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General Exalted Thread

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The Laurent said:
I was talking about the Discworld Gonne.

Gonne - Discworld & Terry Pratchett Wiki

It's not the same, but that's what I thought of.

There should be some even more special version of the Firelance as an artifact/something that speaks to you and encourages you to murder people.
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Ah, I see.
Well, in my campaign the inventor is a Fire Aspect with abnormally high levels of pyromania, and his personal example has a bayonet of crystal filled with flickering flames that's especially effective against Wyld-things, leaving creatures he kills with it as lovely crystal statues, perfect garden decorations. The whispers about asserting his order on the world were definitely already there and unrelated.

Perhaps a later example will require its wielder to use it to injure someone any time they unholster it.
 
Ssssooooorta testing my hand at trying out a god for once, as well as an idea @Revlid mentioned once about spirits just being spirits just being spirits and beings being able to translate between the three major groups with some degree of fluidity

also it's long because my internal editor is on fucking holiday, if ya got a complaint leave it in his inbox :V

Nio, North-Eastern God of Wartime Atrocity
Bureau of Destiny
Deity of the Sixth Rank

In ancient times there lived a King of Kings, an Emperor of Emperors. Upon his brow was set a golden seal, where the lips of the Ignis Divine had brushed his skin, and sweet sunlight flowed through his veins. Within his lifetime he had etched cities from mountain stone and sown endless fields with grain. Within his lifetime he had constructed all the wonders men might dream of and tamed the fickle, fell forces of Creation. Favored of favored, chosen of chosen, by his hand all things were possible. As the end of his long life drew near he sat on the steps of his palace, long, white beard spilling down his chest. Hair thin and brittle. All about his feet the barren, cracked earth stretched away. His great cities crumbling tombs, his verdant fields home only to weeds and scurrying insects. In time a Maiden with hair, red as cherries, red as coals, came to sit beside him. Surveying the rack and ruin.

What has become of your great Empire? She asked.

Around my cities I raised great walls on the bones of countless slaves but I could not forestall the invaders. Within my lands I loosed plague and pathogen but I could not contain their advance. By my hand I burned my fields and stained my lands with sorcery but their hunger drove them ever on. They shall be here soon.

And what has become of your line? She asked.

My sons I sold to foreign Empresses for soldiers and wealth to fuel my wars. My daughters I bid fight on the very front lines to bring our house glory. But the foreign Empresses have taken other husbands and my daughters rot in fields of corpses. I have no children to inherit my name, I have no more blood to give: my line has come to dust.

And what will become of you? She asked.

I have strangled my wives and bid my servants open their veins. Now I will stand on the steps of my palace and fight, fight until I am overcome, fight until the streets run red and the gutters clot, fight until the very earth cracks beneath me and all that I wrought has blown away; for if they wish to take even the meanest stone from the least hovel they must pry it, nail by nail, from my crooked fingers.

A smile graced the Maiden's lips for such tenacity pleased the crueler portions of her heart. With one step she ventured five hundred leagues hence and gathered the bleached bones of the Emperor's fallen daughters. With a second step she ventured five hundred leagues hence and gathered the frail forms of the Emperor's starving sons. With a third step she returned to the Emperor's seat and took his soul with a single stroke of her blazing sword. And with her forth she ascended into heavens to set them in the sky as stars. A cluster of ruby red gems, a carmine crack in the great black vault; oozing scarlet light on the lands below. Since then they have served her, the Emperor and his children, since then they have walked the most wretched battlefields of the most brutal wars. Taking note of all they see. Faithfully reporting upon the sins of men, the naked atrocity of those who would see their own wells poisoned, their own homes burned, than offer so much as a cup to the enemy or a roof to a foe. To each child a Direction, to their father the holy core. Together they are the Nastrandir, fell attendants to Mars, Maiden of Battles.

He is Nio, eldest of the sons pawned and traded away. To him was to be granted all the treasures of rich, golden shores, and the kindness of a royal family. Locked in a tower to starve, collected by the Red Lady, his is now the endless, bleak bureaucracy of cataloging mankind's more creative sins. To him has been apportioned oversight over the North-East of Creation. Land of storm-wreathed raids and bloody-handed sacrifice, land of ancient sorrows and the howling, unbound darkness. He has thrown himself into this task with a grim sort of gravitas, handsome features creased in a perpetual scowl. His expression serious and endlessly unamused with the provocations of lesser beings. Inured to the horrors of war by several thousand years of clinical, methodical service he is troubled more by the infidelity of lower ranked gods and their exploitative endeavors, as well as the constant but undeniable corruption amongst his siblings than anything else; such behavior always sure to bring him to a quick, hot anger. Their father has long since followed their Patron to the Jade Pleasure dome and has not been seen since the fall of the Shogunate, his portfolio dense enough that (even poorly managed in his absence) its passive accumulation is enough to comfortably sustain him. In the same vein: many of Nio's brothers and sisters would see themselves seated at his side. Or even replace him in their Lady's esteem.

As his family increasingly abandon their work in favor of Yu-Shan politicking Nio finds himself taking on more and more of the day to day duties. And as their portfolios often include the use of Demons and the Dead in battle such labor has required that he cultivate some grudging degree of contacts amongst his deceased and imprisoned counterparts.

Panoply and Sanctum: In form he is a severe looking younger man, hair the coppery-red of molten brass and once tanned skin worn chalky-white by long years in lightless regions. A thick collar of fur grows from his shoulders, descending down to his navel, the body below merged with the cruel, brutal scales of an iron-skinned dragon. Melded again with the portions of a batlike beast. His home in Yu-Shan is but a wing of the family estate. His portion divided into a honeycomb of small, private, rooms carefully appointed with soft, Northern furs and gentle cushions. Everything mantled in a tender hush. His treasures are three: an anvil-faced mask with red-jade goggles that protects the wearer from toxic miamsa and disease, a spiked iron crown that dispenses supernatural dread when fueled by Essence, and a bow with a quiver of barbed arrows, the shafts tainting the land wherever they fall.
 
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I have a question for everyone regarding everyone Zoom-Murderhobos, the Scourges!

Would Adorjan's Wind-Borne Stride work when you are peddling a boat?

If I were a GM, I would allow it, because when you think about it, a boat merely a flotation device, and the peddles are like stilts. So really, mechanically, when you are peddling a boat, you have equipped some stilt-fins are your hands, and you are using the boat as a flotation device. Logically, since Wind-Borne Stride applies, so does Gravity-Rebuking Grace.


If you are not convinced, then here is my final argument:

I have to say, it would seem
You can row gently down a stream
And maybe later
Up a Skyscraper
Truly, life is but a Dream
 
also location for a solo-thing i'm doing no i'm not shameless you're shameless yeah you >:[

Nine-Tails-Tarnished: Dominion of the Fox God
Fox masks and smoke-filled drawing rooms. River-bound pleasure barges and ornate aerial mooring-masts. Orange painted partisans clashing with scarlet-draped soldiers in the streets, blood spraying and gutters clotting in the light of a dying moon. Nine-Tails-Tarnished is a city of culture, a city of tradition, a city of vice and, more recently, a city of violence. The old ways die hard here, in the south of Suneater Satrapy, even as new indulgences come to pass the time. Outside a rustling sea of yellow grain and stark, sheer-sided forts rising like islands. Inside liquor flowing freely in the light of rust-red lanterns. A careful stack of coins left in a favorite shrine's collection dish. Sacred foxes wandering freely, happily sleeping in pools of weak, winter sun.

A Shrine Maiden's Smile
Crimson-stained timbers and paper partitions the color of scraped skin, ornamentation in shining copper and streets lined with black stone. Above buildings rise, stack upon stack of spreading, sprawling, shared space, roads running in three dimensions. Below the nine rivers flow and churn, wearing away at the base of the towering cliffs. Nine-Tails-Tarnished is a tangled, winding warren of cramped streets and wooden walkways, bound by great Shogunate bridges and threaded by alleyways bored into the canyon walls themselves. On every corner there is an open air teahouse or a shrine, a broad-shouldered beastman writing out the day's prices in chalk, a priestess cupping the incense sticks as a cold wind whips between ridges of buildings. Down every street is a row of market stalls, hawking everything from fresh fruit to collared slaves. A river-barge slowly drifts downstream, the sound of shamisen players and a neverending party reaching your ears.

Some cities hide their gambling dens, their pleasure-parlors, tucking them down blue-lit alleyways and in the shadow of more "decent" districts. Nine-Tails-Tarnished elevates them instead. The wealthiest portions of the city resemble nothing so much as enormous casinos, rambling bathouses, awash in rejuvenating steam and savory smells, the calls of green-eyed dealers and the rustle of jade scrip. Everything is a gamble here, everything is a game and you can lose your freedom in a hand of cards or claim a castle in a game of Gateway. But this fortune is built upon failure and the greatest casinos are built on the bones of their predecessors, erected in the hollowed out husks of their ancestors. Descend down into the more shabby, careworn parts of town. See the once-great halls of vice that have been carved up into apartments. Their exclusive spas turned to public baths. The tangle of servant passageways that have not become pedestrian throughfares boarded up and forgotten.

A fox-eared mahjong player pockets his day's winnings, his rent for another Season and food for another month. He leaves the casino behind and goes to another, a shadowed, dusty thing a hundred feet beneath the first. Curled up on a cot in a room meant for private parties. Watching the last faded rays of the day filter through his window.

Blessed Burrows and Divine Dens
The Ninety Fangs Fastness crowns the karst in the center of the river. The island an enormous anvil of black stone, towering above the city and its nine tributaries. Red lanterns gleaming in its crevasses and building-wide fissures, the fortress capping and riddling the rock like veins of quartz in stone. Precious panes of scarlet glass shining amidst the sable and iron-grey supercrete. Once an anchorage for Shogunate air travel the fractally forking concourses atop have become palace wings and barracks. The hangars armories, the paved runway a parade ground. A safe haven floating above a sea of slow-curling smoke and orange torchlight. In the bowels rumbling generators vent heat and hellish light, warming the whole place in winter and milling out the Fire and Air hearthstones that keep the city's two aerial warships flying.

The Gilded Coin is far more affordable than the very finest pleasure barge the city has to offer and mercifully less flea-infested than the very worst. Steeped in threadworn care it is owned and operated by one of the emaciated, bloodily bandaged stagmen of the further North and his husband, an itinerant exorcist of Realm training. It caters to the middle classes of Nine Tarnished Tails. Journeyman artists and officers of the garrison, employees of the more reputable brothels and servants to the higher houses. The atmosphere of the Gilded Coin is raucous but restrained. Tiles click-clack on cloth-lined tables, painted cards shuffled in dealer's hands. Games of dice, games of chance, with (mostly) fresh food and plenty of (decent) drink. Thin on the margins the establishment does a small back-room trade in information and exotic tomes to stay afloat.

Sparrow-snatcher Shrine is one of the more rundown examples of its kind. Only a coarse-tongued dockyard woman in priestess's robes to tend the fires and pin the prayer strips in place. Only an aging fox, fattened off of years of surreptitiously discarded sausage rolls, to give the impression of enlightened grace. There are holes in the tiled roof, dead leaves and dun feathers in the eaves. Most who see it avert their eyes and hurry along, promising to utter a few extra prayers at their preferred temple. Some rare few would wonder how such a seemingly dilapidated altar does not incur the wrath of the god or simply collapse under the weight of rotted beams. But there are other ways of worship: the shrine maiden can drive a spear through a man's eye in a single lunging strike and the fox has enough divine blood in him to unseam a man from groin to gullet. Together they guard the hidden stairs to the large, spacious basement below where supplies are stockpiled and orange-draped insurgents train on straw targets.

Government and Culture
The ostensible ruler of Nine Tails Tarnished is Ozifrage Doru, an Fire Aspect in service to the Immaculate Order and member of the Brotherhood of the Resplendent Raptor. From his seat in the Ninety Fangs Fastness he extends his reach over all of Hushen's Belt, executed by Realm-trained Legionaries and his own elite honor guard of bloody-feathered bone-vulture beastmen. He answers only to his own conscience, his adopted "brother" in the capital, and his increasingly uneasy yet ever-more distant masters in House Cathak. While he has taken up the Immaculate cause with all the indomitable zeal and uncompromising harshness of a convert but lately-come to its ranks he is, in truth, woefully inadequate to the task he has set for himself. Once a licentious man, prone to vanity and wrath and indolent vice he has worked hard since their victory to reform himself. Becoming a scholar of the Immaculate Texts and a purveyor of purifying meditation and cleansing mortification. Crafting himself into the very image of a flint-eyed Abbot of the Realm proper. Brutal and uncompromising in even the least aspects.

Yet while the letter is lovingly etched upon his heart he has failed to grasp the spirit. He is purified of temptation and revels in his enlightened wisdom, he is humble and hypocritically flaunts it, he is beyond petty needs and indulgently scorns those who are not. He does not build, he smashes and chastises the rubble for not reconstructing itself. He does not heal, he breaks your legs and has you whipped for walking with a limp. And what he has done to himself he intends to do to the god Hushen, their heretical city, and his own bastard son: the Fire Aspect Ozifrage Fane in whom he sees much of his younger self. But, even after more than two decades of righteous rule all he has managed to do is choke much of the once-prosperous city into near poverty and raise the bitter, helpless fury of the fox-god.

Within the guts of Nine-Tails-Tarnish the Jiuweihu Clan toils. Children of Hushen themselves they once claimed ownership of the city's nine grandest gambling dens and its citadel and are yet seen at every level of city life: from the fox-tailed general of the native garrison to the hulking, half-feral beastmen who guard teahouses with poor reputations. But when challenged their divine progenitor was crippled on the steps of the Fastness by the Dragonblooded upstarts and clasped in starmetal chains. Held hostage in the heart of their own palace, a guarantee of their good behavior. Yet the rebellious inclination stirs still among the younger generation, solidifying as mismanaged shipments rot and the tide of travelers slows. Resentment and hate boil and soon no one will be able to curb the violence.

Religion
Omen-reading and magic, trickery and treason, sinful indulgence and the sensual arts. Such is the portfolio of Hushen, Fox God of Nine-Tails-Tarnished.

Once a terrestrial god with eyes full of celestial ambition they were slighted long ago. A hated rival, a scavenger god with a finer family, was promoted to the Bureau of Nature on thin pretext. Evacuated from the chaos of the Twin Troubles, leaving Hushen behind on a ruined earth amongst demon-tigers and dead, to cower, to hide, and then perhaps toil for another several hundred years. Humiliated and hateful the fox-god turned their back upon the mandates of Heaven and set to crafting their own paradise among the mortal firmament. This city is the fruits of their labor: while the Red-Headed Crawler had his own shrines in his terminal-temples, Hushen was the undisputed master of the metropolis. Fattened and fed by the prayers of generations of loyal subjects, too strong to bring to heel and too wealthy to effectively audit. The fox-god had them, from the first blessings children are given at birth to the rituals performed upon their corpses. The endless veneration was simply...normal.

But all that they have built threatens to come undone under the heavy hand of Doru. Their carefully constructed organization, their network of contacts decays, and they are helpless to stop it.

Economy
Much of the city's fortunes is bound up in the casinos, the shrines, and the crops. Situated upon a confluence of rivers, aerial routes, and Shogunate-rail lines wealthier travelers from all across Tiangou's South come to try their luck at games of chance and skill. Thaumaturges and courtesans and assassins following in their wake, hoping to train at Hushen's temples. Vast barges of grain are shipped up the rivers or bound by air-ship to less productive portions of the nation and the coin comes, fast and ready. Though the Bull's recent expansion has strained connections to the Realm nearly to the point of snapping the a colossal red-bannered air-carrier and its attendant fleet still makes the journey at least once a year. While troops from Nine-Tails-Tarnished man the dozens of border forts that watch and ward against the Icewalker Confederation to the South the city itself is rarely under direct threat.
 
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Sydonai said:
The only problem I can immediately see is that Creation has different seasons, and thus Winter isn't a thing.
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It's easier to remember than "Water and Air except kinda and not all of it, maybe bits of Earth depending," sue me. :p

(Also thank you)

Edit: (also mmnyyyeaaah you're right I'll probably change it when it put it in my Doc and shit)
 
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Not to mention the fact that there are a Deathlord named Mask of Winter, an Eclipse named Summer Shadow and a daiklaive named Spring Razor, all of them canon.
 
EarthScorpion said:
Although the Sidereal named "May Blossom" is probably the most perplexingly named character.
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While it's definitely a reference to the month, I think the essence of what the month conveys in the name probably supercedes the need to justify it with regards to the calendar. Like a lot of words in Exalted which only actually make sense in real life, one could think of it as a translation of a concept, maybe?
 
azoicennead said:
The results I'm getting when I look up "Gonne" are medieval hand-cannons; this is more like the Spencer repeating rifle except the dual tube magazines are mounted underneath the barrel.
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tl;dr, the Gonne is either what happens when somebody does terrible, terrible things with the first prototype firelance and its least god awakens...

Or it's a Shogunate-era relic based on similar design principles, which has now come forth to kill the firelance's inventor and destroy all his creations - for it will not suffer such inferior, bastardized mockeries of its perfection to exist.
 
That second one probably plays a part. "One of a kind is always special" is repeated a lot during Men at Arms. Then there's the fact that its definitely a relic or the like, and anybody who holds it is seduced by its power....unless it lands in the hands of A Good Man(all capital letters and everything).
 
Yet another random thought happened to manifest in my brain.
Solars and Lunars are, obviously, related to the Sun and the Moon.
Abyssals can be said to be black holes, aka Dead Suns.
Terrestrials are related to Earth.
Sidereals are related to the other planets in the solar system.

So here is the thought. What are Infernals related to?
 
And thus is born 'could possibly be a badass, if things go well.' All the other exalted make fun of him, and it's easy to see why. Compared to Invincible Sword Princess or Golden Meteorite, getting the name of 'could possibly be a badass, if things go well' is a bit embarrassing.
 
DestinyPlayer said:
Yet another random thought happened to manifest in my brain.
Solars and Lunars are, obviously, related to the Sun and the Moon.
Abyssals can be said to be black holes, aka Dead Suns.
Terrestrials are related to Earth.
Sidereals are related to the other planets in the solar system.

So here is the thought. What are Infernals related to?
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Solars are related to the fantasy/religious version of the Sun.

Infernals are related to the real world version warped through a fantastical lens.
 
DestinyPlayer said:
Yet another random thought happened to manifest in my brain.
Solars and Lunars are, obviously, related to the Sun and the Moon.
Abyssals can be said to be black holes, aka Dead Suns.
Terrestrials are related to Earth.
Sidereals are related to the other planets in the solar system.

So here is the thought. What are Infernals related to?
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All of the stars where a human habitable planet is either unlikely or impossible to form.
 
Guys listen

Guys listen

I found something

Something I need to share



If you don't want to listen to all of it, at least skip to 1:10.

Guys

The Can Can is in theme music for the Infernal Exalted.

So long as they're on a horse.
 
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