- Pronouns
- They/Them
...Is it weird that the first thing that popped into my head reading 'black bloc skirmishers' is Ebon Dragon Antifa?
General Exalted Thread
- Location
- Ottawa
Partly because the whole thing was based on the general spirit Charmset, and that thing was fundamentally ill-conceived. It served only to inhibit creativity and make spirits less interesting / unique. It had enough structure to make writing spirits a fair bit harder, but was vague / bland / fuzzy enough that it wasn't interesting in its own right. I can't prove this but I suspect it might've been sabotaged by the Eclipse anima the same way the Lunar Charmset was.
Besides, god-bloods don't want to be a splat the way Exalts are. They shouldn't be at all standardized, and they shouldn't have endless vistas of supernatural power to invest xp into. Each god-blood should be a more-or-less unique being with very limited prospects for advancement, magic-wise, and those things together basically remove the need for a splat.
- Pronouns
- They/Them
There's always Sorcery and Martial Arts and I expect God-Bloods make up most of the non-Exalted 'cream of the crop' in those pursuits.
Imadaman
Has no clue, but keeps going.
- Location
- Finland
There's going to be a Merit for God-blooded Exalts in Heirs, at least.
Most of God-blooded just have just some supernatural merits or a trick or two they can do, Essence use is very rare for them in 3e canon.
Most of God-blooded just have just some supernatural merits or a trick or two they can do, Essence use is very rare for them in 3e canon.
Last edited:
- Location
- Pittsburgh, PA
@QafianSage is in the process of rewriting the Ebon Dragon's Charmset (with some help from me - mostly providing ideas and acting as a sounding board), and it's very heavily tilted toward the Ebon Dragon as the ur-iconoclast and revolutionary agitator, automatically opposing accepted authorities and 'conventional wisdom'. He is the patron of outcasts and malcontents, the Drinker at Night's Spring who copes with the nihilistic misery his wisdom has inflicted upon him through a Romanticist, sentimental adoration for lost causes and doomed heroes.
Where the Dragon Beyond the World brings madness and chaos through exposing the utter insignificance of mortalkind before the uncaring cosmos, the Dragon's Shadow brings chaos and upheaval through the destruction of ignorance and complacency, forcing people to confront the ugliness and horror through which kings seize their thrones and empires sustain their dominion. He is the blistering outrage in the heart of every partisan and the embittered weariness of those repulsed by what they once loved.
QafianSage
Ascending Ape
- Location
- United Kingdom
Last edited:
That's really good! How far along are you in writing the charmset? I like the direction of the Ebon Dragon as dark artist.
Coincidentally, I have an Ebon Dragon rewrite of my own that I'm finishing up with feedback from @rogthnor . The direction I went in was less artist and more investigator. He seeks the truth because ignorance is a form of confinement and hides it from others because there is more room to hide within lies and tears down the rules of society to stop them from confining him.
QafianSage
Ascending Ape
- Location
- United Kingdom
It's mostly done, but it's written for my 3e Infernals update, rather than 2e. It could be backported, though. In any case, I can link it if you'd like.
Part of the idea of the thing was that, like how Malfeas likes dance, Oramus music and Kimbery her Lovecraftian paintings and statuary, TED goes in for opera and theatre - in Macbeth, for instance, he's there in the Witches, prophesying dark fates and inspiring dark deeds.
Your concept for him as an investigator is an interesting one.
- Location
- The Hub
There's probably a pair of Souls from them that still remember this and party all the time.
Adjoran hates them.
TenfoldShields
Lounging on a Hoard of Words
- Pronouns
- He/Him
@Imrix's answer is genuinely way more eloquent and probably way more coherent than mine lol but for what it's worth, pitching my two cents in ('cause you can't stop me from fuckin' up a good thing by adding More to it, like putting whipped cream on a steak) I like god-blooded for the way they provide texture to the setting. The way they add a kind of instant flourish without necessitating you involve a capital-E Exalted in things. The divine is everywhere and godblooded are an almost-mundane manifestation of that, they're uncommon but not exceedingly rare (which is the big break with Exingents I think) and kind of naturally gravitate towards occupying some particular role in a given culture/region/nation/whatever which in turn says Something about their parent.
It's got it's uses imo. And it provides a vector for making the divine...tangible, there and present, human and inhuman all at once, while still elevating Exigents. The diversity and creative space of Great Forks fr'ex, couldn't be replicated with Exalted alone imo, and god-blooded both don't diminish and even elevate Exigents in that context.
Manic Dogma
This, I can't deny.
- Location
- The far side of tired
- Pronouns
- Whatever
I love the idea that, in any given village, you'll have at least one person related to a Godblood by not that many degrees of separation. Even if it just means they have weird hair and are especially good at gardening.
Neat! I hadn't even thought of it being for 3e, but that's definitely something I'd be interested in. Does the Yozi excellency mean that you aren't going Ability based like the 3e kickstarter preview? I'd definitely be interested in a link.
My Ebon Dragon re-write is 2e, since I was so dissatisfied by the canon version. It doesn't have much to do with music, but that's mainly because other people had written Ebon Dragon music charms and I didn't want to retreat those themes. The investigation themes came from the 'forbidden knowledge' angle in Games of Divinity and the way Witness to Darkness (his mind root charm) makes you good at seeing through lies and investigating. It became finding the truth no matter the cost and using secret knowledge to harm others through well placed curses and blackmail.
I could send you a link if you're interested.
QafianSage
Ascending Ape
- Location
- United Kingdom
I'd be delighted to have a look at the thing, and here's a link to my Infernals: The Devils Are Here
There's a link to the Ebon Dragon charmset on p.45. You should be able to find it in the table of contents.
And yes, I basically took Infernals more-or-less as they are in 2e and ported them to 3e, with appropriate changes to fit the new system and a good deal of cribbing from EarthScorpion and Aleph's heretical stuff. So Yozi Excellencies, purely Essence-based Charms etc.
Last edited:
I'm still reading through it, but this is very good. I especially like the curses. I think the curse declaration method might work for my version of Light Blighting Hate. I'm extra impressed that this is 30 pages for the Ebon Dragon, on top of 59 pages for the main document, and however many for the other Yozi, all for a different edition than where these mechanics started. I found 18 pages of charms for the same edition pretty tiring. I admire your work ethic.
Here's a link to my Ebon Dragon Re-Write 2e.
Last edited:
QafianSage
Ascending Ape
- Location
- United Kingdom
Ah, thanks for the link. And, to be fair, a lot of the Charms in there are more-or-less cribbed from Sandact's and Lanaya's 3e Infernals update, or less were taken from 2e with minimal edits to make them work in 3e - I put in keywords for crediting those ones - so my workload was a lot lighter than it could have been. Plus, I had help from @GardenerBriareus. And... well, at the time I was in a bit of a frenzy over the thing.
- Pronouns
- They/Them
I really like these, and kind of want to play an evil-protagonists game so I could use the nastier bits.
- Location
- Washington, USA
For the excellency, how about only italicizing the word "dark" in "dark truths" but adding italics to "reveal the" so that "horrible truth" is an action rather than a static item?
For the Mythos Exultant, given the parallel to Adorjan's it seems like it should cost willpower proportionate to the stunt rating to resist, rather than scaling the number of targets. Might also want some cap on how many WP it can cost someone over the course of a scene, and consideration of range both spatial and temporal. For example, does the illusion linger in footprints to bamboozle someone following the infernal's tracks, or analyzing a crime scene?
If you're going to change the Imperfection (which I don't think is really necessary) it should be unambiguous. How about a 3m surcharge in any light bright enough to read by, unless you've got at least 50% cover relative to either the light source or the attacker, and the defense fails outright when fully exposed to true sunlight?
For Fate-Rending Desperation... Touch effects don't normally have range.
Ever-Hungry Shadow Infliction seems to be condensing the effects of five charm purchases (the Life-Denying Hate tree, apart from the upgrade to require sapphire circle countermagic) into four. Adds the Crippling keyword, but removes the ability to become immune for a scene by breaking the curse. Is a single use of the charm meant to apply as many of the effects as you know? It's ambiguous, and that would be a significant power boost if so. The names are clearly a reference to that old joke about the laws of thermodynamics, but the phrasing is a bit awkward. Here's my proposal:
Despair-Choked Spirit Maiming definitely shouldn't include an option to make it not count as a charm activation, errata got rid of all those sort of effects for good reason. Also seems like it becomes way too easy to load someone with effects that require adamant countermagic to break - possible right at E4 with a Twice-Striking Lightning Prism. You've already cut out the possibility of mere scenelong curses entirely, does it really have to be an upgrade straight from days to indefinite? No intervening stops at months, seasons, year-and-a-day, centuries? No extra costs?
Proposed changes to Witness To Darkness are a transparent attempt to nerf the penalties, which I disagree with. I think it's really more of a problem with the larger system failing to clarify underlying assumptions about Manipulation and Charisma being Yin and Yang, so, not worth getting into that argument here.
Shared Boundary Divination seems like a speedbump, and it's unclear what making the action "undetectable" means. Might want to be careful not to step on Cecelyne's toes, when she's got Knowing The Desolate Heart => Inner Voice Betrayal. How about basing it more on Naked Wicked Souls from BWC, dropping those bland bonus successes (which Witness To Darkness already has), instead supplementing a Read Motivation action to negate penalties for physical concealment or language barriers, incidentally letting you eavesdrop on people right through the clamor of Hell or an almost-but-not-quite-perfectly soundproof wall, or play along in a conversation where you can't understand a single word sorta like receive-only versions of Poetic Expression Style + Excellent Emissary's Tongue?
I like the idea of Seeing Is Blindness being an upgrade to Life-Blighting Emptiness Attack rather than standing alone, and affecting other senses, but I don't like the mechanics. How about, if they take at least one health level of damage from the prerequisite, they have to make an opposed roll against themselves: Appearance + Integrity vs. Perception + Awareness. If the Integrity roll wins, they deny the ugly truth and in doing so lose access to one sense, attacker's choice from the usual list of [sight], [hearing & touch], [smell & taste], [misc./other], either for the rest of the scene, or, at E4+, indefinitely as a sorcerous derangement. If the Awareness roll wins, they've stared directly into the abyss and thereby negated any physical injury from the attack, including the mundane component, but are at a -1 internal penalty to Perception- and Wits-based dice pools and static values per health level they would otherwise have taken, which is about as difficult to heal as aggravated damage. If it's a tie they get to choose, but if either roll botches, they get both effects.
For Nemesis Self Imagined Anew, you know there's a simple canon way to get around the "living creatures" restriction, right? Wickedness Beyond Life and Cornered Titan Desperation are both deliberate thematic statements about the Ebon Dragon breaking even his own rules.
The downside to Heart Shrouding Opposition seems weak and tacked-on. I'd rather find some way to salvage the much more thematically rich charms building off of Brooding Resentment Defense in BWC, Victory In Defeat and Mocking Murmurs Retort.
First purchase of Impersonal Presence Declaration is way too weak, and mostly redundant with the excellency anyway. Turn it into a joke about Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, instead: the more they know about your momentum, the less they know about your position. In mechanical terms, any and all penalties or applicability problems impairing the infernal's Dodge DV are also applied to observers' Perception + Awareness pools when opposing the infernal's Dexterity + Stealth in combat.
Then make the upgrade a step 9 reflexive, allowing a faster-than-normal attempt to reestablish surprise. Maybe multiply threshold successes for damage purposes by the number of swings they took at you in that flurry before you slipped away, if you keep the motes committed and maintain stealth. Probably make the retaliation specific to ranged attacks, so Cornered Titan Desperation can apply to more than just Life-Blighting Emptiness Attack.
Sneaky Shadow Trick by itself is just a narrower version of Shadow Spite Curse with an area effect and a mote discount. I'd say go for the counter-forensics first, make it a perfect effect (against mundane scrutiny, at the very least - compare sidereal stuff like Avoidance Kata or the lunar wits charm The Spider's Trap Door), then have an upgrade to Shadow Spite Curse with Sneaky Shadow Trick as prerequisite: whenever Shadow Spite Curse is applied to penalize a reflexive action to notice something, or any attempt to avoid noticing something (often but not always meaning Dodge MDV), you can add 1 wp and commit the motes to make it apply to every such action involving the same subject by anyone within range for the rest of the scene.
...and you've got Bloodless Murk Evasion as 4m instead of 8m.
That identity-loss curse for Ever-Hungry Shadow Infliction would make a good additional prerequisite for the shintai.
UrsaTempest
Don't Panic!
So I read this and I quite like it, though who knows how it'll work in actual play and-
Anyway, I'm reminded how Infernal charms can be, ah, confusing. Doubly so with backported homebrews. Are there a guide on how to best use yozi charms? Like, how to approach combat as Ta'kaozoka, social as Szorzeny, stuff like that.
I could read those, yes, but there are three Favored Yozis to choose, plus one Caste yozi. That means four charmsets to read. I've done reading Ta'kaozoka, but to be honest I'm not quite sure I grok her yet.
QafianSage
Ascending Ape
- Location
- United Kingdom
The best I can really suggest is to go into the General Charms document and read over the Excellencies to get a feel for the different Yozis. Going into depth on all the Yozis and how they play would be a bit much. If I've done my job right, the Excellencies should tell you how they play.
- Pronouns
- she/her
Basically they were introduced as a toolkit of merits and flaws with a power level that ranged from mortal to mini-exalt, so predictably most people tried to make Exalts with it and the idea that this was their intended power level kinda stuck. Also, the worst of the simulationists also latched onto the idea of maintaining harems that doubled as military assets.
Many years ago. I made the mistake of picking up and looking at the Player's Guide as one of the first Exalted books I read, encountering rules for dying in childbirth and wondering what the fuck kind of game it was.
Thank you for your feedback!
I'm considering changing that line in the excellency, but this version of the Ebon Dragon is very much against revealing things as an emphasized action.
I've changed the Imperfection to allow a surcharge if there isn't a darkness based external penalty to see the Infernal and removed the in-between category.
The mythos is actually based around the Elloge one, which affects multiple characters. It doesn't change who onlookers thought did something, it only changes why they think you did something.
Good catch on the touch attack.
I'm working on Ever Hungry Shadow Infliction and Despair Choked Spirit Maiming, but I'm definitely taking those name ideas. I've also axed a few of the upgrade choices, and the duration only goes into the months time scale.
Witness to Darkness is a work in progress. I'm trying not to nerf the penalties but am also struggling with honesty, lies, Charisma, and Manipulation. I had some issues with phrasing that made me worry about penalizing saying that the sky was blue or that your brother wants your throne so you should kill him. I think that I may change it to an external penalty to social attacks that try to express sincerely held beliefs or feelings. Something closer to Madman's Insight in Oramus.
Shaded Boundary Divination is supposed to be something close to Insightful Buyer Technique, not finding out what a character's greatest failure is. It doesn't have that much to do with Naked Wicked Souls, but I decided that being able to suss out relevant Virtues the target has would be in theme.
For Seeing is Blindness, I prefer to have the least amount of rolls and book keeping possible, so I prefer the way it is.
I've gotten rid of the entire 'living creatures only' restriction of ED charms, as he is both living and dead and the Shadow of ALL Things, and it doesn't make sense that he has a weakness to the Dead that every other Yozi lacks. That's from the MoEP: Infernals ED.
Heart Shrouding Opposition is basically Sagacious Reading of Intent. It doesn't need a strong downside to balance it. I could see Mocking Murmur Retort as an upgrade to let you use it on others, but as a social Yozi ED needs an Essence 2 social perfect.
The first purchase of Impersonal Presence Declaration is a small variation of a Solar charm, so I don't think it needs to be buffed.
Sneaky Shadow Trick is cheaper and affects all onlookers instead of one person and is based on the Solar Charm Observer-Deceiving Attack.
I don't want to make the shintai require the character to know every other ED charm.
Not my intention to pressure but @mothematics can you provide any news on when the transcripts of your very interesting and high quality Exalted RP will be posted?
mothematics
How wide is the concept of "you"?
- Location
- the bottom of a coffee cup
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Do you honestly think flattery will work? Do you think me shallow and easily appeased? You fool. You cretin.
You're absolutely correct. I'll do it tonight lol
MiracleGrow
Miracles for only $19.99 [They/Them]
- Location
- DOOR STUCK DOOR STUCK PLEASE I BEG U
And the commission of Iudicavisse is done! She probably looks quite different than what she wears down in hell itself. But it's what she is wearing after breaking out of hell for reasons I can't say cause my party reads this thread 
(She looks like a Steven Universe villain and its great)
(She looks like a Steven Universe villain and its great)
- Pronouns
- They/Them
I'mma guess... 4ft?And the commission of Iudicavisse is done! She probably looks quite different than what she wears down in hell itself. But it's what she is wearing after breaking out of hell for reasons I can't say cause my party reads this thread
(She looks like a Steven Universe villain and its great)