Exalted General - /exg/

Foot and Shoefags deserve to be gassed.

The fuck is wrong with her face?

user's brother here, mine did too but a bit of flipping though it got them well loose. I was more worried about how flaky the gilding appeared to be, but it's fine now.

Also the thing's pretty tough.

First for 3e being shit

>Question of the thread: What are you looking forward to the most in the next few releases to come?

Warstriders. Are we finally going to have an edition where they're not shit sizzling on a sidewalk? Probably not, but one can always hope.

...

Didi you hear about the N/A Moonsilver Warstrider? Bastard offspring between Numidium and Evangelion 01.

I'm looking for a little more Daizenger than a little less "GET IN THE FUCKING ROBOT SHINJI".

Well, I'm looking Fate-denying-yet-reinforcing-while-simultaneously-transcending and wiping out whole chunks of realities by simply speaking (confirmed to be the capstone Evocation) so I'm happy out.

I wonder who his Mate is, Solar Chrono or Abyssal Magus?

I figure the simpler the concept the less a chance of fucking it up they have, but then again, we've seen what they've done with Warstriders in the past, so we know just how badly they can fuck up such a concept.

did they ever fix how expensive the god powers are?
about 15 years ago i made an apollo rifleman and he had a glowing bayonet

its costed a stupid amount of points. for a divine flashlight. a cool flashlight, but still a flashlight

Chrono obviously. He did have the techs with him. Also Magus definitely wouldn't be an Abyssal. The guy was literally just trying to save reality, albeit a bit misguided in doing so.

What?

Well apparently, Warstrider weapons will have the stats of artefact heavy weapons and armour that any Exalt can get, and most of their power comes from their Evocations.

So, what's a good way of getting around high soak in 3e as a Melee user? My GM keeps sending hordes of fuckers wearing artifact plate at us and I keep telling him, "Knock it off, cheap artifacts aren't a thing anymore, just make it normal plate if they're mooks" but he ignores me every time.

Big weapons, damage boosting Charms. You literally should never have a problem using Melee, it's always the hands down best choice in every edition of Exalted for a Solar since it's ALWAYS an all-in-one-do-everything-the-best package, even in 3E.

>and most of their power comes from their Evocations

I must be one of the only people who hates Evo's. Feels like the worst of Charm bloat AND EXP sinks had a baby, except this time you can lose your Charms if you're disarmed.

Yeah, but EVERY attack gets sent to minimum damage unless I chuck 5m into Fire and Stones, and even then it's pointless because even after doing 10 dice of damage the fuckers still have tons of magnitude because it's always 1000+ fearless ghosts or spirits or some shit we're fighting. It's fucking dull.

Wait. Your GM is throwing FUCKING BATTLE GROUPS all adorned with artifact armor?

What.

Yes. 2e has rotted his mind.

Kill them. Take their armor. Make billions selling the artifact armor. Hire fucktons of mercenary corps to protect you and fight back the endless hordes of armor wearers. Take their armor, sell it, etc.

Also get a new GM. It's not even about artifact armor at that point, it's about your GM being shit.

He's a good GM, don't get me wrong. It's just this one habit of his that I cannot understand.

To be frank, I think this is the best exalted creature ever printed.

Then talk to him about it. Tell him flat out you're not having fun trying to chew through heavily armored legions one die at a time, it slows down sessions, and it bores you. Also tell him it's a bit odd there'd be this much heavy armor in one place and things that can wear it. Unless he's sending entire squads of DB's at you constantly, most wouldn't have this kind of shit.

Solution: don't make a dawn the next time you play with him. Combat's gonna be a chore.

Wrong game.

My solution would be to make a better Dawn. Theres nothing that cannot be solved by frightening amounts of unstoppable violence.

Is he seriously given artefacts to mortals? They can't even attune to that shit. Heavy weapons are good against armour. The balanced tag raises your overwhelming value, and the piercing tag reduces enemy soak. Dipping Swallow Defence grants initiative when you parry, allowing you to launch decisives without needing withering attacks.

git gud

>Entire battle groups with artifact armour

Hahaha, what a dolt. If you're going to be doing such things at least make them a low magnitude.

Tell him Veeky Forums thinks he's an idiot .

That also said:

- Artifact weapons. You'll need them.
- Immortal Blade
- PIERCING, Grand Grimscythe or Direlance. Chopping also kinda works but ideally you'll want one of these two.
- Grand Daiklaves can do 6 damage post soak and have chopping.
- Invincible Flurry of the Dawn + Hungry Tiger (Get some sort of charm that lets you use it on any opponent once per scene or something) + Increasing Strength Exercise + Fire and Stones Strike + full Excellency = Dead anything
- Lastly, if he doesn't want to fucking change then bring 2e back to him:

SUN-SWORD CONCENTRATION
Cost: 1m; Mins: Melee 4 Essence 1; Type: Supplemental
Keywords: Uniform
Duration: Instant
Prerequisite charms: Fire and Stones Strike

The Solar’s blade glows in a deep red cherry as his essence makes his blade hotter than an furnace. An attack supplemented by this charm gains the Piercing tag. If a weapon already has the piercing tag then the wielder does not need to pay a point of initiative or defense when using this charm.

At Essence 2+ the user may pay an additional mote when activating this charm, allowing them to cut through magical or natural soak as if it were armoured soak with this charm.

>Grand Daiklaves can do 6 damage post soak and have chopping.

Grand Daiklaves have Balanced, not Chopping. It's what allows them to do six dice after soak.

>Kill mooks, take thousands of pounds of magical material
>Hand them to a supernal craft twilight. Bribe the twilight player if necessary (it probably will be)
>Laugh when the one of the only two things stopping craft from being broken (the other being how impenetrable the craft system is to learn) is thrown out the window
>Stomp on mooks with n/a artifacts

Oh I thought they had chopping.

In either case I think getting something with chopping would be a bit better. If something is fully soaking a heavy artifact weapon than something is very wrong.

To be fair, we don't know that warstriders will have the exact same soak stats as artifact heavy armor, just that for the purposes of practicing martial arts, operating a warstrider counts as wearing heavy armor. Wouldn't be the first case of soak from an unusual source counting as a certain armor category without perfectly matching the stats of that category.

If Warstriders do count as heavy armour then Earth Dragon and White Reaper users will be having some fun.

>White Reaper

Well THAT'S going to synergize beautifully with warstriders being especially good at wrecking armies.

Are we ever going to get more material for Heaven's Reach? Because I have never liked a setting as much as I did this bastard child of Exalted, 40K, and Star Wars.

Pic related because SPAAAACE WHAAAAALES

Funny you mention that.

docs.google.com/document/d/1OhCM-uzILa48740W-sR6TAKucqyUPsJOU5GNd8Fjzq4/edit

No, no we're not. And thats a good thing, that book was pretty "meh" overall and reeked of "the line is dead here's one last shot at some money before new edition".

I think he means the recent fan-supplement that greatly expanded the setting.

I personally thought the ideas were cool and pretty good. Hell the appendix alone was great for Firearms, vehicles, and charms for them. If anything I see the potential for them + the cancelled Shard. You can make an entire book out of the setting, the real victim here was wordcount as you're basically given an overview for like 3 books of materials.

But I'm not deluded. I'm well aware that the main line is the money maker. Shards may've done really well, but expanding each of the books into their own things is a pretty hard sell in the first place. I mean Scion 2e's concept is far easier to sell and friendlier to market.

Wait, what canceled shard?

I suppose my issue with it is that I play Exalted to play Exalted. If I wanted other settings, I'd go play different games, I suppose.

IIRC it was codenamed Victoria. It was a Steampunk Exalted shard where Autochton never left Creation. One of the big things of the setting for example would've been several massive long train tracks that went from the Blessed Isle to the North/East/South Creation.

It was canned for Burn Legend.

Which is fair. As I said it's a really hard sell to do. However I think such settings are good if people still want to play Exalted and got bored of the default setting (I go in and out of it)

This was, at the time, also my big problem with Shards. Exalted then was a game that you only really played for the setting; taking it OUT of that setting felt like wildly missing the point.

Yeah, thats the same feeling I have. It's also why a lot of fluff changes for 3E don't sit well with me. It feels like someones homebrew idea of Exalted instead of feeling like Exalted.

Fucking glorious, thank you!

Did not actually know that existed until now!

That's actually pretty standard with gilding of all kinds, because of how it's applied to the edges of the paper.

I've had it happen with fancy versions of The Divine Comedy, to the collector's edition of Deathwatch.

>It's also why a lot of fluff changes for 3E don't sit well with me. It feels like someones homebrew idea of Exalted instead of feeling like Exalted.
Howso?

It's probably the new Exalted. That's what people who dislike 3E fluff usually complain about.

Is that genderbent Sesshomaru?

That's all? I think the Liminals are kinda being wedged in, but the Getimen sound like a really need counter-point to the Sidereals (without being evolved mary sues like the Nocturnals), while Exigents are something that people have basically been home-brewing on their own since forever.

>the Nocturnals

Oh god I fucking forgot about that goofy bit of fanshit.

Masters of Jade was pretty good, ad Chompy Cake-Thief is staying on as an iconic Lunar.

>mary sues like the Nocturnals

I've only ever heard of these guys. What are they like? What makes them good or bad?

New Exalted primarily, the changes to the setting to accompany that stuff. They just feel incredibly forced to me, like Holden and Morke had some kind of agenda to fit in some homebrew bullshit they had in their own games for years.

>but the Getimen sound like a really need counter-point to the Sidereals

The Sidereals already had many counters. Basically, everything outside of Fate, which was a fairly large roster.

me too, but only because I'm really looking forward to stealing that, like I do for every game that has dlc cut from the main launch. (even games I don't own, just hoard it on a harddrive out of spite)

slippys hit!

>slippy

"Minuend used to be the feared and worshiped sorcerer-queen of a wealthy, upstart kingdom in the deep South, until she woke up one day and wasn't. She aims to reclaim what was taken from her, and to punish those responsible."
This was one of the examples given for a getimian. It sounds to me like she was snarled out of her destiny, and that the snarling has something to do with why she is a getimian now. That her identity and whole life was stolen from her. And that sounds super compelling to me.

The Greco-Roman deities always as strike me as unrelatable, especially when I compare them to the Norse gods. Most of the Aesir and Vanir will freely admit their shortcomings, which has allowed some of them to become greater or just deal with particular crises in unexpected ways. This is hindering my ability to write adventures for this setting. Can anyone recommend me any stories where the Greco-Roman deities were brought low and had no choice but to deal with some gritty and/or humiliating shit?

Why do you need the greco-roman deities to be relatable to write adventures for this setting? They aren't in this setting.

Are you guys confusing Exalted with Scion, by chance?

No I am not.

In real life Apollo became Sol became Sol Invicuts. Likewise, Artemis became Diana became Luna. Those gods and goddesses are the basis for these fictional ones, which don't currently have much characterization as a result of 3E's publishing schedule operating on a geological timescale. Thus I'm trying to fill in the gaps with material from real world myth, but doing so is hard when the most famous story about Apollo and Artemis is about them killing fourteen children to punish their mother for her hubris.

More importantly, why does it even fucking matter why I need to use this as creative fuel? It works. It helps me write. How many people who post in these threads actually run a 3E game?

So if you can't think of any appropriate stories from greco-roman myth, why not take from other myths?

The deities I would borrow from would have to have enough in common with Sol and Luna to justify it thematically. Off the top of my head I can think of one god, Marduk, that I could borrow from. So your suggestion works, but it isn't as good as actually reading up on Apollo/Sol and Artemis/Luna. And the problem with trying to find good greek/roman stories is that THERE ARE SO MANY. That's a lot of chaff to separate from the wheat. And given what colossal nerds fa/tg/uys tend to be, I thought I could get some help narrowing down the list.

The ones who are writing them have the best mechanical track record so far, so there's hope.

I too demand to know about terrible exalted fan stuff!

Tell me stories about the campaign you're in/running/would run if you're so inclined.

Hoping to run this and just about finished first pass through the rulebook. Also going through lore videos, it's pretty dense but I'm really liking the setting. Just looking to see how other people do it.

Nocturnals were basically sort of...they were Attribute-based Exalts (because seriously people treated being Ability-based as some kind of leprous condition at that time; I *still* see people begging the devs to make Sidereals not Ability based) with themes of memory and foiling destinies. They had a strong Dr. Who vibe; a Nocturnal was (barring violence or incident) immortal but would shift in identities every so often.

They weren't very strong individually, intentionally being aimed for the bottom bound of Celestial tier power, but they could still do some crazy shit. They could even engage in a sort of faux-time travel.

They also sort of had a theme of rebellion about themselves. They opposed the Sidereals, but were also apparently meant as mates to them the way the Lunars were to the Solars.

That's....actually less terrible than I thought.

I might be underselling the goofiness a tad because my memory is full of gaps about the material.

But hey, a lot of people DID like them.

Oh. They're the chosen of an Incarna called Nox, who has...fuck I don't remember most of his backstory. Except he's not the same as Five Days Darkness.

>How many people who post in these threads actually run a 3E game?

I'm going to assume the people in a setting specific game like Exalted, use it to run Exalted, not some homebrew weirdness. Nothing wrong with that, but I'm just saying if you come in spouting weird shit like you expect anyone to know what the fuck you're talking about, you're gonna not find anyone knowing what you're on about.

So what are popular deviation from canon that people like/think they work? One reason I never managed to run Exalted was just that there was so much fluff to know and account for that the one time I tried I just went 'fuck it, nothing exist outside of the corebook'. Well, maybe not 'nothing', obviously the core metaphysics and mechanics of the various Exalt types remained it's just that I generally tried to not lose 10 hours of planning cross-referencing everything to make sure it was lore-compliant if said compliance was ruining my game.

Happy you like it!

Thats how most people run most games I'd assume, given so many games have mountains of fluff shit spread across like 30 books easily these days, it's impossible to recall every last detail every second of the day, especially if it's about places and things you personally don't give a shit about or in places the campaign will never go.

My standard line as a GM is "Another group of Exalt's handled it" when it comes to any sort of shit cropping up that would've ended the world or otherwise fucked everything up.

>Thats how most people run most games I'd assume
Having tried to play Exalted online during the height of 2e this wasn't what I saw. I saw clear cut adherence to the lore and metaplot bullshit out the wazoo like the bad days of Vampire.

Can't say much as some of my players lurk these threads but I just started a game where the characters have complete Hollywood Amnesia, they can talk and understand how the world works on a general level but lack any knowledge of their past. Up to and including what the hell they are good at.

The players have no idea what their character has dots in, what their Charms are, and what there backstory is. I had 5 other people create full characters, backstory, Intimacies, NPCs, and all. I had final say and I sculpted them together into a cohesive collection. The idea is they have to learn about who they were and what they are capable of by interacting with the world. They won't know they're good at swords until they have to attack or defend with one, then I let them know how many dice they have to the action. Slowly letting them piece together their Attributes, Abilities, and Specialties. Charms I'm using for the first time on their behalf when it's appropriate, after which they have full control over when they can use it having "learned" it.

This wasn't a surprise or anything, this was the premise I sold the campaign on so I didn't suddenly pull a gotcha when the game started. Can't really talk about the plot overall but the first session seemed to go pretty well.

Okay now I just HAVE to read this, because I'm in the minority who thought the Shard book was actually cool, especially Heaven's Reach and the Modern Age shards.

Shame the book only had four shards, would have loved to see more alternate versions of Creation.

Modern Creation was one of the ones I thought about, but in the end I decided as HR as I thought it was more flexible.

IMO the issue with Modern Exalted is that, being not-our-world-but-close-enough it would invariably draw upon shitstorm at historical similarities and people having their own biases.

I'd personally rather have a "Creation but ideas from our world" rather than having it be Earth. After seeing some of the shitstorms from WoD discussions I'd rather not have things to do with real Earth.

I mean I could. Hell it'd save quite a bit of space, but it comes with its own baggage.

Speaking of 'ideas from our world' and how Exalted clearly draws from all mythologies and world history: in my ill-fated Exalted game (it was a failure, it was years ago, its pointless of me to expand on it) I distinctly recall one player whose concept was...a knight. As in medieval knight.

Now initially I recall scoffing at the idea, since the pure european trappings seemed a little weird given how Exalted is very very asian (just less so in some regions). However, recently I've started to think back on it, especially given my willingness, as pointed out here that while I draw inspiration from canon but doesn't stick to it this also include to countries and cultures. And to which I ask: is the idea of a map chunk which is more classic medieval europe too 'wrong' for Exalted?

No, I don't mean medieval fantasy like D&D, this shit has a bad rep for a reason. My idea, should I ever run Exalted again and come to use such an idea (hah, yeah right) was to cling more to HISTORICAL europe, as opposed to the cheap, shitty 'fantasy europe' everyone tend to use. More specifically the dark age to low middle age era. Does such a place even exist in Creation? Because put through an Exalted lense and adjusted for a lack of monotheism in Creation it totally seem like the kind of place that could exist in-setting. But I could be wrong. Or I could just have forgotten a place which actually exist anyway.

This is probably doable; I'd set it either in the North (because that's where you get humans with European-esque features) or somewhere in the Hundred Kingdoms.

My basic idea was looking more at HOW the middle ages came to be and how it influenced things. What we call the 'Dark Ages' came from the collapse of the Roman Empire, which imo maps up well to the Shogunate. There has always been people making comparison between knights and samurai, of course, and I'd actually ideally play off this idea.

So you'd have a chunk of land which is culturally and ethnically different from the Realm about as much as say, people in other places can be. The rest of the elements of dung age middle age are right there off the bat in Exalted, but can be turned to eleven for good measure: superstitious folk deathly afraid of ghosts and/or demon (perhaps there's something close enough to warrant such high spiritual activity, like a shadowland...or maybe they're just paranoid morons). Toothless peasants. 'Nobles' and an elite warrior caste...who are really just one or two generation removed from tribal conquerors. Oh and splash in, for good measure, an obsession with remaking the Shogunate or something similar despite the people involved being nothing like the Shogunate or not even Dragon-Blooded. But then again the 'Holy Roman Empire' was neither holy nor roman!

A few more elements I thought which could be Exalted-ified of what we associate with europe are the folk heroes and saints, like Saint George and King Arthur. Bonus points if its just really badly deformed versions of the tales of long-forgotten Solar. Fuck, maybe that Sword-in-the-stone nobody can pick up is really an Orichalcum Daiklave.

Adding to this: the idea, loose as it may be, was to mesh the grim and gritty of the technological, social and politic styling of the early middle ages with the folklore drawn from the whole middle age period+europe in general. Injecting just enough of Exalted-ness in it might make for a decent little chunk of map IMO.

You know what I rarely see discussed in Exalted threads unless people are talking about Infernals? Demon and Yozi. Anyone ever fluffed some cool demons? Doesn't need to be some world-ending monstrosity Third Circle Demon, I just mean something weird and alien which could make for some fun encounter or moment where the players are just scratching their heads, trying to understand just wtf is going on in the demon's alien head.

I'm not trying to homebrew anything. The Sol Invictus of real life is who the Sol Invictus of Exalted is based on. Sol Invictus came from Sol, who came from Apollo. I'm not sure how I could explain this more clearly. If I were to adopt the definition of 'homebrew' that you're using, just watching DBZ or a Wuxia film or reading Conan to gain understanding of the setting elements in Exalted setting would be homebrew. The game is set in Creation and I want to figure out how Sol will react to the party because they've reached E3 at such an impressive speed that they've caught Sol's eye and he will be communicating with them. That's not homebrew,