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General Exalted Thread

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Bugs said:
There are negative consequences to everything, as well as positive consequences. Anything you do that causes ripples, good deed or not, is more than likely going to rock somebody's boat. Complaining that you've caught the attention of somebody you'd have rather not due to your actions is childish, because stuff like this is just a fact of life.
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Assumes the caster is alive.

Also if you've got the mojo to break it in one shot you've probably got Adamant Circle Sorcery in which case the implied-lunar caster loses a strategic sorcery off. She can't cast prolonged effects you can't dispel, the converse is not true, and ACS is a hell of a lot better than CCS at blowing stuff up. Starting with how Demon of the Third Circle is a single cast for a whole lot of city-killer strikes, while she has very limited boom on that scale period.
 
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Ct613hulu said:
Is saving a few thousand people and their descendants of a bloodline curse worth potentially making a personal enemy of someone powerful enough to cast such long-lasting and widespread curse?
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The witch queen is already dead.
Ct613hulu said:
The question of whether an Exalt should save the Rouheni allows the storyteller to present the moral question of whether helping people with no connection to you is worth making powerful enemies.
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The earlier conversation assumed the Exalt was Rouheni. Its not 'no connection', its 'your family and people'.
 
Omicron said:
ah yes, "releasing people from an ancient curse that has plagued their existence for centuries," a well-known ambivalent moral action that needs to be carefully handled with shades of gray
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Have a funny rating, but I included "perhaps" for a reason. Handling transition to curse-less society could be basis of an story arc, but it don't need to be.
 
Ct613hulu said:
Is saving a few thousand people and their descendants of a bloodline curse worth potentially making a personal enemy of someone powerful enough to cast such long-lasting and widespread curse?
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If they're the kind of person who uses their power to cast that kind of bloodline curse, then if they're near enough to you to potentially mess with you, they're probably going to mess with you anyway. Getting your kicks in first is just pre-emptive self defence.
 
Carrnage said:
Since we're talking superstitious peasants that don't have a robust legal system this means make them a perpetual underclass blamed for any random misfortune and likely purged every time something really goes wrong.
The difference between that and genocide is the difference between slavery and murder.
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It doesn't have to be that bad. Building a robust legal system is difficult, but not any more so than genocide.

But yeah, like I said, it's hardly a morally pure solution. Still puts the burden of the curse on its carriers, which isn't fair at all. Thing is, short of curing the curse that seems hard to avoid; they're probably going to be a perpetual underclass no matter what. Racial minorities have a hard time even without bloodline curses.

Parabola said:
100% behind this. Curses being held as a legal precedent for forcing someone to take responsibility for the damage their curse does is such a better plot development than literal genocide, honestly. Imagine: instead of trying to negotiate peace or something, an Eclipse has to navigate a labyrinth of red tape to defend a tribe of Rouheni.

Incidentally, do you think there's a culture of curses in the wider world? Like beyond superstitions, do you think some people try to rules-lawyer curses and find practical uses for them? Do you think the Rouheni occasionally get offered exorbitant amounts of money to stay in an enemy kingdom's location, offers which they then refuse because that's basically entirely against their moral codes?

Do you think there are curses that can be passed over to other people, or traded (something like this)? Do you think it'd be a viable concept for Creation in general? Like, probably less simple, requiring a sorcerer of at least Terrestrial level to trade them, but still something that the average person with money considers to get rid of inconvenient things on a personal basis?
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Maybe. It's a cool idea, but I think it runs into the problem that most of Creation is basically mundane (at least on the surface). Most curses in Creation are probably no more meaningful than curses in real life.
 
So we are just uncritically accepting the premise of an explicit Romani/Wandering-Jew stereotype where literally all the hateful blood libel classically held against those groups is instead taken to be provably, unarguably accurate portrayals and avidly debating the storytelling merit?

Is that the thing we are doing now?
 
Dif said:
So we are just uncritically accepting the premise of an explicit Romani/Wandering-Jew stereotype where literally all the hateful blood libel classically held against those groups is instead taken to be provably, unarguably accurate portrayals and avidly debating the storytelling merit?

Is that the thing we are doing now?
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I thought of it as more "here's how we made the Romani out of a settled people" and also a bunch of story hooks.
 
Dif said:
So we are just uncritically accepting the premise of an explicit Romani/Wandering-Jew stereotype where literally all the hateful blood libel classically held against those groups is instead taken to be provably, unarguably accurate portrayals and avidly debating the storytelling merit?

Is that the thing we are doing now?
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Is the "blights crops and farm animals" thing really a myth about the Roma?

Maybe it's just because I'm not European, but I've never heard that one.

Anyway, if it is, I'd agree that this is in poor taste.
 
Sanctaphrax said:
Is the "blights crops and farm animals" thing really a myth about the Roma?

Maybe it's just because I'm not European, but I've never heard that one.

Anyway, if it is, I'd agree that this is in poor taste.
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I don't know if it's specifically that, but I do know that idea that Jews/Roma bring or actively cause misfortune is a recurring theme. They were blamed for the black death in some areas, for example.
 
Dif said:
So we are just uncritically accepting the premise of an explicit Romani/Wandering-Jew stereotype where literally all the hateful blood libel classically held against those groups is instead taken to be provably, unarguably accurate portrayals and avidly debating the storytelling merit?

Is that the thing we are doing now?
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People hit with curses to force them to never settle is a pretty classic fantasy archetype.

Also "one aspect as the result of enemy action" and "literally all" are ... not quite antonyms but certainly not even close to the same.
 
Sanctaphrax said:
Is the "blights crops and farm animals" thing really a myth about the Roma?

Maybe it's just because I'm not European, but I've never heard that one.

Anyway, if it is, I'd agree that this is in poor taste.
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It isn't. It's a reference to witches, who were believed to blight crops and farm animals, which is why they also have a mark (which is a literal witch's mark dohohoho), in which they feel no pain. Furthermore, they are a stealth reference to Japanese miko, which conceals itself as a Romani/European folkloric witch reference, which @EarthScorpion could probably inform you of better than I can, given he wrote them.
 
Sanctaphrax said:
Anyway, if it is, I'd agree that this is in poor taste.
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This isn't really something I want to get into a debate about, but like "Romani/Rouheni" its close enough to draw uncomfortable parallels. Traveling folk have been persecuted for hundreds of years under the impression of bringing in foreign diseases, general misfortune, lawless vagrancy/thievery, satanic-witchery and fortune-telling/curses, practices dealing with malign powers against the dominant Church, and instilling moral degeneracy in the populace. Up to and including, a legend about a ruler casting them out for having brought their exile upon themselves.

All I am saying is, if you really, truly feel that your setting of choice absolutely needs a bigoted archetype based-out of longstanding prejudices still currently being held against a living people, and your very first instinct in this situation is justifying their own oppression by "magic" recapitulating the very things associated with those prejudices as incontrovertible facts of that people you are making direct inference towards, even if these do not align on a 1:1 scale... maybe you should not do that.
 
Got roped into a game of Infernals, can anyone point me to some interesting Oramus or SWLIHN First Circle Demons other than the Luminata? While it somewhat fits with my plans to go for a bounty hunter kind of deal I would like at least some other options besides spiders.
 
pheonix89 said:
People hit with curses to force them to never settle is a pretty classic fantasy archetype.
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It is, but if nothing else Exalted is built atop looking at classic fantasy archetypes as asking "what is this Really, and through analyzing what this Really Is, what is this Saying about the subject it handles" rather than simply repeating the trope as-given with no other thought put forwards save how to fit it into the setting by changing a few names and terminology. If that was the case, the setting would simply be another bland kitchen-sink fantasy dump where the broadest extent of creativity lies in deep-diving the books for just the right combination of justification and lore to explain away how you parked a Macross Valkyrie on the front lawn of the Imperial palace.

A good deal of this comes down to framing, because in this context we have a figmental thing invented to arbitrarily create a minority group out of nothing. A "curse" in this circumstance which is simply a magically-imposed Social Issue upheld exclusively for justifying the continued mistreatment of those people, generation upon generation due to poor circumstances of birth. Therefore any writeup which wishes to make a respectable plot from the existence of that thing shouldn't be focusing on all the ways the victims have been culturally-debased by their own people into wandering thieves, mystics and whores. That's the line of thought which brings us to where we are now, comes back to assigning blame for their condition back onto themselves for Being that marginalized group in the first place, "regional powers forcing people to account for the harm caused by their bloodline," or grants them a villainous backstory by attributing Harmful Outsider tropes to them which gets people asking "do they really deserve to live, as such a risk to normal folks?" type questions in the first place.

Like anyother Social Issue, the question is never so much "how these people are a public nuisance" but punching upwards at the Cause for that root unfairness and the monstrosity of that Social Issue which marginalizes people in this way, and illustrating the parts holding it together and how to effectively combat both it and those responsible for levying it.
 
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So, random question.

Was discussing this with some people in Discord earlier...but why the hell is Thousand Courtesan Ways so powerful as an Essence 1 charm? It gives you +1 Appearance, allows you to sidestep intimacies in social combat (which is huge) and lets you effectively flurry social actions for free, with appropriate stunts.

This should be two or three charms, not one. Or at the very least have a higher Essence prerequisite, Christ.
 
Because it's not desirable to have a big tree of sexytimes charms, so all the various ideas they have for them have to be squished into just a few.
 
A bunch of random stuff:

Do they purposely make it so that it takes long amounts of roleplaying time to create any artifacts of power, unless you got the really high level charms?

Also, how would a humanity with excellencies be like?

How would one start a shard based on transhumanism?
 
Accelerator said:
Do they purposely make it so that it takes long amounts of roleplaying time to create any artifacts of power, unless you got the really high level charms?
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Yes.

Accelerator said:
Also, how would a humanity with excellencies be like?
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Preposterously competent. Everything would be way easier for everyone.

World would be pretty utopian, I think. Most of our problems come from the world being a tough place, and those would suddenly become very solvable. Even stuff like basic social friction is much easier to handle when everyone's got magically augmented social skills.

That being said, excellencies don't make people better morally. Much as I'd like to think that we'd use their supernatural bounty to make a beautiful world, it's possible that solving our natural problems would just give us more free time to make unnatural problems for each other.

Accelerator said:
How would one start a shard based on transhumanism?
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You know how in Heaven's Reach, Exaltation is an invention?

Like that, but the story is set around the time it's going into production. Mass production. Magical abilities can be manufactured, and the price is dropping.

Full-scale Exaltation is still rare; most augmented people aren't that powerful. But there could be billions of Solars in a few centuries. And there's some talk about a process which people can become sapient planets, or even universes.

The sky isn't the limit; there appears to be no limit. And all this godlike power is showing up in a world much like our own. It's exciting, but also terrifying. Everyone knows that for better or for worse, the world as we know it is finished.
 
Accelerator said:
Also, how would a humanity with excellencies be like?
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If you mean humanity as a whole, probably like Sanctaphrax just said - things would be easier for everyone. There'd still be moral issues and infighting, but I imagine a lot of practical problems we have nowadays would just be smoothed over.

If you mean in the sense of what kind of excellencies they'd get, I'd assume Terrestrial-ish in nature - [Ability], because the human basis of doing things is skill above all else. Maybe go with something different to not let them steal the DB's thunder, poor guys don't need people stealing their shtick.
 
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