- Location
- Gladstone, OR
Generally speaking, Magitech like that does not have MM bonuses.
General Exalted Thread
Generally speaking, Magitech like that does not have MM bonuses.
Quantumboost
Now with 50% more dots in Dimensional Science
- Location
- Ensemble Space
That's a nice argument for why Werewolf: the Apocalypse is animist.
It's a bit irrelevant in Mage, where the wuffs aren't assumed to be categorically and objectively correct.
Outright wrong, yes. It's not even a mechanics thing; spirits aren't presented in an animistic fashion. Animism entails that all things have spirits, and objects don't have spirits in Shadowrun unless some Mage bothered to stuff a spirit in it. At best, you might get a spirit who's staked out some Astral territory, which is far from sufficient to qualify.
Thanks.
One last question: would a fuel bolt launcher come with a bayonet without increasing it's artifact rating?
vicky_molokh
Posthuman spidery thingy.
- Location
- Kyïv, Ukraine
It's an argument for why WoD is animist. Because among the multiple mutually contradictory yet objectively true things, animism is one of them and it's as true as the others. It happens. Even if you're a mage.
- Location
- Gladstone, OR
Depends on the bayonet. If it's effectively a mundane* spear or knife statline, then probably not. If you attach a Short Daiklave* to it, that'd raise the dot rating by 1.
*Accepting the notion that artifact/mundane weapon statlines are rough at the most charitable.
Salty
Shadow Cabal Assumptor Supreme
- Location
- Sun, Moon, Talia
- Pronouns
- I/Me
There can't be. So choose one.
Not if you subscribe to the view that WoD is not a unified setting, and Vampires as a line exist independently from Mages as a line exist independently from Mummies as a line, so on, and so forth. Picking and choosing canon is often a necessity, Vicky. Otherwise you get really bad results. Because it's written by many people, and some of them are better than others.
Jon Chung
=][=
Vicky, look. Read this. Statement of intent, right from the original creator, etc, etc.
Do you get why the "Saving Private Ryan" and "Romance of the Three Kingdoms" layer is necessary in order to have the combination work? TVTropes paints a picture of a setting as shallow as the average shonen manga, this is not supposed to be the case.
Grabowski said:
Do you get why the "Saving Private Ryan" and "Romance of the Three Kingdoms" layer is necessary in order to have the combination work? TVTropes paints a picture of a setting as shallow as the average shonen manga, this is not supposed to be the case.
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Very good. Wrapped up my first big plotline, various bits of awful are keeping me from running. I'm in another game though, it's going really well. We're in Gloam. I traded Read Intentions with a centuries-old corrupted Exalt over a mean of pork and human flesh, and I couldn't tell the difference. Social influence is fun now!
Nope, that's Chronicles of Darkness. World of Darkness is all about the meta-plot.
notanautomaton
I've got 99 quests, I've finished one
Poorly, so I dropped it like my little brother.
Noctum
Dual Paradox
- Location
- Under the Skies Above
Low fantasy RPG set in what is basically a fantasy version of Japan where there is heavy emphasis on fluff over crunch (it's a fairly rules light setting, most of the books are about >95% fluff) and roleplay. Notable for high lethality and for characters to be able to accidentally a war and having to commit seppuku for SHAMFRU DISPRAY.
More details here.
- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
I know what Legend of the Five Rings is. Context!
Lealope
Not yet invincible
- Pronouns
- She/Her
He was making a joke based on the fact that people tend to overlook Legend of the 5 Rings.
Noctum
Dual Paradox
- Location
- Under the Skies Above
*headdesk*
Derp.
vicky_molokh
Posthuman spidery thingy.
- Location
- Kyïv, Ukraine
Okay, that's informative, thanks.
Then I have a question (also at @Imrix):
Why is it that the book pays attention to things like bleeding, which won't matter for displaying the politics and other grittiness of the world (because most mortals will just die outright), but not to things like populations and logistics and crops and epidemiology and legislation and invention of technologies and all the other nitty-gritty little details that matter both to mortals and Exalts? (Because really, for all the talk of cholera and plague being written up in the corebook, the important bit about them is how they'll spread or not spread depending on hygiene and army movement and all the other things like that, and that will grittily impact those epic battles Exalts with their armies engage in, such as ensuring one doesn't have a combat-ready army anymore.)
It's just . . . the book doesn't look as if it wants to focus on the realism of the backdrop. It does look like it gives a nod to grittiness in the foreground just in case the campaign involves mortals in the foreground (which it can!). In fact, it seems to me that "design a detailed world with a focus on plausibility and consistency" (Grabowski paraphrased) and "assume the world works, think about why later if you need to" (Moran paraphrased) are two very different approaches, and combining them can be problematic. Note that I'm not saying "it isn't details-only"; I do get that it's a spectrum, but the conspicuous lack of certain things and presence of others gives me (and apparently other people too!) an impression that the game line is much more drama-first on the spectrum.
Because anyone can write some fucking slapdash bleeding rules, and while Exalted tries its best to maintain its sense of down-to-earth consistency, it is inherently limited by the knowledge base of its authors. When those people know what they are talking about, like in the case of Grabowski's Manacle & Coin, you get heavily-researched reams of detail about varied economies of trade.
When they don't, or Aggressively avoid the topics they have no willingness to research, you get outright omissions of vital setting details because no one among them has heard of things like the Diwali festival and they don't want to get it wrong and look like idiots, or you get typical generic fantasy schlock plugged in to gap-fill which every writer has been Pavlovian-trained to include by 40+ years of D&D and Lord of the Rings pastiches. Which are usually their own special kind of stupid altogether.
Exalted has been hamstrung from book one by the fact its majority of authors were primarily drawn from WW itself, people who played WoD games exclusively and thus devoted more headspace to aping the intricacies of Deep Vampire Politics than understanding how a feudal lord assembled a court. Some books suffered more significantly for this than others, and Ex3 is taking it worse than most as the Devs have begun taking hacksaws to big sections they simply do not care for or understand the established significance of.
Eukie
Powered by furious Canadian redheads
a tirade against fiat currencies! (Grabwoski didn't write Manacle & Coin, actually.)
Didn't write it exclusively, but still considered it as much 'his baby' and vital enough to the gameline and "understanding the groundwork of Creation" he essentially spearheaded plans to put it into print before other more traditionally-gameable supplements, in what was otherwise regarded as "White Wolf's Kung fu fantasy game."
So yeah, I have no compunctions about assigning his name to it anymore than most people grant Sidereals largely to be Jenna Moran's, regardless of the other authors involved.
Henna iz-Kabbaz, the Cannibal-Queen of Dead Zairio
Greater Dead
Baptised in the River of Dead Grain
Those who descend down to Dead Zairio will find white marble statues of a great woman-headed lion greeting them when they enter the domain. Those who venture forth to the palace built from the memory of the ruins of the Shogunate will find that those statues are true to death. The throngs of the Dead that pack the dense market streets must give reverence to their monstrous queen, or she devours them. To fail to worship her is to commit a crime, and criminals feed her hunger. The law is swift and harsh. Still, the unquiet souls prefer her rule to the alternatives, for under her hungry rule Dead Zairio has conquered its forebears and grown rich on the spoils of war. The war-ghosts who wear her face on their bone china masks expand across the southern edge of the Inner Sea, and the Lioness Vigilant turns her eyes on Dead Paragon.
The Cannibal-Queen of Dead Zairio has the body of a lion as big as an elephant. Her once-innocent features are hunger-pinched, her skin is like paper, and her tens of fangs are as long as a man's forearm. Her tongue is a leech's. Death has darkened her once coffee-coloured skin to a stormy grey, but her milky white eyes stare out. To that end she wears a china mask painted by the finest artists of her city in semblance of life. It is a pretence let down by the fact that she only wears a half-mask; she bares her fangs, the better to eat you with. Her hunger is part of her, but she retains enough humanity that she tries to channel it. When she loses control then she becomes a true monster.
In life, she was no one. Three hundred years ago, a baker bled out after her first labour despite all attempts to staunch the flow. She was buried, and her husband remarried. Still, an echo of his wife remained to watch over her son and husband, a smoky figure whose spectral robes were drenched in blood below the waist. Her husband grew old. Her son married, and was carried away too young by sweating sickness. Henna's ghost endured, eking out an existence in domain reflecting her hometown close to Creation. Her people did not hold to the ancestor cults and so it was a lamentable unlife, as poor as her first.
Then came a nephrack-born surge up the River of Dead Grain, a landslide of dry seed and dusty worthless soil crashing up over their defences. The river's hunger devoured memory-substance and left nothing behind. Ghosts starved and withered as they were borne away. Famine consumed all. All save Henna, who took some of that hunger within herself and latched onto another ghost as they were swept away. She ate his corpus and crunched his bones - and when he was gone, she moved onto the next and the next and the next.
With her cannibalism, she had the strength to resist the pull of the river. Slowly, painfully she fought against the tide and clawed her way through dusty soil. Her feast had given her the bulk to surface and vomit forth the worthless seed that sought to fill her stomach and so she pulled herself out onto a tiny domain. The hardened pirates who held off Whisper-maddened ghosts and preyed on other travellers here tried to destroy her. She ate them too.
Something in her maddened passions quietened once she found herself alone on an isle of the dead. She had lost human form and bloated into immensity. A full belly let her claw her way back from the hunger, but already she could feel the urge slowly nagging at the back of her mind. Taking their yacht, she wrapped her tail around the tiller and set course back up the river of soil and dead grain, heading back towards Creation. The Dead can feel the pull of the Labyrinth and she knew that cursed place was too close to fliking.
As one of the Greater Dead, the lesser haunts and spooks she encountered could not stand against her alone. What one cunning group could do, however, was subvert her. With a creature such as her on-side, Dead Yahrad became a pirate power - and then they swept in and conquered Dead Zairio, installing themselves as its new aristocracy aided by the conniving of the merchants who realised that they could rid themselves of the hated Tyrant for someone more... amenable to their desires of conquest and profit. Now the nouveau riche pirate-princelings rule a power in the South and the lion-banner of the Cannibal-Queen is raised high by war-ghosts.
Henna herself restrains her predations to slaves, captives, and yidaks and so far this has been successful. The River of Dead Grain suffuses her nature, but she channels it into more than just devouring other ghosts. Her passions drive her to expand, to conquer others and digest their lands to make them her own. She understands at least in part that the merchant-dukes and pirate-counts who hail her as queen view her as a useful monster, but she does not care. It is their role to feed her more ghosts, more lands, more treasures - and they can have the crumbs from her table. The mad power of the Underworld has changed her from the woman she once was and their fear is just another prayer that she can devour.
Notes and Abilities: The Cannibal-Queen is presented here as typical of the kind of Greater Dead that might rule over a new regional power in the Underworld. Through her alliance with a powerful band of River-pirates and their alliance with merchants who considered them the lesser evil, she has a position of queen of a domain. With the force of a combat-focussed Greater Dead, they have been able to conquer multiple other domains - and success breeds success. Because of the wealth flowing into Dead Zairio, they can afford to enhance their defences against the Labyrinth and protect other subservient island domains. Moreover, due to the primary of River-pirates among their forces, they are a naval power who control an entire tributary. As an expansionistic group they will seek to conquer more of the Underworld, but a lack of ancestor cults in Creation is limiting them - and so they will turn their eyes to the mortal world in time.
A necromancer would primarily summon her for combat. She is a terrifying monster that can crash through a legion of mortal soldiers, breaking ranks and devouring champions. Bound down into a host, she would lose some of her most powerful utility from her size and capacity to swallow men whole, but would remain a potent weapon. The other reason, of course, is to gain control over Dead Zairio by binding its queen. A necromancer who would try that must be careful, however, because not all of the power rests in its queen and even if her physical prowess might extract obedience, it will not be hasty or willing.
Greater Dead
Baptised in the River of Dead Grain
Those who descend down to Dead Zairio will find white marble statues of a great woman-headed lion greeting them when they enter the domain. Those who venture forth to the palace built from the memory of the ruins of the Shogunate will find that those statues are true to death. The throngs of the Dead that pack the dense market streets must give reverence to their monstrous queen, or she devours them. To fail to worship her is to commit a crime, and criminals feed her hunger. The law is swift and harsh. Still, the unquiet souls prefer her rule to the alternatives, for under her hungry rule Dead Zairio has conquered its forebears and grown rich on the spoils of war. The war-ghosts who wear her face on their bone china masks expand across the southern edge of the Inner Sea, and the Lioness Vigilant turns her eyes on Dead Paragon.
The Cannibal-Queen of Dead Zairio has the body of a lion as big as an elephant. Her once-innocent features are hunger-pinched, her skin is like paper, and her tens of fangs are as long as a man's forearm. Her tongue is a leech's. Death has darkened her once coffee-coloured skin to a stormy grey, but her milky white eyes stare out. To that end she wears a china mask painted by the finest artists of her city in semblance of life. It is a pretence let down by the fact that she only wears a half-mask; she bares her fangs, the better to eat you with. Her hunger is part of her, but she retains enough humanity that she tries to channel it. When she loses control then she becomes a true monster.
In life, she was no one. Three hundred years ago, a baker bled out after her first labour despite all attempts to staunch the flow. She was buried, and her husband remarried. Still, an echo of his wife remained to watch over her son and husband, a smoky figure whose spectral robes were drenched in blood below the waist. Her husband grew old. Her son married, and was carried away too young by sweating sickness. Henna's ghost endured, eking out an existence in domain reflecting her hometown close to Creation. Her people did not hold to the ancestor cults and so it was a lamentable unlife, as poor as her first.
Then came a nephrack-born surge up the River of Dead Grain, a landslide of dry seed and dusty worthless soil crashing up over their defences. The river's hunger devoured memory-substance and left nothing behind. Ghosts starved and withered as they were borne away. Famine consumed all. All save Henna, who took some of that hunger within herself and latched onto another ghost as they were swept away. She ate his corpus and crunched his bones - and when he was gone, she moved onto the next and the next and the next.
With her cannibalism, she had the strength to resist the pull of the river. Slowly, painfully she fought against the tide and clawed her way through dusty soil. Her feast had given her the bulk to surface and vomit forth the worthless seed that sought to fill her stomach and so she pulled herself out onto a tiny domain. The hardened pirates who held off Whisper-maddened ghosts and preyed on other travellers here tried to destroy her. She ate them too.
Something in her maddened passions quietened once she found herself alone on an isle of the dead. She had lost human form and bloated into immensity. A full belly let her claw her way back from the hunger, but already she could feel the urge slowly nagging at the back of her mind. Taking their yacht, she wrapped her tail around the tiller and set course back up the river of soil and dead grain, heading back towards Creation. The Dead can feel the pull of the Labyrinth and she knew that cursed place was too close to fliking.
As one of the Greater Dead, the lesser haunts and spooks she encountered could not stand against her alone. What one cunning group could do, however, was subvert her. With a creature such as her on-side, Dead Yahrad became a pirate power - and then they swept in and conquered Dead Zairio, installing themselves as its new aristocracy aided by the conniving of the merchants who realised that they could rid themselves of the hated Tyrant for someone more... amenable to their desires of conquest and profit. Now the nouveau riche pirate-princelings rule a power in the South and the lion-banner of the Cannibal-Queen is raised high by war-ghosts.
Henna herself restrains her predations to slaves, captives, and yidaks and so far this has been successful. The River of Dead Grain suffuses her nature, but she channels it into more than just devouring other ghosts. Her passions drive her to expand, to conquer others and digest their lands to make them her own. She understands at least in part that the merchant-dukes and pirate-counts who hail her as queen view her as a useful monster, but she does not care. It is their role to feed her more ghosts, more lands, more treasures - and they can have the crumbs from her table. The mad power of the Underworld has changed her from the woman she once was and their fear is just another prayer that she can devour.
Notes and Abilities: The Cannibal-Queen is presented here as typical of the kind of Greater Dead that might rule over a new regional power in the Underworld. Through her alliance with a powerful band of River-pirates and their alliance with merchants who considered them the lesser evil, she has a position of queen of a domain. With the force of a combat-focussed Greater Dead, they have been able to conquer multiple other domains - and success breeds success. Because of the wealth flowing into Dead Zairio, they can afford to enhance their defences against the Labyrinth and protect other subservient island domains. Moreover, due to the primary of River-pirates among their forces, they are a naval power who control an entire tributary. As an expansionistic group they will seek to conquer more of the Underworld, but a lack of ancestor cults in Creation is limiting them - and so they will turn their eyes to the mortal world in time.
A necromancer would primarily summon her for combat. She is a terrifying monster that can crash through a legion of mortal soldiers, breaking ranks and devouring champions. Bound down into a host, she would lose some of her most powerful utility from her size and capacity to swallow men whole, but would remain a potent weapon. The other reason, of course, is to gain control over Dead Zairio by binding its queen. A necromancer who would try that must be careful, however, because not all of the power rests in its queen and even if her physical prowess might extract obedience, it will not be hasty or willing.
I mean, if you use Debt as part of your background you're going to make some stupid decisions.
Well, Seat of Power Shintai is explicitly there to make a DTAS-alike monster-po form. If your po form can't be expressed that way, it's probably not a good charm to take.
But at least for Sasi, if I was forced to do it, I'd probably go and start stacking things so she was on fire with yellow fire and had yellow laser eyes and flew on demonic power and had skin made of super-tough evil gold, and other things like that that. Things that would get you thinking "that's totally an anathema" without sacrificing the human form.
mothematics
How wide is the concept of "you"?
- Location
- the bottom of a coffee cup
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Having skimmed this thread every now and again and scanned it to see if anyone's answered it, and come up empty-handed, I have to ask: What's the best way to get into Exalted? I was in one game that died, and never really wrapped my head around the 2E mechanics fully, and while I know a good deal about the broad strokes of the setting I'd like to know more, and actually try and put a system in my head (though I don't know which edition) and since this is the general thread I feel like I should ask in here.