Remove ads

General Exalted Thread

Reader mode
Morphic Tide said:
I'm sorry, is there 1st or 3rd edition lore on how the Exalts were made?
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
"In the time before record, in the blank vastness of prehistory, the gods of Heaven created champions to carry their power and glory, wage wars in their name, and fight the battles they never could. These heroic men and women were called the Exalted, for they had been uplifted."

While this doesn't go into any details, what it doesn't say is "one of this other race of beings the gods wanted destroyed who had allied with them forged 'blank' divine gifts and handed them to the gods to imbue with their mark."
 
The exact lore for Alchies is not nearly so dumb, even as much as I dislike the characterization of it in the 2e book. The "prototype" Exaltations were neither Alchemical or Celestial, but something more baser prior and between the two. Creation Exaltations are the result of combining such a thing with the essences of the Incarna/Elemental Dragons, respectively, which is how they manifest differently but still of a "spiritually enlightening" method. Alchemicals draw their inspiration from that prototype, so they could be built with the resources Autochthon had onhand, namely himself, not how the other forms of Exalted were made.

All this accomplishes is giving the two forms a root ancestor, but not much else by way of commonality. Alchemicals are as much a branch of Exaltation-tech as Celestials and Terrestrials are, they aren't the "base" from which all others were made.
 
Last edited:
Omicron said:
"In the time before record, in the blank vastness of prehistory, the gods of Heaven created champions to carry their power and glory, wage wars in their name, and fight the battles they never could. These heroic men and women were called the Exalted, for they had been uplifted."

While this doesn't go into any details, what it doesn't say is "one of this other race of beings the gods wanted destroyed who had allied with them forged 'blank' divine gifts and handed them to the gods to imbue with their mark."
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Absence of evidence does not equal evidence of absence. Very classic fallacy.
 
Honestly, the "blank slates" thing seems mostly to come from a plot hook in 2e Sidereals as its root, in which case we either laugh mockingly or cry, depending on how we feel about people taking 2e Sidereals as a source of sweeping vision or grand poetic scale.

All that needs be said, honestly, about the origin of Exaltation is that the blasphemous, transcendent genius of the King of All Craftsmen was needed to forge such things of terrifying, awful potency and they could not have been made without that crippled blacksmith and the death that lay within him. And so too was the arete of the Sun needed to forge the Solars, the wisdom of the Maidens needed to weave the Sidereals, the mad ferocious brilliance of Luna needed to dream of the Lunars and the abundant fecundity and elemental wrath of the Gaian Dragons to conceive the Terrestrials.

Without the Sun, there would have been no Solars, for Autochthon could not forge them on his own - we have seen his Alchemicals and they are his artwork alone. Same for all other Exalts. But without Autochthon, the Sun could not have wrought his three hundred shining children and even if he had wrought a brilliant race through long and arduous effort, they would not have been the titan-killing Exalted. No more Solars can be crafted, for Autochthon is long-gone from Creation and their genesis is beyond the Sun alone - and it was beyond the unified Solar host of the High First Age, if they ever tried.

And that is all we really need to say.
 
People generally "into" the idea of the Ex3 setting aren't so much interested in it by its own sake, so much as the fact it gives them an easy excuse to dismiss anything dumb lingering around from 2e's writing, even the stuff made by the same people who supposedly learned their lessons screwing it all up the first time around.

As though anyone playing 2e was/is not doing a whole lot of cherrypicking themselves. Its generally been accepted knowledge from 1e onwards that trying to play "all the books, everything canon forever and ever amen" is a fool's errand and no one should bother, but that doesn't seem to stop people from trying or insisting at-length that is the default method of approaching the material.
 
Dif said:
People generally "into" the idea of the Ex3 setting aren't so much interested in it by its own sake, so much as the fact it gives them an easy excuse to dismiss anything dumb lingering around from 2e's writing, even the stuff made by the same people who supposedly learned their lessons screwing it all up the first time around.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
I am, in fact, interested in Ex3 for its own sake :V
 
EarthScorpion said:
Through the entire High First Age, there were no new Exalts made by the unified Exalted host at the peak of its power [1].
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
They didn't manage to perform basic human decency either.
The 2 things are clearly linked. :lol

EarthScorpion said:
[1] Excluding, of course, Terrestrials made the usual way new Terrestrials get made. Which is much more fun than extended Craft actions.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

The 5 elemental dragons play a round of poker, and the winner gets to build the dragonblood?
 
EarthScorpion said:
Through the entire High First Age, there were no new Exalts made by the unified Exalted host at the peak of its power [1]. The lessened, fallen, divided Second Age will not achieve it - and it is far beyond mortal ken.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
:Citation Needed:

I'd personally argue against the idea that Exaltations are flatly impossible to make - or that no First Age Solar ever made their own Terrestrial-tier custom Exalts.* If a Storyteller wants to introduce a unique, unknown-quantity Exaltation forged in ages past to their setting, then more power to them. Likewise, if somebody playing a Twilight/New Moon/Daybreak/whatever the Twilight-equivalent Infernal Caste has their PC be obsessed with crafting their own Exaltation as the capstone of their career, then that's perfectly okay.

Mind you, I'd also argue that accomplishing the latter would involve a very Dark Souls-esque journey of hunting beings whose Essence carries the desired characteristics, brutally murdering them, and then channeling their souls into your masterwork-to-be, crafting the eventual Exaltation around the resultant mass of spiritual energy like a sort of semi-soulsteel core. After all, just because Luna and Sol Invictus willingly gave of themselves to make the Solars and Lunars doesn't mean you can't take that power from others when making your own.


* Of course, as I said when I raised this concept in a prior post, those custom Exaltations probably required massive investiture of time & resources, weren't able to self-replicate like the Dragonbloods', quite possibly were little more than "ultimate butler Exalt" or something similarly niche, and almost certainly had to be specially keyed to a chosen host, because having a personal Artifact of that caliber go whizzing off into the wild every time its mortal wielder dies would get very annoying very fast.
 
In one book there is a little piece about the weakest of lintha blood being greater than the strongest dragonblood.
On a scale from 1 to 10, how much propaganda is it?
 
Reader mode
You must login or register to reply here.
Remove ads
Back
Top