Back and Forth on Creation is Burning.

Good heavens! November already – how the time flies. I beg you to forgive the unusual gap in my performance, and to please believe that the following has lingered in draft form for many a week. And thus, I begin:

Permit me to take this opportunity to winge about Exalted. This is not without purpose! I winge, dear reader, for Great Justice, and because it is a lead-in to today's commentary/rant.

I may have said (and if I have, I do beg your forgiveness) that Exalted was (and is) one of the best games out there. The sprawling, go-anywhere setting, the East-meets-West fusion, the juicy Campbellian archetypes of the titanomachia, of empires gone wrong...

But the system, frankly, sucks. And with the recent second edition, hard as it may be to believe, the system sucks worse. I know – I too thought new editions were made for the purposes of de-sucking an established work. The corebook is clean, I'll grant you that: but the surfeit of oddness (ranging from cut/paste errors in Charm structure) to what, to an outsider, resembles peenar-waving "LOLZ mah Xalts beter than urs" style power-creep makes the many sourcebooks a) bad investments and b) physically painful to read. The exception is the second edition Lunars book: you may take your old Lunars book and line birdcages with it, and it will probably be of slightly greater use.

So what to do about all this system-suckery? My hypothesis is this: if you take a great system (with a tightly-written yet somewhat run-of-the-mill setting) and inoculate it with a superb setting (where the system is, for my purposes, irretrievably broken) awesomeness will precipitate out on to the gaming table. Thus, "Creation is Burning," which will either imminentize the Eschaton or cause said awesomeness to crystallize out of solution, drifting down like manna to obscure our character sheets.

To that end, permit me to introduce Dr. Odie, to whom all credit is due for his command of Burning Wheel and Exalted: and whose laser-sharp focus and insights of crystalline precision drive the few and blurry thoughts I have about this system-conversion experiment. A draft of Creation is Burning made its way to him, and he responded with a thoughtful critique some several hundred words longer than the original document.

Rather than pour innumerable hours into an attempt to fix each Charm and balance it against the others through a thorough conversion -- an attempt which I suspect would be doomed to futility before it began -- my answer is to devise a system whereby one can reproduce the awesome might of the Exalted without bogging the (already very complex) Burning Wheel rules down with a 400-page book for each Exalt type. Obviously, creating such an approximation involves a certain degree of subjectivity; just as two games of Exalted from two different groups will almost certainly vary wildly on their scope and power level (Essence-5 Solars vs. Dragon Kings in Rathess), asking two different gaming groups "what makes Exalted, Exalted?" will yield vastly different responses. I disagree with the groups who use Wushu or similarly light rules for their Exalted conversions, leaving most if not all variations of Charm and technique to flavor text or simple narration; I desire my games to have more mechanical weight than mere ephemera. Yet it also seems that a Charm-to-Charm, 1:1 conversion of every mechanic in Exalted misses the point as well. If that were our intent, why not simply revise the Exalted rule and Charm set to a more balanced and pleasing version, and perhaps port over the BITs from Burning Wheel -- in effect, a conversion not of Exalted to Burning Wheel, but vice versa? While you're free to undertake such a Herculean task yourself, my interest lies in finding the middle ground between those two extremes.

An incredibly salient point: I admit to the geeky adrenaline-rush instinctive "convert every Exalted charm to Burning Wheel" initial effort, but the good Dr. Odie's near-Socratic dialogue put the brakes on that.

With Burning Wheel's strong focus on Beliefs and Instincts as player priorities, I really don't know that Exalted's Virtues are required. One Belief and Instinct devoted to each would surely be enough; if you want a Compassionate character, a Belief (that, as a bonus, ties into the story at hand!) and an Instinct like "Always help the helpless" would be more than enough to get you in trouble. Limit Break, though. Not sure how we'd want to do that. Not sure at all, actually. An obvious one is that every time you don't follow an Instinct (or maybe a Belief, as well), you rack up points toward Limit, but what does a Limit Break entail? This bears further pondering.

My response:

I recognize that BW offers up a buffet of emotional meatiness with BITs. And perhaps a set of Virtue traits is gilding the lily, but it seemed appropriate, given the emphasis on Virtues, and craziness, and the Great Curse... I was strongly influenced by Blossom's Honor/Shame mechanics, though I would certainly not suggest seppuku if a character's Valor exceeded his Temperance. But that balancing act was the root of how I initially envisioned the Great Curse: if you go into Virtue imbalance, you start to suffer the Curse -- when your Compassion is at 6 and everything else is a 3, you get a bit wonky, and start giving away all your gear to the poor -- or you decide to euthanize a nation to end its suffering peacefully and without pain. How this interacts with Limit, eh. I'm not sure. In my foggy initial concept Limit was less important than virtue imbalance...

Maybe just having Virtues reflected in BITs is a better idea after all. Or, just picking up Virtue die traits! They could give you a little bennie, like channeling virtues in E(X)E -- and if your fellow players thought you weren't displaying the appropriate level of Compassion, Valor, etc. then Bam! Off it goes. If you're displaying more, then Bam! You get another one. Maybe suggest characters pick two Virtue traits from, I dunno, 3 or 4 example traits per Virtue. Like: Bravado (Valor) Dt Being outnumbered is nothing -- when the deck is stacked against you, that's when you shine. +1D to all Steel and combat rolls when clearly outnumbered. Advocate (Compassion) Dt You speak for those whom society has silenced. +2S to your Body of Argument in any Duel of Wits when defending or promoting the interests of a disadvantaged social group (slaves, the poor, etc.). So it's kind of like you're automatically channeling the virtue, whenever appropriate.

The jury is still out on that. I must say, though, that after having read the Magic Burner I am sold on using Practical Magic as the basis for Excellencies in CiB, per Dr. Odie's suggestion:

Having had the time to go over the Magic Burner, I note that there's a magic system called "Practical Magic" wherein magic is common and low-key; rather than mighty wizards knowing the spells to end all life, everybody knows a little bit. All doctors know charms to knit bones together and encourage flesh to mend, lawyers and magistrates know minor geas spells, et cetera. The result is that the Sorcery skill becomes highly available, with the caveat that you must purchase (or learn in-game) the ability to use it separately for each skill category. Swap "Sorcery" for "Charms" and you have exactly how I proposed we divide Charm use up (that is, along the broader skill categories). Therefore, I'm inclined to run with that as our base for Charms. First Martial Excellency, Third Social Excellency, Second Crafting Excellency, and so on.

An emphasis of the Exalted game as published is that the character's Virtues (to wit: Valor, Compassion, Conviction, and Temperance) carry an ancient curse, laid down at the close of the titanomachia, when the gods and their Exalted comrades sealed the surviving Primordials in a prison of their own flesh and oaths. The thrust of the curse was that these virtues would incur wicked, foolish, arrogant behavior – that they would carry the Exalts to ill ends through a sort of reductio ad absurdum process. An incredibly Valorous Exalt would be driven to greater and greater deeds of might, challenging mythic beasts, fellow Exalts, and perhaps even the gods in a quest for a worthy opponent. A supernally Compassionate Exalt might choose to euthanize an entire nation to ease their pain, or be driven to destroy death. Yes, Exalted thinks big. The next (or a next, anyway) task is to see where these Virtues fit into CiB. The good Dr. Odie says:

Certainly what will most strongly determine the preferred route for Virtues is what we want to happen for (or in lieu of) Limit Break. If you want to pursue the idea of Virtue imbalance causing trouble, then it makes sense to track each Virtue as its own attribute. If you are more concerned with Limit as originally conceived -- a track that builds up and builds up and then blows up, taking your character's sanity with it -- it makes more sense to focus on tracking Limit, and increment the counter whenever players betray character Beliefs or suppress Instincts. I'm not sure where I think the best course lies. I do know that Burning Wheel very rarely takes character control away from the player totally, and so I'm hesitant to ascribe any compulsions in either form (via Limit Break or through Virtue imbalance). I really like your Virtue die trait idea, though.

With allies such as this in my quest for gaming greatness, how can I fail?

Dr. Madu

Exalted: City of Darkness fluff

If a place that's composed of equal parts Blade Runner and Crouching Tiger can have fluffy bits, that is. Calling it "E:CoD Chunks of Shattered Concrete and Rusted Iron, With Supernatural Kung Fu, Gods in VR, and Beamklaves" is a touch unwieldy (if accurate). Anyway –

Jina Liao knew she was in trouble when the Dragon somewhere in the wreckage behind her began to chuckle. The speaker of of his black-jade armored suit stripped all evidence of humanity from the noise – just a mechanical, grating ‘heh-heh-heh,’ amplified to a volume that shook dust from the leaning concrete pillars of the ancient garage.

Jina was the leader of a ratgang. That was the Dragons’ name for people who refused their offer of safety and security, the so-called “survivor civilization.” The Dragons made deals with spirits of electricity and information, and set themselves up as neofeudal lords in the City’s ruin. The Dragon chasing her now was Cathak Hrond – a sadistic enforcer-prince for the Cathak family.

He was hunting, a pastime for many bored and cruel Dragons. With their Essence-optics they’d pick out a likely ratganger, either kill his companions or drive them off, and then chase him through the underbelly of the City. Typically the pursuit was incredibly one-sided, the ratganger armed with a length of pipe, a shiv, her wits, and a zipgun; the Dragon armed with a Essence-fueled coilgun or flamethrower, and clad in powered jade-alloy armor, guided by spirit-AIs and navigation software.

But Jina was a quarry of a different kind. She ran a ratgang, which made her a force to be reckoned with. She knew the alleys and rooftops of Sector 81 like she knew her own breath and heartbeat. When the Cathak gave chase, lighting her path with blasts from a heavy beam cannon, she nearly lost him in the Railyard Jungle. She swam the length of the Scumpond underwater, hoping to confuse his Essence-sensors. She leapt from balcony to balcony at the Old Hotel, crossing three-meter gaps twenty stories up, to no avail. He hounded her relentlessly, dogging her steps, taunting her through the helmet speaker. “Run, girlie, run! It’s more fun that way!”

Sadistic bastard.

She was sure she had him caught at the Pillar Farm. Once there had been some kind of enormous skeletal concrete structure – a skytower, an airpark, maybe a powerbeam station. But at some point in the City’s past – after the Fall, presumably – the tower had overbalanced and come crashing down, leaving a tangled mass of twisted rebar, pillar-stumps, and pulverized concrete. It was a deathtrap, and ratgangs throughout 81 lost kids and scouts there, two or three a season. Jina figured if there was anywhere in Sector 81 that an armored Dragon could be crushed to a paste, the Pillar Farm was the place.

She was mistaken.

Her cable-tripwire was flawless, placed at the bottom of a looming snarl of snapped-off columns. It looked stable, but when the tripwire went ten tons of debris would roll down in a gathering avalanche. Hrond was following the heat-prints her bare feet left on the gritty pavement – and when he blundered into the cable, invisible at ambient temperature, the grinding roar of tumbling concrete sent Jina into a brief euphoria.

That changed when the first column rose from the pile, supported by a gleaming black jade arm. Hrond gave the shattered concrete pillar a contemptuous power-assisted shove and stood, the servos in his legs yowling as a load of debris spilled from the powersuit’s shoulder plates. “Nice try,” grated the speaker, and the beam cannon came up as Jina turned and ran. A blue-white flash of light accompanied a hisssCRACK as concrete exploded in white sparking tracers of burning lime – and Jina was off, sprinting for cover. Hrond thumbed the beam output toggle to “constant” and twisted the collimator-choke down to a pinhole as he tracked the fleeing ratganger by her heat signature. With a cold smile, the Cathak leveled the beamrifle and watched as the targeting AI settled the crosshairs on the girl’s back. Inhale… exhale… aim… squeeze— the beamrifle spat a searing thread of energy that should have sliced the girl into smoking slabs. But when the Cathak’s flash-compensating filter cleared his visor, all he saw was a red-hot worm-track scribbled across a teetering concrete wall, his missed target written large. No corpse, no girl. With an amplified growl, he kicked his way out of the tangled pillars and stomped up to where the girl had been. A pit yawned at his feet. “Suit, enhance to normal light,” ordered the Water-dragon, and the power armor’s spirit obliged by amplifying the dim and grey ambient to a level like that of a bright day. Colors were washed out into pale suggestions, and the image was grainy and restless – but clearly the girl had stepped on a weak spot and fallen through.

Hrond scowled at the thought of his hunt being cut short. “Suit! Audio enhance,” he commanded, and leaned down at the edge of the gap. As he listened, he gave the hole a brief visual inspection. A maintenance hatch, perhaps; the tags of rusted hinges jutted from the edge. One was beaded with fresh blood. Interesting. A tentative scuffle came through Hrond’s helmet speakers, analyzed and noise-filtered, and unmistakably a footfall. With a tiger’s grin the Cathak stepped back, adjusting the beam rifle’s output to “burst” and the collimator to “wide-angle:” then he lowered the business end of his weapon into the gap, leaned away, and pulled the trigger. WHAM WHAM WHAM WHAM WHAM! The Essence-driven weapon loosed five blasts, each with the force of a grenade in the enclosed space, before a telltale winked in Hrond’s visor. The weapon was spent.

Jina hardly had time to recognize her good fortune as the rusted hatch gave way beneath her feet. She fell, fetching up against a jagged spur of metal with a stifled cry as the air burned above her. Despite the pain, instinct bent Jina’s knees to accept the shock of landing, and when her feet hit concrete after a surprisingly long fall, she rolled with it and ended up sprawled at the base of a wall. Her head rang with the impact, and the darkness was near-absolute. She wasted a few precious seconds trying to decide if she was dead, alive, injured, stunned – the dim grey square of light above her was suddenly occluded, and ratgang instinct threw her into silent, scuttling motion. Her hands were thrust out, one high and one low, to detect or deflect obstacles. She struck something cold, smooth and unyielding: a metal door set into the wall. Her fingers brushed a box bulging from the doorframe: at her touch it lit dimly with golden numerals. Some mad impulse seized her then, and as Hrond lowered his weapon into the darkness, barrel glowing with its priming charge, Jina tapped 5 random numbers into the pad. No one was more surprised than she when the door slid silently open. Not one to question great fortune, she dived though just as the chamber behind her exploded with Essence-fire.

OMGZORZ DOES SHE EXALT?

Yes, she does. When I have that bit o' fluff written it will probably go up here as well.

In the meantime, I offer the following sage advice to all dwellers in the City of Darkness:

Stay alert! Trust no one! And keep your laser daiklave handy!

– Dr. Madu

As if I don't have enough irons in the fire.

Or test-tubes over the Bunsen burner. Maybe that's a better metaphor.

In the works (running in parallel with Creation is Burning) is Exalted: City of Darkness, which is an alternate-universe take on Creation. Imagine the guy who says "In a world..." at the beginning of the movie trailer. Now, say it with me:

"In a world... where the Primordials failed to hold back the creeping tides of Chaos. Where Autochthon's last desperate act to save Creation was to merge his Primordial essence with Mount Meru, the very axis upon which all the world spins. Where there once was a Blessed Isle... there is now the City of Darkness."

(cue Matrix music)

This is a kitchen-sink setting for a game line that lives and dies by kitchen-sink settings. The idea being that the Primordials' ability to spin order out of chaos was overmatched by Chaos's ability to go beyond order (or something like that). As Creation withered away, the Most Mighty and Ancients retreated to the Blessed Isle, and there made their last stand. In an effort to fortify the place, Authocthon merged himself with the Earth pole – and amazingly, his gambit succeeded... but at a price. As the Builder's spirito-mechanical soul merged with the land, nearly all facets of the landscape became reflections of his technological nature. Cart paths became maglev tracks: trees became utility poles. In one swift "Oh shit, we've converted the planet to stable strangelets" moment all of Creation that remained had changed. Where once stood grandiloquent Manses were now harsh-edged arcologies of stone and steel. In Mount Meru's place stood Authocthon's immanent Core, a megalopolis of sky-piercing crystalline towers. On the shores of the Blessed Isle sprouted adamantine walls, grim and grey and glassine.

And then the normal Exalted history we know and love/hate/ignore takes over from there. At its cold, cybernetic heart, Exalted: City of Darkness is but an excuse to get all the Exalt types under one roof, in the same game, with moonsilver sniper rifles and orichalcum hovercycles.

Also, there's a detective story in the works, tentatively titled Monkey. I am sorry to report it has nothing to do at all with real monkeys.

Ook ook!

Dr. Madu

Edited to add: "That movie trailer guy" mentioned in the link above is the inimitable Don LaFontaine, who died Monday, 01 September 2008.  It's the passing of a voice without a face.  I will miss you, Don.

"In a world... where voiceovers are not what they once were."