It's new Exalted book day! Like two weeks ago! Because every fucking one of these monster tomes has hundreds of pages of charms and I'm finding it harder and harder to muster the concentration for getting through them in a small number of long sittings, so I'll just read a dozen or so, "take a break" by playing a video game and then three hours later remembering that I have a lifelong obsession I'm trying to succumb to here. I got through the setting lore damned fast, though. That you can believe.
So I guess I should talk about the charms first, seeing as how they're so fresh in my memory and all. Alchemicals are weird because they're almost exactly the same as every other form of Exalted, but it's to their and your benefit to pretend that they're not. Their charms are presented as technomagical devices that need to be installed onto the Alchemical's body, but there's no setting implications to them. The devices don't actually exist. They're just little exception-based rules packets. Pump in the cost and the benefit comes out and like maybe, on your body, some gears are whirring or something, but don't worry. It's all seamless, automatic . . . magical.
You can get a Piston Driven Megaton Hammer installed and it looks like a big thing you attach to your arm to make you punch harder, but it has no other object-like qualities. You go down to the lab to get it swapped out for another charm, but "Uninstalled Charms dissolve into Essence and subsume into the Alchemical's Anima until she has need of them again. No magic can interfere with uninstalled Charms."
You can't loan your unused Megaton Hammer to a friend, nor can you salvage it for parts. No one can steal it or sabotage it. There's no part of this that resembles taking something off a shelf. The book talks about charms being made by skilled human technicians, installed by surgeons in special vat complexes, but at the end of the day, they are always and only something that is written on your character sheet. It's all very convenient from a gameplay perspective, but it's thematically dull. The Alchemicals have a sort of technological gloss to them. but they don't engage with technological ideas, the chief of which is that doing something for the first time is hard, but it gets easier the more you do it. Once you've proven a device is possible, by building a prototype, you can make as many copies as you can afford. This is something the book (hell, the line) tries to avoid. The Alchemicals and their charms may look like machines, but each one is a miracle.
It's not something I have a problem with per se, but I do think that it steers away from what is most interesting about the splat. They wind up having this "Saturday Morning Cartoon Action Figure Battle Royale" feel about them. On first glance it parses as science-fiction, and you can do awesome stuff like double-jump, swing around on an electric grapple, and shoot people with your built-in energy cannon, but there's precious little depth to it. There are gears and shit, but they don't do anything.
Which is as good a segue as any into the lore. In contrast to the charms, there is a bit of science-fiction depth here, because it puts some thought into things like where the Autochthonians get their food, the way their settlements adapt to and even exploit the strange environmental conditions of the Machine God, the way their unique circumstances affect their politics and culture. It would almost be churlish to point out that extremely old Alchemical Exalted can be retrofitted into living cities and their Municipal Charms are described as factory-sized pieces of civic infrastructure that more or less amount to "Address a Particular Problem Complexes" (no, seriously, their names get pretty on-the-nose, like "the Atmospheric Purification Web" that protects the city of Xexas from the deadly smoke of Autochthon's recycling region or the "Rat Slaying Electrification Grids" which are apparently ubiquitous.)
Now don't get me wrong, I'm not about to rag on sci-fi for not explaining super-tech in excruciating detail. "There is a problem that exists today, but this future society solved it by means of a device made from unobtanium and argle-blargle" is practically its own subgenre. It's just that there doesn't seem to be any limit to this. I kind of feel like whatever the problem, the Metropolitan Exalted can just pull another charm out of the hat. The thing about speculative fiction is that you need to speculate and while I'm not about to say you need a full-on hard magic system to do that, you do at least need some scaffolding to build off of. What is your magic/technology (or in this case magical technology) actually doing? What limitations does it remove? What limitations does it leave in place? What new limitations does it impose? The premise of this setting is that eight whole nations of humans, along with their associated rats, cockroaches and fungi are living in this giant world-sized machine, driven by a vast intelligence that welcomes their presence but only has a limited amount of patience for their disruption, and sometimes that comes across as Autochthon being wall-to-wall industrial nonsense.
But also, like maybe that's okay. There's also the implication that the nonsense isn't actually nonsensical, but rather it's part of an order too large and too complex to be entirely understood. They're in a machine so big it has weather patterns, and what, I'm demanding an explanation for why there are all these electrified cables, pipes filled with every variety of rarefied organic compound, and big-ass gears everywhere? I'm acting like I need to understand what it means for the nation of Sova to occupy "vast chamber-shafts within an organ continent and the spaces between."
The whole point is that it's a super strange world, but that humanity is still recognizable. High status people might wear a luxurious rat fur cloak, because rats are one of the few species that can survive here almost as well as humans. The bulk of the nations' food comes from organic chemicals leeched from Authochthon's massive system of pipes and then subjected to a variety of industrial processes, the secrets of which are under the control of a powerful guild. Some brave people respond to the grim prospect of a life of unceasing toil under an autocratic regime of artisan/administrator-aristocrats by agitating for democracy and the agents of the state treat them like a demon-worshipping cult.
Which is to say, I think that the mortal-eye-view of Autochthonia is actually pretty good speculative fiction. It's only the titular Alchemical Exalted that I'm iffy about.
I don't know. I guess it's because they are canonically, and by way of direct editorial mandate, Not Robots. Rather, they are constructed beings of "clay and magical materials" and have a "crystalline Essence reservoir" instead of a heart. The book insists on calling them "human." What they actually are is a general vibe. They're robots in (almost) all the ways it's cool to be a robot and not a robot in most of the ways it sucks to be a robot. Also, nobody knows how they work, not even themselves. You basically just have to get a bunch of specialists into a factory setting and the God of Invention sends them into a trance, after which a new Alchemical emerges.
They're cool, but also kind of a bummer. I kind of feel like a version of the Alchemical Exalted that leaned more into their robot-ness would make for a more interesting setting. Unfortunately, I have certain extra-textual evidence (decades worth of fandom discourse) that avoiding what I consider "a more interesting setting" is an explicit design goal. If people actually knew how to build an Alchemical, they might try to build a lot of them. Or some nefarious power might steal the secret of building them and build one or more Alchemicals that had no connection to Autochthonia's culture. If they could simply be built, people, both characters in the setting and players in the real world, would ruthlessly objectify them. They would not treat the Alchemical Exaltation as a sublime miracle, or the Alchemical Exalted as glorious heroes, but rather items on a balance sheet, tools to be used.
And I'm sitting here like, "yeah, that sounds like awesome sci-fi all right," but Exalted doesn't really want to do sci-fi, it wants to be its own brand of epic fantasy, so it puts barriers up whenever things threaten to go too much in that direction.
Barriers like the Seal of Eight Divinities. The first appearance of Alchemical Exalted, in Time of Tumult, had the Seal already breached, with mysterious "Locust Crusaders" scouring Creation for natural resources, like some sort of setup for a long-term epic fantasy arc. In second edition, they pushed that back a bit, putting the starting point at a time when breaching the Seal was imminent due to a rapidly-progressing ecological crisis. And third edition, in characteristic 3rd edition style, pushed it back even further, so that it's mentioned as possible, but no one is currently trying to do it, because there's no specific crisis that would demand such extreme measures (there are challenges, which if you were inclined to read into them, might eventually escalate into the 1e/2e plots, but which are presented as being at worst at the outer edges of Autochthonia's routine dangers).
On the one hand, this new steady-state Autochthonia has the advantage of presenting the Alchemicals and their world in way that's well suited to pure Alchemical games of indefinite duration. Authochthonia doesn't need Creation to be interesting. On the other hand, the name of the game is Exalted. It wasn't a weakness of the 1st and 2nd edition presentations that the fate of Autochthonia was tied to the fate of Creation, it was actually the main reason we were even in a position to care about this world.
Alchemicals: Forged by the Machine God is a fine book, and I enjoyed reading it, but "A new fantasy game by the makers of Exalted" isn't exactly something I need or want from an Exalted supplement, even if it does technically share a continuity with the main line. Now, obviously, this is all stuff I can backport in, using material from prior editions and my own imagination, but I do have to count its absence as a weakness. "Not needing to integrate with rest of the setting" is also, in some ways, "not being able to integrate with the rest of the setting" and if the book is not giving us officially sanctioned advice on how to do it, I really have to question who the book is for?
So to sum up - I found this book to be alternately brilliantly inventive and excruciatingly dry, mushy on genre, but with powerful vibes. It's a little worrying that it seems to be a book directed at the most insular and niche of the game's hardcore fans, but I have to concede that a large portion of that worry is simply me suspecting that the line as a whole has lost the ability to connect with a new audience and is slowly trailing off into being a living museum for legacy fans. Of course, as one of those legacy fans, I'm delighted with the book itself, but my imagination falters at the prospect of introducing this world and these characters to Exalted newbies. If you're on the fence about it, don't let my ambivalence dissuade you. If you are at all in a position to know what this book is or why you should care about it, then you won't be disappointed by it.
(Or maybe you will, I don't know your life, but I can say that you won't be disappointed by it for any reason that doesn't also apply to Exalted 3rd Edition as a whole).
Ukss Contribuiton: Fuck it - giant, culinary-grade cockroaches. They're a delicacy because they're one of only a handful of natural proteins to migrate to this environment where the only native sustenance is chemically-enhanced nutrient paste.
