3e or Essence?
General Exalted Thread
MiracleGrow
Miracles for only $19.99 [They/Them]
- Location
- DOOR STUCK DOOR STUCK PLEASE I BEG U
3e, for the most part. I used a lot of the ST guide stuff for craft and sail reworks.
When it comes to lore stuff, predominately 3e. But I do pluck fun stuff out of 2e if people are interested in something particular or its fun. Like I got the occasional but rare Mantis Class Transport out and about cause I think their fucking sick. But! I would discuss this during session 0 so the group adjust that bar to what they want.
Big thing I like to do is to lay out the polity the group is directly interested in. Then have everyone contribute their own factors, ideas, factions, etc. To fill out the area a bit more.
I'm leaning HARD towards western direction cause the sea calls out to me.
Alectai
Speaks Words of Wisdom... On occasion
Any Exalt Types? I'm a big fan of Alchemicals now that they have Third Edition rules for them.
- Location
- my house
I volunteer as tribute!
My unwillingness and inability to participate in Voiced games cucks me again, alas.
MiracleGrow
Miracles for only $19.99 [They/Them]
- Location
- DOOR STUCK DOOR STUCK PLEASE I BEG U
I tend to run celestial games. Solars, Abyssals, Lunars, Exigents. But for this game I'm not quite feeling Sidereals. DB's I'm willing to have as well, but I tend to have them start at a higher essence and give them some extra merits to play around with. I don't know Alchemicals well enough honestly, so I can't give a hard answer on them just yet.
I wasn't sure about running mixed games before. But I been running a group of two solars, a lunar, and a abyssal. And the byplay between them has been fucking incredible.
To make a note, I may not be able to start for a month or two. I'm waiting for a pathfinder game to finish up.
Alectai
Speaks Words of Wisdom... On occasion
Gotcha, good to know! I'll get to planning things out then in the meantime, keep me posted!
Imrix
Periodically Malevolent QM
... They're originally meant for the East, but if you're looking for ideas I could shill Ulsath to you with an eye towards refitting them for Western play.
I'll pass, then. Hope everybody has fun!
MiracleGrow
Miracles for only $19.99 [They/Them]
- Location
- DOOR STUCK DOOR STUCK PLEASE I BEG U
Something I been thinking about a lot. The Realm is pretty awful in it's colonialism.
But I do wonder how the Realm would handle underwater beastmen towns. Like you can't march armies on them and your not gonna be having your water DB's act as a colonial police force. All the ideas that come to me on how they would subdue them in the first place lean towards doing some awful shit.
I'm honestly curious what y'all's thoughts are on this.
But I do wonder how the Realm would handle underwater beastmen towns. Like you can't march armies on them and your not gonna be having your water DB's act as a colonial police force. All the ideas that come to me on how they would subdue them in the first place lean towards doing some awful shit.
I'm honestly curious what y'all's thoughts are on this.
Alectai
Speaks Words of Wisdom... On occasion
Poorly, I imagine, mostly by pretending they don't exist as long as they don't attack. The logistics just aren't great.
The_Reptile_
Jolly Good
- Location
- THE PITS OF HELL. Also known as Connecticut.
As much as the Realm is meant to be the main representative of the Imperialistic, Colonizing Empire that is just generally awful and unpleasant, it's not all encompassing and ever reaching and it does have limitis, and primarily underwater civilizations and what not are a pretty big one. The Realm's not the Imperium where the entire modus operandi is You Will Be Brought In Or You Will Be Eradicated, for as much as their expansion is religiously motivated if something just generally is not worth it they'll leave well enough alone.
- Location
- an unseen void
- Pronouns
- Any
It's a slight logistical twist on dealing with a hill or steppe tribe. Not every part (or neighbor) of a colonial system needs to be conquest. You find princelings to pay off. You punch the most aggro warband while making a point of tolerating the ones who work with you. You build a relationship around bribery, deterrence, and bargaining that means sometimes you can turn them on your enemies and you can trade with them and then if they try to raid you anyway, you have better intelligence on their whole deal.
Ancient touchstones for the Realm from China to Persia to Rome did this stuff all the time. Uncompromising absolutism fares poorly against this kind of periphery group and they can be nettlesome, sometimes deeply, but they're usually manageable except when they are at their most aggressive and united and you are not ready for them because you have eighty other problems all the time.
Ancient touchstones for the Realm from China to Persia to Rome did this stuff all the time. Uncompromising absolutism fares poorly against this kind of periphery group and they can be nettlesome, sometimes deeply, but they're usually manageable except when they are at their most aggressive and united and you are not ready for them because you have eighty other problems all the time.
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- Location
- Many Places
I think that if they needed to take a place directly they'd probably import some aquatic beastmen auxiliaries from a statrapy to act as an occupying force. Or they if didn't need a hold a place just call up some demons for a water aspect to lead around causing havoc until they stoped being problems.
Edit: I overlooked the the indirect methods some others are mentioning but I would fully endorse them and expect them to be used.
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- Pronouns
- Reader
I'd do some manipulation to softening them up first by pitting them against themselves. Find the oppressed minority, provide them the wealth and artifact weaponry to rise up and be opposed by the established elites, lean on the erupting tensions.
Follow up with a good old fashion curse on their crop equivalents and artificially driving away nearby schools of fish. Pick a pliable patsy and have him introduce my coconspirator as saviors arriving with food.
Employ water aspects directing summoned demons or bound spirits to exert control and some kind of tube system to maintain communications. Employ empress like tactics to keep the beastmen fighting among themselves over the choicest resources from which to trade us for common goods which seem luxurious do to being from lands they've never seen or heard of.
- Location
- some computer lab
On the one hand a few lost eggs with mutations would be ideal, both keeping the underwater satrapy in line and keeping the mutant DBs out of sight, on the other hand underwater beastman community looks a lot like a place Leviathan might be hiding, so it's possible that their approach is to send a Sworn Kinship to render the place uninhabitable with that massive AoE elemental attack DB Lore gets.
come to think of it the dynamics between the realm navy, Leviathan, and the Silver Prince would be pretty interesting.
come to think of it the dynamics between the realm navy, Leviathan, and the Silver Prince would be pretty interesting.
MiracleGrow
Miracles for only $19.99 [They/Them]
- Location
- DOOR STUCK DOOR STUCK PLEASE I BEG U
Honestly pretty great points all around. I was leaning towards lots of bribery and elevating a local group to do a coup as the go to approach for that situation.
- Location
- Ottawa
Living underwater is gonna limit the stuff you can make pretty drastically. It's largely impossible for normal merchants to visit you, and you're quite literally a fish out of water if you go anywhere else. So your trade situation is probably pretty bad as well.
I bet a Water Aspect merchant could just buy the things that the Realm would normally seize by force. And for pennies on the dollar. All very friendly and mutually-beneficial, up until people start trying to horn in on the Realm's monopoly and need to die for it.
I bet a Water Aspect merchant could just buy the things that the Realm would normally seize by force. And for pennies on the dollar. All very friendly and mutually-beneficial, up until people start trying to horn in on the Realm's monopoly and need to die for it.
- Location
- Washington, USA
What, normal merchants don't have ships? Any aquatic-beastfolk settlement in the ocean can become a blue-water port just by tying something buoyant to a long piece of rope, and most could pay for imports by doing below-the-waterline maintenance or repairs (barnacle removal, etc.) which would otherwise require slow, costly drydock visits.
TenfoldShields
Lounging on a Hoard of Words
- Pronouns
- He/Him
I do really love one of the first lines in The Traitor Baru Cormorant for how it kinda captures that exact exchange in motion.
Article: TRADE season came around again. Baru was still too young to smell the empire wind.
The Masquerade sent its favorite soldiers to conquer Taranoke: sailcloth, dyes, glazed ceramic, sealskin and oils, paper currency printed in their Falcrest tongue. Little Baru, playing castles in the hot black sand, liked to watch their traders come in to har-bor. She learned to count by tallying the ships and the seabirds that circled them.
Nearly two decades later, watching fire-bearer frigates heel in the aurora light, she would remember those sails on the horizon. But at age seven, the girl Baru Cormorant gave them no weight. She cared mostly for arithmetic and birds and her parents, who could show her the stars.
But it was her parents who taught her to be afraid.
If you have a market, Realm has things you want. If you're in crisis the Realm has things you need (weapons, equipment, there's at least one or two satrapies that cut deals for Realm physicians and Realm medicines). It's just…yknow. You gotta open the door a little. Hear them out about other stuff. Give them a little taste in turn. And that can be the kind of thing that's really hard to walk back later.
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- Location
- Ottawa
I don't think you can reasonably expect people to find a single buoyant object somewhere in the open ocean. Setting up that kind of intermediate meeting point strikes me as a real challenge.
Nautical carpentry is a good idea for making money, though.
- Location
- an unseen void
- Pronouns
- Any
I do think there's one thing Baru Cormorant is really bad at, which is important here to discussion of the Realm, and so I am shamelessly going to steal the words of Arkady Martine on the subject.
I don't have a handy excerpt from A Memory Called Empire as easily at hand to show how responding to this clearly informed her ambitions in that book, but it's Teixcalaan that provides an illustration here that the Masquerade largely misses, and which is especially relevant to a far less modern empire.
What power does the Realm have over a neighbor it's hard to conquer? Poetry. Tapestry. Seven centuries of uninterrupted, flourishing literary canon. What is the most dangerous thing for a water aspect to bring to a seafolk village? Their singing voice. This is what makes the "barbarian" chieftains hunger for you - not just your gold but the shapes it is crafted into and the signals it sends about their proximity to your beauty, their fluency in your high culture. Even those who resent and resist it are charmed by inches and degrees because it is hard to hate art.
Article: But here's my real criticism of this book: I don't buy the seduction of the Masquerade. And I think if this book fails, it's there: in that its empire is too easily read as undesirable. As profane, unethical, fundamentally wrong. It is really overtly evil. It punishes sexual "deviants" with mutilation and death. It murders children callously. It inflicts plague and withholds vaccines. It lobotomizes its own emperors for the sake of convincing its populace that the emperor is just. Most of all, the Masquerade is a eugenicist empire: it is explicitly founded on not purity of bloodline but on purification of bloodline, on making people useful to it. It makes people: it breeds them carefully, it indoctrinates them through schools, it uses drugs and operant conditioning to transform their minds and make them into automata tools. It commits every atrocity that a modern Western reader recognizes as abhorrent. This is a problem. It is a problem because we are asked, as readers, to believe that there are reasons besides blackmail that a person would willingly become an agent of the Masquerade. We are asked to imagine that the Masquerade is a beautiful machine.
Dickinson tries, I will absolutely give him that credit: he knows he has to convince us. He tells us through Baru's own noticing that the Masquerade gives literacy and prosperity and those selfsame vaccines and that when a person or place has been subsumed, it's probably not all that bad to be a part of the Masquerade – and then he undoes it all again, by showing us that in-Masquerade people are engaged in a constant level of horrific policing of their neighbors for social sins. I cannot imagine being happy in this society. It is too awful. What it asks of the people within it is not sustainable as a society; it's also too brutal and un-orthos for me to respond to it as something which is an entrapment and a promise.
The Masquerade isn't civilized. It's civilization, but I don't recognize it as civilized, and this is a problem with a constructed empire.
I don't have a handy excerpt from A Memory Called Empire as easily at hand to show how responding to this clearly informed her ambitions in that book, but it's Teixcalaan that provides an illustration here that the Masquerade largely misses, and which is especially relevant to a far less modern empire.
What power does the Realm have over a neighbor it's hard to conquer? Poetry. Tapestry. Seven centuries of uninterrupted, flourishing literary canon. What is the most dangerous thing for a water aspect to bring to a seafolk village? Their singing voice. This is what makes the "barbarian" chieftains hunger for you - not just your gold but the shapes it is crafted into and the signals it sends about their proximity to your beauty, their fluency in your high culture. Even those who resent and resist it are charmed by inches and degrees because it is hard to hate art.
Queshire
Wants a pink flamingo for their lawn.
- Pronouns
- They/Them
Well, no, not just stumble upon it, but the underwater society could spread word amongst the nearby ports that there's a trading spire at X latitude, Y longitude (or whatever they use for coordinates in Creation. Maybe triangulating positions using the elemental poles?)
TenfoldShields
Lounging on a Hoard of Words
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Oh yeah I agree, for as much as the Imperial Republic's navy and Province-Admiral Ormsment have wormed their way into my brain as key inspirations for the Water Fleet and Rightly Guided Admiralty Board (I genuinely adore House Peleps), I think that's a very salient criticism of the Masquerade books. And something I particularly appreciate about A Memory Called Empire and A Desolation Called Peace, where Teixcalaan is as beautiful as it is terrible (terrible in that classical sense I mean). So nationally narcissistic that its words for The World, Civilization, and The Empire are all basically the same (which is a trick I love to imagine that the courtly language of The Realm also pulls) but so intoxicating in its splendor that it's a fight not to be pulled into that gravity well of ego.
And I think the point too is well made that the Realm as a culture prizes both artistic endeavor and literacy, and they're constantly exporting things like- great sagas, theater, and the kinds of crafts you can just get really good at when you have the inclination and resources to nurture that tendency. And there's every reason for even, or especially, people at the imperial periphery to crave those things.
As a side note, there's some stuff in The Realm that I think is relevant for what kind of stuff is typically going down under the waves @MiracleGrow (and there's more in AT8D for sure, but this is just off the top of my head cause I remember the eely bois in particular):
Article: OFFSHORE
Far from the Realm and the Western archipela- go, Wu-Jian is mostly untroubled by neighboring states above the waves. Beneath is another matter.
The Spirit Court of Drowned Promises consists of old allies of Luna, and they've failed to impress the Immaculate Order. Starved of prayers, the spirits have turned against each other — rumors swirl that Kindly Hetrokonta devoured one of her grandchildren — and their discord is spilling over to worshippers in Shades.
The Gazrhan People are a seafloor civilization of eelfolk. In times of prosperity, they conduct trade with Wu-Jian; in times of want, they raid merchant vessels sailing to and from its ports. They worship an ancient crystal idol that sank beneath the waves an age ago, which speaks to Gazrhan priests during certain convergences of the stars.
Aquatic fae dwell in the Azure Dunes of the Deep, ill-pleased at the Realm driving them from Wu-Jian. The court's raksha prince, Dreaming Coral, works to bring the Ocean's Endless Slum- ber school under her sway, teaching martial prow- ess in exchange for access to dreams and minds. Dreaming Coral plans to unleash the school on a murderous rampage during Calibration, so the Azure Dunes of the Deep may feast on the victims' souls.
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