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General Exalted Thread

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Chloe Sullivan said:
No I mean like Chief Kamehameha sacrificing people to the war god he is high priest of for blessings to conquer his neighbors, while trying to cage weapons out of the realm-flagged vessel that just "rediscovered" the island chain.
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Yeah, that's basically what the West is made for.

I mean, apart from the fact that islands the size of France are treated as if they're the size of small Polynesian islands. And the way all the distances are much further than Polynesia. And the way the West is so isolated from everything else, rather than being a natural branch off of South East Asia.

(And that is why the best bit of the West is the stuff down in the South West, further South than An Teng, where you can do all that kind of stuff without having all the problems of the Far West and it's totally valid to have dinosaur-hunting tribes sacrificing people to volcano gods. Hell, Saata in Kerisgame is basically me just grabbing Papua New Guinea wholesale and sticking it.)
 
Hey, I'm looking for a bit of homebrew I found once, and never again. It's called [Men of Malfeas], and it works on the premise that the 2e 'mortals die in three days when in Malfeas' is total bs.
 
Chloe Sullivan said:
Isidoros = Ryouga Hibiki?
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Isidoros = All of Shonen, ever, past the heat death of the universe.

He has an attack where you punch somebody so hard, they are violently ejected from the timestream, leaving only a cartoonish them-shaped hole in the air. He has a power that makes it impossible to have bad press - if anyone tries to describe how you killed all those orphans in Chiaruscuro, they'll somehow end up pitching it to their audience as a sign of your incredible compassion, because you didn't kill the adults who were acting as their caretakers. He has a power where you begin an implacable journey toward a stated goal, and in exchange for gaining supernatural parrying/dodging abilities while en route, you are also completely oblivious to anything happening around you - including the fact somebody is trying to kill you - and your parrying/dodging manifests as making attacks miss through completely incidental movements. I'm pretty sure that last one happened in One Piece at some point.

ManusDomine said:
RotSe is the greatest book ever written for Exalted, because nothing makes the fanbase unite as well as "lol RotSe". :V
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Ummm... What is RotSe? I'm assuming that acronym stands for "Return of the Scarlet Empress", but other than that I've got no clue.
 
Gnarker said:
Before I forget; You are aware of HardKoreKeltoid's Necromancy rewrite, yes?
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I was not! The model of sorcery that I'm working with begs for effects that are mechanically simpler than what appears in previous editions/the Book of the Emerald Circle, but stuff like this is absolutely fantastic for conceptual roots. Thank you!

Omicron said:
That said, I do find the idea of "institutional eras" of the Realm determined by important legislative changes introduced by the Empress to be an interesting one.
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I remember reading something awhile ago about the Empress slaughtering a part or whole of the Deliberative at some point, and while that is sort of crazy (and potentially cool in an immortal god-queen kind of way) the idea that some kind of massive institutional death might set off a number of reforms and bookend an era of Realm policy seems like the kind of fluff that could be interesting.

I don't know if it's a 2e thing or a 1e thing, but I got the sense the actual organizations of the Realm have been mostly stable in their existence, in the sense that the Deliberative was never taken away, so one might instead focus on the notion that what the thing they call the Deliberative might have changed through a few eras of Realm legislation.

While I can imagine some of these era changes being the inevitable result of politics, some of them (like killing the Deliberative as what I think is a hypothetical example) but be one of the times the Empress artificially induced change in order to upset the balance of power.

How many children has the Empress had? Just the Great House founders, or more?
 
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Aleph said:
Basically, I think the essential objection here to the "Empress has set the Realm up to fall apart without her" issue is summarised thusly:

a) Is there an adequate explanation for why tens of thousands of other politically active Dragonblooded in the Realm have been totally fine, for centuries, with the fact that if the Empress is ever assassinated or when she dies of old age their world-spanning superpower will promptly implode within a decade?

b) If not, is there an adequate explanation as to how tens of thousands of other politically active Dragonblooded who are also Exalted with Excellencies and similar dicepools for political savviness have failed to notice this fact for centuries or, having noticed, have told nobody and failed to spread the information far and wide?

c) If the answer is "because Sidereals", is there an adequate justification for why a group of Celestial Exalts who have as their primary interest the safeguarding of Creation are not only totally fine with their main tool for doing so imploding should a single Dragonblood die of old age or be assassinated, but are in fact actively spending considerable effort supporting this state of affairs to the detriment of other tasks?

d) If other Dragonblooded have noticed and have spread the information and haven't been silenced by Sidereal death squads, how the fuck has the Empress managed to cling to power without being forced to bomb most of the Blessed Isle to rubble with the Realm Defence Grid, given that she is only Empress so long as the tens of thousands of Realm Dragonblooded actually do what she says, instead of - for instance - ganking her and setting up a ruling Deliberative?
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There aren't tens of thousands. The entire Realm culture doesn't work by itself much like the Realm religion is a shame. It presents one thing but functions as another and this is the result of power brokers making it work that way.
not only are the number of Realm DBs strongly limited by a culture of desperation, punishment, sacrifice, and hostility to less than excellent it is repeatedly pointed out the education is great for producing blustering morons with lots of ideals, lots of resources, and no practical modern state stuff aside from managing things as aristos.
The one time its clear they, as a political body, are making the ostensible political machine work as promised they are KILLED. the result is a land run by conspiracy, intrigues, and having houses played against each other and so on.

Think less Zeon or Draka and more Hunger Games. Ministries and laws changed constantly, as did borders, teritory, expectations of conduct, taxes, and so on. All of this due to the Empress who always kept people misinformed and off their game IF they botheredto play as there would be no realm point in a political career iwthout also being part of the selected divine aristocracy who, personal, have multitudes of more directly rewarding options to spend their jade, time, and slaves. All this as she has at least TWO secret police and a religious institution that's, fundamentally, at odds with the reality of the world that spends most of its time breaking men to serve the Dragons OR the gods and reality to obey the IP which is supposed to serve the Empress but often the whims and manipulations of the many factions in THAT.

This is why Fokuff being a mortal is so essential. I think late 1E they kind of forgot the Dragonblooded dynasty was meant to be bad, genuinely flawed and mislead, in politics and so on with too much individual and martial focus.
 
Darmani said:
There aren't tens of thousands. The entire Realm culture doesn't work by itself much like the Realm religion is a shame. It presents one thing but functions as another and this is the result of power brokers making it work that way.
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..Why aren't there tens of thousands? We've heard the phrase "Ten-Thousand Dragons" for like three editions now, and it has always been as a metaphor (because ten-thousand just means "arbitrarily large number" in the original Chinese sources it was taken from). There is over a million Dragon-Blooded in Creation and the Realm is the largest congregation of Dragon-Blooded there are.

Furthermore, while the Immaculate Faith may be a sham, it is also really fucking neat if you are mortal because the Immaculate Faith basically tells Dragon-Blooded that they should protect you and guide you and aid you.

Sure, there are some outliers who don't do these things and are just assholes, but those are just that: Outliers.

Darmani said:
not only are the number of Realm DBs strongly limited by a culture of desperation, punishment, sacrifice, and hostility to less than excellent it is repeatedly pointed out the education is great for producing blustering morons with lots of ideals, lots of resources, and no practical modern state stuff aside from managing things as aristos.
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Where the fuck do you get the "desperation" part of.

Furthermore, insisting that the Realm only produces idiots, might be the most retarded thing I've read this week. Maybe @EarthScorpion feels like sharing his infamous story of what a bunch of Dragon-Blooded did to the Bull of The North and his Circle to elaborate. But if I absolutely must, I'll just go every NPC in Scroll of Exalts through:

Cathak Meladus is not an idiot, Tepet Arada is not an idiot, Mnemon is definitely not an idiot, Ragara Myrrun is not an idiot, Cynis Denovah Avaku is not an idiot and he is also an awesome character, Sesus Rafara is not an idiot, Peleps Aramida is not an idiot, Peleps Deled is a fanatic but he is certainly no idiot, Ragara Bhagwei is awesome and neither an idiot and finally we have Tepet Ejava that is neither an idiot.

But hey from the corebook we have Tepet Lisara who is an idiot, so one point in your favor I guess. :V


Darmani said:
The one time its clear they, as a political body, are making the ostensible political machine work as promised they are KILLED. the result is a land run by conspiracy, intrigues, and having houses played against each other and so on.
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I remember that. As far as I know it was a stupid 2e-ism that wasn't there in 1e but I might actually remember wrong here.

Darmani said:
Think less Zeon or Draka and more Hunger Games. Ministries and laws changed constantly, as did borders, teritory, expectations of conduct, taxes, and so on. All of this due to the Empress who always kept people misinformed and off their game IF they botheredto play as there would be no realm point in a political career iwthout also being part of the selected divine aristocracy who, personal, have multitudes of more directly rewarding options to spend their jade, time, and slaves.
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Wait, you think it's strange that laws and borders changed? :???:

That's like a thing that real empires and states do all the time.

Darmani said:
All this as she has at least TWO secret police and a religious institution that's, fundamentally, at odds with the reality of the world that spends most of its time breaking men to serve the Dragons OR the gods and reality to obey the IP which is supposed to serve the Empress but often the whims and manipulations of the many factions in THAT.
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Oh, you know the gods that have been corrupt and filled with waste and vice since no one kept an eye on them longer? The gods that would rather extort worship and prayer from helpless mortals than do their fucking jobs?

I think I'd prefer it if the Immaculate Order kept check on those gods, because if they didn't do it, who the fuck would then keep them from causing untold chaos and death due to their want for pleasure and prayer.

Darmani said:
This is why Fokuff being a mortal is so essential. I think late 1E they kind of forgot the Dragonblooded dynasty was meant to be bad, genuinely flawed and mislead, in politics and so on with too much individual and martial focus.
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It wasn't.

It was meant to be up to you to decide whether it was bad or not. That was literally the whole point of it.

It had and still has a lot of points, and when you compared them to the Lunars who literally wanted to tear down all civilization, the Abyssals who have the misfortune of being Abyssals, the Raksha who want to dissolve Creation into Wyld-stuff again or any of the other countless threats, I think I prefer to be a peasant in the Realm.
 
Darmani said:
it is repeatedly pointed out the education is great for producing blustering morons with lots of ideals, lots of resources, and no practical modern state stuff aside from managing things as aristos.
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Wait...what? The Realm has excellent education (for the age of sorrows) with ridiculously high standards. Where the hell are you getting the fact that they keep producing morons.
 
RE: DB numbers; my understanding has always been that there's about 40,000 DB's total in Creation, the Realm has a full half of them (!) and half of those are currently clustered in the Imperial City, in preparation for the impending civil war.
 
Chloe Sullivan said:
No I mean like Chief Kamehameha sacrificing people to the war god he is high priest of for blessings to conquer his neighbors, while trying to cage weapons out of the realm-flagged vessel that just "rediscovered" the island chain.

But tell me more about this beach shard.
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You need to run this game some time. :D
 
Actually I guess I should back it up and talk about my fundamental problems with the West from the reading I've done

Every direction has a more or less guiding schtick, we all know. The North gets colder, the South gets hotter etc. They are touched more strongly by the Element that defines their direction. But for the West, it doesn't just grow to define it more and more... it's the biggest ocean you can imagine. And nothing else - it just kinda opens up aside from the South West area by An Teng, and a bit in the north - and then you have a few archipelagos, and some islands that have a plot hook, and for lack of a better word a "hat", and it all strikes me as so dreadfully, dreadfully boring. Why should you play in the West?

There's only a few things that it has to it - there's stuff like what @Chloe Sullivan said, and like @EarthScorpion mentioned you can do all the pirate stuff just in the far South West. There's "I travel from island to island" but the thing is, unless you want some of the (frankly) rather kitschy and one-note prewritten stuff to deal with, if you want to write your own in...

... you have to fill empty space.

Because you're making islands in an area that ultimately is 1) geographically limited for play and whatnot and 2) you're making it whole sale. I'm only slowly learning Exalted properly after too much time talking with the evil, evil @Aleph so if anything in this post is way off let me know: but this strikes me as boring.

Really boring.

And, ultimately, it strikes me as kind of uncreative? Like, let's consider a few things.

1) First Age infrastructure could basically do anything you want; there is no uninhabitable terrain.
2) The oceans are not static; shoreline changes; and underneath it there has to be something unless you're explicitly going for a bottomless ocean thing. There's stuff under the coast in all coastal areas, there's plenty of land just underwater... but who says there isn't , like, I don't know, a whole kingdom under a glassine dome? Who says that some Solar didn't just go full Minecraft and block out some square of the ocean to not exist all the way down to the bedrock, and built something in there?

What's under the ocean? It should be filled with things! Lots of wonders, terrible and amazing, and as far as I can tell it's just "this much distance between you and the next piece of interesting content your ST didn't have to make".
 
I mean, I recall that there's something called Sunken Luthe in the previous edition, and that Holden says it was not very good and that the 3e version will be better, but who knows? I've yet to buy a book on the West besides Blood & Salt.
 
ManusDomine said:
..Why aren't there tens of thousands? We've heard the phrase "Ten-Thousand Dragons" for like three editions now, and it has always been as a metaphor (because ten-thousand just means "arbitrarily large number" in the original Chinese sources it was taken from). There is over a million Dragon-Blooded in Creation and the Realm is the largest congregation of Dragon-Blooded there are.
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The number hovers around that for breeding and control reasons. First off you need to convince powerful women they need to make kids in a society where gathering personal martial power by adventurism is much MUCH more attractive than geting sidelined with motherhood.

Furthermore, while the Immaculate Faith may be a sham, it is also really fucking neat if you are mortal because the Immaculate Faith basically tells Dragon-Blooded that they should protect you and guide you and aid you.
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Shoulda known. The point is that the faith proposes a world that works one way but does not but in a way that's hard for the practitioners to check or have been told not to countenance.

Sure, there are some outliers who don't do these things and are just assholes, but those are just that: Outliers.
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Bullshit. The abuse and institutional levels of so of the DBs of EACH OTHER is a major feature of the Realm as a whole say nothing of the mortal populace who has Realm culture, demands, or whatever forced on them. Don't let the far eastern aesthetic trappings fool you. This is an imperial religion as a tool of political and social control.


Where the fuck do you get the "desperation" part of.
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Realm curriculum is cuttthroat.

Furthermore, insisting that the Realm only produces idiots, might be the most retarded thing I've read this week. Maybe @EarthScorpion feels like sharing his infamous story of what a bunch of Dragon-Blooded did to the Bull of The North and his Circle to elaborate. But if I absolutely must, I'll just go every NPC in Scroll of Exalts through:
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Idiots is the wrong word then. but more much like the IP can produce super kungfu monks it doesn't produce people with the best insight on spirits laws and so on as a whole because of the veneration of the made up dragons and so by trying to emphasize one convenient lie (Anathema are demons the Dragons saved the world, you need them or the world goes to shit) its opened them up to out of context issues.
Mostly the problem is that politics as practiced by the Deliberative is meant to be shiny but fruitless dead end. This is NOT reflected in the late 1E plitical characters who are all savy, idealistic, and competent as to the standard we're TOLD to look for of manipulative, secretive, and work behind the scenes and cross purposes as the actual system doesn't work for the Senator.

But hey from the corebook we have Tepet Lisara who is an idiot, so one point in your favor I guess. :V
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*sigh* my point they are all awesome with no real biases or faults in a society sold as very flawed in premise and actions. Bhagara is at least partially an idiot for his greatest work, the Heptagram, being so infiltrated he doesn't even know.

I remember that. As far as I know it was a stupid 2e-ism that wasn't there in 1e but I might actually remember wrong here.
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Nope very important 1E original. The Deliberative was a public theatre with limited actual power. This helped illustrate that and the Empress's full power and authority.



Wait, you think it's strange that laws and borders changed? :???:

That's like a thing that real empires and states do all the time.
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True but done in a way no one person has the full or true picture. They are told what to do, not the reasons or how to best implement them unless strictly to fulfill a function and then default to ruthless exploitation



Oh, you know the gods that have been corrupt and filled with waste and vice since no one kept an eye on them longer? The gods that would rather extort worship and prayer from helpless mortals than do their fucking jobs?

I think I'd prefer it if the Immaculate Order kept check on those gods, because if they didn't do it, who the fuck would then keep them from causing untold chaos and death due to their want for pleasure and prayer.
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These guys are evil jerks so their opponents are righteous. I hate that argument. The solars aren't "the good guys" for opposing the Realm but they aren't the bad guys OR going to damn creation either.

It wasn't.

It was meant to be up to you to decide whether it was bad or not. That was literally the whole point of it.
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It was a Realm on the edge of failure that had pissed off the World. in need of reform structurally AND spiritually. Not necessarily destruction.
It had and still has a lot of points, and when you compared them to the Lunars who literally wanted to tear down all civilization, the Abyssals who have the misfortune of being Abyssals, the Raksha who want to dissolve Creation into Wyld-stuff again or any of the other countless threats, I think I prefer to be a peasant in the Realm.
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But that doesn't change the Realm, as an institution is what Ankmopork is a parody of. A complex super institution that view have the full view of with semi-cooperative mostly by rigged competition means to sort of function filled with factions many who just want to if not kill the others than certainly beat them up and take their stuff. This is sustained by a massive gluttonous consumption of resources only for the benefit of the upper class which barely share status with others.
And again their society is based on abuse and lies. Not every DB need be Sesus Chenow Lahor but they should be of similar loadout in terms of capabilities AND negative flaws out of poor attitude and choices. Lisara always felt like them overcorrecting to the point she is apparently the one bad Bells' graduate who ruined House Tepet because she had to undermine the Roseblack.
 
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Rook said:
What's under the ocean? It should be filled with things! Lots of wonders, terrible and amazing, and as far as I can tell it's just "this much distance between you and the next piece of interesting content your ST didn't have to make".
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This doesn't help much for the way there is absolutely nothing canon to populate the West with, but my favorite bit of noncanon is that there are actually a great many more civilizations than just islander-based ones, but hundreds of ramshackle villages and hamlets built atop "wandering canopies," floating seaweed patches which skim the waves between major shorelines, miles wide and dozens of feet thick. Usually the inhabitants are descendants of shipwrecks, exiles marooned and left to die, or nomadic peoples who gave up their fleets to lash them onto the weeds and "put down stakes" during rough times. Other patches might simply be the domain of a powerful ocean spirit who has relocated her coastal cult to somewhere more to her liking, and serves as the seed of urban legends about mysterious island palaces which ride unseen through clouds of mist.

The problem arises because these places are perpetually mobile, unmappable with no fixed position, following the larger currents of the sea like icebergs and no landmarks to find them by. Often they become locked to a single region by a particularly aggressive gyre, but sometimes two may pass near eachother, and the inhabitants prepare for either war or trade before the motion of the waves moves them distant again. Entire petty kingdoms of canopy-dwellers have been stitched together from one canopy conquering its infrequent neighbors, or smaller patches wedding into a mutual alliance with more powerful domains, and physically tying the other side onto its mass so the weeds may grow together and complete the acquisition.
 
I was imagining something similar to that too, but my point of reference was from Pacifilog Town from Pokémon :V
 
Dif said:
This doesn't help much for the way there is absolutely nothing canon to populate the West with, but my favorite bit of noncanon is that there are actually a great many more civilizations than just islander-based ones, but hundreds of ramshackle villages and hamlets built atop "wandering canopies," floating seaweed patches which skim the waves between major shorelines, miles wide and dozens of feet thick. Usually the inhabitants are descendants of shipwrecks, exiles marooned and left to die, or nomadic peoples who gave up their fleets to lash them onto the weeds and "put down stakes" during rough times. Other patches might simply be the domain of a powerful ocean spirit who has relocated her coastal cult to somewhere more to her liking, and serves as the seed of urban legends about mysterious island palaces which ride unseen through clouds of mist.

The problem arises because these places are perpetually mobile, unmappable with no fixed position, following the larger currents of the sea like icebergs and no landmarks to find them by. Often they become locked to a single region by a particularly aggressive gyre, but sometimes two may pass near eachother, and the inhabitants prepare for either war or trade before the motion of the waves moves them distant again. Entire petty kingdoms of canopy-dwellers have been stitched together from one canopy conquering its infrequent neighbors, or smaller patches wedding into a mutual alliance with more powerful domains, and physically tying the other side onto its mass so the weeds may grow together and complete the acquisition.
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This is neat, but I wonder how they make their homes or how they eat? Do they make do without metals?
 
Leetsepeak said:
This is neat, but I wonder how they make their homes or how they eat? Do they make do without metals?
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Not sure about make their homes, but fish ARE a thing. Homes would probably be a combination of driftwood and coral and the like. Now, if there's an ocean god, or an Exalt, then they could probably make with the fresh water...if they don't have a First Age wonder (like a jug that purifies water put into it or the like).
 
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