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General Exalted Thread

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Accelerator said:
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?
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Off the top of my head, you could have it be that the train itself doesn't absorb ambient Essence, but instead the tracks are lined with spaced-out "lightning rods" that do that instead, and then you have this very Autochthonian-looking process where these terminals discharge crackling bolts of energy into the train as it passes them, and you can have situations where the people controlling the train try to keep the local geomancy "clean" (Yozic - or necrotic, or even Lunar - Essence probably doesn't do good things if it gets inside the train's machinery) and have to deal with poachers that try to siphon off the terminals' Essence reservoirs for their own purposes.

Mind you, that's probably something you'd see more in a Shogunate-era campaign, barring one surviving line out in the Scavenger Lands or something that's obsessively protected and supported by the god of that form of train, desperate to keep his portfolio from vanishing entirely and always pushing to increase its importance within the region so Heaven doesn't put him out of a job.

As for the larger hearthstone thing... I don't really know? I just don't have much affection for the Everything Needs Hearthstones idea, personally; I'd rather see manses and demesnes matter because of what they do and how they can be turned to a character's purposes, not because they produce magic batteries.
 
Kuciwalker said:
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.
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I second this. At the very least, there should be areas that are plot hooks in geographical form, like Taira: coherent enough that they storytellers has something to work with, while being loose enough that the PCs would be able to insert themselves into the local power structure without potentially provoking severe backlash from an entrenched faction just for making waves in the area.

I want there to be places where I don't have to make up everything myself, but I'm still not forced to have my storyline be "an adventure in X nation, with all its baggage."

If nothing else, give me some indication of where a nation's sphere of influence begins and ends.
 
Accelerator said:
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?
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Giygas said:
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.)
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The train's tracks could easily be a separate Artifact that powers the train, that gathers essence via either geomantically precise patterns(limiting the locations it could be set in) or by being directly hooked into a Manse(altering the local geomancy and and limiting your end and/or beginning points).
Although that opens up the option of the tracks being damaged or sabotaged to prevent the train from moving at all...you would probably have to give it motes directly to power it long enough to get to the point where the track was messed up.
 
It's notable that 1e had a section/book detailing other means of gathering Essence that were more like wind or hydro power, instead of consolidating everything into Hearthstones.

Basically the advantage of Hearthstones is that they work pretty much anywhere across any distance, whereas other forms of essence accumulators were more direct-feed.
 
Shyft said:
It's notable that 1e had a section/book detailing other means of gathering Essence that were more like wind or hydro power, instead of consolidating everything into Hearthstones.
Basically the advantage of Hearthstones is that they work pretty much anywhere across any distance, whereas other forms of essence accumulators were more direct-feed.
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There are also those Infernal Artifacts that gather essence from various phenomena.
 
Kuciwalker said:
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.
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This is what the direction books are supposed to be. Of course, it doesn't really work, given the distances involved, but that is mostly the fault of the map scale.

(There is also the problem that a lot of the writeups are meh, of course).
 
Kuciwalker said:
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.
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Why do you think I moved Kerisgame down to the South West, when it originally started in the Scavenger Lands?

Because Blood & Salt and its An Teng write-up is nearly exactly what you describe. It's a little smaller scale, but it works great. And from An Teng, I used that as the jumping off place to set up the Anarchy of the South West, which is basically a Europe-sized area near An Teng where society is balkanised feudalism where you have pirates replacing knights.

Hmm. I really need to sit down and do a write-up for Nightsea Isle. It's an Ireland sized shadowland island with a famous necromantic academy on it, but we know almost nothing about the island despite its size.

Time to read some South East Asian ghost stories, then! And work out the feel I want for a shadowland that size.
 
EarthScorpion said:
Because Blood & Salt and its An Teng write-up is nearly exactly what you describe. It's a little smaller scale, but it works great. And from An Teng, I used that as the jumping off place to set up the Anarchy of the South West, which is basically a Europe-sized area near An Teng where society is balkanised feudalism where you have pirates replacing knights.
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You wouldn't happen to have a compilation of your South West stuff, would you? It would be nice to have something interesting in the South West besides the Lintha.
 
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EarthScorpion Setting Homebrew: Plunderer Princes
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    • Graveless said:
    My normal answer to the Artifacts/First Age Wonders question is to drop the idea that all magical that a PC could acquire/build can be found on a 5+1 point scale. They figured this out in nWod, even if it wasn't well implemented at times, and Artifact is certainly the background most in need of an expanded scale. Thanks to how it works right now you have, within the same tier, different objects which are all very different in scale: a Heavy Battlecruiser, Teleportation Network, Thousand Forged Dragon, Flying Battle City, and the Realm Defense Grid.
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    I'd argue that looking at oMage's scale of Wonders is probably better than even looking at nWoD.

    In oMage, for example, a small flying corvette is worth like, 30 background dots compared to even a powerful personal-scale Device which might end up rated 8 dots at most. And you have the Qui La Machinae, which is 50 background dots of 'fuck you pls die.'

    It works better than a system where a suit of better-than-normal body armor and a flying battleship are all on a 1-5 scale.
     
    MJ12 Commando said:
    I'd argue that looking at oMage's scale of Wonders is probably better than even looking at nWoD.
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    Will check OMage, but it is probably easier to make bigger artifacts mechanically something like multiple artifacts fused in a single one, with caveat that you have fused them together and they won't work separated.

    And, hey, i was just checking again after a long time Savant and Sorcerer and i found something interesting: Heartstones have a very clear mechanical hook in artifact creation! (I cannot tell if it has been followed in the write-up for the artifacts themselves, because it was the first page i found when opening the PDF. Lucky, isn't it?)

    Essentially, every scale of artifacts has different startup costs per dot(The attunement costs remain the same for the same dot rating across categories of artifacts): Personal scale artifacts(think a Dayclave) the least, larger artifacts(Think vehicles and stuff in that ballpark) a fair bit more, massive artifacts(Edifice sized at least) even more, and, to add insult to injury, there is also a Drawback that increases the amount of essence required. (It isn't clear if it is to Attune, to Activate, or both) Essentially Heartstones and company decrease the amount of dots of Drawback or, if the Drawback ran out of dots or there wasn't a drawback in the first place, the effective dot rating to attune and to activate the artifact.

    I cannot say it is particurarly exciting, but it makes more sense of the random heartstone splattering of 2E.
     
    horngeek said:
    Hell, for those of you who want your cat girl characters, you can just say they're from a beastman tribe with less extensive mutations than normal, rather than Lunar Tells (as fun as Keychain of Creation was, I feel it has a fair bit to answer for).
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    FWIW, Lunar Quest had the player searching for a beastfolk to put a ghost to rest. I don't believe we ever got a good look at her, though.

    horngeek said:
    On the ratmen thing, it does bug me a bit that people always seem to forget that Crafted Races and Beastmen are perfectly valid Exaltation candidates.

    But I rarely see people going for that sort of option.
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    I've technically done this every time I've played for the last 10 years.

    Meaning... once, plus two games that fell apart because 3E sucks. (I don't get invited to many games. Maybe because I complain about how every edition sucks :V)

    I'mma take the excuse to post character sketches!



    (Valo Amarach: Eclipse-caste singer, troublemaker, and mighty pirate)


    (Relentless: Dawn-caste enforcer for the Jian Road Society)

    EarthScorpion said:
    Yes... except you then run into the problem that I also run off the principle that for an long-term viable breed, your positive mutations will be counterbalanced by negative ones.
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    Didn't the Shogunate genocide the fuck out of them?

    That's an adequate explanation for most people being normal humans, without needing to write in new disadvantages.

    (Also, perhaps beastfolk templates tend to manifest in an all-or-nothing manner, with catgirl halfsies being the exception to the rule.)
     
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    Ralson said:
    Didn't the Shogunate genocide the fuck out of them?

    That's an adequate explanation for most people being normal humans, without needing to write in new disadvantages.

    (Also, perhaps beastfolk templates tend to manifest in an all-or-nothing manner, with catgirl halfsies being the exception to the rule.)
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    No, the Shogunate primarily targeted the Solar Created Races. And the Shogunate pre-dates the Balorian crusade, which produced mutant races everywhere - and beastmen are a wyld thing as much as a Lunar thing, and should be even more of a wyld thing to reduce the amount of animal fucking [1]. It is not an adequate explanation.

    And why should beastmen get a free lunch? You can't just give them all the advantages of a human and then stack animal advantages on top when some of those things have their own flaws. Your tigerman has sharp teeth and claws, but is an obligate carnivore who needs a lot more sleep than a human. A wolfman with a thick coat of winter fur takes penalties in hot climates. An elephantman has great hearing, but poor eyesight and no colour vision. A snakeman has venomous fangs, but is an endotherm who needs to warm up in the sun.

    By saying "stable breeds that do not need outside intervention to maintain have mutation costs that sum to zero", you stop the production of supermen and you also give people who are trying to breed supermen things they have to do and stop them from just fire-and-forgetting their project.

    [1] And if the animal fucking is retained, post-Shogunate there's no longer the Shogunate to fight the Lunars in the same way - and a massively depopulated Creation.
     
    So, pet peeve that I've had but never realized it until five minutes ago: how little weather seems to matter in Exalted, and how little impact it has on culture. If mentioned at all, an area's climate is mentioned so briefly and with such little emphasis that you could not be blamed for believing that every single part of Creation experiences the exact same whether, except its hotter or colder depending on where you are on the North-South axis.

    Sure, it makes sense in Creation because everything is managed by the bureaucracy, but I feel that writing the weather being controlled to this degree robs the setting of something important and valuable. Weather mattered to ancient societies, still does today even if not in the same way. Weather shaped the attitudes and beliefs of societies; Egypt saw the sun rise every day and received a regular flooding of the Nile that allowed their civilization to flourish thanks to the fertility the flood brought, and so partially as a result developed a belief that most of their gods were benevolent and that there was a cosmic order to the universe that humans could live their lives by. In contrast, the various civilizations of Mesopotamia got blasted by storms all the time and had annual flooding that was out of sync with prime planting season, and so partially as a result developed the belief that their gods were a pack of petty irresponsible douchebags and had every hero figure they had claim victory over primeval monsters because they had the power of the winds on their side.

    After looking at Blood & Salt as the An Teng section of Plunderer Princes told me to, I had many reasons to hold more antipathy towards An Teng than ever, but the idea of monsoons being relegated to a single paragraph was one of the bigger ones, and was what triggered this whole realization.
     
    EarthScorpion said:
    And why should beastmen get a free lunch? You can't just give them all the advantages of a human and then stack animal advantages on top when some of those things have their own flaws. Your tigerman has sharp teeth and claws, but is an obligate carnivore who needs a lot more sleep than a human. A wolfman with a thick coat of winter fur takes penalties in hot climates. An elephantman has great hearing, but poor eyesight and no colour vision. A snakeman has venomous fangs, but is an endotherm who needs to warm up in the sun.

    By saying "stable breeds that do not need outside intervention to maintain have mutation costs that sum to zero", you stop the production of supermen and you also give people who are trying to breed supermen things they have to do and stop them from just fire-and-forgetting their project.

    [1] And if the animal fucking is retained, post-Shogunate there's no longer the Shogunate to fight the Lunars in the same way - and a massively depopulated Creation.
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    While I think it's sorta interesting to have beast people have some kind of flavorful stuff like being carnivores or whatever, I don't particularly see why they need to have flaws that make them equivalent in power to humans. One of the big things of exalted is that humans are, as a species, kind of bottom of the heap. Remember, we're the group so pathetic that the Primordials literally couldn't be bothered to bind the gods not to use us to kill them. I don't see any disadvantage to having beastmen who are superior to humans, especially under the care of a lunar breeding program.

    And on the other hand, I do see a major advantage in that it means there's more potential elite mooks and somewhat tougher mortal opponents for say, my dragon blooded to fight.
     
    EarthScorpion said:
    And why should beastmen get a free lunch?
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    If by a free lunch, you mean: They have the abilities that they're described as having, with only the disadvantages they're described as having, without houseruling additional disadvantages that they're never described as having?

    Iunno... just cause? It seems like a dick move to punish a player for buying fur and claws when they could have easily bought a Daiklave instead.


    If people want everyone's lot in life to be balanced, and hate the idea of power granted unfairly or transferred through blood, why the fuck are they playing Exalted, anyway? :V

    ("Okay, Sam, I've decided your Fire Caste needs to eat 12,000 calories a day to fuel their fire aura. More realistic that way, and more fair to mortals.")
     
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    Stable free-breeding beastmen being the nominal equals of humans (i.e. mutations netting zero points) while being the situational superiors or inferiors (that tigerman will really ruin a normal human's day in a scrap, but will have real trouble keeping up with a normal human in a long-distance pursuit situation) seems a more interesting position than beastmen being "humans plus".
     
    More to the point, nobody says you can't have beastmen or play beastmen without mechanizing beastmen.

    At the end of the day, they're still human.
     
    There's also the issue of certain Created Races needing to buy up a rather hefty amount of mutation points just to exist under @Revlid's system (looking at you, People of the Air), which under the Zero-Sum paradigm would mean making them pretty thoroughly jacked up to the point where they'd probably end up either wiped out or enslaved by some other, less dysfunctional faction. I mean, that may or may not be working as @EarthScorpion intended, but it's still a definite shift in how things work.

    I guess one idea for blending in a bit of the H+ is that beastmen & other "stable" abhuman races are more likely to have exceptional members - the average tigerman has a total mutation score of +0, but it's not uncommon to see ones who go over by a few points, and every now and then you get uberkatzen that are just plain better than normal humans in many respects*. Abhumans can potentially be born with, or perhaps even gain, certain positive mutations without having to cut deals with spirits or expose themselves to the Wyld, which gives them a slight edge on a societal scale.

    Also, it means you can further encourage superstition and racist supposition, because then "everybody" (read as: "a given group of yokels in one corner of Creation") knows that the turtle-folk are all shamans who talk with spirits, just because some of them manage to score appropriate mutations through genetic luck of the draw and those ones get talked about, or people who don't trust the Walking Pines because you never which ones are packing hypnotic spores in their branch-limbs.


    * Despite one or two unique negative mutations to provide a bit of an Achilles' heel and get a bit more of that classical hero archetype going),
     
    grommile said:
    Stable free-breeding beastmen being the nominal equals of humans (i.e. mutations netting zero points) while being the situational superiors or inferiors (that tigerman will really ruin a normal human's day in a scrap, but will have real trouble keeping up with a normal human in a long-distance pursuit situation) seems a more interesting position than beastmen being "humans plus".
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    Is it really though? Like, why shouldn't they be superhuman?
     
    ichypa said:
    Because they aren't superhuman? They're humans, with some extra features. Those extra features give them capabilities that baseline humans don't have naturally, but it doesn't make them superhuman.
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    Rook said:
    I dunno, why not articulate why you think they should be :p
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    Well, superior to human then.

    Like, they suffer a whole bunch of social problems, like being regarded as crazy barbarians and stuff.

    This seems one of the few cases where the rules and fluff align. They pay points that they could use for more money and connections and stuff in order to be a beastman.
     
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