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General Exalted Thread

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VagueZ said:
I'm just going to single this part out, because the rest of this I think has been addressed pretty well. The problem here is that if you mandate that the bond exists, you've stuck it to the rest of the Lunar concept. "I want to play a cunning shapeshifting trickster, or a warrior who transforms into a gargantuan warform and has her magic sword grow with her, or a forest witch who levels curses and prophecies on the local potentate and then turns into a bird to fly away from the throneroom while shrieking horrible laughter" is already enough on its own; all of these have a lot of support and fun mechanics to back them up. Lunars in this edition have a strong and interesting set of story hooks and powers all on their own. Lunars are the champions of Lunar stories. There is no need for the bond to make a Lunar matter, because it's not just Solars and their mirrors who matter.

Every single thing about the bond that was in 2e can still be there in 3e, if desired. You want to have a bond? Sure, it's there. You want to have it so the bond is the thing that can make an Abyssal or Infernal give up the path of evil and come back to protecting Creation? Well, Abyssals and Infernals are less automatically villainous, but there's certainly redeemable villains among them, and the bond is an easy in for caring about each other and doing something with it. Interested in playing a Lunar dominated by his bond, so he's acting specifically at the whim of the Solar because of reasons beyond his control or understanding? Sure, Solars can be incredibly good at being convincing.

It doesn't matter what parts you do or don't like; that's not the point. The point is that all potential plot hooks and basic relationship templates are still available. 3e only expands the options. Interested in playing a friendly rival, with the two of you always striving to outdo the other in any field from cooking to footraces to martial arts? We can do that. Interested in playing a vicious enmity where the two of you hate each other's guts at first sight and it turns out that she's a monster so your destined foe is truly as despicable as you think and you just have to convince everyone else of that fact? Go wild. Interested in that but inverting the end so you realize that your gut feeling of hatred is meaningless echoes of your previous lives when you were other people, and this feeling should be abandoned? Still works. This isn't right for your character? Then it's not even a possibility; you have no bondmate. There's no upside and some potential downside to keeping the bond as mandatory; if it's kept as something like "you just haven't met the right one yet", that's a dangling plot hook that can color a character concept.

Lunars can stand on their own without the bond. They don't need it. If a specific character benefits from it, all previous options and some additional ones are on the table.
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To add to this: The Bond worked fine for folks in 1e when it was an optional relationshp and symmetrical Merit found in the Player's Guide. I still honestly think that was one of the better ways it was implemented.

How it was in 2e and how I feel the prior devs wanted it, it was going to be basically something that in effect made Lunars sidekick splat. A big factor of Lunars to me in 2e over tiem is they had a very big "You arne't my dayd" or "WHen's dad coming home?" vibe with the factions, things like MIshiko's tomb, and so on. They basically were defined by their relationship with Solar sin a way that was to me kind of unhealthy for bulding any Lunar heat. Since it was defiend by how they could support someone else, or was defined on who "They didn't reallly need Solars" in the case of again, the sorcery oriign they had or the way the TSR was presented. How little they talka bout the Realm despite it being what was murdering htem for twelve centuries compared to Solars who were agreed upon to be in effect extinct was kind of notable.

I also honeslty like how the Lunar-Solar bond is like...organic. I think that there's often a want in RPG settings for everything to have some teleos, some purpos that it is deemed there for a reason. Especially in fantasy settings with a lot of divine intervention like Creation can have. But instead, you have this thing where the Sun and Moon, whcih in Creation aren't that linked besides being siblings and the birhgtest celestial bodies, didn't design their Exalts to be that either. The Bond formed naturally, was an emergent property of themes of the Incarna that hte Incarna themselves don't really express, and which results in the Bond that thier Chosen have that shows how they can evovle past what the gods put in. This is nice too for other benefits like letting Lunar or Solar players opt-out of dealing with having the issues tha tmight arise with views of autonomy of emotion, independence from your past lives, or having a splat defined by the other splat.

Like, for a vibe It hink of how it can go bad, and not to bash it much, but I think that how Lunars are in the Exalted Demake is a good showcase of what a bigger emphasis on Bond would have looked like, and TBH, I kind of lik ehow in 3e in the end, Lunars are settingwise defined more by opposittion to the Terrestrial Host than brooding over the in-effect extinct Solar one.
 
@Rand Brittain
I've been reading Golden Calibration, and I have a question about Expansions. Are they automatically learned when you meet the requirements, or do you have to purchase them? For example, if I know Tiger-Warrior Training Technique, do I have to buy Dust-Forging Commandant, or just get War 5 Essence 3? Also, the text for DFC says War 5 Ess3, but the Charm tree shows War 4 Ess 3
 
mantovani said:
The problem is the Solar Charm Bloat, it makes it harder for Solars to get stuff they want even with the Supernal.



Holden released the sale pitches of the proto versions of the Apocryphal Trio.


●Nightmares (proto Umbrals): don't want to use their powers.

●Revelers (proto Dream-Souled): are one note cultists.

●Heart-Eaters: can't travel.
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I really don't give a shit what Holden said six years ago, when the book for those Exalts is actually out and not at all what you're talking about.

Bluntly, the Charm bloat criticism always makes me roll my eyes. Yeah, some of the abilities suck or have useless Charms. None of them are the combat abilities. If you can't make an army killing Dawn Caste with seven Melee Charms, five Resistance Charms, and two Athletics Charms (your chargen Charm allotment of 15 Charms), did you even try? You could just grab them in order from the trees and still come out with a great character. Melee has an accuracy tree, a damage tree, a defense tree, a defend other tree, and a multi-attack tree, the other combat abilities are similarly divided. Grab one accuracy, two damage, two defense, two multi-attack, bam, you're set for combat, invest in Social or Sorcery or whatever the hell you feel like from then on.

Like, what are the "Charms you want", here? You want Immortal Blade Triumphant? You can get that at chargen. You want Ascendant Battle Visage? Again, you can get it from chargen, though IIRC you might need to spend BP on it. You wanna dip social but still kick ass? Again, seven combat Charms does that fine!

If you don't like the amount of Charms, that's one thing, but the Solar set really is not hard to get what you want, unless I guess what you want is "a bunch of high Essence effects right away", in which case, yeah. Working as designed, there.
 
In fairness, 'Charm Bloat' and 'it's hard for Solars to get the charms they want, even with a Supernal,' are two very different criticsms.
 
Completely unrelated to the current discussion, but a small thing I really like about the current setting material's approach to Dragon-Blooded is like... the multiple outcaste groups who are basically like, straight up middle-arc shonen antagonists, who are out here with a cool base and led by a succession of weird guys with cool gimmick aesthetics/powers. And then the game just presents you with the possibility of outright playing one?

The Grass Spiders have been around since 1e, but I definitely feel like it wasn't until the 3e version that they really felt like fleshed out player options as opposed to like "you might meet a creepy artist assassin guy" NPC fodder. And you've also got the Cult of the Violet Fang, and like... the Seven Storms Brotherhood gets less wordcount devoted to it, but they're still very fun either as antagonists or, as I'm using them, a background element for a morally dubious PC.

What Fire Has Wrought was not a perfect book, but sometimes I just like to reflect on how good a place Dragon-Blooded are at this edition, with all three DB-orientated books to draw from.
 
Gazetteer said:
What Fire Has Wrought was not a perfect book, but sometimes I just like to reflect on how good a place Dragon-Blooded are at this edition, with all three DB-orientated books to draw from.
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I really really liked the Realm already as it's emerged in 3e, the depth of play and the degree to which it's a society in and of itself. The way all the Great Houses have their distinct character, their own cultural terrain and the geography of their domains and the way they see the world (Peleps and Ragara are my true loves, Imperial Navy and Imperial Bank forever). Versus something that can and should and must be (immediately, guiltlessly) torn down by the Solar PC's. That has all the solidity of paper to it. But honestly it wasn't until @Chehrazad successfully badgered me into reading A Memory Called Empire and me revisiting The Realm (the book) that a lot of stuff clicked personally.

Memory does a truly wonderful job of articulating and encapsulating the intoxicating allure of Empire. Giving it depth and dimension in a way beyond just "Empire Bad (it's got lots of black and iron)" or "Empire Good (it's got lots of white and crystal)", the power of the thing, the scale and the scope, not just the knowledge and the effortless sense of class and grace that suffuse it but the genuine beauty it can bring because it very much can be beautiful. But then juxtaposing that seamlessly with the bloody violence it brings to the world around it, the way it twists everything it touches until that thing faces it, is like it. Thinks like it. Knows it. The relentless, insatiable appetite for more land, more wealth, more people, more treasure. The way people have to make a home in it, of it, and how the simple fact of doing that changes them.

And that's something that's very applicable to the Realm and the Dragon-Blooded that rule it imo. The Realm is so vast, so old, it spans all eight Directions and reigns over an entire continent uncontested. It connects far corners of the known world to itself and to each other. It propagates horror and atrocity and is also the seat of profound and enlightened scholarship, philosophy, sorcery, and the Immaculacy. Even in the Threshold it isn't, it can't, be as simple as "everyone hates the Realm". It's too big, it's too many things all at once- its soldiers and civil servants, merchants and monks. Its ships in the harbor and sanitation and a new language on your tongue. It has a hundred faces and it can turn any one it pleases upon you at any time.

It's hard not to love the thing, not to feel something like awe, even as it kills you.
 
TenfoldShields said:
The way all the Great Houses have their distinct character, their own cultural terrain and the geography of their domains and the way they see the world (Peleps and Ragara are my true loves, Imperial Navy and Imperial Bank forever).
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My favourite is Sesus, just because they're such fucking bastards, but it's working out so well for them. They make really good antagonists, but also it's just a fun environment for a PC to have grown up in.
 
Oh man. Favorite? I think it's proobably a tie between Mnemon and Peleps, who both have strong motives/agendas, a nicely complex spin on being pious/virtuous houses, and internal cultures that give you variety and foreign influences and mobility for young scions.

Honorary mentions to Tepet, because I am a sucker for their underdog shtick and Shogunate heritage and other nice bits, and Ragara, who are magnificent bastards I am more excited to use as confusing antagonists for a satrapy than any of the others.
 
grommile said:
With my frames of reference, an empire with black and iron will be brutal and an empire with white and crystal will be sadistic.

(And the Realm is, perhaps, almost as deserving of fiat iustitia ruat caelum as the Deliberative was.)
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I mean I was just saying that I don't think the Realm can be casually summed up as Empire Bad, Yeet so I don't, can't really agree in all honesty. And the Deliberative itself I sort of view as its own animal entirely, a vessel and vector for apocalyptic sun god-king ego and madness. The Realm itself is -for all that the DB's lead it- fundamentally a very human institution that relies on an incredibly broad base of genuine and committed (as well as opportunistic and coerced) support. The Empress needs her ministries and the organs of state. The Great Houses all have their own domains and dominions that buttress the overall whole.

I guess I ultimately don't find it like- I don't find it a particularly useful stance to take even if I wouldn't go so far as to say it's a wholly illegitimate one, if that's how you feel about it y'know?

Potato Anarchy said:
and Ragara, who are magnificent bastards I am more excited to use as confusing antagonists for a satrapy than any of the others.
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Ragara are rancid awful stinky bastard people and I love them to pieces because they will do absolutely insane shit if they think there's dank occult lore at the end.

If you ever get a chance I'd genuinely recommend checking out the comic series the Black Monday Murders which informs a lot of how I think about Ragara. Elevator pitch basically being: secret cultists of Mammon on Wall Street practicing human sacrifice (so it's nothing if not apropos). It's uneven in some places but it plays around with some genuinely compelling themes and ideas.

 
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Potato Anarchy said:
Oh man. Favorite? I think it's proobably a tie between Mnemon and Peleps, who both have strong motives/agendas, a nicely complex spin on being pious/virtuous houses, and internal cultures that give you variety and foreign influences and mobility for young scions.
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Mnemon is easily my second favourite, for roughly these reasons. The 3e version of Mnemon herself is also a pretty fascinating character, and the way the house is structured means that your Mnemon player character probably has at least a bit of a personal relationship with her that casts her in a different light than what people from outside the house see.

One of the things I really liked about the Fall of Jiara, a great Dragon-Blooded actual play podcast, is that you have these couple scenes featuring Mnemon, ostensibly a secondary antagonist in this story to all the other PCs, having private conversations with the one Mnemon PC. And she's portrayed in such a way that it's like... she's got plans for that PC, but she's also obviously genuinely invested in setting her up to succeed, and there's a sense of personability there that makes it entirely believable that that character continues to believe in her house and her matriarch, at least to a degree, even at the end of the story. It's a great example of really deftly using major NPCs to facilitate a player's story, rather than monopolise or derail it.
 
V'Neef is barely even a House but tbh that's the appeal, I'm a sucker for "we have one Cool Young House Founder but oops! We were never meant to be looking at a civil war situation so young and barely founded, we barely had time for any Exalted children, quick let's desperately recruit any Cool Guy Or Gak we can justify adopting in a frantic bid for survival because our eldest siblings hate us"
 
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My favourite part of House V'neef is just like, the image of her sitting at the head of this table with her husband and her actual blood children on either side of her, and then out past them are just all her adoptive daughters and sons, who are like... these fucking ex-patrician and outcaste Imperial Legion veterans, many of whom are a lot older than her, and the glue that's holding them all together is that getting in on the ground floor of this Great House is the single best opportunity they and their personal households are ever going to have.
 
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V'neef is less a specific agenda/plothook in the way that Peleps or Mnemon is and more a gigantic wild card with a famous hot person on top that just serves whatever purpose you need. You need a surprise third party in a local Dynastic conflict? You want to play someone in your DB mixed house campaign who has a weird complicated lost egg background? You need a patron for a group of Realm PCs who's friendly and interesting but an underdog? They're enough of a hot mess they can add spice wherever you need it, and while that makes them slightly underwhelming to me in the abstract it makes them immensely usable in a campaign.

TenfoldShields said:
If you ever get a chance I'd genuinely recommend checking out the comic series the Black Monday Murders which informs a lot of how I think about Ragara. Elevator pitch basically being: secret cultists of Mammon on Wall Street practicing human sacrifice (so it's nothing if not apropos). It's uneven in some places but it plays around with some genuinely compelling themes and ideas.
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I've read the first issue after you mentioned it in ADT, but I would counter: Ninth House. I love Ninth House as inspirational material for a lot of stuff, but it's also excellent Finance Cultist / Magical Ancien Regime inspirational material.
 
TenfoldShields said:
I mean I was just saying that I don't think the Realm can be casually summed up as Empire Bad, Yeet so I don't, can't really agree in all honesty. And the Deliberative itself I sort of view as its own animal entirely, a vessel and vector for apocalyptic sun god-king ego and madness. The Realm itself is -for all that the DB's lead it- fundamentally a very human institution that relies on an incredibly broad base of genuine and committed (as well as opportunistic and coerced) support. The Empress needs her ministries and the organs of state. The Great Houses all have their own domains and dominions that buttress the overall whole.
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Honestly, with the release of new details in Sidereals, I feel that the hubris that the Realm engenders in its ruling class isn't too different than the hubris of the ancient Solars, only set apart by the level of collateral damage that the Dragonblooded can achieve. Solars were chosen for the purge because they were most able to ruin creation by accident, not because they were terminally insane to a greater degree and frequency than the other Exalted Hosts.

The Empress, while not necessarily egotistical, is arguably a far more absolutist figure than any individual solar god king, who had to compete with the rest of the Solar Host, as well as whatever other Exalted polities that cropped up Never did the ancient solars succeed in installing a singular ruler with a universalist claim of rulership. The Scarlet Empress on the other hand, is billed as The One Ruler, the archetypical queen, around whom much of Creation's ideas of what a ruler should be have crystallized. It is by her hand the world was saved, it is by her authority that ten thousand dragons rule the world. She is a figure of terrifying singularity, who has no peers in the mundane world and subject only to the Dragons themselves. She may not claim godhood, but her cult of personality nonetheless pervades every level of her society.

The Solars of old, after all, are deeply connected to the Deliberative, itself a bureaucratic organ of state, though in 3e it appears to be far more of a council of meeting than a true world government. In the Scarlet Realm, the Deliberative was subordinated to the Empress, and what power brokers existed in it always came from or were swiftly integrated into her kinship group. Now with her gone, its legitimacy is up in the air. Sure it looks like its more powerful, but that's because it serves the interests of the Great Houses, and they will discard it the moment it no longer becomes convenient to their ambitions
 
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I started out liking Tepet as my favorite, but the way 3e does Iselsi really speaks to me. They're such good wuxia villains. The Fallen House, long thought dead and gone, brooding in the shadows and plotting revenge.
 
I don't know if "favorite" is the right word for my feelings about House Cynis (what if the Confederate States of America were also the Mafia) but there's something endlessly compelling about the refined ladies and elegant gentlemen who don't buy their allies with anything as crude as money, they write the letter that gets your cousin into the Heptagram, they come over to sip tea with you and talk through it when you're having an existential crisis at three in the morning, all these favors and gestures of friendship and when the time comes it's not an obligation, if it's done right you'll be eager to pay them back, and meanwhile all of it is built on the blood and bones of enslaved men and women, of slavery on a mind boggling scale, it's...compelling is probably the best word I think.
 
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TenfoldShields said:
But honestly it wasn't until @Chehrazad successfully badgered me into reading A Memory Called Empire and me revisiting The Realm (the book) that a lot of stuff clicked personally.

Memory does a truly wonderful job of articulating and encapsulating the intoxicating allure of Empire. Giving it depth and dimension in a way beyond just "Empire Bad (it's got lots of black and iron)" or "Empire Good (it's got lots of white and crystal)", the power of the thing, the scale and the scope, not just the knowledge and the effortless sense of class and grace that suffuse it but the genuine beauty it can bring because it very much can be beautiful. But then juxtaposing that seamlessly with the bloody violence it brings to the world around it, the way it twists everything it touches until that thing faces it, is like it. Thinks like it. Knows it. The relentless, insatiable appetite for more land, more wealth, more people, more treasure. The way people have to make a home in it, of it, and how the simple fact of doing that changes them.
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A Memory Called Empire said:
Three Seagrass reached over and plucked Mahit's glass of alcohol out of her hand, took a large sip, and returned it. "We haven't had an annexation war since before I was born."

"I know," said Mahit, "we do have history on the stations. We were enjoying Teixcalaan being a quiescent neighboring predator—"

"You make us sound like a mindless animal."

"Not mindless," Mahit said. It was as close as she could bring herself to an apology. "Never that."

"But an animal."

"You do devour. Isn't that what we're talking about? A war of annexation."

"It's not—devour would be if we were xenophobes or genocides, if we didn't bring new territories into the Empire."

Into the world. Shift the pronunciation of the verb, and Three Seagrass could have been saying if we didn't make new territories real, but Mahit knew what she meant: all the ways that being part of Teixcalaan gave a planet or a station prosperity. Economic, cultural—take a Teixcalaanli name, be a citizen. Speak poetry.
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Chehrazad said:
she is very cute and my wife everyone please be nice to my imperial bureaucrat wife
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This just reminds me that I really need to play just like, a Thousand Scales bureaucrat and make her a huge fucking nerd-poet, sometime. I don't normally go in for making PCs directly inspired by specific fictional characters, but I'd make an exception here.

grommile said:
It's an empire, not just a country that calls its king an emperor, therefore it has to overcome the scarcely rebuttable presumption that it's bad.
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This feels a little needlessly obtuse to me. No one is actually saying that empire are good. You're responding to someone praising a depiction of one as a complex setting element that characters can have interesting relationships with and that facilitates interesting stories that aren't just about Solars tearing it down with "but I think empires are bad, actually".

It's like if you'd responded to me saying the Grass Spiders are cool earlier by going "hm, I don't know, assassination is morally wrong."
 
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