...Are people absolutely sure that the Lunars splat was the worst-written one of the lot?
General Exalted Thread
- Location
- Gladstone, OR
Lunars and Sidereals both have some rough spots.
So I just had an idea for a Solar Charm that is embarassingly obvious and now quite relevant to me. The main reason I think nobody made one like it, is that a lot of homebrew exists to skip the craft system instead of interacting with it. The other part is that from a mechanics standpoint, the idea of Perfect Equipment Bonus leaves a bad taste in everyone's mouth.
So with that in mind, I want to say this charm (and mini-essay) is about the craft side, not the end-result bonus. If you don't want tools to have +3 dice or the fiddly +1s you can add to weapons/armor, awesome. That's been discussed to death. I'm not discussing what the bonuses are other than how they improve Resource Value.
For reference, stripped down, this is how mundane crafting works:
A dramatic action rolling [lowest of (int/per+dex) + Craft]
Mundane items have a Difficulty equal to their Resources Cost
You cannot create items with a Resources Value higher than your [Craft+Specialtiy]. I believe this phrase is important because it caps your quality at your traits, even if you Roll Better.
You need raw materials and labor where applicable equal to its Difficulty -1, with logical exceptions
Ex. painting supplies are usually res 1, but metalworking materials are [Difficulty -1].
The interval of this dramatic action is [Difficulty] hours, days, weeks, months or years based on what it is.
Ex. A small Resources 1 trinket can be done in an hour, but a house or large construction project could take weeks or months.
So you roll your craft pool at Difficulty. If you roll 0 threshold success, you succeed but wtih no artful flourishes and workmanship bonuses.
If you roll less than required Difficulty, you reduce the final value of the intented project by 1 per success missed. Ergo 1 success on an attempted Resources 4 work ends up being worth Resources 1.
If no such item exists at a reduced resource rating (like there's no such thing as a Resources 3 Estate), the project fails completely.
From here we get to the interesting part that leads into my Charm- what you get from threshold successes and Quality of Goods.
So having read and re-read this section, I wonder if there's an extra layer of mechanical complexity I had not considered; This is on paragraph 2 of page 134, on the lefthand side.
What I think these rules are saying, is that either the threshold successes required for workmanship bonuses vary depending on the item's final Resources rating, or that the listed thresholds are 'flat' goals you must achieve over Difficulty.
Usecase A
If threshold is 0 to [Difficulty], you do not get a workmanship bonus.
If threshold is [Difficulty+1 or +2], you get the Fine workmanship bonus
If threshold is 5+, you get the Exceptional bonus
Usecase B
If Threshold is 0-2, you do not get a workmanship bonus
If threshold is 3-4, you get the Fine workmanship bonus
If threshold is 5, you get the Exceptional workmanship bonus
Having listed it out, I think Usecase B is what they intended, but I'd rather list out my thoughts for thread discussion.
Anyway- so for the purposes of Crafting, Fine is 'Preferential on sale but not improved in value'. Exceptional is +1 Resource Value, so a Resources 2 item becomes Resources 3.
The advantage as described in this system is that you are allowed to Aim Low or Aim High; someone can choose to make an Exceptional item flat out at the appropriate difficulty, and get the requisite bonus. Or they can choose to for a lower difficulty, resource cost AND interval, attempt to earn a high threshold on a 'basic' project.
Finally we get to Perfect Goods, which are actually and explicitly a separate decision made before construction begins. All Perfect goods cost +2 Resources to a maximum of 5 and add +2 to the difficulty. This means say,a 'Perfect' Resources 5 project would be Difficulty 7 to craft! This also includes the interval!
This leads me to my actual Charm:
Limitless Masterwork Technique
Cost: -
Minimums: Craft 4, Essence 2
Type: Permanent
Keywords: Obvious
Duration: Permanent
Prerequisites: Any Craft Excellency
The Solar Exalted are craftsmen without compare, genius in every chiseled facet or artful brushstroke.
This Charm Permanently enhances the Solar. If she attains a threshold of seven successes when crafting a mundane object or structure, she may spend five motes. If she does, her creation gains the Perfect workmanship bonus. Such creations have an unmistakable glow, lustre or crafted quality that sets them apart from each other as an Obvious effect, and those sensitive to Essence can determine that a Solar crafted it.
At Essence 3, this Charm automatically upgrades. One mote and a threshold of 5 will confer perfect workmanship, while a five motes at threshold of 7 allows the Solar to imbue her work with a suitable enchantment as if it were a talisman or other work of thaumaturgy. By default, the Exalt may improvise a suitable enchantment along Solar themes such as a warding against creatures of darkness, or strenthening an object or structure against her own Anima. Such feats can equal third-degree thaumaturgy. If already she knows a suitable Procedure, she may apply that instead with a Threshold equal to her [Occult] rating.
Analysis: Why did I do it this way?
The answer to that is two-fold; one is that I actually have over the years written more than a few Charms that are just 'You now craft 1 rank higher on the quality scale', and I'm sure other people have too. 2e Alchemicals has such a Charm/submod as well that just flatly goes 'things you make are now +1 Better, up to Perfect'.
In hindsight, I realized this was kind of janky design and made an end-run around the Craft System. Now the mundane craft rules are generally reviled or ignored and I don't blame people for that, but it's still a worthy thing to understand WHY.
So in the case of this Charm, I wanted to make a statement- that as a Solar you wanted to still cultivate a Big Success Pool for crafting, which ties into the idea of 'this charm triggers on high thresholds'. It also makes it so you want to 'aim low' anyway, meaning the high thresholds are easy to get. You can aim for a Resources 1 dagger and get 7 threshold for a perfect stabbing tool with a neat enchantment.
I also recently have been devising more ways to weave thaumaturgy into the Solar and general Exalted charmset. Charms should almost always be Better than Thaumaturgy,yes, but the idea is too useful to ignore/saves wordcount when you can point at Thaumaturgy and go 'You can do that too'. I made sure to incentivize the idea of learning more thaumaturgy too.
Like, the ideal goal is that these 'thaumaturgy-OK' charms should be used to get people interested in diversifying.
Now- one of the issues of thaum which is for a separate discussion is that it's frustratingly hard to learn for PCs and there's poor conveyance for how you're 'supposed' to use it. Which is 'Hire educated mortals'.
It doesn't help that most of the things you use thamaturgy for don't jive well with the 'high action' games that are common in the fandom.
- Location
- Denmark
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Oh you're gonna love what my Storyteller Apocrita has done with it:
Death Is Like A Staircase
When the Host of All Hosts felled seven titans with their blades at the dawn of history, they smote them so mightily that they fell all the way from their great thrones and into the depths of the earth, into the very deepest parts of Creation, where no sun shines and the blackness is filled with strange, crawling things with milky eyes and chittering mandibles. Here they lay and sunk deeper and deeper, and with every passing of the age, another layer of death added on to their sinking grave, always crumbling. In the higher layers live the Mountain Folk, insectile beings, bound on the order of their own creator to never leave the confine of the earth unless the Exalted ones were to demand it, here in the earth, they take apart the remains of other Mountain Folk and the Darkbrood that live beneath, putting the chitinous matter back together in strange and ingenious shapes, sealing it with Ichor, the rumoured fifth magical material that some Abyssals have been seen with.
This material is a tarry, blue-grey soup that slowly seeps downward, towards the depths of this twisted grave, it can be shaped and hardened into a terrifyingly hard and flexible substance that neither breaks nor rots for anything except the strongest of magics. Below the layers of the Mountain Folk, are dreadful, ghostly empires and ancient, forgotten races that have adapted to the dark and now live there like natives, hundreds of thousands of priceless artifacts lie scattered here for anyone with the power and will to seek them, and the ghastly death-screams of dead titans still echo in the caves and tunnels. Most terrifying of all is the sickness that turns any sufferer's eyes into a golden shade and makes them dream of old, forgotten gold and seek the blood of their brothers and allies, whispering of long-delayed revenge and treacherous subordinates.
I've come to be a big fan of something @Revlid devised - that there is more than a certain degree of connection between the subterranean places of Creation and the Underworld.
At a superficial level, for example, Shadowlands tend to form in places where the sun never shines, and there are places close to the lands of the Dead where one can walk into a cave and climb down into a Dead domain on certain nights of the year. But the deeper you go, the more everything approximates being a shadowland and it's all so easy to wander into the lands of the Dead. Miners know to always keep a light with them and watch for the vile poisonous damps, vapours from the Rivers of Death seeping out into the world. Breath in the wrong kind of damp and you'll be dead soon enough. Miners know a lot about ghosts - in the same way that blacksmiths know a lot about spirits. They're strange people who don't do what normal men do and who have a foot outside the sane, reasonable world.
(And then, of course, there are the wretched, stinking places where the corpses of the murdered Primordials fell through the world, producing great chasms where the rivers of Death pour down in great waterfalls through Creation, to land directly in the Labyrinth. Chasms where spectres crawl up the walls and cling to the overhangs, lit by pyreflame which dances like witchlights)
- Location
- New York City
If you were gonna write a race of subterranean rat people in the vein of the Skaven or Ratmen or Skritt in Creation, how would you do it?
Rat beastmen; they're just human.
Also, they're a fully developed culture in their own right, and they're not evil Just Because.
(If they're Skaven-esque, they may also have a thing for the Wyld and wyldstone, elements of the chaos of the Wyld trapped in Creation and which maaaaaaaaay be the calcified remnants of fae)
- Location
- New York City
That was my thinking, I was just wondering if anyone had any thoughts on what that culture might be like or any fun ideas for things that make them peculiar. A thing that the Skritt have in Guild Wars 2 is that they have a sort of weird hivemind that makes them smarter when they're grouped together through chittering at each other rapidly, which is kind of a cool quirk.
An idea for something that could make them fairly scary might be that they can eat people's brains to consume their knowledge and learn things, and they might not have much innovation/certain kinds of cultural knowledge because their leaders tend to derive a lot of stuff from the brains they've consumed, which could be compounded by them being quite short-lived.
That's just an idle idea though. I guess a thing I'm trying to consider is how a race of beings like that could be considered dangerous by the Mountain Folk or people on the surface should they get there.
grommile
nasty-minded old cynic
- Location
- NERV-Mercia
- Pronouns
- Traditional/Animate
They look like rats.
That's going to instantly bias humans against them. People-at-large really don't like rats.
Walker of the Yellow Path
Ho There!
- Location
- The Land of Memes
Probably the same way rats in Real Life are considered dangerous. They get everywhere, they eat everything we eat, and they spread diseases with them.
That's a big problem with a group like the Mountain Folk, who IIRC have population troubles. If the Ratmen catch a disease that doesn't affect humans much, but destroys Mountain Folk, exterminating them becomes an absolute priority for the Mountain Folk.
Especially if, say, they're a subterranean hunter-gatherer society living down below Creation in small low-density bands of up to 100 (because the local food supply can't support large groups). As hunter-gatherers, they'd be pretty egalitarian (as they can't support hierarchies), and they also won't have much of a sense of "ownership" - because who can own more than they can carry?
... as a result, when a band comes to the surface and finds that there's entire fields of food just sitting there, way more than any one person can eat - well of course they'll grab everything they can. It's food. And then the farmers get irked - especially when the ratmen then have a population boom born of "seriously, guys, lots of food here". And the farmers are like "vile, degenerate man-rats - they're greedy, you know, and just eat and eat and don't make anything themselves" and the ratmen are like "they just go after us because we need to eat".
And fairly soon you've got farmers setting traps for the ratmen and killing them on sight, and the ratmen are going after the people who are killing them and while the entire conflict looks like "Humans vs ratmen", it's actually just fundamentally "settled farmers vs hunter gatherers". And there are many more humans, so in most cases the ratmen band takes lots of casualties and is forced back away from the settled area because they can't sustain their losses, especially if a Dragonblooded mercenary shows up and goes down into their tunnels with a daiklaive and their anima banner to wipe out the loathsome ratmen.
Oh, I do love that.
While in of itself, that's pretty awesome, its not really what I was looking for, since it basically is just the Underworld, rather than its own, largely separate part of the setting.
Are these meant to replace or be in addition to the Goshun? Because the Goshun, rat people artisans who live under Chiaroscuro, sorta already fill the "subterranean rat people" niche.
- Location
- Denmark
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Do take note that this also replaces Soulsteel with Ichor, which I would love to tell you more about, but uh I think @Aleph knows more about it than me by now judging by how she may have been talking to Apocrita recently.
After all, it comes from the Dragon-Blooded game I'm playing, and all that Chiming Minaret managed to get out when she was somewhere around one of the upper layers was a Mountain Folk Worker Caste fell to the sickness anyways and tried to murder her.
(I think the sickness is the Essence of the slain Solars that has taken on a life on it's own, steeped in the power of the Great Curse and their desires for vengeance, and thus becoming a disease that infects the mnd with thoughts of revenge and makes their eyes gold, forcing them to dream of unending sunlight.)
(Of course, it's also because Apocrita has played too much Hollow Knight and he's obsessed with it.)
- Location
- Singapore
But on the subject of the Ratman, aren't there edible mushrooms below the surface of the Earth? That the mountain folk use to create food and drink and alcohol?
You're right there. I have almost no time for the canon Mountain Folk, and their "we fight a vitally important endless war underneath Creation which is so important that if we lose all your petty surface politics wouldn't matter, also we're unified, and we're also a race that's just waiting to bow and scrape before the returning Solars".
And so I have no time for "a largely separate part of the setting". No, goddamnit, integrate this shit into areas. Have cities in the mountains built in old Shogunate mines! Have Nexus, where the Old City is part of the city and you have people building houses in old sewer tunnels. Have miners knowing that they risk the Dead every time they head down, and that if they die away from the sun they'll probably leave a ghost so you gotta make sure to leave stuff out for the dead miners so if you die you'll get offerings left for you. Have kingdoms threatened by races of degenerate Forbidden godspawn, gods so degraded that they lost their immateriality and now squirm out and raid the surface. Make the underground part of Creation - and the gateway to the chthonic lands of the Dead.
- Pronouns
- They/Them
Hrm, if death is like a staircase, then is Love like an open door?
Edit: Another thing that I'm surprised nobody has spent that much time on, is you need to be human to Exalt, right? But the definition of human is pretty loosey-goosey, right? So it seems like there'd be 'racial' conflict along Exalted lines. I mean, do you think that a lot of people would care that "This rat-man Exalt is a fellow human"?
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You can do that as a Sidereal. The listed Sidereal in 2nd edition core is basically that. So why limit all Sidereals to this incredibly narrow story?
It's especially odd given you vehemence over pattern spiders, as you simultaneously remove the Sidereals control over the shape of destiny while while complaining about the fact that others had control over destiny.
Who.... are you talking too?
Sure, he's a rat-man, but it could be worse.
I mean, he could be from Great Forks. Fuckers. Can't trust a Great Forks pansy. All effete and crap and whining about not having their drugs. Why, back in t' day, we didn't have none of their drugs. We had to chew sticks! Sticks we wrapped in stinging nettles, for the burning feeling on our lips! And we were better for it! It kept us going when we had to carry things uphill in the snow, both ways! Damn wyld zones makin' it always snowy and always uphill!
Here, here.
Perhaps I should have said I wanted to be a separate part of the setting from the Underworld, as that's what I meant. As you pointed out, the underground being almost entirely separated from the rest of the setting as a whole is part of the problem. But while the Dead should have presence (I think they do canonically, anyway) I don't want them to be the main attraction, so to speak.
What interested me in the Underground (I'm just going to call it that from now on for simplicity's sake) in the first place were things like there being powerful demanses down there that mutate the inhabitants of the Underground into monsters, and it being the last place where races from the Primordial era dwell.
I want a world full of fundamentally alien beings and places, rather than fleetingly alien like the Wyld, or the Underworld and Autochthonia where most of the horrors still feel too human; and those beings and places possess inherent, overt agency, unlike Demons. I don't want The Underworld Expansion Pack, as cool as it is in of itself.
*strokes chin contemplatively.* True, very true.
Me.
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Oops. On a phone and I was adjusting quote tags.
- Location
- The sixth circle of Hell (second on weekends)
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Keris: "Preach it, brother! And don't even get me started on fuckin' Lookshy; the rabid sword-wanking bastards..."
(In certain ways Keris is still very Nexan at heart.)
- Pronouns
- They/Them
So yeah, I'm not really sure if you could even really have a "Solar Host" anymore, really. I mean, what does a Solar champion of the Rat-men, trying to guide and unite his people like mongol tribes to carve out their own niche, have in common with some effete mercantile courtesan-y 'regular human' Solar?
"Oh, we're both Solars" doesn't really mean all that much? I mean, it does mean you have a common enemy with the Realm trying to kill you, and so I can see how PC parties could be formed, but there's a lot more separating than uniting, despite having the same sorts of general powers.
"Oh, we're both Solars" doesn't really mean all that much? I mean, it does mean you have a common enemy with the Realm trying to kill you, and so I can see how PC parties could be formed, but there's a lot more separating than uniting, despite having the same sorts of general powers.
- Location
- Spain
Essentially correct.
Even the chances of two Solars meeting are pretty small, let alone a big group.
Of course not.
Hell, there isn't even a Dragonblooded Host, and they're the ones with the teamwork focus. Sure, the Realm is the Realm (and on the brink of civil war), but as I recall they're just a plurality of the Dragonblooded out there - they're outnumbered by Outcastes. And most Outcastes hold the opinion that the Realm can go sit on a dire lance if they want to make them do something.
(And for that same reason, Terrifying Argent Witches scrapped the idea of the Lunars being unified ever since the youngsters in the Shogunate got sick of being used as expendable assets by asshole Deliberative-era Lunars, and promptly turned on them. Instead, they're a loose network of alliances and debts and favours, with the remnants of the Silver Pact as a hardcore group which is only usually 60-120 Lunars)
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Regarding the mountain folk, I actually think at least some of the war under the world is a huge wasted opportunity.
The idea of like, those spirits who wanted to stick with the primordial (but weren't actually their souls) being now evil and twisted things from being imprisoned so far beneath the world with the mistakes that the Primordials locked away down there is really cool as a set of adversaries, but as it never affects the rest of the setting, it's a pretty huge wasted opportunity.
The idea of like, those spirits who wanted to stick with the primordial (but weren't actually their souls) being now evil and twisted things from being imprisoned so far beneath the world with the mistakes that the Primordials locked away down there is really cool as a set of adversaries, but as it never affects the rest of the setting, it's a pretty huge wasted opportunity.