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General Exalted Thread

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notthepenguins said:
Well, Dragonblooded have some conflicting influences there. You're not wrong that those are elements in their design, but they're also very much "What if all the fuss around nobility, around rightful rulers and divine right passed along from parent to child, etc was all actually true." And the idea of it being based on the heroism of your family, of the deeds of your ancestors reflecting on you and vice versa, fits right in there.
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I'unno, I'm not super sold on that still I guess? It feels too much like taking a long, sorta strange, detour to get to a dinner party then getting there, like, ten minutes late while saying it's fine, it's fine Jesus Christ Karen, as you pull in. Like you're basically doing the same thing except kinda wonky and sorta worse. If you're going to make it family centered why not just straight up make it a bloodline thing. Y'know the stuff that binds every family together? And if you're not going to make it group-centered why have the whole emphasis on Gens and Houses as big, broad, and mostly stable-ish institutions to begin with?

It just doesn't gel for me as an outsider I guess. >>

Fair cop to the super soldiers bit, I guess I worded that kind of badly. I meant it more in the way that like...the DBs were never intended to run a society entirely by themselves when they were first conceived as a doodle on Autobot's sketchpad. But now they're in the position of having to do exactly that. And they're so they're going to do a good job in a fair number of respects but they're also make some weird decisions and sub-optimal choices. And they develop tics and flaws and follies along those lines.

One of my prof's had a really good bit during a lecture on Arthurian stuff: "Whatever makes your society work, one day it will make it not-work" (And yeah yeah I know it's not like political gospel exactly but it's a good line). And I sorta see the DB's as being in that kind of position. Like setting aside them as a critique of Divine Right of Kings/Great Chain of Being stuff (which I do admittedly like) I just sorta appreciate the idea that the things that made them so great in the first place are also steadily sabotaging their foundations.

Broken25 said:
Yeah.

No, wait.

I don't.
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I...good for you I guess? :V I meant from the perspective of "we want to make elite units/super skilled labor to support our kickass golden glowsticks". Aka the Gods + Autobot. S'in setting logic. 'Cause I'm not really sure how you get to "we want them to be individual and distinct" versus "we want them to be mass producible and scaleable to threats" from that point. Because there's already the Solars for that first bit.
 
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TenfoldShields said:
'Cause I'm not really sure how you get to "we want them to be individual and distinct" versus "we want them to be mass producible and scaleable to threats" from that point. Because there's already the Solars for that first bit.
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Well, part of the point is that well, treating them as mass producible mooks and not the individually powerful heroes they all actually are...

And at the end of the day they objected to that, rather emphatically and quite successfully. The "they're just replaceable soldiers" is a tempting way to treat them, but it's also one the game is specifically pointing out is incorrect.
 
notthepenguins said:
Well, part of the point is that well, treating them as mass producible mooks and not the individually powerful heroes they all actually are...

And at the end of the day they objected to that, rather emphatically and quite successfully. The "they're just replaceable soldiers" is a tempting way to treat them, but it's also one the game is specifically pointing out is incorrect.
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Not...wholly incorrect I think? Like they were made to be subordinate weren't they? That's what they were for. They were made to be used and deployed in groups and their solutions to stuff is still are group based aren't they? They've shed parts of that as they've grown and changed but some of its still expressed in how they act and what they do.

No they're not mooks and I'm really not saying they are but like...they're also fundamentally different from the Solars (which makes them appealing to me) and I don't think there's really much to be gained by making them Solar-Lites. Which is what putting all the emphasis on individual heroism that you can share with your kids comes off as. Like I don't feel strongly enough about this to super throw down over it I guess and I'm not even really trying to convince you, but I'm trying to explain where I'm coming from.
 
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notthepenguins said:
Well, part of the point is that well, treating them as mass producible mooks and not the individually powerful heroes they all actually are...

And at the end of the day they objected to that, rather emphatically and quite successfully. The "they're just replaceable soldiers" is a tempting way to treat them, but it's also one the game is specifically pointing out is incorrect.
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Look, the Dragonblooded are clearly just jumped-up elemental God-Bloods and not real Exalts :V
 
Hey guys, looking at the pdf for the alchemical exalts and how they invade Creation....

Is it possible that Autochthon can, say, mod the dragonblooded exaltation? Like, say, give them legendary breeding, and make it so that the dragonblooded breeding is like dominant genes, in which your blood does not affect how possible it is for you to exalt. Or, say, make it so that they have the equivalent of wyld-shaping technique and the stuff used to hold back the Wyld?
 
TenfoldShields said:
Not...wholly incorrect I think? Like they were made to be subordinate weren't they? That's what they were for. They were made to be used and deployed in groups and their solution to stuff is still usually group based isn't it? They've shed parts of that as they've grown and changed but some of its still expressed in how they act and what they do.

No they're not mooks and I'm really not saying they are but like...they're also fundamentally different from the Solars (which makes them appealing to me) and I don't think there's really much to be gained by making them Solar-Lites. Which is what putting all the emphasis on individual heroism that you can share with your kids comes off as. Like I don't feel strongly enough about this to super throw down over it I guess and I'm not even really trying to convince you, but I'm trying to explain where I'm coming from.
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I don't think the Elemental Dragons set out to deliberately design underlings. They poured their power into forging the seeds of Exaltation and because they were super-elementals they created weaker Exalts that could reproduce naturally instead of the more powerful, eternally forged but essentially involate Celestial Exaltations.

Like it's just kind of weird. A committee of gods saying "so I make the boss dudes, you make the foot soldiers" is kinda goofy.
 
Omicron said:
I don't think the Elemental Dragons set out to deliberately design underlings. They poured their power into forging the seeds of Exaltation and because they were super-elementals they created weaker Exalts that could reproduce naturally instead of the more powerful, eternally forged but essentially involate Celestial Exaltations.

Like it's just kind of weird. A committee of gods saying "so I make the boss dudes, you make the mooks" is kinda goofy.
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Except then the writers gave Dragonblooded a bunch of shitty Charms which went "you auto-fail against Celestials". And these included Charms in the errata, too.

(God, those Charms suck so much with how they tell you Dragonblooded suck so Celestials look better)
 
TenfoldShields said:
Not...wholly incorrect I think? Like they were made to be subordinate weren't they? That's what they were for. They were made to be used and deployed in groups and their solution to stuff is still usually group based isn't it? They've shed parts of that as they've grown and changed but some of its still expressed in how they act and what they do.

No they're not mooks and I'm really not saying they are but like...they're also fundamentally different from the Solars (which makes them appealing to me) and I don't think there's really much to be gained by making them Solar-Lites. Which is what putting all the emphasis on individual heroism that you can share with your kids comes off as. Like I don't feel strongly enough about this to super throw down over it I guess and I'm not even really trying to convince you, but I'm trying to explain where I'm coming from.
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Nah, I get what you're saying there, but there's also more than enough room in their thematics to play around with the ideas and still not step right into the Solar narrative space. I'm actually of the opinion that your power stemming from your ancestral line and the great deeds and renown of your ancestors is meaningfully distinct from Solar power: a Solar's power doesn't care what other people think, doesn't care about their past or their blood, it cares about them and their divine might and how they will use it. Solars are self-contained in a way Dragonblooded can't ever be, and their ability to force their narrative onto the world sharply contrasts even that image of DBs (because those DBs are ultimately constrained by that history, and can't ever really escape its confines).
 
Broken25 said:
Somewhere in the vast expanses of inmense Malfeas, there is an enlightened, advanced society of first circles that have mastered sorcery and geomancy, whose sages scoff at the existence of higher demons as a supersticious myth.
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I kind of want this to be a thing, just for the sheer culture shock that would ensue when the PCs came across them.

As for the current arguments....

Hey @EarthScorpion wanna tell the class about the different kinds of Second Circle Souls

I kinda wanna know

Thinking of doing a you and making an SCD who's a blatant pop culture reference
 
Accelerator said:
Hey guys, looking at the pdf for the alchemical exalts and how they invade Creation....

Is it possible that Autochthon can, say, mod the dragonblooded exaltation? Like, say, give them legendary breeding, and make it so that the dragonblooded breeding is like dominant genes, in which your blood does not affect how possible it is for you to exalt. Or, say, make it so that they have the equivalent of wyld-shaping technique and the stuff used to hold back the Wyld?
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I guess its possible, with the cooperation of the Elemental Dragons. Would he bother? Probably not, assuming he was even awake.
 
Bel said:
I guess its possible, with the cooperation of the Elemental Dragons. Would he bother? Probably not, assuming he was even awake.
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Ah, well, I was thinking that if he was awake, they would probably bond over their fear of the celestial exalts.

Immaculate monk: And so, these horrible anathema of Gold and silver, who summoned hordes of demons and carried out countless atrocities, were wiped out by the brave dragonblooded and the 5 elemental dragons!

Autochthon: Oh yeah. Those guys. They scared me. Why do you guys think I left for Elsewhere and never came back? I was afraid they would kill me like my siblings. Thanks for getting rid of them.

*Both bond over how horrible Celestial exalts are*
 
Omicron said:
Like it's just kind of weird. A committee of gods saying "so I make the boss dudes, you make the foot soldiers" is kinda goofy.
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Well when you say it like that. :p/:V

But I guess like.... I'm looking at the original set up. The Solars are in charge, they're the leaders, the master craftsmen, the Big Dudes with the Big Ideas and the Big Plans on how to achieve them. They seem to naturally gravitate there, to the forefront of things. And then the Sidereals are most at home as the advisors and viziers, they go around and makes sure the right shit is getting done and stupid shit is not getting done and does their best to keep the Solar grounded and the Lunar isn't bothering the dogs. They sort of gravitate there. Then the Lunars are their counterparts that deal with problems more obliquely, through cunning and guile and shapeshifting and furry terrorism. Living weapons (or at least more of a living weapon) for their Solar. And they're pair bonded so it's pretty self evident where they're going.

And then the Dragonblooded slot in as the platform beneath everyone's feet. Like you're right, and it is silly to say the Elemental Dragons intentionally made them that way. But I don't really get the impression they were made to challenge the Solars as rulers either and for a good long while they were content to follow so...idk.
 
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Accelerator said:
Hey guys, looking at the pdf for the alchemical exalts and how they invade Creation....

Is it possible that Autochthon can, say, mod the dragonblooded exaltation? Like, say, give them legendary breeding, and make it so that the dragonblooded breeding is like dominant genes, in which your blood does not affect how possible it is for you to exalt. Or, say, make it so that they have the equivalent of wyld-shaping technique and the stuff used to hold back the Wyld?
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It's highly unlikely. Even if you're assuming the spark of Exaltation is his doing, the way DBs work is really foreign to his way of working with things. Celestial Exaltations are things, that he can snag and manipulate and modify, Alchemicals are creations, DBs... aren't. They're bloodline, and genetic, and don't really carry any of the hallmarks of his design. He may have enabled their creation, but their design is foreign to his way of doing things.

He might be able to study them and make something similar, but it would be a new thing, transforming ordinary people into magical beings through effort and resources and craft, not another bloodline-transferred type of Exalt. An Autochthonian take on the Dragon-Blooded would be the Super Soldier Serum, not the blood of the divine.
 
notthepenguins said:
It's highly unlikely. Even if you're assuming the spark of Exaltation is his doing, the way DBs work is really foreign to his way of working with things. Celestial Exaltations are things, that he can snag and manipulate and modify, Alchemicals are creations, DBs... aren't. They're bloodline, and genetic, and don't really carry any of the hallmarks of his design. He may have enabled their creation, but their design is foreign to his way of doing things.

He might be able to study them and make something similar, but it would be a new thing, transforming ordinary people into magical beings through effort and resources and craft, not another bloodline-transferred type of Exalt. An Autochthonian take on the Dragon-Blooded would be the Super Soldier Serum, not the blood of the divine.
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But doesn't crafting invlude biogenesis?

Or at least genetic modification?
 
The thing about Dragonblooded is that the eugenics/blood-purity angle is entirely deliberate and it is designed that way as to make the underlying roots of Terrestrial Exaltation a tad unseemly. It's not a "good" origin nor is it intended to be, you don't get that free pass to calling yourself anyone's savior because of it, you fight for it the same way a Celestial fights against her Anathema reputation. The narratives at work are supposed to make any Dragonblooded character reconsider the idea of a 'glorious heritage' when placed in-context of the world she finds herself in, including:

- Proving through deed that you are not your family's lapdog, broodmare or pawn, but a peer worthy of respect by your elders, no matter your pedigree.
- Finding flaw in the Immaculate philosophy that your blood makes you the height of spiritual enlightenment, and wrestling with a crisis of faith and purpose.
- Realizing all your hard work and education, all your untainted blood and ancestral artifacts mean nothing against this fearful farmboy with a broken rake in hand and a silver brand on his brow, how dare he.
- Wielding your low-blood of an Outcaste like a weapon, because the Empire's dogs think you lesser than they.
- And so on.

The idea of the bloodline being this saintly benediction bestowed upon mankind, which must be upheld and takes precedence throughout their lives, is a Deliberate Lie which the Dragonblooded are intended to overcome, and through that introspection of their place in the world become legitimate heroes, rather than simply presenting themselves as Princes of the Earth by dint of birth and happenstance.
 
I don't think making the blood's strength wax and wane with heroes and failures would undermine that at all. Having super-powers because you come from a superior breed isn't actually any grosser than having super-powers because you come from the ovaries/testicles of a superior person.

Anyway, Autochthon shouldn't be able to make the Dragonblooded better than the Elemental Dragons can. But he should be able to make Terrestrials aspected to his elements. Maybe he shouldn't be able to do it alone, but Crystal-aspected Terrestrials are too cool to be impossible.

TenfoldShields said:
Enhenhenh again nubile virgin over here, my tabletop anus un-prolapsed by the winebottle that is Scroll of the Monk or Return of the Scarlet Empress or the 4 Credit Hour course you need to take to make the combat system work...
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Wow.

That is quite a turn of phrase.

As for your actual point...when all is said and done, the Exalted are PC types. They've gotta be main-character-y enough to be the main characters. In theory, every Exalt is a hero.
 
Gnarker said:
TL,DR; Creation doesn't revolve around you anymore than it does around the literal thousands of people who are equally as powerful as you, and every crisis will generally be solvable in some fashion by someone. You can zoom in on that crisis and have that someone be your PC, but if you don't, some other guy will fill in while you do your own thing. Creation as a whole is meanwhile stuck in a Kingmaker balance-of-power Quantumstate to the power of a dozen, and it will remain that way until you, the player, amass enough power and followers to resolve it and declare a king of your choice, or until your GM fiats whatever he needs to keep the local plot going if you just never bother.

Granted, the canon writing does not exactly support the view that Exalted importance shouldn't be overblown in both fluff and crunch, but I believe the locally prevailing opinion points to canon writing as the thing that has to be changed to make things fit here.
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I don't really see that this is directly a counter to the argument presented.

Like, set a scale where you think a Solar Exalt can effectively make a difference. You have a choice of making that difference, at that scale, in Creation or in Malfeas. The desired outcome, from a play perspective, is that in general people are going to say, "Well, I should mostly do that in Creation" - right? It doesn't really matter how high up "shake the pillars of heaven" you want to peg that scale, to this point.

Regardless of where you set the scale, though, Giant Malfeas works against that conclusion. If nothing else, Giant Malfeas works against it because the per capita beings-on-par-with-you is astronomically lower than it is in Creation; rather than maybe one-in-ten-thousand beings being on your scale, there are one-in-an-arbitrarily-large-number of comparable beings. This means that the pressures you describe are enormously lower in Malfeas than in actual Creation; if you want a setting where you aren't constantly tripping over someone else's domain, or where you do stand out as a remarkable hero who can make a real difference - well, go to Malfeas, because you'll probably be the only guy over Essence 3 that anyone you meet there will ever know. Again, you don't have to save Hell; you just have to be able to make more of a positive difference there than you could somewhere else, for comparable effort, for this to at least seem... kind of morally weird.

And that's silly. It's a silly outcome to say, "I went to Hell to make a difference, because it's too dangerous to try to get anything done in Creation with all these powerful Essence users." It's a silly outcome to say, "As a loyal Immaculate, I went to Hell to serve demons, because that's where most of the Immaculates are." It's a silly outcome to say, "I went to Malfeas to avoid Second Circle Demons, who are just too common per capita in Creation."
 
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This heroism-for-exaltation-chance seems like an interesting alternate paradigm.

I don't really see the clash between "the heroism in your history is what keeps the exaltation strong" and "you are mass-produced", though. Sure, they're meant to work in groups and in teams, but... is heroism a limited commodity, now, which can only be present and acknowledged in individuals? In this paradigm dragonbloods don't really need legends as individuals because they have legends attached to the House or Gens that they are part of which they can draw upon. And because they are soldiers, don't think of that as a bloodline at all- think of that as a military unit.

In context, then, a given Dragonblood's chance of exalting has less to do with whether their grandfather specifically was a badass and more to do with whether the group that they are a part of is full of badasses. They are born into the Spetznaz or the Green Berets, and exaltation strength and chance has to do with whether that unit is, in aggregate, made up of heroic soldiers worthy of fear and admiration, or made up of degenerate assholes who should be laughed at. Dragonbloods care about individual heroism to the extent that they know that the greatness of the House is built upon hundreds and hundreds of individual heroic deeds performed by its members, such that when someone says "House Tepet has sent someone to deal with this", people don't care who exactly House Tepet sent because greatness is assumed.

And that greatness is passed on to the next generation in the form of Exaltation.
 
Sanctaphrax said:
I don't think making the blood's strength wax and wane with heroes and failures would undermine that at all. Having super-powers because you come from a superior breed isn't actually any grosser than having super-powers because you come from the ovaries/testicles of a superior person.
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Actually, it being the bloodline is fairly critical because its an indelible, visceral part of who you are, because Birth and Being as a concept is way more mythic than the idea of deeds empowering people or being chosen by gods for greatness. The Elemental bloodline doesn't care about how much of a hero your mother was, only that she held the blood at all and had you along the way, regardless of the circumstances. There's no real esteem to that, no lofty ideals or ideology except those which can be attached to it, because in the end heroism can be faked, and failures shrouded in secrecy, but you can't ever change who your parents were. You're a product of a community, a society, forces at work greater than yourself which have settled you into a position of privileged power, which becomes more uncomfortable the more you become aware of it.

What you can do, is fight against those who would use the purity of your blood as indicative of who you are, what you are capable of and the quality of your character. You can investigate and strike against the now-unstable institutional systems built up around lying to you and those like you, that there exists some kind of inborn right of dominion by ultimately sheer luck, even if that means standing apart from your home, family and birthright in the process. And with the Civil War looming, most certainly will.

Breeding as a concept is meant to divide the Dragonblooded more often than not, because the players who play them are expected to look at the imperialism, the decadence, the tangled intermarriage and adherence to purity in the Empire and Reject its appeals to heroism by luck of birth and station, dragging their friends out of it or directly opposing it as Outcastes, to fashion a better kind of Heroism out of what they Do with the powers it has given them.

The ones who stay behind, content with the status quo built around to pamper and assuage their egos? They're your family still, but now the bad guys.
 
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