You know what was Grabowski's baby in 2nd edition? The Panoply Chapter.
Defining an Estate
An Estate in context of Exalted 2e is a Resources 4 purchase. The thing is, they don't really describe what an Estate looks like.
I can tell you that they mean an old, manorial, old-world/old-money style demesne (the term for property, not the magical background), which usually encompasses the manor-home itself, as well as the outlying lands with which it derives wealth from.
Under the manorial definition, an Estate is a plot of land the owner does not work themselves. They instead have a host of employees- likely housed in a private village they lease out to their employees for the purposes of tending the lands.
I must reinforce this- you could have dozens of people, maybe a hundred, completely unrelated from a Followers Background under your employ as part of the Resources Background. Their job is to play up the grandness of your vast holdings, the wealth you direct at your fingertips.
(You could buy Followers and declare them as the villagers, and then use their explicit loyalty for other purposes in addition to working your holdings to 'pay' for themselves'.)
A good example of such a place is Mulan's family home from the Disney film about her- the walled garden with the portal out onto the street, and the implication of tracts of land behind for it to grow crops and raise livestock (like the chickens.) Granted if you dig into the actual historical factors behind ancient China and similar cultures, they really made up for costs with bride price. (Money paid by the groom to the bride's family, as opposed to dowry, which is the other way around.)
Another good example in my opinion, is Villa Auditore from the Assassin's Creed series- the walled community with the stores and infrastructure Ezio invests in over the course of the game is very much in-theme with the idea of Resources as a background.
Regardless of what it looks like, your Estate costs Resources 4 to buy, and is likely worth Resources 4 in output wealth. Your estate generates capital to be spent on other things.
Now, not all Estates look like that- perhaps you have a townhouse manor in an urban area. Instead of acreage, the corebook gives a fantastic example in the opening paragraphs of the panoply chapter- you have a home full of priceless works of art.
These items are themselves valuable if sold, but players don't want to sell their stuff! Instead, owning this art, hosting it in your home means you have collateral, which in turn means you can take out a line of credit from other financial institutions.
Part of the reason I'm bringing this all up, of estates and their meaning, is that players of Exalted don't necessarily understand what value means. It's a side-effect of living in a supermarket culture- which is y'know, pretty awesome for day to day living. Going to a store for groceries doesn't really dig into the effort and money that went into providing all that produce. of the huge land area dedicated to making it. Of all the upward-trickling costs that lead to it's final price at the point of sale.
Buying in Stages
It's not something that comes up often, but one asks- how do you pay for a palace that costs Resources 5, and then furnish it for another Resources 5 expense? By the rules, you can't, because when you make a purchase that costs dots equal to your rating, your rating goes down by one- there's no Resources 6 per se.
So you buy your unfurnished palace and drop to Resources 4… The books never tell you this, but it's pretty basic- take actions to raise your Resources rating back up to 5! Once you've done that, you buy the furnishings, and repeat until satisfied!
Multiple Resources, Location and Availability
One thing that gets glossed over a lot in 2nd edition is that Resources require you to define what they are when you buy them at character generation. This is usually a cooperative thing between the players and storytellers, where determine if it's a mine, estate, or other source of wealth.
The other important thing, is that the resources system itself is designed to be very hands-free. If you can afford it, you can afford it, and Resources 2 covers a lot of stuff in the setting.
Anyway, the five-dot scale is pretty effective, but it falls apart when trying to do really big things. I think something people forget, is that you can have multiple instances of nearly every background.
If you own two gemstone mines worth Resources 4 each, you don't get Res 4+4 or Res 5 from their combined value (though you could argue for that if you want). Instead, each mine generates it's own Resources Value and thus means you can have two Resources 4 entries on your sheet. This suddenly means you can make two Resources 4 purchases at once! Faster/more often if you are savvy at business and can bolster them back up after a big expenditure.
Secondly of note, is that most Resources are based on Locale. You cannot bring Resources 5 of Cash across the world- your holdings are usually tied down to physical things or places. Professionals with tradeskills like doctors and such can bring their talents with them, which gives them an advantage in finding work and securing a new Resources Rating, but it's not the same as saying 'my mines in the South pay my way during my trip to Haslanti'.
This is important, because 90% of the time, Resources and such aren't meant to be a hurdle or complication. The 10% of the time they are is when a player is out in the middle of nowhere with just whatever they were carrying on hand, and Storytellers are allowed to rule they might be missing something if they happen to not have a way to carry it.
Now there are banks and money-transference in Creation in the Second Age, but they take weeks to resolve normally. It is not an easy task, nor quick, nor safe. When you go far afield, you will not have your huge bankroll to see you through.
So, implicitly, you are encouraged by the system to maintain multiple Resources Backgrounds across many locales and industries in Creation.
Loans, Futures and Shares
The panoply chapter of the 2nd edition corebook goes into much more detail about this than I'm going to worry about- I highly recommend those interested give it a read if they want a fairly salient rundown of pre-industrial economies in a magical bronze-age heroism setting. It gets some things wrong I bet, but it's still quite evocative all the same.
Anyway, banks exist in Creation! And they're nothing like modern banks. It's still a world that doesn't have a floating currency- everything is backed by valuables in vaults or some other form of credit. (To be fair, the First Age likely didn't have a floating currency either, because they didn't need one.)
What does this mean for most players? Not a whole lot, because unless you're really digging into being a landed elite type, most characters are very cash-in-hand during the Second Age. Money is earned and put in hand, then exchanged for good and services.
However, bank notes, cheques and such do exist, as do stocks, buying shares in things that do not exist yet but are planned, and so on. This is the very essence of investment as a concept.
Get on with it!
So what's the point of me blathering on about all of this? Especially that bit about banks, futures and shares?
Well, details aside, a couple hundred years ago there was this guy by name of Columbus, and he managed to secure the money to charge off across the ocean in order to find a faster route to the East Indies and greater wealth. While I'm admittedly glossing over the specifics, the point is wealth motivated this journey, and wealth resulted from it- but more importantly, it altered the course of history of the world as mankind knew it, and all of us here exist as we do because of it.
The same applies in Creation. Wealth in any form is a plot mover, an understandable, attainable and self-descriptive goal that can change the fate of nations. The pursuit of it can beggar kings and raise paupers to riches beyond their wildest dreams. It can fund vast armies as far as the eye can see, or heartbreaking works of art crafted by the finest artists in the world.
A thousand stories in Creation, in the games you can play of Exalted, start with wealth. Not as quests for greed, though that certainly happens, but because the world is full of people who aspire to more than they have- and that's you, the player characters and Heroic Mortals.
