That's something that generally only happens in Sidereals games - you might get eyeballed by someone from the Board of Directors of All Reality. And because it happens here, you can subsequently use it as a model for what might happen in other Exalted games (if the Unconquered Sun is a dude you can meet, who has several nepo-babies out there causing havoc in the Celestial Bureaucracy's various departments, then it no longer seems absurd for the Zenith caste to say, "you know what, I think I need to have a little talk with God, mano a mano.")
Which kind of means that a Sidereals fatsplat is a turning-point for an edition of Exalted. It's when cosmic scale games are officially On the Table. You could, of course, have kludged together something from previous scraps of lore (or, indeed, priot editions' Sidereals books), but it wouldn't have been official. Not until now, when the greatest mysteries of the universe finally have a street address.
Naturally, this poses a problem to an edition that has so far preferred a more grounded version of the setting. You know, Game of Thrones-style political intrigue with the Realm's looming civil war vs doing Celestial Cocaine with Chor Lan, the God of Bad Choices.
Where does Sidereals: Charting Fate's Course fit on the spectrum? Well, it did mention Celestial Cocaine and Chor Lan is a real character, introduced in this book (via a genre of theater that is ostensibly about his life before he "reformed") but there's something subtle at work here. Somehow, all the various tweaks to canon have resulted in a Yu-Shan and Celestial Bureaucracy that feel less like "the place you go to fail your futile first plan when the Big One finally drops" and more like a place that's disfunctional but somehow, improbably. . . tenable. This version of Yu-Shan feels much more like a place where you could run a long-term game that was just about living in Heaven, planning and fixing destiny, and it's a workplace comedy/fantasy horror where sometimes you're fighting strange creatures that puppet the nightmares of the innocent and sometimes you're dealing with the fallout from the boss' incompetent kid totally mismanaging the Department of Rainbows ("The only part of their job Ardis-Iara takes seriously is the actual design of the rainbows.")
I'm okay with this direction. One thing you have to give 3rd edition credit for - new books make the setting feel larger. That's something 2nd edition really struggled with. And I enjoyed almost all the new locations and characters. Hell yeah, let's hang out with Let Mountains Fall, the blue-collar weather worker who never forgot his roots. I've got thrilling new tales of my adventures on Black Ray Island, the collossal semi-petrified manta ray that became a haven for the pirates who ply Heaven's quicksilver seas.
Certainly, the only negative thing I felt compelled to write in my notes was "Daystar?" in reference to one of the Unconquered Sun's other children, Nysela, Charioteer of the Daystar. And that's really more out of an abundance of caution. Here in 3e land, the Daystar is described as a "resplendent war chariot" whereas in 2e it was . . . one of the Ink Monkies' (developers collective that produced semi-canonical extra material, such as Throne Shadow style martial arts, which appears in this book) more controversial creations. I don't really want to get too deep in the weeds here, but the old Daystar was the peak of 2e's "magitech sci-fi and cosmic plots" excess and as much as I sometimes wish 3e would go a little farther in that direction, there's something to be said for artful restraint.
Besides, Heaven has a train, and there's an implication that trains used to be a common technology that was lost with the fall of the First Age. That's probably the right balance. That and airships. The two technologies that everyone can agree are compatible with fantasy. When you consider all the possible ways 3e's first foray into the cosmic scale could have gone, Sidereals: Charting Fate's Course's choices look like well-conidered compromises. It's a conservative new edition. It doesn't take any big swings. But it explores new ground and isn't just a retread of what came before. It's as much as you could reasonably expect from any new edition.
Woe unto you then, for underestimating how unreasonable I can be!
No, I'm kidding. I liked this book. I'm naturally suspicious of "this isn't familiar to me, so it must suck," but I'm also (slowly) learning to be just as skeptical of its compliment "this is too familiar to me, so it must suck." I'm 43 years old. I may open up each fresh Exalted book hoping to see something that will make me feel like I did when I read Exalted for the first time, but I have to acknowledge that basic logic implies that the franchise's ability to do that must always diminish over time.
How did I feel when I first read Exalted? Like I was seeing something new, a way of framing character power and player agency and ownership of the setting that was unlike anything I'd ever seen, though at the time I didn't express it in those terms (I believe a rough paraphrase of my actual words would be "in this game the Fighters can do cool shit" that and Rune of Singular Hate blew my fucking mind, it was the first thing I had to show all my friends.)
And Exalted: the Sidereals was an important milestone on that journey. I was already all-in, of course, but the revelation of Charcoal March of Spiders style and its ultimate charm that let you punch people and turn them into animals or inanimate obejcts or full-on alternate identities. . . that was special.
And yes, it's obvious in retrospect that D&D already had Polymorph Any Object and in terms of level-gating and restricting the power to certain specific character types, the two systems are actually deceptively similar, but it just feels different when your polymorph attack is the capstone of a spider-themed martial art.
But of course, it's all just a magic trick. The tools available to us are talking, bookkeeping, and dice, and you can do a lot with those tools, but you can't do it all at once. A franchise, like Exalted, spends a certain amount of time inventing itself, discovering through trial and error what it means to be Exalted, but a successful franchise doesn't invent itself forever. At some point it becomes itself. And a mature franchise, one that has survived becoming itself, that can produce some great things . . . until it gets stuck.
Because success can be a trap. Having a strong identity means a core of things that are definitely you, a penumbra of things that could be you, and a vast surrounding wasteland of things that are very clearly not you. And that penumbra, it's your room to grow, but damn, it gets thinner and thinner all the time.
That's what happened to Exalted 2e, I think. It reached the limit of the thing it was and didn't have anything else to be. Heroin-pissing dinosaurs were unironically great, but they boxed the setting in and not even Masters of Jade could break out of that box (because, ironically, nothing in Masters of Jade was as cool or as interesting as the heroin-pissing dinosaurs).
Hence 3rd edition. The franchise re-inventing itself. And as great as it's been to see, a franchise in the process of reinventing itself can never recapture the feeling of experiencing it for the first time, at least not for us old timers. Because the first time I read Exalted, I wasn't expecting it to become it to become Exalted. That's a unique burden every reboot and new edition must, in its own way, learn to bear.
Anyway, back to the subject of Sidereals: Charting Fate's Course. It's a book that felt, to me, like the last little bit of struggle to reach the top of the hill. Third edition has, finally, become Exalted. It has entered the "mature franchise" stage of its life-cycle. My prediction for the Abyssals book (which is coming my way as soon as DTRPG finishes the POD), the Alchemicals book (which I could read in the backer draft, but won't), and the Infernals book (in production, according to the Onyx Path website) is that they will be recongnizably 3e-ish (yes, it has its own feel, but no I can't quite put it into words just yet, it's the sort of thing you blog about years after the fact and then feel smug for noticing in retrospect) reconstructions of prior editions' work and that they won't so much expand the setting as fill in the outlines that have been laid down for them by earlier books.
It's telling to me that we're very close (at least in a "having enough of a manuscript to justify crowdfunding" sense) to having a "complete" 3rd edition and the only two "missing" books are Alchemicals and Infernals, which were, respectively 1st and 2nd edition's attempts to push back their own penumbras and establish a beachhead into new territory for the franchise to explore. Alchemicals went from "experimental" to "essential" in between 1e and 2e, and Infernals repeated the pattern between second edition and third, but once they're out, once we have the "essentials," then 3rd edition will be in the same transitional place. What comes after the essentials?
It's left itself a bit of wiggle room. The answer at the top of my mind, after reading this book, is "Getimians." They're presented as foils speficially to the Sidereals, beings from a timeline that never was who by their very existence threaten the smooth functioning of fate. The chapter fictions share a recurring Getimian antagonist who is defeated, but manages to escape, implying future conflict to come. And even the rules make a little space for them, listing them as one of the few groups who can learn Sidereal Martial Arts and the only ones who even potentially get access to the "Enlightenment" keyword.
And so it seems likely, but not inevitable, that we will get a Getimians book. But will that book be third edition's foray beyond the penumbra? Will it be weird and confusing and run the credible risk of being fairly labeled "not-Exalted?" Because that's what it will need to be, if it's going to carve out new ground be explored in 4th edition. . .
Though maybe it's a bit too early to be thinking about that. Truthfully, despite being new, the Getimians feel to me like the sort of thing that could slot easily into a mature 3rd edition. The Exigents book opened up a lot of space for these sorts of corner-cases . . . and I think I'm starting to see the shape of "3e-ness" actually. I compared Exigents: Out of the Ashes to Games of Divinity and Wonders of the Lost Age out of a sense that it was a key part of 3rd edition becoming Exalted . . . or, at least, a particular manifestation of Exalted, and the bullet points are starting to fall into place. A 3rd edition book will:
- Have way too many fucking charms.
- Introduce places and characters you've never heard of.
- Establish that those new things have a conspicuous, though probably somewhat tenuous connection to things you've seen before.
- Ensure that then something familiar does show up, it will be more human, less in-control, and less cruel than it has been depicted in the past.
- Present both problems and opportunities as things that will be largely local.
- Take a softer approach to inter-exalted tier preservation (i.e. between Dragon-Blooded and Sidereals) in contrast to extra-exalted tier preservation (i.e. between Sidereals and the Celestial Gods) that remains hard while pretending to be softer. For example: allowing the God of Martial Arts to practice Sidereals Martial Arts, but establishing that he gave himself a permanent spiritual wound by doing so. Or continuing 2e's bizarre tradition of insisting that not even the really high gods can use Solar Circle Sorcery.
- Be vague and noncommittal about things that are supposed to be "prehistory" even when they are in the living memory of characters being discussed.
These aren't just predictions, they are all also properties I would attribute to Sidereals: Charting Fate's Course. If you detect a hint of ambivalence there, well, I won't deny it, but I will insist that for now, it's just a hint. I've called 3rd Edition my favorite edition of Exalted in the past, and I think that assessment will hold out to the end. And this book definitely demonstrates many of the edition's strengths - its humanism, its willingness to explore, its commitment to preserving "blank spaces on the map," its aspiration towards evergreen gameplay through sheer fucking volume of content. But maybe it's also the first time a 3rd edition book has made me feel like I could see the end of the line.
Once there was a maiden. . .
Who found herself climbing up an earthen path.
Her footsteps made no sound.
There was a silence in the air.
She walked for years, and then, came to a cliff. The road gave way to clouds, and she could go no further.
"There's always an ending," said she.
Ukss Contribution: The God of Roads travels with "a much-put-upon donkey who once ate a Peach of Immortality." I like that a lot. A humble creature, in its innocence snacked upon the forbidden fruit, and now it is done with the celestials' bullshit.
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