Aaron Peori
Rest in Peace
Stop making me sob harder, dammit, that's the opposite of what you're meant to be doing.
Like, literally the opposite. You're terrible at this.
Your first mistake was going to Earthscorpion for mercy.
General Exalted Thread
Your first mistake was going to Earthscorpion for mercy.
vicky_molokh
Posthuman spidery thingy.
- Location
- Kyïv, Ukraine
Huh, four dots in 3e? I just bought mine on the high market of Nexus (or was it Forks? probably Nexus). After all, spiders do export these, and it ends up being something like Resources 4 due to being a minor, mass-produced artifact. In 2½e, that is.
Aleph
Princess of Stabbity
- Location
- The sixth circle of Hell (second on weekends)
- Pronouns
- She/Her
... no, sorry, let me rephrase there. Every E6+ Charm that has been written is terrible. I'm not saying that anything beyond 5 is automatically bad, just that every attempt so far to write one that isn't has failed.
Planned and arranged by her, yes, but she was a Zenith. She made it happen by convincing other people to help her. It was a massive infrastructural project; following on from the fact that yes, infrastructure is important and lets you do things you otherwise can't. And the Salinan Working took the Sorcerous infrastructure of the height of the High First Age to pull off.
Given that quote was after said errata and was essentially a 'we were wrong on this', I'm not sure what exactly you're complaining about, but oh well. Back to the actual topic-
2.5 was a patchwork. This does not make it perfect, and as I said- the devs later said that Essence 6-10 isn't really workable (at least, not in the form it took in 2e).
Salina was the primary mover behind the Working, yes, but she was not the only Sorcerer who undertook the Working- the books are a bit hazy on how much of the actual work she did IIRC, but it's fairly clear to me that she did not do so alone. In fact, Dreams dedicated a bit of space to explaining how Salina had to do a lot of politicking to get the Working approved, which presumably included assistance from other Sorcerers.
Aaron Peori
Rest in Peace
This is basically a problem with the core game not having a high enough scope.
Essence 6+ Charms should not really be different in kind than Essence 1~5, but only in scope. They should emphasize you moving from individual heroism to being the source of power for entire civilizations. Make effects bigger not better.
So less "I hit for 52 dice of damage" and more "I hit the enemy city in the infrastructure. Say goodbye to your granaries."
- Location
- Gladstone, OR
Repeating this for emphasis- those of you who followed my Solar Charm Essays can usually see that the combat game ends at Essence 3-4 with a handful of exceptions in charms- but there wasn't a lot of work put into developing high-essence charms and their design space.
Basically, there is only So Much Killy you can get- so on paper, Combat charms need to diverge into different expressions of [Ability], not just killing power and dice.
Because it's not like it was some profound realisation which meant the charms had to be released and see actual play before people realised they were a terrible idea. People were telling them that Shinmaic Calibration was a terrible idea literally on the day of release. The fact that a Charm this terrible was released as part of errata indicates systematic problems in the errata-writing process.
Which is a really, really bad place for systematic problems.
Aaron Peori
Rest in Peace
Not necessarily esoteric but more expanded in scope to superhuman levels. Like, I meant it when I said a Essence 6+ melee charm should be able to basically destroy infrastructure. The key would be to make it clear that in small unit combat (ie, typical Circle vs Circle confrontations) the metagame doesn't really change. But just expand that metagame out; a melee 7 character should be carving rivers, smashing down castles and so on.
Similar expansions should apply to other Abilities. Bureaucracy 6+ should not be fundamentally different than the previous five, but instead be more universally applicable. For example, you could have a Bureaucracy 7 Charm that allows you to designate someone as a Proxy in any organization that has loyalty to you. This Proxy would do stuff like allow you to maintain the effects of Bureaucracy Charms on the organization as long as the Proxy was still able to make decisions on your behalf even if you did something like go half way across Creation to participate in a behemoth hunt. This dramatically expands the scope of your options (ie, you can set up multiple Proxies to expand you reach) but not the type of your options (ie, you can only drop your standard Bureaucracy loadout on them, you don't get "Even Faster Wheels"). It also maintains a point of failure, since it means that your Proxy could be assassinated or subverted or bypassed in some way requiring you to check in on them occasionally to make certain things are running efficiently.
This is how I figure the High First Age managed to do all its insane stuff. It wasn't that Twilights had Craftsman Needs No Tools Super Haxx Ultimate Edition, its that Twilights could invest factory cathedrals with Enlightened Supply Chain Efficiency Prana which granted the benefits of the Charm to anyone in the workshop. High enough Essence Twilights could indoctrinate armies of mortals and put them into specially blessed factories and have them churning out mass produced artifacts. But the entire thing was predicated on the Solars being around to maintain mote commitments to all this stuff and periodically checking in to make certain somebody wasn't using the factory to build Solar killing power armor (hint; Twilights got lazy) and then when the Solars were all dead and the Lunars withdrawn the Dragonblooded literally did not have the magic to maintain the enchantments which sustained the High First Age.
And this applied to everything, from manufacturing, to medical care, to education, to trade, to art and communication and travel and on and on.
The idea is to make it clear that the higher Essence the Solar gets the more they become a lynchpin to an entire civilization. Less a Load Bearing Boss and more a Civilization Bearing Boss. You assassinate the queen of a Solar controlled nation and all her good works begin to fail and fall apart.
FaeGlade Plural
Semper Legens
- Location
- Land of Bureaucracy
- Pronouns
- Plural/They
Hey, in 3E, your world-changing magical working (in 2.5E, Protoshinmaic Calibration) now really IS a sorcerous working. Which is actually one of my favorite things about that edition (as well as Sorcerous Workings in general).
- Location
- Gladstone, OR
On the note of Infrasturcture, I don't think people (Players and Storytellers) really understand what it is or how to show it off.
like, to most people, a castle is an awesome setpiece, but it's also several years if not decades of time and money spent on constructing it. It is likely a strategically significant location or otherwise valuable. It has a stabilizing influence on the region.
You don't necessarily need dots and dice to mechanize this, but it's can be really important to your games.
So to take @Aaron Peori 's Essence 6-7 Castle example- if you are knocking down Castles, then people should start reacting to you treating Castles as a meaningful, surmountable strategic objective.
Not sure where I'm going with this, but I hope it's useful.
like, to most people, a castle is an awesome setpiece, but it's also several years if not decades of time and money spent on constructing it. It is likely a strategically significant location or otherwise valuable. It has a stabilizing influence on the region.
You don't necessarily need dots and dice to mechanize this, but it's can be really important to your games.
So to take @Aaron Peori 's Essence 6-7 Castle example- if you are knocking down Castles, then people should start reacting to you treating Castles as a meaningful, surmountable strategic objective.
Not sure where I'm going with this, but I hope it's useful.
So the very first session of Pirates of An Teng launched a new Dragonblood campaign.
Two young Dragonbloods set out to make their mark on Creation (and hopefully bag enough loot to gain status in their respective Houses)
Two young Dragonbloods set out to make their mark on Creation (and hopefully bag enough loot to gain status in their respective Houses)
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- Location
- Gladstone, OR
All this talk got me thinking. (Tremble puny mortals.)
==== This is a Rough Draft ====
War in Creation is a surprisingly intimate affair. The enemy is usually somewhere one can see them. An army of several hundred fighters is cause for great concern, and a vast legion of five thousand is the stuff of histories and old war stories- until a Dynast or Solar raise such a force for their own ends.
Most battles are fought across battlefields less than a hundred miles in any direction, and more likely are anywhere from one to ten square miles. That doesn't sound like a lot, but most battlefields are just that- open fields, unworked land, country roads, or farmming communities. Dense urban combat and sacking of cities the culmination of a long campaign.
A battle itself is a swirling melee, either with disorganized hordes of conscripts, or carefully drilled professional soldiers. Scores of men clash in close combat or pelt each other from hundreds of yards away with longbows or other weapons. Mounted Calvary is expensive to raise and hard to control, so it is a rare luxury in to most Second Age Generals.
To put it bluntly, War in Creation has more in common with the feudal wars of China and Japan, or the battle of Thermoplyae. Small clusters of warriors fighting for the best position to engage their enemy. The opening sequence of Ridley Scott's Gladiator I feel is indicative of war in Creation- men in ranks with siege engines, archers and skirmishers.
In a more concrete sense, the magic of the Exalted is focused on battles that extend from a mere 1 mile to around a hundred, not several-thousand mile, sprawling multi-theater campaigns. This isn't to say such magic can't exist, but that at Essence 1-5, it doesn't yet.
========
What to people fight over?
Lots of things, but by and large, they fight over things that are valuable to them. I'm not worried about Ideology- though that's very important to warfare. Right now, I'm trying to describe the basic logic of the general or military advisor, not the cultural or ideological forces behind a campaign.
Individual battles are much the same- you fight for something that's valuable, that advances your goals or makes it so your opponents can't advance their goals.
In Creation, the most valauble things are similar to that on Earth: sources of Resources, trade and travel hubs, or defensible locations.
A place where three roads or rivers meet is inherently valuable. People are going to fight over that as a strategic objective. Whoever controls it can levy taxes or embargo goods. The lack of control can lead to free market, and a whole host of other things. In the South, a fresh-water spring is valuable, and will be hotly contested. In the north, arable land or a valuable cache of mineral wealth.
These are WHY you fight, but they aren't necessarily WHERE you fight.
All things being equal, all forces in a military engagement are going to try to pick the best ground to fight on, and avoid the worst ground. The nature of your forces in turn expand or shrink what counts as 'best ground'.
Rule 1: Soldiers don't go places where there's no point in fighting.
A flat even plain of grass is pretty much neutral, offering no major advatages or disadvantages. A hill in this grassland becomes an immediate tactical and strategic advantage- they create high ground that has penalties and bonuses which mechanically impact attackers and defenders.
Narrow passes and other chokepoints are of great importance- but they are only important if they are useful. An impassible mountain range will force an army to spend months marching around it. A garrison in a valley surrounded by flat plains is pointless, unless something in that valley is useful (See Rule 1), they won't bother.
Sometimes your Objective and your Battlefield overlap. Most often times, they don't. Battles over cities aren't usually IN cities. They're placed wherever the invading army shows up and the defending army intercepts them. Storytellers are put into the position of developing these locations and defining why they're important, useful or tactically meaningful.
Terrain in a given range can vary greatly, and in Creation, armies can cover quite a lot of ground over several actions.
I just wanted to post what I had and such.
==== This is a Rough Draft ====
War in Creation is a surprisingly intimate affair. The enemy is usually somewhere one can see them. An army of several hundred fighters is cause for great concern, and a vast legion of five thousand is the stuff of histories and old war stories- until a Dynast or Solar raise such a force for their own ends.
Most battles are fought across battlefields less than a hundred miles in any direction, and more likely are anywhere from one to ten square miles. That doesn't sound like a lot, but most battlefields are just that- open fields, unworked land, country roads, or farmming communities. Dense urban combat and sacking of cities the culmination of a long campaign.
A battle itself is a swirling melee, either with disorganized hordes of conscripts, or carefully drilled professional soldiers. Scores of men clash in close combat or pelt each other from hundreds of yards away with longbows or other weapons. Mounted Calvary is expensive to raise and hard to control, so it is a rare luxury in to most Second Age Generals.
To put it bluntly, War in Creation has more in common with the feudal wars of China and Japan, or the battle of Thermoplyae. Small clusters of warriors fighting for the best position to engage their enemy. The opening sequence of Ridley Scott's Gladiator I feel is indicative of war in Creation- men in ranks with siege engines, archers and skirmishers.
In a more concrete sense, the magic of the Exalted is focused on battles that extend from a mere 1 mile to around a hundred, not several-thousand mile, sprawling multi-theater campaigns. This isn't to say such magic can't exist, but that at Essence 1-5, it doesn't yet.
========
What to people fight over?
Lots of things, but by and large, they fight over things that are valuable to them. I'm not worried about Ideology- though that's very important to warfare. Right now, I'm trying to describe the basic logic of the general or military advisor, not the cultural or ideological forces behind a campaign.
Individual battles are much the same- you fight for something that's valuable, that advances your goals or makes it so your opponents can't advance their goals.
In Creation, the most valauble things are similar to that on Earth: sources of Resources, trade and travel hubs, or defensible locations.
A place where three roads or rivers meet is inherently valuable. People are going to fight over that as a strategic objective. Whoever controls it can levy taxes or embargo goods. The lack of control can lead to free market, and a whole host of other things. In the South, a fresh-water spring is valuable, and will be hotly contested. In the north, arable land or a valuable cache of mineral wealth.
These are WHY you fight, but they aren't necessarily WHERE you fight.
All things being equal, all forces in a military engagement are going to try to pick the best ground to fight on, and avoid the worst ground. The nature of your forces in turn expand or shrink what counts as 'best ground'.
Rule 1: Soldiers don't go places where there's no point in fighting.
A flat even plain of grass is pretty much neutral, offering no major advatages or disadvantages. A hill in this grassland becomes an immediate tactical and strategic advantage- they create high ground that has penalties and bonuses which mechanically impact attackers and defenders.
Narrow passes and other chokepoints are of great importance- but they are only important if they are useful. An impassible mountain range will force an army to spend months marching around it. A garrison in a valley surrounded by flat plains is pointless, unless something in that valley is useful (See Rule 1), they won't bother.
Sometimes your Objective and your Battlefield overlap. Most often times, they don't. Battles over cities aren't usually IN cities. They're placed wherever the invading army shows up and the defending army intercepts them. Storytellers are put into the position of developing these locations and defining why they're important, useful or tactically meaningful.
Terrain in a given range can vary greatly, and in Creation, armies can cover quite a lot of ground over several actions.
- Hills, crags and high ground - Benefits defenders who hold the high ground, but also makes it harder to reinforce without secure access.
- Rivers- A river can either be used to hem in and trap an army, or defend an army from charges. (Wading through water is slow.)
- Long Mountain ranges - armies will have to spend months marching around it unless they have way through it.
I just wanted to post what I had and such.
vicky_molokh
Posthuman spidery thingy.
- Location
- Kyïv, Ukraine
Again, I do not consider the authors to be sacred. In fact, I'm rather sceptical of WW's ability to make good crunch (and indices), but I also realise that I'm somewhat biased against WW due to my allegiance. And apparently the authors' opinion does or does not matter depending on whether it supports or doesn't supports someone's argument. Or an older and newer opinon of an author has different worth depending which one of the two more supports which argument.
But anyway, I do think that in many cases the bad results are merely outcomes of imperfect and/or misguided attempts to replicate certain themes in the system. E.g. how does one replicate mythical feats such as Thor drinking from a horn connected to the world ocean, and thus lowering the mean sea level? It seems like a world-shaping effect worthy of being at least E6; Shinmaic Calibration is the closest approximation that can kinda-sorta achieve similar results.
I don't think that the E6-E10 equivalents (the worldshaking qualitatively different charms of great scope and magnitude) are completely unworkable. After all, I heard that Nobilis mostly deals with the same sort of material, was written by the authors of Exalted, and is pretty successful if it's your type of thing. Now, whether there is some sort of system-mechanical incompatibility that makes these things unworkable in Ex2, well, I don't know, and I can't imagine why it would be. If anyone has an idea why, I'd be glad to read it.
Note; attackers want to be attacking down slope just as much as defenders want to hold the high ground. The extra force that can be imparted with a charge and the difficulty of maintaining one's balance when struck is even greater when the ground you would move to is lower than it where you are now means that momentum in such cases is very much to the advantage of the attacker.
- Location
- Spain
Indeed. But i still think they are too easy to pull off. A single Solar Sorcerer can pull off the Salinian working (Or any other ambition 3 Solar working) without needing extraodinary resources.
(Unless they changed the number of successes needed since the leak, of course)
vicky_molokh
Posthuman spidery thingy.
- Location
- Kyïv, Ukraine
Pft.
It used to be that Sorcery was this weird special thing only for characters who passed the five tests and were inclined to dedicate themselves to this fine academic pursuit. One path out of many.
But every Solar Exalt is a growing hero on the path to being a world-changing cosmic power with an agenda and an attitude.
And turns out that now, for this reason, everyone will 'want' to be a sorcerous character. That's lame.
- Location
- Spain
Actually, i agree with this. Ex3 Sorcery is just the best way to cause major changes in the world (Since, again, there aren't society building rules, and it completely outclasses craft in simplicity of use and XP needed)
(The solution, of course, is creating competitive ways to cause major change without Sorcery, and raise the difficulty of Workings)
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vicky_molokh
Posthuman spidery thingy.
- Location
- Kyïv, Ukraine
So, I've been hunting for more information on the Great Forks, and some people in the thread mentioned that Scavenger Sons is a better source than Compass of Terrestrial Directions. So when I got a chance to take a look at it, I quickly flipped to Great Forks, only to find that it's a short section about one-third the size of the Forks entry in CoTD. So far, the only thing that seems 'new' in it is a mention of the population size (¼ million citizens, and 'almost' ½ million slaves).
So I'm curious, why do people recommend Scavenger Sons in favour of CoTD? Because it seems like it contains a smaller volume of information about the cities and cultures it talks about (which is a natural consequence of being a single book)?
So I'm curious, why do people recommend Scavenger Sons in favour of CoTD? Because it seems like it contains a smaller volume of information about the cities and cultures it talks about (which is a natural consequence of being a single book)?
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Sucal
The Devil’s Cut
- Location
- Bottom of the barrel
Vicky, sometimes your hilarious.
You never really played much 2e did you?
Its barely a secret that in first and second edition, Occult 5 and the three circles of sorcery were the most XP efficient methods of getting power. Not for the silly niche charms like stormwind rider, not for things like putting food on the table, but because pound for pound Summon Demon of Whatever Circle was the most XP efficient route of doing most tasks. Because there is almost always a demon for that.
Its just that now there are reasons to become a sorcerer for OTHER things.
vicky_molokh
Posthuman spidery thingy.
- Location
- Kyïv, Ukraine
Seventeen sessions so far. Was there a reason to believe that I'm a veteran? (Not rhetorical, not sarcasm.)
And yes, I'm getting the impression that Summon Demon is truly truly truly outrageous, but at least the GM seems to be subtly nerfing dæmons when possible.
The GM seems to believe that the difficulty of becoming a sorc balances against the relative coolness of sorcery, but I think this is an apples to oranges comparison.
Aleph
Princess of Stabbity
- Location
- The sixth circle of Hell (second on weekends)
- Pronouns
- She/Her
It gives a much broader overview, yes, but it also has more plot hooks for some areas (especially Nexus) that at least in my opinion are often better (for instance, plot hooks about the ruins of Hollow and rumours of plague tied to the ancient city instead of making everything about the Emissary). Mostly, though, it's that it avoids various fucking stupid plot holes like the Bull of the North somehow marching an army 2000 miles into the East and then teleporting back to his icewalker territory in the North for no apparent reason and without interacting with any of the challenges such a feat would involve or, indeed, any of the societies or landmarks between points A and B. I tend to use Scavenger Sons as my base and cherrypick from the few CoTDs I've bothered to buy if I find stuff interesting.
vicky_molokh
Posthuman spidery thingy.
- Location
- Kyïv, Ukraine
Hmm. I guess that's not quite what I was looking for. Maybe it's a matter of tastes.
Personally, I'm looking for the sort of information that characters of the region would care about. What are the laws. Is there a three-crop rotation. How much population is there in the capitol city (this one I did get from SS). What is the weather like throughout the seasons. How good are the salaries relative to other nearby places. What everyday traditions and rules differentiate these people from their neighbours. What is local art like. What do the local accents sound like. Does the dialect differ in writing and if yes, how. IOW, what sorts of things would make my character go "Hey, you're not a Forks slave, you're a Lookshy-trained helot impersonating a Forks slave!" or the like.
I suppose that can be described as a cross between a Wikipedia page and a TV Tropes Useful Notes page regarding a state or city. The closest example in gaming sourcebooks that I've seen is the Transhuman Space Fifth Wave book for info on states (and a few cities) and its corebook for the history. The way I see it, for such a sufficiently well-done wikitropenotes-like page, plot hooks sort of automagically write themselves in the GM's head (at least both I and and TS GM I played with managed to come up with plot hooks based on such a reference text).
I also think that avoiding weirdness like Bull of Exalted Teleportation is facilitated by a well-organised history section of the world. As in, an actual history section, like there is in the corebook of TS, that is compartmentalised from the current-state-of-affairs section(s). IMHO mixing the two results in difficult searches for historical and modern facts, and in missed nuances that can later result in inconsistencies.
samdamandias
Apprentice Plane Wizard
I forgot which book it was, but it talked about war in different Directions, and how war in the South tended towards long sieges, while war in the North was usually short battles over specific objectives. In part, this is shaped by the North's weather (To the point that the god of War (North) gets annoyed because all the leaders pray to the weather gods first), because you have to accomplish you objectives and get your fighters home before harvest time ends.
My LARP group will frequently forget that certain books have indices, because almost all the books don't. I'm not sure if anybody thinks WW/Onyx Path can make useable indicies.
TheLastOne
Person of impeccable tastes (for destruction)
Didn't they basically admit that was because Sorcery itself was basically broken and non-functional, and they wanted to have a 'big scale' sorcery tool, without actually going to the work of fixing sorcery?