Well, they can invent their own supernatural Martial Arts Style and learn its Charms, at least.
General Exalted Thread
- Location
- Singapore
How does it manifest in-universe? No improvement?
Yes, but it seems like any sapient group with the possibility of enlightening their essence is capable of that.
- Location
- Singapore
I don't think the mountain folk can.
- Location
- Gladstone, OR
XP debt is an abstraction/balance point for PCs so they don't drown themselves in 'free' training effects. It's a pressure valve, not a simulationist trait.
Basically, NPCs don't have or spend xp unless they St says they do. Ergo, youare allowed/encouraged to train them up.
- Location
- Pittsburgh, PA
I'm a bit fuzzy, but from what I remember it pretty much means that any XP Tiger Warriors earn post-enhancement gets automatically put toward paying off all those dots' worth of Abilities, Attributes, and Charms the Solar uploaded into their souls; until the XP debt is paid in full, they can't spend XP for anything else.
In-universe, it would probably manifest as them needing time and experience with their new abilities for their hun-po structure to stabilize and fully integrate the combat techniques from TWTT. If one of them decided to sit down and learn Firetongue right after being uplifted from clueless yokel to master swordsman, they'd find themselves unable to focus well enough to actually pick up the language with any real facility, as their mind kept drifting off toward rehashing bits and pieces of all the martial training impressed into their souls.
The Mountain Folk are decidedly odd, being what are effectively naturalized Raksha...
- Location
- Singapore
I wonder if it's plausible for, say, the great maker to recreate the people of adamant by taking raksha souls and then calcifying them again? And this time, creating an army of alchemical exalts to kick the ass of whatever solars are around.
edit: Which makes me wonder what Autobot, with a Creation, People of Adamant, and Alchemicals could create in a thousand years. Could it beat the Solar deliberative?
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- Location
- Virginia
Hero-Induction Method
Cost: -; Mins: Academics 5, Essence 3
Type: Permanent
Keywords: None
Duration: Permanent
Prerequisite Charms: Soul-Light Spreading Discipline
This Charm enhances Legendary Scholar's Curriculum. Once per season in which you use Legendary Scholar's Curriculum to teach more than one hundred students in an Ability, one of those students will show outstanding talent, gaining traits appropriate to a two-dot Retainer specialized in the Ability trained. The student also gains a mote pool of 10 motes and the Charm Excellent Solar (Ability), with a dice cap equal to his Ability rating. The student gains the Intimacy created or strengthened as part of Legendary Scholar's Curriculum at the Defining level. This Intimacy cannot be weakened below Minor intensity by any means, mundane or magical, and regains one level of intensity every season. The object of the Intimacy must be something other than yourself.
You may choose to gain this student as a Retainer, and may have up to (Essence) Retainers provided by this Charm at any time. If you do not, the student becomes an one-dot Ally and sets off to pursue the Intimacy.
Sun-Graced Scholar's Pupils
Cost: -; Mins: Academics 5, Essence 4
Type: Permanent
Keywords: None
Duration: Permanent
Prerequisite Charms: Hero-Induction Method
This Charm enhances its prerequisite. Students affected by Hero-Induction Method learn a single Charm associated with their Ability, and now count as a four-dot Retainer or three-dot Ally.
[insert list of which Solar Charm is granted for each Ability; "any Essence 1 Charm" probably works fine for most cases]
Student Eclipses Master
Cost: -; Mins: Academics 5, Essence 6
Type: Permanent
Keywords: None
Duration: Permanent
Prerequisite Charms: Sun-Graced Scholar's Pupils, Power-Awarding Prana
This Charm may be invoked when you are faced with a Defining task you think you cannot accomplish. Touch a retainer granted by Hero-Induction Method with skills appropriate to the task. You die, permanently and irreversibly, and no Charm or other effect may let you avoid this. Your Exaltation immediately passes to this retainer, virtually guaranteeing his success if the task is at all possible.
The newly-Exalted Solar is Essence 1 and shares your Caste but may select a different Supernal Ability. This is essentially the same as if you had died and your retainer had received your Exaltation in the ordinary fashion. As such, If you play out the task itself I recommend creating him with the rules for Exaltation of a mortal during play [Ex3 page 125] or an appropriate substitute, and afterwards using the rules for regular character creation at your table. However, the precise creation and advancement rules used should depend on the purpose of the character (e.g. will he be the new player-character of the player who invoked this Charm, or an NPC?).
Special: This Charm may only be learned spontaneously at the moment of its use and has no experience point cost.
Note: Charms in your Supernal Ability treat your Essence rating as 5 for the purpose of meeting prerequisites. This Charm is not available until Essence 6 even if Academics is your Supernal Ability.
(I wrote these for a Modern 3e conversion, and they are intended to be used with @Irked's versions of Flowing Mind Prana and Legendary Scholar Curriculum.)
- Location
- Virginia
It is an extremely small number of people being granted access to a very few Solar Charms.
FMP / LSC let you train students beyond your own rank in an ability. So your scholar's retainers could be duelists or artists or politicians and better than you at it.
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Aaron Peori
Rest in Peace
I think it makes more sense if Solars provide infrastructure based enhancements to their followers to promote Tiger Warriors into the equivalent of low level supernatural opponents. A band of Tiger Warriors doesn't get Essence levels and Charms but ends up equipped with magical arms and armor, boosted by alchemical potions, enhanced with various talismans and blessings and so on. The Solars have gunzosha commandos, not psuedo-godbloods.
(Note, this is presuming my Martial Arts hack where Martial Arts are a Background like Artifact rather than a series of Charms and thus serve as a Infrastructural Improvement you can induce into a Follower by creating various dojo and training camps in your burgeoning Solar Empire.)
This has the knock on benefit that the Solars minion enhancement effects are something that they can easily port over to a variety of minions.
It also has the knock on effect that the Solar God-King who has attained 'elder' levels has to choose between empowering his minions using his various Backgrounds he creates or investing those backgrounds into Sorcery using the Authority system. Choosing between having a Gunzosha Commando special forces unit and having a flying castle is the kind of thing I definitely want players doing.
Isn't that how 3E does it?
Nope. They're accessed by taking the Martial Artist merit, but each style still has its own associated set of Charms.
Aaron Peori
Rest in Peace
No, Martial Arts in 3E is a merit and a series of Charms. (The Merit being nothing but a speedbump which allows you to buy a new Ability.)
- Location
- Gladstone, OR
Small or not, it's a design precedent which can be taken a bad way. Sure you can't control what players do/abuse outside of your table, but a hallmark of good design is attempting to prevent such abuses clearly and quickly. Basically you want to design with a slippery slope in mind.
- Location
- Virginia
The idea is that there's a specific list of pre-approved Charms, not that you can take any Charm, and in Ex3 few of the Essence 1 Charms have the kind of setting-breaking power you would see in prior editions, especially on their own. (For example, none of the perfect defenses are E1.) And you get one of them.
I'm not convinced this is a big problem (unless you're worried about setting a precedent for other homebrewers, which is totally outside my control anyway). If it were, I would just come up with one small Solar-ish Charm per Ability and throw that in.
One person a season isn't small, it's just slow.
And the my point isn't that they get all solar charms; I did actually read your post. My point is that they get access to solar charms.
You have to be really bad at the areas and the situayion incredibly dire for death and a newbie solar to look like a good idea. It's onlu use is really if you have the broken charm that lets you make mini solars, and even then it doesn't seem that useful.
Plus, it sets up the pretty terrible precedent of Exalted being able to chose who they Exalt. This is just terrible all around.
- Location
- Pittsburgh, PA
@Shyft, @EarthScorpion - there's something I've noticed about 2E Sorcery and Necromancy that seems like it might be a key design idea, and I'd like your input on it.
Essentially, Exalted seems to be at the top of its game when it builds spells with the question "how can this create an evocative narrative moment?" at the forefront of things.
Take the Labyrinth Circle Necromancy Spell Dead Man's Voice. From a utilitarian standpoint, it's a slightly warped version of Infallible Messenger that lets you turn somebody into a temporary mouthpiece for up to an hour at the cost of probably killing them. From a narrative standpoint, this is what you give the villain so they can intrude upon a war council the PCs have attended, as a lowly courtier suddenly convulses and begins to speak words not his own, eyes bleeding black as the Lord of Dol Guldur's foul Essence withers his soul to dust. Bone Puppet Dance is how you recreate that scene in Stardust where the fell witch sends the fallen prince's corpse against the hero, twisting its limp frame about on strings of necrotic Essence*.
Sorcery has things like Dance of the Smoke Cobras (a.k.a. "Thulsa Doom conjures horrors of the deep earth to keep Conan briefly at bay, that he may flee deeper into the temple to complete the rite of summoning"), or Burning Eyes of the Offender, which is literally there to model the moment where Gandalf shifts aside the veil of his mortality and blazes with the light of the Maiar, sending the orcs that have surrounded him reeling back as the unearthly radiance overwhelms their sense of sight. Flight of Separation is there for when you have the wuxia sorceress erupt into a storm of black-feathered hummingbirds and vanish over the horizon, leaving naught but her mocking laughter.
It's not universal, but the spells that have this kind of aesthetic seem to line up well with the "Sorcery should encourage decadent god-king behavior" idea you had, ES, and it's definitely something which could benefit from further analysis by someone with a better knowledge of the system.
* Except in the Exalted version, he's still alive & either sobbing desperately for help as his bones shift and move against his will or nearly sacrificing himself in a heroic display of willpower, gritting his teeth in defiance even as the force of resisting the spell threatens to flay him alive.
Essentially, Exalted seems to be at the top of its game when it builds spells with the question "how can this create an evocative narrative moment?" at the forefront of things.
Take the Labyrinth Circle Necromancy Spell Dead Man's Voice. From a utilitarian standpoint, it's a slightly warped version of Infallible Messenger that lets you turn somebody into a temporary mouthpiece for up to an hour at the cost of probably killing them. From a narrative standpoint, this is what you give the villain so they can intrude upon a war council the PCs have attended, as a lowly courtier suddenly convulses and begins to speak words not his own, eyes bleeding black as the Lord of Dol Guldur's foul Essence withers his soul to dust. Bone Puppet Dance is how you recreate that scene in Stardust where the fell witch sends the fallen prince's corpse against the hero, twisting its limp frame about on strings of necrotic Essence*.
Sorcery has things like Dance of the Smoke Cobras (a.k.a. "Thulsa Doom conjures horrors of the deep earth to keep Conan briefly at bay, that he may flee deeper into the temple to complete the rite of summoning"), or Burning Eyes of the Offender, which is literally there to model the moment where Gandalf shifts aside the veil of his mortality and blazes with the light of the Maiar, sending the orcs that have surrounded him reeling back as the unearthly radiance overwhelms their sense of sight. Flight of Separation is there for when you have the wuxia sorceress erupt into a storm of black-feathered hummingbirds and vanish over the horizon, leaving naught but her mocking laughter.
It's not universal, but the spells that have this kind of aesthetic seem to line up well with the "Sorcery should encourage decadent god-king behavior" idea you had, ES, and it's definitely something which could benefit from further analysis by someone with a better knowledge of the system.
* Except in the Exalted version, he's still alive & either sobbing desperately for help as his bones shift and move against his will or nearly sacrificing himself in a heroic display of willpower, gritting his teeth in defiance even as the force of resisting the spell threatens to flay him alive.
Mmm. I'm actually kind of turning against that for sorcery, and that's one of the thing that I'm trying to hammer into the Anchor system - the idea that your story comes from the Background you're using, not the raw mechanics.
Because the problem we've seen from "writing quirky spells to tell a story" is that you end up with superfluous mechanics and all that redundancy between sorcery and necromancy. The Labyrinth Circle Necromancy Spell Dead Man's Voice is exactly one of the big things I'm thinking of here, because I want that to just be a Whispers-Anchored or necrotic-essence-fuelled casting of Infallible Messenger. Infernal Sorcery had the right idea, by letting you stunt your spell to your themes. There's no need to write Death of Brass Wasps when you can just make that casting Death of Obsidian Butterflies through the Malfean initiation (or as I see it, casting it using Malfean essence or through your Ally, the Brazen Prince of Wasps, where you call on his hellish children to swam forth). And then you go and cast Death of Ravenous Centipedes through Whispers and you're clearly a very different archetype of spell-caster to the effete clinical user of Death of Obsidian Butterflies, but - crucially - the mechanical work and balance effort to create these differences is minimal.
So, really, I'd prefer to populate sorcery with useful effects, and then force people to overlay a mechanic that's been rigorously tested to be useful to players and serves a specific role with a theme which helps them self-define as a certain kind of sorcerer.
They most certainly can, however it is couched behind a degree of investment that doesn't generally work for their circumstances or the things they have directed their broken society around, which means it entails someone exceptional to transgress the boundaries of their "orderly" nature (IE, a player-character).
The cliff's notes version is that they have the Enlightened and the Unenlightened, divided between the Worker and Warrior castes, ruled by the purely-Enlightened Artisans, who each have their own dedicated Patterns. To develop new Charms for a Pattern requires being Enlightened, and both attaining Mastery by learning every Charm within it and achieving Essence 5, something which happens extremely rarely due to the cyclical nature of the Endless War they fight, the lurking horrors in the deep, and the competitive crab-bucket nature of their leadership. The few Workers and Warriors who manage to be Enlightened undercastes rarely survive the hazards of their jobs long enough to pass along their new techniques if they reach Mastery, let alone popularize them under the yoke of Artisan rule which pushes those exceptional few into greater dangers. What new Charms are developed among the Artisans are horded amongst themselves as secret weapons in the case of internal conflict breaking out.
At the same time, to actually create a new Pattern entirely, and thus with it a caste and regrow lost flexibility in the Jadeborn metaphysical makeup, someone would need to learn All of the Mastery Charms in all the known Patterns, as their originator White Shale did, which the Artisans are disinclined from doing because they view the Warriors and Workers as functional menials and their magical abilities as the dirt-scrapings of livestock. It would take actually meeting one of these lesser-folk and recognizing the fact they can attain the status of "Enlightened peer" rather than "malformed Artisan/ruinous mistake" for them to accept their Charms have merit and learn from the example. The hard part then becomes bringing that evidence before the Conclave, who would see this talk as absolute madness and potentially destructive to everything they have built since the Geas took hold.
Its actually pretty mechanically and narratively elegant how the overlapping degrees of Charm emphasis gradually build towards healing Jadeborn society and unifying them as a renewed whole, not just an exercise in character advancement.
- Pronouns
- They/Them
So they're separated into 'effect' and 'method' then. I've got to admit, I find the analogy of 'journey and destination' there interesting.
- Location
- Gladstone, OR
So I was at work and couldn't answer this right away-
I do generally like the 'story setpiece' Spells that are sprinkled liberally through the books, but liking them and thinking them a good design approach is a different thing entirely. Specific implementations aside, I agree with ES a fair amount regarding the 'vision' of sorcery, but I shall unpack further...
A great deal of canon/2e sorcery has always come off as a view of 'someone else's story'. These are the beats and moments that made other characters legendary... and you can appropriate that. That is why a fair smattering of spells evoke explicit biblical miracles like parting the Red Sea, calling down plagues, or marching around a city and blowing a horn to knock down the walls. The advantage of say, a 3e-style Working system is that you can make setpiece beats for yourself without having to a- pay XP, b- deal with fussy one-off rules.
Like, as ES mentioned, one of the greater problems of sorcery is how each spell is a separated resolution blob. Used in moderation that'd be fine... but we have too many exceptions already. Hmm. Point is meandering.
You'll notice that in 3e, they doubled down hard on that 'narrative moment' approach- to which I will point at 3e's Food Gathering Exercise as my usecase example. The 2e version is 'Spend 5 minutes, feed [Essence] Magnitude people. Use 5 times for one day's worth of rations. The 3e version is this rambling treatise on how to hunt without tools, and it guarantees that after 3-4 uses, you WILL run into some suitably big game (and are implicitly encouraged to roleplay it live on camera, eating up screentime). Or the whole swath of socialize charms that let you become a single canon NPC/use his same toolset.
So digging down- evocative descriptions and 'quirks' to make the spell stand out in our minds is good. Invocation of the Invincible Army imo is a fun spell because it makes me want to optimize for it- get a swole sorcerer with huge endurance, have him hold up his arms for 12 hours, get awesome benefits.
Generally what ES proposes and I agree with for the most part is the descriptions should not bleed into the resolution mechanics too much- enough to be evocative in their own right, but not requiring an exception-per-spell. It's why he's pushing down onto Anchors and channeling specific flavors of Essence. Remember though that I adore borgstromancy, so applying it artfully is also worth doing in my mind.