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Through the Ages (Exalted CK2 Style Empire Builder)

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bookworm702 said:
So, while the Realm isn't designed for prayer, it is designed to keep everyone happy, productive, and exactly where the Empress wants them to be, with minimum social change or upheaval. It works really well. As long as she's around.
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Its the Scarlet Empress's prayer factory. Basically, she is greedy and doesn't want the Fodder Exalts to snarf up her power.
 
Necratoid said:
Its the Scarlet Empress's prayer factory. Basically, she is greedy and doesn't want the Fodder Exalts to snarf up her power.
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She barely takes any of it off the top - most of the prayer is distributed to gods at the command of the Immaculate Order. It's sort of like what we do, but much less polite.
 
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Okay, I see a lot of people saying things, and I'd like to make a few clarifications.

A) There are no longer "I become invincible to anything that isn't "Punch me in the face or talk at me, and punching you in the face always takes priority" effects in this Creation. You can become immune to the Wyld's ability to change your nature, and extend that protection to others--but you can't straight up no-sell eighty percent of the toolkit of anything that isn't another Exalt with a single, cheap Charm.

B) Just the same, there are excellent defenses against "I punch you into a duck" level effects, which can make it impossible for you to be instantly cursed into oblivion, by forcing the curse to allow an achievable "Break Condition", so even a death curse can be cured before it runs it's course. This allows for a greater variety of magic in the setting, because it's no longer a sucker bet, and it makes more twisty figures threatening again.

C) The Great Curse no longer keys off of Virtues (As those are no longer mechanically represented in the system), it keys off of intimacies, and there is no longer a single Break Condition, the ST picks one from a list based on the circumstances where the Break happens.

Interlude will be generated sometime today, no ETA yet.
 
You know I keep thinking our very good and helpful PC would be agreeing with Rakan on plenty of things on why Fate that the Sidereals write down is bullshit.
 
Krain said:
You know I keep thinking our very good and helpful PC would be agreeing with Rakan on plenty of things on why Fate that the Sidereals write down is bullshit.
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Again, Sidereals aren't the ones who write down Fate, they manage it, keep it functional and sometimes direct it. Cause you know, they need to or otherwise bad shit happens to Creation.
 
Krain said:
You know I keep thinking our very good and helpful PC would be agreeing with Rakan on plenty of things on why Fate that the Sidereals write down is bullshit.
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...Really? Why? Honestly, it doesn't seem like Fate was terribly unkind to him prior to his exaltation, and he doesn't seem like much of a cultural revolutionary or unhappy with Heaven. A good king, sure, but it's not like he abdicated and ran an election, and he's pretty much friends with a bunch of gods. His only poor encounter with them was the 'Ruins' god, and that guy was dealt with through official channels.
 
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In terms of agreeing with Rakan, I'd say that a LOT of creations problems have come from someone in creation deciding that the world needs to be a certain way, and that something really stupid is justified because of that. Heaven may be terrible, but the cost of destroying it would be too high, and would probably end up with someone just as bad in charge. Of course, that doesn't mean that the one we're going to meet isn't perfectly reasonable and just wants reform through fear, but Rakan himself might e a problem.

Also, is the "Kill eternal Nova and eveyone with her exaltation" thing still a thing for Rakan? Because that might be awkward.
 
Anyway, would just like to note, I'm looking forward to meeting the Getimian.
With some luck we can make a profitable relationship here - which, again, we can't do with Sidereals unless we accomplish a miracle, something that is very unlikely and we'll need every last scrap of aid we can scrounge before it happens.

Will be good to actually have potential for even some help against the hell we're gonna go through.
Forgot to say this before in response to who we'd want to get help from, but I'd prefer the help we can get to survive now.

Deadly Snark said:
Again, Sidereals aren't the ones who write down Fate, they manage it, keep it functional and sometimes direct it. Cause you know, they need to or otherwise bad shit happens to Creation.
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Aren't they part of the group that decides how this is meant to go?

drake_azathoth said:
...Really? Why? Honestly, it doesn't seem like Fate was terribly unkind to him prior to his exaltation, and he doesn't seem like much of a cultural revolutionary or unhappy with Heaven. A good king, sure, but it's not like he abdicated and ran an election, and he's pretty much friends with a bunch of gods. His only poor encounter with them was the 'Ruins' god, and that guy was dealt with through official channels.
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What about the problems of the Health guy?
He's got people in his department who are assholes, isn't there one who wants to drug everyone because then they'd be happy?
And there's disease gods who can freely ignore Heaven thanks to the current setup.

Pretty sure our character would agree that there is some nasty shit up in Heaven, even WITHOUT Chejop sitting there and setting up a policy to have us hunted down, killed and have all our work destroyed.
 
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The cause of many of the problems in Creation can be summed up with 'the guys who are supposed to deal with are dead/exiled/overworked/too few and on a power trip.' If the Solars weren't dead they'd be able to bring significant sections of Creation and Heaven to heel. If it weren't for the Lunar's exile the Wyld would be held in check. If it wasn't for the Sidereals trying to keep up with the workload of the Solar and Lunar hosts on top of their own they'd have far more time to find solutions that didn't involve the murder of the inconvenient and innocent and the diminishment of the future in a constant bid to keep Creation more than one negative space wedgie away from another Creation shattering disaster.

And if it wasn't for the fact that the Dragonblooded are both fewer in number and too busy exploiting Creation to pay for their debauchery they'd have long since gone a good way towards rebuilding Creation and forcing the gods to do their jobs instead of extorting worship and praise for vastly substandard work.


Everything that's needed for Creation's rebirth is already there. Everything that's needed to turn the Wyld from a terrifying menace into a place that's hostile, dangerous but useful to those who know how to deal with it is already there. Everything that will pull the teeth out of the slowly building threat that is the Underworld and the maw of Oblivion is already there. Everything that could deny the Yozi their plans of Reclamation is already there and more than capable of holding them in check before their plans are even half way to fruition.


There may be a thousend dooms threatening Creation, but the Exalted Host can take those thousend dooms a thousend times and still have room to take on more and be victorious.
 
Krain said:
What about the problems of the Health guy?
He's got people in his department who are assholes, isn't there one who wants to drug everyone because then they'd be happy?
And there's disease gods who can freely ignore Heaven thanks to the current setup.

Pretty sure our character would agree that there is some nasty shit up in Heaven.
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Technically as part of the Bureau of Destiny. We'll probably end up killing Uvanavu, God of Health too. It's very unlikely he's going to fight "fate," especially when one of his closest allies Luranume, God of Luck is literally embedded into the structure of fate, and has a secret destiny that Luna gave him that he will one day fulfill. Honestly if Altren had all the information available to him, he and the rest of the Solar Exalted are more at fault with the inefficiencies and injustice of Heaven then any other beings. During the height of the First Age before the Solars went off the deep end, they worked closely with almost all the Bureaus to craft a world of new discoveries with universal healthcare while promoting and directing prayer towards the Gods that best suited their purposes while starving the Gods of famine for example of prayer. The result was a Heaven, very tied to the prosperity of Humanity. With positive concepts being promoted into power.

If Altren feels there's something wrong with Heaven he should work to renew and fix it. The whole collapse after all started after the Solar Exalted apparently did something so disgusting that the Unconquered Sun decided to never speak with them again and retreated into the Crack that is the Games of Divinity. Thus removing a central oversight/auditor who really does take the interests of creation and sentient life at heart. Every structure is only as good as it's oversight, the failure to adhere to an ideal does not discredit it. Creation doesn't need a new structure, it needs to return to it's old one, one without the Great Curse.

Honestly the only dissident god group in Heaven that I don't feel uncomfortable with is the Vindicators of the Game who want to destroy the Games of Divinity and force their leaders off crack. The world functions a lot better when you have an unlimited amount of bureaucrats who don't work for money and have an absurdly good understanding of what's going on. Think how well our world would function if at anytime the Secretary/Minister of Transportation could summon the God of Roads who can cut through all the partisan nonsense and just hand over a list with every road that is in good and bad repair, and who will happily help repair them for free or in-exchange for the road workers whispering prayers of thanks while they work. Heaven when it functions as it's suppose to is just too damn useful.
 
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Hazard said:
Note, gods don't work for free. The ambrosia they get is their payment, and it's basically chocolate money.
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Yeah but it doesn't really cost humans anything except a few words. Although granted more elaborate rituals with actual burning of material goods leads to bigger payoffs. It's like Kyubey's despair energy, it's an exception to the laws of thermodynamics and can be produced endlessly without any real energy input. Hell if I could ensure a friend is richer simply by telling him how awesome he is for 10 minutes each day, I'd be on that so fast your head will spin. This is especially so since Altren's piety stat is so good and he can probably direct prayers more efficiently than most people. My prayers to Jobs, Destroyer of Procrastination and God of Efficient Use of Time would probably just get him a thimble of Ambrosia.
 
Lucienz said:
Yeah but it doesn't really cost humans anything except a few words.
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Note the costs on the Piety actions, and how useful Altren's PI cutting that in half is. Meaningful prayer is expensive, either in terms of the value of what is sacrificed (don't know how 3E does it, but 2E had the Resource value of the sacrifice affecting the roll), or of time spent praying, which could be looked at as another kind of sacrifice.
 
Time spent praying is as much a sacrifice as leaving a sheaf of wheat. It's the opportunity to use it to acquire food or other material resources that would support you and your goals that is lost.
 
wingstrike96 said:
Doesn't prayer only cost much if you want the god to notice you above the general flow of prayer?
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No. It depends on a few things, not least of which on actually trying to get their attention ( 'oh god of forges may your works last eternal' is as much a prayer as 'oh god of forges if I don't complete this piece by midnight I'm going to be dead so please make sure I manage to finish it in time'). If you are trying to get their attention though, every dot of Resources you spend lowers the difficulty by one. Which is useful, when the base difficulty is 8.

It is however very much possible to draw their attention without expensive gifts. Just very, very unlikely.
 
Hazard said:
Time spent praying is as much a sacrifice as leaving a sheaf of wheat. It's the opportunity to use it to acquire food or other material resources that would support you and your goals that is lost.
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A very fair point but I suspect for most ordinary mortals, it's nothing too elaborate. The Celestial Bureaucracy is based on Chinese Traditional Religion which means for most mortals, "prayer" isn't really something too time-consuming like full blown Sunday worship sessions. It's more likely to be a casual prayer to the local village guardian as you make your way to the fields outside the village or a village feast on a special day where everyone parties together underneath a shrine. And in a world where said Gods can appear in physical form and actively aid people, I suspect humans still get way more than they put in. Granted for the most powerful gods you're probably right but even then there are ways to worship without much cost. For example you could built a library and dedicate it to the Goddess of Recorded Knowledge who would probably get a rush of prayers during it's grand opening and then a much smaller and steady stream from the expansion of her domain.
Hazard said:
It is however very much possible to draw their attention without expensive gifts. Just very, very unlikely.
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I think the lone exception to this is the Bureau of Seasons. They use to be directly commanded by the Solar Exalted and old habits die hard. Apparently whenever they get a prayer for good weather or something non-martial related they expedite the request and cover up the blatant favoritism because everyone is rather Traditionalist and understand how awkward it is to outright ignore your former bosses.
 
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Krain said:
Aren't they part of the group that decides how this is meant to go?
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That's not their jobs Krain. The Loom of Fate and the Pattern Spiders and the Maidens are the ones who decides how things are meant to go. Sidereals are the ones who enforces the decisions and make sure that everything goes smoothly and goes how it is supposed to go. They are the Stewards of Fate, not the Lords of Fate and if they weren't doing their jobs in making sure that Fate goes as it is mostly meant to be then Creation starts tearing itself apart.
 
Lucienz said:
For example you could built a library and dedicate it to the Goddess of Recorded Knowledge who would probably get a rush of prayers during it's grand opening and then a much smaller and steady stream from the expansion of her domain.
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Libraries are still expensive. Very expensive in a pre-industrial, pre-bookprinting society actually, because it all has to be hand written, which takes considerable skill and many, many hours writing. You'd most likely also need at minimum a dedication plaque for the ceremony, although it'd have far less effect than designing and building the library from the ground up to be a sacrifice to the Goddess of Recorded Knowledge. You could do that by using certain occult designs in the floor plan, use iconography sacred to her to declare where is what section, and using her preferred organising and shelving methods to store and organise the works.

More things than words can be a prayer, sacrifice needs not be physical, and gods in Exalted take power from more things than people believing in them very hard.
 
Spectrum said:
Purely for the sake of my edification, these changes reflect purely this game and are not actually ripples from big 3.0 changes making it in, correct?
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Essentially, yes.

I'm pretty happy with having a whole pile of options without all meaningful figures being immune to everything but "Kung Fu Grip"

I have started writing the interlude.
 
I wonder how the realm folk will react to all of Karasu and Ember's kids exalting. having all your kids exalt is major bragging rights among Terrestrials, iirc.
 
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