Exalted General — /exg/

maybe it will be in 3rd ed, wouldn't put it past them

It was a 'transitory' period that lasted for centuries, almos as long as the reign of the Empress. As far as the Dragon-Blooded are concerned, it was a golden age when the entire world was (at least nominally) united under Dragon-Blooded leadership, and when many wondrous things destroyed in the Balorian Crusade still existed. Of course it deserves some love.

>almos as long as the reign of the Empress

Which is barely the fraction of a Celestials lifespan. And thats before any life extenders or other shenanigans.

Literally, a footnote.

>Which is barely the fraction of a Celestials lifespan.

I dunno, the Immaculates would argue that a Solar/Lunar's lifespan is more in the area of a few months.

...

That's like saying that, say, American presidents are mere footnotes because their terms are merely a fraction of a human lifetime. Or that the Cold War era was a footnote rather than a time period of interest, or that Napoleon was a footnote, or the Thirty Years War was a footnote. That's just not what a footnote means. The Shogunate era has has an enormous, global and relatively recent influence on the Creation. It is a historical period that's very much relevant to the current cultures of the place. Ignoring it is retarded.

More generally, most Celestials don't actually reach that age. Most Celestials living in the Age of Sorrows were born during the Empress' reign, and from their perspectives centuries are unlikely to seem like a footnote.

No, thats like saying a dog's lifespan is a footnote in a human's lifespan. Because it is. Dogs live a fraction of a human's lifespan. You may love your dog and things may change around your dog, but that doesn't stop that he's gonna die in 10 or so years and you'll probably live, on average, at least 50.

tl;dr It's not important enough to mention in the core because it has little to do with the current state of the game other than "It was the time between the FA ending and the Contagion fucking everything up".

source on comic?

Idk man, posted in last thread. Would be nice to know tho, yeah.

God Country

the firstage didn't even last a full solar generation. a few people who fought in the primordial war saw it end. so that retort doesn't mean as much as it could

the sum total of all of human (And ex-human like solars) achievement is a footnote on that timescale

Have you ever spent your entire mote pool on a social encounter?

No. I have spent all my jizz on a social encounter though. In 3e it's like man essence pool if I understand correctly.

>No, thats like saying a dog's lifespan is a footnote in a human's lifespan. Because it is. Dogs live a fraction of a human's lifespan. You may love your dog and things may change around your dog, but that doesn't stop that he's gonna die in 10 or so years and you'll probably live, on average, at least 50.
Yes, and that President of United States stay in office for more than 8 years, so I guess he's even less significant a footnote than that dog. That's the logical conclusion if all you care about is the length of time something lasts, anyways.

>tl;dr It's not important enough to mention in the core because it has little to do with the current state of the game other than "It was the time between the FA ending and the Contagion fucking everything up"
It's more immediately relevant to the current state of affairs than the First Age, though.

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I honestly find the first age boring as shit, all it had going for it was the scifi and that's out. Would much rather never see it explored and instead get some solid Shogonate worldbuilding. screw solar wank

...those presidents would be about less long than the dog mentioned.

>screw solar wank
was supposed to be @ it's the most dull and unappealing thing exalted is capable of doing

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Wasn't it like 30% of the length of all of history since the primordial war? I thought it was like 1000 something years long.

Not quite.

The Prehistoric Era: (???- Year 0) (First Age begins)
The Ochre Fountain Era (Years 1-100)
The First Deliberative Era (Years 110-652)
The Unfurling Horizon Era (Years 653-1215)
The Shining Reflection Era (Years 1216-1721)
The Thousand Struggles Era (Years 1722-2543)
The Second Deliberative Era (Years 2544-3203)
The Era of Dreams (Years 3204-3699, ending with the Usurpation, roughly RY -750)
The Shogunate (RY -750 - RY -1, ends with Balorian Crusade + Great Contagion)(Second Age begins)
The Scarlet Empire (RY 0 - RY 768, 'present day' Exalted)
RY 768 = Elder Reckoning 5317

So roughly, her Redness' reign has lasted a bit over a tenth of all history since the primordial era, and barely a few years more than the Shogunate lasted.

it was, but celestials live a retardedly long time. the solar's portion of the first age was almost as much of a "footnote" as the shogonate period, especially if you separate out the short "gloriuos golden advancement" era from the shameful "sun tyrants worse than primordials ever were" era

Yeah but all those early eras are pretty much just 'first age' as far as anything matters. Not like any of the distinctions between the eras of the first age are relevant in any sense.
Measuring things by lifespans is a terrible idea, like from the perspective of the player the short era that was the crusade and contagien has more happen in it then the entire first age.

>Yeah but all those early eras are pretty much just 'first age' as far as anything matters. Not like any of the distinctions between the eras of the first age are relevant in any sense.
Except in the sense of them being distinct eras, with standards of living, cultural mores, relationships between the Exalted and forms of government varying?

the only people who would know or care even the tiniest hint about that are maybe 2-6 infernals with pastlives 5, and they'll only care a tiny bit. it is as meaningless to the game as the time before the primordial war. the shogonate on the otherhand should leave some kind of lasting impression on the world that can be found in the 2nd age

Fair enough.

Another thing to consider - for the user(s) who see the Shogunate as a footnote due to its relatively short duration in comparison to Celestial lifespans, that is - is that modern Solars are young. From their perspective, the Realm has lasted for a really fucking long time. For them, the Shogunate is the ancient history of the world. It's like the Roman Empire at its height for people in the Middle Ages, or during the Renaissance, or for modern people, even. It's something long gone, but still remembered and relevant. Anything before the Shogunate isn't even history, it's just myths and legends. Not giving more information about the Shogunate means leaving out a huge part of the worldview of any learned Exalt of the Age of Sorrows.

Hey, I was paying a small but consistent amount of attention to the goings on of Exalted right up until a little after the original Devs got fired and replaced. I was pretty sure the game was just circling the drain to oblivion before that, and after, there seemed to be a lot of noise and I didn't feel like keeping up anymore.

But I'd like to get back into it. At least a little. What's the current state of things? Are the new Devs good? Have there been any new books/errata/webcontent (like Ink Monkeys)? Any new big setting info (are the new Devs taking things in a different direction)?

I appreciate any info.

How do you think shattered vase armor was intended to work, it says "send your arm to fight your opponent while the rest of you stays at a safer distance" is that intended to limit the damage they can do from any one attack to just "however many health levels an arm is worth, plus a crippling effect from destroying the arm"?

>What's the current state of things?

absolutely nothing has happened or changed since you last looked at it.

>Any new big setting info

oh, except that the realm has matriarchal gender roles and some random house is going to be agendered to protest it, and a dragonblood's balls only work once every 20 years.

we actually just got through discussing that.

So, shortly after the main core book leak, there was someone on one of these threads that wrote up a hypothetical combat between two E4 solars who do an ULTIMATE SHOWDOWN OF ULTIMATE DESTINY starting at like 30 init each. One was solar melee, and the other was Resistance/Single Point. Anyone have a bookmark for it?

Exalted isn't even "circling the drain" any more, it's a skeleton in the ground.

It's more or less exactly the same. We won't know if the new devs ruined it until we see some of their original work, not hammering out a re-do of a 90% done manuscript.

Basically the new edition is on the "how long until Neall or a freelancer ruins it" clock for now.

who is Neall?

Not much has changed, but the new devs have actually been actively engaging the community and clarifying shit rather than hiding up their own assholes for the most part and only popping their heads out to throw shade at the people who they ostensibly want to buy their shit.

Thank you for the update. I am anti-stoked about the matriarchal thing. One of my favorite things about the Dragonblooded was that they had an egalitarian view of gender roles - not because of bluhbluh social justice etcetc - but for a legit in-universe reason that made them not-the-norm. (That being that, hey, half of the Supreme Enlightened Beings walking among us punching gods are women. Ergo, they must be equal to men.)

So that sucks. But what is this about their balls?

From time to time someone will pop out and ask "why there are no breeding farms where DB will improve their numbers?"

And this is already answered with Realm being aristocracy based and multiple DB children is out of the option. You need enough land, wealth and possessions to leave to your children. Also people forget that nobody gets anything because Scarlet Empress owns Blessed Isle. Nothing is hereditary. She loans manses, houses, provinces etc to other Great Houses.

But devs are stupid and decided to explain why there are no more DB. It isn't weakened blood that was a consequence of millennia breeding with mortals. No. Every time male DB busts a nut and conceives a child his body starts producing low quality sperm so his children have low chance of exalting. It takes around 20 years before his balls recover and he can make another DB child.

The Realm has always been matriarchal, honestly. But yeah, they were mostly egalitarian, though they didn't allow feminine behavior associated with weakness, which I found weird.

>But what is this about their balls?
Just a handwave so people don't get their magical realm on all the damn time for the sake of efficiency.

>though they didn't allow feminine behavior associated with weakness,
How is this even defined? Are all Dragonblood women full butch?

>Just a handwave so people don't get their magical realm on all the damn time for the sake of efficiency.

It's not just a handwave, it's a pretty major change. That said, it doesn't JUST affect men, it also affects Dragon-Blooded women; a female DB can't just sleep with multiple "fresh" DB partners over two decades to ensure maximum conception.

I really want to know how the hell you have an army of DBs like this though. Devs have hinted that it may not have been as limited in the primordial war era but aren't saying anything concrete about it.

>though they didn't allow feminine behavior associated with weakness, which I found weird.

Through history what did people do with weak people who were in seats of power? They were either removed, manipulated or used.

Feminine behavior, which is gentle, caring, loving, empathy etc. is seen as a weakness that can be exploited.

who's magical realm is about efficiency exactly? what would that person even look like?

>And this is already answered with Realm being aristocracy based and multiple DB children is out of the option. You need enough land, wealth and possessions to leave to your children. Also people forget that nobody gets anything because Scarlet Empress owns Blessed Isle. Nothing is hereditary. She loans manses, houses, provinces etc to other Great Houses.

The problem with this is that it only explained why the *Realm* doesn't run DB breeding farms, not anybody else.

Ah, its another one of those forum things. Never actually comes up in a game, but enough people who don't have a regular group and so only engage the IP via reading the setting books like a novel talk about it, so the Devs think it's a real thing.

Like the "We can't have a Reclamation because every game has to be about that and so you can't have games about farting around in a teahouse." When, in reality, people who wanted to have a game about farting around a teahouse just did that and... went on with their lives while doing that.

>Every time male DB busts a nut and conceives a child his body starts producing low quality sperm so his children have low chance of exalting. It takes around 20 years before his balls recover and he can make another DB child.
Wait is the essence draining from impregnating or from ejaculating?

>Wait is the essence draining from impregnating or from ejaculating?

Impregnating/conception. It's weird because y'know, a man has to emit sperm to conceive, but whatever. Essence is magic and allowed to not make total sense all the time.

Something something spirtual/essence link between a guy and his sperm?

I wonder if there's any contraception charms.

>I wonder if there's any contraception charms.

There's that merit, Selective Conception.

That's not solars being in focus, it's more like solars being in a vacuum.

You could say Lookshy is trying it. But their attempts don't generally try to strengthen the bloodline so there isn't much difference. Rest of the Creation has insignificant number of DBs so there is no improvement even if they tried.

A sane reply would be that a DB with perfect breeding can knock up as many other DBs with perfect breeding as much as they want, because two perfects outweigh a little bit of weakening.

But then you have them doing the do with people who aren't perfect, and then those not-perfects get with other not-perfects make even-worse-not-perfects and so forth, and then suddenly that slight weakening from blowing your load too soon after the last one becomes a big deal between your kid Exalting and not.

Whether the devs go with that explanation will have to be seen later, but I'll probably go with it if it becomes relevant in my game.

>Feminine behavior, which is gentle, caring, loving, empathy etc. is seen as a weakness that can be exploited.

Why am I starting to picture the Realm as Naggaroth?

Is it bad that I like the new take on DB generative Essence solely because it's blatantly a take on how Taoism saw the act of ejaculation and conception as the most spiritually exhausting thing a human could do?

From our perspective nothing. There was a dev switch but you may or may not give a shit depending on how you feel about that. Wait till a book comes out, download the inevitable leak here and give it a look I guess.

>And this is already answered with Realm being aristocracy based and multiple DB children is out of the option.
No, this was already talked about in an old thread. Due to the position the empress holds and the part she played both in history and in shapping the immaculate order she could have shaped the realm into a completely different culture if she felt like it. It wouldn't even necessarily be anymore difficult then what we have now, with the abuse levels of constant training and the giant secret service to keep the houses in check and the semi regular attempts on the empress's life.

No, not at all. Exalted has been doing shit like that since forever, and in this case you might have just 'discovered' the reason why they went with that.

PC recently stole a Soulsteel Daiklave called 'Heretical Communion' what could it do?

commune heretically, duh.

>Ah, its another one of those forum things.

ish... I've never heard of a PC setting up a rape camp but I've seen more than one Storyteller look at how Lunars make Beastmen and say "wouldn't that be vastly more effective with a few captured Dragon-Blooded?"

commune with heretics?

>Rest of the Creation has insignificant number of DBs so there is no improvement even if they tried.

Uh. No. They are everywhere but beholden to no one. There is something like 5000 outcasts spread all across Creation. The problem is they are not centralized like the Realm. But Dragonblooded are everywhere.

assuming a dragon blooded house wanted to increase their numbers without resorting to a farm, couldn't they just have a sorcerous working done on their main estate that heavily reduces the speed at which its residents age above peak adulthood, increasing the time they have to produce dragon blooded children?

Give someone stabbed with it an intimacy of loyalty towards the void or weaken an intimacy related to regular religions, thus causing heresy?

I'd have liked the idea better if it existed from the start. Doing it now in the all-SJW bullshit all the time era though makes it look like they're trying to insert some shitty beliefs and then using this as a justification for it, rather than just sticking with the old standby of "ignoring it because it's only a problem if you are actively looking to make it one".

I mean, you don't see them trying to fix the fact the Realm literally couldn't control the Blessed Isle with it's base army size and would be hilariously open to any invasion at all despite the DB's presence, let alone the new, improved, bigger world BI, and the satrapies atop any of that in either version of Creation. But no one brings it up so it's not a problem.

If I recall DB live for around 300 years and are in peak physical form until last decade or so.

we won't even know until the new guys actually write one from scratch. but considering how long it's taking to polish off something they had 3/4 of the way written from the old team i'm not particularly hopeful

Doesn't mock-chop-suey or whoever the fuck do exactly that with *his* goatwolfmanbearpig rape camp?

lost eggs have shit breeding unless they're forgotten realm or lookshy bastards though

again though, that would quickly and massively destabilize the realm, theres a reason nobility dont have like 8 kids let alone 40

I mean they might do it /now/ since it's falling apart anyway, but now would be too late to start.

IIRC, he doesn't like to "taint" his wolf-goat-men with DB blood, because they had a hand in the Usurpation.

I don't get why the answer wasn't just "yeah, theres totally way more dragonbloods than we said last edition, we fixed the math." instead of doubling down on the implausably tiny population(not even talking about breeding armies, just talking about being at or above 2 kids per family since the last apocalypse)

what part of more dragon blooded would massively destabilize the realm?

Half of Dragonbloods live to around 150 or 200, it is incredibly easy and likely that DB couples will be able to pump out the Realm expected 5 kids in that time. Most can do it before they hit 100. The population curve hasn't really changed at all since the fluff from 1e said a 12 year child gap was the average for the Realm anyway.

All this has done is made the Realm even more egalitarian, or at least logically so. Previously the Realm should have absolutely treated DB women as a protected class since they could only have a kid every 5 years as opposed to a male blowing his load. Not every single Dragonblood is a warrior on the front lines, women should have been heavily pushed into non-combat roles to keep them safer. Now both men and women have a cooldown period which means neither sex is more of a bottleneck than the other. A population of 99 women and 1 man would grow just as slowly as 99 men and 1 woman.

>Half of Dragonbloods live to around 150 or 200, it is incredibly easy and likely that DB couples will be able to pump out the Realm expected 5 kids in that time. Most can do it before they hit 100. The population curve hasn't really changed at all since the fluff from 1e said a 12 year child gap was the average for the Realm anyway.

the number of dragonbloods they say exists doesn't make sense for the number of dragonbloods they say survived the fairy crusade and the amount of time they say has passed since. they'd need to have like 5 more cataclysms just to knock the numbers down to their ridiculously tiny "realm can't actually control the blessed isle with the numbers you've quoted let alone keep an empire, devs have no sense of scale" thing, not if they're at 2.1 kids per couple let alone 5 or more. forcibly spacing them out every 12 years means nothing to that. it'd fix way more things if they just increased the number of dragonbloods they estimate are around instead.

>A population of 99 women and 1 man would grow just as slowly as 99 men and 1 woman.

it'd have been even easier to just say the high breeding dragonbloods can lay eggs ;)

but no, why do people act like biology should be what's limiting their numbers? the dragonbloods are nobility. they'll only have as many kids as they can actually support since more would break politics. they're not just constantly shitting out as many kids as they absolutely can, they're not an 1840s irish steriotype and it wouldn't be even remotely reasonable to expect them to be under...pretty much ANY conditions except possibly the height of the primordial war oglaf.com/owlbear/

Another comment, i forget where from, says that each given DB family is expected to have AT LEAST five children. And they can keep having kids for like 200 years remember, instead of the like 40-50 years it can normally happen in for humans. Keep that up for eight centuries.

Mmmm... true. A fair point, I suppose.

I have no idea why the whole "20 years before you nut" is a thing.

I mean think about it this way. There are pretty much no DBs with perfect breeding in modern Creation. More, you won't know whether the children Exalt or not until ten to fifteen years later. Hell, not everyone with the potential to Exalt in fact Exalts!

So assuming a Breeding 5 Dragonblooded male goes around fucking everyone he can, he STILL won't reliably produce Dragonblooded children, because the other half of the equation are the mothers and genetics!

>I mean think about it this way. There are pretty much no DBs with perfect breeding in modern Creation. More, you won't know whether the children Exalt or not until ten to fifteen years later. Hell, not everyone with the potential to Exalt in fact Exalts!
>So assuming a Breeding 5 Dragonblooded male goes around fucking everyone he can, he STILL won't reliably produce Dragonblooded children, because the other half of the equation are the mothers and genetics!
I've never known how to feel about Breeding as an actual mechanic. It makes it too tangible in game terms to make it more likely for DBs to exalt, IMO. It's too tempting an option for powergamers, which pigeonholes them into being elitist high-Breeding Dynasts. And from a fluff perspective it also complicates things because it goes back to a 'born with talent or without it' situation.

Apparently breeding in 3e is only going to give you a few social benefits and, narratively, a greater likelihood of your kids Exalting. No more absolutely must-have additional motes.

>I mean, you don't see them trying to fix the fact the Realm literally couldn't control the Blessed Isle with it's base army size and would be hilariously open to any invasion at all despite the DB's presence, let alone the new, improved, bigger world BI, and the satrapies atop any of that in either version of Creation. But no one brings it up so it's not a problem.
The size of the legions doesn't really matter for holding the Blessed Isle, because the legions don't exist to hold the Isle. They mostly serve in the Threshold. Guardians of the Realm or whatever are more relevant for controlling the Isle, and the Imperial Navy is more important for preventing any invasions. Also, there are 30 legions now, but there have been more in the past, and can be more again if needed.

>what part of more dragon blooded would massively destabilize the realm?
I dunno, what part of more demigods wanting their slice of the empire cake could possibly go wrong?

>I dunno, what part of more demigods wanting their slice of the empire cake could possibly go wrong?

What is the threshold? The Realm does not control everything yet. More Dragonblooded means they can more effectively conquer and administer Threshold territories. In fact the only thing stopping them is lack of Dragonblooded.

>Every time male DB busts a nut and conceives a child his body starts producing low quality sperm so his children have low chance of exalting. It takes around 20 years before his balls recover and he can make another DB child.
That's also a thing for women though.

>They mostly serve in the Threshold
that's even worse and more spread out

i'm sure a house could gain more esteem by having more children join the immaculate order.

From what I gather, Immaculate Order is a career people actually choose. Dynasts can be directed to another career despite wanting to join the Order, but the opposite almost never happens. The Order is for the genuinely pious and devoted. Monk are also more loyal to the Order than their Houses, so I don't think the Houses would be all that willing to go through the trouble and expense of raising even more children only to basically give them away.