General Exalted Thread

[Lealope]

Note that the joke minigame posted earlier in this chain contains as a core premise "everybody gets Sidereal Martial Arts and gets to narrate bullshit they inflict upon the setting", and this is not something that is true in practically all actual games of Exalted. Evaluate SMA in the context of "do I want Falafel to have the ability to use Creation-Slaying Oblivion Kick to depopulate the Blessed Isle in one tick" or "do I want Ketchup Carjack to have the ability to teleport across Creation for one mote" and "is that capability gonna fuck up my game".

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I don't think you can call anything that includes those effects mechanically sound even if you remove any blatant bugs. So don't rec things like that. Or just point out the minefields and rec them anyway; I'll try patch it up by keeping the fluff and substituting the mechanics from a similar but non-broken charm or just remove it outright. (which I know you've done with at least Prismatic Arrangement of Creation).

Powerful/esoteric doesn't intrinsically equal broken and I'm well aware of how people have tendencies towards including effects that they'd think completely unacceptable in other contexts when it comes to SMA.

That's fine. I'm just asking for personal use here because I think they're cool. I can recognise the obvious stuff and just need a heads up on non-obvious interactions.

 

[GeneralChaos]

I don't think you can call anything that includes those effects mechanically sound even if you remove any blatant bugs. So don't rec things like that. Or just point out the minefields and rec them anyway; I'll try patch it up by keeping the fluff and substituting the mechanics from a similar but non-broken charm or just remove it outright. (which I know you've done with at least Prismatic Arrangement of Creation).

Powerful/esoteric doesn't intrinsically equal broken and I'm well aware of how people have tendencies towards including effects that they'd think completely unacceptable in other contexts when it comes to SMA.

That's fine. I'm just asking for personal use here because I think they're cool. I can recognise the obvious stuff and just need a heads up on non-obvious interactions.

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Powerful doesn't mean broken, but when you enemies have twice as many dice as you in your specialties and very high essence charms, you lose. Period.

Elders are broken. Don't let the NPCs make you characters irrelevant by virtue of age and more essence than you can get in a typical game.

Sidereal Martial Arts are essentially elder level charms for Sidereals. They are broken by default because they assume that the character using them already has many more dice than you and can generally curb-stomp you if they put in the slightest effort, so they generally don't bother with balance at all. Instead they let your enemies fuck you up in ways beyond simply punching you to death.

Pattern Spider Touch, for instance, lets an Elder Sidereal punch people into ducks. Grandmother Spider Mastery lets her hit everyone in her line of sight, and is instrumental to the Creation-Slaying Oblivion Kick. Kaleidoscopic Border of Impossibility lets her give you mental illnesses and redefine the battlefield to something that makes you completely fucking helpless.

Stuff like this is not useful. You can adapt it to be fun to play with, especially if you are the Elder Sidereal using it, but it's not fun by default.

 

[Frakir's brother]

Right, so I have a quick question for all you STs. A woman from a weak line of dragonblooded gets pregnant by a young dynast. While still pregnant, she exalts as a solar. The question is, does her unborn child still have as good a chance at a dragonblooded exaltation as they would have?

 

[SinisterPorpoise]

Right, so I have a quick question for all you STs. A woman from a weak line of dragonblooded gets pregnant by a young dynast. While still pregnant, she exalts as a solar. The question is, does her unborn child still have as good a chance at a dragonblooded exaltation as they would have?

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Conception happened before exaltation, in a world like ours I would say yes, but in Creation babies don't get a soul until their first breath after being born.
So I have no idea.

 

[uju32]

Right, so I have a quick question for all you STs. A woman from a weak line of dragonblooded gets pregnant by a young dynast. While still pregnant, she exalts as a solar. The question is, does her unborn child still have as good a chance at a dragonblooded exaltation as they would have?

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Not an ST, but post-conception Exaltation should not change the unborn child's prospects.
It's an edge case, but I'd expect that kid is more likely to favor it's ancestry than it's mother's new status.
Of course, being born a Solar Half-Caste is not exactly a bad deal either.

 

[Frakir's brother]

Not an ST, but post-conception Exaltation should not change the unborn child's prospects.
It's an edge case, but I'd expect that kid is more likely to favor it's ancestry than it's mother's new status.
Of course, being born a Solar Half-Caste is not exactly a bad deal either.

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Any Exaltation> any half caste.

Conception happened before exaltation, in a world like ours I would say yes, but in Creation babies don't get a soul until their first breath after being born.
So I have no idea.

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Eh, thanks for your time anyway.

Right, first two responses obtained, casting Infallible Messenger.
@ManusDomine @Aleph @EarthScorpion @Revlid

 

[Shyft]

@Frakir's brother 's... geez man, give the question some time to breathe. I can tell you right now that there's no canonical answer to your question, so if you are the ST, it's down to a judgement call. I personally err in favor of not using Half-Castes in general because they step on DB's thematic ground, but if you want to use them on your game, more power to you.

 

[Frakir's brother]

@Frakir's brother 's... geez man, give the question some time to breathe. I can tell you right now that there's no canonical answer to your question, so if you are the ST, it's down to a judgement call. I personally err in favor of not using Half-Castes in general because they step on DB's thematic ground, but if you want to use them on your game, more power to you.

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Would you believe I didn't remember when I posted? I'm STing for a brand new crowd and I got really into this one npc I'm designing. She starts off as a typical, interesting mortal's life gets hijacked by an exalt, then Tepet Chimalli died in the Bull's war. She exalts while the Bull's forces are looting the camp followers and escapes, knowing nothing about her situation. She's on the run, desperately wants to kill the Bull, and all she knows about what she is, is Immaculate doctrine. She doesn't want to die, for the sake of her unborn child, but she believes in the immaculate religion.

 

[Shyft]

Would you believe I didn't remember when I posted? I'm STing for a brand new crowd and I got really into this one npc I'm designing. She starts off as a typical, interesting mortal's life gets hijacked by an exalt, then Tepet Chimalli died in the Bull's war. She exalts while the Bull's forces are looting the camp followers and escapes, knowing nothing about her situation. She's on the run, desperately wants to kill the Bull, and all she knows about what she is, is Immaculate doctrine. She doesn't want to die, for the sake of her unborn child, but she believes in the immaculate religion.

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Fair enough. I'm going to have to break it to you gently- but everybody does an 'Immaculate Believer Solar' at some point in their gaming career, as PC or NPC. The challenge is not metagaming it too hard.

 

[Lealope]

Powerful doesn't mean broken, but when you enemies have twice as many dice as you in your specialties and very high essence charms, you lose. Period.

Elders are broken. Don't let the NPCs make you characters irrelevant by virtue of age and more essence than you can get in a typical game.

Sidereal Martial Arts are essentially elder level charms for Sidereals. They are broken by default because they assume that the character using them already has many more dice than you and can generally curb-stomp you if they put in the slightest effort, so they generally don't bother with balance at all. Instead they let your enemies fuck you up in ways beyond simply punching you to death.

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So use the Enlightenment hack?

Pattern Spider Touch, for instance, lets an Elder Sidereal punch people into ducks. Grandmother Spider Mastery lets her hit everyone in her line of sight, and is instrumental to the Creation-Slaying Oblivion Kick. Kaleidoscopic Border of Impossibility lets her give you mental illnesses and redefine the battlefield to something that makes you completely fucking helpless.

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So recommend rewrites that don't have that stuff?

Stuff like this is not useful. You can adapt it to be fun to play with, especially if you are the Elder Sidereal using it, but it's not fun by default.

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Again, that's explicitly what I'm doing. This is for personal use.

 

[Frakir's brother]

Fair enough. I'm going to have to break it to you gently- but everybody does an 'Immaculate Believer Solar' at some point in their gaming career, as PC or NPC. The challenge is not metagaming it too hard.

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Thanks for telling me, and it's easy to see that I am the only one that knows the setting in my group. I've never had the chance to play myself. I'd like to believe that Kaelan is better than most, but I'm not going to flatter myself.

 

[Malfeas]

I've been going over some old homebrew 2e martial arts styles I did years ago and felt like sharing. Feel free to comment, I may update these later to fit with 2.5e and use them in a game.

Alacritous Dervish Dance Style
A style emphasizing grace, speed and grandiose theatrics.

Stone Talon Style
A Terrestrial Martial Arts style focused on vicious headlong charges, disruptive attacks and scenery destruction. (Sadly unfinished!)

Titan of Unbridled Joy Style
A powerful Celestial Martial Art made by an ancient and forgotten Serenity-caste Sidereal, focused on endurance, powerful clinches and redirection; in the name of peaceful resolution of course!

 

[uju32]

Any Exaltation> any half caste.

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Eeh, not necessarily.
IIRC, Half-Castes have access to Solar Charms, which can be a problem for young DBs.
The Usurpation presumably made a point of killing them all off for a reason.

And so we begin with Session 22 of Sunlit Sands! Props as usual to @Aleph for running. I had a hell of a past two weeks- been sick, work kicking my ass, to say nothing of whatever's happening in her life!

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Once again, thanks to you and @Aleph for sharing.

Tatters' wound looks like she got cursed by a big-time undead. Might even be the one at El-Galabi, which would explain why she's so unenthused about letting her crush tackle the place. Especially if there's a freaking 3CD equivalent in charge (Yikes!!!)
Probably going to end up as a reason for Inks to go up a tier in Sorcery sooner rather than later, if the threat of the yidak lord isn't enough.

Might wanna ask why she went poking .

Or if she was a mortal covert agent for the Wyld Hunt that killed El-Galabi, and thus got special cursed by the Solar monk, and possibly geased. Would explain the whole crush on first sight thing she has for Inks, and where she seems to have gotten her very good training from; slipping in and out of a shadowland like that is no mean feat.

Playboy heir Gion is like the protagonist of a Japanese anime.
I am going to point out that the reports of the nature of his father's death have a distinct resonance with the fact that there is verifiable Infernal activity in the area, what with the Infernal essence token that Pesala's granpa came into possession of.

Might wanna ascertain if his visions predate Inks coming to Gem, or only started when she showed up.
Would help determine who's sending them.

Nice ghost-kitty though.
I wonder what Maji's response to it is.

 

[SinisterPorpoise]

IIRC, Half-Castes have access to Solar Charms, which can be a problem for young DBs.

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The majority of people in this thread ignore that and just make them bog-standard Godblooded.
edit:
As evidenced by this salty fellow who posted less than a minute after I did.

 

[Salty]

Once again, evidence that Half-Castes were a terrible idea and should be ignored entirely.

 

[GeneralChaos]

So use the Enlightenment hack?



So recommend rewrites that don't have that stuff?



Again, that's explicitly what I'm doing. This is for personal use.

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The thing about the Enlightenment hack is that it was made to work with the Styles system, which tears apart Supernatural Martial Arts in general. I have no idea how you'd translate SMA to work with Enlightenment, but it's probably possible.

Most of the rewrites and homebrew that aren't built around "use this set of weird, impossible, unbalanced things to be AWESOME!" are frankly not cool. Jon Chung's Prismatic Arrangement of Creation is an E4-5 style that is mechanically sound and lets you get a bunch of awesome powerups. It's about as cool as PAoC ever was.

What are you trying to do with these styles? Are they for a mentor, to be taught piecemeal to your PCs? Are they for enemy Sidereals to use on your PCs? Are they just there to look pretty in the background?

 

[Wizard_Marshall]

Not sure if this is the right thread to ask, but has anyone made an Infernal crafter? I've been interested in taking a look at an Infernal crafter sheet for a friend's campaign. I've tried searching myself, but it's mostly Solar crafters or some examples of combination charms. We're using a lot of homebrew, but I just want to get character sheet ideas from veterans. I'm fairly new to Exalted.

 

[SinisterPorpoise]

Not sure if this is the right thread to ask, but has anyone made an Infernal crafter? I've been interested in taking a look at an Infernal crafter sheet for a friend's campaign. I've tried searching myself, but it's mostly Solar crafters or some examples of combination charms. We're using a lot of homebrew, but I just want to get ideas from veterans. I'm fairly new to Exalted.

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SWLIHN has some interesting stuff, including a Charm that let's you turn anything you kill with it into a different substance of your choosing, the telekinesis is also pretty nifty for someone that doesn't want to directly handle materials.
Also Kimbery's Excellency applies to anything which involves creating "disturbing art" and her Charm-tree can create poison-shooting tattoos/tags fairly easily.

 

[Imrix]

Also, Adorjan has Impatient Tempest Labours that's very useful for the decker problem that crafter's face.

 

[Jon Chung]

So recommend rewrites that don't have that stuff?

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There's a very low chance you're going to find a SMA which has no bullshit, because a) bullshit is what entices people to write SMAs and b) the original three SMAs were stuffed full of bullshit and are often used as balancing benchmarks for fanmade SMAs with regard to how bullshit they were allowed to be compared to everyone else's (read: player characters') shit.

If they don't use the original three as a balancing benchmark, they're probably using Scroll of the Monk, have fun with that.

 

[Broken25]

Actually, i think @Omicron posted a couple of not-terrible SMA's in this very thread?

Megathread - Pen & Paper - General Exalted Thread | Page 1217

 

[Anasurimbor]

Right, so I have a quick question for all you STs. A woman from a weak line of dragonblooded gets pregnant by a young dynast. While still pregnant, she exalts as a solar. The question is, does her unborn child still have as good a chance at a dragonblooded exaltation as they would have?

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The canonical answer is that the chance of her unborn child (or any future children) eventually Exalting as a Dragon-Blood would remain unchanged by her own Exaltation.

 

[Aleph]

Right, so I have a quick question for all you STs. A woman from a weak line of dragonblooded gets pregnant by a young dynast. While still pregnant, she exalts as a solar. The question is, does her unborn child still have as good a chance at a dragonblooded exaltation as they would have?

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I believe it is canonical (and at the very least it's appropriate) that thematic actions on the part of the mother while pregnant can affect a baby's chance of Exalting and general overall wellbeing and nature; eg "flare your anima totemic every day", "spend the entire duration of the pregnancy in a 4-dot manse of your Aspect", "journey to the Elemental Pole of your Aspect and seek the blessing of your Immaculate Dragon", "eat a diet strictly composed of foods aligned with your essence nature", "meditate upon your element and train in its associated Abilities eight hours a day throughout the last two trimesters", etc. Or conversely "suppress your primary Virtues repeatedly while pregnant", "spend extended periods of time in shadowlands or the Underworld", "go through multiple Limit Breaks", "defile a temple to the Immaculate Dragons", and so on.

One can therefore assume that "literally Exalt as a Solar and be suffused with the radiant power of the Unconquered Sun" is a) probably going to impact the child in some way and b) likely not do anything good to its chances of a Dragonblooded Exaltation (though it'll still be better off than a baby conceived by a Solar).

Not sure if this is the right thread to ask, but has anyone made an Infernal crafter? I've been interested in taking a look at an Infernal crafter sheet for a friend's campaign. I've tried searching myself, but it's mostly Solar crafters or some examples of combination charms. We're using a lot of homebrew, but I just want to get character sheet ideas from veterans. I'm fairly new to Exalted.

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Well, I mean, Keris kind of is. She's more an artist and artisan, but Craft-wise she's an alchemist and bio-crafter/fleshweaver, a genius silversmith who loves her vitriol-silver something fierce and does gorgeous jewellery, and a hellish smith who can work with other forms of vitriol-metal at incredible speed and has a pronounced tendency to declare herself dissatisfied with something, smash it and then use the bits to build something else (possibly a replacement for whatever it was).

 

[Lealope]

The thing about the Enlightenment hack is that it was made to work with the Styles system,

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Was it? Sure, people use them concurrently but I don't see how they were made to work together.

What are you trying to do with these styles? Are they for a mentor, to be taught piecemeal to your PCs? Are they for enemy Sidereals to use on your PCs? Are they just there to look pretty in the background?

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My group just wants to do weird kung fu shit like wielding the principle of fame to cut someone with a spotlight.

There's a very low chance you're going to find a SMA which has no bullshit, because a) bullshit is what entices people to write SMAs and b) the original three SMAs were stuffed full of bullshit and are often used as balancing benchmarks for fanmade SMAs.

If they don't use the original three as a balancing benchmark, they're probably using Scroll of the Monk, have fun with that.

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Eh. Sure, a lot of the older SMA are complete write offs due to and the ones that aren't still have problems but those tend to be only one or two charms and those are pretty easily replaced. It's maybe a fifty fifty ratio from what I've seen (and I've seen a lot at this point).

I'm willing to put in a bit of work.

 

[Chehrazad]

I believe it is canonical (and at the very least it's appropriate) that thematic actions on the part of the mother while pregnant can affect a baby's chance of Exalting and general overall wellbeing and nature; eg "flare your anima totemic every day", "spend the entire duration of the pregnancy in a 4-dot manse of your Aspect", "journey to the Elemental Pole of your Aspect and seek the blessing of your Immaculate Dragon", "eat a diet strictly composed of foods aligned with your essence nature", "meditate upon your element and train in its associated Abilities eight hours a day throughout the last two trimesters", etc. Or conversely "suppress your primary Virtues repeatedly while pregnant", "spend extended periods of time in shadowlands or the Underworld", "go through multiple Limit Breaks", "defile a temple to the Immaculate Dragons", and so on.

One can therefore assume that "literally Exalt as a Solar and be suffused with the radiant power of the Unconquered Sun" is a) probably going to impact the child in some way and b) likely not do anything good to its chances of a Dragonblooded Exaltation (though it'll still be better off than a baby conceived by a Solar).

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Nah, you and @EarthScorpion wrote that for Kerisgame.

(It's appropriate, don't get me wrong but you still wrote it for Kerisgame.)

Eh. Sure, a lot of the older SMA are complete write offs due to and the ones that aren't still have problems but those tend to be only one or two charms and those are pretty easily replaced. It's maybe a fifty fifty ratio from what I've seen (and I've seen a lot at this point).

I'm willing to put in a bit of work.

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Well, canonically you have Sapphire Veils of Passion as a balance point, and for fanworks, @Omicron's and @Revlid's styles are both well-balanced.