[OSSR]Exalted: the Lunars

[Dean]

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

This is the truest thing.

[Starmaker]

Reasons for exaltation in typical White Wolf fashion differ between books, or even between paragraphs.

The main book babbles about how you personally have to already be awesome at your thing, and if you get lucky, you just might be magically awesomified by an exaltation spark. (Before that, you're an ordinary human.) There's a strictly limited quantity of these "exaltations" to go around, so this setup is as meritocratic as a power fantasy can get; if anything, the random component allows for mortals who are heroic and hardworking but never get exalted, i.e. one's lack of exaltation is not automatic proof of the person "not trying hard enough"/"not truly wanting to succeed".

Then it says exaltation tends to happen at puberty. Since mopey animu teens aren't awesome by any stretch of the imagination, it says it's enough to want to be the bestest really hard. Ugh.

FWIW, there's also an explicit repudiation of the princess/cuckoo thing: celestial exaltations are "too powerful to be transferred through blood".

The main Sidereals book introduces a god responsible for all the celestial exaltations, like, a single real dude who you can talk to and stuff, what with all the other gods being too busy playing beer pong. He's an in-universe Exalted fanboy, complete with the squee-ing. If, before, Solar candidates were supposed to be committed to protecting civilization, or at least to gaining qualities that might come in handy when protecting civilization, this guy assigns exaltations however he feels like.

An Abyssal-related book (I forget which) says Deathlords are in the business of seeking out unsparked Exalted in dire straits and offering Abyssal exaltation. There's a story in which a Deathlord molests and exalts a diseased and dying peasant kid who would've otherwise become a Solar if not for the plague. By this time, any and all attempts at meritocracy are officially over.

Luna's gender is explained in (I think) a 2e book. Basically, there were a lot of moon gods and goddesses, and they had a battle royale, and the survivors merged.

Oh, and another thing. There are supposed to be 500 Solar and Solar-derived exaltations around, total; the number of Lunar exaltations is probably of the same order of magnitude. So the population needed for any kind of tribal structure doesn't exist, it's the anime club we know from nWoD before there was nWoD. Lunars can't function other than as BBEGs for the D&D Team Monster, except the monster races are the result of rape and bestiality rather than just "there".

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

Kind of. They were Solars' submissive and/or resentful fucktoys, but they were also closest in power to the Solars. When the Dragon-Blooded took over, the Lunars had to go one way or another; they weren't going to bow to teh Dragon-Blooded, and everyone knew that..

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

This is the truest thing.

They actually drop this on one of their Solar sample characters and make him sekritly inherit the exaltation of an all-around unpleasant guy who, among other things, raped and tortured his furry waifu. The White Wolf wiki states that the bullshit went way farther than any of the books I used to have suggested: specifically, every Solar had a pre-assigned Lunar mate, somehow always of the opposite gender, bound in a forced marriage throughout all the spark reassignments.

---
When I bought the main Exalted book (on the basis of the cover picture), I tried to come up with a less offensive interpretation. So Lunars-prime were intended to be stewards of civilization at the world's edges (human presence, civilization, exploration, and the spread of knowledge push the border with chaos back) and/or ninja assassins. Then the people in power got ousted, and the Lunars ran away with their tails between their legs, hid, and now fuck out armies of beastmen breed monster armies through "a wizard did it" magic and plot the downfall of civilization. Meanwhile, people who actually try to be stewards of civilization get lunar-exalted in the border regions, and the elder Lunars kidnap them and press them into subscribing to the bullshit individuality screed and the service of Team Monster. Your goal as a newly exalted Lunar is to run away to civilization, get powerful, come back with a vengeance, kill the elders and steal their secrets.

[Longes]

@Starmaker - close, but no cigar.

The main Sidereals book introduces a god responsible for all the celestial exaltations, like, a single real dude who you can talk to and stuff, what with all the other gods being too busy playing beer pong. He's an in-universe Exalted fanboy, complete with the squee-ing. If, before, Solar candidates were supposed to be committed to protecting civilization, or at least to gaining qualities that might come in handy when protecting civilization, this guy assigns exaltations however he feels like.

And then 2nd edition came around, and that god is basicly a maitenance guy. He has no way of influencing the exaltations - his job is scrubbing the memories of the previous owner, and he kind of sucks at it. He is also one of the few people who know about The Great Curse, and hadn't done anything about it.

Oh, and another thing. There are supposed to be 500 Solar and Solar-derived exaltations around, total; the number of Lunar exaltations is probably of the same order of magnitude. So the population needed for any kind of tribal structure doesn't exist, it's the anime club we know from nWoD before there was nWoD. Lunars can't function other than as BBEGs for the D&D Team Monster, except the monster races are the result of rape and bestiality rather than just "there".

There are 300 Solaroids (150 Solars and 150 Abyssals+Infernals) and 300 Lunars. And a 100 Sidereals.

The White Wolf wiki states that the bullshit went way farther than any of the books I used to have suggested: specifically, every Solar had a pre-assigned Lunar mate, somehow always of the opposite gender, bound in a forced marriage throughout all the spark reassignments.

The in-universe explanation, is that teh UCS was afraid of Lunars turning on Solars (a reasonable concern, giving the general assholishnes of Exalted) and forced Luna to make unbreakable bonds between Lunars and Solars. Luna cheated, by making the bond "Strong Emotion", which can be hate, love, jealousy and everything else. The bond works for all Solaroids.

The worst thing about Lunars, is that unlike Solars (who were imprisoned) and Sidereals (who went NWO), Lunars had a thousand years on their hands, and hadn't done anything during that time.

[Ancient History]

Chapter 3: Character Creation

Technically, this is from a different splat, but it's basically the same.

FrankT:

While it is listed as a chapter, and we will review it as such, Chapter 3 doesn't really feel like a chapter. It is only six pages long, and one of those pages is the Character Creation Summary. There are two pages of art and stories before and after this chapter, if you throw the summary sheet in with them the filler is literally as long as the content in this part of the book. In any case, character generation is mostly the same in all the various storyteller games. And of course, this chapter doesn't actually tell you what any of these things actually do, the chapter is pretty incomprehensible on its own.

AncientH:

We're 88 pages in, or about a third of the way through the book. We've covered...uh...some stuff about barbarians and some stuff about Lunar society. Maybe I'm being unfair here, but it just feels like we've chewed through a lot of pages, and there was writing on them, but none of it has really sunk in as being terribly essential to me. Maybe if they'd emphasized at the beginning that you start off as a barbarian douchebag and then upgrade to Dudebro Exalt Lunar, and woven the connections between the two a bit more tightly it would add a bit more meaning. As it is, you're given a large box of crayons and told these are the lines you can color within, please follow the numbers.

The character generation rules here are terrible. Seriously, they broke down step one, "Character Concept" with five different subheadings of one-two paragraphs each. That's gotta be a thousand words for something that might boil down to "Sabertooth Swordsman" and doesn't include giving your fucking character a name.

FrankT:

It's easy to forget how unstandardized character generation was in the pre-nWoD days. There isn't any human character plus template stuff to work with, every book did character creation slightly differently and repeated all the same crap over again. But generally not quite pure copypasta and sometimes there were changes buried in the text that would have profound implications. I'm too lazy to line compare this shit with the Solars book. For some reason, it straight up tells you while assigning attribute points that Lunars are far more powerful than mortals. It tells you this right before it tells you that your starting attributes are capped at mortal values because go fuck yourself.

AncientH:

Really, you step back and read this thing and you wonder how someone, somewhere, didn't decide to make it easy for the players. Just give them a generic Lunar character sheet they can copy or print out with the absolute minimums filled in already (Attributes: 1 dot each, Survival 2 dots, etc.), and then tell them what they can add and what the different boxes they fill in mean. Fuck, they practically used to do that with the old splatbooks. I could have done this whole fucking thing in two pages.

FrankT:

Every White Wolf product has had some version of checking “none of the above” for subgroups. Sometimes these non-associated characters were the route to true ultimate power, like the original Vampire Caitiffs who didn't get a 2 point discount on three clan disciplines, but did get a 1 point discount on all disciplines (and were thus strictly ahead in the crazy science fiction future of maxing out several disciplines). Here, the version is the “Casteless.” According to this chapter, being casteless means that you suck. You start with fewer charms, you start with fewer points in attributes, you don't get favored attributes, and don't get cost discounts on anything. I think this is basically the authors telling you to go fuck yourself for wanting to opt-out of their inane forehead tattoo system.

AncientH:

Which is in proper keeping for White Wolf, who really want you to paint yourself into a carefully aligned box and never step outside of it.

The actual character creation summary is a page-and-a-half, and it's still too goddamned wordy, because the last page is just a list of all the archetypes and virtues and backgrounds and...and...y'know, at some point the reader has to stop and remind themselves that the few Special Rules for playing Lunars aside all this shit is in the core rulebook, which you have to have anyway! So really, this entire chapter's purpose is to boil down to "Special Rules for creating Lunars," and they can boil that down to half a page...so why the fuck didn't they do it and leave it at that?

FrankT:

It being an oWoD game, you have background points to spend. Some of the things you can spend points on are in this book, and some of them are in the original Exalted book. It's actually a tremendous pain in the ass to try to make a character with this book. The list of backgrounds doesn't even tell you what book they are in, you have to guess.

Regardless of what book these things are in, none of them are in this chapter. Chapters four and five are the actual writeups of the abilities your characters can have of the abilities that are in this book and not in the other book.

AncientH:

The fucking "choose your totem animal" appears twice: once in the Character Concept, and once in Finishing Touches. I don't know if that was on purpose because they thought it critically important all Lunars know which kind of furry they're playing, or because even this six page wunderfuck chapterette had multiple authors that weren't talking to each other, but I wouldn't rule either out.

[Ancient History]

Chapter 4: Traits

FrankT:

For a book that isn't a complete game, this book has a lot of crunch. Sure, it's rambling, incoherent, contradictory, and incomplete, but it's crunch all the same. This chapter is 20 pages of crunch, and isn't all that bad. We haven't been doing this review partially because I had to review some scientific literature about chronic kidney disease, and also because both of us really dread the chapter coming after this one – which is basically 76 pages straight of solid (if mind numbingly idiotic) crunch.

But this twenty page chapter is about traits. Traits in Exalted are the numbers on your character sheet. Some of these numbers are things that everyone has, like Strength or whatever. Some of them are things that pretty much anyone could have, like skills. And still others are the rating levels of unique qualities of the character or their background. The next chapter is given over to “Charms” which are usually unrated unique powers that you either have or don't have.

Now if you're wondering what the fuck is going on, or why you'd want to categorize the fact that your character knows about a cool place to hide and soak up power along with how strong or smart the character is, and not among the weird powers you have to write the descriptions of on your character sheet – I really can't help you. That shit don't make a lot of sense. But over and above the fact that the game's definition of “what is a trait” is basically insane, the traits themselves are also insane. See, the very first page of this chapter starts in with “Altered Backgrounds.” That is to say they are those traits that you write in on your character sheet where the same name for a trait does something different when you write it on your character sheet and you happen to be a Lunar and not a Solar. Let that sink in for a moment. You're already writing terms on your character sheet to set categories of traits which you have to describe yourself because they are all unique anyway. And the terms explicitly don't mean the same thing when used by two different characters. Icelandic law doesn't even begin to describe this clusterfuck.

AncientH:

None of this is exactly new; anyone who has been following WoD for any length of time is familiar with the fact that different clans/bloodlines/houses/tribes/etc. each get their own "lookit how special I am!" backgrounds, skills, etc. in addition to their bevy of unique powers. Also obvious to most gamers is that despite some backgrounds and whatnot taking up the same place on your character sheet (and costing the same points), some are quite obviously better than others. I usually like to point out the various Medium-related merits and flaws to drive this home, but this is Exalted.

For example, we get this gem:

Expanded Backgrounds
The Silver Pact and those barbarian tribes who are a part of it possess a rich and distinct cultural heritage, one that is much different from that found among civilized peoples. Respect and privilege are things one earns through his own blood and sweat; neither is given freely or inherited.

To underline how bullshit this is, the first expanded/altered background is "Artifact," which you character certainly didn't make and probably inherited.

FrankT:

I don't think it can be said enough how non-user-friendly this book actually is. Those backgrounds that have been changed don't tell you everything that they do, only how they are different. And the backgrounds that haven't been changed aren't listed at all. Not even a little heading followed by “see the Solars book because fuck you.” So the only way to know for sure that you actually have to use the description of a background in the Solars book unaltered is to read the entire Lunars book and check to make sure it isn't listed. So I'm pretty sure the “Allies” background isn't mentioned, so I'd go read the Solars book. But if I just missed it or it's somewhere else in the book or something, then I'm wrong. The game is seriously demanding that you work backwards from the negative information of things not being mentioned in a 250 page book that required you to read a 350 page book. It's beyond simply having rules that are secret because they are in obscure places – this game has some pretty important rules that exist because they are never mentioned at all.

I think there's actually a mathematical proof that it is logically impossible to know for sure what rules Lunar players are actually supposed to use to make or play their characters.

AncientH:

It should be underlined that being a plucky young Lunar with everything to prove sucks, because you're surrounded by unwashed barbarians, all the good resources are taken by three-thousand year old monstrosities, and even if you join the Silver Pact you're going to be somebody's bitch for the next couple thousand years and you're still never going to be boss. It makes one want to pitch this whole barbarian thing and go start a cult/business/pyramid scheme in the city somewhere, except of course they all hate you there.

For example:

Lore and Literacy
Lunar characters typically come from an illiterate or semiliterate culture, where the majority of the population is without letters. To reflect this, unless they have special Storyteller permission otherwise, Lunar characters are illiterate unless they have at least Lore 2 (not 1 as for more civilized characters). Barbarians with Lore 1 are assumed to have learned their lessons through memorization of songlines and wise sayings, not from book.

So break out the breathmints and get a cushion for your knees, because Mister Cavern's cock isn't going to suck itself. Note that this completely negates that bit about the special claw-mark language earlier, and of course from an historical or anthropological viewpoint is complete bullshit.

FrankT:

All told, the book spends more than a page ranting at you about what you get for spending your background points to have eaten meat. This is a waste of space, because you can spend your background points on having shapeshifting moonsilver armor or something, and you can probably eat meat every fucking meal for the entire campaign.

The big draw is that as a Lunar you can transform yourself into any animal or person that your personally kill and eat the heart of. That's kind of neat, but it's also extremely trivial to do in-game. Because you are mandatorily a hunter supreme and exquisite murder machine. You'll be eating a half dozen hearts per session and the list of creatures you can turn into will rapidly fill an entire extra page. Asking players to spend actual character generation points on having eaten two animals from their home region is fucking stupid.

AncientH:

The main kick about Exalted is that you play a god, and bless the blank spaces where their pumping organs should be, the writers actually acknowledge this on occasion with traits like "Cult," where you get to have a pool of worshipers and their prayers feed you.

FrankT:

The Castes are here again. I don't know how they are considered “traits” even by the bizarre use of the term this game holds to.

AncientH:

The painful part is that all the castes are given...before they give you the rules for them.

There are also rules given for the Great Curse, because no White Wolf character can exist without some curse involved somewhere. My favorite is "The Curse of the Drunken Monkey," since that basically involves acting like a fratboy that takes "doggy style" very literally indeed.

I remain unclear as to the purpose of the "anima banner," which is a thing where if you have too many motes of peripheral essence your tattoos glow and then you go slightly super saiyin with the glowing hair and shit, which for reasons that I don't understand force you to shift out of your current form.

FrankT:

The final five pages of this chapter are given over to numerically describing Lunar honor. You have little numbers that go up and down that determine what the other 149 Lunars who are specifically scattered to the ends of creation think about you and which of the six ranks you currently fit in and how famous you are among this elite set of blood drinking savages. And the fact is that I don't give a shit. I don't give a single shit about any of this, because my apartment building has more than 150 people in it. My “fame,” “honor,” and “status” within this group means fucking nothing, because you could fit every single one of them into a Denny's and just introduce yourself. Or not. I don't even care.

And the thing is: they double down on how shitty this all is. There are 150 people who get these stupid “-ya” ranks, and every other person counts for nothing and Lunars are expected and encouraged to lie, cheat, and steal from them because they don't count. The whole book is about a modest family of pathological liars, murderers, and thieves who have an elaborate set of rules about not murdering or raping each other too much. To any impartial observer, including anyone reading this book, the protagonists are unbelievably vile and petty.

AncientH:

Final word of the chapter is on Lunars and Regeneration, pointing out (in case any PC missed it) that Lunars regenerate, even if nominally dying of a mortal wound, and are thus quite hard to kill. It doesn't discuss how to deal with this or work it into the game or provide special means to overcome, it's just...there. Why is it there? Why?

[Longes]

I remain unclear as to the purpose of the "anima banner,"

The purpose of anima banner is to ruin your attempts on being discrete and give MC the reason to fuck you up. See, everyone in Creation hates every Exalted who is not Dragonblooded. And lighting up your anima banner in the middle of the city is like saying "Hi, I'm a witch. Please burn me." For that reason Night caste is the one true Social caste - they can spend extra motes to negate banner.
It's declared purpose is to have cool glowing chakra qi shit, like in those dragon balls kids watch this days.

You guys should take a look at 2E Sidereals book later. It has comparable level of bad.

[Ancient History]

Chapter 5: Charms

This diagram is a “charm cloud” which was made as a player aid to make navigating the Lunar charms more convenient. That is not a joke.

FrankT:

The charm system in Exalted is... needlessly baroque. Each “charm” is an arbitrary power that may or may not interact with the rest of the system in one of a dozen ways. There are prerequisites for learning specific charms, and some of them are based on your power level and some others are based on having to master a certain number of schools or have specific skills or whatever. Also there are multiple currencies that you use to power these things. From a D&D player's perspective, it's like if wizard spells were found in extremely large feat trees and some of them cost psionic power points while others used even more baroque resource management systems.

So basically each charm has an Essence minimum. Essence is the number that determines how good you are. Having a bigger number makes you better, and having a lower number makes you not as good. You can choose to start with a higher Essence number, or if you are an idiot, may choose to start play with a lower Essence value. It's Whitewolf, shit is just like that. Also, most charms have one to three specific charms which you have to know before you can learn it. But remember that those charms probably also have prerequisites, and the prereqs of the prerequisite charms are not listed in the charm you are looking at – so tracking down how many (and which) charms you actually have to learn in order to unlock one you're looking at may be something of a chore. Also, each charm may or may not have additional attribute or skill minimums, and these will not be the same necessarily as the stat or skill minimums of the prerequisite charms, which won't be listed in the power you're looking at. So for example: I'm looking at a charm that requires you to have a Wits of 4, but it has a listed prerequisite charm that when you go find it apparently requires you to have an Intelligence of 4 to learn, but it also has a prerequisite charm and when you look that up you find that it requires a Charisma of 3. So really this charm requires you to have at least Wits 4, Intelligence 4, Charisma 3, but two thirds of those requirements aren't even mentioned in the description of the specific charm.

Actually using charms may or may not have a cost or an activation roll. Costs are usually in “motes of essence” (which are like power points and totally different from essence), but may also cost Willpower or Health Levels. Activation rolls are not standardized at all, and are hidden in the text of the power (or in a few cases, implied by referencing other things in other books that have activation rolls). The effects of powers are also not standardized at all, and fans of the system take great joy in finding combos that multiply and remultiply their dicepools. In addition, there are a lot of ways to automatically win various kinds of contests, and even though there are specifically things that automatically win against other things that automatically win, there are enough instances of unclear priority in automatic success that the game descends into “My dad can beat up your dad” arguments more often than is comfortable for anyone.


You may need one of these.

AncientH:

The thing about charms is that this was either White Wolf's effort at an improvement in its general approach to powers (where random "like" abilities were grouped into categories and sold in a specific order), or White Wolf was too lazy to actually go to even that minimum amount of effort and just threw a bunch of random powers and effects together. There is no way to tell the difference.

When creating a character for a Lunars game, don't look at the powers the Lunars possess, but also all the powers that they do not possess.

NO. Do not ever do this. You will never actually run a game if you go through all the fucking charms your character doesn't have. This isn't like Pokemon where you "gotta catch 'em all," and in most cases that's not even possible. Stick with the shit you can do. There's enough mighty wanking to be done with existing charms as it is.

FrankT:

You might think that charms having weird names would serve some sort of system. Like maybe everything with
“exercise” in the name is used the same sort of way. Or maybe all the charms that have to do with charging have the word rhino in the name.


Yeah, not so much. While some rare charms do something that can be inferred from what they are called, most charms seem to have been named in the same lottery that ultimately made 4e attack moves.

In addition to having names that are extremely bizarre, charms are not in alphabetical order. They are arranged by chain, in an order that you might want to take them. This means that for chains that branch, or have charms in them that are also in other chains (and only listed in one of the chains), an individual charm may be quite hard to find. And since the names of charms don't have much to do with what the charms actually do, it's really hard to find what you're looking for. There's basically nothing to do but read the whole thing and hope you remember enough of them to make combos. What little organization this is actually makes things actually harder to find than if they were just in a random order.

AncientH:

Before we even get to charms proper, there is a large amount of wanking on about Lunar shapeshifting, because Lunars specialize in shapeshifting and are very good at it. This is supposed to be counterbalanced by them not being as good at other things, but honestly if you're playing a fucking Lunar then Necromancy isn't your go-to signature ability now is it?

Anyway, shapeshifting is needlessly confusing and possibly contradictory in some places. I know that moonsilver artifacts are supposed to stay with you (somehow) when you shapeshift, but here is says all your gear goes Elsewhere. Also, depending on the charms they know a Lunar has something like 3 "true forms," which is important when you go glowy supersaiyan and shit. The point of this (besides making shapeshifting, your key signature ability as a Lunar, needlessly complex) appears to be that as you become more powerful it becomes harder to use shapeshifting to...not...look like you? "Wait, I know those glowy lines - that's Vimvigor, despoiler of a thousand virgins, source of the warrens, first breeder of rabbitkind! Go get his fuzzy ass!"

Also, charms can be chained into combos and when you graduate to the hybrid beastman form you get to pick a bunch of sub-charm "beastman gifts," which is basically "build your hybrid form on the fly" kinda thing except ill-organized.

Also, on p.123 for no reason whatsoever there is a half-page image of a dude in a swimsuit.


Okay, maybe not that bad, but still fairly jarring.

FrankT:

One thing that leaps out at you as you read these things is how amazingly specific some of these charms are. Yeah, some of them just “make you tougher” in some way or another, and others just let you “strike with claws” or something kind of lame. But one of them let's you temporarily transform your head into a cow head while charging into combat without a weapon order to inflict extra damage with your unarmed attack. In a more sensible game, that sort of thing might be just lumped into a general shapeshifting stunt system where you could get minor bonuses by shifting parts of your body into various animal parts – but not in Exalted. Here you are asked to keep track of individual transformations of hand and foot and such that you can make – and then because you've used one of your exceedingly limited charm slots on it, you'll end up using it over and over and over again.

They've actually managed to make characters who can change their hand into a tentacle or grow snakes out of their hair dull.

AncientH:

On p.128, they re-use a piece of art from earlier in the book. The one where the guy looks like he just shat himself. Did they really think we wouldn't notice? I mean, I guess they might, considering how nobody is going to sit down and do a straight read-through of this book...ever.

"Many-Faced Moon Transformation" allows the Lunar to change their sex. Really, the only surprise in this is that it didn't show up in White Wolf games sooner. Anyway, because all good White Wolf writers don't want to deal with even the concept of abortion, if you do end up pregnant you can't use this charm. Which seems like a real loss of storytelling opportunities to me; haven't any of them seen Junior?

FrankT:

As previously noted, almost all the charms are categorized into trees. These trees have names, but like all names in this game, they are in no way helpful. Seriously six of the trees are named “Unarmed Combat.” Yes, really. There's “Unarmed Combat I,” “Unarmed Combat II,” and so on out to “Unarmed Combat VI.” Of course, having six trees of Unarmed Combat crap is a giant waste of space, because even though there is a veritable mountain of unarmed combat bullshit you can get, having an artifact weapon is cheaper and better than all this crap. Exalted fan apologia for this is that it is cool that Unarmed Combat sucks and is a giant waste of charms because that way when and if you succeed at beating an armed opponent you'll have accomplished something that was cool because it was difficult. Seriously, that's the actual
justification.

Fighting unarmed against an armed opponent is meant to be particularly difficult and, therefore, impressive

I'm not sure why they couldn't have just made balanced unarmed combat charms and just let people who wanted the thrill of succeeding at a task despite having flushed a bunch of charms down the toilet flush a bunch of charms down the toilet on purpose by taking charms that weren't about combat at all, but they very specifically didn't go that route. And when people called them on it later, the core designers explicitly doubled down and announced that it really was supposed to be that way. It would be like if Skip Williams had come out and said that Monks are underpowered by design because that way players can experience the thrill of having a character who is incredibly shitty for their level.

AncientH:

Seriously, there's so much overlapping crap here it's hard to single any of it out for comment. I mean, most of these charms have the same basic effect that Wizard of the Coast would assign to a feat, except in D&D it was much more concise and straight-forward and with fewer bullshit prerequisites, and that's not something you hear very often. "Door- Breaking Method" is a charm that is basically what Sunder is as a feat, except a whole paragraph with costs and shit involved.

Also, one more thing about the names: words like "prana" and "kata" are thrown about at random with no real reference to their original cultural meanings. It's all part of the weirdly kinda-racist exaggerated anime game they made here, which probably began with a lot of leftover Kindred of the East artwork that they had laying around, but it's really just wonky when combined with a bunch of pretty stock Western animal forms like Bear and Eagle. You don't see Poisonous Platypus Fang or Luxurious Panda Hug or Deadly Honey Badger Strike is what I'm grasping at; these are all variations on Monkey Stealing the Peach.

FrankT:

There is simply no way in hell we're actually going to cover all of these fucking things. The damn chapter is 76 pages long and packed full of crazy. Just to drive the point home, the last charm in the chapter is “Celestial Sphere Sorcery” which actually is just a pointer to charms in other books and it doesn't tell you which books. By the way, those books are the main book, the Twilight Caste castebook, the Sidereals book, Savage Seas, Book of Three Circles, and Savant and Sorcerer. but you wouldn't know where to even start looking by reading this charm description. It doesn't even tell you that there aren't any spells in this book! It seriously just says that it enables you to cast a Celestial Circle Spell. The fact that there are no Celestial Circle Spells in this book is something you don't know until you read the entire book and notice that there aren't any.

Exalted continues to try to be edgy and relevant by dissing on D&D. It's actually pretty sad. It was sad and pathetic in 2001, and it's sad and pathetic now.

AncientH:

On p.164 there's a really kind of offensive picture of a topless skunk furry-woman with a multitude of piercings being eaten by something with a lot of teeth and two tongues. It's extremely fanservice-y, moreso than all the other nipples and sideboob so far in this chapter, and I'd post the image but trying to find a copy online took me into some weird places - apparently skunk-girls are popular in furrydom, I didn't know that.

Anyway, Frank's right: this chapter is a fucking beast, and we can't even really cherry-pick the most egregious charms because there are too fucking many. There are over a dozen chains and they go from 3 charms to over a dozen each. I don't even know how they assigned the writing on these - I would think maybe everybody got a chain or two, but given you have like 2-3 chains for each fucking thing on average, I think maybe they had six guys each doing a bunch of chains and it turned out that there was a lot of fucking overlap, and instead of paring it down a little they just said "Okay, Jim-Bob's is Melee I, and Joe-Bob's is Melee II" and so on and so forth.

The sorcery portion might as well be listed "No Moons Only" because they try really hard to make it clear that only No Moons should be doing this shit, not that that has ever stopped a single player ever in the history of gaming. Anyway, the big WHOOP is supposed to be that if you (a Lunar) spends the extra three charms on magical tattooing, you get to buy into Celestial Style Sorcery! ...never mind that even Exalted players will admit that sorcery just sucks balls compared to charms.

Link (or open the spoiler for the copypasta)

According to the very first Exalted literature available on sorcery (First Edition Core on p. 216.), "to work sorcery is to command the essential forces of the very universe." It is described as being slow, inefficient and expensive (in terms of motes of Essence and points of Willpower expended to cast spells) when compared to Charms. It also goes on to describe those who master sorcery as beings to be feared.

However, the mechanical benefits of sorcery have never lived up to these descriptions of it, which have remained largely consistent throughout the Exalted line. Mid-Essence Terrestrial Charms, such as Dragon Vortex Attack (and by extension, As in the Beginning) have proven to be even mightier and more effective at large-scale destructive effects than spells like Total Annihilation or Rain of Doom. With the ease of negating even the most powerful sorceries via Charms like Magic-Shattering Strike or Spell-Shattering Palm (Li), sorcery's effectiveness is further challenged by both native and non-native Charms as being "more transcendentally difficult and powerful than jumping over mountains and taming societies to the Exalt's will". (Second Edition Core, p. 250.)

Given the ease at which sorcery (and by extension necromancy and protocol weaving) can be defeated by a variety of Charms that cost less in terms of motes of Essence and points of Willpower spent—Charms which are faster to use than spells, build off of low-Tier Charms or are starting Charms (such as Spell-Shattering Palm) and can even give a sorcerer's opponent motes back for countering such magics, it is strongly recommended that players approach the sorcery system with extreme caution with the understanding that Charms currently outstrip sorcery in every single way with a few notable exceptions (those exceptions being summoning—particularly demon summoning—and transportation spells). Direct damage spells, such as Death of Obsidian Butterflies or Flying Guillotine are often defeated by low-Essence, low-tier perfect defenses much cheaper and faster than it takes to cast such spells in the first place and are of limited use in combat due to their speed, expense and ease-of-defeat. Spells that buff the caster's traits, such as Invulnerable Skin of Bronze or Wood Dragon's Claw provide greater benefit to combat sorcerers, but require additional Charm-based support to justify their worth as equally-effective or more effective than native Charms.

Given these basic examples, and other more complex issues that have been debated on various forums that discuss Exalted, it is strongly recommended to players to talk with their Storytellers first before developing character concepts that are dedicated to the use of sorcery, as they may quickly find themselves falling behind in power when compared to other player characters who invest their experience in Charms instead of sorcery. This kind of caution in using one of Exalted's core powers is sometimes referred to as a "bear-trap" or "landmine".

[Whipstitch]

apparently skunk-girls are popular in furrydom, I didn't know that.

It's Chuck Jones and Walt Kelly's fault for setting the precedent that anthropomorphic skunks are horny French people like Pepe le Pew and Miss Hepzibah.

[angelfromanotherpin]

Essence is the number that determines how good you are. Having a bigger number makes you better, and having a lower number makes you not as good. You can choose to start with a higher Essence number, or if you are an idiot, may choose to start play with a lower Essence value. It's Whitewolf, shit is just like that.

Actually, Essence was one of the few interesting parts of Exalted chargen for me. The freebie/xp ratio on Essence was terrible, and so from a strict build efficiency perspective, you'd rather spend the freebies on something else. Hell, the Flaw that made you start at Essence 1 was great, if you could manage to survive to the first upgrade with only Essence 1 charms.

So the questions were: did the character concept require any higher Essence req charms, and did I expect this GM to throw early challenges at me that I'd need those charms to take on? If the answers were no, starting at Essence 2 was probably the superior move.

Not usually factored in: will the game last long enough for the calculus to work out.

[Longes]

I think that the best Charms ever got was Infernal Charms from 2E. They were interesting, as organised as you can get with the Yozi-Charms system, they (mostly) didn't have speed-bumps, they interacted with the combat system in a good way. And then 2.5 came by, and fucked up Infernal combat.

EDIT

Exalted continues to try to be edgy and relevant by dissing on D&D. It's actually pretty sad. It was sad and pathetic in 2001, and it's sad and pathetic now.

The saddest thing about exalted sorcery, is that all really cool effects are "Mother May I?" For example, insanely awesome Solar Haven spell (Solar Circle Sorcery) requires five orichalcum statues of "indeterminable cost".
Solar Circle is the only good circle though. It has neat effects, like pushing area out of time, creating warp paths, crushing city walls.
Oh. And demon summoning. Demons are better than you, and there is no problem that can't be solved by generous application of demons.

[Silent Wayfarer]

The main advantage of demons is that you can always summon the optimized demon for whatever task you need, and Exalted rewards specialization.

[GâtFromKI]

There are 300 Solaroids (150 Solars and 150 Abyssals+Infernals) and 300 Lunars. And a 100 Sidereals.

I have a very genuine question: if I understand what you're saying, each time the PCs kill some BBEG, he's immediately replaced by some other BBEG - since there are always 150 Abyssals+Infernals exalted. Therefore, PCs can't defeat evil, they can't even reduce the number of BBEG.

So, what is the PC's goal in that setting?

[Grek]

The new Abyssal exalt will be a different person than the old one. Less powerful and potentially not evil. Additionally, the evil exalts can (in theory) be turned back into Solars.

[Username17]

So, what is the PC's goal in that setting?

That's an excellent question. You're supposed to make your own goals, and sculpt the world with your vast cosmic power. The tagline for the setting is "What legends will people tell of your deeds?" However, the world is dominated by big penis NPCs you aren't allowed to beat, and the entire setting is a prequel, so we know that it turns out that you fail.

Also, most characters can't work with each other, there are very few challenges that are remotely within the realm of things the PCs can handle without curbstomping effortlessly or being TPKed, every group of people and supernaturals is made puppy-kickingly repulsive, concepts of justice and morality simply don't exist, and the setting is a nonsensical divine right pastiche where apparently egalitarianism is cosmically wrong. It's like the whole setting was made by a 14 year old who thought he understood Nietzsche.

So the game tells you to swing for the bleachers, but doesn't give you any real meaty ideas of what you could actually do or why you'd bother. Then it walks even that back by telling you that you can't really accomplish anything, and in the future you won't have succeeded, and it's cosmically fundamentally true that it's pointless to even try.

I hate Exalted so very very much.

-Username17

[Lago PARANOIA]

It's like the whole setting was made by a 14 year old who thought he understood Nietzsche.

Correction: It's like the whole setting was made by a 14 year old who thought he understood Nietzsche while furtively whacking off to his FATAL/Corruption of Champions/Avatar/Final Fantasy darkfic.

[Koumei]

There's an actual book that sort of transitions Exalted into the modern age. It breaks it into several parts, and most of them are stupid. It starts with the collapse of Creation, in Gunstar Autochthonia - you escape the end of the world by boarding a massive space ship with cannons and stuff. Either space is extra scary, or you go through a warpspace thing where shit attacks from every angle, so basically it's a 40k Space Hulk. You can play that one as "anyone except the baddies", and apparently they actually work together here, tossing former anger aside.

Then there's Gunstar Part II, where characters actually start piloting mini ships and get laser cannons of their own and shit. At this point, one of the Primordial evils (see: Infernal patrons) is replaced by some other one, and there's some other changes to who gets what.

The third bit is suddenly a massive "What the fuck". It's a HKAT martial arts thing - they've settled Earth, back in KUNG FU FIGHTING days. The character sheets are mega-simplified and combat only resembles Exalted in the sense of "you use pools of d10". It's like they wanted to remake the Street Fighter RPG but someone told them they were only allowed to keep a couple of things from it.

Finally, there is the absolute least stupid of the bunch. I don't have to tell you not to hold your breath. So now that you can forget that shit about Earth being the Exalted Creation (a good thing), you play in the modern world... except the Infernals are actually ruling the world (IIRC secretly - nobody has figured out that the President is a Green Sun Prince. Possibly they actually rocked up like Shao Khan and are the formal god-kings). Everyone else is trying to fight the system, except Sidereals, who are divided between "This is better than the old world, and it's destiny. Stay on target" and "Fuck, how many times have we cocked this up? NO MORE SETTING UP POWERFUL GOD KINGS"

So yes, in canon, they originally went with "their world is our world, and it was made by Cthulhu and tended to by Jehova" but then changed it to "You still fail, their world dies and it's all ruined, but now it's a totally different world. Also, the baddies are once again in massive positions of power and there's a Masquerade thing where you're not allowed to use your own Exalted power to punch them in the tit."

[Longes]

There are 300 Solaroids (150 Solars and 150 Abyssals+Infernals) and 300 Lunars. And a 100 Sidereals.

I have a very genuine question: if I understand what you're saying, each time the PCs kill some BBEG, he's immediately replaced by some other BBEG - since there are always 150 Abyssals+Infernals exalted. Therefore, PCs can't defeat evil, they can't even reduce the number of BBEG.

So, what is the PC's goal in that setting?

Here's the thing. There is no Team Good in Exalted. There is Team Evil (Abyssals), Team Cthulhu (Infernals) and Team Asshats (Solars).

Team Evil is lead by dead Primordials, who want to destroy the world so they can finally die properly. Abyssals have a chance on redemption, snapping the leash and becoming a Solar.

Team Cthulhu is, nominaly, lead by imprisoned Yozi, who all have various motives, with Malfeas and Adorjan being the only two fully evil. Malfeas is pissed about being turn inside out and being imprisoned within himself, and wants to kick the crap out of gods and humans. Adorjan is gigle-murder-vroom-vroom axe crazy. Yozi have practically no way of controlling Infernals, so the default mode for players is to go Devil-Tiger and find something to do.

Team Asshat is made of Solars, and doesn't have a leader. Their default enemy is Dragonblooded empire that sits in the center of Creation.

[Longes]

There's an actual book that sort of transitions Exalted into the modern age. It breaks it into several parts, and most of them are stupid. It starts with the collapse of Creation, in Gunstar Autochthonia - you escape the end of the world by boarding a massive space ship with cannons and stuff. Either space is extra scary, or you go through a warpspace thing where shit attacks from every angle, so basically it's a 40k Space Hulk. You can play that one as "anyone except the baddies", and apparently they actually work together here, tossing former anger aside.

Then there's Gunstar Part II, where characters actually start piloting mini ships and get laser cannons of their own and shit. At this point, one of the Primordial evils (see: Infernal patrons) is replaced by some other one, and there's some other changes to who gets what.

The third bit is suddenly a massive "What the fuck". It's a HKAT martial arts thing - they've settled Earth, back in KUNG FU FIGHTING days. The character sheets are mega-simplified and combat only resembles Exalted in the sense of "you use pools of d10". It's like they wanted to remake the Street Fighter RPG but someone told them they were only allowed to keep a couple of things from it.

Finally, there is the absolute least stupid of the bunch. I don't have to tell you not to hold your breath. So now that you can forget that shit about Earth being the Exalted Creation (a good thing), you play in the modern world... except the Infernals are actually ruling the world (IIRC secretly - nobody has figured out that the President is a Green Sun Prince. Possibly they actually rocked up like Shao Khan and are the formal god-kings). Everyone else is trying to fight the system, except Sidereals, who are divided between "This is better than the old world, and it's destiny. Stay on target" and "Fuck, how many times have we cocked this up? NO MORE SETTING UP POWERFUL GOD KINGS"

So yes, in canon, they originally went with "their world is our world, and it was made by Cthulhu and tended to by Jehova" but then changed it to "You still fail, their world dies and it's all ruined, but now it's a totally different world. Also, the baddies are once again in massive positions of power and there's a Masquerade thing where you're not allowed to use your own Exalted power to punch them in the tit."

Koumei, that book is five alternative settings. They are not related to one another in any way.

Also, Exalted being a prequel to WoD thing was scrapped in the second edition.

[Archmage Joda]

I find the fact that you didn't list the Ebon Dragon, whose very existence is defined around being a dick, as one of the completely evil Yozis, unsettling.

[Longes]

I find the fact that you didn't list the Ebon Dragon, whose very existence is defined around being a dick, as one of the completely evil Yozis, unsettling.

He isn't evil, he is just a dick

But, yeah. I forgot about the Ebon Dragon. He is the kind of petty evil that would spit in your cereal, before starting Armageddon. That's what makes him the least effective of all the Yozi. And he is their tactical leader :|
And he wins in a published campaign :|

I hate Exalted so very very much.

I actually kind of like Exalted, in a Stockholm syndrome sort of way. It was the first RPG I played. My first character (Twilight Sorcerer/Crafter) died from the very first hit in the very first encounter And three sessions later the GM bailed on us.

[TiaC]

I actually kind of like Exalted, in a Stockholm syndrome sort of way. It was the first RPG I played. My first character (Twilight Sorcerer/Crafter) died from the very first hit in the very first encounter And three sessions later the GM bailed on us.

I like Exalted as long as it's not the actual RPG or being written by White Wolf. Other people have done some cool things withe the setting. (2nd ed setting only, 1st ed is crazy)

[mlangsdorf]

Could you link to some of those non-WW versions of Exalted? I like the game conceptually, but the execution stinks. All of the similar games I'm aware of (Weapons of the Gots, Anima: Beyond Fantasy, etc) stink too, so I'm curious.

[Ancient History]

Chapter 6: The Wyld

FrankT:

Having spent just north of a hundred pages diddling around with mechanics, we're back to fluff. Is the crunch over and done with? I'll keep you in suspense, because at this point while reading you'd have no idea. In keeping with traditions of this book, this chapter is incomplete, with all things not said being intended to defer to other books without actually mentioning what books you should read or where in those books the information might be found. And since you can't know if something is unsaid in this book until you've read all two hundred and fifty pages of it, this will be a time consuming process. This is made more exciting by the fact that this chapter is about the pretentiously spelled “Wyld,” which I think I should remind you is specifically used to mean a different thing in this book than it is in the other books.

So really, you're being asked to assemble a text puzzle by comparing multiple pieces of text that are found in different books, none of which tell you how many pieces there are or where any of the other text pieces are or even what other books you have to purchase to find them. And then while you're comparing the different passages, you have to keep in mind that they are literally written in different languages! That is not a joke. They actually have the same words on the same subject mean different things in the different books.

This is a Kafkaesque comedy. A grimdark parody of presenting information to an audience. By the time The organizational issues are so stupefyingly terrible that I have difficulty finding room in this review to discuss how offensive and horrible the actual content is.

AncientH:

The Wyld is a concept familiar to players of Werewolf: the Apocalypse, which is unfortunate because the Exalted Wyld doesn't really have anything to do with Werewolf Wyld, except that they're both "lol, chaos" kinda things. This is sad, because I think Exalted would be a good setting for Pentex; hell the Silver Pact would probably qualify as a subsidiary.

In the literary DNA sense, the Wyld is Chaos stolen more or less directly from Michael Moorcock's Elric series, where it really is the random unknown terrain off the edge of the map which humans can tame so that the mountains don't walk and shit. Of course, if you go too far back that way you get into weird territory involve RuneQuest Broo and Warhammer Fantasy Beastmen, but I can't decide if the Exalted authors were actively stealing from those guys or genuinely ignorant of their literary heritage and unironically recreating shit that's been around for longer than they've been alive.

FrankT:

This chapter is 28 pages long, and as you might imagine it is kind of rambling in places. The basic gist is that “The Wyld” is an extraworldly wilderness full of Cthulhu and fairies that exists outside the game world if you walk or sail far enough in any direction, but it also bleeds through in patches. And the farther you get from the center of the game world, the more likely you are to run into one of these patches of crazy, to the point that if you go far enough everything is just a madness inducing lava lamp all the time. Other books talk about everything outside civilization's heartland as “The Wyld,” but this book only refers to those places where Hastur fairies bleed through as “The Wyld.” Because fuck you. Also, they have an extra level of crazy called the “Deep Wyld” where things have extra cheese and come with crazy bread.

Also, they created a couple other levels of capitalized levels of Wyldness that a place can have. Things are Bordermarches, then Middlemarches, then Deep Wyld, and finally “Pure Chaos.” I don't think the authors actually know what a “march” is, because “Bordermarch” is redundant and “Middlemarch” is an oxymoron.



Much page space is burnt on the fact that time, space, and form are all transient and flooby in the Wyld. But you still can't go backwards in time. Because that would make things... complicated? I dunno. You've basically created canonical Ditko space, who honestly gives a fuck about keeping causality straight at that point?

AncientH:

"Middlemarch" is also stolen from Moorcock, but a different novel than the original one. Actually, I'm going to take back what I said in the last enty: these people know every RPG incarnation of Chaos and are actively ripping off all of them. There's chaos mutations, chaos wastes, tides of chaos, weird dilations of time and space, chaos beasts, chaos cults, yadda yadda yadda. I want to say there might be a hint of what would become Arcadia in Changeling: the Lost in here, but that might be optimism because there are a bunch of Fair Folk running around in the Wyld doing typical faerie bullshit.

FrankT:

Yeah, if you wanted to call some of the Wyld stuff a blatant ripoff of Earthdawn's Scourge, you wouldn't be wrong. What's really weird though, is that none of this stuff belongs in this book. There's a whole other book about the Fair Folk who live in The Wyld, so really this whole chapter is like a preview piece of the next book, which was entitled “Creatures of the Wyld” and went right back to talking about The Wyld as if it was everything beyond the Threshold and not just the little pockets of crazy town. So it's a preview section for a book that was being written without any apparent consultation with the people previewing it.

AncientH:

There's even a Parlainth expy in here, which is pretty blatant. Honestly, I think this whole chapter was originally written as part of the barbarian gazetteer earlier on since it goes on and on about how the Wyld is different in different parts of the map, but then I notice that it mentions things like "Metagalapan birdmen" which I don't remember reading about before and I'm not sure. It's entirely possible that the two chapters were just written independent of one another at the same time and the editors put a hundred pages of bullshit in between the two sections so we wouldn't notice the holes in the setting.

FrankT:

Having just spent more than a page announcing that mapping the Wyld was impossible and no maps of where the Wyld was could be made, they then proceed to spend a couple more pages telling you about Wyld effects on different parts of the map. It's literally ass to ass. I can't even write words about how fucking stupid this is. It's like the authors didn't get the memo that they had just written.

Anyway, there are mechanics hidden away in this soup of garbage. You'll be wading through a bloated paragraph describing something that had just been announced was indescribable and they'll drop some hard rules for sneaking off into the Wyld to huff paint for free power. These rules... are not good rules.

This is supposed to be a joke, but the rules are basically actually like that.

AncientH:

An entire sidebar is devoted to the Eye of Autocthon, a mysterious artifact that appeared in an Exalted adventure no one played and that might possibly be expanded on slightly in the forthcoming-at-the-time-of-writing Alchemicals sourcebook, but really this sidebar doesn't give a fucking clue as to what it does or looks like or where it is or who has it, so what is the fucking point? It has nothing to do with the Lunars except that the Eyes of Sauron Autocthon apparently stabilized a bunch of the Wyld. Whoopedy-friggin'-do.

The Wyld rules are bad for many reasons, but mostly because there's a lot of them and they're fairly long and unwieldy. When Games Workshop did their first book about the Chaos Was...er, Wyld, they included very many tables that you could roll for quirky and bizarre and dangerous "random" effects. This book instead has many Essence tests and target number formulas buried in paragraphs talking about Wyld Addiction and Recovering from Wyld Addiction and the difference of how mortal and Exalted spells work in there and...well, this is more annoying than when the 3e Manual of the Planes did it, although I'm rather sure that in 3e they managed to compress most of that shit down quite a bit more. As it is, going to Limbo the Wyld means quite a bit of work for Mister Cavern, all so your character has a chance to grow some nice cosmetic crotch-horns or something.

FrankT:

Being a chaos touched beast man is generally speaking a shitty deal. Chaos mutations Wyld mutations are basically another list of completely arbitrary powers, distinguished from the other completely arbitrary lists of completely arbitrary powers in that they are in a different part of the book. A bunch of these are literally lifted from Warhammer chaos mutations lists. It's been a while since I've read Slaves to Darkness, they might literally all be taken from the Warhammer chaos mutations lists.

The final page of this chapter is more charms. Because 76 pages of Charms in a chapter named “Charms.”

AncientH:

Well, none of the fun ones are there. You can't grow a chainsword or get blood of molten copper or grow a second face on your stomach, and even turning into a fucking four-breasted wemic looks like a bit of a fucking chore using the rules-as-written, which seems like a bit of an oversight considering the target audience of the game. It also tells you that being a mutant is a terrible thing that can prevent you from Exalting and makes it harder to advance as an Exalted because you're tainted by the Wyld blah de fucking blah, but let's be honest here: I played a game on this forums where every character was given the opportunity to mutate into different forms, often at random and with possible deleterious effects, and every fucking one of them took advantage of it. I had players tripping over themselves just to sell their character's souls, fuck the ECL. It's how a Jerren rogue turned into a cyborg steam gnome. The point is, long-term character planning does not often come into play in games because most campaigns don't last that long. People like playing Random Mutant Power Roulette and well they should.

You have rolled...poorly. Wait, hang on, you also got Dragon Breath. Use it wisely, when and if you...oh, well, the forest is on fire.

Special shout-out goes to the Essence Channeler mutation, which lets mortal mutants channel Essence and learn some charms. This isn't explicitly an NPC mutation, although Exalts explicitly can't take it, but I'm not entirely clear on how and why a non-Exalt PC would take it, since most mortals can learn to manage their Essence anyway at least to cast spells, and if you chose to be a half-ghost or half-demon or something you can still use Essence. I suspect the real advantage is the ability to learn charms, which means you get to be the rare mortal who manages, in their own shitty way, to do some of the shit that gods do...but you're still paying through the fucking nose (15 XP per) for it, and I don't think the whole worshiping thing works for mortals, more the pity. Really, what would make this game a bit more interesting is that instead of being a little god is if you were a mortal trying to become a god...eh, but then you'd have a lot more fine management of worshipers and whatnot. So probably not.

Next up: Storytelling!

[Starmaker]

let's be honest here: I played a game on this forums where every character was given the opportunity to mutate into different forms, often at random and with possible deleterious effects, and every fucking one of them took advantage of it.

The difference between mutations you can expect on the Den vs. elsewhere is the difference between sex with an attractive stranger and dickwolf rape.

[Koumei]

I've said it before, personal horror is dead. Games still try to push the "You gain a mutation, THAT'S TERRIFYING", without getting the memo that players say "I got a mutation, THAT'S AWESOME".

About the only way you can make it a bad thing is to actually make it an unmitigated bad thing ("you are now blind. No you don't get sonar or whatever to make up for it. You're just blind"). This doesn't make it bad in the sense of creepiness, just in the sense of "fuck this shit".

But if you grow a scorpion tail and wings, it's hard to push that as being a bad thing.