User Profile

[BrilliantRain]

Assuming you guys ever write up the Eye, will it be possible to use it once or twice without being certain to screw everything up, or is it better served as an unpredictable MacGuffin of Deus Ex Machina and stories surrounding it should focus more on stopping people from using it?...

[BrilliantRain]

Yeah. Honestly, most people don't really need the whole Primordial War, First Age, Shogunate, Fae Invasion/Great Contagion history lesson. At least not to start with. If they ask, you can say that "long ago, the Solars used to be God-Kings, but they fucked up and the DBs overthrew them, and that's why the DBs are in charge now." but I wouldn't go into more detail. At least not in the opening pitch.

[BrilliantRain]

Are there any categories of being that absolutely cannot have Eclipse keyword charms?...

[BrilliantRain]

I like to share the 1e Intro Fiction.

The origin story of Strawmaiden Janest from the end of the 3e book is a good one too.

That said, the elevator pitch for the game I would use is "In an ancient world out of Greek and Chinese myth, you have been chosen by the Sun to be a demi-god with nearly unmatched power ...and thus marked for death by the greatest empire of Creation, run by the Element Benders from Avatar. But! the empire is currently in disarray (think Game of Thrones meets Romance of the Three Kingdoms), so you have some breathing room so you can do whatever...

[BrilliantRain]

You could allow them to recycle charms they definitely don’t want anymore, but I wouldn’t put that in as a specific game mechanic unless you want to have people recycling charms regularly so they don’t need to spend xp on the new stuff they want. If so, I’d definitely make recycling take a month or more, to ensure there was incentive to keep some charms ready on “standby” instead of just being able to reuse the same 60 xp over and over again as you swapped jobs....

[BrilliantRain]

What about by proxy? I mean, a Solar Ambition 3 Working can create a powerful spirit of singular power. Could that spirit potentially be capable of creating their own Exalted? Or is that something you’d still want to leave up to individual Storytellers to decide upon?...

[BrilliantRain]

Personally, I’d just straight up drop either Slots or Installation Costs. They do slightly different things, but their main functions are similar enough that you probably don’t need both. Of the two, I’d probably drop Slots and just say that you can install everything you can power.

If you want to be able to swap things out quickly, you could say that you could install some non-powered charms (which give a penalty for each extra charm) and then allow the Alchemical to switch around what’s powered with an action.

[BrilliantRain]

There’s a webcomic I read once where someone, frustrated with how little a seer was telling her, said

“Hey, there’s this amazing technology humans have discovered. It’s called the Straight Answer. I bet you’d love it. I can show you how it works.”

“Are you saying I am too cryptic?”

“YES! See? It’s easy. You should try it.”

....Granted his defense is that, once he impacts a situation he can no longer see that person’s future. For awhile anyway, but I doubt Rachel and Sidereals can use that loophole.

[BrilliantRain]

Could you use a Sculpted Seafoam Eidolon of a large and dangerous looking bodyguard to give you a bonus on your own intimidation rolls?

And, even if the Eidolon can’t take dice actions, people who fail the roll will still react normally, right? If I created a tiger with the spell and had it rush at someone, they would still usually be inclined to run, right?...

[BrilliantRain]

Would creating a distaff that could spin a particular quality, like knowledge or vanity, into thread be a legitimate Sorcerous Working? If so, what rating would you say? Celestial 2?

[BrilliantRain]

Something else to consider is xp costs vs. how easy you want to enable going from “middling mortal” to “skilled mortal/basic exalt” to “compentent exalt” to “best exalt ever.”

The example I listed above with Mechanic, assuming she already had 15 charm slots, ends up costing 90 xp for 15 social charms and gets you effective Cha 4, Manip 3, App 4, 1st Cha and Manip Excellencies, effective Presence and Socialize values of 5, and 5 misc social charms. This should be enough to put her in the high side of “skilled mortal/basic exalt” or the low end of “comptent exalt”...

[BrilliantRain]

Consider that artifacts are replicable at their most basic level. I mean, there are thousands of Daiklaves and all of them have the same basic power to be a "Giant Anime Sword that can be swung around like a Feather." They all get different powers beyond that and none of them are exactly the same, but there are nevertheless lots of basic categories of artifact that all do basically the same things.



What I'm saying is that, if Enthusiastic Agile Mechanic, who has Cha 3, Manip 1, and App 3 and zero dots in social abilities because her player spent everything...

[BrilliantRain]

Can Liminals initate into Sorcery or Necromancy?

[BrilliantRain]

It’s a consideration. Really everything here is something to consider, including “giving Alchemicals reconfigurable charms is actually a bad idea and we shouldn’t do it again.”

Honestly, it might be worth going back and asking “why are we giving Alchemicals reconfiguable charms in the first place?”

The answers I’ve come up with so far for that are as follows:

* It serves as an external power check on Alchemicals, so that they cannot use all their charms at once, which helps set their rough position on the power scale without having to give...

[BrilliantRain]

Hmmm... What if each Alchemical had an “Emergency Swap Beacon” that would let them swap out all the charms they wanted instantly.... but it burned out after one use until repaired at your vat complex, and a normal refit takes, say, 15 minutes per charm, up to a maximum of 8 hours or a flat four hours?

[BrilliantRain]

While I agree that a month is too long, I do think it’s possible for the refit time to be too short. I mean, if an Alchemical can just swap out their entire combat charmset with a reflexive action or even a normal action, it becomes a more complicated version of the Aura mechanic and stops feeling like much of a drawback.

I get that an hour isn’t the same thing as a combat action ....but, in social situations, it can be. You could have an associate filibuster the grand assembly or move for a recess or be fashionably late, any of which could be represented as just one “influence...

[BrilliantRain]

Do you have access to Shards of the Exalted Dream? Because the Modern Shard had a very different origin for Alchemicals and they had new rules to reflect that. You might find looking at those useful....

[BrilliantRain]

Can you give us a few examples of things that NA rank Artifacts can do vs. some things they definitely cannot do?

[BrilliantRain]

I’d have to dig into my records but I ran a fairly long Alchemicals game in 2e and I don’t remember the players swapping things around too much. It was a game that took place in Nurad and I rembember trying to provide plenty of downtime between adventures for swapping and installing new charms, but I don’t think they took much advantage of it. I might just be misremembering however. I’ll ping some of them and see if they remember.

I would say that I think charm swapping is a fundamental aspect of Alchemicals and should be encouraged, so I hope you come up with a good way...

[BrilliantRain]

I read these books awhile back and my memories of them were that they were good, but I hated the Lintha as presented in Blood and Salt (largely because it felt like they took a fairly reasonable plot hook of Pirate Mafia and turned them into ULTRA HARDCORE DEMON WORSHIPPERS, which I found just terrible. I know I’m in the minority here) and that AB: Water was fairly weak and tended to assume all Water aspects = Sailors, much like CB: Twilight assumed that Twilight = Sorcerer, so there’s less difference between the people discussed and everyone was kinda forgettable.

I remember...