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General Exalted Thread

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Funny thing is, GET never was as all-encompassing as people like to believe. It only prevents spirits from reforming after death. By RAW it does nothing against Raksha, Behemoths and so on, and is similarly useless against effects that prevent a being from dying in the first place.

I think you're all overstating the power and significance of GET. Yes, the Exalted can find ways to kill everything. That doesn't mean it is always as easy as 'apply Daiklave to forehead, pop GET, job done'. That is the case of using a Charm to skip the interesting story, rather than enabling it. Heck, the main example of how the Exalted can kill the unkillable are the Primodrals. The guys where they had to go build dams to stop unstoppable rivers and take out all their Third Circle Souls before they could die, rather than just chopping at their world-body until they cut through their health levels and then activating GET.

Here's the thing, though. One hard to kill or recurring antagonist is fine if done properly. It makes you actually earn that victory. But having every opponent come back and not stay down isn't. That's why GET exists, to take out the gods, ghosts and demons that usually serve as the 'mid-tier' enemies for campaigns, when the ST doesn't want to constantly throw other Exalts at his players but still wants a challenge. And having them all come back again and again would just get tiresome after about two sessions at most.

I understand the push-back, though. A 'puzzle boss', as it were, that breaks the usual rules of the system and forces you to engage him in a specific way can be really jarring if done badly. That doesn't mean you should completely swear off the concept, though. Exalted is supposed to emulate mythological heroes, and what's cooler? Strangling a lion because its hide is invulnerable or going 'lol, anti-hardness charms' and cutting its head off? Hunting down the soul hidden in an egg in a hare in a duck on a remote island or going 'GET says GET fucked, lich'? Yes, it can be fun to go 'no, fuck you, we play by my rules now' in the face of the smug antagonist gloating how he's invulnerable, but that doesn't mean that 'playing along', as it were, isn't also a valid story.
 
Oh Definitly, @Elero - I agree that quirky, 'setpiece' fights should exist with idiosyncratic win conditions... how to phrase this.

Exalted and really games in general have a problem with arms racing. Part of what appealed to me about Exalted was that when done right, the arms race stopped. There was no Immortal Killing Technique 4, you only ever needed Ghost-Eating when it would come up. I do agree that a great many other beings don't require it or are immune to it, but it's more...

When you write a charm, you write a charm with an idea of it being The Only One you need. You don't write charms that are intentionally hobbled or meant to be outmoded. Doing so invites arms racing. Now, I do agree that the lack of granularity between 'Not Perfect' and 'Perfect' makes combat gameplay frustrating in 2e- this is why the 3e combat system feels better for people, because they're watching initiative go up and down as an abstraction.
 
There's a significant difference between quirky puzzle bosses that require unusual methods to kill (i.e. building a dam to kill a river-Primordial or writing an essay text that ridicules and eliminates a persistent cultural meme-Primordial) and a creature that's fought in an entirely conventional way but just requires super speshul snowflake means to kill deader than dead.

I don't have a problem with the former (it can be pretty interesting) but the latter is just ridiculous and stupid. Unless you are a Neverborn (or your immortality causes you to suffer to a similar degree), getting facefucked by a daiklave will kill you and GET will make sure you stay dead, end of story.
 
Accelerator said:
Would they also give a guide on how to homebrew spells?
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I'd rule of thumb it that codified spells are probably more or less a little less powerful than a working of the same circle, because they can be cast faster, there's no xp cost and there's no weird side effects that come from juggling the Finesse of the working.

A Working that lets you enchant a city's walls with invulnerability (with side effects) would probably become a spell that let you enchant a city's walls to quickly repair themselves, for instance. A Working that grants it's caster some form of immortality isn't going to be converted into a spell, since generally people don't need to give themselves immortality once they already have it.
 
So what book is the Spell Summon the Harvest found in for 1E? I heard there were a few differences between the editions and I wanted to check it out.
 
Elero said:
Funny thing is, GET never was as all-encompassing as people like to believe. It only prevents spirits from reforming after death. By RAW it does nothing against Raksha, Behemoths and so on, and is similarly useless against effects that prevent a being from dying in the first place.
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One problem with this, Raksha are a type of Spirit.
It's just that they rarely get acknowledged as such due to political/religious reasons.
 
Sanctaphrax said:
They didn't, though. Or at least I've never seen anything indicating that they did.
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The Exalted Host of the time were Paleolithic cavemen who'd lived all their lives in holy dread of the Primordials, and now been given the power to strike down the beings who were responsible for the lives of desperation and constant suffering they'd lived up until then.

I would be legitimately surprised if the Primordial-slayers of the Host didn't take visceral joy in what they did, because as far as they were concerned the Primordials deserved anything they got and more.

Hence why they also didn't really give much of a shit about the Black Nadir Concordat defiling the Primordial dead for power.

Sanctaphrax said:
Again, they didn't. Or at least I've never seen anything indicating that they did.
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Well, there's the mass genocide, for starters. Humanity was the least of an unimaginably vast number of sapient races in the Primordial Era. By the time the Deliberative was done, all that remained besides them were the Dragon Kings, the Men of Adamant (who they later exterminated), and the shattered ruins of the Lintha.

Likewise, I'd argue that "creating" the Neverborn ranks as a pretty major atrocity; even compared to being sealed inside your king's inverted body and used as no-cost slave labor is a kinder fate than what the Neverborn go through.

Sanctaphrax said:
This isn't actually true. A low-Essence Solar isn't gonna kill the Sun and Moon, not without getting a lot stronger. Ghost-Eating Technique isn't nearly enough to render the setting kill-able.

There are all kinds of monsters that you can't kill without jumping through hoops; I don't see any harm in monsters that you can't keep dead without jumping through hoops. And for basic setting reasons it's valuable to have various random mid-tier enemies survive the magic that killed the Primordials.
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I mean, it can kill the Primordials, who literally made the setting, and the only way for things to not be killable with it is for the author to erect walls of contrivance around his precious butter dumpling to protect it.

Also, "you can't do this yet" is still a pretty earth-shattering statement when we're talking about being able to stab the sun to death.

As for the idea of mid-tier enemies having to be GET-proof... I legitimately don't comprehend your logic there.

Faux-Edit: As some people also pointed out, the idea of "puzzle bosses" who need additional work to kill can be fun for tabletop games. However, in Exalted, I'd say that unless it's an out-and-out Primordial, Yozi, or other being of such unthinkable power that only an Exalt could even try to harm them, such experiences are the province of parties that don't have GET handy.

A heroic mortal finding Koschei's heart to rob the beast of its immortality is fine. However, to me, declaring that some random behemoth is more durable than the architects of Creation just to enable such a plot is sloppy, ill-thought-out, and just generally a poor decision.

The Exalted Host built that dam to expose Adrian's hidden heart; it was GET that burnt that heart to ashes. Which is an important idea: if you're going to have a "random behemoth" be resistant to GET to justify a puzzle fight, then you need to do it by explaining how it is dodging the Ghost-Eating Technique's effect and how you, as an Exalt, can tear apart its petty trickery and bring it down.
 
Sydonai said:
One problem with this, Raksha are a type of Spirit.
It's just that they rarely get acknowledged as such due to political/religious reasons.
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Hrm, are we talking E2 or E3? I am very confident they aren't in E3. Vance himself has said in the Ask the Devs thread that they aren't spirits and we even have a Charm that works on spirits (Spirit-Caging Mandala) which explicitly gets an upgrade to also let it apply to 'denizens of the Wyld'. I'm fairly confident it was the same in E2, but I don't have the time to go looking for sources right now.
 
GardenerBriareus said:
The Exalted Host of the time were Paleolithic cavemen
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Yes, I remember the Age of Dreams expansion book which elaborated on human life in Primordial times...

Wait, that didn't happen.

A lot of humans were slaves for civilization which were advanced, if unrecognizable to modern humans or Creation in the starting game era. Slaves, certainly, but slaves to strange creatures who lived in magical citadels that reached the sky, or the biopunk sun-kingdom of the Dragon Kings, or a thousand other strange places.

Even humans that had their own culture had no particular reason to be Cavemen. What about machine-cults operating the Workshops of Autochthon, cathedrals of engines which they could not comprehend but could maintain? What about people living on great crystal island floating in the sky, living their entire life in an unchanging clockwork routine lest She Who Lives "repair" them as deficient devices? What about conquering armies producing black weapons in smoke-filled furnaces and going to die by the hundred of thousand, all clad in terrible armors, for the whims of a prince who would one day be Octavian? What about wild-eyed scribe-cults of the living script, spending their lives copying and transmiting the words of He Who Bleeds The Unknown Word, and who considered madness a divine blessing?

From these ranks of absolutely oppressed, effectively-slave-to-the-gods humans, could be drawn Zeniths and Twilights who would not need to receive all their knowledge from the gods, as they were already wise in their own right, only now given the power to rebel. Dawns who had already commanded armies in the name of Daeva who would have as soon squashed them flat as rewarded them could now take their armies with them to the edge of the world in preparation for the final battle. Eclipses who had spent every day of their lives at the side of an inhuman master could take their knowledge of their politics and shatter them from within before anyone had realized the Exalted even existed.

Certainly there were fearful paleolithic human tribes hiding in the wilderness, clutching stone weapons and clad in fur, and these could have produced Exalted as well. But by no means do these have to represent the whole of the human experience in the Age of Dreams.
 
Peanuckle said:
So I hear this alot, but I've never found the source for it. Where's it at?
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Dreams of the First Age, Lands of Creation, page 139.

GardenerBriareus said:
I would be legitimately surprised if the Primordial-slayers of the Host didn't take visceral joy in what they did, because as far as they were concerned the Primordials deserved anything they got and more.

Hence why they also didn't really give much of a shit about the Black Nadir Concordat defiling the Primordial dead for power.
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I doubt they regretted the killing. But I also doubt they laughed. Desperate battles aren't fun, unless you're a violence-addicted lunatic. And most Exalts aren't.

GardenerBriareus said:
Well, there's the mass genocide, for starters. Humanity was the least of an unimaginably vast number of sapient races in the Primordial Era. By the time the Deliberative was done, all that remained besides them were the Dragon Kings, the Men of Adamant (who they later exterminated), and the shattered ruins of the Lintha.
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Maybe I'm miss-remembering, but I actually don't recall anything saying the Exalted systematically exterminated the Primordial races. The obvious culprit for the disappearance of pre-War stuff is the Three Spheres Cataclysm.

And I'm 80% sure the Men of Adamant aren't canon. Pretty confident ES made them up as an additional subrace of Mountain Folk. The canonical Great Geas was immoral, but not genocidal.

GardenerBriareus said:
Likewise, I'd argue that "creating" the Neverborn ranks as a pretty major atrocity; even compared to being sealed inside your king's inverted body and used as no-cost slave labor is a kinder fate than what the Neverborn go through.
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Thing is, that's just what happens when you kill a Primordial. The Exalted would, I'm sure, have preferred to kill them cleanly. But there's no non-horrible way to deal with a hostile Titan; kill them, imprison them, or let them run free, it'll be awful regardless.

GardenerBriareus said:
I mean, it can kill the Primordials, who literally made the setting, and the only way for things to not be killable with it is for the author to erect walls of contrivance around his precious butter dumpling to protect it.

Also, "you can't do this yet" is still a pretty earth-shattering statement when we're talking about being able to stab the sun to death.

As for the idea of mid-tier enemies having to be GET-proof... I legitimately don't comprehend your logic there.

Faux-Edit: As some people also pointed out, the idea of "puzzle bosses" who need additional work to kill can be fun for tabletop games. However, in Exalted, I'd say that unless it's an out-and-out Primordial, Yozi, or other being of such unthinkable power that only an Exalt could even try to harm them, such experiences are the province of parties that don't have GET handy.

A heroic mortal finding Koschei's heart to rob the beast of its immortality is fine. However, to me, declaring that some random behemoth is more durable than the architects of Creation just to enable such a plot is sloppy, ill-thought-out, and just generally a poor decision.
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You've got it backwards. You don't declare a random behemoth immune to GET in order to enable a puzzle plot; you make a puzzle plot in order to declare random behemoths immune to GET.

One of the key things to avoid, when writing for something like Exalted, is univariate power. You don't want a straight line from the weak to the strong. Making it so that the methods of killing the mightiest beings are universally effective against lesser monsters simplifies and constrains the setting in a bad way.

Really, this whole section of your post shows the exact kind of thinking I want to avoid.

The best thing 2e did, when statting up the Primordials, was making them inferior to mortals in significant ways.
 
Sanctaphrax said:
Maybe I'm miss-remembering, but I actually don't recall anything saying the Exalted systematically exterminated the Primordial races. The obvious culprit for the disappearance of pre-War stuff is the Three Spheres Cataclysm.

And I'm 80% sure the Men of Adamant aren't canon. Pretty confident ES made them up as an additional subrace of Mountain Folk. The canonical Great Geas was immoral, but not genocidal.
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Nope. In canon, the People of Adamant is who the Jadeborn were before the Great Geas was laid upon them. It lessened and changed them.
 
Yes, it lessened and changed them, but I'm looking at the Scroll of Fallen Races right now and I don't see your Adamant/Jade slave-soldier/people of stone line of descent at all.

In fact, it says the Great Geas seemed to be of little importance until the existing Mountain Folk started dying of old age.
 
Sanctaphrax said:
Yes, it lessened and changed them, but I'm looking at the Scroll of Fallen Races right now and I don't see your Adamant/Jade slave-soldier/people of stone line of descent at all.

In fact, it says the Great Geas seemed to be of little importance until the existing Mountain Folk started dying of old age.
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Oh, right, no, the idea that they're separate is something I entirely made up because I wanted essentially a theosophic-esque descent from Adamant to Jade to Stone.
 
Sanctaphrax said:
In fact, it says the Great Geas seemed to be of little importance until the existing Mountain Folk started dying of old age.
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Lets not get things twisted though, the Great Geas WAS an explicitly-staged act of genocide levied against the People of Adamant. Because they were viewed as a cultural and military threat even at a time of relative peace and recovery.

Simply because the informed method required generations of time to start working, and the writers were/are largely unfamiliar with using the term outside the context of mass-killings like that of the Dragon Kings, doesn't mean that the Exalted were not responsible in formalizing a death-sentence against an entire nonhuman population by insuring there would be as few of them remaining as possible for the indefinite future to potentially contest Exalted dominion. "Changed," "lessened" and similar language is just codes and euphemism to make it all seem more passive, indirect and not as actively evil as wading in with daiklaves-drawn, all for semi-politically leveraging the technicality of there being some form of the Jadeborn still around.

Folks here like to cast the maiming of Malfeas and the creation of the Neverborn to be the worst crimes the Exalted ever did simply on the magnitude of the accomplishment, but its simply the ones that lend themselves best to "good people doing retroactively bad things."
 
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1. Anyone heard of konosuba? The crimson magic clan?

2. There is a working, where a sorcerer, realizing the farmers needed a mill and water, made wheels that turned themselves eternally. The wheels are then used to drive the mill and water pump. What level of sorcerous working is this?
 
Accelerator said:
2. There is a working, where a sorcerer, realizing the farmers needed a mill and water, made wheels that turned themselves eternally. The wheels are then used to drive the mill and water pump. What level of sorcerous working is this?
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It depends. Is this a single mill? Terrestrial 2, or maybe do it as a 2-dot artifact instead. Is it a blessing on a whole region that makes all the windmills turn themselves regardless of the weather, or something to that effect? Celestial 1 or 2, maybe Terrestrial 3 if it's just one village, or you could build a manse or hearthstone that does the job.
 
Accelerator said:
1. Anyone heard of konosuba? The crimson magic clan?

2. There is a working, where a sorcerer, realizing the farmers needed a mill and water, made wheels that turned themselves eternally. The wheels are then used to drive the mill and water pump. What level of sorcerous working is this?
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Probably Terrestrial 2, but it explicitly makes a singular wheel that drives a mill and water pump, not something that an enterprising player character can strap belts to and use as a source of perpetual motion for every purpose under the sun that they can think of.

All it is doing is replacing the need for a river to get a watermill working after all.
 
Dif said:
Lets not get things twisted though, the Great Geas WAS an explicitly-staged act of genocide levied against the People of Adamant. Because they were viewed as a cultural and military threat even at a time of relative peace and recovery.

Simply because the informed method required generations of time to start working, and the writers were/are largely unfamiliar with using the term outside the context of mass-killings like that of the Dragon Kings, doesn't mean that the Exalted were not responsible in formalizing a death-sentence against an entire nonhuman population by insuring there would be as few of them remaining as possible for the indefinite future to potentially contest Exalted dominion. "Changed," "lessened" and similar language is just codes and euphemism to make it all seem more passive, indirect and not as actively evil as wading in with daiklaves-drawn, all for semi-politically leveraging the technicality of there being some form of the Jadeborn still around.

Folks here like to cast the maiming of Malfeas and the creation of the Neverborn to be the worst crimes the Exalted ever did simply on the magnitude of the accomplishment, but its simply the ones that lend themselves best to "good people doing retroactively bad things."
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Bear in mind that the Exalted didn't actually create the Great Geas. The Solars prayed to the Sun to protect them from the People of Adamant, the Sun commanded Autochthon to bind his children underground, and Autochthon levied the Geas.

From what I've read, it's not even clear that Autochthon intended the Geas to be as bad as it was. And it seems very unlikely that the Solars or the Sun wanted what happened to happen.
 
Unbanshee said:
Probably Terrestrial 2, but it explicitly makes a singular wheel that drives a mill and water pump, not something that an enterprising player character can strap belts to and use as a source of perpetual motion for every purpose under the sun that they can think of.

All it is doing is replacing the need for a river to get a watermill working after all.
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Ah, yes. Thats the problem.

What makes something terrestrial and not celestial?

Presence of supernatural effects? But isn't terrestrial based upon enhancing the effrcts of a natural world.

So shouldn't terrestrial be making it so a small stream or breeze can turn a massive wheel, and celestial is having the wheel turn by themselves?

Or is it like artifacts, in which the working is rated on how useful it is, so a working that create a pot that never runs out of water is higher in the south than in the west?
 
Accelerator said:
Ah, yes. Thats the problem.

What makes something terrestrial and not celestial?

Presence of supernatural effects? But isn't terrestrial based upon enhancing the effrcts of a natural world.

So shouldn't terrestrial be making it so a small stream or breeze can turn a massive wheel, and celestial is having the wheel turn by themselves?

Or is it like artifacts, in which the working is rated on how useful it is, so a working that create a pot that never runs out of water is higher in the south than in the west?
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That's one of the fundamental problems with 2e and 3e- we just don't have good baselines for those kinds of questions.
 
Minor topic-shift. What's the general opinion here of Holden and Morke being terminated and replaced as Exalted's developers? I ask because I saw Morke expressing displeasure at the prospect of Neall Price being brought on as one such replacement, and it got me wondering how y'all feel about the subject.

(If this conversation's already been held, I'd be happy to go peruse it if someone has a relevant page approximation for me to wander off to.)
 
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