- Location
- Denmark
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Well, yeah.
I mean, it's White Wolf.
Go WoD or go home.
As a fellow person who enjoys standard Alchemicals, you have my sympathy.
General Exalted Thread
I mean, it's White Wolf.
Go WoD or go home.
As a fellow person who enjoys standard Alchemicals, you have my sympathy.
Green Sun, Black Shadows handles it by the Sidereals accidentally having broken the Mask just a tiny bit more than they intended, resulting in everything supernatural suffering from a (slightly weakened) Arcane Fate. So it's less that the Exalted want to stay hidden, and more that they have to put in considerable effort to get people to remember things as happened, instead of rationalizing them as, say, druggies with barbecue forks.
My disappointment was biting that it was not about the lumbering imperial behemoth of the British Realm which rules a quarter of the world, ruled over by its ancient un-married red-haired monarch Elizabeth [1] who - like the rest of the European aristocracy - has the blood of the dragons in her veins. So, too, does the powerful rival to the British Realm, the Republic of America, who broke away from the Realm with their own dragonblooded and have developed powerful advanced essence weapons and power armour.
But the power of those aristocrats with the blood of the dragons is not unchallenged. Across the world, in oppressed areas the ancient sun-heroes of Egypt, Central America and Sumeria are sometimes seen [2]. Colonial provinces will rise up, led by brilliant shining figures. And then there's the mysterious agents of the Fates, who are seen in every side in every conflict. The greatest intelligence analysts of the British Realm have produced walls covered in scribbles and sketches and paintings, showing the same men and women showing up for hundreds of years. And then in the corners of the world, the witches of the chaos-moon bring madness, aided by their legions of slave-fae from beyond the stars. The Americans were fools to land on the moon - they released the Lunar monsters once again.
The less said about the vampiric knights of death who clawed their way out of the Underworld, long dead figures from history empowered by the power of the realms of the Dead, or the malign forces of Hell who claim that they were the titans who forged the world until the gods betrayed their parents and stole the world... well, the less said the better.
[1] Although her daughter Victoria will stop at nothing to ensure she inherits her mother's throne, even if the Empress has shown more favour to her youngest daughter, also called Elizabeth.
[2] Like Crane-Style using Zenith Ghandi who's raising the Indian provinces up in revolution against the British Realm.
- Location
- Pittsburgh, PA
See, I got the impression that Exalted Modern is intended to be "watch modern Earth (or Victorian Earth, or WW2 Earth*, etc.) go completely ploin-shaped as various flavors of Essence bullshit flood in all over the damn place", so I'm kind of puzzled that anyone tried to make it into a WoD-style thing.
Or this. I thought the idea was having Exalted majesty and madness married with real-world setups, so you can have Abyssal Blackbeard being hunted across the high seas by the tenuous alliance of a Dragonblooded British Admiral and a newly-Exalted Solar Spaniard who both have bones to pick with the rapey bastard.
Or Twilight Jacques de Vaucanson being the smuggest dick imaginable to the Dragonblooded wonder-makers of the French court.
In other words, have the Exalted stuff start shaping things on a national and/or global level, not hobo around in back alleys wearing a trenchcoat it nicked off the local representative of the Silver Ladder.
* Dawn Caste Teddy Roosevelt and his Glorious Solar Riders!
I always liked how Shards weren't just a straight port of normal Creation into space/modern day earth/etc. and actually switched up which splat is in power, which splats hate each other and even the nature of exaltions/gods.
I think it would lose something if it always was 'old DB empire, enemy of Lunars, is weakening, suddenly Solars/Abyssals/hidden Infernals'
I think it would lose something if it always was 'old DB empire, enemy of Lunars, is weakening, suddenly Solars/Abyssals/hidden Infernals'
- Location
- Pittsburgh, PA
Wait, what was it like in Exalted Modern, then? Is this what that other guy meant by wrecking the Lunars/Alchemicals?
- Location
- Gladstone, OR
No, in the other shards, they redid the metaphysics so Alchemicals were more Tokusatsu Power modules and Lunars were nanomachine alex-mercer-alikes. It came off as a base cash-grab for the ignorant sci-fi crowd.
DBs are artificially created by manipulating their genes, Infernals secretly rule the world, Lunars are working for the Infernals since they've been manipulated via the bond and are their secret undercover agents. Sids mostly backed the Infernals I think, but some rebelled and freed the Solar shards. Alchemicals are created to be weapons, but many rebelled. Solars are...pretty much unchanged, except they never ruled in the first place so they have less of a 'returning King' vibe and nobody will call them Anathema or try to kill them on first sight.
It must be noted that Infernals are even worse than Solars at secretly ruling anything. Somewhere between the "I literally can't use this to be subtle" excellency, the "I can't use this for long term planning" excellency, the "I need giant cults of devoted followers and hordes of demons to use my charms well" Charms, the landscape warping Charms, the fact that they have a comparative advantage when it comes to UNLEASH THE DEMONS, and the fact that large numbers of their powers are blatantly and obviously supernatural, Infernals-as-shadowy-urban-horror-masters doesn't hold together.
(This is because Exalted Modern is terrible, especially with everything it does with Infernals. The writer didn't seem to grasp that the Ebon Dragon is only one sixth of the Yozis Charm concept space.)
- Location
- Pittsburgh, PA
I'm sorry, the fuck!?
What the actual shit.
The page I read on Exalted Modern had it be that our universe was the place beyond the Seal of Eight Divinities, where Autochthon hid; due to using slightly better logistics than canon, Autobot had the juice to build our solar system as a place for some of his inhabitants to get off, then slowly fled away from the Seal, building the rest of our galaxy as he went for various reasons.
~5,000 years later, the Seal starts breaking down and Essence starts bleeding in. From there, it was left up to the ST on what exactly was going on in Creation. One option suggested was that the Neverborn managed to blow everything to shit, leaving a handful of refugees that flee to Earth, with the Celestial Exaltations following after them in search of mortals to bond with. Alternatively, it could be an unexpected consequence of the Jade Prison's shattering, opening the way for sociopolitical shenanigans with the Realm or other cultures from vanilla Exalted, or even theoretically having it be that one of the uncaptured Solar Exaltations managed to help someone crack the Seal during the Great Contagion, ushering in a mad rush of Shogunate defectors, Silver Pact, and assorted misfits.
As for what was apparently the original setup... No. Just no.
- Location
- Gladstone, OR
I got nothing @GardenerBriareus , I read the book more than a year ago and hated like all of it, so...
- Location
- Pittsburgh, PA
In retrospect, I should clarify it was a webpage that (I thought) laid out the bare-bones conceit of the setting and then dived into how certain Abilities and Background worked differently in a post-Bronze Age society.
- Location
- Denmark
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Run before it's too late Sucal! Run!
Would it help if I told you that there's a sidebar with "It doesn't really have to be Infernals secretly running stuff behind the scenes. It can be someone else, too"?
Welcome to Shards.
Now granted, the initial billing was "now you can play Exalted in a modern setting, like you've all been asking for," and didn't exactly specify which setting that was. It could have worked if it was merely your suggestion, or if it was a more Modernized Creation, where Bronze-age had given way to turn-of-the-century industrialization, perhaps roaring-20s equivalent world-culture in the wake of a recently-ended "Great War," with the River Province forming together with the nearby city-states to become the United Rivers Republic, while the Inner Sea satrapies become Scarlet Protectorates under imperial oversight, etc.
But that would have taken actual work and research to execute, so instead we got urban fantasy blank-slate 2010s Earth with humaniform robots, nanoswarms and fight-auras.
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Eukie
Powered by furious Canadian redheads
Demons draw their power from the faith of mortals, so to empower themselves they must reveal their demon nature to or enter into a demonic pact with mortals. Demons are also vulnerable to faith wielded against them (genuine belief combined with prayer allows mortals to banish, ban, bind, or even exorcise demons) so making too many people aware that you exist means anyone with a grudge against you can banish you through speech or even thought alone. The more a Demon reveals about themselves, the easier it is for someone to piece together their True Name, and the more powerful a Demon is, the easier it is to command them if you know their True Name. Even people who don't want you dead may use the opportunity to summon and bind you into their service if they can get information on you.
Apocalyptic Forms don't seem to have many restrictions though. Except for the part where revealing yourself to be a big scary demon means anyone opposed to you can shout "THE POWER OF CHRIST COMPELS YOU!" and force you flee for hours.
Demons are immensely powerful and ridiculously vulnerable at the same time.
- Location
- Virginia
These are a little muddled. There are different changes in different Shards:
Gunstar Autochtonia
In this, every splat is metaphysically the same. Creation is a whole string of worlds, the Exalted lost the Primordial War, and they flee in the world-body of Autochton (Battlestar Galactica style) pursued by the Traitor Sun a fleet of Infernal Exalted. Uses normal Exalted abilities, and the main tech change is that there are "voidships" that are basically starfighters.
There's an explanation of how each splat fits into their society, but it's not much of a change from the traditional First Age.
Heaven's Reach
In this, every splat is given a sci-fi explanation. In the distant past, the Immortal Golden Engineer (allegedly) built the various Exaltations. Solars/Lunars/Sidereals have actual autonomous hunter-killer shards implanted in them; Dragon-blooded have hereditary genetically-transmitted Essence engines (some kind of nanomachine in the blood?).
The Exalted built the Stellar Intelligences and the Grand Celestial Mountain (a sort of otherspace computer/internet you can walk into through portals) to help them administer their galactic empire; the Stellar Intelligences rebelled, and when they surrendered allowed themselves to be code-bound to stay in the edges of the galaxy. When they did this, in revenge they introduced subtle bugs into the Solars' own coding; when the Solars realized this they voluntarily gave up power and disappeared into the frontier, hoping to find a solution.
The Lunars now rule the remnant of the Solars' old empire; with the loss of the Stellar Intelligences and the Solars it is no longer possible to administer a true galactic empire. The Sidereals, designed to maintain the GCM, have mostly retreated into it; but it has so much less to do now that there more Sidereals than work, and many of them have gone off to have adventures in the rest of the galaxy.
The Stellar Intelligences that died collapsed into black holes (Tomb-Stars) that contain a realm inside of them - Terminus - from which the mysterious Abyssal Exalted come.
The Shrieking Hordes (the Wyld) are the strange things that lurk in the half-reality of the "canals" that connect stars for faster-than-light travel.
Alchemicals are not explained except as "strange half-mechanical Exalted created by Autochthon along no known Essence framework" and who are increasingly showing up in the galaxy as a scout world of Autochthon (who, undiminished, has been upgrading himself while wandering outside the galaxy) approaches.
Heaven's Reach uses "Modern" Abilities, adding Firearms and Drive and their accompanying charms.
Modern
In Modern, almost every splat is also metaphysically the same, with the exception of Dragon-blooded. They are explained to the population as being the result of genetic engineering, but they are actually produced by infusing fetuses with the blood of the Elemental Dragons.
As mentioned above, the Infernals run the world behind the scenes, with the loyalty of the Sidereal and Lunar Exalted.
Modern also uses the "Modern" abilities, obviously.
Hm. I think the benefit of Exalted Modern would be, insofar that it exists, making the statement that many of the themes of Exalted about the corruption of the powerful, violence being a cheap and easy solution, and the sins of the father are immortal. Combine it with another one of those Exalted themes-the one where the world is likely to destroy itself because everyone is more worried about The Fucker Right Next To Me rather than The Fucker Who Wants To Cast Us All Into The Screaming Abyss.
So maybe not 'the less said about the vampiric knights of death the better.' Maybe they're the new, much-loved Exalt type. People are developing Neverborn-based weapons to cast the enemy screaming into the void. People are using these Deathknights, deliberately courting them, to make these weapons which exist to end all life. Because after all, maybe everyone will die in a thousand years. But if you don't do this Those Fuckers Next To Me are going to kill us all in a decade.
After all, the enemy of my enemy is my buddy even if he hates me about as much and wishes to turn the entire world into a dead land where nothing grows.
- Location
- NYC
My problem with Shards is that it reeked of not being playtested. There were tons of setting conceits, details, and characters that would break down within a single session of gameplay.
Well, in theory.
In practice, what I really wanted from Exalted Modern was self-aware and rather campy excuses to have the American Republican Guard (the masters of Elephant Style) fight to secure funding to build a giant jade-steel wall on the southern border, for fear of the growing hardworking and industrious Solar empire rising in Mexico. I wasn't really looking for great themes - I just wanted to see the industrial powerhouse of Russia, still communist and still led by IMMORTAL STALIN, THE FIRST MAN OF STEEL, and the kung-fu fights between the INDUSTRIAL CHAMPIONS OF THE PEOPLE and the aristocracy of Europe with the blood of dragons.
Hence, the Abyssals being dead champions crawled out of the Underworld is mostly an excuse to have Vampire Julius Caesar, Vampire Vlad Dracul and Vampire Montezuma team up and fist-fight Ghandi, master of Crane Style (and also Snake Style).
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Hey n-Wolf are not enganging in the same sort of terrorism, it is more the problem that the man faction of them is about being on the spirits side , while the player ones have to content with troubles with spirits, making people uncomfortable just by being around them even if it is not to the same degree as prometheans.. And the problem that you sometimes have to kill someone because they are working with a spirit. But civilisation and citys are no longer there enemy here.
Which in a way makes them harmonise with the imaculate order, if it had turned into a religion in hiding.
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- Location
- London, England
Age of Bronze collapsed pretty much entirely because I re-wrote too many rules and then couldn't keep track of them well enough to actually write proper updates. You might notice that it was abandoned shortly before the first actual combat scene. This was not a coincidence.
So yeah, I fully encourage anyone else looking at Exalted Quests to keep things as simple as they possibly can.
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- Location
- Denmark
- Pronouns
- She/Her
On this whole Modern thing:
I want to see Ronald Reagan enter the form of the Solar Hero and say "Mister Gorbatschow, tear down this wall."
"Or I shall do it for you."
I want to see Ronald Reagan enter the form of the Solar Hero and say "Mister Gorbatschow, tear down this wall."
"Or I shall do it for you."
I feel Gunstar is pretty weak, as it magnifies a couple big issues with 2nd edition: Elder problems, poorly designed artifacts(I seem to remember that, at base, the artifact voidships can't actually harm themselves with their main weapons*), weak organization rules, a terrifying social system, etc.
Both of these settings also fall very easily into the 'must save the entire world plot'. Gunstar for obvious reasons: the entire setting is designed around a continuing existential crisis. Modern because of the whole Inferals are secret masters, which while it can be ignored, then leads to a whole bunch of somewhat non-nonsensical world building. You need some sort of Secret master if you run the setting as presented, and that secret master needs to be hostile to overt Exalted presence while not being hostile to Infernal presence.
As people have said, I think Modern fails due to the whole "why are Exalted/spirits hiding?". Having the Infernals be secret masters can answer why spirits are hiding, but not why the infernals themselves are hiding, or any of the other Exalted. If you're going that route, I think it's better to have them be a new, emergent thing. Personally, if I was going to redesign it, I'd have Exalted be similar to, say, Shadowrun magic. Something that used to be in the world, but disappeared for a long time, and only now is returning. Have gods be absent, instead favoring Elementals(as they're significantly easier to imagine as not working well with humanity), which also allows for easier Infernal influences, as demons can act as a counter to Elementals while still not being a purely positive force. Maybe keep the Sidereal presence the same (it's easy to have them not have an obvious effect, due to numbers, arcane fate, and their job regarding fate). Have Terrestirals be slowly increasing in number. As for the rest, well, it depends on how the ST wants to go with the setting.
Edit:* Yep, artifacts ones have 20L/25B soak, which means that they have that much hardness. Their main weapon, Essence cannons, deal 15L damage. So you need 6 successes to break hardness. Obviously charms can help this, but it's still odd. Speeds are also pretty low compared to some Exalted speed multipliers or modern systems (fighters are moving at 60mph).
Both of these settings also fall very easily into the 'must save the entire world plot'. Gunstar for obvious reasons: the entire setting is designed around a continuing existential crisis. Modern because of the whole Inferals are secret masters, which while it can be ignored, then leads to a whole bunch of somewhat non-nonsensical world building. You need some sort of Secret master if you run the setting as presented, and that secret master needs to be hostile to overt Exalted presence while not being hostile to Infernal presence.
As people have said, I think Modern fails due to the whole "why are Exalted/spirits hiding?". Having the Infernals be secret masters can answer why spirits are hiding, but not why the infernals themselves are hiding, or any of the other Exalted. If you're going that route, I think it's better to have them be a new, emergent thing. Personally, if I was going to redesign it, I'd have Exalted be similar to, say, Shadowrun magic. Something that used to be in the world, but disappeared for a long time, and only now is returning. Have gods be absent, instead favoring Elementals(as they're significantly easier to imagine as not working well with humanity), which also allows for easier Infernal influences, as demons can act as a counter to Elementals while still not being a purely positive force. Maybe keep the Sidereal presence the same (it's easy to have them not have an obvious effect, due to numbers, arcane fate, and their job regarding fate). Have Terrestirals be slowly increasing in number. As for the rest, well, it depends on how the ST wants to go with the setting.
Edit:* Yep, artifacts ones have 20L/25B soak, which means that they have that much hardness. Their main weapon, Essence cannons, deal 15L damage. So you need 6 successes to break hardness. Obviously charms can help this, but it's still odd. Speeds are also pretty low compared to some Exalted speed multipliers or modern systems (fighters are moving at 60mph).
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