Bending the World

[Naz]

After eons of fighting the Wyld, a Solar or Sidereal manages to wrap Creation around the Wyld, trapping it beneath and within the physical form-enforced world. Creation is made even less for it, but more secure. Over time, this still does not prevent some denizens and/or influence of the Wyld from seeping out into the new sphere.

[The Wizard of Oz]

It's one of the early sets of novels done by Weiss and Hickman in the early 90s.
There are four worlds, which exist in alternate dimensions to each other:
1) An endless jungle planet teeming with life and vitality, but a little perilous due to the great beasts and giants that will make a quick meal of unwary travellers.
2) A sea-covered world peppered with islands, where sea drakes roam.
3) An underground world.
4) A realm (I wouldn't say world, because there's no planet) of flying islands surrounded by eternal air.
There's also a small inner world of perpetual twilight, but which otherwise is quite nice and balanced.

It turns out that in fact these worlds were made after a great cataclysm split the original world up along elemental lines.

[Elfive]

I have not.

[The Wizard of Oz]

Don't suppose you've ever read the Death Gate Cycle, Elfive?

[Elfive]

I considered that but decided I liked Tatooine better.

[Accelerator]

Records of the Great Calamity are vague and contradictory. Some say heaven itself was torn from the sky and slammed into the face of the world. Regardless, the ancient magic binding the five pillars of reality together came loose. Each elemental pole collapsed in on itself as the boundless chaos outside reality rushed in, forming five new worlds.

The centre, Earth, is the most hospitable, retaining a balance of the elements to produce a varied climate that supports a range of ecosystems.

The world of Wood is an endless jungle planet teeming with life and vitality, but a little perilous due to the great beasts that will make a quick meal of unwary travellers.

Water is a sea-covered world peppered with islands, where adventurers and pirates roam.

Fire is a desert world. Those who seek a life here must huddle around what few precious oases persist.

Air is a snowball planet home to great woolly beasts. Travellers must face near-constant blizzards.

In all this, what became of the exalted? Who can say? Perhaps their shards are lost, unable to find their way home in the endless expanse the universe has become.

Maybe, after thousands of years, some have finally found their way back.

Wait. What about the pole of fire as the sun?

[Elfive]

Records of the Great Calamity are vague and contradictory. Some say heaven itself was torn from the sky and slammed into the face of the world. Regardless, the ancient magic binding the five pillars of reality together came loose. Each elemental pole collapsed in on itself as the boundless chaos outside reality rushed in, forming five new worlds.

The centre, Earth, is the most hospitable, retaining a balance of the elements to produce a varied climate that supports a range of ecosystems.

The world of Wood is an endless jungle planet teeming with life and vitality, but a little perilous due to the great beasts that will make a quick meal of unwary travellers.

Water is a sea-covered world peppered with islands, where adventurers and pirates roam.

Fire is a desert world. Those who seek a life here must huddle around what few precious oases persist.

Air is a snowball planet home to great woolly beasts. Travellers must face near-constant blizzards.

In all this, what became of the exalted? Who can say? Perhaps their shards are lost, unable to find their way home in the endless expanse the universe has become.

Maybe, after thousands of years, some have finally found their way back.

[Roswynn]

But I wouldn't ever make this person the hero of a story, I think it's more fitting for a villain. While I don't buy into Exalted being super Anime or anything I think Heroes should always strive to take risks that lead to better solutions then to meekly go along with guaranteed safety.

I think such a drastic, desperate, ambiguous solution might agree with both a hero or a villain, or an anti-hero, or an anti-villain... What I mean is that the people who are bending the world to protect it from total annihilation are obviously desperate, on the ropes, and out of time. I'm fine with a protagonist deciding that, hell, this is my best bet to avoid everything going to s**t. A tormented, soul-wracking decision, to be sure, but one I can very well see a protagonist make, in the final hour of the struggle, when darkness is approaching for good and numberless greater heroes have simply died trying to fight for a better outcome. What can I say, I love me some moral ambiguity!

Maybe that's how Chejop Kejak and the Bronze Faction felt?...

Oh. It appears, again, I'm unable to quote anything else without erasing everything I've written (is anyone else having the same problem? What's wrong with my computer/the forums?) but I just wanted to explicitly compliment A Not Quite Simple Soul for the cool story and their imagination, and BlueWinds for what must have been an awesome campaign (crap, I would have loved to be a player in that one! ).

Edit - BTW, all this talking of magic going away reminded me of Dragon Age and Solas shaping the Veil to defeat the tyrannical Evanuris, in the process inevitably diminishing his race, destroying elven civilization and separating the physical world from the Fade... sigh... Gotterdammerungen are the best!

[BlueWinds]

Back mid-2e I ran an exalted game set on modern day earth. It was present day, modern world, no magic, and all of a sudden weird things started happening - demons, ghosts and gods, and then humans Exalting (including the PCs, of course).

The pre-historical background, which the players never really explored, was that the Jade Prison never broke. The Deathlords were still there though, and over the course of millenia, finally began really ruining the world. The Sidereals basically decided "well, we're all doomed, so might as well accept a diminished world, just like the prophecy said we were going to get." They basically wrapped the elemental poles into a big bundle at the center of the Earth, turning Creation into a sphere and cutting it off entirely from the wyld.

Without wyld energy constantly flowing in, magic faded. With magic went spirits, unable to maintain material form - still present, just weak and impotent. Exalts became merely human. Until the present day, when {insert shadowy organization here} discovered that the plate tectonics under Iceland are really weird - almost as if one of the volcanos there was only the tip of a 6 mile mountain (I go with 6 miles rather than 600 in my head-canon, as being far more reasonable). They broke in, something went weird when they found the Jade Prison buried in stone, and magic started flooding back into the world.

Had the game gone on long enough, I'd have hinted that the world wasn't going to stay spherical - flat is its natural state, and it was going to start reverting soon. And the Deathlords, who the Sidereals sought to escape by breaking the world, are still lurking...

[TheCountAlucard]

Just so you know, referring to the known world as "Creation" isn't exactly unique to the Exalted setting. As long as people tell stories about the world being created, I see no reason for them to stop doing it.

[Shadowstripe]

Well, it... isn't, really.

As the end point of a framing device in which the setting is a kind of primordial pre-history, it wouldn't naturally emerge as something deliberate or useful. It's a Gotterdammerung kind of thing; a diminishment, with an edge of tragedy (albeit with an implication that everybody might be better off without the mythic grandeur).

Not the point I was trying to make. The point I was trying to make is for those who decide that Creation will end and the World is born... how will they do it and why will it be needed for that particular game. I am not saying that knowing how the Creation becomes the World we know is needed... in most cases it isn't. What I am asking is for those few games where it is an intended outcome of some threat (such as the escape of the Yozi or a similar threat)... what in particular is it that threatens Creation so much that such a radical undertaking is needed for that specific game.

To put it another way... if you were to run a game where this is the most likely result for the conclusion... what would cause this outcome? Would it be something the Players are trying to accomplish or prevent? How do you see it happening... and what happens afterwards (assuming that this saves the World that is being created).

When the Death Lords rose up the last time the Solars, Liminals, and Dragonblooded of the Shining Future faction rallied the smoking remains of the rest of creation and forced heaven itself to descend upon the underworld alongside their mortal and elemental forces. The sidereals fractured with many convinced that it was creation's fate to die. The Neverborn sent an unwitting abyssal to violate the treaty between the exalted and the exalted by ordering the abyssal to assassinate the current incarnation of one of the Eclipses who brokered the treaty, what the Abyssal didn't realize is that the heart of Malfeas's fetich soul was grafted into him. When the eclipse slew the assassin it shattered the agreements that bound the Yozi and enraged them further at the same time. As the war reached a fever pitch the never born husks themselves became the battleground and the powers wielded and unleashed finally granted many of them their true and final deaths. This was not without consequence as they fully pierced barrier into oblivion the barrier itself shattered and threatened to suck the rest of existence along with it. An attempt was made to shift the break into elsewhere, but the remaining Yozi maddened by the war and witnessing their likely ultimate fates made one final stab into the ranks of exalted and managed to penetrate to where the sorcerers were working on the rift alongside the Unconquered Sun whom was struck a mortal blow. The working disrupted, the remaining sorcerers and the dying Incarnea attempted a less precise solution, hurling the rift into the depths of the wyld. They managed but it took the last of the Unconquered Sun's strength and that of the solar exalted. The Sun's corpse cooled into iron and creation collapsed around it. The rift drew infinitely upon the infinite chaos of the wyld and such equal intrinsic opposites consumed each other leaving only scraps and hints of their existence in the matter and energy of the universe.

In order to ensure creation's continuation the remaining incarnae and other greater divinities forged the star that creation turns about, but like the Unconquered Sun most died in the attempt, while a few were rendered merely dormant. Their corpses form the other planets and moons in the solar system. Heaven was destroyed in the war, little bits and pieces fell to creation and maintain fragments of their former power and glory. The outer poles ceased to exist when the wyld ended, but the iron of the fallen Sun anchored the remains of creation in place, relative to the sea of chaos.

The lesser gods and elementals that yet lived were forced into dormancy by their exertions, a sleep so deep most may never truly awaken, though on rare occasion one might stir, briefly. With the massive shift in reality itself and the flows of energy within creation sorcerers were stripped of the vast majority of their powers, nothing but tatters remain, although a new sorcery may one day rise in it's place should the new world ever be sufficiently analyzed.

It has been millennia since Creation was bent into Earth, the old spirits are beginning to dream coherently, even lucidly, and one wretched existence melded to the god-corpse in the heart of the world has gathered the remnants of it's dreadful will. The Exalted are long since faded from the world, only distant echoes of the Dragonblooded remain in humanity's blood, the tomb-worlds of the incarnae can still exert some primitive influence upon the minds and hearts of mortals.

However this world has it's own champions.

The Archives have bonded to shards of The Creation That Was, they are living libraries who can bring forth the glories of the past.

The Seekers know that reality was once a much different place, and that some greater potential lies in The World That Is. They have begun to tap into it, although the process is neither simple, nor gentle upon their minds and bodies.

The Listeners can perceive the dreams of the sleeping spirits and are more aware of the tomb whispers of the Incarnae, and have been changed by them. They draw upon the powers of the dormant and dead.

This is the kind of imaginative explanation for bending of the world that I am looking for... something to explain how the bending of the world comes about and why it was needed... and even the suggestion that it isn't the end... merely a new beginning.

Yes, something like this isn't needed to enjoy Exalted as it is... but it is fun to see Exalted from such a perspective... and see all that it could be... in both directions. Exalted is truly limitless in scope... and with visions like this... it will never truly end... merely change over time (not that this is in any way the direction Exalted will go... merely a shard of what could be).

[limaxophobiac]

Assuming it's the prehistory of our world and not the world of darkness, I'd say something most have gone incredibly right to create a fairly stable world not constantly threatened by a dozen different apocalypses at once, were the will of more than a handful of shiny superpowered jerks matter, and where infinite meaningless chaos is replaced with infinite actual stuff.

[Dorchadas]

My favorite context for the idea of bending the World would have to involve it being done as a measure of protection. Perhaps a threat so severe that, while the Exalted Host could come together and repel it, Creation itself would be crippled, broken, or even outright destroyed through the titanic struggle that would occur in an exchange of blows, clash of armies, and desperate negotiations all together would wreak havoc on Creation's ecosystems and individuals, before it gave out at the end.

This is my favorite explanation for it. Specifically, another Fair Folk crusade that almost destroys the world until Creation is folded in on itself and the Wyld shut out beyond an even more powerful barrier--an endless void.


Though based on Gunstar Autochthonia, it could be seen as Creation returning to its original state. I don't really like the Three Spheres Cataclysm, but that specific interpretation that blends the base setting with the Spiral is really neat. I can only imagine how SWLihN must feel afterwards, considering she destroyed a Creation that was perfect for her--endless spheres whirling through the void with fire at their hearts.

[Flare]

My favorite context for the idea of bending the World would have to involve it being done as a measure of protection. Perhaps a threat so severe that, while the Exalted Host could come together and repel it, Creation itself would be crippled, broken, or even outright destroyed through the titanic struggle that would occur in an exchange of blows, clash of armies, and desperate negotiations all together would wreak havoc on Creation's ecosystems and individuals, before it gave out at the end. I'm sure for some people there would have to be an explanation of why the Primordial War didn't cause this, but this conflict would, but there are any number of those, from making the antagonists more of a threat then the Yozi, or suggesting that maybe Creation did suffer just as much during the Primordial War, but there was more of it, and it could survive the destruction, if lessened by it. Or perhaps after all these world spanning conflicts, wars, and uprisings, this one is just the breaking point; a grand, massive war, that by itself would have been a tale for the ages, but when combined with every other factor in the world results only in the last shuddering gasps of a dying world. Or maybe it just is because it is, and no explanation is really needed.

So in preparation for that, someone decides a broken, non-magical, ruined Creation is better then no Creation at all. Maybe it's not 100% the world would be ruined if they let the War play out but it's 100% the world will, in some way, survive if Creation is broken. The idea of a Creation that may not even be the World of Darkness, but just a normal, non-magical Earth, would be preferable to it not existing at all in this person's eyes.

But I wouldn't ever make this person the hero of a story, I think it's more fitting for a villain. While I don't buy into Exalted being super Anime or anything I think Heroes should always strive to take risks that lead to better solutions then to meekly go along with guaranteed safety.

[Isator Levi]

I'm not looking for solutions to bending the world... I am interested in how others would accomplish such a task in their games... and why it would be needed.

Well, it... isn't, really.

As the end point of a framing device in which the setting is a kind of primordial pre-history, it wouldn't naturally emerge as something deliberate or useful. It's a Gotterdammerung kind of thing; a diminishment, with an edge of tragedy (albeit with an implication that everybody might be better off without the mythic grandeur).