E-Who-Must-Not-Be-Gendered
In today's "Rereading Old Books Gives Khan Ideas" session, I sort of want to run a campaign based on a royal warstrider, where the players are all Dragon-blooded or elite mortal artisans who work in a factory-cathedral to build a new royal warstrider for their Solar or Lunar overlord, and try very hard not to die to work accidents or deliberate sabotage by a rival Celestial.
World's Cutest Direwolf
A plethora of martial arts styles have been described by Mørke on facebook. Like the appropriate post and he'll tell you which one you should learn, apparently.
Sky Tamer Style, a "hard" defensive style that requires a bullwhip. Signature jutsu creates a vortex around you, your whip cracking and striking hard enough to shatter bones.
Dark Messiah, a "hard" offensive style using your bare hands to shatter bones and rip through tendons. Signature jutsu is destroying someone's senses and shattering them with a hundred fists moving through the shroud.
Mantis Style, a style that is both "soft" and "hard", defensive but primarily offensive. The Mantis signature technique is replying to any attack with a lethal counter attack, hands striking like steel talons.
Black Claw, a style with primarily "soft" defensive technique, and the dreaded jutsu for which it was named, wreathing your hand with caustic black Essence as you rip your target's heart from his chest.
Prismatic Arrangement of Creation Style, a style that is "hard" and "soft," defensive and offensive, and requires total mental and physical control of one's Essence. The legendary jutsu of this style allows you to assume the stances of other supernatural martial arts that you have mastered simultaneously.
Stone Archon Style, a "hard" defensive style that uses soul-twisting koans to defeat an opponent's mind and spirit, while increasing your physical strength and durability. The signature technique of Stone Archon allows you to enunciate and solve a cosmic riddle that transforms you into a mountainous archon of stone.
Ebon Shadow, a "hard" offensive style that uses stealth and subterfuge in lieu of a defense. Sowing chaos with your opponent's senses, you strike horrifying blows with sai or fighting chains. Your signature jutsu is a defensive shadow aura that makes you incredibly difficult to strike.
Righteous Devil Style, an unclassified offensive style that utilizes a firewand and your Essence to control the streams of flame that leap from your weapon. The signature technique buffets your foe with the fires of judgment, forcing them to repent or burn.
Heaven's Ladder Style, a "hard" offensive style that is legendary for using a ladder as a weapon, Heaven's Ladder is the signature style of the Imperial City Fire Brigade. Its signature techniques involve scaling and leaping from the ladder, using it as a fulcrum, a catapult, a platform, and a clinching tool.
Monkey Style, a "soft" offensive style that emphasizes conservation of force to turn a larger opponent's strength and momentum against them. The signature jutsu involves punching someone in the balls really hard.
Red Locust Swarm Style, an unclassified offensive style that involves the carrying of and mixing of volatile reagents with one's own Essence, to hurl caustic bombs and acid bolts. A style made for maiming and killing groups of tightly-packed enemies.
White Reaper, a "hard" offensive style using a war scythe. This battlefield martial art focuses on wide arcing strikes and defense as offense, to slaughter groups of foes in tight formations. Its signature technique is the "Bleeding Crescent Strike" that expends arcs of burning momentum to deliver a critical strike with maximum force.
Ivory Pestle Style, a "soft" defensive style that uses a battle staff and scenery to create a nigh impassable defensive chokepoint. The signature jutsu of Ivory Pestle allows you to hold a closed position like a hallway, rampart, or bridge, launching a shattering counterattack on anyone who tries to move through you or past you.
Single Point Shining Into the Void, the legendary lost style made famous by the loculicidal duelists of the Solar Deliberative. Single Point uses a single-sided reaper daiklave; its characterization as a style that utilizes sheathe-drawing attacks is misleading. It is a "hard" offensive style that emphasizes understanding your blade's natural rhythm and matching it to unleash strikes of unparalleled speed and fury.
Terrible Ascent Driven Beast, a style made famous by the bureaucrats of the Thousand Scales. Taking a sliver of the Wyld into your heart, you hold the raw chaos within the binding chains of tax codes, border surveys, archaic trade regulations, and hundreds of years of census survey and almanac knowledge. Subsequently, you are able to bind someone's Essence and cripple their nervous system with citations and recitations of weaponized bureaucratic lore and bludgeoning with really heavy tax ledgers. The signature technique of Terrible Ascent Driven Beast is transformation into the Efficacious Wind-Borne Auditor, a phantasmal effigy of yourself that moves like the wind, can run on air and pass through walls.
Border of Kaleidoscopic Logic, a Sidereal martial art classified as "soft" and offensive, utilizing Essence understanding and reality-encoding mantras to merge with your opponent's existence and alter it. The signature jutsu of this style forces your opponent to live his entire life backwards to the moment of birth. Outwardly, this takes only a few seconds. Internally, they experience this in real time.
Silver-Voiced Nightingale Style, a "hard" and "soft" offensive style that utilizes musical (sonic) weaponry, primarily your voice, to debilitate a target and end a fight before it starts. Used as a "hard" style, the voice can be shaped to blow a heavy oak door to flinders, put cracks in a stone wall, and bring down rotten or loose tonnage on the heads of your enemies. Used "soft" it can paralyze, stun, and disorient. The signature technique allows you to strike a foe with your voice like a solid fist.
Thunder on the Final Precipice Style, a "hard" offensive style that utilizes a familiar hunting hawk or other prey bird and fighting claws as a means of attack. The practitioner can cast his soul and his very senses into the prey bird, infusing its talons and beak with steel-hard Essence and making it strike like a heavy ballista, while borrowing its speed, accuracy, and incredible eyesight for launching his own attacks. The signature technique, "Ghosts on the Empty Steppe" allows you to perfectly counter one of your opponent's Charms for the rest of the scene.
Graceful Hummingbird Style, a "soft" defensive style that uses a fencing blade to parry, stun, and disable attackers, emphasizing deterrence and minimizing wasted energy. Its signature technique involves striking someone the moment they attack, completely shattering their momentum before the fight begins.
Steel Devil Style, a "hard" offensive style that utilizes a blade wielded in each hand, Steel Devil emphasizes striking inside the line of your opponent's attack with one blade while attacking their body with the other. Its signature technique unleashes a flurry of repeating strikes that continues to deliver sequential attacks with each successful blow.
Dreaming Pearl Courtesan, a fighting style popularized by courtiers and consorts in southern polities, where a member of the royal seraglio is just as likely to be a spy, assassin, and bodyguard. Dreaming Pearl is both a "soft" and "hard" style with offensive and defensive emphasis. It uses an eclectic blend of courtesan's tools, including folding war fans, razor-lined sleeves and skirt-hems, sinuous dancing motions, and even one's own hair to attack. The signature jutsu of Dreaming Pearl Courtesan transforms you into a massive flying carp dragon.
Tiger Style, one of the most famous and deadly of all fighting styles, Tiger is a "hard" offensive style that uses baghnakhs or fingers hardened to the strength of iron, to claw through joints, tendons and sinnew, and stiff punches and kicks to shatter bones. Tiger Style's signature technique is being able to fight on the ground equally well as standing up; once an opponent's leg is broken or back is injured, that is often where the fight goes.
Violet Bier of Sorrows, a style known to few. It is named after the symbology of the department of Saturn (the Maiden of Endings) in the Bureau of Destiny, and her constellations dwell within its astrological schema. Violet Bier of Sorrows is "soft" when it is on the offense, deflecting, evading, and countering with telling, crippling strikes; it is "hard" on the defense, disrupting a foe's attacks with blows to their joints or torso by striking within the arc of their strikes. The typical practice involves a short slashing blade for offensive strikes, and a heavy cudgel for defensive strikes. The signature technique of this style is the "Metal Storm." Sensing a crippled foe's moment of defeat, you make it real, launching a volley of strikes impossibly from every direction.
Obsidian Chains of Torment, a style associated with executioners and gladiators hailing from the shadowlands. It is a "hard" and "soft" offensive style that exclusively uses a chain scythe with a huge sickle blade at one end and a heavy weight at the other. The signature technique of Obsidian Chains of Torment whirls the blade of the chain scythe with terrifying speed while advancing, forcing the attacker to flee—or if they rush their attack, to be surprised by a clashing blow from the weighted end of the weapon before being sliced in half as the sickle makes its next pass.
Hungry Ghost Style, a "soft" offensive style that uses baghnakhs but is wholly unlike Tiger Style in that it emphasizes passing around an opponent's attacks at close range, dancing into their periphery and flowing around the arcs of their motion while slashing at vital areas with your claws and trying to drive them off balance. The signature technique of Hungry Tiger draws the life force from a heavily bleeding opponent to fuel the speed and power of your killing blow.
Crane Style, a "soft" defensive style common to vartabeds of the Near East. Crane uses war fans and graceful flowing movements to confuse an opponent and draw them into committing into extended attacks only to find that you have dodged at the last moment and delivered a bruising counter. A Crane stylist wears down her opponent with her defensive, punishing stances. Her signature jutsu is a counterattack that infuses her counterattack with incredible force when she retaliates against someone who has attacked her previously.
Charcoal March of Spiders, a "hard" offensive Sidereal martial art that involves honing your Essence into fine steel hard threads that can easily cut through stones. Casting these deadly wires out like a web, you make it nearly impossible to approach or evade as the fight progresses. Once you have crippled and trapped your opponent, you can strike them with the signature attack, Water Spider Bite, which allows you to rip out your target's soul and devour it. I am very much looking forward to a MA book.
Fire Dragon style, a "hard" offensive style that primarily uses your natural weapons (fists, feet, knees, elbows) to intercept an attacker's blows with strikes of your own. It is a fast, aggressive style, whose signature jutsu involves igniting the Essence that lives at the end of your fist in devouring fireballs that explode on contact with your hapless foe's torso.
Water Dragon Style, a "soft" defensive style that uses the Essence of water to accentuate your movements, allowing you to flow gracefully and fluidly away from and around your enemy's strikes, while coming back at them with twice the force. Its signature jutsu involves shaping channels of water around you into punishing extensions of your normal attacks, extending your range with battering bolts of fast-moving liquid.
Earth Dragon Style, a "hard" defensive style that involves hardening your body by taking dozens to hundreds of strikes a day in training, and learning to hone your physical Essence in places of Earth aspected power, such as mountains, quarries, and so on. The signature jutsu of Earth Dragon allows you to channel the earth around you into your attacks, hammering your foe with walls of solid rock.
Wood Dragon Style, a "hard" defensive and offensive style that involves moving into your target's periphery and forcing them to make unsteady attacks, attacking them when they are off-center, and holding your ground like an unmoving tree when they try to attack you. The signature jutsu of this style allows you to merge your Essence with the plant life around you, calling snarling roots from the ground to bind and slash at your opponents.
Air Dragon Style, a "soft" offensive style that uses winding, twisting motions and speed to turn your opponent's own strength against him, stealing his momentum and putting him off balance for your own fast, punishing strikes. The signature Jutsu of Air Dragon allows you to command gusts of wind to accompany your strikes, throwing your opponents off balance with gale force upon landing an attack.
Quicksilver Limbus Style, a "hard" offensive assassination style that involves honing the Essence around your hands until they can slice through wood and softer stones (not to mention flesh, muscle, sinew, etc). Your lightning fast slash attacks eventually engender an ability to hurl your Essence like a dart, or to throw precise and incredibly fast throwing knives. The signature jutsu involves harnessing your Essence into a caustic silver streak that you hurl into a foe's eyes, temporarily blinding them and making it impossible to dodge your flurry of thrown blades.
Savage Witch Style, a style used by those hardened, wizened old ancients who live on the Steppes on the edge of the Wyld in the Near North. It is an unclassified offensive style that uses the growth of a long, carnivorous beard as its main method of attack. Users of Savage Witch are known to have bestial claws on their hands and feet, run on air, and release swarms of flesh-eating one-eyed bats from their beards. The horrifying signature technique of Savage Witch is when the beard splits open into a giant, many-toothed maw and slams shut like an iron maiden around an opponent, devouring them completely.
Dread Cyclone Style, a "hard" offensive style that attacks almost exclusively with kicks. Dread Cyclone is heavily practiced on the southern and eastern shores of the Realm, where practitioners are said to be able to land kicks at any time, from any angle. The kick techniques allow even smaller framed women to use their momentum and body weight to land crushing leg attacks on much larger foes. The signature jutsu is the eponymous Dread Cyclone, in which you stun a foe with a shattering kick and then leap into the air, twisting leg over leg with a flurry of alternating kicks with the force of a compact hurricane.
Blood Riot Style, a "hard" offensive style used to train assassins in the lawless southern city states along the Diamond Road. The training in this style is brutal, infusing the killing techniques and methods deep into your mind and soul, burying it within your blood. Blood Riot uses wrist razors to slash and score opponents. It is an aggressive, fast style, but its signature jutsu involves releasing a vial of your own volatile blood, alchemically treated to release a scent that unlocks the full extent of your buried training. This transforms you physically, making your skin harder, your teeth sharper. Your fingernails become steel hard claws, and you move like the wind and fight blindly, slashing at a target that has been hit with your Riot Blood until they are dead or you are.
Dancing Golem Style, a style used in the jungle riverlands of the Southeast, named after the great war god statues of Zek'e. Dancing Golem is a brutal "hard" offensive style that uses the knees and elbows primarily to break an opponent's arms and legs as they try to attack. It can also deliver shattering punches and kicks, though these are seen as tools to stun or finish an opponent. The signature jutsu is an Essence-infused flying knee that can topple a war god.
Serpent's Tongue Style, used primarily by bandit clans in the highlands of the Blessed Isle, is an unclassified offensive style that uses a rope dart to fight at multiple ranges. Up close, the rope is used to snare limbs in order to throw or batter opponents while they are off balance. The rope dart is typically laced with a poison distilled from the practitioner's blood and Essence by an alchemist who knows the trick of making it into a toxin that painfully inhibits Dragon-Blooded Essence. Stylists also put this poison on the spiked gauntlets they wear, and generally use a loose assembly of armor to protect their shoulders, knees, elbows, heel, and hands, coinciding with the body weapons they tend to strike with.
Cloud-Binding Focus Style, a style practiced traditionally by members of the Imperial Legion, this is an offensive style that is both hard and soft, and can be practiced with heavy armor. It complements styles such as Wind-Cutting Blade and the much more rare Single Point Shining Into the Void, but itself is an unarmed style emphasizing capturing your opponent's limbs and hurling them to the ground. Tossing an armored opponent to the ground can leave them mortally injured before a weapon is even drawn to dispatch them. In addition to meeting and channeling an opponent's force into brutal throws, Cloud-Binding Focus has a series of straight-line striking techniques for disrupting a number of attacks and breaking out of grapples. The signature jutsu is a perfect counter that absorbs the power of an incoming attack, increasing your strength tenfold as you bodily lift and slam your opponent into the ground.
Cobra Style, a style that derives much of its technique from Snake style and Crane style, it is a "hard" offensive style, with some defensive techniques that mirror Crane. Cobra stylists use short blades with a reverse grip, pointed down like the fangs of a viper. Their signature jutsu is the False Crane Posture, a neutral defensive stance that conceals their true movement, allowing them to strike an opponent's vital centers with a lightning-fast poisoned Essence strike.
Throne Shadow Style, a traditionally unarmed "soft" defensive style that allows you to channel your martial talents through a number of subordinates, allowing them to move and strike in perfect synchronization as your weapons. This is its signature technique.
Citrine Poxes of Contagion, a Sidereal martial art that fashions your Essence into a virulent strain of unforeseen maladies that wreak havoc with your foe's physical and spiritual immunities. The signature jutsu is a horrific withering strike that does damage to the soul and flesh and scars the opponent into their next lifetime.
Surging Fist Style, a style that is falling out of use on the Blessed Isle due to the rise of Cloud-Binding Focus. Surging Fist is a "hard" offensive style that teaches the user to harness his Essence in one place, allowing him to flash across short distances at the speed of light and deliver critical blows. Dragon-Blooded mostly consider this a showy circus style, unfit for the battlefield, though a few Exalted practitioners are working to revive it as a legitimate battlefield style. In any case, it uses no weapons or armor and relies on crushing kicks, straight punches, and uses very few roundhouse or spinning motions to generate momentum, forcing stylists to hone their Essence and rely on it for greater attack force. The signature technique of Surging Fist is opening the opponent with a flashing stunning strike that empowers the stylist to make an additional crushing attack instantly.
Wind-Cutting Blade, a "hard" offensive style famous in the Realm. It relies on use of the reaper daiklave, and features many telltale techniques that involve sheathing and drawing the blade at supersonic speeds. Wind-Cutting Blade is considered to be one of the most dangerous and impressive martial arts in the Realm. Few know that it is a somewhat weaker derivative of Single Point Shining Into the Void, a style that is almost unknown in RY 768. The signature jutsu of the Wind-Cutting Blade is to flash past an opponent, delivering a strike before they can react, and sheathing your blade to unleash the killing force of the attack upon their body a moment later.
edited 25th Aug '15 12:58:27 PM by rikalous
The Wildest of Ronins
So those are supposed to be 3e's MA styles?
If so No Solar Hero Style means its Ruined Forever. 
World's Cutest Direwolf
Nah, that's just a dev fucking around. Some neat shit, though.
I think Solar Hero is going back to being called "Brawl Charms" like it used to be.
![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
Yes.
(If they still had mortal-viable MA styles it could hold merit to have a mini-style for teaching your mortal followers, but that's gone now)
Those are the conceptual ideas of styles they plan doing. Some are already done in the core, some ought to be in the workings for DB book (dragon styles, obviously) and some are probably just a pile of ideas they'll start on later.
edited 25th Aug '15 3:16:26 PM by Adannor
Cephalopod Lothario
Interesting. Violet Bier is no longer the Samurai/Kendo style.
World's Cutest Direwolf
I think my favorite thing about that list, which, mind, contains the phrase "carnivorous beard," is the fact that there's a style associated with bureaucrats. (Weird that it's Ascent-Driven Beast, though.) I've always liked the idea of Creation being a place where any random schmuck might bust out some specialized martial art Kung Fu Hustle-style.
I guess that's Single Point's job now?
You know, even if Hero Styles aren't a thing anymore I could totally buy some mortal seeing Demetheus is action and developing a martial art in emulation of him.
Ok, I have sort of a question: if you pass gods from other series to exalted, in what category will belong? for example the four god of chaos in warhammer, they will be primordials? the emperor a solar exalted? and what about the lady of pain fromo planescape? just wondering
"My Name is Bolt, Bolt Crank and I dont care if you believe or not"
Just a harmless giant from a foreign land.
The Gods of Chaos would probably be Primordials, yes. Big E would be a First Age Solar.
"You can reply to this Message!"
World's Cutest Direwolf
And the Primarchs a walking set of arguments against Half-Castes.
More seriously, I think the Lady of Pain would have to be some Wyld prodigy to keep the aversion to being worshiped. Actively being against people praying to you is pretty damn weird by the standards of Creation (and Yu-Shan, and Malfeas, and the Underworld...).
In fact WH 40 K blend rather well with Exalted:Emperor(solar) Eldar as siderals and Dark eldar as rakasha, now the Necrons and c`tan....that will be interesting
edited 27th Aug '15 3:36:51 PM by unknowing
"My Name is Bolt, Bolt Crank and I dont care if you believe or not"
Hmmm...I wouldn't say the Primordials would be Chaos Gods. Primordials tend towards extreme mental inflexibility and don't care about mortals. Whereas the Chaos Gods are directly fueled by the beliefs and desires of mortals and are pretty good at manipulating mortals.
Don't know much about them, but the Raksha seem a little more similar, they're inherently chaotic beings and feed on people's dreams to give them strength.
Impossible Gender Forge
In exalted, even the firemen know more Kung Fu than you.
and yet chaos gods have the same problem of understanding concept outside them, Tzeetch cant win because if he does it would disapear, Khrone need eternal conflict, they cant live outside that not matter what.
World's Cutest Direwolf
I'd kinda expect a random firefighter to be able to beat the crap out of me, since it's a job you're supposed to be in top shape for. The fact that courtesans and musicians can bust a kata in your ass strikes me as more unusual.
They could be Primes, yes, but I always rather thought of them as Raksha.
Remember that the category of "musicians" includes people who play some pretty big instruments.
Believe me. I used to play the trombone in high school, and had to carry it for the 15min walk home most of the time. They are not light.
World's Cutest Direwolf
Fair. And then there's the big bastards with the tubas...
Shoulda gone with "singers" instead, I guess.
Remember: Big E reincarnates. So he's even closer to Exalted than anything.
The Exalted seem more like the Forces of Chaos. They do all the drugs and have sex with everything, and do mad science. That's more Chaos than Imperium.
The Emperor is a huge dick though, so I guess that's kinda close to the Exalted.
he does? if you are tacking about star-child is more of him becoming something greater, which is very solar thing to do.
I put Dark eldar with the Rakasha because both have as a theme the fair folk who goes to hunting and talking people in fates worst than death.
the Imperium is clearly dragon-blooded, dominant but siege for all place and wiht a system that colpase without their leader...yeah.
"My Name is Bolt, Bolt Crank and I dont care if you believe or not"
No, in the past, what with him being a bunch of prior historical figures before that.
What? I think he change his identity, that it.
Also I think that the emperor express well the Solar ethic and problem, yes he is a dick...but is a dick FOR mankind.
Also the ossmidiah will totally by autochron and the void dragon will be his disease.
"My Name is Bolt, Bolt Crank and I dont care if you believe or not"
Oh, okay. The arrow threw me off.