General Exalted Thread

[uju32]

Why does it need to be a thing at all?

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Why not?

Like this is Exalted, not Fading Suns. The technology of the Second Empire doesn't need to be understood by the Guild's engineers.

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You happen to be arguing against a position no one seems to have taken.

On the lost technology scale I think Exalted works better when there's hints of that former prowess rather than "you can build and interact with First Age things" especially when that means you need to fit "a big sword" and "tactical nuclear weapons" on the same 1-5 point scale.

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*shrug*
You are entitled to your opinion.
I happen to think Exalted works best with a spectrum of technologies available, from the solid-state practicality of a daiklave to someone's design for a Unison Device.
Whether it works for your game is a different question.

The Solars of the first age had millenia of peace and a well-designed infrastructure behind them when they made the meanest crafts of their age.
You don't.

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The Solars of the First Age also had to build and research most everything from scratch.
You don't.

 

[Revlid]

I never liked that bit. What does it even mean, to say that your essence pool contains a nuke's worth of energy?

Are we supposed to use that to calculate a mote-to-joule ratio? Why would anyone want one of those?

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I read it as a general expression of the kind of power a Solar can be expected to wield, and the violent impact they will have on world affairs. Each one is a Person Of Mass Destruction, comparable to an atom bomb in any arena.

Of course, your mote pool can also fuel a Total Annihilation, so there's a more direct meaning.

The Solars of the First Age also had to build and research most everything from scratch.
You don't.

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You kind of do, though.

You're not living in the First Age. You haven't been for thousands and thousands of years. The Jadefolk and Dragon Kings aren't around to crib notes from any more, and Autochthon and the various tutor gods are either dead, vanished or disinterested. Sure, there are some scattered documents or bits of wisdom that survive from the First Age, but these are garbled, fragmented, and mostly under the control, theoretical or otherwise, of the setting's various power players.

Besides which, most of these documents are not going to be useful explanations of how to repair a circuit board. Even setting aside the fact that most ancient documents which survived thousands of years are things like tax returns or plays or praises to various rulers, we do not write today's technical manuals with an eye to a Bronze Age audience with access to a blacksmith's forge and a mortar and pestle. Nor do we build things that could be repaired or replicated by such a group, no matter how relatively skilled.

If you give an ancient Greek Solar the full blueprints for a modern attack helicopter, and they successfully translate it, they will still need to work out how to drill for oil and process it into fuel and plastic, how to create the various alloys in use throughout the machine, where to find and how to handle the plants they need for rubber, and so on.

If they somehow manage that, they will need to use their ridiculous superhuman Craft Charms to personally etch out and machine-level forge and assemble every single piece of that machine, to a level of precision that mortals or non-invested Exalts cannot match. Then they have a single attack helicopter that they need to personally make fuel (never mind ammunition) for, and they still don't understand the laws of aerodynamics that allow it to fly. Oh, and it'll go down to the first Archery combo to look their way.

What's more likely is that they discover the broken husk of a modern attack helicopter and take apart its propeller-blades to make into awesome new daiklaves for their party. Or they see an image of aforesaid helicopter and feel a surge of past life memories, which inspire them to create Jade-Empire-style rotorcraft of light bamboo and wind-blessed bone cages that bind air elementals to lift them.

 

[Jon Chung]

Sure, Lunars. Did he ever regret removing crossbows, or making the Guild, or the Empress?

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Not that I'm aware of, but this isn't particularly indicative of anything. After Lunars he basically dropped off the internet.

Which means that either the Default Exalted Campaign needs to last that long, or this is a mischaracterisation of what PCs should be able to achieve.

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Accomplish a) well enough that you can assume b), timeskip over the millenium of work, end.

As someone who self-identifies as more technically-minded, I of course don't like this idea. But as far as I remember, WW was always more on the 'natural language' side of things, and its fans (the majority of those I encountered, anyway) liked it that way and were opposed to attempts/requests for a rewording.

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And Exalted fans in particular are not a perfect overlap with the World of Darkness fans, because Exalted 1 pulled in people that were not previously White Wolf fans, and those people pulled in more, etc. Why are you assuming this is not the case?

Speaking of the elevator pitch, I was intrigued by the idea that the Second Age was a greater age than modernity, that what we achieve today is but a faint shadow of even the lessened Age of Sorrows, that the magics of the Technocracy are small time stuff compared to that which was during the Exalted gameline, which is in turn small time compared to the First Age. (The need for infrastructure is actually one example of such lessening; it's the difference between the mythic master craftsman who needs no tools and the modern assembly-line operator.)

But in some ways, for me, Exalted failed to deliver that aspect of their elevator pitch, as much of the world still felt like typically low-tech fantasy. Sure, from a First Age PoV, the Age of Sorrows is supposed to be the shit ages, but I still don't quite feel that compared to the Age of Sorrow modernity is set in the shit ages, and that's a disappointment and undelivery.

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Where in the world did you get this idea? The vast majority of people in the Second Age are living in tents and mud huts to wooden cabins. How the hell is any setting in which you actually need to worry about dying of cholera, where things like 'running water' and 'sewer systems' are mythological to the average peasant, going to make modern technological civilization look like shit? Whoever gave you this impression did you a major disservice.

 

[Broken25]

If you give an ancient Greek Solar the full blueprints for a modern attack helicopter, and they successfully translate it, they will still need to work out how to drill for oil and process it into fuel and plastic, how to create the various alloys in use throughout the machine, where to find and how to handle the plants they need for rubber, and so on.

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Eh, that's hardly a millenia of work. You can get from steam to nuclear power in a couple of centuries; With some effort, maybe in just one.

 

[Shyft]

@vicky_molokh - Gotta jump in here, and if this is covering detail you already knew, my bad.

Okay- in 2nd age Creation, 99% of the mortal population are rural farmers or otherwise not living in anything resembling a modern city- or even an ancient city. These are not stupid people- there is no world-wide force demanding they all be of sub-optimal capability. Instead they are uneducated.

So, if you pick a random spot in the East, you're likely going to find a lot of forests, hills, rivers, small mountains, lakes, etc. To say nothing of demesnes, old ruins, and so on. But you're also going to find farms, orchards, and small hamlets and villages that don't have names or even show up on tax forms.

If you've watched Princess Mononoke, places like Iron Town are rare exceptions.

Anyway- so the 'standard' of Creation is, in relative terms, farming or other 'work/live off the land' jobs. You have hunters who scare up game for local larders- it's all very rustic. Otoyomogatari is a pretty good description of how a more 'upscale' or 'rich' village or town might behave. Note that they spend a lot of time hunting for food and raising livestock, between other more luxury/cultural feats like carving, weaving, etc. Most of the food preparation science is all based on how to make it last and not go bad.

The average mortal is a guy or gal in whatever clothes they can trade, earn or be gifted. They're not destitute, but they are by no means wealthy or anything affluent. Mortals work for their meals.

Now, next thing- the cities in Creation are better described as city-states. As in, you walk outside the walls/city limits, and you generally either are in territory that is under the city's authority like outlying farmland... or it's just plain 'who has it owns it'.

Fun fact: Cities in creation are not guaranteed to have modern conveniences either- the cities on the Blessed Isle might, but I guarantee you the further out in the Threshold you get, there is a Dynast who has to use an outhouse.

 

[vicky_molokh]

Not that I'm aware of, but this isn't particularly indicative of anything. After Lunars he basically dropped off the internet.

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I thought Lunars came out after the corebook, not before. Shrug.

And Exalted fans in particular are not a perfect overlap with the World of Darkness fans, because Exalted 1 pulled in people that were not previously White Wolf fans, and those people pulled in more, etc. Why are you assuming this is not the case?

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Judging by the fact that Holden & the Ink Monkeys had and still have a strong following, I think 'imperfect overlap' is a bit of a simplification. It always seemed to me that different people were attracted to different things in this game line, as evidenced by the strong disagreements between MSVETO, the fans of what is sometimes called 'the RpgNet version of Exalted', and others (in fact, I think we've been over this). But - and I may be wrong! - I'm getting the impression that you and perhaps some other SVETOs see the new author's choice to pick the more WWish group of fans as their target audience to be a 'bad idea' as opposed to merely an idea for which you/they aren't the target audience.

Where in the world did you get this idea? The vast majority of people in the Second Age are living in tents and mud huts to wooden cabins. How the hell is any setting in which you actually need to worry about dying of cholera, where things like 'running water' and 'sewer systems' are mythological to the average peasant, going to make modern technological civilization look like shit? Whoever gave you this impression did you a major disservice.

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From elevator pitch. Which is, BTW, @Shyft, why I see the dark agey elements of the setting to be clashing with the image that is presented on the cover (and in the 1e intro):

Do not believe what the scientists tell you. The
natural history we know is a lie, a falsehood sold to us by
wicked old men who would make the world a dull gray
prison and protect us from the dangers inherent to free-
dom. They would have you believe our planet to be a
lonely starship, hurtling through the void of space, barren
of magic and in need of a stern hand upon the rudder.
Close your eyes to their deception. The time before
our time was not a time of senseless natural struggle and
reptilian rage, but a time of myth and sorcery. It was a time
of legend, when heroes walked Creation and wielded the
very power of the gods. It was a time before the world was
bent, a time before the magic of Creation lessened, a time
before the souls of men became the stunted, withered
things they are today.

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The elevator pitch strongly implies that our vision of the past as a dark age is false, and that it is modernity that is the dull gray prison, while the previous age was much brighter and freer. That the 'senseless natural struggle' (which so aptly describes subsistence farming and the fights against cholera) are a lie. That the people of the old era were greater than we are, not the 'withered and stunted' things that we are. It's actually kinda annoying that perhaps half of the game line is an exercise in bait-and-switch after such a pitch.

 

[uju32]

You kind of do, though.
*SNIP*

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The tutor gods are inactive, but you do have the resources to cut deals with them.
Some gods are actively interested in cutting deals or revitalizing long-neglected portfolios, especially in the throngs of out of work gods.
There remain caches of surviving information and technology like Denandsor and Shakanzer; Cache Eggs are also a thing.
The returning Exalts themselves benefit from things like Past Lives, the Jadeborn deploy gunzosha equivalents in the field, and maintain carefully hoarded libraries and factory-cathedrals. Dragon Kings remember previous lives with clarity if you can enlighten them.

You have Charmtech and sorcery.

I understand that it might offend some people's sense of aesthetics?
But what I like about Exalted is precisely the fact that you can go from daiklave and breastplate to power armor and Essence laser if you so choose; it's one of the things that drew me to 2nd Edition, despite it's well known mechanical problems.
That there is a place for giant robots as well as the spear in the same setting.

Wouldn't bother otherwise.

 

[Jon Chung]

Judging by the fact that Holden & the Ink Monkeys had and still have a strong following, I think 'imperfect overlap' is a bit of a simplification. It always seemed to me that different people were attracted to different things in this game line, as evidenced by the strong disagreements between MSVETO, the fans of what is sometimes called 'the RpgNet version of Exalted', and others (in fact, I think we've been over this). But - and I may be wrong! - I'm getting the impression that you and perhaps some other SVETOs see the new author's choice to pick the more WWish group of fans as their target audience to be a 'bad idea' as opposed to merely an idea for which you/they aren't the target audience.

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When you make a game called Exalted 3, the general expectation is that you cater to the Exalted fanbase, not the oWoD one, yes.

From elevator pitch. Which is, BTW, @Shyft, why I see the dark agey elements of the setting to be clashing with the image that is presented on the cover (and in the 1e intro):

The elevator pitch strongly implies that our vision of the past as a dark age is false, and that it is modernity that is the dull gray prison, while the previous age was much brighter and freer. That the 'senseless natural struggle' (which so aptly describes subsistence farming and the fights against cholera) are a lie. That the people of the old era were greater than we are, not the 'withered and stunted' things that we are. It's actually kinda annoying that perhaps half of the game line is an exercise in bait-and-switch after such a pitch.

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Ha ha ha. Amusingly, that back cover blurb has been considered to be misleading and inaccurate since the 1E corebook came out, mainly since it implies a much tighter oWoD connection than the line actually has.

 

[vicky_molokh]

When you make a game called Exalted 3, the general expectation is that you cater to the Exalted fanbase, not the oWoD one, yes.

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Yeah, but apparently the Exalted fanbase is not monolithic, and there are different subgroups who like different aspects of the game line (and IIRC you agreed that this is indeed so, but maybe I'm misremembering). At which point, Ex3e is aimed at the Exalted fanbase, but at a different part of it than MSVETO.

Ha ha ha. Amusingly, that back cover blurb has been considered to be misleading and inaccurate since the 1E corebook came out, mainly since it implies a much tighter oWoD connection than the line actually has.

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Well, the subtle connection got damaged more and more as years went by. But even without the direct WoD connection, even if we assume that it talks about real-world modernity, it still promises the buyers to get a more optimistic setting in the short term (even if it's doomed to decline in the long term). And the promises in this pitch are one of the big things that attracted me to Exalted in the first place (the other being the pitch in the intro chapter of 2e, about what sets Exalted apart from other RPGs).

 

[EarthScorpion]

Well, the subtle connection got damaged more and more as years went by. But even without the direct WoD connection, even if we assume that it talks about real-world modernity, it still promises the buyers to get a more optimistic setting in the short term (even if it's doomed to decline in the long term).

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I'm sorry, but no, that's not what it says at all. I understand that English isn't your first language, but you're entirely missing the associations and the like that that blurb is designed to produce.

"Do not believe what the scientists tell you. The
natural history we know is a lie, a falsehood sold to us by
wicked old men who would make the world a dull gray
prison and protect us from the dangers inherent to free-
dom. They would have you believe our planet to be a
lonely starship, hurtling through the void of space, barren
of magic and in need of a stern hand upon the rudder."

This element is there to say "Your science is wrong!". It's also there to contrast to how things were - and notice how it talks about how the modern world is a "dull grey prison" designed to "protect us from the dangers inherent to freedom". It doesn't even try to counter the idea that the modern world is safer than the prehistory that these scientists are trying to conceal.

"The time before
our time was not a time of senseless natural struggle and
reptilian rage, but a time of myth and sorcery."

yo dawg it wasn't just dinosaurs there was myths and sorcery, like swords-and-sorcery games.

Nothing about optimism there, incidentally. Have you read myths?

"It was a time
of legend, when heroes walked Creation and wielded the
very power of the gods."

We're evoking mythology, just like we said last sentence.

Once again, it's saying that heroes are around and they're god-like in power. It isn't, no matter how you assert things, explicitly saying anything about 'optimism' - and incidentally, given what it's being contrasted in the modern world, this implies this world is less safe than our own one.

"It was a time before the world was
bent,"

The world was flat back then.

"a time before the magic of Creation lessened,"

There's magic in this setting, and it's fairly commonplace.

"a time
before the souls of men became the stunted, withered
things they are today."

Oh look, some standard Conan-esque spiel. Blah blah blah this is literally straight out of the Conan playbook.

Seriously, this entire spiel is designed to evoke Conan and it's stuff. Like:

Know, O prince, that between the years when the oceans drank Atlantis and the gleaming cities, and the years of the rise of the Sons of Aryas, there was an Age undreamed of, when shining kingdoms lay spread across the world like blue mantles beneath the stars - Nemedia, Ophir, Brythunia, Hyperborea, Zamora with its dark-haired women and towers of spider-haunted mystery, Zingara with its chivalry, Koth that bordered on the pastoral lands of Shem, Stygia with its shadow-guarded tombs, Hyrkania whose riders wore steel and silk and gold. But the proudest kingdom of the world was Aquilonia, reigning supreme in the dreaming west.

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"Civilized men laugh," said Conan. "But not one can tell me how Zogar Sag can call pythons and tigers and leopards out of the wilderness and make them do his bidding. They would say it is a lie, if they dared. That's the way with civilized men. When they can't explain something by their half-baked science, they refuse to believe it."

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So, really, no:
a) Stop complaining that a widely discredited pair of paragraphs don't hold true.
b) The paragraphs don't actually say what you claim they're saying - they're actually just markers indicating "this is like Conan" and they're certainly not promising a "more optimistic" thing.

 

[Revlid]

Eh, that's hardly a millenia of work. You can get from steam to nuclear power in a couple of centuries; With some effort, maybe in just one.

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If you have the infrastructure for it, yeah! If you have a whole planet of educated people and trained labourers and innovative engineers and cheap workers and motivated governments collaborating and competing and stealing ideas and resources, then sure you can go from the first steam engines to the first nuclear power stations in about 400 years. Creation doesn't have that, and a Solar blacksmith-hermit living in an ore-rich cave is no substitute.

A typical person in Creation might regard an abacus as fancy new accounting technology. The journey from steam power to nuclear power isn't even a useful point of reference, not least because they're both the same fundamental principle – use water to convert heat energy to kinetic energy – which Creation has yet to rediscover.

You're talking about people who consider recurve bows to be scary foreign military developments – they are not going to grok laser guns. If a laser gun survives from ancient times, it will be regarded as magic, and there will be ritual requirements for its use, like keeping the sacred lens of pure crystal polished and clean, or placing its solar battery out in the sun and beseeching the Sun god to instil it with his burning wrath. A Solar with relevant past life memories might remember a time when countless Burning Solar Wands were forged in great foundries for whole armies garbed in strange armour who flew on the winds in great carrier-birds of steel and fire. That doesn't mean they can turn Bumfuck Village into a laser gun factory, because a laser gun factory requires more things – knowledge, resources, tools, labour – than they can possibly acquire in the Age of Sorrows.

that's why they call it the age of sorrows

 

[Broken25]

If you have a whole planet of educated people and trained labourers and innovative engineers and cheap workers

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Well, that depends of what you have to start with, isn't that right? And really, a enterprising Solar can find all of those with some effort. There are educated people in the blessed isle and you can get knowledge from gods and demons and caches of the first age. And you can use Solar training charms to educate your engineers quickly.

And once you have your seed of educated people and a power base, industrialization can be done stupidly quickly, as history can attest.

So sure, maybe you need 50-100 extra years of work to reach XVIII levels of development. Still hardly a work of millenia.

 

[pheonix89]

Ignoring infrastructure and not making tools to make tools is out of theme for Solars anyway. Tool use is kind of humanity's thing, you know? And the Solar Exaltation takes skills and strengths we have up to eleven.

What they should get to do is skip a substantial number of tools to make tools and technological prerequisite by conceptual just-that-good-ness. A solar making a top-of-the-line steel blade without a forge setup that would let people without Craft charms make decent steel? Totally plausible. Making a jade daiklave with that forge? Pull the other one.

Which also helps explain the technological collapse and failure to redevelop because the initial run up the tech tree skipped a bunch of steps and so half the tech to get up to whatever level mortals alone or mortals + DB's can reach never was actually invented, and with all the salvaging and attempted reverse-engineering there's less effort in finding and filling in those missing slots. Oh, it's happening, but it's not like people could find the information in a library because large chunks never existed.

 

[Revlid]

Well, that depends of what you have to start with, isn't that right? And really, a enterprising Solar can find all of those with some effort.

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No, he can't, because a Bronze Age smith's idea of skill is very different from a Renaissance-era clockmaker, and in turn very different from a modern engineer. If a Solar puts together the most awesome foundry-city that's been seen in generations, he can produce shining blades and enchanted helms, dominate the trade of an entire Direction, produce new alloys the like of which haven't been seen in the Age of Sorrows, foster countless new artisans and inventors, and change the course of history with the weight of his craft.

What he can't do is make laser guns. You're somehow skipping over that part, the bit where we go from a Bronze Age scattered with broken relics to Leonardo da Vinci launching the Hubble Space Telescope with the help of some skilled apprentices.

There are educated people in the blessed isle

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"Oh, boy, I'm sure all these well-educated medieval monks will be super useful in creating the internet."

and you can get knowledge from gods and demons and caches of the first age.

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"Well, we managed to salvage fourteen intact data crystals from this cache of twenty thousand, jury-rig together a bit of sorcery that can translate its recordings into readable text, and then translate all the ancient language into an understandable format, even the jargon and technical terms! Unfortunately, they turned out to be archived tweets."

Demons won't be hugely useful, because the overwhelming majority of First Circles won't remember the First Age or have any interest in human science. You're asking for a Second Circle Demon who is hyperfocused on recording specific technical information from the human First Age, in a format that would be useful to a caveman. For some reason. What you're actually going to get is a Second Circle Demon who makes weird dioramas of the First Age from an inhuman perspective, or has secret occult knowledge that you can maybe leverage into something usable, or who keeps the living brain of a Solar savant in a jar somewhere and wouldn't trade it for anything.

As for the gods, note that those gods who actually gave a shit about advanced First Age technology are mostly starved and mad, if they're not outright dead, because their purviews were wiped out. The others will have moved on and mostly forgotten about it – if the god of Solar Panels managed to get a dead man's shoes sideways promotion to being god of Sun Dials in this Age of Sorrows, he's not going to retain a huge amount of knowledge or interest as regards recreating all the infrastructure that could create and benefit from Solar Panels.

 

[Broken25]

"Oh, boy, I'm sure all these well-educated medieval monks will be super useful in creating the internet."

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But you don't want to create internet! You want to start the industrial revolution. And for that you want to alfabetize all the people you want, educate a core of elite people to lead the process, multiply agricultural output to free workers... Honestly is more a economic problem than a technological one.

And all of that are perfectly possible for a Solar. You have more than enough time.

And once you have done that, you basically just have to wait, and sooner or later laser guns will start appearing in their own.

Demons won't be hugely useful, because the overwhelming majority of First Circles won't remember the First Age or have any interest in human science. You're asking for a Second Circle Demon who is hyperfocused on recording specific technical information from the human First Age, in a format that would be useful to a caveman

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No, i want a Second circle with metalurgic knowledge that i can adapt to quickstart industry to XVIII tech.

 

[Nonagon]

What are those merits?

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The combat system, due to its mechanics, produces the following beneficial effects:

1) Different characters feel different from one another. Melee is not Brawl is not Dodge is not Resistance is not Archery is not Thrown is not Stealth. A Single Point Stylist feels qualitatively different in play from a Brawl specialist, providing character options that are all viable and can meaningfully contribute to combat, but also matter and change how the game plays on a very basic level.

2) The number of broken combos is pretty much limited to a single one - Increasing Strength Exercise and Iron Whirlwind Attack produce some, err, interesting effects when comboed. Other than that, there's basically nothing that breaks the combat engine or is clearly the best strategy of all time, despite the game having about nine million Charms.

3) Despite there being few truly broken Charms in the game, they feel powerful. Going up against some badass monster and just rolling sixty dice on a single damage roll as a Single Point stylist feels strong. So does making five different attacks in rapid succession as a Melee character, or building up ludicrous amounts of initiative via Stalking Wolf Attitude before gibbing somebody despite otherwise being a weak combat character, or just shrugging off a serious attack with a Resistance Charm. Looking through the Charm effects once you have a good grasp of the system, there are a lot that make you go, "wow, that's really cool," "fuck that's good," and "I really want that." Yet, at the same time, (almost) none of them break the combat engine! That's a pretty impressive feat!

4) Combat involves a degree of tactical, round-by-round decision making. The systems have the necessary complexity and variety to more or less ensure that no single decision is the only good one, and to change what's the best decision fairly constantly. Combat decision making involves the weighing up of a variety of different factors, which, to me, is the core of good combat engines: they force me to think about what I'm doing rather than default to doing the same thing (or sequence of things) over and over (at which point it'd be better to scrap any combat engine and just replace it with roll some dice, you win/tie/lose, done).

 

[vicky_molokh]

Ignoring infrastructure and not making tools to make tools is out of theme for Solars anyway. Tool use is kind of humanity's thing, you know? And the Solar Exaltation takes skills and strengths we have up to eleven.

What they should get to do is skip a substantial number of tools to make tools and technological prerequisite by conceptual just-that-good-ness. A solar making a top-of-the-line steel blade without a forge setup that would let people without Craft charms make decent steel? Totally plausible. Making a jade daiklave with that forge? Pull the other one.

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I must say that it seems to me that it's not out of theme, in fact it's one of the more iconic Solar Charms:

Craftsmen Needs No Tools

Craft 4, Essence 3

Ahhh, one of the most iconic Solar Charms. At Craft 4, Essence 3, this lovely effect is firmly a Miracle. You spend 7m+1wp to supplement a craft action.

This charm waives the need for tools when crafting, and removes any penalties for lackin tools. (You still might not have the right tools). By the strictest reading of the charm, you qualify as having a Basic Workshop for whatever craft you happen to be using. Basically if a job needs a hammer, you can push nails with your fingers. If you need chisels for shaping rock, your fingernails will do. You want to cook eggs? Your palms are now skillets.

Secondly, like Crack-Mending Technique, this charm lets you accomplish [Essence x3] hours worth of work per realtime work hour. Again I have to stress that there's no consistent ruling on how long it takes to craft an artifact in work hours, save that it's a Season, or three months.

So we have come yet again to the conclusion that Solars are all about Removing Obstacles between them and taking an action. There are THINGS that need to be made, and they don't have time to worry about having tools on-hand.

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(Quote trimmed because the rest of it is less on-topic for the above point.)

 

[Revlid]

And all of that are perfectly possible for a Solar. You have more than enough time.

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Well, no you don't, because the Realm will kick down your door and burn your budding factory line to the ground.

Ignoring infrastructure and not making tools to make tools is out of theme for Solars anyway. Tool use is kind of humanity's thing, you know? And the Solar Exaltation takes skills and strengths we have up to eleven.

What they should get to do is skip a substantial number of tools to make tools and technological prerequisite by conceptual just-that-good-ness. A solar making a top-of-the-line steel blade without a forge setup that would let people without Craft charms make decent steel? Totally plausible. Making a jade daiklave with that forge? Pull the other one.

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I must say that it seems to me that it's not out of theme, in fact it's one of the more iconic Solar Charms:

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I've always disliked those Solar Charms which invalidate tool use – whether it's Craftsman Needs No Tools or even Lock-Opening Touch or Glorious Solar Saber. I much prefer Charms that allow the Solar to improve existing tools or substitute for a lack.

Partly this is a matter of aesthetic. If I'm a wandering demigod craftsman, I want to carry my set of cool tools in my rucksack and chip away at carvings or clean drill-bits when I'm making camp, and mourn them when they're lost in a divine flash-flood. If I'm a Night Caste cat burglar, I'd actually like to have lockpicks, and reasons to make contact with the sort of people who can sell me cool thief tools. If I'm a shining sword-saint... I want a sword, y'know.

It's fine to say I'm so skilled at craft that I can beat a sword into shape with my bare hands! But that shouldn't necessarily be the optimal/default option, if only because "you don't need to lug around a big cooking pan" is a big benefit on its own, one that a character should have to seek out rather than just naturally expanding as part of becoming better at cooking. It's pretty clear that a lot of writers thought so, as well, given the steady trickle of Craft artifacts that just added successes so as to avoid being invalidated by CNNT.

If I were writing Glorious Solar Saber, for instance, I'd start with a Charm to enchant any Melee-based weapon so that it sheds sunlight and inflicts aggravated damage to creatures of darkness. Then another, separate Charm to improve the effective quality of any Melee weapon I'm wielding – this is the "ah, he's wielding a stick like a fine blade!" Charm. With an upgrade it even lets you "wield" a blade forged from your own meditative weapon-thoughts, which traces out in front of you like a crystal of hardened air. Then you just combine the two and voila – a Solar can conjure up a shining holy blade from nothingness, but if he actually has a sword to enchant it's cheaper/easier.

Similarly, Craftsman Needs No Tools could be replaced by a Charm to improve the quality of the tools you're using – so yes, you can treat your clenched fist as an improvised tool, but if you lugged along an actual tool it's even better! And a really advanced tool starts waiving its downsides and generally operating more smoothly, and so on.

 

[pheonix89]

I must say that it seems to me that it's not out of theme, in fact it's one of the more iconic Solar Charms:

(Quote trimmed because the rest of it is less on-topic for the above point.)

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Waives need for tools. Taken literally that means the charm means lets you make the Five-Metal Shrike with your bare hands. I'm about 95% certain even Autobot has need of tools to make tools at that level, even if he has a much higher start point. Exceeding what a primordial can do at the center of their focus is bad design space for Elder charms. For a low-essence common effect its Chicanery. Yes, as is in the Chicanery-No keyword.

@Revlid
Yeah, sounds about right.

 

[SinisterPorpoise]

Waives need for tools. Taken literally that means the charm means lets you make the Five-Metal Shrike with your bare hands.

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What the charm does is flashforge tools out of your own anima and then let them fade into non-existence the instant you don't need them(because keeping them around for longer is tiring as all hell).

Sure, from a First Age PoV, the Age of Sorrows is supposed to be the shit ages, but I still don't quite feel that compared to the Age of Sorrow modernity is set in the shit ages, and that's a disappointment and undelivery.

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Well, they don't have to deal with Pentex. And the Sidereals Immaculate Philosophy is actually much less controlling(read:brainwashing) than what the Technocracy does.

Are we supposed to use that to calculate a mote-to-joule ratio? Why would anyone want one of those?

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Lots of people. Maybe you haven't noticed, but look at what this site is called.

 

[MJ12 Commando]

You happen to be arguing against a position no one seems to have taken.

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Exalted's not the only setting with a Guild. The point is that Exalted's technical sophistication is entirely dependent on magic and incredibly fragile, which is why it's largely stuck in the Bronze Ages, rather than being because everyone has their secrets squirreled away. It's Numenera, not Fading Suns. As @EarthScorpion said a while ago, there's an actual place for 'high-tech' stuff in Exalted. It's the Shogunate, not the First Age, which should be basically myth by now.

*shrug*
You are entitled to your opinion.
I happen to think Exalted works best with a spectrum of technologies available, from the solid-state practicality of a daiklave to someone's design for a Unison Device.
Whether it works for your game is a different question.

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Yes, a spectrum of technologies available. And I'm saying the First Age's stuff shouldn't even be on that spectrum, it was too exotic, too powerful. By making it so that First Age technology is available, rather than First Age weapons being basically the same as bringing a M-60 and a hundred bullets into the Bronze Age-i.e. "you will kill all the people until you run out of ammunition"-you cheapen the First Age. The First Age's tools can't be impressive when they have to be something that people might be running around at in chargen-and given that this is the Bronze Age 'impressive' is a very very low bar. The Wonders of the Last Age stats for power armor were generally underwhelming and unimpressive for the reason that they had to be stuffed in the 1-5 dot range, same with warstriders.

I want the First Age to be a time of phenomenal, absurd prowess that simply isn't likely to come in the near future. You're not going to be rebuilding the United States in the game, at most you can build the NCR or Caesar's Legion, and the game should reflect that.

The Solars of the First Age also had to build and research most everything from scratch.
You don't.

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One does not take sand from a beach and fashion a dataprobe...

The fact is, at the point where you can actually start working on rebuilding the First Age's technology, that should be the end point of a game. You have created a powerful, rich empire, you have defeated your major foes, and now you have centuries of peace to build all the things you need to build to start on that journey. The game's systems are dedicated to running a game in a fantasy, largely low-magic mileu. First Age technology is going to either be underwhelming or unsupported, and I'd prefer 'unsupported' to 'underwhelming' by far. A time of myth and legend works better when it's actually mythical.

 

[Cosar]

If I were writing Glorious Solar Saber, for instance, I'd start with a Charm to enchant any Melee-based weapon so that it sheds sunlight and inflicts aggravated damage to creatures of darkness. Then another, separate Charm to improve the effective quality of any Melee weapon I'm wielding – this is the "ah, he's wielding a stick like a fine blade!" Charm. With an upgrade it even lets you "wield" a blade forged from your own meditative weapon-thoughts, which traces out in front of you like a crystal of hardened air. Then you just combine the two and voila – a Solar can conjure up a shining holy blade from nothingness, but if he actually has a sword to enchant it's cheaper/easier.

Similarly, Craftsman Needs No Tools could be replaced by a Charm to improve the quality of the tools you're using – so yes, you can treat your clenched fist as an improvised tool, but if you lugged along an actual tool it's even better! And a really advanced tool starts waiving its downsides and generally operating more smoothly, and so on.

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Don't forget that CNNTs was stealth nerfed in Oadonel's codex, so that it only replaced having basic tools. This means that for artifact crafting you're still operating at a penalty, rather than the roll simply being inapplicable. Granted, the nerf wasn't too strong, and the way the crafting system was set up that really only meant you needed a few more intervals to make anything, but that's more due to 2ed crafting being pretty terrible.

 

[pheonix89]

High-end arti crafting with basic tools should be flatly impossible. Not just huge penalties, but not even getting to roll.

 

[EarthScorpion]

What are your versions of the People of Jade and Adamant?

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Hmm, let me try to remember the exact details.

Firstly, and probably critically, they're de-PCised. Without the chains of "having to be constructed as a PC group despite the fact I've never even heard of anyone playing a Mountain Folk game", they can be built from the ground up to enable their use as interesting narrative tools for the games people actually play.

Secondly, and almost as importantly, they're de-dwarfised. Dwarves as a "separate race" can fuck right off. If I wanted bearded short hard drinking people in Exalted, I'll go and put some humans with the Small mutation (and Cosmetic (Female Beards)) in some area. Yes, even the mountain-dwelling bits of dwarves. LotR dwarves are humans in Exalted. And then we can have weird sects of humans living in Shogunate mines that they've turned into cities, keeping themselves separate from others, and if they and other people consider themselves a separate race, that's just good ol' racism. "Humans" in Exalted are way, way broader than most fantasy - so any legit non-human non-spirits need to be stranger and more distinctive. As it stands, the Mountain Folk really aren't that distinctive.

Thirdly, the "endless war in the darkness and without them Creation would be dooooooomed" aspect needs to go, too. It's one of those too-large, all-consuming things and thus should be attacked in the shower with a knife while memorable violin music plays. That means breaking the Darkbrood's role up into smaller bits, and that also means that the Mountain Folk can be much more Balkanised and vary by region. A GM can totally just drop a small city of Mountain Folk into their campaign as a thing that's in the area without touching any greater plot or larger scale organisations.

(Also, as a 4th personal preference, any use of them as "lol lol lol Celestials have super-crafting mooks just waiting for you to show up" can fuck right off. I hate plot elements that basically only exist to hand free things to 'the glorious returning Solars' or 'the Alchemicals are here, here's lots of allies for them'. Any reworked Mountain Folk have to primarily stand alone as an independent plot element with any utility they provide strictly secondary at best.)

So, within those constraints you've got quite a way to go in whatever direction you like.

What I was leaning towards is the idea that, effectively, the "shape" of a Mountain Folk doesn't matter. They're almost a golem-race, so to speak; their form is set by their statue-body which their heart is placed in at 'birth'. They don't have a childhood - they're made in their adult form. And there's nothing about them which means they have to be humanoid. Sure, Mountain Folk made to interact with surface worlders are built to resemble statues of humans, but that's no more them than the spider-like mining creatures who gnaw at the rock to extract gems. They're both, equally, Mountain Folk - because they're living statues animated by the heart which is a calcified fae.

When they were the People of Adamant, they all used bodies of perfect, flawless adamant. They made no mistakes. Each progeny they crafted was perfect - taking ages to craft - and possessed their full capacity. They made no progeny who were inferior. In the Primordial War, to make up casualties they made the first "slave soldiers" - made from inferior jade, less attuned to their nature, but the jade-born were only a short-term solution to the losses of the war. They were inferior, and they were never meant to make their own progeny. Jade clouded their minds and meant that errors crept in. If the jade-born were to make progeny, they might be even worse.

Only the Exalted came to trust the jade-born more than the distant, cold, calculating adamant-born. They had fought alongside the jade-born, while they could read the actions of the adamant-born after the war and they knew that the People of Adamant would not consider themselves servants of the Exalted - only peers, at best. And they, too, were outraged by how their blood-brother People of Jade were treated by their makers.

So the Exalted Host acted, and the People of Adamant were no more. No wonder Autochthon fled.

But the jade-born realised that they were never meant to be, that they were flawed copies of the People of Adamant. Errors crept in. Within a thousand years, some jade-born were so flawed, so clumsy that they could only work in lesser materials like marble and other stones. The sickening society of the jade-born tried to stop such flawed jade-born from furthering their decline, repeating the sins of their forefathers. They forced quality controls, prevented the construction of new jade-born without vetting, and desperately tried to keep as many of the elder jade-born alive. They begged the Deliberative to try to help them make more adamant-born, to lessen the decline. But the Deliberative was overthrown and the jade-born found that they were presented once again with a choice - swear allegiance to the Shogunate, or face another pogrom.

They swore allegiance.

The Balorian Crusade and the Contagion together irrevocably shattered the Mountain Folk society. The plague wiped out most of their cities, but then the Balorian Crusade trapped vast numbers of new hearts of calcified chaos princes. In the scattered post-apocalyptic remnants of their societies, all the constraints that had maintained their standards were cast aside. Soon the jade-born were a rare elite among the stone-born masses.

Shambling, clumsy, crude - the stone-born are mockeries compared to the grace of the jade-born, and even they were just parodies of the adamant-born. Their minds are limited by their mediums. The elite caste of jade-born try to preserve and expand their ranks, but the stone-born outnumber them and there are ruined cities below the earth where stone-born shamble through, carrying crude club-shovels and following their mountain-deep instincts to make things. Their minds can still contemplate beautiful things, but much of the original savant-like genius is lost to them. Some of the brighter stone-born have learned their old magics which let them alter their bodies and they fortify their selves, but the Mountain Folk will never regain their old glory.

Narratively, the Mountain Folk can play the traditional role of fantasy orcs, dwarves or trolls as the GM sees fit - because they're all of them. Also, they can be giant stone spiders living beneath the earth. They turn to unliving stone in the sunlight, so they're certainly part troll there, but they have a genius with tools and can be cunning even when they're not that bright (somewhat orcish) and the jade-born provide the dwarf-like 'dying race' thing.

 

[Revlid]

High-end arti crafting with basic tools should be flatly impossible. Not just huge penalties, but not even getting to roll.

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That depends on how you define "high-end artifact", I think. Certainly, the Wonders of the First Age would be out of reach.