Exalted General - /exg/

Wrote his shaping ritual as a contract passed with the old Shunfei, senile lesser fire elemental dragon imprisoned under the city of Pasaro in the blessed isles. Shunfei's fire is long dead, but his smoke is still here, and he is patient.

Every time I shape sorcery, my character is covered in odorous smoke.

>my character is covered in odorous smoke.
OH! AH! Ooooohhh...that's rather nice.
youtube.com/watch?v=hr4knvNNgtU

If character sheet user's here, I finished up the list of differences between backer preview pdf and the final release.
Also updated the charmlist and ran it through a spell check to catch some more typos.
docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1pki3s-pBNmtBSOOWjih6MYBpu7au8olK_l2h48PziFI/edit#gid=965052309

I am truly the worst. As stated, I hate discrepancies between XP and sometimes I can't fully give the players a chance to get both bonuses, at least not all of them. So I tend to just make a pot of solar XP. If one person does something it gets added to the pot. Pot can go up to 8SXP in a session. After session is done everyone gets the full total in the pot. I also tend to give 10 regular xp a round because i'm a masochist and I like rapid power creep. Sometimes I still give double XP sessions too.

I award between 3 and 5 pretty much every session. But my group pools awards and then divides them evenly.

>Heaven-Drawing Discipline
>An Exalt with this Charm can reduce the time it takes to produce work from weeks to days, and from days to hours.
>An Exalt with this Charm can reduce the time it takes to produce work from years to weeks, and from months to hours.
Seems like Holden and Morke changed their mind about how long it takes to write a book.

>Essence 2 50 experience points
>Essence 3 125 experience points
>Essence 4 200 experience points
>Essence 5 300 experience points

>You gain 5 XP per session.

>It takes 10 sessions worth of XP before you can reach Essence 2.
>It takes two more, for a total of 12, before you can afford your first Essence 2 charm.
>It takes one more, for a total of 13, before you can actually use that charm in play.
>That's 25/27/28 sessions for Essence 3 content.
>That's 40/42/43 sessions for Essence 4 content.
>That's 60/62/63 sessions for Essence 5 content.

How many sessions did the devs think your typical game of Exalted lasts for? Wouldn't their time have been better spent on less Essence 4-5 content and more Essence 1-2 content?

Magical materials are in no way mandatory for artifact creation in 3e. They certainly help, but you can make iron daiklaves for murdering Fair Folk, a spear from the tusk of a defeated behemoth, or whatever else. The only thing affected will be what type of Evocations you get and the type of people that are limited in unlocking them.

Maybe way back when, in theory.

But all the artifact examples are MM and the book only lists evocation themes for the MMs

By the time you reach each essence level you can afford this many charms:
>Essence 1 15 charms
>Essence 2 21 charms
>Essence 3 35.6 charms
>Essence 4 45 charms
>Essence 5 57.5 charms

What's interesting is that it goes by 2-3 steps now.

you don't need to have evocations to be an artefact

All artifacts 3 dot+ are capable of evocations though

Except for the utility ones, that expressly don't.

They fantasized about having Speed the Wheels, Mind-Scribing Method, and Heaven-Drawing Discipline themselves.

Cite me anywhere that says artifacts actually require one of the magical materials.

The lack of a premade non-MM artifact isn't a citation.

just because they can doesn't mean they must

What do you mean? It's not like there is all that much Essence 4-5 content in the book.

So you're saying that an Artifact 2 Iron Daiklave would have the mathematical bonuses of a daiklave, the ability to fuck up Fair Folk, and I wouldn't even have to waste my time fucking around with annoying-ass Evocations?

I'm fucking sold.

Daiklaies must be 3 dot though

Guy with reduced xp gain here: We're 30xp away from Essence 4.

who doesn't fantasize about having Solar charms, really? Admit it user, you've done it yourself too

My game is almost to Essence 5. We've been playing for about a year with weekly sessions, we did miss a few though.

I find that absolutely astounding. The longest game I've ever had in any system after over a decade of gaming is 25 sessions before changing schedules or interests caused a game to end.

Playing online because your friends are chads is torture. Every other game goes cold before the first session because half the players didn't even turn in their sheets.

>mathematical bonuses of a daiklave
It's going to be absurdly heavy because it won't have the magical properties of attuned orichalcum, plus it won't be nearly as sharp or indestructible.
>I wouldn't even have to waste my time fucking around with annoying-ass Evocations?
If you don't want them, don't bother with them.

Why don't you just get a greatsword for free, user?

>tfw extremely long running, very exciting online game with top ST
>tfw not a single player has dropped out or just quit
What kind of unreliable shit-heads do you recruit for your games that don't even bother making a sheet?

>It's going to be absurdly heavy because it won't have the magical properties of attuned orichalcum, plus it won't be nearly as sharp or indestructible.
There have always been non-MM artifacts, and they all get the weight reduction and indestructibility of other artifacts. In 2e, they just didn't get the extra magical material bonus. In 3e, by that dude's logic, they just wouldn't get Evocations.

>If you don't want them, don't bother with them.
If I don't want even a single Evocation, I'd rather save a merit point by getting a weapon that doesn't have any.

>Why don't you just get a greatsword for free, user?
For the mathematical bonuses of a daiklave.

>What kind of unreliable shit-heads do you recruit for your games that don't even bother making a sheet?
Not that guy, but literally anyone you can find? Most people don't know any significant number of people who are both reliable, and have free time, and are interested in tabletop games. You usually have to settle for 2/3, or even 1/3.

huh, that's pretty interesting numbers. Maybe it's because I don't find my games via a Mongolian Cartoon website. Where did you find your games?

That's an interesting question, which single charm would you guys pick to have in real life?
It doesn't include prerequisites and doesn't give you ability dots.
I'd like Excellent Emissary's Tongue to learn new languages, Swift Sage's Eye to read every shitty thread on Veeky Forums, God-King's Shrike would be fun to troll with, Uncanny Shroud Defense to save my life, Ephemeral Induction Technique to create a spirit slave would be kickass, Celestial Bliss Trick to please them, Immunity to Everything Technique because getting sick sucks, Mastery of Small Manners to not spaghetti, or maybe Invisible Statue Spirit for classic yet stationary invisibility.
I'm not sure actually.

The game I'm in has lost a number of its players, and one can't attend every session since she had a kid. For a few sessions, it's been me and the psycho Dawn

>Where did you find your games?
My real life list of friends. Maybe I should start searching for people on Vietnamese Cave Painting websites instead.

Terrestrial Circle Sorcery.

Even assuming I don't gain the ability to learn additional spells, that still nets me Summon Elemental (I don't have enough hubris to assume that real life me can safely bind demons), a shaping ritual with attendant merits, and the ability to do Workings.

I'm hesitant to go sorcery because I don't think I even have 2 dots of Int and 2 dots of Occult, Elementals are the safe way to go through.

I'm confident I have at least 3 dots of Int and 1 of Occult, and having literal fucking sorcery would be a damn good reason to start diving into the deep, weird world of the occult.

People on Veeky Forums are usually pretty unreliable, but people on roll20 are literal freakshows.

>waifushit

Mine in my current game turned out to be Mara.
>Best Sorcery tutor.
>Best Martial Arts tutor.
>Most helpful social infiltrator.
>A very amiable yet impish demon. Good at hiding her intentions behind a veil of flirtatious levity (to Exalts) or obliging generosity (to mortals) until it's time to commit some atrocities and ruin people for keks. All fun and games, right? But...
>Dat enforced intimacy of love for learning Black Claw Style.
>My nominally good-natured and sociable character, an Eclipse and wealthy Guild Factor with a taste for the occult and arcane, acts on these feelings with a manic undercurrent of possessiveness that reveals itself at disturbingly increasing intervals.
>Catches her off guard since she likes to disclose the mental influence behind the Martial Art so she can watch those afflicted try to struggle arduously against it. Someone just outright riding the current is unexpected, but she can dig it. Just another form of degeneration, right?
>Once I finally gain Celestial Circle Sorcery and manage to bind her, dress her up as a maid because I'm a fucking weeaboo.
>Delve into the lore of Sorcery's origins,
>courtesy of the Lover Clad in the Raiment of Tears, who has an idea where this shit is heading. Very supportive woman, she is.
>Find out it's probable the only person Mara had true, unconditional love for that wasn't just shallow affection and appreciation for their dire fate/gradual corruption was Brigid, or at least the Solar that was in her equivalent historical position, when she was a Deva.
>This relationship was part of how the knowledge of Sorcery was stolen from the Primordials. Mara got burned pretty damn bad. When The Dragon's Shadow was twisted into the The Ebon Dragon, that's when her current pernicious mentality regarding love was cemented.
>But she still loyally stayed by the somewhat remorseful Brigid's side voluntarily during the First Age until the Twilight's death.

(cont)

Occult is basically science in Creation. Elementals are as real and commonplace as animals, Gods are everywhere and their magic is reproduceable, and stunting is more built into the world than gravity.

Sorcery is easy to justify

Anointment of Miraculous Health scores pretty high for being no-questions-asked instant healing, although "once per scene" and only 1 level (presumably I have essence 1 for this) is a bit unfortunate.

Harmonious Presence Meditation is +3 dice on all social, more or less forever.

One of Hardship-Surviving Mendicant Spirit or its upgrade Element Resisting Prana, depending on how this works, would open up a lot of options.

Various Thrown and Archery charms are basically "gimme olympic medal kthx".

Judge's Ear Technique might be tempting if not for the ocean of legal problems that would probably get involved in actually trying to use it.

But at the end of the day? One of the Unsurpassed (Sense) Discipline charms would probably win out.

>So my Eclipse discovers a letter by the Magnus discussing an encounter with a phantasm of Brigid, a pattern burnt into the shadow of existence, he discovered near the Underworld projection of a Manse she'd created long ago. You might know the letter, one from Ink Monkeys.
>This gives my Eclipse an idea.
>Experiment with the assimilation of foreign spiritual manifestations and inchoate essence patterns by a physical body.
>Come to a sorcerous breakthrough. Dis gonbi gud.
>Compel Mara to guide me to the site of the old Manse mentioned in the letter.
>Arrive at the equivalent coordinates in the Underworld. Discover a massive, domed mausoleum of ivory-white, ashen-gray, and obsidian-black.
>ST is gonna make me work for this shit.
>Call up mercenary-leader/swordswoman extraordinaire Dawn and martial artist spy/bodyguard Night.
>They've long seen past my Eclipse's guise of virtue and benevolence to the conniving, ignoble douche within, but there's mutual respect built up throughout the years and the pay is obscenely good.
>We conquer the Manse. They get to keep most of the artifacts and loot we find. Eclipse has little interest. He's here for a purpose.
>One of the deepest rooms is spatially impossible with the rest of the structure, an expanse with properties comparable to the Labyrinth (it may very well just outright be in the Labyrinth). Within the building is an open-air garden of glistening, darkly-hued roses and violets beneath an eclipse-ruled sky which should rightfully be a ceiling.
>That's where I found what the Magnus had, gazing upwards listlessly, stagnating.
>Drag Mara across the Underworld to the Manse. Tell her we're going to be doing something very special. A gift for her. The preparations have already been made.
>Present her with the last known vestiges of Brigid in all of existence. This shabby, tattered, barely-coherent specter of her power that was branded into reality.
>I'd been waiting for this moment. Pic related, Eclipse's face when.

>Complete the Working I'd been occupied with. So many fucking dice.
>Devour whole the umbral remnants of the only person Mara ever truly loved right in front of her.
>Mind hit with a nightmarish wave of fragmented memories, jagged shards of cosmic awareness, and an onslaught of anguished Whispers.
>Instant Limit Break.
>Suddenly able to respire necrotic essence. Anime Banner is swirling with traces of its acrid impurity.
>Now have black sclera. Have to hide it with Flawlessly Impenetrable Disguise from then on.
>Permanently tainted own essence, probably corrupted my exaltation for incarnations to come.
>So worth it.
>Bring full suite of social charms to bear.
>Longass social scene where I basically just proceeded to mindfuck the poor demon using everything I'd learned about her throughout the game, as well as the enigmatic memories I'd been bombarded with after consuming Brigid's shade.
>Turns out 2nd Circles have insecurities and sore spots too.
>By the end of it, she's psychologically broken, weeping and smiling at the same time, and calling my Eclipse by Brigid in tandem with her typical byname for him.
>And that's how you train your waifu to be the most loyal, devoted, and dutiful pet she can be.
>Eclipse eventually comes to his senses. He's not even fully conscious of what happened.
>Mara does too, but not completely.
>She's regressed to her mentality as a Deva to some extent, how she lovingly acted around Brigid.
>Her true nature as the Shadow Lover bubbles up intermittently when appropriate, though seemingly more deranged than ever.
>She still confuses the name of my character with Brigid from time to time.
>A lovely relationship.
>Meet up with the Lover some time after. Pretty much instantly notices my contaminated essence. Even she wonders what the fuck happened.
>Daily reminder from her that all factors of the human experience are transient and not ultimately satisfying.
>Sporadic voices in head think that sounds legit.

Exalted is fun.

I was considering Element Resisting Prana, but I'd need a higher Resistance for it to be of use, certainly not 4 dots for fireproofing.

Can someone tell me how easy it is to figure out someone is not mundane? I'm confused by the transparency thing.

Does this mean that out of character, we always know when someone is clearly not mortal, but in character it isn't obvious when someone use excellency or something unless it has the OBVIOUS tag?

>>Daily reminder from her that all factors of the human experience are transient and not ultimately satisfying.
>>Sporadic voices in head think that sounds legit.
Well, why not fix that then.

I've been playing RPGs for 20+ years.

I've been playing with the group I'm running Exalted for 4 years now. There's been some bumpiness along the way but the group has settled into its rut, which is heavy on the narrative and relatively light on combat.

There are personality clashes and sometimes we can't play something because someone isn't into the genre, but we're adults. We talk through it.

This group originally organized, for what it's worth, on the old White Wolf forums. Of the original group I believe I am the only person left. But of the second wave we've got three remaining players. We four have been the core of the group. Six players are currently active, one is on sabbatical for work reasons, and I think we might be able to convince a couple others to come play with us in a pinch.

I play in a group with another member of that group as the only common link playing a different game.

I'm also playing a third game with a group recruited partially IRL and partially via PAX. Pretty solid so far.

A 4th game would really tax me, especially if I had to GM it.

Some protips: somebody has to be proactive about reminding people when you're playing.

If you don't know the platform (roll20, hangouts, irc) get familiar with it before you have to use it to play.

Treat these people like you would your friends because that's the sort of relationship you're trying to build.

Get everyone's emails and email each other during the week to stay stoked about gametime.

Good people make good games. If you're consistently ending up in bad games, you may want to look in the mirror.

>Does this mean that out of character, we always know when someone is clearly not mortal, but in character it isn't obvious when someone use excellency or something unless it has the OBVIOUS tag?
Yes, precisely. Unless someone uses a charm with the Obvious tag, or their Anima flares, they just come across as 'REALLY GOOD' rather than 'HOLY SHIT MAGIC.'

Celestial Bliss Trick.

Well, probably Unsurpassed Showman Style so I could also make tons of money off music

So if a player sees a guy use a non obvious charm to defend himself, his first reaction shouldn't be "That guy isn't mortal?" It should be... "Eh, he's good?"

If that is the case it seems like the wyld hunt shouldn't be that hard to avoid.

>So if a player sees a guy use a non obvious charm to defend himself, his first reaction shouldn't be "That guy isn't mortal?" It should be... "Eh, he's good?"
More 'Wow, he's incredible,' but yes.

>If that is the case it seems like the wyld hunt shouldn't be that hard to avoid.
If you take care to avoid Obvious charms and flaring your Anima Banner, and you don't go swinging artifacts around? It's not that hard to avoid. Especially when you take into account that it'll probably be months or years before word of an Anathema even reaches anyone who could do something about it. And by that point they might not care anymore.

>If that is the case it seems like the wyld hunt shouldn't be that hard to avoid.
sure...unless you get into a serious fight and have to flare your anima. Or you want to carry around an artifact weapon and don't have storage charms. Or you do something totally crazy no mortal could do.

How does the Guild work? Do they have like guild houses in towns and stuff?

lmgtfy.com/?q=east india company

The Wyld Hunt, as with all TPK-level threats in RPGs, is more a way to make players play in a particular way than an actual challenge that they'll encounter. Creating that divide between powerful and "WITNESS MY TRUE POWER" Peripheral essence use, and then forcing players to be subtle with their power, is another way Exalted tries to make Exalts feel powerful. (Apparently Dishonored was designed to do the same thing; they wanted non-lethal players to always be carrying six ways to kill everyone in the room, so they can have the fun of thinking "I won't... but damn straight I COULD".)

But I can still see a lot of ways for clever hunters to catch out Solars. The Robin Hood approach for instance; put the Exalt in a competitive situation where winning without essence becomes slowly but progressively more unlikely.

There's also the possibility of a DB deciding that they're jealous of an extremely talented "mortal" PC and accusing them of being Anathema with no actual evidence. I like the idea of a Solar needing to use Solar charms to convince people who think they're a Solar that they aren't, especially if they haven't used any charms up to that point.

Yes. If that's what you want.

The Guild is made up of semi-decentralized cells that slowly trickle money up towards the top in exchange for things like information, business loans, and sometimes even mercenaries if you're doing something profitable enough. Most Guild members are, at best, loosely affiliated, and pay more for the prestige/trustworthiness that affiliation brings, and occasionally the slight protection it offers.

It is not, strictly speaking, not actually a guild, despite being called The Guild.

If that's what you want.

Consider the expression "fuck you money" - when you don't have to put up with the boss's shit, or the landlord's shit, or anyone's shit, because you could say "fuck you", walk out of your job on the spot, and have enough money to live comfortably for a year or two while looking for a new job.

The Guild has "fuck you money" on a national scale. Hello, we're from the Guild, we would like an exclusive license to sell drugs and buy ivory from your country. BTW, should you refuse this deal, we'll just use some of our oodles of cash to buy up all the grain you planned on importing, and ask your successor after the starvation and peasant riot has thrown you out of office.

The Guild also has the money, manpower, contacts, maps, and general scope-of-organization that they can organize a fifty-wagon caravan with a bunch of whatever is cheap here, travel three thousand miles east, sell goods, buy whatever's cheap there, and come back three thousand miles with rare exotic goods from far away. It's trading on a scale that has a massive barrier to entry, so the Guild has a self-sustaining semi-monopoly simply because nobody else has enough spare cash lying around to risk it on sending tons of goods three thousand miles away.

The Guild lives by the rep that you do not fuck with a Guild factor. Any bodyguards he might have are mostly to ward off random violent drunkards, not a serious assault. If you make a serious assault on a Guild factor, you will win easily and can loot his office, and three months later when you started thinking maybe you'd gotten away with it they'd forgotten all about it, in walks a Guild investigator with two hundred Brides of Ahlat in tow (I didn't even know they hired out as mercenaries!) prepared to grab the town by its metaphorical ankles and shake it upside down until every perpetrator falls out and can be made to repay and/or suffer as appropriate.

I did a nonlethal ghost playthrough of Dishonored first, I love my stealth games, then I did a chaotic open fighting run, with a little bit of sneaking.
I found it the most fun when I played the Daud dlc as lethal and sneaky, getting up behind guys and backstabbing them, having their bodies turn to dust instead of needing to drag them away. It allowed me to chain a few kills before they turned around to see a body.

I do like Exalted for having those 2 tiers; non-flaring pushing the limits, superman world of cardboard straining to stay in control, and then bonfire anima drown them in motes until they choke on it and everyone for miles flees or marches upon us.
It's great for feeling the stakes of the story at the moment the gloves are off.

Well let's try this again. I've been looking for an image that finds it's way into these threads on occassion- a dude with a katana pointing towards the viewer, with armour, blond hair and old japanese flag (one with rays) in the background. Does anybody know which one I'm talking about?

Is that pic supposed to be Mara or just a Lunar?

The Guild works by having read their metaphorical Adam Smith and realizing that trade, merchants, and entrepreneurialism are actually good things.

This is far from obvious. Adam Smith only began the writing about economics of polities around 1750 in our history. Before that, trade was poorly understood, mercantilism was the order of the day (basically you should never import goods you can produce yourself), and being a broker was seen as vaguely dishonorable. Crafting, good. Going to faraway countries and bringing back exotics, good. Buying stuff today and selling it tomorrow and somehow earning money, that's impossible, you must be cheating somehow (or cheating someone).

Working on it.

The voices are hardly impossible to suppress, but removing them entirely seems like it'll be a different story. It's not like I received a 2e Whispers background or anything (a lot of it is mostly an expansion to his Necromancy shaping ritual archetype), so I don't know how close to that the ST is playing things. Similarly, I'm not entirely sure yet to what extent they're an aspect of the thing my Eclipse absorbed into himself and whether they're related to the various ominous benefits doing so has bestowed. They could also be related to Spectres/the Neverborn, assuming there's some sort of link there, or even just the result of my character's fevered mind straining against the eldritch knowledge presently floating about his head.

But the ST has kept us busy, so I haven't had as much of a chance as I'd like to look into it.

Just a pic that I thought would sorta resemble Mara.

>It is not, strictly speaking, not actually a guild, despite being called The Guild.
I prefer to call it the Guild of Guilds.

>Just a pic that I thought would sorta resemble Mara.
Here's the only official art I could find, even if it's for ants.

>There's also the possibility of a DB deciding that they're jealous of an extremely talented "mortal" PC and accusing them of being Anathema with no actual evidence. I like the idea of a Solar needing to use Solar charms to convince people who think they're a Solar that they aren't, especially if they haven't used any charms up to that point.

I don't think most would call them anathema if it was just jealousy. They'd probably just kill them or try to then find out they actually are anathema. Since, any mortal standing up to a dragon-blood is...not possible but other stuff like demons and giant animals are possible? And I mean just one vs one.

Yeah, that's the one they used in Compass of Celestial Directions: Malfeas. It's kinda ugly though, to be frank, so I prefer the image I found in , which seems spot on to her general description, or at least typical traits seen throughout her multiple forms across every edition such as blue eyes and doe-legs.

>It's kinda ugly though, to be frank
EY YO DAS RAYCISS YOU NAZI-ASS CRACKAH

...

Kill them and then find out they are actually anathema I mean.

Also Mara does not look like much of a seducer in that picture.

Is Mara supposed to be a big deal among 2CD? She seems to get a ton of exposure, but there never seemed to be any good reason for it.

She's engaged in a lot of setting-important fuckery.

>so they can have the fun of thinking

Except it wasn't fun. Your nonlethal options were so limited that you had to abuse the cheaty and trivialising blink and time stop spells just to get through. And to do what exactly? Avoid actually having fun with the million and one harder, faster, cleaner tools they keep handing you to kill your enemies?

The "lets give them lots of exciting tools but tell them not to use them" thinking that went into Dishonored shouldn't be emulated in anything. It should only be held up as the curious example of a stealth game that actually wasn't much fun to play pure "ghost's shadow" stealth in.

y tho

I think she was somehow involved with Exalted learning the secrets of Sorcery. This might have changed though.

Yeah, she is. There's quite a few reasons for it too, although after some pretty hefty significance in 1e, Mara didn't have all that much exposure at all during 2e until nearer to its end. And frankly, 2CDs always feel a bit too weak in every edition and generally end up getting perks added to them by the ST so that they match up with the setting's lofty exposition upon them, accounting for why Mara herself might not seem that impressive. Probably why 2CDs tend to be a bit vaguer in 3e, so the ST can just provide them with whatever powers think are appropriate.

For Mara, in a meta sense she was one of the very first, if not THE very first 2nd Circle Demons to be introduced, as she was originally written up in 1e's Storyteller's Handbook. Incidentally, this is where the name for Black Claw Style comes from, as it's noted that she has a Specialty in it, but... Black Claw Style is never exposited upon in all of 1e and would in fact not be drafted until the latter days of 2e when Ink Monkeys was being published. By that point, CoCD: Malfeas had already adapted Mara to 2e and removed her specialty in a style that didn't actually exist at the time, even though BCS in Ink Monkeys was explicitly invented by her. Ah, White Wolf development! Also, she's basically Exalted's version of a succubus, so you know that's gonna be popular.

Anyways, in-setting, to start with she's the Defining Soul of Erembour, one of the Ebon Dragon's most prominent Third Circle Souls, but what really gives her eminence is that she's one of the 2CDs with by far the most influence outside of Malfeas and likewise one of those that escapes Hell most often due to her significant cults spread throughout, IIRC, the East and South. As mentioned before, she invented Black Claw Style which in its 2e lore caused a notable incident during the First Age (this was removed in 3e, probably to keep the First Age more mysterious).

(cont)

But probably the most significant thing is her implied role in the introduction of Sorcery:
exalted.xi.co.nz/wiki/Thus_Spake_Zaranephilpal/OriginsOfSorcery

Note that this was two years before 2e even existed and what Infernals actually were was still quite mysterious. The Scarlet Empress being abducted and mindfucked by the Ebon Dragon had already been hinted at in the books remarkably early on and the fanbase had pretty much ascertained it, though.

So food for thought. May or may not apply to 3e, but in the 3e game I've described here, it became a very relevant plot point.

Sounds like she's Exalted's Kim Kardashian. She keeps getting attention because she's always been getting attention.

Why is Gem the best part of the setting?

youtube.com/watch?v=fufuluffQDY

What would be the function of a manse in a city ruled mostly by mortals? Would it be some sort of public office?

Depends on its magical powers, man. I'm too lazy to look up if mortals can attune to manses in 3e or not, but a lot of them are automatic/manual anyway.

If it's an impregnable fortress with a fuck laser on top of it, it's probably a military hold. If it's a place where the shadows whisper all sorts of interesting gossip, it's probably a political setpiece.

Many Hearthstones don't require being placed in an artefact, some do things such as purify water or create summer temperatures. We don't quite know what Manses do if you can't attune to them in this edition, but we know that Demesnes are magical landscapes that may grow interesting and unusual plants or some good that has a tangible benefit.

You could honestly say the same thing about Octavian. He was initially introduced in Games of Divinity, the first book we got a glimpse of Malfeas in, had a prominent lore role in 1e's Creatures of the Wyld, was the first 2CD introduced in 2e, and kept getting references throughout 2e's run (especially in every single book that featured Hell prominently), not to mention cameos in a multitude of comics. I'd go as far as to say that he has the most comic appearances of any demon in Exalted, in fact. Now he's already back in 3e right in the corebook.

He's well-known, a standby, and people think he's plenty badass. He's kind of the iconic Second Circle and definitely had a greater presence than Mara in general until probably the advent of Black Claw Style late into 2e.

This isn't even touching upon Third Circle Demons. Ligier, Orabilis, and Erembour get plentiful references. It's arguable whether this is to Ligier's benefit or detriment as a character, as he doesn't feel very kept in reserve at all. On the other hand, he is the motherfucking Green Sun. Hard to fucking miss him.

So yeah. I wouldn't call Mara's appearances overwrought at all. As far as the Second Circles go, I'd say she's well-realized. Other 2CDs deserve the sort of fleshing out that she's gotten, and each certainly has hints of how they could be expounded upon. Zsofika, Stanewald, Gervesin, Florivet, Gebre, Sigereth and Sondok all cry out for this.

Alternatively, you could take the effort of using them in your games and attributing all manner of cool shit to them that you'd like.

1st for Morke and Holden are liars

Help a brother out.
I want to play this chucklefuck as a Solar.
Put everything into dodge, athletics, melee, thrown, etc. and do everything I can to become the most untouchable dodge tank possible.
Most of the charms I'm running are from the Dodge and Athletics pools.

Question is, are there any decent (debuffs are optional but awesome) throwing weapons?

>are there any decent throwing weapons

Look at this motherfucker.

Buddy, are you sure you need help?

Do honestly even need Melee?

Gotta do something for his pistol.
Also I don't want to be total dead weight. Thought I might as well grab something ranged to actually not be useless.
Otherwise, it's BAT SMASH FOR DAYS MOTHERFUCKER.

>Also I don't want to be total dead weight. Thought I might as well grab something ranged to actually not be useless.

Put points into Athletics and buy up the Gotta Go Fast tree, this will keep people from sniping you from where ever.

No, I mean, you look like you're going to do perfectly fine.

Get Awareness. Get some Initiative Charms. Go first every combat. Thrown likes going first.

Otherwise your build is perfectly serviceable just from looking at the abilities you're favoring. It's all simple and gets the job done, although Melee is an xp eater. You're certainly not split up in too many directions, otherwise. You'll do fine.