(Exalted 3e) Exigents: Out of the Ashes

 It's been almost exactly one year since I last read an Exalted book and two years since I last read a new Exalted book. So Exigents: Out of the Ashes was very exciting for me, all the more so for not retreading a subject previously covered in first and second edition. We are talking all new Exalted types here - from the fully-playable Architects, Chosen of the City Gods to the canonical but undetailed like the Chosen of Plentimon, God of Dice to the hypothetical like the Chosen of the God of Rice to the frustratingly semi-canonical like the Umbral Exalted, Chosen of Nebiru, the Traitor Incarna of an invisible planet that bears his name.

And oh, man, it feels good to see more Exalted-style fantasy, even if some of it feels a little strained, like it was included to check off a list, and only really fleshed out as it was being written. Perhaps, unsurprisingly, the worst offenders were the "optional canon" Exalted of the "Creating New Exalted" appendix. They all feel like . . . okay, in first edition, there was a book called Time of Tumult, one of the first printed for the entire line, that had an appendix which introduced the Alchemical Exalted. When they first appeared, they were just these weird robot guys who didn't really fit in with anything else in the setting. "Oh, yeah, there are robots," the book seemed to say, and then the next 20 books refused to elaborate. Until three years later when Exalted: the Autocthonians was released and whoa! they come from a whole other planet, with a weird machine ecosystem, and this book has new societies, new creatures, a new exalted type, and a selection of campaign models that present them as a late-game out-of-context problem. It was super cool and totally out of left field (if you were like me and didn't get Time of Tumult until after 2nd edition had mostly run its course).

And the three "new" Exalted types felt to me like they were originally destined to get similar gazetteer/exalt type/campaign arc supplements. The Dream-Souled were empowered by a great power of the Wyld, a mysterious being called Ketu the Dream Prince, who appears to be on the same level as the Incarnae or the Primordials. And while they were generally fairly benign, it's pretty easy to imagine a harder-edged version of their "driven by impractical utopian ideals to the point where they don't entirely perceive reality" shtick that could be an apocalyptic threat. 

Likewise, the Hearteaters were once a "friendly" exalted type, until their patron Incarna was slain and they were cursed by the enemies of the gods to become these insatiable social vampires who use their unparalleled mind-control powers to hollow people out until they became will-less thralls. And though they are maybe not individually powerful enough to be a threat to Creation's Exalted, they are near-impossible to kill because whenever they are slain, their memories and power just go to one of their thralls. And honestly, that's a pretty great campaign there . . . or would be, if they got the full villain treatment.

Also, the Umbrals fit into this pattern, even if I think their hypothetical book would be the weakest of the three. A secret Incarna, who refused to join the divine rebellion, was imprisoned by his siblings and sealed away for an age until, out of pure spite, he dumped all his power into creating a new exalted type that gained strength from their own suppressed malevolent urges. 

I can definitely see some potential with these guys, but the book's diffidence about their inclusion, combined with their tenuous connection to existing lore . . . it made me feel like they only exist to explain that one illustration in the 3rd edition core, and they were developed just enough to get people to shut up about them. I don't normally go in for behind-the-scenes speculation, but I do know that 3rd edition had a rather dramatic change in developers and I suspect that the old crew had plans for a bunch of Authocthonians-style "event books" and the new leadership quietly abandoned them.

But okay, enough about that. What about the bulk of the book, you know, the stuff that is definitely actual canon?

It's . . . interesting. Occasionally even great. But it's shaking the foundations of the setting and stretching the limits of the system, to such a degree that I think Exigents: Out of the Ashes is a watershed book for the series. Only time will tell what its lasting legacy might be, but I think it's fair to think of 1st edition before and after Games of Divinity, 2nd edition before and after Wonders of the Lost Age, and 3rd edition before and after this book.

Which may seem like a bit of an overstatement, considering that Exigents were first introduced in the 3e core, and first got playable rules in Exalted: Essence, but the difference between those earlier books and this one is huge - Exigents: Out of the Ashes demonstrates quite persuasively how fundamentally unworkable Exigents are under the 3rd edition rules. . . and it still managed to sell me on playing one.

Strawmaiden Janest gets her own chapter. Conceptually, this is a good idea. She is an appealing character whose story players are going to want to emulate. A better showcase for the potential of Exigents as a character type, you are not going to find. And this one, incredibly specific (no matter what sort of "she has no canon identity" hedges the sidebar tries to introduce) character gets 55 pages of charms, just for her.

Are multiple players going to all play different versions of Janest in the same campaign? Is one player going to keep playing Janest in multiple different Exalted campaigns? Could Janest's highly flavorful and well-tuned charmset be repurposed for other, similar Exigents (Chosen of the God of Peasants, maybe)? You don't have to say "yes," not even out of loyalty to Exalted as a game. It's okay. She's just an example of the sort of thing you can do with Exigents. 

"See what an interesting and gameable Exalt we professional designers were able to make out of a concept as simple as 'an unremarkable local harvest god?' Now imagine the potential that exists with the god of gambling, or the goddess of toxins, or the god of artificial flight. You're welcome."

Except I don't feel welcomed. I feel burdened. Burdened with the knowledge that "exception-based Nobilis" is apparently really fucking awesome, because Janest's chapter was followed by yet another chapter that gave dozens of pages to one specific character - Pakpao, the Puppeteer, Chosen of the god of an idiosyncratic local theater style - and she too is super cool. She has the power to bring puppets to life (even giant parade puppets created for special festivals), tangle people up with phantom strings, and even turn into a puppet herself. Wah! It almost makes me think that a hundred pages of charms for just two characters might actually be worth it. Almost.

And I think about this world of infinite Exalted, with its bottomless wells of time and energy and creativity, and it's amazing and weird and wonderful. Like, really dig into the game's fantasy superheroes vibe. You can hit the super-hero element by giving each character their own highly specific branding and the fantasy angle by making that branding something fragile and mystical, like farmland or puppetry. This is a world where Calendar Man is going to wreck some serious shit and . . . it's not exactly Exalted anymore, but maybe it's something better.

Yet, for as awesome as it is, I'm not sure Exigents: Out of the Ashes is an rpg product that's fit for human consumption. Because no human, not even the really obsessed homebrewers who will do entire charmets by themselves (imagine me looking shiftily at the corners right now) can bring its vision to life. Don't get me wrong. I could, over the course of a couple of years, probably do 2-3 credible Exigents, share them online, and . . . give internet strangers the ability to play my 2-3 specific characters, just like they could play Janest or Pakpao. Maybe, over time, with a large and active enough community, there would exist the thousands of pages of available content to fulfill the book's promise, but honestly, even with the abstract advice from the charm design chapter, quality control is sure to be intermittent.

You could probably mitigate this problem by making Exigent varieties that were less singular. The Architects, Chosen of the City Gods, are a good start, though they run into the basic Exigents problem in microcosm - they really would benefit from custom content that helped make them Chosen of specific cities, rather than of urban life in the abstract. Partly this can be mitigated by the choice of Foundation Attributes (i.e. a scholarly city that focuses on Intelligence, Perception, and Charisma gives a very different character than a warlike city that focuses on Strength, Stamina, and Appearance), but there really should be individual charm trees that reflect the iconic character of Creation's major cities.

On the other hand, those charm trees needn't be more than 10-15 charms long, even under 3e's charm-heavy paradigm, and so supplementing the Architects' base utility with customization is not terribly onerous. The bigger problem with them as a character type is that there's an innate logistical impracticality to having multiple Architects in the same party - the Chosen of Nexus and the Chosen of Chiaroscuro may have similar powers, but their interests and attention are likely to be very far apart.

The only chapter that could actually support a campaign was the Sovereigns of Uluru. It's a little awkward how close they are in themes to the Dragon-Blooded, being super-powered aristocrats with cutthroat family politics, but I'd probably just overlook the similarity if it weren't for the fact that the Sovereigns are squabbling over the power vacuum left behind by their recently-deceased queen, so maybe that's something that could be tweaked.

The real problem with these guys is that (I can't fucking believe I'm saying this) their charms section needs to be 2-3 times as long. They are ability-based exalts, but all of their charms are based on the same 5 abilities. The book tries to play this off as a bit of setting lore, but it is quite transparently a pragmatic adaptation to the fact that they had only 1/6th of a hardcover to work with. Those 5 Abilities are already supporting charms that very clearly belong to another Ability. It wouldn't be too hard to cut those 5 trees down to half their size and make one tree for each of the 25 Abilities. That way you can have a party that uses the whole character sheet, you know, like you would if you were trying to play a game of Exalted.

I don't mean to be so grumpy, though. I mostly enjoyed this book, as much of a mess as it could be sometimes. I don't think the setting is ready to handle the basic question it poses - what if supernatural power were significantly less scarce and less openly under the control of a limited number of tightly-knit cliques? But I think you could tweak the lore to create a new, Exalted-adjacent setting where the blessings of the gods were less predictable and more widely-distributed. The main use I can think of for the material is to ditch the "diminishment" concept and use Exigent-style rules for god-blooded, strange magical prodigies, and the surviving pre-human peoples. But honestly, Exigents: Out of the Ashes saves me very little effort in realizing that vision. I'm not sure it fits with the Exalted 3rd Edition rules at all. It could probably work with Exalted: Essence, if you had a large enough list of abstract charm modes to just assemble a quick new Exalt type on the fly (fleshing out with custom charms as necessary). It might also work with a less charm-intensive edition, like 1e. And it would thrive in a narrative or effect-based alternative to the Exalted rules.

Final verdict - Exigents: Out of the Ashes is a monument to hubris, which in many ways makes it the perfect Exalted book.

Ukss Contribution: So much great stuff here. I kind of want to just rattle off a list of runner-ups from the sheer intoxicating joy of being back in Exalted. Like, Janest can trap a god inside a seed, then grow the seed, and the god becomes one with the plant that grows from the seed, possibly changing its essential nature. There's an undetailed example Exigent, the Foxbinder, where a trickster god was forced to create an Exigent as punishment, and so their Exalt is both their parole officer and protégé (basically, the Exalt takes the fox spirit as a familiar in order to gain their Exalted powers). The Chosen of the Firmament "led an army of devil stars" and I don't know what the hell that means, but I am enthralled by the possibilities.

However, I think my ultimate choice is civic festivals that incorporate giant puppets. This is such a cool cultural detail that I kind of wanted to hear less about the magical Puppeteer and more about the town she came from.

(Shadowrun 3e) System Failure

SPOILER WARNING

 Ah, the book of tying up loose ends. With the publication of System Failure, practically nothing established during or prior to third edition will ever again have more than historical relevance. . .

Or, at least, that's how it felt sometimes. Cross Applied Technologies is no more! Lucien Cross perished in a plane crash and his arch-rival Damien Knight went on a gravedancing hostile acquisitions spree. I'm sure this was devastating news to the small but loyal group of Shadowrun fans who eagerly awaited each new bit of information about Quebec's premier AAA megacorporation. Likewise, the oppressive Tsimshian government has been overthrown, Ibn Eisa has been finally outed as a Sheddim, and Ares is canonically the winner of the Probe Race (though, of course, nothing seemed to have come of it).

I suppose, in the broadest sense, this book delivered on the introduction's promise to "put the smackdown on the world of Shadowrun."  Most of it is transparently setting the stage for 4th edition's upcoming rules and setting changes, but those changes are significant enough to qualify as "a smackdown."

The main plot of the book is that Winternight's scheme to destroy the world, the dissonant Otaku of Ex Pacis' scheme to take over the Matrix, and Deus the AI's scheme to reconstitute himself from the brains of his torture victims all dovetail with Richard Villiers' oddly reluctant scheme to make a bazillion nuyen by taking Novatech public to result in a worldwide crash of the Matrix, leading to it being rebuilt according to 4th edition's revised decking rules.

And it's a weird series of adventures, because the scope and the stakes are as high as they can get (multiple nuclear devices are detonated, all over the world), but the PCs are just kind of there, being these hapless little guys. I wouldn't even necessarily level the Standard Metaplot Adventure Critique against it. The PCs aren't even hired as agency-less spectators to NPC shenanigans. It's just a thing that happens that's too big and too rapid for them to even understand until well after the fact. Even if you run the suggested adventures, at no point is the fate of the world in the hands of any individual, not even Deus or Richard Villiers. Shit just stacks up all at once and for the PCs to have any effect, they'd have to be in like four or five places at once.

That's probably the best way to handle a major metaplot event - don't let the PCs near it until it's too late. Like, jewel thieves in west coast criminal circles probably had very little opportunity to affect the subprime mortgage crisis, even if they did occasionally pull off a daring heist against wealthy dowagers whose fortunes were made by investing in commercial lenders. Yeah, the PCs commit crimes for hire, but they don't often engage in global counterterrorism ops for hire. That's a whole different set of guys. 

I just wonder how something like that would play at a table. The players are just happily bumbling along, doing their typical Seattle-based crime hijinks and BAM! The Matrix crashes. Lights go out. Planes start falling from the sky. No warning. No indication of a possible cause. No ability to do anything but react to your immediate circumstances. All because a homicidal AI and a sophisticated (possibly magical) computer virus got into a code fight at the Boston stock exchange.

Heroes reacting to sudden and unexpected disasters is a type of story people enjoy. You probably wouldn't think much of a narrative set on the Titanic if they somehow managed to dodge the iceberg. But that kind of event, it dramatically changes the genre of the story. It's a sedate upstairs-downstairs drama, but BAM, it's now about surviving the unforgiving elements of the North Atlantic. It's a low-key stoner comedy, but BAM, they're fighting aliens now. And that sort of turn is fine in a book or a movie, but in a collaborative medium like rpgs, maybe your players were prepared to tell gritty crime stories and not "survive the collapse of the modern world" stories.

Or maybe they'd thrive under the challenge and I've just been denying them and me of a potentially wonderful experience by keeping most of the plot firmly on screen. System Failure is betting that's the case, and that's probably why it's labeled a sourcebook instead of an adventure.

I think I just have to toughen up and be okay with it. Because I mostly enjoyed the book as a work of fiction. It was thrilling. The characters were . . . broadly drawn, but broadly compelling. I definitely felt like I was witnessing significant events.

Though my biggest takeaway from the book is that I've been greatly underestimating the threat posed by Winternight. Maybe because their goal of triggering Ragnarök and becoming the new generation of Norse gods was fucking ridiculous. There's no way that plan was ever going to work. But I guess it could be pretty dangerous in the course of failing. Somehow, these guys got their hands on dozens of nuclear weapons, experimental flesh-eating nanofog, and the personnel and resources to deploy this stuff in a coordinated attack on five different continents. They caught the Corporate Court with its pants down and very nearly destroyed the bulk of human knowledge and international commerce. Plus, they were also responsible for using weather control magic to create the coldest winter on record. This is a significant step up in threat level from how they've been depicted in the past.

I guess it's just a case of supervillain logic. The story needs an antagonist, and so the chosen foe was always going to be able to generate a credible threat. There's a lot of ambiguity in the things that have so far been left unsaid, so we can just fill it in with "yeah, their ideology is a joke, but they've got one of the world's most powerful magicians, one of its most brilliant engineers, one of its most dangerous warriors, and all the wealth and influence those three can gather (which turns out to be a lot)." Nonetheless, they feel like they should be in a Spiderman story or something. They even forced Saeder-Krupp to hunker down and weather the storm.

Even aside from the basic structural issues at work here (there being no single location critical enough to the plot for the PCs to be there to alter its course), this amped-up version of Winternight is probably too much for most characters. They're only likely to get involved at the periphery. The book actually suggests they might work for Winternight, inadvertently. You know, just unremarkable shadowrunner shit - breaking one of their conspirators out of prison, guarding their mages while they manipulate the weather at an unauthorized power site, delivering mysterious packages to unremarkable-seeming locations.

Having the PCs contribute to the apocalypse in this way is kind of interesting, thematically, because it only happens if they're careless about verifying who they work for and are indifferent to the morality of their missions (If the GM is good at their job, that is. A bad GM would just use this as an untelegraphed rug-pull). But it's a type of interesting that has the potential to feel really judgmental, so I'm not sure it's a good idea.

In general, I'd say that the Crash 2.0 plot was fine for what it was - utility metaplot - but I'm not super tempted to run it as a game. It was always destined to be a bullet point in future editions' history chapters, and it never escaped that feeling.

Okay, so a few other odds and ends.

Captain Chaos is dead, having sacrificed himself in a desperate last stand against the magical computer virus that threatened Shadowland. I may have had my issues with his moderation style, but not to the extent that I wished for his death. I'd be very interested in learning the reasoning behind this development. It feels like the end of an era, but what were their hopes for the new era to follow? 

Also, the Novatech IPO feels like a really weird plot to me. I guess it's because stock prices are such a fundamental part of the wealth of our real-world oligarchs. Like, Richard Villiers is really out there running the world's 12th largest corporation with mostly his own money? It's implied in the epilogue that he preferred not having to answer to shareholders, but is that really an onerous enough burden to forgo all the advantages of playing the game with other peoples' money? Theoretically, Elon Musk has to answer to shareholders and when has that stopped him from being an utter disgrace? Maybe that's just one of the effects social media has had on our society. Previously, it was possible to think of billionaire CEOs like Villiers and Lofwyr as these cold-blooded masterminds whose greed was subordinate to a greater business savvy (as the S-K representative put it, Lofwyr has no interest in changing "the focus of the company from doing things that make sense to doing things that make shareholder value go up at all costs.")

It's always weird when I notice a cyberpunk story be less cynical than real life. Look at these corporate guys, valuing things other than having a bigger number than all their peers. Next thing you're going to tell me is that "Corporate Court anti-trust regulations don't allow one AAA corporation to own part of another?"

So, like, do these guys hate money or something? What's the point of even having a Corporate Court if it's going to prevent cartelization, monopoly, or hyping up meme stock to leave retail investors holding the bag? Does private equity exist in this world? Why is Richard Villiers having such trouble loading Novatech subsidiaries down with debt, stripping them of assets, and writing them off when they inevitably fail? Does the Corporate Court have an equivalent to the SEC?

Of course, I'd be lying if I said I understood these issues well. Maybe the economy of 2025 is vastly different than the economy of 2005. It seems plausible. It's been a fifth of a century. In the 20th century, 1959 was a whole other game than 1939. It's just, if that's true, if our fiction needs to be so much more cynical because reality itself has gotten proportionately more cynical, then how fucked are we? 

I think it may be a lot.

Oh, I guess I should mention something about the off-hand revelation that the New Revolution attempted a coup that briefly looked like it might be successful. It got as far as armed insurgents in the White House, killing President Kyle Haeffner, but then the book inexplicably shut it down almost as soon as it began. Maybe rebooting the Matrix was already enough of a status-quo shakeup for one book, but the entire plot wound up feeling pointless. At the very least, they should have left Senator Jonathan S Braddok alive and free so he could run for president and win in 2068. 

Too soon? Yeah, too soon.

Anyway, System Failure was a pretty satisfying end to Shadowrun 3rd edition. Maybe some of the metaplot threads got swept aside with undue haste, and I'm enough of a pot-stirrer that I'd prefer a metaplot book that took some bigger swings, but it managed to check in with almost all of the most interesting of the edition's plotlines. It's enough to whet your appetite for the next edition without leaving you with any burning sense of unfinished business, which is pretty much all you can expect from a season finale.

Ukss Contribution: One of the new setting elements introduced with the rebooted Matrix is something called "Idols." They get very little detail here, appearing only in a transcript of some lady's conversation with her psychiatrist, but they seem to be American-Gods-style neo divinities attached to the Matrix. The two names we get are Gossamer, who appears as a shimmering aurora of multicolored light and The Branded Lady, who appears as a woman whose body is covered in tattoos of various corporate logos. 

Ukss has its Astral Web, which is not quite an internet, but is close enough that it would be distinctive and meaningful for it to have its own crop of home-grown divinities.