- Location
- Singapore
Like lunars?
/ jk. But anyway, i still don't care much.
What i do, care, though, is that they try to establish the Lintha's badass cred by trying to make the dragonblooded look weak.
General Exalted Thread
/ jk. But anyway, i still don't care much.
What i do, care, though, is that they try to establish the Lintha's badass cred by trying to make the dragonblooded look weak.
The original, real, Lintha were born with Enlightened Essence and had their own suite of Charms while Dragonbloods only have a chance to Exalt.
But the modern "Lintha"...
Dukantha is certainly impressive on an individual level, and they have valuable demonic assets, but aside from that and their criminal network...
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Well, the real original Dragonbloods also were guaranteed Exaltation (assuming that's still canon)
- Location
- Singapore
Damn, ninja'd
Are there any examples of lintha charms/ magic/ sorcery/ thaumaturgy? I'm wondering if i should buy blood and salt
The "explanation" of how Lintha Charms worked was basically "use the crunch of the Solars' E1 Charms and change their fluff as appropriate".
Parabola
Divided Loyalties Librarian
- Location
- The Destination of Fate
- Pronouns
- She/Her
I'm now thinking of a Zenith Solar who in his past life was a super-Realm supporter.
Only in this metaphor, the current incarnation of him walked up to Her Redness, stabbed her in the back, and then whispered: "Hail Kimbery," revealing that he's become a fanatical Infernal.
The book mostly uses (sometimes lightly refluffed) Solar Charms to reflect the Lintha's Charms, so...probably not worth buying just for that.
For example:
As I understand it, the reason that the Lintha are still around and haven't been smashed by the Realm isn't so much that they're a match for the Dragon-Blooded (and that bit that says otherwise is pretty obviously meant to be propaganda), its that no one can find their hideout and burn the nest. Lintha Ng Oroo moves around, is shielded from magical scrying/detection, and makes itself more difficult to find unless you're a Lintha.
RedV
Refuelling
- Location
- Right here
I thought those applied to the directly sired (mothered?) children of Kimbery, and having the actual children of a Yozi be capable of beating/matching a DB of equivalent essence makes sense, especially when DBs are more of group combatants rather than stunning individual fighters.
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- Location
- Denmark
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Frankly, the Dragon-Blooded are the Army of Ten-Thousand Heroes; chosen of the Five Elemental Dragons and enlightened by the grace of the Five Elements flowing through them, if someone tells me that an old, pureblooded Lintha could match a Dragon-Blooded I'm going to laugh at them.
And then I'm going to laugh some more.
No doubt can a modern Lintha fleet provide quite troublesome for even the Realm, but Lintha have never, and should never be capable of matching Dragon-Blooded one-on-one, otherwise what's the point of making the Host of the Dragons, Army of Ten-Thousand Heroes if some random Lintha chumps could beat Dragon-Blooded naturally.
No, the Exaltation was a wonder unrivaled, which shook Creation to it's very foundations.
And then I'm going to laugh some more.
No doubt can a modern Lintha fleet provide quite troublesome for even the Realm, but Lintha have never, and should never be capable of matching Dragon-Blooded one-on-one, otherwise what's the point of making the Host of the Dragons, Army of Ten-Thousand Heroes if some random Lintha chumps could beat Dragon-Blooded naturally.
No, the Exaltation was a wonder unrivaled, which shook Creation to it's very foundations.
RedV
Refuelling
- Location
- Right here
But they died in the millions during the Primordial War, and much of their power is focused on co operation. Having the first generation Lintha created by Kimbery herself being unable to match a single creation of the mere devas of Gaea is kind of chumping the purebloods imo.
So what?
Even the purebred Lintha are functionally a race of demonbloods. Yes, Dragonblooded do "chump" them, because Dragonblooded are the pinnacle of soldiery - the Water Aspects came upon the fortress-harbours of the Lintha and burned their ships and murdered their sleeping sailors.
The Dragonblooded are Exalted, and the Lintha are inferior creatures, trying to fight them in their own specialised niche.
- Location
- Pittsburgh, PA
I'd go with the idea that the elite elder Lintha of the Primordial Age, the unparalleled champions of their race, could definitely walk up to a Dragonblooded soldier of the Exalted Host and kill them. In the same way that a maxed-the-fuck-out raksha noble can probably kill a Terrestrial Exalt in mano-a-mano - by virtue of shitloads of effort and time that the Terrestrial didn't need to get as far as they did, and the Exalt being an idiot who decided to ignore that the Ten-Thousand Dragons fight as one, and do not try to lone wolf the equivalent of Shin from Fist of the North Star. Moreso, that Dragonblood is something he actually has to fight, instead of booting up an environmental damage Charm or Shaping effect and watching them die screaming. To continue the FotNS reference, the Dragonblood is Toki in his first fight with Raoh, and basically any other non-Exalted champion that the Incarnae could throw at the problem is Rei trying to do the same thing*.
Also, the Lintha elder is one of maybe one or two thousand tops, and once he goes down the Lintha as a whole would need to wait for somebody else to naturally badass their way up out of the E2-E3 godblood standard of the species. Meanwhile, the Dragonbloods start off outnumbering the Lintha elite, and since they're actually fighting intelligently and ruthlessly rather than trying to have climactic 1v1 death duels, the actual rate of attrition is hilariously weighted in favor of the Dragonbloods.
EDIT: To be clear, the average Lintha matters about as much as the average mortal soldier against the Terrestrial Exalted of the First Usurpation, but I'd argue that the best of the best of the best of their race, the paragons of the Lintha who had clawed their way to E4 or E5, would be able to fight them and win one on one. Y'know, in the same way I'd say that a high-Essence Dragonblood is going to crush the average Solar into a smear on the landscape.
* For reference, Toki went up against Raoh, horrifying god-king who had up until then crushed anyone who opposed him with a single blow, and fought him on even terms, turning the force of Raoh's own blows against him and nearly tearing out the god-king's throat in the first exchange. Raoh only won by pushing Toki into an unfavorable position, placing his foot over his opponent's to hold him in place, and then ramming a sword through his own goddamn foot to pin Toki in place for a finishing blow.
Rei, by comparison, took Raoh on knowing he was outmatched, planning to unleash a secret forbidden technique of his martial art that would destroy them both. Raoh worked out what Rei intended to do, countered the secret forbidden technique before it could land, and then obliterated the poor bastard with a single Shaping effect.
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I'd say that while the Dragon-Blood could have defeated the ancient Lintha, it wouldn't have been a cake-walk, and the Dragon-Blooded fighting the Lintha is different from the Dragon-Blooded Host fighting the Lintha Empire. The latter apparently had automaton armies and would have been supported by Kimbery's sub-souls (the loss of access to which was apparently a major factor in the Empire's collapse). Still, the Dragon-Blooded of old were as far above their modern counterparts as the ancient Lintha were above the modern Lintha, so power disparity was probably about the same back then.
Of course, my personal head canon -- given that what details there are regarding how the Primordial War actually went down are mostly vague -- is that if it somehow occurred again in the modern day, with both sides back at fully strength, it could not possibly go down the same way. Beyond chance and butterfly-wing-flap differences, Creation as we know it, as it is presented to us, is fundamentally different from the Creation in which the Primordial War was waged. The Exalted might have been able to triumph over the Titans because they were able to use concepts and powers that no longer exist. The same might be true for the Lintha; while on paper, it shouldn't be possible for even the ancient Lintha to fight evenly with the ancient Dragon-Blooded, perhaps the data that would allow such a scenario to make sense could be on the parts of the paper that were blacked out or thrown into the incinerator.
Of course, my personal head canon -- given that what details there are regarding how the Primordial War actually went down are mostly vague -- is that if it somehow occurred again in the modern day, with both sides back at fully strength, it could not possibly go down the same way. Beyond chance and butterfly-wing-flap differences, Creation as we know it, as it is presented to us, is fundamentally different from the Creation in which the Primordial War was waged. The Exalted might have been able to triumph over the Titans because they were able to use concepts and powers that no longer exist. The same might be true for the Lintha; while on paper, it shouldn't be possible for even the ancient Lintha to fight evenly with the ancient Dragon-Blooded, perhaps the data that would allow such a scenario to make sense could be on the parts of the paper that were blacked out or thrown into the incinerator.
I've thought about this for a bit, and I think it would make a lot of sense if this wasn't the case. For one thing, what were then before they gained Kimbery's favor and she started banging their princes to spread her bloodline throughout their race? How would they have gained her favor in the first place? It would make more sense, at least to me, if they were a race created wholesale by Kimbery, as one of her many children. Instead of the ancient Lintha as a whole being demonbloods, there would be the Lintha, and then there would be the God-Blooded Lintha, who were born from the union between a Lintha and Kimbery, and would be the rulers of their race. The Lintha would therefore be an inhuman Primordial race, and the half-breed descendants of Kan Pol and his comrades would have been the actual "Lintha-Blooded." While they called themselves Lintha, looked like Lintha, been elevated about normal humans by their Lintha heritage, and could learn the ancient magics of the Lintha, they would be no more actually the ancient Lintha than a Fae-Blooded child of a Jadeborn would actually be one of the Mountain Folk, or than a God-Blooded would actually be a spirit.
If you look at the ancient Lintha through the lens that they were an inhuman race, rather than a race of Demon-Blooded, then it becomes easier to understand how the ancient Lintha could be so powerful, and would of been capable of not getting curbstomped by the Dragon-Blooded. An inhuman race, rather than a race of X-Bloods, wouldn't need to be constrained by the limitations and lower potential a half-mortal would need to be considered with. The examples we have of inhuman races who were peers to the Lintha, the ancient Dragon Kings (probably the norm at the time due to better infrastructure and morale) and the Enlightened Jadeborn (because no Great Geas to weaken them), are considerably more powerful overall than the strongest X-Blood, enough that they would, at minimum, be a legitimate challenge for a Dragon-Blooded. It would be reasonable to assume that the Lintha-as-inhuman-race would be similarly powerful and similarly challenging.
And they are dying.
IIRC the "Purebred" original Lintha were an entirely separate species unrelated to Humans.
Although I think they, like humans, were based off of the Man of Adamant(That is what they were called correct?)?
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But this is also correct, in that they had Hun-Po Souls and could even Exalt.
Although IIRC any that did would get most of their Lintha-esque qualities removed and replaced with more Human traits because even though their souls fit the exaltations didn't actually view their bodies as being human.
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No. I strongly, firmly disagree. I absolutely reject the standard fantasy "profusion of races that are just humans with make-up" so common to fantasy.
The Lintha are human, at a soul level. They are Kimbery's chosen humans, but they are still human. If one were so inclined, one could consider them Kimbery's Human Deluxe fork of the Primordial's Human Project. The purebred Lintha stretched the empowerment of "what a human can support" as far as they could go, and the end result was a sub-Dragonblooded race whose power was rooted in their countless demonic siblings, their infrastructure, their arts and their technology.
That is how the Lintha stood up to the Exalted host and held them off - not by number inflation and power boosting, but by being a sophisticated sea-elf civilisation with demonic warships, giant kaiju on their side, commanded by Lintha trained at the knee of Kimbery's war-souls and with their foot soldiers wielding armour and weapons inhabited by demons. They fought the Exalted through the power of civilisation and structure (and having a giant Demon Sea sugar-mama to run to).
And that is what the modern Lintha fail to understand and why they will never rise again, even if through magic all their blood was made as pure as the first Lintha to slither out of Kimbery's womb. Their true power lay in being the pre-existing hegemon. Their power lay in the fact that a Lintha soldier in full armour with full support could stand up to a Dragonblooded as long as they were part of their formations and the Lintha war machine - and the war smashed the Lintha society and the Exalted murdered their demonic patrons.
They're post-apocalyptic Americans, talking about how their bloodlines were so much better before the war and how the men of today are less than they once were - when the real reason they're nothing is that they're a bunch of inbred scavengers with bolt action rifles while the US military was the world's greatest war machine which would spend millions on a missile to avoid a soldier's death and massive infrastructural chains all set up to enable their superior position.
By making the pure-bred Lintha "super special", you're feeding and normalising and encouraging the self-destructive behaviour of the modern Lintha. Their culture of blood purity is a lie, a poison spitefully fed to them by Kimbery to punish them for breaking her laws and committing cannibalism.
TenfoldShields
Lounging on a Hoard of Words
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Uhhhhhrrmm.
I'm pretty shit at mechanics in general, which I'm told isn't as much a problem in 2e because 2e is a flaming dumpster full of screaming calculators and the numbers are burning and don't matter anyway. BUT POINT IS I can give you some feedback on the narrative aspect because that bit, at least, I'm not complete shit at.
Bluntly, I think C'al Siphar isn't much of a demon in the proper sense. 3CD's exist to Say Something about a given Yozi; to use Ligier as an example he's very much Malfeas's royal aspect. His idle magnanimity and noblesse oblige mixed in with his raw, burning, power and utter self-loathing. He's the sort of guy who makes things, who turns thoughts into action and while he isn't stupid he also isn't much of a dreamer or visionary in and of himself. 2CD's exist to Say Something about a given 3CD. Gerevesin is how Ligier communicates, ie via NUCLEAR SUN SPEARS (and his low-key susceptibility to pure and unfettered love I guess). C'al doesn't really say much about Ligier in and of himself and what he does say is inconsistent with what's known of the Green Sun.
He exemplifies Ligier's love of crafting fr'ex but we've got that Soul already. Berengiere is his Indulgent Soul and part of her thing is that she embodies how Ligier truly enjoys the process of creation, of fashioning beautiful products out of the self and expression of others, via the lens/metaphor of being a weaver. That he can't really make anything without taking something and makes his best work with some sacrifice of the self. He exemplifies the drawing of two far points together but that's not really Ligier's wheelhouse either. Things come to him, things rely on him, he doesn't really bother calling on others unless it's a super special occasion or something caught his eye. He embodies Ligier's latent love of humanity and how the Exalted are super amazing at building shit, able to surpass even his greater self.
But Ligier reeaaaally isn't the kind of person to have a secret adoration of mankind. He was the Prince of all the Earth and shit. He shone in the skies above early Creation and when he was unseated it was via defeat, humiliating surrender, and the death of his sister. He might have some fondness for master craftsmen or powerful women (iirc he can escape Malfeas to briefly chat with either under certain conditions) but it doesn't speak to any abiding love for humans as a whole. Beyond that C'al Siphar just...seems like a fundamentally decent dude? He helps humans because he likes humans and he likes them because he just kinda does. He thinks they're better at everything than the Yozi are which is, tbh, quite a lot of understanding from a creature that was royally fucked up and shoved in the cosmic dog-cage by humans in times past. He doesn't really have any character flaws in general he's just a Good Guy.
If it helps I think the best way to approach designing stuff in Malfeas and demons in general is to understand that they're products of an immense trauma coupled with a deeply fucked up society. To pull from Games of Divinity: "Eternally bitter, the Yozi reach out from their prison to work vengeance against the world. Few things in the Demon City do not ultimately serve this end. Its horrors exist to torment and kill. Its beauties exist to break the mortal heart. Only in the music of the realm do the Yozi relent. They are both dancers and musicians beyond mortal peer, and though their songs can destroy as easily as heal there is no malice in them."
This isn't to say that there can't be sympathetic demons or likeable demons or even heroic and noble demons, but rather that they exist in this context and they're all a bit bugfuck crazy.
Similarly the two 1CDs feel as if they lack the crucial demon weirdness and are just kinda Decent Dudes as well. Friend to all children and all that jazz. 1CD's are first and foremost tools and their intended role tends to be the foundation of how they view the world. Blood Apes exist to beat the shit out of each other and view the world as for shit-beating. Neomah are incubi/succubi and their main preoccupation to the near exclusion of all else is just making their weird chimera-babies.
A demon that exists as a living guide/atlas should be obsessed with charting and remembering territories and have behavior and biological functions that key into that. A demon that exists to build should have a particular something that they're built to uh...build and seek to solve most problems or challenges via building that thing. Hopping Puppeteers for instance: they're constantly rearranging territory to suit their crazed aesthetic and can be cajoled and bound to raise siege fortifications or rip them down. And then you have their weird addictive secretions as just some fucky thing they do.
greensun
You shall all burn beneath my light!!!
Pávam-berek
The Beauteous Fowl
Progeny of the Pearlescent Maiden
The Pávam-berek are beautiful beyond compare; they are peacocks the size of a lion with feathers of lapis and emerald and gold, their eyes literal gems and their crowing like silk to the ear. Their majestic heads are crowned with feathers of ruby and their beaks and claws are shining obsidian.
They are also completely and utterly useless.
The weight of opulence upon them means that are completely incapable of flight and move slowly upon the ground, and they must rest often as it pains to be standing for too long. Furthermore, they only eat precious gems and metals, along with with very rare and expensive spices(Resource 3 expense each day.) Meaning that they consume more wealth than they are worth, as when they perish most of their feathers and flesh dissolve into dust.
Put simply, they were created as to serve as both living art pieces and as a show of conspicuous consumption, to have one or even several of these creatures in one's entourage means that a sorcerer or Demon Lord is very well off indeed.
Uses: They are on the whole, utterly worthless, as they are both unable to fight, track, or serve in any other usage besides being living art. That said, they help drive off Adorjan with their beautiful, if unmagical, music and more than one Sorceror has snuck one into their rivals vaults and let them eat their massive fill.
Limited and Escape Conditions: they gain a point of limit for every day they go hungry. They rarely leave Malfeas, as they are often too slow to seize the opportunity, but rarely the can escape when a monarch locks a peacock into a vault with his other riches. The creature in question transforms into the demon, who then beggars the king.
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So a useless demon, who none the less has a purpose, as both an art piece and as an example conspicuous consumption. I could well imagine a sorceror-lord throwing precious jewels like seeds onto the ground for their favored pet to eat.
The Beauteous Fowl
Progeny of the Pearlescent Maiden
The Pávam-berek are beautiful beyond compare; they are peacocks the size of a lion with feathers of lapis and emerald and gold, their eyes literal gems and their crowing like silk to the ear. Their majestic heads are crowned with feathers of ruby and their beaks and claws are shining obsidian.
They are also completely and utterly useless.
The weight of opulence upon them means that are completely incapable of flight and move slowly upon the ground, and they must rest often as it pains to be standing for too long. Furthermore, they only eat precious gems and metals, along with with very rare and expensive spices(Resource 3 expense each day.) Meaning that they consume more wealth than they are worth, as when they perish most of their feathers and flesh dissolve into dust.
Put simply, they were created as to serve as both living art pieces and as a show of conspicuous consumption, to have one or even several of these creatures in one's entourage means that a sorcerer or Demon Lord is very well off indeed.
Uses: They are on the whole, utterly worthless, as they are both unable to fight, track, or serve in any other usage besides being living art. That said, they help drive off Adorjan with their beautiful, if unmagical, music and more than one Sorceror has snuck one into their rivals vaults and let them eat their massive fill.
Limited and Escape Conditions: they gain a point of limit for every day they go hungry. They rarely leave Malfeas, as they are often too slow to seize the opportunity, but rarely the can escape when a monarch locks a peacock into a vault with his other riches. The creature in question transforms into the demon, who then beggars the king.
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So a useless demon, who none the less has a purpose, as both an art piece and as an example conspicuous consumption. I could well imagine a sorceror-lord throwing precious jewels like seeds onto the ground for their favored pet to eat.
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- Location
- Pittsburgh, PA
"Look, you'll understand why I made that house shaped like a seashell if you just get a couple hits of H off the walls, man. Just go have a lick and you'll get it."
"what are you and why are you talking to my infant son"
- Location
- Gladstone, OR
@Norr-Saba to build off of @TenfoldShields 's point, it helps to remember that Primordials/Yozi's have their hierarchies of souls as a side effect of existing, instead of any great agency or authority on their part. Malfeas didn't make Ligier, Ligier just happens to be a name, face and personality to a huge metaphysical chunk of Malfeas's greater identity. Taken too far we get the soul-organs/made of charms problem, but as a rough metaphor it works.
Sounds plausible, but I'll need citations that it happened to a Lintha of Kan Pol's generation before I will accept it as fact, since afterwards the "Lintha" were at least half human.
I get where you're coming from, but I utterly reject the standard fantasy trope of "if its at all relevant it has to be done by humans." I fucking sneer at the idea that the Primordials would elevate a huge chunk of their prayer cattle and then dismiss humanity as no potential threat, when they'd have proof in the Lintha that when empowered by supernatural heritage, organized into a civilization, and train in the arts of war, they could be formidable. I sneer at the idea that only Autochthon and Kimbery, out of the entire Primordial Host, would arbitrarily find humanity to be worthy of their extended interest and favor. Humans are just squishy, magic-less Jadeborn; there is nothing special about them except that they have potent and varied dreams and are so inherently weak that they need to rely on supernatural protectors to survive.
Entities and species that appeared generally anthropomorphic existed for epochs before humans did, and I reject the idea that the only way the Lintha could have come about is if they were empowered humans. It makes the setting less interesting and less diverse, and I hate that with every fiber of my being.
Correct, it is a lie, because after Kan Pol died, the Lintha ceased to exist. All that were left were half-breeds that called themselves Lintha. The modern Lintha are no more true Lintha than beastmen are Lunars or those snakemen who live in the southwest are actually debased Dragon Kings. They're Nazis who proclaim themselves the rightful successors of Rome and stage fake archeological digs to "prove" that they were descended from an Arayan race that was more advanced than other civilizations that were contemporary to it. They crow about the glory and privilege of their heritage and do nothing to uphold its honor or dignity.
That said, I really don't see how them needing the power of civilization and extensive infrastructure is really mutually exclusive with the ancient, inhuman Lintha possessing average stats greater than a God-Blood's, and getting easier access to their innate magics than a God-Blooded would (represented mechanically by getting automatic charms during chargen rather than needing to buy them with bonus points like a God-Blooded, and/or needing to pay 10 xp to buy a Charm like a Jadeborn vs a God-Blood's 12 xp). Of course they would. I won't deny that. Civilization and infrastructure always results in greater power, both on a fluff and mechanical level. Dragon-Blooded from the Realm or Lookshy get more Ability dots and backgrounds with access to better Charms compared to outcastes, and Sidereals trained under the Celestial Bureaucracy start off with more of basically everything in comparison to ronin Sids. A united, cohesive empire spanning a continent would certainly be more formidable than a single katamari-city of pirates.
So what if the ancient Lintha were genuinely, innately powerful? It doesn't make the modern Lintha's claims any more legitimate, and more importantly, it still doesn't make those claims deserved. They do not have a right to the ancient Lintha's glory and magnificence. So what if they weren't weaklings that the Dragon-Blooded could steam-roll without their sugar-mama because Exalted? They would still prove victorious because they were the Dragon-Blooded, an army unlike any to ever exist before or since, empowering each other and being empowered in turn; fighting as one like nothing and no one else could. The greatness of the ancient Lintha doesn't need to be false for the Lintha's beliefs in blood purity to be an empty, self-destructive lie, any more than the Dragon-Blooded of old need to be a pack of short-sighted, covetous traitors for the Immaculate Faith to be a load of hogwash.
Either it didn't happen or if it did it was hushed up, but it was brought up as explicitly being possible.
Which does not exist. You're making this up. In the standard humans-elves-dwarves-orcs fantasy world, vast swathes of things get done by dwarves and elves (orcs, being either designated bad guys or misunderstood tribal warriors tend to be responsible for less).
Likewise, so much of what you're saying is ungrounded that I can't engage with it. The Primordials had lots and lots of races. Autochthon didn't favour humanity - he favoured the Era'teen right up until they tried to enslave him (then he ate them all, and that's where the soulsteel in Autocthonia comes from). You sneer at the idea that only Kimbery felt like favouring a branch of the prayer-cattle? There's no good reason at all to do that. Why should any of the Primordials do that, when they already had their own favoured creations and races?
Likewise, you're apparently unaware that demon-weapons and the like can't hurt the Yozis. They're not formidable. Not from the Primordial viewpoint. Why the fuck should the Primordials worry at all that humans can use demon weapons when blessed by Kimbery's doting souls? If they get uppity, at worst they can kill First Circles and annoyingly discorporate Second and Third Circles (who have to spend a year reforming). And then the offended parties will either yell at Kimbery to get her fucking pets under control and stop crapping on their lawn, or they'll declare war on them and punish them by destroying a few cities.
Nope. Wrong again. You're the one making the setting less diverse. You're adding non-human races that look exactly like humans, except, oooh, they have green skin, white hair, and red eyes. And can breed with humans. But oh, they're so much more powerful than regular humans. They're dull, dull fantasy elves, complete with palate swap.
As it stands in Exalted, the classes of being that look human are:
- Humans, including beastmen and the Lintha and other human offshoots.
- The People of Jade, who share common "ancestry" in the First Man
- Spirits, who can have many forms and probably didn't commonly wear human forms when humans weren't the dominant lifeform
- Raksha, who are lying liars who lie (also, see Spirits)
There's nothing special about the human form. It's a parochial trait of things coming from the First Man.
Also note that "human" is way broader in Exalted than most fantasy, when you complain about "humans" doing everything. Most fantasy races would just be branches of humanity in Exalted:
- Dwarves? Humans with the "Short" mutation and Cosmetic "Both Sexes have Beards"
- Elves? Humans with longer lifespan and cosmetic pointy ears
- Orcs? Humans with green skin.
- Snakemen? Human snake beastmen.
- Centaurs? Human horse beastmen.
- Hobbits? Probably a bunch of dwarves who've bred with other humans and lost the "both sexes have beards" trait.
... what the earth are you talking about?
Article: A poet, a historian, and the architect of Lintha philosophy, Kan Pol the younger was a mere halfblood, the child of Lintha Ba'ar, a ship's mate, and an unnamed commoner.
The Lintha were already long since watered down, and indeed Kan Pol was a conservative backlash against the liberal standards of his time. The entire modern Lintha culture is born of a reactionary philosopher, and hardened by Dukthanka who is just Kimbery fucking over the Lintha further.
As Stephen Lea Shepard puts here:
Article: Keep in mind that the Lintha focus on pure breeding is only, what, three, four hundred years old? Kan Pol's book was a reaction to looser breeding standards that had persisted among the Lintha since the end of the Shogunate. Not even counting the Shogunate period itself, that leaves about four or five hundred years in which they bred with whoever the fuck they wanted. Lotta mutant-strain got into their bloodlines during that period, and persists today, including the nigh-ubiquitous gills.
Ton of it would have been with pelagothropes.
Stop.
Arguing from chargen and XP costings is an awful idea. When I'm talking about the ancient Lintha being effectively god-blooded, I don't mean that they're generated with the bad mechanics in Scroll of Heroes. I mean they're humans who natively use Essence and have their own native Charm selection.