General Exalted Thread

[Salty]

All I really have to say about Abyssals is that I've always felt that Resonance was simply the most thematic thing about them.

The mere fact of its existence cuts them off from any long-term relationship with mortals, and provides a constant source of angst, anguish, and conflict.

 

[Lealope]

Abyssal Charm trees should be built in a similar way to Infernal ones. Each should be focused on a specific type of Abyssal to emulate. There should be the vampire tree, which is all about drinking blood and gaining various benefits from the process thereof. There should be the tree for being the Frankenstein monster, all about replacing parts of yourself with a variety of corpses to become a better monster. There should be the the mummy tree, which makes you able to inflict horrific curses on people who defile your sacred sites. There should be the slasher zombie tree, about being an unstoppable murder machine. There should be the dream wraith tree about haunting people in their sleep and driving them to suicide or madness.

And yes, as @EarthScorpion says, there should be the tree about being the revenant who has come back from the dead to pass judgement on the living.

The trick, I think, would be that while Infernals have huge sprawling trees that are mostly meant to be self-contained I think Abyssals should have small trees each based around a specific horror movie archetype. Then you can mix and match much more easily to create your vampire, with some flavor of banshee and grim reaper and poltergeist thrown in. Maybe, say, five to ten Charms for each archetype tree, just enough to give a variety of effects from Essence 1~5 but not enough to be the entire character.

Monsters tend to swap and trade gimmicks much more frequently than supervillains. You get fast or slow zombies, bestial or sophisticated vampires, sexy or horrifying ghosts and so on.

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I feel like this might be a little on the nose. I do think that they should have abilities that incidentally function as horror movie monster powers but it should be a *wink wink, nudge nudge* sort of thing.

 

[Carrnage]

All I really have to say about Abyssals is that I've always felt that Resonance was simply the most thematic thing about them.

The mere fact of its existence cuts them off from any long-term relationship with mortals, and provides a constant source of angst, anguish, and conflict.

Click to shrink...

Resonance is cool but it's a bit too much stick, it makes abyssals kind of more daunting to play than other splats.

 

[Chehrazad]

If you play a dark-Solar-mirror Abyssal in a game without reference to Solars you... Play a guy with cool dark powers that grow into baroque horror powers. It's still cool and it stands on its own.

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In an ideal world where these guys with guys with cool, dark powers exist, of course.

I do not think that Abyssals should be entirely non-Solar, if no references to "was once a Solar" is in their themes, we might as well cut them out, replace them with Liminals and call it a day.

I do, however think they could be so much more than just "emo Solars" however.

 

[Aaron Peori]

I feel like this might be a little on the nose. I do think that they should have abilities that incidentally function as horror movie monster powers but it should be a *wink wink, nudge nudge* sort of thing.

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Well, you do what you do with all Exalted references. You take the themes and then conceal them through a few levels of Exalted's metaphysics and the occasional bad pun. It's not like you'd call one tree "Vampire" and another "Zombie". You'd probably add in some concept for the Abyssals to work off of much like Infernals have individual Yozi that would conceal the basic concepts from a surface level examination.

 

[Lealope]

Well, you do what you do with all Exalted references. You take the themes and then conceal them through a few levels of Exalted's metaphysics and the occasional bad pun. It's not like you'd call one tree "Vampire" and another "Zombie". You'd probably add in some concept for the Abyssals to work off of much like Infernals have individual Yozi that would conceal the basic concepts from a surface level examination.

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Yozi's can represent archetypical villains because the themes behind those villains don't change, even as their contexts and powers do.

But zombies? Vampires? There are 5-7 distinct different varieties of vampires in Warhammer Fantasy, each with very divergent themes. Vampires are an outlier due to their popularity but many of these monsters have been reimagined and reinterpreted dozens of times with the only thing remaining the same being their names.

Y'need a better, more solid starting point for an entire charmset.

 

[horngeek]

Well, you do what you do with all Exalted references. You take the themes and then conceal them through a few levels of Exalted's metaphysics and the occasional bad pun. It's not like you'd call one tree "Vampire" and another "Zombie". You'd probably add in some concept for the Abyssals to work off of much like Infernals have individual Yozi that would conceal the basic concepts from a surface level examination.

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I dunno, man, I don't see why you can't put this in the Ability-based framework that already exists. "Already dead, the Deathknight feels no pain" is a perfectly fine Resistance Charm, for the zombie example. There are already Charms that give you vampiric abilities.

 

[Aaron Peori]

Yozi's can represent archetypical villains because the themes behind those villains don't change, even as their contexts and powers do.

But zombies? Vampires? There are 5-7 distinct different varieties of vampires in Warhammer Fantasy, each with very divergent themes. Vampires are an outlier due to their popularity but many of these monsters have been reimagined and reinterpreted dozens of times with the only thing remaining the same being their names.

Y'need a better, more solid starting point for an entire charmset.

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As I mentioned up above that is the point of having the trees be very focused around a single concept, so you can mix and match. You might have your core charms all come from the 'blood-sucking' tree and then use other trees to create your variety of vampire.

I dunno, man, I don't see why you can't put this in the Ability-based framework that already exists. "Already dead, the Deathknight feels no pain" is a perfectly fine Resistance Charm, for the zombie example. There are already Charms that give you vampiric abilities.

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Because linking them to abilities limits their conceptual space to those abilities. I mean, I can't think of a Bureaucracy Undead, just off the top of my head. By pingeonholing the Charms into abilities you gate off certain effects to only players who invested in that ability even if the effect makes thematic sense for the character but not the ability being particularly high. Further, you keep your Charms too focused on the ability rather tan explore the themes of monsters and horrors.

 

[Omicron]

As I mentioned up above that is the point of having the trees be very focused around a single concept, so you can mix and match. You might have your core charms all come from the 'blood-sucking' tree and then use other trees to create your variety of vampire.



Because linking them to abilities limits their conceptual space to those abilities. I mean, I can't think of a Bureaucracy Undead, just off the top of my head. By pingeonholing the Charms into abilities you gate off certain effects to only players who invested in that ability even if the effect makes thematic sense for the character but not the ability being particularly high. Further, you keep your Charms too focused on the ability rather tan explore the themes of monsters and horrors.

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So... How does an Abyssal invest in Bureaucracy powers, if they are not ability-based but undead-based yet there is no "bureaucracy undead"?

 

[EarthScorpion]

The trick, I think, would be that while Infernals have huge sprawling trees that are mostly meant to be self-contained I think Abyssals should have small trees each based around a specific horror movie archetype. Then you can mix and match much more easily to create your vampire, with some flavor of banshee and grim reaper and poltergeist thrown in. Maybe, say, five to ten Charms for each archetype tree, just enough to give a variety of effects from Essence 1~5 but not enough to be the entire character.

Monsters tend to swap and trade gimmicks much more frequently than supervillains. You get fast or slow zombies, bestial or sophisticated vampires, sexy or horrifying ghosts and so on.

Click to shrink...

Interestingly enough, I think this idea actually has a good grounding in being an Attribute-based Exalt rather than an Ability-based Exalt. See, once you discard the "Oh, Abyssals must be be easy to Solarise" idea and once you embrace the "I am a Hammer horror monster" thing of Abyssals, you notice that a lot of these monsters are defined by what they are, not what they know.

Jason isn't utterly unstoppable because he's trained himself to be tough. He just doesn't stop. Vampires move faster than the eye can see and are in your face, drinking your blood like it's jet fuel because that's what they are, not because they're masters of unarmed combat. Revenants who can smell sin and are driven to hunt down people who commit pre-martial sex, etc, aren't trained in investigation and haven't honed their awareness - that's just what they are.

You've got an "utterly unstoppable Jason" tree in Stamina, which has a very solid thing of "You won't hurt me, you won't stop me, I'm just going to keep going after you". You've got a ghoul tree in Wits, which is all about faking life through the consumption of life, healing through cannibalism, and so on. You've got a banshee/siren tree in Charisma because your voice is so sweet it lures men and women to their doom, which gives you portents, doom, and a voice that can kill. You've got a possession tree in Intelligence, for being the monster that's just a mind that steals the flesh of others. You've also got a "majestic lord of the night"-type vampire tree in Charisma, so you can command peasants and the Dead alike through the fact that you are the lord of the dead and life and death acknowledge your power. And so on.

Then, if you're going with 3x3 Attributes, and each Attribute has at least two associated trees in the corebook of ten charms each, then you've got 180 charms for a core which is well in the 150-200 charms of a corebook. That gives you some room to give other Attributes extra concepts, maybe have some shorter more numerous trees, explore different version of "Vampire" in different Attributes, justify how you can cover "bureaucracy" by being lord over the dead or by being a psychic vampire that drains mortals of will and brings them into perfect compliance with your desires, etc.

 

[horngeek]

Because linking them to abilities limits their conceptual space to those abilities. I mean, I can't think of a Bureaucracy Undead, just off the top of my head. By pingeonholing the Charms into abilities you gate off certain effects to only players who invested in that ability even if the effect makes thematic sense for the character but not the ability being particularly high. Further, you keep your Charms too focused on the ability rather tan explore the themes of monsters and horrors.

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To me, this is an argument against focusing them purely on mimicking monsters. Abyssal Bureacracy should either somehow specialise in coordinating ghosts and the like, focus on causing organisations to decay, or both.

 

[Omicron]

To me, this is an argument against focusing them purely on mimicking monsters. Abyssal Bureacracy should either somehow specialise in coordinating ghosts and the like, focus on causing organisations to decay, or both.

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Also, publicly executing a failing subordinate as an "example" that makes everyone else work harder.

 

[Aaron Peori]

So... How does an Abyssal invest in Bureaucracy powers, if they are not ability-based but undead-based yet there is no "bureaucracy undead"?

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They might not have direct Bureaucracy powers. It's okay for some splats not to be good in certain areas. They can probably act to gain similar results but would have to jump through more hoops. I'd certainly not discard the idea right away until I developed the conceptual space of Abyssals more thoroughly but I'm not going to sit there and say "Abyssals must have Bureaucracy charms" because unlike Solars (and Dragonblooded to a fair degree as well) they're not supposed to represent the breadth of human culture heroes and human excellence.

An Abyssal is more likely to inflict a haunting like curse on the building the bureaucracy operates in to drive those inside to madness then he is to just effect the bureaucracy on a conceptual level.

 

[grommile]

Bureaucracy seems like it would be in-scope for an urban vampire (as opposed to the backwater aristocrat vampire or the ravening beast vampire).

 

[Omicron]

They might not have direct Bureaucracy powers. It's okay for some splats not to be good in certain areas. They can probably act to gain similar results but would have to jump through more hoops. I'd certainly not discard the idea right away until I developed the conceptual space of Abyssals more thoroughly but I'm not going to sit there and say "Abyssals must have Bureaucracy charms" because unlike Solars (and Dragonblooded to a fair degree as well) they're not supposed to represent the breadth of human culture heroes and human excellence.

An Abyssal is more likely to inflict a haunting like curse on the building the bureaucracy operates in to drive those inside to madness then he is to just effect the bureaucracy on a conceptual level.

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Yeah, this is basically "Abyssals in name only."

Don't get me wrong, you have a solid concept for a splat here, but it only shares superficial similarities with Abyssal in any incarnation, past or future, concept or execution. Name it something else.

 

[Carrnage]

To me, this is an argument against focusing them purely on mimicking monsters. Abyssal Bureacracy should either somehow specialise in coordinating ghosts and the like, focus on causing organisations to decay, or both.

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Actually i'd have it be unsustainable business practices.

"Yes human minions burn the jungle down and use it to replace your old farms that are infertile due to overfarming" "look we simply corrupt the local banking overseers help out a few downtrodden souls get mortgages and sell those debts to others"

because you want to destroy the world, not a few businesses.

 

[horngeek]

Actually i'd have it be unsustainable business practices.

"Yes human minions burn the jungle down and use it to replace your old farms that are infertile due to overfarming" "look we simply corrupt the local banking overseers help out a few downtrodden souls get mortgages and sell those debts to others"

because you want to destroy the world, not a few businesses.

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Hell, I'd view all of those as valid.

 

[EarthScorpion]

They might not have direct Bureaucracy powers. It's okay for some splats not to be good in certain areas. They can probably act to gain similar results but would have to jump through more hoops. I'd certainly not discard the idea right away until I developed the conceptual space of Abyssals more thoroughly but I'm not going to sit there and say "Abyssals must have Bureaucracy charms" because unlike Solars (and Dragonblooded to a fair degree as well) they're not supposed to represent the breadth of human culture heroes and human excellence.

An Abyssal is more likely to inflict a haunting like curse on the building the bureaucracy operates in to drive those inside to madness then he is to just effect the bureaucracy on a conceptual level.

Click to shrink...

That's why I think an "Attribute Abyssal" framework keeps a good - ha ha - skeleton to hang things off. Charisma can support "I am so scary that my followers and the peasants down in the valley do not dare cheat me of my taxes". Appearance supports "I am the effortlessly sensual vampire who commands the love and adoration of my lackeys and so they always work their hardest to fulfil my every whim". Intelligence supports "I am the diabolical undead mastermind whose plans stretch for hundreds of years and my projects always go as planned because I am just that clever".

It makes their powers part of their nature at a more personal, "them" level than a raw Essence Infernals-esque "My hate burns you with green fire, like the hate of Malfeas".

...

The more I think about it, the more I like your "unquiet dead" Abyssals. Every single Abyssal, to a man and woman, died. One of the few things the early Infernals chapters do well is the whole "every Infernal failed" thing, because the splat really does build off it. Every Infernal is a failure who has a second chance, driving them on. Every Infernal knows the bitter gnawing feeling of defeat. Behind the splat and all their grandiose boasts, all of them have hit rock bottom and are building themselves up as something new.

Now, by contrast, every single Abyssal died. They all died in what should have been their greatest moment. The difference between Infernals and Abyssals is that Infernals blame other people, but they're only covering up their own failing and their own weakness. Abyssals have every right to blame other people.

Abyssals should be angry. They should be purposeful. They're the unquiet dead, hanging onto life through rage, spite and a sheer dogged determination to either punish the world or see vengeance or set things right.

That's why I'd cut their "I'm just immortal" thing - instead, they live as long as they have a driving goal. Abyssals die if they fall into decadence or purposelessness. They don't experience ennui - it just kills them. Every Abyssal has something they want that drives them onwards - and so even if they look like they're wasting time in their creepy castle on the hill, they're actually up to something, whether building up their forces to take over the country or becoming the most accomplished necromancer or whatever.

(Amusingly, that'd mean that they won't go First Age Solar, because having no purpose is fatal)

 

[Revlid]

yet there is no "bureaucracy undead"?

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I'm torn, here, between:

1. pointing out the varied and cross-cultural depictions of Hell or the Underworld as fundamentally mercantile or bureaucratic
2. making a joke about bureaucrats

I'm not sure I strictly agree with Aaron Peori's take on Abyssals, but I find it rather more compelling than one focussed on "Redemption". Firstly, because Redemption was a minor, niche concept which grew like a cancer to overtake the entire narrative of the Death Knights, warping their design choices and crowding out other stories. Second, because I'm not hugely interested in a splat where the draw is that I might, eventually, be able to play a different splat – Promethean pulled that story off, but most games are not Promethean, and the context of Redemption is very different than the context of the Pilgrimage. Thirdly, because it doubles down on the "dark Solars" gig rather than allowing Abyssals unique room to breathe, which is something that was old even before Abyssals 2e proudly unveiled a whole book of existing Solar Charms adorned with black eyeliner.

That said, if you asked me to give you a signature Abyssal, I wouldn't pick an undead character at all. I'd pick Guts.

 

[SerGregness]

That said, if you asked me to give you a signature Abyssal, I wouldn't pick an undead character at all. I'd pick Guts.

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That's an odd way to spell Raziel.

 

[Lealope]

As I mentioned up above that is the point of having the trees be very focused around a single concept, so you can mix and match. You might have your core charms all come from the 'blood-sucking' tree and then use other trees to create your variety of vampire.

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Ah, sorry for the misunderstanding. Just to clear things up, their Charms wouldn't strictly be limited to the personal powers of the representative monsters, right? Because I think that's the real sticking point for me.

What I'd like is for Abyssals to have Fisher-King style charms that change the world around them to reflect the horror story they want to tell. Thus, there would be a vampire tree focused around promoting subservience in mortals or a werewolf tree promoting an atmosphere of secretive paranoia.

That said, if you asked me to give you a signature Abyssal, I wouldn't pick an undead character at all. I'd pick Guts.

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Would you mind expanding on this? Because my image of an established Abyssal has always been Sauron while he had a body.

 

[MJ12 Commando]

I'm not sure I strictly agree with Aaron Peori's take on Abyssals, but I find it rather more compelling than one focussed on "Redemption". Firstly, because Redemption was a minor, niche concept which grew like a cancer to overtake the entire narrative of the Death Knights, warping their design choices and crowding out other stories. Second, because I'm not hugely interested in a splat where the draw is that I might, eventually, be able to play a different splat – Promethean pulled that story off, but most games are not Promethean, and the context of Redemption is very different than the context of the Pilgrimage. Thirdly, because it doubles down on the "dark Solars" gig rather than allowing Abyssals unique room to breathe, which is something that was old even before Abyssals 2e proudly unveiled a whole book of existing Solar Charms adorned with black eyeliner.

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Maybe we're all taking the wrong approach here. Maybe we should go back and ask ourselves, fundamentally, what sort of heroism the Abyssals represent through their Exaltation conditions. Abyssals get their Exaltation from dying. The act that puts them in the history books-which make them a force which can shape all of Creation, is one which kills them. What does that suggest to you?

It suggest to me a couple of words pretty quickly. Sacrifice. Martyrdom. Fanaticism. Fearlessness. The politicization of tragedy. The whitewashing of the flaws of the dead. Leaving a legacy. Single, drastic acts compared to constant work.

This might not be the same stuff you get, but I think it makes a better framework than starting from established powers which are "Solar things with eyeliner." For example, it suggests more thematic charms which work on a large scale rather than just "EVIL LEADERSHIP."

A Solar changes behavior by constant action. An Abyssal's methods of changing behavior might be much more fire-and-forget but might well have its context twisted and reinterpreted in ways the Solar's can't.

 

[Noctum]

That's why I think an "Attribute Abyssal" framework keeps a good - ha ha - skeleton to hang things off. Charisma can support "I am so scary that my followers and the peasants down in the valley do not dare cheat me of my taxes". Appearance supports "I am the effortlessly sensual vampire who commands the love and adoration of my lackeys and so they always work their hardest to fulfil my every whim". Intelligence supports "I am the diabolical undead mastermind whose plans stretch for hundreds of years and my projects always go as planned because I am just that clever".

It makes their powers part of their nature at a more personal, "them" level than a raw Essence Infernals-esque "My hate burns you with green fire, like the hate of Malfeas".

...

The more I think about it, the more I like your "unquiet dead" Abyssals. Every single Abyssal, to a man and woman, died. One of the few things the early Infernals chapters do well is the whole "every Infernal failed" thing, because the splat really does build off it. Every Infernal is a failure who has a second chance, driving them on. Every Infernal knows the bitter gnawing feeling of defeat. Behind the splat and all their grandiose boasts, all of them have hit rock bottom and are building themselves up as something new.

Now, by contrast, every single Abyssal died. They all died in what should have been their greatest moment. The difference between Infernals and Abyssals is that Infernals blame other people, but they're only covering up their own failing and their own weakness. Abyssals have every right to blame other people.

Abyssals should be angry. They should be purposeful. They're the unquiet dead, hanging onto life through rage, spite and a sheer dogged determination to either punish the world or see vengeance or set things right.

That's why I'd cut their "I'm just immortal" thing - instead, they live as long as they have a driving goal. Abyssals die if they fall into decadence or purposelessness. They don't experience ennui - it just kills them. Every Abyssal has something they want that drives them onwards - and so even if they look like they're wasting time in their creepy castle on the hill, they're actually up to something, whether building up their forces to take over the country or becoming the most accomplished necromancer or whatever.

(Amusingly, that'd mean that they won't go First Age Solar, because having no purpose is fatal)

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So basically:

Which actually fits in quite well with how ghosts tend to come into being in Creation, being the soul of someone with unfinished business. Abyssals are just ghosts writ large.

 

[Broken25]

Revenants who can smell sin and are driven to hunt down people who commit pre-martial sex,

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Pre-martial sex?

Do they hate people who go to die satisfied or what?

 

[Sucal]

Pre-martial sex?

Do they hate people who go to die satisfied or what?

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Have you like never watched a Slasher film or something?