- Location
- Singapore
Actually, on that note, I wonder...
Ok, is there any reason not to simply allow your artifacts (trains?) to simply absorb ambient essence? Instead of spending a hearthstone on them?
General Exalted Thread
Ok, is there any reason not to simply allow your artifacts (trains?) to simply absorb ambient essence? Instead of spending a hearthstone on them?
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I imagine just lower levels of power.
TBH I'd imagine that certain areas (Nexus, the Haslanti League) might use actual pure steam trains. We know steam works in exalted (and better than in our world cause you can have steam cannons).
The shogunate probably would still have used essence powered, or spirit powered trains, but in the second age, I'd be willing to entertain steam engines in a bunch of areas, especially the south and maybe the Scavenger Lands too.
Big question: Does the realm have trains? Indeed, how do people in the realm move around?
- Location
- Singapore
Never heard of them.
I imagine stuff like horses, buggies, sorcery, or carriages.
- Location
- Canada
Eh, some artifacts do this, the issue is the charge times and getting the right aspect of essense.
Like, it's going to take quite a bit of essence to move literal tons of whatever, and you're going to want to get that stuff to wherever faster than if you loaded it in carts and sent it by Yeddim. So if your train needs a certain amount of essence to go at X speed pulling Y weight, then using ambient essence is kinda useless if it only reaches top speed at noon one month of the year.
EDIT: and you'd better hope to all that's holy that a shadowland never forms somewhere your tracks cross, because then you're getting necrotic essence in your ambient essence extractors, and that just ruins everything.
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It's almost as big as the continental USA.
It seems like it'd at least have canals.
- Location
- Library
The Blessed Isle was de-facto terraformed to suit High First Age and Shogunate. Keeping that in mind:
I image that Blessed Isle have giant and meticulously maintained rivers and canals networks to move goods and people around everywhere, expect for mountains ranges (or maybe not even some mountains - drilling tunnels through mountains is something that Shogunate and High First Age could do and perhaps Realm in it's 800 of history could do too) . It's just the most ROI way to do it - and it's possible in Age of Sorrow.
Better than roads, but roman-style roads (all roads lead to Meru...) are backup system.
Exalt have more extravagant means of travel, most notably airships and hired/employed/befriended Sorcerers that could cast Stormwind Rider. Second, there are some ways that depend on elementals and gods; I would image that some form of transport depending on, for example, cloud gods as gondoliers for important or decadent Dynasts.
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I was wondering if the roads and canals might have some kind of geomancy to make travel faster as well. It seems like the kind of thing that first age solars and the shogunate might design.
edit: I don't feel trains really fit it's aesthetic. They seem like they'd be more a scavenger land thing, or built by the emerging technological powers of the North and South.
- Location
- Library
Well, for one, the Immaculate Order keeps the gods in check, preventing spring flooding, droughts and (possibly) excessive ice accumulation - so the canals and rivers are operational all year long. This alone would put Blessed Isle far beyond rest of Creation in term of travel times and trade volume.
- Location
- Singapore
Ah, I just found the artifact that absorbs ambient essence.
Artifact 5.
though I wonder how many dots an artifact has for being able to absorb its own essence....
though I disagree with the necrotic essence. Its actually canon that you can store essence motes.
I was actually thinking of the same thing. If anybody has read Codex Alera by Jim Butcher, he plays with the same idea. Everybody in Codex Alera is a furycrafter of SOME strength after all and the roads of Alera have the furies setted in such a way that on the roads you can march a LOT quicker than anywhere else. Tavi, the main character of the book who didn't have his Furycraft at the time had to hitch a ride on a wagon because he couldn't keep up with the pace a Aleran Legion was putting forth.
- Location
- Singapore
On that note, I once saw a headcanon on Onyxpath forum, that with a combination of sorcerous pacts, workings, enchanted roads, and deals with spirits and elementals, the lunars and solars had altered several roads throughout creation that enabled a person to go from one end to another in a few days. Whether by altering road conditions so that the wind is always at your back or you are always going downslope, or by simply shortening the distance travelled.
- Location
- my house
A question for the thread: What are the limits of Crowned With Fury? Could an Infernal give long term orders such as "A year from now stab yourself"? Can it give complicated ones with many sub orders like "When the clock strikes 12, head to burrows street, while there you will meet a man with a white cloak, if he is bald kill him. If he has a top knot, follow him for 10 minutes...."? What about weird orders like "Feel happy", "Forget this ever happened", or other things of that nature?
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To be honest I think it'd be helpful to have some level of faster travel options in exalted just because of how big creation is. Like, unless you only want to use one piece of setting material at a time and have no interaction with one another at all. They're thousands of miles apart straight line distance.
I'm just not following this argument at all. Sorcery-wise, 2e did basically nothing to encourage the kind of "critical thinking and cause-effect logic" you describe. 3e does... well, I'm not immediately sure what you mean, there, so I'm not sure what it does in that regard, but it's hard to see how it could do any less.
Unless "do literally nothing to encourage this kind of thing" is what you mean, in which case... how did 2e fail to deliver on it?
I'm scratching my head here a little bit. I still don't understand what it is, concretely, that 2e did (or failed to do?); what you wanted it to do; and how 3e is any worse in this regard.
azoicennead
Overly-Affectionate Zombie Squad
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Yes to all of those. Keep in mind, though, that Crowned With Fury enhances a social attack, doesn't guarantee it hits, and can be resisted if it does hit, so just because you give the order doesn't mean they'll follow it.
- Location
- Wörms, the half continent
It is noted that necrotic essence is corrupting, foul, different stuff from Creation. Even the Yozis, poisoned by their own spite and hating of the gods as they are, can use creations essence.
The dead have no such luck. There is a reason that abyssals cannot respire essence of creation, and solars cannot respire in the Underworld. The Yozi's may be beings of infinite spite but the hatred of the dead primordials eclipses even that, and taints all it can reach.
Giygas
Cutest Sawk i could find. Lucario is a nice extra.
If you are using canonical Heartstones, then you can create something that works by using an heartstone, but instead put the artifact that acts as an Heartstone. (It exists, and it does have a time limit that force a swapping or a recharging, and it has a name. I Merely forgot everything else about it.)
If you are using Earthscorpion Heartstones... you would have to craft a very good artifact, and it would be worse in everything but energy consumption than anything equivalent. It would be probably better to use a normalish engine, or an essence token from a Desmene. (BUt i am not actually Earthscorpion, so you should ask to him for a better guess.)
Crowned With Fury does not "give orders". It makes social attacks that are orders into UMI, accompanied with an Obvious flare.
It does not enhance your capability to make your social attacks do anything that normal UMI cannot. Thsu, no, you cannot give orders like "kill yourself" to a character who is not already suicidal. You can give complicated ones, and as long as they don't reject the mental influence they will do it to the best of their capabilities. Most people cannot just "feel happy" or "forget this ever happened", but a person subjected to such a social attack will try to act like they're feeling happy or that they don't remember what you don't want them to talk about.
Well, given the fluff on the Denzik and from Masters of Jade, trading throughout multiple Directions is a year-long venture on average, which is sensible because people don't have things to trade every day of the year. And trade is seems to be the only legitimate reason why most people would travel so far out of their home Direction. Even in real life, with cars and highways and trains and airplanes, I don't think most people up and travel to distant parts of the world, or even their own countries in larger nations, a great deal. In my experience, you'd have to be wealthy, have saved up for a special occasion, or have a good reason to be traveling so far in order to often travel long distances.
There just doesn't seem to be a reason for there to be a common source of rapid, inter-Directional transportation for individuals and small groups when the only people likely to be moving those kinds of distances and need to go quickly are probably going to be doing so for reasons that involve moving goods and people in bulk.
For outliers, well, they can just use uncommon means of transportation, like First Age artifacts, the gates of Yu-Shan, or Sorcery to get themselves around. Means of fast travel do exist in Exalted, but they would be things that are exceptions to the general rule, just like PCs are.
What Is Stormwind Rider? (100mph, lets you travel in a straight line between places)
What Are Agatae? (30mph, also lets you travel in a straight line between places)
And those are just two travel options in sorcery. There are a good number of fast travel options for PC parties. The setting, however, does not permit it for larger groups.
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What is unavaliable to mortals?
Like, yeah, a group of PCs can move around pretty freely, but that doesn't allow for much in the way of interaction between places.
As it's written, basically every place in exalted should be its own separate setting which interacts only vaguely with one another. Some of this should be fixed by monkeying with the distances, but some options that allow goods and mortals to move at speeds a bit faster than a horse (especially given horses are pretty expensive in creation) would I think be pretty useful.
No, what you do is what you're meant to do and populate the areas around the pre-written map areas properly. Gem isn't meant to be in contact with Lookshy; Greyfalls only knows about the Coral Archipelago from maps. The Scavenger Lands is busy being Europe-sized in its own right. Nexus, Great Forks and Lookshy are on the scale of national capitals away from each other and have nations between them. Going from Lookshy to Nexus is like going from Paris to Rome - it's a major undertaking (though eased considerably by having direct naval contact).
It's why the things that force the Bull of the North all over the North and East are so annoying. He is a regional threat - if you're not too near him, you can ignore him until you've scaled up where he's a peer rival.
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Nah. It's more of a case that white wolf/Onyx path haven't quite got how big their map is. Like, there's plenty of places in exalted which cannon interact with their neighbors despite distances of hundreds or thousands of miles between them, because places that the developers have written about interacting is staggeringly more interesting than treating every place marked on the map as effectively its own separate setting. Long distances are great in the abstract, and long journeys can make the setting a bit more epic, but you need something, be it fast travel or preservation of goods to make things like international trade and international affairs practical.
Of course you can fill in the blanks with your own stuff, and it's good to have the ability to do that, but it's pretty silly when you've basically made every part of the written setting a separate thing with zero interaction with any other part of it save the Realm and the Guild. That's boring.
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Carrnage
Human
- Location
- New Zealand
What do you think my point was?
- Location
- Virginia
I think the real issue is that pretty much all of the places Exalted depicts in detail are really far apart. Even if we accept the stuff like "Paragon has a trade war with Gem" as bad writing and ignore it (as I'm inclined to) this puts a lot of burden on players and storytellers to invent a ton of setting material, which not all of them want to do or are good at doing. Even worse, they're not given any examples of how to do so.
What the line should do is have a few focused writeups of smaller regions that fill in most or all of the blanks in those maps. Chapter-length writeups of region roughly the size of Taira + close neighbors. This would give a much more complete setting for STs who don't want to invent a lot of their own stuff, and an example to work off of for the ones that do.
What the line should do is have a few focused writeups of smaller regions that fill in most or all of the blanks in those maps. Chapter-length writeups of region roughly the size of Taira + close neighbors. This would give a much more complete setting for STs who don't want to invent a lot of their own stuff, and an example to work off of for the ones that do.