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General Exalted Thread

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If he were using a pink salmon red warstrider, would Sha do everything three times faster? :V

EarthScorpion said:
Sha can escape from Hell whenever a warrior races to prevent some great calamity, such as the breaking of a dam, that will occur in five days or fewer.
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In other words, assuming he's still bound by Cecylene the same as everything else entering or exiting Malfeas, Sha inevitably arrives just a bit after the calamity occurs.
 
Accelerator said:
As for the women, in the medieval ages, they were.... rather..... low on the ladder. You see, since the church was rather powerful in the medieval ages, and since the story of genesis had Eden, the women were viewed as somehow.... a symbol of temptation and vice. Or something like that.

Women usually worked at home, and did stuff for the husband. Also, when they got married, in stuff like nobles houses and arranged marriages, they didn't simply have sex. They waited until she was of age, like 18 or so, until they started... consummating the marriage.

This, of course, changed during the black death. During the black death, the population dropped. Of course, this meant that manpower was low, and women started to run their own businesses. One women even started a brewery, and sold the best beer in the town. The brewery got problems later and shut down, but it still shows that women had power. Sadly, after the population recovered from the plague, women's rights decreased again.
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This is... Significantly less true than we tend to think. Smithing, for example, was a fairly woman-heavy line of work, although yes, the Black Death was a major game-changer. It really depends what era you're talking about - the 'Middle Ages' covers a long and diverse period even before you have to account for the whole, "we're talking about all of Europe here," aspect. While it's true that the use of peasant levies declined greatly, this is really only true of the 11th century and later; prior to this, peasant conscripts saw widespread use despite their poor quality and the need to tend the crops.

@Gamerlord you'd be better off asking this in our History & Military subforum or the AskHistorians reddit, there's some actual experts over there. As in, people who are published.
 
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Accelerator said:
So.... he can reduce aging, but they still die as if they had continued aging without a violent death?
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I mean, that's not the worst bargain - you could use Sha's services to escape the discomforts and loss of faculties that normally pile up near the end of one's lifespan, so you'd live better, just not longer. Also, I'd assume that as long as you avoided death by violence or illness & kept pawning your years off on him to stay 30-40ish, then you could make it for a good 80-100 years without needing further assistance, because you're not getting physically old and frail enough to get done in by a cold or a buildup of fluid in your heart.

No, what gets you in the end is that your hun-po structure decouples, and the two halves either rise as ghosts or pass into Lethe. Now, there are ways to get out of that, but they involve either First Age technology (which means First Age infrastructure, so good luck with that in the standard setting) or transforming your soul structure into something sturdier - those with the right ancestry can eventually cast off their mortal form to become a god or a demon or a raksha or whatever, and just about anyone can aim for transformation into an akuma*, try to get the Immortality mutation** by some means, or get made into a behemoth by an elemental lord, Celestial god, or other spiritual high-roller.

The giant glowing asterisk that accompanies all of these options is that you sacrifice any hope of becoming an Exalt by doing so; that's not a huge sacrifice, given the obscene paucity of Celestial Exaltations compared to the teeming masses of humanity, but it does have implications when applied on a massive scale. Also, anything other than the Immortality mutation means that you've almost certainly left conventional human psychology behind in the course of your apotheosis - even the nicer lords of Hell don't really think in ways that mortals do, so taking on a portion of their nature will color your view of the world accordingly, and the process of culturing your Essence in order to become a god/demon/raksha/elemental/etc. already involves adopting patterns of thinking and priorities that don't match up with the average person's***.


* For reference, I'm using @EarthScorpion's version of akuma, where it's just a term for mortals (and Exalts) who are made into behemoths by the Yozis and/or one of their subordinate souls - so that's actually not the worst option in the world, if you can find a patron whose beliefs line up with your own.

** Under @Revlid's system, the Longevity mutation increases your lifespan by 25% per dot you purchase, to a maximum of 5 dots to boost your lifespan by +125%. Buying full ranks in Longevity lets you meet the prerequisite to get another mutation called Immortality, which costs 5 dots and halts natural aging entirely. Mechanically, you can get 3 dots' worth of mutations for 2 BP at chargen, and each dot worth of mutations you buy after that costs 2 XP. Thus, biological immortality clocks in at either 8 bonus points or 20 experience points - a bit hefty, to be sure, but not entirely out of reach for a sufficiently-motivated human.

*** To be clear, this doesn't necessarily mean you turn into Cthulhu or succumb to the Dark Side, but it does mean that you're not quite a normal person anymore. The tricky thing is working out how much of that is actual, external alteration of the mind and how much is a product of the path the person walks to achieve their transformation, or a matter of them choosing to further amplify traits they already had as part of becoming more than human.

The child of a blood ape already tends to solve his problems with violence, and as he progresses along the path to demonhood, that tendency becomes more pronounced, because blood apes are violent, and if he wanted to be a pacifist he'd probably have been better off distancing himself from his demonic ancestry rather than amplifying it.

A faeblooded mortal's powers already work best when playing a role, so he gets better at playing a role and building up his own hype to get better at accessing those powers, until his 'real' self withers away in favor of the roles he's devised for himself. Eventually, the roles are all that matter for determining how he acts and what he does, his souls unravel into a roiling core of Wyld-stuff, and he is human no longer.

A person who swears themselves to Zamesh and his eternal crusade becomes resentful of authority, advocating that all good men rise up in revolution against their masters - but why in Creation would you become one of the Crimson Firebrand's akuma (and how would you convince him to do so) if you weren't already somewhat anti-establishment and prone to inflammatory speech and action?
 
Imrix said:
This is... Significantly less true than we tend to think. Smithing, for example, was a fairly woman-heavy line of work, although yes, the Black Death was a major game-changer. It really depends what era you're talking about - the 'Middle Ages' covers a long and diverse period even before you have to account for the whole, "we're talking about all of Europe here," aspect. While it's true that the use of peasant levies declined greatly, this is really only true of the 11th century and later; prior to this, peasant conscripts saw widespread use despite their poor quality and the need to tend the crops.

@Gamerlord you'd be better off asking this in our History & Military subforum or the AskHistorians reddit, there's some actual experts over there. As in, people who are published.
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Yeah, I know. What I told him is basically paraphrased from a documentary I watched on youtube.
 
*finds trove of GURPS stuff*

THE MUSE IS FED, GLORY TO THE MUSE.

EDIT: Would anyone be willing to look over my next chapter? I'm having trouble figuring out where to end it.
 
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Guys, a 2 dot artifact can mimic a essence 2 charm.

Does that mean a 2 dot artifact can give you a perfect defense?

Because that is both absurd, and hilarious.
 
Accelerator said:
Guys, a 2 dot artifact can mimic a essence 2 charm.

Does that mean a 2 dot artifact can give you a perfect defense?
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Okay so, here is the component you are missing, the "Can," which is the part where the Artifact version of a given effect has a lot more baggage involved than the Charm-equivalent does. Mostly because these are two dissimilar chunks of mechanics trying to do the same things in redundantly overlapping ways.

First point, Perfect defenses aren't typically entry-level access powers, they usually require some kind of XP buy-in that establishes that there was an Investment Paid into having that perfect defense in the first place. Charms have trees, creating an escalating XP path, where any given effect must be judged by how many prerequisite Charms you need to buy to reach it. Before Evocations deliberately chose to blur that line, there's nothing to point to a comparable payment requirement (as Artifacts are, at best, by houserule, a Rating x3 xp jump between dot-ratings, which barely fits average XP costs to dip into a tree), so it was safe to conclude that anything of a given threshold further than one Charm-purchase away is off-limits for the wide variety of Artifacts.

Second, is the part where the Artifact usually has some other, non-Charm-emulating function by nature of being a physical object. A sword with a built-in Excellency is still a sword, foremost. Which means that you have to mentally attach that benefit Also onto the Charm it is emulating. Its not simply an Excellency-sword anymore, but approached as an Excellency which allows you to deal and parry Lethal Damage with a 'conjured' weapon statline, a non-unarmed attack, the whole nine yards. This means that there is no standalone "this trinket is a Charm in physical form" Artifacts, because they simply cannot exist, because once you start applying the natural benefits of that Artifact onto the Charmlike effect, even simply to the degree of "I can unattune this, and hand it to someone else to attune and use instead" you get a Vastly higher Essence minimum than you started with.

Third, tying together the first two points, a suitable Artifact to be judging an effect against is not actually emulating a spot-fire instant-use Charm like a Perfect, but a Scenelong Charm with a "mote payment" extra clause owing to the commitment of Essence simply to hold Access to that ability in the first place. An Artifact with a magic power is gating access to that power behind its mechanics as a magic object, and so has more in common with Solar Hero Form than it does anything else, and that's before you start adjusting costs for not being an intangible magic-exception to the rules. Would you fairly eyeball anything which grants an innate Perfect defense trigger by Essence 2 as a scenelong benefit, as an entry-level power? Even if it included a binary Y/N conditional switch to activate like that of a "have you been disarmed of this" artifact? Not many people would.

So no, trying to draw a 1:1 correlation between the two for having similar numbers attached is optimistic at best, and the ticket to bad homebrew at worst.
 
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But anyway, on a more serious note, do you guys have any headcanon or homebrew on the Dragon kings and their tech?

I got, like several headcanons. One is that Dragon kings pretty much use alchemical shrubs to brew their own version of tea. A Dragon king with the Fire path loves these, and uses his own fire path to boil the water.

There's also their version of heroin and such.

Coconuts with thinner skin that basically act as juice cans. You pick it from the tree, peel off the layer at the top, then start drinking whatever's inside.
 
ichypa said:
They have crystal elevators and automated doors, so I don't see why glass/crystal windows wouldn't be a thing.
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Tis a pity that they don't expand on them.

I find them and the mountain folk very.... interesting. Especially the different types of tech. I'm surprised that they never got a laser beam crystal gun that uses the might of the unconquered sun to blast enemies to bits.
 
Accelerator said:
Tis a pity that they don't expand on them.

I find them and the mountain folk very.... interesting. Especially the different types of tech. I'm surprised that they never got a laser beam crystal gun that uses the might of the unconquered sun to blast enemies to bits.
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Yeah, the Mountain Folk and the Dragon Kings are some of the most fascinating parts of the setting, imo.
 
ichypa said:
Yeah, the Mountain Folk and the Dragon Kings are some of the most fascinating parts of the setting, imo.
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Yes indeed.

Think about it. Inhuman races. With their own sets of powers, tech, and culture. And to be sure, maybe I'm just ignorant, but this is the first time I've seen one that includes reincarnation. And puts it as part of their culture.
 
The Dragon Kings are super-interesting from the notes and snippets we see about them, and quite honestly were I not pouring so much of my efforts into Alchemicals/Autochthonia I'd probably be doing the same for them as well. Because they are a unique beast in the respect that most of their technology was quite literally Living Things, not just in the sense that it was grown and developed, but that without them around to activate it using their specific array of magics, the vast majority of it is unrecognizable as technology or simply inert after centuries of disrepair. Without them around, you see only a still snapshot of their aesthetics, without the necessary impression that their world wholly sprang into being around them.

Their ability to manually adjust the physical properties of crystal and vegetation at a touch and have it simply Start Working sans automation is not something to be discounted, because it leads down the path of a "broken" spyglass which once required the user to manually alter the flex and curve of its lenses internally during operation, or a smoky black wall-pane of quartz which could be drawn back like a curtain to full transparency or "opened" as a door. Aquatic air-bladders of rubbery flesh which could be bit into and regulated like scuba tanks, to reinflate and heal with exposure to air and sunlight. They slept on beds of soft grasses or hammocks which reacted and conformed to their bodies like the most supportive matresses possible, with indoor plumbing that was often as simple as water-filled vines and pitcher plants, but more commonly full-blown water treatment with hot/cold running utilities baked to sterility by solar heat and filtered through granular stones. Roads cleared and paved themselves even through dense jungle. Food simply grew from locations around the home, though as courageous omnivores they were disinclined from lingering in favor of going out into the world to hunt fresh game for themselves.

Everything which could be was adjustable to some degree or another without "sophisticated" actions of interlocking or moving parts that characterize the common engineering works of man, and even their lavish arms and jewelry whorled and breathed around them like moonsilver. Armor and fashion locked into place with tightening cords of iron-hard ivy or grew to cover the wearer as she moved, like light-warping sheets of camouflaging crystal, while weapons capable of focusing cauterizing fire on the edge of a blade wicked away bits of essence from her blood or the rays of the sun to power themselves independently of a stored battery. Gripping pads of pliable stone would adhere to any non-smoothed surface without the need to adjust her claw-holds for climbing or walking on slick pathways, only to turn gritty and increase traction when necessary. Transport spheres and gazebos of shining glass warmed or cooled their interiors by controlling the refraction of light through its surfaces, a quirk of which could also be reduced in size along with thermal-conduction through stone to help maintain the varying temperatures of prepared food and drink.

The list goes on and on. The ability of a Dragon King to walk through her domain and simply have it Change around her whims was the reason they took such commanding control of every corner of Creation, even as they grappled against the other primordial spawn of prehistory. Altering both nature and her tools simply by act of being allowed them to rapidly furnish themselves the kinds of power bases, technologies and infrastructure that would require decades of dedicated toil otherwise, and with the addition of humanity as their labor-force, the relatively brief lifetimes of three or so centuries between reincarnations meant very little when rebuilding losses and expanding took all the effort of cultivating a plot of farmland.

Dragon Kings are super-fucking-interesting, guys.
 
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Last note on the concept of Dragon King culture, its really, really significant to note that they were the only species of their era to survive to witness their own obsolescence in recorded "living" memory passed down from life to life. Even during the War, it was the Unconquered Sun who placed his faith in the Exalted alone to command the fighting force against the primordials, not his Chosen People. They had to have seen the writing on the wall then, even before the great cataclysm which tore their entire way of life and understanding of eachother apart. They fell in line with things based purely on the idea the Sun must have had a grand plan for their future after this, that somehow all their zeal and devotion and sacrifice would be rewarded.

History and tradition are the cultural bedrock the Dragon Kings have always relied on, especially in unstable times where you need a firm rock in a landslide. These are beasts who hold blood-grudges theoretically forever, fighting and dying to uphold causes and avenge insult that have stopped having any meaning, and needed an institution of conduct created so that chains of vendetta wouldn't drag them down into infighting for all time. They modeled a society which emphasized the interconnectedness of every individual, every relationship, every life and lesson learned, and when great chunks were ripped out of it, had only their faith in the Unconquered Sun and his ambitious insurrection to fall back on.

And then they didn't get victory, they merely succeeded. Guy goes and hands the Chosen of humanity the Mandate of Heaven, forcing them into a place of watching from a distance as mankind applies its own self-rule in worse ways than the Dragon Kings had ever done so, under sun-tyrants of the First Age exploring excesses they had never reached. Generations of Dragon Kings living, remembering the war-trauma and heartbreak and dying to live and remember it all again. Only for the spoiled rulership of the Solars to finally spit in the UCS' face, have him turn away and leave every one of his followers adrift. The Sun had to have had a plan for this outcome, right? Why else would he have forsaken them so, turned the world over to spiteful children as the great empire atrophies? The Crusade and Contagion were a small mercy then, almost erasing every trace of them from the world, and wiping their institutional memory clean for a brief moment in time.

Now they are dying out, and any conscious, self-enlightened and aware Dragon King who can recall enough of the context to understand Why things have become as they are also understands Why they are dying out. Its going to be mankind who replaces them, and perhaps already has in the grand scheme of things. The entire cultural basis of the Dragon Kings is built atop impossible, absolutely immeasurable loss, cast into the wind by forces they cannot combat or control anymore in the shell of an empire that once spanned from corner to corner of a world much greater than this. In a lot of ways, their own faith and long memories are their own worst enemy, and grappling with the hand which has been dealt to them is the most fascinating aspect of the Dragon King condition.

There's a hell of a lot of heavy shit to work with, because the concepts of faith, tradition and holding onto both as the last remnants of culture when that culture has effectively stopped existing to the world around them, is something so rarely explored in this niche. High Holy Speech is a dead language, remembered only by rapidly-dwindling elders trying to pass along who and what they were. The great warriors of the past are merely legends, misconstrued by modern human scholars into strange beasts or foreign gods in wild shapes than the prehistoric heroes who lived and fought when Creation was still new. The injustice is on a level that defies understanding.

Dragon Kings are super-interesting, guys.
 
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