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General Exalted Thread

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bigblack said:
Hopefuly it will give us NMage and Werewolf Worm.
(I'm desperate for more NMage and Werewolf)
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Hmm. How would I do nWolf-Worm?

Well, in such a fusion, I can only decide that a parahuman is something most akin to something which has the traits of both one of the Claimed and one of the Hosts. In this, the Entities are presumably extrasolar Incarnae, descending to Earth along with their brood of spirits. Parahumans are Host-Claimed of alien spirits, and thus every single one has a degree of physical mutation (a la Case 53s).

Hence, parahumans won't have an instinct towards conflict - they'll instead have an instinct towards whatever their possessor-spirit is and promoting that, because that directly strengthens them. A pyrokinetic is claimed by an alien fire spirit and needs fire to stay strong, a "tinker" is claimed by a spirit of alien technology and so is driven to make examples of that alien technology (even as their body slowly becomes machinery).

Predators is our friend here - we see that Endbringer-like things are totally in-character for nWolf things (just look at the monsters in the back - hell, one of them is basically Leviathan). That also has the rules for Hosts and Claimed.

If you're using nWolves in the middle of that, then, their standing issue is that there's probably an "alien moon" in orbit in the Shadow - the Incarna-Entity, which drops clouds of its brood onto the Earth to eat the local spirits and search out human hosts. Hence, werewolves are initially set in conflict with the invading spirits, because holy shit are those spirits breaking all the rules - and the Incarna of this world hate the invader, so the lunes and the helions and the like are trying to fight off the invader.

Heh. Amusingly, this comes out as using nWolf to play Apocalypse, only with less furry shit and less ecoterrorism. But just as much werewolves tearing into superheroes, since these parahumans resemble fomori somewhat.
 
Graypairofsocks said:
IIRC the other charms that destroy souls are shaping.
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Then they are badly written and should be discarded because Shaping doesn't mean "warps reality", it means "deprotagonizes people".

Like; GET is the precedence for spirit-killing, all other spirit-killers should defer to GET for design principles.

It's also incorrect; Terminal Sanction, Spirit-Maiming Essence Attack and Spirit-Shredding Strike are not Shaping.
 
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ES joked about defining Martial Arts through corporate Java, but I think there's a grain of useful ways of thinking in that, because hierarchies and inheritance allows us to think about how Charms and Martial Arts relates to each other. It would of course have to involve a thorough design process, but if you're designing a game without a thorough design process you're probably doing something wrong anyway...

So first you start by defining what Charms can do. Not just what individual Charms can do, but the limits of what all kinds of Charms can do in combination; "The cheapest possible cost of doing X is Y." "The maximum number of dice that can be rolled for a single action are Z." "No more than W damage can be dealt in a single turn.", "Perfect defences cannot be cheaper than V.", etc. Once all this has been put onto paper, you start designing what I'll in a nod to ES joke call "Abstract Charms"; Charms that represent these limits. If no Perfect Defence can be cheaper than V, then one of the Abstract Charms is a Perfect Defence costing V, etc.

This Abstract Charmset is the first thing we'll test to destruction, and once we're satisfied with the Abstract, and that no combination of Abstract Charms violates any of our rules, we can take the next step. The next step is to define limits for and create Abstract Celestial, Terrestrial, and Spirit Charmsets, just as we did for Charms in general; no Terrestrial Charm may allow dice pools to exceed 18 dice, etc. And then we mercilessly test this set to destruction, checking that we don't violate the limits, get degenerate states, or great imbalances.

And having done that, we start to make limits for Solars and an Abstract Solar Charmset, limits for Lunars and Abstract Lunar Charmset, and limits for Sidereals and an Abstract Sidereal Charmset, etc. Then this too is tested for strange and unwanted interactions, to make sure we're still content with what we have. Then we can add on the next layer, which is Martial Arts Charms. Here, too, we define limits and start making Abstract Charms. Since Sidereal Martial Arts are accessible to all Exalted, this of course means that Sidereal Martial Arts is bound by the limits on Charms, the limits on Celestial Charms, the Limits of Solar Charms, the limits of Lunar Charms, etc. all the way down to the limits of Terrestrial Charms.

Then, having made all these Abstract Charms, we can start to make actual Charms, safe in the knowledge that as long as we've stayed within the limits, unwanted effects are extremely unlikely.

Now, this is a lot of work, but I also hope/imagine that by having these Abstract Charms, some work can be saved. For example, let's say there are five Infernal flurries. They all work a little differently; one adds [Essence] extra attacks, one adds [Cult] extra attacks, one lets you buy extra attacks equal to your number of extra -2 Health Levels, or whatever. But instead of having to check every new Charm against each of the five Infernal Flurries, we just check it against the Abstract Infernal Flurry, which says "This adds at most 5 extra attacks". In this extreme case, we've added 20% of work by writing the Abstract Infernal Flurry, but we've also saved 80% of work in testing.

I'm sure there's lots of problems with this approach, and I'm sure ES and Chung will tell me at length. Nonetheless, I think if you want lots of interacting systems, a rigid hierarchy of specifications that allows new instances to be tested against the specifications of the old instances, rather than the instances themselves, is a better way to go on about it than to write without specifications and clearly defined limits.
 
Eukie said:
I'm sure there's lots of problems with this approach
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Honestly, this is the most-sane method for the process, but the only place it really breaks down is in people's perceptions of what Charms should be First: either Magic or as Game Functions, because they cannot be both. "Magic" defies game design and attempts at balancing itself, because anyone can argue what individual things Magic should be capable of doing within the system, ie Potentially Everything. Because otherwise it would not be Magical Enough for the name, it would simply be much-derided "mechanics-as-physics." A Game Function imposes a limitation of its own nature by establishing a Rule in the minds of the reader, and even if that Rule is something the reader would otherwise agree to under the premise of Do-Anything Magic (like no Perfect Defenses under X motes), they would see the codification of that Rule as a slap in the face towards what Magic entails, which is Doing Anything. Lacking that codification means indirectly suggesting that having Perfect Defenses under X motes IS a theoretically workable possibility, and people prioritize that possibility over game balance, since this requires it be subject to some extreme outlier condition which no one can readily establish a concrete basis for judging.

Because that option of a mechanic, any mechanic, being off the table in a game about Magic is the problem, not the possible degeneracy of such a mechanic. Because people enjoy the Ideas of Charms more than the factual realities of them, in-play or otherwise. "If I cannot do whatever I wish via Charms alone, then Charms are not suitably Magical" has been the albatross around the neck of any real, genuine attempt to engineer a coherent and understandable system out of Exalted from word one.

And the root of the problem lies with Magic, and the baggage surrounding it.
 
Dif said:
Honestly, this is the most-sane method for the process, but the only place it really breaks down is in people's perceptions of what Charms should be First: either Magic or as Game Functions, because they cannot be both. "Magic" defies game design and attempts at balancing itself, because anyone can argue what individual things Magic should be capable of doing within the system, ie Potentially Everything. Because otherwise it would not be Magical Enough for the name, it would simply be much-derided "mechanics-as-physics." A Game Function imposes a limitation of its own nature by establishing a Rule in the minds of the reader, and even if that Rule is something the reader would otherwise agree to under the premise of Do-Anything Magic (like no Perfect Defenses under X motes), they would see the codification of that Rule as a slap in the face towards what Magic entails, which is Doing Anything. Lacking that codification means indirectly suggesting that having Perfect Defenses under X motes IS a theoretically workable possibility, and people prioritize that possibility over game balance, since this requires it be subject to some extreme outlier condition which no one can readily establish a concrete basis for judging.

Because that option of a mechanic, any mechanic, being off the table in a game about Magic is the problem, not the possible degeneracy of such a mechanic. Because people enjoy the Ideas of Charms more than the factual realities of them, in-play or otherwise. "If I cannot do whatever I wish via Charms alone, then Charms are not suitably Magical" has been the albatross around the neck of any real, genuine attempt to engineer a coherent and understandable system out of Exalted from word one.

And the root of the problem lies with Magic, and the baggage surrounding it.
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No? Charms are a game mechanic to describe the magic/ability of the characters' in-game. And there are clear limits to magic, and some not so clear limits.

For one thing, you can't resurrect the dead, travel back in time, or overcome a perfect defense. Those are clear limits. That can't be done no matter the potency of the character. Less clear limits are less clear, like how good charms are allowed to be, pure number wise. Or so I think, it's not too clear to me at least.

Now, writing down clear limits and what magic can do and not do makes it less "magical" and "fantastical". Or so I feel myself. But a hazy and obscured rule set would be difficult to use.
 
Nekraa said:
No? Charms are a game mechanic to describe the magic/ability of the characters' in-game. And there are clear limits to magic, and some not so clear limits.

For one thing, you can't resurrect the dead, travel back in time, or overcome a perfect defense. Those are clear limits. That can't be done no matter the potency of the character. Less clear limits are less clear, like how good charms are allowed to be, pure number wise. Or so I think, it's not too clear to me at least.
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Except, you're thinking of the three Impossibles, (No (Backwards) Time Travel, No Resurrection of Distinct Beings, and No UnExalting Someone) and yet people have tied to make Charms which do those very things on more than one occasion. So for some folks, it is Not outside the realm of possibility of what Exalted's Magics can do, even shatter its own metaphysical precedences. Even look at the late-end of 2e, when we got things like Infernals only permitted to buy a 6th dot of Essence by making an end-run around character advancement structure and purchase it via Charms. That is the mindset which needs to be fought against when attempting to re-game-orient how Exalted is judged by its readers, as a delivery method for internally-consistent game structure, and not exclusively intended to give you a feeling of what is "fantastical" by the difference between 2-3 allotted dice.

The ones demanding Magical-Magic are wrong, of course, but by calling it access to Magic, with the connotations which Magic has, Charms are ultimately deemed a Plot Power which is doled out in incremental amounts to the PCs. And those people take an all-or-nothing stance against that, and the idea that either Charms are Magic and thus encompass Everything, or they are not and everything implodes into contextless spreadsheets of numbers once you can see the man behind the curtain. This is how you get things like Evocations, where the "measurable unit of Magic" becomes access to a Charm, and because obviously since Magic can do anything, so can Artifacts, and an Artifact cannot be Magic by itself, you have to package it. Because of that lack in codification, Charms are now the standard to comply with.

So part of the issue lies with either burning down the concept that Charms encompass all forms of possible Magic, or to stopping trying to appeal to the But Does It Feel Like Magic crowd.
 
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must not slack off

must write more

have some ellogean ecology

Aszok, the Venturing Vineyards
Progeny of the Edda Exsanguis
Demon of the First Circle

Elloge's blood is the stuff of stories. Dreams and delusions, lies and lamentation. Visceral Wine is what happens when this narrative hemorrhage is distilled down to its purest components. Purified, refined and fermented in great organic vats. The liquor is a rich, softly shining, scarlet ichor. A spirit that can, for a brief span, transport the drinker to an imagined world. Far, far away from their cares, from their worries and their fears. Needless to say such a drink is immensely popular in the shattered world nestled between the Demon City's ribs. Serfs will beg, barter, borrow and steal to enjoy a cup of a lesser vintage; treasuring the brief moments of pleasant, uncomplicated sensation. Citizens will host lavish banquets, awing others with their wealth and casks of mastercrafted tales; epic stories flowing freely, the guests given a taste of rapture. Those of Ellogean descent are particularly partial to the drink and will often trade their services for a bottle or two laced with the stuff of Creation.

But such a prodigious demand requires an equally expansive infrastructure. And, while some demons taste the currents and measure the cascade, it falls to others to actually brew the stuff. This is the role and function of the Aszok. A nightmare mixture of lobster, octopus, and colossal spider, they daintily stride across the surface of the Minstrel Echo's lochs and flooded forests. Vast, jointed legs suspending a slim, armored oval of a body. Armored tail flexing. The head terminating in dozens of questing, coiling, proboscis-tendrils. The underside of their bellies ringed with calloused, translucent, casks where vintages sit and settle. These redundant stomachs rotated deeper within the body, beneath the armored plates, by muscular thews as the situation requires. The contents injected and treated with all manner of organic reagents as they age. Guided by their masters these wandering vineyards migrate up and down the fluid length of Elloge's ruined form. Greedily supping upon her heart's blood.

Fearsome as they may seem, in truth they are placid, communal beasts possessed of little higher intellect. Brains largely unnecessary when they are so heavily warded by their jagged, scabrous hide; horned and thorned by ivory-white. Such is the nature of Malfeas: attempted raids are commonplace and cultivating Visceral Wine is no easy task in such a hostile, fickle environment. Certain casks must be exposed at different times. Some must get a certain measure of Liger's light, some must settle only in darkness. It is not unknown to see such titanic beasts hunched and huddled together. Regrowing layer after layer of rust-red shell as they bravely face the Arrow Wind. Or to see a river geyser with scarlet as a beast a dozen meters tall swims free from the riverbed. In the end they truly desire little else but to present an acceptable product. It is their purpose, their pride and joy. Nothing makes them happier than the seasonal harvests, where workcrews of demons patiently detach the toughened "barrels" and heap praise upon their heads.

Obscurity (2/3): Binding these creatures to Creation should be a cruelty, without access to the lifeblood that gives their existence meaning any sane, self-aware creature should curl up upon itself and pine away. Fortunately the Venturing Vineyard is simply too monumentally thick to be laid low by such a minor inconvenience. Experimentation has proved that they can and, indeed, gladly will purify even stagnant, reeking mires with a fair bit of success and sorcerers have used them to sustain mortal armies across brine-marshes or trackless sands. Much as their infernal counterparts will sometimes employ in the trains of their armies below (Elloge's blood is, at the very least, nourishing). If properly plied they are also excellent vinters and provide a bounty of useful instruction. A sound investment for any Sorcerer who plans to deal extensively with the Ellogean.

An aszok may escape into Creation when a vineyard is watered with the blood of merciless slaughter and base treachery. A vanguard ambushed. A family cut down. The stilled, stifled stories soaks into a soil and, within four days and nights, a Venturous Vineyard appears to dutifully harvest the fruits.



Katona, the Storybook Soldiers
Progeny of the Silkworm Princess
Demon of the First Circle

If the world will not give us heroes we must fashion them ourselves. In life and death, Heaven and Hell, this fundamental truth holds sway. And in a universe so desolate, so often deprived of goodness, the urge to envision noble saviors is a powerful one. Practically speaking the katona aren't meaningfully much different from the thousand strains of soldiery that populate the armies of Malfeas; weaker than some, faster than others. More dangerous than a few, less potent than many. But for those who employ them there is an inherent virtue to their being. An inspiring magnanimity that restores depleted spirits and lifts tired hearts. To see a battalion of the creatures cutting their way through a melee to rescue a lost warband, to see them bravely covering a retreat in the face of overwhelming odds, is to see hope. A frail, fragile, rarity in the seething cauldron that is the Yozi's prison.

Is this the truth? Who can say? Even a weaver's work may beguile her eye. Even a writer's characters may deceive him. Perhaps such virtue is only a self-indulgent projection by desperate demons, a gaudy mask painted over a hollow, paper-thin construction. A folded shell, bound by orders and driven, golem-like, by a personal story penned by an alien hand. It is known: even demons can delude themselves into seeing only what they wish to see. Even the workmen of the Reclamation are guilty of very human romanticization.

Nevertheless: the Storybook Soldiers appear as any other tome in their dormant form. A weighty book or a fattened scroll, the parchment veined with thin lines of red. The words wet and glistening as if freshly daubed by a brush. If one peers closely they may see the pages softly flutter in time with deep, even breaths. A careful eye may even note that the illustrations shift and change, reflecting prized memories and treasured recollections. In such a state the katona is largely harmless if, at times, restless and prone to pinching hands and cutting palms. When activated they unfurl. Unfold. Vellum and parchment and paper rushing out in a storm. Collapsing itself into a suit of stylized, segmented armor around a darkly beating core. Red mist drifts from a faceplate laddered with slits. Origami musculature flexes and rustles. The opened book brackets the spine. In their hands they clasp razor-edged swords and towering warbows. At an order they will charge into impossible odds or wait, dormant, steadfastly guarding their Master's holdings; an observer's unease aside they seem to take solace in their duties. If nothing else they are very much loyal and loyalty is a currency without peer in Malfeas.

The katona rarely speak, communicating intent through expressive gestures and complex body-language. The written word is sacred to them, the stuff of their creation, and they will not engage in it lightly. Their lettered "skin" frames their essential selves, shrouding the twitching, throbbing core in definition and structure. With an effort of will they may shatter their frames temporarily. Becoming a swarm of pages, a tangle of parchment ribbons, that flows over the landscape.

Obscurity (2/4): Every Yozi have their favored warrior-breeds and the Storybook Soldiers see widespread use throughout Elloge's geography. Obtaining information on their general characteristics is not particularly grueling and many sorcerers employ the demons to guard and monitor their hidden caches of lore, great archives, or sanctum libraries. But it is only those who undertake careful investigation and win the favor of these champions who might uncover the truth: each and every katona yearns for actualization. They burn for it. From clumsy, clay tablet to crystalline First Age reader they edit and self-modify. Endlessly iterating towards some self-evident end. Their arrogance boundless, matched only by their ethic and dedication to their cause.

A katona may escape into Creation when a tome penned all in blood is left to linger on the shelves. The demon taking up occupation of the pages. Sorcerers with such works are reminded to handle them regularly or, at the very least, copy the works in something less tacky.



Inaurata, the Cleansing Crawler
Progeny of the Marrow Prince
Demon of the First Circle

An open wound invites infection and courts contamination; an untreated laceration is little more than an unbarred gate, a warm welcome that beckons gangrenous rot and other blood-borne sickness. The Minstrel Echo's entire worldself is covered in such raw, ragged injuries and her blood courses through the landscape even still. Driven by her shuddering, shivering heart. The vulnerability is obvious and the nature of Malfeas further compounds the issue: the Yozi are ever jockeying, struggling for space. Kimbery cries out and the sea chews the land. Rivers sizzling and spitting as they drown in acid. Isidoros flicks his head and captured detritus rains down. Teeming with a boar's muck and effluvia. Metagaos crawls forth, vines coiling, seeking ever more sumptuous spreads and such an incursion is the worst of all for it brings with it plagues of parasites and stubborn, resistant growth, both coupled to the threat of a hungry Yozi.

The Cleansing Crawlers were designed to serve as one, among many, lines of defense against such dangers. A quartet of heavy, arthropodal forelegs; the limbs fused with slablike shields, tipped in hooked claws to anchor in the earth. A, sinuous, lashing body with hide the shade of fine porcelain; overlapping chitin as hard as tempered jadesteel, layered over with long, milky white spines. A snake's hissing maw; vents within that send the inaurata's potent breath weapon issuing forth. Nymphs the size of a small child. Mature, molted adults as large as a river-barge. A shieldwall-swarm of the demons is a true terror to behold. A mobile artillery line that squirms across the Highlands as fast as a horse can gallop. A moving line of trenches and foxholes, able to burrow down into the river mud in mere minutes.

Their greatest weapon is their chemical spray. A crimson cloud of mist that calcifies and crystallizes what it touches. Petrifying enemies and ruinous swamp-growth alike; rendering inert, impotent, and leaving them vulnerable to shattering by hails of the spear-like utricating spines or contemptuous flicks of a broad-sided tail. Common use sees the inaurata deployed to quarantine blights and contain offensive action. Their arrival heralded by a rolling bank of carmine fog that freezes the enemy advance in its tracks.

In demeanor they are aggressive policemen and they take their position incredibly seriously. Without their work entire swathes of the mythos might fall. Or, worse, be subverted and infected by an enemy Yozi and who could say what the results of such an immense breach would be? Such a position breeds both paranoia and pride. Their armored legs are often fluid-etched with the great battles they've participated in, the great plagues they've forestalled. Their ire at being slighted is immense and their courtship contests are impressively bloody.

Obscurity (2/3): Creation is no stranger to pathogens of terrible virulence. The Great Contagion scarred the world and shattered empires. Nexus-that-was-Hollow holds beneath it an entire city of plague-dead and it is far from alone. Even today, in this Fallen Age, entire metropoli may be depopulated by pox and plague; rendered desolate and deserted within a Season. At times a heavier touch is called for containment and the inaurata hardly need encouragement to go about their duties. They are no less potent on the field of battle and are an impressive shock-force but sorcerers would be wise to bind them; to a demon one germ-bag looks much like the other. Men and women of a more gentle disposition may instead summon the beasts to milk their venom-sacs. Heavily diluted such demonic toxin is a powerful coagulant and able to staunch even the most terrible of wounds.

A Cleansing Crawler may escape into creation when a city's quarantine is broken. Panicked infectees fleeing into the dark, evading mounted patrols and search parties; destined to spread their doom far and wide. Salvation comes from an unlikely source as demons from hell gleefully pounce upon such poor souls. Cloaking them in ruby red and shattering them into glittering shards.
 
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How would you bypass surprise negators?

I mean, you can combo using surprise negator + defense, but how would one get past that?

How would one remove that advantage?
 
Accelerator said:
How would you bypass surprise negators?

I mean, you can combo using surprise negator + defense, but how would one get past that?

How would one remove that advantage?
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You don't.

Surprise negators are not an advantage. Surprise is an advantage, which surprise negators exist to even the battlefield by removing.
 
Broken25 said:
These seem, like, a tad too convenient? Compared with the main demon-soldiers, aka blood apes and teododja, they lack their significant drawbacks.

They should be remarkable weaker to compensate, i think.
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Ah yeah, I didn't emphasize it but they're not terribly strong or really exceptional fighters. Like they're not bad but...their main advantage is the morale bonus because they're inclined to do heroic things on the field (because they all have this weird inferiority-messiah complex thing going on). And certain kinds of demons are really into that because it's been hell in a cell down there for like five thousand years and you develop weird hangups in that time. :V

Tbh they probably mostly see use in Creation serving as book-mimics for a sorcerer's library. Since they don't mind standing vigil over stuff and can be trusted not to be lured away by un-murdered cats.
 
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