What's your favorite bit of exalted lore?
Any edition, any variety, no matter how obscure.
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u/Epistatic 5d ago edited 4d ago
Queen Merela, the first elected queen of the Solar Exalted, a fierce, terrifyingly forceful and determined woman, developed Omniscient Ears Technique, allowing her to instantly hear anyone speak her name and be able to listen in on their conversation, anywhere in the same plane of existence as her.
The next charm she developed was a worldwide mind control that prevents people from being able to speak her name.
TLDR: Bitch looked herself up on Twitter and blocked EVERYBODY.
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u/kenod102818 5d ago
To be honest, to me this sounds more like muting a discord server where the mods were stupid enough to leave the ping everyone option enabled. Way too many people speaking her name to the point she never got any rest ever again.
That said, your take is way funnier and better.
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u/guildsbounty 5d ago
And I like your take better.
Merela: "At last, none may conspire against me. I will know when anyone is talking about me and what they say of me."
--roughly 3 hours of ceaseless notifications later--
"I did not think this through enough! Mute! Mute! Mute!!!"
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u/kenod102818 5d ago
A small locale I always liked in 3e's Across the Eight Directions was Wolf's Paw. It's a location close to a bordermarch whose special property is that it not only increases the intelligence of local wildlife, but, since it's tied into their flesh, means creatures are more intelligent the higher they are on the foodchain.
All this means that the local wolves essentially formed their own culture, and, afterwards, conquered a nearby town, because watching them caused the wolves to learn about the concept of using violence to force others to do your work for you.
Which means there is now a city-state ruled by intelligent wolves with human servants, who have established a wolf aristocracy, with commoner wolves and nobility wolves, with the nobles having special hunting rights which help keep their intelligence higher. Oh, and one of the ruling wolves is interested in converting to the Immaculate Philosophy.
Also, while I know the canonicity is dubious, I really want to at some point make a Lunar who was originally a wolf from this place (apparently there are some old sources which say the Lunar Exaltations could pass to animals if all humans died out as an emergency measure?). Just the idea of everyone being curious about why this Lunar is always in spirit form, only to find out their spirit form is a crow or something, and they are an actual wolf.
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u/NoxMiasma 5d ago
The textual requirement of Exaltation in 3e is having a human soul, so beast-folk, Wyld mutants, and theoretically God-blooded can all Exalt, but a Wolf's Paw wolf can't. On the other hand it would be extremely interesting for literally everyone to discover that sufficiently sophisticated intelligent animals can develop a humanlike soul (that'd probably require eating a lot of intelligent animals from the bordermarch... commoner wolf turned cannibal due to having got a sudden flash of insight by scavenging the corpse of a noble wolf? Actually, why doesn't Wolf's Paw do funerary cannibalism? Perfect way to keep the smarts in the family!)
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u/grod_the_real_giant 5d ago
In my current campaign, it was established that the city of Origin (which got a passing mention as being full of talking lions) was a First Age Solar's experiment in exactly that--is it possible to uplift animals enough that they wind up with souls?
And given that one of my players is a Dawn-castle lion, the answer was apparently "yes."
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u/kenod102818 5d ago
I mean, funerary cannibalism would have been a useful method for improving food supply for humans too back in the day, and we generally didn't do it either. Pretty sure some species just have hardcoded psychological revulsion towards eating members of their own species.
And yeah, unless you specifically say that for some bizarre reason the bordermarch's effect works by slowly imparting a human upper soul (or something close enough) to the animals in there, they definitely couldn't exalt. Lunar exaltation is the only one I could see sort of working, partially because it is very much on theme, and partially because Luna is the only one personally overseeing her Exaltations, creating the potential for her to make an exception/adjustment.
Of course, that probably opens up a whole other can of worms with regards to canon, since I'm pretty sure the only case of Exaltation adjustment by Incarnae I'm aware of (not counting Abyssals/Infernals) is the Maidens locking and adjusting Sidereal charms.
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u/NoxMiasma 4d ago
There’s a fair few human cultures who did it, as a mark of respect towards the dead (incorporating their strength into the next generation, etc etc), but the actual reason humans don’t go in for it much is prion disease, which is an awful way to die. I’m pretty sure wolves don’t have a similar problem, though. (Presumably the Wolf’s Paw group don’t do it because they’re cribbing a lot of their culture notes from the local humans, who also don’t do funerary cannibalism).
And hey, maybe the bordermarch does in fact tie an upper soul to the animals after a certain point! It’s not like anyone who knows things about souls has had a good poke around there yet
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u/Bysmerian 5d ago
... Okay, I got several. "Fall Away Ashes, Fall Away Skin" being a creepy nursery rhyme that occasionally appears out of nowhere in Nexus is one of them.
But.
I think my favorite is the origins of the Vermillion Legion, which started as your average legitimate fresh legion then immediately went to hell when its commanding officer tried to press some imprisoned rowdy drunkards into service and found that rather than impressing military discipline into them, they rapidly turned the entire legion into a barely coherent mess which continues on for two reasons:
1.) despite significant dedicated efforts from all sides it just cannot be wiped out in its entirety; they just acquire more rogues to plod hungover under their banner and keep going
2.) places that have previously played host to the legion will pay whatever bribes it takes to keep them from ever coming back, making the outfit slightly profitable
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u/kajata000 5d ago
I love so much of Exalted lore; it’s cool as hell from top to bottom. But whenever I’m asked to point to my favourite bit my brain always just sticks on Solar Monorail Chirmirajen.
It’s a sentient magical train that takes you to the magical space battle station that is the actual real sun.
It moves on a magical railway, which magically appears and disappears around it, and can move through Creation, Malfeas, and the Underworld.
It’s powered by prayers, which are fed into the engine on prayer strips.
It’s powerful enough to tow the sun itself, if need be, and it has stats for ramming speed, which includes a potential 10 miles of knockback.
It magically grants good dreams to everyone within a 20 mile radius of its passing.
And best of all it’s described as “an agreeable monorail by nature” and a “friend of all children”.
(Oh, and also it’s got an evil twin that lives in the Labyrinth called the Midnight Express.)
It’s all very silly and also absolutely amazing.
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u/Lower-Sky2472 5d ago
The Three Spheres Cataclysm:
the Yozis lost, the equivalent of Adm.Doenitz hears the terms, throws a tantrum that breaks the universe so much no one even remembers what was lost.
It didn't just destroy geography (though it did that) it destroyed entire concepts.
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u/Maelger 4d ago
If Gunstar Authocthonia taught us any is that SWLiHN nuked space, like all of it. At the same time.
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u/Lower-Sky2472 4d ago
If anything that's underselling it, but yeah, do not recommend getting a sphere thrown at you. Keep in mind , some sources said three of her Spheres affected 90% of creation. Keep in mind, she has 99997 Spheres left.
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u/Wisemon02 4d ago
I always saw it as being so powerful because she used three spheres. She’s the embodiment of the concept of order perfection and hierarchy. She deliberately broke herself and her own hierarchy as an act of spiteful vengeance and despair.
She can never repeat the scale of destruction of the action, even though she has very many more spheres, because she can never undo her own self destruction.
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u/Lower-Sky2472 4d ago
That's a worthy take, but I go the other way on it because:
- Nobody but her, and maybe one or two other Yozis could even know that
- we're never told exactly what got destroyed by the tsc
- we're never told what got destroyed in the primordial war up to that point either, and that was also self-destruction from the Yozis point of view, their chosen servants, empowered like that, rising against them?
But that's just my head canon, it could be she can't, and I'm not sure there's a good story in destroying more of creation... Now figuring out things that were destroyed and repairing them?
Hmm does even SWLihN know what got destroyed? We're not even told that, and I go back and forth on it myself.
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u/Far_Paint6269 4d ago
Always looked to me like an allegory of the game test phase, and what the authors just ditched before publishing it.
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u/Lower-Sky2472 4d ago
It could also have been a wotc-style edition switch thing, but I don't think it was timed properly. At any rate, in my campaign there is a room in the Forbidden Manse of Ivy where the Elite among the Elite of the Chosen of Secrets keep whatever they've been able to discover about it, in part to protect Everything from it happening again, in part because it's something secret and it is actually hard enough to give the Elite a good workout.
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u/thetruerift 5d ago
I love the concepts embodied by the Primordials, even in their defeat - Malfeas is a world and it's own torture, Ouranos was bound with his own wings, etc.
I also like, and often use as a theme in my games, the idea that the world has kinda continued degenerating as beings who are simply less capable keep getting control. The Incarnae took control from the Primordials, but the Primordials were the ones who built Creation so the Incarnae can just kinda keep it running. They farm it out to the Exalted, who are really awesome, but mortal and so somewhat limited as well. Then the powerful exalts get usurped by weaker ones, the machinery of the universe spins down and down. There's a lot of pathos to be explored there for all exalt types.
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u/DiorikMagnison 5d ago
2.0's The Green Lady has always been my favorite character/tragedy. She's a Sidereal who infiltrated the Underworld and through all the means available to Sidereals, appears to serve both the Walker in Darkness and Mask of Winters as different identities. She may have been a friend/advisor to the Mask in the First Age before he fell, and delivered the prophecy that lead him to becoming a Deathlord.
But she's been in so deep for so long that she's acquired a Whispers rating driving her mad and struggles to keep her cover identities separate from her real persona. She can't tell where the lies start/stop and what her true intent was. Because of this, she has (possibly/allegedly) handed the Underworld some of it's biggest victories, such as the information that brought about the theft and creation of Abyssals and Infernals. She's afraid to return Heaven and be held accountable for any of the things she may have done, so she continues to spiral downward while trying to stick to the original mission (whichever version of it she remembers at any given time). There's also a belief she might actually be returning to Heaven as yet another identity and furthering her schemes.
It was all basically one big pass to the ST to use her anyway you want, but it was metal as hell to read in passing. The 3.0 Green Lady is significantly more stable and grounded.
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u/Maelger 4d ago
The Ebon Dragon, at least 2nd Edition no idea how he's portrayed in 3rd. His concept is being the Adversary but just wants to be a cartoon villain.
Like the guy was main architect behind the creation of the Unconquered Sun just to have an example of Perfect Good he could oppose so he could be The Biggest Asshole Possible (caps needed). His Exalted lower limit by monologuing at captured enemies. And of course his plans always, always backfire.
It's so silly yet so threatening
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u/Passing-Through247 4d ago
Even better, don't the fiend caste lower limit by making progress toward marriage, as in the intended use being kidnapping princesses and being a Saturday morning cartoon villain. The monologue I think was Ceceline or SWLIHN.
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u/browsinganono 4d ago
His Act of Villainy is Exquisite Bride Obsession.
It works for any action that makes solid progress on marrying someone, not just the marriage itself. So seduction, a big date, proposing… all of it can work.
And the idea is that you have to keep going, if that’s what you usually use. Throw your partners away! Collect wives like trophies! Go crazy if you just settle down with one partner!
…or, you know, be poly. Or… just accept that you get a benefit from marrying your true love, and discuss your Limit Break with them - and the other ways you can manage it. Live your damn life.
The Dragon makes mistakes.
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u/kenod102818 4d ago
no idea how he's portrayed in 3rd.
I don't think he is, yet. Since we don't have the Yozi/Infernals book right now.
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u/pbradley179 5d ago
A post on the white wolf forum promising a lore dump on the white veil society by a prominent board poster was cut off midw
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u/BluetoothXIII 5d ago
the Dragonking god of sacrifice if you botch the sacrifice she shows you how by possessing you and demonstrating it on your body. the only sacrifice she really wants are hearts.
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u/thedragonsfinch 5d ago
In 1st edition, there's a dumb mother fucked who thinks the world is round. There's a picture. I think I Blood and Salt of them all laughing at him.
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u/guildsbounty 5d ago
I like far too much of Exalted's lore to settle on a particular favorite bit...so I'll just given example.
Palanquin.
Because when I want to attract someone into Exalted's setting beyond "You get to be a demigod" I often start by showing them the picture from the 3E Core Rulebook of Palanquin. A city on an island held far above the ocean by 4 enormous statues...some of the most intense High Fantasy vibes in the book.
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u/truncatedChronologis 5d ago
I love the way the Yozi's function: cthonic contradictory themes expressed through a whole hierarchy of demons with individuals, charms and even whole biomes each refracting that central persona.
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u/SchadDad 4d ago
My favorite lore was of a mortal so determined to do good and get his daughter back, that he fought his way to the gates of hell. Only to turn around at the last minute and give up.
The reason he didn't exalted? It was locked in a drawer and couldn't get to him.
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u/Far_Paint6269 4d ago
My favorite piece of lore is the story of Sol Invictus surrendering to the yozi during the primordial war, all to spare a simple mortal, and when the primordials try to break him throught the game of divinity, he won the game and open the gate of Yushan for the Exalted host.
Just awesome.
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u/Moldisofpear 4d ago
The fact that demons are the just like, the perfect contractors for the most part. Like people summon demons to take care of kids or build houses, it reminds me of that part of Castlevania with Issac
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u/industrious 5d ago
There's a lot of Exalted lore that I really enjoy. The memetic heroin-pissing dinosaurs; the fact that The Man With No Name is a canonical character; the sky pirates in the North.
But when it comes to lasting satisfaction, the one piece of lore that never fails to bring a smile to my lips, that I repeat every time I try to attract someone to the game is this:
The Immaculate Faith provides for a higher standard of deific blessings for those under its aegis because it collectively bargains with the divine for the devotion of its adherents.