Just in case anyone is interested I wrote up a big dumb transparent Naruto reference into a whole-ass Charmtree. If you've ever been interested in playing a member of the Uchiha Clan but in Creation, here you go!
Also, if anybody has feedback or critique, please don't hesitate to comment on the doc or respond to me here. This is kind of the first thing I've done with 3e's ruleset aside from a few small artifact brews here and there, and I really have no idea what I'm doing.
Just in case anyone is interested I wrote up a big dumb transparent Naruto reference into a whole-ass Charmtree. If you've ever been interested in playing a member of the Uchiha Clan but in Creation, here you go!
Also, if anybody has feedback or critique, please don't hesitate to comment on the doc or respond to me here. This is kind of the first thing I've done with 3e's ruleset aside from a few small artifact brews here and there, and I really have no idea what I'm doing.
Noice! I went through and left a number of suggestions, but overall this is a damn good Charmset well worth porting into a game (even if it might not go amiss to reflavor somewhat to make the reference less blatant.)
The Brazen Genius Dominion was an early Shogunate power, whose Directors won many victories on the back of their peerless automata. When one of their neighbors, the Hollowed Earth Shogunate, turned on the Dominion and ceased their yearly tithe of raw materials for their foundries, the Directors of the Brazen Genius Dominion personally designed the Ore-Hunting Beetles as a response to the Hollowed Earth's betrayal.
Each Beetle stands tall as a yeddim and twice as long, sporting a mass of prehensile drills and grasping claws on its front end, with which it can easily burrow through the earth. The waving "legs" along its sides generate a harmonic Essence frequency that suffuses the stone and soil through which it travels, pushing the automaton along and preventing the paths it carves from collapsing behind it prematurely. Provided a sample of ore or worked metal, the Beetle can then track down the seam from which it was originally taken and devour whatever usable materials remain; as it does so, it heedlessly tears through whatever tunnels or chambers had been established around the seam, and often causes the mine to implode once it departs and the stabilizing harmonics which radiate from its legs are no longer there to counteract the structural damage of its visit.
As the Hollowed Earth Shogunate faded into history and the Brazen Genius Dominion proceeded forward, the Beetles became a valuable tool in its strategic arsenal - in addition to their intended purpose of sabotage and resource-gathering, Ore-Hunting Beetles were often used to transport valuable cargo and for clandestine movement of military forces, as well as the simpler task of carving out usable tunnels and mineshafts. Even once the Directors were forced into vassaldom beneath the Seven Wing Iron Shogunate, the Beetles often accompanied Dominion war-levies and served as a totem for their continued national pride.
When the Seven Wing Iron Shogunate's attempt to conquer the lands to their east met with disaster, a full half-dozen Beetles were likewise lost to enemy hands; enraged by this besmirching of their honor and discontent with the racial elitism of the Seven Wing Iron regime, the once-Dominion rose in rebellion against their overlords and directed the remaining 30 Beetles northward into the heartlands of the Seven Wing Iron Shogunate. With their harmonic projectors carefully retuned to disrupt, rather than reinforce, the great subterranean column of Ore-Hunting Beetles tore open the dragonlines of the Seven Wing Iron Shogunate's heartlands like a surgeon's blade, and sent vital segments of their road network plummeting into the great chasm left in their wake. Christening themselves the Brazen Claw Assembly, the Beetles' masters splintered into great hosts, marching alongside or behind each Beetle like mobile city-states. Though sworn to never war against one another, the various Assemblies became infamous for their mercenary ways, offering the power of their Ore-Hunting Beetles and the ingenuity of their maintenance clergy to whoever was willing to pay.
By the time of the Twin Calamities, at least three of the forty known Beetles had been destroyed, and the thirty-two under the Brazen Claw's control were spread across three Directions. As the Contagion fell upon Creation, a great conclave was called to reunite this scattered host, but the precise location of this conclave, its outcome, and the number of Assembly Masters who actually attended have all been lost to history - records remain of the Brazen Claw Assembly sundering their contracts and disappearing into the earth, but that is all. Almost a half-decade later, a trio of Assembly Masters and their Beetles resurfaced to participate in the first counteroffensives against the Balorian Crusade in its march upon the East, but no account of how they came to be there survives.
At least one Ore-Hunting Beetle is known to have survived into the Age of Sorrows, being the origin and greatest treasure of the Hsthfara peoples. Although badly damaged by Crusaders and in poor repair, it nonetheless forms the foundation of their nation's industrial output. In times of peace, conjured Earth elementals are made to retrieve chips of ore and gemstone from deep underground for the Beetle to scent, and then all the Hsthfari need do is wait for the automaton to resurface and vomit forth great cartloads of material for their guildsmen to make use of. In times of unrest, the threat of sending the Beetle to devour the mines of the nation's enemies, or to burrow under their forts and collapse them, serves quite well in negotiations. On the five occasions in which war broke out regardless, the Beetle proved pivotal to ensuring Hsthfara's survival, whether by making good on their threats or, in one famous instance, demolishing a Necromantic Working meant to raise up the dead beasts of the land as soldiers and grinding the maker to pulp within its crablike jaws.
I really like the idea of there being giant insectoid mining robots that PCs can find and/or fight; the GI Joe villainy of them being originally meant to collect ore by stealing it from other peoples' mines (destroying said mines in the process) is just gravy.
For STs who prefer a more toned-down Creation, I left plenty of room for all but a handful of the Beetles to have been destroyed or otherwise put out of reach during the Calamities (like so many other things): burrowing is a good trick, and the Beetles are powerful enough to not even need it against a lot of potential threats, but when used during a massive Wyld invasion it can end with the Beetle accidentally tunneling through the walls of reality and falling into the Wyld for lack of reliable sensor readings, or getting attacked by subterranean raksha-kaiju.
As for the Second Age... I imagine that the Beetles have spirit wine* reservoirs to fuel what their makers considered normal operations - which is to say, blazing a trail through solid rock fast enough to reach their target behind enemy lines, gobble up all the ore, and leave before too many Shogunate supersoldiers can converge on its location. Likewise, while the actual automaton itself needs fairly little maintenance, it had a number of thaumtech gubbins that helped it perform its functions, the equivalent of diamond-tipped drill bits and such, most of which will have suffered from whatever happened to the Beetle during the Calamities and the subsequent centuries of neglect. Unless a decent-sized country's worth of resources get dumped into refurbishing and upkeep, the Ore-Hunting Beetles will be operating on powersave mode, and a lot of the little flourishes that made them badass by Shogunate standards won't be usable.
In that dismal state of disrepair, it's "just" a giant mechanical beetle that can grind its way through anything short of solid iron at a mortals' jogging pace, generate the output of your average strip-mining operation in a matter of seasons and without needing any investment of labor or resources beyond itself, transport cargo and/or people in its belly, collapse most Second Age structures by tunneling under them, and fuck up an area's geomancy real good if deliberately ordered not to avoid tunneling through dragonlines (or if the harmonic whatsits that normally "smooth out" the impact of its passage on the dragonlines have succumbed to age or been damaged, depending on the needs of the ST).
So it's basically trash
EDIT: I'll also clarify that the Seven Wing Iron Shogunate's racial elitism was a matter of them being flying insect-men (some of whom were also Terrestrial Exalts) thanks to blessings their ancestors received in the High First Age, and looking down on all these overgrown larvae who can't even take a few stab wounds without collapsing in a heap.
* QafianSage and I came up with the idea that the Old Realm term for hearthstones converted into a liquid medium is "[the Essence aspect of the hearthstones] wine" - Sun wine, Moon wine, Fire wine, Malfean wine, etc. (This may or may not have been due to the fact that in the Primordial Era, there were beings which required such things to become properly intoxicated.)
During the First Age, it lingered as a poetic turn of phrase. During the Second Age, more than one person has been hideously killed or crippled by trying to sample a jug of 'spirit wine'.
Noice! I went through and left a number of suggestions, but overall this is a damn good Charmset well worth porting into a game (even if it might not go amiss to reflavor somewhat to make the reference less blatant.)
Thank you so much for the feedback! Every bit helps. I'm glad that you enjoyed it! My hope is that people will look at this and be like "yeah, I'd play a character with this merit."
Reflavoring is something I'm going to try and do with future drafts. I might also try and do longer writeups for the three Clans of the Garden, in the style used for What Fire Has Wrought and Heirs to the Shogunate.
I'm curious, is anyone running a play by post Exalted game anywhere that might have room for another? I've been kind of spinning my wheels in the game for a while, and with the Lunar book's hard copy due to come in within a month or so, I really do want to have a crack at it. I've got... One game going on?
But it's slow as molasses and also seems to be punishing me for playing a character who actually required downtime to reach their full potential.
I'm curious, is anyone running a play by post Exalted game anywhere that might have room for another? I've been kind of spinning my wheels in the game for a while, and with the Lunar book's hard copy due to come in within a month or so, I really do want to have a crack at it. I've got... One game going on?
But it's slow as molasses and also seems to be punishing me for playing a character who actually required downtime to reach their full potential.
I usually run livegames via Discord now. Play by post is just too slow and plodding for me, I can't handle it anymore and I inevitably lose interest, which is unfair for everyone involved.
Still, if you're interested in it, I can let you know if a spot opens up.
I'm curious, is anyone running a play by post Exalted game anywhere that might have room for another? I've been kind of spinning my wheels in the game for a while, and with the Lunar book's hard copy due to come in within a month or so, I really do want to have a crack at it. I've got... One game going on?
But it's slow as molasses and also seems to be punishing me for playing a character who actually required downtime to reach their full potential.
I've got a game running by text that should be wrapping up in a couple weeks, but I gotta second Deations on the text pace being glacial (or, to not abidicate my own responsibility, I haven't figured out how to have my text game be not slow as fuck) so I'm really only guessing at the time frame. Definitely not multiple months unless we miss sessions, which has happened...
Anyway, what I'm saying is that once that opens up, I'd potentially have bandwidth to start another.
Mmm, the issue on the whole is that my schedule can be unpredictable, as I work a two week on--two week off rotation of work, so during that two weeks on, I may not be available for live sessions.
I'm curious, is anyone running a play by post Exalted game anywhere that might have room for another? I've been kind of spinning my wheels in the game for a while, and with the Lunar book's hard copy due to come in within a month or so, I really do want to have a crack at it. I've got... One game going on?
But it's slow as molasses and also seems to be punishing me for playing a character who actually required downtime to reach their full potential.
When the goddess Amaterasu-Ōmikami hid herself in a cave out of sorrow, the kami were able to coax her out by having Ame-no-Uzume-no-mikoto, the goddess of dawn, do a lewd dance to lure her out of the cave.
Ergo, the way to get The Unconquered Sun out of his depression is to have a bunch of himbo Solars start "Magic-Mike-ing" in front of the Jade Pleasure Dome. Pictured here is the Iconic Dawn, Volfer, doing just such a thing, accompanied by Adon 's Zenith Syn and my Night Caste 7-Flint.
1. Can I get art made for Asarin? She became relevant in a game I'm in due to the awful machinations of a terrible scheming dragonblood sorcerous (me lole).
2. Second, I assume her clothes are more realmish in desgin or do you have a particular vision?
3. Would you happen to have any stats laying around?
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