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General Exalted Thread

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Eos_Astraeus said:
Personally, I think Malfeas should at least be 100x the size the size of creation. It fits with the narrative of the price of change and usurpation being an a smaller smaller world, safe for an age but ultimately lesser.

Both the usurpation against your betters be they primordials (90% loss), or solars (9/10s lost), or even the realm chipping away at creation, making the decision to fight against them for your proposed "better" world even more suspect in the first place given previous experience.
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Setting the long-running argument above aside: is there a source for "90% of the world lost in the Usurpation?"
 
Irked said:
Setting the long-running argument above aside: is there a source for "90% of the world lost in the Usurpation?"
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Per canon, the Usurpation wasn't cataclysmic, no. Unless i am forgetting someting.

Personally, i like to think that loads of people died due to fuck-you kill swiches and civil war. But certainly not 90%, nor anything close.
 
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Broken25 said:
Per canon, the Ususpation wasn't cataclysmic, no. Unless i am forgetting someting.

Personally, i like to think that loads of people died due to fuck-you kill swiches and civil war. But certainly not 90%, nor anything close.
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Honestly, we really don't know much about its aftermath and the state Creation was left in, due to the utterly perplexing continual refusal of the line to give us much info about the Shogunate.

However, we do know things were stable enough that one of the priorities of the Dragonblooded was genociding all the Solar races, rather than desperate nose-to-the-ground scrabbling to survive.
 
I meant the SWLiHN's 3 spheres as a consequence of usurpation one taking out 90%

and the sequel taking out another 9/10s in the Crusagion as it wouldn't be possible without the new deathlords

edit: I wasn't counting the genocide of the losers servant races though as that really didn't destroy much of creation
 
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About the only thing we know for sure about the Usurpation is that Mount Meru went from being the most populated city in Creation to a lifeless rock which even the Dragonblooded consider difficult to climb.
 
So, quick question. Ive been reading the Oramus charmset by ES and am wondering how " wreathed by portents" works. what is an instability penalty and what does it do?
 
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ManusDomine said:
Well, to be honest I don't think Breeding should add anything but a higher chance that children will Exalt.

Making it increase your magical superpower pool as well just makes people go "OH BOY I SHOULD TAKE THIS, BECAUSE IF I DON'T I'M AN IDIOT", which is like, the opposite of what one would want as a game designer.
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Yeah. It has the exact same problem as Willpower, but worse. With willpower, all you've got to do is say, "my character is incredibly determined," and that's that, but with Breeding, you have to either get shoehorned into being the pinnacle of the Dynastic breeding program, or you have to come up with some super special snowflake reason why you are the second V'neef.
 
Bursting Eagerness Soul said:
Yeah. It has the exact same problem as Willpower, but worse. With willpower, all you've got to do is say, "my character is incredibly determined," and that's that, but with Breeding, you have to either get shoehorned into being the pinnacle of the Dynastic breeding program, or you have to come up with some super special snowflake reason why you are the second V'neef.
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Or just, you know, say it happens.

There are plenty of stories where the bloodline of the [god/king/savior/hero] can go dozens of generations without producing an exceptional heir until, poof, suddenly the strongest there has ever been!

One of the advantages of metaphysical biology is you don't have to worry about pure genetics (and even then, sometimes genetics produces weird things on its own).
 
Bursting Eagerness Soul said:
Yeah. It has the exact same problem as Willpower, but worse. With willpower, all you've got to do is say, "my character is incredibly determined," and that's that, but with Breeding, you have to either get shoehorned into being the pinnacle of the Dynastic breeding program, or you have to come up with some super special snowflake reason why you are the second V'neef.
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This is exactly my problem.

Because Breeding gives you more Magical Perfect Defense Health (lol just kiddding, Dragon-Blooded Perfects are a joke), and it also effectively gives you more social status while also giving your children a higher chance to Exalt.

Not taking Breeding is a zero-sum game basically.
 
Broken25 said:
Per canon, the Usurpation wasn't cataclysmic, no. Unless i am forgetting someting.

Personally, i like to think that loads of people died due to fuck-you kill swiches and civil war. But certainly not 90%, nor anything close.
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The Usurpation absolutely was cataclysmic—apocalyptic, even. It was not a neat betrayal but decades of brutal warfare that left naught but ruins. So while it did not destroy 90% of Creation itself, it may well have destroyed 90% of the infrastructure and 90% of the population.

Exalted said:
Some Solars survived the initial ambush, and there were terrible wars as these survivors fought back against the Dragon-Blooded. For decades, strife wracked the Realm as the last remaining Solars fought against destruction. Much of the glory of the First Age was lost then, and much of the knowledge as well. In the ruins, the Dragon-Blooded set up a military government and ruled for centuries.
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ManusDomine said:
This is exactly my problem.

Because Breeding gives you more Magical Perfect Defense Health (lol just kiddding, Dragon-Blooded Perfects are a joke), and it also effectively gives you more social status while also giving your children a higher chance to Exalt.

Not taking Breeding is a zero-sum game basically.
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From a pure mechanical perspective you are completely correct. From a more complete in setting perspective it does mean that it cuts off a great many character options as well as creates obligations from having the social station of a high blood purity dragonblood.

This doesn't really resolve the issue of how some backgrounds don't really make sense at the higher levels without other related backgrounds as say Spies 5 is absurd if it doesn't come with backing or influence, and resources 5 is going to require other backgrounds as part of the explanation as to why you have it. I mean how can you be that rich without either employee's (followers), a repuration (infuence) or some other non money based power. Breeding is like those, if you have high breeding it should have to come with all the backgrounds that being a high social standing realm dynast should, but doing that would mean you character sucks as all your bonus points went into backgrounds. Which itself is a setting problem.

Anasurimbor said:
The Usurpation absolutely was cataclysmic—apocalyptic, even. It was not a neat betrayal but decades of brutal warfare that left naught but ruins. So while it did not destroy 90% of Creation itself, it may well have destroyed 90% of the infrastructure and 90% of the population.
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And that is before the centuries of the infrastructure failing due to lack of Solar support during the Shogunate and 90% of everything being killed by the contagion. I should note that everything means everything including things that normally wouldn't be hurt by a plague. Like say forests or rivers.
 
Keep in mind that Breeding is an out of game conceit. In setting, nobody can see your Breeding level floating above your head. It tends to show up as greater aspect markings... but so does just having high essence or even elemental blood.

Your Breeding 5 Dragonblooded may be treated like a Breeding 0 Outcaste until and unless she starts popping out Dragonblooded babies with some reliability.
 
ManusDomine said:
Music boxes that set people on fire guys.
-The Dragon-Blooded Usurpation Commitee
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Everyone who derides the Wyld as mostly filled with smug raksha thinking they matter while being easily crushed would do well to keep in mind that one of the First Age vignettes in 1e was Usurpers dropping a monster from the Deep Wyld into a Solar/Lunar couple's bedchamber and the thing just ate them both while they struggled futilely.
 
Aaron Peori said:
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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I'd like to point out that a) the marching the demons out if malfeas and then dealing with the consequences sounds exactly like the sort of game exalted us designed to play.

and b) it matters to the demons you saved
 
Omicron said:
Everyone who derides the Wyld as mostly filled with smug raksha thinking they matter while being easily crushed would do well to keep in mind that one of the First Age vignettes in 1e was Usurpers dropping a monster from the Deep Wyld into a Solar/Lunar couple's bedchamber and the thing just ate them both while they struggled futilely.
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"Pff, he can't be serious that my motes are my health."

"I'm sure I'll do just fine without a Perfect defense."

"NO TEARS"

"ONLY REGRET"
 
ManusDomine said:
"Pff, he can't be serious that my motes are my health."

"I'm sure I'll do just fine without a Perfect defense."

"NO TEARS"

"ONLY REGRET"
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Nah, it's just the good ol "Surprise Attack + Grapple" that was the killer there. Especially when the couple had clearly wasted their motes on suboptimal sex.

(As we all know, sex is objectively suboptimal. You're just letting someone else grapple you. They could do anything. That's why the Immaculates are chaste.)
 
EarthScorpion said:
Nah, it's just the good ol "Surprise Attack + Grapple" that was the killer there. Especially when the couple had clearly wasted their motes on suboptimal sex.

(As we all know, sex is objectively suboptimal. You're just letting someone else grapple you. They could do anything. That's why the Immaculates are chaste.)
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This is also why Thousandfold Courtesan Calculations is also a Social Charm.

So you can exploit their willingness to be grappled and MAGICFUCK them into compliance with The Oppressive State. :V
 
ManusDomine said:
Well, to be honest I don't think Breeding should add anything but a higher chance that children will Exalt.

Making it increase your magical superpower pool as well just makes people go "OH BOY I SHOULD TAKE THIS, BECAUSE IF I DON'T I'M AN IDIOT", which is like, the opposite of what one would want as a game designer.
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I'd expect the Ex3 Breeding trait to work something like the Cult merit does, now. Maybe ignore the willpower cost of the Terrestrial excellency rerolls (Breeding) times per story or something.
 
SerGregness said:
I'd expect the Ex3 Breeding trait to work something like the Cult merit does, now. Maybe ignore the willpower cost of the Terrestrial excellency rerolls (Breeding) times per story or something.
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I've brainstormed about basically doing this:

Breeding (• or •••)
Requirements: Dragon-Blooded
Immaculate scholars have debated for years whether the blood of the Dragons derives it's potency from the virtue of the Ten Thousand Terrestrial Heroes, or simply from the purity of familial connection. Regardless, the character has inherited the mythic prowess of her forebears. This Merit grants the character the effects of a Hearthstone of her Aspect, but none of the other of the effects of having a Hearthstone, such as increased Essence recovery. One dot of this Merit grants the effects of a lesser Hearthstone, while three dots grant the effects of a Greater Hearthstone. At the storyteller's discretion, there might exist a five-dot version of this Merit, which grants all the effects of having a Hearthstone attuned, as well as a Greater Hearthstone.

The one-dot version of Breeding adds an additional die to the roll that determines a child's chance of Exaltation, while the three-dot and five-dot versions would provide two and three dice respectively.

Do note that this is not remotely balanced in any way, but is much less terribad than the 1e/2e version of Breeding.

But yes, the 3e version will probably either be a static social merit or what you proposed.

EDIT: And for Hearthstones such as Mountain-Burden Stone, it simply turns their effect into a once-per-scene power that works by the usual roles.

EDIT2: If one is a Dragon of A Different Colour, one might even be allowed to take an Abyssal Hearthstone.
 
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