Umm, why? One of the major selling points of Exalted is the huge rich kitchen-sink setting that went far and wide outside the previously-dominant region for fantasy-genre settings. I think that makes people who like medievalesque settings less attracted to Exalted, and people who like Exalted very unlikely to rewrite the setting from scratch into something medievalesque.
The only Sidereals alive today who were even involved in the whole matter are monsters like Chejop Kejak, and Lytek would be better-advised to sit on the evidence himself than try to take him on, lest he be transferred into working as the god of quack quack quack. Hell, under 2e canon it seems more likely that Lytek would come down with a sudden case of becoming a starmetal paperweight.
"I see you're complaining about our treatment of you during certain times of emergency. Fortunately, we have a new position for gods like you. How would you like to be the patron god of being punched in the face repeatedly by Sidereals until they regret all their poor life decisions?"
Do we even have data on what most of the the Hundred Kingdoms are like? Last I checked, I found only vagueness, but maybe I wasn't looking hard enough.
"I see you're complaining about our treatment of you during certain times of emergency. Fortunately, we have a new position for gods like you. How would you like to be the patron god of being punched in the face repeatedly by Sidereals until they regret all their poor life decisions?"
I mean, it's not like Sidereals can fuck with gods with impunity, because that's boring and not how organizations work. It's just that the kind of backlash they'll face mainly comes from other Sidereals or their immediate bosses/colleagues. If some young idiot makes their job harder or brings complaints to their door by refusing to think for themselves or work outside the box or apply a soft touch, then that young idiot is going to get the unpaid overtime and the blacklisted divine familiars and the sacred duty of checking out paradox manifestations in the sewers of Yu-Shan.
If Lytek finally scrunches up the evidence he needs to prove that Sidereals beat him up during the Usurpation... well done? That's not going to bring a huge amount of pressure to bear on the actual Fivefold Fellowship, because Lytek has been relatively impoverished for thousands of years and likely rubbed a lot of people the wrong way when he was in power ("oh, the department of contagious diseases has been downsized by First Age vaccines? I can't say it bothers me – well, it's not as though Solars are going anywhere").
Whose door is Lytek going to knock on to bring trouble to Chejop Kejak? At best, he'll have the ear of old friends and fellow commiserators, and having Proof Of Their Misdeedstm won't change the situation much on that end. It might act as a catalyst, but... that's about it.
I guess? I was mainly going from the History of Yushen section of the 2nd edition really. In THAT particular write up Lytek had a few favors still to pull in and just people who didn't like the consolidation of power under his boss and the Sidreals manhandling him....which is how he got away with the Lisa Wilbourn level smug letter announcing the Solars had shown up again. More he had a few bodyguards on him to make sure nobody ran off with the exaltation so again.
To be clear I'm not suggesting that he would be able to do MUCH, I was more thinking of a guys whose plan Was to destabilize Yu-Shan 'proving' their manhandling of a (then) Major God might help. The Fellowship would probably not suffer and maybe one or two Sidreals get a stern talking to but that's about it. The real consequence is much more likely to be from inside the fellowship at what was meant to be hidden came to life. So...maybe a few positions held go from Bronze to Gold.
"Nice going Chejop" one of the younger Sidereal snorted as they stared at 300 times Solar Exalted Jade Prison, reshaped into the form of a gigantic humanoid, strode through Yu-Shen. "This turned out wonderfully."
The leader of the vision of bronze twitched slightly.
Because a society run by glorious golden god-kings with armies led by glorious golden god-generals doesn't stay "medieval western European" for very long.
Knights in armor, warring kindoms, with an Arthurian Mythos. King Arthur would be a Solar expy, his round table Dragon Blooded, and Lancelot perhaps a Lunar. I'm not looking for a one-to-one conversion but rather the aesthetics.
Because a society run by glorious golden god-kings with armies led by glorious golden god-generals doesn't stay "medieval western European" for very long.
Knights in armor, warring kindoms, with an Arthurian Mythos. King Arthur would be a Solar expy, his round table Dragon Blooded, and Lancelot perhaps a Lunar. I'm not looking for a one-to-one conversion but rather the aesthetics.
See the above. It's also not like the God-Kings won't fight among themselves as well.
Hundred Kingdoms. No literally that's it. 'Medieval Western Europe' is one of the many settings in Exalted and you can just pick out an area and put your Europe-flavoured region there, and the Hundred Kingdoms is pretty much the currently-existing region closest to Europe.
Creation is bigger than Earth. The whole thing ain't gonna be medieval western Europe but medieval western Europe fits in quite easily - go towards the north and the northeast, the aesthetics in those areas are closer to European. Just grab like a thousand-mile-by-thousand-mile box somewhere (you can fit that easily between the Bull's empire and Whitewall, up in the Tear Eater region between Halta and the Haslanti League, or grab a chunk of the Hundred Kingdoms or whatever) and boom you have a land area roughly the size of the entirety of western Europe to play with.
It ain't gonna be medieval western Europe for long but it can start there easily enough, and it can keep the aesthetic for a good couple centuries even if the political landscape rapidly starts looking less like actual medieval western Europe and more like common fantasy interpretations thereof.
Knights in armor, warring kindoms, with an Arthurian Mythos. King Arthur would be a Solar expy, his round table Dragon Blooded, and Lancelot perhaps a Lunar. I'm not looking for a one-to-one conversion but rather the aesthetics.
Double-posting because these are pretty much entirely unrelated topics.
Okay, so. I happen to be in a modernesque Ex3 game myself, so I've been homebrewing modern weapons for that. As has been discussed over the past few pages, the flavour is somewhat mutable - you can totally just take a hundred Withering attacks to aim and save the actual shooting for when you're doing a Decisive attack for a more realistic feel, or you can go all John Woo and yeah all those withering attacks have actual bullet being fired.
You're gonna see a lot of new tags here, I used original ones where I could, but modern weapons have a lot of functions that bows don't. They'll be listed first. Design notes in italics.
At present this is only handheld weapons. I'd like to brew up tanks and artillery if only because I want to punch a tank in half, but that's a project for later. This would probably also be applicable to siege weapons as well, since I note War charms specifying the pretraining of people firing siege weapons, but no actual rules for siege weapons for that Charm effect to hook into. @Serafina has a brew of them back on page 450something, I do like some of its ideas at least.
You'll probably notice from the weapons we have in play that this isn't aimed at the 2000s, it's closer to WWII. In particular we're playing in the interwar period (1921), so a lot of these weapons don't actually exist for us, but they were easy enough to balance around the same axis as the preexisting weapon set, and some enterprising Twilight might invent them early. Not in our team though, the universal reaction to Craft was 'man fuck that'.
Without further ado:
Modern: Modern weapons do not add Strength to the wielders' damage roll. Instead, add +4 to the weapon's damage to calculate the raw damage of Withering attacks with a weapon that has the Modern tag. This is literally just the Crossbow tag refluffed because it felt weird tagging grenades with 'Crossbow'.
Automatic: This weapon, firing numerous times over the course of seconds, is capable of performing Suppression attacks. A Suppression attack costs 1 initiative and reduces the attacker's Defense by 1 until their next turn, but increases a Withering attack's damage by 3. If used to attack a battle group, it adds the battle group's Size to its raw damage. In function this is pretty close to Melee's Chopping tag - the big thing automatic fire is useful for is providing suppressive fire and making them keep their heads down, which seems to be initiative damage to me. Could also be onslaught.
The other big thing automatic fire is useful for is doing things to lots of dudes at once. That's what the anti-battle group function is for - I did consider ways to do things to multiple 'heroes' at once, but when my best balance points for that were charms I figured it was best to step back from there and just save the 'room broom' function for large quantities of mooks. Significant opponents need to be focused on directly.
Here's where we get into my thoughts about 'area effect' and anti-battlegroup weapons. Serafina had 'double raw damage' on her siege weapons, Death of Obsidian Butterflies had its own mechanic for increasing damage against a battle group, but on their own I wasn't entirely satisfied with them.
They're basically flat. I wanted to emulate the actual effects of proliferation of artillery by turning Size into a disadvantage, making it so that large blocks of dudes tightly compressed together would be highly vulnerable to artillery fire, while small dispersed groups moving as small packets could achieve some level of safety.
In this case we're basically just neutering some of the advantage that comes from 'lots of them' (ie the Size bonus to soak is being countered by the bonus to raw damage). Having lots of guys spread out is at least not a defence when you use wide-area attacks.
Arguably some of that's already implicit - flat buffs to anti-battlegroup attacks do take somewhat longer to shred battle groups, but with each shot they're wrecking a whole lot more guys in larger groups, where the amount of troops wrecked to make a Size 5 battle group drop to Size 4 are enough to make 3-5 Size 3 battle groups, so one could potentially get more juice out of packet movement already, without needing to hit them harder for having more guys in an area.
Still, worth bringing up for mention.
It creates some interesting pressures, actually - a Solar normally wants a single blob of dudes because he can only command so many effectively (delivering an order to a thousand-man blob takes the same amount of actions as a five-man squad), but if large quantities of artillery force him to split his unit into smaller teams, he starts needing to scramble for good lieutenants who can deliver orders to the various subgroups - Dragonblooded, or the 'train lieutenants' charms that came up a few pages ago.
Or just leaving a horde of Size 2-4 Tiger Warrior groups to their own devices. Exactly how subdivided they should be able to get is more a question of etiquette than anything else (nobody wants to run 200 Size 1 squads), but there is some interesting room to play around with 'not just having all your troops in one gigantic blob' in terms of tactics.
Which seems like the sort of thing people who invest in War are here for.
Blast: This weapon creates an environmental hazard that inflicts 1L damage a single time, with a resistance difficulty of 3, against everything within Close range of the primary target, including the primary target itself. If used to attack a battle group, it adds the battle group's Size to its raw damage, and to the damage the battle group suffers from its environmental hazard. Okay so honestly most of my thoughts about battlegroup killers went above. Blast is for things genuinely optimized at the job of wrecking lots of guys at once. It's useful but not overwhelming against 'heroes' - people with large dice pools for resistance rolls (usually Dex/Dodge) are probably going to be fine, but it remains a threat that they at least have to pay a little attention to, and is highly destructive against cohesive battle groups and tightly-packed forces.
Brace: This weapon must be braced to fire accurately against some appropriate solid surface, and its wielder cannot attack with it on any turn in which they take a movement action. Here's where bipod mounts and the like come in.
Handy: A Handy weapon is more easily wielded in close quarters and quicker to bring to bear against an enemy, and at Close range, has the same Accuracy as it does at Short range (+4 for mundane weapons, +5 for artifacts). This is for those extremely close fights where yeah you're basically in melee range - shorter-barrelled guns like pistols are far easier to bring to bear than most ranged weapons. If you're going room-to-room you'd probably want a Handy weapon because you are going to be spending a lot of your time at Short and Close range.
Heavy Piercing: Heavy Piercing weapons are even more specialized in defeating powerful armour than regular Piercing weapons - while not particularly better against the amounts of armour a human being can wear, these weapons are capable of defeating the thickest plates of armour mounted on vehicles. A Heavy Piercing attack costs 1 Initiative to attempt, and ignores half of the target's armoured soak, rounded down. A Heavy Piercing attack can also be made Decisive, costing 3 Initiative (subtracted before making the attack), and ignores half of the target's Hardness. A Heavy Piercing weapon may also use a Piercing attack, as the tag, costing 1 initiative to attempt and ignoring 4 points of soak from armour, if this is better than ignoring half. This is for killing tanks. The actual 'Heavy' aspect is a little moot on the personal scale - regular Piercing's -4 soak is more than half of the armour soak of anything on the character scale until artifact heavy armour barely edges it out, and sees most of its utility against non-PC soakbeasts, the broad category I envision tanks falling into.
I'd envision them as having some Hardness too - enough to make it take a good chunk of initiative to actually damage them, so that if you're not using anti-tank weapons, you need to build up a fair amount of initiative to do whatever stunts killing the thing entails (ie targeting viewports, trying to get the hatch open, etc etc - or if you're an Exalt it could be reasonable to just fluff cutting the thing in half).
Melee: This weapon, while primarily ranged, can also be used as an effective melee weapon, of the type designated in parenthesis, such as Melee (Light). Who here likes pistol-whipping? One advantage guns have over bows is that they tend to be pretty solid hunks of metal, making them perfectly serviceable clubs. And spears, if you like bayonets. This is basically just an inversion of the melee weapon Throwing tag - though significantly more informative because that tag really should tell whether the thrown weapon is light/medium/heavy. Are there even any heavy thrown weapons?
Recoil: This weapon is difficult to handle, and requires prodigious strength to fire with anything approaching control - for every point below 5 its wielder's Strength is, they suffer a -1 penalty to all attacks with it. This penalty may be negated by bracing the weapon against an appropriately solid surface, as with the Brace tag, or by firing it with less than its full capabilities (such as forgoing the use of the Automatic tag, or using a one-handed weapon in two hands). This tag is actually a bit of a stealth-buff. With modern weapons being mostly strength-independent, ranged-combat characters get little use out of Strength, and will always be spending their xp on other things. I'm fine with that as an option, but I would like Strength to have its uses, both for omnitactical battle hydras who want high strength for their melee stuff, and for people who want to play Heavy Weapons Guy. Without this, while Strength 5 peaks higher than the Modern tag in terms of damage, you have to switch back to bows to do that. And while Jack Churchill is a totally viable high-strength modern character I don't think he should be the only one.
So the Recoil tag is there for those weapons that are unreasonable to use (or use in a particular way) for normal people, but theoretically could be with sufficient strength.
Slow-Decisive: This weapon is highly destructive, and explicitly does not actually fire until it is a Decisive attack - Withering attacks are the act of aiming it and otherwise preparing to fire. When it does fire, however, on a Decisive attack, it takes extra time to reload, requiring an action spent to do so, as detailed under the Slow tag. John Woo aside, even I thought it would get a tad ridiculous if people started firing rocket launchers a trillion times to rack up the opportunity to actually attack the target. With Slow weapons in particular, though, it gets a tad weird to be spending time reloading a weapon you never actually fired. This is basically a very softened version of Slow - while building up initiative you can 'fire' as frequently as you're able, and then reload after the Decisive attack where you actually fire the weapon. This would also serve pretty well with early firearms.
Handguns
Pistol: Light Archery Weapon. Tags: Lethal; Archery (Short); One-Handed; Mounted; Concealable; Modern; Handy; Melee (Light) This is your standard-issue pistol - revolver, semiautomatic, 9mm, .45, etc etc etc, the differences don't really register at Exalted's level of granularity.
Heavy Pistol: Medium Archery Weapon. Tags: Lethal; Archery (Short); One-Handed; Mounted; Concealable; Modern; Recoil; Handy; Melee (Light) This is for your monstrous hand cannons. The usual Compensator-type guns, Desert Eagle, etc etc etc.
Machine Pistol: Light Archery Weapon. Tags: Lethal; Archery (Short); One-Handed; Mounted; Concealable; Modern; Automatic; Recoil; Handy; Melee (Light) This is for a lot of the smaller SMGs out there, and the various 'actually autofire' pistols (M-93R; C-96 Schnellfeuer, etc). For most people they're probably going to be autofiring these two-handed, but if you crank your strength you can one-hand it. You can, I can't. The earliest of these hasn't been invented yet for our game.
Rifles
Rifle: Medium Archery Weapon. Tags: Lethal; Archery (Medium); Modern; Melee (Medium) Here's where the classic WWI/WWII rifles live, before autofire caught on.
Sniper Rifle: Medium Archery Weapon. Tags: Lethal; Archery (Long); Modern This probably needs no introduction.
Anti-Tank Rifle: Heavy Archery Weapon. Tags: Lethal; Archery (Long); Modern; Recoil PTRD, PTRS, and all the modern-day anti-materiel rifles.
Assault Rifle: Light Archery Weapon. Tags: Lethal; Archery (Medium); Modern; Automatic; Melee (Medium) We're still in 1921 so we don't get any of these. Life is torment.
Machine Rifle: Medium Archery Weapon. Tags: Lethal; Archery (Medium); Modern; Automatic; Recoil; Melee (Medium) This is for light machine guns, SAWs, and the like. To be entirely honest the Browning Automatic Rifle and the Bren covered like 3/4 of my mental imagery here.
Heavy Weapons
Heavy Machine Gun: Heavy Archery Weapon. Tags: Lethal; Archery (Medium); Modern; Automatic; Brace This is for the machine guns that absolutely need to be rested on the ground - M2, various stationary machine guns, etc.
Infantry Mortar: Light Archery Weapon. Tags: Lethal; Archery (Long); Blast; Modern; Brace; Slow This is basically a man-portable artillery piece. It also has indirect fire, but tags of 'bypass cover' and the like are a bit too crude to really handle this. Instead I'd advise using the common-sense limitations mentioned in the cover section - recalculate the cover depending on the angle of attack. So a six-foot wall provides total cover against guns but no cover against a mortar or grenade, whereas a roof provides total cover against a mortar and none against guns.
Grenade: Light Thrown Weapon. Tags: Lethal; Thrown (Short); Blast; Modern Short-range explosive firepower - practically speaking modern ranged-focus characters probably aren't going to have Thrown too since it's split (saving debates on whether or not it should be, for now), so they'll mostly be using it for the blast radius.
Bazooka: Heavy Archery Weapon. Tags: Lethal; Archery (Medium); Heavy Piercing; Modern; Slow-Decisive This would optimally cover most early rocket launchers and the like, from the Panzerschrek to early RPGs. Here's where the anti-modern-tank weapons come in - early tanks would be lightly-equipped enough that the anti-tank rifle can work against them, but as WWII wears on you'd start needing Heavy Piercing weapons. We don't have these, unfortunately.
Panzerfaust: Heavy Archery Weapon. Tags: Lethal; Archery (Short); Heavy Piercing; Modern; One-Handed; Slow-Decisive It's fairly minor but it was evocative enough to stat it up.
Flamethrower: Firewand stats suffice. It's not exact, but it's close enough, and I didn't really want to bother reinventing the wheel.
This manse, an intricately carved black jade statue of a giant turtle, lies on the isle of Meshaguga in the far South West. It lies within trackless salt-marshes, and the only people that know of existence are the fisher-tribes who eke an existence off this sour landscape, fishing and trapping birds. They know to be scared of this place, for strange spectres appear before people who approach it. A boy must place his hand upon the head to become a man, and it is said that sometimes it bites. Certainly the water moves strangely around it, flowing in circles or spirals - and sometimes fresh.
It was not always this way. In times gone by Meshaguga was a site of great beauty, before the chaos-storms of the fae twisted its landscape like clay. The manse was built in accordance with the stunning natural vistas. A single piece of black jade from the furthest West was carried here by a mighty sorcerer, who laboured day and night to carve it down to its current form. From its mouth came blessed waters, and the island flourished.
Ah, in such times strangers from across Creation would come to the island to meditate upon its white sands and imbibe of the naturally healing properties of the water of its rivers. The turtles lay their eggs on the sands and sometimes they would hatch changed by the power.
But now Meshaguga is forgotten and the jade turtle statue stands on its plinth within the marshes. No more turtles come to this place. An earth elemental born of sun-dried salt claims this manse - and the entire island. She has polluted the dragon lines so what was once a pure water manse now carries the same salty taint. She crawls through the mires in the form of a great eight-legged alligator the size of a river dragon. The marshes grow sicker and sicker. The tribes are dying as the land gets sourer and sourer, and the fish stop coming here. From a distance, the centre mountains of Meshaguga look like they are covered in snow, for the elemental loves to bask there - and sheds her skin during the height of summer.
The final tragedy of Meshaguga is that the salt that is killing their land is worth a fortune. Should the Realm find this place, it will most likely subjugate it - and the Throne might conspire to have a mighty brotherhood of sorcerers devise a way to enslave the elemental. But this will fix nothing. Even if someone were to drive off or kill the elemental, the lost beauty will not return and the salt will not vanish. This is an island in dire need of heroism.
@Pale Wolf I may mine this for ideas. I'm also looking into how to do firearms for Exalted, although targeting a more "20 years into the future" aesthetic. My thoughts were:
Kill Thrown / Brawl / Martial Arts, the combat abilities are just Firearms and Melee. Fold Resistance into Survival.
Kill Dodge: instead, your Firearms rating is used to determine your Cover defense (implicitly, rather than explicitly taking cover your character is assumed to be constantly doing so, and Firearms includes not just pure marksmanship but also the associated skills police or soldiers would learn).
To clarify the above: the Evasion defense is gone and replaced with a new defense stat called "Cover". The "Take Cover" action is removed (mechanically, the idea is now represented by the Full Defense action). Explicitly narrated cover is represented by stunt bonuses, and prepared defenses like a trench can grant up to a +1 equipment bonus.
Ranged weapons automatically act as if they had the Crossbow tag (bows are not a serious weapon and would need a special tag).
Auto keyword boosts damage vs. battle groups (possibly combined with a restriction on how much damage non-Auto weapons can do to battle groups).
Melee can't parry bullets without a stunt or a charm.
Three range categories for guns with different accuracy tables (e.g. pistols use the Thrown table, rifles use the Archery table, snipers use the table -3 -1 3 4 2).
Area keyword: corresponds to your Blast keyword, but I was thinking of implementing as "single attack roll applies to the defense of everyone within (Range)" with limitations on certain effects that grant benefits on hitting / missing / being missed. Not sure how to balance this, though.
Piercing: on ranged weapons the tag no longer confers the usual benefit, instead granting +1 Overwhelming and -4 Soak / Hardness against vehicles (without an initiative cost).
Mounted: similar to your Brace keyword, it requires a non-flurryable action to "mount" them before use.
A Melee tag pretty much equivalent to yours, for the same reasons.
I'm definitely going to use the idea "withering attacks can reflect aiming" (which may not even need a rules change, really). I may go with the "environmental hazard" implementation of area attacks instead of what I have now. I may also steal your Slow-Decisive tag.
Modern: Modern weapons do not add Strength to the wielders' damage roll. Instead, add +4 to the weapon's damage to calculate the raw damage of Withering attacks with a weapon that has the Modern tag. This is literally just the Crossbow tag refluffed because it felt weird tagging grenades with 'Crossbow'.
Hm. I think there's a better answer than this or a flat +4, and which neatly solves the Dexterity problem without forcing you to swap to Kerisgame attributes.
For attacks that would normally add Strength to damage, calculate your attack pool as (Strength + Dexterity, maximum 5) + Ability + Accuracy and your damage pool as Damage + (Strength + Dexterity - 5, minimum 0). For attacks with the Crossbow or Flame tag (or for firearms) use the formula with Perception instead of Strength.
Although this makes Strength 5 Dexterity 3 mechanically equivalent to Strength 3 Dexterity 5, that's better than having one of them be inferior to the other.
Hm. I think there's a better answer than this or a flat +4, and which neatly solves the Dexterity problem without forcing you to swap to Kerisgame attributes.
For attacks that would normally add Strength to damage, calculate your attack pool as (Strength + Dexterity, maximum 5) + Ability + Accuracy and your damage pool as Damage + (Strength + Dexterity - 5, minimum 0). For attacks with the Crossbow or Flame tag (or for firearms) use the formula with Perception instead of Strength.
Although this makes Strength 5 Dexterity 3 mechanically equivalent to Strength 3 Dexterity 5, that's better than having one of them be inferior to the other.
@Pale Wolf I may mine this for ideas. I'm also looking into how to do firearms for Exalted, although targeting a more "20 years into the future" aesthetic. My thoughts were:
Kill Thrown / Brawl / Martial Arts, the combat abilities are just Firearms and Melee. Fold Resistance into Survival.
Kill Dodge: instead, your Firearms rating is used to determine your Cover defense (implicitly, rather than explicitly taking cover your character is assumed to be constantly doing so, and Firearms includes not just pure marksmanship but also the associated skills police or soldiers would learn).
To clarify the above: the Evasion defense is gone and replaced with a new defense stat called "Cover". The "Take Cover" action is removed (mechanically, the idea is now represented by the Full Defense action). Explicitly narrated cover is represented by stunt bonuses, and prepared defenses like a trench can grant up to a +1 equipment bonus.
Ranged weapons automatically act as if they had the Crossbow tag (bows are not a serious weapon and would need a special tag).
Auto keyword boosts damage vs. battle groups (possibly combined with a restriction on how much damage non-Auto weapons can do to battle groups).
Melee can't parry bullets without a stunt or a charm.
Three range categories for guns with different accuracy tables (e.g. pistols use the Thrown table, rifles use the Archery table, snipers use the table -3 -1 3 4 2).
Area keyword: corresponds to your Blast keyword, but I was thinking of implementing as "single attack roll applies to the defense of everyone within (Range)" with limitations on certain effects that grant benefits on hitting / missing / being missed. Not sure how to balance this, though.
Piercing: on ranged weapons the tag no longer confers the usual benefit, instead granting +1 Overwhelming and -4 Soak / Hardness against vehicles (without an initiative cost).
Mounted: similar to your Brace keyword, it requires a non-flurryable action to "mount" them before use.
A Melee tag pretty much equivalent to yours, for the same reasons.
I'm definitely going to use the idea "withering attacks can reflect aiming" (which may not even need a rules change, really). I may go with the "environmental hazard" implementation of area attacks instead of what I have now. I may also steal your Slow-Decisive tag.
#1 is pretty much in line with my own personal preferences, but since I'm not GM in this game, I'm somewhat more constrained with how I brew.
I'd like to go into this in greater depth but I head out the door in fifteen minutes so I'll come back later.
#2/#3/#6 is a pretty significant change - you're going for a more realism-oriented tone? I'm of the view that one can fluff Evasion-based actions as 'I took cover' rather than 'I twirled between the bullets', but putting it as a specific hardcoding is viable.
This will cause some balance tweaking to happen though - if you kill Dodge you have no defensive charms anymore, you can write more under Firearms or fold some of the Dodge ones in.
#5, I'm not sure you'd really need any such restriction. Presumably 'single' shot weapons fired into battle groups are actually firing a lot of bullets, not just one. If you want to revamp it so area weapons are needed to effectively kill battle groups, it's viable, but that's more on the 'adjusting battle group rules' than going towards modern.
#8 is nonononono. That was originally what I had as Blast to be honest, but it was in no way balanced. Compare it to charms - 'single attack roll hits everyone' is, decisive-wise, more powerful than the actual multi-attack Solar charms, which split up the initiative into a handful of attacks.
Withering could be viable but it's hard to find comparisons, most multiattack charms are Decisive-based (and no matter what you need to make sure withering area attacks only damage the init of most of the people targeted and don't give it back to the attacker, if one grenade reaps init damage from five guys at once and pours all that init into the grenadier things break horrifically.
#10 is pretty viable (it's definitely inclined towards a much more Firearm focus with higher granularity between guns and types, I aimed more for the least disruptive conversion I could), and your #9 is interesting.
That's pretty viable too, I basically borrowed the preexisting 'Strength doesn't matter' ranged weapon tags for this. (Since otherwise unless you're high-Perception crossbows do more damage than guns. It would be a pretty viable solution for that general class of weapon if we were building from the ground up though)
