]

Are there entities other than exalts who display anima, or are anima banners and caste marks unique to the Exalted?

 

[Omicron]

Are there entities other than exalts who display anima, or are anima banners and caste marks unique to the Exalted?

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Anima banners and caste marks are specific to the Exalted. However, other kinds of beings may start to glow when using certain powers, or even develop a full blown DBZ aura pillar of light stuff, which an onlooker could mistake for an anima but which technically isn't. Ligier, for instance, is said to reveal a green radiance in battle that annihilates lesser foes and blinds greater ones.

There were early signs in Ex3 that "anima" was a broader term for a kind of emitted energy that could occur from a variety of sources; Arms mentions that starmetal is born of the "anima" of stars gathering over time. I don't think anything was done with this long term, though.

 

[SinisterPorpoise]

There were early signs in Ex3 that "anima" was a broader term for a kind of emitted energy that could occur from a variety of sources; Arms mentions that starmetal is born of the "anima" of stars gathering over time. I don't think anything was done with this long term, though.

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IIRC in 2E it mentioned that Mortals that somehow got to higher Essence ratings, ...so 3, started to have a faint anima with a chiarusco effect?
IE, making light things brighter and shaded things darker.
edit:
I can't find where it says that right now, because I have work tomorrow and need to sleep, but have found additional info on the general subject, 2E Corebook P.15;

anima: A normally invisible aura that surrounds all living things. When an Exalted uses Essence, that Essence often spills into his anima, making it visible. Therefore, Exalted who expend a great deal of Essence are often surrounded by a brilliant display of power that can be visible miles distant.

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[Lioness]

In 1st and 2nd edition there used to be a god-blooded flaw called aura of power* that made their essence pool split into personal and peripheral like an Exalt, my general understanding was that Ex3 had moved away from this as it was needlessly muddying the waters between god-blooded and Exalts.

*I initially said beacon of power, that's a different flaw that removes personal essence entirely.

 

[Blaque]

There were also some things in Creatures of the Wyld which displayed animas. The undead things that were created by Mother Bog and the shards of Mokrelus the Hundred-handed. They were specifically not human, but had magic that replicated Charms a bit and the use of that seemed to generate animas.

 

[Lioness]

There's not a God of Fire since it's kind of just not something that needs maintaining or which can be managed that way, since it's one of the five building blocks of the universe, which seems to extend beyond Creation itself. I'm not sure what such a god even would do. Save maybe be the one you go to as a go-between between it and the Dragon of Fire (the latter of which I kind of headcanon long ago as being the gods of their elements on paper, and kind of the Platonic Embodiment of "Being Made from that Element" in another).

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Yeah, I've mostly thought about a hypothetical god of fire in the context of how their Exigent could be meaningfully different from a Fire Aspect the conclusion I reached was that the position might exist as a political counterweight to some positions traditionally held by fire elementals.

 

[Mosshadow95]

So I've been looking through the primary Exalt books for information about the Usurpation and this edition they've really made it vague. One thing in particular is that they have mostly removed mention of Solar atrocities outside of the Dragon Blood who was turned into a living garden and no one in power thought it was particularly bad or crazy. Meanwhile Desus was nuked from canon and there's no mention of Wyldhand or Leviathan's Mate's serial sexual assaults.

However, there is one big change that I don't think I've seen discussed here or the Discord. Lunars got changed to be near equals to the Solars in the First Age instead of abused victims. Does this make them at fault for the leadup to the Usurpation and complicit in what ever crazy atrocities were committed to make the Sidereals create their conspiracy?

I know that fans have switched from MHS, Leviathan and Raksi being hated and depraved villains in 2e to being popular characters but can we consider that they could have been responsible for whatever crimes happened at the end of the first age, or at least been people who stood by and just admired the Flesh Garden? Of course their backstories are really vague now so there is the space for the shocking reveal that one of them was a pro-purge Lunar who got backstabbed by the Sidereals later. And there hasn't been any written character as far as I know for that.

Now in Many Faced Strangers, Ul the Burning Eye is my favorite character and he actually has a rather detailed First Age backstory, more information than a lot of characters, as you get his Exaltation, his career and family and the Usurpation in full paragraphs. The thing that gets me about him is that there isn't really anything wrong here, he seems like a good heroic person and he has a Platonic Solar Mate and then he marries a Dragon Blooded wife and has children some of whom are also DBs and they all live together in the Fulgurite Spire which is an island fortress town.

During the Usurpation his own wife(this would imply he married within a couple centuries of the Usurpation) and ALL his children and the DB officers in the isolated teleporting magical self contained fortress turn on him and his Bond mate Navo and forces him to flee when the Solar dies. His children spend centuries after this trying to hunt him down under the Shogunate before they all get killed by the Contagion.

During the Usurpation, the Spire's Dragon-Blooded
officers — led by Tiam and her children — cornered
Navo and slew him. Unwilling to fight his own family,
Ül fled into the wilderness. But for decades thereafter,
descendants of his joined Wyld Hunts against him to
prove their loyalty to a wary Shogunate.

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So the more I look at it, the more something is wrong here. In 3e the Usurpation is supposed to be more open to all the Exalted to be involved in and be more messy, Chejob Kejack isn't supposed to whisper "Execute Order 66" into a cellphone (2e fans please correct me on this) and then all of Ul's beloved children, relatives and closest military personnel have their IAM brainchips activated and they begin shooting at him with artifact lasers while the rest of the Solars die in one fell swoop during their New Year's Ball drop.

Thing is, why do Ul and Navo get targeted? This is like a group of Exalts that could easily be uninvolved in the Usurpation or be asked by the Bronze to help out in. Why does his entire family turn against him? Is his character bio missing out on information? Did he and Navo help another Solar planning to create a massive Psychic Beacon that would crush the wills of his personal Domain and when his DB family asked why he would do something so crazy he just shrugged and said he trusted X Solar Tyrant to use his super weapon with restraint? Was Navo actually a horrible person turning citizens into horrific fleshblobs for fun and Ul just shrugged and told his wife that he was certain that his Mate would turn them back to normal in a couple months, before leaving for a business trip to cure a random disease? I just don't see a motive for why Ul was betrayed in such a manner. I don't think these are questions that the author intends the GM to need to answer for the player facing story but as a GM looking into this, it feels as if something is very wrong here.

EDIT: main point of this meandering post is Why wasn't Ul one of the guys whose DB's family stood by him. And 2nd: Maybe his Bio leaves out him being evil which is why they turned against him and maybe this was common for Lunars but is left out of their Bios.

EDIT from discord ideas: Maybe he was already doing his disease testing on the Fulgurite spire during the FA and even if it was innocent in his mind, he had begun doing it to all his close family and he demanded they let him infect them because it was for the good of all of Creation since he had to get his cures out to the rest of the world as soon as possible. So when a Sidereal came over it was easy to get it into his families mind that this was actually a plot that would see them all dying horribly.

 

[SentientPebble]

I get the impression that the writers wanted the First Age to be up to interpretation - was it really as horrifying as the Sidereals say, or was it an age of plenty that could have been preserved? Except "We managed to turn most of the world against the immortal God Kings, such that their own families turned against them and drowned the world in blood to depose them" and "Everything was perfect and we were the heroes creation needed" are two utterly incompatible perspectives, and the Sidereals at least seemed to have a lot more people on their side? So it sort of ends up feeling like someone is looking at the past with violently rose tinted glasses, and it's probably the Lunars?

 

[SinisterPorpoise]

I know that fans have switched from MHS, Leviathan and Raksi being hated and depraved villains in 2e to being popular characters but can we consider that they could have been responsible for whatever crimes happened at the end of the first age, or at least been people who stood by and just admired the Flesh Garden?

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IIRC Raksi at least was something like 16 when the Usurpation happened, and may have even exalted after it started.

Except "We managed to turn most of the world against the immortal God Kings, such that their own families turned against them and drowned the world in blood to depose them" and "Everything was perfect and we were the heroes creation needed" are two utterly incompatible perspectives, and the Sidereals at least seemed to have a lot more people on their side?

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Except, the Sidereals broke fate in relation to memory, and considering how it was broken in 3E( which I consider dumb but whatever) I think that it's an inevitability that it would also effect memories and records of the Usurpation as well.
In fact, the very fact that Arcane Fate is a Sidereal thing instead of a Solar thing in 3E makes no sense with how the Mask was handled.
But what I'm saying is; who knows how accurate any of the memories or records of the First Age and Usurptation actually are when they are self-retconing.

 

[mothematics]

In fact, the very fact that Arcane Fate is a Sidereal thing instead of a Solar thing in 3E makes no sense with how the Mask was handled.

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Why is that?

 

[SinisterPorpoise]

Why is that?

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Because what broke it was, technically, the Solars rather than the Sidereals.
The Sidereals had the galaxy-brain idea to hide the Jade Prison inside of the Mask somehow.
Containing all of the imprisoned Solar exaltations was too much for it, resulting in the Mask shattering into pieces.
Edit:
Also, the fact that breaking the Mask was an accident in 3E implies that unlike in 2E the Bronze Faction didn't view what they did as a punishable crime.

 

[Omicron]

Because what broke it was, technically, the Solars rather than the Sidereals.
The Sidereals had the galaxy-brain idea to hide the Jade Prison inside of the Mask somehow.
Containing all of the imprisoned Solar exaltations was too much for it, resulting in the Mask shattering into pieces.
Edit:
Also, the fact that breaking the Mask was an accident in 3E implies that unlike in 2E the Bronze Faction didn't view what they did as a punishable crime.

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...but it broke the Mask. The Constellation. It affected Sidereals because Sidereals draw powers from the Constellations, and one of theirs broke. It wouldn't have mattered whether the Jade Prison was full of Solar Exaltations or germinated potatoes, and it wouldn't have mattered if it had been the Sidereals doing it or the gods or the Lunar Exalted or, like, Santa Claus. Arcane Fate exists because a source of Sidereal power that influences their Exaltation broke. The Solars, by contrast, don't care whether the Mask is whole or broken of transformed into marshmallow, Constellations don't affect them to begin with.

 

[Half Moon]

Also, the fact that breaking the Mask was an accident in 3E implies that unlike in 2E the Bronze Faction didn't view what they did as a punishable crime.

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I think a fair number of Sidereals would agree they should be punished, but regardless, who would do the punishing? Sol turned his face away. The Maidens clearly didn't care. What other gods are going to stand against the Fivescore Fellowship?

 

[Gazetteer]

I get the impression that the writers wanted the First Age to be up to interpretation - was it really as horrifying as the Sidereals say, or was it an age of plenty that could have been preserved? Except "We managed to turn most of the world against the immortal God Kings, such that their own families turned against them and drowned the world in blood to depose them" and "Everything was perfect and we were the heroes creation needed" are two utterly incompatible perspectives, and the Sidereals at least seemed to have a lot more people on their side? So it sort of ends up feeling like someone is looking at the past with violently rose tinted glasses, and it's probably the Lunars?

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I don't quite think it's that up for interpretation? Like, how and whether the Solar Purge was justified is something the game doesn't really want to weigh in on, both because it would be tonally wrong, and because it's not super relevant to the stories that it wants to tell now. The Sidereals who carried out the Solar Purge think it was justified (with a very big notable exception), the surviving Lunars who were victimised by it do not think it was justified. We don't have a lot of information on how most of the really old gods and other spirits in the setting like, feel about it. No one else was alive for this to happen, and have only heard about it secondhand.

The First Age was demonstratively bad enough that the Sidereals did this in the first place and were able to sway most of the Dragon-Blooded host to their cause, and not even those surviving Lunar elders are interested in going back to the arrangement they used to have or in like, propping up the returning Solars at all -- even MHS wants to make a version of the Old Realm specifically ruled by Lunars. I don't think anyone needs to be like, lying or remembering what happened wrong.

it's kind of funny how even with like, 3e not going in for so many of the lurid examples of Solar cruelty that 2e added that the Forest Witch section still has the same anecdote about that Solar decorating her garden with the still living, dismembered body of her Dragon-Blooded servant as punishment for a minor mistake that we've had since 1e, though.

 

[Amidatelion]

I for one am glad that we're no longer lingering on the idea of insane psycho torturers and serial rapists, Dragonblood gardens aside.

The failings of First Age Solars in my view should be more like the tragic, larger than life flaws of god-tyrants driven mad by passion, not the petty, greasy malevolence of Garth Ennis Superheroes.

 

[Blaque]

Not going into it helps also kind of avoid a bit of what I felt 2e would at times do, and harp on how "things are worse now" as a reason to de-legitimize Dragon-Blooded. Not in the sense that empire needs it, but I think there's a vibe of "Only Solars should have been in charge" to some of prior edition writing, which then resulted in the Usurpation being a mistake, since no "real leader" could fill in.

Might just be my vibes, but keeping it a thing historians in-setting argue on as much as we might is probably healthier in presenting more options for folks, and also writing the setting with less a "Solars are the only ones whose opinion really matters" I think.

 

[akoboldskobold]

My headcanon—and I am emphasizing that this is basically my fanfic—is that the end of the First Age was bad, like real bad, but the Solar Purge was also a gross overreaction. There were a lot of Solars and Lunars doing a lot of fucked up things, but, as with any other period and place with politics, there were factions who were opposed to the status quo, even if they were small. There would be Solars and Lunars who would be a part of these factions, along with Sidereals and Dragonblooded.

I also think that 'one great Solar host' was never a reality on the ground after the Divine Revolution. I imagine that the Old Realm was pretty weak, with a bunch of Solars constantly threatening to take their ball and go home. Perhaps it was like the Holy Roman Empire, at least from what little I know of it, with the Old Realm repeatedly trying and failing to centralize power and authority—but ultimately had to respect the rights and autonomy of its constituents. Perhaps the core 'Solar Faction' was dominant enough that the Deliberative's politics were driven by that faction's internal divisions and petty infighting.

Given that the Solar Purge even happened, I imagine the political environment of the time was incredbily polarized and that the normal day-to-day operation of the Old Realm was breaking down because of it. Due to this polarization, the proto-Bronze convinced themselves that all Solars and Lunars were dangerous and had the potential to become outsized threats, no mattter the character of the Solar or Lunar in question. At the risk of leaning too much into 'the Immaculate Order's dogma is a projection of the beliefs of Chejop Kejak specifically,' I think the proto-Bronze believed something like what the current Immaculate Order teaches its monks:

The Order knows that it hunts and murders Exalted, but believes that the unyielding perfection of Solar Essence and mutable chaos of Lunar Essence lead inevitably to insanity.

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Of course, the proto-Bronze was made up of Sidereals, and we all know that Sidereals think they Know Better Than You.

Though, from reading this thread, this take is almost certainly too detailed to be a real positive for the story of Exalted. It redirects focus away from what's most interesting and important about the setting, its present. I am still of the opinion that the reality of the First Age was still pretty factional and divided, even if time has reduced the memory of it to 'one big happy family' in certain circles. Solars seem like they're much too proud to be able to play nice for long with people who are not their friends.

 

[Chehrazad]

I get the impression that the writers wanted the First Age to be up to interpretation - was it really as horrifying as the Sidereals say, or was it an age of plenty that could have been preserved? Except "We managed to turn most of the world against the immortal God Kings, such that their own families turned against them and drowned the world in blood to depose them" and "Everything was perfect and we were the heroes creation needed" are two utterly incompatible perspectives, and the Sidereals at least seemed to have a lot more people on their side? So it sort of ends up feeling like someone is looking at the past with violently rose tinted glasses, and it's probably the Lunars?

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It has always been the case that the late First Age was a quite horrible time, and that Solars will find themselves face to face with their own bodies conducting quite awful things — mute spectators as "their hands" pull out hearts, or "their tongues" proclaim awful curses — through their dreams of the First Age (title drop, bam), going back to Exalted's very First Edition, and continuing throughout Second and Third Edition. The central gamble was never whether it was okay or bad, it was whether it was possible to return it to the glories, or if it was okay to accept a lessening for the sake of greater safety. The Bronze faction chose the latter. Third Edition is no different in this regard, it just removes the explicit nature of the Great Prophecy, and gave the plan an additional element that emphasizes the intentions of the Sidereals to act as caretakers of the Old Realm's continuation, rather than surrendering Utopia in the name of the mid to late Iron Age.

Because what broke it was, technically, the Solars rather than the Sidereals.
The Sidereals had the galaxy-brain idea to hide the Jade Prison inside of the Mask somehow.
Containing all of the imprisoned Solar exaltations was too much for it, resulting in the Mask shattering into pieces.
Edit:
Also, the fact that breaking the Mask was an accident in 3E implies that unlike in 2E the Bronze Faction didn't view what they did as a punishable crime.

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There is not really any evidence that the Mask works like this, or that the Constellations would work like that, or that any of this would unfold as you say. The Solars are not affected by the Constellations in the same way Sidereals are, and in the context of their time, it's not really hard to see why the Sidereals would want to hide the Solar Exaltations inside the Constellation Of Things That Should Be Hidden. And no, of course the Bronze Faction do not, by and large, see the Usurpation as a punishable crime, as a matter of factional policy — more than a millennium has passed, and Sidereals have a vast burden of various duties to contend with on a daily basis, it would be strange for the faction as a whole to take a stance on something that specific. However, Charting Fate's Course is, I think, pretty clear when it says that:

Article:

Many in the faction see the Empress' disappearance and its consequences as a dire failure, endlesly ruminating on how it could have been avoided. Old arguments are revived as the members point fingers at each other, calling into question decisions made decades or centuries ago. Resentment seethes beneatht he surface of many Bronze dinners and salons as old friendships are tested, and longstanding alliances begin to crumble. The faction's elders have taken responsibility for failing to foresee this, smoothing over the worst of it — but it remains a wedge issue for political enemies to exploit.

Source: Charting Fate's Course

It is clear to me that the Bronze's project, which began with the Solar Purge, but is not defined by it, is increasingly called into question by the shifts of the Time of Tumult. The vast majority of Bronze members would be quite young in comparison ancients like Chejop Kejak, and thus would have little direct identification with the Solar Purge, knowing it only as the founding story of their faction, and the basis for the current world order. Their understanding of the world would be shaped by the concerns immediate to them, in which the factional politics of the Sidereals, and the grand and overarching secret history of Creation, might prefigure as elements, but ultimately do not form the core building blocks. The Tory Party in British politics also emerged out of the Cavalier movement in 17th century Britain and the English Civil War and the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, but that does not mean Theresa May has particularly nuanced positions on the nature of the English Civil War, and the individual policies of Oliver Cromwell vis a vis the House of Stuart.

 

[VagueZ]

I'd express it a little differently. Getting a close look at the pre-Usurpation world, especially close to the Usurpation, means that it's now possible to argue the relative merits of Sidereal actions with specifics. Or, in other words, it's no longer a philosophical choice: we aren't making the call between "lesser but safe" or "risky yet glorious." We're looking at Frank the Solar and passing judgment on him as a character and individual. He wouldn't have listened to Sidereals, so we had to pick this route. Or he was still broadly innocent of Solar crimes, so his death is moral cowardice on the parts of the conspirators.

Both of these, and all the myriad variations of it, are toxic to actually playing Exalted in its default assumptions. It inspires litigation and discussion about the specifics of people who died over a thousand years ago. Sometimes this can be pulled off well: "Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic 2" has, as one of its primary story threads, something like "once, there was a mighty general who, at the command of a charismatic leader, fired off a horrible superweapon, and ended a war—who was this general, and why did they do it?" KotOR2, though, kind of very notably also has Darth Nihilus being an immediate threat in the here-and-now, while your PC's background is still informing what you're up to in the story.

Keeping the majority of the First Age's luminaries, and its glories, and its tragedies, out of full canon means that we have the option to bring this sort of story out (because your PCs have inherited memories and share personality traits with their previous selves), but means that we don't push the bounds of good taste further than we need to (as Amidatelion points out) and avoids just indicating that the play space is the shattered debris of when things were good (to restate Blaque's point).

Giving more information on the First Age as hard facts basically locks out the opportunity to develop it as necessary for a given character/campaign needs, and inspires an unhealthy sort of fandom obsession with something that is best treated as a secondary element.

Even if some players and characters will have a firm call on if the Usurpation should have happened, the most useful thing that its lead-up can be is "bad enough that the Sidereal-backed conspiracy was understandable, but not so atrocious that only the insane would refuse to support it."