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General Exalted Thread

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I'm going to be running a board-style (IE, you run it for a set time, with regular updates over a series of hours, rather than having one update every few days) quest on anonkun (no smut). Currently it's following Belladonna, Ghost-blooded daughter of the Pyre-Saint of the Penitent Legion, as she adventures around. We start at 4:00, be there or be square.
 
Okay, formualting reply @EarthScorpion

I do agree that scarcity should be an important driver in how characters act, but my criticism is that right now, the existing gameplay and culture model is not yet 'fun'. Note that fun is subjective so every solution is not going to work for everyone.

The problem I'm having is that scarcity is opaque to approach. I as a player am not armed with the tools, be they implicit knowledge, explicit mechanics, or purchasable charms. I want Lava. I'm locked into a box of how to Get Lava. The box is too tight and too unadorned to navigate. I don't know how to get lava, and I'm discouraged from being clever in getting lava.

Like you raise the examples of 'drill to fire dragon line' or 'make a manse', find a volcano, etc. Those are not obvious, and it's not tutorialized well yet. Plus in my case I am working under the 2e model of manse design/creation- not to say that's what we're using in inksgame, but my 'picture' of creating a manse is muuuch bigger and more complete compared to yours, possibly.

Hard choices make for interesting times, but a lack of apparent clarity and direction just makes those choices feel like arbitrary stumbling blocks. Scarcity is a fact of life, but in context of Exalted-the-game-you-play, scarcity should lead to fun activities. You do raise the point that making something Not-Scarce is a setting-changing deed, which I wholeheartedly agree is important.

Like... Okay. Many videogames approach their scenarios as having One Solution- it's not a Hard Choice paradigm at all, but the 'victory', the feeling of accomplishment, comes from discovery of The Solution. Other games reward the player implicitly for finding a solution, out of many potential ones. More-open-ended games including TTRPGs allow players to feel the flush of victory/success/completion when they've devised a clever solution. I was able to be quite clever with Hepatizon, because I was able to argue that I only needed 'Blood and Bile', not 'human blood' or 'chicken blood'. So I decided 'I'll use cows, they already fit into several industries and the byproducts of the hepatizon process are valuable as well.

Now, sometimes you absolutely need the hard-check against player cleverness, if for no other reason than to break them out of the efficient-robot-behavior box, but as it stands the model feels like too much stick and not enough carrot. Or, the stick hasn't been adjusted enough to be a carrot. Finding a volcano is cheaper than making one, but I at least want the option to make one.

I see games like Exalted, for good or ill, like a lego set. You get these parts that have multiple uses, and you build up more and more sets until the 'applicability' extends into a new function. You don't have to agree or accomadate me, but I'm aiming to critique this constructively.

So, my thought is that for scarcity, it should not only drive conflict, it should drive conflict towards what players find fun. Or even better, players should be armed with in-game tools and out-of-game mechanical knowledge to approach scarcity and other challenges in the manner they find fun. Or, put more humorously- Scarcity should lead to places that make for great kung-fu-battle, be they with fists or words. Obviously some of this requires tailoring on the part of the player, and not so much as to make it convenient or a given. Challenging players where they're weak is a useful trick to improve tension in a game, but making every single challenge one they're Bad At is frustrating.

Touching back on Project Rules and specific means, my criticism is something like this: When told I need something, I am not able determine my own path to getting it due to lack of conveyance. I need Lava, and until otherwise informed, the sources of Lava I can approach are too few.

Now, extending, sometimes you absolutely do want a singular or otherwise Unique Means to something, but as a tool to upsell the pagentry of whatever you're attempting. If you need the best lava ever, the only place to get it is the Elemental Pole of Fire. Here the onus is more on the storyteller to try and convince the player that this expedition is worth it both in terms of play-time invested and how it actually dovetails into what the player is trying to do.

Like, if I am just making a daiklave that can heat up and melt stone, I don't think I need Pole of Fire lava. If I want a daiklave that can raise volcanos with a swing, I probably need Pole of Fire Lava.

I do like your timescale mechanics here.

@uju32 That's a fairly salient rundown of the situation. Inks is Compassion 3, but that didn't prevent her from using demon labor to achieve her ends. Part of why I'm using Neomah is that I basically am assuming there Aren't any better demon laborers to fulfil their needs, which I feel works with the spirit Aleph runs the game under. Demons have costs to maintain them, and in this case, the neomah's cost is that they make demons and demonblooded. Since Inks is comp 3, I made a point to care for both the customers, workers and the results of their labors.

I hadn't considered the complication of potential human sacrifice as well, and I'm definitely going to beef up security now that I think about it. The advantage of a demonblooded population boom is that those children are as much an investment as anything. Inks is in a position to train expert talent into the world, but she has to negotiate the cost/risk of their demonblooded nature. Now, this isn't to say that all demonblooded are inherently prone to corruption or 'falling in' with their demon heritage. And fortunately, none of the kids Inks is responsible for are older than two seasons.
 
Blind Miner
Lesser Dead
Dead beneath the Earth

Tap. Tap. Tap. The sounds echo out from below the earth. The miners refuse to go into the dark places without a flame - and that's a problem, because there's firedust in these depths. But the miners say that the tapping isn't just the sound of the props, no; it's Ol' Ali, who died when there was a cave-in, all alone in the dark. He's still down there, sightlessly tapping his way through the dark, checking all the timbers. If he runs into a miner, he might just think that they're a weak brace - and take their bones, to reinforce the ceiling.

When a miner slowly dies down in the blackness, trapped far from the sun, his ghost might forget what eyes are for. When he rises as one of the Dead, dried skin covers his eye sockets. His form is twisted and mangled if he died from rockfall, or else gaunt and shrivelled if he died in deprivation. Instead, his hearing is inhumanly sharp, and he taps his too-long fingers against the walls and floor. The sound echoes as he blindly gropes through the dark. When many men die in a cave-in, they'll form entire shifts of ghosts who keep on working, returning to their crushed corpses to rest when they tire. Blind miners are material in total blackness. Even a smidgen of light is enough to disapparate them, but below the world they have solid form.

Throughout Creation, miners are treated with caution by many - just like blacksmiths. Miners venture into the depths, braving death - in more than one way, for the lightless places below the world are close to the lands of the Dead. Many miners have tales of strange things they have seen, and they leave small offerings out for dead friends. Many blind miners are kindly ghosts, and will tap to warn other miners of weak supports or more malevolent spectres - but others are cruel and will trick and deceive men who don't leave them beer and bread. Miners know to fear those blind miners who formed from men who resorted to cannibalism before they died, because their ghosts are hungry for life.

Necromancers use blind miners to carry on their work in life, or else as sentinels who listen for things that cannot be seen. It is rumoured that below Thorns, the Mask of Winters has vast chain-gangs of blind miners hollowing out underground chambers. Exorcists often have a mixed relationship with blind miners - and may face resistance from the living if they try to rid a mine of the Dead, especially if the blind miners blame the owners for the deaths within. Laying angry ghosts to rest may mean the exorcist must face powerful men.
 
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Out of curiosity, is there any way for an Infernal to learn Mardukth's charms if we assume canon 2e and Mardukth being a Neverborn? I ask because I've seen a pretty extensive charmset posted by Imrix- how would you find a way to unlock it for an Infernal?

Since we're using the Sorcerous Working system of 3e, my immediate reaction was to wait and buy E5 and then cast an Adamant working to fuse with a hekatonkhire (or multiple) or maybe use an Ebon Dragon charm to transgress boundaries and temporarily convert Sorcery ranks to Necromancy and venture into the underworld to do <something> with his tomb, or maybe use the way Oramus manifests 'impossibility' to contract with a non dead variation of Mardukth and have the exaltation emulate his themes from that taste.

Sadly, all of this requires E5. Would there be a way to do it sooner, or is it just impossible unless we have a Shard where Mardukth lives? I don't care too much about derangements /mutations acquired doing so.
 
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RedV said:
Out of curiosity, is there any way for an Infernal to learn Mardukth's charms if we assume canon 2e and Mardukth being a Neverborn? I ask because I've seen a pretty extensive charmset posted by Imrix- how would you find a way to unlock it for an Infernal?
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If we assume canon? Good fucking luck. You might be able to get some dribs and drabs of his power by locating a cultivar of his Essence from before he died - but then you're basically a self-made godblooded/demonblooded of whatever aspect of Mardukth the Essence was drawn from, not anything like an Infernal Exalt, and a Green Sun Prince attempting to do that would probably find that his triune soul can't properly assimilate & process the Mardukthian Essence being introduced to it. Mind you, an Infernal who adopts such a lineage/cabal/cult of people who wield the embers of a dead titan as holy receptacles for Creation's fallen rulers or somesuch would be a neat idea, but it's not really what you're asking about.

I mean, technically his corpse is around, but you'd have to be-

RedV said:
ANYTHING WORKS WITH ENOUGH NECROMANCY AND EBON DRAGON CHARMS
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No RedV

Stahp

Wat r u doin

More seriously, that sounds like an absolutely excellent way to get eaten whole by a Neverborn as it instinctively tries to assimilate your own Mythos to rejuvenate its own, with the same result as an ocean trying to warm itself around a candle. A big part of my concept of the Neverborn is that they are no longer the Primordials they once were; the Exalted Host tore away everything they took pride in, everything they defined themselves by, and all that's left is a fractured soup of deathbed visions and fragmentary recollections made real by the undirected Essence of a murdered titan. You can't communicate with a Neverborn because it's no longer a single being, it's the sundered fragments of all its former souls mixed with, again, random brown noise and junk memory evaporating off its smashed-open brains, all screaming at once. You might be able to use Unity to fuse with a hekatonkheire, but you'd only be getting a connection to it, not the Neverborn whose nightmares it crawled out of - much in the same way fusing with Ligier doesn't give you any real connection to/authority over Malfeas unless the former convinces the latter to cut you in. Which is impossible in this example, because the 'Malfeas' part of the equation is an eons-dead, thrice-profaned corpse in a dreg-heap at the end of the world.

I suppose, in theory (very much in theory), you might be able to track down a "sane" hekatonkheire, one whose being is both self-aware and possesses goals & beliefs you agree with, fuse with it, and then Voltron around with it in the Labyrinth until you find the tomb of its parent Neverborn. Then, maybe you could try to start researching a way of possibly strengthening its connection to that Neverborn beyond being just an echo of its dead mind, and using it as the start point of a new spiritual tapestry woven from the shreds of its former Mythos. Then you kill a lot of Greater Dead, Deathlords, hekatonkheires, and other sources of necrotic Essence to empower a handful of same that you can use to serve as subordinate souls to the hekatonkheire's fetich, and also forcibly pump energy into the 'veins' of metaphysical tissue you're stringing between these chosen successor souls like intestines being wrapped around a series of iron stakes driven into the earth (which should help give a picture of about how wholesome this whole process is likely to be).

Then, you continue killing/recruiting powerful beings of Death, wish upon a star, and start sacrificing leprechauns until this unholy Frankenstein of reconstituted Primordial corpseflesh starts to become self-sustaining*, and begins to eat into the metaphysical carrion-husk of the tomb itself like a cancerous cyst, or perhaps a maggot nest incubating in roadkill. Assuming that a group of plucky heroes haven't shown up to kill you and your blasphemous alliance of the damned yet, your hideous fetal Onceborn now has a chance of eventually usurping the font of (utterly defiled) Primordial Essence the Neverborn is fueled by, eventually suffocating even its unnatural, impossible existence to sustain its own. At this point, you probably have the combined armies of - if not Man, then definitely several other majority shareholders in Creation and the Underworld knocking at the gates of your nightmarish Labyrinth laboratory-womb, and the contractions of the Onceborn's impending coffin birth are tearing bloody rents in the Labyrinth itself and sending devastating shockwaves into the Underworld beyond it.

Congratulations, assuming you managed to survive this: you have absolutely not resurrected the dead Neverborn into its former Primordial self. You've certainly done something, but not that! Definitely not that.


* Perhaps with the aid of an Abyssal Exalt you plug into this mess of souls and Essence, because why the fuck not? Sanity got left behind ages ago and the ghosts of the Black Nadir Concordat are giving you a hearty thumbs up from the depths of Oblivion at this point in the plan, so just go for it. What could possibly go wrong?
 
RedV said:
Out of curiosity, is there any way for an Infernal to learn Mardukth's charms if we assume canon 2e and Mardukth being a Neverborn?
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Nothing of the sort is ever addressed in canon so I'd assume no.

I've tossed around the idea of finding Gramalkin, one of Mardukth's souls who betrayed him in the war and still lives as a god of the hunt. There might be enough Mardukth left in him to do something, but that's completely ST fiat.

GardenerBriareus said:
Congratulations, assuming you managed to survive this: you have absolutely not resurrected the dead Neverborn into its former Primordial self. You've certainly done something, but not that! Definitely not that.
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I definitely want to see the outcome of this :)
 
Okay...

Big reply post. Let's break it down. This will, I am afraid, be a little bit stream-of-consciousness.
Shyft said:
And Here we go with Sunlit Sands Session #6! This is after @Aleph and I had a lengthy discussion prototyping the Project Rules. We're both still not 100% pleased with them yet, but they Worked for our purposes.

Session #6 logs

The rough idea is that you Plan things, which takes a week before stunts or charms. Planning reveals Setup Costs. Setup is the abstracted 'dramatic action' that covers the gathering of assets, assembly of resources and so on. Like if you need to build a workshop or source specific materials or get permission from a local lord, that's all abstracted in the Setup Step. Setup takes 1 season before stunts or charms.

Now, the nice thing is that once you set up a Project, the facilities are There and you really don't need to set them up again unless you're doing something Dramatically Different.

Projects are balanced around the amount of product they create, or individual characters per season, in turn represented by the Magnitude Scale (we've adjusted it so Mag 0 from corebook is now mag 1). So a Difficulty 3 Project can create Magnitude 3 Product. In the case of Inks's Hepatizon facility, she can create Magnitude 3 hepatizon tools.

To make the hepatizon, she needed Blood, Bile and Bronze. We previously discussed that cattle could supply the blood and bile in sufficient quantities, so as part of the setup phase, Inks arrnaged for a local rancher to deliver cattle. She also had to get permission from the Despot, which you'll see in-session, and build the actual facility itself.

The actual opening scene of today's session was Inks's grand unveiling as a public Solar- something I've never been able to do in any game I've played. Gem is far enough away from the Realm and Immaculate Influence as to not be AND SUDDENLY WYLD HUNT. Even though I know both in character and out that such a hunt may yet arrive.

Now, the demonstration seen here is a suggestion Aleph made a few weeks ago about how to earn some credibility as a sorcerer and demonologist- not only can Inks Summon the horrors of hell and bind them to her will, but also banish them. And, six sessions in, we are introduced to Chronicle, as well as the fact that Inks has the charm Summoning the Loyal Steel precisely for moments like these.

Chronicles actual design is still in flux, but the basic idea is present here in that it is a wide blade without a proper stabbing tip, relying more on wide swings and weight. It is about 6'6" long (Inks in her yet-to-be-accquired iconic heels is about 5'9").

Chronicle is one of my other 'Exalted Bucket List' requests- because I have never been able to play in a game wtih a Grand Weapon that isn't nerfed to uselessness. Amusingly, Aleph and I are still trying to figure out what it does beyond being a huge sword, because fundamentally we approach the aesthetics and magical technology of Creation differently- I personally don't connect Form to Function when it comes to artifice, I'm of the camp that superheavy plate can look like anything as long as it 'tells' people its' superheavy plate. Aleph by contrast would not call anything like bikini armor as 'superheavy' unless it explicitly was fluffed as 'this is first age forcefield armor' and whatnot.

So by that model, Chronicle, according to Aleph, must have a power based on the fact that it is Huge. We haven't figured out what that power is yet, but have agreed that in absence of a specific power, it will have some Plot Significance.

The original 'idea' of Chronicle was that i was actually just a Grand Daiklave with a hefty drawback- a 2nd circle demon, Soumyakanti, was ripped in half and part of her was bound in the blade (her beauty). The rest of her was left in Hell, and as part of this binding, she would rip free of Malfeas every year at some random point and location, before picking up materials nearby to create a new body and fight the attuned bearer for her remaining half.

In a very real sense, this was created as a first age 'Dinner and a Show' mechanic. The person who held it would get an interruption by a foe who changes every year and thus be a New Novel Distraction.

Further still, Chronicle is also Inks's anchor for Emerald Circle Banishment, characterized as the Easy Way or the Hard Way.

After the banishment demonstration, we're introduced to Ryabu, and the plothook of El-Galabi!

Touching back on the Hepatizon project, we continue to make inroads on this. Basically Inks needs cattle, a facility, demons and permission. As I discover through the session, only the Despot can grant permission to build on the mountainside, which means I had to talk to him again.

Also on the note of project rules, our first run of htis prototype hit on the problem of 'a project that begets projects', which complicates matters and is frustrating as a player, because it goes 'Okay you are doing this but now you have to do That too'. We've agreed that next time we do a project, we won't do that/try something else. I believe my suggestion was less about 'making a project out of a project' and more 'now that you've completed the project, whatever you did to get it done is leaning on you for a response.'

As the session goes on, Aleph introduces me to more of Gem's persons and families of interest as well, seeding plothooks and fleshing out the world. One unfortunate issue is that it's difficult to keep all the names straight- especially since it's two people. The advantage of a group game is that all the players talk to each other and reinforce the game knowledge as they discuss it. The past couple real-life weeks between Aleph and I were very light on communication.

Also Maji continues to be excellent for sight gags and serves as a 'Straight Man' to Inks's more wild outbursts.

Now, meeting Rankar again, there's less political games and more straight business. Further, he has very good advisors and records- because he managed to name Ink accurately, instead of the Anathema perjorative sobriquet. This threw me as a player, in a good way, because it was unexpected but also intriuging. There is a chance he has access to heavenly records or even a Sidereal advisor, but I'm not really metagaming it either.

Here I also determine that Rankar is sufferent from some sort of injury or illness, but that he specifically does not want it treated, likely not publicly. Being weak for a political figure like himself is very much a problem, and he has to put on a show of strength at all times.

At this point, we've established everything we need to make the facility and set it up. I need sufficient Neomah to keep the Heranhals happy, and the Heranhals are provided with sufficient raw materials to make Hepatizon in economic batches. I also followed another suggestion of Aleph's to make sure the Neomah bordello keeps fastidious records of its patrons, which may or may not become useful material later on. In Session 8, we realized that House Sahlak has a monopoly on such businesses, so we retconned Inks paying out the fee to maintain the monopoly. I can't remember the exact reference amounts, but Gem really likes its monopolies.
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Shyft said:
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

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.
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So, the Project rules. These are very much still in flux, and I think part of why Shyft is unhappy with them is that he's giving me too much credit as an ST. I'm making up a lot of this as I go, and it's still not necessarily balanced perfectly - ES's thing about Major, Minor and Trivial Projects is something I hadn't been using (and will now adopt). One of the really notable things about Inksgame is that @Shyft is a far more experienced player, I think, than I am an ST. Even if he hasn't necessarily been able to play as he'd have liked in the past, he's been thinking about play styles and incentives and player-system interaction for a long time, while I'm barrelling into this with my pants around my ankles.

So in session 6 we have Inks setting up her hepatizon production factory-complex with attached neomah-bordello, and deciding to do something about El Galabi. I'll be honest here - I have some concerns about Shyft's ambitious reach. Setting up Scope 3 factories, producing hundreds of demonblooded children and starting orphanages to keep them, plans to revitalise a Solar demesne-turned-shadowland, and that's just what Inks has got going on at the moment. Now, on the one hand, this sort of overreach is a good thing to beat players over the head with. "Your orphanage is rapidly running out of staff! What do? Your many businesses need more day-to-day management than you can keep up with, and you haven't got any trained people to run them (and training said people will take even more time and focus!) How do you respond? Something Unexpected just happened to disrupt your plate-spinning! What are your contingencies?" However, this does rather run into an issue of ST overhead - I'm not necessarily sure how to model what happens if Inks hits a limiting factor and can't find a workaround. So while I love Inks' grand, brassy moves, that's been kind of a lowkey concern of mine as she's been making so many of them. I'm not too worried about it, but if she keeps throwing herself at Big Projects I'm gonna have to start seriously wondering how I can juggle plot focus and consequences for all of them. I want Shyft to have fun, which is a big part of my planning, but I still haven't hit the right balance (and confidence level) of setting things up for him to have a good time playing Inks while still challenging her and arranging things towards a larger plot.

The more technical side of the Project system and Scarcity-driving-a-plot, @EarthScorpion and @Shyft have already covered. I'll get back to that later. The bordello is actually my current biggest concern, because I try to model things pretty cause-and-effect-edly, and it basically is too big to realistically sustain. Scope 3 neomah plying their trade is 100 demonblooded children a season, every season. Even if Inks manages to find enough staff for that - which is a big "if" - and sets the orphanage up to funnel kids through it from newborns to the point of being able to leave and go off into the world seeking their fortunes at, say, 16... that means it'll stabilise at something like eight thousand kids. Which is eight thousand mouths to feed, eight thousand children to house, eight thousand demonblooded youths pouring into the south every season... you get the picture. It's a big, big Thing. Now, Shyft mentions that Inks is using neomah because he's assuming "there aren't any better demon laborers to fulfil their needs... demons have costs to maintain them, and in this case, the neomah's cost is that they make demons and demonblooded." Which is entirely correct - the most commonly known demons for a role are, by intent, the best at that role. Still, there might be a story or a Major Project in Inks finding an alternative. She might travel to Malfeas in search of another, lesser-known breed of courtesan-demon with a different upkeep cost that she can handle more easily. Or she might try and design (or loot) a set of pleasure-automata for the heranhals to work out their desires on. Or something else entirely! We will see.

Chronicle! Shyft and I have had a talk about its potential powers - we actually came up with a pretty decent one that fell down on a couple of points - maybe we'll decide to go with it, maybe not. He is correct that the appeal of surfboard-size-swords to have surfboard-size-swords has always entirely passed me by - it feels a bit too anime-aesthetics-without-any-thought, and honestly even a lot of the ones in anime are big for a reason and have significance attached to their bigness. I much prefer to have a reason for Chronicle being as big as it is, since a surfboard-size blade hitting no harder than a normal-sized one that's also an artifact sends my internal consistency-checker flying through the nearest wall.

Skimming through the rest, I happy-smiled at "gracious Aleph" and the appreciation for palm leaves and puns. Glad I'm entertaining you, Shyft! And yes, I was totally hoping, though not really expecting, that she'd get cocky and try to scope out the thing in the temple (no spoilers, guys!)

The influential players of Gem is both a pro-point and part of a falling-down on my part. I really should have put together a rumour-doc with the sort of "general knowledge" that Inks has picked up over the course of her time in Gem, and I haven't got round to it. Again, this is my first time as an ST, so I don't have much calibration for the amount of preprep work that I need to do for my "style" of STing - I haven't found my personal balance yet. Likewise, Shyft has mentioned he'd like to see the mystical/awesome layer of Exalted some more; dealings with gods and fights with kung-fu monks and dramatic fleeing from giant faces in sandstorms and the like. I've not been putting enough detail into that sort of thing, or the visual descriptions of Gem, so that's something I'll need to address, hopefully before the next session.

I have a lot more stuff to talk about re: scarcity and assumptions and the project system, but arranging my thoughts enough to put this together has been sort of exhausting, so I think I'll leave that post until a later date. Hopefully I can contribute some useful input to the discussion instead of just a third viewpoint that contradicts both of the ones so far.
 
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Aleph said:
Scope 3 neomah plying their trade is 100 demonblooded children a month, every month. Even if Inks manages to find enough staff for that - which is a big "if" - and sets the orphanage up to funnel kids through it from newborns to the point of being able to leave and go off into the world seeking their fortunes at, say, 16... that means it'll stabilise at something like eight thousand kids.
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One hundred per month, with Fifteen months in an exalted year and for sixteen years is twenty-four thousand, not eight. Unless you did something to reduce it by a third.
 
Estro said:
One hundred per month, with Fifteen months in an exalted year and for sixteen years is twenty-four thousand, not eight. Unless you did something to reduce it by a third.
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The comments in the actual session logs say 100 per season instead, and while a month sounds more accurate for the number of demons there are, the total calculations seem based on that.
 
Aleph said:
The bordello is actually my current biggest concern, because I try to model things pretty cause-and-effect-edly, and it basically is too big to realistically sustain. Scope 3 neomah plying their trade is 100 demonblooded children a season, every season. Even if Inks manages to find enough staff for that - which is a big "if" - and sets the orphanage up to funnel kids through it from newborns to the point of being able to leave and go off into the world seeking their fortunes at, say, 16... that means it'll stabilise at something like eight thousand kids. .
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You always have an option of sacrificing newborn for more power:whistle: Trade their souls for cool stuff!.
 
Shyft said:
Well, Compassion 3 means Inks'd have to roll every time she does that...
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Look, the solution is simple.

Inks has a lot of cattle blood. Therefore, give the neomah blood from the cattle, and then instruct them to instead make things from the cow-blood rather than the human things.

Sure, you might get demon-blooded calves, but you can still feed the demon-blooded veal to your demons, thus reducing waste.

(I accept no responsibility for them mixing some human into their cows and any resultant minotaurs produced. Anyway, if you can persuade neomah to make animals with human organs, Inks will always have a ready source of donor organs when she starts medically treating people. That's perfectly ethical science, for values of "ethical" and "science" that involve demon-made xenotransplants)
 
EarthScorpion said:
Look, the solution is simple.

Inks has a lot of cattle blood. Therefore, give the neomah blood from the cattle, and then instruct them to instead make things from the cow-blood rather than the human things.

Sure, you might get demon-blooded calves, but you can still feed the demon-blooded veal to your demons, thus reducing waste.

(I accept no responsibility for them mixing some human into their cows and any resultant minotaurs produced. Anyway, if you can persuade neomah to make animals with human organs, Inks will always have a ready source of donor organs when she starts medically treating people. That's perfectly ethical science, for values of "ethical" and "science" that involve demon-made xenotransplants)
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A perfectly Exalted Solution.:V
 
EarthScorpion said:
Look, the solution is simple.

Inks has a lot of cattle blood. Therefore, give the neomah blood from the cattle, and then instruct them to instead make things from the cow-blood rather than the human things.

Sure, you might get demon-blooded calves, but you can still feed the demon-blooded veal to your demons, thus reducing waste.

(I accept no responsibility for them mixing some human into their cows and any resultant minotaurs produced. Anyway, if you can persuade neomah to make animals with human organs, Inks will always have a ready source of donor organs when she starts medically treating people. That's perfectly ethical science, for values of "ethical" and "science" that involve demon-made xenotransplants)
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That's actually a reasonably solid idea. This is one of those conveyance things of like 'how much lattitude do you have with bound demons as to their behaviors.' It's not always clear.
 
EarthScorpion said:
Look, the solution is simple.

Inks has a lot of cattle blood. Therefore, give the neomah blood from the cattle, and then instruct them to instead make things from the cow-blood rather than the human things.

Sure, you might get demon-blooded calves, but you can still feed the demon-blooded veal to your demons, thus reducing waste.

(I accept no responsibility for them mixing some human into their cows and any resultant minotaurs produced. Anyway, if you can persuade neomah to make animals with human organs, Inks will always have a ready source of donor organs when she starts medically treating people. That's perfectly ethical science, for values of "ethical" and "science" that involve demon-made xenotransplants)
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I'm sure Anhalt wouldn't mind a cow person or two running around. He already has his minotaur war god servants, so its not like he'll have room to complain except on the grounds of copyright infringement.
 
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