Prior to the session actually starting, we had a quick discussion regarding pacing and tone, which I'll elaborate on here:
Aleph expressed a concern that the game was too compressed into large downtime chunks with immediate, dense bursts of 'character interaction' between them. This was causing her problems, because she couldn't rightly portray the growing cast of NPCs or effectively convey new plot information.
Now, the reason for my go-go-go-ness lies primarily with my formative Exalted career. Most of the games I was in were very light-weight, beer/pretzels injoke fests. They had no real respect for time, both player and storyteller, and most of them were thinly plotted tracks between fight scenes that rarely meant anything. I as a player was denied agency to do things I wanted to do, which sounds more... negative than I intend, but it influences me greatly.
So with that in mind, I as a player desperately want to play a game that lets me make progressively larger marks on the world, to create enduring structures or perform feats of legend, instead of merely parading through an increasingly elaborate procession of one-off combat encounters that are tennuously focused on a climatic conclusion with the big-bad-de-jour; usually a deathlord or Yozi.
(Note that almost none of those games got to the 'Fight the big bad' step before dying).
In Sunlit Sands, Aleph was unprepared for how committed I was to constant growth and large-scale actions, and expressed the desire to reign that in, focusing on more in-person scenes and character interaction for the immediate future. My concern as I expressed to her was akin to 'in practical terms, I have to wait a real-life week to advance my plot, and I am always under the impression that I will either
not get to play, or be forced to confront the reality that the game has
died before anything could be accomplished.
That fear motivates me, to a level that is possibly unhealthy for game enjoyment.
It is a credit to Aleph and my... maturity, I suppose, that I'm able to set that fear aside for this session.
Now for the actual session postmortem!
This is
Vahti. She is a Flame Duck. There are many Flame Ducks, but only one Vahti. Naturally, Inks's response to hearing 'breakfast in bed' is 'Flirt, and flirt
hard.
Sourced from a prior conversation, Vahti's characterization is as follows- "If Maji is the demon on her shoulder going "rule, dominate the peons, be a tiger-princess, crush your foes!", Vahti is basically filling a similar niche of "imp of the perverse urging her on" for Inks' more brazen, flirtacious side. She's also unusually academic for a flame duck; the result of trying to emulate Inks' more cerebral traits (with less success, since Int 5 is harder to mimic than Flirt 7)"
A bit of harmless, character-building fluff in the opening scenes of the session is just what I as a player need to get into the groove, character on and moving.
Now, for context, Inks promised Hinna she would help with her research
eight ingame months ago give or take. I completley forgot as a player as did Inks the character, suffice to say Hinna was less than sanguine about it. We invoked Vahti and Pipera both as plot-hook compilers, mostly just to not make the same mistake again.
The anhule silk-harvesting wing is still on the to-do list, but as mentioned, Aleph wanted a character session. Along the way we hashed out a few logistical details, like Inks's expanding staff to include Ajjim as cartographer and permanent resident in the townhouse. Tigerdad and daughter, best roommates.
More seriously, Ajjim can in his own way be the 'hero of another story' with Inks as a patron who breezes in at times. That's part of the beauty of Exalted as a setting and the kind of thing wildly diseparate powers are meant to do.
The best written example, in my opinion, is in fact the
introduction of Excessively Righteous Blossom in the 1st edition Autochthonians book- I've linked the relevant passage.
What I'm trying to say here, is that Ajjim's viewpoint can be invoked by the storyteller to underscore the kind of presence an Exalt has on the setting, as well as the kind of impact Inks as a player character has. Like last week, Aleph made it pretty explicit that there are less than
ten naturally Appearance 5 characters in Gem. To say nothing of the rarefied heights of Per 5, Int 5, Craft 5 and so on.
So hypothetically, a side-scene with Ajjim describing how Inks impacts his life, how he
steps out of his bedroom to see this godking woman working miracles or making breakfast or bathing. That kind of thing is in my opinion
critical to really selling Exalted, especially to new players. If you aren't starting as mortal, you need to use the mortals around the players to pin down why being an Exalt means something beyond game mechanics and abstracted powers.
Note that all this Ajjim stuff is just me noodling on about the topic, Aleph hasn't needed to touch on this yet and may never need to, but It's fun to discuss. I also really want the readers of these posts to learn things, tools and tricks to make their games better.
Anyway, having refreshed myself on today's agenda, Inks stopped in to visit Soft Ash, the overseer of her orphanage, and get a status update. Again, Consequences matter, and I think Aleph made the right choice here in choosing to elaborate on a previous event or action, instead of making up a brand new one.
Of the choices offered, I'm leaning mostly towards training the children to have Temperance 4, which is both fantastic and... I admit the main reason I want to do it is because I just want to see what would happen.
Part of the storyteller's job is to offer hints, or direction in the case of players floundering. I couldn't think fo what WAS viable, so I asked for assistance and got it.
Having resolved that, we finally approached Hinna, and got temporarily rebuffed. Remember- I accidentally snubbed this woman for eight months, and she was fairly Passionate about her secret sorcerous experimentation.
But having negotiated her schedule, Inks and Vahti finally have a proper sitdown with Hinna. Now, I admit I was suspicious of Hinna, her passion was frankly unnerving when she was first introduced, but I did not want to assume that she was inherently a Bad Guy, as Aleph generally aims for nuance or complexity in her characters. Exalted as a fandom has a tough time making characters come off as anything but what their magic glows as.
The running theme of the last half of the session is 'Tutorialization'. It's an underutilized concept and something that takes time to learn and master. It's the idea of presenting a situation or scenario with the intent of learning or instructing, as opposed to a 'Live fire' test.
The thing I want to stress here, is that in a
bad table/game environment, this kind of thing invites a paranoia response- never go anywhere without a guard, never bring soft dependants like Vahti along, etc. Paranoia is a common thing.
So in this sequence, Aleph tutorialized the idea of 'lingering plotthread consequences' as well as 'Mortal Sorcerers' and implicitly, poison/similar mechanics. Hinna, whom Inks had unfortunately neglected due to previously mentioned reasons, has managed to both drug Inks and her newest squeeze. This is bad. Inks has an awful track record with poisons.
Now, a lot of people are going to call out the whole thing of Inks getting caught out by a poison effect- I could have been more paranoid, trying to assess the wine, but I chose not to. As much as I was supsicious of Hinna both before and during the scene, (infernalists are generally not seen as good people, but Inks is a Demonologist, so why throw stones?)
The funny thing- as the logs indicate, is that when Hinna revealed her sorcerous enlightenment, Inks was actually already going 'yeah I'd be happy to work with you, I just made a mistake."
Allowing people to be entertainingly wrong is fun.
From here we had a bit of experimentation- I could have opted to succumb immediately, but I wanted to see if Inks's pools were up to snuff. Against Toxicity 4 with only 17m left, I had very little chance...
now, I
could have cranked to full totemic, generated 6m per action and burned an autosux every poison roll at the chance of keeping out of my incap level. I'd have had to pass at least 4 of the 10 poison intervals to stay ahead of the curve, but I would've been locked at -4 and no Minimum Essence rule to save me.
Also note that this is the first actual Combat roll of the game- we didn't join battle, as there were only two characcters who likely had identical speed traits, and bluntly, Hinna and Inks both are Nerds, with anemic physical stats accordingly.
After hashing out the mechanics and making a few experimental rolls, we both agreed that the more interesting path would be to have Inks succumb and see what Hinna has in store.
With that, the session and this post-mortem concludes!
