[OSSR]Exalted: the Lunars

[Ancient History]

Exalted
THE LUNARS

FrankT:

We're setting the wayback machine to 2002, when White Wolf had fully realized that 3rd edition D&D was kicking their ass. Remember that before 2000, White Wolf was the biggest name in RPGs. They had seen their rival TSR go bankrupt only to have it come back stronger than ever under Wizards of the Coast. So White Wolf decided to fight 3rd edition directly: they made a fantasy game. And not just one or two books, Exalted came out just a year after D&D's 3rd edition and fifteen months later they were releasing their thirteenth book: The Lunars. Exalted ran an aggressive anti-D&D campaign, it was supposed to be the D&D killer. They'd killed D&D before, they could do it again. All they needed to do was to play on peoples' inherent snobbishness and get them to look down on D&D for being old and lame. But this was a much harder task in 2001 than it was in 1993. Mostly because 3rd edition D&D was new and hip and not old and lame. Exalted simply wasn't getting the traction that Vampire had enjoyed. 3rd edition D&D kept beating them. And beating them hard.

But the shovelware engine would not be denied. They had created a paradigm in which they needed to write a bunch of books to infill various types and locations and shit, and so they jolly well were making them. At this point in time, White Wolf was a professional publishing house with like deadlines and shit. Exalted: the Lunars was handed off to the B-Team, a group of professional hack writers who included absolutely zero people who designed the core system and were merely writing to the specifications they had been given at the start of the project. So even though the direction already hadn't worked, the plan had pretty much nothing to do but stumble forward. By November of 2002, Exalted had its Lunars book. And it retailed for thirty dollars.

AncientH:

I like to think of Exalted as a sort of distillation of everything White Wolf had learned about making RPGs at that point. The World of Darkness had grown up sort of organically from the key ideas espoused in Ars Magica: there is a divide between the supernatural and non-supernatural world, and you the players get to explore this parallel society that exists under the noses of the muggles, and which is broken up into competing factions, each of which has their particular cool powers and weaknesses. It was never a game for roleplaying Dracula, it was always about roleplaying The Lost Boys and Near Dark and Interview with a Vampire.

That said, the World of Darkness was also explicitly the modern world, with cell phones and chainsaws and condoms and all the other tremendous advantages of civilization. White Wolf hadn't really ventured into the pseudo-Medieval territory since Ars Magica, and their couple Dark Ages/Renaissance/etc. games always sucked a bit when you looked at them because quite frankly it was much harder to be a monster in a world of humans around the time when you freaked the fuck out at fire and fire was your dominant light source. However, it was also an age before guns and cannon and nukes, so monsters of various stripes were unambiguously more powerful than their modern day counterparts - closer to the times of Myth and all that.

FrankT:

For all its high-mythic pretensions and manga shout-outs, the fact is that Exalted has always been a weird “what if” thing that was supposed to be like their World of Darkness material but in a high fantasy setting instead. A lot of the tropes and systems and story elements from World of Darkness get shoveled into Exalted even at the cost of making any fucking sense at all. And nowhere is that more egregious than with the Lunars. They are very explicitly the Changing Breeds people from Werewolf: the Apocalypse with some nods to the high fantasy trappings of the setting. The Lunars are the “Champions of the Silver Pact” and it all takes place “before the World of Darkness.”

This treads into some very weird and frankly offensive territory. As a high fantasy setting, “Creation” was, well, created. And pretty recently too. And the World of Darkness is basically supposed to be our world. So if Exalted is indeed the past of World of Darkness, that's creationism all there in a shitty little bundle. You'd kind of hope they'd repudiate that sort of thing because it's stupid and offensive, but when 2nd edition came around to try to clean house, they doubled down instead. Because White Wolf was incapable of learning from their mistakes. And now they don't even exist.

AncientH:

Exalted also has to be cast against White Wolf's second-prong attack on D&D: the d20 books of the Sword & Sorcery imprint, which included Ravenloft (licensed from Wotc), Scarred Lands, Everquest and World of Warcraft licensed products, and the stable of Monte Cook/Bruce Corbell's Malhavoc Press. These were all universally terrible, but I think Scarred Lands at least showed White Wolf that they could not effectively compete against established product identities like Forgotten Realms with their homebrewed D&D campaigns - so instead, they based Exalted on their established product identity.

The Book

FrankT:

The book begins with a “map.” That needs scare quotes, because the map is supposed to be all “tribal” and shit. Which means that things aren't to scale, it's all bullshit chicken scratches, and none of the cities or points of interest are even written in. It's just a collection of stupid looking runes that are supposed to represent various tribal zones of control.

And then, this being a White Wolf book, there is a mini-story. It's four pages long and extremely pretentious, referring to the protagonist's “mate” and shit. But honestly, I just can't give a fuck. Nothing really happens.

Only then does it get to the actual Introduction and seven chapters that make up this book proper.

AncientH:

Aesthetically, this is not one of White Wolf's better jobs. It's a hardback book with the vaguely manga-esque comic book-style figures that dominated WW art at the time, and was filled with weird page textures to mimic D&D-style books. The map on the inside cover was done with a sharpie, someone colored and shaded it in Photoshop, and then some bastard scribbled glowing pseudo-elfscript on top. Several of the names are more than vaguely familiar to players familiar with Werewolf: the Apocalypse.

It retailed for $29.95, which was fucking expensive, and at 254 pages is far too long - consider that the average early Vampire splat was less than a hundred pages and softcover. It also didn't help that in a couple short years they'd be made redundant with Exalted 2nd edition and Power of the Exalts - Lunars.

Introduction


This is an example of the script. Third element down looks like a cock and balls. I don't think that's accidental.

FrankT:

All the chapters, including the introduction, have their own one page pieces of genre fiction. These are not written in DaVinciForewardRegular or anything fucking insane like that. But it is written in black text over a dark background and I absolutely can't get myself to give any fucks at all.

So the actual introduction starts off with the assumption that you are intimately familiar with the story of Exalted in the form it had in 1st edition, meaning that if you are opening this book without having recently read the core book you are going to be a little lost. This introduction doesn't start with any civilized “what is this book?” bullshit, that would breed weakness! Instead it starts:

It has been a long time since the Usurpation, 15 long centuries since the Lunar Exalted turned their backs on their mates and fled into the wilderness on the edges of Creation.

Needless to say, this is not an introduction that really gives a fuck what you think if you aren't already an Exalted fan. Before the first page is even over, it jumps in to discussing the Silver Pact's political struggles about who should be number one on the attack agenda: Death Lords, Fair Folk, or the Empire. Note that the book has not at this time deigned to tell you what the fuck a Death Lord or Fair Folk is, why we should care about the Empire at all, who the Silver Pact represent, or what a Lunar Exalt is or why we should care. The assumption is that we have been keeping up on all things Exalted before even opening this book and don't need any description of what Lunars actually are or do in order to be interested in reading deeper into a book called “The Lunars.”

AncientH:

There are a lot of pains in this book, especially if you're familiar with any of the other White Wolf games. The art styling isn't consistent or recognizable compared to Werewolf: the Apocalypse - instead of the weird claw-mark slash glyphs that readers are familiar with, we get this spiraling elfscript that looks like Ogham got Vulcan drunk one night and they fucked like rabbits on viagra. The White Wolf sense of humor is conspicuously absent, aside from some of the unintentionally hilarious art. There is also a general lack of the immediacy that is familiar in White Wolf books. Exalted is set during the Age of Sorrows, and Apocalypse isn't really on anybody's calendar.

FrankT:

It's not until page 11 of this book that they come clean with the following sidebar:

This Is Not A Complete Game
Despite its size, Exalted: The Lunars is not a complete game. It is a supplement for White Wolf's Exalted, a game in which characters take the roles of Solar Exalted, shining golden heroes who were the husbands and wives of the Lunars in the long-forgotten First Age. This book doesn't include descriptions of the game's various Traits, rules on combat or a complete setting. It just has an in-depth treatment of the lands beyond the Threshold and rules for creating and playing Lunar Exalted characters. You'll need to at least have access to a copy of Exalted to use this book.

Well, thanks for that.

I think I should point out a bit how fucking insane this is. Lunars aren't really on the same power scale or supposed to be in the same part of the world as Solars. So this book is a 254 page book that requires you to have another book that you can't use while playing with this book in order to play. Actually playing the characters from the two books together gets a single page (on page 249, we'll get there) and no mechanical support at all.

AncientH:

It also makes abundant use of specific vocabulary - another holdover from World of Darkness, which basically requires a glossary to understand, so they give you one. Some highlights from this glossary include:

god: Often used generally in this book to mean any little god, elemental, Exalt, demon, behemoth or faerie noble who captures the worship of a barbarian people and the chiminage of their shamans.

You have used a word in its own definition. That is a crime.

hybrid form: A hulking and deadly humanoid caricature of the Lunar's totem animal. The hybrid form becomes one of the Lunar's natural shapes when the Exalt learns the Charm Deadly Beastman Transformation.

I hate the charm names. I also hate they feel obliged to capitalize "Charm."

tlak: A formal gathering of Lunars called to settle grievances and discuss concerns.

Can we just call it a moot? I mean, it's a fucking moot. We all know it. You don't have to make up words.

Wyld, the: In this book, the Wyld is never used to mean "outlands" or "ungoverened regions," the way it often is in the Realm or the Threshold. It is used by Lunars as by savants - to mean areas actually touch by the madness that lurks beyond the edge of Creation.

Having different meanings for the same word in different books is not a good thing, but White Wolf has had worse sins.

Really, this glossary is pretty spare considering the specialized terminology used in this book. There's hardly a fucking paragraph that doesn't have one or more capitalized words to show that it refers to something specific of which you are assumed to be familiar with.

This has nothing much to do with anything, but I love that Adam Warren drew it. I think WW specifically sought out comic book artists to provide art for their Exalted books both to improve their general art standards and to set it apart from the Vincent Locke kind of black and white that defined their World of Darkness games.

FrankT:

Most of the introduction is taken up with the Lexicon. Note that most of the crazy bullshit words of Exalted are defined in a different 350 page book, to the extent that they are defined at all. So if someone came to you in November of 2002 and said they wanted to start a Lunars campaign, they'd have you read 600 pages, most of it irrelevant, and not really in any kind of order that made any sense. It was... a steep learning curve.

The actual Lexicon covers some things that are explanations of things in the book, like how it tells you that the Silver Pact is the Creation-wide society of Lunars who are also called Lunar Society (no “the”) and the Society of the Moon (“the” included). And that they are in charge of “kidnapping” newly Exalted Lunars. But it also has some terms that are in the world such as “urrach-ya” which is apparently the term for “non-person” in their bullshit made-up barbarian language. It apparently applies to absolutely everyone who isn't part of their stupid tribal society, and Lunars are allowed to lie, cheat, and murder these people (which is to say: almost all people) without that supposedly impinging their honor at all.

Yeah, we're in the lexicon in the damn introduction, and we already have the doctrine of Aryan Exceptionalism. Trust me: it doesn't get any better later on.

AncientH:

There's a lot of wasted space in this book. It's two columns, with header and footer art, wide margins with their own art, and as much as 3/4 of any given page can be taken up with sidebars and illustrations. I'm looking at page 13 - the last page in this chapter - and there's just this...fucking...thing taking up the bottom half of the page. It's an amorphous computer-generated varied grey blog, with these striations originating from an off-center point, and with a distinct border and...I don't know what the fuck it is or why it's there except that it takes up half a page that you'd otherwise leave blank.

So we're 13 pages in, and with two columns you could expect up to 13k wordcount, but in my estimation it's only about 8-9k. That's really a lot of low information density. Full shovelware ahead!

[Koumei]

There's a lot of wasted space in this book.

Yes, everything between the front and back covers.

[name_here]

That is one terrible fictional script.

Also, they should probably have gone old school and called the meetings Things.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Oh hell yes.

You two should never review Mouse Guard or Sword World RPG. Because if you did, I would immediately die. Of happiness.

[Josh_Kablack]

So White Wolf decided to fight 3rd edition directly: they made a fantasy game. And not just one or two books, Exalted came out just a year after D&D's 3rd edition and fifteen months later they were releasing their thirteenth book: The Lunars. Exalted ran an aggressive anti-D&D campaign, it was supposed to be the D&D killer. They'd killed D&D before, they could do it again

Frank, your timing is off.

I can't speak to the Lunars book specifically, but I was playtesting 1e Exalted when only 2 of the 3 3rd ed D&D core books were out, and I knew people who had been working on Exalted for a good couple years before that. Exalted was intended to be a D&D killer. However the lead time for a whole new branch on the WoD lineup was long enough that Exalted was NOT a reaction to 3e D&D, but rather a late entry to killing 2e D&D.

Don't look at it as a failed attempt to reclaim past glory, look at it as beating a dead horse.

[Username17]

So White Wolf decided to fight 3rd edition directly: they made a fantasy game. And not just one or two books, Exalted came out just a year after D&D's 3rd edition and fifteen months later they were releasing their thirteenth book: The Lunars. Exalted ran an aggressive anti-D&D campaign, it was supposed to be the D&D killer. They'd killed D&D before, they could do it again

Frank, your timing is off.

I can't speak to the Lunars book specifically, but I was playtesting 1e Exalted when only 2 of the 3 3rd ed D&D core books were out, and I knew people who had been working on Exalted for a good couple years before that. Exalted was intended to be a D&D killer. However the lead time for a whole new branch on the WoD lineup was long enough that Exalted was NOT a reaction to 3e D&D, but rather a late entry to killing 2e D&D.

Don't look at it as a failed attempt to reclaim past glory, look at it as beating a dead horse.

That would explain a few things. I guess the days of White Wolf shoveling out a "complete" game and book line in 3 months wouldn't come until they completely stopped giving a fuck with the bankruptcy. Exalted as a lame attempt to do a finishing move on 2nd edition AD&D makes a lot of things make more sense. The entire early advertising campaign was predicated on the idea that D&D was a dinosaur that people were embarrassed by - but coming out in August of 2001 that was extremely obviously not true.

If what you say about multi-year lead times is true, that kind of makes the whole scenario even more out of touch. They were waging a 20th century war with 20th century tools in 2002. No wonder they got their asses handed to them.

-Username17

[Koumei]

Indeed, even after 3E came out completely and was shown to be a massive success unlike seen before (or indeed, since), even after 3.5, they were still operating under their old mindset of "We will defeat 2E". They didn't handle change well - or perhaps they had written the script of how events would unfold and couldn't conceive that anyone else would deviate from their script. That's very keeping in line with their actual game plots.

[Ancient History]

Chapter 1: Setting

FrankT:

The setting chapter begins with the four words “The Lunar Exalted are” and thus very obviously should have been the start of the actual book, since this is really the first sentence that deigns to even pretend to tell you what the fuck is going on. This is page 16, which is nothing compared to the prosaic space wasting of something like Scion, but still pretty bad.

So the beginning of the chapter is basically the introduction to the book, with all previous useless crap being well, useless crap. The concept here is that the Lunars are “barbarians” and proud of it. Basically, almost the entire first page could be replaced by “Crom Crom Crom!” and it would have made more sense. The nominal introduction had a Robert E. Howard quote on it, frankly they could have just copypastaed a page from a Robert E. Howard book and it would have served just as good.

Like most impassioned defenses of barbarism, this doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Princes and merchants are “weak” and “cowardly” because they would starve without the farmers, are their fletchers and chiefs weak and cowardly? I know it says later that literally all the able adults gather food, but that's ridiculous. For that matter, if the barbarians are doing well enough where they are, why is it important that they go invade civilization at all? Why can't they just stay where they are and leave civilization to crumble in peace? There are clearly some unsupported premises here, and it doesn't hold up to scrutiny.

AncientH:

Well, it sort of helps to remember that the Lunars got the short end of the stick. They're stuck out at the edges of creation where things get sort of thin and then fall into primordial chaos, full of monsters and...yeah, it's basically Cimmeria. However, in Cimmeria they only fight civilization because civilization decides to come to them; it's a reactive thing, like the Native Americans maybe putting up a resistance to all these fucking white people. Even having said that, of course, the Native Americans weren't "noble savages" or "barbarians," they had some impressive fucking cultural achievements - it was culture, sure, but it was a different culture. It wasn't even more "in tune with the native world" or any of that crap.

So, Lunars are Fantasy Barbarians married with the oWoD Changing Breeds. It's pretty explicitly based directly on Robert E. Howard, and your goals as a bad-ass dick-swinging werewolf Lunar are pretty much the same: wander into town, steal shit, get drunk and get laid, bitch about all this civilization, kill a few people and then leave to do it all again next week.

FrankT:

The book goes on and on about how the “savage” cultures value honor, strength, and individuality and that's why they are heroic. But they've already given the game away in the lexicon when they admitted that their barbarian honor allows them to lie, cheat, and steal from basically anyone they don't like. It means that every mention of pride and honor and bravery rings exceptionally hollow. Since Barbarian “honor” apparently means “we are nice to our friends” it doesn't really mean anything.

And that's really important, because the “honor” is basically supposed to be the reason that their entire culture isn't just shitty, vile, and impoverished. Which since the honor is laughably hollow and kind of offensive, means that there really isn't any saving grace at all. The box text under “They Are Heroes” is supposed to make the argument that these are people you would want to root for. And it fails utterly at that task.


This is a much stronger argument for Barbarian heroes than anything in this book.

AncientH:

Barbarians cannot throw away the lives of adults by consigning them to laboring in a workshop or a mine.

I call bullshit. Some of those Lunars are waving metal swords as big as they are about. Either they have some fucking blacksmiths and miners, or they have a really intensive system of child labor.

They have more elfscript tattooists per capita than any other faction. Unless those are the equivalent of passing out drunk at a party and waking up with penises drawn on your face in permanent marker, which I personally would find hilarious and appropriate.

So what you really have is a group of Lunars who can't call themselves artisans, but that's basically what they are. It's like cultures that insist every male is a warrior and has to wear a knife at all times, it's just for show. So somewhere in the back ranks of the Lunars are tribe members like Lesbian Hair who put the goddamn loincloths and canteens together so that the big assholes that spend all their time taking vacation trips to civilization can survive, because you know none of the PCs are going to take a skill like "Sewing."

Then of course they get around to telling us that all the real work is done by slaves.

FrankT:

The book goes on at length about the benefits of an economy without specialization. That doesn't even make sense. Seriously, that is not a thing. At all.



You can't have society without specialization. Indeed, the reason you have “society” at all is to harness the benefits of specialization and division of labor. Hunters and gatherers, fletchers and shamans, whatever. Then, just to rub your nose in how stupid this all is, they talk about how agriculture is performed by slaves. Yeah, the society whose entire purpose is supposed to be individuality, freedom, and non-specialization has an underclass of fucking slaves who are forced into narrow economic roles.

So even if you believed that “specialization is for insects” and you were a fapping libertarian who thought everyone needed to be a renaissance man and honor was more important than food security and all that other crap – the Lunars lead a Barbarian society that is nothing like that. Their “honor” is not different from total unethical corruption. Their “free” society is one of masters and slaves. Their contempt for people who would starve without farmers to rely on is comical in light of the fact that they also rely upon farming serfs for food!

And the thing is, all of this completely unironic. Even their out of character box text tries to convince you to treat these guys as heroes even while frankly admitting that there is absolutely nothing likable about them at all.

AncientH:

There is a section on food.

To ensure a steady supply of food, most sophisticated barbarians keep herds.

Uh-huh.

Lacking farms, few barbarians eat civilized staples such as rice and millet.

Yeah, that's uh...decadent right there. Also bullshit.

Cereal grains make a man fat more readily than the meat, seeds and root vegetables preferred by tribal peoples. As a result, obesity and diet-related illness are rare among barbarian tribes.

Okay, some asshole switched to the paleo-diet right before they wrote this, probably in mortal fear of type II diabetes.

So yeah, this is the society that Denis Leary promised.

FrankT:

While this chapter is nominally about “setting,” almost all of it is about the really reprehensible barbarian culture that the Lunars lead and cultivate. But while a lot of ink is shed on the barbarian culture, it's all very “high level” and I'm not sure how you could actually play any of this. See, there are about 34 groups that I think might be Barbarian Peoples on that incomprehensible sharpy map at the beginning of the book. And when it runs through taboos, it just gives examples and like one thing from a bunch of different tribes. So apparently the Jackal Tribe doesn't show their faces to outsiders and wear face scarves when dealing with foreigners. That's kind of cool, but it's not really enough information to actually play a character from the Jackal Tribes or have adventures in the Jackal Tribes and have that have any consistency.

So to the extent that this book is telling you anything about the barbarian cultures, it is giving you a simple framework and instructing you to make up your own damn barbarian culture. Which makes you wonder why this chapter has 34 pages in it.

AncientH:

...and they stole root, tree, and branch from every "uncivilized" culture in history. Seriously, there's half a page devoted to Aborigine songlines, secret societies for menstruating women, potential shamans selected for "homosexuality or gender aphasia", totems, witchcraft ("Barbarians hate a known witch."), helot-style slavery, Nordic wergild, etc.

A word on totems and gods - there is actually a full-page box text devote to this - the vast majority of the actual people are not Lunars Exalted, just, y'know, human barbarians. They live in a supernatural world bordering on chaos that fucks them up pretty bad, what with all the monsters and shit, and there's bits in the book where some tribes will drink the only source of fresh water even though it turns them into snake people because it is the only source of fresh water. To deal with the supernatural, the tribes have specialists shamans, who make deals with...well, pretty much anything can be called a "god" in this setting, but basically any PC character will do. This is all pretty confusing, because I'm not entirely clear where the Lunars Exalted begin and the barbarians end, and it makes it pretty clear in the text that the Lunars only care about the barbarians so far as enforcing their "morality." So if the barbarians are fucked up, it's pretty much the Lunars' fault.

FrankT:

The “Atrocities” box text is especially tone deaf. The book comes right out and says that barbarian raids involve rape, torture, murder, and enslavement of people, and it admits that some players won't be comfortable with that. It even suggests that convincing your tribe to be “moral warriors” instead of rapists might be a good focus for a story. Does it not occur to the authors that by acknowledging that “moral warriors” might be a different thing than what the people normally are that they have tacitly admitted that these people are immoral warriors?

There's even a section a bit later called “Barbarian Morality,” but they've already admitted repeatedly that the barbarians they are describing are not moral people. Even that section can't keep a straight face, talking about “respect for the individual” and “slaves” on the same fucking page.

Also: they practice infanticide. You know, just because they weren't abhorrent enough as-is.

AncientH:

Yeah, the whole "deformed children are culled by the Wyld" bit is repeated more than once throughout the book, in a primitive form of eugenics. This gets weirder because the closer you are to primordial chaos, the more mutated and fucked up your particular tribe will be.

The War section is basically the Beastmen from Warhammer Fantasy, minus the siege weapons.

Just another Friday night.

Barbarian tribes get together in loose mobs and charge straight at the enemy. Sometimes, they win!

FrankT:

The focus of the book is supposed to be the Lunars themselves, rather than the barbarian tribes, though it's easy to forget that because it goes on at such length fapping to their horrible barbarian society. Truly every page brings with it more stupidity and vileness. But for what it's worth: the Lunars themselves are shapeshifting warriors who are given great powers by being fated to gain shapeshifting powers. By virtue of having been selected arbitrarily by fate to be better than other people, they are given great power and respect in the tribes and basically get to tell people what to do and guide the tribes on the “path of honor,” which of course seems to be a path of doing whatever the fuck the Lunars feel like telling them to do at any given moment. So to recap, this “individuality” and “personal responsibility” respecting culture elevates some people to the status of living gods and enslaves other people for basically no reason in either case save the accidents of their birth.

It doesn't get around to telling you what Lunars can actually do for another two chapters, and even then it spends three chapters and over a hundred pages telling you what that is. Even then, this information is not particularly helpful by itself, since as you'll recall the antagonists and traits are defined in a different 350 page book.

AncientH:

There are several pages on religion, cults, initiation ceremonies, rites of passage, blah blah blah. This shit is nominally important because the Lunars are supposed to be gods in the flesh and these are how their people interact with them. The immediate problem with the barbarians as presented in this book is that if Conan was born into one of these tribes, he'd dedicate his life to killing the Exalted, and you can't blame him. Pretty much every society struggles with church-and-state issues, and here you have some physical asshole come along telling you to gear up and forget raiding your neighbor's cattle, because there's some asshole in the valley next door that's building walls and you have to go fuck them up. You might not want to do that.

So, a quick recap: the "setting" for Lunars is barbarian society, which is stolen hodge-podge from real-world cultures with no respect to the actual combination or circumstances of the use or creation of different practices or beliefs. The barbarians call themselves, which nobody has done in real life prior to Robert E. Howard, and theirs is supposed to be a tough life that leaves them to being incredibly beautiful, fit, meat-eating warriors with all the mundane dirty work done by slaves - which is exactly as the Lunars Exalted want it, because they want to lead the tribes against the Solars and other assholes they don't like. Of course, the Lunars aren't alone in this, because the barbarian shamans are not picky/fickle/opportunistic and will bend over and spread their cheeks for any "god" under the right circumstances, because supernatural power is supernatural power.

FrankT:

The last 18 pages of the chapter are given over to mini essays on various tribes in the setting. It's split into quadrants, and for some reason starts in the East and goes around. Note that Exalted's map actually looks like this when it isn't being draw in sharpy to be “savage” looking:



That doesn't really come through in the map in this book at all, but there basically isn't anything to the West at all. The descriptions in the text sort of implies that by talking about island tribes and shit, but with the bullshit maps they give you for this book, it's really hard to tell what is supposed to be going on.

AncientH:

Honestly, I have trouble giving a shit about the tribes. It all just sort of flows past the eyeballs and it never seems to fucking end, it's just an ongoing litany of "damn, sucks to be a barbarian." Also, seriously, based on the way things are worded the main occupation of barbarians is steal each other's cattle and stealing each other to sell into slavery. Oh, except for the Dune People, who steal people to fucking eat them and breathe through hollowed-out human femurs while buried in the sand.

Some of the tribal practices are just bullshit. The Western/Island tribes for example have this thing where you get drunk and they put you on a boat and if you break a taboo while shitfaced they sacrifice you...and women have it especially hard for some reason, I don't understand. But of course some of the women can choose to live as men, accepting "facial tattoos and sterilization in exchange for the right to sail as far as they please." Well, thanks for that.

There's also a picture of a dude in armor made from giant seashells, but it looks decidedly less badass than this real-world coconut fiber corded armor.

FrankT:

Naturally, the list of “Tribes of Creation” is rather incomplete. They really like the Arczekhi Horde and give it multiple sidebars. Other things that seem to be tribal groups on the map don't get mentioned at all. And in between, a lot of groups are stuff like “The Hill Peoples” who are a series of tribes who live in a region (and ironically speak the River tongue). All told, twelve groups get headings, but there is no standardization, and of course some get long entries and others short entries. Some are very high level “there are various tribal groups in this area” and others are down to specific tribes and talking about their leaders and practices and such. Obviously put together by a group of authors operating under little direction with everything cobbled together on short notice.

AncientH:

The writers were pretty much given free reign on this one, and if I had to bet money I'd say that the map was created first and then the writer(s) were shown it and told to fill in the blanks for XX pages. Did I mention that this shit goes on forever? This isn't like Werewolf: the Apocalypse, where you had 12 or 13 distinct tribes and then maybe some other Changing Breeds thrown in there for good measure. This is basically somebody trying to fill a world with bullshit fantasy barbarians, and it is excruciating to go through, probably because I just don't care. Maybe if the world were smaller, the tribes more distinct, the individual tribes less bullshit...maybe if they'd broken the world up by regions instead of having one big "this is all the barbarians ever except the ones were didn't put in, lol" fuck-you chapter. As it is, this is just painful.

Also, kind of useless. What if the PCs decide "Right, let's head north - what kind of people do we meet?" - is Mister Cavern going to go out and buy another shelf-breaker just to see what fucking barbarian tribes are out that way? Fuck, no. (Well, today maybe. 2002: $29.95; 2013: $3.01. I think I could sell it for more as toilet paper.)

FrankT:

The section fails utterly to make the barbarian groups in any way appealing. In some places it seems like they aren't even trying. The “Cannibals of the North” have an unknown name because they don't even talk to other people, they just try to eat any they can catch. I have no idea how or why that's supposed to be something that any person would in any way empathize with.

Really, it seems like someone tried to do the whole World of Darkness “you're a cannibal monster and also the protagonist” thing and still make it unironic heroic fantasy. It doesn't work. At all.


Feel the heroism!

AncientH:

This chapter ends with another half-page ugly, blobby symbol, but this one is in the shape of a crescent moon, so maybe the first one was supposed to be a full moon? Maybe? I don't know.

I guess I should try and enter the mentality of someone reading this for the first time. If I was 13, and this was my first RPG, it would be a vast new world to explore, full of violence and the struggle for survival but also magic, trade, and even a few mentions of sex (although marriage appears to be strictly heterosexual and monogamous, unless I missed something). If I was a D&D fan...well, I'd probably be seeing how much of this I could feasibly port into my home campaign, because frankly at this point only about 1% of the material in the chapter refers to actual Exalted mechanics and apparently everybody speaks Language, which must be very helpful indeed when you wander far afield to steal slaves to sell to the civilized people that you hate for shit you can't make, like steel weapons that you plan to use to kill them later. And it actually works better as a port for D&D barbarians, because you as an Exalt aren't going to ever be dealing with the tribes as members, you're going to be a petty god lording it over your particular hunter-gatherer group.

That's all there is to say about that, really.

[gamerGoyf]

This seems like an auspicious time to ask what's the deal with White Wolf and modernity? Between their barbarian fappery in exalted and basically all of oMage did like someone at WW genuinely think that going back to tribal society was a good idea or were they just trying to be edgy?

[Ancient History]

Pop culture trendy-ism, more than anything. They're basing it off a bullshit understanding of "uncivilized" peoples as "in tune with Nature" and "Noble Savages" and shit; it's the same basic mentality that leads to people buying herbal medicines and getting shiatsu massage, coupled with more than a moderate taste of New Agey earth religion bullshit where the more "primitive" peoples are supposed to have been more spiritual - which is why you have white people decorating their homes with dreamcatchers and Asatru is a thing in the Nordic countries.

[Lago PARANOIA]

You guys haven't even gotten to the really stupid shit like, like, say, putting character generation rules in the 2nd half of the book after emphasizing repeatedly that you should already have the core rulebook.

That was one of the most blatant and contemptuous example of filler I've ever seen in a TTRPG product.

Also, this lady: http://fc07.deviantart.net/fs71/i/2011/ ... 3gk4o8.jpg

Probably a genocidal cannibal rapist. I have my Exalted: Lunars book somewhere and the name Anja Silverclaws vaguely rings a bell.

[Red_Rob]

the more "primitive" peoples are supposed to have been more spiritual - which is why you have white people decorating their homes with dreamcatchers and Asatru is a thing in the Nordic countries.

There was a lot of this sloshing around the RPG world in the 90's. See also Shadowrun: "When the Magic comes back the Native Americans are the bestest at it, and rise up to throw the white man off their lands! But this is fine because forcibly ejecting white people from their homes isn't bad, because their ancestors did it to someone else generations ago!"

[Schleiermacher]

The thing about Exalted: The Lunars is that it's one of the few Exalted books that's so bad, even the most diehard Exalted fan will readily agree that it is shit. As such, tearing into it is a bit like lambasting WotC for putting out Complete Champion or Complete Psionic. Nobody likes those books anyway, so why bother?

What I'd really like to know is what you would make of Manacle and Coin or Exalted: The Dragonblooded, which are widely regarded as some of the best books of 1E or even all of Exalted.

[Lago PARANOIA]

As such, tearing into it is a bit like lambasting WotC for putting out Complete Champion or Complete Psionic. Nobody likes those books anyway, so why bother?

Because it's not just garden-variety TTRPG kusoge (video-game culture term, but so many traditional games fit it that I don't mind calling them such) like say RIFTs or Eurosource. It's seriously on the level of FATAL. It's edited better and has better production values and doesn't masturbate right in front of you, but it's fucking FATAL. If FATAL was significantly less self-aware and (even more) pretentious.

This review is of special interest to me because Exalted fans don't seem to be aware of how vile their fandom can be outside of the bubble. The fact that people just see it as a garden variety 'bad' book akin to Complete Champion or Complete Psionic is in of itself evidence of how fucked-up the IP is.

[Maxus]

The thing about Exalted: The Lunars is that it's one of the few Exalted books that's so bad, even the most diehard Exalted fan will readily agree that it is shit. As such, tearing into it is a bit like lambasting WotC for putting out Complete Champion or Complete Psionic. Nobody likes those books anyway, so why bother?

For the fun of it. To look at the worst as well as the best.

[fectin]

Mostly, Lunar NPCs are antagonists.

Lunar PCs are mostly flirting with furrydom anyway; they're going to do whatever they think it is beastmen do anyway, and no setting info is going to get in their way.

[Ancient History]

Chapter 2: The Lunars

FrankT:

All the chapters begin with a fanfiction piece that is hard to read because it's black text over a dark background with crap drawn on it. But Chapter 2 has a second fanfiction piece after that which is hard to read because it is entirely in italics. Italics are fine for textual emphasis, but writing a two page story in italics is just a crime against typography.

Anyway, by the time we get to page 56 the actual body of text that is actually about the thing this book is supposed to actually be about begins. And it begins with an origin myth. Now, normally you wouldn't much care, because origin myths in RPGs are classically things that use up space and no one gives a shit about. Certainly, that crap in the Master Race's Handbook Complete Book of Elves about the Godswar and the Elfwar really just seemed like wasted space. Unfortunately, this is not the kind of thing that you read over once and wonder if there's any way to sue the authors for time lost. Because the first sentence of the third paragraph, before we have mentioned a single thing about what Lunars hope for or expect to accomplish or why we should care about them in any way, is this:

Today, Luna's Beloved are as much beast as human; they run with animals, they prey on others, they even mate with animals and humans indiscriminately.

OK, emphasis added, but that is fucking gross. We haven't gotten in a single word about why we should be even the tiniest bit sympathetic for these fuckers and they are already leveling with us that the protagonists of the book are cannibals who run the forest around raping badgers. That is not even a little bit of an exaggeration.



It goes on to tell you a little bit about the Lunar psychology. Apparently, Lunars simply don't see the value in people having food security, shelter, or security. So I guess these would-be forest gods are so fucking out of touch that they don't understand why people would even want their basic needs to be taken care of. The Lunars are portrayed as so out of touch and dickish that it really defies ready understanding. Seriously, they don't see the value in you having a roof over your head during a storm or having a pantry with tomorrow's food in it today. They are so “animalistic” that even basic squirrel behavior is apparently incomprehensible to them.



Also, the only value they see in people having skills is that they can make things that can be stolen and also they can be enslaved and forced to make things that can be stolen. Despite being “in tune with nature” they are apparently too stupid to understand non-parasitic relationships. Commensalism and Mutualism are apparently incomprehensible to the Lunars, which make them considerably stupider and less in-tune with ecology than deer or clown fish. And we haven't even finished the first page of this shit. This chapter goes on for twenty eight more pages.

AncientH:

Nothing good ever starts with bestiality, and arguably it goes downhill from there. The thing about the Lunars, the key defining characteristic, is that they are shapeshifters. White Wolf had over a decade to play with the myths and conceptions of shapeshifters in the World of Darkness, so this should be old hat. But where the werewolves and werebears and shit were all (primarily) warriors of Gaia fighting against corrupt spirits, each tribe with their own distinct cultures, the Lunars take all the terrible parts of the Changing Breeds - the indifference to humanity, the dog-fucking, the cultural appropriation - and turn it way the fuck up to 11, and then the dial snapped off.

All the Lunars are stems from Luna.

Well, there's a picture of Luna on the same page and I can see her nipples.

She is neither truly male nor truly female - or perhaps, she is both.

I may have mentioned it, but the gender relations in this book really fucking annoy me. The truth in life, and you can see this in history and anthropology, is that homosexuality and gender weirdness have cropped up in every culture and been dealt with in any number of ways. I'm okay with a genderbending god-figure - hell, Loki was the original mpreg - but the way they deal with it is very annoying and artificial, because it's obvious that they don't want to address it at any length when they can go on about cannibals and the glory of spawning a bloodline of beast-people and other things.

FrankT:

About half a page is given over to a rant about their shapeshifting hermaphroditic moon goddess. Now we're back in the realm of gods who won't ever have any direct impact on the story, so this is pretty much meaningless fluff material, but at least it doesn't really give us any more reasons to hate these people. Really, the only thing that even impacts the game is a little note that the Lunars get really possessive about all the “moonsilver” which isn't explained here. But when it actually is explained, are you really surprised that crafting things out of moonsilver takes a bunch of specialist labor and mines and shit? No, that little piece of gross hypocrisy is just a sprig of parsley next the giant steak of special pleading and horrific immorality that this book is already heaping onto our plates.

AncientH:

Continuing the Luna = Moon = Silver = Werewolves bit, the society of the Lunars is called the Silver Pact. This is your basic anarchist ideal where nothing is written down but everyone shares an unspoken agreement not to rape and kill each other too much. On top of this are characters called "No Moons," "Full Moons," and "Changing Moons" who are supposed to basically keep the Lunars from throat-fucking each other and moving forward on the big project of wiping out civilization, but as expected this is just a bullshit couple of terms that is pretty poorly defined. I mean, at least in Dark Ages when they invented the idea of the Ashen Priest, it sort of fit into the established pseudo-feudal vampire mindset, but these Lunars all prance about like Silver Fangs and Shadow Lords, and too many chefs spoils the soup.

And, of course, to make things more interesting only about half of all fucking Lunars are members of the Silver Pact. Fuck all is known about the rest, but presumably there's at least a couple Lunars that think this farming thing has something going for it or maybe think heretical thoughts like bathing might get ride of some of the lice.

FrankT:

The Pact is gathered when something is important enough to call a big council meeting. In keeping with their other examples of the barbarian society “valuing individuality” there is strict ranking and low ranked Lunars are expected to not even speak in meetings for many years until they've been promoted a few times and the other Lunars give a shit what they have to say about anything. Pacts can be called together by Lunars of rank “uf-ya” or higher, and I've already forgotten what that means and don't care enough to look it up.


AncientH:

I don't know where this image comes from (although it looks like Pumbaa's grandparents), but the Lunars are responsible for far too many of these.

Lunar society has something like five ranks according to the lexicon, each of which ends with -ya because...uh...fuck, I dunno. For people that disdain "civilization" and value "freedom," these guys keep a lot of slaves, organize themselves into castes and ranks, and sign on to a general group assembly deal. So they're hypocritical shits is what I'm saying.

FrankT:

One of the most contentious things about Exalted is the unapologetic anti-egalitarianism of the setting. Exalted people are specifically better than you and different types of Exalted people are better than others. Really, if you combine that sort of hierarchy of awesomeness with any sort of non-merit based selection scheme, you pretty much have an explosion of icky anti-humanist bullshit on your narrative hands as thoroughly as if you'd thrown a social darwinist match into a bed of divine right tinder. Of course, while hideously repellent as actual social engineering, choosing your chosen ones by lottery is good for a power fantasy. After all, many of your readers are painfully aware that they personally don't have any obvious merit, and would like to be chosen to be god king anyway.

This books tries to have it both ways: Lunars are marked for Exaltation by fate and get a trippy dream visitation from Luna to give them a head's up, and then they have their caste assigned to them by the other Lunars based on what they've done and what they seem to be good at when they get forced to perform degrading and nigh impossible tasks while imprisoned. As far as I can tell, this satisfies absolutely no one. It's still pure vileness as regards an actual society, and the whole requirement of sniffing the ass of a bunch of people too stupid to understand why wolves dig dens for years at a time hardly seems to fit into any power fantasy I would admit to having.

AncientH:

I mentioned the terrible Lunar script, but apparently there's a different thing called "Claw-Speak" which the Silver Pack has developed into

a secret code of claw slashes that allows them to communicate ideas more complicated than "mine."

The big thing about Lunars is that this is a time of change, when they might actually get their shit together and things will get done, the cosmic order changed, yadda yadda. This is all bullshit because this is White Wolf, not Alderac, and the game setting tends to creep forward fitfully if at all until the magic day somebody decides to stage an apocalypse/abandon things all together.

A large chunk of the chapter has to deal with your training and upbringing as a Lunar Exalted, including a sidebar on what qualifies as a "young Lunar" (short answer: you the PC), most of which boils down to "It depends." Because the Lunars are scattered all about, and some get trained and some learn by instinct and ancestral memories, and quite a few apparently are proper fucked because they never learn shit.

FrankT:

Apparently, if you don't get tattooed and undergo a big tutorial about your powers, there is a chance that you will eventually lose control of your form and become a big chaotic monster that does nothing at all but rampage, called a Chimera. This is considered bad by the Lunar elders, though I am totally at a loss as to why, since it seems to be basically what the Lunars do anyway. But if you were anyone else, the basic non-desirability of that outcome would seem reasonably self evident. This is why... Lunars kidnap all new Exalts and force them to get tattoos and undergo training montages without telling them why. I'm not making this up. This seriously sounds like the most unproductive method of getting people to not run off into the wilderness and turn into monsters I can conceive of.

AncientH:

On the other hand, you can probably entice a ten-year old to run away by explaining you're a werewolf (and a ninja!) and that you want to teach them cool secret awesome powers.

This is another big break between Werewolf: the Apocalypse and Exalted Lunars - in Werewolf, you're born one of the Changing Breeds. It's just who you are. It's what set them apart from the mages who had to Awaken and the vampires who had to be turned and the ghosts that had to die. Exalts are more like...mutants in Marvel Comics. Hit puberty, see Luna, wake up a werewolf and there's the bald dude asking you to come to his private school in New York while your parents just nod along to whatever the fuck he says. It's a different dynamic, is what I guess I'm trying to stress. It's Harry Potter and Princess/Cuckoo syndrome.

I know I'm doing a lot of these.

FrankT:

In order to remind you that this is a multi-player cooperative story, they offer a means for non-Lunars to join Lunars. It's a sidebar about how if you try to do it, the Lunar elders will try to kill you, and if you succeed at their cheater tasks anyway, they'll let you in but be pissed off. Because Lunars are petty assholes in addition to all their numerous other negative qualities. Also note that such a big heap of bullshit just to get two characters to work together is rather caustic for a system that is supposed to handle four to six characters at a table. Supposedly this book has some playtesters, but I am at a loss to imagine what they actually playtested.

Probably just this, because if anyone even playtested “putting together a group” it would have taken longer than the playtest campaign to get to the first adventure.

AncientH:

Part of becoming a Lunar means getting your tattoos, going through the trials to earn your scars, getting a new name, and picking out a territory. None of that sounds too bad, especially when you consider that they could have gone with genital mutilation rites.

Lunars, somewhat unexpectedly, organize themselves into Packs. I say this is unexpected because we have had all of fucking zero hints of this up until this point, when it did honestly seem like each fucking Lunar was going about the world doing their own fucking thing and I can't really recall tales of specific packs...well, we had some names on the map, but we didn't know those were supposed to be actual Lunar five-man bands, and with names like "tribe" you get the impression of a lot of more Lunars in a pack than in your adventuring party. Given that all Lunars basically supposed to be gods anyway, this sort of feels like it should be like your own little pantheon, but they never really address the theological consequences.


"Wait, so I can join the Thundercats?"

Again, the hierarchy of the Lunars is up in the air. You have the No Moons, who are basically the Buffy Watchers of the Lunars, and you have the Elders, who are...uh...older, more badass Lunars, and between them they appear to call the shots. But not like the mob. Not like much of anything really, because (and I like to stress this), the level of organization/non-organization is a bit baffling here. Presumably any Lunar who wants to can give everyone the claw and fuck off into the wilderness whenever they feel like it.

FrankT:

Much ink is spilled about “The Silver Way.” It's the Lunar ethical code, which as you may guess from the earlier ethical and moral discussions in this book: is worth basically fuck all. There are various rules you have to follow as regards your conduct to other people, but all of it has an “if they deserve it” clause attached, and you get to decide who deserves it and who doesn't. Apparently everyone who lives in cities, and probably a lot of other people too just blanket aren't honorable enough to bother keeping your word to, which is basically a blanket permission for the “honorable” Lunars to lie, cheat, and steal. Their word is explicitly worth nothing, and their honor is worth more as toilet paper than as a decree.

AncientH:

This isn't one of the old Vampire road/morality things, which is good. It also doesn't have any stipulations against fucking your sister or her cat, which is bad because as we've already established those are things that apparently happen with Lunars, which is probably part of the reason the rest of the fucking Exalted give them a wide berth.

Also, hilariously, Lunars have "get off my lawn" syndrome very hard indeed:

A Lunar's territorial streak becomes more pronounced with age. The longer a Lunar survives, the more increasingly dominant his personality becomes; after five centuries of surviving the Wyld, it's all be inconceivable for an elder to let anyone tell him what to do. Rather than spend the majority of his effort on continual tests of dominance with his fellows, the elder breaks away from other Lunars, claiming a portion of land for himself and any human or animal followers that are content not to challenge his authority.

So, jokes about Libertarianism aside, this appears to be one of the major reasons why the Silver Pact can't get shit done. Lunars live to be about 3000 years old, and at 500 they turn into crochety fucking Gran Turismo Gran Torino style assholes that retire to a shack in the woods with their bitches and shotguns.

FrankT:

There are multiple sections on various forms of non-lethal duels, which I assume is what essentially all of the
“playtesting” this book received was about. Since these are all bullshit, I don't know what the point is.

AncientH:

Lunar Exalted take mates in much the same way as barbarians and beasts do - essentially, whenever it suits their fancy.

An unhappy amount of the text is given over to mating.



A substantial part of this is devoted to rape ("non-consenual mating") which is a) not made out to be an inherently bad thing, and b) unlikely because the mere presence of an Exalted makes mortals panties drop and nipples harden. In fact, Lunar society explicitly doesn't give a fuck if you commit rape or who/what you sex up. Which is really fucked up.

FrankT:

Beastmen happen because a Lunar turns into a goat and rapes a human woman. Or turns into a human and rapes a goat. Seriously. There's a couple pages given over to “mating” and it's hella nasty. Lots of rape and guro. Frank suggestions of eating mates when you're done with them. This entire discussion is revolting. A few times even the authors seem to notice that they are writing something that is equal parts offensive and retarded and try to walk it back.

Many Lunars disdain non-consensual mating, for a variety of reasons.

• Too late, assholes! You already left that barn door swinging in the wind when you had Lunars raping all the animals that were held in the actual barn. Also when you had them take mates as “beasts do.” Also when you talked about the atrocities. Also when you talked about killing and eating mates you were done with. Also... you know what, fuck it! You get zero points for pointing out that there are some number of Lunars who disdain rape, because you've already established that the rest of them don't even do that.

They spend almost an entire page on “The Thorniest Issue” which in this case is rape apologia. It warns the storyteller to be “quite careful in the level of detail with which you describe or react to the inevitable results.”

AncientH:

There's a lot of shoveltext about Lunar spirituality and methods for regaining Essence and forging Moonsilver and other shit that honestly no one cares about and should have been handled much more briefly; the writers start slipping some game mechanics directly into the text at this point which is a bit confusing, and which tells me that either not everybody was on script (which, given how this chapter is all over the place already screams "multiple people each doing separate mini-essays") and that some of this stuff was probably intended for a game info chapter but the editors didn't fucking care.

FrankT:

This being White Wolf, you you get not only an Exaltation type, but also a subtype. Your subtype is called your “caste” despite the fact that it is one of the only things that is actually isn't determined by your birth. You'd probably think there would be five moon castes, and you'd be wrong. Waxing, Waning, and Half moon are all lumped into “Changing Moon.” Probably because people got bored writing actual content, even if it was just procedurally generated bullshit like moon forehead mark groups. The picture here is a furry dude with a bunch of piles of human skulls. Just um... so you understand that these are the “heroes.”

AncientH:

The castes are bizarre because they're pretty directly the moon phases from Werewolf: the Apocalypse, but somebody screwed up and now there's three instead of five.



Then of course there are the rest of the non-Silver Pact Lunars. The Children of the City are basically Glasswalkers and Bonegnawers without a cool name. Chimerae are Lunars who didn't get the magic elfscript tattoos and became beasts of chaos.

We also, for no other reason than presumably they had nowhere else to put it, get a sidebar on Beastmen that describes Hawkmen, Elkmen, Hyenamen, and some Sharkmen that worship Fair Folk.

FrankT:

The end of this chapter is given over to the Lunars' diplomatic stance with the various other flavors of Exalted and a couple of ancient big penis NPCs. The short version is that the Lunars are a bunch of assholes and don't get along with anyone and this book presents a setup which is basically unplayable over and beyond the fact that it is morally repugnant.

AncientH:

Which is fairly par for the course for a White Wolf product. You've got umpteen factions and none of them really play nice with each other, so how the hell do you get them to sit down at the table as a group?

The end of this chapter is "Beasts of the First Age," the sort of legendary Lunars that most splatbooks use to fill up the back couple pages and pad out the book a little, and so it is here. The half-page illo at the end is a blobby ring-thing like a circle left by a coffee mug...which, actually, would have been an improvement.

[Voss]

What is really baffling about the Lunar society thing, particularly the old Lunars becoming more territorial and dominant, is the base Exalted source material explicitly pins the Lunars as the consorts of the Solars back in the Wonderful Beforetimes of the First Age (or whatever it was called, before the Solars lost their shit and descended into genocidal madness and Ruined Creation Forever).

So all the crazy Barbarism non-society shit is... something they've made up to compensate for the fact that they were all bitch-consorts to someone else, back when reality ran the way it was supposed to. It also pretty much implies that pan-sexual bestiality was the norm of creation, since Solars had a fixed form and gender and their consorts, well, didn't.

Which is pretty classic WW bullshit, really. Suck people in and then announce that everyone was a dogfucker all along.

[John Magnum]

Trivial nitpick: Gran Turismo is a series of racing video games. Gran Torino is the Clint Eastwood movie where he's a crotchety racist.

[Chamomile]

Trivial nitpick: Gran Turismo is a series of racing video games. Gran Torino is the Clint Eastwood movie where he's a crotchety racist.

That comment makes so much more sense now. I was completely lost as to what the Hell Gran Turismo had to do with hermitage.

[Maxus]

The picture AH didn't know is originally by Ursula Vernon.

And then someone added some glowing crap all over it.

Edit: Always read her notes at the bottom of the page.

[Koumei]

I was confused by the Gran Turismo thing too.

Anyway, I'll offer my insight on why Lunars get only three Castes: unlike most other types, a Caste doesn't get a group of five favoured Abilities, they get a group of three favoured Attributes.

With nine attributes, your choices are 3x3 or 9x1, unless you wanted to double over, with is completely unpossible. Oh wait, Alchemicals came along, gave that the finger, and give you six Castes ("Physical", "Social", "Mental", "Top Row", "Middle Row", "Bottom Row").

I think the book on playing games set Last Thursday includes info for the Waxing and Waning.

[Ikeren]

I kinda liked some of the mechanical stuff that went on in complete champion, from an optimization stand point. Is there a complete champion review here where people explain how terrible it is? (Or is it a --- covering identical territory to complete divine + D&D morality/alignment is terrible sort of standard complaint, which I'm familiar with and believe but confused as how complete champion get a worse grad than complete divine as a result).

[Lago PARANOIA]

Of course, while hideously repellent as actual social engineering, choosing your chosen ones by lottery is good for a power fantasy. After all, many of your readers are painfully aware that they personally don't have any obvious merit, and would like to be chosen to be god king anyway.

Ow. That's a mic-dropping diss right there. As a doctor, you should be ashamed at intentionally inflicting such a nasty sickburn on the audience.

[OgreBattle]

I thought all the exalts were suppose to be inherently repugnant, hence their era being destroyed by Dragon Blooded who were tired of their shit.

But yeah, Exalted is something that kinda covertly slaps you with rape/guro when you were expecting high adventure and power levels.