IIRC, Spirits increase in general power with age and worship. The more they are worshipped, the greater the amount of Essence they respire (i.e. they get more motes with which to do stuff and recover them faster) and the wider their purview (and thus their selection of Spirit Charms) grows.
Exalts don't have unlimited xp to buy their stats to arbitaraly high levels. The idea that every character needs to prep for paranoia combat deforms the setting because of the way the mechanics work. One exalt might be specialized into superhuman senses and this will make hiding things from him very difficult. But a master swordsman who's eyes can read the intricacies of the way a sword is swung from seven miles away is a different challenge than the courtier who can read the most subtle nuance of a breath from someone in court.
Huh. Well, they ended up getting Dawn instead, because the group already had a Zenith, and I wanted to keep at least some semblance of variety.
I'll be honest, I never realized how much of a similar situation this ended up being to Ms. Mobayashi's Dragon Maid. But that dragon is definitely going to end up at least imprinting on them and becoming a companion, once I actually figure out what to do with the fourth person and we can actually get on with the actual game.
The issue here is that, at the end of the day, the canon handling of Terrestrials is morally indefensible. To say it advocates eugenics is a gross misrepresentation of eugenics, because there were eugenics supporters who believed in it as a tool for eradicating horrific congenital disorders without understanding where their ideology could end up going.
That's... not how it works in setting though? The ones drafted into the army or forced to become monks are dragonblooded who join the realm but who were exalted outside of it. A breeding zero dynast of the realm isn't forced into anything other than being one of the favored sons or daughters of the empire that is currently teetering at the peak of the world. Well and marrage, but that's a family thing and not a racial thing. And they aren't better because of their blood, but because they are spiritually superior - the child of a dragonblooded dynast who doesn't exalt is 'better' than mortals because they're part of the ruling class, not because they inherit their parent's magic.
Yeah but what do Terrestrial fans do then? Just not play it?
I was not aware that this was for something bigger than a story or a campaign, my bad.
Well, I don't know if it is, but I'd of course prefer it if you give us poor Dragon-Blooded fans something; we did after all get shoehorned into a corner for the duration of an entire edition.
This all got sparked by rognthor's questions about how the Exalted and One Piece settings could be fused for a proposed quest.Well, I don't know if it is, but I'd of course prefer it if you give us poor Dragon-Blooded fans something; we did after all get shoehorned into a corner for the duration of an entire edition.
That's true. You know what could have been cool? If there were other Dragon-States besides Lookshy and the Realm; if there were Shogunate Reamnets in the North-East who are Samurai, or Cataphract Lords in the South, or even Western Demi-Gods who rule entire island nations etc. Dragonblooded who are outside of the normal paradigm we're all familiar with could be really interesting. They wouldn't have to fit to the mold of the Dynasts, they could be better or worse than them, they could have different traditions; like they might less hostile to Anathema, or even more so than usual. Perhaps their descended from the officer corps of a now dead Solar who was particularly lucky with his supporters Breeding roles and they lack the same hatred of Solars that Lookshy and The Realm has, but they still keep animosity towards Lunars and Abyssals and the like, or even a hidden village of assassins and infiltrators ruled by an ancient Fox-totem lunar with clans of Dragonblooded Ninja defining the upper nobility?Well, I don't know if it is, but I'd of course prefer it if you give us poor Dragon-Blooded fans something; we did after all get shoehorned into a corner for the duration of an entire edition.
The impression I've always had is that Exalted is, assuming you don't deliberately ignore the wider implications of the setting in the name of having a good time (or ignore them IC because your PC has a different view of things), a game where the only "message" is emergent from its established ideas - namely, that power inherently destroys all it touches, peace is meaningless and/or unattainable, and the best that can possibly be done is to procure success and happiness for you and yours while leaving the rest of Creation to rot, then manage to die of old age before your sins come back to haunt you.
Them not saying "hey, by the way our section on Terrestrial Breeding has lots of disturbing racial supremacist undertones and creates a mechanical implementation where banning miscegenation and conducting arranged marriage programs to reverse the impact of previous miscegenation results in stronger Dragonbloods" does not mean their writing doesn't say so anyway, if you understand my meaning.
Setting aside everything else, like the fact that the Realm is the default antagonist for the default game, and that just because they have super powers and say they're morally and spiritually superior doesn't make it true...
I understand your point and sympathize to some degree even though I ultimately disagree with the main gist, but this seems silly to me. Many countries believed in eugenics - my own was considered the foremost in the field and inspired the German scientists, for example, although Danish ideas of master race were quite different (the Danish scientists thought it was the duty of the master race to establish a society that would 'care' for the 'lesser races') - but people aren't actually rational actors. What you call authorial fiat, I call worldbuilding and people acting like people. A Lebensborn project does not appear in the Realm because culture is not a rational progression and it is in the interests of no one to make female Terrestrials (who are canonically closer to the top; remember that the Realm is softly matriarchal) into baby-makers who sit at home, or do you want to be the one to tell Tepet Ejava or Mnemon that that's their role? The Scarlet Empress perhaps?
Dragonbloods are in many ways a deconstruction of those racial superiority ideas. The setting gives us a race where the racial superiority beliefs of real life human societies are actually objectively true in that they are smarter and stronger and other races lesser them by mixing. Yet they are still the villains. They are still assholes who terrorize the rest of the world for their own personal benefit. The realm has to put down peasant rebellions every generation or so because their rule is cruel and their superiority is used purely for their personal benefit and for crushing others beneath their boots harder. They have more power but they are not better in any means but might.
he may be thinking of the lintha there
dragons are significantly less "unfortunate implications" than solars, so whatever.
to be fair they literally hold the world together, and the people not in their empire tend to alternate between "save us please dragonbloods, we need you" when they have a problem followed immediately by "now fuck back off to the blessed isle you imperialist scum"
Wasn't that just a 1e thing? Seems it has moved from that quite a bit.
