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General Exalted Thread

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Walker of the Yellow Path said:
Plus, the 10 day lag is just something that need to be planned around, and it is probably faster than mundane smuggling anyways. You could even use it as a quick way to get stuff to cross Creation, though that requires 20 days of travel from the poor demon, and a pair of sorcerers who know each other on the opposite sides of the world.
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Honestly I'd expect to see this used as an overnight overfortnight delivery service called "First edition Exalted" (aka "FedEx").

Gives a whole new meaning to Mailer Daemon.
 
Has anyone played much with Edge of Morning Sunlight? That's in Melee - E2, pay 1m after any WIthering or Decisive attack hits, deal (Essence) dice of health level damage to target. Only works vs. CoDs without an E3 upgrade Charm, at which point it also works on people you hate.

I've asked some folks about it and gotten an, "Eh, it's good, but not great," reaction, but on paper that looks kind of terrifying - if every single full-accuracy Withering attack is also potentially throwing 3+ damage dice, at basically no cost, that feels like it distorts the combat economy pretty significantly.

Has anyone played with this? Am I overreacting?
 
It beats up on CoDs sure, but unless you plan on developing an Intimacy of hatred for every single opponent you fight (which I think your ST would find very interesting) you won't see it used that often.
 
Salty said:
It beats up on CoDs sure, but unless you plan on developing an Intimacy of hatred for every single opponent you fight (which I think your ST would find very interesting) you won't see it used that often.
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Well, not all of my opponents, to be sure, but my characters typically have negative Intimacies for any noteworthy antagonists, i.e., the people I'm most likely to fight.

On reflection, I think the heart of my fear is that "Withering or Decisive?" seems to be the most fundamental decision in the combat engine. And I'm glad it's there - the system needs to have interesting decisions to make, if it's going to be at all fun. Anything that seems like it might compromise that decision, then, feels... hinky.

Again, this may be an overreaction; I'm running on theorycraft, not play experience, thus far.
 
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Well, first things first.

For the first charm to activate, you have to have at least one success on a damage die already. Which suggests that your opponent isn't exactly a peer anyways, as they shouldn't be letting you hit them. Then you pay the (admittedly trivial) cost and you get to roll 2/3 dice, which will most likely come out as 1 health level of damage. This is basically ping damage, and will require you to beat away at them with a couple attacks or else get rather lucky before it has much of an effect.

Then you get into the meta considerations. Namely, that the charm you're worried about is 6 charms deep in the melee tree. This is already non-trivial, but since we're talking about Essence 3, not really all that relevant. The important one, though, is that you have to have either negative Major or Defining Intimacies for the specific characters you wish to use it on. This is not a trivial requirement.
 
Salty said:
Well, first things first.

For the first charm to activate, you have to have at least one success on a damage die already. Which suggests that your opponent isn't exactly a peer anyways, as they shouldn't be letting you hit them.
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Hm. This is not at all my impression of 3e's system. With a light Artifact Weapon, you can throw up to 17 dice on a Withering attack vs., at best, Defense 7, with stunts and Excellency usage helping both sides evenly. That's something like a 75% chance to hit at base!

Hitting on decisives seems to be much more up-in-the-air, especially since they don't benefit from Accuracy, but my sense of Ex3 is that you are supposed to hit and get hit with a fair degree of regularity. This isn't your experience?
 
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It's definitely a strong charm if you want to whittle down an enemies health pool.
But at most you are rolling 5 dice without double-10s, so that's maybe 2 damage per round. Opponents with more health levels typically also have more -0 health levels, so even against those you won't impose penalties all that quickly.
So the main use seems to be putting pressure on the enemy to finish a fight quickly. Which I like mechanically.

Now the upgrade-charm Sharp Light of Judgment Stance doesn't just allow that against CoDs, but against anyone you hold a Major or Defining negative intimacy against. AFAIK this applies to groups as well.
A major Intimacy should already be a pretty big deal however and establishing Intimacies needs to be justified, so there's some limitation on it.
 
I can just see it now "no no, my character is a brooding punisher type guy, he hates everyone, except his circle, and he doesn't act on that hatred because he has a defining intimacy towards his circle."
 
Ishem said:
I can just see it now "no no, my character is a brooding punisher type guy, he hates everyone, except his circle, and he doesn't act on that hatred because he has a defining intimacy towards his circle."
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Then he's playing the wrong splat. He should go play an abyssal.

So is bash/lethal/Agg no longer a thing?
 
Chloe Sullivan said:
Then he's playing the wrong splat. He should go play an abyssal.

So is bash/lethal/Agg no longer a thing?
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As has been explained already, bashing/lethal/aggravated damage has been brought over essentially unchanged. What may have thrown you is that there's an additional division between initiative damage and health damage. Health damage is caused by decisive attacks, fills in health levels with whatever type of damage is appropriate to the weapon, and is basically the same as damage in 2e.

Initiative damage is part of the brand-new initiative system that's at the heart of the new combat mechanics. Basically, when you make withering attacks you steal a chunk of your opponent's initiative (and get +1 on top of that to make it a positive-sum game). Then you can spend initiative to make the decisive attacks you need to do health damage, and the more initiative you spend, the more health damage you do. Initiative damage is much less significant than health damage, but dishing it out is how you get set up to do real damage. (It's not trivial, though; in addition to keeping you from doing real damage, if your initiative hits 0 you go into Initiative Crash, which is all kinds of bad news.)
 
As the document itself says, combat in 3E is basically lifted wholesale from Dissidia: Final Fantasy.
 
Rather annoyed at myself.

Was wondering why there wasn't an option/ritual to get sorcerous motes from a Familiar, before realizing you could just do it the normal way and use those motes to excellency the gather motes roll.
 
Who says you can't make your own shaping ritual based on a Familiar?The book certainly gives you the option to make your own initiation.
 
Dynamesmouse said:
Who says you can't make your own shaping ritual based on a Familiar?The book certainly gives you the option to make your own initiation.
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Playing a 3e game atm with no real homebrew until arms of the chosen comes out. Already made a brief and silly set of rituals for a 'wild mage' style archtype, (or would that be animal mage, I always get confused). Either way the first allowed for tapping familiars for S-motes, the second granted 1/3 of the familiars initiative as S-motes for the scene and the final one did some other stuff I forgot for not being important.

I was just noting that in canon
 
So, Socialize in 3E can allow you to do a rather nifty and unique thing:
Create entirely new personas for your character.
It starts as a new set of Intimacies, but can also include having entirely new abilities or even charms.

Rule-wise, the whole thing starts with Heart-Eclipsing Shroud which needs Socialize 5, Essence 3 and has 5 prerequisite charms. Each purchase creates an entire new set of Intimacies called a "Persona". Each Persona is activated with a 4+ hours meditation, and your Personas Intimacies and your real ones are treated as entirely separate things.

The next charm, Hundred-Faced Stranger, gives each of your Personas their own set of abilities.
First, you sum up (Socialize) + (One Dawn-caste Ability) + (Integrity OR Presence) + (Bureaucracy OR Linguistics) + (Ride OR Sail). Your Personas start with that many Ability dots.
Half of those must go into Eclipse- or Zenith-Abilities (So Athletics, Integrity, Performance, Lore, Presence, Resistance, War, Survival, Bureaucracy, Larceny, Linguistics, Occult, Ride, Sail, Socialize).
Personas can purchase Craft, Occult, Lore or Dawn-Abilities, but they may not be higher than your natural ones.
Personas also gain 10 new favored abilities and 3 specialities.

In addition to that, your Personas have half as much experience as you, which may be spent on abilities or specialities for the persona.
And while in a Persona, you can activate any charms you still fulfill the prerequisites for.

The next charm after that allows you to spend Persona-Experience on charms for that Persona.
Further charms upgrade your Persona-Experience to 3/4ths of your actual XP or borrow abilities and charms from your Personas.



Now let's make a character who utilizes that. How about a wandering salesman who can slip into some more appropriate identities in new places?

First we need the relevant charms of course. That spends 7 charms out of our 15 at character creation.
Then we maximize the points our Persona gets. Let's pick Bureaucracy 5, Integrity 5, Ride 5, Brawl 5 and of course Socialize 5. That gives us 25 dots to spend.

The first Persona we create is simply much more outgoing and talkative than we are. Let's call it our "Bard Persona".
Out of those 25 dots, we spend 5 on Brawl to make sure we can still fight properly. We also have Resistance 1 so that Ox-Body technique is still active, and Integrity 3 and Socialize 2. With the remaining points we get Presence 5, Performance 5 and Linguistics 4.
Now whenever we know we want to impress people, we can do so after 4 hours of meditation.


Now let's see how that character may progress.
The first logical purchase would be Legend Mask Methodology, and Draw the Curtain soon thereafter. That's 16 XP spent - so with Draw the Curtain, our persona now has 12 XP to spend and can buy charms.

At Essence 2 (and thus 50 XP) we can create another Persona.
Again Brawl 5, Resistance 1. But this time we make a Thief: Larceny 5, Athletics 5, Stealth 5, Investigation 3, Awareness 1.
Both of our Personas also have 37 XP to spend - enough for 4 charms and something to spare.

At Essence 3, another Persona can be created. We could make a Sailor:
Brawl 5, Resistance 5, Sail 5, Survival 5, Athletics 3, Awareness 2.
Or a Doctor:
Brawl 5, Resistance 1, Medicine 5, Investigation 5, Lore 5, Occult 4. For this, the main character would need Lore 5, Occult 4 - but we could purchase charms with Persona-XP.
And of course there are at least 75 XP to spend on each Persona, which could be 9 charms.

Meanwhile, the characters main experience is well-spent on Brawl-charms which are active across all Personas. If we give the Persona's higher Resistance, the same goes for Resistance-charms.
Socialize-charms are easily shared with the Bard, while buying Awareness-charms would benefit the Thief.
And of course any Solar-XP should be spent on increasing Attributes or Willpower since that benefits all Personas. Or Evocations or Eclipse-charms, since those are automatically shared across all Personas as well.
 
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Chloe Sullivan said:
Then he's playing the wrong splat. He should go play an abyssal.

So is bash/lethal/Agg no longer a thing?
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It's still a thing, though it should be noted that there's only one type of soak that's equally effective against all damage types, and stamina adds to your soak directly on a 1:1 basis. The only thing the different damage types do is affect healing times.
 
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The Whisperers


Like a rotting carcass heaves and festers from the unseen motion of worms, the dead and dying gods roil in their agony, their dreams bubbling to the surface of their great tomb-corpses in a mockery of breath. There they ooze, pearls of divine nightmares that congeal into shape, and crawl down the vast expanses of these Labyrinthine mausoleums to wreak havoc in the Nameless Realm.

The Whisperers are small creatures, no taller than a child of twelve; human-like in the shape of their hands and feet, dog-like in that of their elongated faces and tail, lizard-like in the scaly texture of their skin, they are albino and blind, though their senses of smell, taste and hearing are incredibly acute. They speak a unique dialect bearing no relation to human tongues, full of hissing, rattling and murmurring. They dwell in the darkest recesses of the Underworld, where they are seen as annoying pests or marauding bandits; and in the corridors of the Labyrinth, where they are seen as a primitive but dangerous people that cannot be left unchecked. The Whisperers are drawn to the sounds of metal and the smell of man-made tools; though they have no industry of their own, they steal all crafted objects they can from human ghosts, cladding themselves in a motley of armor pieces of different cultures and time periods, wearing any forged weapon they can find, and decorating their attire with ornaments they do not understand.

Most bands of Whisperers number no more than two dozen individuals; they are federated by happenstance, a desire for survival, and brutal violence - led either by the biggest, strongest of the bunch, or by the most cunning who slit the throats of his rivals. In such groups they creep along the shores of the rivers of oblivion, attacking Underworld settlement for more weapons, ornaments and pieces of attire. Though they are usually repelled, it is never without the loss of some item to one thief or another; and though most bands are short-lived, a Whisperer who survives long enough to gather a panoply that pleases his vanity creeps back to the confluence of rivers, and to the black tunnels beneath the Underworld itself to join his brethrens. There, he is granted a name for the first time, and a place in the byzantine, ever-shifting hierarchy of their cults - how good a place depending on the panoply he has managed to collect.

There in the shadow, these blind creatures gather and pronounce solemn oaths and hissing sermons; in the narrowest, most secluded caves and hallways of the Labyrinth, always evading the pursuit of hateful mortwights, gathers the Cult of Whispers. Each one of the dwarfish creatures that belongs to it was born of a boiling nightmare from the fitful slumber of the great corpse-god they revere; all are agitated by chaotic visions, and an all-consuming desire to answer - what? Broken fragments of questions whose answers have long ago lost any meaning; pieces of sentence, memories of dead races, shards of a name that once called thunder and shaped the land. In their gatherings, the blind creatures croak these pieces of wisdom, they seek answer, and those among them that have survived the longest, whose panoply has the most delightful metallic sound, the most ravishing smell of blood and sweat, take place on pedestals to preach to their people their aberrant gospel, a grotesque religion made of the cobbled fragments of knowledge they each possess.

These cults are not united; the Whisperers form nations of their own, ramshackle troglodytic cities carved into the shifting walls of the Labyrinth. They go to war against one another and against the cities of the nephwrack priest-kings alike, favoring skirmishes, thieving raids, quick retreats in the dark tunnels they come home; they die in droves in any case, but this does not matter to them, for theirs is a vision of life twisted and terrifying. To most outsiders who only interact with their skirmishers and roaming youths, the Whisperers appear cowardly and meek, but this is a false conclusion brought by their preference for cunning, underhanded victories. The Whisperers believe that their true self is the shard of nightmare at the core of their being, around which their corpus is but a fragile shell, easily discarded. Should they die, they will dissolve back into the nightmares of the one they call the Great Temple; and in time they will bubble back to the surface and take form again. Thus, they believe, they are the most immortal of all of the Underworld's beings, for they are as eternal as the Great Temple itself.


Whisperer Raider

This individual has not yet earned a name from its prowess on the "surface" - the Underworld proper - and thus is referred to as "spearman," from his weapon of choice. He is wearing a cuirass of rusted iron stolen from the tent of a war ghost on the march, a skirt of black-and-white feathers plucked from the body of a valkure his entire band worked together to bring down, and an obsidian-tipped spear; though its point is enchanted and never breaks, the spearman dislikes it for not being made of good metal, and sometimes shouts curses and insults at it in the night. His band numbers twelve warriors such as him, raiding settlements in the Eastern Underworld; two months ago they took a ghost-child in a raid for amusement, and made her their mascot; they are now known as the Wailers to the villages they harass, for their coming is heralded by the cries of the babe. Since it will never grow up, they will likely eat her when her crying gets tiresome; the spearman looks at the child, and thinks that he would rather not eat her, and has fantasies of striking out on his own with the babe strapped to his back.


Essence: 1; Willpower: 3; Join Battle: 5 dice
Health Levels: -0/-1x2/-2x2/-4/Incap.
Actions: Sneaking: 5 dice; Feats of Strength: 4 dice (may attempt Strength 2 feats); Senses: 5 dice (see Senses); Tracking: 6 dice (see Senses)
Appearance 2 (Hideous), Resolve 2, Guile 2
Combat
Attack (Spear): 10 dice (Damage 11)
Attack (Bite): 7 dice (Damage 9), carries disease (see Merits).
Combat Movement: 5 dice
Evasion 4, Parry 3
Soak/Hardness: 6/0

Merits

Senses: Whisperers ignore most penalties from blindness, compensating with smell, taste and hearing; they can operate perfectly in the dark. Furthermore, they add two bonus successes to all Perception-based rolls to notice or follow strong scents; they often carry animal skins filled with putrid oils in order to "tag" their targets for easy tracking.

Diseased Bite: Whisperers consume horrible fruits and roots that grow in their lightless cities as treats, leaving their maws festering with liquid sickness; their bite can infect ghosts as it would humans, and humans must roll at Virulence 4 to avoid infection.

Dark-Dwellers: The corpus of a Whisperer is a thin shell of reality, not fully cohesive; under the light of the sun or moon, they suffer one point of aggravated damage per round until dissolution. As such, the rare times they appear in Creation, they remain confined to the darkest tunnels of the underground.

Whisperer Priest

N'dchuck lords over a parish of a thousand of her kind with hissing sermons whose words enthrall her listener; rumors among her flock have it that she has lived in this incarnation for more than ten years, a rarity for her race. Crippled in one leg, she limps along, supporting herself on a staff of wrought iron; she is most often seen hunched over under the weight of her apparel, feathered tassels and silver necklaces rippling around her gaunt figure, with only the barest glimpse of the bronze armor beneath. She wears a pendant in which a single eyeball has been set in a Labyrinthine iron socket; through it, she sees like mortals do. Legend has it that she wrestled the secrets of necromancy from her great nemesis, the Magistrate of Ashen Rivers; with it she wrought a great, hidden temple beneath the rivers, where her people worship her like a goddess. The sole purpose of her existence as she sees it is to conquer the two weaker parishes above hers, and to unite their strength to conquer the Magistrate's great canal-city that sits on the shores of oblivion. To this purpose, she will make her ragtag bands of raiders into a true army.

Essence: 3; Willpower: 6; Join Battle: 6 dice
Personal motes: 30
Health Levels: -0/-1x2/-2x2/-4/Incap.
Actions: Command: 7 dice; Mad sermons: 7 dice; Feats of Strength: 4 dice (may attempt Strength 2 feats); Senses: 8 dice (see Senses); Tracking: 8 dice (see Scent)
Appearance 4 (Hideous, except to other Whisperers), Resolve 4, Guile 3
Combat
Attack (Bronze Sword): 8 dice (Damage 11)
Attack (Iron Staff): 7 dice (Damage 13)
Attack (Bite): 6 dice (Damage 9), carries disease (see Merits).
Combat Movement: 3 dice
Evasion 1, Parry 4
Soak/Hardness: 8/0

Merits

Cult 2: An underground city of a thousand Whisperers gather in their fanatical praise of N'dchuk, the Sighted Mother, the Wrestler of Sorcery.

Senses: Thanks to her eye-pendant, N'dchuk is not actually blind; while she still does not suffer from darkness penalties, she also adds one success to all sensory rolls when in light. Furthermore, she adds two bonus successes to all Perception-based rolls to notice or follow strong scents.

Diseased Bite: Whisperers consume horrible fruits and roots that grow in their lightless cities as treats, leaving their maws festering with liquid sickness; their bite can infect ghosts as it would humans, and humans must roll at Virulence 4 to avoid infection.

Dark-Dwellers: The corpus of a Whisperer is a thin shell of reality, not fully cohesive; under the light of the sun or moon, they suffer one point of aggravated damage per round until dissolution. As such, the rare times they appear in Creation, they remain confined to the darkest tunnels of the underground.

The Eye: Rarely, the sorcerer-priestess will bequeath her necklace to a faithful and capable servant for a time; this allows her to see through the eye, and communicate mentally with the wearer, though she cannot compel them in any way. Once per year, she may spend one Willpower to summon the pendant back to her if it seems like it is about to be lost.

Offensive Charms

Spiteful Curse (10m, 1wp; Simple; Instant; Essence 2): Designating a victim with the tip of her staff, N'dchuk hisses a pronouncement of doom in a tongue forgotten by all but her people; she rolls 10 dice against that individual's Resolve. On a success, the next attack intended to kill them will gain two successes on its attack roll.

Staff of Decay (5m, Supplemental, Scene-long, Decisive-only, Essence 2): Channeling necrotic Essence through her iron staff, N'dchuk gathers a bubble of green-black energy at its tip, which is released if she hits her target, inflicting to the body part it touches the full corrosion of ages, skin wrinkling and drying and rotting until it turns to dust. N'dchuk's player must choose which part is targetted upon declaring the attack; if it inflicts damage, all actions using this body part suffer a -3 penalty for the rest of the scene, then a -1 penalty until all damage from the attack is fully healed. This Charm may only be used once per scene, but is reset by dipping her staff in the blood of a fallen opponent, a miscellaneous action.

Torrent from the Black River (1wp, Simple): This is a necromancy spell. Gathering the sorcerous motes to use it takes N'dchuk three turns; once per scene, using her spell through a stunt allows her to reduce this duration to two turns; once per scene, making a sacrifice of a living creature or a sentient ghost as a miscellaneous action that cannot be flurried furthermore reduces this duration by one turn. Flowing darkness raises around N'dchuk, surrounds her, then rushes to engulf her enemies, dissolving flesh and soul through the terrible power of oblivion. This is an undodgeable decisive attack applied in a line against enemies out to medium range, wide enough to strike all opponents within one range band of its center. It has an attack roll of 12 dice, a raw damage of (3 + extra successes) or (7 + extra successes) against battle groups; battle groups also suffer a -2 penalty to Defense against this attack. It does not reduce N'dchuk to base initiative. Most "soft" organic equipment, such as furs, clothes and leather armor, are destroyed by this spell.
 
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