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General Exalted Thread

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There's also a pretty straightforward solution to the "actually, the magical materials should be cheap in the Second Age" problem. In fact it's odd that I've never seen this mentioned; weren't some of the original line designers economists?

In the First Age, the pure magical materials really were far rarer and more expensive. One response to this was a lot of investment in expensive, complicated facilities to extract or refine more of them (like the sun-concentrating-mirror manses), yes. But a much more common response was to find substitutes, ways to achieve the same result with much fewer of the "proper" magical materials. Maybe you use your advanced metallurgy to produce jade-steel alloys that are only one part per hundred of jade but nearly as strong. Maybe you have machines able to etch starmetal so finely that you can draw out potent effects from only trace quantities. Maybe you are able to so totally control the surrounding geomancy that your manse can be mostly made out of gold, using orichalcum for only the most critical features.

In the Second Age, if you try to reforge that jade-steel you'll just ruin it. You are four or five rungs down the infrastructure ladder to even attempt to work starmetal that finely. You'd need firm control of the geomancy for a hundred miles around to make up for gold's lack of mystical oomph. So even though it's somewhat easier to get your hands on a jade talent, you often need ten where your predecessors could have made do with one.

(This also explains why the Second Age isn't just totally awash in hand-me-down daiklaves. Even in the First Age, the constraints of a daiklave or other personal-scale weapon generally ruled out the MM-substitutes. These weapons were correspondingly still fairly rare, since there were uses of pure MMs that gave comparable or better bang-for-your-buck.)
 
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If, say, i wish to summon a large flock of birds, like quail, to me in the desert, would it be thaumaturgy or sorcery?
 
Bel said:
...Speaking of eating somebody's love ones, is there a way to well transfer wounds from you to your victims? Not sure how balanced it would be and mortals are much squishier than exalted...but the image of "You can't hit me, your wife will be the one whose cut!" is a fairly strong one. You basically keep your human shields inside yourself. Though that does make people trying to cut you open a bit tragic...
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The problem with taking a hostage like that there's no incentive to ever let them go. After a while of being like that they'd basically be doing their wife a favour.
 
Going on the off chance that this is the appropriate threat to ask this question about Exalted, can someone explain the new sorcerous intitations to me?
In the examples given in the core book, is it the pact with say Mara that gives you access to TCS, in the sense that she shakes your hand and you can do magic?
Or would she be the teacher and supply shaping rituals and the rest functions like in 2e?
I'm not really invested in the Five Trials but i'd be kinda bummed if the whole "making a sacrifice on the altar of your own power" part was no longer necessary.
Because that is actually a cool character moment, if you don't do something lazy like cutting off your hand.
 
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Tungul said:
Going on the off chance that this is the appropriate threat to ask this questions about Exalted, can someone explain the new sorcerous intitations to me?
In the examples given in the core book is the pact with say Mara that gives you access to TCS in the sense that she shakes your hand and you can do magic
Or would she be the teacher and supply shaping rituals and the rest functions like in 2e?
I'm not really invested in the Five Trials but i'd be kinda bummed if the whole "making a sacrifice on the altar of your own power" part was no longer necessary.
Because that is actually a cool character moment, if you don't do something lazy like cutting of your hand.
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If you don't buy extra perk, yeah, she basically just shake your hand, you now can use sorcery, congrats!
(No, she doesn't even supply you with spell)
If you do buy her perk, she'll give you much more support. Bonus roll against demons, can ask her question in your dream, etc.
 
theweepingman said:
If you don't buy extra perk, yeah, she basically just shake your hand, you now can use sorcery, congrats!
(No, she doesn't even supply you with spell)
If you do buy her perk, she'll give you much more support. Bonus roll against demons, can ask her question in your dream, etc.
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Frankly I always interpreted it as her giving you tuition in sorcery which fit her particular style of casting, and I think such an approach is far more beneficial for both the game (so Mara can't just round up a bunch of people, make them promise to do as she wants to and then shake their hands for sorcery) and more interesting for characters. She does, in fact supply you with a spell if she teaches you sorcery, which we can infer from such a character possessing a control spell; while it has been stated by the developers that the Five Trials no longer exist (a mistake, I think), I think it is fair to assume that sorcery is not something that one can merely gain for free, and indeed I would suggest that one have sorcery be mind-breakingly hard to master. It is an art that requires aptitude, skill and dedication to the point of obsession, not for the faint of heart.
 
ManusDomine said:
Frankly I always interpreted it as her giving you tuition in sorcery which fit her particular style of casting, and I think such an approach is far more beneficial for both the game (so Mara can't just round up a bunch of people, make them promise to do as she wants to and then shake their hands for sorcery) and more interesting for characters. She does, in fact supply you with a spell if she teaches you sorcery, which we can infer from such a character possessing a control spell; while it has been stated by the developers that the Five Trials no longer exist (a mistake, I think), I think it is fair to assume that sorcery is not something that one can merely gain for free, and indeed I would suggest that one have sorcery be mind-breakingly hard to master. It is an art that requires aptitude, skill and dedication to the point of obsession, not for the faint of heart.
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Tuition would make way more sense than hand shaky sorcery givvy. Otherwise sorcerers would be a lot more common than they should.
Ironic considering that the easily accessible thaumaturgy has been dialed back to being a few scattered individuals with weird powers, but worldshaking sorcery is now as easy as any spirit the size of an Ifrit being in a greeting mood.

By the way do you have a link to the devs saying that? I'm curious at their reasoning for offing the trials. With the next big sorcery book being all about the life of Bridgid thats a pretty big retcon.

It kind of has to be doesn't it? Otherwise any spirit with half an ambition could be breeding an army of loyal god-blooded sorcerer children.

While were on the subject do you think Exalts can intitiate each other? Seems like the kind of thing they would do and they easily overpower Ifrits
 
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Accelerator said:
If, say, i wish to summon a large flock of birds, like quail, to me in the desert, would it be thaumaturgy or sorcery?
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There is explicitly a Procedure for this in the Art of Husbandry, Summon (Species), where you can spend up to two hours calling up a given species of non-magical animal to your location, with difficulty as-determined by the Control Rating of that animal. There's only two things limiting the use here, one from the ritual, and one external to it. First, the animal species has to live within the nearby area and be able to physically make it to the magician's side, going by a mile per dot of the user's Essence. You can't draw a whale from the deep and force it to travel inland upstream just to say you did.

Secondly, the ritual needs to be used with care inside the supernatural ecosystem. Because as-mentioned, all natural animals have god-Avatars associated with them, and many, many tribal peoples who live off these beasts with any regularity make sure that the spirit of the animal and its guardian god are appeased by the respect made towards the hunt. Simply wandering into a new territory and depopulating the region of caribou because you've repeatedly drawn all the nearby herds to slaughter is going to build up some disfavorable enemies, and not just from competing peoples who use those caribou as a food/culture-resource, but also the Caribou Avatar leveraging those herds as focal points of esteem and worship.

Without the restraining laws of Yu-Shan stopping upfront collusion, most terrestrial animal spirits work akin to gang bosses, with mutual alliances and internal politics following migration routes instead of neighborhoods. If you have overdrawn from the herds of Caribou Avatar, they might meet with Wolf and Bear to figure out what to do about the problems you are creating for all three of them, because there's now less food to sustain wolf and bear populations as well as the nomads, which begins a ripple effect across the region. Starving wolves and bears, scenting caribou trails back to your lands, might undertake makeshift raids under the cover of darkness, savaging innocent people who get in the way, and so on.
 
Tungul said:
Tuition would make way more sense than hand shaky sorcery givvy. Otherwise sorcerers would be a lot more common than they should.
Ironic considering that the easily accessible thaumaturgy has been dialed back to being a few scattered individuals with weird powers, but worldshaking sorcery is now as easy as any spirit the size of an Ifrit being in a greeting mood.
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Well, it's not just tuition. Ultimately, being a sorcerer isn't "you've learned things", it's "you are now magic". In the case of a pact with Mara, it's quite possibly "you are now magic because you learned at the feet of a demon lord", but tuition isn't strictly necessary - otherwise sorcerous relic initiations wouldn't make sense. Likewise with the Soul-Perfecting Elixir - you're not a sorcerer because you know how to brew it, you're a sorcerer because you brewed it and drank it.

It kind of has to be doesn't it? Otherwise any spirit with half an ambition could be breeding an army of loyal god-blooded sorcerer children.

While were on the subject do you think Exalts can intitiate each other? Seems like the kind of thing they would do and they easily overpower Ifrits
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There are probably hard limits on how often spirits can initiate sorcerers. (Plus, note that it's not any old ifrit, it's an ifrit lord - a certain metaphysical stature is clearly required.) An Exalted sorcerer probably could get an "initiate someone in sorcery" charm, with similar restrictions on how often it can be used. Something like E4 Occult 5, you can initiate one sorcerer per year would probably be fine, and a necessity for anyone trying to start a school of sorcery. (Once it's established, you can start using "studied at a great academy of sorcery" initiations, but you'd have to get it started first.)

Actually... in the case of Solars, I'd say they don't get a "bam you're a sorcerer now" charm. It doesn't fit their themes. Instead they get a charm that makes it easy for them to guide students to initiate by other means. They can paint an arcane rune on their student's third eye and drop them in a wyld zone to get them Scarred by Nightmares safely-ish, or they can spend a month taking their student to various elemental courts and be sure than they'll find a patron, or they can get their student bitten by a sapphire dreamsnake without the 99.9% failure rate, or if they run a school of sorcery, their students get the "studied at a school of sorcery" initiation way easier. This is a lot less convenient than a Lunar distilling the blood of a hundred magical beasts (i.e. himself in a hundred different forms) into a silver potion that enlightens the drinker, but in exchange it can be used a lot more often.
 
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Vanigo said:
Something like E4 Occult 5, you can initiate one sorcerer per year would probably be fine, and a necessity for anyone trying to start a school of sorcery.
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What do you think of Dragonblooded having one that can only be used on their own children who successfully Exalted? It keeps the sorcerous family thing earlier fluff had, and gives another reason beyond heavy prejudice in favor of Exalts for why the unExalted patricians aren't guided towards Sorcery that they can actually obtain and become useful with, by removing the pressure to have a reliable alternative method anyone can use.
 
beowolf said:
What do you think of Dragonblooded having one that can only be used on their own children who successfully Exalted? It keeps the sorcerous family thing earlier fluff had, and gives another reason beyond heavy prejudice in favor of Exalts for why the unExalted patricians aren't guided towards Sorcery that they can actually obtain and become useful with, by removing the pressure to have a reliable alternative method anyone can use.
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The problem with that is, we know where the Realm gets most of its sorcerers - the Heptagram. Giving Celestials an easy way to initiate small numbers of sorcerers doesn't conflict with that, but giving it to Terrestrials does. I'd say Terrestrials just plain don't get one. Or, if they do it requires multiple exalts working in concert so that it almost never happens outside of big academies - but that would be kind of redundant, since big academies can initiate students by virtue of being big academies.
That still leaves you with a good reason why the patricians largely don't learn sorcery - big sorcerous academies are the most easily located source of sorcerous initiation, and as such they're probably the hardest to make work. Terrestrials have excellencies, so they can reliably hack it, but mortals tend to wash out of the upper-level classes.
 
Parthus Journey-Questioner
Creature of the Wyld
Spawn of Chaos

It is said that once, when the world was younger, a great cat-like beast from the transient lands of chaos came roaming into Creation, devouring all it could. Now as all men know, the moon is a ceaseless trickster and he led the wyld-beast on a merry dance until, exhausted, the beast collapsed beside a river where the goddess Mercury was bathing. Alas for the creature, the goddess broke his collarbone with a boathook and blinded him in three eyes before he could even unhinge his jaw, for as the goddess of sailors, Mercury fought like a tavern tough. It thought to distract her by challenging her to a game of wits about the many strange lands it had been to, but Mercury was wiser than it and turned its words back on itself. Somewhat irked by its presence ruining her favourite bathing spot, she tricked it into an oath that it could only feed off those who agreed to one of its riddle-games and lost. In time the creature starved and Creation quenched its chaos and it became a mortal housecat.

That is the tale that Parthus tells, at least, and he claims to be one of the children that the nameless wyld-beast sired on the great cats of Creation before the chaos within it died. Three metres tall at the shoulder, with the body of a leopard, the neck of a snake and the head of a man, Parthus haunts the Fire Mountains. He lays claim to many rivers and roads that crosses this jagged landscape, confronting travellers and threatening them with all kinds of terrible fates if they do not correctly answer his riddles and puzzles. Parthus is a liar. Much like his claimed father before him, he cannot touch anyone who does not agree - even implicitly - to wager their life against their capacity to answer him.

For all the chaos-taint in him, many might say that Parthus cat-like nature holds him close. He is profoundly lazy, sleeping on mountain ridges for most of the day and is most active around dawn and twilight. He prefers to kill with a bite to the spine, and often will not strike immediately after someone fails his riddle - knowing that now their life is in his hands. Other times he will pretend to be a god or an elemental to fool those who have not heard of his legend, going as far as to invite them into fantasies he weaves with his forepaws which make them pliable and more willing to agree to his games. Those who assume that just because he cannot feed from them means he will not fight back often receive a lethal surprise - his inherited oaths do nothing to stop him from defending himself from violence, even if he cannot initiate the conflict. Should someone look like they mean to harm him, he asks a riddle and takes their blow as an answer of sorts.
 
Iirc, the devs don't really want giant sorcery acadamies, which is bullshit in case you're a twilight who wants to bring your enlightenment to the world.
 
Holden and Hatewheel didn't want massive sorcery academies, except possibly the Heptegram. I don't know that Minton and Vance have commented on it.

Remember: We have new devs now who are actually nice people. Be careful where you lay the blame :p
 
RedV said:
Um, what happened with Okeanos?
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They basically went "Well it was a place where minorities of Primordial Races fought one the side of Okeanos and by extension the Exalted, making those groups possibly the only remaining populations of those species after the Primordial War. And since they didn't fight for the Primordials, there would be no reason for the Exalted Host to slaughter or oppress those groups, meaning that those species could rebuild from Okeanos as a part of First Age civilization. Therefore, there could be more cool and different inhuman civilizations beyond pockets of Dragon Kings and the Mountain Folk living underground; letting Creation have more than variations on four to five flavors aaannnnnnnd its gone."

I look at Okeanos, and I see the crown jewel of Exalted's evil plot of putting all sorts of potentially cool and fascinating places and peoples in the West, and then systematically choking the life out of anything that might have once caught my interest before my very eyes. It feels like everything in the western quarter of Creation has been robbed of anything that would make me want to have anything to do with it; all of it has either been destroyed or neutered by backstory, been denied proper development, or just been left fucking blank.

Okeanos? Very cool, destroyed via backstory.
Heartwind Island? Really cool, destroyed via backstory.
The Great Western Ocean? Miles and miles of nothing-filled wasted space until 3e.
The Wailing Fen, the Swamp of Sorrows, etc., basically the entire southwestern coast below An-Teng? I didn't even really know they existed until I tracked down some of the 1e books. There are tree-squids down there and they do nothing with that.
An-Teng? Wasted potential; instead of an order vs. chaos overarching theme set in magical India, we get lukewarm plothooks and a whole bunch of meh set in magical British-occupied India.
The Rajtul? Vikings with elkmen mystics backing them up, have minimal development and get to share their chapter space in Compass: North with several other cultures and locations that are frankly also more interesting that most of the ones that got their own chapters.
The City of Shining Reefs? Atlantis full of Neverborn worshipers who's culture and power has decayed from its glory days and whose people don't actually do much because they just didn't give a fuck.
Luthe? It would require a separate rant to elaborate all the reasons I hate Luthe.
The Denzik? Quite interesting, actually, but not really even a part of the West.
The Lintha? The third or maybe fourth iteration on Atlantis the West has, and one of the most interesting aspects of the direction; but, their entire point is supposed to be that they aren't cool anymore.
The big swath of islands sitting between Wavecrest and the Neck? Might as well not exist.
Wavecrest, Coral, the Neck, and Skullstone? Respectively: Volcanoes and little else of note, pirates and supernatural gambling and little else of note, little of note even in-universe, and a place that, like Luthe, would require a separate post to encompass all the reasons I hate it.

I will be the first to admit that I am biased on this subject. I'm sure that, objectively, the West has lots of adventure fodder and fertile narrative soil. But personally, I can't look at the West without feeling like it is mocking me with everything it could be but isn't.
 
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