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General Exalted Thread

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Shyft said:
Sure, but that's a ham-fisted approach to it and for good or ill, 1e and 2e expected more of its playerbase to achieve its end. It works, don't get me wrong, but like with a lot of my frustrations with 3e, it's inelegant.
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It's really not that inelegant? Come up with spell. Come up with aesthetic quirk thematically associated with spell. Come up with minor mechanical enhancement to spell. Done.

These things are incredibly easy to write, and frequently quite fun.

(And, yeah, it does work. A completely free-form RP would also "expect more of its playerbase" but that's not a point in its favor.)
 
Kuciwalker said:
It's really not that inelegant? Come up with spell. Come up with aesthetic quirk thematically associated with spell. Come up with minor mechanical enhancement to spell. Done.

These things are incredibly easy to write, and frequently quite fun.

(And, yeah, it does work. A completely free-form RP would also "expect more of its playerbase" but that's not a point in its favor.)
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It being easy to write has nothing to do with how elegant it is as a means to enforce "sorcerers are strange because of the power they wield".

While it does make them strange, it's the strangeness of a perpetual tan or an extra glossy nailpolish or weird background details that your average mortal won't notice.

It essentially says that every sorcerer has a minor cosmetic mutation, which is both more directly weird than what other editions have, but in forcing this weirdness quota it misses the point entirely.

A sorcerer should be strange and alien because of the things they done for power and how that has changed then, but when it becomes something directly physical rather than cultural or behavioral, it becomes something that gets lost in the weirdness already present in Creation, such that nobody would think twice if you pass it of as a spirit blood mutation or body-art.
 
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Xyzarach said:
A sorcerer should be strange and alien because of the things they done for power and how that has changed then, but when it becomes something directly physical rather than cultural or behavioral, it becomes something that gets lost in the weirdness already present in Creation, such that nobody would think twice if you pass it of as a spirit blood mutation or body-art.
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Sorcerous Initiations and shaping rituals already solve this problem, speaking as the current player of a Dragon-Blooded who casts her sorcery because she learned that the secret language of the universe was a Language of Flowers, and thus she trails blossom petals and casts spells through the harmony of a well-tended garden in bloom, through the blossoming of flowers and the beauty of floral poetry.

(Also she may or may not be literally just Byakuya Kuchiki as a woman. :V)
 
ManusDomine said:
Sorcerous Initiations and shaping rituals already solve this problem, speaking as the current player of a Dragon-Blooded who casts her sorcery because she learned that the secret language of the universe was a Language of Flowers, and thus she trails blossom petals and casts spells through the harmony of a well-tended garden in bloom, through the blossoming of flowers and the beauty of floral poetry.

(Also she may or may not be literally just Byakuya Kuchiki as a woman. :V)
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And here I thought that was just a Nobilis reference.
 
Meh, I can't really say that I've ever understood or bought into the "Sorcerers are weird" idea, because unless you're one of 700 people capable of going past the Terrestrial Circle, you're not really any "weirder" than anyone else who is 1) very likely to be an Exalt or a heroic mortal, which by itself already sets you apart from general humanity, 2) is an Essence user, and are therefore aware of and capable of manipulating the fundamental energies of reality, and 3) just gone through 4-5 different life redefining experiences. There is nothing innately unnatural about them beyond their ability to use Spells, and the ability to wield supernatural magics is not rare in Creation.

Basically, I don't believe Sorcerers are weird, but people who would be inclined to learn Sorcery in the first place are.
 
I think the root problem with the perceptions of Magitech is that for a lot of people, there's an unspoken impression that there's such a thematic division between Technology/Industry as "a sign of Modern Times" and Mythology as "from a time of Magical-Thinking" that each exist wholly in opposition to the other, when that is really not the case. Its the old saw of "technology develops from advancements in sciences, and science is the result of things we now understand, therefore magic by definition can not (or should not) be attributable to or compared against technology otherwise it ceases to simply be more than a wacky physics problem with more glow-filters."

This is why clockworks, telescopes and other forms of "blunt rock and stick" inventions like ballista generally get a pass in otherwise "magical" settings, because they are so bare-bones as to not betray any modern sensibility except when they get too complex for the dirtfarmers (and therefore the reader) to easily grasp the basics of. Anything beyond that must require magic, because elsewise you see mention of 'sparks of lightning being caged in clay pots and used to ignite burning filaments in glass baubles,' and the mind immediately leaps to Lightbulbs regardless of the usage or purpose.

The advent of mass-scale industrialization has its own folklore and folk heroes, like John Henry or Joe Magarac, and the great steam engines and factories were seen by the public at large to be nigh-miraculous at the turn of the century. The outlandish devices on display at the early World's Fairs were obviously ideas coined by genius luminaries, performing feats either unthinkable for the time (the telephone/telegraph) or prohibitively out of reach (the daguerreotype photography process, among others) of the common man, so there was a natural inclination to treat such things with wonder and amazement that bordered on the magical. Such were people so caught up in the spectacle of huge advances in technology and impossibly complex machines that in the 1890s there was once staged a live train wreck with a standing audience of almost 40,000, leading to a catastrophic explosion, entirely unaware of the now-obvious result of slamming two high-pressure steam boilers into eachother at high speeds, even by the people who designed the things.

I think, if anything, the adamant desire to distance "applied understanding of something" from that sense of childlike wonder at experiencing and engaging with that something firsthand is a huge failure of imagination on the part of both writers and readers, and it only becomes moreso in the case of a "magic" where that general understanding can be a "science" applied in literally any fashion you can think to describe. Instead, everyone has to be as ignorant as we are or moreso, and you hit the wall of the Problem With Crossbows from the other side.
 
Shyft said:
You don't have to like my definition- I don't much like it either. I think it's useful insofar as giving us a starting point in which to ask further questions. Like- why can't I make a sentient wind chime with Craft Air that acts as a personal assistant? The only reason right now is 'Because sentient artifacts are Magitech'.

That's not a bad reason, but it could be improved.

Magitech = Stuff you can't make in the Second Age is a developmental definition, not a practical or useful one. You point out 'magic with the thematics and aesthetics of technology'- and I reply: "All forms of craft and construction are considered technology'. So you likely mean modern technology... but that's a problematic definition too because it leads to obnoxious things like Magical Computers* and such.

* I know such things already exist in varying degrees of Well Written and Not. Ideally a new definition of Magitech encourages more of the former.
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While I think the discussion you're prodding at is interesting, I think you approached it from the wrong angle. The label of magitech is, as it currently exists, entirely about how a thing looks to us, as players - specifically, where magic has been used to enable either modern of futuristic aesthetics. When you remove the aesthetics from consideration, magitech is frequently no different from any other magical object.

To borrow the example you used here, most people wouldn't consider a sentient wind chime PA magitech. Nor would they consider a network of sentient wind chime PAs that communicate by sending small breezes between each other, so they or their employer/owner can send messages magitech.
On the other hand, many people would consider a disk filled with wires of mystically potent metals that projects an illusion of some sort controlled by a sentience housed in the disk to be magitech, and the network of wind chimes was a description away from being phones that house a AIs.

Going further, most people wouldn't consider a cannon that uses a complex array of lenses and mirrors to focus sunlight (I default to Archimedes and his burning mirrors on this, but really any kind of light works) into a beam that scorches and ignites whatever it hits magitech, but...
Sanctaphrax said:
You're going to have a really hard time convincing me that a laser gun isn't magitech, no matter how laboriously it was crafted.
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I was describing a laser cannon using fantasy-friendly aesthetics.
 
Yeah. The definition in people's minds is aesthetic, and any attempt to redefine the word has to play nice with that.

I mean, there's at least one significant non-aesthetic difference between magic and technology. Magic reifies intuitive human concepts like "lightning", "swordsmanship", and "communication", while technology is reductionistic. But I don't think that has any real relevance to the distinction between magitech and regular artifacts. Especially since, in a magical setting like Creation, reductionism will often lead you to the concepts that magic reifies anyway.
 
The word "magitech" is fucking awful anyway. Not only is a linguistic abomination, but it also directs the mind down unhelpful pathways.

A golem powered by a red jade furnace in its stomach which has to be fed fuel, which forces hydraulic steam to drive its muscles until it is cooled by the blue jade plaques, for example, is magitech - but it's also entirely within scope for a Second Age Twilight Archimedes to be making. A blade made from utterly purified orichalcum which has its edge fractally shaped into the name of the Sun so that it features an infinite number of names of the sun within a finite volume is not magitech, but it's completely outside the capacity of Second Age Creation to make.

My solution? Call "things there's no way you're making in the Second Age, so characters have to either find them or steal them" Wonders and have done with it. Some Wonders are magitech, but not all magitech is Wonders and not all Wonders are magitech.

Essentially:

Magitech: The aesthetic of technology made with magic. Implies no superiority over other artefacts. A lightsabre is mechanically identical to a lightning bolt sung to by a legendary singer and coaxed into taking form as an air-light blade that crackles and hums as it is swung.

Wonder: Something beyond the capacity of the Second Age to make; irreplaceable, massively valuable. Superior to lesser Artefacts.
 
EarthScorpion said:
The word "magitech" is fucking awful anyway. Not only is a linguistic abomination, but it also directs the mind down unhelpful pathways.

A golem powered by a red jade furnace in its stomach which has to be fed fuel, which forces hydraulic steam to drive its muscles until it is cooled by the blue jade plaques, for example, is magitech - but it's also entirely within scope for a Second Age Twilight Archimedes to be making. A blade made from utterly purified orichalcum which has its edge fractally shaped into the name of the Sun so that it features an infinite number of names of the sun within a finite volume is not magitech, but it's completely outside the capacity of Second Age Creation to make.

My solution? Call "things there's no way you're making in the Second Age, so characters have to either find them or steal them" Wonders and have done with it. Some Wonders are magitech, but not all magitech is Wonders and not all Wonders are magitech.

Essentially:

Magitech: The aesthetic of technology made with magic. Implies no superiority over other artefacts. A lightsabre is mechanically identical to a lightning bolt sung to by a legendary singer and coaxed into taking form as an air-light blade that crackles and hums as it is swung.

Wonder: Something beyond the capacity of the Second Age to make; irreplaceable, massively valuable. Superior to lesser Artefacts.
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But then how can they release a book full of Wonders of the Lost Age for people to assume they should be able to make?
 
Kuciwalker said:
That's not the main way 3e makes sorcerers Weird. It's actually much more straightforward and cooler: when you become a sorcerer, you designate a spell as your "control spell", which gives it enhanced effects but also gives you some kind of personal weirdness. For example:
  • ISoB as a control gives your skin a permanent bronze tint.
  • Stormwind Rider generates winds when you feel strong emotions.
  • DOoB turns your nails to sharp volcanic glass.
  • Infallible Messenger makes little tells start appearing hidden in objects you spend time around (e.g. cherubs in corners of paintings).
The only flaw with this is that they didn't write these effects for every spell, but they aren't hard to homebrew (actually it's pretty fun).
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Eh, that is neat, but it could just as easily be substituted into 2E as homebrew, like you're already going to be doing with most of 2E. To me, it's more useful shorthand to have Sorcery be the real shit; I like the idea of your average mortal treating Sorcerers in the same way they treat powerful spirits and other dangerous wild cards, because then you can let Sorcery be rare (by mortal reckoning; Exalts are going to be/interact with them a hell of a lot more) and strange and the subject of rumor & superstition, while thaumaturgy gets to flex its muscle with ll sorts of other supernatural ideas: men of the desert who have branded their tongues with the symbol of an elemental lord, and whose breath brings fever and madness to those who displease their fiery lord*; warrior monks that turn aside blades with their hands and see men's emotions as clear as the sun's movement across the sky, at the cost of spending their free time engaged in ascetic ritual and practicing strict vegetarianism, people who learn to trap hungry ghosts in fist-sized cages of carved bone or entreat the least gods of a smithy's forge to better the quality of the works made within it.

Sorcerers and Necromancers are the men and women who refuse to content themselves with that, and choose to sacrifice a little of their lives (and perhaps their humanity) to grasp the Promethean fire. A water-speaker can swim across a river as easily as a fish - a Sorcerer calls forth ancient symbols of Creation's lost makers to tear open the river, and walks across the bed without dirtying his clothes. Spirit-breakers set careful lures to capture ghostly servants one by one - a Necromancer spits blood upon the dry earth and raises a tree of bone-and-iron birds to do his bidding. Thaumaturgy works within the rules of the world - Sorcery (and Necromancy) forces the world to accept its user's rules instead.



* Somebody - either @Aleph or @EarthScorpion - wrote up a whole thing for modeling supernatural vows of power, mystic exercise regimens, and the like via @Revlid's mutation system, to help spice up thaumaturgy. I strongly recommend you guys hunt it down if you haven't already bookmarked it.
 
All the thaumaturgy effects in 2E have been rolled into Terrestrial workings in 3E anyways, and given mortals can learn Sorcery freely, nothing's been lost in that regard.

It does make 3E thaumaturgy pretty superfluous, admittedly.
 
EarthScorpion said:
The word "magitech" is fucking awful anyway. Not only is a linguistic abomination, but it also directs the mind down unhelpful pathways.

A golem powered by a red jade furnace in its stomach which has to be fed fuel, which forces hydraulic steam to drive its muscles until it is cooled by the blue jade plaques, for example, is magitech - but it's also entirely within scope for a Second Age Twilight Archimedes to be making. A blade made from utterly purified orichalcum which has its edge fractally shaped into the name of the Sun so that it features an infinite number of names of the sun within a finite volume is not magitech, but it's completely outside the capacity of Second Age Creation to make.

My solution? Call "things there's no way you're making in the Second Age, so characters have to either find them or steal them" Wonders and have done with it. Some Wonders are magitech, but not all magitech is Wonders and not all Wonders are magitech.

Essentially:

Magitech: The aesthetic of technology made with magic. Implies no superiority over other artefacts. A lightsabre is mechanically identical to a lightning bolt sung to by a legendary singer and coaxed into taking form as an air-light blade that crackles and hums as it is swung.

Wonder: Something beyond the capacity of the Second Age to make; irreplaceable, massively valuable. Superior to lesser Artefacts.
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Do you differentiate items that need, a few decades to a century, to be replicated to one's that take the greater part of a millenium to even be mostly understood?
 
Deations said:
All the thaumaturgy effects in 2E have been rolled into Terrestrial workings in 3E anyways, and given mortals can learn Sorcery freely, nothing's been lost in that regard.

It does make 3E thaumaturgy pretty superfluous, admittedly.
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It doesn't quite work: workings seem to require you to commit XP for each instance, while Thaumaturgy was more like an ability.
 
EarthScorpion said:
Here.
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Oh, that's neat.

For something like this, maybe the mechanism is an appropriate dice pool(Immaculate Martial arts would be one of the physical attributes+Martial Arts/Brawl+relevant Specialty/Style).* When a number of successes equal to the Mutation Points required is obtained, you get the effect whether that be an Immaculate being able to cave in a man's chest through his armor with a single kick or successfully concocting a potion or whatever.

For Sustained stuff, you might need to make a roll every week or so and score just one success to maintain it based on whatever requirements are necessary. An Immaculate may need to keep practicing their katas as well as maintaining a strict vegetarian diet and vows of chastity. A shaman would have to make the appropriate prayers and offerings to the spirits to maintain his Second Sight, etc.


*Maybe Awakened Essence adds to the dicepool?
 
Carrnage said:
Do you differentiate items that need, a few decades to a century, to be replicated to one's that take the greater part of a millenium to even be mostly understood?
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If I were doing it, I would say it's impossible, with a sidebar noting that if you want to change that, it should probably require a campaign of active effort for a basic wonder, and more for anything beyond that. We're talking like, "this Wonder is impossible to create - nor can it be found among the impossibilities of the Wyld, for it's nature is anathema to Chaos. Should one wish to forge it anew, conquering entire kingdom to strip them of irreproducible first age materials would be merely the first step. They would have to bring those kingdoms beyond the Loom of Fate, subjecting them instead to bespoke laws of reality calibrated to permit the Wonder's creation. Only then could a Solar Craftsman and their seventy-seven Dragonblooded Lieutenants begin the forging process"
 
tzar1990 said:
If I were doing it, I would say it's impossible, with a sidebar noting that if you want to change that, it should probably require a campaign of active effort for a basic wonder, and more for anything beyond that. We're talking like, "this Wonder is impossible to create - nor can it be found among the impossibilities of the Wyld, for it's nature is anathema to Chaos. Should one wish to forge it anew, conquering entire kingdom to strip them of irreproducible first age materials would be merely the first step. They would have to bring those kingdoms beyond the Loom of Fate, subjecting them instead to bespoke laws of reality calibrated to permit the Wonder's creation. Only then could a Solar Craftsman and their seventy-seven Dragonblooded Lieutenants begin the forging process"
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Did the solars put all that effort into every object they made? and were all their objects forged with techniques that are possible with solars at their height?
 
Carrnage: Basically in this instance I would assume we are running into a 'we build the tools to build the tools to build the tools.....and we use those tools to create a essance flux that allows us to create Square Circles, in order to create the Teleport Gateways'.

The Solar's at their height had all those tools. They had the cathedral-factories, and were re-routing laylines and shit all over Creation. You, as the newly exalted Twilight Exalted in a little town in Creation do not have those tools and probably, at best, have vague memories of using them to create that amazing wonder. You don't understand how they work or how to build more of them. You have no idea how to go from hammer and chisel to nano-mote assemblers.
 
Bel said:
Carrnage: Basically in this instance I would assume we are running into a 'we build the tools to build the tools to build the tools.....and we use those tools to create a essance flux that allows us to create Square Circles, in order to create the Teleport Gateways'.
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you miss my point Technology doesn't have tiers it has components, advanced fission reactors are merely boilers for steam turbines that have been largely unchanged since coal electric generators. and even the most advanced societies still make use of primitive tools and techniques because those techniques work.
 
Okay cool back from work now I can do magitech things.

@ichypa - your definition of 'shapes/manipulates Essence' is unfortunately identical to that of regular Artifice. (this is one of the problems with Mtech as a concept because it's not Unique yet. It's the Lunars of Craft). Like, at the metaphysics, a daiklave is a daiklave because it is 'Swording magic' baked into a physical form. However, I know for a fact in conversations with @Aleph that she personally views artifice as more 'Form follows function'. It's why we've had long discussions on what powers a proper 'anime-sized' daiklave should have, because in her mind, a sword that big is big for a reason, instead of just Looking Cool.

@runeblue360 - Industrialization is... well really I think a lot of people can agree that industrialization and magitech should be decoupled in some fashion? I mean, I firmly believe you should be able to mass produce things without magitech, but maybe some specialist products require magitech? That depends on how far you want to take the 'make a tool to make a tool' paradigm. And to be fair, I like worldbuilding around that conciet, but I'm not ready to approach it yet without a good definition of Magitech.

As @Sanctaphrax points out, too firmly enmeshing the aesthetics of technology with it's societal impact, of focusing too much on the 'word' over anything else is a problem of 2e and possibly a problem with 3e. (That I can't speak to yet.) The later post about intuition versus reductionist thinking is also quite relevant.

@azoicennead raises a fair point that leading the question wtih 'what is magitech' conjurers quite firmly the whole aesthetic of power armor, skyships and so on. So again this comes back to a question of 'what is it' and again the main definitions I've come to acknowledge are 'they're things you can't make in the second age/require first age support' and 'you are expected to satisfy minimum requirements to get full utility out of them' (Repair/Maintenance/Hearthstone Sockets'. The latter is more aesthetic-agnostic and thus more useful.

@EarthScorpion - Your addition to the discussion is insightful, but I have to point out that it's not as helpful as you might think. I started this whole thing trying to keep people from falling into the 'it's awful' bandwagon, which is just as unhelpful. I definitely agree that your examples should be things that happen and that a wider breadth of 'Cool Stuff' should be available for players.

Anyway, the root of my initial question/goal here is to develop thought on what 'Is' magitech, and if there actually is a qualitative trait that can be meaningfully expanded in both mechanics and setting. If there isn't, what could one be? The fact is, I was sold on and love a lot of what was presented as Magitech in Exalted, but I agree that it's not done well right now. The solution may very well be to remove it from the game's lexicon and replace it with something else. If that solution works for you, awesome. I'm not there yet.
 
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