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General Exalted Thread

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Aleph said:
So the two major examples of Cecelyne's Laws we have that I feel most illustrate their ultimate purpose are the colour blue and the clocks.
  • Nobody is allowed to look at the colour blue. The laws are written in blue. Therefore, by admitting to knowing the law, you implicate yourself as having broken it (and the burden of proof is presumably on you, so you can't just say "I had a slave read it to me and didn't look at it myself").
  • Timekeeping devices are illegal, but the powerful can claim that a room full of clocks are merely trophies while the weak can be killed for the regular drip of water through a leaky roof.
So I had a bit of a discussion with @Jon Chung about this, who disagrees with my take but offered useful examples to illustrate how our takes differ. As I see it, the philosophy of the laws is not that they're set up so you can't help but break them. That would be boring and, frankly, miss the point. No, the aim - if we take the example of Illegal Blue - is to produce a state where you can do one of two things. You can break the law by reading them and then scrupulously follow all of the laws you now know - but they change, so you need to do this fairly frequently, and this might attract the attention of a Priest who accuses you of having read the laws and thus seen the Forbidden Colour. Or you can obey the law, refrain from reading them, and consequentially live in fear you might be breaking one without knowing - and since you don't know that you're not, you can't argue against any accusations levelled against you; false or otherwise.

This is the philosophy Cecelyne writes her laws by. The point isn't to kill everyone, or to force everyone to be doing something illegal. The point is that everyone is terrified, all the time, because her Priests can pick out anyone at any time and go "you're breaking the law" and they can't defend themselves. To cite that you haven't broken the law is to admit to breaking it, so the only legal recourse is to be defenceless against false accusations made at the whim of anyone stronger than you.
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The problem of this is that it's no longer law at that point but taboo, and thus it doesn't actually work as a commentary on what it ought to be and seems to be commenting about, which is that although the law is ostensibly the same for rich and poor and powerful and powerless alike, the rich and powerful get away with far more than the poor and powerless do. The whole thing about the ostensibly self-contradictory law is that Cecylene, as I've said to @ManusDomine and in this thread, is a critical legal theorist. She thinks law is nothing but applied politics, and politics is nothing but 'the strong do what they can, the weak suffer as they must.'

Like, for something to be law it has to be more than something that bans people from doing a certain bunch of things. That's taboo, or kapu, or whatever you call it. It's something that can't be understood, can't be put into a coherent system of law.

To be law, Cecelyne's laws have to be:
1. Generalized
2. Public and visible
3. Proscriptive
4. Understandable
5. Consistent
6. Possible
7. Stable
8. Consistently used.

Others would argue that there's a 9th quality here, that they can't be wholly discretionary, and I'd agree, but I'm ignoring that for now because it's more optional.

Now, there's room for active unfairness even with all of these. Debtors' prisons were law, and nobody would deny they were law, despite the fact that they were unfair. Banning both poor and rich from sleeping under bridges is law and unfair. But what we have with the "Laws of Cecyelene" are basically a set of half-assed taboos that fail to provide any meaningful commentary on anything they could comment on and that's a real tragedy. Cecelyne's laws should be hugely cynical, as befits her alignment with crits, and probably should exist entirely to justify the fucked-up hierarchy of the Yozi hell-realm and the bitterness, hate, and unfairness of the Yozi. But it should still be law. If it becomes nothing but mere taboo, Cecelyne's revelation loses most of its effect, because it's no longer "law only matters when imposed on people by the stronger party"-i.e. the canon revelation as well as the critical legal theorist understanding that all law is political, but something else entirely and something much lesser.
 
FBH said:
To me, such phillosphy would work far better for some tribal confederacy built by a lunar on the edge of creation, where every person is expected to carry themselves, Each person can hunt and gather on their own if they have the strength to do so, and they can move between various tribal families in the overall society if they get sick of the people they're with or whatever.

That's maximum free choice, not a city of a million people that requires vast supplies of grain.
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Yyy... you do understand that metropolis with specialized labour and no clan structure offers vastly broader spectrum of meaningful choices that what you described?

FBH said:
Hong Kong was the product of the British empire though. It's a trade port set up to allow British commercial interests to access China. Rome became central to Europe because historically, it was an empire, and then continued to hold religious importance for people after its religious life was done. In both cases, they were balanced between a bunch of other powers, rather than being great powers themselves. Switzerland mean time isn't a trading centre, it's a banking centre, and it's hyper defensible, which Nexus isn't.

Nexus, on the other hand, is an independent power, with no body (except maybe Lookshy, maybe) to insure its interest.
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And Nexus lies on the ruins of First Realm city, still operate some of it's infrastructure (the three dams, Solar tombs retrofited as source of infinite heat for forges, and there is illustration with airships in SS and I always run Nexus with airship because of it), occupy intersection of the three most important rivers in the East and is protected by entity capable to go toe-to-toe with 3rd Circle and is known for massacring every army that stayed in Nexus, which is equivalent of WMD level of military power...

So You point being? Beside the fact that you clearly didn't read the Nexus description before starting to argue?

It also, you know, has the problem that it doesn't exist in modernity, so the question "what is everyone going to eat?" becomes far more pressing.
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They own tons of farmland along three big rivers surrounding area and have first age irrigation. Again, would you at least read the source material before arguing? Because I am now convinced that you didn't and that whole discussion is pointless. If you start with "how does random collection of mud huts become worldly metropolis" and I start with "all that was described in book as a basis of Nexus power and culture" we can't have a discussion.
 
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fitzgerald said:
.......... goddamn it now I want to read a Discworld Exalted crossover where an early Rincewind ends up in Nexus and promptly spends his entire time running from demons baring Infernal exhalations, dragonbloods and well pretty much everything

All while trying to maintain control of the SPELL seared into his mind
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Honestly, I'd assume Exalted Rincewind is some poor bastard who has a Third Circle Demon (possibly one of Qaf's or Cytherea's) squatting inside his skull because he managed to accidentally fulfill its release condition in the course of breaking into his Sorcerous order's archives. The poor bastard is probably running from Sidereals who want him out of the picture before the Unquestionable inside him finishes whatever plan it has in mind for that Direction and quadruples their paperwork for the next decade.

Twoflower is totally an Outcaste visiting from the Bordermarches with his horrifying Wyld-touched Artifact(?)/Familiar(?), the Luggage.
 
MJ12 Commando said:
But it should still be law. If it becomes nothing but mere taboo, Cecelyne's revelation loses most of its effect, because it's no longer "law only matters when imposed on people by the stronger party"-i.e. the canon revelation as well as the critical legal theorist understanding that all law is political, but something else entirely and something much lesser.
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I'll note that theories of law are a really fascinating subject that - if stolen shamelessly - can provide highly interesting avenues for people to explore in their game, just like it can provide you with Original Justice, a First Age judge who was known for his unconventional and scathing reviews of his peer judges' decisions and stalwart defense of the law as originally written and interpreted.

His greatest enemy was Iudivicasse who now seeks his reincarnation to twist him into an activist judge. :V
 
ManusDomine said:
I'll note that theories of law are a really fascinating subject that - if stolen shamelessly - can provide highly interesting avenues for people to explore in their game, just like it can provide you with Original Justice, a First Age judge who was known for his unconventional and scathing reviews of his peer judges' decisions and stalwart defense of the law as originally written and interpreted.

His greatest enemy was Iudivicasse who now seeks his reincarnation to twist him into an activist judge. :V
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When he was killed in the Usurpation, one might say that he was...
:coolbeans:
Borked by the Sidereals.


YEEEEEEEEAH.
 
MJ12 Commando said:
When he was killed in the Usurpation, one might say that he was...
:coolbeans:
Borked by the Sidereals.


YEEEEEEEEAH.
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As law students (okay I think you're a lawyer by now) it is our sacred duty to make a Circle of thinly disguised Supreme Court members representative of our countries; if we get @Fernandel to try Exalted, he can play a thinly disguised member of the Bundesverfassungsgericht, I can play a member of Højesteret and you can play a member of the Supreme Court.

This will be done, for such is the way of The Law.

(We could say that not doing so would be pure applesauce :V)
 
Kuciwalker said:
The problem here is with the ridiculous construction of Lookshy. It beggars belief that a city could maintain this sort of warrior culture disdain for commerce in the face of so much business and so much "new money" for seven centuries out of sheer cultural stubbornness.

If the writers want me to believe in a Lookshy like this, they need to give it (pre-Perry) Japanese-style isolationism, which also means giving up its whole foreign policy and position in the Confederation of Rivers. Frankly, that would probably work better - you could even move it to the West and make the Japan parallel even clearer. Lookshy as the closed city / nation that views itself as only legitimate continuation of the Shogunate and has been able to resist foreign influences due to its warrior culture and Shogunate arsenal - ready for Commodore Solar to open up.

In theory this creates a problem for "well then how do the Scavenger Lands stay independent?" but that really isn't a problem - there's lots of territory the Scarlet Empire doesn't control, or only controls weakly. As the most economically productive region outside the Blessed Isle, it's perfectly reasonable that the Scavenger Lands would have been able to resist the Empire. Especially if that productivity isn't in the form of easily-extractable natural resources but instead based on commercial and industrial development.
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My preferred solution for the Scavenger Lands, incidentally, is to de-special-snowflake-ise Lookshy (back more to the 1e depiction, where they're more like "an army with a lot of artefact plate and weapons, and First Age stuff they mostly use like cannons and field artillery) and then really dive into the whole "Scavenger Lands" thing.

Yeah, the entire place looks sort of like a Final Fantasy meets Fallout, and there's a whole spectrum of post-Shogunate cultures in the Lands that have retained at least some Shogunate knowledge. Lookshy is at the far end of the "conservative, preservationist" end of the spectrum, but it's a spectrum, not just Lookshy as a sudden single city-state spike.

Like, to bring in Fallout metaphors, Lookshy is the Brotherhood of Steel - reactionary, conservative, preservationist. But there are raider gangs (read, the city-states that started as post-apoc raider gangs) where the prince goes to battle wearing first age armour with a crown bolted to the brow and they have several artillery pieces mounted on top of the old lighthouse that is their capitol. There are Van Graaf scavenger lords who get lucky with a cache of weapons and suddenly have enough firepower to be a major player who found nations and suddenly whittle things down. There's Great Forks who are a weird tribal culture - except they literally have the gods on their side (and Great Forks can do with some expanding). There are nations in there with an army of a thousand terracotta warriors who they can activate and who hoard them for major wars, and there are nations who have an I-can't-believe-it's-not-a-nuke that they say they'll use on anyone who invades (and then you have a Sidereal game where someone has stolen the launch codes and you need to get it back).

And of course, there's a lot of Dragonblood in the population so a lot of ruling families will have a DB every few generations and a lot of them are going full CKII "massive web of marriage alliances" so invading one of them risks a doomstack forming and taking the chance to go pillage your satrapies and they're close to their supply lines while yours have to cross the Inner Sea.

The solution isn't to make Lookshy more open and mercantile and lose their nature as a conservative, reactionary power that's mortgaging their future for their present position. It's to make everything less dependent on Lookshy and remember that this is the Scavenger Lands where a mercenary band can validly have a number of essence cannons and several Dragonblooded among their ranks, and thus high end mercenary bands are peers of Realm legions...

... even before Guts shows up as a Abyssal and joins one of them.
 
EarthScorpion said:
Yeah, the entire place looks sort of like a Final Fantasy meets Fallout, and there's a whole spectrum of post-Shogunate cultures in the Lands that have retained at least some Shogunate knowledge. Lookshy is at the far end of the "conservative, preservationist" end of the spectrum, but it's a spectrum, not just Lookshy as a sudden single city-state spike.
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Tell me about Sephiroth's Legion.
 
ES, this is also fine but then either Lookshy needs to drop the anti-merchant stuff or it needs to move. Easiest solution: put Nexus where Lookshy is currently. (Also useful: redraw the map so you don't have every Eastern river emptying into the Yanaze.)
 
Kuciwalker said:
ES, this is also fine but then either Lookshy needs to drop the anti-merchant stuff or it needs to move. Easiest solution: put Nexus where Lookshy is currently. (Also useful: redraw the map so you don't have every Eastern river emptying into the Yanaze.)
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Plot twist: Greyfalls is relevant.

I still rather like the idea of taking the entirety of the Scavenger Lands and moving them to the other side of the map to replace the West in its current form. Nothing of value would be lost.
 
changeling said:
Yyy... you do understand that metropolis with specialized labour and no clan structure offers vastly broader spectrum of meaningful choices that what you described?
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Not really. In a metropolis you don't actually have much freedom of choice because you're really busy trying to not starve.


And Nexus lies on the ruins of First Realm city, still operate some of it's infrastructure (the three dams, Solar tombs retrofited as source of infinite heat for forges, and there is illustration with airships in SS and I always run Nexus with airship because of it), occupy intersection of the three most important rivers in the East and is protected by entity capable to go toe-to-toe with 3rd Circle and is known for massacring every army that stayed in Nexus, which is equivalent of WMD level of military power...

So You point being? Beside the fact that you clearly didn't read the Nexus description before starting to argue?
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So, given all that power, my point is why wouldn't it be an empire? An Imperial Nexus would be probably the most powerful place in the Scavenger lands. Your examples of places that didn't had constraints that Nexus lacks. Rome in the Middle Ages and Hong Kong in Modernity had reasons why they could be rich, and not powerful, Rome was always secondary to the Europe spanning church so it's empire was based on god, not Rome, Hong Kong is a trade city that provided a bridge between a decaying maratime empire and a vibrant new continental one, and was a limb of one or the other, rather than its own independent state.

Both have reasons why they're not empires.

Nexus, on the other hand, has none of these constraints. If it's council of entities are really a group of beings capable of taking on a newbie solar, then why exactly wouldn't they seek to employ their power outwards? And if they are so broken and isolated, then why haven't other powers simply cut them out of the loop?

They own tons of farmland along three big rivers surrounding area and have first age irrigation. Again, would you at least read the source material before arguing? Because I am now convinced that you didn't and that whole discussion is pointless. If you start with "how does random collection of mud huts become worldly metropolis" and I start with "all that was described in book as a basis of Nexus power and culture" we can't have a discussion.
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That's dumb. the basis of its power and culture is clearly the first age ruins and its position on the rivers.

I don't like the idea of Nexus owning huge amounts of farm land (especially if there's no slaves) because it totally changes the character of the place. If Nexus has huge amounts of farm land, then it's not going to be very poor and desperate. Whenever stuff gets bad in the city, everyone is just going to flee to the countryside and go back to farming their family plot or working on the harvest.

You certainly could have it work this way (it's how the Song dynasty worked) but it's not exactly going to create the kind of desperate poverty and cut throat antics that mark Nexus and the things that inspired it.
 
FBH said:
I don't like the idea of Nexus owning huge amounts of farm land (especially if there's no slaves) because it totally changes the character of the place.
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So you're literally just ignoring me when I point out that Nexus has slaves and calls them "indentured servants" and doesn't give one shit if imported slaves have their names signed in indentureship papers, hmm?

And when you go on about how it "changes the character of the place", you're once again ignoring what is actually written.

"The rivers provide Nexus with its vitality. They are the routes by which commerce travels, they provide the water necessary to sustain life and they flood periodically washing rich soil to the low flood plain farmlands that surround the city."

"Ironically this vile water vastly enriches the farmland below the city. The lands downriver from Nexus not only recieve a yearly covering of floodborne silt, but also nutrients from the gallons of decomposed waste. While the vegetables and grains grown near nexus may taste dubious and prove remarkably resistant to chewing, they are nonetheless healthy specimens. More palatable foodstuffs grown in less hostile environments are consumed by those who can afford better fair than the 'swamp rice' for which Nexus is infamous. In addition to rice, quinoa also thrives on the floodplains and cabbages and many varieties of squash are cultivated in the hills above."

(moreover, Nexus also heavily emphasises how many canals and waterways there are within the city - "a few thousand homes connected by a few million bridges, canals and streets". It's clearly and deliberately evoking quite a bit of Venice.)
 
EarthScorpion said:
So you're literally just ignoring me when I point out that Nexus has slaves and calls them "indentured servants" and doesn't give one shit if imported slaves have their names signed in indentureship papers, hmm?
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That's a fair point, but if we're doing slavery in all but name, that would bring things far closer to my conception of them, with well developed organs of force in order to enforce the needs of the city's oligarchy. Like, do you think just because someone isn't called a slave they're not going to make a run for it from the farm at the first opportunity? If they use slavery, why not then also just call it slavery? Slavery is wholly normal in creation. To not have it would impinge on people's property rights.


And when you go on about how it "changes the character of the place", you're once again ignoring what is actually written.
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I don't know about you, but I ignore and repurpose white wolf cannon all the time, because I like my ideas more than theirs. I don't think either of us are in a good position to stand for the purity of the setting as written, given both of us change large parts of it to fit our vision of how the setting should be. Like, I've read quite a bit of your homebrew, and there's certainly stuff that fundamentally changes the character of the setting. More than "Nexus is a lawless city with an empire" vs. "Nexus is a lawless city" does.

"The rivers provide Nexus with its vitality. They are the routes by which commerce travels, they provide the water necessary to sustain life and they flood periodically washing rich soil to the low flood plain farmlands that surround the city."

"Ironically this vile water vastly enriches the farmland below the city. The lands downriver from Nexus not only recieve a yearly covering of floodborne silt, but also nutrients from the gallons of decomposed waste. While the vegetables and grains grown near nexus may taste dubious and prove remarkably resistant to chewing, they are nonetheless healthy specimens. More palatable foodstuffs grown in less hostile environments are consumed by those who can afford better fair than the 'swamp rice' for which Nexus is infamous. In addition to rice, quinoa also thrives on the floodplains and cabbages and many varieties of squash are cultivated in the hills above."

(moreover, Nexus also heavily emphasises how many canals and waterways there are within the city - "a few thousand homes connected by a few million bridges, canals and streets". It's clearly and deliberately evoking quite a bit of Venice.)
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That's cool, but it doesn't, actually, remove the need for Nexus to have an empire, because you can't actually remove the empire around Nexus without removing the Nexus part of Nexus.

Even if Nexus has large amounts of great farmland to feed everyone (which doesn't make a huge deal of sense given that you'd think the best farmlands would be towards the elemental pole of wood and on the blessed isle, so that Nexus would just ship in a lot of its food from those), then it will still need things from the outside world. Ore, lumber, raw textiles, the stuff that goes into those huge manufacturers and first age forges, the stuff that alchemists use to brew their mixtures, and that cloth workers make into things.

The only way to do away with the need for Nexus to need things from the rest of the world, and in turn, because of its riches and this need, develop a military force with which to enforce its interests, and thus to become an imperial power, is if they all lie within sight of the city. If that's the case, then it stops being a trading state, because what exactly does anyone have to offer it? Not very much if it's completely self sufficient. In order to be Nexus, the great trading state, they need ways to make sure the trade flows.

How will they do that? Well, with soldiers of course.

Ergo, my effort post.
 
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So, has anyone ever given any thought to how one might go about developing new Dragon King Paths? The Scroll of Fallen Races says it can't be done, but I've always found that to be rather nonsensical; the very fact that the Dark Paths are a thing proves that Dragon Kings can discover new Paths beyond the ten that were "built in" so to speak.
 
ichypa said:
So, has anyone ever given any thought to how one might go about developing new Dragon King Paths? The Scroll of Fallen Races says it can't be done, but I've always found that to be rather nonsensical; the very fact that the Dark Paths are a thing proves that Dragon Kings can discover new Paths beyond the ten that were "built in" so to speak.
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I believe you need to be an essence 6 elder dragon king
 
ManusDomine said:
As law students (okay I think you're a lawyer by now) it is our sacred duty to make a Circle of thinly disguised Supreme Court members representative of our countries; if we get @Fernandel to try Exalted, he can play a thinly disguised member of the Bundesverfassungsgericht, I can play a member of Højesteret and you can play a member of the Supreme Court.

This will be done, for such is the way of The Law.

(We could say that not doing so would be pure applesauce :V)
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Dibs on Posner.
 
FBH said:
You can only do so much with strategic position.
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Yeah, but historical evidence tends to suggest that 'only so much' extends up to 'a heck of a lot'.
FBH said:
Besides which, it just seems kind of more boring to me if Nexus isn't doing stuff outside its borders. Like, can you articulate why you object to this?
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I don't, really. I don't care about Nexus enough to have strong feelings about either interpretation - my geographical babies are Whitewall, Metagalapa and Riwan. I was just picking up on one point in particular that seemed very off-base.
 
changeling said:
And Nexus lies on the ruins of First Realm city, still operate some of it's infrastructure (the three dams...
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IIrc they don't operate the dams. One of the dams is broken, the other is actually some kind of weird sorcerous working and nobody knows how it works, and the third one is retracted and nobody knows how to rise it.
 
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FBH said:
Yeah, but then once you get big, you suddenly find that in your power, you suddenly have people who need killing.

To be a great power is to be at war.
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... Yeah, but Nexus is at war. It's at war with the Realm. Remember the Realm? The Empress and her ambitions of conquest, which cities like Lookshy, Nexus and Great Forks are slap bang in the path of, hence why they were forced to form the Confederation of Rivers in the first place?
 
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Imrix said:
... Yeah, but Nexus is at war. It's at war with the Realm. Remember the Realm? The Empress and her ambitions of conquest, which cities like Lookshy, Nexus and Great Forks are slap bang in the path of, hence why they were forced to form the Confederation of Rivers in the first place?
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Can't say its ringing any bells, I'm afraid.
 
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