No, Sibri's new here. I quite like her! The thing about how not biting someone who passes through her if she hasn't bitten them at least before being unacceptable influence, even if she's specifically opened a gate for them, is pretty great. As is her self image as a teacher and how that interacts with her "can end up on Creation" loophole.

Yeah, at worst you can say is that her Charms focused too much on the Intelligent Fighter Wall of Snakes thing, and not the Slightly Satanic Cool Teacher thing. The fluff gives enough plot hooks, and a reason for a breakout on her part or her familiars, that she can easily get involved in any story vaguely resembling a sympathetic rebellion - one of her snakes shows up and starts playing advisor to a major character, or a skin of one of her students needles its way into a manipulator role. Really, I didn't see any dull entries; all the creatures are good plot hooks as well as combat monsters, and all the characters seem fairly interesting; the most boring is Kian-Ji, and that's mostly because he's a catalyst rather than a character in his own right. His role is to dine with people and conjure a bunch of their incarnated Intimacies - which hardly makes him something I wouldn't want to include, the problem is he's fundamentally a supporting role in other people's stories. He can be one for your players, and even better, one can know what he is and still seek him out - if you're overconfident, sure of your motives, or both, you can end up with a team made of the badass cousins of the Inside Out cast.
 
Squishy, there is a very wide world of bad Exalted takes at your disposal you could be dabbling in other than this. At some point, just showing up every six months to lob the same dud grenade into this topic gets old.
 
Squishy, there is a very wide world of bad Exalted takes at your disposal you could be dabbling in other than this. At some point, just showing up every six months to lob the same dud grenade into this topic gets old.
The problem is most of the rest of my Exalted takes are widely accepted ones! The map is bad! it's way too large! There are giant swaths of useless land! That doesn't start discussion!

To be fair neither does this.
 
We need to add in like five more exalted types that are each regional to specific elemental directions. I'm a genius.
 
Well if we want some pedantic discussion yeah the map is too large, and the byline I've heard given is the reason there's so much empty space is not becayse it's actually empty but to enable players the opportunity to fill it in themselves! … Which is kind of a Solution Looking For A Problem cause generally speaking players who come in to pre-generated settings do so specifically to avoid writing their own societies, and the ones who do make up their own generally don't give a damn on if their OC Kingdom Do Not Steal is occupying space belonging to some canon place. :V
 
Well as someone who do be making up a lot of stuff, I do enjoy the map is full of empty space, that's not really the problem. The problem is that it's so large that it's hard to make things really feel meaningful and that most of the empty space is not particularly interesting empty space- miles upon miles of desert does not inspire the mind when set to a map.
 
I'm still vaguely annoyed the islands in the North-west are full of weird cannibal people, because they look like a great place to start out a couple of exalts and organically increase contact with at first regional, then directional, and then the world powers, but nope. Weird cannibal people. Just let me have somewhere to put a weird mix of medieval welsh/irish squabbling princelings with complex revenge codes and other fun stuff.
 
Yeah, the map having loads of blank space is good, actually. You can just throw a whole country down there and there's space for it.

How big the map is can be silly sometimes, but it's not the kind of detail I get very worked up over. I'm not running a fantasy empire building sim with this shit, and I'm pretty willing to narratively abstract stuff like distance when it's convenient. It's nice to have something to give you a general sense of the world still, though.
 
I think the map size is fine, the problem generally comes up when places incredibly far apart are portrayed as having relations with each other with no mention of the intervening peoples or states. The Guild is a particular offender, especially some of the land caravan routes.

Regarding DB, since I am not entirely sure what wall of snakes I am walking into, I've always sort of felt like there should be more of them. Right now they are so strongly associated with the Realm, Lookshy, now Prasad, and a few xenophobic locals without any real visibility that they feel like a Realm+ satellites thing. It seems like Terrestrial dynasties or the like should be a far more common governing paradigm in the Threshold. The idea that lost eggs generally run to the Realm, thus reducing their prevalence in the Threshold, never struck me as especially convincing.
 
okay so dragon-blooded numbers-
-are not the point of the splat, Next

I think the map size is fine, the problem generally comes up when places incredibly far apart are portrayed as having relations with each other with no mention of the intervening peoples or states. The Guild is a particular offender, especially some of the land caravan routes.

Regarding DB, since I am not entirely sure what wall of snakes I am walking into, I've always sort of felt like there should be more of them. Right now they are so strongly associated with the Realm, Lookshy, now Prasad, and a few xenophobic locals without any real visibility that they feel like a Realm+ satellites thing. It seems like Terrestrial dynasties or the like should be a far more common governing paradigm in the Threshold. The idea that lost eggs generally run to the Realm, thus reducing their prevalence in the Threshold, never struck me as especially convincing.

Putting aside that the Scarlet Empress supposedly conquered all of Creation at one point, there's a lot of benefits to being under the umbrella of a worldwide superpower that tells you you have the gods-given right to do as you please, and not a lot of benefits in snubbing them.
 
Regarding DB, since I am not entirely sure what wall of snakes I am walking into, I've always sort of felt like there should be more of them. Right now they are so strongly associated with the Realm, Lookshy, now Prasad, and a few xenophobic locals without any real visibility that they feel like a Realm+ satellites thing. It seems like Terrestrial dynasties or the like should be a far more common governing paradigm in the Threshold. The idea that lost eggs generally run to the Realm, thus reducing their prevalence in the Threshold, never struck me as especially convincing.
So, like, this is an edition change I don't see people talking about very often, and it seems to have blown past even a lot of people who are pretty into 3e in general, but that's like... explicitly not the case with the third edition version of the Realm.

Lost Eggs on the Blessed Isle are gathered up as children, made to choose between the coin and the razor, and then sent to Pasiap's Stair or to the Cloister of Wisdom, as in previous editions. Foreign outcastes explicitly are not, though, even ones born in satrapies. The Blessed Isle got bigger along with the rest of the map, and the way it's depicted now, it supplies enough outcastes for the Imperial Legions' purposes without having to accept any rando dragon-blood from the Threshold.

Foreign outcastes can join the Realm, but that's either going to be joining the Immaculate Order anyway, or signing onto the Legions, which they're made to work for -- they have a period of serving as an ordinary soldier in the auxiliary forces for a time just to like... show them the pecking order and see if they can take orders, and then if they stick that out, they're promoted and will be let into the legions proper. Joining the Realm is a privilege that foreigners have to earn, not one that's just handed to them. (They can also marry into the Dynasty either through a Great House or a Cadet House, with the latter being a whole lot easier to swing, if not actually easy)

So, like... as a result, there are a lot more outcaste bloodlines and societies depicted in the third edition material than in the old lore, which frequently have nothing at all to do with the Realm, from the Wanasaan exorcists to this weird group of fae-blooded outcastes called the Cult of the Violet Fang to like... Yu-Shan even having a population of Dragon-Blooded who have just been living there since the Divine Revolution. On top of older groups like the Forest Witches and the Grass Spiders, of course. Heirs to the Shogunate in particular is pretty great for highlighting this stuff.
 
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I expected to have some spicy takes on Essence to stir up thread activity, but then I got sucked into 150+ hours of the Trails in the Sky trilogy over the last couple months that kind of obliterated my media time and I haven't actually sat down to read through everything yet. >.<
 
Dragon Blooded should lay eggs. Convince me I'm wrong.
I don't have to. You already know, deep in your heart of hearts, that you're wrong. Also Dragonblooded born from eggs is canonical in 3e, under specific circumstances. Check the Clan Akatha writeup in Heirs to the Shogunate.

Pregnant Dragonblooded should gestate for 15 months. I don't have a reason why, I'm just trying to be controversial.
 
I'm still vaguely annoyed the islands in the North-west are full of weird cannibal people, because they look like a great place to start out a couple of exalts and organically increase contact with at first regional, then directional, and then the world powers, but nope. Weird cannibal people. Just let me have somewhere to put a weird mix of medieval welsh/irish squabbling princelings with complex revenge codes and other fun stuff.
I am always a sucker for irish/welsh-coded homebrew regions.
Literal giant scorpion people.
I mean, they're already part of canon? I remember seeing something like that in one of the official creature/monster/enemy supplements.
 
I'm still vaguely annoyed the islands in the North-west are full of weird cannibal people, because they look like a great place to start out a couple of exalts and organically increase contact with at first regional, then directional, and then the world powers, but nope. Weird cannibal people. Just let me have somewhere to put a weird mix of medieval welsh/irish squabbling princelings with complex revenge codes and other fun stuff.
Does an Irish/Welsh region necessarily need to be on islands, though? Aside from just matching the general terrain, that seems like it could pretty easily fit in other parts of Creation.
I mean, there's nothing of importance north-east of the Linowan, or anything on their north-west/south-east borders at all AFAIK.

I mean, they're already part of canon? I remember seeing something like that in one of the official creature/monster/enemy supplements.
Can't speak to 3e (or 1e, really), but the only scorpion-people I recall in 2e are the Tinsiana in CoCD: Malfeas as 1CDs.
 
Putting aside that the Scarlet Empress supposedly conquered all of Creation at one point, there's a lot of benefits to being under the umbrella of a worldwide superpower that tells you you have the gods-given right to do as you please, and not a lot of benefits in snubbing them.

To my knowledge, the Empress's holdings never extended beyond the Isle, the Shores of the Inner Sea, some of the islands in the West, An-Teng, and Greyfalls. It is something of a major setting point that Lookshy keeps her out of the East, a situation that has been repeatedly tested militarily.

So, like, this is an edition change I don't see people talking about very often, and it seems to have blown past even a lot of people who are pretty into 3e in general, but that's like... explicitly not the case with the third edition version of the Realm.

Lost Eggs on the Blessed Isle are gathered up as children, made to choose between the coin and the razor, and then sent to Pasiap's Stair or to the Cloister of Wisdom, as in previous editions. Foreign outcastes explicitly are not, though, even ones born in satrapies. The Blessed Isle got bigger along with the rest of the map, and the way it's depicted now, it supplies enough outcastes for the Imperial Legions' purposes without having to accept any rando dragon-blood from the Threshold.

Foreign outcastes can join the Realm, but that's either going to be joining the Immaculate Order anyway, or signing onto the Legions, which they're made to work for -- they have a period of serving as an ordinary soldier in the auxiliary forces for a time just to like... show them the pecking order and see if they can take orders, and then if they stick that out, they're promoted and will be let into the legions proper. Joining the Realm is a privilege that foreigners have to earn, not one that's just handed to them. (They can also marry into the Dynasty either through a Great House or a Cadet House, with the latter being a whole lot easier to swing, if not actually easy)

So, like... as a result, there are a lot more outcaste bloodlines and societies depicted in the third edition material than in the old lore, which frequently have nothing at all to do with the Realm, from the Wanasaan exorcists to this weird group of fae-blooded outcastes called the Cult of the Violet Fang to like... Yu-Shan even having a population of Dragon-Blooded who have just been living there since the Divine Revolution. On top of older groups like the Forest Witches and the Grass Spiders, of course. Heirs to the Shogunate in particular is pretty great for highlighting this stuff.

Yes, I too have read WFHW, The Realm, and Heirs. All those new populations are those "and a few xenophobic locals without any real visibility" I referred to. You will notice that Heaven's Dragons don't interact with Creation very much, the Cult of the Violet Fang generally stays in an extremely remote location near to the edge of Creation, etc. Thus my frustration that Terrestrials seem limited to the Realm+satelites+remote enclaves rather than more deeply integrated/interwoven into the fabric of Creaiton.

All this, and the rest of that about the details of joining the Realm (which are not terribly changed from 2E) do not distract from my actual point: Why are Terrestrial dynasties not a far more common political regime in the Threshold? Creation is full of scary things. Especially after the Crusade there were none of the structures in place to protect people. Being a terrestrial exalted was close to sufficient to declare yourself ruler of all you surveyed. And yet in location writeups there might be some incidental terrestrials but they generally don't occupy the upper echelons of the hereditary nobility of anywhere rich enough to support them.

I have asked this exact question before and been told on the forums that Threshold DB generally skip off the the Realm because they can offer a much better deal than whatever podunk petty kingdom the Terrestrial was from. Which seems... extremely at odds with how real people behave. Lest it be said: I'm not saying that Terrestrial rule should be the standard everywhere or that mortals can't do things. I'm saying it should be more common and visible. "How does this polity continue to exist in the face of supernatural threats" is an important question in Creation and Terrestrial Warrior-Aristocrats are one of the most reliable solutions.
 
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