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General Exalted Thread

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Basically every word anyone says about Hearteaters reinforces my conviction that they should not be an Exalt type.

They're not even heroes chosen by the gods!

They work so well as a "monster" type, and feel so odd as an Exalt type. Basically every distinctly "Exalted" trait they have feels tacked-on.

And seeing them crammed into the Exalt-shaped-box makes me doubt I'll ever get to see Dragon Kings written up properly for 3e...

BossFight said:
I mean sure, but you can also just use Will Crushing Force or repeatedly spam social charms while draining them of motes.

Like "given a captured enemy you can mind control them with a pretty significant certainty of success" is a problem of the game not the artifact. That ships sailed already.
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There are ways, but this one still seems like too much. Too easy, too cheap, too effective.

BossFight said:
I'm not sure I agree? It's telling that Solars (the splat defined for.two editions as having been in charge in the first age) have a bunch of charms that make them super persuasive and not a lot that make them super good at ruling. That feels like a deliberate design decision.
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That's just because the devs have always failed or refused to write decent rules for bureaucracy, leadership, and ruling in general.

I'm very confident that it's not a deliberate design choice.
 
Hearteater powers are, in a lot of ways, narcissism writ mythological. If you tried to play a good one, it would probably look a lot like someone playing a vampire trying to conduct themselves "ethically" - it's all about the struggle to rein in your monstrosity, and the drama happens when you inevitably fail.
 
And seeing them crammed into the Exalt-shaped-box makes me doubt I'll ever get to see Dragon Kings written up properly for 3e...
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Pillars of Creation for Exalted Essence will have Dragon King rules. Hopefully, we'll get a chance to do them for the regular 3e line as well.
 
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Chehrazad said:
Can you tell me what ruling well is, if it is not ruling with efficiency and charisma?
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I didn't say they couldn't rule well, but rather they had a lot more "I'm so charismatic you'll do what I say" charms then they had "make a perfect bureaucracy" charms. And it seems telling that the game line decided that the perfect rules of the long ago golden age were rulers by dint of personal charisma and not supernal organization charms.

Gazetteer said:
I mean, they also have a lot of charms for running organisations and armies efficiently? But yes, they don't have a "rule kingdom good" charm, which is down to the philosophical stance that there's no magic for ruling wisely or well. I don't really feel like this is as self evident as you think it is. Solars are incredibly persuasive and charismatic and, should they focus on this over the long term, are probably better at it than just about anyone. It seems kind of wild to me to look at that and decide "this means they should be better at mental domination and mind control than an Exalt type dedicated to those things."

Hearteaters are not shining god queens, they are not paragons of excellence who can charm people with their supernatural charisma or impossible eloquence. They are insidious, mind-destroying horrors that crawl in from the edge of the world and transform people into extensions of themselves. They are the warped ruin of something ancient and beautiful, very likely beyond any true redemption. If your perception of Solars is so wrapped up in the evil mind control thing that you look at that and perceive it as intruding on Solar themes, I genuinely do not know what to tell you.
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Note, I never said they should.be better at mental domination then Hearteaters. What I said was my one complaint is that having an explicit mental domination splat takes focus away from the idea of Solars as uniquely horrifying.

As someone who has always liked the contrast between the aesthetics of Solars (a bunch of stuff that screams I am the protagonist) and the actual reality of their abilities (not in a necessarily evil way, but in a way that makes clear Solars can be just as monsterous as any villain and that just because you used the mind control charm to make the enemy believe in the power of friendship doesn't make it any less mind control) this is something of a loss.

I think it's a loss that's worth it because Hearteaters sound awesome, but I do still mourn the loss.
 
BossFight said:
I didn't say they couldn't rule well, but rather they had a lot more "I'm so charismatic you'll do what I say" charms then they had "make a perfect bureaucracy" charms. And it seems telling that the game line decided that the perfect rules of the long ago golden age were rulers by dint of personal charisma and not supernal organization charms.
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Is it ruling badly to rule by charisma? Your wording was "super good", to circle back to what you said. I'm looking at the Bureaucracy Charm tree in Exalted Third Edition and I am seeing a lot of Charms for improving the functioning of an organization under your auspices, lacking (absent) as the 3e organizational subsystem is.
 
Sanctaphrax said:
Basically every word anyone says about Hearteaters reinforces my conviction that they should not be an Exalt type.

They're not even heroes chosen by the gods!

They work so well as a "monster" type, and feel so odd as an Exalt type. Basically every distinctly "Exalted" trait they have feels tacked-on.

And seeing them crammed into the Exalt-shaped-box makes me doubt I'll ever get to see Dragon Kings written up properly for 3e...



There are ways, but this one still seems like too much. Too easy, too cheap, too effective.



That's just because the devs have always failed or refused to write decent rules for bureaucracy, leadership, and ruling in general.

I'm very confident that it's not a deliberate design choice.
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Hearteaters are an Exalted type cursed by the Primordials using the murder of their Exalted patron and his still-beating heart as the focus of the ritual. They were once Chosen by Aurora, but Aurora is dead, as the trigger-pull of the ritual that turned the Auroral Exalted into the Hearteaters. If they're not an Exalted type, they lose the whole point of being what they are. "Random mind-control monsters from the Wyld" don't have nearly the impact of "The Exalted cursed in an Adamant murder ritual by the Primordials in a desperate gambit to rip the Exalted Host apart".
 
You shouldn't assume that, as non-Exalts, they'd have a non-backstory. Obviously they'd suck if they sucked. But it is very possible to write good backstories without using the E-word.

We could even keep the connection to Aurora, and / or various details of their origin. I'm not a big fan of those details, though; to me they feel real weak. Fanficcy in a bad way. The Exalt tag makes that difficult to avoid, though.

You can argue that the Hearteaters were once real Exalted, but...were they? Aurora's chosen seem to have been very very different. An entirely separate order of being. One being made from the bones of the other only goes so far. I guess it meant something to first Hearteaters, who had continuity of memory with their previous selves, but those are all non-characters with no names and no importance.

An NPC-oriented character type that's poorly suited for heroism (even in the classical sense) and not actually chosen by anything is the very opposite of what an Exalt type ought to be.

If you ask me, the Apocryphal tag on the Hearteaters is a sign of the problem. Because really, there's no reason Creation can't have that sort of being in it. They only need to be decanonized because of the vast baggage associated with the E-word. Such as the implication that a similar fate could befall the existing Exalt types, which I really don't like.

PS: This conversation reminds me of something I've long wondered. Why does Ex3 use the term "enemies of the gods" so often for the Primordials? It's weirdly generic. Like they couldn't afford the licensing fee for the right term.
 
You can argue that the Hearteaters were once real Exalted, but...were they? Aurora's chosen seem to have been very very different. An entirely separate order of being.
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There is no indication that this is the case. Everything we know about Aurorals suggests that they functioned like other types of Celestial Exalts. Are you arguing based on the text from the Apocryphals chapter of the Exigents manuscript, or is this all based on conjecture and secondhand information? Because it sort of sounds like you're pulling information out of a hat, here.
 
Yes, exactly, the Aurorals seem to have been normal Celestials. Very very different from the Hearteaters; not at all the same type of being as them.

If it sounded like I was saying that Aurorals were very very different from other Exalts, then I apologize for the lack of clarity.
 
Kymme said:
A Solar Exalted placed in charge of a group of people can, through their Charms, get that group to function as an extension of themselves. They can bring pretty much any idea they can possibly have into reality. They can do great things - sculpt the course of nations, win wars, construct great works, utterly redefine cultures and enact sweeping changes to vast regions. They have Charms for a lot of things.

Notably, one thing they can't do, not with their magics, is check to see if any of the high-minded ideas they could bring into reality are actually *good* ideas. If a Solar commits their forces to battling the ocean, they might just batter a whole-ass body of water into submission with military might. Is that a good idea? Why not try it and see what happens!
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Why hello there James C. Scott. :D

Remember folks that a lot of human catastrophe isn't becuase people in power didn't get to implementing their Great Ideas. it is that they had a lot of power, and no one willing to stop them.
 
mothematics said:
Hearteater powers are, in a lot of ways, narcissism writ mythological. If you tried to play a good one, it would probably look a lot like someone playing a vampire trying to conduct themselves "ethically" - it's all about the struggle to rein in your monstrosity, and the drama happens when you inevitably fail.
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It kind of affects how I tend to think about Aurorals would have been. WHere you selected a person or persons to be Patrons, whom you acted as a Muse. It was all give. You became attached to them. By loving them or caring about htem you could give them great power. By hating htem or despising them, you could be hteir nemesis. But no matter what, you had to care. And their magic would have been soemthinga bout pooring your all into them to etiher be the light htat made them shine, harrowed htem across the world, or the beacon of conflict that if they at least tried to follow you, could achieve things of great legend.

And then whatever it was, it made it so that what became giving became taking. Your Patrons became Pawns. They had to love you, you didn't need to carea bou them. They now make you great. They now serve your legend. Before you could be Krishna, Kamina, or even maybe Ravana if need be. And well....that's gone now. You made legends, now you eat others to build yours.

Or something like that. But yeah, it's to me interesting to look at the mechanics we have, the idea of how the magic was about ultiamtely about building power around genuine emotional investment....and how that can be flipped form somethign that's that beautiful light of the sky to the most horrible brilliance.
 
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They only need to be decanonized because of the vast baggage associated with the E-word. Such as the implication that a similar fate could befall the existing Exalt types, which I really don't like.
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Again with the baffling statements. This setting doesn't advance outside of a GM's table; it's not like the metaplot-heavy tabletop RPGs of the 90s-early 2000s or a modern live-service video game like Genshin Impact. What could possibly go wrong with there being an "implication"? Do I have to care what other tables do with this game where you play as very special kung fu dudes?
 
It's just a point of fictional metaphysics that I don't care for. Not a particularly big deal, obviously.

Caring about this sort of thing is a bit weird, I admit, but I'm in good company. In fact, I might well be in your company!

Probably an actual majority of the fandom has opinions on things like whether mortals were originally just prayer batteries or whether animals could potentially Exalt as Lunars after human extinction or whether it's possible to destroy an Exaltation or whether character X was morally justified when they did Y or what have you. Largely meaningless at the table, but... well, here we are.
 
Everything I know about Hearteaters come from this thread and maybe it's my natural rebelliousness but I love them.
 
Hypothetically, were a group manage to a) slay [Incarna responsible for Exalted type], b) corrupt the type with resources comparable to Primordials (multiple?) during Primordial war, I'll just shrug and go 'sure, why not, seems you've expended reasonable enough of effort for this'.;

Plus corrupting Exalted already have precedent; both Infernal and Abyssal, for one.
 
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Okay, so not only are we back to "being really persuasive is basically mind control" logic, now we're also pretending that being really persuasive is a uniquely Solar thing. Because you know, it's not like anyone else has social charms or anything.

BossFight said:
What I said was my one complaint is that having an explicit mental domination splat takes focus away from the idea of Solars as uniquely horrifying.
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What are you on about? Solars are not uniquely horrifying, that's never been their design intent or a meaningful focus of their themes. They're uniquely powerful, for better and for worse in a variety of ways, but nothing about them has ever been viscerally, fundamentally horrifying in the way Hearteaters are.

Like, sure, a specific given Solar could be enough of a prick to break someone down psychologically and reduce them to a withered husk of themselves. Maybe even also wield some especially nasty sorcery to burn away their selfhood completely. But that's one Solar being a monster, not an inherent quality of the goddamn splat, and not something nobody else could achieve with time and effort. I really don't like the Hearteaters, I find them very, incredibly offputting, but I think arguing that they're eating anyone else's thematic lunch is at best based on some pretty myopic and drastic misreadings of the other splats.
 
Sanctaphrax said:
If you ask me, the Apocryphal tag on the Hearteaters is a sign of the problem. Because really, there's no reason Creation can't have that sort of being in it. They only need to be decanonized because of the vast baggage associated with the E-word. Such as the implication that a similar fate could befall the existing Exalt types, which I really don't like.

PS: This conversation reminds me of something I've long wondered. Why does Ex3 use the term "enemies of the gods" so often for the Primordials? It's weirdly generic. Like they couldn't afford the licensing fee for the right term.
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To my mind, that's part of the draw, actually. It's actually probably the case that whatever let them happen is unique and unrepeatable: Sidereals backer draft, for instance, answered 'so why not build another Jade Prison, then?' by having one of its named components being the crystalized tear the Unconquered Sun shed when he turned his back on Creation. Almost certainly, any deeper dig into what happened to Aurora's Chosen would come up with something similar: to do this again, you need something that legitimately not only doesn't exist, but probably can't exist again. Hearteaters aren't quite "there, but for the grace of God, go I": they're what happens when things are twisted and broken beyond recognition. And we have truly broken Exalts already; the black-market corrupted Exigents can definitely get that rough. But if the Hearteaters aren't Exalts, then they lose part of the core humanity that makes their situation so tragic.

And the reason for using 'enemies of the gods' or other terms for 'Primordials' is a deliberate stylistic choice: by making just a little extra distance between the reader/player and the Divine Revolution, things can be a little more mythic than a previous edition's tendency to just wax omniscient about stuff that no one in-character would know that doesn't directly affect day-to-day play at the table.

Queshire said:
Everything I know about Hearteaters come from this thread and maybe it's my natural rebelliousness but I love them.
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Of course you do.

And now you have no choice but to continue to do so.
 
'Enemies of the Gods' is probably also a generically vague term to give leeway to include antagonistic forces outside of the Primordials should the devs or players wish.
 
Chehrazad said:
Is it ruling badly to rule by charisma? Your wording was "super good", to circle back to what you said. I'm looking at the Bureaucracy Charm tree in Exalted Third Edition and I am seeing a lot of Charms for improving the functioning of an organization under your auspices, lacking (absent) as the 3e organizational subsystem is.
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Which is why I stated that "for two editions the Solars were defined by having plentiful social charms and very little rule good charms".

Like this is specifically about how the addition of the Hearteaters represents a thematic change from 1e and 2e where there was (imo) a deliberate attempt to show that Solars ruled because they were persuasive and not necessarily because they were effective. Which ties into exalted's larger tendency to dig into a lot of typical powers/tropes and ask how things would shake out irl.

3e adding more bureaucracy charms is only relevant to the discussion in that it further emphasizes 3e's move away from this idea (which makese sad but is not really a complaint about Hearteaters at that point).
Manic Dogma said:
Okay, so not only are we back to "being really persuasive is basically mind control" logic, now we're also pretending that being really persuasive is a uniquely Solar thing. Because you know, it's not like anyone else has social charms or anything.


What are you on about? Solars are not uniquely horrifying, that's never been their design intent or a meaningful focus of their themes. They're uniquely powerful, for better and for worse in a variety of ways, but nothing about them has ever been viscerally, fundamentally horrifying in the way Hearteaters are.

Like, sure, a specific given Solar could be enough of a prick to break someone down psychologically and reduce them to a withered husk of themselves. Maybe even also wield some especially nasty sorcery to burn away their selfhood completely. But that's one Solar being a monster, not an inherent quality of the goddamn splat, and not something nobody else could achieve with time and effort. I really don't like the Hearteaters, I find them very, incredibly offputting, but I think arguing that they're eating anyone else's thematic lunch is at best based on some pretty myopic and drastic misreadings of the other splats.
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I disagree. Solars have always been the most powerful splat and the one with the most potent social affects. A solars power *in and of itself* has been portrayed as horrifying given how dim a view exalted tends to take towards power/great man theory, and that horror is only exacerbated once the focus goes to their social effects which are terrifying.


Like, their has always been a contrast between the *aesthetics* of the Solars (glowing gold, heroic, skilled not strong, etc) which makes them look like heroes (in the modern sense) and the reality of Solars (they are not chosen for goodness just greatness, their powers are often differ mechanically from other splat powers from just being stronger even if they aesthetic difference makes solar powers *seem* more heroic/moral, etc) which is that they are Heroes (old school).

And the social charms are a good example of this dichotomy. Because at first glance Solar social charms seem completely above board. 100% moral. You are just talking to people. There's nothing wrong with talking to people. It's not *magic*, you're just persuasive.

But then you start actually looking at the math and realize that even if the game doesn't call it mind control, your social skills are so strong that the ability of other parties to meaningfully consent is non-existent. In a few days and with a few offhand counts you can completely remake a person.

Solar social charms, it turns out are horrifying (I don't know what else to call powers which turn you into kill grave+) and you as a player need to think really hard about when or even if to use these.

And I've really liked that contrast. The idea that these don't *feel* like evil or even dangerous powers. That using them doesn't feel like you're doing anything wrong. You're just talking to people after all.

But then you look around you and see how everyone adores you. How you can get anything you want with a simple word. That even the people who hate you do so only at your difference and that you can change that whenever its convenient.

That's horrifying.
 
My opinion is I think Hearteaters are really cool. But you need to keep a very low number of them in creation. Make them something that forces uneasy alliances and good horror set pieces.
 
I personally don't care for Hearteaters, but that's why the concept of apocryphal splats is nice. I don't have to use them or think about them. If someone tries to use them as evidence to argue some point about the themes of the setting or the nature of the Exalted I can just say "Hearteatwhomst? Those guys don't exist in my reality."

Gazetteer said:
Solars as the super brainwash splat is a direction I understand loomed very large in the fandom's mind at one point. However, it's more a result of looking at their powers through a deeply cynical lens and taking the worst possible outcomes as an inevitability, than it is a logical outcome of their themes.
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See Gaz, you're overestimating the quality of the line's historical writing again. It's not just a fandom-side thing; I can pop up Caste Book: Dawn and there's Lyta, brainwashing hundreds of mortals into blood-crazed fanatics to throw against Dragon-Blood as sacrifical hordes to drown them in a sea of bodies!

Sanctaphrax said:
PS: This conversation reminds me of something I've long wondered. Why does Ex3 use the term "enemies of the gods" so often for the Primordials? It's weirdly generic. Like they couldn't afford the licensing fee for the right term.
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The term 'Primordial' actually has been discontinued. It doesn't occur in any of the extant Ex3 books, except as an adjective (that is to say to mean 'old,' not anything related to the Yozis). But 'enemies of the gods' is indeed kind of burdensome and vague. As a result, the Sidereal manuscript has introduced the term 'Ancient', in lines such as 'Whether forged by the Ancients or the gods,' or "Outandish rumors claim that the dweomerforge is itself a cast-off fragmant of one of the Ancients.'

As for why, I suspect that it's to dissociate whatever Ex3 is doing with the Yozis and the Divine Revolution from the Primordials. The term 'Primordial' has a lot of baggage; we know who the Primordials were, we know how they functioned, we know them down to the specifics of their biology, we have an entire origin story for them... So just retire the term and call them something else that is slightly different enough that it could refer to a broader, vaguer category of beings that don't have all the same commonalities.

Blaque said:
Why hello there James C. Scott. :D

Remember folks that a lot of human catastrophe isn't becuase people in power didn't get to implementing their Great Ideas. it is that they had a lot of power, and no one willing to stop them.
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This does kinda run into one of the issues the 'no Charms to rule justly' thing has always had, which is that Charms explicitly make people superhuman at figuring a lot of stuff out, and that's apparent in the James C. Scott comparison. There is no Charm to decide wisely, but there are absolutely Charms that let you identify at a glance that the allegedly 'primitive' agriculture of your people is actually optimally designed for the nature of the soil you have and if you replace it all with massive wheat fields you will destroy the soil and everyone will starve. There is no Charm to tell you what a good ruler is, but there are absolutely Charms that will tell you that taxing households based on their number of windows is fucking stupid.

Solar Charms are very good at obtaining information and predicting outcomes. They can't make you a good person, but they strip away a lot of the mechanisms that make states awful by necessity of ensuring their functioning. They tell you how to efficiently obtain taxes, how to spend taxes effectively, what tax burden your population is capable of comfortably bearing, how to placate your warrior caste... Yeah, if you suddenly decide that trees are personally offensive to you and to go on a crusade to raze every forest, bad things will happen, so... don't do that?
 
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