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General Exalted Thread

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You know all those arguments on how the dragon-blooded couldn't have not noticed that the realm was designed to fall apart without the scarlet empress?

What if she just used some Dynasty charm to make sure no one finds out? Or to boost the abilities of the dragonblooded under her command that's in charge of keeping this a secret?
 
'A custom Charm only this character possesses that only addresses this specific situation did it' is just an incredibly lazy cop-out that doesn't make anything better.
 
"what if every dynast in the realm was trapped in a lotus eater machine that there was no way of breaking out of that prevents them from ever realizing that the realm was designed to fall apart even though it is supposed to have institutional legitimacy and be an actual empire instead of a large cult of personality?"

I mean; I get why some people (@Omicron, for instance) think that the idea of a Realm that's falling apart as it lacks the empress that once guided it, is awesome; I just disagree.

But this is getting stupid.
 
Accelerator said:
You know all those arguments on how the dragon-blooded couldn't have not noticed that the realm was designed to fall apart without the scarlet empress?

What if she just used some Dynasty charm to make sure no one finds out? Or to boost the abilities of the dragonblooded under her command that's in charge of keeping this a secret?
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Okay, cool. Let's arbitrarily assume that this works now, and assume that the DBs not descended from her - like Lost Eggs and Outcastes and Lookshy - don't realise it with ease and broadcast it everywhere in giant letters.

So how'd she set this system up? You know, back when nobody was descended from her, and she was making alliances with massive groups of other DBs who were just as perceptive as her, and who she needed for her empire to function because her giant glorious WMD dick wouldn't help actually build a polity. Given that said other DBs would probably both notice and object to "so I'm just gonna staff literally every major institution with my kids so that I have Dynasty control over the entire Realm, that cool?"
 
rogthnor said:
So here's a question for the thread! What are some good infernal charms for getting monks that aren't demons?
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Did you mean mooks?

ES wrote some Malfeas training charms that make people stronger by making them go through Chemo-Therapy. As a by-product, they make mortals immune to disease. which believe it or not was the true killer of armies back in the past. And by past, I mean as recently as the American Civil War.
The Book of Ten Thousand Scorpions

ES also wrote some Kimbery cult-training charms here: The Book of Ten Thousand Scorpions
He was using his Kerisgame Hack, so when he says styles, just treat them as specialties.

Cecelyne has the Verdant Emptiness Endowment charm tree, but a lot of people don't like how it's just a push-button charm.

Revlid rewrote the She Who Lives In Her Name charmset, and added an organization training charm here: She Who Lives in Her Name (Revlid Charmset)

Adorjan doesn't really train large groups of people, but her Excellency can be used to train up some hero's pretty well.

The Ebon Dragon, Oramus, and Isidoros don't really train up mooks, to be honest.

If you like Revlid's Elloge, found here:Elloge, the Sphere of Speech (Revlid), you could make a charm that builds off of Witty Soul Satori to make a really good training manual. Casting Coveted Crowns also works, sort of.
 
Hrm, now while I've only played in two Exalted games (and ran a third) I will say, one did have a decent amount of down time, albeit generally only once a story and sometimes not even that frequently. The other game I was in lasted for years OOC but in character I don't think more than a single year had passed. I know calibration was a big thing and we just never could make it to it... (( the game I ran was almost entirely with people from the first game. I kinda wanted it to be more open and long form but I had low player engagement (probably my fault) and it just never happened ))

I will say, in most of the games I've played outside Exalted heavily tended towards the 'action'-y style with almost no downtime and of the remaining the one with the MOST downtime was the one that ran in 'real time' with the others being of the style of "at most a couple weeks of downtime separating a long string of sessions only representing a couple days at most."

Re: Gens Malfeas, I still contend the issue isn't getting a group of DBs loyal to you, it's keeping them loyal to you after they have multiple generations of descendants.
 
I know I've sung this song before, but one of the many benefits of heroism-based blood strength is that it interferes with attempts to breed Terrestrials like cattle.

As for the Scarlet Empire and its collapse...the Scarlet Empress is pretty heavily inspired by Qin Shi Huang. The Empire going to hell when its founder's "live and rule forever" plan fails seems plausible to me, since it, well, happened.

The supernatural side of the situation makes the Empire both more and less stable, so I figure it's a wash. The centuries of stability are negated by the fact that someone who's ruled for centuries can be more of a load-bearing pillar than someone with a human lifespan, the quarrelsome nature of demigod heroes is negated by the guidance of the Star-Chosen, etc. It all adds up to a good analogy for real world history, by some astonishing coincidence.
 
I don't think the heroism based blood strength thing works in general, but I do think that there's room for self-only Dragonblooded breeding increase effects, if not ones that are widely usable and can't be easily made safe.
 
Sanctaphrax said:
As for the Scarlet Empire and its collapse...the Scarlet Empress is pretty heavily inspired by Qin Shi Huang. The Empire going to hell when its founder's "live and rule forever" plan fails seems plausible to me, since it, well, happened.
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Shi Huangdi literally means First Emperor. Qin Shi Huang anticipated successors in the very title he gave himself. The Qin Empire fell apart because his competent heir Fu Su was killed in a bit of court intrigue after his death, and his second son was a complete moron. He wanted to live forever if he could, probably, but he wasn't an idiot.

Anyway, hmm. Sole experience of long-term Exalted play (> year) was pretty breakneck. I had started out wanting to Exalt as a Solar (we did the whole prelude thing) and to build up an Empire to take on the Realm, but instead wound up a Lunar and the whole group went on a series of madcap adventures across Creation, Yu Shan, the Wyld and the Underworld to put together a coalition to fight off a returning First Age Solar (who happened to be my character's Mate because of course) possessed by the remnant of a Primordial and a coalition between Oramus and a custom Deathlord who hated said Solar and were prepared to burn Creation to the ground to stop her. We got around the time frame issue largely by coopting existing structures as allies (and boy did we wind up with a huge number of those), getting Artifacts from said Allies, raiding tombs, or our Twilight using the cathedral-factory facilities in the Imperial Manse, and waiving a lot of training time with stunts. Essence gains were entirely based on milestones in the narrative rather than having to go off to meditate.

It was mind a relatively relaxed and relentlessly sunny game with a lot of humor and good intentions and so on. And despite arguably having the most fighty character in the group (the Slayer was the only competition mind) I don't think I ever actually killed anyone over the course of the whole thing. Banished them to the Wyld never-zone with the Sword grace of the Ishvara I accidentally created, though...
 
pheonix89 said:
I don't think the heroism based blood strength thing works in general...
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Any particular reason?

Cavalier said:
Shi Huangdi literally means First Emperor. Qin Shi Huang anticipated successors in the very title he gave himself. The Qin Empire fell apart because his competent heir Fu Su was killed in a bit of court intrigue after his death, and his second son was a complete moron. He wanted to live forever if he could, probably, but he wasn't an idiot.
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If your own prime minister and chief eunuch arrange the forced-suicide assassination of your heir, you're not really doing any better than the Scarlet Empress did.

Really, though, don't listen to me. Listen to Grabowski. Here's an excerpt for those who can't be bothered with link-following:

Grabowski said:
...I don't have a problem seeing the endless cycle of the emperor's advisors overpowering him and ruining the state for their own profit until there's an unmet crisis of empire that the decayed imperial structure can't meet as a direct legacy of the First Emperor. He consolidated power in China and ended the Age of War by creating a state with a single point of failure and an ethic that favored the state (in the person of the emperor) over the individual, and thus made it nearly impossible to protect the /office/ of the emperor because so much of the office was concentrated in the Son of Heaven, and no safer than that one person.

The Chinese did lots of brilliant things. It's an awesome culture, and I have a whole shelf full of books about it. I just think that the concentration of the state authority on the semi-divine personage of the emperor and the consequent demeaning of the individual can be laid largely at his feet. He could just as easily have used the abdication of the Sage Kings to justify some sort of functional succession mechanism. The great thing about democracy it that distributes the mechanism of succession in such a fashion that it's difficult to hijack.

It's obvious the Emperor confronted this issue, he just chose to provide for it by eating mercury rather than establishing something that could genuinely sustain the nation, and I do think the consequences were long-ranging.
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Ignore the bits about deliberate sabotage on the Empress' part if you want; they're really not necessary. If anything, they distract from the central point; just as the Immaculate Order is a critique of Legalism, the Scarlet succession crisis is a pretty clear critique of authoritarian centralization.
 
ManusDomine said:
And uh, none of these come any close to actually being a Warframe proper; given a Warframe is actually a remote-controlled golem-body designed to limit and focus the power of the Tenno. And they also allow you to do shit like jump easily over 20 meters in the air, run on walls, influence gravity on a personal scale and many other feats. I really like power armour in Exalted, because I think it's aesthetics are rather interesting and sort of unique, but a Warframe, it is very much not.
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Now for some reason I'm thinking about a Primordial where each Warframe is one of its Third Circles (although its fetich is probably the Lotus).

Damned if I know where to go from there, though.
 
The Sandman said:
Now for some reason I'm thinking about a Primordial where each Warframe is one of its Third Circles (although its fetich is probably the Lotus).

Damned if I know where to go from there, though.
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What, gods no.

Warframes are nothing to do with the Primordials. Orokin are as First Age Solar as fuck.

Evidence 1: They loved gold. Really, really loved gold.

Evidence 2: They got murdered by their loyal soldier warrior elite in a sudden betrayal at a grand celebration

Evidence 3: Hubrissssssssss
 
EarthScorpion said:
Orokin are as First Age Solar as fuck.
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You just have to tone down the completely, wildly out of control and incomprehensible retardation.

I like my First Age Solars' problems to have been born from what they decided to do rather than not being competent enough to do it. Also, it's hard to take the First Age seriously if you model it after a civilization that thought the eradication of entire bloodlines was a reasonable response to a single engineer being behind schedule and thought twins were blasphemous manifestations of the Enemy.

The Orokin were demented & stupid on a level where, if the Lotus hadn't exterminated them, they'd have eventually just become Entity-style blind idiot gods ensconced in hypertech cradles.
 
GardenerBriareus said:
I like my First Age Solars' problems to have been born from what they decided to do rather than not being competent enough to do it. Also, it's hard to take the First Age seriously if you model it after a civilization that thought the eradication of entire bloodlines was a reasonable response to a single engineer being behind schedule and thought twins were blasphemous manifestations of the Enemy.
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Both are totally Late First Age Solar-OK behaviour.

I mean, honestly. Once one person in a family has proven themselves so woefully inadequate to their tasks, you can't trust any of their kin. The rot goes deep. Any of them could fail you. Any of them. No, the only ethical thing to do is to excise the defect at the root. Because your society must be perfect and imperfection cannot be tolerated. After all, you were using your Bureaucracy Charms to ensure the project completed on time and therefore if it's late they must be plotting against you.

And as for why you'd want to kill twins - isn't it simple? Uniqueness is an aesthetic virtue. Nothing must be identical. Nothing. Everything in your society must be different and interesting, not some mass produced copy - whether books, clothing, or mortals. A failure to be unique is a crime against the harmony of the aesthetic society.

(Probably different Solars held those viewpoints, but they are both First Age Solar-OK)
 
A question: Do Exalts actually know that they are using Charms? I mean, when an Exalt uses a Charm to enhance his sense of smell, is he explicitly using the Charm and letting his Exaltation do the rest (knowingly) or is he channeling Essence to his nose (knowingly) or is he just breathing in the wind and letting instinct do the rest?
 
Gamerlord said:
A question: Do Exalts actually know that they are using Charms? I mean, when an Exalt uses a Charm to enhance his sense of smell, is he explicitly using the Charm and letting his Exaltation do the rest (knowingly) or is he channeling Essence to his nose (knowingly) or is he just breathing in the wind and letting instinct do the rest?
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Depends.

I think for solars, its more instinctual. For dragonblooded and sidereals? They probably know there are cerain ways to jse essence that does stuff. I.e. charms.

Also, charms can be taught.
 
EarthScorpion said:
Both are totally Late First Age Solar-OK behaviour.

I mean, honestly. Once one person in a family has proven themselves so woefully inadequate to their tasks, you can't trust any of their kin. The rot goes deep. Any of them could fail you. Any of them. No, the only ethical thing to do is to excise the defect at the root. Because your society must be perfect and imperfection cannot be tolerated. After all, you were using your Bureaucracy Charms to ensure the project completed on time and therefore if it's late they must be plotting against you.

And as for why you'd want to kill twins - isn't it simple? Uniqueness is an aesthetic virtue. Nothing must be identical. Nothing. Everything in your society must be different and interesting, not some mass produced copy - whether books, clothing, or mortals. A failure to be unique is a crime against the harmony of the aesthetic society.

(Probably different Solars held those viewpoints, but they are both First Age Solar-OK)
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The point I was making is that the Orokin, as I've seen them described, were universally insane and incompetent to the point where I assume they needed robots to feed them, or else they'd have immediately choked to death trying to consume the silverware. They made Captain Planet villains look like paragons of prudence. If you handed them a telescope, they'd kneecap themselves with it and then have your homeworld obliterated for "attacking" them.

A First Age Solar having a plan whose components (or ultimate goal) are morally horrifying is fine. Multiple First Age Solars having differently-motivated atrocities to their name is fine. Every First Age Solar acting like a memetic Sidereal gathering and fucking up in every possible direction 24/7 is not.
 
EarthScorpion said:
Both are totally Late First Age Solar-OK behaviour.

I mean, honestly. Once one person in a family has proven themselves so woefully inadequate to their tasks, you can't trust any of their kin. The rot goes deep. Any of them could fail you. Any of them. No, the only ethical thing to do is to excise the defect at the root. Because your society must be perfect and imperfection cannot be tolerated. After all, you were using your Bureaucracy Charms to ensure the project completed on time and therefore if it's late they must be plotting against you.

And as for why you'd want to kill twins - isn't it simple? Uniqueness is an aesthetic virtue. Nothing must be identical. Nothing. Everything in your society must be different and interesting, not some mass produced copy - whether books, clothing, or mortals. A failure to be unique is a crime against the harmony of the aesthetic society.

(Probably different Solars held those viewpoints, but they are both First Age Solar-OK)
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Yes, and pretty much every other solar would go "Dude, what the actual fuck is wrong with you!". There's a difference between one loon being OK with something and that thing being official policy.
 
Leetsepeak said:
Although the day is almost over, I'd love to hear some fun stories! Have you had romances in your Exalted games, people? Between PCs and NPCs? PCs and PCs? NPCs and NPCs? What have been your favorites, and how do you view romance in the scheme of Exalted?
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I've only run one game where PC-NPC romance had a major impact in game, in most others the husband / wife served as an important background of intimacy.

It involved the party ambassador getting into a seduce off with the ruler of the neighboring lands, a rival Solar who was also socially focused. They ultimately decided that they were better for each other than anyone else could possibly be because of a hilarious turn of negotiations where both rolled 1.5*their dice pool in successes with all out social Charms in play.

She wound up being their strongest ally for the entire campaign and was vital to making their 'take over the north through trade' plan functional, because they had three crafters and no one with significant bureaucracy.

For PC-PC, the best I've seen was a couple playing two Dynasts in a marriage. The twist, the characters loathed each other and the players were good at finding pointless things for them to argue over.

They also would've easily won the Gendo Ikari Parenting Award because neither would back down on throwing their just Exalted teenage daughter into what would be dangerous situations for her Essence Four parents purely to spite the other character.

EarthScorpion said:
So. Let's talk downtime.
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The amount of downtime my campaigns normally had tended to shrink as a story arc went on.

It started at days to weeks between chapters, but went down to picking up where we left off around the climax. Typically this is because of combat.

Between stories, I usually gave months. There was always an exception for the players deciding to kick off a new arc instead of being reactive though.
 
Graveless said:
I've only run one game where PC-NPC romance had a major impact in game, in most others the husband / wife served as an important background of intimacy.

It involved the party ambassador getting into a seduce off with the ruler of the neighboring lands, a rival Solar who was also socially focused. They ultimately decided that they were better for each other than anyone else could possibly be because of a hilarious turn of negotiations where both rolled 1.5*their dice pool in successes with all out social Charms in play.

She wound up being their strongest ally for the entire campaign and was vital to making their 'take over the north through trade' plan functional, because they had three crafters and no one with significant bureaucracy.

For PC-PC, the best I've seen was a couple playing two Dynasts in a marriage. The twist, the characters loathed each other and the players were good at finding pointless things for them to argue over.

They also would've easily won the Gendo Ikari Parenting Award because neither would back down on throwing their just Exalted teenage daughter into what would be dangerous situations for her Essence Four parents purely to spite the other character.
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...More information. More stories. MOAR.
*starts chewing on Graveless' arm*
 
pheonix89 said:
Yes, and pretty much every other solar would go "Dude, what the actual fuck is wrong with you!". There's a difference between one loon being OK with something and that thing being official policy.
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As per the 1e Aspect books, by the time of the Usurpation the Solars had gone considerably downhill. I believe that's the source where the "musical organ made of humans whose screams played the notes when they were pressed" came from.

Even by the much more mild DotFA stuff, the Solar Deliberative tolerated atrocities by members and especially by elders, letting them waive the rules on "how you could treat your subjects" by changing their land's status from prefecture to tributary.

Fairly consistently, by the Late First Age the Solars were mad, bad, and dangerous to know.
 
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