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[Blaque]

Tell that to the Discord yesterday....

[Blaque]

Not really. Folks would often take the time to generate a lot of successes to get the Resplendencie they needed to have neough for powers. If you gamed things right you rarely had in gameplay it be a meaningful resource. I'd just carve them out entirely. The simplified emchanics in Shards of the Exalted Dream and the mechanics for htem found in the Exalted Essence podcast stuff boths eem to be just more sensbile ways to deal with these.



I'd outright can Colleges as traits entirely. They're a huge amount of systme bloat for a trait that is used in one very niche role...

[Blaque]

If it does link to the WoD, it is in the same sense some of the fantasy work that Exalted draws on is linked to Earth. The pretty well-known "After the seas drank Atlantis and before the rise of the Sons of Aryas" movie-starting quote of Conan, as well as "Before the world was bent" found in Tantih Lee's Flat Earth series, and a lot of the implications of the MIddle Earth stuff all have a lot of "This fantasy setting we're presenting here is a secret pre-history of the world" thing going down. It's a genre staple of epic fantasy, basically.

Notably though,...

[Blaque]

Paradox is mostly there as a WoD-homage that didn't pan out. And I think that Astrology as it was written in 1e and 2e was too much of a Decker-like mess to be worth much of the time or effort. Folks mostly did it only for the Resplendencies, and making a disguise, or outright to abuse the Ascendant and Descendant stuff in some manner by having it be free-form hanging buffs.

Right now we know that apparently a lot of the Resplendency powers are probably just going to be roleld into teh main Sidereal Charmset (as poetic as it is, they are probalby not doing one-Charm-per-Scripture-line...

[Blaque]

My own headcanon is the Empress saw House Peleps' monopoly on the navy as a long term potential danger to the security of her power and was probably going to either "nationalize" it a way similar to how she ran the Legions, or was going to start spinning-off fleets to other Houses in the future. V'Neef in this context is kind of the first step in that process that probably was a few centuries long term....

[Blaque]

Kind of a bit too it kind of made Lilith the secondary character and accessory for the Desus-as-example. WHen Desus originally was a background element of her that was not even named until a few books after the corebook while she was a character with fiction and an illustration. He went from a supporting element of her to someone going and basically making her accessory to him, which adds to the loss of her as a character/actor in all of this. Not a good llook when the game decides the abuser is more the character than the vicitm....

[Blaque]

Currently the book is having backer errata, indexing, and post-preview editting done and will be put on DTRPG sometime in the next few months....

[Blaque]

Ones I've seen or used:
- Alchemy (Basically chemistry for stuff like soap, medicines, some brewing, metulrugy etc.)
- Architecture
- Blacksmithing (the corebook has weaponsmithing and armorsmithing but I find thsoe a bit too specific)
- Cooking
- Military Engineering
- Shipwrighting
- Tailoring

It's worth remembering in 3e also that if you can explain something as related to a craft you have but not quite, it's just at most +1 difficulty. So for instance I had a character with Craft (Military Engineering) use that in a pbulci works project...

[Blaque]

The ghost ones copy-pasted from 1e were Soulforging, Jadecrafting, Pandemonium, and Moliation. Notably, the first two didn't need their own Crafts by that time, and the necrotech chapter of Abyssals just used Craft (Fire). Also, the 2e ghost mechancis were notably bad copy-pastes....

[Blaque]

So something to remember is that despite the Empress' use of the Sword of Creation, what "taking a move" even was is not clear. At the early days, the Blessed Isle had at least two polities (the Empress' Realm, Arjuf) and maybe a few more. You had Lookshy and Grand Cherak poised to rival them. And there might ahve been two or three other polities scattered about that Lunars did smash into bits, or which evnetually went sideways and weird like the Cult of the Violet Fang. So it might have just as much been "Do what exactly?", along with other issues like what SLS noted with...

[Blaque]

This is again, kind of out of date based on discussions so far from devs. The Deathlords aren't nine version sof Sauron and have their schemes that while large scale aren't existential threats to Creation by default. Abyssals are dangerous, but their empires and conquests are a difference in kind, not scale, and there's not something about them inherently that needs to be stopped save folks tend to not like dying much or having Abyssals killing their family and leaving them alive to apprecaite the results due to Chivalry of Death reasons.

The Yozis are for-sure-absolutely-never-getting-out...

[Blaque]

I think LIminals are interacting with some of the base metaphsyics of the setting in subtle ways. The gist of the dark mother and their interactions with the thresholds of life and death kind of result in this. The gist I got also from the previous devs at least is they were originally conceived to be able to fit into multi-splat groups well (they originally were gonna be in 2e). This all feels like something that probably lends themselves to subtler impact on the world. Which also kind of fits i think with their themes of horror and isolation I think. They do a task no one understands, that rarely...

[Blaque]

Kind of a defense of Liminals and Getimians:

Getimians are actually to my understanding pretty distinct from Nocturnals. Different origins (literally), different htemes, different relationship with the world. Nocturnals were an attempt to my understanding of making another Exalt that was "part of the original set' In a way and part of how the world' history worked and expanding its cosmology. Getimians work fairly different in they're about being Aberrant, not part of the normal order of things, and upending norms of the setting. While they have a lot of aesthetic ties with Sidereals,...

[Blaque]

Something 3e does with the Blessed Isle to me that stands out is that it's very mcuh a cotninetn in itself for real this time it feels. The Isle is ancient, has had many different polities over the centuries, and the current Scarlet Realm is probably the first time in a long time, if ever, it was united under a single government besides nominal control the Shogunate or Deliberative had. The Empress uniting it wasn't a guarantee as rarely if ever been so. She secured the Grid, but her success after is a matter of good politics, support, luck, and it seems like she honeslty got along well with one...

[Blaque]

I mean, for reasons stated upthread. And I think for general dramatic reasons of, especially in 3e, not tyring ot say everything which seemed importatn was Actually a Celestial in Disguise. I think also that the Seven Tigers appeared to have had enough trust and built up power base to be the Dragon-Blooded Daimyos they calimed to be, or enough that if it weren't the case it's meaningless since they got sky-lasered....

[Blaque]

My gathering is any folks who favored the Vision of Gold who weren't in the Usurpation project just sat out. A big thing that I think the devs want to give Sidereals is a bit of an actual Fellowship feel and this idea that they do have generally a professional working, institutional relationship. Thew ay the Visions were presented were pretty mutually exclusive. Bronze menat going all in with Usuraption. Gold meant going all-in with reforming the Solars. If either failed they'd get Darkness. The majority of Sidereals decided on Bronze. The ones who disagreed probably were just reasonable enough...

[Blaque]

The Brand and Guts generally being cursed, plus a lot of his motifs, always made me think Abyssal as well. Though Lunar isn't bad either....

[Blaque]

In 2e yes. In 1e and 3e it's never said, but the setting seems built on the idea that DBs are indivdiually powerful enough you don't need a million of them to be a world-dominating threat. The numbers we have in the world today are sufficient for a lot of their accomplishments, and the differences in the First Age for their base probably was more available equipment than raw numbers....

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I'm actually not clear the Shogunate and Realm are isomorphic at all. The Terrestrial Shogunate seems to have had a very very weak hold on the Blessed Isle as a whole to my gathering and was based more in the East primarily, with I think consequences on how that affected its control/administration/etc. of the rest of the world. It might be my own biases, but I get a sense the currently politically unified Blessed Isle in 3e is in itself something fairly unique to the Scarlet Dynasty....

[Blaque]

This is actually exactly what Leviathan did for the West as I gather, and to some extent what Ma-Ha-Suchi did in relation to the Dreaming Sea region....