3E Infernals - Change of Direction

[Yzarc]

Neall Raemonn Price @burntneall
Happy eclipse to Eclipse Caste Solars, Moonshadow Caste Abyssals, and Penumbra Caste Infernals

It is intended seriously. Neall and I have spent lots of time discussing Ex3's Infernals.

If the Abyssal Castes are dark mirrors of their Solar counterparts, then the Infernal Castes are twisted, warped reflections.

While the theme of the Infernals reflecting the decadent god-kings of the First Age still rings true, it's not the entirety of what they are.

Probably wisest not to assume stuff from the KS previews will hold true. Current devs seem dedicated to putting out quality work, and that's going to require implementing a particular vision they're passionate about, not just following old blueprints left behind by predecessors. Same as what we did when we came aboard, same as what Geoff did when he took over from Ken Cliffe all the way back during proto-1e.

So recently the name of the Eclipse Caste Equivalent of the Infernals, called Penumbra Caste got revealed. A thread was made for discussing what the rest of the Caste names are going to be and can be found here.

This thread is the discuss some of the changes in the Direction of the Infernal Splat.

From the old Infernal Preview, they were meant to represent the Solars in the Peak of the First age. When they had it all and were served hand and foot. Their themes were corruption of form and shintai's were (in retrospect) hinted to be the Supernal Ability of the Infernals.

However, with the change in the development team, there has been hints (See the above quotes) that while there is still going to be the decadent god-kings theme, it will not be the main one or not as heavy as hinted in the old preview.

The new theme seems to be heavily hinted to be along the lines of them being "a warped and twisted reflection" to the Abyssal's "Dark Mirrors". (Man I know it was just a metaphor, but I couldn't help but get some serious Szoreny vibes from all that talk about distorted mirrors.)

The Image I got from this was that of a person standing in front of a fun house mirror with the light in front of him, casting a shadow behind him. The Person is the Solar, the Shadow is the Abyssal and the warped reflection in the fun house mirror is the Infernal.

So all in all, we have the hint of the main theme for the Infernals but any thoughts and ideas on how it will manifest? Would Shintai's still play a huge role? In the old preview, it was hinted that they would be "kings" in hell and have a lot of privilege with the Yozi "living" through them. Currently that seems to be on hold though. So how do you think they are going to differ from Solars and Abyssals during character creation?

So any thoughts and ideas? Any one have some information that they can share? Also what are your opinion on the change of direction?

[Matt the Bruins fan]

Robert Vance's reply to my question on the subject indicated that shintai are still going to be very much a thing for the Infernals. From that we can probably conclude that the splat will continue to employ themes of transhumanism and malleability of identity to some degree, though the specifics must be years away from publication. He also indicated that the idea from the kickstarter of the Infernals being precursors/a test run for a second set of better, more powerful, more yozi-loyal infernals has been dropped. Both of those decisions have my wholehearted approval.

[TheCountAlucard]

Pushing past your own humanity to become something else isn't transhumanism - that's for when it's happening to humanity as a whole.

[HighPriest]

At this point, I'm still holding out hope that Infernals end up having Yozi based Charms instead of generic ability based Charms, but it sounds like the current devs still aren't interested in returning to that.

I just don't think Exalted needs Lemon-Lime Solars to go with Vanilla Solars and Chocolate-Cherry Solars.

Otherwise, it sounds like the current vision puts the Infernals closer to what I liked about the 2E Infernals. The backer claim that they were the sorta-lame versions of what the Infernals would eventually use to try to cause trouble "for real" later on seemed like a great way to cut their importance short.

[Isator Levi]

Also what are your opinion on the change of direction?

Change of direction would suggest that it was any more significant than what Vance has said about it in the first place.

"Rings true but not the entirety of what they are" sounds like a fairly succinct description of even the preview.

EDIT:

At this point, I'm still holding out hope that Infernals end up having Yozi based Charms instead of generic ability based Charms, but it sounds like the current devs still aren't interested in returning to that.

I just don't think Exalted needs Lemon-Lime Solars to go with Vanilla Solars and Chocolate-Cherry Solars.

Jesus, now I even feel like my own post is unnecessarily hostile.

Can we just... not? Can we have a discussion without needing to cast shade over the parts that we disagree with?

As a start: I promise to not say a thing about transhumanism.

[HalfTangible]

I came into Exalted right around when 2e was ending and 3e had just gone up on Kickstarter, but Infernals were one of the only exalted types I never really got the appeal of. They were slaves to the Yozis, but also decadent god-kings of Creation, but also transhumanists that were shackled by their particular Yozi's stupid hang-ups and thus couldn't really be transhumanist, and had to get rid of their Limit by revelling in your evil like a bond villain, but also being Exalted when you're shamed because you couldn't do something literally impossible (as Solars have to do) and doing so over a vast enough area would have made Creation just like hell so the Yozis could escape? I dunno, they always seemed like a huge mess to me.

As I understand it: Infernals as described in 3e are basically the god-kings Solars were supposed to be at their absolute worst. These are the kind of guys who will turn a massive swathe of Creation into pure chaos for a training exercise, but unlike the Solars, this wasn't an extreme that occurred near the end of their reign, this is something that they do as a matter of course. (Come to think of it the Yozis' original plan may have been for the Solars to get That Bad in the first place when they laid the curse down so they could escape on their own, but now they've decided to just skip the middleman cuz they have to?)

...This may seem odd, but when they say a twisted reflection of the Solar ideal, I think of the Vaults from Fallout. Intentionally setting up an experiment where you drive people to kill off one of their own every year, only to reveal that you were going to release them all as soon as they stopped killing, by which point they were down to 5 people. "Curing" a group of addicts and then immediately putting drugs back into the population. Saving someone's life so you can experiment on them in the most horrific of ways. That 'I do horrible things because I want to see what will happen' attitude.

Yeah I know that Exalted's world doesn't have cut-and-dry good vs evil (like, say, DND) but I'm trying to get an idea across here.

Also, this quote better still work:
"-and once I've killed you and crushed your miserable smuggling operation, I'll take all of your filthy drug money and use it to fund AN ORPHANAGE! MUAHAHAHAHAHAHA"

[AnubisXy]

To be honest with the changes to mechanics and even to the caste names it feels like the new Infernal Exalted are simply completely different from the Old Green Sun Princes to the point where they could have the tag, "loosely inspired by the Green Sun Princes." Which is, honestly fine. I thought the GSP's were the bees knees, but I've reached a point where I think that if they're going to get altered and changed away from how they used to function, it would be better to make a clean break of it, burn the entire structure to the ground and rebuild it from scratch rather than having them come off as shallow alterations of something that I feel was amazing in concept but did not really fit the Exalted paradigm very well.

So I would prefer not to see "transhumanism" play a very big role in the Infernal Exalted in 3rd edition, but would rather see them embrace something new that better fits within the overall Exalted narrative.

[Sunder the Gold]

Also, this quote better still work:
"-and once I've killed you and crushed your miserable smuggling operation, I'll take all of your filthy drug money and use it to fund AN ORPHANAGE! MUAHAHAHAHAHAHA"

Yes, this please.

[Ravraxas]

Change of direction would suggest that it was any more significant than what Vance has said about it in the first place.

"Rings true but not the entirety of what they are" sounds like a fairly succinct description of even the preview.

"not the entirety of what they are" is the change of direction in question, at least in communication.

Because you know, "decadent first age solars" was the entirety of the info we had about Infernals up until now, given that what was in the preview was cast aside immediately afterwards.

And given that we know the Castes have changed, as the previous devs indicated all of them were to have two words in their name, and Holden himself has told us not to expect Infernals to be what they would have written I think it's pretty unfair to be this waspish about it.

I came into Exalted right around when 2e was ending and 3e had just gone up on Kickstarter, but Infernals were one of the only exalted types I never really got the appeal of. They were slaves to the Yozis, but also decadent god-kings of Creation, but also transhumanists that were shackled by their particular Yozi's stupid hang-ups and thus couldn't really be transhumanist, and had to get rid of their Limit by revelling in your evil like a bond villain, but also being Exalted when you're shamed because you couldn't do something literally impossible (as Solars have to do) and doing so over a vast enough area would have made Creation just like hell so the Yozis could escape? I dunno, they always seemed like a huge mess to me.

They were never slaves to the Yozis, those were the Akuma. Changing human limitations for another sets of limitations is basically what any kind of transcendence of humanity would do due to reality being... limited. They become more than human not impossible cartoon transhumans that have no flaws or limit whatsoever.

You don't need to be evil to indulge in an Act of Villainy, it just has to be inconvenient. Casting the Bat-signal over Gotham as you hunt down your enemies to hand them over the law still fulfills Malfeas' Act of Villainy.

The make creation into Hell thing is just one of the many plans the Reclamation had going on. I can think of like two things on the top of my head you could do to work towards freeing the Yozi that have nothing to do with that.

As I understand it: Infernals as described in 3e are basically the god-kings Solars were supposed to be at their absolute worst. These are the kind of guys who will turn a massive swathe of Creation into pure chaos for a training exercise, but unlike the Solars, this wasn't an extreme that occurred near the end of their reign, this is something that they do as a matter of course. (Come to think of it the Yozis' original plan may have been for the Solars to get That Bad in the first place when they laid the curse down so they could escape on their own, but now they've decided to just skip the middleman cuz they have to?)

...This may seem odd, but when they say a twisted reflection of the Solar ideal, I think of the Vaults from Fallout. Intentionally setting up an experiment where you drive people to kill off one of their own every year, only to reveal that you were going to release them all as soon as they stopped killing, by which point they were down to 5 people. "Curing" a group of addicts and then immediately putting drugs back into the population. Saving someone's life so you can experiment on them in the most horrific of ways. That 'I do horrible things because I want to see what will happen' attitude.

Yeah I know that Exalted's world doesn't have cut-and-dry good vs evil (like, say, DND) but I'm trying to get an idea across here.

Also, this quote better still work:
"-and once I've killed you and crushed your miserable smuggling operation, I'll take all of your filthy drug money and use it to fund AN ORPHANAGE! MUAHAHAHAHAHAHA"

And some of us have as much interest in playing that as in roleplaying some new Infernal's first encounter with Lillun.

What would be the fun in playing some moron drunk with power and doing things for the evulz? I would have a character rather than a plot device to set up some apocalyptic backstory. Because that's what decadent First Age Solars ultimately are. A justification to why Solars don't run Creation anymore.

Not to talk about how identifying those 50 exaltations with the stereotype lessens the impact of the Solar's return and it's potential to blow up Creation.

Or how the new rules about artifacts mean they will probably be unable to act the part when it comes the time to use those First Age superweapons.

I mean, i don't really mind Infernals being super decadent. Hell in Exalted is super decadent so they should be like that anyway. But just dropping all the baggage of First Age Solars in the Infernals and color codding their "evil" away as Green is kind of lazy and a disservice to what Infernal were in 2nd Edition.

[Isator Levi]

Oy, there's so little to talk about here, other than rehashing old arguments and arguing the minutiae of how things were discussed in those articles.

[BrilliantRain]

Oy, there's so little to talk about here, other than rehashing old arguments and arguing the minutiae of how things were discussed in those articles.

Yeah, given that we have basically no information about the new Infernals, we're the blind men describing the elephant after observing it through a telescope.

It might be more productive to simply say what you want from Infernals in 3e, instead of trying to use twitter posts and entrails to try to divine the Will of the Devs.

[HalfTangible]

They were never slaves to the Yozis, those were the Akuma.

Yeah I was never clear on the difference between a GSP and an Exalted Akuma, beyond 'they don't need to be GSP'.

Changing human limitations for another sets of limitations is basically what any kind of transcendence of humanity would do due to reality being... limited. They become more than human not impossible cartoon transhumans that have no flaws or limit whatsoever.

You don't need to be evil to indulge in an Act of Villainy, it just has to be inconvenient. Casting the Bat-signal over Gotham as you hunt down your enemies to hand them over the law still fulfills Malfeas' Act of Villainy.

The make creation into Hell thing is just one of the many plans the Reclamation had going on. I can think of like two things on the top of my head you could do to work towards freeing the Yozi that have nothing to do with that.

Acts of Villainy (ignoring the name) are still pretty shitty, as I recall. Get a bride, monologue about your plans, let an enemy live so they can bask in your brilliance...

As I said, I realize pure evil isn't a thing in Exalted. But all I really got from GSP is that they were meant to serve Hell, act like bond villains and eventually usurp creation by making it just like hell (whether they want to or not), allowing the Yozis to escape.

And some of us have as much interest in playing that as in roleplaying some new Infernal's first encounter with Lillun.

What would be the fun in playing some moron drunk with power and doing things for the evulz?

Sounds like fun to me =/ I never played Infernals because I never got a clear idea of what they were and also had no access to their book.

I would have a character rather than a plot device to set up some apocalyptic backstory. Because that's what decadent First Age Solars ultimately are. A justification to why Solars don't run Creation anymore.

Not to talk about how identifying those 50 exaltations with the stereotype lessens the impact of the Solar's return and it's potential to blow up Creation.

Or how the new rules about artifacts mean they will probably be unable to act the part when it comes the time to use those First Age superweapons.

I mean, i don't really mind Infernals being super decadent. Hell in Exalted is super decadent so they should be like that anyway. But just dropping all the baggage of First Age Solars in the Infernals and color codding their "evil" away as Green is kind of lazy and a disservice to what Infernal were in 2nd Edition.

Honestly I always saw the comparison to the first age solars as a reference point more than an actual 'coding'.

Look, just give the Infernals a clear identity, and I think I'll be happy with them.

[Isator Levi]

The following thoughts are going to be fragmentary and circuitous, as I'm grasping at minor details and following them to no particular purpose:

It might be more productive to simply say what you want from Infernals in 3e

I'm trying to explore ideas of Infernals being a subversion of traditional heroic narratives or elaboration of villainous ones through some postmodern analysis...

How do I put this...

It's nothing new that I've considered possibilities in Infernals related to the lifestyles and messages found in a lot of the culture around rock music from about the 60s through the 80s or 90s (although it's really a subject in which my knowledge is rather inadequate), combined with some ideas on weird mysticism with a rebirth bent, and maybe a general idea of the darker underbelly of society. I'm trying to put that with the idea of them being Chosen from among the downtrodden, the dispossessed, the wounded, and from there the idea that it's not so much a case of power to overcome these scars, but that derives from them, feeds them; if following the cliché motivation of "reshape the world in my image", that arrives at an image that might superficially resemble a darkest timeline, but apart from the catharsis it could represent for the Exalt, might be considered to hold certain benefits for the inhabitants.

Not necessarily benefits as we would perceive them, but that's hardly new. Like a religious system of the past that held that something considered normal and acceptable today (and, indeed, at the time) was bad and needed to be repressed. Perhaps a wounded and powerful individual might preach that things such as art and beauty and love are things that constrain and hurt people, and ought to be done away with, and it makes you more than a Care Bears villain.

Or perhaps just a person who would bend the world into a system to feed things into filling their own inescapable hunger.

I look back on the old Yozi Charms, and how while they were written to have something like thematic and balancing weaknesses, the forms these took often followed the idea that there was something broken in the power. And not just in the forms of weaknesses; various kinds of wound and deficiency often being inextricably part of how they work, or a basic aspect of their aesthetic. You got Malfeas shintai Charms in which the idea that a new form bursts or burns its way out of you wasn't expressed mechanically as a weakness, but it's still a nasty, grimy image. To be revised, move away from the idea that developing the power is what wounds you, that you're taking on the burdens of the Yozis' narratives; it's who the character already is, and this is how they express those demonic powers, why they're capable of doing so. So you get Stealth Charms of an odd kind that render you invisible, but also blind, and lashing out violently against the first thing that makes contact with you.

I try to find basic, rudimentary ideas about the different takes on the Solar Exalted by looking at them faced with the end of the world (or the onset of chaos, if those are different things); as a Solar, your actions are in service to stopping that (regardless of morality); as Abyssal, you find beauty in it and peace in its apparent inevitability; as Infernal, you revel in it and in the face of it, turn your apparent helplessness into a source of strength, perhaps seek refuge in it beyond the realms of humanity.

That's about all I can manage. I think the thing about the Charms is kind of new.

[The Hug Ninja]

Things I liked about Infernals.

1. The Ebon Dragon’s relationship with failure. Charms like this but Kill Feint Cleverness and Victory in Defeat were genuinely interesting because everyone else's charms tend to be keyed off of your actions being successful. Sadly it was swept aside for evil because we've never seen that before outside of the entire Abyssal charmset.
2. Perfect defences with thematic weaknesses. The specific way it was handled tend to lead to idiocy like people deciding they'd just never stop running.
3. Adorjan the Buddha, Scourges were an open invitation to play hyperactive Fishmalks (in no small part because of point #2) but I liked that the Silent Wind had the whole philosophy about letting go. More should've been done with that.
4. The Chrysalis Grotesque, the imagery is fantastic.

[Anathemouse]

I didn't care for a lot of things in the infernals book, especially the first two chapters. I did, however, really like the idea that whereas the Solar Exalted are defined by their Crowning Moment of Awesome, the Infernal Exalted are defined by an epic failure. I think it would be great to have their charms warped by their own personal failure, as if they are so hung up on that moment that the bitterness permeates every aspect of their being. Sort of the way that Ebon Dragon couldn't help but betray himself because of his very nature, an Infernal's flaw would always find a way to manifest. If Hercules is a Solar, Oedipus is an Infernal.