The Exalted 3 Kickstarter Is Up!

[QUOTE="The Dark Wizard]Who here has immediate plans to run a 3E game after it comes out?

[/QUOTE]I do. I've been brainstorming with my group for a game. Based on everything we're hearing about EX3, we are really excited about it.
 
Darkon said:
I do. I've been brainstorming with my group for a game. Based on everything we're hearing about EX3, we are really excited about it.
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Same :) !


Also welcome back to the site :P .
 
[QUOTE="The Dark Wizard]Same :) !
Also welcome back to the site :P .

[/QUOTE]Thanks! I like what's been done to the place :)
 
Millershipper said:
I am such a sap. I backed this to get the pdf. *sigh*
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Like they said in kickstarter comments section a while ago. "There is no small pledge every penny counts." (Also considering that we will get pdf like instantly and probably will wait for book a couple of weeks it is a valid goal IMHO)
 
Here, have a look at this:

Fiction Preview Note: This is a working draft and subject to change before publication.
The following fiction is scheduled to appear in the Exalted Third Edition corebook, one of a small number of larger fiction pieces designed to illustrate the setting.


The farming village was nestled at the end of a fertile valley, water-fed and cradled by two mighty mountains. It had been 768 years since the Scarlet Empress threw back the Wyld hosts, and now they had returned, marching their unreal armies through the mountains and scouring the valleys one by one. The Realm had withdrawn from the region the year before, first recalling its soldiers, and then the Immaculate missionaries; when the tax-man failed to appear to demand the dragon’s share of their harvest, the farmers knew for certain they had been abandoned. The village lay open and defenseless, ripe for the taking.


Janest paused for a moment at the top of the great high hill above the town, peering back down the way she’d come. The sun had set an hour ago, and she could see a vast and sprawling constellation of unearthly lights spread across the valley, rivaling the stars above in number and majesty—the camps of the Fair Folk. They would be upon the village with the dawn.


The field-maiden set her back on the sight, regarded the shrine ahead of her. It was a simple thing, built of deeply-polished wood, framed beneath a red-painted torii. One of the High Reavers had come and drawn her away from her preparations that afternoon, where she drilled with her field-sisters. Like the rest of the field-maidens, Janest had been taken as an infant in a raid on a settlement in a neighboring valley, and raised by the High Reavers—priests, augurs, and judges who watched the weather, proclaimed the first day of planting and the first day of reap, and spoke the will of the harvest god. She had grown up in the town, tilling the soil and working the fields, and training also to defend them. They were simple farm-folk, and so trained with the weapons of their trade: threshing-flails, pitchforks, winnowing-fans…Janest herself favored the scythe.


Ten Sheaves demanded her presence, she had been told.


“I can’t go,” Janest had said, glancing back to her sisters, “I have to make ready to defend the town.”


“The god says that your presence is necessary if we are to be saved,” the High Reaver had replied. And so the field-maiden had made the long climb up to the shrine.


Janest stepped forward, placing a hand upon the ancient wood of the torii. It tingled beneath her fingertips. The harvest god had lived up on the hill for as long as anyone could remember, and they had always honored him according to the calendar demanded by the Immaculates—and given him extra worship as well in the lean years, hiding their prayers and libations from traveling monks. But Janest had never seen the god with her own eyes, and couldn’t think of why he might want to see a simple field-maiden on the eve of the town’s annihilation.


She stepped through the torii with the sensation of crossing some subtle boundary, like passing through a shaft of sunlight or a stream of water. Golden wheat surrounded her now, stretching on and on in rambling rows. The sky overhead was a pure and perfect black, scattered with bright, unfamiliar stars that gleamed like winter ice. She looked back, and saw no torii, no hill: the rows wound away in every direction.


A voice spoke from her right, deep, crackling like breaking stalks: “Janest. Walk with me.”


Janest glanced toward the voice by reflex and caught a glimpse of a silhouette in another row, a figure with hair like straw and hemp-woven sleeves—she quickly pulled her gaze away. The High Reaver had instructed her to keep her eyes averted unless the god bid her otherwise, and so she did. Ten Sheaves began to walk, and Janest fell into step alongside—the god in his row, the field-maiden in hers.


The rich smell of growing things surrounded them as they walked; from time to time a cold wind would blow through the rows, a reaping-wind, and Janest would shiver. Presently, Ten Sheaves began to speak: He spoke of a long life overlooking the fertile valley and the farms beneath, watching the Ages unfold in extravagance and poverty, describing times and people Janest could scarcely imagine; he spoke of the Games of Divinity and how the sky of Heaven turned by their listings, and though Janest knew not of these games, she could hear the wonder and longing in the god’s voice; he spoke of the Exigence, a divine fire, a miracle even to the gods, handed down from On High that the gods might raise champions and protectors; he spoke of what it meant to be a god and to believe in justice in an age of the unjust. “Long ago,” Ten Sheaves said, “there were great champions, men and women of profound might, who carried the fire through the pitch. But when they left they took the light of the world with them.”


Janest cleared her throat, spoke for the first time since she had arrived. “What happened to them, these champions?”


“They were struck down,” the god said, “butchered, bound away. The world was eroded in their absence—even the fires of the Exigence guttered. Now they have returned, they walk the world again, but they have come too late, too late for me. Look.” She felt more than saw a hand pointing to the horizon. Janest looked.


The field-maiden realized she could see something dreaming upon the limits of the horizon—a great gleaming edifice of lights. She had the impression of towers, and heart-breaking beauty. “That is the Celestial City of Yu-Shan, which men and gods alike know as Heaven,” the little god said. “I have never walked its streets, and now I never will; perhaps you might, one day. For now, we can stand here, and look upon its lights.”


Unschooled in how to properly address divinity, Janest hesitated, then asked: “God of the harvest, why have you called for me?”


Ten Sheaves gave back a question of his own: “Have you any relatives of blood in the valley?”


“No,” Janest said. She realized the god was farther away, had slipped back to a more distant row at some point, though he sounded as close as ever.


“Yet it is not yourself you fear for.”


Janest’s jaw worked. She wasn’t normally a woman of words, and seldom explained herself. “The people of the village… they’re still my family, it doesn’t take blood. I want to protect them.”


“A field-maiden’s duty?” the god asked.


It was, but… Janest shook her head. “The people and the land together are my kin; separate, they’re not themselves. They’re precious to me. Without them, I am lost.”


Ten Sheaves seemed satisfied. “Field-maiden Janest. I have prayed to the Most High, and he has approved my petition. You are to become Exalted—my champion, my Chosen—and the salvation of your people. If you live, perhaps the salvation of much more.”


Janest stared ahead, eyes wide and focused on the row ahead as she spoke into the wind the way a blind woman might. She felt blind. It was a new terror, the fear of not knowing the way. “Ten Sheaves—I’m—I’m not the best fighter among the field-maidens, Amalon with her threshing-flail—”


“You fight well enough. Strength of arm is common in this age,” Ten Sheaves said, “and not the strength I desire.” A pause. “I am a god, Janest, but I am small among the ranks of immortals. When I call upon the divine flame, its price will be my consumption.” The night-sounds of the spirit field faded away—the crickets, the sigh of the wind—and it became very quiet. “There’s no other way. Come the dawn, the Fair Folk will erase this place if not stopped. This is my final day either way.”


Janest got the sense that the god was looking again at the distant lights of Heaven—at the streets he would never walk and the towers he would never climb. “I’m sorry,” she said, and though she had only today met the god on the hill, she meant it.


“It’s a strange thing,” Ten Sheaves said, “to die. It’s a strange thing for immortality to end, and to go into the darkness.” Janest could no longer see the god when she looked into the rows, he was receding, receding. “I will not come again, but is the wheat truly gone when it spills its kernel upon the ground? This is a wicked age; as my final act, I would sow it with hope. Turn toward the lights of Heaven, Janest, and walk. The Unconquered Sun stands prominent in the Games of Divinity; let his fire guide you.”


The field-maiden lingered a moment, searching for any sign of Ten Sheaves, but the god was gone. She turned and advanced into the rows as he bid. There was darkness for a time, and she felt fear, but she could see the sun rising through the stalks. It was the sign of a god whose name she had never heard until now—but hadn’t she known him all along, toiling under his gaze and thanking him for the life that sprang from the fields? In the sense that the light was familiar, she felt neither blind nor alone. Then she remembered—the valley, the village. I must go back. They need me—and the fear of not knowing her course melted away like dew under sunlight. She pushed onward.


At last the rows parted and Janest stepped into a clearing where the stalks had been beaten flat. In its center stood a strange lady scarecrow, born up by a brace of beams and spreading her arms as if to bear up the sky on her back. Her hair was dark like Janest’s, and what she had taken for straw was actually skin. She looked past these features, partly out of fear, partly out of consumption. She reached out to it, and in turn its arms came together between them, bearing up an offering, a final gift. Ten Sheaves’s voice was in her head, impelling her to take it—and take hold of her destiny. She reached out and grasped the perfect obsidian hilt, and the lady of straw met her gaze, her hat falling away, and Janest saw that she was looking at herself.


Almost immediately she saw and felt it—the pulse of eternity, a spark leaping, lightning unfurling in jagged tongues between heaven and earth, connecting them. The essence of Ten Sheaves exploded from her like fire: amber-gold changing into a ghostfire of blue-white. For a moment, Ten Sheaves was in her senses, crackling through her cells, changing everything he touched. Blood rushed in her veins, and it was not just blood but the mountain streams that tumbled down into the valley and fed the fields. She flexed her fingers and they were full, ripe stalks of wheat nodding beneath a passing breeze, the crops she had tended all her life. She felt also the seeds sleeping in the earth, felt the pregnant promise of the soil beneath her feet, and the call of rains drawn up from the oceans—and that too faded away as the last of Ten Sheaves fled down into the recesses of her soul, sending up a bonfire to mark his passing. The amber-gold light was all around her now, spilling out from her. As she stood under the rising light of the Unconquered Sun, she sensed the kinship between the small god that had Exalted her and the source of the fire that had empowered her and ended him. She knew that to be even the least among gods was still a wondrous thing, now ended, now passed to her, now kindling anew.


She took the gift to hand, and the world faded into the purity of the dawn.


* * *


Shortly after midnight, the spring that flowed from the top of the harvest god’s hill dried up, first slowing to a trickle, and then ceasing altogether. The creak-and-thump of the waterwheel slowed and finally groaned to a halt, its uncharacteristic silence awakening those few in the village who had managed to sleep. The wind that spun the prayer wheels outside the High Reavers’ hall hesitated and then died; the wheels ticked to a stop. The village was silent and still for hours after these grim omens, waiting without hope for the coming dawn.


An hour before the sun came up, the doors of Ten Sheaves’s shrine opened, and a young woman stepped out, walking with purpose.


* * *


The armies of the Fair Folk came on with the rising of the sun. They sang as they marched, knowing that the day promised a banquet of pain and fear—such was the meat and drink of the hobgoblins and silverwights and lesser panjandrums that made up the majority of the horde. The nobles leading the expedition hoped for more refined sport—the souls of mothers, torn raw and agonized by the deaths of their babes, perhaps; or the vengeful flailing of young boys burning to avenge atrocities. Either would make for appropriate amusement.


They marched under war-banners woven of flame and dreams of glory, and set up a great strange riot of drums and flutes played by wizened, hideous musicians dredged from the Lands Beyond Creation, capable of creating beauty only in their music; all else they did was crude and cynical and base. As the army reached the edge of the fields before the town, the jeweled and beautiful noble that led the war-band raised one elegant hand, signaling a halt. Slavering, fanged skirmishers beat the ground around him with their bone clubs and barbed blades, eager for slaughter.


A lone girl stood at the edge of the glebe, body toned and hardened by a life in the fields. Her amber-gold eyes flashed in the light of the rising sun, and her chestnut hair waved in the rising breeze. She carried a great and terrible scythe, a god-weapon, its haft shot through with veins of green jade, its long and wicked blade gleaming with a ruddy inner light. Its grips displayed the unmistakable hollows of empty hearthstone sockets. The weapon was taller than a man, yet she hefted it as though it weighed nothing at all. The lords of chaos signaled the advance.


Strawmaiden Janest crossed the field to meet them.
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[QUOTE="Plague of Hats]Here, have a look at this:

[/QUOTE]
Went ahead and fixed your post :) !


When you copy and paste something try to stick it in bbcode editor first so it does not carry the formatting from another site.


Also thanks for sharing!
 
[QUOTE="The Dark Wizard]Went ahead and fixed your post :) !
When you copy and paste something try to stick it in bbcode editor first so it does not carry the formatting from another site.

[/QUOTE]
Thanks. I ended up thinking it looked the way it's supposed to look because of how dark the site is.
 
[QUOTE="Plague of Hats]Thanks. I ended up thinking it looked the way it's supposed to look because of how dark the site is.

[/QUOTE]
Ah I was referring to when it was dark green.


The story is amazing by the way :) .
 
For those dysfunctional people who aren't obsessing over every bit and byte of Exalted news flying around the tubes, the Dev Chat video stretch goal is completed and it should be released tomorrow as part of the next update. It contains a ridiculous amount of spoilers. Ridic. Totally. Which I guess is fair since it's almost two hours long! Keep an eye out.
 
[QUOTE="Plague of Hats]For those dysfunctional people who aren't obsessing over every bit and byte of Exalted news flying around the tubes, the Dev Chat video stretch goal is completed and it should be released tomorrow as part of the next update. It contains a ridiculous amount of spoilers. Ridic. Totally. Which I guess is fair since it's almost two hours long! Keep an eye out.

[/QUOTE]
Yay! :P
 
I don't suppose there is a summary some where or highlights of the video?


I don't have the time to listen to it any time soon :( .
 
I'll try my best, but well a lot of spoilers are already on the white wolf forum so anyway:


-Merit Familiar 3 is going to get you proto puma prime (which simply means an useful familiar) which will be released in a bestiary book.


-Arms of the Chosen: A book about artifacts and evocations. Making your own artifacts and evocations as well.


-very detailed books about the various regions of creation and literally full on Heptagram book (high school dragon blooded essentially)


-God-Blooded will finally get a book that they deserve, they won't be anymore bastard make up of previous splats.


-Heroes of Niobraran (Spelling?) : Essentially it's set during the first age, the solars have beaten Lintha, and a group of underwater races get together and decide to fight back, the solars are nearly defeated. It's a brutal and ruthless war but of course, the solars win at the end but this looks very exciting.


-Exigents: As people imagined will be custom made Exalt , the book will have essentially a matrix of charms so people can make their own exalt and even choose their power levels, if they want them to be as strong as solars or terrestrials from this black market exaltations so to speak. Essentially there can be exalt of every concepts, they can have charms with anything attributes based, essence based or virtues based.


-The biggest project they will try to do, a shard of some sort: Exalted vs WoD. Yeah you heard that right. It will be his own system/book. Like they say, they don't plan to steamroll the WoD, since it's not going to be fun.
 
I am particularly fond of this Exigent Exalted idea, lot of potential there, let's see how it turns out. But one thing that saddens me, is that once again it feels that they're neglecting Abyssals in favor of the new shiny Exalted, happened in 2ed when Infernals came out, and it happens again with Liminals (which honestly I don't find very appealing at this point), and the redo of Infernals.
 
We are still waiting for the abyssal spoiler but to be fair, maybe the deathknights are going to be a little more active, they did talk about how the deathlords were more proactive in this version. Like Mask of Winters is literally a warlord and the Silver Prince in the west has actually a fleet and actively fight the realm (yeah it's a big change compared to being just a snake in disguise).


I try to mention some of the highlights but the video is like 2 hours long, so I'm bound to miss some stuffs when I post here.
 
Basically Abyssals are champions of the underworld, they aren't mirror of the solars anymore and relationships with deathlords are more like master/apprentice instead of master/slave. So you can choose to follow a deathlord or do your own thing. Deathlords are essentially just mentor trying to have you as allies instead of putting you on a leash. Following a deathlord will give special perks/powers.
 
I know it's too early to pass on judgment on what little information we have, but I'm not sure I'm digging this whole concept of Deathlords giving you the themes and basis for Abyssal charms while being the Icons and Concept you more or less emulate or aspire to, just like how Solars emulate and aspire to achieve the greatness and power of the Sun.


In a way it also feels like what they did with Infernals in 2nd Ed, instead of being Exalts using Yozi charms, you're using Deathlord's charms, but how can you compare powered up ghosts with the Titan creators of the world? Ghosts are rather weak when compared with other supernatural creatures, and their natures are quite narrow which affects the powers and themes they can express themselves with, giving you a rather specialized but limited area to shine with. Looking at the Lover's charms, basically you can be a great seductress, whore, man eater and all the stuff she represents, but you're pretty much stuck with sexual devouring powers even if you would like a different approach for your character.


It feels disappointing that your 'Divine' benefactors are a bunch of whiny ghosts that can't seem to achieve any of their goals (with very few exceptions) look rather pathetic when compared to the might, power and skill of Sol, Luna, the Maidens, Gaia and her Elemental Dragons, or the Yozis themselves.
 
I can see where you are coming from but the deathlords are super ghosts and always have been. Basically the way to look at it, Sol is easily one of the most powerful being in creation and like they even mention in the spoilers, one deathlord, cannot hope to challenge Sol but all 10 of them? the odds wouldn't be in Sol favor. The ways that they reworked the charms, is to give you something more tangible, your charms will look more like deathlords patrons true but essentially with these powers than you and your buddies can be the 10 deathlords by proxy attacking UCS. It's also to give you more freedom, so you wouldn't have to deal with resonance and all that jazz.
 
I guess my main beef is that so far all we've got from Deathlords in 2 editions is that they're super powerful ghosts and are your quintessential villain, but still they manage to remain lame and plain pathetic in some cases. With very few exceptions (arguably the Silver Prince and Mask of Winters), your patrons have spent centuries arguing and fighting between themselves while doing nothing to make a mark in the world. In previous editions this was somewhat lessened by the fact that Deathlords were simply the agents of the Neverborn, the dead primordials were your true patron and responsible of Abyssal exaltations in the first place, and a bunch of chthonic undead titans looks way better than a group of squabbling super ghosts.


The spoilers might say it, but there's no way you can compare 13 Deathlords to Sol. For starters simply because you know they would never ever be able to agree on working together for anything.


I know I'm rambling too much, but Abyssals are some of my favorite Exalts and it pains me to see them getting left in the dust time after time. I really do hope I'm wrong when the actual book comes out.
 
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