(Exalted 3e) Arms of the Chosen

 Arms of the Chosen is one of those rare books where I love everything about it except certain fundamental, load-bearing design decisions so I kind of feel obligated to effusively praise it even as I propose tearing it down to its foundations and rebuilding it from scratch.

Might as well get started, I guess. Step one: explaining the premise of the book. Basically, in Exalted 3rd Edition (aka "the one with a shit load of charms") the most powerful magic items have the ability to grow in power alongside your character, unlocking "Evocations" (aka "a shit load of charms") that allow you to use appropriately themed special moves. Get yourself the Black Jade sword known as "Mistweaver" and at Essence 1 you're calling up fog in your immediate vicinity and at Essence 4, with 5 charm purchases, you're calling up climate-altering cursed mists that blanket regions hundreds of miles across. Broadly speaking, this is both cool and good. I liked it when it was called "thread items" in Earthdawn and when it was called "weapons of legacy" in D&D, and I like it here.

Now to step two: the "but." I like the idea of Evocation trees in the abstract, but scaling a magic item's power to keep pace with a character's power is not so straightforward a task in an exception-based point-buy system where your power stat is less of a strict level mechanic and more of a character advancement chokepoint. Like, to get that deadly megafog from Mistweaver, you have to both be near the apex of character power (having played for at least 40 sessions at the default xp gain rate) and you've got to spend five charms worth of xp (about 10-15 sessions depending on whether you spend general or solar xp, though potentially as few as 6 if you spend both and always get the full bonus). By my most generous estimates, that's 15% of your character advancement resources tied up into this thing, so that you can use your (admittedly impressive) super move once per story. 

On its own, that's a neutral piece of data. Maybe it compares poorly to investing in Solar Stealth or Solar Melee, but you can slow walk it by only buying Evocations with Solar xp, so you're not necessarily facing a huge opportunity cost. The worst thing you can say about it is that it's a lateral move from being a character without an artifact and that you're only getting benefits proportional to your investment, just like you would with any other form of character advancement. And even that's underselling it a bit. Generally speaking, it's better to buy charms than mundane traits, which is why Exalted 3e gives you a second kind of character advancement currency that can't normally be spent on charms. It's a significant advantage that artifacts let you bend the rules by giving you charms that you can buy with your "mundane" budget. 

Where the Evocation system loses the plot is in equating the potential to invest more xp with an increase in item power. The guidelines are Artifact 3: 10 evocations, Artifact 4: 15 evocations, Artifact 5: unlimited evocations. And the book doesn't seem to realize that a longer shopping list is simply a promise to eat up more of your resources, nor that player characters don't actually benefit from higher ceilings they're never going to reach. In fact, you could make an argument that the best artifacts are the ones with short, tight evocation trees that let you access the artifact's gimmick right away and then beeline to its ultimate form with no more than 1 or 2 charm purchases per Essence level. 

From a char-op theorycrafting perspective, the unlimited evocations of Artifact 5 might technically be worthwhile, in the sense that they would allow you to convert 100% of your solar xp into charms, but this is something we can put concrete numbers to because xp progression in Exalted 3e is rather rigorously metered out. You get 5 regular xp per session, and advance Essence level after 10, 15, 15, and 20 sessions respectively. You can also get a maximum of 4 solar xp every time you gain regular xp. So the optimal evocation progression is one that lets you spend 40 solar xp on Essence 1 evocations, 60 each on Essence 2 and 3, 80 on Essence 4, and then unlimited on Essence 5. In other words, the theoretical maximum number of useful evocations is 24 at Essence ratings 1-4, plus one for every 2.5 sessions your game endures at Essence 5. Except that you're probably not going to get the full solar xp bonus every time, and even with the potential for evocations you're probably still going to want a few dots of mundane traits to meet charm prerequisites and round out character weaknesses, and your year-long Essence 5 game is probably not going to last too much longer than 65-75 sessions. So it's entirely reasonable to cut that maximum in half and still be pretty close to optimal. That's 12 evocations at Essence 1-4 and 2-3 at Essence 5. In other words, an Artifact 4. 

But what's especially funny is that while Artifact 3 doesn't quite get you to the theoretical ceiling and Artifact 5 is likely to never need its excess capacity, the structure of the game is such that you don't even need to have your full ceiling in the form of a single artifact. You are practically guaranteed the opportunity to loot evocation-capable equipment from enemy Exalted and are only slightly less likely to get artifacts from dungeon-crawling, crafting, or bargains with terrible inhuman powers. Just the simple, nearly inevitable combination of a rating 3 artifact weapon and rating 3 artifact armor gives you a maximum of 20 evocations, which blows right past the practical limit and comes pretty close to the hard limit. 

Which is to say, I think all artifacts should allow for unlimited evocations. If a player is really going to go all-in on investing in the Distaff or the Heaven and Earth Gauntlets, I say that's a gift to the group more than anything else. The absolute "worst" case scenario is that they somehow get two artifacts' worth of evocations while only carrying around one artifact. And honestly, that's better, both from a gameplay perspective (see: D&D's "golfbag of weapons") and from the perspective of the essential genre fantasy that evocations were meant to enable - a legendary hero whose signature weapon is so iconic that it becomes a legend in its own right. If a player character is going to invest more than 100xp into the giant paintbrush with bristles so sharp it acts like a magical spear, well maybe that thing deserves a brevet promotion to a higher artifact level. It's not even lore incompatible. If an Exalted smith can coax magic from metal by incorporating essence into the forging, who's to say that's a process that has to end when the metal cools. Maybe artifacts are built with a certain inherent potential, but that potential can be expanded by channeling boatloads of essence into them every day for years at a time.

All I know is that on a practical level, a cap that is never reached is not a real limitation and a cap that is reached is a powerful message about player preferences, so I'm not sure what purpose the evocation limit even serves. But that's something to contemplate in step 4. Step three is "put another slice of wholesome bread on this compliment sandwich because I'm starting to sound misleadingly negative."

Almost all the artifacts in this book are really fucking cool. And I'm only saying "almost" as a hedge. I can't actually think of any examples I disliked. You can get something called a "razor parasol" and the example here is Rainwalker, which lets you mitigate falling damage and banish rainclouds, up to and including malevolent sorcerous weather like the Rain of Doom spell. There's a suit of armor that lets you cosplay as a demon. You can walk around hell, and the demons will be like, "oh, there goes Sozen, the famous demon who definitely really exists and is not just a demon-sona made up by some long-dead artisan and snuck into hell's census by a corrupt apostate priest." If people try to read your mind, they'll just learn the hypothetical demon's hypothetical thoughts instead. Oh, and then the last item in the book is a warstrider (magitech mech suit) that is not even trying to hide the fact that it's a bootleg Eva Unit-01. Magic item books in general are a great format. Exalted's magic item books have always had an appealing audacity besides. And Arms of the Chosen is worthy example of both.

Which is why step 4 - complaining about the mechanics some more - is going to be so painful. I talked a lot about scaling and reaching evocation caps, but 3rd edition artifacts have some much more immediate problems, the biggest and most easily dismissible of which is that the evocation trees in the book are not meant to be canonical. Theoretically, each and every wielder of a particular item is supposed to create their own custom tree based on their personal relationship with the item. Nobody actually wants this and nobody is going to do it, but it's only a problem conceptually because the ideal form of a 3e artifact is a charm tree 4-7 charms long that expresses a growing escalation of the item's basic schtick . . . and the published items mostly deliver that. A few of the example evocations have solar charms as prerequisites, and I don't love that as a mechanic, but I paid closer attention to them this readthrough and I didn't notice any solar charms acting as bottlenecks to an artifact's most iconic powers (for example, non-solars can access Mistweaver's deadly fog just fine, despite one of the evocations giving solar melee charms the mute keyword), so the book is only slightly less useful to other exalts. I'd much rather have a set suite of core functions and then the narrative permission to customize further, but since this is easy as hell to houserule ("no, you don't have to create your own evocations, you can just use the ones in the book"), the problem is more of chimera than a serious flaw.

The main thing that I'd call a problem in the pragmatic sense is the fact that evocations are Essence-gated. This is something that kind of works narratively, and has a practical justification in terms of gameplay, but which I really don't like as a genre element. 

Narratively, you could argue that while artifacts, broadly speaking, "do things," they don't necessarily do those things on their own. They could require a source of power. Hook your fog generator to a weak battery, get a cloud that spreads out a few dozen feet. Hook it to a big honking battery and you can spread a fog out a hundred miles and make it last indefinitely. And when it comes to characters in the Exalted universe, their "battery," so to speak, is their Essence rating. This makes sense and while artifacts have traditionally been powered by motes, making the permanent Essence rating more of a soft limit than a hard one, it's an element that's been in the series since the beginning. A daiklave in the hands of an attuned wielder is a majestic and terrible weapon and in the hands of a regular person it is nothing more than an extremely inconvenient slab of inert metal.

With the gameplay, it's even simpler. Character powers in general get stronger as the characters rise in Essence rating. If Artifact powers were not gated behind Essence rating, then you could potentially have a starting character tossing around effects better suited for an Essence 5 game.

The problem with both these points, though, is that they're kind of bullshit. As far as gameplay is concerned - well, this is Exalted. Starting characters tossing around haxxor super powers is, like, right in its wheelhouse. Previous editions let you start at Essence 4 (at the cost of nerfing your character in other significant ways) and even though 3e is the first to make you start at Essence 1, it also gives solar, abyssal, and infernal exalted a special mechanic to access Essence 5 effects as a starting character. So, like, I don't think it's terrible for the game's balance if a callow young Dragon-Blooded is able to take up their family's ancestral blade and test its top evocations against a solar's supernal melee. In fact, I think it's pretty badass. Sure, the kid is only a threat because of an item they carry, but this thing has been passed down for generations, it's okay if it lives up to the hype.

Which leads into the bullshit part of the narrative. Magic items are a form of technology and technology, even in fantasy fiction, is supposed to be a bit of an equalizer. It can take skill and knowledge and generalized "power" to wield to its utmost potential, but it should also be something you want to keep out of the hands of novices, lest they gain terrible power without the wisdom or experience to use it safely.

Ideally, a magic item should probably be like a real world tank. You take someone like me and put me up against an experienced tank driver in a tank v tank battle, I'm going to get absolutely destroyed, with no reasonable chance of victory. However, it is likely possible to teach me enough about tank operations in a shockingly short amount of time for me to pose a terrible danger to anyone not fortunate enough to be hiding behind anti-tank armor. I think evocations, conceptually, are a good way to model this, but by gating the big effects behind a high essence rating, you're backloading the good stuff to an undesirable degree.

Imagine - big news! A Scavenger Lord's dilettante child came back from a dig bearing the infamous devil blade, Gorgon, which has been known to consume souls and turn whole armies to stone with its baleful gaze. Oh, no, now they're waving it around carelessly, shaking it ominously at passersby. Not to worry, though, they're not an Essence 5 exalt, so the worst thing that can happen is the creepy eye on the side might open all the way.

Kind of a bummer, and not very thematic. Though the real issue is that this sick-ass blade has a really cool iconic power and your players aren't going to see it for sixty sessions, minimum. It's all very "when will we get to the fireworks factory?" I think there's room to do better here.

It's an issue that sort of dovetails with the other big mechanic I don't really care for - material resonance. Basically, it's an important bit of lore that each Exalted type has its own signature magical material and that when an exalt uses an artifact made of their signature material, they get an extra boost. Fair enough. And it is something that contributes a lot to the game's look and feel. Except that they decided, not unreasonably, that material resonance put characters into pigeonholes and cut them off from too many mechanical and aesthetic options (it also doesn't help the setting when you can look at someone holding an orichalcum sword and safely assume they're a solar exalted, because that means solar PCs are also effectively cut off from their own signature material, at least until they're powerful enough to openly defy the wyld hunt). 

But then, instead of just getting rid of resonance as something with mechanical weight, they decided to expand it by creating three states of material resonance - full resonance, neutral resonance and dissonance, and instead of downplaying the difference between these states, they made them even more important by giving evocations the "dissonant" and "resonant" keywords. And the dissonant keyword is so bad that you'd almost never take a dissonant artifact in preference to a neutral one and the resonant keyword is so good that you'd almost never take a neutral artifact in preference to a resonant one. 

I think the intent was to create a system similar to the divisions between circles of sorcery or levels of martial arts initiation, except that it completely messes up the incentives. The point is that terrestrial martial arts and spells compare favorably to terrestrial charms, celestial martials arts and spells compare favorably to celestial charms, and sidereal martials and solar circle spells compare favorably to solar charms. The limit of what you could access was tied to your exalt type, so that martial artists and sorcerers have options that won't unduly diminish or enhance their overall effectiveness. The resonance/dissonance split creates a similar tiered structure, except that dissonant evocations compare unfavorably to resonant evocations . . . which are mechanically identical to acquire. 

So you've got some weird outcomes where you can put a dissonant tag on a starmetal item's evocations and this only applies to liminal and (some) exigent exalted, and even then only to the ones who deliberately chose to pick the worst possible item and then invest dozens of xp into it. It's the most thoroughly useless keyword imaginable, because the only time it's ever going to apply is when a player is engaged in behavior I absolutely do not want to punish.

I figure the solution to the resonance problem and the solution to the backloading of cool powers is one and the same - replace Essence gating with a more free-form "Harmony rating" where you basically meet an item's prerequisites by checking boxes off a list - maybe there's an intimacy you can have at major/defining, a particular type of hearthstone you can socket in the item, a regular sacrifice or ritual you have to perform, or a particular deed you have to accomplish. And maybe, if your exalt type is resonant with the material, you get a little boost to your harmony score and if it's dissonant, maybe you have to buy off the penalty with an extra task, but it's all role-playing so the only real penalty to wielding a "dissonant" weapon is that you have to make it a larger part of your character's personality (which is presumably what you wanted to do when you made such an unconventional choice in the first place).

I don't know, I'm just spitballing here. I think I've gone on for too long and should move quickly to step five - closing up the compliment sandwich.

I like this book a lot. For all my complaints, it really delivers when it comes to making magic items feel like a big deal. I could see myself unironically shouting, "Holy shit! You got Stormcaller!" which isn't necessarily something I could do in previous editions. All that stuff I was talking about before are just things I might conceivably do when I inevitably write a guerilla 4th edition after the game goes on a long hiatus. For now, I respect that they tried something new and will always remember Arms of the Chosen as one of the highlights of 3rd edition.

Ukss Contribution: Another situation where I'm spoiled for choice. I liked pretty much every artifact and loved a significant portion of them - Flying Silver Dream, the sword that fights for you, the weaponized umbrella, at least three different heavy metal swords. It's almost too much.

If I have to pick just one, though, I think it will be Asphodel, the magical mace that houses the ghost of an ancient sorcerer and the ephemeral kingdom he rules. With the right evocations, you can pop in for a little visit, banish your enemies to ghost prison, and even borrow the undead sorcerer king's treasures and servants. It's like having a friendly neighbor and vacation hideaway that you carry with you at all times. Plus, the politics and metaphysics of this thing are fascinating.

(Eberron 3.5) Secrets of Xen'drik

My first order of business before writing about Secrets of Xen'drik (Keith Baker, Jason Bulmahn, Amber Scott) is determining exactly how many secrets Xen'drik actually has. Because by my least generous count, it's only one and the book should really be called "Secret of Xen'drik." 

Although, to be fair, it's entirely possible that I'm just being an asshole and my standards for what qualifies as a "secret" are way too high. Sure, there's no way that the layout of the city of Stormreach is a secret, but you could probably argue that the death giant Prokres doesn't want to advertise his scheme to reassemble the Shard of Arcane Endowment to all and sundry. However, stuff like that is only really a secret in the context of the setting. I kind of feel like the title of the book is something directed at me, the real-world human reading the book, and thus for something to be a "secret" of Xen'drik, it can't just be new information about Xen'drik that I'm learning for the first time, it has to be something that the creators of Eberron already knew before this book was written and just deliberately decided not to reveal until now. And of the stuff I learned about Xen'drik from this book, only one fact rose to a level of "surprising but fundamental backstory" that makes me consider deploying a spoiler warning before discussing it here.

SPOILER WARNING (it's not going to be blocked because I'm going to have to talk about it for a considerable length of time, so this is your last chance at turning back if you're invested in being surprised by Eberron canon):

The very first warforged were created by the quori of a previous age, to use as a weapon against the giant civilization of Xen'drik c. 40,000 ya.

Whoa.

Okay, if you really parse it down, that's actually two secrets in one, because we're also getting the first explicit talk about the cyclic nature of Dal Quor and how each turning of a Dal Quor age sort of "resets" the quori and changes the nature of their existence, with the previous age being centered around "The Dreaming Heart" instead of "The Dreaming Dark." But I'd argue that's less a secret of Xen'drik and more a secret of Dal Quor that just happens to be relevant to a secret of Xen'drik. So really, the title of the book should be "A Secret of Xen'drik and a Secret in Xen'drik and Also Some Useful Information About Xen'Drik for DMs Who Want to Run Games There, Some of Which They May Wish to Keep Secret from Players, but Which Won't Actually be All That Surprising to People Reading the Books for Pleasure 20 Years from Now."

I could just be overthinking it, though. "Secrets" is a fair enough substitute for "information" in casual usage that the title of the book doesn't actually feel like a lie. If I make too big a deal of it, it's just going to look I'm hamming it up for content. . . 

(You're welcome.)

Anyway, about that secret. I'm of two minds about it. On the one hand, I really, really like that a dangling lore question got a canonical answer. Previous books were oh so coy with their "Merrix d'Cannith claimed to have invented the warforged, but ruins in Xen'drik suggest that something very much like the warforged existed for far longer than the people of Khorvaire believe" so it's both surprising and welcome to get a definitive who, when, and why for this. I understand why rpgs do it, but I always find "the real answer is whatever works best for your game" to be an unsatisfying way to fill these lacunae.

On the other hand, thematically, it's kind of a frustrating reveal. I'd have greatly preferred it if the warforged were a novel invention of the Last War. Because that would have been a genuinely post-medieval story. New inventions leading to new weapons and tactics, with unprecedented destructive potential. Are humanity's knowledge and power growing faster than their wisdom? Yeah, you can do a story that's post-medieval by way of post-apocalyptic and frame it as "humanity reinventing a technology that helped destroy a previous civilization that once thought of itself as powerful, and it appears that they're making all the same mistakes." But that's a 20th century theme, and for Eberron I'd really prefer a 19th century theme. 

My real diagnosis is that it's just D&D's genre conservatism sneaking in. If you've got something that looks like advanced technology, it's okay only so long as it is the salvaged legacy of a forgotten golden age. People in laboratories, learning things about nature, and then writing papers about what they learned so engineers can make new inventions based on the papers . . . that's out of bounds. Because nostalgia over a lost past is a fantasy vibe, and abandoning the past for the temptation of the new is a science-fiction vibe. 

DAMNIT, WIZARDS OF THE COAST, LET ME PLAY A KOBOLD THAT EXPERIENCES MODERNIST MORAL VERTIGO! Is that really too much to ask?

I have to hope that it isn't, because there is one type of post-medieval story that Eberron seems eager to tell, and it turns out to be kind of uncomfortable when divorced from any potential discussion of technological and scientific hubris - the story of a powerful culture sending its dangerous fuck-ups into the territory of a less powerful culture whereupon they proceed to fuck shit up for the glory of capitalism. 

There's a new creature called a Dream Serpent, whose scales and fangs are valuable commodities. One of the sample adventures has an NPC sending you to the Dream Serpent nesting grounds, to bring back said commodities (via more or less indiscriminate slaughter). And one of the obstacles you might face on this mission is a run in with the native Drow or Yuan-ti (depending on the party level) who are violently upset that you ignored the clearly posted sign that said (actual quote) "the ground beyond is holy . . . trespassers will be punished severely."

So, in the real world, we have a term for the activities described in this adventure. It's "the crime of poaching." And we have a term for what the natives are doing when they attack the PCs. It's "enforcing the law against poaching." Yet the PCs will most likely end the adventure keeping the skins and getting paid. There's, like, a good ending where they had the ecological foresight not to kill the young snakes and they're able to negotiate ex post facto with the Drow whose permission they neglected to secure and they get away scott free. And there's a medium bad ending where they kill the hunters sent out to punish them and get away scott free. (The bad bad ending of a law enforcement TPK is only implicit in the structure of the game itself). And in precisely none of these does the book seem at all aware that it's telling a story where the villains win.

I can't say for sure that this sort of story would come off better if the warforged were initially created in a Cannith laboratory. The two subjects aren't technically related, after all. However, my gut tells me that you don't tell the technological story unless you're consciously building a 19th century world, and if you're consciously building a 19th century world, you're going to tell the poaching story much more carefully than you would if you're just building a medieval fantasy world where some magic replicates certain 19th century technologies. Hunting a rare monster for personal financial gain feels very different if you're a peasant trespassing in the king's game reserve than if you're a mercenary tourist fleeing fantasy-WW1 for fantasy Africa. 

I really enjoy a certain semi-canonical interpretation of Eberron, but I do not enjoy the way Eberron tries to have it both ways. Humanist enough to treat lycanthropy as a disease worthy of compassion, not quite humanist enough to examine the colonialist hypocrisy of rampantly plundering a continent's natural resources simply because the natives regard them as merely "holy" instead of "valuable" or "critically endangered." I'd tell them to pick a lane, but I don't entirely trust them to pick the right one. So I'll say instead that they should get in the lane I picked out for them - fantasy that reflects the growing complexities of a world fitfully transitioning to modernism and is self-aware enough to question whether certain historical bad behaviors were truly inevitable. The thing that draws me to the series are the occasional glimpses that they might eventually get there. I just have to ignore my common sense intuition when it tells me there's not enough of the series left for them to stick the landing.

Ukss Contribution: There's a lot of good stuff here. Like, I can't deny that there's an element of orientalist exoticism going on with the game's presentation of the "continent of mystery," but one of the frustrating things about D&D is that orientalism is one of the few consistent ways to get the game to pull the stick out of its ass. Stormreach is a city that seems tiny in scale because it's built inside the ruins of a giant city. There's a bird who has magical properties because it feeds on magical flowers. One of the sample maps has you swimming through phosphorescent algae. These are all things that could fit effortlessly into a "standard medieval fantasy" setting, but don't because the authors rarely give themselves that sort of license to invent. 

My favorite example of this - lizard folk who fly around in hang gliders. The book makes it a point to mention that they are "primitive hang gliders" and the lizard folk are using them to attack "civilized settlements" (because of the aforementioned orientalism), but I find myself in a position to be considerably more chill about it. Glide away, you beautiful lizard people, Ukss will be waiting for you when you land!

(Exalted 3e) Miracles of the Divine Flame

 Okay, I think we finally have enough information to officially call it: The Exigent Exalted are an untenable character type. I know, I know, devastating news, but we have to face facts. Miracles of the Divine Flame was as good an Exigents supplement as anyone is ever going to make (maybe even as good an Exigents supplement as it's realistically possible to make) and it did nothing but exacerbate the fundamental problems with the splat.

Which is to say Exigents: Out of the Ashes gave us a 400-page book that allowed us to play 8 distinct characters, its crowdfunded stretch goal gave us 200 more pages that allowed us to play 8 different distinct characters, and my main take-away from both is that it would be both super cool and super onerous to play a 17th distinct character. 

The new characters are amazing. Play the Foxbinder and you're in this magical buddy cop story. You can ride a giant fox! He can turn into a sword, or a hat, or switch places with you to confuse your enemies. He's also a naughty little scamp who will take advantage of your lapses in concentration to play pranks on you. It's wholesome. It's whimsical. It's funny. It's an eloquent demonstration of the strengths of asymmetrical, exception-based splat design. 

It's also an eloquent reminder that you're never going to fucking homebrew this stuff, who the fuck do you think you're kidding with that shit? I mean, each of the new Exigents had between 40-50 charms, which is on the far side of realistic, and enough to get you up to a 280xp game, even assuming you spent your xp on nothing but favored charms. That's more than a year of weekly sessions. You could pace yourself. Whip up the first 15 charms prior to session 0, then three more every five weeks. It's not like a full-time job or anything.

But that's not how these things work. You don't build a character around the selection of your first 15 charms. You select your first 15 charms based on your plans for your character. The stuff deeper into the charm tree is the bait on the hook. Nobody's salivating over the phenomenal cosmic power of getting double 9s on a persuade roll that cites a popular aphorism, they're looking forward to the day when they can scribe magical laws on floating scrolls of fire that will burn alive any who transgress against them. This sense of charm sets as, basically . . . shopping lists, that's important. In fact, it's the whole point of the exercise.

So you could probably get away with just writing the first 15 charms, but you couldn't do it without the idea of the shopping list. If you're going to be excited about the character (and you should, it leads to better games), then you're going to have to be excited about the charms you plan to write. It's dangerously close to a circular problem. You can avoid writing a whole charm set by just writing the beginning, but in order to write the beginning, you have to know how it's going to end. And it would be a lot easier to know how it will end if you actually wrote the ending. But if you write the ending, then you haven't actually saved yourself all that much time.

It's not necessarily an intractable problem, but it's something that could benefit greatly from the sort of high level design work that doesn't always come easy. The Chosen of Plentimon, God of Dice gets a cool ability called the "Fortune Pool," where they skim off extra successes from easy rolls to add them back into hard rolls and a lot of their charmset involves expanding the Fortune Pool, coming up with new uses for the reserved dice, and eventually doing tricky stuff like saving failed dice to add to your enemies' rolls. That's a whole-ass vision. It's taking the idea of splat asymmetry and using it to experiment with storyteller system mechanics. Which is wholly great, sure, but it sets a high bar if I ever want to make an Exigent of Iphira, Goddess of Fermented Apples. 

Which is why I've come to the reluctant conclusion that Exigents are untenable. They're a splat powered by the optimistic assumption that the fandom's energy and passion is effectively infinite. I absolutely want to play as Pakpao the puppeteer or Tamako the Foxbinder or, honestly, any of the completed (or mostly completed) Exigents, but the cost/benefit split for literally any of the unrealized options (even the really strong contenders like Five Days Darkness or Madame Marthesine) is simply not there. At least not for me, and I'm about as passionate about Exalted as it's possible to get.

So I guess, overall, I'd say that Miracles of the Divine Flame is a really good book, almost pure value from cover to cover and arguably the most essential of the crowdfunded stretch goal books. The fact that it's the book's high quality that winds up arguing most persuasively against Exigents as a general idea is a fascinating artistic paradox.

Ukss Contribution: Surprise! My favorite thing was Pakpao again! She gets a charm where her shadow swallows up an enemy, chokes them to death, and then spits out a puppet that looks a lot like them.

Unfortunately, I have no idea how Ukss will ever be able to handle double Pakpao, so I have to go with my second choice (which sort of resembles Pakpao's whole deal, but only coincidentally) - the patron deity of the Thousand Venoms Mistress, Whirling Lady Koro-Bana, Goddess of Self-Made Widows.

I don't know what it is, but the phrase "self-made widow" tickles me greatly. It's fun to imagine they have their own goddess.

(Eberron 3.5) Voyage of the Golden Dragon

 Voyage of the Golden Dragon (Nicolas Logue) is a short collection of 4 adventures that all revolve around the titular "Golden Dragon," Khorvaire's largest airship, originally meant for the Breland military, but auctioned off to a private company after the war, who turned it into a luxury cruise ship.

With the caveat that each adventure is incredibly short (maybe 6-8 linear encounters), it's a good cross-section of what you might do with a luxury cruise ship in a "post medieval, pulp-inspired, but not really (::wink::) world." There's a fancy gala event that gets taken over by terrorist infiltrators who want to hold the rich folk for ransom. There's necromancy-enhanced political intrigue between two of its high-status passengers. There's a shoreside adventure with an obnoxious explorer type. And there's an aerial attack from an implacable foe.

It's all pretty utilitarian. The book has a singular mission - get you to use the hell out of that damned airship - and it pursues that mission with maximum efficiency. And if that seems like a pretty bland thing for me to say about a series of fantasy adventures, consider it merely an artifact of the book's format. None of the adventures last long enough to do anything super cool, but they also don't leave themselves enough time to notably screw things up. They just work.

I guess it was a little . . . sketchy that the description of the ship's onboard casino took pains to tell us that, "Goblins in green-tailed surcoats scamper about, bringing patrons their beverages and exchanging their currency." It's probably nothing. But racial homogeneity among a luxury casino's serving staff strikes me as . . . a trope.

But that's literally just one sentence, and I'm probably only paying attention to it because there's so little else to talk about. The kitchen is powered by fire elementals. That's pretty neat. Of the eight named crew (though more, like the goblins, are implied to be aboard), two of them are spies for the Brelish crown, which is pretty funny. There's a canonical sexual relationship between a halfling and an elf. 

Overall, I guess it's just a decent location, with some decent NPCs, that is the subject of some decent adventures. Score one for basic competence.

Ukss Contribution: The first two adventures feature a reoccurring villain, Paldrith Malinko, a wealthy and powerful pirate prince who wants to destroy the Golden Dragon because it is slightly larger than his own still-under-construction flagship. That's impressively petty. I'm trying to avoid putting airships specifically into Ukss (because I got the idea that more fantasy worlds need to have actual airplanes, and because I think the early-20th-century vibe planes bring is interestingly different from the steampunk aesthetics of airships), but the same plot should work equally well with naval vessels.

(Exalted 3e) Miracles of the Solar Exalted

 Miracles of the Solar Exalted (John Mørke) is a nothing of a book, just 40 pages of backer charms from the Exalted 3rd Edition kickstarter. Some are good. Some will be repeated in the Abyssals book. Some are over-designed. The usual fare. If you like Exalted, you'll like this probably. 

I did have to laugh at some of the niche charms, included to round out the charm trees (or just because Mr. Mørke had a particular itch he needed to scratch). Like the Performance charm that lets an actor infer the entirety of their character's script based only on a few lines of dialogue. How many times in the developers' home games are they asking players to make a "script remembering" roll? When would this even come in handy? How is this an Essence 3 effect worth 8-10xp and 5 committed motes? Even in an unusual situation like a campaign that's a hard-core simulation set backstage at a theater troupe, well, you've just created a charm that completely bypasses the systems you presumably invented specifically for this situation. Also, your story hinges on a character getting up on stage and flawlessly performing a part for which they were unable to rehearse? By the rules of drama, that's a once-a-story event at best. Repeat the trick and suddenly it's not "Oh, wow, they're so great! They're able to fill in for the second understudy with no preparation whatsoever," but rather, "Damn that bastard! They never show up for rehearsals, I've never even seen them read a script, but somehow their lazy ass never suffers consequences. They always nail their performances, even when the rest of us are left pulling our hair out stressing about their lack of preparation." And I'm not saying that this couldn't be a compelling Solar Exalted character concept. Just that if you're making that character, it would make more sense mechanically for Divinely-Inspired Performance to be a permanent charm with no cost.

That's just a nitpick, though. If anything, the lazy actor build is inspirational in the best weird-char-op tradition. The only part of Miracles of the Solar Exalted that bothered me was the Apocryphal keyword. The short version - it has no mechanical meaning, it's only present to let us, the readers, know that a particular charm is non-canonical.

There are things in rpgs that are objectively worse, from a moral perspective, so I should definitely try to keep my annoyance in perspective, but this is just such a chickenshit move. You solicited money from these people on the premise that they would be able to leave their mark on Exalted by creating a custom charm . . . so compromise your fucking vision, okay?! I mean, the whole point of collaborative creation is that you surrender total control in exchange for the beauty (and yeah, sometimes, the cringe) of the unexpected. You invited randos from the internet with more money than sense (and/or the Exalted obsession that made this a sensible financial transaction) to become part of the process, so let them be part of the process. Because of your choice of stretch goals, Creation is now a weirder, wilder place where Solar and Lunar exalted can merge into a composite being and legendary warriors can wade shirtlessly into battle. Deal with it.

I don't know. Maybe I'm making too big a deal out of this. It just doesn't sit right with me. It's like he invented the keyword to say "I, John Mørke, am willing to perform mercenary design work to the client's specifications, but let it be known that I, John Mørke, in my role as developer, do not personally sanction these decisions." I guess I feel like maybe Exalted is a little bit more resilient than that.

Later books in the line would take to bundling these backer charms in with the campaign's stretch goals to make one larger supplement. That's probably a superior approach (and would likely have saved the core book, in particular, a whole lot of trouble, to the extent of changing the direction of 3rd edition's development as a whole). As it stands, Miracles of the Solar Exalted was just a somewhat useful, but utterly forgettable book. There's only one reason to consult it (you want more choices for your solar's charms), but that reason is hardly a compelling one (the corebook has a lot of fucking charms).

Overall, I approve, but only on the balance, and probably only because I'm a soft touch for all things Exalted.

Ukss Contribution: It wasn't an intended rules outcome, but setting is a bit thin on the ground and I'm a bit salty about the Apocryphal keyword still, so I'm going with the "impossibly lazy, but infuriatingly talented actor" that is implied to exist by a strict reading of the mechanics of Divinely-Inspired Performance. I think they'd be fun as both a quest giver and a macguffin.

(Eberron 3.5) Player's Guide to Eberron

 The Player's Guide to Eberron (James Wyatt, Keith Baker, Luke Johnson, Stan!) has the sort of format that paradoxically either makes me read really fast or makes me read really slow. It's divided into a series of encyclopedia-like entries that are all some precise multiple of two pages long. So I can either finish a section quickly and say to myself "this seems like a natural stopping point, I'll just take a little break" (followed by four hours of video games) or I can finish a section quickly and say, "wow, that was easy, I'll just do another one right away." There's no middle ground between these two reactions, but each one is equally likely.

The real tie-breaker in these situations is how interesting I find the subject matter. And in this case, I found the subject matter very interesting indeed . . . but like 85% of it I've already seen before. This book calls itself a "player's guide," but it's not clear to what end it's meant to guide players towards. Like, maybe it's just the case that players empirically don't read core books (let alone supplements) so they tried to manifest a similar outcome by giving a player-oriented title to a condensed lore compendium. The same thing happened in Planescape with the Planeswalker's Handbook. 

Also, frustratingly, like the Planeswalker's Handbook, the Player's Guide to Eberron is probably the best entry point into the series. It's a broad cross-section of things you need to know about the world of Eberron, but just enough that you can pluck each individual topic out of context and be done with it in a couple of minutes. You want to play a warforged, you turn to the "warforged" section near the end (they're arranged alphabetically, like an encyclopedia) and you get a bit of information from the main campaign book, a bit of information from Races of Eberron, and maybe a very little bit of information from the adventures and it's all very functional. But it doesn't actually tell you how to build a warforged character, and only offers two extra feats, so you still actually need the main book. I guess that means that the Player's Guide to Eberron is meant for people who have all the other books . . . but don't read them?

This is not as off-the-wall a theory as you might suppose. There is some novel information here - three new prestige classes, a bunch of new feats, a couple of new organizations - but the bulk of the stuff that expands the actual Eberron setting comes in the form of references to things you'd originally find in various non-Eberron D&D supplements. Want to know how to play a xeph or a raptoran? How to incorporate Magic of the Incarnum into the setting? There's a sidebar for that. I've heard it said that "if it exists in D&D, it has a place in Eberron" and this book here is the proof that they at least put some thought into fulfilling that promise. Most of these little cameos feel like an afterthought, but afterthoughts are a kind of thought, so I think it's fair to say that Eberron has earned the right to call itself a kitchen-sink setting. 

I wouldn't necessarily call it a satisfying sort of kitchen-sink worldbuilding, however. It's very uneven in the degree to which all of these disparate elements are given something significant and cool to do. Incarnum magic is largely confined to The Island Where They Do Incarnum, the thri-kreen "wander the wastes, though they are hardly numerous," and yeah, it turns out that the various nations of Khorvaire have militant philosophical organizations that resemble the Samurai class. On the other hand, the Elan get a cool new backstory (they are living prisons that trap quori spirits deemed criminal by the Dreaming Dark - the spirits are forced to possess the body, but bound to have no control over its actions, and the composite creature is an ageless, psionically-active being with no memory of its previous life), the shujenja class represents the priests of a dragon-worshipping religion, and swashbucklers are so integrated into the themes and aesthetics of the setting that they're barely worthy of comment (in a good way).

I'm in the unusual, though likely not unprecedented position of having read every Eberron book published thus far and most of mainline D&D books being referenced in the sidebars. I've got very close to maximum context (somewhere between 92% and 95%, I'd say) and what the Player's Guide to Everron feels like to me is a bunch of old-hat information sprinkled through with trifling little tidbits. On the one hand, I'm not necessarily opposed to the old hat per se, and I absolutely live for little tidbits, but on the other hand I'm hard-pressed to imagine a significant use for this thing. A book where they went through all of 3.X edition's obscure sourcebook and gave me a paragraph of canonical Eberron backstory for every random prestige class and monster with an Int score would likely be one of my all-time favorite rpg supplements (period), but wedding a partial implementation of that idea to a rather unambitious recap of Eberron as it stood in January of 2006. . . well it commits the cardinal sin of kitchen-sink worldbuilding: it doesn't make space for the new material by making the world feel bigger. Rather, the boundaries of Eberron feel very similar to what was established in the main campaign book, and it's just the margins that feel a little bit more crowded.

I have a certain experience with this very tension in the world of Ukss. It's easy to just keep adding new stuff without any regard for what has come before, and at the start it can feel like an expansive bigness, but if you don't make the effort to fit the pieces together, the whole thing can become so expansive that it loses coherence. New elements can't just be for the gaps, because that's making the new stuff subordinate to the old, but if you're always making room for the new elements, that's just the same problem seen from the other side. You need both an openness to expanding the horizons of the possible and a dedication to finding connections between your ideas and fitting them all into a single context. That's hard enough when you're scrupulously curating everything to go into the melting pot. I shudder to think of how it might feel to just inherit all of D&D's vast and sprawling canon all at once (oh, the writers of Races of the Wild thought it'd be cute to have catfolk . . . they can live in the jungles of Xen'drik, I guess).

Overall, I'd say that I have no strong feelings one way or another about the Player's Guide to Eberron. I like Eberron as a whole . . . and this is certainly Eberron, all right.

Ukss Contribution: One of the critical pieces of technology in the world of Eberron is Khyber dragonshards. Arcanists use these crystals to bind elemental spirits into the locomotive systems of airships and rail carts and a bunch of other useful items. These crystals are found, naturally occurring, in the vast system of caves that is Eberron's equivalent to the Underdark. 

The Ukss contribution for this book is a weird bit of trivia about these Kyber crystal deposits - that sometimes they will randomly ensnare passing demons. Obviously, this is mainly meant as a cool hazard for dungeon-delving adventurers, but I can't help looking at this phenomenon from the perspective of the demons. A slight, but not insignificant danger to wandering around underground is that you might get trapped in some bullshit rock. I find the cultural implications to be fascinating.

(Exalted 3e) Deeds Yet Undone

 Oh, wow, an Exalted adventure book that isn't a jumpstart . . . but does somehow recapitulate the jumpstart adventures' worst quality by putting three of them into a 64 page book. . .

Wait, am I just outright saying that Deeds Yet Undone would have been better if it was three times as long . . . 

I mean, yeah, probably. 

It's a tricky thing, because quality isn't strictly a function of length. If that were the case, then Ukss Plus would be one of the greatest rpgs ever made (instead of merely being, like, in the top 10% or so). However, one of the dangers of working with such tight page counts is that you'll leave out important (possibly even vital) information.

Take the city of Kiliran, for example. It's a completely new location, never before covered (or even mentioned) in one of Exalted's myriad setting books, but its pitch is so good that it immediately feels like it could have been part of Creation since the very beginning -  "Kiliran, upon the edge of the wheel of creation, the farthest mortal port." This is both something that would logically exist in the world and an exceptional bit of rpg utility. You'd pretty much want to use it in exactly the same way as the adventure - as a staging point for naval expeditions into the vast and endless sea that contains indescribable mysteries from the chaos that preceded Creation.

Paradoxically, it is the very strength of Kiliran's pitch that makes its presentation in the book so weak. This lonely place, this last, fragile resting point before the literal end of the world, it's going to be something with immense cultural, political, and mythic significance to the entire world. It is somewhere that would inevitably be celebrated, romanticized, and objectified by people thousands of miles away. So, naturally, you give it two and a half paragraphs, most of which are pretty vague (oh, this sea port has "a district wherein bowls of noodles and fried rice are sold to the local sailors" - I never would have guessed).

That's not a matter of design or writing skill, it's a matter of curation. The main thing a more thorough description of Kiliran would accomplish is to set the stage for all the countless different adventures that did not involve leaving town at the first opportunity. There's a world where "The Thousand Milk-Churning Strikes" gets a 64-page book all to itself, and in that book Kiliran takes up an entire chapter with its own mini-supplement, and maybe it's a beautiful world. It might even be a better world, but it's not the world we live in.

That's not necessarily a complaint. It's unreasonable for me to ask for the deep structural changes needed to make this book into a full adventure/mini supplement instead of a sampler pack of adventure seeds offered as a crowdfunding stretch goal. However, it does make me question exactly how useful a sampler pack of adventure seeds really is.

I guess the main strength of Deeds Yet Undone is that it offers a pretty persuasive cross-section of iconic Exalted plots - a dungeon crawl/creature of the week mystery that could easily be adapted to (high level) D&D, a highly abstract sandbox with a broad goal like "win this war," and a journey into absolute fucking nonsense with a weirdly mythological vibe.

The first adventure, "The Crucible of Progress" is the most traditional of the three. It's basically "CSI: Kaiju Crimes Division." A giant monster is intermittently attacking a town, but after each attack, it disappears without a trace. Can the PCs find out where it's coming from and put a stop to it? It's got some characteristic Exalted flair - the setting is described as "[taking] after imperial China both in economy and aesthetics, merging those elements with aspects of Italian medieval communes such as Florence and Venice." The main villain, who is using a First Age artifact to covertly summon and banish the monster, is the Goddess of Silkworms. Her main goal is to use the monster attacks to destabilize the town's relationship with the Realm so that the Guild can come in and take over the local silk trade (which she regards as more likely to strengthen her power and help her become the Goddess of Silk itself, instead of just the worms). One of her main strengths is that she has manipulated the Exigent Exalted of Fireworks to view her as the town's most important divinity.

It's a good use of the setting, and not quite something you could do in just any old fantasy world, but it lends itself to a linear narrative. This monster situation has a definite solution, and the follow-up plots really revolve on the players becoming invested in the fate of the town, rather than moving on to the next one. That's neither a strength nor a weakness, per se, but yeah, I kind of wish there was more setting there to work with.

The second adventure, "A Shadow Falls" is a bit more in Exalted's unique niche, in the sense that it's a zombie attack story that is framed as a slow-burn war story, requiring PCs to demonstrate their political, strategic, and organizational aptitude in addition to personal valor on battlefield. As compensation for its mechanical scale, it's probably the most generic in terms of setting elements. The zombies are under the control of some Abyssal Exalted, in service to an unnamed Deathlord, but it could be any necromancer, really. I like it as support for a particular style of play, but it was probably my least favorite of the three stories.

Which leaves Chapter 3: "Ten Thousand Milk Churning Strikes." Hoo boy. It's my favorite of the three . . . but mostly because it's the most creatively challenging. In terms of rpg-style gameplay, it's the weakest. It's a race to a magical macguffin and it's structured like it's meant for one session - 1) Meet your rivals and bargain with the monarch for your official permission to launch an expedition. 2)Some light sabotage and dirty tricks before setting off. 3)Slice of Life at sea. 4) "Random" encounter with a sea monster. 5) A three-to-four-way naval battle as all the various rivals reach the destination at more or less the same time (extraordinary success with the sabotage or the sea monster notwithstanding). 6) Get the macguffin.

But specifics matter. Somehow, it is simultaneously both maximum Exalted and something thoroughly disconnected from anything Exalted has ever done before:

"In an age unnamed, when the gods thundered across the sky like mortals would walk upon puddles, there was a distant sea of infinite milk. This milk was sweet like honey, thick and viscous like cream, and intoxicating like wine. This Milk of Immortality was once the favored drink of the gods and is what caused the gods to be immortal . . .

"To share it among themselves perfectly, the far western sky and earth gods of Kiliran decided to take a great mountain - taller than Creation itself - and turned it into a pestle, and then they reached out to Vandr, the Serpent That Encircles the World and mount of the Lord Luna, and wound them about the mountain pestle . . ."

And this is, on one level, absolute gibberish. It doesn't fit with any previous conception of Exalted's pre-history. It doesn't even mesh metaphysically. It's like a backstory from a different game. But it's also the first thing I've read in 3rd edition that came close to making me feel like I did when I was reading the game for the first time. On considered reflection, I'm not the biggest fan of the "in the murky depths of the Time Before, literally anything could have happened" approach to the setting's history, and I actively disapprove of the notion that Creation could have multiple "equally true" creation stories. . .

But there's something there. An infinite sea of milk . . . timelines that don't line up with known facts . . . a physical scale that makes a mockery of naive intuitions about mass or volume or distance . . . you could make a case for this being a new, spooky presentation for the action of the Wyld. The primordial chaos isn't just a mutation-causing radiation field or a LOL-random monster factory. It's alternate universes, alternate histories, alternate cosmologies, stitched together in a geography of dreams. The Sea of Milk is exactly as big and exactly as important as the stories say, but only in the context of its own tenuous reality. 

Or, at least, that's one possible theory. Maybe there's just a Sea of Milk out there and the stories are merely a folkloric attempt to explain why it exists. Still, it's a delightfully off-putting thing to place at the center of your macguffin race. It kind of sounds like a joke. It kind of sounds like someone's religion. Because there's a grandeur in its absurdity. There's a noticeable chain of reasoning: milk - motherhood - life - the sea. Enough, at least, to believe that it's a plausible legend that people would be plausibly motivated to pass along. And in this world, that legend is gloriously literal. An imperial navy officer, a pirate, a merchant-sorcerer, and the PCs are gearing up to launch an expedition to find it. Maybe it's mostly an allegory, but it's also a place where people can go. And that stubborn literalism around the sublime, even to the point where you start to be a bit of a buzzkill about it, that to me is the game's signature move.

But it wouldn't be such a tough sell if the book simply had enough of a pagecount to thoroughly explain itself.

Overall, I'd say that Deeds Yet Undone left me wanting more, but not necessarily in a good way. I found it enjoyable enough, but I'm not sure I want to do the necessary amount of work to actually use it.

Ukss Contribution: My favorite thing is the city of Kirilan. I'm probably going to port that into my Exalted games from now on. However, because Ukss is not flat, it doesn't actually make sense to have a "most distant mortal port." So I'll go with something from the backstory of the second adventure - "The Rain Wars." The adventure doesn't explain what they actually were (cause it's so short, you see), but the name suggests intriguing possibilities.