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General Exalted Thread

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Queshire said:
There's certainly enough Dungeon stories on this site lately that it's clear at least some people find base building interesting. If Qaf charms help you build your evil overlord lair of evilness then I'm sure some players will be interested in them.

If you're not then simply don't take them, and if one player taking them upsets the dynamic of a player group... well, that's something which would need to be ironed out between the player group.

It's not an inherent flaw of the charms.
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I would argue that it is an inherent flaw of the charms if the whole charmset is based on that strategic immobility. However, a charmtree based on that premise, geomancy-heavy, which interacts with other charm trees - for instance, allowing the Qafian to send his nacreous eyes to any geomance'd spot no matter the distance - seems much more feasible.

I'm aware that this is a compromise, which is likely not going to make anyone happy, but I thought I'd at least raise the point.
 
Accelerator said:
Never heard of it. :p
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It's only one of the most important works on the medieval perception of Kingship, illustrating excellently how being King was far from a secular, Realpolitik-like position of governance, but also an almost sacral figure, seen as capable of working miracles, up to and including healing with a touch. It's an excellent refutation of the idea that the Divine Right of Kings was only a cold, calculating lie to justify power, but also something that Kings themselves believed, and often sought to aspire towards. It should be obligatory reading for Exalted, because it makes it a lot less harder to forget that in a pre-modern world, spirituality and theology were often strongly inter-woven with politics and sociology.

The reason Qaf reminded me of it, is due to the belief that the Body Politic - the King's "political body", which he was literally the head of (jurists and clergymen being his eyes, nobility being his heart etc.) would diminish and wither if he was a bad King, and took bad care of it. This is today, commonly thought of as the "fisher king"; if the fields wither, people are unhappy and bandits prey on hapless travelers, this is God making it known that the King is failing his duties, and his Body Politic weakens, like a man who fails to take care of his body will weaken.
 
ManusDomine said:
It's only one of the most important works on the medieval perception of Kingship, illustrating excellently how being King was far from a secular, Realpolitik-like position of governance, but also an almost sacral figure, seen as capable of working miracles, up to and including healing with a touch. It's an excellent refutation of the idea that the Divine Right of Kings was only a cold, calculating lie to justify power, but also something that Kings themselves believed, and often sought to aspire towards. It should be obligatory reading for Exalted, because it makes it a lot less harder to forget that in a pre-modern world, spirituality and theology were often strongly inter-woven with politics and sociology.

The reason Qaf reminded me of it, is due to the belief that the Body Politic - the King's "political body", which he was literally the head of (jurists and clergymen being his eyes, nobility being his heart etc.) would diminish and wither if he was a bad King, and took bad care of it. This is today, commonly thought of as the "fisher king"; if the fields wither, people are unhappy and bandits prey on hapless travelers, this is God making it known that the King is failing his duties, and his Body Politic weakens, like a man who fails to take care of his body will weaken.
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Pretty much. My rough thought is Qaf would have the usual "Mind Tree" / "Body Tree" of the Revlidian Yozi design.

Mind Tree - Ascetic Monk, Ascension-Seeking Supervillain
  • Root - Permanent booster to meditation, allow you to meditate to replace sleep, no penalties from hunger, disease, poison etc while meditating
    • Tree: Mind Over Body - Resistance/Survival/Medicine/Integrity, cure Poison/Sickness/Crippling/Shaping/mental influence in yourself by meditating, become a holy man who can tear out unwanted Intimacies from people and take their Sickness/Poison/Shaping/Crippling/mental influence with them
    • Tree: No Distractions - Integrity - Give up unwanted Intimacies that get in the way of your goals, suppress the effects of non-Temperance Virtues in yourself, strengthen your Temperance
    • Tree: Teacher of Men - Training, branches off No Distractions. Root is to target a character and lay an effect on them that means they get a training dot if they give up an Intimacy of your choice (Ie "your love for her is holding you back. Give her up and you will master the sword"). Upgrades to give you new routes to bribe people in return for training, like having them do a task for you (MONTAGE TIME).
    • Tree: Evil Kung Fu Master - Martial Arts, have skin as hard as stone, catch arrows with your mind, get damage bonuses against people with lower Temperance than you, punch men in the Virtues, also punch out all their blood. Basically, be the corrupt temple master villain of a kung fu flick.
Body Tree - Fisher King, "I Am A Holy Place", Living Dungeon/Game Level
  • Root - claim a Holy Place, usually manifests as a hillock, but if you use it on an existing high place (castle, temple, shrine, etc) then it can be hidden within it.
    • Tree: Come To The Mountain To Serve The Sage - Bureaucracy/Performance, call lesser beings to your Holy Place, make them work well together while they're there, indoctrinate them into your service, make people serving you on your Holy Place immune to environmental conditions.
    • Tree: I Am The Land - Enhancements for your Holy Place, control the weather, direct environmental conditions at people who come there. Also starts merging your Holy Places - for there is only one Mount Qaf, and it is all these places, allowing you to use something akin to Hellwalker Technique to travel between your Holy Places. Capstone is an E5 landscape-style shintai
    • Tree: The Memes, Jack - Socialise, Bureaucracy, broadcast social attacks from a Holy Place in a way that makes it obvious that the weird dreams and weird ideas are coming from the Holy Place, control your armies and operations from a distance, possess your followers in a way that means that if they die, you die.
Something like that, at least. This is just a crude tree prototype of what I feel is a strong theme build that should give you plenty of tools to misuse by blending with other Yozis.
 
GardenerBriareus said:
If Qaf was the kind of solipsist you're imagining him as, then he'd still be sitting in the Outer Chaos somewhere, quietly doing fuckall. The Shining Answer is an inherently active, dynamic quest for higher purpose - not within, but without. Theion and his siblings were so fed up with how meaningless the Wyld around them was that they built a new without in the hopes it would let them find the Answer. Why would Qaf have been anywhere near that if he could achieve total cosmic enlightenment by just sitting around doing nothing? About the only answer I can think of within your paradigm is that he radiated Buddha Waves that made the other Primordials drag him along on the assumption he was important, and they would "talk" to his comatose form and then imagine up his side of the conversation. In which case he's literally a Monty Python sketch.
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What's this "stuck in one place" idea?
Qaf is in a lot of places, all at the same time.
His body is an infinitely long pole, so large that it's for all intents and purposes a mountain, that's the entire reason the Exalted had to make a special prison dimension specifically to contain him.
 
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Given how many fan interpretations of Yozi there are, I don't think it is fair to say that anyone designing a new one must preemptively cut out some concept because other people have done it is really fair. People who don't use the various fan yozi don't have all those other options either as a balance concern or a thematic counterpoint.


Some Qaf ideas I had while reading:

Qafian enlightenment buildup in a person produces a simultaneous growth of something like a demesne token in them for later harvesting, perhaps those nacreous eyes that have been mentioned. So your servants all bear some mineralogical inclusion in their bodies that you could perhaps see through and which you can kill them by removing for your own ends.


Combat shaping some sort of literal highground for king of the hill uses that grant you bonuses if you stay on top of it and lesser bonuses if other people get to the top by knocking you off. Perhaps branching off the no movement action charms.


Link the demesne desecration charm to the terraforming charm to the (capstone?) manse building charm. So you start by meditating in a demesne (or whatever) to start your tower and it begins to suck vitality from the land.


Perhaps a theme of value or worth? Charms that manipulate or remove metaphysical value from things, so that your tower, while a horrible blight on the land or what not, is obviously worth all the value that has been removed from the surrounding land.


You can receive power that is projected to you from your quasi-network of claimed territory. Not as well as if you were actually in it, but so that attacking your source of power while you are away is a viable option.



Finally, if anyone has played Tyranny, Kyros and Edicts may be something worth looking at. They are essentially territory-wide spells that last forever until their conditions are met and which depend on a certain metaphysical control over an area.
 
Accelerator said:
CREATING THE STONE LABRYINTH
Cost: 10m, 1wp

The sorcerer raises a hand, and shouts the Word of the Lost. At this, a labryinth is conjured around the sorcerer. The maze can be made of anything. In the jungle, hedges grow into shape. In the ocean, water rises up into walls. On land, earth reshapes itself into a maze. In the air, the space itself warps. The difficulty of navigating the maze, is (Sorcerer's essence + Intelligence + Occult), and anyone trapped inside must roll (intelligence + survival) to get through the maze. If the person wins, he is able to navigate the maze without getting lost, and is able to either find the sorcerer, find other people, or exit the maze.

At an interval defined the sorcerer, whether via ticks, actions, hours, or days, a new part of the maze is added. The maze starts off enclosing a 100 yard by 100 yard square, and each interval increases by the size by a hundred yards. This continues on, until each side of the maze is 1000 yards in size. As each interval passes, the maze is reshaped, forcing whoever is trapped inside to reroll. If they fail, they are once again, lost.

This maze is useless against anyone who can fly. Or jump good.

Please review
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Neat. But I do have some criticisms.

Assuming this is terrestrial, I think the maze probably shouldn't be permanent. Major architectural features shouldn't be too easy to construct.

Essence + Intelligence + Occult is a huge difficulty. Should be toned down.

Actually, come to think of it, it should probably be an extended roll. After all, the main measure of success in maze navigation is how long it takes you. And it should be very hard to trap someone permanently with a simple spell like this one.

Ten resetting growths seems like an excessive number. I'd go with two or three.

GardenerBriareus said:
Except if you want to do anything other than sit in one place, you have to chuck all your Qafian Charms in a bin.
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I don't think anyone is suggesting that the idea be taken that far.

That goes for your whole post, actually. Qaf's holy places attract attention, but not to the point that every Essence 3 Infernal with three Qaf Charms is drawing the combined armies of heaven. Qaf's Charms encourage the construction of giant brainwashing obelisks, but not to the point that you can't use them for other things.

Go ahead, use Qaf's crowd-attracting Charms to drum up business for your shop. Use his home-fortifying Charms to make an instant fortress for your invading army. Use his loom-in-people's-dreams Charms to spread public health advice and stem the spread of a plague. And so on.
 
Hmm... Mummy the Curse with its Sekhem, Dedwen, and Relics might be also be a place to look for inspiration. Mummies have a natural "obsessed with the occult" field they project that can get worse with cosmic enlightenment.
 
Exthalion said:
Hmm... Mummy the Curse with its Sekhem, Dedwen, and Relics might be also be a place to look for inspiration. Mummies have a natural "obsessed with the occult" field they project that can get worse with cosmic enlightenment.
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I think EarthScorpion's Oramus charmset had that (might have been an other one) but yeah. I do like ES's list of the mind/body tree above and how you can be the evil kung fu master in the temple.

Also, because your drawing attention you largely avoid the 'twilight sitting in a cave crafting' problem...its just now Exalted has become a Kingdom Management Game. You have all these people coming to your Evil Castle / Tower / Temple and you can interact with them as a city forms around your castle / tower...and then you have the strategic actions of sending your armies of Mordor minions out to lay siege to the free peoples of Middle Earth Creation.

I mean its not being a murderhobo going from town to town, but playing Kingdom Maker is a Villainous Archtype in itself.
 
ManusDomine said:
It's only one of the most important works on the medieval perception of Kingship, illustrating excellently how being King was far from a secular, Realpolitik-like position of governance, but also an almost sacral figure, seen as capable of working miracles, up to and including healing with a touch. It's an excellent refutation of the idea that the Divine Right of Kings was only a cold, calculating lie to justify power, but also something that Kings themselves believed, and often sought to aspire towards. It should be obligatory reading for Exalted, because it makes it a lot less harder to forget that in a pre-modern world, spirituality and theology were often strongly inter-woven with politics and sociology.

The reason Qaf reminded me of it, is due to the belief that the Body Politic - the King's "political body", which he was literally the head of (jurists and clergymen being his eyes, nobility being his heart etc.) would diminish and wither if he was a bad King, and took bad care of it. This is today, commonly thought of as the "fisher king"; if the fields wither, people are unhappy and bandits prey on hapless travelers, this is God making it known that the King is failing his duties, and his Body Politic weakens, like a man who fails to take care of his body will weaken.
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See, that sounds interesting to me because it sounds a whole lot like the old Daoist ideal of a Chinese ruler, a few thousand miles away and I think around a thousand years prior. You exist as a good king, looking south and doing nothing in yourself but being virtuous, and as a direct and natural consequence your empire flourishes and runs well.
 
linkhyrule5 said:
See, that sounds interesting to me because it sounds a whole lot like the old Daoist ideal of a Chinese ruler, a few thousand miles away and I think around a thousand years prior. You exist as a good king, looking south and doing nothing in yourself but being virtuous, and as a direct and natural consequence your empire flourishes and runs well.
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Incidentally, Kingship exists beyond the King himself, so you get situations such as when King Charles I of England was sentenced to death... In the name of the King. This made perfect sense! The King was being sentenced to death, but he was being so in the name of the King, because the land must always have a King.
 
Bel said:
I think EarthScorpion's Oramus charmset had that (might have been an other one) but yeah. I do like ES's list of the mind/body tree above and how you can be the evil kung fu master in the temple.

Also, because your drawing attention you largely avoid the 'twilight sitting in a cave crafting' problem...its just now Exalted has become a Kingdom Management Game. You have all these people coming to your Evil Castle / Tower / Temple and you can interact with them as a city forms around your castle / tower...and then you have the strategic actions of sending your armies of Mordor minions out to lay siege to the free peoples of Middle Earth Creation.

I mean its not being a murderhobo going from town to town, but playing Kingdom Maker is a Villainous Archtype in itself.
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It's too bad that Exalted has, at best, terrible mechanics for managing kingdoms and interacting with the setting at the scale of a large organization.
 
Part of the issue with organization mechanics is that they actually require two different subsystems to implement in Exalted.

One is a bureaucracy system, for what you can do pushing paper, managing subordinates, etc.
The other is a leadership system, for what you can do as the leader of an organization, how organizations interact with each other (through negotiation or direct conflict), etc.

Each needs to operate kind of independently, but also combine to work together.

Personally, I'm a fan of some kind of explicitly downtime-only, between sessions management system for leading large organizations, with in-session focus on interacting with the organization through interacting with significant NPCs for immediate changes.

Edit: But, I also think that there needs to be some kind of more meaningful unified "stuff happening in downtime" category of actions in Exalted that can lead into story hooks and give nice rewards. Stuff like "go hunting for [treasure/monsters], lay down spynetworks, manage organization, train army, create sorcerous working, etc." PCs declare what they're doing at the end of a session based on plausible narratives, make a roll or two, and then the GM presents the consequences at the start of the next session. Charms can open up entirely new downtime actions or give new options for old ones, with the generics getting a bonus based on the number of applicable Charms.
 
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Hey guys, just found this. What do you think of it?

Artifacts/TelgarArtifact0 - Exalted - Unofficial Wiki

Sanctaphrax said:
Assuming this is terrestrial, I think the maze probably shouldn't be permanent. Major architectural features shouldn't be too easy to construct.

Essence + Intelligence + Occult is a huge difficulty. Should be toned down.

Actually, come to think of it, it should probably be an extended roll. After all, the main measure of success in maze navigation is how long it takes you. And it should be very hard to trap someone permanently with a simple spell like this one.

Ten resetting growths seems like an excessive number. I'd go with two or three.
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Like this?

Creating the Stone Labryinth - Terrestrial

The sorcerer must be standing on a solid surface when casting this spell. The sorcerer raises a hand, and shouts the Word of the Lost. At this, a labryinth rises from the ground beneath the sorcerer, composed of local materials. In the jungle, hedges grow and trees reshape. In the North, walls of ice form. On land, the earth rises to form barriers and barricades.

The difficulty of navigating the maze, is (intelligence + occult), and is an extended roll, with anyone trapped inside needing to roll (intelligence + survival).

At an interval defined at the start of the spell (ticks/ actions/ hours), the maze grows. It starts a hundred yards squared, and each interval increases the side by a hundred more yards. This continues on, equal to (sorcerer's willpower - 3), and each time the person doing the extended roll has to restart, as the maze shifts about him.

The maze walls are infused with supernatural durability, having 20 lethal and bashing soak, with 50 health levels. Regardless of the difficulty or the situation inside, the maze falls apart and collapses after a week.

The maze itself is supernatural, but does nothing to prevent people from flying or jumping over the walls. The sorcerer cannot get lost within the maze, and knows perfectly how to navigate it, both to exit and enter and to find people within.
 
Looks like an improvement. But extended rolls have more to them than that. They have two difficulties; one denoting the difficulty of each roll and one denoting the number of net successes you need against the first difficulty to pass. They also have an interval, which tells you how long each roll takes.

Also, I don't think the maze walls need to be that durable. It's not a problem if some strongman smashes their way through the maze.

I mean, it's a problem for the sorcerer. But not for the writer.
 
Sanctaphrax said:
Looks like an improvement. But extended rolls have more to them than that. They have two difficulties; one denoting the difficulty of each roll and one denoting the number of net successes you need against the first difficulty to pass. They also have an interval, which tells you how long each roll takes.

Also, I don't think the maze walls need to be that durable. It's not a problem if some strongman smashes their way through the maze.

I mean, it's a problem for the sorcerer. But not for the writer.
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I apologize, then.

Hmm.... Question. What numbers should I use for the difficulties and the net successes needed?

And what do you think of the reshaping forcing you to redo the whole thing?
 
Not sure about the best numbers. Maybe difficulty Intelligence/2, goal number Occult + Essence, interval half an hour? That'd keep everyone in there for a significant amount of time, but nobody would die of thirst or anything.

The interval is the trickiest part, for me. It should be set long enough that the maze is a problem, but not so long that it's overpowering. And it should play nice with the resetting.

What numbers are realistic, I have no idea. I've never tried to walk a maze. I guess realistically the size should affect the difficulty; not sure if that's worth the effort.

The reshaping seems pretty cool to me. Not sure there's much significant difference between action-interval resetting and tick-interval resetting, though.
 
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Sanctaphrax said:
Not sure about the best numbers. Maybe difficulty Intelligence/2, goal number Occult + Essence, interval half an hour? That'd keep everyone in there for a significant amount of time, but nobody would die of thirst or anything.

The interval is the trickiest part, for me. It should be set long enough that the maze is a problem, but not so long that it's overpowering. And it should play nice with the resetting.

What numbers are realistic, I have no idea. I've never tried to walk a maze. I guess realistically the size should affect the difficulty; not sure if that's worth the effort.

The reshaping seems pretty cool to me. Not sure there's much significant difference between action-interval resetting and tick-interval resetting, though.
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Hmm... how durable should the maze be? Sure, an exalted can punch through with ease. But a mortal hero has quite some difficulty.
 
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