(Exalted 3e) Many Faced Strangers

Ah, Kickstarter, the platform that dares to ask, "what if the Exalted fatsplats weren't long enough?" And in daring to ask, it also dares to answer - in the form of Many-Faced Strangers, which is no more and no less than 235 extra pages of Lunars: Fangs At the Gates.

So first off, right away I can tell you that it's a mistake to wait five years between reading the main book and reading its overflow supplement, especially for a game as jargon-dense as Exalted. Frequently, I'd be looking at an NPC stat-bloc or one of the new charms that upgraded an old one and I'd think, "whoa, I bet I'd be really impressed if I knew what the fuck they were talking about."

Now, in my defense, there was a four year gap between the books' release dates, so there was no really elegant way to read them back-to-back (aside, perhaps, from leaving the Lunars book untouched for all that time). I think I just have to accept it as the price of being an Exalted fan - 3rd edition has a slow-drip release schedule and getting a "complete" line will almost certainly take longer than the lifespan of 1st and 2nd edition combined (if you start the timeline count when the 3rd edition core was announced, rather than when it was released, this has already happened). Am I happy about this state of affairs? No. Has it negatively impacted my enjoyment of Many-Faced Strangers? Yes. But I don't call it my "ride-or-die fandom" because I expect it to be easy.

The best way to view Many-Faced Strangers, as a standalone read, is to think of it as a quick dip in a broad but shallow pool, bathing me in a refreshing cross-section of random Lunar lore. We get new martial arts styles, including one that makes you into a jrpg villain by surrounding you with a mantle of floating swords (or axes or hammers or chains or whatever your favored weapon might be). We get a quick character write up for Leviathan, one of the setting's most divisive characters (is he "would be cool if he didn't suck" or "would suck if he wasn't cool" - we may never get a definitive answer, but personally, I'm on team "he's cool because he sucks.") In other words, it's got a lot of cool stuff in it.

In other other words, the cool stuff doesn't build to anything. That's not surprising, given the book's form, its origin, and its relationship to its companion volume, but it is the sort of book where you're going to ask yourself why you're reading it. And I have the misfortune of knowing exactly why I'm reading it - because it's the next in line on my blogging project. That's a bad reason to read a book like this. Don't get me wrong, I love Exalted enough that I enjoyed the experience, but it was definitely something I did at a bad time and for bad reasons.

The good reason to read parts of this book is because you're going to play or run a Lunar Exalted game and you need just a little bit more of that Exalted special sauce. Nothing in here is essential, but there's lots of stuff that would be nice to have. Some of the backer-suggested charms are the sort of thing you can build a character around: dealing full damage when you are in a miniscule insect form, hunting down ghosts and stealing their mortal form, drawing on the power of your bonded territory to enhance sorcerous workings. Once again, having a clear starting point (in the forms of the mega-fans' wishlists) leads to stronger charm design overall. Certainly beats rerolling 6s and doubling 8s.

If you're a GM, you might also be interested in running the scenario at the back of the book - "War for the Caul." It's well-designed, in that super open-ended Exalted way where you can never be entirely sure about the capabilities or motivations of the PCs so the most it can do is suggest categories of challenges. I think you could definitely use it as the starting point for developing a fun and memorable campaign. My main caveat would be that the island continent of The Caul is terribly mysterious.

Yes, here I go again, being the sort of GM who will hate on an rpg just for leaving room for GM creativity, but damnit, this is important. The Caul is not just "mysterious" because it's never gotten a continent-sized write-up, it is mysterious in the context of the story and by the standards of Creation. This mega-island is a literal lost world. It faded out of existence for hundreds of years and then suddenly came back, as if no time had passed. It's sacred to both Lunars and Dragon-Blooded because it has a (dare I say it) mysterious connection to their patron deities, Luna and Gaia. If a Dragon-Blooded goes on a pilgrimage to all five of the shrine cities, their next child is guaranteed to exalt . . . and that's a pretty big deal. 

And that's just the stuff we've seen in print. The adventure implies that there's a lot more stuff we haven't seen. In fact, the Caul is explicitly called a "cradle of mysteries and wonder." The land itself is supposedly a "sibling" to the Lunar Exalted in some kind of poorly-defined way, and if they controlled all five of the shrine cities, they'd be able to do the pilgrimage for a similar Big Deal Reward. And if you read all three of the major sources of information about the Caul (this book, The Realm, and Lunars: Fangs at the Gates) you'll have only the vaguest idea what any of that is supposed to look like.

Obviously, you're supposed to make it up, but I'd have appreciated a more frank, direct, and . . . helpful discussion about how you're supposed to make it up. It's not a dealbreaker or anything. The adventure is plenty usuable without. It's just . . . am I supposed to know the difference between a sacred land, worth warring over for 500 years, and just, like a manse or something. (I mean, I probably should, given how much Exalted experience I have, but the same experience that makes me theoretically able to develop my own version of The Caul also puts me in relatively little need to have The Caul as an excuse).

The other thing I'd change about the adventure, while we're on the subject, is His Divine Lunar Presence Sha'a Oka. I wish he were just a bit . . . more. Part of this, of course, is down to the Quick Character format, which is more or less custom-designed for making big NPCs seem less impressive, but if you make the proper allowances, he's probably beefy enough. He's just not "give him the most ostentatious fucking title"-level impressive. He's best known for repeatedly coming back after his apparent death and his stat bloc implies that this is simply a result of skillful use of the standard Lunar toolkit (which, to be fair, is well-suited to repeatedly faking your death). I'd have preferred something more explicitly out-of-context like "thanks to a solar-circle sorcerous working, bestowed upon him by the Caul's Luna-descended spirit courts, this motherfucker absolutely cannot be killed while the shrine cities still stand." It's rules legal, fits in with 3e sorcery's "unsettling sword and sorcery-style forbidden magic" vibe, and would actually explain why this guy gets the big title.

That may be my habitual mystery-hatred at work, though. "They gave him a big title because they think he's real cool for keeping the holy war going for 500 years" is probably explanation enough. Needing every little thing to have a canonical "justification" is how 2e got so . . . 2e. But damn, I miss 2e sometimes.

Speaking of trolling up just the absolutely most picayune edition-warring bullshit - this book puts a new wrinkle in the origin of Creation's solar eclipses. As a brief refresher, the theories we've seen are "it's just astronomy, dude" from Across the Eight Directions' appendix and "heaven-sent omen of the Unconquered Sun" from the 1e core. Now, we also have Kama-Soth, "the Moonshadow Prince, a mischievous bat spirit that holds domain over solar eclipses - those moments when Luna interposes herself between Creation and the brilliance of the sun."

And look, Creation is flat and has no fixed size. It just sort of blends at the edges into the limitless primordial chaos that preceded shaped existence. There aren't intersecting orbits or anything like that. Across the Eight Directions was cagey about what the sun and moon actually are (and to be fair, we've gotten some pretty bad answers in the past), but what they most definitely aren't is a massive flaming ball of gas at the center of the solar system and a cold, dead rock that sometimes happens to get in the way of that. 

My main evidence that eclipses are an Unconquered Sun thing comes from the fact that the Solar Exalted have a whole caste named after it. But that's not, like, definitive or anything. The Solars also have a Night caste and it would be pretty fatuous to claim that the Unconquered Sun causes night by going away. I can get on board with the idea that Luna has an important role to play in Creation's solar eclipses. The very fact that an eclipse requires coordination between different celestial gods is probably why the Eclipse caste have the role of diplomats. So what the hell is Kama-Soth doing?

I actually like the idea that there's a Lunar spirit who does naughty gremlin shit during solar eclipses. That's a fun encounter. But he doesn't need to be anything but reactive. The eclipses themselves should come down from the top of the celestial hierarchy.

Although, I'll admit, I'm putting way too much thought into this. I guess it's just sentimentality. I remembered that quote from the 1e core instantly. Turned straight to the correct page and found it exactly where I was expecting it to be. Because as small a detail as it was, it was one my pivotal moments of being sold on Exalted. "Oh, in this world solar eclipses can be turned off for a thousand years and then turned back on when something cool happens . . . that's, like mythic."

But I suppose every generation has its own myths. I really enjoy Exalted 3rd Edition, but it's not exclusively for me. Overall, though, I'd say that Many-Faced Strangers had the distinction of being more for me than not, so I'm happy to welcome it to the Exalted family, even if it would have been much more useful four and a half years ago.

Ukss Contribution: Kama-Soth, the god of eclipses. In Ukss' Cosmic Sphere, the sun is actually a distant celestial body, and the moon does interpose between it and the planet of Ukss, so having a bat gremlin dude who stirs shit up on those occasions poses no cosmological problems whatsoever.