I agree with this. The Lunars, unified to any extent, should have been a major force in the world.
However, when you work backwards from there, reasoning 'therefore they aren't unified,' you lose me.
Because the Wyld Hunt exists. The Dragonbloods chase them down and kill them, all the way to the ends of Creation. (That's why it's called the Wyld Hunt, right?)
Maybe they look up to the dragonbloods before they exalt, as
@Aleph argued for some reason, but they'd better learn to stop doing that real fucking fast or else they'll be killed and replaced with someone who can. The Realm considers it their literal, actual religion that all Lunars must be killed on sight, eternally. That goes for most of the threshold, by the way, not just Realm dragonblooded. Maybe two Lunars in neighboring kingdoms consider each other rivals, but oops, here comes the fucking Wyld Hunt, whose entire job is to chase them across the world and kill them!
This feels like you're looking at Russia in 1941 and wondered why they might unify to fight Germany. Sure, the Germans are invading to destroy the Russians, but hey, have you looked at a map? Most of Russia is thousands of miles away from Germany!
If you say the Lunars don't have a common enemy, despite a common enemy stomping on their faces every day for 15 centuries, then you've only replaced one failure of the setting with another one.
You've only got two options here:
a) The Lunars unite but fail to impact the setting for centuries because they're complete fucking losers
b) The Lunars fail to unite for centuries despite being stomped on because they're complete fucking losers
In theory, you have other options: Put most Lunars in the Jade Prison, make them more explicitly weak and shitty, or just get rid of them. That would require actually changing the backstory from 1e, though.
PS: The Lunars haven't even secured the Caul. The Realm maintains a military presence there.
Well yeah.
This is a revisioning, entirely. I have them take enough territory to be quite comfortably secure (I used 'the Caul' but it's a placeholder, it could well be an America-sized continent in the West, or a gigantic island of Creation in the Wyld - I'm actually favouring this at the moment, Lunar Avalon ties well into fae lore, and a few other reasons it'd get ridiculous to lay out in parentheses) - the Realm can come and die if it so pleases - and beyond that point they don't agree on much, so you've got like a single Lunar working on breaking Realm control of his homeland but the rest have other interests.
This ain't the 3e envisioning, because the 3e envisioning is precisely what people have issues with.
I have them as having
fully accomplished the goal of basic security and survival, because with three hundred Lunars who can agree on that, it's bloody well going to get accomplished damn quick. They
aren't getting stomped on. It's just that once they secured 'not getting stomped on', the primary focus they could agree on was over, and certainly there are people who want to push straight to the Blessed Isle but they don't
need to unify offensively, only defensively.
The goals they can agree on, they've won already - a fairly basic goal like 'not get hunted down and repeatedly stomped on when the forces of Heaven are 50-50 for and against us at worst' is pretty trivial for a full Exalted host. It's done, they were secure as of at worst a couple centuries into the Realm. They've beaten back as many invasions of their secure holdings as have come, and while they're always going to keep a lookout defensively, annihilation of the Realm just isn't an immediate concern.
I mean sure it kills newly-Exalted Lunars if it can find them outside of Lunar-controlled regions, but wtf do they care? It's not them, it's those other guys. Hell, this even benefits them - a few established Lunars probably do pretty brisk business finding and saving newbies and getting favours and debts to call in. No way those rookies would be so grateful without Realm murder bearing down on them.
I don't reason that Lunars aren't unified as a logical consequence of 'the setting would be different in these ways if they were'. It's purely Doylist - the
effect of the Lunars being fully unified in a grand crusade against the Realm creates effects on the setting that we don't want, if we're authors of the setting. (In this shard. Lunar/Realm Cold War is a totally viable shard, it just drowns out other conflicts so much it can't be the primary) It's not that I've reasoned that the Lunars aren't unified - I've reasoned that they
mustn't be unified, because then either they're chumps who somehow can't break bloody even with half of Heaven on their side until the Empress disappears, or they recast the entire setting in the silver light reflected off their pecs as their titanic conflict against the Realm becomes the biggest thing to ever big.
The effects of the Lunars being ununified and getting their asses beaten on the regular also creates effects on the setting that we don't want, I failed to specify that it wasn't the idea because I didn't even consider that we weren't past that by now. But 'getting their asses beaten repeatedly' is
optional, and it's an option I don't care to exercise.
In the post I linked, I outlined a take I felt resolved at least
some of the issues. If you don't particularly like it, that works, I literally thought it up yesterday and there are other solutions getting tossed (like putting the Lunars in the Jade Prison too, or the ones Jon Chung, Revlid, and EarthScorpion are bandying about), but it does manage to tread the ground between 'fail to impact the setting for centuries, getting stomped on all the time' and 'impact the setting so seriously that they take it over entirely'.
Lunars are in a pretty similar situation to established Solars - after seven hundred years post-Contagion, they're gonna be established by now. Established Solars don't worry about the Wyld Hunt - they worry about full deployment of the legions. And a full host of hundreds of established Solars don't worry too much about that, either. Not like it's not a
concern, but it's one within their power to handle.
The Lunars fought the battle against getting Wyld Hunted on the regular, and they won it. Completely. They were the plucky resistance in the Shogunate era, but now they're all shiny and established. Their central dominion isn't forever immune to attack but it's handily fended off every attack that has come to it, and any attack that could threaten it, they're gonna see coming for a decade in advance. With their lives secure they don't need to fixate singlemindedly on annihilating the Realm. So they don't, they focus on things
they want to do. A lot of these are going to be against Realm assets somewhere or other (they're pretty much always spying on the Realm and there are enough dedicated revanchists that direct attacks and sabotage are always under way somehow or other, and any Lunar who wants to uplift his people from imperialist domination is probably fucking over the Realm some way or other, they are fomenting so many revolutions the US and Soviet Union might get a little jealous), but it's not a focused effort, and because by and large they're
not in danger, they don't really need to make a focused effort.
They can contest the Realm wherever there's a Lunar sufficiently interested, but mostly those are personal goals, rather than a focused effort at breaking Realm hegemony over Creation as a whole. So the tribes and kingdoms set free from the Empire are determined by 'is a Lunar coming from that region and interested in it personally?' rather than for maximum geopolitical impact.
They don't have a common enemy because
they've won that battle.
In
practice, this is pretty Cold War-like itself (I've totally referred to it as the Lunar Soviet Union in my head) - but by keeping Lunar efforts unfocused and individualistic, they can be a viable presence to pop up anywhere as allies and enemies of a manageable, Second Age scale (like just one Lunar and his Dominion), without bringing in the titan-killing force of all of them together.
Unless you work at it and forge an agreement between them all, a new Silver Pact. It's totally PC territory to accomplish such a thing, if the game leads that way (whether you're Lunar yourself or other), but that level of concentrated power should be something you have to
work at creating, trading a hundred favours and a thousand promises and some
extraordinarily honeyed words, not something that's already active in-setting or an implicit, automatic assumption.
