General Exalted Thread
Roadie's Houserules
Roadie
A plate full of blins and a cat nearby.
Here's a combat section rewrite by me, with the source on Github. Social influence and Archery Charms are also in there so far.
The goal here is to result in something that results in the same gameplay and generally the same mechanics as the original text, but is much more concise and is more mechanically sound in general (e.g. actually using Supplementals instead of Reflexives everywhere, defining Go To Ground as an action instead of vague bullet points, etc etc). Nitpicks and whining to that extent are appreciated.
The goal here is to result in something that results in the same gameplay and generally the same mechanics as the original text, but is much more concise and is more mechanically sound in general (e.g. actually using Supplementals instead of Reflexives everywhere, defining Go To Ground as an action instead of vague bullet points, etc etc). Nitpicks and whining to that extent are appreciated.
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Jon Chung
=][=
The fuckers can't even build non-buggy Cephalons.
- Location
- The end of all things
Don't be ridiculous, there's no such thing as Virtue. It's nothing more than an Anathema myth that they attempt to use to "prove" their depraved "righteousness".
He's saying that when confronted by the fact that you can save 100,000 demons for the same effort required to save one human (as is the assumption here), you have to work the numbers a lot ("lets assume 99% of demons aren't sufficiently humanlike to have any moral value, and lets presume the remaining 1000 are murderers. Surely one innocent-ish human is worth more than 1000 murderers") to make saving the humans the right decision.
Whereas if the ratio of 'demons saved by effort':'humans saved by effort' is lower, you have to do less justifying to make it seem like saving the humans is one of the most moral choices.
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So, concept in question:
Born in Chiaroscuro, Anuli was always considered a bit of a prodigy. Her teachers at the academy all thought she would go far- for she displayed great knowledge of history, and of those pieces of technology and artifice that mortals could comprehend and maintain.
Even though she was quite young, she was gifted enough that she was selected to be part of the mortal support staff for a long-term research project in an out-of-the-way locale (specifics don't matter here, not just yet).
And something went wrong at some point. An accident happened, Wyld creatures, something. Whatever it was, Anuli got put in a stasis pod, frozen-
And forgotten, a planned rescue never came in the chaos of the Usurpation soon after.
Centuries passed. Somehow, Anuli woke, trapped in a ruined facility that a mortal couldn't hope to fix. She tried anyway, to open up the facility-
And somehow, astonishingly, she did it. Only afterwards, looking at the glow around her, did she realise how.
She'd Exalted, as a Chosen of the Unconquered Sun. But now... the new Twilight Caste is in a wholly unfamiliar world.
...I may have been playing Fallout 4 when I had this base idea.
On another note, I've just read a bit of Punisher MAX and the Punisher is such an Abyssal.
He makes a deal with a dark power to continue the slaughter forever, dies that day in the park, and gets up to wage a war. He loses his name (as many characters say "Frank Castle died that day. This is the Punisher.") becoming a force of retribution that brings death to everything that surrounds him while fulfilling his Motivation.
He makes a deal with a dark power to continue the slaughter forever, dies that day in the park, and gets up to wage a war. He loses his name (as many characters say "Frank Castle died that day. This is the Punisher.") becoming a force of retribution that brings death to everything that surrounds him while fulfilling his Motivation.
Sounds like an alternate backstory for Misho Thrice-Radiant.So, concept in question:
Born in Chiaroscuro, Anuli was always considered a bit of a prodigy. Her teachers at the academy all thought she would go far- for she displayed great knowledge of history, and of those pieces of technology and artifice that mortals could comprehend and maintain.
Even though she was quite young, she was gifted enough that she was selected to be part of the mortal support staff for a long-term research project in an out-of-the-way locale (specifics don't matter here, not just yet).
And something went wrong at some point. An accident happened, Wyld creatures, something. Whatever it was, Anuli got put in a stasis pod, frozen-
And forgotten, a planned rescue never came in the chaos of the Usurpation soon after.
Centuries passed. Somehow, Anuli woke, trapped in a ruined facility that a mortal couldn't hope to fix. She tried anyway, to open up the facility-
And somehow, astonishingly, she did it. Only afterwards, looking at the glow around her, did she realise how.
She'd Exalted, as a Chosen of the Unconquered Sun. But now... the new Twilight Caste is in a wholly unfamiliar world.
...I may have been playing Fallout 4 when I had this base idea.
(cool idea tho)
Sounds like an alternate backstory for Misho Thrice-Radiant.
(cool idea tho)
I'm aware of the resemblance (fucking tendonitis)- the main difference is that she's a lot newer to being Exalted in general than Misho.
It's a different take on the idea, really.
(Also, her seeing Chiaroscuro is going to be heart wrenching)
Graypairofsocks
What is Grammar?
- Location
- earth
That's an interesting idea. What he does would probably be ok with the Neverborn.
But you can't. The entire assumption is tosh.
You can save 10,000 demons for considerably more effort than it takes to save a population centre in Creation, and as an added benefit the people in Creation are much better at staying saved because they aren't mad impulse driven spirits who live in a literal hellhole where the sun is radioactive, the sea is actively malevolent and made of acid and poison, and their entire culture isn't super fucked up social Darwinism.
The assumption that it's easier to save demons than humans is a nonsensical assumption that seems to think that the overall hazard per realm of existence is constant. No. Malfeas is just vastly more dangerous than Creation, because it is, not to belabour the point, literally hell.
Haven't done more than skimmed it and don't have very good knowledge of the mechanics besides, but there's two kinds of things you really should be able to do in Exalted:
1. Grapple someone, then use him as a human shield to take an attack for you, including melee attacks
2. Use banter, intimidation, or other mindgames in a fight to throw off, unsettle, or manipulate and predict opponents, or in mechanical terms a social attack in non-social combat to drain and generate initiative
Can those be done with your rewrite? And especially but not only if not, do you have plans to further expand on a rewrite of the base system?
- Location
- Denmark
- Pronouns
- She/Her
I dunno, Cephalon Simaris looks pretty non-buggy.
Admittedly, Simaris has other issues.
Nitpick: viewing this in Chrome, your left-hand bullet point summary overlaps your actual text, which is irritating.
Love the concept as a whole, though I haven't had a chance to read through it yet. I like the inclusion of the "Supplements: Action" component.
Graypairofsocks
What is Grammar?
- Location
- earth
Here is something cheesy I just remembered I wrote:
Graypairofsocks said:
- Location
- Singapore
I remember that.
Someone also mentioned Sidereals testing out The Citrine Poxes of Contagion style on you.
Aaron Peori
Rest in Peace
I think I will belabor this point a bit here, just to drive this home.
First off, you have to get from Creation to Hell. This is not a trivial undertaking unless you are an Infernal Exalt. You have to first find a place of desolation which can take anywhere from hours to years of travel depending on where you are in Creation when you get this Demon Saving Impulse (easier in the South, much much harder in the verdant East).
Second, you have to stumble across a path into Cecelyne. This is not as easy as it sounds. It can takes years of wandering the desert before you start finding the path into the Silver Sands.
Then its five days of grueling travel across a Mad Max style hellscape, harried by the harshest conditions in the setting as well as massive sandstorms, demonic raiders, honeytrap style oases of supposed safety and heaven help you if Cecelyne herself somehow figures out what you are up to and decides to take personal issue with it.
Now you arrive in Malfeas, which is fucking huge even in the smallest interpretations acceptable to some people here. There is no gaurantee, by the way, that you arrive anywhere near where you wanted to show up. As a first time immigrant you will be dropped at an essentially random point on a random layer of hell just outside the walls of Malfeas. Now you have to go and find an impending layer collision, which can take anywhere from a few minutes to a few thousand years of searching to actually come across depending on how big your version of Malfeas is and how close you are to the next impending catastrophe.
Having now located a layer collision in progress you climb to the top of one of Jacinth's towers, unlimber your daiklave and wait... a long ass time. Again, minutes to hours to days depending on how much of a dick Malfeas is feeling like at that moment.
But the moment of truth arrives and you swing your sword and shout Heavenly Guardian Defense and... well, you don't get crushed. But the layer collision still happens. Because nothing in the Charm says you can deflect things that outweigh continental shelves by an order of magnitude with the Charm in question. So yay, you managed to accomplish jack fucking shit with your beginning level Exalted Charms.
But let us say you are not a freshly Exalted Solar and instead have centuries of experience and have developed a suite of custom Charms and artifact gear sufficient to allow you to single-handedly bounce a planetary mass away from you. Congratulations!
Now you have Malfeas' attention.
See, the Yozi are normally so fuck off huge that you are nothing more than a dust mite on them. You actions are so low in scale that you will never get their personal attention. Now imagine you were scratching an itch and suddenly something flung your fingers away from your skin. Well, now you have the attention of a sadistic titan-god-monster. Maybe he feels magnanimous and pfff HAHhahaha! Sorry, I couldn't complete that sentence. So most likely is what he does is he smashes the layers back together. Because they're not layers. They are his body and they don't move based on gravity. They move because he wills them to move. And fuck you, personally.
So now you are engaged in a ping-pong match with a Primordial and he doesn't even need to expend motes to keep driving down the layer you are deflecting with increasingly apocalyptic force.
And this isn't even the worse case scenario. Because it's entirely likely getting involved in an open conflict, as a hated Solar Exalt, with a Primordial joten, is going to draw the attention of some of the other Yozi. You might wonder, suddenly, why the sound of your conflict abruptly vanished and you look back and, whoops, all the demons you were trying to save are dead and a girl with brass teeth is staring at you with a smile and mimes to you 'What have you learned?' in a helpful way.
Let us say, instead, you have a sightly more likely to succeed plan. You decide to get a bunch of demons out of Malfeas. So you go around and use social Charms and bureaucracy Charms to arrange to get as many demons as you can to start following you in a march out of Malfeas. Well, again, I hope Cecelyne doesn't notice this and decide she doesn't like your pretensions to altruism. She doesn't even notice you, normally and she has no problems with you enslaving a bunch of demons but the strong helping the weak at their own expense. Oh man no, fuck that noise.
Or maybe you piss off a second circle of third circle whose serfs you are stealing. No, they weren't their serfs five minutes ago, why does that matter? Maybe Octavion just wanted an excuse to add to his desiccated skull collection or Ligier is just feeling pissy that century.
So maybe, somehow, you manage to save somewhere between ten thousands and a hundred million demons and march them across to Creation. Well, now what, genius? Because I guarantee you Heaven is going to notice an army of demons larger than most nations emerging out of Cecelyne at the back of a Solar Exalted. I don't think 'Wyld Hunt' so much as five or six Dragonblooded legions with half the Bronze Faction (and a few Gold Faction as well because holy shit what are you doing?) Sidereal assassins show up maybe with the Aerial Legion for air support.
So, uh, yeah. Getting the demons out of Malfeas is going to be only the beginning of your horror show of difficulty.
Let us say you anticipated this and instead of trying to set up a nation of demons somewhere in Creation you instead take them off to your preserve you Wyld Shaped out in the deep wyld somewhere. You fight off the harassing Creation armies long enough to start fighting off the harassing raksha armies who well remember the servants of the hated Primordials and have a bone to pick and manage to get all your demons in Demotopia safely behind you massive protective walls and defenses.
You succeeded. That's great.
And the next time you sleep the Ebon Dragon appears in your dreams and shows you the demons he created, ten times the number you saved, and is torturing to death as we speak. Just for you.
Out of spite.
Saving the demons of Malfeas is not easy, simple or straightforward. It also accomplishes nothing, especially if you believe that numbers trump everything, because the problem is not the demons.
It's the Yozi. It's always been the Yozi.
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Dynamesmouse
Bzzzzzz
What the Neverborn did to the First and Forsaken Lion was pretty fucked up, but they don't do it often. Just murder all the Primordials and the First Circle will be free of them!
- Location
- Singapore
What did they do?
Graypairofsocks
What is Grammar?
- Location
- earth
It would parry the layer collision, but it would parry it for you alone and you would have to keep doing it or be crushed.
Fortunately there is a charm for that, it is "Guarding Star Tactics" (From the 2.5 errata). It is an add on to Heavenly Guardian Defense that allows you do destroy the attack that you parry, in the case of parry indestructible weapons the object gets scattered. In this case it should send the layer in the other direction, thus crushing some other unfortunate demons.
Also Isidoros deflects layers like this, and malfeas doesn't get annoyed at him.
We don't know why though.
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I have the feeling the grammer in this post is terrible, i am playing a video game at the same time so I wont fix it.
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- Location
- Denmark
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Ink Monkeys Charms are of... Questionable quality.
And Guarding Star Tactics is an elder Charm if I remember correctly.
It's important to remember that Yozi interactions amongst themselves are very different from their interactions between just about anything else in the setting. They're people who matter, in their view. Very little else qualifies.
Plus, the fact that this only changes which layers collide still defeats the purpose of the exercise.
Just Ebon Dragon Things.
Probably because Malfeas can't actually stop him. Isidoros is physically stronger than he is, and if they were to get in a straight-up fight Izzy would win. So Malfeas doesn't push the subject in order to retain the image of power.
Well, if people keep on claiming that a single Celestial - or at best a small party of them - should be able to do anything at all, and conclude that "No, there's no easy solution to Malfeas" means "Oh no I can't care about it", that's going to happen.
If you actually set yourself achievable goals and didn't decide to set yourself personally against 23 extremely pissed off beings that are considerably mightier than you, plus all their souls (who are also mightier than you), then all their souls, the conclusion might be a little different.
You can care about Malfeas. You can find a Second Circle who through working with you find you get along with, sway their loyalty, through moral argument shift their values, and so decide to release them. You can fall in love with a Third Circle and call them forth from Hell to marry them as an equal. You can meet a First Circle who's a cheeky chappy and acquire them as a Demonic Familiar - and you can find a demon who's got a mortal cult and "corrupt" them so they become a guardian of the village, a demon who helps the mortals and receives their prayer and stands up to corrupt gods. You can even find a small First Circle society and lead them out across the desert like an infernalist Moses, to a place they can dwell without the horrors of Hell preying on them.
But the horrors of the Demon Realm are mightier than you, oh Exalt, for your predecessors laboured long and hard to make that place and the makers of Creation bound within have made themselves into a realm of terrible beauty and torment, for they are eternally bitter and take our their vengeance on lesser beings they create for they cannot reach Creation.
Honestly, this is another case of what I like to call "ROW ROW" syndrome - the expectation that you should be able to solve all problems and like the consequences from doing so using only methods that you approve of. For example, take the "problem" that blood apes live to battle, kill, and consume the blood of their victims, and so any society with blood apes in it will be violent and full of random murder.
This leaves you with two choices:
- Do nothing. Countless demons will die to blood apes in the future, for they are a common breed of demon who are easy to make more of and they are useful fighters so get made en masse for demon lords.
- Exterminate the blood apes, so other demons are safe from them, and kill everyone who might make any more. Do you feel like a hero now?
Demons are not human. They are urge-driven spirits. They are demons. Ignoring that is foolish.