CaptainChewbacca wrote:A friend of mine is big into it, and I like any RPG where I'm not the DM. I made a character; An eclipse-caste Solar who is a 'pirate king'. My only virtues are Valor and Conviction, since I'm a hedonist pirate (I exalted after capturing a treasure fleet while drunk and without pants, on a dare). I've maxed out Throwing, Dexterity, Dodge, and Sailing, and for backround I've got guild backing and a shitload of contacts/allies.
I didn't get Exalted at first, but my brother explained it to me thus; In exalted, the character you start with is already a level-20 D&D character.
Any advice/suggestions on things to do or avoid doing as I go about trying to become the pirate king of the Threshold?
Exalted is sorta like, if D&D is dudes hitting eachother with swords, "Robots vs. Ninja at the beginning of time" or whatever- It's basically the 300 RPG in terms of epicness. The world is literally the size of the earth, with no punches pulled on travelling time or scale. Oh, and it's approximately >50% water which gives it much more surface area.
Quick rundown on ancient ancient history since you said you don't get Exalted. Avoiding the mistakes of past empires is what you need to do- Exalts can build empires, but keeping them standing is harder:
There's formless chaos, right, called the Wyld. Beings, really actually more shapes and ideals called Fey or Fair Folk live there. Some of them get really really high and become the idea of Order or whatever. So that's bad. Cause they're living in Chaos.
So these Fair Folk, calling themselves the Primordials, literally build the universe inside the Chaos. The other Fair Folk are understandably pissed, because reality and laws of nature are deadly to most of the fair folk who can't survive in a universe like that (ignoring the fact they could keep their infinite space of chaos and let the primordials have their own finite chunk of reality, because the fair folk are assholes).
The primordials win, because they're on the defensive inside a fortification (the universe) that the enemy can't attack any more than you or I could swim in magma.
The primordials start to play the games of divinity, which is something mysterious gods do. Nobody knows. Probably not even the designers. Except two, Gaia and Autochthon (aka Autobot, since that name is hard to say and spell).
Now, the Primordials sorta let their world go to shit, so they make Gods and beings to take care of it, and institute a rule of reincarnation for them so that if Gods die their portfolios and powers sorta pass on (there is a god/spirit of everything, from Pratchett style small gods for a boat to gods of blood or cattle or freedom or whatever) and so that the souls of men keep coming back. Wait, on that men thing, see the next paragraph.
The Gods do their housekeeping, and the world runs smoothly. Men at this time are stone age slaves kept in reservations and living at the edges of the technologically advanced Dragon King empire. The Dragon Kings are dinosaurs. Yeah. Anthropomorphic lizards or whatnot. Underground, the Jadeborn, basically animated rock dudes caused by the fact that some Fey Folk got trapped in the Imperial Mountain (The... 600 mile, IIRC, tall mountain at the center of the world) when it sprung into being. They basically are high tech dudes too. Humanity meanwhile hasn't invented metal.
The Gods get kinda bored, though, because janitor work can only be so exciting. So they plan a rebellion. Which is hard, because they've sworn by the very fabric of reality not to fuck with the Primordials or their plans, and not to have any Dragon King or Jade Born or Fey Folk be given aid to do so.
But then the Unconquered Sun, Sol Invictus, notices the little mammal dudes. And he gets this crazy idea. He goes to the rest of the gods and says "Let's give massive powers to mankind, so great that they can beat the shit out of our overlords."
And strangely enough, everyone agrees. Because that's seriously the best plan they've got. Gaia is there too, betraying her kin, because she is the consort of Luna, the second most powerful god. Autobot is there too because the Primordials laugh at the crippled titan of artisanry and don't let him build as much stuff. Autobot and Gaia intercede, making the Jadeborn and Dragon Kings, their respective "children", not use their technomagical might against the rebellion (they basically have nuclear weapons, airborn battleships, artillery, guns, everything in parity or better than the modern day).
The Sun gives 300 dudes the power of the Sun, making them kickass at everything. They become god-kings and generals.
The Moon gives 300 dudes the power of the Moon, making them slightly less kickass beings who walk the line between formlessness and order. They basically become shapeshifting barbarians.
The Five Maidens (Mercury: Journeys, Venus: Serenity, Mars: Battle, Jupiter: Endings, Saturn: Secrets) each give 200 dudes the power over fate. They become ninja. The Sidereals are basically kung-fu fate-editing ninja.
The 5 Elemental Dragons, subsouls (gods are like computers, they have subprocesses and individual divisions) of Gaia, are smarter and enchant 10 virile men and 9,990 women and have massive orgies for a while. In the preparation stage of the rebellion, while the thousand or so kickass beings are drilling and learning magical warfare and shit, the 10,000 multiply and become the Terrestrial Exalted, basically the cannon fodder in the war of the gods, immensely superior to a mortal but incomparably weak compared to a full blown exalt of the other types.
The rebellion goes down. Since men reincarnate, the Exalted are like Persian Immortals and never really die, even if their memories get mostly wiped and their skills reset every time they die. They kill half the primordials. The other primordials, seeing the writing on the wall, surrender.
The victorious Sun-God laughs and declares they're all to be put to death. As the primordial gods (sans 2 traitors) prepare to fight their last battle, Gaia shows up and intercedes (probably because her twin/lover is one of them), pointing out that this sets a bad precedent and is sorta wrong. So the Primordials are instead given a subsection of reality built out the body of one of their own, Malfeas, just like the world is built from Gaia.
The Primordials are made to swear on their Names (which are in fact gigantic epic poems, in abbreviated forms still being the size of buildings, that describe them utterly, and swearing on them rewrites those books) an oath to never thwart the Gods or attempt to reclaim reality from the Sun or whatnot.
This oath is not very ironclad, since the Primordials have tens upon tens upon tens of thousands of years to sit there and play lawyer with it. They become Yozi, and their subsouls and subsouls of those subsouls Demons, as they sit in anger and impotent rage in a hell of their own devising. They could live peacefully if they would put down their vendetta, but can't because they're too damn pissed that the world escaped them.
But for the First Age, this oath basically works.
The Solar Deliberative is set up, with the Solars changing from Generals to God-Kings and the Lunars from Barbarian Warlords into the consorts of the God-Kings. The Sidereals change from Ninja to Bureaucratic Ninja. The countless Terrestrial Exalted become Bureaucrats, Soldiers, etc.
Everything runs totally smoothly. Kinda.
See, the dead Primordials are a bit of a problem. Killing a primordial is against the laws of nature, it shouldn't be possible. The dead corpses of the primordials sink into their own negative pits, the Underworld, where their gravity attracts souls that should go into Lethe to be reincarnated. Those are undead and ghosts. The dead Primordials are not quite dead but not quite alive, since they
can't die since they're not living beings as we know them. They want to return everything to oblivion out of spite since it they can't rule the world, they don't want anyone, Yozi or God, ruling it. 13 Solars, who don't want to die and forget their memories, become their Champions the Deathlords by accepting the power of oblivion in exchange for anihiliating everything. They basically get the part of the bargain "You die last", Cthulhu style.
The bureaucracy still kinda works. Except it doesn't. The Primordials, as they were banished or killed, cursed the Gods using their power. They basically implanted character flaws in the Exalts-
Solars- Overexaggerated Emotions
Lunars- Rage?
Sidereals- Hubris
Terrestrials- I forget.
Oh right, before I forget, the first act of the Solar God Kings is to literally call on the gods to make a magical nuclear first strike against the Jadeborn. The Dragon Kings were pwned in the war and rendered basically extinct, their civilization crushed, but the Jadeborn sit safely underground, greater than even mankind. And the Solars can't have that, because Darwin says there can only be one, highlander style.
So Autobot is pissed and gets his panties in a wad and leaves, building his own universe of steampunk and metal and taking it sailing away.
Anyway, the Solar Deliberative is corrupt and such. The Sidereals see this, and make a grand prophecy:
They have three options:
1) Do nothing- the world is unmade by the solars being pricks.
2) Tell the Solars to stop being pricks- The world is about 95% likely to be unmade.
3) Kill every Solar in a surprise massacre/assault- The world will survive but it'll totally suck compared to the glory of the current age.
They choose 3, unaware that their own Hubris (or arrogantly ignoring it) may make their options not the only options or inaccurate.
The Dragon-Blooded and their Sidereal puppeteers rise up and kill 90% of the Solars in a single night of long knives at a huge festival for what's their equivalent of the turn of the millenium (or billenium, since they live way longer).
The other Solars are hunted down and killed, and the Lunars retreat into the bordermarches of the Wyld to avoid dying.
The Shogunate, a Dragon-Blooded solar deliberative is set up, and it creates a magical prison to keep the souls of the Solars from getting back in. The cage is a bit leaky, so they have to go kill a few every now and then, but it mostly works.
But since the Dragon-Blooded are sucky, they can't control an empire the size of the world.
The Second Age would have gone on smoothly had the Underworld not delivered a huge plague at this time, trying to kill everything and make it more Oblivion-like. The plague kills 9 out of every 10 people.
At the same time, the Fair Folk who live closest to reality, the Raksha, as they are known by their more pure chaotic bretheren who hate them, launch a crusade to chaoticize reality and remove the natural order that pains them so much. The world shrinks as its borders are consumed by chaos. About 1/3 of the world or so by surface area gets subsumed.
The entire world was going to end, except a woman named the Scarlet Empress, who basically makes Alexander the Great and Leonardo Da Vinci together look like bad statesmen, conquerors, and geniuses, manages to enter the Imperial Manse, the NORAD control room for all the awesome guns and defense outposts the Solars made.
Only she survives the traps and other bad stuff in there (or perhaps she killed or sacrificed her comrades to get through) but she engages the main cannons and guns and stuff and pwnts the Fair Folk, in the process the gun (lacking fine control it used to enjoy) causes earthquakes that ravage the world. The Fair Folk are repulsed, but the Empress' new empire can only encompass the Blessed Island at the center of the world (appx. 25% world surface area) if she doesn't want to richtor scale it repeatedly to lay down nuclear explosive level pwnage.
Okay, so the Shogunate is sorta subsumed, and the states around the blessed empire are made into tributaries, roman style. Except Lookshy, which is founded by the technologically advanced (for the time) Seventh Legion who refuses to surrender and basically sits there taunting her right beyond the safe range of her magical doomsday gun. That's the origin of why the River Province/Threshold is so Balkanized and unimperial.
You should know the modern story- The scarlet empress dissappears at the exact same time the box that holds the solar souls springs a huge leak. Half the souls are gobbled up by the Yozis and the Neverborn Primordials (who split it 33/66) for use in the Abyssal Exalted for the Underworld and god knows what the Yozis plan, but half return to reality normally. Ass kicking revolutionary stuff occurs.
If by Pirate King you mean a badass pirate like Blackbeard you're thinking too small, that can be done easily. If you mean king who is a pirate too then so what you need to do is pull a Scarlet Empress. Train some troops- you need a big army. Solars can be charismatic, find a good face person who can hypnotise imperial loyalists just by looking at them into being fanatics for you. Get a solar or some other exalt whose specialty is training and/or artifact forging and crank out weaponry and armour for your elite troops.
Odds are, even if there aren't 5 players, you'll get 5 solars including yourself who make up your core group. Try to get these 5 archetypes for a good empire builder.
1: Kickass General/Warrior (Exalted leaders lead from the front), probably you
2: Charismatic Diplomat/Preacher to expand the cause.
3: Artisan/Magic-User to crank out useful stuff. When your troops have replicas of ancient armour and swords that slice through steel like butter, they beat guys with regular chainmail and spears.
4: One guy who in addition to whatever he does needs to be the support mage. Healing and CANT STRESS ENOUGH War-related training charms like Tiger Warrior Training. This will let you produce troops awesometastic enough to make the Freehold Operatives look unwanked.
5: Go crazy, I can't think of anything else you need to conquer the world.
Play powers off eachother and harrass the Imperials enough to provoke a small response you can defeat Bull of the North style to prove your awesomeness, unite the Threshhold by diplomacy and warfare, and then go to town reforming the world.
Exalted at its high levels, Solar Campaigns, is meant to be a game where at the end you literally can reform the entire structure of the heavens and reality. Think it's unfair that gods and exalts rule over mankind? Fix it. Think the Solar Deliberative at the beginning was really good except for the Great Curse of the Primordials? Fix it.
Solars are basically invincible warlords and god-kings. Go forth do some public works for a city to make it loyal to you, use your godly powers to make it own its rivals in the face, and let it all snowball up into a world power.
After all, you're gonna live for 5,000 years. You can afford to play politics over generations and take it slow, unlike D&D characters.
Be Che Guevera. That'd be cool. Become a really popular figure- heal the sick, fight for the common man, etc. Communist Solar Pirate would be hillarious.
