Depends on the Solar who made it! Could also be a Hork-Bajir type species! Blades for everything, eats bark or dirt or something else worthless but plentiful, used as free labor and designed to be too stupid to question being slaves. The First Age would be full of that stuff. Some would be weird and vaguely mechanical, some would be biological, some would be demons, some would be 'fuck off it's magic'! There's tons of room for the benefits of automation without literal factory lines.
General Exalted Thread
- Location
- Singapore
I look at roll of divinity, and element control is stackalable. How so? Range and barrels increase per essence level above 2?
Here is the thing. The problem you're objecting to here, the 'lack of imagination'? That is how we Got to this point. Not because people don't have good ideas for worldbuilding the First Age, but because there are zero reference points to attach those ideas onto once you sweep aside everything which came before. This is not a problem which started with the fandom either, its existed since First Edition.
There were three points in the entire setting which First Edition left entirely up in the air, with nothing save vague allusions towards what to do with them (in descending order of broadness): The Wyld, the Primordial War/First Age, and the Underworld. Between them, we have "literally everything and anything," "impossibly super-advanced beyond all frame of reference," and "old and unknown lands of former-Creation, apply your own death-filter." All three of these persisted as huge, looming question-marks until 2e, when they finally got books devoted to people sitting down and thinking critically about "what should be here besides big signs saying Here Be Dragons?"
The first and last took cues from Creation and their respective splats, and though they Tried, were ultimately not outlandish enough to deviate from especially weird places in Creation colored by their major influences. A middlemarch forest of towering, blown-glass evergreens lit from within their heartwood like blazing lamps and bedecked in icicle-candles is a cool visual, but its a cool visual which exists independently of being the Wyld. It could just as easily be a potent Fire demesne, an ifrit's cultured sanctum or a minor faerie freehold.
Not much different than a foaming geyser of superheated blood on a blasted plain which shoots out from the ground in gorily regular intervals, nonetheless capable of enwrapping an immersed ghost in a temporary, yet death-tainted body of warm and pliable skin. This exposure would be permanent to any living mortal, though the broiling steam will agonizingly strip away her old flesh down to the bone in the process. Is this curiosity, liable to let ghosts briefly walk among men as equals, or allow the living to be 'reborn' with a new face and form, an exotic Underworld feature or simply the results of a powerful shadowland?
Does it Matter? Ultimately, not really. Because the knowledge we have about the Wyld and the Underworld from a dozen and a half evocative examples is still enough to make even ideas like these feel as though they could "fit" and "make sense" with the themes, even if only tucked away into a small corner and not made into full setpieces unto themselves. The First Age though, that was an entirely separate can of worms all together, since it exists as a Time Period and an Ideal rather than a concrete Location. There were no evocative examples of the First Age at its height, only a collection of people, objects and places which exist Now in the Time of Troubles, but did then in far better conditions and or in more numerous amounts.
It had a collection of Things which had to be there rather than a Theme, and you cannot ask people to "build their own" without first asking the questions of "what does the First Age mean for this game" and "where do these things factor into it" to fill the void of that lack of evocative worldbuilding and create that theme. At the time of Wonders of the Lost Age, the writers had only Magitech and "as the Second Age version, but not as shitty" to work from, not any setting-questions to answer, so they simply made more Things which iterated on what might be useful in a Second Age context. Even before Dreams of the First Age rolled around it was already set in stone that the Old Realm was about having A Shitload of Expensive Stuff, and many of its greatest treasures were Purchasable Stuff you could hammer together in your spare time if need be.
Which is a large part of why Dreams fell so flat, being bigger numbers, more things and Not All That Different, just Cleaner And Nicer. It didn't answer any questions people were hoping it would, and instead collected a lot of First Age Stuff in one place to try and stitch together a civilization from it without saying anything about it beyond "if your frame of reference for the Second Age doesn't apply here, use your understanding of the Modern day instead." And that is exactly how people interpret it now, once you take that "Magitech Stuff" off the table and demand people do it themselves. It makes that lack of answered questions more pronounced, because the book never poses any new questions to stop and force the reader to second-guess those pre-established attitudes.
The only reason we ask those questions Now, and need answers to them Now, is because 1e/2e brought with it a wealth of contradictory information insisting the reader make sense of it all. If you don't have that context of 1e or 2e knowledge to try and reconcile, and the book says nothing on the subject, you're left with where the writers of Wonders and Dreams were at, but with even less to utilize because you cannot answer it with the solution of magitech. Which is not a failing of the reader, but a failing of the book to provide what is necessary to make it Work.
It does not ask the potential Storyteller, "is your First Age a utopia built on mortal servitude? Exalted hubris? Technological advancement?" "Are its Solars truly the tyrant-kings they were portrayed to be, ignorant but well-intentioned rulers in ivory towers, or unwitting victims of a jealous coup by an overly alarmist Sidereal junta?" and so on, because those will be the things which shape the themes and focuses of "this is how the First Age was" ingame more than any establishing-paragraphs about farming arcologies and how abundant the hand-manufactured lightbulb was. So until the text Does take explicitly-noted steps to make those gestures, and give the reader something which can Inspire them to work out the kind of First Age which is not a reductionist magitech cybercity with a fantasy cast, or cleaner-and-nicer Second Age with some spit-shine on the ugly parts, it is selling an Empty idea of "make shit up to solve these setting-gap problems."
You can't just demand imagination in a contextless void of "not this, but not the other thing either." Because inspiration doesn't work like that, the book has to Teach what the First Age should encompass before it asks the reader to define it for themselves.
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Biggest element of the First Age, considering Elder Exalt malfunctions...is that it was if anything else...not standardized. Every single God-King present will have their own vision of utopia and the means to attain it, they may work together on projects, but I personally see it as their fiefs being wildly divergent.
I mean, can you imagine anyone trying to impose a standard form of utopia upon the collective Exalted Host without everyone ELSE fighting them over it?
You'd have the guy trying to recreate the forest he lived in before it became collateral damage out of nostalgia, and then souping it up to be basically fantasy elf land.
The guy building a robot army so everyone could live in post scarcity forever, the guy making Slaanesh proud, the guy who figures he should make sure future generations of humanity don't get soft by turning his domain into a giant deathtrap and the guy who just doesn't give a shit, as long as he could get a good fight(and deliberately letting megabeasts breed and wyld pockets exist so he doesn't get too bored).
So...very much like the Wyld, I just don't see the Exalted Host coming to a unified quality of life agreement beyond a league of nations to adjudicate issues when their stuff fallout onto the guy next door's lawn.
Too many strong willed, highly dedicated individuals.
The only things they are likely to agree on are threats to all Creation as a whole. And even then it's a maybe. The Sword of Creation probably had literal brawls break out over how to implement it and permissions over everyone's territory.
I mean, can you imagine anyone trying to impose a standard form of utopia upon the collective Exalted Host without everyone ELSE fighting them over it?
You'd have the guy trying to recreate the forest he lived in before it became collateral damage out of nostalgia, and then souping it up to be basically fantasy elf land.
The guy building a robot army so everyone could live in post scarcity forever, the guy making Slaanesh proud, the guy who figures he should make sure future generations of humanity don't get soft by turning his domain into a giant deathtrap and the guy who just doesn't give a shit, as long as he could get a good fight(and deliberately letting megabeasts breed and wyld pockets exist so he doesn't get too bored).
So...very much like the Wyld, I just don't see the Exalted Host coming to a unified quality of life agreement beyond a league of nations to adjudicate issues when their stuff fallout onto the guy next door's lawn.
Too many strong willed, highly dedicated individuals.
The only things they are likely to agree on are threats to all Creation as a whole. And even then it's a maybe. The Sword of Creation probably had literal brawls break out over how to implement it and permissions over everyone's territory.
The corebook doesn't need to say anything about the First Age, other than it existed, it was great, and now it's gone. Because that's all that matters for the point of the corebook. If there are later books focusing more on the first age, sure. But right now, the point is to focus on the Age of Sorrows. Not on the distant past. You wanna do more with the first age, imagination. And I mean, if you want it to be a forge-world like a Mechanicus planet in 40k, or a shiny Magitech Mass Effect looking sci-fi vibe in your games, sure, more power to you.
My objection was to what it should be canonically, and to the idea that industrailizing was absolutely essential, because it isn't. Industrialization, in the context of the wonders Solars can make, is just fluff. It's the flavor of how they accomplish their grand things. Some Solar might have an awesome factory-cathedral. But that doesn't make it better than the dude who bred a service race of monsters and workers to form a permanent underclass to serve his human population, and who are every bit a match for well equipped and trained humans on the fields of battle, just by being weird-ass monsters.
It's just fluff for how he got where he is.
EDIT: To be clear. If the goal of the corebook was to have a clear first age, or communicate a clear vision of it, I'd totally agree with you. But it's supposed to be a mythic time of long-long ago, and mean something different for every table. Do what works for you, just...please, please don't say that industrial automation and factories are the absolute endgame for everything. It's a world of wide ranging magic. Lots of weirder options out there!
I'm sorry if I am not communicating well. I feel like I'm zig-zagging and not keeping track of my brain.
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Parabola
Divided Loyalties Librarian
- Location
- The Destination of Fate
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Sounds like a great back story for that artifact's Evocations.
I think that's actually an official Artifact, although I don't remember where...
- Location
- Singapore
did it involve a vehicle?
It is. The Glorious Scythe, a 5 dot Artifact in WotLA.
What's it do?
- Location
- Singapore
used to cut down mass numbers of infantry.
Only about 60 Twilights in the lot of them, and not all of those are interested in social engineering.
And not everyone is interested in retooling a society from scratch according to a particular esthetic.
While there will be people who will delight in doing the whole fairyland thing, most people will not go out of their way to reinvent the wheel.
I suspect you'll find that First Age society would end up significantly more standardized than you'd expect, simply by sheer dint of human laziness.
It is.
Glorious Scythe, Shogunate-era 5 dot artifact, Wonders of the Lost Age.
Not counting just the Twilights. Keep in mind the Eclipses, Dawns, Nights and Zeniths may also look askance at experimental improvement projects from their peers even if they have no social or technological engineering projects of their own. Heck, it's quite likely that the progressively minded types are more likely to head into the Wyld to carve out a chunk of reality to experiment on, while the more possessive/protective types are more likely to claim their homelands to protect and preserve as they were before the War...or improve in more limited manners in their own vision.
- Location
- Singapore
Also, nothing says they have to match their caste.
Nothing wrong with a dawn learning athletics. Or a night caste learning investigation.
Nothing wrong with a dawn learning athletics. Or a night caste learning investigation.
- Location
- Singapore
Ya know, i kinda read that as attack on titan....
Now thats an idea....
- Location
- Pittsburgh, PA
So a network of Essence conduits that continually cleanses & reinforces the hun-po structures of humans that live inside its field of influence, fueled via careful cultivation of the region's geomancy.
A costly-but-effective Wonder that condenses the emitted energies of a high-power Solar manse to create a tangible embodiment of some of the qualities endemic to Solar Essence, namely "cleanliness/purity", which naturally smooths out irregularities & filters contaminants from other motonic structures that interact with it.
Dragon King biotech, straight from 2E.
Do you see the thing here? It's actually not that difficult to have the setting be open to either magic-as-technology or mysticism as ways of explaining how its components work. The gameline could lay out a coherent pencil sketch of things like the High First Age, the Shogunate, the Underworld, and other major elements of the setting and then tell the readers that they're free to choose for themselves where their Creation falls on the sci-fi/fantasy spectrum - with a handy set of examples for how to do so.
The issue here is:
Yeah, this. This is not good, or even competent, design. At best, it's a continuation of 2E's perennial problem where new players have to spend months absorbing data on the gameline via Internet osmosis before they have the slightest clue of how to actually play the damn game - at worst, it's a towering monument to sloth and indolence, elegantly shaped into a middle finger that blocks out the proverbial sun.
Because you can't make the First Age a formless blob without also sanding a lot of detail of everything that came after it. I can easily superimpose my own ideas of how to handle it onto that blob, and you can do the same, but anyone who hasn't lived and breathed Exalted long enough to have their own clear picture of what "their Creation" is coming in the door? They're fucked.
Meanwhile, the various groups of more seasoned Exalted players get to claw at each other endlessly on the Internet over how to interpret 3E's "canon", because it's essentially a blank slate with no actual form of its own beyond a few scraps of lingering 2E. Holden spent years tormenting his "coworkers", saying crazy shit on the Internet, and generally metamorphosing into a Third World nerd dictator, and finally offered up something that's inscrutable to newcomers and might as well be the Apple of Discord for everyone else.
Clearly our experiences differ.
Of course not.
Not everyone will be an archetype of their Caste.
But as far as I know, Exaltations tend to select for aptitude.
And people are lazy. When the wheel has already been invented, not that many people are so bloodyminded as to insist on wholesale
Look at the whole history of the schools of Sorcery, for example.
Not to mention that,at least in the early and mid-First Age, some shit was subject to censure, whether legal, or just an aggrieved Night Caste staging an assassination. So you either have to be unassailable, or at least defensibly conventional.
There was a reason why K'Tula kept the nature of her modifications to herself, her husband and progeny a secret.
Like veekie said, easier to simply requisition a couple of reality engines and go rework a section of the Wyld if you want to do anything radical.
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Parabola
Divided Loyalties Librarian
- Location
- The Destination of Fate
- Pronouns
- She/Her
As a new player myself, not being told what exactly the First Age is in 3e's corebook is actually a relief, precisely because of the reasons you just mentioned. It feels difficult to have to read 2e's several books to get the most in-depth understanding of what the First Age was 'supposed' to be like. Not being told what it's like beyond broad strokes is ok because it means that with a new group of people who've never played before, we can just figure it out ourselves.
Although I can totally understand how annoying it'd be, to someone who's already internalized all of 2e's fluff.
You're extrapolating an awful lot from one word of one tweet. About the workings of a splat that's years down the line, no less.
Maybe wait until there's a little more information?
- Location
- London, England
Especially since the Infernal Castes were always mirrors of the Solar ones at that. Less direct ones than the Abyssals, but still pretty obviously connected.
azoicennead
Overly-Affectionate Zombie Squad
- Pronouns
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Just like Fiends were?
- Location
- Pittsburgh, PA
That's actually a good point, and one that helps me understand your perspective here. New players absolutely deserve to have a guidebook to the setting that they can use until they soak up the full package.
My argument is that for Exalted, that should probably take the form of quick bullet points, maybe even a "complexity ranking" where things like the Wyld/Underworld/Malfeas/Heaven/etc each get a section that tries to run through how to handle them at different granularities*. Most of all, it needs to have plot hooks and premade idea bundles for DMs to pick up and work with.
I'm mostly using an old third-party D&D book as my blueprints here - it was ultimately just a list of monsters, but each one had notes on how they behave, ways for sample cultures/races to play off them, and most of all, at least two prebaked story premises for each one that made clever use of the monsters' natures and abilities.
Anyway-
FUUUUUUUUUUUUUU
... I am officially out of energy right now.
Something to the effect of:
- For newbie DMs: a few basic places you can run a decent game in without needing too much setting lore, and the barebones IC knowledge your average peasant, scholar, and occultist would have on the weirder parts of the setting. The High First Age is present only as a cluster of contradictory myths and vanishingly rare bits of remaining architecture/work. Shogunate history is present mostly through the lens of Immaculate doctrine or similar biased sources, but also by including several examples of how its remains still influence the setting (with a blurb on how to adjust the optics on that from "broken Shogunate swords used as pickax heads" to "Shogunate-era helicopter blades recycled into Second Age daiklaives.")
- For intermediate DMs: some behind-the-scenes detail on some of the previous weird parts, so now you have some of the more subversive knowledge like demons not being pure evil, tiny dribs & drabs on Lunars beyond the regional stereotypes, a little on the Underworld and how ghosts happen - and most importantly, some solid ideas for how to leverage this new information and use it to enrich your game without getting overwhelmed. Add a bit of focus on using this to provide potential for the players to "discover" that things aren't as black and white as they thought along with the PCs. First Age knowledge is still murky AF, Shogunate can be worked out in broad strokes if the players do some digging.
- For seasoned DMs: more detail on the weird parts. The Yozis, until now established primarily as weird vague demon gods with ominous titles, get some level of characterization for the DM to use, which in the process helps further the picture of the Yozis as pitiable/sympathetic and dangerous/unpleasant in equal measure, along with an overview of Hell's "rules" (No love without pain, etc.) and appearance. The Underworld's metaphysics are broadly outlined, with particular focus on Greater Dead and Deathlords (because as the things you could potentially meet/fight/parley with, those are the more immediate thing for most campaigns). More OOC information on Lunars; Sidereals and Celestial Bureaucracy get a paragraph or two outlining them as present in the setting, but again the focus is more on what they do to the setting at a distance than going into their organization or internal philosophy. Add the Grey Men here if you want to provide a street-level agent of the Fivescore Fellowship for players to interact with, since they can work just fine as shifty secret agents of Fate working on orders from shadowy superiors without dragging in all the Celestial Bureaucracy/Sidereal lore.
- For veteran DMs: everything that's been too bulky or complicated to fit in before now. Not a comprehensive dissertation on the setting, but enough that the DM could feasibly keep their campaign chugging along for a year or two while letting all the juicy knowledge sink in and waiting for future books to flesh out some of the more esoteric/weighty elements of the setting. Here's where you put in some hooks for Malfean skulduggery with cults or other shady business, ideas for Underworld strangeness that could bubble up into Creation as part of a story, and the aforementioned pencil sketches of the High First Age, the Usurpation, and suggestions on how to handle those things in your own campaign.
- For newbie DMs: a few basic places you can run a decent game in without needing too much setting lore, and the barebones IC knowledge your average peasant, scholar, and occultist would have on the weirder parts of the setting. The High First Age is present only as a cluster of contradictory myths and vanishingly rare bits of remaining architecture/work. Shogunate history is present mostly through the lens of Immaculate doctrine or similar biased sources, but also by including several examples of how its remains still influence the setting (with a blurb on how to adjust the optics on that from "broken Shogunate swords used as pickax heads" to "Shogunate-era helicopter blades recycled into Second Age daiklaives.")
- For intermediate DMs: some behind-the-scenes detail on some of the previous weird parts, so now you have some of the more subversive knowledge like demons not being pure evil, tiny dribs & drabs on Lunars beyond the regional stereotypes, a little on the Underworld and how ghosts happen - and most importantly, some solid ideas for how to leverage this new information and use it to enrich your game without getting overwhelmed. Add a bit of focus on using this to provide potential for the players to "discover" that things aren't as black and white as they thought along with the PCs. First Age knowledge is still murky AF, Shogunate can be worked out in broad strokes if the players do some digging.
- For seasoned DMs: more detail on the weird parts. The Yozis, until now established primarily as weird vague demon gods with ominous titles, get some level of characterization for the DM to use, which in the process helps further the picture of the Yozis as pitiable/sympathetic and dangerous/unpleasant in equal measure, along with an overview of Hell's "rules" (No love without pain, etc.) and appearance. The Underworld's metaphysics are broadly outlined, with particular focus on Greater Dead and Deathlords (because as the things you could potentially meet/fight/parley with, those are the more immediate thing for most campaigns). More OOC information on Lunars; Sidereals and Celestial Bureaucracy get a paragraph or two outlining them as present in the setting, but again the focus is more on what they do to the setting at a distance than going into their organization or internal philosophy. Add the Grey Men here if you want to provide a street-level agent of the Fivescore Fellowship for players to interact with, since they can work just fine as shifty secret agents of Fate working on orders from shadowy superiors without dragging in all the Celestial Bureaucracy/Sidereal lore.
- For veteran DMs: everything that's been too bulky or complicated to fit in before now. Not a comprehensive dissertation on the setting, but enough that the DM could feasibly keep their campaign chugging along for a year or two while letting all the juicy knowledge sink in and waiting for future books to flesh out some of the more esoteric/weighty elements of the setting. Here's where you put in some hooks for Malfean skulduggery with cults or other shady business, ideas for Underworld strangeness that could bubble up into Creation as part of a story, and the aforementioned pencil sketches of the High First Age, the Usurpation, and suggestions on how to handle those things in your own campaign.