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.
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