Remove ads

General Exalted Thread

Reader mode
*nods* I was also talking in a 'sometimes, you simply live without the world-changing events happening' sense. That vacation arc, for example (although even that, in the Kerisgame, had learning sorcery as part of it). If that makes sense?
 
EarthScorpion said:
[1] A Creation where the rulers and the dominant elite were part of a mass-society rather than a few individuals? Revolutionary and radical, promoting diversity which had never been seen before. New schools of philosophy, art and music, created as a response and rejection of Solar hegemony and later created simply out of massive human diversity.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Yeah I gotta chime in here, because the Shogunate doesn't get enough attention.

Metatextually, the First Age was a huge allusion to our modern lifestyle. You had celebrities, consumerism, the internet, and a whole bunch of other things. Six impossible things before breakfast and so on.

But I want to touch on that 'Celebrity' bit, and Solar Hegemony. Even setting aside that the Solars did have a turnaround in dying, Exalting someone new, and repeating this process, I need to really drive home the fact that some Solars were literally fixtures across multiple generations of people who were born, lived and died under their rule.

Much how celebrities and famous people set trends, the First Age Solars did much the same, constantly, often without thinking. They defined what was and wasn't cool, what was and was not moral. If a Solar wore a certain style of clothing, then whole cultures emulated her without much prompting.

This of course applies to the darker, terrible things Solars got up to. I don't want to give the impression that the First Age Solars were down to the last, horribly depraved, but depravity absolutely did happen, and they legitimized more of it than anyone ever expected, intended, or even noticed.

Then the Usurpation, and the Shogunate. Suddenly, the worldwide media culture of the First Age collapsed. Infighting, isolated populations (by borders of loyalty, mostly), and so on created what ES was getting at- that the Shogunate was a new and unheard of model of existence.

First Age = Seemingly Permanent Exalted Fixtures
Shogunate = Dragonblooded as a culture that sat on top of the rest of the mortal culture.
 
@Aleph If there's one thing I can say about Earth Scorpion is that, while I don't like his love of horror, he's very good indeed at telling tales.

And frankly, while Exalted certainly can do 'high power, high impact, save the world' games very well, I personally think that the lower key things tend to better demonstrate that you are playing characters set in a time and place where mythology is still being formed. And that's far more awesome.
 
horngeek said:
*nods* I was also talking in a 'sometimes, you simply live without the world-changing events happening' sense. That vacation arc, for example (although even that, in the Kerisgame, had learning sorcery as part of it). If that makes sense?
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Oh. See, I don't find that all unusual. All the Exalted games I've ever been in have routinely had downtimes of a month or more in-game. The Dragonblooded game was seasonal - we'd usually have a few sessions over the course of a season. The Alchemicals game I ran often had the party splitting up and doing their own tasks, only doing things together when their city required all their Alchemicals to work on a project. And so on.
 
This is, of course, not to say that Keris doesn't have big things happening. She's met Adorjan once, and run with her, and birthed a new soul from it. She'll probably meet her again (and possibly take another 3 Agg in the process, and certainly spend another week bedridden with fever and delirium). Metagaos spoke to her through Lilunu, tempting her to sample his Charmset - and as the first Infernal ever to do so, the All-Hunger Blossom is taking a personal interest in her career. Even her "that sounds like it would be cool to watch" reaction to what Dulmea said about Kimbery flooding open-pit mines in Malfeas, if she decides that she's bored waiting for the Sea to do it herself and "arranges" for it to happen, is likely to qualify as a big enough sacrifice [1] to get the attention of an Unquestionable, or perhaps even the Great Mother herself [2].

But the lovely thing about the low-key base level of the game is that when crazy shit like that happens, it's exceptional. And dear god, it feels like it. @EarthScorpion is very effective at communicating how terrifyingly powerful and vast a Primordial is, even when speaking through a mouthpiece like Lilunu - if you think Shashalme was scary, you ain't seen nothin' yet.

[1] Res 4-5 from the contents of the mine itself, plus several hundred Essence 2-3 demons, all claimed by the waters of the Demon Sea.
[2] Keris: "... I did not think this through. Um. Hello?"
*later*
Sasi: "Keris, dear. I am sure there is an excellent reason why you are covered in unmelting ice-brine, half-delirious and in the beginnings of a fever akin to that which comes from the exposure to the All-Makers. And once you have recovered, we will be discussing it. At length. Now get into bed and rest before you fall over."
Keris: "I know Demon Sea Shintai! Wheeee!" *collapses*
 
Last edited:
Aleph said:
Kerisgame part six! In which Keris decides not to attack the street-length rock-centipede, creates life (again) and discovers once more that Echo is utterly adorable.

Edit: You know, despite following the "Exaltations are weapons; Exalts were made as murder-machines designed to kill Primordials" view pretty heavily, Kerisgame is usually (ironically) fairly low-key and "mundane", insofar as that word can be applied to a girl who can hear the sound of machinery through twenty yards of solid concrete at the bottom of an 800-metre deep lake that used to be a mineshaft, and who is so lethal in combat that ES doesn't even bother asking me to roll to slaughter a group of mortal soldiers unless I'm trying to do it in total silence or without any of them noticing or something.

But the subtle things are still there that speak of really cool shit happening in the backstory. Case in point...

A layer of death and rot from the Great Contagion still lingering in the geological record, just below a second layer from when the Pole of Wood reconnected with Creation after being knocked loose during the Balorian Crusade, sending out a wave of Wood Essence so potent that it lingers in the fossil record on the other side of Creation more than seven hundred years later. An Exalted parallel to the layer of iridium in Earth's geology from the KT impact.

So cool.

(That wave of Wood Essence was, incidentally, what prompted the hyper-rapid growth that let Creation recover so quickly from the mass-die-off of the Contagion, which is also why most Shogunate ruins are completely overgrown, especially as you get closer and closer to the East).
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

"This not place belonging to... honour?" Keris tries, before giving up. No, she can't read it.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

I don't really know why, but I've always loved this line and the rest of the warning it references.

Probably because I've always liked the whole "buried and sealed apocalyptic force/danger" trope.
 
horngeek said:
...Solar tomb, perhaps? It seems like the sort of thing the Shogunate might mark with "This is not a place of honor."
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Possibly.

My other guesses are something involving the Contagion(people stuffed plague dead corpses in there before it got to be too much?) or maybe, given where the reference comes from, some kind of nasty Shogunate weapon or the waste products there of?

In any event, there's probably all sorts of unpleasant shit in there.
 
Nervaqus987 said:
I don't really know why, but I've always loved this line and the rest of the warning it references.

Probably because I've always liked the whole "buried and sealed apocalyptic force/danger" trope.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

It's also a nice reference to the work that's being done to figure out how to properly close off nuclear waste storage sites for thousends of years, including for long after it has passed living memory and the records have long since been lost.
 
*shrugs*

It must have been SB I put it up on. Not all that interesting, really - it's basically an alt-Yozi clone of Endless Desert Shintai for "whee, I'm a giant sea" rather than "whee, I'm a giant desert". Endless Desert Shintai basically did everything necessary, and I just tweaked it so you're basically a moving tsunami rather than a giant desert and sandstorm.

Also with its prereq, which is rather more interesting.

Lurking Indigo Haar


Cost: 10m, 1lhl; Mins: Essence 3; Type: Simple
Keywords: Combo-OK, Obvious, Sorcerous
Duration: One scene
Prerequisites: Sea-Within-Veins Prana

Toxic and cloying, the Great Mother seeps into dark places within the Demon City and spreads her rising waters until they drown entire districts of the Demon City. Such does she spread her love to places which have never known her touch. While this Charm is active, the warlock's sea-blood hisses and steams out of pores and tear ducts, creating a thick multi-coloured miasma around her with a radius of (Essence) yards. Characters within this Sorcerous zone of cloying mist are considered to be underwater (Exalted, pp. 155) and so suffer the usual -2 external penalty to most movement, the need to hold their breath, and so on. Ranged attacks made into the zone from the outside also suffer the penalty to "movement", as twirling tendrils of fog twitch them off-course. Fire-based attacks (such as flaming arrows) ignore this penalty.

This briny smog impairs visibility to the same degree as fog at night (Exalted, pp. 135), and can only be pierced by fire-based light sources. Other light sources such as sunlight simply refract into oily rainbow halos, causing the smog to invalidate stealth as though it were an anima flaring at the 4-7 mote level. Visibility penalties apply to attacks made into the fog, as those within seem indistinct and shapeless. Additionally, the alien acidity of the smog tarnishes metal with a multicoloured patina and leaves indigo ice-rime on plants, adding the Infernal's (Essence) in bonus dice to any attempt to track her passage through an area she had this Charm active.

Demon Sea Shintai


Cost: 40m, 3lhl; Mins: Essence 5; Type: Simple
Keywords: Blasphemy, Form-Type, Obvious, Shaping, Sorcerous
Duration: Indefinite
Prerequisites: Lurking Indigo Haar, Great Mother's Blessed Waters, First Kimbery Excellency

Upon the outer layer of Malfeas, a tributary of the Great Mother lies exposed to the eyes of all. Sometimes this Creation-sized body of water moves, and where it passes it drowns entire domains, serfs and citizens alike dying in agony. Such is the whimsy of the Demon Sea. Upon activation of this Charm, the Infernal bursts - the terrible pressure of her ocean-blood tearing her flimsy human form apart. From this is born her true tsunami form, which rushes forth across the land with terrible fury.
  • The Infernal's flesh exists as a great surging body of indigo fluid, stained with bright colours, measuring a full mile in diameter. Her immense size makes attacks by smaller beings undodgeable (without Charms). However, she can't suffer more than one damage level per attack in step 10, unless the attack encompasses at least a tenth of her size. Similarly gargantuan beings ignore these modifiers.
  • Exposure to her flesh is an environmental hazard with the statistics of a vitriol bath. In addition, at each damage increment the victim is affected by a dose of Spiteful Sea Tincture poison, or any of the variants thereof that the Infernal knows. This affects inanimate terrain the Infernal passes over, so vast depressions are sunk into the land by her corrosive bulk. As a Shaping effect polluted water is called into existence to fill these recesses.
  • All bodies of liquid within a mile of where she passes are affected as by Great Mother's Blessed Waters, as a Sorcerous effect which lasts a month. If she is injured, then the duration on bodies of liquid in range at that point is Indefinite.
  • She can take whatever actions she normally could do anywhere within her body with her normal traits, paying 3m per action to physically interact with anything corporeal (social attacks cost nothing). Her waters freeze into icy renditions of her human form, carrying the now ice-encrusted equipment she had when she activated this Charm.
  • The warlock is immune to Poison, Crippling, and non-magical Sickness. She can't starve or suffocate.
  • She may move at her normal movement rate (Dashing and Jumping are impossible), and is immune to Blockade Movement actions.
  • She may communicate via Performance out to (Essence) miles, her terrifying choral voice the song of ten-thousand creatures of the ocean depths.
  • Targeting the centre of her being with appropriate countermagic (or Adamant Circle Banishing) terminates this Charm. Despite being Sorcerous, it can be voluntarily deactivated.
 
EarthScorpion said:
*shrugs*

It must have been SB I put it up on. Not all that interesting, really - it's basically an alt-Yozi clone of Endless Desert Shintai for "whee, I'm a giant sea" rather than "whee, I'm a giant desert". Endless Desert Shintai basically did everything necessary, and I just tweaked it so you're basically a moving tsunami rather than a giant desert and sandstorm.

Also with its prereq, which is rather more interesting.

Lurking Indigo Haar

Cost: 10m, 1lhl; Mins: Essence 3; Type: Simple
Keywords: Combo-OK, Obvious, Sorcerous
Duration: One scene
Prerequisites: Sea-Within-Veins Prana

Toxic and cloying, the Great Mother seeps into dark places within the Demon City and spreads her rising waters until they drown entire districts of the Demon City. Such does she spread her love to places which have never known her touch. While this Charm is active, the warlock's sea-blood hisses and steams out of pores and tear ducts, creating a thick multi-coloured miasma around her with a radius of (Essence) yards. Characters within this Sorcerous zone of cloying mist are considered to be underwater (Exalted, pp. 155) and so suffer the usual -2 external penalty to most movement, the need to hold their breath, and so on. Ranged attacks made into the zone from the outside also suffer the penalty to "movement", as twirling tendrils of fog twitch them off-course. Fire-based attacks (such as flaming arrows) ignore this penalty.

This briny smog impairs visibility to the same degree as fog at night (Exalted, pp. 135), and can only be pierced by fire-based light sources. Other light sources such as sunlight simply refract into oily rainbow halos, causing the smog to invalidate stealth as though it were an anima flaring at the 4-7 mote level. Visibility penalties apply to attacks made into the fog, as those within seem indistinct and shapeless. Additionally, the alien acidity of the smog tarnishes metal with a multicoloured patina and leaves indigo ice-rime on plants, adding the Infernal's (Essence) in bonus dice to any attempt to track her passage through an area she had this Charm active.

Demon Sea Shintai

Cost: 40m, 3lhl; Mins: Essence 5; Type: Simple
Keywords: Blasphemy, Form-Type, Obvious, Shaping, Sorcerous
Duration: Indefinite
Prerequisites: Lurking Indigo Haar, Great Mother's Blessed Waters, First Kimbery Excellency

Upon the outer layer of Malfeas, a tributary of the Great Mother lies exposed to the eyes of all. Sometimes this Creation-sized body of water moves, and where it passes it drowns entire domains, serfs and citizens alike dying in agony. Such is the whimsy of the Demon Sea. Upon activation of this Charm, the Infernal bursts - the terrible pressure of her ocean-blood tearing her flimsy human form apart. From this is born her true tsunami form, which rushes forth across the land with terrible fury.
  • The Infernal's flesh exists as a great surging body of indigo fluid, stained with bright colours, measuring a full mile in diameter. Her immense size makes attacks by smaller beings undodgeable (without Charms). However, she can't suffer more than one damage level per attack in step 10, unless the attack encompasses at least a tenth of her size. Similarly gargantuan beings ignore these modifiers.
  • Exposure to her flesh is an environmental hazard with the statistics of a vitriol bath. In addition, at each damage increment the victim is affected by a dose of Spiteful Sea Tincture poison, or any of the variants thereof that the Infernal knows. This affects inanimate terrain the Infernal passes over, so vast depressions are sunk into the land by her corrosive bulk. As a Shaping effect polluted water is called into existence to fill these recesses.
  • All bodies of liquid within a mile of where she passes are affected as by Great Mother's Blessed Waters, as a Sorcerous effect which lasts a month. If she is injured, then the duration on bodies of liquid in range at that point is Indefinite.
  • She can take whatever actions she normally could do anywhere within her body with her normal traits, paying 3m per action to physically interact with anything corporeal (social attacks cost nothing). Her waters freeze into icy renditions of her human form, carrying the now ice-encrusted equipment she had when she activated this Charm.
  • The warlock is immune to Poison, Crippling, and non-magical Sickness. She can't starve or suffocate.
  • She may move at her normal movement rate (Dashing and Jumping are impossible), and is immune to Blockade Movement actions.
  • She may communicate via Performance out to (Essence) miles, her terrifying choral voice the song of ten-thousand creatures of the ocean depths.
  • Targeting the centre of her being with appropriate countermagic (or Adamant Circle Banishing) terminates this Charm. Despite being Sorcerous, it can be voluntarily deactivated.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
You're right, the pre-request is very interesting; it expands on the idea of a sea in your veins concept in a very literal way, that also proves to be very useful.

Once again mortals can't fight against you, either you murder them or they drown, and even a lot of Exalted would find it difficult to fight while suffering the effects of such an effect. Especially if they haven't invested in any environmental survival charms.
 
Nervaqus987 said:
"This not place belonging to... honour?" Keris tries, before giving up. No, she can't read it.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
I don't really know why, but I've always loved this line and the rest of the warning it references.

Probably because I've always liked the whole "buried and sealed apocalyptic force/danger" trope.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Wait, "always" loved? Is this a reference I'm not ge- wait. Aww hell. I had read that, I'd just forgotten the title.

EarthScorpiooooooon!

(I suppose at least you put me onto it before I did something very unwise, so thank you for that. I mean, I'm probably still going to do something very unwise, but at least now I know it'll blow up in advance.)
Nervaqus987 said:
In any event, there's probably all sorts of unpleasant shit in there.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Well, Keris heard machinery.
This lake is not a natural formation. Keris is sure of it. They dug it out. The centre of the lake simply drops off, in a nearly vertical fall which goes down four, six, eight hundred metres. The low bit is maybe fifty metres wide, but... no wonder they made a hillock here. There used to be a barrier perhaps twenty metres from the top, but it's broken. Its debris litters the bottom, along with hundreds of years of sediment.

And the bottom isn't the bottom. Oh, it's a bottom. A bottom which is tens of metres thick. But when she swims deep, deep, deep down - so deep there's no light at all and puts her ear against the bottom, she can hear the things in the white stone at the bottom, below the thick sediment. The hissing things in metal cylinders. The sound of water boiling. The clattering and clanking.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Hissing things that are still working. Machinery that's still functioning. So it's probably not just a mass grave, whatever it is.
greensun said:
Once again mortals can't fight against you, either you murder them or they drown, and even a lot of Exalted would find it difficult to fight while suffering the effects of such an effect. Especially if they haven't invested in any environmental survival charms.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
It manages to make Keris even more lethal and unfair against mortals than she already is, which is honestly kind of impressive.
 
Last edited:
Aleph said:
Well, Keris heard machinery.

Hissing things that are still working. Machinery that's still functioning. So it's probably not just a mass grave, whatever it is.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Well, my first thought to underground machinery in Creation tends to be Jadeborn.

Not sure how similiar their role in your Creation is to the canon ones, though.

My second ones usually involve still functioning First Age(although for your game it may be Shogunate era) magitech, which combined with the warning......

Thousand Forged Dragon(s)?
 
Aleph said:
So it's probably not just a mass grave, whatever it is.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

It could still be a Solar's tomb!

I've actually moved away from that for my characters who have artifacts from the previous bearers of their Exaltations, mind. Rose/Blossom, for example, was given the spear carried by her past life.

She actually has no idea who actually gave her the spear, mind, she was only half-conscious at the time.
 
horngeek said:
It could still be a Solar's tomb!

I've actually moved away from that for my characters who have artifacts from the previous bearers of their Exaltations, mind. Rose/Blossom, for example, was given the spear carried by her past life.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
I made a character at one point who Exalted in a Solar tomb, with a Lunar nearby.

The Lunar was not her Lunar Mate, and the tomb wasn't actually hers, or even related to her. It was just a convenient way to map together her having Lunar Indiana Jones as an Ally and being in enough danger to do a Cool Thing and Exalt.
 
Hell it could be the grave of something like a Second or third circle demon killed in the primordial war.
 
Last edited:
Aleph said:
Wait, "always" loved? Is this a reference I'm not ge- wait. Aww hell. I had read that, I'd just forgotten the title.

EarthScorpiooooooon!

(I suppose at least you put me onto it before I did something very unwise, so thank you for that. I mean, I'm probably still going to do something very unwise, but at least now I know it'll blow up in advance.)
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Look, it's probably just glowing green and radioactive. Do you know what radiation does to pulp heroes like the ones in Exalted?

That's right! It gives you superpowers!

Disclaimer: Cancer may be considered a superpower. Also, Super-Dying is definitely a superpower.
 
Jen said:
Why can't demon have grave. Avalanche-Face-Lady's current job is guarding a grave of some unknown Demon in canon after all.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Huh, okay, so apparently demons do get graves. Maybe a high essence demon's location of death retains some magic properties? Or maybe Demons just picked up funerary things from humans by cultural osmosis?
 
Reader mode
You must login or register to reply here.
Remove ads
Back
Top