Thread started by Mort:
Went off to Static today, just because it's a lovely weather outside and I wanted to spend most of my lunch break out of the office. And what do I find? Not only the Sidereal hardback but also the Players guide. So obviously I had to pick them both up. Sigh, I really can't afford this, but I just had to have the player’s guide... you know, because.
I've had a brief flick through the players guide, and this is a short summary of it:
In true white wolf style the players guide has got the obligatory merits and flaws in it, I'm not a huge fan of the merit/flaw stuff, as it tends to boil down to munchkinism, but I need to look through them before I give full judgement. Then there's a full guide for creating god-blooded characters, god-blooded are basically mortals who has been infused by the blood of some supernatural entity. Be it a small god, demon or even ghosts. A god-blooded is very weak compared to a full-blown exalt, but may prove an interesting option in gameplay. They can also use thaumaturgy, which is explained in another chapter of the book.
Then we have the Dragon kings, these are basically the ones who ruled creation before humans, old lizard creatures, most of which has reverted back to their animal instincts and is nothing more than slavering beasts. But there are rules for playing Dragon kings who has regained their lost glory, not sure I care much about this.
The most interesting chapter is the updated rules, with rules for power combat, as they call it. It's basically guidelines on how to make combat more flowing and a bit more deadly, as well as rewarding stunts even more than before. From my quick glance they've got some really interesting ideas here.
There's also a bunch of new charms and shit like that, but that's only expected.
The Sidereals is about, well the Sidereals, the chosen of the maidens. These guys are cool; most like every other sort of exalt around really. They tamper with fate and astronomy, and can be likened with mages, although their power isn't as open ended as a WOD mage is. The best thing with them is that they actually live in the city of the gods, and run errands for the celestial bureaucracy. Gives me so many adventure ideas it's not even funny. Especially since I watched Spirited Away last night and the first thing I could think about was: This would be so cool in Exalted...
The only problem is that I don’t have a clue where to begin, there are so many stories that can be told in the Exalted world, and so many different types of exalted to use. There is a distinct risk of going overboard and trying to fit it all in, which means you end up with a rather crap story.
Archived comment by Andrew:
ReplyDeleteAs you could probably tell I really like Exalted, especially the rules for encouraging stunts and of course the "kewl powaZ". I guess a game comes along when you really want to explore various settings/stories but don't seem to have the time to run them. I had this with Cyberpunk 2020 as I wanted to run stories based on Netrunning squads, "secret government organisations", mercenaries in a war-torn African (IIRC) country and even a full cop story. As they say, it's only limited by our imagination (queue cheesy coughs ;) ).
I'm also reading through "The Call of Cthulhu & Other Weird Stories" and I never thought they'd be so good. Some of them are simple yet the way they are told make them scary. This has lead me to look for old CoC RPG material and especially sources of 1920's US details. I guess it's time to take a look at the finances....
Archived comment by me:
ReplyDeleteExalted is fun, but I'm concerned about the sheer numbers of supernatural beings they've now got running around. I mean, there are the Solars, Lunars, Abyssals, Sidereals and Dragon-blooded, and now the forthcoming Alchemicals. With the Player's Guide, they've now got yet more factions...
It's starting to look like the World of Darkness all over again, where by the end there only seemed to be half a dozen normal humans left. Which is disconcerting.
As far as blending ideas and concepts into a campaign, I've always found that the best way is to take half a dozen or so ideas from the source material, and to work with them, and desperately try to avoid letting other elements corrupt the whole. In D&D I handle this mostly by strictly limiting the available sourcebooks. With World of Darkness, I avoided cross-overs, and so on. As Andreas said, trying to blend too much together gives a crap chronicle (there are many other ways to get a crap chronicle, of course, but this is one of the guaranteed methods).
Of course, the other problem that can then occur is when you have far too many ideas for just one chronicle. This wouldn't be a bad thing, necessarily, if it weren't for the fact that campaigns last so long. So, if you have the ideas for three campaigns, that's over two years of play accounted for. And if you have yet more ideas in the meantime...
Archived comment by Mort:
ReplyDeleteYes, there are supernatural things in abundance in Exalted, but it's been like that from day one. The main Exalted rulebook kind of makes it clear that creation is full of critters of all types. If the Fey isn't trying to break into creation, there's a rogue god wrecking havoc in the countryside, etc.
Now the thing is that Exalted is meant to be over the top action, and to pull that off you need lots of big nasty things so your player characters got something to ass-kick. You can meddle with normal humans when you are in a city trying to buy some goods, and being a Solar Exalted you could probably convince them to sell you their store for a broken toe nail. But when you get attacked it has to be something more challenging than a simple pleb. Therefor it's good that there are lots of supernatural nasties that you can choose from as a GM.
In the World of Darkness this was never meant to happen, you were supposed to be the ones operating from the shadows, and so on and so forth. At least in Vampire. Now the problem still remains that you just cannot use all the source material all at once, as that would undoubtedly put the PCs in the background, which is a definite no-no in Exalted. Rather you should, as a GM, figure out what the players would like their nuclear solar powered death machines to do, and use the appropriate material for the job.
The circle wants to prod some abyssal buttocks and send Mask of Winters packing? Fine, time to stat up some nasty ghosts and Abyssals. They would like to clear out the once great city of Rathess and re-establish the Solar Deliberative in it's full glory? Ok, just use the players guide and the Rathess adventure module. Now this is harder than it sounds, because everything is just so cool, and I want to use it all. Not to mention that I don't actually have a group to play Exalted with at the moment...
Of course, if you want the players chose the direction of the game you need people who knows a little bit of what is going on in Exalted, and what a chosen of the Unconquered Sun is capable of.
Now, for an Exalted game I’d probably prefer to have a circle of Solars, I don’t know, but all the others feel a bit wrong, they are more of the bad guys than the main characters. Except for Sidereals, because they are just plain Cool, with a capital C. However, playing as a group of Sidereals just wouldn’t work I think, having one in a circle of Solars, as an advisor, could potentially work.