General Exalted Thread
Aleph
Princess of Stabbity
- Location
- The sixth circle of Hell (second on weekends)
- Pronouns
- She/Her
now, I'm sure they won't accidentally make an hole in the seal. maybe. hopefully. 
Aleph
Princess of Stabbity
- Location
- The sixth circle of Hell (second on weekends)
- Pronouns
- She/Her
No, they couldn't do that even if they wanted to. And she specifically said not to mess with the actual plug.now, I'm sure they won't accidentally make an hole in the seal. maybe. hopefully.
Well, they'll probably have finished scouting the area, at least. This is what happens when you try to juggle three IC schemes, people! Especially if your character isn't very good at planning and multitasking such things.
greensun
You shall all burn beneath my light!!!
If it helps, I'm pretty sure Keris could murder a small city without anyone figuring out what happened.
I've just had a look at her charms and good lord is absurdly lethal, reminds just how scary Scourges are. Especially with that AoE charm that Echo was spawned from.
the echo charm is like holy shit lethal. especially with adorjan-born speed boosters.
Aleph
Princess of Stabbity
- Location
- The sixth circle of Hell (second on weekends)
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Keris was intentionally built to be a whirlwind of murder in melee. She's not perfectly optimised for it - I could build a chargen Scourge even better than she is, if I cut out literally everything else - but with four or five more Charms she'll be pretty close. And no, she probably couldn't murder an entire city with no signs. A small town, if she struck at night, quite possibly, but a city would probably be too big to get everyone.
And yes, Silence In Her Wake is even more hilarious than Opened Eye of the Hurricane for unfair melee combat. Sadly, murderin' does not help with most of her current problems.
Edit: Come to think of it, I don't think I've used Silence In Her Wake (on actual targets worth consideration) since I started publishing the sessions, have I? Heh. I'll have to see if I can remedy that and show you how hilarious it is when used.
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The Kerisgame set-up makes the Infernals very much nega-Sidereals. Rather than government employees, they're high-flying contractors who work for megacorp execs and have to stay on the good side of their asshole bosses and try to explain to them that what they want cannot per se be done right now unless they're willing to spend rather more than they intend to.
And because they're working for the Third Circles rather than the Yozis, they can just play their bosses off against each other, bribe their souls (Sasi is bribing/blackmailing the Red Moon's Indulgent soul, to make her well inclined towards her and so she will consider the offer of a demesne to be far, far more than what she'd wanted Sasi to do beforehand), and try to make sure none of their patrons ever take them for granted because they can go find someone else to work for. And being paid incredibly well as long as they perform to standards, but risking nasty consequences if they fuck up.
So, basically, if a Sidereal is a government bureaucrat sitting at their desk and engaging in office politics, under this model an Infernal is a corporate freelancer sitting in a club doing cocaine as they network with clients over their next contract.
Aaron Peori
Rest in Peace
So Infernals are Shadowrunners and Sidereals are Mr Johnson.
Kay.
greensun
You shall all burn beneath my light!!!
I love that charm., it is just so unfair!
Oh, so the normal tactic of ganging up on an exalted is your strategy? Well guess what, it makes me harder to hit now! Good luck trying to hit me while I carve out your throats with teeth, asshole!
You have such a way with words ES
But yes, I do prefare this way of modeling Green Sun Princes better than the canon model, which was too Yozi heavy. It also takes on a more literal meaning when you play a game set in the Modern Shard.
Your boss is not a only a corrupt corporate executive, but also a demon!
(And it isn't him being a demon that makes him an ass, its the fact that he doesn't refile the coffee jar when he's had the last cup. Fucking ass, Cecelyne should have a law for that.)
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Pretty much!
Especially since, when you get down to it, all the Sidereals are basically on the same side and their disagreements are on means. Infernals? No such luck. The All-Thing exists at least in part to try to resolve what happens when two different Unquestionable hire Infernals for opposing missions so they talk things out there, rather than backstab and sabotage each other. Deveh in theory is under Sasi's auspices as she has been granted mission control over the An Teng area, but in practice he ignores her because he's taking orders directly from an Unquestionable of SWLIHN and argues that this trumps her (and it does), which means that if she wants to force things, she has to travel back to Malfeas and call an emergency conclave of the All-Thing to try to resolve the fact that Deveh's patron is breaking the rules (because Deveh is a SWLIHN-fanatic who basically ignores all other Unquestionable).
Things are going to get even more... uh, dynamic when some of the Unquestionable go "So, why can't we hire other Exalts under the same rules and use the All-Thing to settle their disputes?"
(the moral of this story is that by having the Unquestionable running the Infernals rather than the Yozis, it turns into "Shadowrun where you're answering to squabbling demon-gods who spend at least half their time trying to thwart each other's power plays, which gives you plenty of room to do your own thing and alter the balance of power in Malfeas")
Aleph
Princess of Stabbity
- Location
- The sixth circle of Hell (second on weekends)
- Pronouns
- She/Her
It is certainly probable that none of the other Unquestionable interested in An Teng have yet noticed that Keris has been recruited by the Shashalme - Sasi's warned them that Iastestus is doing worrying things with Deveh, but I'm not sure she mentioned Keris's "generous" new patron - and that when they do cotton on they will be magnificently pissed off.
Dynamesmouse
Bzzzzzz
She is certainly... Kerismatic!
samdamandias
Apprentice Plane Wizard
The real reason why Bluesids don't have Iconic Anima banners
Well, that would certainly explain the (proposed) plot about intercepting a coadjutor-to-be and conveying them to a certain temple before the exaltation burns them out and escapes back to Malfeas.
Aleph
Princess of Stabbity
- Location
- The sixth circle of Hell (second on weekends)
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Kerismatic (adjective): the quality of being charismatic in a way that creates more problems than it solves.
Aleph
Princess of Stabbity
- Location
- The sixth circle of Hell (second on weekends)
- Pronouns
- She/Her
I'm honestly not sure to what extent @EarthScorpion has written Sasi up. I wouldn't mind seeing some of her Principles OOC, though Keris won't know all of them.
- Location
- Gladstone, OR
Mentlegen, Ladies. It's time to Ride Charms.
But first, let's talk about Travel, Mounted Combat, and how freaking big Creation is.
Ride, the Ability
Ride, at the core, is the ability that governs manipulation and specialist training for mounts such as horses, simhata, yeddim and whatever else that could be conceivably ridden in Creation. Yes, you can in fact ride a dinosaur. Yes, I do in fact recommend it.
Ride is different from Survival in that the former is focused on managing a mount, while the latter is essentially the 'Everything Else' of animal care.
Now, not to focus too much on it, but ride also governs the control for certain personal vehicles that were later detailed in Wonders of the Lost Age. For good or ill, there are no Charms that affect ridden Vehicles.
Narratively, Ride covers the tropes and concepts of the messenger, emissary, traveler and nomad. It's wrong to say that Ride is westerns, but it does hit certain notes.
Mounted Combat
For those of you who remember my movement essay, you might recall that i mentioned Unstable Footing is a mechanical clone of Mounted Combat! Because that's still true now, I'm not going to go into as in depth review of the mechanics, but instead hit some high notes. These are detailed more fully on page 154 of Exalted 2nd Edition Core.
First, your attack and defense pools are throttled by your character's Ride score. If you are Ride 3, Dodge 5, you calculate your DDV as [Dexterity+Ride+Essence]/2. Your Melee is capped at 3, and so on.
Second, mounts have a Control Rating. If your Ride Rating is less than the CR, you must flurry a misc action to keep control of your mount in addition to other actions. The difficulty of this roll is equal to the Control Rating.
A trained warhorse has a CR of 2, so you need Ride 2 in order to act freely. A Wild, unbroken horse has a CR of 4, so if you have Ride 4, you can just hop on and ride it without issue.
If your Ride meets or exceeds the mounts's CR, you may control your mount as a reflexive action.
Lastly, a mounted character enjoys +1 DV against any melee attacker on the ground, who doesn't have the Reach Tag or other means of easily striking them.
Travel - or - Creation is Really, Really Big
Ride (and Sail) exist as an ability, because Exalted as a setting needs travel mechanics. It is that big, and travel is that important, that rules exist to arbitrate it. They're fairly soft rules, serving more as guidelines, but like with a lot of things in Exalted, these rules try to model important aspects of the setting.
I want you to take a look outside for a second (assuming it's light out), or maybe Google Maps and streetview for a bit. You're gonna see roads, lots with houses, maybe apartment buildings or something. Everything is really dense.
Creation is not dense. Creation is wiiiiiiiiiide.
If you look at a map of Creation, you'll see dots marking out big cities- these are the cities that have survived for hundreds of years, and are so important that people across the world have heard of them.
Most of those cities are tiny.
Rathess (pretty much the oldest city in Creation), according to one map floating around the internet/books, is about six miles wide. Whitewall? Not much bigger. Amusingly both of these cities are circular.
Now, one thing I want to stress is that even modern cities aren't that big. Portland, Oregon, north of where I live, is maybe 6 miles across at the widest point? It is however, intensely urban and very, very dense. We all know Manhattan Island is teeny-tiny, for the amount of people crammed into it.
Anyway- the big, noteworthy Creation cities- they're all quite small and nowhere near as dense as modern cities. They don't look like our cities. Even the really established ones like the Imperial City look nothing like a modern urban center.
So, we accept that cities are tiny. The other thing we have to remember is that Creation is by and large populated by kingdoms and city-states. They have vast tracts of outlying farmlands, managed by minor lords, nobles, whatever system is in place because again, Creation is huge.
It's not empty either. Nexus is the 'city', sure, but the further out you go from Nexus, you find trading towns. You find docks along the river. Watering holes and inns. Communities. Creation is full of things that aren't on the map- and those wide open spaces are meant to be influenced by the big cities- and more importantly influenced by your characters.
Next important thing: Most people in Creation- the mortals, even the terrestrial gods who work in their domains, don't range very far from their place. Mortals in Creation often die within 10 miles of where they were born, having maybe seen one or two villages away from them. Travel is hard.
Mind you, exceptions exist to emphasize this. Traders have made thousand-mile journeys in the real world, and they've done so in Creation. Armies march to war, and there's however many woodsmen and the like who just go out and do stuff in the spaces between developed areas.
Let's take a second to determine how hard travel is. There's a section dedicated to it, and a chart for it in corebook, in the storytelling chapter- pages 263-264.
Walking? It says the average person (including your heroic player characters) can walk 3 miles a day, or 250 miles monthly. There are people who have walked across the United States, with routes averaging around 3300 miles. By Exalted rates, that journey would take 12 months.
Horses aren't much better, 6 miles per day, 500 per month, but still they will get you where you want to go.
The travel chart goes into a lot more permutations and such than I feel necessary for this essay, but the point I'm trying to make is this: Travel is a Big Deal, it takes time.
Using Travel as a Storyteller
It's tough, for one, to get players used to the idea that something they might want is further away than a scene break. But that's a misleading statement.
See, you don't have to roleplay out travel, but it is something that should be accounted for regardless. People grow up, are born, and die in the time it takes to travel across the world, and it's no different for your players.
So when contending with Travel, it pays to acknowledge a few things.
Like with a lot of Exalted, the game pins so much hope on you being willing to think outside your assumptions- to draw on numerous resources both in the books and outside of them.
Of specific note, that the book points out, is that armies must march everywhere. They have huge supply chains, and can on average move 25-30 miles a day before magical aide.
For those not keeping track at home, I want to call that slow as molasses in January.
Armies, big, kingdom-conquering blocks of men and material are hard to move en-masse across the world. It's expensive, risky and honestly doesn't work that often unless you have magic helping you out. Armies don't show up on your doorstep undetected.
The Problem of Ride
There's not much reason to get Ride dots or Charms in most games of Exalted, simply because most games are run with an eye towards scene-to-scene gameplay with very specific venues, obstacles and setpieces. Most of which don't actually cater well to ride-themed characters.
Essentially, if you don't have anywhere to go, there's no reason to take Ride. If the Storyteller doesn't let you go anywhere, then that's a problem.
Past that, it can be an extra burden on the storyteller to manage having a mounted combat guy alongside four non-mounted combatants.
Solar Ride
For Solars, Ride is about being the Ranger, the Far-Wanderer. The Traveled, Experienced one. They're the master mount-whisperer, the one who can ride any animal, in any condition.
Ride Charms
Master Horseman's Techniques
Ride 1, Essence 1
Now here's an interesting introductory Charm. Master Horseman's Techniques were, to my knowledge, a set of 1e charms that were compacted into a single entry. In 2nd Edition, you buy this charm, and gain a single Trick from the list. You could then buy more tricks for 1bp or 2xp.
As an Essence 1 Charm, the scope is very limited, essentially encapsulating a series of mortal competencies into a single package. The Charm itself is a Permanent upgrade to the Solar, creating non-charm actions and effects.
Harmony of Spirits Style allows the Solar to reflexively spend one mote, preventing themselves from falling off a mount (botches, being tackled, the animal bucking, etc). More interestingly, it lets you do this while inactive in ordinary travel, like when you're asleep.
Yes, Solars can stay in a saddle even when asleep.
Horse-Summoning Whistle lets them spend one mote to call a loyal mount to their side, as best as the mount can navigate the local terrain and circumstances. This is Wanderer calling Argo, for all your Colossus Chasing needs.
By the way, this doesn't state a range limit. Obviously it's not practical for most situations, but a clever Solar can think of a wonderful few instances where this would be wonderful.
Master Horseman's Eye - By spending oone mote, you can tell what a mount's strengths and weaknesses are. I doesn't really elaborate much, but I'm thinking it tells you stuff like mount's personality, it's relevant Traits and so on.
Speed-Sustaining Technique lets you spend one mote to essentially render the mount immune to exhaustion for 2 hours. It doesn't get tired, and it won't throw shoes or suffer from injured hooves.
Now I want you to imagine a strong, awesome horse running flat out for two hours. Repeatedly.
Spirit-Steadying Assurances, the last trick, lets you spend three motes to prevent a mount from panicking. Either as a precautionary measure, or in response to a scare.
Just, flat out stops the mount from panicking.
An interesting thing of note, is that none of these effects are committed, they're all spent- easily recouped by stunting.
Worthy Mount Technique
Ride 3, Essence 3
Amusingly, Solar Ride kicks up to Essence 3 and 4 very quickly. WMT is Ride 3, meaning that it's equivalent in skill to a Professional Horseman or rider of sorts.
This charm is a permanent upgrade to the Solar that essentially allows it to share and apply Reflexive charms to the mount as if it were themselves. Invoking a charm on a mount's behalf invokes a +1m surcharge however.
It does have a minor limitation- you're only allowed to invoke charms on a loyal animal you're currently riding. Loyal as in 'Has a such an intimacy towards the character', yes, animals can have intimacies. Haven't you ever had a dog? or a particularly needy cat?
Anyway, the charm goes onto specify that it doesn't give you additional charm-use per DV refresh, so it has to follow all the legal rules of Charm activation, but otherwise, it opens up quite a few options. Martial Arts Excellency to improve a tiger's clawswipe? Sure! Give your Clawstrider mount Graceful Crane Stance and let it run on wires? Nice!
So, this is an Essence 3 effect largely because it extends Outside the Solar in such a dramatic, metaphysical way. The last time we saw even a remotely similar effect, it was back in Lore with Power-Awarding Prana, also Essence 3. It is a 'modest miracle', though by no means as grand as Wyld Shaping Technique.
Still, it's fantastically useful.
Single Spirit Method
Ride 5, Essence 4
Alright, so we have an Essence 4 Charm. Should be pretty miraculous- and it is, in a very subtle way. Single Spirit Method builds upon the groundwork laid by Worthy Mount Technique. It allows the Solar to invoke Supplemental Charms to enhance the mount's actions, adding a 2 mote surcharge along the way. There's some other stipulations about how you can't use it, (simple charms/combos that contain simple charms) but they don't have much in the way of borgstromantic impact- they're mostly a design concession to keep actions clean.
Now, strictly speaking, mounts won't have weapons, they'll be using Martial Arts. Unarmed attacks are by default valid 'weapon statlines' for Martial Arts Charms. Any martial arts charm, unless otherwise stated. SSM itself calls out Thunderbolt Attack Prana, which is also a great charm to invoke as part of a grant sweeping stunt.
But let's dig a little deeper- if you say, fit a horse's hooves with an artifact, it's probably going to fall between Melee and Martial Arts. As long as it's a weapon, even an improvised one, Melee Charms are valid. You can't activate Simple Charms on behalf of your mount, but suddenly, an improvised hoofstrike is enhanced by Hungry Tiger Technique.
So what is this Charm trying to say about Solars? It's telling us that part of 'Solar Skill' is being able to invest and act through their mounts, that their connection to their noble steed is so close as to share the very shape and technique of their Exaltation, even in a limited fashion.
Phantom Steed
Ride 5, Essence 3
Hey, a Ride Charm that costs something! For 10m+1wp, you can create a glorious golden horse in six seconds. It even comes with a stat block detailed on page 236 of corebook! Aforementioned stats are rather impressive, but only somewhat relevant for the moment. The horse itself also lasts for 1 day. (The 10 motes are committed as well).
The important part is that you A: make a horse in 6 seconds, and that it's automatically Loyal to you (which means all the loyalty-tagged Charms in Ride work on it automatically). It is also a tireless mount that needs no sleep, rest, water or food. It has a control rating of 2. Now if you're Ride 5, you automatically pass the standard ride action… but if something forces you to make a ride roll, you do so at Difficulty 2.
Remember how I've gone on about Difficulty actually being pretty low overall, and it just gets inflated by accident? This is one of those places where it's pretty low. You make this roll harder, as a Storyteller, by leveling internal and external penalties where appropriate.
Now, as with many many charms, I'm going to hammer the borgstromantic statement home again- Solars can stand on their own. Don't have a horse? Make one!
More seriously, I think what needs to be stated, is that as much as Solars have the theme of 'always having the tools' or 'removing parameters', there is still this one undeniable fact: Infinite XP does not exist, and not every Solar is going to have a given Charm.
Instead, take these as thematic touchstones of what kinds of Charms Solars get, not as axiomatic statements that a Solar never has to make a tough choice about how to do something. Part of the point of Training Time is preventing the common answer of 'I learn a charm to solve the problem!'
Options exist, but players don't have access to all of them all the time. That lack of having an option is what creates stories, but so does having options.
Flashing Thunderbolt Steed
Ride 5, Essence 3
Starting after a Ride excellency, Flashing Thunderbolt Steed is a straightforward speed and endurance buff for your mount. As an Essence 3 effect, it confers several bonuses all with the intent of ensuring the action you want to take goes as smoothly as possible.
The action in this case, is run for days. The charm has a duration of One Day, just like Phantom Steed. By spending 5m+1wp, FTS essentially says the mount can run for flat out without suffering ill-effects. It gets 1 automatic success on rolls to keep its footing or successfully jump an obstacle.
It also lets the mount run [It's Stamina x10] miles per hour.
A standard riding horse has Stamina 4. That means it can run 40 miles per hour, and won't get tired. That's highway traffic speed, by the way. Phantom Steed and Simhata have Stamina 7. That's 70 miles per hour. Freeway speed anyone?
And what is the borgstromancy - This is the statement of Solar Skill that their mounts can get them where they want to go when, faster and better than the best mortal horseman in the land. The Solar is the best horseman in the land, and charms like these are what show it.
Of last note- unlike a bunch of other Charms, this one doesn't require the mount be loyal, or that they even own it. You could conceivably apply this to any animal you're riding, like that yeddim...
Wind-Racing Essence Infusion
Ride 5, Essence 4
Ahh here we have another Permanent Upgrade Charm, stacking on top of Flashing Thunderbolt Steed.
At the core, WREI is very simple, it lets a mount travel [It's Stamina + Solar's Essence] x10 miles per hour. At Essence 4, Phantom Steed clocks at 110mph. Then 120mph at Essence 5.
Thats crossing from one side of the United States to the other in almost 24 hours. You the rider would have to stop more often than the horse does. And if you recall Master Horseman's Technique essentially let you sleep in the saddle without falling off…
Sometimes Horses Fly Approach
Ride 5, Essence 4
The capstone of Solar Ride is, in it's elegant simplicity, a nice one.
For 5m+1wp, this Simple Charm lets you touch a mount and give it the ability to fly and wilingness to do so. It can run on water, clouds, the air itself and so on with just a Move or Dash Action, as per normal motion. It goes on to specify that it can trade 2 yards of horizontal movement rate for 1 yard vertical ascent. (It doesn't say anything about going down however…)
The last thing of note before I close out Solar Ride is that this charm's cost is reduced to 5 motes (no willpower) when used on the Phantom Steed or something summoned by a similar Charm.
Ride in Closing
Ride has a problem,and that problem is invariably, only one person is going to have it unless the Storyteller has gone out of their way to make a point of encouraging it before the game started.
This isn't as much a problem as an underutilized opportunity. As I mentioned earlier, part of the travel abilities of Exalted are meant to emphasize how imperfect they are. That one person might be the best rider in all the thousand miles, but there's only one of him and now how can the circle of Solars race to the rescue?
Questions like these are what create memorable, dramatic moments, as well as teeth-gnashing, hair-pulling frustration, and that all comes down to delivery. This concept has nothing to do with Ride or Sail, though they're really big places where it comes up a lot.
Any obstacle in a tabletop roleplaying game is going to be met with a few possible reactions, and the two important ones for Exalted are the following:
"Why do we have to do this obnoxious bullshit?"
- and -
"I don't know how to solve this problem/you're screwing us over!"
In the former case, that's a question of game tone and player expectations. If the players are expecting 'the narrative' to move them through the world, suddenly declaring they must contend with Travel Times, Obstacles and so on, can be jarring.
What's important to remember, is that pulling the rug out from under the players is a bad move at the tone level. If the Storyteller has a group and game full of goofy high flying robot-punching action, it's probably not a good idea to over-emphasize the maintenance rules.
However, if the Storyteller goes out of their way to emphasize the impact of travel, of these limitations without necessarily assigning weight to them immediately, then when it does come up, it is organic and understandable.
As an example, let's say a circle of Solars is running a mercenary company that doesn't have a home base. They travel from town to town taking jobs, and the Storyteller figures that it takes them a few weeks between stops. These weeks aren't played out, but they are acknowledged as happening.
Suddenly, a war breaks out! Now the players and their dependents need to think 'how do I get from Here to There'? The times they were using for 'idyllic' travel no longer apply. This is a challenge, but it's an understandable one.
The second outcry, of "The problem is opaque" is more difficult to judge. It boils down to how much buy-in the players have with the game and setting, and how much they follow the Storyteller- not in a rail-roading sense, but in a shared grasp of game tone.
As mentioned before, the single guy with Ride, he becomes the bottleneck of fast travel. He can get himself and possibly one other person from wherever they are to somewhere else very quickly, but that leaves the other players in the lurch.
This is intentional at a design level, but can be implemented poorly.
The trick is, Storytellers are hoped to capture that feeling of frustration, and channel it from 'these rules or settings are dumb' and more into the 'sudden upset and lack of equilibrium'. The players suddenly don't have an ideal situation, a neutral position in which to manage every single decision. They're put on the spot, and have to make a tough call.
The point of putting down limitations on players, be they Solar or Dragonblooded or even Mortal, is to get them to make decisions. In ideal situations, players don't make decisions, they execute preset programs. We as players, as humans are very good at that. I hesitate to declare this 'fun', but tension comes from the sudden and jarring loss of that clarity, of that sense of I cannot just run this through autopilot.
This is probably one of the most difficult things any game-runner can ever learn or understand.
But first, let's talk about Travel, Mounted Combat, and how freaking big Creation is.
Ride, the Ability
Ride, at the core, is the ability that governs manipulation and specialist training for mounts such as horses, simhata, yeddim and whatever else that could be conceivably ridden in Creation. Yes, you can in fact ride a dinosaur. Yes, I do in fact recommend it.
Ride is different from Survival in that the former is focused on managing a mount, while the latter is essentially the 'Everything Else' of animal care.
Now, not to focus too much on it, but ride also governs the control for certain personal vehicles that were later detailed in Wonders of the Lost Age. For good or ill, there are no Charms that affect ridden Vehicles.
Narratively, Ride covers the tropes and concepts of the messenger, emissary, traveler and nomad. It's wrong to say that Ride is westerns, but it does hit certain notes.
Mounted Combat
For those of you who remember my movement essay, you might recall that i mentioned Unstable Footing is a mechanical clone of Mounted Combat! Because that's still true now, I'm not going to go into as in depth review of the mechanics, but instead hit some high notes. These are detailed more fully on page 154 of Exalted 2nd Edition Core.
First, your attack and defense pools are throttled by your character's Ride score. If you are Ride 3, Dodge 5, you calculate your DDV as [Dexterity+Ride+Essence]/2. Your Melee is capped at 3, and so on.
Second, mounts have a Control Rating. If your Ride Rating is less than the CR, you must flurry a misc action to keep control of your mount in addition to other actions. The difficulty of this roll is equal to the Control Rating.
A trained warhorse has a CR of 2, so you need Ride 2 in order to act freely. A Wild, unbroken horse has a CR of 4, so if you have Ride 4, you can just hop on and ride it without issue.
If your Ride meets or exceeds the mounts's CR, you may control your mount as a reflexive action.
Lastly, a mounted character enjoys +1 DV against any melee attacker on the ground, who doesn't have the Reach Tag or other means of easily striking them.
Travel - or - Creation is Really, Really Big
Ride (and Sail) exist as an ability, because Exalted as a setting needs travel mechanics. It is that big, and travel is that important, that rules exist to arbitrate it. They're fairly soft rules, serving more as guidelines, but like with a lot of things in Exalted, these rules try to model important aspects of the setting.
I want you to take a look outside for a second (assuming it's light out), or maybe Google Maps and streetview for a bit. You're gonna see roads, lots with houses, maybe apartment buildings or something. Everything is really dense.
Creation is not dense. Creation is wiiiiiiiiiide.
If you look at a map of Creation, you'll see dots marking out big cities- these are the cities that have survived for hundreds of years, and are so important that people across the world have heard of them.
Most of those cities are tiny.
Rathess (pretty much the oldest city in Creation), according to one map floating around the internet/books, is about six miles wide. Whitewall? Not much bigger. Amusingly both of these cities are circular.
Now, one thing I want to stress is that even modern cities aren't that big. Portland, Oregon, north of where I live, is maybe 6 miles across at the widest point? It is however, intensely urban and very, very dense. We all know Manhattan Island is teeny-tiny, for the amount of people crammed into it.
Anyway- the big, noteworthy Creation cities- they're all quite small and nowhere near as dense as modern cities. They don't look like our cities. Even the really established ones like the Imperial City look nothing like a modern urban center.
So, we accept that cities are tiny. The other thing we have to remember is that Creation is by and large populated by kingdoms and city-states. They have vast tracts of outlying farmlands, managed by minor lords, nobles, whatever system is in place because again, Creation is huge.
It's not empty either. Nexus is the 'city', sure, but the further out you go from Nexus, you find trading towns. You find docks along the river. Watering holes and inns. Communities. Creation is full of things that aren't on the map- and those wide open spaces are meant to be influenced by the big cities- and more importantly influenced by your characters.
Next important thing: Most people in Creation- the mortals, even the terrestrial gods who work in their domains, don't range very far from their place. Mortals in Creation often die within 10 miles of where they were born, having maybe seen one or two villages away from them. Travel is hard.
Mind you, exceptions exist to emphasize this. Traders have made thousand-mile journeys in the real world, and they've done so in Creation. Armies march to war, and there's however many woodsmen and the like who just go out and do stuff in the spaces between developed areas.
Let's take a second to determine how hard travel is. There's a section dedicated to it, and a chart for it in corebook, in the storytelling chapter- pages 263-264.
Walking? It says the average person (including your heroic player characters) can walk 3 miles a day, or 250 miles monthly. There are people who have walked across the United States, with routes averaging around 3300 miles. By Exalted rates, that journey would take 12 months.
Horses aren't much better, 6 miles per day, 500 per month, but still they will get you where you want to go.
The travel chart goes into a lot more permutations and such than I feel necessary for this essay, but the point I'm trying to make is this: Travel is a Big Deal, it takes time.
Using Travel as a Storyteller
It's tough, for one, to get players used to the idea that something they might want is further away than a scene break. But that's a misleading statement.
See, you don't have to roleplay out travel, but it is something that should be accounted for regardless. People grow up, are born, and die in the time it takes to travel across the world, and it's no different for your players.
So when contending with Travel, it pays to acknowledge a few things.
- It's meant to give you room to do things.
I mean that you can flesh out the route, show interesting things, create an adventure out of the trip itself- this is the most play-intensive options, but it's not mandatory nor unwelcome when done right. - Travel helps pace out the game.
Exalted is a story of Big Movers and Big Actions. It doesn't have Action Movie pacing, where the whole crisis is condensed into a handful of days and in turn condensed into 2.5 hours of screentime.
There are characters with plans that require centuries to come to fruition. To that end, the greater movers and shakers do not cackle madly in their lairs. Instead, these are political actors, masters of science and statecraft who make sweeping declarations that take time to enact, and further time to fully resolve. - Travel creates a narrative need when you can't simply teleport across the world.
Without access to a supernaturally fast horse or a willing sorcerer, players are forced to look for other, less favorable options. Like making a poorly-planned bargain with a river spirit, or taking a shortcut through the Labyrinth which could take months off the journey and their lifespans if they aren't lucky.
(This is also the same reason there aren't many good "group travel" options, barring Sail or Sorcery, because the idea is that the guy on horseback is charging out in front to keep tabs on the situation as it develops, while the rest of the party either prepares as they can, or waits for him to ferry them all up to where they need to be, splitting their forces in a dramatically-necessary fashion.) - It gives your players a chance to shine
You know why there's travel magic in the game? It exists to let exceptional people do things exceptionally fast. They may not always want to use it, but having it is intensely useful.
If a player knows Stormwind Rider, suddenly they can cover huge distances whenever they want. That's really important- because there aren't that many fast travel options.
Like, as an example, you know ambulances, or medivacs? Those don't exist in Creation. If someone gets hurt, it's up to local healers to save them… Unless you know a Sorcerer or similar. Then you might get a doctor in days instead of seasons.
Like with a lot of Exalted, the game pins so much hope on you being willing to think outside your assumptions- to draw on numerous resources both in the books and outside of them.
Of specific note, that the book points out, is that armies must march everywhere. They have huge supply chains, and can on average move 25-30 miles a day before magical aide.
For those not keeping track at home, I want to call that slow as molasses in January.
Armies, big, kingdom-conquering blocks of men and material are hard to move en-masse across the world. It's expensive, risky and honestly doesn't work that often unless you have magic helping you out. Armies don't show up on your doorstep undetected.
The Problem of Ride
There's not much reason to get Ride dots or Charms in most games of Exalted, simply because most games are run with an eye towards scene-to-scene gameplay with very specific venues, obstacles and setpieces. Most of which don't actually cater well to ride-themed characters.
Essentially, if you don't have anywhere to go, there's no reason to take Ride. If the Storyteller doesn't let you go anywhere, then that's a problem.
Past that, it can be an extra burden on the storyteller to manage having a mounted combat guy alongside four non-mounted combatants.
Solar Ride
For Solars, Ride is about being the Ranger, the Far-Wanderer. The Traveled, Experienced one. They're the master mount-whisperer, the one who can ride any animal, in any condition.
Ride Charms
Master Horseman's Techniques
Ride 1, Essence 1
Now here's an interesting introductory Charm. Master Horseman's Techniques were, to my knowledge, a set of 1e charms that were compacted into a single entry. In 2nd Edition, you buy this charm, and gain a single Trick from the list. You could then buy more tricks for 1bp or 2xp.
As an Essence 1 Charm, the scope is very limited, essentially encapsulating a series of mortal competencies into a single package. The Charm itself is a Permanent upgrade to the Solar, creating non-charm actions and effects.
Harmony of Spirits Style allows the Solar to reflexively spend one mote, preventing themselves from falling off a mount (botches, being tackled, the animal bucking, etc). More interestingly, it lets you do this while inactive in ordinary travel, like when you're asleep.
Yes, Solars can stay in a saddle even when asleep.
Horse-Summoning Whistle lets them spend one mote to call a loyal mount to their side, as best as the mount can navigate the local terrain and circumstances. This is Wanderer calling Argo, for all your Colossus Chasing needs.
By the way, this doesn't state a range limit. Obviously it's not practical for most situations, but a clever Solar can think of a wonderful few instances where this would be wonderful.
Master Horseman's Eye - By spending oone mote, you can tell what a mount's strengths and weaknesses are. I doesn't really elaborate much, but I'm thinking it tells you stuff like mount's personality, it's relevant Traits and so on.
Speed-Sustaining Technique lets you spend one mote to essentially render the mount immune to exhaustion for 2 hours. It doesn't get tired, and it won't throw shoes or suffer from injured hooves.
Now I want you to imagine a strong, awesome horse running flat out for two hours. Repeatedly.
Spirit-Steadying Assurances, the last trick, lets you spend three motes to prevent a mount from panicking. Either as a precautionary measure, or in response to a scare.
Just, flat out stops the mount from panicking.
An interesting thing of note, is that none of these effects are committed, they're all spent- easily recouped by stunting.
Worthy Mount Technique
Ride 3, Essence 3
Amusingly, Solar Ride kicks up to Essence 3 and 4 very quickly. WMT is Ride 3, meaning that it's equivalent in skill to a Professional Horseman or rider of sorts.
This charm is a permanent upgrade to the Solar that essentially allows it to share and apply Reflexive charms to the mount as if it were themselves. Invoking a charm on a mount's behalf invokes a +1m surcharge however.
It does have a minor limitation- you're only allowed to invoke charms on a loyal animal you're currently riding. Loyal as in 'Has a such an intimacy towards the character', yes, animals can have intimacies. Haven't you ever had a dog? or a particularly needy cat?
Anyway, the charm goes onto specify that it doesn't give you additional charm-use per DV refresh, so it has to follow all the legal rules of Charm activation, but otherwise, it opens up quite a few options. Martial Arts Excellency to improve a tiger's clawswipe? Sure! Give your Clawstrider mount Graceful Crane Stance and let it run on wires? Nice!
So, this is an Essence 3 effect largely because it extends Outside the Solar in such a dramatic, metaphysical way. The last time we saw even a remotely similar effect, it was back in Lore with Power-Awarding Prana, also Essence 3. It is a 'modest miracle', though by no means as grand as Wyld Shaping Technique.
Still, it's fantastically useful.
Single Spirit Method
Ride 5, Essence 4
Alright, so we have an Essence 4 Charm. Should be pretty miraculous- and it is, in a very subtle way. Single Spirit Method builds upon the groundwork laid by Worthy Mount Technique. It allows the Solar to invoke Supplemental Charms to enhance the mount's actions, adding a 2 mote surcharge along the way. There's some other stipulations about how you can't use it, (simple charms/combos that contain simple charms) but they don't have much in the way of borgstromantic impact- they're mostly a design concession to keep actions clean.
Now, strictly speaking, mounts won't have weapons, they'll be using Martial Arts. Unarmed attacks are by default valid 'weapon statlines' for Martial Arts Charms. Any martial arts charm, unless otherwise stated. SSM itself calls out Thunderbolt Attack Prana, which is also a great charm to invoke as part of a grant sweeping stunt.
But let's dig a little deeper- if you say, fit a horse's hooves with an artifact, it's probably going to fall between Melee and Martial Arts. As long as it's a weapon, even an improvised one, Melee Charms are valid. You can't activate Simple Charms on behalf of your mount, but suddenly, an improvised hoofstrike is enhanced by Hungry Tiger Technique.
So what is this Charm trying to say about Solars? It's telling us that part of 'Solar Skill' is being able to invest and act through their mounts, that their connection to their noble steed is so close as to share the very shape and technique of their Exaltation, even in a limited fashion.
Phantom Steed
Ride 5, Essence 3
Hey, a Ride Charm that costs something! For 10m+1wp, you can create a glorious golden horse in six seconds. It even comes with a stat block detailed on page 236 of corebook! Aforementioned stats are rather impressive, but only somewhat relevant for the moment. The horse itself also lasts for 1 day. (The 10 motes are committed as well).
The important part is that you A: make a horse in 6 seconds, and that it's automatically Loyal to you (which means all the loyalty-tagged Charms in Ride work on it automatically). It is also a tireless mount that needs no sleep, rest, water or food. It has a control rating of 2. Now if you're Ride 5, you automatically pass the standard ride action… but if something forces you to make a ride roll, you do so at Difficulty 2.
Remember how I've gone on about Difficulty actually being pretty low overall, and it just gets inflated by accident? This is one of those places where it's pretty low. You make this roll harder, as a Storyteller, by leveling internal and external penalties where appropriate.
Now, as with many many charms, I'm going to hammer the borgstromantic statement home again- Solars can stand on their own. Don't have a horse? Make one!
More seriously, I think what needs to be stated, is that as much as Solars have the theme of 'always having the tools' or 'removing parameters', there is still this one undeniable fact: Infinite XP does not exist, and not every Solar is going to have a given Charm.
Instead, take these as thematic touchstones of what kinds of Charms Solars get, not as axiomatic statements that a Solar never has to make a tough choice about how to do something. Part of the point of Training Time is preventing the common answer of 'I learn a charm to solve the problem!'
Options exist, but players don't have access to all of them all the time. That lack of having an option is what creates stories, but so does having options.
Flashing Thunderbolt Steed
Ride 5, Essence 3
Starting after a Ride excellency, Flashing Thunderbolt Steed is a straightforward speed and endurance buff for your mount. As an Essence 3 effect, it confers several bonuses all with the intent of ensuring the action you want to take goes as smoothly as possible.
The action in this case, is run for days. The charm has a duration of One Day, just like Phantom Steed. By spending 5m+1wp, FTS essentially says the mount can run for flat out without suffering ill-effects. It gets 1 automatic success on rolls to keep its footing or successfully jump an obstacle.
It also lets the mount run [It's Stamina x10] miles per hour.
A standard riding horse has Stamina 4. That means it can run 40 miles per hour, and won't get tired. That's highway traffic speed, by the way. Phantom Steed and Simhata have Stamina 7. That's 70 miles per hour. Freeway speed anyone?
And what is the borgstromancy - This is the statement of Solar Skill that their mounts can get them where they want to go when, faster and better than the best mortal horseman in the land. The Solar is the best horseman in the land, and charms like these are what show it.
Of last note- unlike a bunch of other Charms, this one doesn't require the mount be loyal, or that they even own it. You could conceivably apply this to any animal you're riding, like that yeddim...
Wind-Racing Essence Infusion
Ride 5, Essence 4
Ahh here we have another Permanent Upgrade Charm, stacking on top of Flashing Thunderbolt Steed.
At the core, WREI is very simple, it lets a mount travel [It's Stamina + Solar's Essence] x10 miles per hour. At Essence 4, Phantom Steed clocks at 110mph. Then 120mph at Essence 5.
Thats crossing from one side of the United States to the other in almost 24 hours. You the rider would have to stop more often than the horse does. And if you recall Master Horseman's Technique essentially let you sleep in the saddle without falling off…
Sometimes Horses Fly Approach
Ride 5, Essence 4
The capstone of Solar Ride is, in it's elegant simplicity, a nice one.
For 5m+1wp, this Simple Charm lets you touch a mount and give it the ability to fly and wilingness to do so. It can run on water, clouds, the air itself and so on with just a Move or Dash Action, as per normal motion. It goes on to specify that it can trade 2 yards of horizontal movement rate for 1 yard vertical ascent. (It doesn't say anything about going down however…)
The last thing of note before I close out Solar Ride is that this charm's cost is reduced to 5 motes (no willpower) when used on the Phantom Steed or something summoned by a similar Charm.
Ride in Closing
Ride has a problem,and that problem is invariably, only one person is going to have it unless the Storyteller has gone out of their way to make a point of encouraging it before the game started.
This isn't as much a problem as an underutilized opportunity. As I mentioned earlier, part of the travel abilities of Exalted are meant to emphasize how imperfect they are. That one person might be the best rider in all the thousand miles, but there's only one of him and now how can the circle of Solars race to the rescue?
Questions like these are what create memorable, dramatic moments, as well as teeth-gnashing, hair-pulling frustration, and that all comes down to delivery. This concept has nothing to do with Ride or Sail, though they're really big places where it comes up a lot.
Any obstacle in a tabletop roleplaying game is going to be met with a few possible reactions, and the two important ones for Exalted are the following:
"Why do we have to do this obnoxious bullshit?"
- and -
"I don't know how to solve this problem/you're screwing us over!"
In the former case, that's a question of game tone and player expectations. If the players are expecting 'the narrative' to move them through the world, suddenly declaring they must contend with Travel Times, Obstacles and so on, can be jarring.
What's important to remember, is that pulling the rug out from under the players is a bad move at the tone level. If the Storyteller has a group and game full of goofy high flying robot-punching action, it's probably not a good idea to over-emphasize the maintenance rules.
However, if the Storyteller goes out of their way to emphasize the impact of travel, of these limitations without necessarily assigning weight to them immediately, then when it does come up, it is organic and understandable.
As an example, let's say a circle of Solars is running a mercenary company that doesn't have a home base. They travel from town to town taking jobs, and the Storyteller figures that it takes them a few weeks between stops. These weeks aren't played out, but they are acknowledged as happening.
Suddenly, a war breaks out! Now the players and their dependents need to think 'how do I get from Here to There'? The times they were using for 'idyllic' travel no longer apply. This is a challenge, but it's an understandable one.
The second outcry, of "The problem is opaque" is more difficult to judge. It boils down to how much buy-in the players have with the game and setting, and how much they follow the Storyteller- not in a rail-roading sense, but in a shared grasp of game tone.
As mentioned before, the single guy with Ride, he becomes the bottleneck of fast travel. He can get himself and possibly one other person from wherever they are to somewhere else very quickly, but that leaves the other players in the lurch.
This is intentional at a design level, but can be implemented poorly.
The trick is, Storytellers are hoped to capture that feeling of frustration, and channel it from 'these rules or settings are dumb' and more into the 'sudden upset and lack of equilibrium'. The players suddenly don't have an ideal situation, a neutral position in which to manage every single decision. They're put on the spot, and have to make a tough call.
The point of putting down limitations on players, be they Solar or Dragonblooded or even Mortal, is to get them to make decisions. In ideal situations, players don't make decisions, they execute preset programs. We as players, as humans are very good at that. I hesitate to declare this 'fun', but tension comes from the sudden and jarring loss of that clarity, of that sense of I cannot just run this through autopilot.
This is probably one of the most difficult things any game-runner can ever learn or understand.
azoicennead
Overly-Affectionate Zombie Squad
- Pronouns
- He/They
Minor correction: walking is 3 miles per hour, and horses are 6 miles per hour. The per day times are 15 and 30 miles, respectively.
Not going to mention yeddim (110 mph) or tyrant lizards (120 mph) becoming sports cars?
Dynamesmouse
Bzzzzzz
You forgot to mention that "Sometimes Horses Fly" doesn't have the Obvious tag, and that was never errata'd away.
Giygas
Cutest Sawk i could find. Lucario is a nice extra.
Well, it isn't obvious because the source of the power isn't(Except if the Solar start using Peripheral motes to fuel the charm, but everything is obvious if a Solar uses Peripheral motes). Maybe it is a spirit horse, maybe an artifact that looks like an horse, who knows?
Maybe it is even a Discordian who became an Horse!(Discordian can totaly become horses; they can even fuse with horses!)
So, Aleph. I don't know if it was a typo or an actual mistake made during the game, but I spotted some failed addition in one of your rolls. When you rolled a sixteen die pool on a social attack against Sasi, and only got six successes? The numbers you put first add up to 18, not 16. This is two days late, and obviously a minor detail, but it jumped out at me.
Aleph
Princess of Stabbity
- Location
- The sixth circle of Hell (second on weekends)
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Ah, that's probably a roll where I forgot to add the stunt in the first calculation, added and rolled the extra two dice immediately thereafter, and then edited the extra bits into the first set of brackets to reduce the amount of OOC discussion. Not the first time I've done that; I have a habit of forgetting to add stunt dice. I presumably added the "+2 stunt" bit into the list of contributors but forgot to update the "=16" part. Which was kind of dumb of me, because I know I did update the number of successes; it was just 5 without the stunt.
Quite a lot of that sort of cleaning up goes into the public log; the raws are a lot messier and have more discussion and comments and corrections in them.
Edit: Yeah, the raw log for that bit:
((... heh. Actually, it's sort of easy to forget sometimes that Sasi isn't the only one who can wield her beauty like a hammer. Let's see how well Keris does on a roll to remind her that two can play at that game - or rather, that Keris loves her dearly and does so much for her and asks only for Sasi's love and affection in return.
3+5+3 Cerulean Paramour+1 bonus {targets who believe you to be sincere}+4 Kimmy ExD {charm, endlessly giving, demands payment}=16. Bah, only 5 sux, probably not enough to penetrate her MDV. Heh. Though still an amusing nudge.))
((Oh wait, forgot stunt. 2 more dice; 1 extra sux.))
((... sigh. Keris, you have an MDV of, like... 2, against Sasi, because of that 4-dot Principle. If that.))
3+5+3 Cerulean Paramour+1 bonus {targets who believe you to be sincere}+4 Kimmy ExD {charm, endlessly giving, demands payment}=16. Bah, only 5 sux, probably not enough to penetrate her MDV. Heh. Though still an amusing nudge.))
((Oh wait, forgot stunt. 2 more dice; 1 extra sux.))
((... sigh. Keris, you have an MDV of, like... 2, against Sasi, because of that 4-dot Principle. If that.))
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At this point I'm wondering how useful that charm would be for a sorcerrer who summons and rides Agaeta
greensun
You shall all burn beneath my light!!!
If your flying around on the back of a demon, and a lot people know what demon is because DBs like using Sorcery just as much as the Celestials, you've bigger problems. Like the Aang cosplayer who is trying to cave your skull in with a staff made out of Blue-Jade.