There any details on the Bull of the North's nascent empire in any of the 1e books? Players are visiting the Bull's territory to try and get some sort of alliance (or at least a trade deal) with him, but I have no actual idea what the Saltspire League and whatever else he's got are actually like.
There any details on the Bull of the North's nascent empire in any of the 1e books? Players are visiting the Bull's territory to try and get some sort of alliance (or at least a trade deal) with him, but I have no actual idea what the Saltspire League and whatever else he's got are actually like.
It's been years and I don't have the book or remember what it was called, so grain of salt, but:
He jammed a bunch of different nations that hate each other together and welded them with magic and overwhelming personal charisma and "you'll die if you don't do what I say" and hating the Realm. The vibe is gonna be extremely tense, especially because he got personally fucked up IIRC by one of the Tepet Exalts, several of his Exalted allies died, and he took significant losses, and with Tepet broken his forces are chafing and getting resentful of being forced to work together, and smelling weakness from him.
There'd be a lot of diehard loyalists, a lot of people who hate him, a lot of folks along that spectrum, and a lot of simmering tension all around. Trade-wise, you'd likely be trading more with the individual people's within his empire than with the Bull, because he's got shit to do and most of his supernatural power is on warfare and violence, the economic side is something he'd be delegating to a degree, other than the obvious "keep making weapons and armor" and such. Invent some neat folks to be part of his coalition, show off the tensions between them and their neighbors, and let the PCs deal with the folks handling that level of stuff.
The Bull's is one of those things where previous editions aren't going to help you very much.
The best source for it is the entry in 2e Compass: North which was written by one of the current developers and trying to dial back a lot of long held anxieties about there being another circle of Solars in the world with a multi-year head start on the PCs.
Ah, sorry. I got a little caught up on transcribing the koryos into post form and didn't really comment on the rest of your post. I definitely like what you've written, and as @Kaiya pointed out I used a particularly unpleasant phrasing to express myself. It was a stupid, off-the-cuff reaction that should have been rewritten/expanded on or edited out before I put up the post, and I in no way intended to denigrate your work.
But... I actually like some of the original take on the Dogs of the Unbroken Earth as an instance of Yu Shan politics leaking into Creation.
The Dogs' domain is "land that is currently wilderness", and the Twin Calamities resulted in massive stretches of land returning to wilderness because 90% of the population had died. All of a sudden, the Dogs of the Unbroken Earth had their department's remit expanded into one of the largest in Yu Shan - an INSANE jump in their prestige and political power.
I honestly found it refreshing - the turnaround effect of a Bronze Age context meaning that human expansion into wilderness can happen for reasons other than pure kyriarchic avarice. The Dogs protecting their territory can easily take the form of them opposing Realm magistrates trying to turn a quick buck by liquidating a forest, sure.
However, they would also oppose a farm community that tries to deal with a growing population (or a blight, or some other issue with keeping everyone fed) by reclaiming nearby swampland one basket of soil at a time. The more peaceable arrangements you outlined are absolutely valid, and I'd consider them a necessary component of any conversation on how to portray the Dogs.
I just also want to keep the larger sociopolitics of the situation in mind. The potential for Dogs of the Unbroken Earth to become exploitative or abusive toward mortals is inherent to the position of power they hold.
It's been years and I don't have the book or remember what it was called, so grain of salt, but:
He jammed a bunch of different nations that hate each other together and welded them with magic and overwhelming personal charisma and "you'll die if you don't do what I say" and hating the Realm. The vibe is gonna be extremely tense, especially because he got personally fucked up IIRC by one of the Tepet Exalts, several of his Exalted allies died, and he took significant losses, and with Tepet broken his forces are chafing and getting resentful of being forced to work together, and smelling weakness from him.
There'd be a lot of diehard loyalists, a lot of people who hate him, a lot of folks along that spectrum, and a lot of simmering tension all around. Trade-wise, you'd likely be trading more with the individual people's within his empire than with the Bull, because he's got shit to do and most of his supernatural power is on warfare and violence, the economic side is something he'd be delegating to a degree, other than the obvious "keep making weapons and armor" and such. Invent some neat folks to be part of his coalition, show off the tensions between them and their neighbors, and let the PCs deal with the folks handling that level of stuff.
@SunnySprings I can't for the life of me find the book I read this in, so solid odds this is something I hack-job'd for a game I ran ages ago and just forgot wasn't actually a thing >_< Sorry
Known for his unique striped markings, after only a century of duty Banded M'zafa was promoted from a young Lion-Dog to Celestial Lion for valorous acts in defense of Yu-Shan against the invading Fair Folk, earning him the nickname of "Celestial Liger." Once a driven, idealist guardian spirit, his swift promotion exposed him to the very worst of Yu-Shan's law enforcement culture, turning dedication into careerist egoism and integrity into toxic pride. His rapidly growing list of deeds and achievements quickly became motivated wholly by his own inflated ego rather than any dedication to higher ideals. When what was supposed to be a routine investigation accidentally uncovered crimes involving powerful personages in the Celestial Bureaucracy, M'zafa's star began to fall. Reassigned to hopeless punishment postings, centuries of demerits and mockeries turned M'zafa from hotshot guardian spirit into a jaded burnout, his days defined by substance abuse and casual acts of corruption. In time the title of "Celestial Liger" became one of mockery rather than pride.
At least, that's how things were. The Celestial Liger has fled the halls of Heaven for the Blessed Isle and Exalted a mortal champion, and he has no idea how or why. His memories of the last few decades are a haze of drug dreams and failures, but remembers that he had been drinking particularly hard recently. M'zafa remembers burning a lot of bridges with his co-workers, and making some powerful enemies that he probably shouldn't have. He doesn't remember carving the words "Run and Don't Stop" onto the flesh of his foreleg with his claw, nor does he remember leaving Heaven and Exalting a bewildered mortal on the Blessed Isle or his reasons for doing so. He definitely doesn't remember coming into possession of a coal of the Exigence, whether he acquired it legitimately or stole it from an evidence vault he doesn't know.
Regardless of how M'zafa found himself in this situation, he's stuck in it, Diminishment reverting him to a lion-dog, though he likes to think of himself a "liger-dog". He's not bound to his Chosen, but he has little other options but to accompany him, his powers of deduction are rusty but he's smart enough to realize he's probably not welcome in Yu-Shan. It's been centuries since he last set foot in Creation and he has almost no practical knowledge of life among the terrestrial gods. Initially sticking with his Exigent out of desperate self-interest, he finds the hero re-kindling more and more of the ideals and hopes of his younger self.
Whiskey Stone, Masterless Archon
A young street gang leader, Whiskey Stone was arrested for involvement in a major crime ring in Pangu City and sentenced to years of hard labor. The Magistrate Odros Renera, wandering bringer of justice, took pity on the youth and had him remanded into her care as an Archon instead. A few years of the road managed to instill some discipline and integrity into the young brawler, and eventually he and Renera came to have a relationship not unlike sifu and student. So when Renera was cut down on the road shortly after the Empress disappeared, just managing to mutually slay her assassins and save Whiskey Stone, the reformed rogue had many reasons to be distraught. Whiskey Stone's mourning was cut short however, by a gigantic striped lion god stumbling out of the treeline, babbling something in a language he can only assume was Old Realm, and filling his very being with divine fire before blacking out.
Both a masterless archon and an illicit Exigent in the very heart of the Realm, Whiskey Stone's life is doubly in danger and he knows it. That he has an eccentric, amnesiac, possibly fugitive, lion-dog following him around only complicates matters further. The smart thing to do would be to hide in the wilderness or stow away on a ship bound for the Threshold, but Whiskey Stone can't bring himself to do it. The Magistrate Odros Renera dedicated her life to justice, and as her student and archon Whiskey Stone can't let her death be in vain. A wandering vigilante, Whiskey Stone performs much of the same feats that his master did, defeating bandits, rooting out corruption, and solving mysteries, the exception being that as he has no Magistrate's authority, everything he's doing is now deeply illegal. He was a criminal before he was an archon though, and he remembers old tricks on how to evade the Black Helms.
M'zafa has been both bane and boon to Whiskey Stone on his travels. The former celestial lion has surprisingly good insights into various cases, though these sometimes manifest as seemingly bizarre hunches and tangents. His constant whining about how dreary Creation seems compared to Yu-Shan is less appreciated. The lion-dog usually follows him while dematerialized, offering advice audible only to Whiskey Stone. When required he usually manifests as a striped mastiff or in his true lion-dog form.
Exigent Seed: The Ligerheart The Ligerheart is the chosen of a renegade Celestial Lion, his patron reduced to a Lion-Dog by the strain of Exalting him. Banded M’zafa, “The Celestial Liger” Known for his unique striped markings, after only a century of duty Banded M’zafa was promoted from a young ...
Crossposted from the VS forum, a small essay that was prompted by a VS Debate prompt but isn't really relevant to the debate itself:
Graphic Novel and Mythic Paratext
I want to talk about what I'm going to call the Two Scales Issue, and before getting to Exalted, I want to talk about Kill Six Billion Demons and Supernatural.
It's gonna make sense, you'll see.
I'm Just Gonna Rant About K6BD For 600 Words Now And No One Can Stop Me
Kill Six Billion Demons is a serialized webcomic written and drawn by Tom Parkinson-Morgan aka "Abbadon." K6BD, as I am going to call it, is primarily composed of two elements: the Graphic Novel (a term I choose to emphasize the visual, aka 'graphic' aspect, and to separate it from the webcomic as a holistic work) and the Mythic Paratext.
The Graphic Novel is the illustrated work which comprises most of the work's ongoing narrative. It's where we see our protagonists, their foes, their struggle, see them talk to each other, and watch them fight in high-octane anime battles. The Mythic Paratext is a series of prose sequences, typically found beneath each comic page, almost all of whom are excerpts from fictious in-setting works. They range from stuff like
"Let there be no Genesis, for beginnings are false and I am a consummate liar."
-Psalms
all the way to complete short stories with beginning, middle, end, and a complete character arc and twist reveal. None of these texts can be trusted on the facts, as you are warned from chapter 1, but they still paint a particular picture of the setting, its tone, and its backstory.
And the Graphic Novel and Mythic Paratext are at odds when it comes to scale.
K6BD the Graphic Novel exists within a certain range of displayed power, a range that is visuallymanageable. Characters exist at various tiers of power in the internal logic of the setting, but generally remain within a range that I would describe as "Big Three Era Shounen." It's conceivable for a fight between two world-shaping badasses to take place within the space of a large arena or building, although when particularly hype it might escalate to roaming over a chunk of countryside causing a bunch of collateral the whole time. Here is a high-end attack by one of the "certified badass but not King of the Universe" tier characters:
Incredibly fucking hype, but that's solidly pre-Saiyan arc kamehameha stuff. Spoiler attacks escalate beyond this display, but rarely do you see any given attack cause damage on a scale beyond that of dropping a real-world nuke, though some characters can drop that level of damage several times in quick succession.
By contrast, here is a fairly typical incident within K6BD the Mythic Paratext:
Article:
On one such occasion, Aesma was thrown out long before she could get at the wine. Her wailing and pounding at the doors of the speaking house drew nearly two score of pilgrim-saints, who were passing on the King's Road. When they approached to inquire about her distress, she engaged them in a ferocious battle that lasted the better part of five hours, as was her custom. The battle was so fierce that it cracked two roaming moons and threw part of one into a primal sea, which boiled away to steam.
"That's better," sighed Aesma, when the dust had settled and the sea had finished boiling. "Hey," said Aesma to the battered and bloodied pilgrims as an idea struck her, "Where can I get some wine about here?"
Later in that story, this character starts pulling stars out of the sky and throwing them at someone, and when that fails, she grabs the entire multiverse and starts lifting it in the air to use as a bludgeon and beat someone to a pulp, though she is convinced to drop that course of action before she can fully go through with it.
There is difference in scale there. And for sure, we can't trust that this account is in-setting true; but things of that scope are generally true of the backstory and mood of the K6BD setting. One character off-handedly mentions that the sun of his world was destroyed during a war, and when another character asks why there are then now two suns on that world, he smiles and simply says "I put them there." Was that a personal act of divine power, or the work of centuries and entire nations of sun-forgers? We don't really know. We do know that there was a Multiversal War in which all of creation went at war against itself, hundreds of thousands of planets, and gods the size of mountains died and people now live in their petrified corpses.
But that doesn't appear on screen. The modern K6BD setting isn't really meant to inspire the vibe that everyone who lives today is a pale, faded shadow of their much cooler ancestors? But there's Mythic stuff they can do in in backstory, off-screen, in dialogue references and in prose paratext, and there is what they're allowed to do in the visual medium of the work, and those two operate on different scales.
Remember When Supernatural Was Good, No Not That Season, No Not That One Either, The One Before, Yeah, That Was Cool
Supernatural, the TV show with the Winchester brothers, has kind of the same issue, though it's a lesser work and so I'll spend much fewer words on it. At a critical juncture, it is made clear that the apocalypse is going to happen and armies of demons and angels will devastate the world with the sheer scale of their fighting. A not-insignificant part of this apocalypse will, specifically, be due to the duel between Lucifer and Michael, whose sheer powers clashing will wreck a chunk of the United States on its own.
However, because Supernatural is a CW show with a budget of "none" and a SFX team of "who?," what we see of Lucifer is that he is a dude with the proportionate strength and speed of a middle-aged guy, who can sometimes snap his fingers and make someone explode (saves money on combat choreography) and can sometimes do like, light shows, some telekinesis, basic stuff. Michael is much the same, and both of these characters are tricked into a magical prison before they can exchange a single blow, because the CW couldn't afford to show even one entire second of the battle they've been hyped up.
Now, that battle still happens - offscreen, in AU settings or "future visions," where we are told that it definitely was as apocalyptic as the story warned us. We just can't see it. The same is true of basically every cosmic antagonist in the show, all of whom allegedly have incredible, world-shaking power, which they're allowed to use as long as we don't have to film them. If they're on screen, they're always only as powerful as required for a farm kid to shank them in the ribs with a magic knife.
Okay, But What Does That Have To Do With Exalted?
Here are excerpts from Games of Divinity, one of the most well-regarded and fundational Exalted books and a major part of its establishing backstory and mythic tone:
Article:
His name is Malfeas, the Demon City, though once he wore another. His heart is a green metal sun. His body has turned inside out to form his eternal prison: a city of black stone and brass, a living metropolis of fluted, flared architecture and mad interwoven design. In his rage and frustration, he has grown new cities of his flesh and sent them slamming against the older cities that surround them — a hundred times, at least, and perhaps a thousand. Now, the city exists in endless layers, with his tarnished heart casting a green glow over the whole.
Often, two layers crush together. They do not rebound. Rather, the outer layer expands, its structure both collapsing and unfolding like a puzzle to form a larger, greater shell. The greatest city of them all, the outermost layer where his insideout body lies raw and open with its visceral rooflines and its black towering bones, has nearly infinite scope. There is room for worlds to pass between its arches and Yozis to wander down its streets. Even Malfeas, the Demon City, can dance in its central square. The demons that fly between that city and the next one inward sometimes become lost in its skies, unable to see anything but green light in any direction. They wither into nothingness thereafter.
Article:
Near the edge of the Demon City, there lies the beginning of the desert Cecelyne. On one side, she rests within Malfeas, bound by the terms of their imprisonment. On the other side, she has no boundary and extends outward forever. One can walk on Cecelyne straight through the Malfean walls, under the blank black desert sky. A traveler with the time to spare could walk from Malfeas to where Creation should begin, and beyond, and keep on walking for the desert goes yet further. Cecelyne stretches to the very edge of infinity, and what she has learned there she does not say.
Article:
Of all the Yozis, She Who Lives in Her Name fought the hardest against her imprisonment. As the flesh of Malfeas closed behind her, she cracked three spheres against his bones, and the flames that rose from them swept across all things. The things they did not burn are now Creation. The things they turned to ash are beyond the memory and ken of the world and the gods. Not even the Yozi know the price Creation paid for her vengeance, before the flames died and the bones of Malfeas sealed her in.
Article:
Somewhere in the Demon City blows the wind Adorjan, and all things she touches die.
Once, she was Adrian, the River of All Torments, who encircled Creation and rained fire, razors and ice upon the army of the gods. The horrors that raged from her surface held even the Exalted back, until the Solar Marus met the demon Lilike that was Adrian's heart and slew him. Then, Adrian lost herself and became Adorjan, the Silent Wind. This took some of her power — but Creation and Malfeas still fear her. Without the secret of the Demon Wracking Shout that Marus heard as Lilike died, the Exalted could not have held Adorjan back from their armies. Demon Princes and immortal behemoths alike bear scars from where they have felt Adorjan's touch.
An endless city of size so vast that planets could pass through its arches. A relativistic desert that stretches to the edge of infinity. A being whose last act of spite changed the very shape of reality such that none may ever know what the universe was like before she struck. A river that encircled the entirety of the world, slain in her own heart, turned into a world-spanning wind held back by a mournful cry.
These are all the foes of the Exalted in the Divine Uprising, and they lost. Each of these beings in incarnations identical or even more momentous, and over a dozen of their peers, were brought low into abject surrender. They reshaped the boundaries of the world and sealed its makers in a dimension that may be infinitely larger than the Creation they were banished from, but will always and forever be infinitely less.
They would go on to face similarly grand threats. The Scorpion Empire was a paracausal nightmare army wielding time and space themselves as weapons, engufling entire chunks of the world within their own time that it disappear from Creation's:
Article:
Even at the height of the First Age's splendor, monstrous forces assailed Creation, threatening to crush the world. Some came from the chaos beyond reality's edge, others from dark and vasty depths under the world, and yet more from places that the Second Age has no name for or language to describe. The warstrider Cathedral of Sublime Annihilation was created to stand against such a threat — the face-snaked legions that marched under the pennant of the Scorpion Empire. The legendary marksman Seres Ebonheart fought against them to protect his sunlit kingdom, but was ultimately forced to retreat, his dominion consigned to the rapacity of time. The defeated Seres did not swear vengeance, for his only anger was with himself. He set about forging the warstrider as punishment and purification, rededicating himself to Creation's defense with every day of toil. The completed Cathedral of Sublime Annihilation marched on the monstrous incursion force like the inevitable judgment of heaven, and drove them from the world in a cataclysmic barrage of sunfire artillery.
Article:
Plaintive Abiona forged [the Waymakers] for her Circlemate Unforgiving Lightning to wield against the Sequence of Irreducibles, a chasseur of the Scorpion Empire. The Sequence had folded and encysted itself deep within Creation's substrate. Its armored scales were distance; its talons, fractal blight. Thus, Abiona forged a weapon that to cut space itself, using the arch of a heavenly gate as a whetstone to hone the Waymakers' edges. Thus armed, Unforgiving Lightning descended into the Cascade, cutting a clear path through the infested space of its dominion to strike at its heart-lemma. He prevailed, though his right hand was forever warped by its predatory geometries.
These are, unquestionably, unimpeachably, the deeds of the Exalted Host, as established within the reality of their setting.
Elsewhere, we see lesser feats, though still of mind-boggling scope. the Hawk Star's Jess is a sling formed after its maker tamed a shooting star, which once killed a mile-tall behemoth with a single shot through the brain. Of the Heaven and Earth Gauntlets, we are told their wielder "shattered the fortress of the Flying Devil Kings, bested a golem of jade and sorcery in a sparring bout, and diverted the course of the living mountain Mostath away from a village with a single blow." Of the legendary aerial mech Ascendent Nova Phoenix, we are told it is dreaming of its past battles - "battling the skyship armada of the Five Directions Navy, setting the skies ablaze with their ruin; dueling the Brass Seraph, forged by the demon prince Ligier to corrupt the champions of Creation; driving the renegade devil-stars back to their lairs in the firmament."
And the thing about all these aspects of mythic backstory is that they exist on a spectrum that stretches increasingly far from what the rules can model by a straightforward reading? But they're still setting truth.
There are no rules for taming a shooting star, but if your ST can't come up with some way of handling it based on the rules we already do have, they're not very imaginative. A wolfstag that's a mile high is beyond the provisions of the Legendary Size Merit, but I'm pretty sure we already have published rules to handle antagonists of such size in official supplements. A several-mile shot to the head, in the right battle context, isn't necessarily going to be Extreme++ range the way it would be in a different battle context... but if your ST is being a hardass about it there are still Charm combinations to ensure a shot from any range. Modelling an army of a thousand mortal soldiers, and defeating that army single-handedly, is relatively easy; "battling the skyship armada of the Five Directions Navy" may be more of a challenge, both to mechanically represent and to succeed at as an Exalted, but you can do it.
Defeating a city-world of alien geometry that is so infinitely greater than Creation that it could pass through its arches?
That's harder. In both regards. If you really want to do it, you're gonna have to delve into some relatively abstract territory, or fall back to the old template where you don't actually 'defeat' the Demon City, but rather you wander through it on an extended quest to find and slay each of its constituent souls as individual foes and Dark Generals, tackling armies and alien geographies and aberration of space-time or gravity until you have reached the Green Sun itself (which is, I should mention, the actual size of a sun), and make it kneel (which you can still do).
But by and large, these deeds aren't really supposed to happen in this day and age. They are the Mythic Paratext; the backstory of the universe, the deeds from long ago. Your characters aren't supposed to be lesser than those who waged this battle, but rather they come into a broken order, a weary and wounded world. There is no Deliberative, no great army of the gods united with one purpose. This does not reflect on you, but on those who have come before you. You live in the Age of Sorrows, which is to say the Graphic Novel; and indeed the deeds of the Exalted as playable characters of the game, in the modern-day setting, can map pretty closely to the battles portrayed in K6BD, complete with giant superbeams, floating cities and running heists in worlds populated entirely by devils. Solomon David's "PERFECT KILL: TOTAL LIFE OBLITERATION" is literally a Charm you can buy in Emereald Gyre of Aeons Style.
Putting a sun in the sky and a multiversal war that litters the substrate of reality with the petrified corpses of the gods and the first angels? That's backstory. That's the Mythic Paratext. That is the Age of Dreams.
But it is something that was done. Unquestionably so. Just like the defeat of all the Ancients and their binding in a prison of their own selves that lies on the edge of infinity beyond the world.
And perhaps one day, your deeds will be the Mythic Paratext of another Graphic Novel.
I've made this argument and heard disagreement or agreement based purely on whether or not I frame it as a positive or negative thing, but my thought is that Exalted 3e is better for not trying to model both the Graphic Novel and the Mythic Paratext at the same time. Exalted 2e attempted to do both, with things like Dreams of the First Age, Broken-Winged Crane, and Glories providing Charm infrastructure that let people model the journey of a wandering wuxia hero to a reality-warping, cosmos-eclipsing demiurgic supergod. I think it's safe to say that its success, if any, was mixed.
And that's fine. TTRPGs are tools we use to create the games we want to play, and good tools have specific uses. If I want to paint the broad strokes of a setting's Mythic Paratext or what-have-you I'll run Godsend, or Mythender, or something. The experience will be all the better for using a tool specifically intended for that purpose.
This is a very good essay, which ties into a number of thoughts I've been turning over in my head the last year or so. Elden Ring is the piece that made me cohere some thoughts together, as it happens. In that game, there's one setpiece boss fight where you are told that a specific weapon is the only way to kill it: the "serpent hunter" is its only weakness, the only thing you can possibly use to stand up to its power.
It is not a fight where you just swing its bane at the monster and win. Using it just means that you... can fight it. It's a From Soft Soulslike; you're expected to die a number of times against any and all bosses except the most trivial. You still need player skills, you still need several other preparations.
But it's the sort of thing where it feels epic. If tales were told in-universe of the event, it would portray the Tarnished as a legend made flesh, probably someone ten feet tall and steely of gaze, who strode through the lava to strike a telling blow.
In actuality, I spent an awful lot of time trying to cheese the fight and otherwise use low-risk strategies and flubbed it a lot. The mythic is built on the prosaic, on a thousand little pieces that built up the grand success. But the grand success still happened.
Exalted 2e attempted to do both, with things like Dreams of the First Age, Broken-Winged Crane, and Glories providing Charm infrastructure that let people model the journey of a wandering wuxia hero to a reality-warping, cosmos-eclipsing demiurgic supergod. I think it's safe to say that its success, if any, was mixed.
This framing does explain why trying to talk to people narrowly into some of the content from those books is basically like talking to someone who is into an entirely different setting, a lot of the time.
Repeating my comment from the vs thread, butI think the tension between the mythic paratext and the actual day to day play of the game is why I like perfect effects so much, at least conceptually. Because they say "whatever the scale of this thing, I can fight it like I would a person. It doesn't get any *weaker* but it is constrained to the limits of the page".
And so a solar can use a charm that lets them wrestle a being no matter the size as if they were of equal size and that means they are as effective at wrestling a trex as they are at wrestling a planet, and neither breaks the game.
Repeating my comment from the vs thread, butI think the tension between the mythic paratext and the actual day to day play of the game is why I like perfect effects so much, at least conceptually. Because they say "whatever the scale of this thing, I can fight it like I would a person. It doesn't get any *weaker* but it is constrained to the limits of the page".
And so a solar can use a charm that lets them wrestle a being no matter the size as if they were of equal size and that means they are as effective at wrestling a trex as they are at wrestling a planet, and neither breaks the game.
The perfect part wasn't the issue, it was how lethal the system was otherwise. Paranoia combat was a combination of factors:
Poison, Crippling, Shaping, Emotion, Unnatural Mental Influence keywords can all trivially destroy any character if they land.
Ambush allows for insane amounts of damage to be dealt while denying use of some Charms (I think, on that last part, it's been awhile).
Raw damage started out really high, Charms would double or triple it.
You had a minimum damage of (Essence) and could easily make lots of attacks per turn.
You had a low maximum of health levels compared to damage output.
Paranoia Combat is the end result of a game where you cannot get defense high enough to survive a dedicated attacker, you cannot become durable enough to weather the damage, ambushes are an easy I Win button, and there's a ton of weird magic effects that are either autowin or ruin your character and make you want to kill them off and play a new one, AND that has a bunch of defensive effects that are perfect.
It's "paranoia" because you literally can't let anything hit you because you're freaked out you'll melt, and once one player does it, everyone has to, because the game is warped around that one guy being invincible and now the GM is going "oh, shit, I guess I need to build enemies accordingly".
Premise: A modicum of optimising that an unwitting player/GM can fall backwards into without realising is sufficient to kill most characters in two or three hits.
Problem: As a result, combat can unpredictably become hyper-lethal at any moment, and there is no resurrection in this game.
Solution: Get a paranoia combo, ensuring character survival by perfectly defending against any potentially lethal attack, i.e. most of them.
New problem: Combat is now dull as dishwater because everybody perfects everything until they run out of motes.
New solution: Publish a new edition.
Perfects were a solution to a broken game, not what broke it. There's a reason the recurring motto of homebrewers throughout 2e's life cycle was, "don't fuck with perfects until you've fixed lethality"; there were a lot of people who thought you could 'fix' the game by nerfing perfects to let combat be lively and interesting again, who got a well-practiced explanation of how that was coming at the problem from the wrong end.
Exigent Seed: The Gourmand The Gourmand is the Exigent of a god of gastronomy, theatrical cooking, food vendors, and fine cuisine. Oa-Allium, Culinary God Jolly, prone to theatrics, and vaguely onion-like, Oa-Allium once was a humble, self-employed food cart owner in Yu-Shan’s night markets, sell...
I've been doing something interesting with Exalted for the last few month, interesting to me, at least. I've run a fair few games, over the years, for 2.5 and Ex3. Some were dumb, but managed to be fun, some were good ideas I executed pretty poorly, some were good ideas I executed fine, but health issues and college were in the way. The main thing super consistently in common, though, was that every single game was about combat. I was running for people who wanted to kung-fu, kung-fu was the natural assumption, so I built the game around bit threats the PCs could kung-fu and occasionally social at. There were some memorable times the combat Solars would manage to resolve stuff by acting as superpowered mediators, but most of the time, it was kung-fu.
If you've ever played Exalted, you know how stressful lots of combat can become. Even combat heavy games usually need to be like, once every three to five sessions, or folks burn out. It's demanding, the system is complicated, it takes awhile, that's fine, it is! But it's still tiring, and when you run for three to five Solars, making the stakes real becomes pretty hard!
One of the most memorable examples of this, for me, was @Omicron's Gloam City Nights. Five Solars enter a city under which a horror lurks and has corrupted the Exalted defenders of a major Realm port. The game was a product of me talking to Omicron in DMs in 2015 and going "You just can't run a Solars game in one city. They're just too big, it isn't possible. They'll break it if they have to hang around, you'll only ever get a story or two before you tap out."
If you know Omi, you can probably guess that he took this as a personal challenge to his abilities as GM and mastery of TTRPG systems. He gathered some players, including me, asked us to each make a Solar who had a reason to come to Gloam, and trapped us there with a timeless horror, his Exalted champions, and Aizendio Brandosuke, who I'm really sad we never got to kung-fu. The game ended near the end of 2016, because 2016, but I learned a lot from it. I learned how to manage combat and story pacing, how to assemble a cast of characters and a local climate and give a locale a genre/tone. I learned how to really manage Exalted combat, how to threaten even a Solar, what it meant for a spirit to have martial arts, for a Dragon-Blooded to have dips in all the IMAs, and what happens when you give an Exalted ninja hemlock.
I also learned what it felt like to have Enough Solar XP, and it was eye-opening. Omi had a few more lessons to teach me, during the Lunars playtest, but it was Gloam that gave me everything I really needed to understand how to run Exalted (and a long-lasting enduring friendship with the group's Eclipse who I don't think is a member of this forum 'cause I can't seem to @ his usual screenname, so I'll just thank Omi for accidentally introducing me to one of my very dearest friends whom my life really would be so inferior if I hadn't met him that fateful game).
I tried to run a few games over a few systems the last years, all failed pretty early, chronic health issues fucking suck, and it was frustrating. September 2022, though, another really good friend I'm happy to have met by fortune's favor, @emeralis00, who heard me and Horngeek pitch a pair of DFRPG characters and went "I can run that", she'd been having troubles in her Exalted group, and made a comment along the lines of "I can't see how Solars could fight their way out of a paper bag, much less the Yozi". This confused me greatly, she explained the circumstances of the game she was in, and I went "well that's just plain not how it's supposed to work". So, I decided to do a solo Solars game, to show her what they can really do.
At which point @Maugan Ra made a genuinely hilarious and bold pitch for including him, along with a very sweet (seriously no pressure tho) adendum, and I ended up going "oh, what the heck" and started the OOC a couple days later.
The game was always gonna take place in the Dreaming Sea, because IMO it's the best part of the setting. I also decided to run it 15 years post-Solars returned, to give the world time to start really catching on fire. From there, though, I used a map editor, put a bunch of markers on it, and let them pick where to go.
To my absolute delight, they picked the far south-eastern border of Creation, where I'd put a little marker: "FairyLand". I absolutely invite them both to tell you all more about their characters, because Incandescent Butterfly and Juran Heartsong, ex-slave Twilight Caste of Ysyr and Eclipse Caste merchant of Nemeria, are just amazing together. But the fae, in particular, I love as antagonists. It's easy to homebrew magic for them, they have a blend of high stats, strong Charms, low mote pools, and being stylish, hot, and completely evil that makes for amazing enemies and evil allies, and they're a big threat to young Exalts/non-combat Exalts and you can get a lot of really cool mileage and use out of them, especially when you can delve into faery courts, oath magic, what it means to have a magical army that feeds on terror, and all that neat stuff, I'm beyond stoked to get to use them as the center of an entire ongoing campaign.
What's neat from a GM perspective, is that Juran Heartsong was almost 100% pure social. Bureaucracy, Socialize, Presence, enough Melee to not die if a goblin got the drop on him. Incandescent Butterfly was pure Craft, meanwhile. "Do Artifact 5 at chargen" level craft. She's Essence 2 now, gonna hit the N/A capacity soon. One arc, she did 12 artifacts inside a season. She's got enough Sorcery to protect herself and rock that budding supervillain vibe hard (when she's not a wallflower everyone overlooks, instead), to dodge and soak and archery with her 5-dot artifact bow, but she's mostly craft.
When they sailed into Mankya Pravance, seat of the Earl of Pravance, a powerful Raksha Cataphract with a Manticore problem, they presented themselves as mighty Solars addressing an ancient and terrible power, with confidence and daring, to get their hands on the gossamer produced by the fae, and get unbelievably rich trading to the rest of the Dreaming Sea. The Earl could have killed them both in about three turns. No contest. So could the Manticore they ended up luring to its death under the guise of friendship. The first arc was beautiful. It was pure social daring against threats they simply could not overpower, mythic scale trickery and resorting to clever artifice and clever words and tricky Oaths, and ensnaring the fae in their own unbreakable bargains, leveraging their way to power.
It was ten sessions before Juran first rolled battle, and murdered a goblin leader in an honor duel. It was four or five sessions after that that they fought a beefed up field god, mutilated by the Raksha, a nightmare scarecrow spirit who still could have killed either of them in a fair fight, for all that it was "only" E2.
The conflicts of the game are almost entirely social. They deal with faery lords with overwhelming stats but critical magical weaknesses, and who, very importantly, remember the Old Solars. Remember the Solars of the Age of Dreams, with yearning and hunger for those halcyon days, when Balor told them tales of taking Creation from its guardian suns. They've dealt with a vicious old Wood King spitting bile about the loss of the Solars in one breath, and planning to betray them with the other. They deal with mistrustful spirits who have long suffered under the Raksha the PCs are sworn to work with, with ancient and mighty elementals rendered horribly ill, with Infernal Exalts and mad Lunars and even faery knights with a glorious destiny, sworn to them as a knight and empowered by dreams of glory.
And this has been so fun, because it means antagonists stick around, because it means they get really rooted into a power structure that had a lot to offer them, but which is fundamentally exploitative. They make moral compromises that seem to imperil their souls, and moral stands that imperil even more, they each have their own grand arcs planned, their epic, world-altering goals they build towards for deeply personal reasons, and it intersects really neatly with their different takes on morality, on what is really important, on the trials they've faced.
A big thing I've been trying to really do is curb the amount of XP that can go to Solar Charms, carefully measuring when they go up in Essence, how much they can get more Solar Charms, but making sure they have a lot of Splat XP. Splat XP, I feel, is a core part of a game feeling good. It lets you buy abilities, attributes, martial arts, workings, Eclipse Charms, spells, all that cool character-enhancing stuff that lets you expand without spiking up and up and up the same way Celestial and especially Solar Charms end up doing, and seems to be more or less having the effect I wanted.
Much more recently, it's become a trio game as @Omicron actually joined in, playing a bird buddy of theirs who really isn't that remarkable in the grand scheme of things, and is probably not a shapeshifter who has claimed the position of the God of Teaching Birds Human Language. He's done some things you'd reasonably expect a bird to be capable of, and knows that which the birds know, and definitely has not recently assumed the rank of Duchess of the Fae, nor is he plotting to make a Sunday school for birds in an effort to fight violent crime on the Dreaming Sea. I do, of course, invite Omicron to tell you more, but, really, there's not a lot to say.
He's just a bird, after all.
anyways i've been gushing about my players and my joy GMing for them for 1800 words now which is the most i've written in forever not for this game so i will call it here, with a final note:
If you run Ex3, use the social system, it's amazing, give plenty of Solar XP, don't charge for Workings or Prophecies that don't enhance a player directly, use the Venture system from Essence for Bureaucracy stuff, and don't run for more than two Solars but mixed games are awesome!
In all seriousness they're a lot more tragic than that description lets on, but their themes do involve predatory theropods and copious amounts of opium and cocaine
I absolutely invite them both to tell you all more about their characters, because Incandescent Butterfly and Juran Heartsong, ex-slave Twilight Caste of Ysyr and Eclipse Caste merchant of Nemeria, are just amazing together.
(...)
Incandescent Butterfly was pure Craft, meanwhile. "Do Artifact 5 at chargen" level craft. She's Essence 2 now, gonna hit the N/A capacity soon. One arc, she did 12 artifacts inside a season. She's got enough Sorcery to protect herself and rock that budding supervillain vibe hard (when she's not a wallflower everyone overlooks, instead), to dodge and soak and archery with her 5-dot artifact bow, but she's mostly craft.
Oh boy, where to start...
Incandescent Butterfly is a mess.
When she first stepped off the boat, she had practically no self-esteem, and was largely terrified of everyone. As a result of deliberate and malicious twisting of her life experiences by her former master, her understanding of how people worked was a simplistic and faulty carrot and stick understanding. She believed people were inherently materialistic, mysterious vending machines that she could input finished goods into and receive stuff like food and more resources to make things out, and that pressing the incorrect buttons resulted in cruelty and pain for alien and impossible to know reasons. She's working on this now, with recent realization that humans have complex wants and needs, and (bafflingly!) motivations which are not based on pure materialism.
She also has an intense streak of perfectionism, such that a masterwork item, the peak of ordinary human craft, is only merely acceptable coming out of her workshop. Not too long after arrival in the Dominion (faeryland), we had a minor housing crisis from those few humans given to us as a result of Juran joining the fae's political games. Butterfly, being the crafter that she is, decided to fix this problem. She built a small city of empty houses, each equipped with running water and warded against pests. This process took three months. We only hit the occupancy cap after nearly a year of refugees from neighboring faerie territories, and an internal war with another fae duchy from which we stole and freed their slaves.
Despite this, she was upset that she didn't manage to fit the self-cleaning magic into the structures in her already busy schedule.
She's been getting better though! Her little cheer squad consisting of an insane lunar mate, an infernal mother figure, and a faerie knight boytoy have been doing wonders for her self esteem, with such lessons as "it's okay to be a monster", "I love when you give that evil sorceress vibe", and "you deserve better, go ahead and murder those people". People have begun to realize that maybe ignoring the shy Twilight standing in the back of the room was a bad idea. Particularly after the murders, the demon summoning, the highly questionable experimentation with fae corpses, and the maniacal laughter.
She's decided that she's gotten too annoyed at everyone ignoring her and her goals, and promptly became a wrecking ball to the plans of everyone in a country that has barely finished reacting to the addition of a socially focused Solar.
I had a concept for an Apocryphal: Plague Rats. The Great Contagion has no god. For all it's power and influence, the prayers of the desperate were never answered or even heard. And yet there exist Chosen who throb and pulse with sickly puissance. Hated and hunted, bearers of a legacy that Should Not Be.
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