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[Saur Ops Specialist]

There may exist a problem with Moray Darktide being a Dawn all the way since the Dawn book as an example of how to Dawn. It's not like Sail is super-defining of Eclipses, either; arguably, that would be Bureaucracy, which they nonetheless now share with Twilights (in addition to Linguistics), and Socialize, which is similarly on-dock for Nights....

[Saur Ops Specialist]

An academic study of strategy would probably fall under Lore. Actually knowing about how to direct forces across battlefields and toward long-term objectives is somewhat different, not that it stopped Zhuge Liang and various other figures from having both ends covered to a great and profound degree in addition to their legendary inventing, statecraft, cooking, etc.

[Saur Ops Specialist]

Except that it's not quite the same when that full split doesn't occur.



It gets slightly more important in EX3, since there was an attempt made to produce a sorcerous initiation that used some elements of traditional Chinese medicine, namely the organ system correspondences, and the lungs, normally associated with Metal, are in Exalted, associated with Air....

[Saur Ops Specialist]

It maps less cleanly onto it than you might think, as ghosts in the WoD don't actually divide into two on death. Only Hungry Dead really split apart that way. Also, the Five Phases are slightly off for the setup in Creation, since Air is only kind of like Metal (associated with the po) in some respects, but Air has associations with lightning instead of Wood (associated with the hun in the Wu Xing's setup) and cold instead of Water and so now everything is crazy without principles of Yin and Yang....

[Saur Ops Specialist]

There are a lot of selling points to the withering and decisive setup, but realism isn't one I'd mention. It's meant for a highly stylized experience from out of the movies, or watching someone get S or higher rank in DMC games - a contributor to a visual spectacle. Realism probably wasn't a going concern for its production.

One of the first things I'd do if I were playing 1e, though, is adopting the mass combat system that encompasses/replaces extras. Why bother having two different systems for few vs many action scenes when you can combine the two and save yourself the trouble...

[Saur Ops Specialist]

That's just the thing - they don't parse the world in Spheres, but into Colleges, and to them, Paradox is Paradox.



Exalted Pattern Spiders are: Born of a designed god, keep a flexible system functioning when the Maidens don't want to make it work, don't like to work more than they have to, and have a single, definite progenitor, which was built by Autochthon.

Werewolf Pattern-spiders are: Born of a fractured desire for absolute understanding held by the Weaver, totally dedicated to freezing everything forever to make this a reality, and far greater in number...

[Saur Ops Specialist]

The Dreaming is only part of the inspirational material that went into Exalted's Wyld; Werewolf's Wyld is also part of it, and the mutagenic effects are akin to becoming like one of the gorgons from Werewolf, only without separate spirits of the Wyld to make it happen (and they would reject humans anyway in W:tA).



Even Sidereals, who are authorized to make alterations to the Loom within the boundaries of Astrology, can easily get clapback and resistance from the Pattern Spiders that maintain it. Someone who lacks these credentials is probably going to end up in more...

[Saur Ops Specialist]

No, I mean that the Loom of Fate would punish anyone who used Special K to deviate from it, and doing anything coincidental is going to require both knowledge of the system and a rather large amount of paperwork. Also, Pattern Spiders from the WoD were not even remotely the same thing as what Pattern Spiders in Exalted became....

[Saur Ops Specialist]

Mage would probably ascribe the constellations of Exalted as the Paradigm, since they're a collection of mystic secrets used to cut through or direct the setting. Pattern Spiders would probably be a bigger danger for Namebreakers, though; Sidereals have a professional, working relationship with the spiders, but mages are just unauthorized freeloaders begging to be kicked off or exploded. Willworker beware.

[Saur Ops Specialist]

It doesn't incorporate the Lunars as hunting hounds of the Fair Folk, but it does incorporate the "Wyld madness" aspect, which used to be a case of what the text of the core would suggest was a case of early chimerism being "forgot about being Exalted, is a Fair Folk noble now", which only got the back half knocked off. And, again, the Fair Folk book gave Lunars the capacity to learn FF Charms, and never gave any particular justification for it. It also mentioned Lunars considering helping the raksha as an alternative to sitting things out on the borders of Creation. So, while...

[Saur Ops Specialist]

Techniques got no mention after their abandonment, but imagine if they had been mentioned in the core and shadows of them were still around in EX3 and on into a hypothetical EX4. That's the sort of situation that 1e was in, and it stretched on late into the line, since Fair Folk presumably gave Lunars the capacity to learn Fair Folk Charms because of the pre-release lore's connection between them. Then 2e copied it because it was in 1e....

[Saur Ops Specialist]

I recall one of the sources for Lunars being "insane, inamicable allies of the Fair Folk" being Grabowski himself, so it's probably not all that much of a distortion. On the other hand, the Making of Exalted Artbook also goes back and forth; Rich Thomas described them as the "sane but barbaric" counterpoints to the Fair Folk, but also mentioned that the two had been stuck together at one point when the book discussed Fair Folk, with Fair Folk as essentially that design phase's version of Chimerae....

[Saur Ops Specialist]

I don't know whether to ask if that was intentional, or "Phrasing?"...

[Saur Ops Specialist]

I have a bone to pick about beastfolk conception due to a flippant comparison GCG made to it and lupus Garou and like-born Fera. Somehow, that comparison took off, even though you had Lilith living as an owl, explicitly noted as doing as the owl do, a much closer parallel to use of Primal-Urge and shapeshifting in W:tA to live in the patterns of a beast's life before returning to the matter of the cosmic war in the setting. This does not seem the appropriate venue for Pasiphae and the Bull.

[Saur Ops Specialist]

We got a fair number of posts about that, actually. People may not have liked it, and shown hang-ups about their expectations about what was necessary to stabilize Creation vs the Wyld, but the writer quotes are still floating around to this day.



It was generally a lot lighter than they thought, but the passages mentioning this could have done better not being buried in a section where certain other distracting passages lay.

I still can't process the why of Renown, though. There were reasons it was in W:tA and tracked the way it was, and none of them exist...

[Saur Ops Specialist]

I don't get that kind of read off of him. At the very least, he seems to be way more sociable when not at work with it, and keener to help other Lunars with non-slaver related face punching. Just because he has a drive to do something that needs to be done doesn't mean he's completely out of the game....

[Saur Ops Specialist]

You'd be surprised, just after reading this, how readily that bit about Lunar Exaltation and the practicalities of which Lunars are more likely to survive gets buried under other sentiments. Bask in its shining promise for now; it's still a bit of a while yet before everything goes mind-numbingly sideways.

[Saur Ops Specialist]

The term, I think, is traditional economy.

[Saur Ops Specialist]

On the third hand, Deled doesn't seem like the type to have a conflicted, secret, heresy-loving side, and he's not the kind of character with hidden depths... ironically enough, being the past editions' Water poster boy. His water is not damp enough; some facet of him is drying it up.

...

Too Much Yang Major Weakness!...

[Saur Ops Specialist]

Waves Like Water to Water Dragon seems a difficult crossover, given that the former relies on snaking motions of long, flexible weapons and Water Dragon uses razors strapped onto hands......