Exalted General - /exg/

>even if the place itself was pretty boring.

They really need to fix this, so I'm glad they recognize its a problem

What are (((their))) expies in Creation?

thanks

I remember Doom 4 going on sale 50% off extremely early in its release and that is probably one of the best FPS games of recent years.

This is a nice map, but
Isn't creation a bit small? If creation is 11000 miles tall from what I assume is from start of Wyld to Wyld, and an Exalt can travel at 300 miles an hour , you can cross it in a mere 37 hours? Given, that's like half of earth's circumference.

You're the first person I've heard to call the Creation too small. I've heard the opposite complain quite a few times, though. Really, though, it's not small, it's just that Exalts who focus on going fast can go pretty damn fast.

Which DB houses are the biggest assholes?

What's your favorite Supernal Ability?

Pic unrelated, mine is probably Presence or Socialize.

Remind me, what was the origin in previous editions? If I recall after the primordials died and failed to move on, their lingering lust for creation formed it around them and their tombs right?

All of them.

>What's your favorite Supernal Ability?

How do you make Doomguy in 3xalt3d?

Cynis. From the perspective of a modern player, there's just something particularly fucked up about being involved in slave trade on that scale.

The Guild.

I thought more about it, Creation is 187 million square miles, so just about thousand square miles shy of being earth sized.
Anyone that's not Tepet is just degrees of asshole anyway, but I' guess Chartak

Was there a significant difference between how 1e and 2e spirit non-permanent deaths were handled?

The "ME SO ANGRY" Charms and a lot of either Brawl or Archery. Athletics to copy his crazy move speed.

>"ME SO ANGRY" Charms
Which ones are those?

Bloodthirsty Sword Dancer Spirit and 1 other.

Watcha think

I only played 2e so I don't know, but as I understand, 1e was much less described in its mechanics but had roughly the same narrative ideas. Like in 1e gates to yushan exist as an idea, but they were only described in 2e (their precise location and how they are used).

I'd guess spirits are told they revive similarly, but there are no reference to any stats in 1e. They'd say ghosts respawn in a while and sometimes move one instead of describing the exact rolls the ghost's pkayer has to make.

If you want you can pirate the books in the OP, in 2e it's the roll of glorious divinity 1 and 2, and I guess Games of Divinity and Abyssals? For 1e.

What does (((their))) refer to, and what does the Guild have to do with it?

Jews

It''s a far-right thing, anything with (((triple parentheses))) is a Jew. The Guild has the primary characteristic of being money hungry to the point of obsession.

>What does (((their))) refer to?
Look up "coincidence detector"

>what does the Guild have to do with it?
They're perfidous nation-wreckers with no nation who use their vast wealth and connections to worm their way into societies and manipulate them to their own nefarious ends.

I'm having a hard time finding players, so I might as well ask here right? Anyone running?

>They're perfidous nation-wreckers with no nation who use their vast wealth and connections to worm their way into societies and manipulate them to their own nefarious ends.
The guild isn't that uniform

The guild sells people to raksha and buy the husks back to use as beasts of burden. And they are pretty uniform, what kind of mafia isn't?

Yes, and the Guild brings medicines to nations suffering from plague. They also span the entirety of Creation, so how the hell could they be uniform?

By having a central family that keeps the branches in check, like any mafia.

Can you take a demon/elemental as a familiar without being a Twilight?

That's only the case when the discount happens immediately or close to it. If a game is steeply discounted when it just comes out before a steam sale, that's a bad sign. A year and a half? I'd be more surprised if it wasn't on sale, and would assume the people in charge of the game were just greedy.

You can if you use Ephemeral Induction Technique. Not sure if there's any other method.

>They also span the entirety of Creation, so how the hell could they be uniform?

>By having a central family that keeps the branches in check, like any mafia.

What he said. Imagine having Guild in West, East, North and South of Creation. While they are all working in their own sphere of influence they are all answer to "The Central". Central also sends their own men(that are much higher in hierarchy that province operatives) to make sure everything works as intended. Now imagine a hierarchy of multiple levels of operations. While you have some freedom of operation you still have your superior that tells you what to do. And each level of command leads to one step closer to "Central".

Also like anyone with some brain Central probably makes sure there is no rogue branches, deserters, or ideas of going independent. Make consequences of those kind of ideas extremely brutal to make sure others follow in line and don't get same ideas.

That's ridiculous. Creation is too big.

It isn't ridiculous. You just need to think.

You have a team of 5 workers. They are under team 1.

multiple teams are under team leader.

multiple team leaders are under province commanders.

multiple provinces are under region control.

etc. etc.

Now also add that Central sends "Generals" from time to time to further push their goals. Also spies on multiple levels of command and also bribes for snitches and informants to see what is going on in different regions.

How exactly do the guys sitting in Nexus keep the Guildsmen in Chiaroscuro or the western Isles in check? Do you think they have regular video conferences or something? Furthermore, do you have any idea how utterly impractical it would be to send people from the Guild's nominal headquarters in Nexus to locations thousands of miles away to make sure that everything works as it should? Aside from that trip taking a long, long time, the sent operatives managing to arrive at all would be far from a certain thing. The Guild is more of a network than an organization. That's how it's always been, and that's the only way things could work in a world with the Creation's level of technology.

they have far superior means of long range communication than human empires on earth did two hundred years ago

When the "Central" has to wait years to hear from some of the branches, and then wait years more for their orders - based on information that's outdated when those orders are given - to reach those branches, the "Central's" control is starting to seem pretty damn weak.

Correct me if I'm remembering wrong, but doesn't that Charm just make a new elemental or petty god?

Not feasible with medieval communication methods.

communication is instant for anyone who can afford a staff with a sorcerer on it

Sorcerers have, maybe. Sorcerers are rare fuckers, though, and while the Guild no doubt employs their services, those services are unlikely to be ubiquitous enough to allow for the kind of central control modern day organizatios might practice.

Even Infallible Messenger will take hours, maybe closer to a day, to deliver a five minute message to a target on the other side of the Creation. Also, people who can afford to keep a sorcerer on call are likely to be rare, even among the Guild.

i very much disagree, first of all sorcerers arent all that rare, basic ones are much more common than dragonbloods, and second of all you don't need them at every level of the chain, just distant links, and third of all, even if you did need them at every level of the chain, the guild would be able to do that because they are just that insanely rich that training legions of sorcerers isn't really that much of an effort

You never read Manacle and Coin did you?

real world empires were built and maintained with far less than infallible communicator drones that fly hundreds of miles per hour

>i very much disagree, first of all sorcerers arent all that rare, basic ones are much more common than dragonbloods
Based on what, user? I know Morke isn't a developer anymore, but I seem to recall him stating that something like one mortal in a million might become a sorcerer. Even if the new devs don't stick with that, sorcerers being more common than Dragon-Blooded seems unlikely, and certainly isn't stated to be the case in the 3E canon.

>and third of all, even if you did need them at every level of the chain, the guild would be able to do that because they are just that insanely rich that training legions of sorcerers isn't really that much of an effort
Training a legion of sorcerers isn't that simple. Aside from anything else, you actually need people with the talent and mindset required to learn sorcery.

Mafias operate internationally just fine. Anyone trying to turn it into a charity would just get culled.

Mafias of what year?

>Based on what, user?
the fact that all it takes for one to become one is training

>Training a legion of sorcerers isn't that simple. Aside from anything else, you actually need people with the talent and mindset required to learn sorcery.
no you dont, all you need is to secure some way of enlightening their essence, which there are many different ways to do for an organization that powerful, and then you train them up

i can easily see the guild having a half dozen mortal sorcerers in every major city

Large empires of antiquity generally didn't work through strict central control, because that shit just doesn't work. Empires also tend to have the advantage of things like patriotism and genuine loyalty keeping the distant governors at least somewhat interested in obeying the higher authorities. A network of greedy fuckers assisting each other insofar as it helps them satisfy their greed doesn't have that.

"Sorcery is a mountaintop of enlightenment", and all that. Nobody can read the 3E section of becoming a sorcerer and come out with the impression that anyone can learn sorcery with the proper training, at least not if they put any thought into what they read.

i dont really give a fuck about 3rd ed desu

...

That's something you should maybe mention. I mean, if you want to do your own thing, that's cool, but I think it's a reaasonable default assumption that people talk about the current canon when they make claims about how things work.

i think its more reasonable to talk about the things we actually have in any canon over speculating what might be written in a book five years from now

Well, for 3E, we have the statements of previous devs, and a section on sorcery which makes it clear that you need "effort, dedication, and the
willingness to abandon old views and deeply held beliefs" in order to become a sorcerer. The last of these is, of course, something that people can't just decide to have, even if they want to become sorcerers and their employer wants it too. Sorcerers being rare is something we know to be the case, so no need to wait years for any future books.

>five years
That's some downright admirable optimism, user.

m8, the conversation is about whether the guild makes sense, trying to poke holes in it by looking at disparate implementations of sorcery isn't getting anyone anywhere

The other editions are no longer relevant.

ITT: One user who never read the 1e book on the Guild attempts to describe what the Guild is.

The charm uses the term "Spirit" but you may summon a Raksha if you deliberately set out to do so. Does it matter if the spirit is created? If you wish to determine the spirits nature instead of it being informed by your surroundings, you can check out Burning Excorcism Technique or Carnal Spirit Rending.

Then lets leave sorcerous means of communication out of this. As for the Guild itself, we don't actually need to argue about whether it's centralized or not, because both of the previous editions have had a whole book dedicates to the subject. Manacle and Coin tells us that "the Guild is, in reality, an affiliation of powerful individuals who share like goals, with just enough structure to support it". That's a short and accurate description of what the Guild has always been presented as.

i don't disagree with what you're saying, i'm just sort of peeved you wanted to build an argument based on mixing and matching elements from different editions

What? I have honestly no idea what you're trying to say. What I said about sorcery was in response to anin claiming that sorcerers are pretty common and sorcerous means of communication could enbale the Guild to function as a centralized organization. My views on sorcery are based on 3E because, well, it is the current edition. My views on the Guild are based on previous editions, because that's what we have, and there's no indication of the Guild having significantly changed in 3E, especially considering the fact that Morke, Holden, Minton and Vance all worked on Masters of Jade.

But that's only natural, if we don't have new lore we use the old lore.

>My views on sorcery are based on 3E because, well, it is the current edition. My views on the Guild are based on previous editions, because that's what we have
this is what pisses me off

you can't take one from one edition and another from the other and declare that they don't make sense together

no shit, they aren't even from the same edition, they don't *need* to make sense together and the fact that they don't proves nothing

No that's stupid, we don't have a new Wyld book either and we still have mentions to Shaping effects in 3E.

you can speculate about things based on such mixmatching, but you can't make an argument that something doesn't make sense because of the disparities it gives you

Again, I have no idea what you're talking about. I haven't pointed out any conflicts or inconsistencies between the different editions. I haven't tried to claim that the Guild as described in previous editions doesn't make sense, or that Guild in 3E is different from the Guild in 1E or 2E. I'm saying that the Guild has never, in any edition, been described as a centralized organization. There's at least one user who's just plaing wrong about the way the Guild works, going by any edition. The discussion on sorcery started when that user mentioned sorcerous means of communication, and any comments I have made about sorcery have been in response to that. I haven't said a word about how 3E sorcery works with the Guild of the previous editions.

...

The centralization discussion is also secondary, since what that user said is "the guild isn't consistently evil", witch it is. Centralization is just a reasoning as to why it would be evil across the entirety of creation

Original 'guild isn't consistently evil' user here, but figured I might as well toss in a few more cents. Yes, the Guild as a whole is immoral because they only answer to the profit motive. But immoral != evil, they aren't kicking puppies for the sake of it. It just so happens that in the majority of cases doing evil shit gets you more money. In the uncommon case that doing something good gets you money, they'll do it.

Of course, this focuses primarily on Guild merchants - artisans and administrators are a whole 'nother can of worms.

Even for merchants, the average Guild merchant is just, you know, an average merchant. A guy who's more likely to sell tea to local people or something than slaves to the Fair Folk. There's some added security in belonging to a larger organization, and the Guild offers some nice business contacts, and that's appealing to plenty of honest, reasonably moral merchants who just want to make a living for themselves and their families.Guild does a lot of horrible things, and a lot of its wealth comes from doing horrible things, but for the average merchant selling his wares to average people in an average town, all of that's far away.

Okay, but it's faulty reasoning based on an incorrect premise, and it's worth discussing.

Whatever good the guild makes is incidental. Of course immoral IS evil, morality is the measure of good. They're not kicking puppies for nothing, they're kicking puppies for profit, how's that any better?
The premise that the guild can't get sorcerers? But the Realm has a whole school of them and if anyone can shill out the jade out for the services it's the Guild.

I mean, yes, the good is incidental (assuming a hypothetical Homo Guildmanus who's sole care is for profit), but so is the evil. It's an externality that they don't care for, because they want the money.

And, of course, that's assuming some perfect representation of the Guild were to exist - people in Creation are more complex. Many are evil, many are good - if you were to chart the morals of every Guildsman you'd probably find a bell curve - but the ones that do evil shit and get away with it tend to skew towards higher positions, because that tends to make slightly more money and money is power in the Guild.

The Realm has a school whose staff numbers around 80 and most of the people who go in don't actually become sorcerers.

When the Primordials died, they clogged the metaphysical machinery of what was previously a perfect reincarnation system.

Giveme all the scrying spells you know, canon or homebrewed.

Can I activate a charm even though it accomplishes nothing? for example lets say it works only against decisive attacks but you are being attacked by a withering, can I still activate it?

Why they are doing evil is irrelevant, they are doing evil. Those goo nature merchants might associate with the guild out of necessity, but you already said the higher ups are all going to be more and more corrupt, and so whatever influence the Guild has will eventually turn to the worse.
They can still probably make a magic mailbox with Infallible Messenger ingrained on it or some minor bird spirit to carry a simple roll of parchment to and fro, or even intelligent carrier birds. Sure something like that would be worth jade by the slab, but it's well within Terrestrial Circle power and Guild resources.
I'd say no, charms are really just actions suffused by Essence. You can'd do a non-applicable action because it just don't make no sense. Are you just trying to build your anima up fast?

I'm more interested in using Aegis of Invincible Might as early as possible, but it only activates when you use Adamant Skin Technique which is Decisive-Only

Yeah, those charms turn on when your life is threatened, and withering attack don't do that. You could argue that every attack has killer intent, but Decisive attacks are really about to hit you in the noggin where the withering attack doesn't come close enough to trigger a visceral reaction like Aegis.

The problem is Aegis is perilous, so if somebody crashes me, then goes for the kill I'm fucked. What's the point of the capstone of an ability that revolves about surviving shit if I can't use it when I'm most vulnerable

Well Aegis is Perilous but Adamant Skin is not, and neither are Iron Skin Meditation and Diamond Body Prana that you ahve to have anyway. Since Aegis is Permanent, anytime after you use Adamant you automatically have Aegis go off. Even if you are in crash, if you can come back from crash by paying 8 motes in attacks it would turn on right there

Still lookin

Your best option is to check R20 and the Game Finder threads.

>They can still probably make a magic mailbox with Infallible Messenger ingrained on it
No, they probably can't replicate the effects of a spell permanently and in a way useable to non-sorcerers. Why could they?

> or some minor bird spirit to carry a simple roll of parchment to and fro, or even intelligent carrier birds
Carrier birds are already a thing. Making them intelligent would no doubt be beneficial, but I don't see how that would speed up communication to the extent that it would make maintaining a centralized organization on the scale of the Creation possible.

Also, again, we have two books dedicated to the Guild, and we know for a fact that it hasn't been a centralized organization in the past editions.