The Age Of Discord - Another Exalted Campaign

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Anna
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The Age Of Discord - Another Exalted Campaign

Post by Anna »

So, I've decided to run an Exalted campaign again. Even if it only attracts one or two players, it's something I feel like doing, and partially I'm doing it for Latooni, who wishes for a chance to play his favorite character again.

For those of you who are curious and not familiar with the setting, Exalted takes place in a larger than life fantasy world. Created by beings known as the Primordials, who created an ordered world from the chaos of the Wyld. They created Gods to oversee the world and do their bidding, and then retired to lounge in luxury. The Gods were not happy being lapdogs, but because of limits placed upon them, they were unable to fight the Primordials. Not directly.

But some of the most powerful amongst them, and a small handful of rebel Primordials, had a brilliant idea. They would take the power of the Gods themselves, and imbue it into Mortals, creating the Exalted. The Exalted fought the Primordials, and won, and the Gods claimed heaven for themselves. But the Primordials cursed the Exalted, and the most powerful of them went power-crazy and insane. Lots of bad shit happened. The Solar Exalted, greatest amongst all Exalted, were banished and bad shit happened. A more indepth history can be found here, if this has piqued your interest: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exalted#Background

**********

With that out of the way, the details for this campaign are as follows.

The campaign is set roughly three hundred years after the return of the Solar Exalted. A great deal has occurred in those hundred years. The Yozi, who sought to ruin Creation to the point that they might escape their prison and once again claim dominion over it, have been defeated once again. Amazingly, it was one of their own creations that was responsible. A Green Sun Prince by the name of Gregarious Flayer Of Joy went rogue, casting off his Yozi masters, and with the aid of a small group of other Exalted, he overthrew Malfeas, defeating the Yozi and forcing them into new Geas' that rendered them all but powerless.

The Infernal Exalted were freed from their shackles, and the child who had been the host to their Exaltations for so long was released from her torment. Though still twisted mirrors of Solar Exalted, shaped by infernal influences, the Green Sun Princes are now arguably one of the greatest forces for good in all of Creation.

The Neverborn were likewise routed. They have been denied the oblivion they sought, but the same cannot be said for many of their minions. More than half of the Deathlords, once believed utterly immortal, were slain over the course of a hundred years, as more and more Solar Exalted returned to the world and set their sights upon cleansing the Underworld's corrupting influence. Many Abyssal Exaltations were cleansed of the blackened taint that had been placed within them, and other Abyssals still were able to escape with their Monsterances and claim freedom, during the vast wars. Only a small number of Abyssals remain loyal to their Abyssal masters now.

The Scarlet Empress returned to Creation, and using Infernal magics attempted to not just take over the The Realm, but to take control of the very minds and souls of every Dragonblooded on the Blessed Isle. There were five years of chaos, but the defeat of the Yozi rendered her powers obsolete, and she suffered greatly at the hands of her victims after her demise. In the wake of her death, and the chaos she had caused, the Realm fractured into three disparate warring factions. Their fighting goes on to this day. The Green Jade Shogunate seeks to turn the Realm into a beacon of hope for all, including those once believed anathema, welcoming even demons and the undead to their cause. The Flame Of Heaven is zealous in its ideology, believing that only by furiously wiping out all anathema can the Empire reclaim its rightful rule. It is lead by the Immaculate Order, a religious theocracy. The third group, the Allied States of Creation, is a faction consisting of nations and city-states within the Blessed Isle and Scavanger Lands, that pushes for a democracy.

But perhaps two things that have occurred are of the most significance.

One: The Great Curse has begun to manifest itself once more. Elder Solar Exalted are succumbing to madness, becoming more and more eccentric and posing a greater threat to Creation than all the monsters and primordials they defeated once had.

Two: The Celestial Bureaucracy is having a war of its own. The Games Of Divinity were destroyed. Sol Invictus himself vanished, without a trace. Luna has retreated into hibernation and speaks to no-one. As a result, the factions in Heaven are more concerned with themselves than the fate of Creation, and the Loom is poorly tended, the pattern of Creation becoming frayed and tangled in places. Sometimes in ways almost beyond repair.


You will be cast into this world. Doesn't that sound fun?

-------------------------------

Character types I will allow: Solars, Abyssals, Infernals, Lunars and Dragon-Blooded
Character types I may allow: Heroic Humans (Including demi-gods and other creatures included in the Scroll of Heroes), Ghosts (I doubt any of you will pick this or humans anyway), Sidereals (If you can make me not hate them.)
Character types that are absolutely out of the question: Fair-Folk.

Check out the Wiki, if you're interested, lemme know, leave a post here, and maybe give me an idea of what kind of character interests you.

--------------------------------

House Rules
We will be using the 2.5 rules, which aren't that different from the Core Rules and clean things up quite a bit. Merits and Flaws will be allowed. But most importantly, I've made a big decision.

You know what the biggest problem with Exalted is? Fucking dice. Too many fucking dice. Too much. Fuck it. So I am going to be minimizing dice-rolls if not cutting them out completely. So don't min-max your character. It won't do you any good. Feel free to make a fresh, exciting, interesting and well-rounded character. If you don't feel you want to dump 75% of your exp into combat skills just to avoid dying, well congrats, you won't need to!

In most situations where dice-rolls will be required, I will look at the posts made, and do a bit of mental math based on stats, and maybe roll one or two die to determine the result. Making better posts will weight the dice more heavily in your favour. I really want to encourage stunting. An impressive enough stunt will likely be an auto-success. I want to focus on the role-playing. Not the numbers. Not 2 hours of rolling dice for 10 seconds of in-game combat.

Here's hoping it works out. Sign up! Lemme know if you're interested, and join #Exalted on irc.rizon.net!


Players and Characters:


Important NPCs:
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Re: The Age Of Discord - Another Exalted Campaign

Post by Latooni »

I will naturally be participating.

I'll be playing Melua Mala Maia, Solar Exalt of the Night Caste.

HOLY SHIT THERE'S A BIO NOW
Spoiler!
Melua Mala Maia was born on a relatively small island in the archipelago known as ‘the Neck’ to outsiders. Melua, however, grew up knowing it as Okeanos, the paradise of the West. Born in the Cyanin tribe by a Smaragdi mother into a family with many siblings, her life was about as simple and uncomplicated as it gets in Creation - A natural disaster or unruly god every few years, but overall, simple, healthy, and enjoyable.

That changed when she was 10 years old.

A raiding party from a pirate vessel hit her village, and Melua witnessed her oldest brother cut down before her eyes. The members of Melua’s tribe managed to band together enough to repulse the invaders, but not before they managed to kidnap Melua, one of her sisters named Nima, and a few other children and teens. These, they dragged back to their boat, and returned to Coral to sell as slaves.

The day of the auction was certainly a terrifying one to Melua. She was smart enough to realize what was happening, but there was absolutely nothing she could do to stop it. In the middle of her despairing, she realized she was already sold. The old sailor who bought her told her she reminded him of his long-deceased daughter, but also that he wasn’t so well off that he could afford to have a non-working slave, so Melua’s hair was cut, she was dressed in boy’s clothing, (to hide her gender from the woman-hating Storm Mothers) and made to serve as a cabin boy on the privateer vessel the sailor was the captain of.

The day of the auction was the last time Melua ever saw Nima.

It wasn’t bad, overall. “He” was nicknamed Greenie, and it was quickly found that ‘Greenie’ had absolutely no fear of heights. Melua mastered the aerial athletics course that was the ship’s rigging, and learned a lot about sailing. Really, being a slave wasn’t so bad, at least for Melua.

Almost 2 years later, bad things started to happen. First, they never seemed to be able to catch up to the merchant vessels they preyed upon. Then, there was a freak accident, and a crew member died. The mortality rate while boarding vessels increased. Finally, an absolutely brutal storm wiped the deck completely clean of all the masts and rigging. The old sailor who put her on as a cabin boy sadly came to the conclusion that it’s impossible to keep a girl hidden as a boy, when she’s turning into a woman. Taking pity on Melua, he encouraged her to escape, instead of selling her to someone else. Gratefully, Melua took to the streets, trying to live life in the cracks between society.

There are no good places to be an unclaimed girl orphan in the Coral Archipelago. Azure, however, is one of the worst. Rather quickly, an official tried to snag her, and asked her if she belonged to anyone. Melua, her arm firmly in the official’s grasp, didn’t have an answer besides her tears. That’s when she heard a boy say, “She’s my cousin. I’m taking care of her.” The older orphan’s claim was good enough for the official, and so Melua started life living with the group of orphans he belonged to.

The orphan who claimed responsibility for Melua was a Ghost-Blooded teen named Thrice-Cursed Virtue, and his main way of providing for the orphans in his band was by being a thief. Initially, Thrice-Cursed Virtue had a policy of not letting anyone help him in thefts, but he changed his mind rather quickly when he discovered just how good Melua was at getting into places she wasn’t encouraged to be, and started treating her as her partner.

Over the course of the next 3 years, Melua learned quite a few larcenous skills, and gained significant skill as a thief. She even surpassed her teacher, Thrice-Cursed Virtue, who started acting instead as her fence and agent. The money they made fed their group of orphans, and when they just had too much money, they’d give out the rest to other orphan bands, telling them it was courtesy of Emerald Night, a vigilante thief. Melua also grew very attached to Thrice-Cursed Virtue, harboring several private, girlish thoughts on the matter. However, the only relationship they ever had was a business one.

Starting around the middle of Melua’s 15th year, her skills got to a new height, and Thrice-Cursed Virtue began talking to the wealthy. The kind of wealthy patron who really wanted a painting, or a rare piece of jewelry, but it was either an heirloom or someone else’s collection. Through Thrice-Cursed Virtue, they hired ‘Emerald Night’ to fix that problem. Melua, by this point, had realized something about herself - She loved challenges, she loved taking risks, and she loved putting herself in danger. Naturally, she jumped at the chance to indulge her adrenaline addiction, and started stealing from sites under heavy security. The payments from the first three clients allowed Thrice-Cursed Virtue to get a new home for their band of orphans.

Melua had found what felt like her natural calling. Every theft made her feel alive, and she was making quite a bit of money, which she used to help other bands of orphans. She began to hit bigger and bigger targets, hitting the homes of officials and Exalted Terrestials, leaving a small emerald in the place of the stolen good. Melua matured into a beautiful young woman, while the legend of Emerald Night began to spread throughout the entire archipelago.

When she was 17, however, it all came to an end. On the way back from having stolen an artifact from her latest target, she returned to find Thrice-Cursed Virtue looking very guilty, and herself surrounded by soldiers. Melua asked, pleaded, and screamed for Virtue to explain himself, but he didn’t say a word, even as Melua was dragged off in chains.

Melua’s trial was flimsy, without evidence, and the fact that the charges were accurate seemed more to be a fluke than actual justice, but at the end of the day, the sentence was handed down: Melua was to be returned to slavery, and sold to one of the wharf-side brothels.

2 months later, Cynis Taose, the Wood-Aspected madame of the Amethyst Palace, the paramount house of courtesans on the entire island, found Melua while on one of her infrequent sweeps of the brothels for potential talent. Even though Melua’s mind was close to being lost, Taose recognized her potential, and bought her from the brothel. After a week spent recovering, Melua was cautiously optimistic about the idea. Anything was better than where she had just been.

Melua spent her mornings being run through a crash course in various things a high-class lady should know, such as etiquette, learning to read, singing lessons, playing instruments, dancing lessons, and rudimentary politics. Her evenings were spent on dates with clients, who tended to actually be very influential people.

Melua was fascinated with her exposure to this side of society. Previously, her only encounter with the upper crust was stealing from them, but now she was one of them! ...or, at least, a pale shadow of them. As her skills grew, so did her popularity with her clients, and she became one of the top-billing girls. Melua wasn’t happy with her lack of freedom, but the fear of being given back to the brothels was enough to keep her in line, combined with the fact that at times, she even enjoyed her current job.

3 years after joining the Amethyst Palace, however, Melua encountered a client that treated her extremely poorly in the bedroom. Melua was quite upset about this, and ended up choking the client to death using her necklace. Unfortunately, Melua’s status as a slave, even a high-end one, meant severe punishment for murder. She made a decision that night. Coral had systematically ruined her life, without fail, every single time she thought she began to like it. So, the answer was obvious: Escape Coral.

Using her old skills as a thief, Melua escaped, and managed to steal a small vessel from a harbor, setting out without being entirely sure what she was doing, just that she wanted to be gone.

Unfortunately, a few days out on her sail, she rediscovered why it’s a very bad idea for a beautiful woman to try to sail the seas alone. Her small craft was hit by storm after storm, each stronger than the last. At the peak of the largest, Melua had to work non-stop to keep the craft from shattering into pieces from the forces involved, even while the ugly face of one of the storm mothers glared at her. Finally, the mast snapped...only for Melua to single-handedly manage to keep it attached to the ship, having completed the knots on the final ropes just in time. As Melua shook her fist in defiance at the shocked storm mothers, she noticed her fist was glowing.

After finally making landfall, Melua started to roam. She stole liberally, testing the extent of her new abilities. She stole food, clothing, money, a few artifacts, and most of all, knowledge. Within a year she had a pretty good grasp of what being a Solar entailed, and had managed to teach herself the language of the gods. She was determined, eventually, to go back to Coral and fix the cesspool that ruined her life, even as something inside her told her that she had a job to do.

For the time being, though, she decided to explore Creation.
Last edited by Latooni on Thu May 08, 2014 2:50 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Anna
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Re: The Age Of Discord - Another Exalted Campaign

Post by Anna »

Some clarifications:

This RPG will be run on IRC. Anyone is welcome to join. If you don't have rulebooks, that's okay, those can be acquired for you.

Characters start with the standard amount of BP and 15 points of experience to spend after creation, using the 2.5 ruleset. Anathema Character Creator works wonderfully for that: http://anathema.github.io/

There is one small, additional thing, however. In addition to having Intimacies, as normal, your character will also have Defining Features. Each character will have 6 defining features. Where an intimacy is something your character cares about, a Defining Feature is an intrinsic part of your character. It influences how they behave, and can be tapped into to offer bonuses in appropriate situations.

An example:
Defining Features:
Likes to show off.
Smart-mouthed.
Devoted to my family.
I need to protect my sister.
Strong sense of justice.
Silver tongue.
In short, they're six important things about your character. They shouldn't be too vague, they should be more specific, and show insight into your character's personality and the things that truly matter to them. After picking out six, each one starts with 1 point already in it, and you have 10 more points to distribute between them. A defining feature with more points in it has a stronger grip on your character, offering greater bonuses when properly tapped, but also greater penalties if denied.
Defining Features:
Likes to show off. xxx
Smart-mouthed. x
Devoted to my family. xxx
I need to protect my sister. xxxx
Strong sense of justice. xx
Silver tongue. xxx
Each Defining Feature can be tapped at-will in an appropriate situation. They offer a bonus to whatever you are doing equal to the number of points put into them, and in many cases can result in an automatic success. They don't always, however, and failing after tapping a defining characteristic can cause a loss of willpower and an increase in Limit. I'm hoping the addition of Defining Features will help people craft interesting and unique characters, with real personalities, whom they will enjoy playing. :D
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Re: The Age Of Discord - Another Exalted Campaign

Post by Cynsye »

How many dots of inheritance would you allow for a god-blooded (as that falls outside normal character creation)?
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Re: The Age Of Discord - Another Exalted Campaign

Post by Anna »

Probably 4-ish. I can't remember how OP God-blooded can get, but I remember 5 dots makes you the child of someone super-ultra important and powerful, so 4 is probably as high as you should go.
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Re: The Age Of Discord - Another Exalted Campaign

Post by Cynsye »

Probably won't go higher than 3 then, 4 pretty much puts you on par with a minor god.

God blooded can get pretty high base stats starting out, and god body can be especially silly on top of that (take it three times? Well, just gain +6 str and +3 sta for a while when you feel like it), but other than that they can be a bit lackluster combat wise unless you min-max. So... that won't be a focus :3 .
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Re: The Age Of Discord - Another Exalted Campaign

Post by Anna »

God Charms are significantly less powerful than Solar-tier Exalt charms, though, so... I mean, don't feel the need to hold back. Even if you are capable of showing off in some ways, you'll be hampered in others.
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Re: The Age Of Discord - Another Exalted Campaign

Post by Cynsye »

Character Sheet
Background etc.
Few extra notes:
Timescales: was born on the 4th day of calibration, 3454, which is RY -995 in the realm calendar. Assuming start of campaign is exactly 300 years after 2nd edition “present”, is currently 2063 years old.
A character of this age would usually have an additional ~3-4000exp just from passive gain, which shows just how much Custos has lost over the years. (This is enough XP to max out all attributes, abilities (and specialties), all branches of Thaumaturgy, Willpower, Virtues, raise Essence to 3, then throw a good 100+ charms or 50+ sorcery spells on top)
Needless to say, he doesn’t realise the full extent of what he has lost, as it would probably drive him somewhat insane to truly know how much of his life is missing.
Custos' father has not been seen in creation since the usurpation - it is unknown where it is, or even if it is still exists.
The Procedures of Creation: Custos may piece together the fragments of his memories of his time studying the procedures to add two successes to a roll in Craft, Lore, Medicine or Occult by spending one willpower. Activating this ability must be done prior to the roll being made.
The House of Learning: Was granted tenure... which was most definitely a mistake. Paying an immortal till the end of time probably wasn't what they had in mind.
Essence: Custos' essence was very deliberately sealed - a servant who one day suddenly becomes a god associated with such a powerful concept as life itself is not guaranteed to remain one.
Memories: Custos' memories are not lost, they are all still contained within his hun soul and brain, but a lot of the biological connections within his brain relating to long term memory are damaged as his heart stops, and they then regenerate to their default state - i.e. not connected.
Artifact: The Crystal Heart functions by constantly reading and storing a "template" of the body, and this template is stored upon death, and then used whilst regenerating to manipulate and shape connections within the brain to restore their correct functions. These "at death" readings are stored in a long term memory "drive" in the artifact. It is this part of the artifact's function that is damaged - writing the previous incarnations readings to memory damages the readings already present. Whilst regenerating, the Crystal heart "hides" Elsewhere.
Spoiler!
Last edited by Cynsye on Sat Jun 07, 2014 8:13 am, edited 14 times in total.
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Re: The Age Of Discord - Another Exalted Campaign

Post by Lizzie »

Character: Kirigasa Yoko, zenith caste solar.

http://puu.sh/961Fp/882152fff3.pdf

Bio: In the works

Defining Features:
1. Rebellious
2. Friendly and outgoing
3. Likes a good fight
4. Adventurous
5. Treasures freedom
6. Godcrusher
Last edited by Lizzie on Thu May 29, 2014 6:41 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: The Age Of Discord - Another Exalted Campaign

Post by Latooni »

Melua's (fucking long) bio finally added to my post.
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