With regard to the ongoing discussion on Malfeas (and wow it is ongoing, it's been running for like three days now):
I'm not going to get
too into this, because I just got done with a threadban over in the Type Moon Thread for morality derails. But I will say this much: Fundamentally, it's a silly problem to have that's easily avoided.
Exalted, to me, has always been a game with two sides to it. You were given a ...
relatively stable, but dying world, that just got smacked in the knees a couple of times to give you something to fight against. The world as it is sucks, but it's limping along: it is fading, its best days are far behind it, but it's not all doom and gloom and life as a mortal is, at least, bearable.
And you were given an Exaltation: beyond anything in-character, the narrative right to change that world. To do whatever you liked with it.
Not without consequence, and not without opposition - but the default question, as has been said so often in this thread, is not "Can you?" but "Should you?".
I
like this statement. I like this game. It's what kept me coming back to Exalted, after the gleam of novelty wore off and the perfects and various statements of supernatural excellence lost their shine. (Though Duck Fate still amuses me, five years later.) I don't see why I should discard it just to keep a large Malfeas. Alright, as
@Revlid notes, we have to settle for a lasting peace - but even then you can
achieve a lasting peace: if all goes well and your quests come to fruition (and your game doesn't die before you leave the first room), uniting the Exalted Host under your banner and saving the world, keeping it saved for a century or three is
something you can do, as an epic quest, as the end of ... well, probably a few back-to-back campaigns, there. Make a coalition, unite the host, claim Creation properly, pacify your rule. But it's still... that scale of "conquer Heaven and push back the apocalypse" is a story that can't be told elsewhere.
Exalted says that these things are hard; that the tools that we, as humanity, have used for so long - tools like imperialism, like monarchy, like bureaucracy, like capitalism, tools like the concept of divine mandate and the primacy of faith or of blood - are plagued with immorality, petty desires and selfish greed, and that there are no easy answers. But it does not say that these things are impossible - not for you, O bearer of a divine Exaltation.
... so, why is there a little subscript to all this saying "oh, but you're not allowed to care about Malfeas"?
Like, okay, fine, there are lots of reasons why a character who ended up caring about Malfeas more than his own kingdoms would be being a little silly, or hard to find, or whatever. But let's be honest here: most characters are more than a little silly, and most players are going to want to play things that don't make the most sense in-character, since they're informed by modern, probably Western cultural values and morals. If we want to focus the story on Creation, then as game designers and homebrewers that's on
us, not the players. There needs to be a reason - good, obvious, simple reasons, like access to the Wyld, like the Seal of Eight Divinities, like the existence of the Wyld Hunt - for an outside reader to care more about Creation than the people outside of it, by default.
Or, well, you're going to predictably get people not caring about Creation, and presumably we don't want that. By the same principle that says "don't scatter land mines in the combat mechanics and assume players can work around them," we shouldn't scatter land mines in the more fluff-based parts of the setting either.
