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General Exalted Thread

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Ok, now I got an idea for a spell. For forests.

Let's say that the forest is killed. Poison. Poor soil. A forest fire. All you have left are, say, destroyed husks of trees. No leaves, no life, nothing.

So you want to revive it. No, the ecosystem is wrecked. all is dead.

So if you want to, say, make the trees bloom with flowers and leaves, and revive them, what kind of spell should it be? Should it conjure ashes from your palm, and flow around, the sacrifice of life giving the trees rebirth?
 
Run a Hecatomb variant. Life lost is restored by life sacrificed. Scourge the land with fire to cleanse the rot, bless the land with purified water to wash away the poison, then plough the land with blood and seed to restore life to the ashes.
Imrix said:
Yes. That's what I said in the first place; "... the rules force a lot of decisions on the ST that, regardless of deliberate intent, carry the risk of damaging what a player finds fun about their character, and some of the advice they have for doing so - things showing their clear intent for use cases - are the kind that are really easy to mess up, or are messed up to begin with." That is, the game's advice to the ST pushes them to err in favour of more volatile and dangerous decisions, the exact kind of thing that's easy to mess up.
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Its always fiddly because Limit Break takes away some element of player control and it doesn't matter HOW you do it, there will be players who oppose that. The onus is more heavily on the ST because they don't really have a vested interest in fucking the players, so much as the players always having a vested interest in minimizing consequences to themselves.
 
veekie said:
Its always fiddly because Limit Break takes away some element of player control and it doesn't matter HOW you do it, there will be players who oppose that. The onus is more heavily on the ST because they don't really have a vested interest in fucking the players, so much as the players always having a vested interest in minimizing consequences to themselves.
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o_O
Minimizing... Consequences...?
You lost me.
 
Could be worse. Could be:
"In your Limit-Break induced rage you break your favorite artifact over the skull of your favorite NPC".
 
azoicennead said:
o_O
Minimizing... Consequences...?
You lost me.
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Thats exactly it. Depends on your game group, but you can see players try to haggle down a Limit Break because they're afraid of the consequences.
The full and open collaborative approach works well with groups which have both mature GMs and mature players, but this is kind of a gradient more than anything else.

So where people are concerned about the adversarial element of a GM abusing a Limit Break to "set the players back", such a GM is ALSO likely to cause all kinds of hell on their own without that justification, but given the player : GM ratio, you're more likely to have at least one player in the group trying to minimize or avoid the effects.
 
Sydonai said:
ST:"In your Limit-Break induced rage you break your favorite artifact over your knee."
Or replace "Artifact" with "NPC", or "relationship", or anything else you might consider an important or defining trait of your character.
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That's literally playing someone's character for them. That's a problem that extends beyond accidental or intentional abuse of the Limit Break mechanics.

veekie said:
Thats exactly it. Depends on your game group, but you can see players try to haggle down a Limit Break because they're afraid of the consequences.
The full and open collaborative approach works well with groups which have both mature GMs and mature players, but this is kind of a gradient more than anything else.
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To be clear, I was making a joke because I tend to do, uh, "brilliant" things like "flare my anima to totemic, declare my name as one of Hesiesh's titles, and challenge a Realm monitoring force that I can see includes several Terrestrial Exalts to a fight".
I recognize the problems of Limit Break RAW in 3e, but I'm entirely willing to embrace the consequences of my actions and will do things for little gain with potentially terrible consequences because it fits my character.
 
What kind of tools would a wandering magician or thaumaturge carry with him? For some reason I am really fucking blanking on this when I can usually figure out something.
Sanctaphrax said:
Recently, I brainstormed some notable Lunars. Was trying to think of ways to give Lunars great accomplishments without it coming across as a fakey retcon. Somehow I got to writing, and now I've got these.

Once upon a time, eleven hundred years ago, there was a young shaman with a dead wife. The shaman, like the rest of their Northern tribe, believed that the righteous dead lived forever in a utopia of unfettered growth and permanent summer. And had they been confident in their wife's righteousness, they might have simply mourned her.

But the shaman had doubts. And they were consumed by fear, fear that their wife was suffering eternally in the frozen wasteland of the unworthy. So they travelled to a haunted place, a shadowland, and descended into the Underworld.

The journey through Creation from the shaman's home to the shadowland was difficult. The journey through the Underworld from the shadowland to the shaman's home should have been impossible. But the shaman managed it somehow, and found...

Horror. No bountiful utopia. No frozen wasteland. Something worse; a hunting ground for spectres. And so the shaman despaired.

Then madness came. If the underworld wasn't what it was meant to be, the shaman would force it into its proper shape.

Sometimes the line between madness and inspiration is only power. And when Luna smiled upon the shaman, that line disappeared.

In the present day, the Kingdom of the Black Moon is among the most pleasant places in the Underworld. A land of lush vegetation and warm moonlight, ruled by the almighty No Moon Corpse-Eating Bird. It is a safe haven from spectres, Deathlords, and other such things, as Corpse-Eating Bird comes to judge the hearts of all who walk its fields. Puppets of the Neverborn, and other dangers to the Kingdom, are dispatched without mercy.

In the Kingdom of the Black Moon, the dead are assured a level of comfort and safety. Accordingly, the kingdom is a place of utter madness, a gathering place for misfits from across the Underworld. Corpse-Eating Bird is a strict judge in some ways but a very lenient one in others; they have no problem allowing in a ghost who constantly rolls around on the ground while eating its own feet or a necromantic abomination made from thirty dead Terrestrials stitched together.

There isn't much in the way of central government in the KIngdom of the Black Moon. There are a few reasonably well-organised cities, but most of the inhabitants live outside of them, ignoring each other as they pursue their own mad Passions.

In the centre of the Kingdom lies the humble hut of Corpse-Eating Bird. They're very happy there with the ghost of their wife, despite all the excellent reasons why such a relationship shouldn't work at all. When not judging new arrivals to the Kingdom or dealing with national crises, they spend their time with a number of lesser necromancers who serve as both students and lieutenants.

The future of the Kingdom is uncertain. The Deathlords have grown far stronger with the arrival of the Abyssal Exalted and may no longer be inclined to tolerate Corpse-Eating Bird's total disregard for their authority. On the other hand, Abyssals who promise not to harm their neighbours are more than welcome in the Kingdom.

The Underworld is, and should be, a nasty place. But it needs some grey to go with the black, and I think an elder Lunar could provide some of it.

After all, how do you make part of the Underworld (un-)live-able?

The main thing is to keep the monsters out. And that's something that Lunars, as bigger monsters, are well suited to. The resulting utopia will be weird as heck, but again, Lunars are well suited to that.

The intention here is that the cities of the Kingdom are gathering places for the Underworld's approximation of the good guys. The fields around them probably look something like a Hieronymus Bosch painting.

Corpse-Eating Bird is meant to be a bit goofy and not at all sane, but still someone that unambiguously heroic PCs could respect/work for. They're not quite as strong as a Deathlord but they're in their general weight class; I'm ignoring the 2e stats for the Deathlords, obviously. With that in mind, no Deathlord has yet been willing to risk full scale war with them and their rag-tag army. Corpse-Eating Bird, for their part, has absolutely no interest in picking fights beyond the borders of their kingdom.

If you believe the history books, Yarevi Mallarek was one of the greatest Terrestrials of the Shogunate. By her matchless strength, keen intellect, and relentless will she turned a small kingdom on Creation's edge into a great nation. She slew one of the Lunar Anathema and founded a mighty lineage. Her grandson Narmat Mallarek was almost as great, and her great-granddaughter Yarevi Mallarek II was perhaps even greater. House Cathak is proud to claim descent from her.

You shouldn't believe the history books. Yarevi was not a Terrestrial at all. Her own father locked her in the family prison and left her to starve there as punishment for her failure to Exalt. And Yarevi would have died there, had she been someone else. But she escaped by faking a suicide and killing the guards when they came in to take out her "corpse". She fled into the land her father ruled, and lived there as a fugitive for seven years.

Luna smiled upon Yarevi's determination, and Chose her. Two days later, her father was dead.

The Silver Pact expected Yarevi to join. She turned them down. She wanted nothing to do with them; she wanted the throne she was born for. She'd happily mouth Immaculate dogma to get it.

From there, Yarevi's story is more or less as recorded. She really was a hero of the Shogunate, despite her total lack of interest in the religious and moral doctrines of her brethren. As she saw it, only the Shogunate could satisfy her lust for glory. The Sidereal Exalted, wisely, decided to work with her and even facilitated her impersonation of her grandson and great-granddaughter. She participated happily in the Wyld Hunt, and lived long enough to die of the Great Contagion.

House Cathak finds it very, very, offensive when moon-worshipping barbarians claim that three of their honoured ancestors were the same Anathema.

As I've said before, I dislike the way that canon portrays Lunars as almost universally Pact-following. Why should a daughter of the Shogunate, raised to see "barbarian" peoples as scum, renounce civilisation in favour of revenge?

Putting Lunars even on the "kill Lunars" side of history is both ridiculous in the same way that real history tends to be and a great way to build up Lunars as individuals without contradicting their lack of success as a faction.

The truth about Yarevi is probably well known among Lunar and Sidereal loremasters, but since there's no surviving evidence it basically just seems like a libel.

And yes, she did kill and eat her own family members. She was straight-up evil, in a heroic kind of way.

Alata was a Lunar of the Changing Moon, famous for her kindness. She brought wealth to the poor, health to the sick, peace to the warlike, and comfort to the despairing. Despite her vast power, she had no pride; she would willingly spend months attending to the lowest beggar, if the lowest beggar needed it. And ninety years ago, she disappeared.

Whose Whispers Chain is one of the Neverborn. In the First Age, Alata's pre-incarnation broke the doors of his tomb and defiled his rotting corpse in pursuit of knowledge and power. He has been a blight upon Creation ever since. And for ninety years, his Whispers have been silent.

Ninety years ago, Alata travelled into the Labyrinth. She told her friends that she was going "to make amends, and to seek forgiveness". Neither she, nor her Exaltation, has been seen since.

Perhaps she brought some peace to the dead Titan. Perhaps the Neverborn is simply too busy torturing her to notice the rest of Creation. Or perhaps something else entirely happened. Nobody knows.

There have got to be a few old Exalts who just wander doing good deeds. It's a time-honoured trope, after all.

This one's mostly intended as a dangling plot hook. It raises the possibility of making peace with the Neverborn, without outright saying that it's possible. And what if Alata emerges, listing certain tasks that must be completed for the Neverborn to pass on?

The plight of Malfeas' lesser demons is terrible indeed. But even they have heroes. And chief among them is Okataman.

Okataman, a mighty being of unknown origin, appeared six hundred years ago bearing a scroll of lambskin. Upon that scroll were written seven demands made to the greatest demons on the behalf of the least. Okataman nailed the scroll to the door of Irellador, a castle-demon of the Second Circle known for his cruelty, and declared that henceforth any who refused the demands would be his enemies.

Irellador laughed. Then Irellador died. Other demons of the Second Circle followed him, and soon Okataman's name was powerful enough to bend the laws of Hell. Angry mobs chanted his demands and struck fear into their betters.

It couldn't last. A demon of the Third Circle came to avenge the death of one subsoul and the humiliation of another; it died. Another came, to avenge its brother; it killed Okataman.

Okataman is dead, but his legend lives on. Although even mentioning the Seven Demands is grounds for execution in Hell, his name is whispered by those lesser demons brave enough to resent their station. Some say he was a mighty behemoth made by Sacheverell; others say he was a First Circle who rose above his station. A few say he was the Ebon Dragon in disguise. All agree that he was, and is, a symbol of resistance against the irresistible power of the demon princes.

Okataman was actually a Lunar of the Full Moon. He first tried to bring justice to Creation, but a Sidereal convinced him that the demons of Malfeas needed him more. Some time after coming to Malfeas, Okataman told an emissary of the Silver Pact that the Sidereal could have killed him easily enough. He wasn't sure of her motives in sparing him, but speculated that they were a mixture of genuine concern for lesser demons and a desire to push Lunars in general away from attacking the Realm.

Remember that argument we had about the morality of Hell's hugeness?

Well, here's a Lunar and a Sidereal who took the less popular side of it.

Okataman is meant to seem ridiculous to other characters in-setting until they realise that he's both completely serious and extremely effective. At which point he becomes a weird mixture of frightening and admirable.

He was doomed from the start, of course. One Exalt against all the Yozis and all their higher souls is not a fair fight.

Nice thing about Hell is that you can drop a preposterously badass Celestial into its history without causing any continuity issues.

Not sure exactly what the Seven Demands are. But I wanted to have him pull a Martin Luther.
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Pretty sweet.
 
Gamerlord said:
What kind of tools would a wandering magician or thaumaturge carry with him? For some reason I am really fucking blanking on this when I can usually figure out something.
Pretty sweet.
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I always have different ones, but a staff is classic,
I set a powerful thaumaturge up with one of those Buddhist staves with the rings, but with each ring being gold with a single flake of Tumbaga.
Another NPC just had musical instruments made of Cecelynian glass, and you can get the sand for that from any beckoning.
 
Gamerlord said:
What kind of tools would a wandering magician or thaumaturge carry with him? For some reason I am really fucking blanking on this when I can usually figure out something.
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You can't just say "a wondering thaumaturge". What do they do? Are they a furtive demonologist on the run, a geomancer who's building a big mapping project, a wandering alchemist with a lab in his cart... what?
 
EarthScorpion said:
You can't just say "a wondering thaumaturge". What do they do? Are they a furtive demonologist on the run, a geomancer who's building a big mapping project, a wandering alchemist with a lab in his cart... what?
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He's mostly a stage magician, a career performer whose sleight of hand and mental tricks only help along his thaumaturgical studies. He seeks out small trinkets and artifacts, knowing that going after big hauls is an easy way to run afoul of Exalts and nastier things. His prized companion is his monkey familiar, who with a lot of effort and risk can be 'ridden'. That skinchanging is basically the apex of his capabilities, but it's enough to let him scam rubes and impress bumpkins.

I've been binging not only on Exalted books but also WoD ones, which have proven suprisingly helpful in providing ideas.

EDIT: I know changing shape is a Lunar thing, but I just read through the WoD Skinchangers book and was inspired by the examples.
 
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Gamerlord said:
He's mostly a stage magician, a career performer whose sleight of hand and mental tricks only helps along his studies. He seeks out small trinkets and artifacts, knowing that going after big hauls is an easy way to run afoul of Exalts and nastier things. His prized companion is his monkey familiar, who with a lot of effort and risk can be 'ridden'.

I've been binging not only on Exalted books but also WoD ones, which have proven suprisingly helpful in providing ideas.
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Okay, so this guy is a mix of a huckster, a charlatan, and a small-time scavenger lord.
  • A wagon that he lives in and which carries the things he finds. It's got a small alchemy lab at the back that he uses to make things, like flash powder, smoke bombs, and the like.
  • Packs of divination cards. He uses them both for card tricks and hustling, and also for fortune telling.
  • An expensive telescope he keeps hidden in a false compartment. Its lenses are Shogunate-era, and it's the single most valuable thing he owns. He uses it for reconnaissance and also for astrology.
 
EarthScorpion said:
Okay, so this guy is a mix of a huckster, a charlatan, and a small-time scavenger lord.
  • A wagon that he lives in and which carries the things he finds. It's got a small alchemy lab at the back that he uses to make things, like flash powder, smoke bombs, and the like.
  • Packs of divination cards. He uses them both for card tricks and hustling, and also for fortune telling.
  • An expensive telescope he keeps hidden in a false compartment. Its lenses are Shogunate-era, and it's the single most valuable thing he owns. He uses it for reconnaissance and also for astrology.
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That'll work as a start-off point... I'm writing a raid of this guy's current home (he's stuck due to inclement travelling conditions) and I need something to be found so he can get pissed and fight back. Tertiary antagonists ho!
 
Gamerlord said:
What kind of tools would a wandering magician or thaumaturge carry with him? For some reason I am really fucking blanking on this when I can usually figure out something.
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Traveller's Staff: Artifact 1
TRAVELER'S STAFF (ARTIFACT •)
This gnarled staff is a branch from an ancient apple tree found in a powerful Wood demesne on the Blessed Isle. The Empress claimed this demesne as a crownland until a few decades ago, when she awarded it to House V'neef. Only tools of the magical materials can cut this tree's wood, and only a master of Lore, Occult and Craft (Wood) can preserve the ageless tree's magic in a staff.

A traveler's staff can be used as a normal quarterstaff in combat, but the staff is more useful as a source of food, firewood and shelter. At sunset, the user may plant the staff into the earth and commit 3 motes. The branch then grows into a full-size apple tree that bears enough ripe fruit to feed five people for the evening. If she needs firewood, the owner can use the tree's branches to provide it—wood gathered this way burns readily. Come morning, she can find a large, straight branch that easily snaps off—and it becomes the original staff. The tree then dies and rapidly rots away. By sunset, no sign of its presence remains, and the Essence is released to the Exalt who caused it to grow.
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Oadenol's Codex pg 158

Horn of the Ways: Artifact 2
HORN OF THE WAYS (ARTIFACT••)
In the Middlemarches of the Wyld, space can twist and fray strangely, and that power sometimes inheres in Wyld-spawned creatures. A horn of the ways is made from the horn of any large beast born in the Middlemarches, enchanted and bound in moonsilver. The Lunar Exalted use these artifacts to travel quickly across Wyld regions, but they can also be used to penetrate fortress walls, escape imprisonment and outflank their enemies.

A horn of the ways makes a mournful howling sound, easily mistaken for the wind or perhaps a strange beast. The magical horn opens paths that did not exist before and vanish shortly after the Exalt follows them. Used in the wilderness, a horn of the ways adds four dice to Survival rolls to travel from location to location or simply escape an area. Further, the horn eliminates all terrain penalties to movement speed (see the Complex Travel factors on p. 266-267 of Exalted; no matter where the traveler goes on land, treat his movement as on a highway). Used to get past an impassable barrier (a fortress wall, for example), it adds four dice to Larceny rolls to open doors or other passages and eliminates all penalties for the lack of appropriate tools. Using the horn on a journey requires the Exalt to commit 5 motes until he gets where he wants to go. A character can bring no more than 10 people (a combat unit of Magnitude 1) along the horn's secret paths, and if anyone loses sight of the Exalt, they lose the benefits from the horn
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Oadenol's Codex pg 159

Both artifacts that a wanderer would find very useful, and whose loss would significantly hamper their lives. Both natural in origin.
And neither is too valuable.
 
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uju32 said:
Both artifacts that a wanderer would find very useful, and whose loss would significantly hamper their lives. Both natural in origin.
And neither is too valuable.
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The only question is whether the thaumaturge has any motes to activate them with. Being an enlightened mortal is rarer than being an experienced thaumaturge.
 
Sanctaphrax said:
Alright, let's call this a question for the thread. How would you approach Lunars?
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Creation is under siege. Demons, Fey, the Dead, rogue Gods, Mad Exalts, straight up monsters and Other Things™ are constantly attacking it from all directions, in ways both overt and subtle.

The Realm claims it alone protects Creation, and much of it's authority derives from that in some fashion. Heaven is silent on the matter. But the further you get from the Realm's influence, the more stories come up about great heroes that glow with a silver light. A lunar has directly saved each and every population center in Creation in this age at least once. They have to keep their heads down and sometimes it must be done in harsh and brutal ways, but every living human that walks the face of Creation is breathing because of a Lunar.

That's what they've been doing since the fall of the First Age. And they have to either do it on their own, or be extremely subtle about building up infrastructure to support themselves, because Heaven's puppetmasters can levy curses and sic their divine lapdogs upon nations that are ruled openly by the Lunars, while the Realm will deploy their Legions to burn them to the ground and their monks to poison the memories of the people against them. And while the lunars are not (or should not be) incapable of directing a society through their magic, the sidereals and the dragon blooded have a leg up on them through their very natures.

They can not boast about their deeds in any meaningful fashion publicly because of this, so the silver pact was formed to allow them to keep their stories alive. If a lunar asks, any no moon of even a little experience should be able to recite the story of the great deeds done by their past reincarnations, and many full and changing moons can do so for the lunars they know personally as well.

What do the lunars do? they defend creation as best they know how. they are 300 moon-blessed heroes who face the threats that others can't, both from without and from within.
 
beowolf said:
I like the general thrust of the rest of this post, but does this particular point include the ones on the Blessed Isle? Because that's maybe going a little too far in boosting their accomplishments.
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when Koth Eight Eyes tricked The Baron of Calamatous Intent and Riotous Appetites into trying to consume the Elemental Pole of Fire to fuel his assault upon the Blessed Isle (spoiler alert, the Baron exploded), he certainly saved the imperial city.

that said, it was a poetic turn of phrase. the baron would have been smote before getting the the blessed isle by SOMEONE. Most likely. But we will never know, will we? If you insist on totaly accuracy, the closer you get to the center of creation, the less immediately true that statement is - though if you look back far enough it holds up.
 
Unbanshee said:
when Koth Eight Eyes tricked The Baron of Calamatous Intent and Riotous Appetites into trying to consume the Elemental Pole of Fire to fuel his assault upon the Blessed Isle (spoiler alert, the Baron exploded), he certainly saved the imperial city.
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What's the rule? "I will never attempt to consume any energy field larger than my own head."
 
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