Exalted!

Somebody spilt coffee on the map?

Okay. Wow.

The North is freaking different.

So anyone knows yet whether its worth waiting for 3e?

I wouldn't if you can get your hands on the 2e stuff. The lore changes to 3e are meh, and no type of Exalted other then Solars will be available for like a year after 3e is released.

pshhhh, who needs more than solar exalted :P

Your spell check is wigging out man- That's a funny way to spell "Abyssal."

More dates 3E was supposed to hit by have passed us than for fucking doomsday. By this point, Onyx Path has given up on offering a prediction more concrete than "on the horizon."

Keep vigil for 3E if you would, but to actually game within the foreseeable future, pick up 2E.

The DB book was supposed to come out six months after core, back when Onyx Path still made predictions in the month range. I'm hoping that once the core system is all nailed down, they'll be able to bring out the rest of the books quickly enough that that's actually accurate.

edited 7th Oct '14 9:23:02 PM by rikalous

So wait, is 3e seeming worse or not than 2e? ._.

Mechanically speaking I think its supposed to be better, narratively speaking falls under YMMV. At least that's what I've gotten from what little I've bothered to pay attention.

Whether 3E is better than 2E isn't even up to debate yet. It's up to speculation, since the information we have is at best incomplete and at worst misinterpreted.

Mechanically, it looks to have a better basis to work with.

The problem with 3e is that it will be woefully incomplete for a long time. If you want to play other splats, you'd have to homebrew them from scratch - and if you were willing to do that, you could've fixed 2e to your enjoyment anyway.

If you want to play Exalted and have a chance to play 2.5 in front of you - take it.

edited 7th Oct '14 9:41:59 PM by Adannor

Ok...

As has been said many times before, we're still in the stage with the blind men touching bits of an elephant, except that one of the blind men has a thoroughgoing hatred of snakes.

Having seen the leak, I at least can see it vaguely It's cool, aside from a couple "what in the love of fuck are you doing" charms.

Well, judging from what we see so far it might be possible to port the 3e system into the 2e setting (with exception to the Abyssal, which got a major narrative overhaul: some I can agree with, others not so).

Taking the blindfold off is cheating!

Making a 2E-style Abyssal charmset should be easy. Just take a bunch of Solar charms and slap Snidely Whiplash mustaches on them.

(One change to Abyssals I can definitely get behind is dropping the mirror keyword. Because where Abyssals don't get repainted Solar charms they get shit like Writhing Blood Chain Technique and Black Heart's Venom.)

Well, I don't mind seeing Resonance go (it's Exalted. Not Vampire the Requirm), but then I fell in love with the Modern!Abyssal in Shards (with the heavy vengeance/anti-hero vibe) so I might be a bit biased.

Resonance was a lot more annoying in theory than in practice, I've noticed. It talked a good game about the only viable options cackling villainy or angsty lonerdom, but the actual rules aren't that onerous at all. It'd be making me nervous if there was talk about 3E Resonance actually working like the fluff said it should, I can tell you that.

Shards Resonance I'm kind of eh about, because mechanically it's another form of the Great Curse despite the fact that they were never affected by any such thing and Great-Curse-equivalents for splats that were not actually targeted by the Great Curse have historically been rather more distinct from the real deal. On the other hand, it lets you make an Abyssal who flees shrieking from the sun in between long stretches of being perfectly fine with sunlight, and I find that more hilarious than is really warranted.

It's almost like they wanted the people who sold their soul to the Neverborn to be somehow compelled to carry out their wishes. Weird.

Well, be fair Modern!Abyssal is all about them being screwed over before and returning for revenge, which makes them a completely different kettle of fish from the original Abyssal. Modern!Abyssal are ANGRY rather than emo.

Heck, it is encouraged to twink with that modern setting and now I am imagining that it is a crazy UCS (as opposed to the Infernals who control the world) who sent them over to the Underworld and screwed them over (which would explain them having a dislike to sunlight!).

The same can be said for the Infernals. In fact the "selling your soul" is pretty much their thing.

edited 8th Oct '14 1:50:32 AM by IraTheSquire

I really gotta get around to reading more of Shards than the appendix at some point. (So many books.)

Unless the Neverborn wanted to empower a bunch of angsty loners, it wouldn't actually do that even if crunch did match fluff. Resonance-as-described already offers a path of disobedience, it's just a rather narrower one than Resonance-in-practice.

My headcanon fluff has always been:

• The Neverborn warped the Solar shards Abyssal as an unconscious effort.
• The Deathlord have about as much control of who gets picked as Lytek does.
• The Neverborn don't demand obedience, they don't demand anything. The very essence and existence of the Neverborn is pain and agony and when the Abyssal channel that, the Neverborn hurt a little less. All they want is for the Abyssal to go and do stuff.
• The Deathlords, on the other hand, may warrant a different level of control over the Deathknights.

Okay, Rakan Thulio's story is starting to take shape in the new spoilers.

Apparently he's an Endings who tore out the thread of his own death from the Loom, giving him Immortality, and the art spoiler is a rough draft of him examining said strand in front of a team of Gentimians (I assume). He's also called the Sleepwalker, because he Exalted just as he was beginning to die in his sleep, and nobody's been able to track him after he skedaddled.

Also, his core motive for wanting to overthrow the gods? Because he blames them for creating a cursed fate...where he's unlucky in love.

By the way, this is also the man who angrily cursed his former beloved's Exaltation so that anyone seeking To Be a Master of swordfighting will inevitably try to kill the current bearer.

I'm not sure yet if that's an overall plus or minus, but it both shows how dangerous the man is and why at least one Gentimian has gone over to Heaven's side.

Thoughts:

Damn. I was hoping for an evil Serenity. He totally seems like Serenity material. Much more interesting than evil endings, since Endings already have their own problem with the Deathlords going on. He seems like a classic example of how a Serenity could go wrong. "Why do I have to create love and harmony, and get none myself?"

I think the Deathlords have competition in the "Incredibly powerful beings with incredibly petty motives" catagory.

Why do I feel like Ebby would be a massive fan of this guy? Petty motives, defiance/betrayal to the powerful, likely doomed cause, fixation on a particular love. and MASSIVELY FUCKED UP WAYS OF APPROACHING LOVE, MARRIAGE, AND ROMANCE.

He seems like he'll be a fun villain, though I'm kinda tired of the "Everyone older than you is crazy as balls" trend. He seems like someone that you'd have to be either kinda twisted yourself, horribly lied to, or personally indebted to to work for.

(Also, damn. Tearing out your thread can't be easy. Hell, fucking with the Loom of Fate without Pattern Spider/Maiden approval seems incredibly dangerous and difficult. I mean, how do you get out of Yu-Shan after that?)

edited 15th Oct '14 7:28:44 PM by DrTentacles