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General Exalted Thread

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EarthScorpion said:
He's a better-than-you character with a circle of multiple Solars - including a high level sorceress - Lunar allies, a massive unified horde, and the magical meta-narrative ability to teleport around the map so he's not content to infect the North, but he also teleports thousands of miles with his entire horde without passing through the intervening space to get involved with fucking Halta.

I was in a long running game in the North, where we were DBs in Cherak. By a certain point in the game, everything ended up based around "what the fuck the Bull is doing?" because he's such a concentration of force that he warps the entire setting around him - and the habitable areas in the North are actually pretty close together. You can't really run a game in that area without running into "will the Bull act against you?".
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Yeah, that sounds about right. Pretty similar to the issues I have with the Deathlords in the Underworld, you just can't escape them.

I'd dispute the meta-narrative teleportation ability, though. If my understanding of where his territories approximately lay is correct, and going by the description of his warpath given in The East splat, I think he just bulldozed his way across the southern River of Tears, through Linowan turf, over the Silver River, and kept going east, rolling over Rokan-Jin and Talinin on the way. He could have managed this by going roughly in a straight line, and once he destroyed the Talinin capital of Dramasine, he'd be fairly close to Haltan territory. It wouldn't be implausible for Halta to reach out to this guy who's been beating the shit out of Linowan and its allies lately.
 
EarthScorpion said:
So, finally got around to reading this and... well.

Goodness, you don't do things by half measures, do you? I'm clearly too used to Kerisgame, where Keris is fundamentally a Night - even if she's a Scourge - and she reflexively hides herself, establishes convoluted disguise schemes, and never flares her anima if she can possibly avoid it. Some of that is an Infernal thing, but most of it is, I think, just how @Aleph plays.

Also, her tiger is super cool. Go tiger!
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Generally, most of my play experience has been between two extremes- people who HAM AND CHEESE exalted up to 11, or 'Nights Nights Nights NIGHTS'. The latter almost live in fear of their storytellers. Now, I have something of a rocky history with ham/cheese exalted, because most of the time it was people making explicit or implicit references to hot-blooded giant robot shows or memes, as opposed to... well, actual decent roleplaying ham/cheese. I have nothing against being a huge, larger than life hero, I just am tired of hearing the Shining Finger Speech over and over again.

As far as play experience goes, I really didn't start getting meaningful characters until relatively recently- as opposed to ciphers of my own personality or thinly veiled justifications for mechanical experiments. Scarlet Edge, Venerable Forge of Iron Wills, Smiling Lotus and Inks were all of that 'generation' of character. Edge was a first-ager, so she existed in a different culture. Forge is an Alchie, Lotus is both a bluesid and doesn't talk, and is the laziest sidereal ever. And then we have Inks, who I described as 'Tony Stark or Bruce Wayne with great legs'; the idea being that she's a mercantile hero or a knowledge hero, not a punch-dudes big speeches hero.

So for Inks, this basically means that she's... got enough development to have a way of doing things. Her way is Investment. Throwing time, effort and money into something until she gets the return she wants. Since she's a Solar, she can afford to be a bit wasteful in conventional ways. PR is an investment in it's own way and I expect to tackle that... by building a swank house and hosting huge parties.

As for Maji- that was part of the 'Exalted Bucketlist' talking. I've never had or played alongside a Familiar worth engaging with. SEcondly, most of the time I've run into Familiars, people have deliberately gone Too Special Snowflake and left the ST hanging as far as 'the fuck do I do with this?' Also, Familiars (and similar characters) lead to what I call Sight-Gag bloat. Given the option for a gag, an ST may invoke it For the Gag and not much else.

Like, a lot of Familiars grow out of memes or references, like Fuck You I'm an Anteater, or the Mantis Shrimp with it's SONIC BOOM PINCERS. That's cool and all... but it really doesn't help make a good game or asset. Cats and dogs are boring familiars of course too. A tiger is on the one hand generic, and on the other, actually Really useful, because you know Exactly what to do with a tiger as both a player and storyteller. The tiger is big, scary and cuddly. I expect to use Maji like a backup in combat much like I would a blood ape or similar.

Specifically to Maji, however, is that Aleph ran with the original idea we had and we started pinging off each other to get what you see here- where Maji is the grandson of a southern wargod (and may or may not have cute tigergirl cousins). I Also picked him specifically as part of testing the Sorcerous Anchors mechanic- he serves as the means in which Inks cast Infallible Messenger and Invulnerable Skin of Bronze. On top of that, I specifically wanted to emphasize Maji aesthetically as being the 'hyper-masculine big brother' figure to Inks's hyper-feminine presence. That and I am at heart an unrepentant fan of Disney and could not pass up the idea to do a Jasmine/Rajah dynamic- I grabbed Friendship With Animals technique exactly for Maji.

And @Aleph sort of flatstared at me when I showed her the Solar Familiar Training Charm and how it could make the already Large Mutation'd Tiger even bigger. I did some scale checks, and I think Maji's head comes up to about Inks's bicep, and Inks is 5'10" without her shoes

I've generally experienced the following problem wtih Animal and Little Kid characters in games- they monpolize screentime. This is the internet, and we are all at heart softies who like cat videos and cute things, so having a 'cuteness button' means people mash it.
 
SerGregness said:
Part of the issue you're having, is that 'epic hugeness coexisting with dysentery' is a feature, not a bug for most of us. The short version is that the gritty realism serves to cast the epic heroism into contrast, and vice versa. Stephen Lea Sheppard went into some depth about it here, so check it out when you're done with work (don't be late!).
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Well, I guess some of it is that for me, Layer sometimes threatens to invalidate the meaning and agency of the people with dysentary/Layer 1. Like, the problem is, for me, it seems that it's less cast in contrast and more made something you can ignore and control. I mean, ultimately this is more a bedrock issue, and thus is my own hangup, but like, Imrix compares it to superhero stories.

Superhero stories often have a part where a villain goes, "You're better than the rabble, you should rule with an iron fist!"

And the hero goes, "No, despite my powers, I'm just a fallible man."

Obviously, this is partially to preserve the 'status quo' where ordinary people matter and lead ordinary lives that the heroes can save, and that's a problem on its own.

Exalted, while it is deeply concerned with the consequences of doing so, is a setting where the superhuman who takes control of everything from the Sheeple is justified. They ARE smarter and they ARE more skilled at bureaucracy and poetry and everything else that anyone could ever do. They're not always right about things, but they're always good at them. They love deeper, they laugh harder, their wrath is, as the point of the epic heroism goes, far grander...and yes this sometimes makes them raging shitlord Titans smashing the first Layer into dust with their mighty thews, and that's why I say it's a personal opinion rather than something inherently BadWrong about Exalted.

Like, it's something I can theoretically see tons of appeal in, the Can versus Should and all of that, and yet sometimes it seems to just come back to the same old, "The special and powerful people should have more rights" sort of vein.

As an anecdote of sorts for why I'm honing in on that now, in the thread, "The Best Fics You Ever Read" someone rec'd a story they said grappled with "The rights of the ordinary versus the rights of the extraordinary" and I said that that was a bad warning sign because I'd NEVER, not once, seen a work with fanfiction side with the non-Ubermensch. The solution is always, "The super special protagonist deserves more rights and powers than everyone else."

And while Exalted can totally say, "This guy is a bad ruler" and so on...the only people who can reasonably replace them are other special super-powerful people with special destinies and bloodlines and so on. As far as I know there's never been a proposal for, say, a Realm replacement that doesn't involve, "A different type of Exalted, insert type here, runs things instead."

Note, this does make me a minor hypocrite since Mage: The Awakening totally has special people that are better than the huddled masses, but something about that clicked for me in a way Exalted never did? Again, this is all very personal. Like, I think I have a point with fiction in general and its exaltation of the unique superhuman, but my specific apathy for Exalted (Why am I here? Because a lot of the homebrewing is good, the debates are fun, and there are individual elements I really like, it's just that the package as a whole doesn't interest me) is just that: specific and personal, and not meant to be an attack on others who enjoy the themes I even called out as being potentially fascinating in this game, but that didn't, in this context, grab me.
 
The Laurent said:
Well, I guess some of it is that for me, Layer sometimes threatens to invalidate the meaning and agency of the people with dysentary/Layer 1. Like, the problem is, for me, it seems that it's less cast in contrast and more made something you can ignore and control. I mean, ultimately this is more a bedrock issue, and thus is my own hangup, but like, Imrix compares it to superhero stories.

Superhero stories often have a part where a villain goes, "You're better than the rabble, you should rule with an iron fist!"

And the hero goes, "No, despite my powers, I'm just a fallible man."

Obviously, this is partially to preserve the 'status quo' where ordinary people matter and lead ordinary lives that the heroes can save, and that's a problem on its own.

Exalted, while it is deeply concerned with the consequences of doing so, is a setting where the superhuman who takes control of everything from the Sheeple is justified. They ARE smarter and they ARE more skilled at bureaucracy and poetry and everything else that anyone could ever do. They're not always right about things, but they're always good at them. They love deeper, they laugh harder, their wrath is, as the point of the epic heroism goes, far grander...and yes this sometimes makes them raging shitlord Titans smashing the first Layer into dust with their mighty thews, and that's why I say it's a personal opinion rather than something inherently BadWrong about Exalted.

Like, it's something I can theoretically see tons of appeal in, the Can versus Should and all of that, and yet sometimes it seems to just come back to the same old, "The special and powerful people should have more rights" sort of vein.

As an anecdote of sorts for why I'm honing in on that now, in the thread, "The Best Fics You Ever Read" someone rec'd a story they said grappled with "The rights of the ordinary versus the rights of the extraordinary" and I said that that was a bad warning sign because I'd NEVER, not once, seen a work with fanfiction side with the non-Ubermensch. The solution is always, "The super special protagonist deserves more rights and powers than everyone else."

And while Exalted can totally say, "This guy is a bad ruler" and so on...the only people who can reasonably replace them are other special super-powerful people with special destinies and bloodlines and so on. As far as I know there's never been a proposal for, say, a Realm replacement that doesn't involve, "A different type of Exalted, insert type here, runs things instead."

Note, this does make me a minor hypocrite since Mage: The Awakening totally has special people that are better than the huddled masses, but something about that clicked for me in a way Exalted never did? Again, this is all very personal. Like, I think I have a point with fiction in general and its exaltation of the unique superhuman, but my specific apathy for Exalted (Why am I here? Because a lot of the homebrewing is good, the debates are fun, and there are individual elements I really like, it's just that the package as a whole doesn't interest me) is just that: specific and personal, and not meant to be an attack on others who enjoy the themes I even called out as being potentially fascinating in this game, but that didn't, in this context, grab me.
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Yet to some extent, every time the less special people destroy the special people it's justified.
 
FBH said:
Yet to some extent, every time the less special people destroy the special people it's justified.
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I do remember someone interpreting the history of Exalted that way. I can't remember the post, but I do remember ES going something like, "That's not how I see it, but that does fit the events, so go on with your bad self?"

Something like that? I do remember an exchange about differing views of Exalted history. One of them was King In The Mountain, for instance.

Edit: Also, isn't part of the point of the current situation that the entire world is falling apart, it's gotten sicker, the First Age is gone, and things have been going to shit for a while? That's at least the general vibe I get from the setting. Things have been getting worse ever since the Solars fell, justified or not.
 
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The Laurent said:
I do remember someone interpreting the history of Exalted that way. I can't remember the post, but I do remember ES going something like, "That's not how I see it, but that does fit the events, so go on with your bad self?"

Something like that? I do remember an exchange about differing views of Exalted history. One of them was King In The Mountain, for instance.

Edit: Also, isn't part of the point of the current situation that the entire world is falling apart, it's gotten sicker, the First Age is gone, and things have been going to shit for a while? That's at least the general vibe I get from the setting. Things have been getting worse ever since the Solars fell, justified or not.
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Things have been getting worse, but it's pointed out that if they had been left alone, Creation might have been put in a much more precarious position as the Solar's grew too arrogant and dangerous with their unchecked powers.
 
The Laurent said:
Edit: Also, isn't part of the point of the current situation that the entire world is falling apart, it's gotten sicker, the First Age is gone, and things have been going to shit for a while? That's at least the general vibe I get from the setting. Things have been getting worse ever since the Solars fell, justified or not.
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The world has been less glorious since the Solars fell....but the First age was less glorious than the world of the Primordials. And while the first part of the First age wasn't bad/was pretty good, the end of the first age was getting increasingly bad for everyone (which is why the Usurpation happened). Like, Solars were specifically pointed out as the most dangerous things for the world at that point.
 
The Laurent said:
I do remember someone interpreting the history of Exalted that way. I can't remember the post, but I do remember ES going something like, "That's not how I see it, but that does fit the events, so go on with your bad self?"

Something like that? I do remember an exchange about differing views of Exalted history. One of them was King In The Mountain, for instance.

Edit: Also, isn't part of the point of the current situation that the entire world is falling apart, it's gotten sicker, the First Age is gone, and things have been going to shit for a while? That's at least the general vibe I get from the setting. Things have been getting worse ever since the Solars fell, justified or not.
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The Usurpation was pretty much Primodial War 2. It lessened the world, but it also healed it.

I mean, if you're an infernal you can make the case that everything is wrong because of the Primordial War, and you're actually fighting to restore creation to how it should be.
 
FBH said:
I mean, if you're an infernal you can make the case that everything is wrong because of the Primordial War, and you're actually fighting to restore creation to how it should be.
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You could also play a Realm Dragon-Blooded and point out that the Shogunate was the last true empire, and that all empires and kingdoms since are but pale shadows, which is why the correct action is to bend the knee to the Scarlet Realm, since it is a true successor to the mantle of the Shogunate, and therefore has a manifest destiny to spread it's great wings to all of Creation.

You will then proceed to argue with your fellow Immaculate monk whether the Incarnae should be referred to as Incarnae or Celestines - depending on your interpretation of the scriptures of Ao Feng Cho of Hollow - because you're an Immaculate monk, and arguing theology is the highest amusement and calling that you find in life. :V
 
ManusDomine said:
Is this after or before he fails to use any of his Water Dragon Charms with his non-form weapon spear?
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He could use them with his form weapon tiger claws, though.

While oddly enough, his block doesn't have him actually knowing Five-Fold Dragon Style, it would be logical for him to have the dire lance if he did, since its a form weapon for the style. He'd be able to switch between the two weapon types depending on what Charms he'd be using.
 
The Laurent said:
Things have been getting worse ever since the Solars fell, justified or not.
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No, things have been getting worse since the Primordials were overthrown. See: The existence of the Underworld. Like, I get what you're saying, but if you try to get an earnest Great Man Theory reading out of Exalted, the ultimate message is "everything was better before we put Great Cthulhu in a headlock and made them cry Uncle" and that... doesn't... really... track?

Because yeah, Exalted is a setting where the powerful are going to be in charge, and the little people don't really have another option. Look where that's gotten everybody. Look where that's taking everybody. Remember that the 'canonical' end of Exalted, insofar as it has one, is 'everybody jockeys for position and struggles with each other until the sky falls in and the world finally breaks for good.'
 
Imrix said:
No, things have been getting worse since the Primordials were overthrown. See: The existence of the Underworld. Like, I get what you're saying, but if you try to get an earnest Great Man Theory reading out of Exalted, the ultimate message is "everything was better before we put Great Cthulhu in a headlock and made them cry Uncle" and that... doesn't... really... track?

Because yeah, Exalted is a setting where the powerful are going to be in charge, and the little people don't really have another option. Look where that's gotten everybody. Look where that's taking everybody. Remember that the 'canonical' end of Exalted, insofar as it has one, is 'everybody jockeys for position and struggles with each other until the sky falls in and the world finally breaks for good.'
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Maybe, but the also sorta canonical start of Exalted, like, the root of it, is "The Solars/Infernals/Every Kind of Exalt/Whatnot are coming back/etc and that might change everything. And the world really could use with a change." And honestly, as much as that's a problem, it might be better than relentless pessimism, even if it's flawed.

So I'm not sure where I stand as far as that goes. I dislike the possibility of Great Men saving the world, I dislike "The world is fucked", so...I dunno. *shrugs*.
 
The Laurent said:
Maybe, but the also sorta canonical start of Exalted, like, the root of it, is "The Solars/Infernals/Every Kind of Exalt/Whatnot are coming back/etc and that might change everything. And the world really could use with a change."
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Well, yeah. They're also largely the reason the world could use with a change, because in their madness and arrogance, they broke it. Exalted is in large part a look back at the Epic Heroes! of myth and legend in order to say, "yo, these people are kind of, um, awful, if you really think about it," and a piece of that is the idea that, okay, if history really is all about Great People, you can't have it both ways, y'know? If I'm the only one with the power to save the world, then it's also my fault the world is so fucked up in the first place.

The best parts of Exalted, to me, are about how it's a power fantasy that forces you to think about what it means to have power. Not just the cheap Gospel of Uncle Ben, but about the awful spectre of unintended consequences, and how hard it is to even know what the right thing to do is.
 
landcollector said:
Let's say before.
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The great warrior-monk smashed down the wall with his prodigious strength; he had heard the heretics - nay, the apostates - argue something as preposterous as calling the venerable Incarnae - which dwelt at the heart of the Great City of Heaven, which itself stood in the heart of a sea of mercury and under a great dome of all the noble metals - Celestines, rather than their true name. Indeed, to do so was blasphemy of the highest order, for did the Incarnae not busy themselves with the highest of matters, and therefore were not to be disturbed by the petty arguing of mortals? Their arguing might even doom all the world - disrupting the thoughts of the Incarnae with it's sheer wrogness, once again it was up to he, Peleps Deled - the only righteous man left in this fallen world, to put an end to the wild abandon and decadence of monks who had strayed from the path of the righteous.

As the rubble of the wall fell before him, and the two monks stared at him, their heretic eyes wide in surprise and fear - obviously a sign of their guilt at this heresy - he took a combat stance, spear ready as he shouted from the top of his lungs. "Preposterous heretics, you who would damn all of Creation with your mistreatment of such sacral matters! I have come here to put an end to your wickedne-" he suddenly stopped himself with a confused look on his face as he stared down at his Direlance. "Why do I have a spear?" he asked himself in utter bafflement, staring at the foreign weapon in surprise and astonishment. He felt himself filled with a most holy and righteous anger, for obviously, some kind of wicked blasphemer - perhaps even one of the foul Anathema - had snuck a spear into his hand, that he had most certainly not held before.

He collected his breath for a most righteous corrective sermon at the least God of the Direlance; surely it had failed it's duties, for had it warned him he would never have fallen to such treachery and deceit! He shouted and spoke as was he blessed by the dragons - which he incidentally was, being Dragon-Blooded - and as he condemned the poor spirit, which highly likely wasn't sentient in the first place, a pair of very confused monks quietly snuck away, never to speak of this again.
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Imrix said:
Because yeah, Exalted is a setting where the powerful are going to be in charge, and the little people don't really have another option. '
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What about Authonconia? I find the themes of Authonconia are almost a complete 180 of "main" Exalted themes while still taking place technically in the setting, ironically despite the whole aura of state repression and confirmity going on there, Alchemials act a bit like comic super heroes in their distance from the levers of power and champions of the populat sthick.
 
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