Re: the Realm's Dynasts and their general virtue, I don't think they're really any worse as a whole than any other group or splat. In Exalted, everyone is 'the bad guy' to someone else. Except the Ebon Dragon, who is the bad guy to everyone.

Re: crossovers with One Piece, I'd personally do a Burn Legend kind of deal and have exaltations proper not really be a thing, but an expression of some people in particular just being really goddamned stubborn to let reality get in their way, which is how they do ridiculous things. Most Devil Fruit users would probably be Exigents, but others can be expressed purely as other splats (Chopper as a Lunar, anyone?).

From there you just need to adapt the scale of things so that some powers are more dramatic than as written, and move on from there.
 
Terrestrial Exalts are a superior race of human...
They aren't a superior race of human though, they're humans blessed by the dragons. Military service is something the a ton of perfectly Dynastic exalted and mortals commit towards as well, and the razor means they shave their heads, not become sterilized for god's sake. And the point of it all isn't to keep them from breeding, it's to get them under the control of the realm who is in command of one of them and who's ruling class is defied by the other. The Empress and the Great Houses never wanted a bunch of loose canon exalts who don't have family ties to them running around the blessed isle causing shit to get stirred.

Lost Eggs are a term used by the realm for any dragonblooded who exalts outside the realm, who seeks to join the realm. It's not a catch all term for low breeding exalts.

The Immaculate Faith is predicated on the idea that Terrestrial Exalted are spiritually evolved through multiple lifetimes of righteous action and thought, not superior life forms. Mortals should follow them because Mortals should aspire to be like them, in the hopes that doing so will advance their spiritual standing.
 
They aren't a superior race of human though, they're humans blessed by the dragons. Military service is something the a ton of perfectly Dynastic exalted and mortals commit towards as well, and the razor means they shave their heads, not become sterilized for god's sake. And the point of it all isn't to keep them from breeding, it's to get them under the control of the realm who is in command of one of them and who's ruling class is defied by the other. The Empress and the Great Houses never wanted a bunch of loose canon exalts who don't have family ties to them running around the blessed isle causing shit to get stirred.

Lost Eggs are a term used by the realm for any dragonblooded who exalts outside the realm, who seeks to join the realm. It's not a catch all term for low breeding exalts.

The Immaculate Faith is predicated on the idea that Terrestrial Exalted are spiritually evolved through multiple lifetimes of righteous action and thought, not superior life forms. Mortals should follow them because Mortals should aspire to be like them, in the hopes that doing so will advance their spiritual standing.
Wouldn't it be theoretically possible under some kind of solar project or whatever that over very long period of time that for all humans to eventually become terrestrials?
 
tl;dr - In keeping with the general downward spiral I've been in since Trump was elected and I lost the healthcare coverage I needed for my therapist, I've found it increasingly hard to avoid seeing the worst in everything, and now that's finally bleeding into my enjoyment of fiction, formerly the final bastion of denial I hid from the world inside.

Also, I haven't been able to write anything of substance since November 2016, which is a very bad thing considering I find very little value in my existence beyond my creative ability.

So yeah, I've got nothing left.
 
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.

tl;dr: it really just depends on the exalt.
To clarify my question was part of a conversation which specified challenging them in their area of expertise.
 
Seeing as we are on the topic of the Dragons anyway i have had a question.
Have the Devs said anything on the topic of the Five Glorious Dragon Styles?
The fact that they are Celestial Martial Arts and that the Dragon Blooded go beyond their limits to learn them, was kind of what made them really cool to me.
Now that there's no divide between TMA and CMA that the Immaculates overcome through enlightenment, will there still be something that make the Dragon Styles something spiritually significant to the Dragon Blooded?
 
Wouldn't it be theoretically possible under some kind of solar project or whatever that over very long period of time that for all humans to eventually become terrestrials?
The blood of the dragons isn't the only requirement for exalting as a dragonblooded, you also need whatever ill-defined quality that makes someone into enough of a hero to become an Exalt. As is, the blood of the dragons has spread so far throughout creation that you'd be hard pressed to find someone who doesn't have a dragonblooded ancestor at some point in their family tree.
To clarify my question was part of a conversation which specified challenging them in their area of expertise.
Gods, Demons, Elementals, other exalts, things that you aren't willing to just bulldoze through with your daiklave. It all depends on the character in question, since any example I give is easily countered by someone pulling a different example out of their hat. What do you mean by "challenge"? Does a master artisan need to be challenged to prove their mastery? What's the point in playing Creation's Greatest Swordswoman if there's someone who is your equal? An exalt who spins themselves as a fertility god is challenged by a drought.
 
The Immaculate Faith is predicated on the idea that Terrestrial Exalted are spiritually evolved through multiple lifetimes of righteous action and thought, not superior life forms.

The immaculate faith is a lie.

Like, of course than Dragon blooded are a superior race. It's everybody in their fluff. Degeneracy of blood, etc etc. Your chances of Exalting are diretly proportional to the purity of your blood. And of course, you have things like the legendary dragonblooded of old whose children had guaranteed exaltation as long as both parents were perfectly pure.

You may not like it, but that's how canon goes.

Wouldn't it be theoretically possible under some kind of solar project or whatever that over very long period of time that for all humans to eventually become terrestrials?

If the ancient Exalt host had genocided all base humans, leaving only the original DB to populate creation? Sure. But is too late for that.
 
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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.

Any more positive interpretation requires that you assume one of the prior ruling factions (the Primordials, the Incarnae, the Deliberative, etc.) was right and then work to restore them to greatness, which is essentially that last option I mentioned but with loftier ideological motives.
The core-message of Exalted has always been to fight when fighting must be done, against those deserving of being fought, on behalf of those incapable of fighting. Its a tale of tragic and misguided heroics, few-against-the-world, speaking truth to power even though it will undoubtedly mean your death. You can't beat it by getting stronger, acting smarter, or planning more thoroughly, because Fate might be written in generalized terms for those capable of bending it, but still you can't fully escape it. That's the message, to FIGHT for the Impossible Dream.

Like okay, this requires going back a bit to 1e, before the fandom was fully enmeshed in simulating a 100% Rationalist Creation, but its a crucial context that gets missed a lot of the time.

The conceit of "classical heroism" as a keystone was that You, the Players, are the only morally-correct actors in this scenario, by the dint of the fact you are a 21st-century person with an arguably genre-savvy perspective on narratives and history, and not a classical hero even if your character might be. The peoples of Creation aren't intended to be protagonists or villains, they are meant to throw the reader into an alien world of conflicting societal and cultural mores with our own, and only fulfill tropes when they are written extremely bluntly/badly. "Heroism" is presented like the Beast of Vampire, it is your power and drive, yet pushing you out into the world to raise hell because conflict and violence fuel the state of things as they exist in Creation. No one is morally right, because the world is a wrong and broken place. It was made wrong, then broken worse, and the past is viewed only as an idyllic Eden for those who benefited the most from its original nature.

To use that power solely to maintain you and yours until the sky caves in is explicit moral cowardice from a 21st century perspective, and the state of Creation is arrayed as it is to make you go "that isn't Right, someone should Do something about that." Because by default You The Player are expected to be thinking this, not whoever is carrying an Exaltation at the time, even if you control the direction of their story. Its on You to be the difference, not the cultures and mindsets making Creation what it is and continues to be, since if there WERE right-thinking moral actors in the world, someone else would be working at something Besides making sure the cycles of violence perpetuate themselves needlessly. This was admittedly easier before the First Age was detailed more heavily, when you could claim that it was close enough to our own that people who thought like us and accepted our views on injustice existed then, though the justifications of things like past-lives and reclusive old mentors bewailing the fallen Second Age of man.

And the thing is, for all this gloom and doom of tragedy, this is not intended to be a Grimdark message that "everything sucks forever and all of it amounts to nothing," but a hopeful one that "dying for a nobler cause is better than living for unjust prestige and power." Creation's peoples live in filth and squalor, but they still Live. Babies are born to happy homes, farmers still farm in rural hamlets far afield of any apocalyptic crisis, monsters and demons are rare and obscure creatures by anyone's reckoning enough that people are still shocked and terrified by them, instead of regarding them as simply another plague or drought season to endure. A regular, if magically-foreign and primitive by our standards, method of life and living is possible and the vast majority of Creation takes part in it entirely ignorant of the kung-fu battles and sweeping wars as anything except caravanners tall tales. So if that is yet possible, it is still something worth fighting and dying For, even in the face of impossible if not inevitable odds of failure.

The problem lies in the pervasive idea that we, the Players, must closely identify with someone and their belief-systems or culture in order to better play the role of a Creation-native. How we must feed into the absolutist stances inherent to the settings factions, that the Realm must be either imperialist slavers OR the last bastion of civility in a chaotic world, that Solars are either returning saints or horrible tyrants. Or that pursuing "classical heroism" is a cause morally-justifiable in of itself. But we don't have to and it isn't. Creation's view of people is messy for this reason, that you can't fully codify them out. Virtues are deliberately skewed towards the harmful, where highest Compassion is as the sword that falls from the hero's grip when good men do nothing, and Conviction is the lies Hard Men tell themselves. Temperance is the hallmark of the controlling mircomanager, and Valor is the ego unchained. These are the forces at work in Creation, not battles of Good and Evil, and trying to say any of them are more defensible than the others like sports teams means that we as players are forced to justify-out the worst aspects of them in order to reconcile who among the "lesser evils" is the one which "deserves to win" when none of them do.

No one faction in Creation deserves victory, but it does have its share of victims to be defended, lives to be saved and battles to be fought. And That is the point. Sure, you'll probably die in the attempts getting there, but you died standing for those victims, saving those brief and fleeting lives, and fought in those battles worthy of heroes. Isn't that Enough?
 
Vitures are dumb though there no scaling to them having 3 in virture isnt really any different from a 5 despite what the fluff may say.
 
Vitures are dumb though there no scaling to them having 3 in virture isnt really any different from a 5 despite what the fluff may say.

That's... largely irrelevant? The thematic underpinnings of what Virtues mean/do matter. Yes, you're correct in that the system we have is Okay- Could Be Better, but what's always been more important is what they said about Exalted as a setting.
 
That's... largely irrelevant? The thematic underpinnings of what Virtues mean/do matter. Yes, you're correct in that the system we have is Okay- Could Be Better, but what's always been more important is what they said about Exalted as a setting.
Then why did 3e ditch it then? Seems like a lot people perfdr 3e intimaciy system over it.
 
Ledstrom
Spawned by Glaciers
Wood Elemental




Ledstromy are titanic elementals of the Northern forests. Their bark hide is covered in a cold, white, mossy fur. Regions of this are punctured by razor-sharp needle leaves. Adult ledstromy live solitary lives resting in place for centuries at a time, moving only to avoid encroaching nuisances or find a more comfortable seat.

As Creation's climate has varied through the ages, glaciers have covered vast areas. When conditions are right for those areas to become ice-free once more, seeds form underneath, sprouting into young ledstromy that grow, dormant, for years and decades. After they reach a certain size, they start pushing the glacier towards the sea. Glaciers borne by a great number of ledstromy can move over a dozen yards per day. When the entire cohort reaches maturity all at once, they express their full might and lift the glacier off of the ground, during which time they can shuttle it overhead at around a mile per hour, until it is wholly deposited into the sea[1][2].

Once the glacier is gone, each ledstrom picks itself up out of its deep hole to take a nice, long nap in comfortable snow surrounded by pleasantly laconic trees, leaving behind a landscape dotted with lakes in the depressions they formed.

Capabilities: Humans rarely interact with ledstromy, although most of the Celestial Bureaus have to coordinate to handle the final maturation. The rare sorcerer or Exalt may try to beg assistance of one - they are among the strongest creatures in Creation - but as they have few needs or desires beyond comfort and isolation, attempts to bargain are rarely successful. Ledstromy are ferocious fighters when attacked, and most of their number were destroyed resisting the Balorian Crusade.

[1] This is usually catastrophic for every coastal city within several thousand miles.
[2] "But... but... that is not how glaciers work," you stammer indignantly. "You are a boring person," I respond, citing my professional credentials as an actuary.

I'll edit in a link to a QC statblock later, I haven't put together its Charms yet.
 
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I mean, it's One Piece. Having creepy inbred freaks be 100% right about how they're the perfect life form and you should hop on their leprous dicks right now is the opposite of how to do One Piece properly.

No, I'm not ever letting go of the fact that canon Terrestrial Exalts are mechanically geared toward being Lebensborn enthusiasts thanks to the implications of how Breeding works...

Then change Breeding. I think that's a good idea anyway, but it's downright necessary if that's your perspective on how DBs are now.

And by "change Breeding", I don't mean have it change in setting. I mean have it always have been different in setting.

For what it's worth, I also dislike the anti-miscegenation master race vibes that sometimes creep into DB writing. But I don't think it's as dominant as you seem to; DBs are mostly portrayed as aristocrats, not as members of a separate race.

Let me rephrase then. What can challenge a Essence 5 exalt in their specialty?

Depends on a lot of stuff. The most important factors are splat, edition, and level of optimization. So the question as-is isn't really answerable.

EDIT: @Bel honestly I like the idea of the celestial dragons just being straight dragonblood. After all doffy was pretty strong.

Doffy's a monster because he's himself, not because he's a Noble/Dragon. The story seems pretty clear that the separate race pretensions of the Dragons are rubbish.

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.

Which really make them fitting to be connected to the World Nobles and/or Marines.

Like I said above, DBs are generally portrayed as an aristocracy, not as a master race. The mechanics are certainly race-y, but the storytelling isn't.

Sadly, the moments where DBs seem most like a separate race are not very deconstructive at all. They're the moments when the fans and writers, seemingly without irony, mourn the tragedy of miscegenation. Bear in mind, DBs were the good guys back when their blood was "pure".

Anyway, I feel like associating DBs with the Nobles gives too much legitimacy to the Nobles' bullshit.
 
Seeing as we are on the topic of the Dragons anyway i have had a question.
Have the Devs said anything on the topic of the Five Glorious Dragon Styles?
The fact that they are Celestial Martial Arts and that the Dragon Blooded go beyond their limits to learn them, was kind of what made them really cool to me.
Now that there's no divide between TMA and CMA that the Immaculates overcome through enlightenment, will there still be something that make the Dragon Styles something spiritually significant to the Dragon Blooded?

I mean, they don't really need anything beyond 'Fire Dragon Style was given to us by Hesiesh himself after burning the world clean of...' in order to justify them having a special place in Realm culture. That said, the devs have said that learning one of the dragon styles is how Ex3 Dragonbloods get rid of the Terrestrial keyword on their martial arts, so there's some mechanical incentive as well. I also remember Vance saying that the Immaculate styles wouldn't have any Mastery keyworded effects, so an Immaculate Master would only be an inferior practitioner from worse dice caps and essence pools, not due to anything baked into the style itself.
 
I'm thinking about doing a One Piece/Exatled Fusion quest and I was hoping the people of this board could help me hash out how the settings fuse.

Current Thoughts
Dragonblooded: Dragonblooded houses would take on the roles of the Celestial Dragons, and are based in Yu Shan rather than the blessed Isle. The Celestial Dragons are aware of the First Age when Solars ruled (which would be the void century from One Piece) and the Sidereals are subordinate to them instead of manipulating them.

Dragonblooded who joined after the formation of the WG, and are thus not celestial dragons, are generally rulers of their own subordinate countries or join the Marines. The Marines are in fact the largest concentration of Dragonblooded in the setting.

The Sidereals run the various CP#. They are generally aware of the Void Century, though how much they know is dependent on their rank.

The Immaculate faith would not exist. Instead the Marines would generally have the job of subjugating gods when they conquer a new area. Many gods have willingly joined the WG and serve in exchange for special treatment. The God of Warships for instance is a highly valued shipwright.

Creation is not nearly as stable as it is in normal Exalted, and the Wyld has extensive bleed through, especially in the area known as The Grand Line.

What I'm not sure on:
How Devil Fruit should fit into this.
How to reconcile the fact that in One Piece anyone can get strong with effort, which is absolutely vital for many characters stories, and how in Exalted Exalts are basically untouchable by mortals.

You're going about this the wrong way. Do not try and turn One Piece into present-day Creation. Take First Age Creation (so, before Usurpation) and ask yourself what would be necessary for it to turn into One Piece.

So, the Celestial Dragons would not be the superficially similar Terrestrials, but rather descendants of the Solar Exalted as would be fitting.

Usurpation or an Usurpation analogue clearly happened during the Void Century, but something went wrong/differently: Exaltations, like the Avatar, have vanished when the world needed them most. Baseline humans have become obviously superhuman.

The Devil Fruits are probably some form of biological artifact.

etc. etc. etc.
 
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Let me rephrase then. What can challenge a Essence 5 exalt in their specialty?
Only a peer, like another Solariod, a Third Circle Demon Specialized in the same area (as in a Ligier is superior to everyone who isn't dick deep into crafting) or the like. Solars are by design exceptionally dangerous in their area of focus, but weak in areas they aren't as invested in. Like an Essence Five Craft Twilight is going to win the cook off against everyone but a peer, but the same Twilight would be threatened by a normal bear, since they didn't develop their combat skills properly.

While a Dawn-Caste murder-hydra could literally murder bears by the dozens for days, they'd have trouble fighting the Bear-Totem spirit inside of his Orchalicum Bear-Strider with his squadron Cloud-Bears as support.

It's all context and situational.
 
Only a peer, like another Solariod, a Third Circle Demon Specialized in the same area (as in a Ligier is superior to everyone who isn't dick deep into crafting) or the like. Solars are by design exceptionally dangerous in their area of focus, but weak in areas they aren't as invested in. Like an Essence Five Craft Twilight is going to win the cook off against everyone but a peer, but the same Twilight would be threatened by a normal bear, since they didn't develop their combat skills properly.

While a Dawn-Caste murder-hydra could literally murder bears by the dozens for days, they'd have trouble fighting the Bear-Totem spirit inside of his Orchalicum Bear-Strider with his squadron Cloud-Bears as support.

It's all context and situational.
Yes but the context I have repeatedly given is what can reasonably challenge a exalt within their area of expertise. What can challenge a battle focused dawn in battle, what can cook with th same level of skull as a craft focuses twilight, etc.
 
A peer focused on that thing. A battle focus'd 3rd circle can challenge a battle focused solaroid.
 
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Devil Fruits, a vital element, work as-written. Simply rare and valuable means of becoming powerful. They compete with Exaltation in whatever areas their powers allow them, but lack the versatility or fringe benefits of Exaltation. Further, no mortal with a fruit will match a motivated Exalt with that same fruit. (Exceptions exist, of course)
This sounds like it'll lead to stacking templates and charmshare. Why allow Exalts to eat Devil Fruits?

I do think that representing Devil Fruits as charms isn't really the right way to go about it, though I'm struggling to come up with a fitting exalted analogue.

A peer focused on that thing. A battle focus'd 3rd circle can challenge a battle focused solarium.
Is this the glorious power of well cultivated plants?
 
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