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General Exalted Thread

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So, I see this conversation on Abyssals as horror monsters. My thoughts are as follows:

1. As has been stated, unlike Infernals who have charm trees representing types of villain, Abyssals under this setup should have charmtrees representing single sets of powers, because horror monsters have their things blurred so much that you can't have any type represented by one Charm tree. The horrific monster hiding in a human skin fits Werewolves, Vampires, Ghosts and some stranger things like the Worm-That-Walks. The creature that gets stronger from devouring souls fits Ghosts, Vampires and some types of Necromancer. So, 5-15 Charms for each thing to make it easy to work with this. 15 Charms if you want to be able to focus on being extremely good at one niche is a good way to allow for flavor-based characters.

2. I like the Revenant idea. Having it so that Abyssals are the result of saying "I'm not done yet, I will end them" as you lay dying after trying to do something grand enough for a Solar exaltation is interesting flavor. It's a great way to show that Abyssals are not good guys, because when blind vengeful hate is what keeps you going, you are at best the lesser evil. It also makes it so that high-essence Abyssals are either lost in an endlessly growing trail of vengeance or have a nigh-impossible thing to take vengeance on.

3. I also like the idea of being able to substitute the goal for vengeance with actively killing, and having something that gives extra time/resonance removal for killing in a specific way would make the 'Abyssal as horror monster' go further. This would let you play as a vengeance driven madman who will kill everything connected with what killed them, or a monster that kills in a very specific way on an identifiable schedule. Or someone who flips between the two whenever convenient, in-game or in-character.

4. If the bit that Abyssals are corrupted Solar exaltations is kept, Solar exaltations need a similar overhaul. I'm not saying bring back Mirror, I'm saying have both use similar Charm tree structures, perhaps with Solars having fewer of the 5-15 Charm trees, but getting access to larger trees, or just having fewer trees in-general that are longer than Abyssal Charm trees but shorter than Infernal Charm trees. Basically, Infernal Charm trees represent coherent villain archetypes, Solar Charm trees represent separate character aspects and Abyssal Charm trees represent the mess of horror monster powers.

5. While we're at overhauling a splat or two, let's make Infernal Charm trees into more coherent archetypes matching the 'style' of villain that most closely matches the associated Yozi. As an example, the Malfeas Charm tree would be for the powerful tyrants who fought their way to power. The sort of character that would be the final boss of a campaign to tear down an evil empire. The Ebon Dragon would be for endless schemers who look to make everything fail forever. The Joker is small time compared to the scale that any decent user of that Charmset would be able to pull.
 
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Kiriel said:
Abyssals re-write? Why don't we use Geist Sin-Eaters as inspiration? /half-serious
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Because Geist is about people who have agency and power and get to be forces for positive change. They're not undead, they're alive again.

Also their afterlife isn't the ongoing aftershock of the impossible death of the titans who made the world.

It's all far far too happy sappy optimistic.
 
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I don't particularly care for proposed idea of "Driven to vengeance, you die if you get it or else go for more vengeance."

While a revenge driven story is a classic, I also like the idea that an Abyssal story has room to explore what happens afterwords. That they incorporate a theme of....not exactly rebirth and not exactly new life and not exactly redemption, but something that has elements of those. They've gotten their revenge and now they have the opportunity to pick up the broken pieces of what's left in their wake and put them back together. Maybe they try and recreate what was lost, but maybe they try and create something new.

Vengeance can and maybe should be a powerful influence on Abyssals. Their Charms could very easily encourage them towards revenge, giving them a number of powerful bonuses if they're acting to get revenge against a target of their hate.

Their Exaltation stopped them at a point just before life transforms to death. They maybe mostly dead, but they've still got one Last Breath, one tiny little spark of life left to them. Enough vitality in them to be capable of change and growth in a way that none of the rest of the Dead trapped in their cold and static patterns, from the least ghosts to the Neverborn themselves, are capable of.
 
Nervaqus987 said:
Their Exaltation stopped them at a point just before life transforms to death. They maybe mostly dead, but they've still got one Last Breath, one tiny little spark of life left to them. Enough vitality in them to be capable of change and growth in a way that none of the rest of the Dead trapped in their cold and static patterns, from the least ghosts to the Neverborn themselves, are capable of.
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I agree.

The main problem i have with ES view is that there is virtually no difference between the Abyssals and the Deathlords.

(Except that the first can operate freely in creation, of course).
 
I've been mulling this over because of all the stuff about Abyssals as they pertain to Solars, but something's been bugging me about the whole topic. The Abyssal is, at its heart, a force of death and decay; its existence advances entropy. The whole point is supposed to be that your very existence's point is to speed up the death of everything. You don't leave things better, at the end of the day, even if you can accomplish some good on the road to whatever.

"I will become a Solar" seems to be in pretty gross violation of this central theme. I don't think redemption itself necessarily is - but I can't manage to square the two in my head.
 
Nervaqus987 said:
I don't particularly care for proposed idea of "Driven to vengeance, you die if you get it or else go for more vengeance."

While a revenge driven story is a classic, I also like the idea that an Abyssal story has room to explore what happens afterwords. That they incorporate a theme of....not exactly rebirth and not exactly new life and not exactly redemption, but something that has elements of those. They've gotten their revenge and now they have the opportunity to pick up the broken pieces of what's left in their wake and put them back together. Maybe they try and recreate what was lost, but maybe they try and create something new.
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I'd rule that you could also make non-revenge-oriented goals into your unlife-sustaining motive; the Humbled Pilgrim will not rest until he has mapped the meridians of Essence that move through Creation and gained a true understanding of its metaphysical structure & origin. Muzai's Forgotten Son is driven ever forward by his determination to see his family readmitted to the city whose name he bears, restored to their rightful station among the nobility.
 
Nervaqus987 said:
I don't particularly care for proposed idea of "Driven to vengeance, you die if you get it or else go for more vengeance."
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It's not automatically vengeance - but it often is. It just has to be something that, essentially, you care enough that you aren't willing to lie down and die when you should be dead. And implicitly, something you care enough about that you're willing to inflict all the side-effects of Abyssal Charms on Creation to see accomplished.

One very, very common things in mythology from across the world that's assigned to the unquiet dead is obsession (which is a lot more PC friendly than the other thing that's often ascribed to them, which is raw malice). An Abyssal can be, for example, obsessed with protecting his city and stopping all crime in it. By day, he passes as a cold, pale nobleman who has many consorts and who owns vast swathes of land in the city and around it - but by night, he becomes a stalking terror that hunts down law-breakers and criminals and anyone at all who would threaten his beloved city. Is the nobleman the real him, or is it the monster in the shadows?

(We might call him the Prince Who Is The Night)
 
runeblue360 said:
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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Honestly, I think the 3E idea about drawing inspiration from the Deathlords is a pretty solid one. Just, you know, without the rape ghosts.
Salty said:
Because Geist is about people who have agency and power
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Wait, is your position that Abyssals shouldn't have agency and power?
 
I like a lot of the plots and incentives of the vengeance idea, but it feels far too narrow for a PC splat. Maybe driven ing like passion instead, potentially with a particular focus on negative feelings of keeping it around hatred and destruction is incredibly important.

They're people who should have died, but are clinging onto life. This has a strong parallel to how ghosts function, where their intimacies allow them to continue existing. Something that warps their behavior around the most important parts of their former lives. Something similar, though able to be changed more easily, would tie Abyssals into the underworld. They understand what the rest of the entities are going through, because their passions are just as strong. So long as they listen, they'll be able to stop themselves from building up resonance and becoming more deathly.

There's a lot of potential for charm-tech that could hook into that as well.

Edit: ninja'd by the idea's source
 
Rook said:
I've been mulling this over because of all the stuff about Abyssals as they pertain to Solars, but something's been bugging me about the whole topic. The Abyssal is, at its heart, a force of death and decay; its existence advances entropy. The whole point is supposed to be that your very existence's point is to speed up the death of everything. You don't leave things better, at the end of the day, even if you can accomplish some good on the road to whatever.

"I will become a Solar" seems to be in pretty gross violation of this central theme. I don't think redemption itself necessarily is - but I can't manage to square the two in my head.
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The Redemption storyline is a gross violation of that theme: it's all about how, while you are a force of death and decay you can stop being one. You can change your core nature to something else.

Technically, I'm not sure the Redemption storyline automatically lead to becoming a Solar at the start, but it's the most obvious and straightforward path, and needs the least work in order to continue playing the character after redemption: the rules for Solars already exist. So it became linked, and certainly the writing staff pushed that path pretty hard with various abyssals who looked to be seeking redemption plus various charms.
 
I don't understand why people keep zeroing on the notion of vengeance as the defining part of Scorp's proposal. It's very clearly not; he just explained it again lol
 
Broken25 said:
I agree.

The main problem i have with ES view is that there is virtually no difference between the Abyssals and the Deathlords.

(Except that the first can operate freely in creation, of course).
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Keep in mind that a Deathlord is ES's game, at least, is just 'a ghost powered by stolen power from the Neverborn'.

They could want literally anything or have any goal or driving desire. They just happened to sup on the lifeblood of dead titans.

And there is a difference between an Exalt and an insane but powerful Spirit. On many levels.
 
Whatever the case, we all seem to agree on Abyssals being Exalts of 'unfinished business,' needing some form of goal to keep going. Some of us want that goal to be a gruesome thing, playing to the fact that Abyssals are meant to destroy creation. Others what Abyssals to just be the Exalt equivalent of Ghosts.
 
rikalous said:
Wait, is your position that Abyssals shouldn't have agency and power?
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My position is that Abyssal Exaltation is not a positive experience. Abyssals don't effect positive change in the world and don't get to be happy as Abyssals.

Well, not the sane ones, at any rate.
 
I have an idea of a doctor that had the cure for a plague that was ravaging his lands, dying in the attempt of writing it down to save his people.

Instead, as he lay dying and ran out of ink, he simply bled himself for more ink until he died and later received the Black Exaltation, only to find his lands deserted and empty, as people had fled from the plague.

So his obsession would be something like eradicating this plague completely, then moving on to other plagues and eventually disease in general.

The fun would come from trying to use Abyssal Charms to do this of course.
 
Would there be any scope to have Abyssals be the ones to play with the "no takebacks" rule a little?

I'm thinking of Re:Zero as inspiration here, as far as the tone is concerned.

If we're trying to think of themes to hang Charms off, "violation/transgression" seems as good as any. Because Abyssals (and ghosts, for that matter) are fundamentally wrong in Exalted's cosmology. Their very existence is tied to a thing that should not be.
 
Salty said:
My position is that Abyssal Exaltation is not a positive experience. Abyssals don't effect positive change in the world and don't get to be happy as Abyssals.

Well, not the sane ones, at any rate.
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I think "don't get to be happy" is valid. But a positive change? The Punisher gets to be a positive change and he's kind of the ur-Abyssal in my mind. It's often 1.2 steps forward 1 step backwards, but it's in the right direction.

I'd say they don't get to be purely positive changes; there will always be large tradeoffs. The Abyssal doesn't remove the splinter from the foot of the rampaging elephant so that the jungle can live in peace, he cuts the beast down.
 
I think the only way that a Redemption subplot squares up with the Abyssal condition is that if it is the kind of personal redemption which ultimately ends in you doing something that might change things for the better someday, when others build up what you've torn down, but look like an even worse monster than before for doing so. You're the Oda Nobunaga, the Vlad Tepes, The Boss from MGS3, the "national hero" who people will nevertheless spit on for your actions, though you helped shape the way they now live. Abyssals are Doomed rather than Damned, after all, and that means it extends long after their actions. Solars get to leave grand legacies, Abyssals make no less of an impact, but are left unsung except when it comes to the trail of blood in their wake.

You can act the hero all you like, maybe even truly Be one deep in your heart, but the final hurdle comes at the cost that history will not remember you that way, and may inspire people to misrepresent your cause or goals to villainous ends. Any inheritor to that Exaltation, Abyssal, Solar or otherwise, will be left with the stain of your existence and will have to work to scrub away that shame until the very last traces of you are gone.

Basically redemption from an Abyssal standpoint shouldn't be the only choice, it should be the Worst choice you can make.
 
Broken25 said:
Hell no.
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Unless you by "no takebacks" mean "stuff a fucking ghost in a corpse and tell people that it's totally a true resurrection gize", in which case it's okay.

Which reminds me of some Charm ideas for Abyssals.

Let's call this Charm cascade; Nightmarish Hunter and take a look:

The first Charm in Nighmarish Hunter is Hunter-Horror Unfurled, which externalizes your Po soul as something that is mechanically a really nasty Hungry Ghost, your Po will probably manifest during the night and go hunting the area and bring trophies from it's hunting back to you when you wake.

Hunter-Horror Unfurled is followed directly by Atrocious Assemblage Hunt, which allows you to manifest your Po in the shape of a pack of spectral hunting beasts, for maximum Hounds of Baskerville. They cannot get too far away from you though, they are leashed to you as is only natural.

Atrocious Assemblage Hunt is then followed by Unhallowed Nighttide Regalia, which causes shades and darkness to follow in the wake of your hunting pack (or Po), making mortals afraid or even dragging them with you on your hunts as wild, ghoulish accomplices.

And I also have some other ideas.
 
Dif said:
I think the only way that a Redemption subplot squares up with the Abyssal condition is that if it is the kind of personal redemption which ultimately ends in you doing something that might change things for the better someday, when others build up what you've torn down, but look like an even worse monster than before for doing so. You're the Oda Nobunaga, the Vlad Tepes, The Boss from MGS3, the "national hero" who people will nevertheless spit on for your actions, though you helped shape the way they now live. Abyssals are Doomed rather than Damned, after all, and that means it extends long after their actions. Solars get to leave grand legacies, Abyssals make no less of an impact, but are left unsung except when it comes to the trail of blood in their wake.

You can act the hero all you like, maybe even truly Be one deep in your heart, but the final hurdle comes at the cost that history will not remember you that way, and may inspire people to misrepresent your cause or goals to villainous ends. Any inheritor to that Exaltation, Abyssal, Solar or otherwise, will be left with the stain of your existence and will have to work to scrub away that shame until the very last traces of you are gone.

Basically redemption from an Abyssal standpoint shouldn't be the only choice, it should be the Worst choice you can make.
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Hell No.
 
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