[OSSR]Exalted: the Lunars

[RadiantPhoenix]

Isn't the basic principle of most World of Darkness splats that the players deliberately and knowingly put in some effort to play someone who was nominally cursed (in a cool way)?

[Voss]

Isn't the basic principle of most World of Darkness splats that the players deliberately and knowingly put in some effort to play someone who was nominally cursed (in a cool way)?

No. The 'curses' and 'flaws' have been a combination of horrifyingly stupid, easily avoided or mechanically unsound since day one. And every so often revolve around bestiality. More often than not, players are going to build characters to ignore the clan/breed/caste/aspect/etc flaws anyway, so the game actually benefits by just ignoring them from the word go.

[Whipstitch]

Well, I'd say it's more like, yes, it is nominally a big theme but in practice, nobody has any shits to give and only White Wolf and a few other odd ducks ever really considered it a main draws. It doesn't help that the "curses" you labor with aren't really all that bad--I like sunlight and all, but giving up tanning and socially appropriate feeding seems like a pretty decent deal if you're getting immortality in exchange. There isn't just much motivation there to draw from even if you're open to the idea of playing a troubled soul--such players will still feel compelled to have been betrayed by a lover or have some other tragic shit in their backstory. It's both more believable and more personalized. The clan and flaw curses were of course even more laughable--only Nossies and Malkavians had curses that people gave a shit about, but they were relatively rare picks because the former faced steep social penalties while the latter were roundly mocked and often considered disruptive. Everything else was pretty much incapable of defining your character in any satisfying sort of way. For example, Toreadors were sexy, sexy people who are really distracted by good art.

[Ancient History]

Chapter 7: Storytelling

Final Chapter!

It would be easy to run a monotonous, drawn-out Lunar series.

• This is the actual opening sentence of this chapter.

FrankT:

Discounting the hard-to-read story on a dark background page that comes at the beginning of all chapters in the book, this chapter is 26 pages long. And the central thrust is that they are going to tell you how to actually run a game that tells a story using Lunars as the protagonists. The very first thing they concede is that XP grinding by fighting a series of essentially random and completely meaningless battles against monsters and soldiers from the Realm or the Wyld is dreadfully dull. This is true, but sadly is also pretty much 100% of what the previous 225 pages of the book were dedicated to.

Which is pretty much where we are here: for all Exalted promises over-the-top crazy and balls-to-the-wall action, there really isn't anything to do. And what little there is to do is mostly to have essentially meaningless fights and grind XP. There are only a few people in the world whose death would actually make much difference one way or the other, and they all have plot immunity because go fuck yourself.

AncientH:

Normally, you would expect a chapter called "Storytelling" to be for the Storyteller/Master Cavern, the kind of typical MC-eyes-only final chapter where secrets are revealed and valuable (?) information is provided on how to run a game for your players. Unfortunately, this is not the case:

The following section is by no means reserved for Storytellers: The great secrets of the Exalted universe are not revealed herein. But it's sure to be of more use to Storytellers than players; if you're going to be participating as a player in a Lunars series, this part of the book you can safely skip past for the time being. Storytellers, read on, there's a lot to cover.

I don't want to read too much into a single paragraph, but a lot of warning signs jump out at me. First, the gut reaction: no secret data. That means that instead of saving the best for last, what I have to look forward to is another 25.5 pages of non-essential crap that somehow didn't make it into the overblown pagecount of the previous chapters.

Second, "Storytellers" vs. "players." I know it's a bit of brand identity/trademarking/game language wonkishness, but it's a first-among-equals implicitness that I don't cotton to. While they do try to stress that the MC "leads the troupe" and everyone participates in shaping the story of the game, there's...I dunno, it seems to diminish the individual players.

Third, "Lunars series." I think this is about as close to open, tacit acknowledgement as we ever get that you're probably never going to have different types of Exalted PCs together in your game, and also that they have no fucking idea what to actually call a bunch of Exalted sessions without using words from other games like "campaign."

Last and pretty much least - the players can "skip this section" - and go fucking where? All there is after this is an index. Is that where we're skipping? Had a nice read through the book, now go and look up all the shit you've already forgotten? Was there supposed to be an appendix at some point?

FrankT:

The storytelling advice of this chapter isn't particularly good, they fall back of railroading so much that it's going to get its own paragraph in a second. But the frank assessment of the problems with Exalted in general and Lunars in particular as a storytelling medium is accurate enough that one is tempted to ask why this book went to print as-is. There's a whole subsection on how hard it is to differentiate the player characters when everyone is a shapeshifting barbarian and another on how hard it is to get the characters together considering how geographically remote and openly hostile all these different tribes are. Those are true things, and they are indeed very corrosive to cooperative storytelling. But they were also design choices when designing the setting and design choices when writing this book. I can only really look at this chapter as a letter of protest by the freelance writers. Where having completed this book according to the design specifications given, they simply end it with “Oh yeah, this is unplayable garbage, thanks for reading.” Which really raises the question of why nothing was done about how terrible this whole thing is before it got to this point.

But such as the book gives an answer to how you could possibly play this game at all, the answer appears to be “railroad the fuck out of things.” They are so egregious about it, that I can't really get this across with hyperbole. So I'm just going to have to quote their actual example of something you should say to players when putting together a game before they have even begun making characters:

I'm expecting the group to be a fairly young and idealistic group of barbarians all from the same tribe, who have not yet Exalted and are about to head out on a rite of passage into adulthood.
After they Exalt, the characters will become their tribe's main defenders and engage in a lot of heroic battle. There won't be much moral ambiguity here: Your characters should all be pretty much good guys, fighting against the evils of the Wyld, the Fair Folk, the Realm and wicked members of other tribes.

That reads like parody to me. The authors are at this point trolling the reader and White Wolf, blatantly suggesting that the storyteller has to pretty much design all the characters and plot out their entire life story before you can even have a game. At which point, why are we even playing this game?

AncientH:

The "Differentiating Pack Members" thing is particularly horrible and goes on for many pages, mainly because it's not addressing the real issue. It says that having a group where everybody is a shapeshifting asshole can make telling them apart hard, but that doesn't mean that Crocodile Dunedan and Mistress Sobek are going to be hard to pick apart when in-character - remember, both of them have distinct glowing tattoo things, so that's a pretty easy one. A child of six could point that out. Instead, it goes on about roles and identical stats and Charm selection, and what it means but refuses to say is "Okay, we want you guard against every player finding the one Charm combination that is super effective and everybody uses it." There, was that so hard? I mean yeah, I guess it flat-out admits that your system is terrible and broken and Lunar society doesn't really have distinct roles because your writing sucks and you ignored all the good historical data in favor of slavery and bestiality. It would be nice if you could distinguish between a character that's a moonsilversmith, a tattooist, a hunter, a scout, a shaman, a witch, a berserker, a poisoncrafter, slut-of-ten-chiefs, brewer-of-the-sacred-mushroom-beer, domesticator-of-wild-horses, motherfucker-who-knows-how-to-make-fire, etc. Y'know, if those were actual roles described in the book which are distinct and meaningful with their own skills and tools and shit.

FrankT:

Various ideas are given for things you might want to have stories about. These are basically “D&D, but shittier.” Seriously, the suggestions are literally things like “killing terrible monsters” and “pillaging ancient ruins,” things which D&D is simply objectively better at delivering. This is followed up, no shit, by a heading called “Making a Lunars Game Unique” and I absolutely can't tell if this is deeply sarcastic or simply completely clueless. This section is pretty much exactly the chapter you'd write if you were making fun of how terrible Exalted actually is at being a replacement for Dungeons & Dragons, but it's also important to remember that White Wolf was always flirting with being so stupid as to be indistinguishable from self parody. This book certainly crosses that line, and Poe's Law certainly applies.

AncientH:

Page 232 is half-taken up by a dragon showing a group of barbarian warriors with cat ears its taint. Seriously, tail high, legs spread, total exhibitionist. Except it has no genitals or anus to display.



The problem with Lunar character growth starts early and often, but basically boils down to the Conan problem: early Conan was young, capable, strong, and bored, and wandered south after a battle to get a little action in the southern cities. This is a natural character progression for a barbarian character. After quite a bit of debauchery and more wizards than he liked, he needed to skip town and ended up on an ocean, which meant he became a pirate. Eventually he quit the pirating to head up some bandits, found another ocean, and became a pirate again. Interspersed with this were stints as a thief, a mercenary, a slayer of wizards and improbable wildlife, and he probably sired an entire generation of blue-eyed, dark-haired bastards before he finally wandered back up north a bit and became a king.

That's the fictional barbarian character in a nutshell. Wander about, have some fun, obey your primitive code, sneer at the softness of civilization while enjoying their wine (and a bit of black lotus every now and again). It's not a character arc, really, until Conan becomes king and decides.


So, group play with a bunch of Exalted is a little harder. Obviously, having them pal together for years fighting monsters-of-the-week is a bit weird - it's the timeless sort of Dungeons & Dragons and comic book storyline. It's why a lot of games these days focus on a specific campaign, with a viable beginning, middle, and end. That concept seems largely lost on the Exalted crowd, though.

FrankT:

While many of the pieces of storytelling advice are wholly generic and could have been left to the other books you are supposed to read (like “pace your stories” kind of generic), they don't pass over opportunities to be reprehensible. Over and over again it admonishes you to portray this society that Lunars have created in a favorable light, and that's just impossible. These are slave holding, infanticidal, cannibalistic rapists. They are an over the top villain group that would strain credibility if you swapped them in for the Orcs and Bugbears of a D&D campaign. So the suggestions of how to go about presenting them as the heroes come off as somewhere between rank cluelessness and holocaust denialism.

AncientH:

There's a little sidebar called "Eschewing the Silver Pact" about the difficulties of having a PC who isn't a member of the werewolf mafia Silver Pact. Part of this is the whole outcast-from-society deal, and part of this is the whole no-glowy-tattoo-that-marks-me-as-a-member-of-one-caste-for-life deal. Honestly, you could spin out some interesting stories about what it means to be an orphan among Exalted, not wanting to bow down to the Man and doing your own thing. However, the sidebar suggests:

It's probably best if you assume characters who don't want to have contact with the Silver Pack have been tattooed and their caste fixed by non-Silver Pact elders.

In other words: fuck you, you're being slotted into one of three character roles arbitrarily because Master Storyteller didn't want to change his opus. This is terrible advice.

FrankT:

Five actual pages of this chapter are wasted on ruminations on the ramifications of their terrible Face system. As previously noted: their face system is insulting and stupid and it still boils down to Lunars behaving in a manner that is wholly indistinguishable from being honorless war criminals. But beyond the fact that the renown system is all about promoting deeply immoral behavior, it also has very little to do with how powerful a character is. This means that the advice isn't just stomach churning, it's also useless.

This section of the book tries to treat your level of acceptance in Lunar's hideous society as a level for gauging what kind of challenges are appropriate. This doesn't work even a little bit. You can gain face for doing impressive things that imply you are very powerful, but you can also lose face the same way. You could be the most powerful dude in the world and still have a Face value of zero. That's not hyperbole, the most powerful dudes in the setting literally have a Face of zero because sometimes they sleep in a comfortable bed.

AncientH:

I think we've mentioned by this point, but it bears repeating: this chapter drags on and fucking on, and the art is b-grade even by Exalted standards. It's also fairly random, so that they'll spend four pages talking about the evils of civilization (no, really) and then an entire page about City Lunars where the sole salient point they want to hammer home is "Exalted is not a game about small victories."

And really, that should have been the whole point of the fucking chapter. It should have been 26 (well, okay, 2-6) pages about how you and your pantheon/bros of barbarian gods go around killing monsters, stealing the treasures of the civilized folks, accepting the virginities thrown at you, and basically killing the other guy and end up sitting on a pile of gold taller than your horse. It's supposed to be a game where you get Epic Powerz because you face Epic Threats. You're supposed to be things of myth and legend, and...well, you're bottom-rung plucky young squad with everything to prove in a world that's like dreaming of Peter Pan on crack and viagra. You're not Luke Skywalker, you're a couple of padawans in the Jedi Order and if you step out of line then Master Jackson will slap a bitch. Also, tie you down and put glowing tattoos on your ass.

It's sad, really.

FrankT:

After a brief foray into discussing how revolving a game about shapeshifting combat monsters wholly around combat is in fact boring, they spend the last 8 pages of the book talking about how to work in other character types and playing in cities and all the other crap you might want to actually fucking do if you intended to tell any kind of ensemble cast cooperative story at all. These 8 pages talking about storytelling with “civilization” and “other exalted” should have been most of the chapter, if not most of the book. Interacting with people and characters who are different than your own is like 99% of the point of having a cooperative storytelling experience in the first place. So without a good method of integrating other characters or travels to other nations, there's basically no game.

And yet, there's really nothing here. Most of the advice about mixing characters and genres is basically telling you to not bother. You'd think that there would be some sort of game mechanic advice on how to mix characters who have access to the different charm trees in the same party. And um... it doesn't have that. In fact, it doesn't even really have much to say about the simple party dynamic and setting problems inherent in trying to mix these character types into an ensemble cast. In many cases, it has nothing to say at all. The subsection on putting Lunars into a Solar Story literally begins with the phrase “One of the finest uses for an old First Age Lunar in a Solars story...” They seriously didn't even consider the idea that you might want to have the player who got the Lunars book bring a Lunar character into the base game (which at that time was all about Solars). The one glaringly obvious thing you would absolutely definitely want to do with this book was not even considered as an option. The subsection is 100% given over to discussing have a giant DMNPC Elminster it up with some Lunar flavor.

Honestly, I think this whole section missed the boat as hard as X-Men 3 when they had Cyclops and The Juggernaut in the same movie and never had Scott let loose the big eye beam on The Juggernaut. At some point you've got to give the audience what they paid for, and this book absolutely doesn't do that.

AncientH:

The last page of the book proper before the index is a quarter-pager. Half of it is taken up by the big coffee stain, a quarter of it is text, and the other quarter-page is a random Experience Cost table ripped from Exalted and included here for no fucking discernible reason except that they couldn't figure out what the fuck else to fucking put here to fill out the goddamned space. Now consider: this entire book has been nothing but bloated pagecount, with the words just doled out by the shovel full. They couldn't have gotten somebody to give another 500 words? Did they really cut nothing from the book that they couldn't cram into this chapter? That's terrible.

Anyway, this has been a review of Exalted: the Lunars, which is one of the most painful RPG books I've personally ever read through, and I know Frank feels the same. I think part of my issue with the book is that...well, there are the blatantly offensive bits about rape and bestiality. There is the bad core game concept and setting concepts which nobody really thought through. There are the shitty mechanics. The art and formatting are just a cherry of awfulness on top; it's not that I blame (most) of the artists, but I want to shit in the heart of the layout guy/art direction guy (Brian Glass. Brian, if you goggle your own name and come across this, I want you to know this is a bad product, and you should feel bad for your part in it.) The fucking cover, which is nothing to write home about, is credited to over 5 people! What the hell!

So. It's a bad sourcebook, from a bad game, from a company with a history of making bad games. It' retailed for $29.95 new, and was one of those hardbacks that made the shelves at your FLGS sag in the middle. And, nowadays, it's less than a footnote in gaming history. Nobody important was associated with this book, no careers were launched or foundered, there's nothing in here that really went on to influence anything else except maybe the 2nd Ed Lunars book, and I'm not going to fucking look at that because I stopped caring right around where they were trying to defend rape. This is a book which deserves to be forgotten, and by and large is, and that is the way it should be for now and everymore, a-fucking-men.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Damn, that was amazing.

Anyway, in your opinion, where does Exalted: The Lunars rank in badness among RPG product? I mean, obviously nothing is going to derail Racial Holy War anytime soon but I think that you could make a non-frivolous case that it's worse than FATAL.

[Ancient History]

It's not worse than FATAL. It's not even the most offensive White Wolf product. I mean, World of Darkness: Gypsies. The production values, even with the terrible layout, the questionable art in places, and the stupid fucking format, are relatively high because the it's a hardback on glossy paper and everything is aligned and there are no p.XX's, so it's better than most RIFTS books in that context.

What it is is insulting and mind-bogglingly ill-conceived. Exalted is a half-baked game, this is a bloated mess of a sourcebook that's pure shovelware and tackles an already iffy concept, the Lunars - and it fails terribly at about every aspect of doing that. The background for the Lunars varies between bugshit stupid to overtly offensive, with a lot of mind-numbing paragraphs wedged in there about being a True Barbarian and how everybody is a Warrior and nobody works for a goddamn living and then you read something about it being pretty common to rape your slaves and none of that is enticing to play a Lunar character. The organization of the book is bizarre, the rules are baroque and ill-conceived and executed at almost every level, it is hard to use. The advice for players and gamemasters is either worthless, contradictory, or generic pap spooned out and smeared on the page to fill more pages. Character options are limited, and then they tell Mister Cavern that if players do want to color out of the lines they should be slapped the fuck down, and once again the Lunars do not play well with others. The moral compass for this book is all over the map, with most Lunars being cool with rape and cannibalism but the laws of the universe forbid you from getting an abortion if you get knocked up after using your "let's just experiment" slashfic charm.

And from a writing perspective, it is shocking how much of this was written with no thought put into how the setting and games were supposed to mesh and work, which is painfully obvious in the last chapter. It's not like the Tir books for Shadowrun where they make it hard for you to get in and there's fuck all to do when you get there, in Exalted: the Lunars you're playing a culturally and literature-insensitive stereotype of a Barbarian Hero that was quite clearly ripped off from D&D. In point of fact, there's not a fucking lot in the book that isn't ripped off or regurgitated wholesale from other, better games - the whole fucking Wyld for example is just a (very) poor man's version of the Chaos Wastes, and if you want to read about that then you save your pennies and buy Liber Chaotica which is a better fucking book than this by every single conceivable measure.

I mean, even if you were a diehard Exalted fan, the only thing you'd really be interested in in this book are some of the mechanics (mainly the charms - does anyone really want to roll for Wyld Addiction?), and that is a disorganized mess and could easily have been squeezed down to fifty pages or less with judicious editing. When you look at the actual content of this book, it's no more than the old 70-page WW clansplats but it's bloated out to almost three times that in wordcount. That's a lot of dead tree for an incredibly low information density.

[TheFlatline]

I remember not giving a single fuck about Exalted. Glad to see I didn't miss all that much.

[Longes]

I think part of my issue with the book is that...well, there are the blatantly offensive bits about rape and bestiality.

And then second chapter of the Infernals book happened, where demons eternaly rape a little girl who stores Infernal Exaltations, and the players are expected to regularly participate.

[Ancient History]

I actually find that less offensive. Not unoffensive, because rape is always offensive, but because it's a book about demons. If you were gauche enough to put out a White Wolf sourcebook about Nazis, it can't all be Iron Crosses, Heroes of the Reich, and Rommel in the fucking desert with no mention of the Holocaust. When you get a book which is supposed to be no-shit no-holds-barred fucked-up evil, like fucking Black Dog's Clanbook: Baali was supposed to be, then a certain level of rape and goat-fucking is almost expected. Hell, the revised Clanbook: Giovanni started off with a piece of fiction about a guy making a snuff film on short notice, and that was the best part of the fucking book. Some things are supposed to be disturbing and wrong, and some books are made revel in it.

What makes it badwrong in Exalted: the Lunars is that these are supposed to be heroes. Heroes aren't supposed to rape anybody, period, three exclamation marks. They actually try to excuse the rape and make excuses for it. That is not okay. When your Giovanni necromancer fucks a corpse in the eye socket to see their last sight, nobody's making any bones as to whether or not that's fucked up. Nobody is trying to defend that as a good and righteous act.

Now granted, I personally prefer a tabletop roleplaying game where PCs are in no ways required or encouraged to commit rape. I understand that's a cathartic and harmless fantasy for some people, because games like Corruption of Champions are still popular, but TTRPGs are an essentially social activity, and I don't want to sit down at the table and throw dice with people that are into playing out rape-fantasies in front of other people. It's not edgy and cool, and it's not culturally authentic or historically accurate because it's a fucking fantasy RPG with elkmen in it. And as an essential fucking background element that you cannot get away from with Lunars, it's especially bad. I mean, nobody goes and rolls up a Giovanni without wanting to be an incestuous necrophole. It's right there in the job description. But some assholes just want to be a super-werewolf and find out that it's a regular thing for their people to raid other villages and steal their women as slaves and fucktoys (we won't even get into the magical pheromone bullshit again).

So yeah, I think it's a different thing. If you're writing a proper bad-guy/ultimate evil sourcebook, you want to be reviled. It's a measure of what you're fighting against and why. That's a large part of why Book of Vile Darkness failed; it was War on Drugs and nipple piercings. So while I'm not down with Infernals, I won't hold it as quite the same standard as Lunars.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Well, that, and even if you ignore the moral fuckery the book is pretty much useless on its own terms. It generates few plot hooks, gives you few 'other sides' to the setting or antagonists, and doesn't really add depth to the setting. It just pretty much exists as an outlet for vaguely plausible and random antisocial fantasies.

Even if I did want to use the Lunars as villains in some unrelated sourcebook, there wouldn't be much useful. I mean, the idea of a magical stone age hero cult whose leadership are vile, delusional mutans who maintain their position by terrorizing the lower castes with propaganda and violence is a good kernel of an idea, but you really need to add some work to it.

[Username17]

World of Darkness: Gypsies is still a worse book, because it legitimizes the marginalization of real people who really exist in the real world. The police of Ireland and Greece stole the children of a couple of Gypsy families and demanded that they prove that they weren't child snatchers in 2013. Because bullshit racist scare stories of Gypsy magic are used by actual police to justify actual harassment of actual people. And World of Darkness: Gypsies played into that narrative, and that is reprehensible. But for some reason, Teeuwynn still gets work. You'd think that would have been a fiery end to her career, but it was not.

As to page XX issues, I actually think that Exalted: the Lunars managed to find a way to present information that was worse than a Page XX citation. When you see a page XX issue, you know whose fault that is. It's the layout guy. But it also conveys information to the reader: the information that there is information that should be looked up to reference the thing that just got said. Now obviously, the page number would have been nice, but at least it tells you what book you're supposed to be looking this up in. And critically it tells you that there is something being referenced at all. In Exalted: the Lunars, it doesn't say when it is presenting something stand alone and when it is presenting something that is a modification or addendum to something written elsewhere in the book or in another book altogether. It's terrible.

-Username17

[Longes]

I actually find that less offensive. Not unoffensive, because rape is always offensive, but because it's a book about demons. If you were gauche enough to put out a White Wolf sourcebook about Nazis, it can't all be Iron Crosses, Heroes of the Reich, and Rommel in the fucking desert with no mention of the Holocaust. When you get a book which is supposed to be no-shit no-holds-barred fucked-up evil, like fucking Black Dog's Clanbook: Baali was supposed to be, then a certain level of rape and goat-fucking is almost expected. Hell, the revised Clanbook: Giovanni started off with a piece of fiction about a guy making a snuff film on short notice, and that was the best part of the fucking book. Some things are supposed to be disturbing and wrong, and some books are made revel in it.

What makes it badwrong in Exalted: the Lunars is that these are supposed to be heroes. Heroes aren't supposed to rape anybody, period, three exclamation marks. They actually try to excuse the rape and make excuses for it. That is not okay. When your Giovanni necromancer fucks a corpse in the eye socket to see their last sight, nobody's making any bones as to whether or not that's fucked up. Nobody is trying to defend that as a good and righteous act.

Now granted, I personally prefer a tabletop roleplaying game where PCs are in no ways required or encouraged to commit rape. I understand that's a cathartic and harmless fantasy for some people, because games like Corruption of Champions are still popular, but TTRPGs are an essentially social activity, and I don't want to sit down at the table and throw dice with people that are into playing out rape-fantasies in front of other people. It's not edgy and cool, and it's not culturally authentic or historically accurate because it's a fucking fantasy RPG with elkmen in it. And as an essential fucking background element that you cannot get away from with Lunars, it's especially bad. I mean, nobody goes and rolls up a Giovanni without wanting to be an incestuous necrophole. It's right there in the job description. But some assholes just want to be a super-werewolf and find out that it's a regular thing for their people to raid other villages and steal their women as slaves and fucktoys (we won't even get into the magical pheromone bullshit again).

So yeah, I think it's a different thing. If you're writing a proper bad-guy/ultimate evil sourcebook, you want to be reviled. It's a measure of what you're fighting against and why. That's a large part of why Book of Vile Darkness failed; it was War on Drugs and nipple piercings. So while I'm not down with Infernals, I won't hold it as quite the same standard as Lunars.

The problem I have here, is that Infernals aren't just badwrong guys - they are supposed to be a playable splat. And in a lot of things - you can see how Infernals aren't Always Chaotic Evil. Gods in Exalted are dicks, who killed their creators just so they can huff paint celestial cocaine instead of working. It's perfectly reasonable to have an Infernal who works to overthrow the gods and free humanity. But Chapter 2 requires everyone involved to eat a puppy, just to prove that they are really evil. Having your villain rape a puppy and kick a little girl just to show that he is evil is a lazy and boring writing.

[TheFlatline]

Out of curiosity, if you just scooped the Garou out of Werewolf The Apocalypse and kind of transplanted it into Exalted would it make more sense than the Lunars? I mean, you'd have to play with the tribes but it wouldn't be that difficult.

Because it seems that way. The shapeshifters had a purpose in their origin myths, to destroy that which has gone on too long and to help chaos formulate into pattern and keep everything in check. The idea of a whole group of shapeshifters who patrol through creation as the reality police isn't a bad idea for a high fantasy game. It gives them purpose to interact at all levels of the world that I sort of gathered from Exalted, and it would give them at once a reason to be feared movers & shakers in the world and to also be despised by... well... everyone.

Basically, I'm seeing the Lunars/Garou/Shapeshifters as sort of the League of Shadows from the Batman films, but instead of being only about entropy, they're also about creation out of raw chaos and flourishing life. That seems more complex to me, because it means you have to be a nurturer *and* a destroyer.

[Longes]

Because it seems that way. The shapeshifters had a purpose in their origin myths, to destroy that which has gone on too long and to help chaos formulate into pattern and keep everything in check. The idea of a whole group of shapeshifters who patrol through creation as the reality police isn't a bad idea for a high fantasy game. It gives them purpose to interact at all levels of the world that I sort of gathered from Exalted, and it would give them at once a reason to be feared movers & shakers in the world and to also be despised by... well... everyone.

That already exists in the form of Sidereals.

[talozin]

I remember when this came out, and of course I bought it because it was fucking 2002 or whatever, and I was making bank and, more importantly, was not married -- so I pretty much just bought shit if it looked vaguely interesting. And if it turned out it wasn't, oh well. And I remember reading through Lunars once and then basically never feeling the need to open it ever again. This review manages to put my vague dissatisfaction into words pretty well -- even if you ignore the morally appalling aspects, it's just not a very compelling setting.

There's not really anything here and there's not really anyone you'd want to play in it. That's kind of an impressive accomplishment for a game about fantasy shapeshifter barbarians, but it's not one I'd want to put on my resume.

[Username17]

Out of curiosity, if you just scooped the Garou out of Werewolf The Apocalypse and kind of transplanted it into Exalted would it make more sense than the Lunars? I mean, you'd have to play with the tribes but it wouldn't be that difficult.

More sense? Oh hellz yeah. Don't get me wrong: Werewolf: the Apocalypse is offensive and shitty, but it had enough draws in it that when I was a dumb teenager I ended up running a short lived Werewolf campaign, shitty mechanics be damned.

The first thing you do when making your character is decide their parentage, and your three choices are "parents were incestuous," "mommy raped dogs," and "other (also mechanically the worst choice)." That is, to put it mildly: fucked up and not OK. And it was still better than what Exalted served up for the Lunars to deal with. Your "teammates" aren't supposed to kidnap and torture you when you start getting the power. You aren't expected to capture a bunch of slaves and put them into your rape camp to breed an army of chicken hybrid soldiers.

Now the Garou Tribes were too numerous. Even though they have cool names, I genuinely couldn't tell you what the difference between the Get of Fenris and Red Talons was supposed to be. IIRC, the Get had the Wolf totem and the Talons had the Gryphon totem, but I don't remember or care what that did, and culturally they both seem like interchangeable groups of lupophiles. This was, however, much much better than that dozen tribal groups that got half assed writeups in Exalted: the Lunars, let alone the two dozen or so groups that just got a name on the map. I don't remember how the Uktena and Stargazers were different and don't really care, but it's information that exists, as opposed to differentiating the various desert people in Exalted, which is straight impossible.

Not all of the W:tA Auspices had equal gravitas. I've never seen anyone voluntarily choose to play a Galliard. Anyone who wanted to be a "bard" like character immediately went Ragabash. Anyone who wanted to be a character with a bunch of Rage went straight Ahroun. I couldn't even tell you what Galliard gifts do. It has simply never come up. But even if you only see people play Ragabash, Theurge, and Ahroun, they were still more interesting than the Full-New-Changing tattoos in Exalted.

Bottom line: yes, the ways that Lunars in Exalted are different from Garou in W:tA made them worse. It made them more offensive and harder to tell stories about. But the Garou were still bad, and by the year 2000 it should have been obvious to everyone that they needed to be simplified and rewritten with less dog rape.

-Username17

[Voss]

Unfortunately, when they did simplify it and take out most of the dog rape, they did such a bad job on it that it made the entire concept seem non-viable.

[Username17]

Unfortunately, when they did simplify it and take out most of the dog rape, they did such a bad job on it that it made the entire concept seem non-viable.

Yeah, WTF was unplayable and so uninteresting that I didn't even care about finding solutions and workarounds. But I don't think that invalidates the idea that WTA needed simplification and a removal of dog rape.

-Username17

[Starmaker]

The fucking cover, which is nothing to write home about, is credited to over 5 people! What the hell!

I guess the characters on the cover were drawn by different people.

@Koumei, re: mutations: #5 here. No. Just no.

[Voss]

Unfortunately, when they did simplify it and take out most of the dog rape, they did such a bad job on it that it made the entire concept seem non-viable.

Yeah, WTF was unplayable and so uninteresting that I didn't even care about finding solutions and workarounds. But I don't think that invalidates the idea that WTA needed simplification and a removal of dog rape.

-Username17

No, but it did confirm that WW had no ability to dig themselves out of their self-created rape hole. Someone could probably do something impressive with a werewolf game, but it can't be them.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Anyone know of any good werewolf source material? I'll even accept a furry webcomic, as long as the plot is good.

I mean, you got good vampire and Frankenstein's monster and mummy and such source material out the ass. But werewolf material? The pinnacle of the medium seems to be Underworld and Golden Sun, which is just fucking sad.

[TheFlatline]

Underworld was such a ripoff of World of Darkness that it is fucking hilarious.

I guess there's a bunch of werewolves running around in the Anita Blake series, but that degenerates into 50 Shades of Supernatural pretty quickly.

[Orion]

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.

This is an interesting comment, because I think it actually touches on the best thing about Exalted. Reading and comprehending these books is way too damn hard for them to actually function as the rules of a game; in fact, they're so hard to read attempting to comprehend them becomes the game. I created myself 2 or 3 sample character from each of the main Exalt types, and while the process convinced me that the game was in way playable, it was weirdly satisfying like solving a sudoku or a crossword.

I suspect this is what drove all the online Exalted fandom. There really was a crowd of gamers on the White Wold forums who loved Exalted. I used to lurk there. The thing is, the online fan club was more a club of Exalted readers than Exalted players. I don't just mean that they weren't playing the game. I mean they literally acted like a book club or a college Lit class, spending a lot of their time arguing about themes and constructing harmonized readings with extensive bibliographies. There were even some celebrity posters who took the role of sages, initiating the other posters into esoteric readings of the backstory. It was all very Leo Strauss.

[Maxus]

There's an urban fantasy series that -starts- with the lycanthropes being pretty cool--lycanthropes is a magic-powered virus that gets regeneration, but also overclocks the hormones and more emotional parts of the brain, as well as the transformation (incidentally, lycanthropes are huge eaters because changing shape and regenerating requires fucktons of calories and mass), and silver is chemically reactive with the virus or something.

The lycanthropes are physically badass, but if they lose control or have some battle-madness (which, they hype up on adrenaline easier than normal people) they become a loup garou and stake out a territory and kill and fuck everything that enters it, often in that order.

So the official Packs have a self-discipline regimen that's almost like some of the stricter buddhism. And have things like...at big meetings, they deliberately pass their hand through a fire, to prove that their mind is in control of their body.

But as the series went on, that shit went away and that whole self-discipline shtick went away in favor of the Pack needing a single badass leader or else they fall apart.

[codeGlaze]

Underworld was such a ripoff of World of Darkness that it is fucking hilarious.

I guess there's a bunch of werewolves running around in the Anita Blake series, but that degenerates into 50 Shades of Supernatural pretty quickly.

I thought it was a WoD product. I'm... guessing that's wrong..