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General Exalted Thread

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EarthScorpion said:
Honestly, I do give the Demon City vast barren wastes.
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Well, I was speaking more in the context of people who want to downscale the Demon City. Yours still can have countless megacities dotting Malfeas like dystopic acne, whereas limiting the volume more strictly can give an actively claustrophobic feel.

For instance, if only the innermost two or three layers were truly habitible to demons, with the ones more distant being too cold and airless etc. space metaphors and there's this constant move inwards as the Green Sun builds layer after layer, building by building so you can't stay in any one place too long or you end up outside the airlock and sometimes an inner layer ruptures and the Silent Wind bursts in or the Ebon Dragon steals away the heat and light etc. The Yozi and some of their weirder souls and behemoths might live in the dark and cold away from Ligier, but the population is otherwise packed claustrophobically tight in what's basically a generation ship prison aimed at nowhere, with a total surface area smaller than Australia but with even more lethal wildlife.
 
Omicron said:
There's a huge misunderstanding in the fanbase, a misconception that just because Exalted is deliberately designed to allow (and to an extent incentivize) playing larger-than-life mythical heroes with gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirths, classical heroes whose deeds can be grand or terrible, the game doesn't judge you for it. But it totally does.
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... People actually think that? I mean, I wouldn't know either way, I'm well aware there's a lot of Exalted discussion I miss on places like the OPP boards, but you're railing against a problem that I have never really seen. Sometimes people join the conversation thinking the game is there for a shallow power fantasy, and they invariably meet a deluge of corrections.

I mean, I have some edge-case disagreements and I think taking a fairly humanocentric view of morality in Exalted is uncomfortable but not necessarily indefensible, but you seem to be railing at... I don't want to say a strawman, but rather something that's hidden from me by a wall?
 
Nidamento, the Hidden Landgrave
Demon of the Second Circle
Defining Soul of the Blood Red Moon

Fair Ululaya sits upon her throne and all is beautiful and wonderful for ten thousand demons gaze upon her and sing out her praises. And should a voice be raised in dissent, then inky darkness takes them and there is a rending of flesh and cries of pain - which are heard by none, for the beauty of the Blood Red Moon will brook no rivals. This darkness is Nidamento, whose shade makes the light of his lady all the brighter. When Ligier would overwhelm Ululaya with his terrible fluorescence, Nidamento extrudes his ink to fill the air, which only red light can shine through and which tarnishes and corrodes the beauty of all things that are not red. Then all things are as they should be.

At the heart of his darkness, Nidamento wears winged crimson pearl armour granted to him by his lady. It would be a work of beauty if it was not coated in his viscous ink. He must compact himself down to wear this shell-like plate, for in truth he is an amorphous form of effervescing ooze the size of a yeddim. Where he steps he leaves his ink and ugliness scars the world. When he goes to war in his lady's service he discards his armour and dons one of her terrible war machines. One secret he hides even from his lady is that one of his cults is in distant contact with Vanileth, the Shogun of Mechanical Flight, for their interests are much in common and he would wish to see Creation once again experience the thrills of war in the air. He likewise wishes to corrupt the hawkriders of the East to his service, and to taint the bloodlines of their hawks with his demons.

Given to the Hidden Landgrave is the outer edge of the Blood Red Moon, and he guards it against all outsiders. Forty-four are his legions of Hell, riding great flying beasts born within the guts of the red moon. These beings he anoints with his ink and so they are wretched horrors, ugly beyond belief. They wear their ugliness as a mark of pride, for it is a sacrifice they make in Ululaya's name and the ink that has burned their eyes mean the only beauty they can see is hers.

Sorcerers call upon Nidamento to exhale clouds of his ink and cover a city or a battlefield to thwart the machinations of the sun and the moon. This blocks their light save at the rosy dawn and dusk. He is also a skilled general who specialises in commanding aerial cavalry, and many of his arts of generalship are lost to Creation. The Hidden Landgrave gains a point of Limit for each day when he is not able to fly. He can crawl into Creation during the dusk of the night of the new moon, but only when a woman in red thrice damns a rival of hers to the Demon Realm. This is all the permission Nidamento needs to snatch the foe up, and drag them to Hell to be turned into one of his servants.
 
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Dif said:
Creation is more important because no matter how many things live, or die, or wield incredible wealth or supernatural powers from elsewhere, if they are not already making an effort to be in Creation, the story will never be about them in a meaningful sense. Creation is an engine which applies significance by its very nature.
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The Yozi may think that the Games of Divinity are the source of Meaning. But, honestly, they are wrong, and thinking like that makes them assholes.

Value comes from sentient beings. A lifeless universe is worthless, no matter how grand, compared with a single inhabited world.

Omicron said:
People matter. Lives matter. Suffering matters. Demons are sentient beings which you summon from their hell-prison under the light of a sun they explicitly despise, to bind them to your will. It's slavery and it makes you a pulp sorcerer - grand and terrible and a huge asshole. Demon-summoning is not morally neutral.
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This.
 
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Broken25 said:
The Yozi may think that the Games of Divinity are the source of Meaning. But, honestly, they are wrong, and thinking like that makes them assholes.

Value comes from sentient beings. A lifeless universe is worthless, no matter how grand, compared with a single inhabited world.



This.
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Unfortunately, the Yozis are the ones who made Creation in the first place, so for them to place meaning in life is like you placing meaing in the figurines you make, or the computers you build.
 
Especially when you ask yourself the question 'if you are a being better described as an entire setting, what do these small things seeking their paths through you matter?'
 
Demon summoning isn't morally neutral.
It's morally ambiguous.

Demons aren't inherently evil. They're sentient beings that may have some fucked-up instincts and grew up in a really shitty environment, but that doesn't make them evil.
Summoning a demon doesn't damn your soul, make you an enemy of humanity, or require you to make any malicious offerings or pacts.
Those things are morally neutral, sure.

But what allows demons to be summoned - their imprisonment and their surrender oaths - is also what made them so fucked-up.
It's a form of slavery - the demon doesn't have a choice in the summoning. Even if you assume that only willing first circles show up (which doesn't work for second and third circles, so it's unlikely), the binding is equal to slavery, potentially for life.
And as for the surrender oaths - sure, your character isn't responsible for them. But it was still an act that put all those first circles - who are not at all responsible for the actions of their progenitors - into a prison with the enraged, maddened creators of the world. The Exalted host shares at least some responsibility each time thousands of demons are crushed by a layer of Malfeas, when the laws of Cecelyne enslave a demon, when Kimbery drowns whole quarters of the city, when a second circle tortures hundreds. That's what happens if you imprison people with mad beings who hold power over them.
This isn't morally neutral. It's morally wrong, and it's an inherent part of demon summoning.

At the same time, a summoning frees the demon from all that. You're liberating a prisoner from a brutal prison - but you only do so for their labor and perfect loyalty. You might even save their life - but at the cost of robbing them of their freedom. And you're certainly profiting of a horrible, unjust system.
So at best, we can call this "slightly good", but really it's ambiguous with many dark shades.

Exalted tries heavily to decouple demon summoning from being evil or morally corrupting, to contrast it with many other fantasy settings.
But people shouldn't forget that that doesn't mean it has no morality attached to it. It's just that this morality is tied to the actual lives involved, and your impact on them.
If you want to play a morally good demon summoner - you either ignore that part (as many morally good slaveholders did over the millenia, they just ignored the moral of slavery), or you actually summon demons as a form of prisoner release program, without making it conditional or coercing them.
 
Broken25 said:
Value comes from sentient beings.
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Yes, and which ones are valued most?

Because no Exalt is omnipotent, and all sentient life is not equal, they must prioritize their efforts on a scale lower than "everything." You cannot fight every battle, save every life, and the simple act of weighing the livelihood of ten thousand-thousand ultimately meaningless demons against a hundred of your beloved countrymen in their time of need presents you with an entirely deliberate Sophie's Choice when Creation exists to be a signpost going "this is what matters" and Malfeas will simply put off his eternal rage until some other, less convenient time. Those demons will die, by hook or by crook, but you can help create a foundation for your countrymen to thrive instead of pushing against a force of inevitability and telling yourself that perusing fatalistic gestures of martyrdom makes it own reward.

Meanwhile, your countrymen will be dead and scattered to the winds, cursing you as a traitor in the one place of all reality where history makes stories about victors.
 
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Serafina said:
At the same time, a summoning frees the demon from all that. You're liberating a prisoner from a brutal prison - but you only do so for their labor and perfect loyalty.
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This is one of those edge cases I mentioned, because this isn't actually true. You don't have to bind a summoned demon. You can totally summon them up and simply request their aid on the basis that, hey, it's time outside Malfeas, y'know?

The fact that almost nobody does this, or even acknowledges it as a possibility, is a useful part of the arrangement, I think. It makes a very succinct moral statement about sorcery and sorcerors, that they don't have to be slavers, yet they almost always are.
 
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Kuciwalker said:
Aside from this, I also think you are giving them credit for a design that conflicts with what's actually written in the books.

The books spend a huge amount of time talking about Creation. About why this is a lesser, fallen age, and that matters (rather than just being a footnote about a small principality). About the greatness and terribleness of things people do there.

At no point does it read like it's setting you up for "oh, and by the way, really the game is supposed to be about confronting nihilism after learning everything we just talked about is insignificant".
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Hmm. How to put this?

Basically my goal with Exalted is I don't want to tell a story about Saving The Serfs of Malfeas or Curing the Great Curse or Resurrecting the High First Age or Reforming Yu Shan.

I don't want to "save the world". My goal when I run a game of Exalted is to tell a very personal story. Go look at the map of Creation and look at those blocks that are five hundred miles to a side. I want my entire story to occur in there. The Iliad. The Romance of the Three Kingdoms. A story about a nation in peril, great cities being threatened, a rise of god-kings... and that's it.

But according to @Broken25 I can't tell that story. There are probably something like 150 Million People in the East. What does my kingdom of 1 million souls in the far South matter compared to that enormity? Why should I be content to tell a story about the lives and loves of these people and the struggle between those who would control or destroy them when I should be focusing on those people who outnumber my pititful little corner of Creation by two orders of magnitude?

This is the exact same problem @Broken25 has between Creation and Malfeas. I don't care about Creation, I care about Paragon or Whitewall or Nexus. I want to be free to tell a story about the meaning of this city-state or this nation or these people. I don't want to have to constantly think "There is a much more important story that needs to be told."

Perversely, the existence of Malfeas and its teeming hordes frees me to tell these tiny stories about small nations. Malfeas is huge. The Underworld is huge. The Wyld is literally infinite. No matter what I do I can not 'save the world', because Creation is a tiny, tiny fraction of the actual world. I can not, in a normal sized chronicle or even one that lasts hundreds of in setting years, possibly make a dent on saving all the demons of Malfeas and all the ghosts of the Underworld and all the numberless hordes of Chaos.

If 'saving Creation' can be important within the scale of this literally astronomically large expanded world than 'saving Gem' can be important within the scale of Creation. The only thing that matters is the story I want to tell, about the group I want to tell it about. Whether that story is six billion demons or eight strangers taking shelter in a Guild caravan layover in the Far North.

Omicron said:
Exalted isn't actually a relativist setting.


[...]

And if you think that's cool, shine on, you crazy diamond. You will be standing among Gilgamesh and Achilles and Elric, all of whom did great and terrible things, and whose terrible things were wrong and symptomatic of their heroic flaws, and all of whom are judged in legend.

What tales will be told of your deeds?
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I don't think we're disagreeing here. The books never outright call any of the atrocities evil. They just present cause and effect, action and consequence.

Obviously, we the audience are meant to judge but nothing in setting will judge you.

Broken25 said:
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Value comes from sentient beings.
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No, value comes from us.
 
EarthScorpion said:
The Hidden Landgrave gains a point of Limit for each day when he is not able to fly. He can crawl into Creation during the dusk of the night of the new moon, but only when a woman in red thrice damns a rival of hers to the Demon Realm. This is all the permission Nidamento needs to snatch them up, and drag them to Hell to be turned into one of his servants.
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Who is the "them" that Nidamento snatches up? Is it the woman in red, or her rival that she damns? Or both?
 
Aaron Peori said:
Obviously, we the audience are meant to judge but nothing in setting will judge you.
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No, there's plenty in the setting that will judge you. For one, pretty much every Dragonblood of worth will have a murderboner for you you gods forsaken anathema to all Creation!

The setting itself though?

That won't judge, not on morals. It won't say 'that's evil,' or 'that was a good thing.' All it will tell you is 'these are things that happen here, in Creation. And right here and now also, or a year from now, or 10 years from now or even later will you see the consequences of that action.' And it will not tell you if it was good, or wrong of you to make this decision, or to take this action.

All it asks is 'you have the power to make a difference. What will this difference be?' Laying moral values into that difference is something for the audience to decide.
 
Aaron Peori said:
Hmm. How to put this?

Basically my goal with Exalted is I don't want to tell a story about Saving The Serfs of Malfeas or Curing the Great Curse or Resurrecting the High First Age or Reforming Yu Shan.

I don't want to "save the world". My goal when I run a game of Exalted is to tell a very personal story. Go look at the map of Creation and look at those blocks that are five hundred miles to a side. I want my entire story to occur in there. The Iliad. The Romance of the Three Kingdoms. A story about a nation in peril, great cities being threatened, a rise of god-kings... and that's it.

But according to @Broken25 I can't tell that story. There are probably something like 150 Million People in the East. What does my kingdom of 1 million souls in the far South matter compared to that enormity? Why should I be content to tell a story about the lives and loves of these people and the struggle between those who would control or destroy them when I should be focusing on those people who outnumber my pititful little corner of Creation by two orders of magnitude?
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I could not agree more with this.

Creation is uninteresting, but Nexus is not. The North is boring but Gethamane is interesting. The Blessed Isle is irrelevant, but the Realm defines the world.

I want to tell stories about individual heroes who have an impact on the world, about their relations and connection to their fellow men and women who never took the Second Breath. I want to tell the story of God-Kings who return in the twilight of the Age of Sorrows, perhaps in order to set right once more, what was wronged once. I want to tell stories of the Ten Thousand Dragons and their heroes who give lay low their lives and causes for the Realm that they love, just like I want to tell stories of those Children of the Dragons who see the corruption in the Realm and declare "no more!" and leave it for good or try to reform it.

I want to tell stories of a hundred heroes and saints, killers and kings, each of whom has his or her own story to tell, each of whom is a human being, a sentient being with it's own will and agenda and desires. I wish to tell the tale of the Illiad or the Odyssey or the Romance of The Three Kingdoms or the fall of Rome or Ogier the Dane seeking revenge for the murder of his son at the hands of Charlot. I want to tell a story about epic destinies, legendary weapons, heart-crushing romance and heroic tragedy.

But no, none of it matters because Malfeas has a larger population of course.

Aaron Peori said:
I don't think we're disagreeing here. The books never outright call any of the atrocities evil. They just present cause and effect, action and consequence.

Obviously, we the audience are meant to judge but nothing in setting will judge you.
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Indeed, the books will tell us "this is how the slave trade is driven, this is how it usually ends up, and these are the people who do it".

It is up to us, the audience to conclude "and they are horrible people".

Aaron Peori said:
No, value comes from us.
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I don't know if I agree with this, but I definitely contest the notion that a lifeless universe is less worth than a planet with life. The universe is beautiful and terrible, filled with wondrous things that I wish I had the chance to see with my own eyes.

Life, and the universe both have their own beauty, and likewise do the works of humanity.
 
Aaron Peori said:
Hmm. How to put this?

Basically my goal with Exalted is I don't want to tell a story about Saving The Serfs of Malfeas or Curing the Great Curse or Resurrecting the High First Age or Reforming Yu Shan.

I don't want to "save the world". My goal when I run a game of Exalted is to tell a very personal story. Go look at the map of Creation and look at those blocks that are five hundred miles to a side. I want my entire story to occur in there. The Iliad. The Romance of the Three Kingdoms. A story about a nation in peril, great cities being threatened, a rise of god-kings... and that's it.

But according to @Broken25 I can't tell that story. There are probably something like 150 Million People in the East. What does my kingdom of 1 million souls in the far South matter compared to that enormity? Why should I be content to tell a story about the lives and loves of these people and the struggle between those who would control or destroy them when I should be focusing on those people who outnumber my pititful little corner of Creation by two orders of magnitude?

This is the exact same problem @Broken25 has between Creation and Malfeas. I don't care about Creation, I care about Paragon or Whitewall or Nexus. I want to be free to tell a story about the meaning of this city-state or this nation or these people. I don't want to have to constantly think "There is a much more important story that needs to be told."

Perversely, the existence of Malfeas and its teeming hordes frees me to tell these tiny stories about small nations. Malfeas is huge. The Underworld is huge. The Wyld is literally infinite. No matter what I do I can not 'save the world', because Creation is a tiny, tiny fraction of the actual world. I can not, in a normal sized chronicle or even one that lasts hundreds of in setting years, possibly make a dent on saving all the demons of Malfeas and all the ghosts of the Underworld and all the numberless hordes of Chaos.

If 'saving Creation' can be important within the scale of this literally astronomically large expanded world than 'saving Gem' can be important within the scale of Creation. The only thing that matters is the story I want to tell, about the group I want to tell it about. Whether that story is six billion demons or eight strangers taking shelter in a Guild caravan layover in the Far North.
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But the Exalted can "save the world" in the sense of have huge effects on the entirety of Malfeas. That's how we got Malfeas!

No, an individual Exalt can't. But it's clearly the scale of things you are allowed to at least think about. It's why you exist.
 
Aaron Peori said:
But according to @Broken25 I can't tell that story.
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Don't put words in my mouth, please. You can tell wharever story you want.

But if i want to play the Alexiad, i don't want to conclude than an empire than spans a fifth of the world isn't but a blip of sand compared with a layer of Malfeas.

As far as i am concerned, the Scarlet Empress matters more than Octavian. The setting should work accordingly.

(But really, my main problem with Malfeas isn't much the question of meaning, but the fact that it breaks my SoD).
 
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Kuciwalker said:
But the Exalted can "save the world" in the sense of have huge effects on the entirety of Malfeas. That's how we got Malfeas!

No, an individual Exalt can't. But it's clearly the scale of things you are allowed to at least think about. It's why you exist.
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... Not really? I mean, uniting the Exalted Host is already a "save the world" tier plot in itself.
 
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