- Location
- Gladstone, OR
Alright, at @Aleph's request, I will be posting the logs faster so that she has a centralized place to go and find them for reference. I'll keep it to one-log-per-post though, and maintain the core index. Note in advance, I may sound fairly critical of the projects and thaum materials in this post-mortem, but I am doing so with the intention of it being constructive. I welcome counterpoints/discussion.
Session 7 Logs For Real This Time
Session 7 Logs For Real This Time
After our test-run of the Project Rules, we now calculate the results. It's worth noting that Aleph's ST style tends to decouple character traits from result quantity/quality. I almost never will roll to produce Hepatizon, instead we use Inks's pools and that of her underlings to establish a minimum level of competency. Aleph can go into further detail as she likes. The significance of this, is that we will not see any swings in efficiency or flourishes from getting lots of threshold successes.
For clarity, when I say Difficulty 1-5 task, Aleph will likely use the phrase '1-3 dicepool'. I mentally do the conversions in my head of 10 heroic dice equal an average of 5 successes.
Anyway, the session begins with the resolution of the hepatizon complex. It's finished, built, and we have a concrete location for it outside the caldera/outer wall of Gem, specifically placed so that incoming trade traffic doesn't see it. Even so, multicolored smoke and strange portents linger around such a demon-heavy enterprise.
Now, before modifiers/other magic, this complex will produce fifty 'people' worth of Hepatizon. Be it armor, weapons, or in this specific case, mining tools. Hepatizon itself if you don't know is one of the Herenal's secret crafting recipies, among which include making bowstrings from the strings of time, or using Ligier's light to harden silk. Of the available recipes, it was the one Inks could make a lot of.
Further, we are using Aleph and ES's 'Thaum Materials' fluff/crunch, with the intention of testing it. One issue we ran into that I forgot to mention, is that there is an issue of Specificity versus Playability.
For example, Tumbaga as per Aleph requires Lava or Sunlight Furnaces. I'm going to focus on Lava for the moment, but I won't forget sunlight. Note that it's specifically lava- not 'hot molten rock' or 'magical heat sources'. The problem is that the specificity doesn't always matter if it's abstracted during the Planning or Setup Phase of a project. I as a player am not empowered to make a Cool Clever Stunt. I'm instead obligated to Find Lava as a Cost to make this material.
I'm not against paying costs, but any RPG experience is one that demands effective time management, especially one with an ad-hoc or wildly variable schedule. We've had weeks separate some sessions due to my retail job and Aleph's own obligations.
So breaking it down, if 'Lava' is articulated as an Obligation or Cost, it becomes a burden. It's not properly conveyed as a Challenge to overcome, but a checkbox to satisfy. Further still, and we touch on this further post Session 8, that it's not in and of itself a set piece. What I mean is that if Lava is Required, then Going To Get Lava should be a fun, engaging setpiece.
But that is sort of a compromise, and similar to the issue with Exotic Components from 2e.
@EarthScorpion and Aleph both design from a position of 'incentivize the player to act in a manner that is setting-compliant'. Unfortunately, Exalted as a culture encourages a degree of entitlement that actively erodes 'meaningful investment'. I as a player am somewhat conditioned/biased in favor of 'I am the Exalt, why can't I get this obstacle out of my way?'
Further still, obligating a cost or requirement without fleshing out means to approach it means that such things are burdens instead of opportunities. I personally as a player WANT to go to exotic locales and claim them for their rare magical potent resources. I however don't want to be told that I must follow a specific MMO-esque recipe.
So this comes back to Tumbaga- if I wanted to make Tumbaga under Aleph's current model, I would need gold and lava. Getting lava is easy in Gem and hard pretty much anywhere else, and is not articulated in a manner that makes this obligation fun or challenging. Further, I am given the impression that I am not allowed to say 'well what if I make an okidaci crucible' or 'I convince an earth/fire elemental to help me out'. It MUST be lava, because the intention of the obligation is to prevent a player from abusing the otherwise freeform nature of the thaum material 'rules'.
I can't speak with total accuracy, and I gladly invite correction, but the goal of any sort of obligation or minimum requirement is to guarantee 'points of failure' or a logistical trail that can be interacted with both by players and NPCs. I as a player am perfectly happy with the idea of a lava source that's six days travel away through a really treacherous pass guarded by jealous mountain spirits- that's cool and part of the pagentry of Exalted. I'm less cool with the implicit, possibly unintentional limit on creativity and optimization. And that latter point is the other major issue:
Exalted has a problem of enabling people to do too much at too little cost, so a great deal of Aleph and ES's ideas/proposals exist in the space of 'this should cost more'. But so far, nobody's pinned down a certain alchemy of cost-to-play that is fun to participate in. You either have it or you don't, and getting it is abstracted or it isn't. I don't want to enable a thoughtless "I magic up a lava source in my back yard at no cost to me' situation. I however firmly believe that 'magic up a source in my back yard' should be viable, at appropriate cost.
Hypothetically, a better system for someone in my position is keyword-based, where I am able to plug in or satisfy requirements by sourcing the right keywords. Lava in and of itself is a pseudo-keyword, but it has to be lava, and I don't understand how to get lava in Aleph's Creation.
Extending on the idea of appropriate cost, I should also state that Goals should influence costs/investment as much as anything specific. Fundamentally you want tradeoffs, not all-eggs in one basket. Exclusivity breeds dynamism, but too much exclusivity creates frustration because you can't make anything interact.
To elaborate, if Inks wants Lava, and she wants it In Her Back Yard, those two statements should have mechanically relevant and approachable parameters.
Hah, that digression went on longer than I thought.
So to re-emphasize thaum materials, Inks is producing 50 sets of artifact-statline mining equipment. We don't have a mechanical representation of this, but essentially imagine she's making 50 '1 and 2-dot' daiklave stat line equivalents for the act of mining gems/digging out volcanic tubes.
Now, we move on to the other thingie! The neomah bordello!
Like the first time Inks set up a Neomah as part of her industries, she had to deal with the fact that she's got many many more Neomah, and many more patrons for their services, both Heranhal and citizen of Gem. We established that a Neomah makes one child per week, and I summoned [Magnitude 3] Neomah to meet the demands of [Magnitude 3] Hepatizon project/Heranhals.
As per log, Aleph makes me aware that the bordello right now will probably produce 100 children per season, to say nothing of any demons that need banishing. Enough that actually feeding, clothing and caring for them is going to be a Challenge. So much so that I made a point of doing an 'establishing' roll for an orphanage, which may get expanded into a proper Project sometime in the future.
I also am utilizing the new custom style I wrote for Inks, growing out of the fact that she created the hepatizon refinery in the first place.
Trailblazer Style (Bureaucracy)
The vibrant, fierce and always-moving entrepreneur, the [stylist] seeks out new markets and industries. Companies and assets rise up in her wake. Unfortunately, this forward focus does not lend itself well to directly growing existing assets.
Novice: +1d when identifying untapped markets
Adept: +1d when seeking investors
Master: -1 Difficulty when setting up new companies, facilities or industry-market entities.
As a Style, it's focused strongly on New New New, and would require a secondary style that is specific to management and growing businesses. Fortunately, sourcing investors is relevant at all levels of management, so there's a degree of continuity.
Since I rolled 11 successes, the actual result of Inks's effort was above and beyond my actual expectations- having secured goodwill with the local population and absorbed existing orphans and such from the greater Gem area.
Having taken care of these issues, Inks moves on to securing Ryabu's services as a 'Ranger'. I don't have a cohesive vision of his character yet, or his organization, but he's likely one of the civic groups that defend Gem against foreign threats.
Here Aleph also does a good job of fleshing out more of Gem by bringing up the Families and even Ryabu's connection to them. This paints the picture that Gem is a tangled morass of alliances and 'family businesses' that interweave with each other, despite their pretense of 'monopolies'.
I'm also bemused that Ryabu is as old as he is- I'm used to playing or running games for characters who err on the young side for various reasons. Creation is very much accommodating of the old gnarled master or touch-of-grey experienced hand though. Not that being in their thirties is 'Old'; I'm 31! We've kind of waffled on Inks's age, for the record, as she's sometimes in her mid 20s or early 20s.
[11:01] Ahh, Inks, I love playing her up-front approach to problems. "I want to do something about this. I need more information. First hand."
And Aleph, gracious Aleph, has Ryabu respond as one would to such a desire. As I make the rolls to convince him, I can't help but note that Aleph is much more transparent about these traits and desires than I expect- mostly because I still function under the assumption that a lot of this information is gated behind either specific actions like the Read Motivation rules, or Charms.
Like, from a design perspective, a Charm is a flag that says 'before this is purchased, you either need to take action, or it never comes up'. Once you buy a charm, it's a flag saying 'ST, the player wants this to be a thing'. But that's not the same as giving the player things.
It's worth noting however, that not even corebook Solar Charms have a specific 'Identify all Intimacies' effect.
Now, El-Galabi as far as I recall is actually ES's creation from a few pages back, and I am actively not searching for it as to avoid metagaming. Aleph assured me she's tweaked it slightly as well to keep it fresh.
Here we have a brief OOC conversation about travel magic, and while I very much enjoy Stormwind Rider, I specifically decided against getting a lot of travel magic early because I wanted to keep 'downtime' on the table where appropriate. Once travel magic becomes widely availible, players and games compress themselves down into breakneck, day to day affairs that leave almost no time to pull back.
Like, one of the major failings of most dramatic action rules is time management. If you tell me I have 3 months of downtime, and I know how long a task will take, I will likely try to do as much as I can in the block of time. Optimization is just something people do. Allowing too much optimization breaks game balance though. A good example of this is tracking hours worked and sleeping. Tireless Sentinel Technique can let you work almost the entire day save for food/water. If you use hours-worked in your game, this invites a complexity explosion that most STs aren't equipped to handle. ES and Aleph of course basically gut anything that deals with 'Hours' beyond linear blocks of time like Tiger Warrior for that exact reason.
On the note of travel magic, I very specifically avoided Agatae as one of Inks's summonables, because I am dead tired of the pretty wasp meme. I have nothing against the demons themselves, I just don't want Inks to be a wasp-rider. As a player I am generally disinclined to 'Randumb' things.
Like as a digression, I remember a Lunar player who's totem was a Mantis Shrimp. The only reason this player picked that, was because of the youtube fad about their supersonic forearm strikes. Non-sequitur gags are fine and dandy- I know I built Maji and Inks to have one, but I have been inundated with Bad 'Flash in the Pan' ideas over the years.
Anyway, the Expedition! Camels, caravans, one of Inks's freed-slave employees plus Ryabu heading to El-Galabi! I still snicker at Alephs' crack about palm-leaf shading.
As the scene transition carries on, we are shown more of the local terrain, which unfortunately isn't as relevant as I would hope- we weren't stunting survival or attempting to navigate treacherous setpieces, so it mostly just was there to flesh things out. This is good, but it wasn't very interactive. I couldn't grab the ash and DO anything with it, for example.
Advice to anyone playing smart characters: TAKE NOTES. do it in character- paper while not cheap in 2nd age Creation is still something you can carry with you, and one of the easiest 'smart person' things you can do is write stuff down. Aleph and I both agree that writing down plans for a magical creation means you can make it again faster the next time, or hand those plans off to someone else. This is huge.
The log describes El-Galabi itself, and we had an interesting meta-moment were I wondered if Inks's anima was sunlight, and if she knew how sunlight affected the dead. Now, inside a Shadowland, I'm pretty sure that 'Shadowland' takes precedent over 'Sunlight', so ghosts are material, but I'll have to doublecheck with Aleph.
Also puns- no lie that was actually a really good one on Aleph's part.
Minor squee note: I get to leverage Exalted resilience without relying on Charms! Staying up late and wide awake! Thinking about it, you gotta wonder how Exalted feel while resting/sleeping. Can they just go full bore and then decide, I'm gonna lie down, and doze off? Do they get tired/drowsy like regular folks?
Character point: Being nice to the help. Inks, who basically is a runaway mafiya princess, is making camp-breakfast in the middle of nowhere for a camel-riding sentinel of Gem and her employee.
Here, Inks and Ryabu has out the details of the first major excursion, and while Inks could totally have pushed the issue, I as a player didn't feel the need to go in hard the first visit. If I had pushed my luck, Aleph could have rightly caught me out with a combat scene of some sort or similar challenge, and I'm confident that while she wouldn't rocks-fall me, I would have suffered a hazard comesurate with my misjudgement, compounded by any lack of preparation.
Having negotiated the proper vantage point, I make some final observations, and a greater picture of El-Galabi and it's situation beings to form.
El-Galabi is in my opinion a great place to start in terms of experimenting with a 'Plot' that is player driven but built out of materials the Storyteller provides. So far Inks is providing the pace, because she hasn't committed to a course of action that locks her progress to forward-only. I'm allowed as a player to approach and retreat as circumstances dictate. This is not to say that all plots should be this gracious, but it is nice that this one is.
For clarity, when I say Difficulty 1-5 task, Aleph will likely use the phrase '1-3 dicepool'. I mentally do the conversions in my head of 10 heroic dice equal an average of 5 successes.
Anyway, the session begins with the resolution of the hepatizon complex. It's finished, built, and we have a concrete location for it outside the caldera/outer wall of Gem, specifically placed so that incoming trade traffic doesn't see it. Even so, multicolored smoke and strange portents linger around such a demon-heavy enterprise.
Now, before modifiers/other magic, this complex will produce fifty 'people' worth of Hepatizon. Be it armor, weapons, or in this specific case, mining tools. Hepatizon itself if you don't know is one of the Herenal's secret crafting recipies, among which include making bowstrings from the strings of time, or using Ligier's light to harden silk. Of the available recipes, it was the one Inks could make a lot of.
Further, we are using Aleph and ES's 'Thaum Materials' fluff/crunch, with the intention of testing it. One issue we ran into that I forgot to mention, is that there is an issue of Specificity versus Playability.
For example, Tumbaga as per Aleph requires Lava or Sunlight Furnaces. I'm going to focus on Lava for the moment, but I won't forget sunlight. Note that it's specifically lava- not 'hot molten rock' or 'magical heat sources'. The problem is that the specificity doesn't always matter if it's abstracted during the Planning or Setup Phase of a project. I as a player am not empowered to make a Cool Clever Stunt. I'm instead obligated to Find Lava as a Cost to make this material.
I'm not against paying costs, but any RPG experience is one that demands effective time management, especially one with an ad-hoc or wildly variable schedule. We've had weeks separate some sessions due to my retail job and Aleph's own obligations.
So breaking it down, if 'Lava' is articulated as an Obligation or Cost, it becomes a burden. It's not properly conveyed as a Challenge to overcome, but a checkbox to satisfy. Further still, and we touch on this further post Session 8, that it's not in and of itself a set piece. What I mean is that if Lava is Required, then Going To Get Lava should be a fun, engaging setpiece.
But that is sort of a compromise, and similar to the issue with Exotic Components from 2e.
@EarthScorpion and Aleph both design from a position of 'incentivize the player to act in a manner that is setting-compliant'. Unfortunately, Exalted as a culture encourages a degree of entitlement that actively erodes 'meaningful investment'. I as a player am somewhat conditioned/biased in favor of 'I am the Exalt, why can't I get this obstacle out of my way?'
Further still, obligating a cost or requirement without fleshing out means to approach it means that such things are burdens instead of opportunities. I personally as a player WANT to go to exotic locales and claim them for their rare magical potent resources. I however don't want to be told that I must follow a specific MMO-esque recipe.
So this comes back to Tumbaga- if I wanted to make Tumbaga under Aleph's current model, I would need gold and lava. Getting lava is easy in Gem and hard pretty much anywhere else, and is not articulated in a manner that makes this obligation fun or challenging. Further, I am given the impression that I am not allowed to say 'well what if I make an okidaci crucible' or 'I convince an earth/fire elemental to help me out'. It MUST be lava, because the intention of the obligation is to prevent a player from abusing the otherwise freeform nature of the thaum material 'rules'.
I can't speak with total accuracy, and I gladly invite correction, but the goal of any sort of obligation or minimum requirement is to guarantee 'points of failure' or a logistical trail that can be interacted with both by players and NPCs. I as a player am perfectly happy with the idea of a lava source that's six days travel away through a really treacherous pass guarded by jealous mountain spirits- that's cool and part of the pagentry of Exalted. I'm less cool with the implicit, possibly unintentional limit on creativity and optimization. And that latter point is the other major issue:
Exalted has a problem of enabling people to do too much at too little cost, so a great deal of Aleph and ES's ideas/proposals exist in the space of 'this should cost more'. But so far, nobody's pinned down a certain alchemy of cost-to-play that is fun to participate in. You either have it or you don't, and getting it is abstracted or it isn't. I don't want to enable a thoughtless "I magic up a lava source in my back yard at no cost to me' situation. I however firmly believe that 'magic up a source in my back yard' should be viable, at appropriate cost.
Hypothetically, a better system for someone in my position is keyword-based, where I am able to plug in or satisfy requirements by sourcing the right keywords. Lava in and of itself is a pseudo-keyword, but it has to be lava, and I don't understand how to get lava in Aleph's Creation.
Extending on the idea of appropriate cost, I should also state that Goals should influence costs/investment as much as anything specific. Fundamentally you want tradeoffs, not all-eggs in one basket. Exclusivity breeds dynamism, but too much exclusivity creates frustration because you can't make anything interact.
To elaborate, if Inks wants Lava, and she wants it In Her Back Yard, those two statements should have mechanically relevant and approachable parameters.
Hah, that digression went on longer than I thought.
So to re-emphasize thaum materials, Inks is producing 50 sets of artifact-statline mining equipment. We don't have a mechanical representation of this, but essentially imagine she's making 50 '1 and 2-dot' daiklave stat line equivalents for the act of mining gems/digging out volcanic tubes.
Now, we move on to the other thingie! The neomah bordello!
Like the first time Inks set up a Neomah as part of her industries, she had to deal with the fact that she's got many many more Neomah, and many more patrons for their services, both Heranhal and citizen of Gem. We established that a Neomah makes one child per week, and I summoned [Magnitude 3] Neomah to meet the demands of [Magnitude 3] Hepatizon project/Heranhals.
As per log, Aleph makes me aware that the bordello right now will probably produce 100 children per season, to say nothing of any demons that need banishing. Enough that actually feeding, clothing and caring for them is going to be a Challenge. So much so that I made a point of doing an 'establishing' roll for an orphanage, which may get expanded into a proper Project sometime in the future.
I also am utilizing the new custom style I wrote for Inks, growing out of the fact that she created the hepatizon refinery in the first place.
Trailblazer Style (Bureaucracy)
The vibrant, fierce and always-moving entrepreneur, the [stylist] seeks out new markets and industries. Companies and assets rise up in her wake. Unfortunately, this forward focus does not lend itself well to directly growing existing assets.
Novice: +1d when identifying untapped markets
Adept: +1d when seeking investors
Master: -1 Difficulty when setting up new companies, facilities or industry-market entities.
As a Style, it's focused strongly on New New New, and would require a secondary style that is specific to management and growing businesses. Fortunately, sourcing investors is relevant at all levels of management, so there's a degree of continuity.
Since I rolled 11 successes, the actual result of Inks's effort was above and beyond my actual expectations- having secured goodwill with the local population and absorbed existing orphans and such from the greater Gem area.
Having taken care of these issues, Inks moves on to securing Ryabu's services as a 'Ranger'. I don't have a cohesive vision of his character yet, or his organization, but he's likely one of the civic groups that defend Gem against foreign threats.
Here Aleph also does a good job of fleshing out more of Gem by bringing up the Families and even Ryabu's connection to them. This paints the picture that Gem is a tangled morass of alliances and 'family businesses' that interweave with each other, despite their pretense of 'monopolies'.
I'm also bemused that Ryabu is as old as he is- I'm used to playing or running games for characters who err on the young side for various reasons. Creation is very much accommodating of the old gnarled master or touch-of-grey experienced hand though. Not that being in their thirties is 'Old'; I'm 31! We've kind of waffled on Inks's age, for the record, as she's sometimes in her mid 20s or early 20s.
[11:01] Ahh, Inks, I love playing her up-front approach to problems. "I want to do something about this. I need more information. First hand."
And Aleph, gracious Aleph, has Ryabu respond as one would to such a desire. As I make the rolls to convince him, I can't help but note that Aleph is much more transparent about these traits and desires than I expect- mostly because I still function under the assumption that a lot of this information is gated behind either specific actions like the Read Motivation rules, or Charms.
Like, from a design perspective, a Charm is a flag that says 'before this is purchased, you either need to take action, or it never comes up'. Once you buy a charm, it's a flag saying 'ST, the player wants this to be a thing'. But that's not the same as giving the player things.
It's worth noting however, that not even corebook Solar Charms have a specific 'Identify all Intimacies' effect.
Now, El-Galabi as far as I recall is actually ES's creation from a few pages back, and I am actively not searching for it as to avoid metagaming. Aleph assured me she's tweaked it slightly as well to keep it fresh.
Here we have a brief OOC conversation about travel magic, and while I very much enjoy Stormwind Rider, I specifically decided against getting a lot of travel magic early because I wanted to keep 'downtime' on the table where appropriate. Once travel magic becomes widely availible, players and games compress themselves down into breakneck, day to day affairs that leave almost no time to pull back.
Like, one of the major failings of most dramatic action rules is time management. If you tell me I have 3 months of downtime, and I know how long a task will take, I will likely try to do as much as I can in the block of time. Optimization is just something people do. Allowing too much optimization breaks game balance though. A good example of this is tracking hours worked and sleeping. Tireless Sentinel Technique can let you work almost the entire day save for food/water. If you use hours-worked in your game, this invites a complexity explosion that most STs aren't equipped to handle. ES and Aleph of course basically gut anything that deals with 'Hours' beyond linear blocks of time like Tiger Warrior for that exact reason.
On the note of travel magic, I very specifically avoided Agatae as one of Inks's summonables, because I am dead tired of the pretty wasp meme. I have nothing against the demons themselves, I just don't want Inks to be a wasp-rider. As a player I am generally disinclined to 'Randumb' things.
Like as a digression, I remember a Lunar player who's totem was a Mantis Shrimp. The only reason this player picked that, was because of the youtube fad about their supersonic forearm strikes. Non-sequitur gags are fine and dandy- I know I built Maji and Inks to have one, but I have been inundated with Bad 'Flash in the Pan' ideas over the years.
Anyway, the Expedition! Camels, caravans, one of Inks's freed-slave employees plus Ryabu heading to El-Galabi! I still snicker at Alephs' crack about palm-leaf shading.
As the scene transition carries on, we are shown more of the local terrain, which unfortunately isn't as relevant as I would hope- we weren't stunting survival or attempting to navigate treacherous setpieces, so it mostly just was there to flesh things out. This is good, but it wasn't very interactive. I couldn't grab the ash and DO anything with it, for example.
Advice to anyone playing smart characters: TAKE NOTES. do it in character- paper while not cheap in 2nd age Creation is still something you can carry with you, and one of the easiest 'smart person' things you can do is write stuff down. Aleph and I both agree that writing down plans for a magical creation means you can make it again faster the next time, or hand those plans off to someone else. This is huge.
The log describes El-Galabi itself, and we had an interesting meta-moment were I wondered if Inks's anima was sunlight, and if she knew how sunlight affected the dead. Now, inside a Shadowland, I'm pretty sure that 'Shadowland' takes precedent over 'Sunlight', so ghosts are material, but I'll have to doublecheck with Aleph.
Also puns- no lie that was actually a really good one on Aleph's part.
Minor squee note: I get to leverage Exalted resilience without relying on Charms! Staying up late and wide awake! Thinking about it, you gotta wonder how Exalted feel while resting/sleeping. Can they just go full bore and then decide, I'm gonna lie down, and doze off? Do they get tired/drowsy like regular folks?
Character point: Being nice to the help. Inks, who basically is a runaway mafiya princess, is making camp-breakfast in the middle of nowhere for a camel-riding sentinel of Gem and her employee.
Here, Inks and Ryabu has out the details of the first major excursion, and while Inks could totally have pushed the issue, I as a player didn't feel the need to go in hard the first visit. If I had pushed my luck, Aleph could have rightly caught me out with a combat scene of some sort or similar challenge, and I'm confident that while she wouldn't rocks-fall me, I would have suffered a hazard comesurate with my misjudgement, compounded by any lack of preparation.
Having negotiated the proper vantage point, I make some final observations, and a greater picture of El-Galabi and it's situation beings to form.
El-Galabi is in my opinion a great place to start in terms of experimenting with a 'Plot' that is player driven but built out of materials the Storyteller provides. So far Inks is providing the pace, because she hasn't committed to a course of action that locks her progress to forward-only. I'm allowed as a player to approach and retreat as circumstances dictate. This is not to say that all plots should be this gracious, but it is nice that this one is.
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