Pen & Paper - Spielsysteme > Exalted
Exalted - Small Talk
Edler Baldur:
Genaue Details, wie die Änderungen aussehen werden, gibt es noch nicht. Aber schon Hinweise was problematisch war/ist, bzw. welche Vorstellungen die Devs haben.
Die Zitate sind aus mehreren Themen, leider habe ich jetzt nach längerer Suche noch nicht das andere Lunar-Thema wiedergefunden. Da stand auch noch was drin.
--- Zitat von: Holden ---This is an understandable attitude. Unfortunately, it's understandable because throughout the entirety of 2e (and the waning days of 1e, to a degree) the Realm was written as a huge but bumbling incompetent that was about to fall down on its own and didn't really present a serious threat when compared to say, any single Deathlord. This is when it was not being actively written as setting protagonist, rather than brutally exploitative world-strangling empire.
--- Ende Zitat ---
--- Zitat ---Next time someone wonders why we want the Yozis shoved back in their cage and beaten until they're quiet, I'll point to this. This is the legacy of Second Edition: The world-strangling empire sitting on your character's usurped throne has been reduced to Rita Repulsa, the long-forgotten joke of a villain from season 1. It, the usurped throne, and the world they rule have been made irrelevant.
Never again.
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--- Zitat von: Plague of Hats ---It's really just the whole "solved" issue. What new things did we learn about Creation moving from First to Second Edition? Not much, really. The preponderance of material was polishing old gems, some of which were lusterless to begin with. The ridiculous map scale crap from First Edition, which was a mistake, was left in place and compounded in Second. Charms became more and more specific and necessary. The books were very preoccupied with telling you about stuff, instead of telling you about storyhooks. It was very didactic. It cataloged instead of exploring. It lacked enthusiasm.
This kind of thing, especially if it afflicts an entire game line, often has an impact on the reader.
EDIT: Oh, and that's just the setting, which even in the most loosey-goosey games can attract canon crusaders. The mechanics are so arcane and ponderous that they encourage a sort of studious monasticism from anyone willing to try to engage with them at all levels. To a lesser degree, this is also true of the setting.
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--- Zitat von: StephenIs ---As of 1e:
The goal of the two or three dozen elder Lunars who set the overall agenda of the Silver Pact, to the degree that such a thing exists, is this:
"The Dragon-Blooded and Sidereals wrecked our civilization, killed our spouses, killed as many of us as they could, and chased the rest of us away to eke out survival in the Wyld, which actually melted our Exaltations until we developed a fix for that. And then they bungled relations with Heaven, squandered the wealth they'd stolen, wrecked those portions of our civilization they'd managed to salvage, and kept such a bad handle on public health that a magic plague erupted and killed almost everything, which let the Fair Folk (who we'd been trying to keep out) back in. Then, by complete luck, one of the managed to grab the gun pointed at the head of the universe and, the moment she'd actually put it to responsible use, turned it around and used it to maintain an even worse form of the crumbling ruins of the civilization they'd managed to salvage. Fuck them all. Fuck them long and fuck them hard.
"So. First? Right of vendetta, motherfuckers. Chejop Kejak killed my wife and our three kids; before I die his head is going up on a pike on my lawn. Second? Even if we didn't invoke right of vendetta, neither the DBs nor Sidereals are up to the task of ruling the world. We need to replace them. Then we can put the world back on track by building up something that is simultaneously much closer to the heights of magnificence they managed to smash than anything they've maintained since then, and with fewer of the systemic weaknesses that we can now see in hindsight contributed to this whole mess in the first place."
They are, however, the underdogs. There are not a lot of Lunars and they are hard to organize; there are even fewer elder Lunars. There are many Dragon-Blooded and they are well-organized. Keep in mind the elder Lunars will feel much more kinship with each other than with their younger cohorts, who are born into the world the Dragon-Blooded made and don't know what they're missing or what's been lost.
Let's say you're Raksi. What can you do to contribute to the goal of "Kill all surviving elder Sidereals because fucking blood debt, destroy Dragon-Blooded grip on Creation, and start again?" Your resources are: the ruins of Sperimin and anything else you can grab.
What happens if you rebuild Sperimin? Well, there are not a lot of elder Lunars and they're badly-organized. You have backup, but his name is Ma-Ha-Suchi and he has his own problems; the next Lunar is twice as far away and also has her own. There are a lot of Dragon-Blooded and they're well-organized. If you make Sperimin a livable place and build roads leading to it, the Dragon-Blooded are going to come and steal it from you.
So you squat in it and keep it unlivable, as a natural resource to be called upon at such a time as DBs aren't organized enough in Creation to just steal it from you anymore. It's the First Age lore equivalent of a national park.
You need allies. The obvious choices are a) your own kids, and b) other, younger Lunars. The other, younger Lunars, of whom there are far more than there are surviving elders, are not exactly going to be lining up to join your cause as it actually exists, because it sounds crazy to anyone who doesn't know intimately how much you've suffered. So you build a mystique around yourself, you make a cult of personality and keep them loyal to you that way. You feed them propaganda. Sure, it's sorta lies, but you know you're right and they'll be much better off if you win than if you lose and let the world stay under the control of the Realm.
Your medium-term goal is to smash Dragon-Blooded civilization down to the point where their organization collapses, which requires constant guerilla war against the infrastructure that allows the maintenance of that organization. Eventually Dragon-Blooded civilization is going to splinter and you can snare up a bunch of it in your cult of personality and they will be joining the side of good (i.e. your side), and later those DBs can help rebuild the world, but in the meantime it all needs to come down.
Once you've reduced the whole world to stone age levels of infrastructure, destroyed all the magitech the DBs hold while keeping yours in reserve until you need it to rebuild Creation, and permanently fucked up the Realm's lines of supply and communication to the point where fielding organized legions is impossible, your trained barbarians and Essence 8 Charisma Charms will have a distinct advantage over the DBs, who can expect to get to like Essence 6 before they need anagathics to live long enough to cultivate their Essence any more (you will be destroying the infrastructure that lets them harvest anagathics), and who have armies entirely trained to need supply and communication lines to function. Until then, yes, their legions kick the shit out of your disorganized hordes, but the thing about hordes is you can always organize another in two or three generations. Meanwhile you keep raising your kids to believe barbarian fighting methodology is strongest even though it isn't because once you've hit the endgame of this stage of your plan, it totally will be.
...
You will notice this plan is meticulously thought out, entirely workable given a long enough timeline, is going to make Creation into Holiday in Cambodia, and is not optimized for making elder Lunars sympathetic at all. To which I say: Have you read the descriptions of Cathak Cainan and the Slug? Pay atention to the part where Cathak Cainan makes a habit of squeezing his satrapies as hard as he can and puts down rebellions with a maximum of brutality to make a point, and where the Slug is party to a gigantic prostitution ring in a setting that's not terribly interested in downplaying the ethical problems of sexual slavery. They are both reprehensible people.
And yet Cathak Cainan and the Slug are immensely popular because they're written with charisma and panache, and Cainan keeps getting sexy illos.
The failure of the 1e book was execution, not conception. It failed to sell the Silver Pact's plan while also failing to communicate it.
2e Lunars was written by people who wanted to salvage Lunars but who did not understand either what 1e Lunars was trying to do, nor precisely how it failed to achieve it.
3e Lunars will, at the very least, be written by people who know exactly where 1e Lunars went wrong.
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--- Zitat von: Holden ---Here's the Great Contagion, in a nutshell:
It gutted the world because of the Usurpation.
Yes, it was unleashed by the Deathlords. Yes, they, too, are a product of the Usurpation. They didn't have to be. It could have been something else. It was them.
Creation was totally unprepared. Its infrastructure, where it hadn't failed entirely, had been co-opted for internecine warfare among the Dragon-Blooded, or against the Fair Folk, or against the Lunar Exalted. The thing was aggressive, virulent, horrifyingly lethal. Dragon-Blooded medicinal Charms bounced off it without doing much more than making victims comfortable in their final hours. Exalted physicians themselves weren't immune to the awful thing. The magic of the Lunar Exalted had never been particularly slanted toward handling something like this to begin with. The Sidereal toolkit wasn't designed for wide-scale medical emergency relief, either-- Sidereal magic is a precise surgical instrument, not designed to shoulder the burdens of a dying world.
The resources of the late Shogunate could cure it, mind. Wine distilled from the Peaches of Immortality banished the illness and the Sidereals carried some of that out from Yu-Shan. A few mighty gods were able to cast out the sickness and desperate Terrestrials were able to press some of them into service if they didn't volunteer first.
It was a little twig fence thrown up before a tidal wave.
The medical Charms of the Solar Exalted... could cure the incurable. They could force the disease into abeyance. Check its spread. Drive it back.
If the Jade Prison had been shattered during the Contagion... well, never say never where the Exalted are concerned, but it likely wouldn't have helped.
A Solar doctor can save a household, a village. But a city like Deheleshen? Or Hollow? One doctor, no matter how excellent, in a dying megalopolis of ten million people? Unprepared?
In the First Age, the Great Contagion could have been stopped cold. Leading Solar medical experts had organizations like our WHO; immortal geniuses had spent lifetimes preparing virulent outbreak contingencies, ordering the mass creation and stockpiling of medical wonders; establishing distribution networks, vaccination-firewall contingency plans, designing Charm-strengthening hospital manses for the treatment of the sick by Terrestrial doctors.
By the Great Contagion the stockpiles had been looted, the geomantic power preserving stocks of vaccine rerouted for other purposes and the miraculous powders and potions allowed to spoil, the contingencies lost or forgotten or made impossible to implement due to lack of Celestial administrators or orchestrators...
The Solars designed their utopia to withstand many different hypothetical doomsday scenarios, including mass outbreak of horrific disease. The Shogunate didn't have the plans or infrastructure in place, and they'd lost most of the raw magical power they would have needed to have a prayer. The Great Contagion is the story of the decline of Creation as much as it is a tale of the absence of the Solars.
This is important. The Solars are now returned to Creation, and they are starting again from scratch-- neither by the color of their anima, the name of their patron, nor even the raw might of their Charms are the dire terrors of the Age of Sorrows tamed or relieved. Taking the Second Breath and bearing a golden caste mark is where the journey of a Solar-- and the tale of the returning Solars-- begins, not where it ends.
--- Ende Zitat ---
Edit: Da noch etwas Zeit gehabt, zusammengefasst war noch das Problem mit den Lunars, was diese in der Zeit gemacht haben, als die Solars verschwunden waren, da die bisherigen Erklärungen (TSR oder wie es heißt) eher unspektakulär waren. Weiterhin waren die Lunars auch nie so toll beschrieben worden, sei es in der ersten oder auch in der zweiten Edition. Das stellt jetzt aber nur eine Zusammenfassung dar, irgendwo in einem der anderen Lunar-Themen im Exalted-Forum bei WW war dazu mehr geschrieben worden, aber wie gesagt, finde ich gerade nicht wieder.
Jiba:
Ist doch im Buch in der Zweiten aber doch gut beschrieben: Erst ein paar hundert Jahre Wyldexil, dann Thousand Streams River um die Manpower zu erreichen, wirklich was gegen die Drachenblütigen zu bewirken. Da machen die Entwickler ein ein Problem, wo gar keins ist.Ich sage, man gebe den Lunars ein paar coolere Plothooks im Jetzt und schon passt das. Das eigentliche Problem fängt für mich nämlich bei den Solars an. Die sind den Entwicklern eonfach zu sakrosankt.
Edler Baldur:
Was würdest du denn bei Solars ändern wollen?
Und für die Lunars, ich finde das Ergebnis, was derzeit in der 2. Edition präsentiert wird, eher ernüchternd. Wir haben 300 Lunars und das einzige Projekt was diese bewerkstelligen ist TSR? Nja. Gut, es gibt auch Leute die der Meinung sind, dass TSR für 300 Lunars ein gutes Ergebnis ist, dafür dass diese mehrere Jahrhunderte Zeit hatten. Sehe ich persönlich nicht so.
Und nein es sind nicht die Entwickler die hier ein Problem machen, es ist eher so dass hier auch ein Großteil der Spielerschaft ein Problem sieht und wirklich nur wenige anderer Meinung sind. Wenn ich ein Lunar-Spieler wäre und mir dann ansehe, was meine Älteren in was für einer Zeitspanne bewerkstelligt haben, dann würde ich mich auch leicht auf den Arm genommen fühlen.
Edler Baldur:
Weihnachtsgeschenke:
Interview mit John Morke:
Interview auf Charisma Bonus
Entsprechendes Thema auf RPG.net
Und bei White Wolf
Viel Spaß.
Teylen:
Der KS soll angeblich zum approval rausgeschickt worden sein 8)
Das heißt bald kann man EX3 backen,... hoff ich doch :D
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