Tales of the Moonlight Maiden: Special Guest Stars (Exalted)

And now comes my weekly scrabbling around for something to put above the 'read more' jump break. But no real updates or announcements to make at this time, assuming nothing comes to me by the time I get this finished and posted.

Oh, actually something did come to me -- I slightly tweaked last week's post, as I realized I forgot to do an 'intro caption' for Shichirou. No real revelations there, but just mentioning it.

As a heads-up, as implied by the title, this post has a few guest appearances from some canon characters who aren't gods. Though as I type that, I realize I've been having guest appearances from various gods (and there'll be more in this one) from the start of this story, and haven't made as big of a to-do about it. And now I'm wondering why it's a big deal when canon Exalts show up but not as much when canon gods do. Something to ponder. Either way, recognizing the characters shouldn't be necessary, but it might be a fun thing if you do.

Anywho, let's get into it.

Tales of the Moonlight Maiden: Interview With Something Sort of Like a Vampire (Exalted)

Hey there, my good folks. Look who's back, back again. With, um... okay, I can't think of anything clever to get into here. One of the downsides of putting one of these out almost every week, is that I'm not going to have any interesting personal developments or insights every (or most) weeks. I mean, there's the whole ker-fluffle with D&D, WotC, and the OGL, but I'm pretty sure everything I'd have to say about it has already been said by a dozen other people who are smarter, better-informed, or both. 

For the record, this isn't me being self-deprecating. This is me fully aware that I'm not as neck-deep in the larger industry as I like to think at times, so I see most RPG news from a distance. Especially when it comes to D&D.

But anyhow, now that I've unintentionally satisfied my need for some sort of intro...

Tales of the Moonlight Maiden: Endings and Beginnings (Exalted)

Greetings, folks! Here's hoping you all came out the other side of the holiday season/New Year's/Calibration in good health and spirits! (Well, 'good vibes' spirits, at least. Here's hoping the liquid spirits weren't too excessive.)

Assuming I don't remember something halfway through writing the post and come back to edit it into this paragraph, I don't have anything special to get into before the Exalted write-up, at least not on a personal level.

However, this week we finally get into the tournament action, so lemme take a minute to school you on some system stuff -- first, a quick run-down of Exalted combat for context, and then the special system I've put together for the tournament. I'd put it behind the jump cut but I wanted to keep a firmer division between the commentary and the actual action. Feel free to skip ahead to Shang Tsung if you're not interested in mechanical stuff.

For those of you unfamiliar with Exalted 3e's combat system, there are withering attacks and decisive attacks. Withering attacks are the 'clashing back and forth' attacks you see in fiction, like the couple minutes' of preamble before someone's hand gets lopped off in Star Wars, or much of Westley's and Inigo's sword duel in Princess Bride (or anything with a sword duel, really). Damage dealt by such attacks takes initiative away from the defender and gives it to the attacker (including bonuses from success, so it's not just a zero-sum game), representing a shifting of momentum -- an insignificant wound that damages morale more than the body, or an overextension and loss of positioning, etc. Taking the last of an opponent's initiative represents a major shift in momentum in a fight, with bonuses to the attacker and penalties to the defender, a state called 'initiative crash.' Decisive attacks are the serious blows, that spend that initiative to try and damage the target, hitting their health levels. 

These are an abstraction, of course: in-character, in theory everyone's trying to stab everyone else, but that out-of-character choice is the difference between the attack that merely sends you tripping over your own feet and leaving your opponent an opening and the one that actually draws blood. For example (spoilers for a 35-year old movie), the point where Inigo is beaten in the sword duel and Westley knocks him out is Inigo suffering initiative crash and then their players negotiate the outcome. But Count Rugen stabbing Inigo at the film's climax is a successful decisive attack, as is Inigo killing him after building his initiative back up following his comeback.

(Obviously, there are permutations and complications beyond this, but I'm trying to be brief-ish)

I didn't want the fights to involve taking everyone to near-death until they lose consciousness and then have someone heal them with magic, so I set the OOC 'victory condition' for a match to be initiative crash (representing best of three falls, submission, or judge's decision). But this has the problems of the likelihood of someone being taken out on their first turn. Also, a lot of martial arts only do their most interesting stuff with decisive attacks, and while I could allow for a 'first blood' system, I've seen how damage rolls and I've seen my players' characters deal a lethal blow to someone who's full on health with a lucky roll.

To resolve this, I've given each character a number of points called Fortitude that gets worn down, a number of points' worth of damage that 'protects' a character's last point of Initiative. It's worn down normally by withering attacks, and decisive attacks do damage directly to it (and in addition, deal extra damage the same way they do to battle groups). So once it runs out, then a character can be properly initiative crashed and that'll finish the fight one way or another. So in other words, I've given everyone kind of a health bar. I also use it as a mild balancing thing -- the lower 'tier' a given character is, the more Fortitude they get, so the characters can't as easily steamroll, say, Dragon-Bloods.

But after way too much preamble...

...the tournament is upon us!

Tales of the Moonlight Maiden: Happy Calibration, Y'all! (Exalted)

I know I've mentioned this in passing a few times, but for those of you unfamiliar with Exalted, Calibration is a period of five days in between the end of one year and the start of the next. The sun, moon, and stars vanish from the sky and reality gets a little wobbly. Weirdness happens all over, and certain magical feats (like summoning Third Circle Demons) are only possible during this period. The people of Creation don't even properly consider it part of the calendar and they try to acknowledge it as little as possible out of superstition.

I give this explainer of Calibration not only for educational purposes but also to contextualize the fact that Calibration is inspired by that week between Christmas and New Year's Eve/Day where the year is basically over, but not really. It's that weird liminal time where everyone feels a little off. So it inspired this five-day period where Creation gets weird because many of the cosmic systems that keep it running have literally been shut down for maintenance. To be recalibrated, in other words.

(Fun fact, I actually didn't fully get that that's why it's called 'Calibration' until, I wanna say, late second edition. For whatever reason, I was content enough to just write it off as a word that sounded meaningful and/or mysterious regardless of what it literally meant, because Exalted used to be really bad about taking words, often of Eastern theological/mythological origin, and using them regardless of impropriety because they sound exotic.)

So yeah, this week's session not only takes place during Calibration, but was technically run (and, barring incident, written up and posted) during it.

Speaking of which, sorry for the silence, there wasn't a session last week because of holiday stuff. I thought about dusting off my Promethean write-ups, but I had higher priorities demanding my creative/typing energy. I hope everyone had a very pleasant weekend, whether celebrating a holiday or not.

(Memo from the Department of Expectation Management: Incidentally, things just didn't line up for the full-blown action to get underway this week, but unless something weird happens the next session should start at most minutes before a Join Battle roll. Also, content warning for TV Tropes links and discussion of drug use.)

And now, let's get into it!

Tales of the Moonlight Maiden: Finally, A Tournament Arc (Exalted)

I know my titles and such are only funny to me. But now that we've gotten the Gateway tournament out of the way, we move into one of the time-honored classics of the blend of fantasy subgenres Exalted uses for its smoothies: The martial arts tournament. (Though this session is primarily talking and setting things up, actual fisticuffs will come next session. This has been an announcement from the Department of Expectation Management.)

Oh, and before we get into it, just letting you know that the Sidereals Kickstarter is in its final week. Sure, there's pre-orders and you can always buy the book later, but if you want a fancy edition of the book and access to a preview manuscript just for backing, now's the time!

Tales of the Moonlight Maiden: Play It Out (Exalted)

Hey there again, folks. Here's hoping I get this done in a timely fashion and posted and remain fully caught up for a week or two. (Which I seem to have technically done, barring a plane falling on my house during the editing process, not that you'd know if that happened so I don't know why I'm typing this.)

First off, real quick, here's a reminder that Onyx Path is doing a massive sale on the Trinity Continuum books to celebrate their 10th anniversary! (link may be wonky on mobile) If you're new here, I've worked on multiple books from the TC: Æon line, and I wholeheartedly believe my best work is in there. (Though the work I did for the upcoming Brave New Worlds supplement for Trinity Continuum core might give it a run for its money, we'll see.) I don't know off the top of my head how long the sale's running since they've described this sale as a 'Part 1,' implying a 'Part 2,' so why wait?

Second, this week's post wraps up the "Crossroads" story. I'm pretty sure I've mentioned before that I was going to do a write-up or at least just talk more about the system I'm using to represent playing Gateway. And really, all I did was use this fan-made system, pretty much straight-up, converted to Third Edition. I'd considered at one point tweaking it to add some utility to the War Ability, introduced in Second Edition right before the linked rules got posted (and arguably useful for Gateway), but decided against it as nobody in the group has any War (as far as I know) and I didn't see the need to punish them for it.

And before I get into the meat of the post, I just want to take a moment to be amused that while it may not seem like it on the surface because of the Southwestern climate, in-setting this story is taking place at Creation's equivalent of this time of the year -- early on in the last month of the year, a couple of weeks away before the craziness of ringing in the new year. I dunno, that amuses me slightly. On a semi-related note, in case I forget to say so later on in the month, I hope everyone has a safe and pleasant holiday season, regardless of what holidays you do and don't celebrate.

Tales of the Moonlight Maiden: Running Out of Moves (Exalted)

Yup, me again. Can't be rid of me that easily.

(Unless something goes wrong between me starting and finishing this post and I forget to come back and adjust the intro, this'll be the third of my posts to go up in a week, so my brain's only got so much to work with for intro material.)

Before I get into it, while not Exalted-related, Onyx Path has been doing sales all this year to celebrate their 10th anniversary. They've just started off December with a massive sale on the Trinity Continuum books in PDF. (That link might be wonky on mobile) How massive? Everything's only 10%. Not 10% off, but 10% of the usual price. That includes the Trinity Continuum core, Æon, Aberrant, and their various supplements (barring a couple that came out very recently). So if you've been meaning to delve into the Trinity Continuum, now's a very good time to start picking stuff up because you could get the entire line for under $30 USD. May I recommend the Æon core, Terra Firma, Under Alien Skies, and Prometheus Unbound? I'm kidding, I'm kidding. I recommend all of it, quite frankly; those are just the ones I worked on.

(Actually, that reminds me, I need to update my 'stuff I've worked on' page. Not that there's a lot of changes, but it's the principle of the matter. And... done.)

And with that, on with the show!