- Location
- Ottawa
"Fangs" are right there in the name, and stingers work just as well. Mechanically and narratively.
General Exalted Thread
- Location
- Nova Scotia
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Emphasis mine. Like, obviously you can do what you want in your home game, but this is currently the only thing we have specifically addressing people shaped like animals using martial arts charms.Article: Martial Arts
Martial Arts are incompatible with animal shapes. Lunars in animal forms can't use Martial Arts to attack or parry or activate Martial Arts Charms. Any Martial Arts Charms active when they enter an animal shape end.
mothematics
How wide is the concept of "you"?
- Location
- the bottom of a coffee cup
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Snake Style is fantasy shéquán and I am pretty sure you can't exactly do its whipping finger thrusts without like, arms. Exalted Martial Arts are formalized techniques and not just magically augmented expressions of physicality and skill, so it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to be able to use them as an animal, but ultimately I think it's just a balance thing? "Can an animal do martial arts" is sort of a red herring, we've all seen Kung Fu Panda. I'd just check the MA-spirit shape combo you have in mind isn't broken then go from there.
- Location
- United States
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I'm wondering what non-combat stuff would be considered First Age artifice in 3e. From the limited examples given by Arms of the Chosen, it's stuff like sentient artificial life, the Book of Three Circles, and so on, but Arms of the Chosen is, well, more about weapons and armor than it is about the kind of stuff that a Solar crafter might make in the good old days.
It's mostly a judgment call based on what you think would clash with the basic aesthetics and tenets of the setting. For example, making yourself a servitor golem to take care of the sweeping and deliver messages to your other staff is probably not First Age Artifice, where a quietly-whirring small flying disc doing the same probably is.
Geomantically channeling wood and water essence to create a hot spring that accelerates healing? Probably not FAA.
Creating a small pod in a clean white room that accelerates healing probably is FAA.
And so on.
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- Location
- Vermont
Stuff that would have implications if it was wide-spread can be considered first age artifice. A flying machine or extremely powerful siege weapon would be considered first age artifice, as well as something that allows for instant communication over distance.
- Location
- Ottawa
That's a Lunar-specific ruling of no relevance to gods and other stranger things. No reason for other beings to use the animal shape mechanics from Lunars.
It's also a pretty dumb ruling, but that's beside the point.
- Location
- The North
See, I find this interpretation of FAA really annoying in play, because like, why on earth should slapping some gears or technological greebles onto an artifact make it require white xp and sorcerous workings to create? Why should I need an entirely new Craft ability, entire workings, and tons of white xp just to access one particular aesthetic? Also, that interpretation isn't even supported by the game, since apparently clockwork soldiers (the Brass Legionaries) don't count as First Age Artifice.
First Age Artifice adds on a bunch of extra hoops to jump through to get your artifact built. The reason for this, as I understand it, is to place certain works of artifice purely within the purview of Solars, to explain their vanishing rarity in the setting and the spectacle and wonder of Solar artifice, in a sort of simulationist fashion. Which seems completely roundabout and silly (since NPCs don't actually... use... the crafting rules), but it's the mechanics we're stuck with.
- Location
- Classified
Have you ever played or seen a character that made use of Linguistics and its Charms? Not certain what, exactly, its use cases are.
I mean, the actual important part of my post is where I said that it was a judgment call. If the 'gears' you're slapping on to your artifact are big clockpunk things like Yoshimitsu's arm from Soul Calibur 2:
Then I'm pretty sure that'll fly as normal artifice in most groups.
As for the brass legionnaires, that's addressed in the book:
MYRIAD MANUFACTURE
While marvels such as daiklaves or warstriders are always unique (p. 12), some artifacts, such as Brass Legionnaires, exist as part of a greater whole. In the First Age, Creation-wide webs of miraculous infrastructure permitted artificers to manufacture such artifacts in batches. Without that infrastructure, creating artifacts on such a scale is impossible.
While marvels such as daiklaves or warstriders are always unique (p. 12), some artifacts, such as Brass Legionnaires, exist as part of a greater whole. In the First Age, Creation-wide webs of miraculous infrastructure permitted artificers to manufacture such artifacts in batches. Without that infrastructure, creating artifacts on such a scale is impossible.
The soldiers themselves aren't FAA, but the infrastructure that allowed creating so many of them is.
- Location
- Ottawa
There is, frankly, no good reason for First Age Artifice to have separate rules. If you want to evoke the forgotten powers of the lost golden age, just raise the artifact rating and / or change the aesthetics.
I cut that chunk of rules text entirely when I rewrote Craft and I'm not sure anyone even noticed. If they did notice, I don't think they mentioned it.
I cut that chunk of rules text entirely when I rewrote Craft and I'm not sure anyone even noticed. If they did notice, I don't think they mentioned it.
Setting aside for a second the fact that FAA does, in fact, use the same craft rules, certain things clash with the setting without having the actual power commensurate with high-dot artifacts, so some kind of distinction makes sense. If you disagree with that, I guess we just have a difference of opinion on, like, foundational principles on this and I'm not sure where else there is to go with the discussion.
- Location
- Ottawa
That can be resolved the same way you resolve all similar Craft-related aesthetic conflicts; have people make things that reflect their own lineage of craftsmanship.
Modern artificers make golems and not little whirring flying disks for the same reason that Realm artificers make dragon-headed goremauls that roar and not skull-headed goremauls that scream. Or if you'd prefer a less magical example, for the same reason that Creation's tailors don't make clothes that look like the ones we wear in the real world.
If you want something "heavier" than that, definitely don't use the RAW. It basically amounts to a heavy mechanical penalty for picking the wrong aesthetic, and actually makes the First Age seem kinda stupid for doing everything the needlessly hard way.
Modern artificers make golems and not little whirring flying disks for the same reason that Realm artificers make dragon-headed goremauls that roar and not skull-headed goremauls that scream. Or if you'd prefer a less magical example, for the same reason that Creation's tailors don't make clothes that look like the ones we wear in the real world.
If you want something "heavier" than that, definitely don't use the RAW. It basically amounts to a heavy mechanical penalty for picking the wrong aesthetic, and actually makes the First Age seem kinda stupid for doing everything the needlessly hard way.
Oh yes. One of my DB's used Linguistics to write an alternate Immaculate Texts that caused a schism in the Immaculate Order.
And one of my Solars in a 3rd ed game has high linguistics and frequently uses it for overhearing conversations in other languages and for non-verbal communications - quite handy if you have to semaphore to people outside easy hearing distances, which came up in our game.
The Bookwyrm is great, I liked the hints we got of his life and that part was always amusing.
And yeah, Linguistics is great if your playing a game where social/political stuff was just as important as punch/sword good charms.
- Location
- Pittsburgh, PA
Weeeeellllll
For starters, there were two very distinct periods within the First Age - High and Low. High First Age was the apex of Creation, the point where even the inhuman ambitions and grand designs of the Primordial tribe became almost plebeian. It was an era where humanitarians could (and did) think of their work not in terms of "how am I to feed the hungry?", but in "how am I to ensure that none shall ever go hungry again?". Diseases were eradicated outright, not merely held in check. The crooked was made straight and the straight made crooked. Nothing was exempt from criticism or potential repeal, even things like death, aging, and the Exaltations themselves.
Part of what drove the Bronze Faction to act was that the desire to reshape the world completely had become the norm among the god-kings of Creation. Salina's grand effort to give Sorcery to the masses was not achieved by founding academies, it was achieved by carving new shapes into the fundaments of existence, forging the world anew so that just as surely as the wind blows and fire burns, those who sought Sorcerous enlightenment would find it. That way of thinking and of doing is inherently frightening and has the potential for great harm, just as it inherently also has the potential for unimaginable good.
Creation was not made with the happiness of mortals in mind. It was made half as an experiment and half as a mansion for the Primordial tribe. If their Emperor and his regime had been rightly cast down, why then should his lesser tyrannies and cruel negligences be treated as inviolate? How was the need for life to feed upon life, or for mortals to wither and weaken, or the simple nature of the Far Directions to be inimical to peaceable mortal settlement, any less of an unjust imposition than the "rights" of Unquestionable autarchs to do as they pleased with the peoples of Creation?
(The way in which the great Deliberative's members came, in time, to resemble the beings their forebears had conquered came to form the other portion of what drove the Bronze Faction to plan the Usurpation.)
After the Solars were sealed away and the Terrestrial Exalted rose to power, there was the Low First Age, or the Shogunate. Peasants in the Age of Sorrows would consider it an equally mythic and miraculous era, such that the High and Low periods are often unwittingly amalgamated together. However, the Shogunate was not the time of expanding horizons and unimaginable plenty that had preceded it. The Princes of the Earth were thrust into the wreckage of the Deliberative's dreams, and as the Sidereal Host slowly failed in its attempts to rein in the unruly Heavens they were less and less able to intervene in the affairs of Creation, for good or ill.
Shogunate occultists cannibalized the Deliberative's archives and stockpiles for inspiration and materials, picking over the lofty esoterica of their predecessors for anything that could be put to immediate, practical use. Entire civilizations rose and fell around the largest pieces of High First Age genius available, with sages engineering new models of infrastructure and industry from a lost Solar's speculative notes on the aesthetics of Calibration or a scholarly treatise on the variances between different subclades of Fire Essence. Beautiful expressions of rarefied thought and theory were dismantled to build grand facilities and terrible weapons... and in time, the ruins of those facilities and the shards of those weapons would be dismantled by the people of the Second Age to build houses better than straw or sandstone and weapons better than bronze or pig iron.
++++++++++
Now, moving on into less abstract advice...
The first and most important way in which the Shogunate was distinct from the Second Age was in its infrastructure and scale. Sometimes, this is extremely blunt and direct: Shogunate urban centers often held many hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of people, leaving Second Age cities to nestle within their vast ruins like a mouse in a rubbish heap. Likewise, a Shogunate conception of a "small shipment of food" would put any current merchant's imagining of the term to shame, and while their lives were no less unfair and held no less hardship, the peasants of the Low First Age were at least more likely to die in war or in work accidents than from a childhood disease. Their water supply might be rust-flecked and unreliable and so gritty that the water had to be left to settle, but there would generally be water.
On a more abstract level, the Shoguns had much readier access to resources - and to the knowledge of how to make use of the resources available to them. Look no further for this than the wondrous Five Dragons Stone of which many of their structures were made - stone which could be poured in molds like wax, and grew stronger with the passing of time, rather than weaker. Even backwater baronies could expect their most important defensive positions to be built of the stuff rather than rammed earth or quarried stone, and it took decades of plague-spurred warfare and a Crusade to lay the old cities low.
Now? Alchemists can tell you how to make 'dragonstone', and some cultures still make extensive use of it, but not only do they build to a much smaller scale than their ancestors did, many have lost crucial steps and ingredients in the original recipe, or must amend the formula for lack of materials or ability, and so Second Age dragonstone is a pale shadow of true Five Dragons Stone, crumbling and cracking within a generation or two of being cast. Still a valuable thing, still a secret which people have killed (and died, and worse) to obtain, but so much less than what once was commonplace.
Second, the Low First Age bears more resemblance to the Second Age than the Second Age does to the High First Age. A Second Age culture might rely on growing loyal beast-soldiers in clay urns; so to might any number of Shogunate powers have relied on similar occult Procedures, and the main differences would be in the scale of operations, the potential for further strengthening the creatures after they finished their gestation, and what sort of threats and military actions the occultists had in mind when designing their vat-grown servants. For all the aspects of Shogunate logistics and infrastructure that are foreign to the Age of Sorrows, some of it would be quite familiar to a Realm quartermaster or civil minister. Crops had to be tended and armories had to be stocked, even if the crops were harvested by the thousandweight rather than the sackful and the armories held Essence repeaters and war plows* instead of crossbows and chariots. The High First Age was the era of "don't worry about the logistics, just DO THINGS"; the Low First Age was the era of "pay very careful attention to the logistics, so you can properly manage your empire and crush your enemies".
* 'War plow' being my term for Shogunate tanks, so named for being something between a small mobile bunker and an upsized Celtic war chariot, with "[...]break the ranks of the enemy with the very dread of their horses and the noise of their wheels[...]" supplemented with "- and by horribly grinding infantrymen and sufficiently small cavalry to pulp under their wheels and impaling them on the metal thorns draped upon their hulls -", occasionally omitting the historical conclusion of "[...]and when they have worked themselves in between the troops of horse, leap[ing] from their chariots and engag[ing] on foot."
While "ride down the enemy and crush them underfoot" is hardly a unique idea, the frequent use of war plows to mount artillery, archers, gunners, etc. may have given rise to the archer-charioteers of Second Age warfare.
- Location
- The sixth circle of Hell (second on weekends)
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Honestly at this point the line should probably just pony up and start calling the Shogunate the Second Age - which might remind more people that it, you know, existed - and the current Age the Third.
(Actually if you're measuring objectively we're probably on the Fourth or Fifth right now, with either Zen Mu or Primordial-ruled Creation being the first depending on whether you're counting from the waking of the Primordials as the first thing distinguished from formless chaos [1] or the establishment of linear time as, you know, the point you can started measuring "Ages", but the Exalted Host of the First Age were strangely reluctant to write those parts into the history books.)
[1] Raksha don't get to count as an Age of their own.
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Although from an in-universe perspective you could make valid arguments that the Shogunate would want to make a clear point of separation between it and the Solar Deliberative, and that the Empress might have an interest in establishing continuity between her rule and that of the Shogunate...
notanautomaton
I've got 99 quests, I've finished one
Depends on if you're counting the Ages of Creation or reality as a whole. Creation is probably Fourth Age, though that question does have a heavy political element. I'd imagine that in Malfeas scholars probably consider everything after their imprisonment Second Age, and the victorious Solars started counting at said sealing.
At the same time, whether the Shogunate counts as its own Age is probably an open question, with the Shogunate itself counting it as part of the same Age as the Solars to increase legitimacy at first, while later scholars could have started considering it its own age to divorce themselves from said Solars. The Early Realm may have resisted calling itself a new Age in order to draw legitimacy from the Shogunate, and later scholars might lump everything pre-Contagion as a Golden Age of Creation
Then if you're counting the Ages of reality you could add 1- 3; Zen-Mu, the Primordials hanging out in the Wyld, and the time before Cytheria could be counted as their own Ages.
Anyways, in summary depending on how you count you can get any number between 2 and 7.
That was actually the main reason. Wanting to radically reshape Creation is one thing. As long as the people who want to do it are sane, rational and highly humane people who have the well being of humanity in mind, that's fine. Solars are supposed to be ambitious. Make Creation even better for humans innately? Why the fuck not?
But an insane god king whose response to questioning his choices is brainwashing you into murdering your entire family, well. . .
I believe there is a line somewhere back in 1E that it is called the First Age because it is the First Age of Man. Though the Shogunate really needs more love.
Muhkat Lomorki
Draconic Sorcerer
What do you think of using Exalted's system for a game set in the 31st Millenium where you play as Primarchs? Would that work or would it require too much fiddling with the system to be workable?
- Heirs to the Shogunate, Introduction
Note that, far as I can tell about 3e, the Shogunate was a Second Age thing.
- Location
- Classified
That blurb reminded me, what do you guys think of the Forest Witches? Have to say, I am not a fan, especially of that whole "directed reincarnation so as to usurp our enemies by becoming their children" thing.