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, the 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.
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