Manual of Exalted Power: The Infernals
Chapter Six: Wonders of the Demon Realm
You're not scientists, you're just a bunch of hippies!
Frank
37 Pages of... stuff. The chapter starts with more rants about First Age bullshit.
Anyway, every so often the authors of an Exalted book will remember and then refer to a basic fact about the Exalted setting that makes telling stories set in it fundamentally impossible. In this case someone recalled that the Exalted setting is
Animist, and in principle every rock and blade of grass has its own Kami.
Literally exactly this.
And of course, Hard Animism is a very weird story conceit which necessarily involves pretty much everything being
extremely small and
hyper personal because you're fucking negotiating with the river and arguing with trees about whether they would like to be made into tables. You can't
do big things if the world isn't basically materialistic because
causes don't have
effects in a world of spiritual mystery and introspective mysticism.
In Malfeas, none of the rocks and swords have spirits of their own, because they are all made out of the fingernails of big demons. So you can't talk a piece of metal from Hell into being a flower instead, but also it “isn't really iron” so again its physical properties are anyone's guess.
Exalted is like an onion. An onion where every layer is a reason why actually playing this game is equal parts impossible and undesirable. Some of the layers are quite deep and people don't talk about them much, but “In this setting, you can't really predict what the properties of
wood,
stone, or
metal are going to be under any circumstances.” is just as much of a deal breaker as the child rape. In terms of actually playing a cooperative storytelling game of course, not in terms of getting the FBI called on you. No one is going to call the FBI on you for having unresolvable disagreements about setting conceits in a cooperative story. Except maybe George R. R. Martin, because he seems to have some genuinely strange ideas about how intellectual property works.
K:
In practice, you'll be reminded very rarely that objects have least gods inside them. Exalted has its own love language, and that language sounds a lot like "the first rule of Exalted is that we don't dig too hard into the fundamental setting assumptions of Exalted."
Frank
Much ink is spilled about magical materials. Some of those materials literally look like spilled ink. I could get into the bit where in reality “vitriol” is
clear and in classical alchemy it was considered to be
green because they used to get it from ferrous septahydrate crystals, which are green. But the thing about using real words to mean things that they obviously don't mean and made up words for things that have actual words for them and shit is just par for the course in White Wolf products. It scarcely matters. No, the thing that really stands out is that Infernals don't get their own stupid metal affinity, but for a modest XP surcharge they can use the metal affinities of other Exalt types.
K:
It's committed mote cost and not XP.
Frank
And that gets us to a pretty perceptive statement by Orion that I'm just going to quote verbatim:
Orion wrote:Reading and comprehending these books is way too damn hard for them to actually function as the rules of a game; in fact, they're so hard to read attempting to comprehend them becomes the game. I created myself 2 or 3 sample character from each of the main Exalt types, and while the process convinced me that the game was in no way playable, it was weirdly satisfying like solving a sudoku or a crossword.
I suspect this is what drove all the online Exalted fandom. There really was a crowd of gamers on the White Wold forums who loved Exalted. I used to lurk there. The thing is, the online fan club was more a club of Exalted readers than Exalted players. I don't just mean that they weren't playing the game. I mean they literally acted like a book club or a college Lit class, spending a lot of their time arguing about themes and constructing harmonized readings with extensive bibliographies. There were even some celebrity posters who took the role of sages, initiating the other posters into esoteric readings of the backstory.
The Infernals is essentially this natural trend of Exalted reaching its natural endpoint. Exalted was never a
game, it was a
book club. And Infernals is what happens when members of the book club become ascended fanboys and start writing the material going forward. So some of that is the stuff about grim dark horribleness. But a lot of that is just the deliberate creation of more sudokus and crossword puzzles for the book club members to solve.
The fact that the Infernals pay more to bond artifact materia makes them in a pragmatic sense
worse.They are paying strictly more to get the same benefit anyone else is. But at the limit of infinite experience points, they are
better. Because they can use all the different material boosts from obscure books you don't care about. Because these characters are never actually intended to be played from the start, and the writers didn't care about the
process at all. The infinite horizon can always exist in the mind, and that mind's conception was and is always what this book was written for.
This goes to the very heart of the fact that this book is literally pornography and is pornographic in nature throughout its entire length. There are different contributing authors, and those different people are masturbating to different things. Sometimes it's relatively normal stuff, like the bondage nuns with big bare breasts. Sometimes it's really horrible stuff like the guro child abuse. But the thing where at least one of the authors is beating off to spending infinite experience points to collect all the advantages and powers from all the books on one hypothetical character is not actually less of an excuse to pound meat than those other things.
Now the broader question you might have is why
bother to make it have these drawbacks at all? This is fucking
Exalted. People pretty much expect each and every book to be completely fucking bonkers when it comes to quaint ideas like “game balance.” But White Wolf also
justifiably has a reputation for encouraging Storytellers to deny the players. Which is why so much of this book is dedicated to powers that either “don't seem that bad” or simply directly bypass Storyteller input altogether.
The fantasy we are reading is one where the player “gets one over” on Mr. Cavern. That Mr. Cavern agrees to allow the character because it “doesn't look that powerful” and then
bam, infinity experience points later it's using shapeshifting moonsilver armor with an orichalcum daiklaive and using all the charms off the different lists and finally,
finally using the ultimate unfair magic combos to defeat all the named characters in the setting and achieving final victory in Exalted. As pants-wetting fantasies go, it's at least fairly harmless. Much better than the child torture guy. But why anyone would allow someone who jizzed on game design manuscripts be someone who actually
wrote semi-official game manuscripts is beyond me. Clearly there's a failure of background checks involved.
None of the people who actually wrote any part of this book should have been allowed to write for any company.
K:
I'd agree that as an intellectual exercise, trying to make Exalted "work" can be an amusing pastime, because it clearly doesn't. I've spent a fair amount of time failing to figure out how various adventures would have to be set up to convey the thing they are going for, and I've decided that this is the game you pretend to play because you can't. There are attractive ideas here knotted together with the intellectual equivalent of AIDs, like the serial killer's dreamscape in the Jennifer Lopez movie
The Cell, and for some reason both were funded and made.
It's also clear that this game suffers from the old "if someone will basically do it for free, we'll let them." When you are letting people compete for how little money they will take, you shouldn't be surprised when you get bad work on the game design and moral fronts (see Shitmuffin).
Frank
Obviously no one is
actually going to sit there and Storytell for anyone's character while they get to a meaningful approximation of infinity experience points. Because that's stupid. And Exalted games don't actually last very long because they are stupid and basically unplayable at the best of times. But this bizarre “collect them all” fetish is not
inherently dumber than the “Character Optimization” subculture of other game fandoms. Obviously no one plays games long enough for people to “actually play” any of those stupid 20th level builds on the old D&D CharOp boards either. But there are certainly people who find joy in it. Even, as in this case,
sexual fulfillment I should suppose.
K and I have even participated in these sorts of things, although mostly to troll. We
did do The Wish and The Word, which was a mic drop of collecting all the power from all the lists and using the best loopholes to kill the gods themselves and piss on the setting. That is a thing we did. And this book is basically someone doing that. Just, they are doing it from the standpoint of literally writing the rules and also doing it with their dick in their hand.
To that extent, it's basically Pun-Pun. If your rules-fu isn't good enough to come up with the best combos, go ahead and fucking
make something up that says you get to have all the best of everything. Give yourself that participation trophy! Then
jizz in it!
K:
The best part is that everyone is right. The combat monster CharOP wanker knows that his character is unbeatable, and that's true for a given definition of unbeatable, but then so is the Sorcerer player, or the Warlord, or the Mindfucker…. Everything relies on the circumstances and nothing defends against everything.
Frank
But yes, lest we sound too bitter about this, we do completely acknowledge that the pederasty guy is a worse person and a worse writer and that the fact that their draft was accepted is obviously a worse and less excusable failure on behalf of Richard Thomas. The guy who beats off to hoodwinking Storytellers into letting him catch all the Pokémon is merely puzzling rather than morally offensive.
K:
Heck, you can even learn important lessons here from the hoodwinker. I mean, at least he really does understand the system well enough to place his charges where they will do the most damage.
The other guy… well, my guess is that having this on his resume is not getting him future jobs.
Frank
There is much ado made about turning demons into crawling weeping brandy so that you can either pour the demon souls into weapons or drink the demon souls as potions of Essence mote recharge. It's
really complicated and I'm sure there's some way to abuse it. Of course, it might just be in here for the atrocity porn, where one of the authors got to discuss cannibalism where the victim is in some sense awake and resisting during both the preparation and the consumption process. Get your guro on, I suppose.
K:
Yeh, its really unnecessary evil. You can't even say that there is some mechanical advantage like you could in
Vampire where Diablerie was the only route to power; Chalcanth is not a good way to get motes for the work involved, and you get nothing more from drinking demon souls of others.
Frank
The special equipment of Malfeas has a value in vague Resource equivalents. Which is unfortunate. Basically what we have here is a rejection of the D&D demand that we count gold coins, but
without an accompanying rejection of the D&D idea of counting special arrows. And so here we are, buying specific numbers of Green Fire Arrows with non-specific numbers of gold coins. The results are pretty much exactly what you'd expect.
K:
I don't even understand how Exalted economies are supposed to exist when they are so many ways to magically generate wealth, even wealth you'd think is impossible to create like more fucking land.
It's the only thing they aren't making more of.
Frank
There's certainly an amount of satisfaction to be had remembering to buy the silk rope and the ten foot pole and then using them during your dungeon delve. And there's an amount of satisfaction to be had in counting your silver pieces and realizing that you can buy that chain mail you'd wanted earlier.
But equally, there is an amount of satisfaction to be had in
not worrying about how many arrows and pitons your character has and just abstracting all that stuff. The backpacks of adventurers could be entirely quantum, having or not having relevant equipment as required to move the story forward. There's no right or wrong answer, the amount of asspulling and Logistics & Dragons that each player wants to do at the table is very personal and won't even be the same night to night. Sometimes you want to play the ropes and pulleys minigame, sometimes you just want to get drunk and smash Orcs.
But Exalted's attempt to abstract the number of
coins in a character's pocket but
not abstract any of the other objects in the character's pockets,
including the ones that were bought with coins was... not fortuitous.
K:
Luckily, I think you really aren't supposed to. Let the peons worry where the bread comes from because the PCs are distorting reality for more bread when they need it.
Frank
Exalted has a lot of Artifacts. Which are magic items that are shit simple to start play with, but very difficult to figure out how or if you can pick them up in game. Some of these have cool descriptions. Some of them are mechanically “good” for the number of background dots they cost. And as you might have guessed, the overlap between those are approximately proportional and thus many things people want to like are actually “not worth it” and many things people are “supposed to use” are dumb as fuck.
To that extent, the list of artifacts in The Infernals is not really better, worse, or even different than any other collection of artifacts one might find in any Exalted book.
K:
There are some standouts.
There is an armor with a Perfect Defense. There is a shield that can parry attacks that can't be parried. Hellforged Wonders are the cursed magic item rules that the game has needed for a while. While Rome was burning, someone was clearly checking things off their wishlist.
Frank
The mechanics in this chapter are not good. Some of them don't even exist. There are gloves that let you dribble bright green poison from your fingertips. What does it do? I have no idea. The point is that it's fucking
green and that's all you get to know.
I did some checking around the rest of the chapter to see if “green venom” was like a
thing, but it's not. There are a lot of poisons in this book, and a lot of them are green. Lots of stuff in this book are green. The players have the word “green” in their exalt type name.
K:
There is a chart at the bottom of the page with the stats on the glove and the poison.
Frank
The Infernals wrote:This cubit-long rod of brass
Very frequently, British patients will attempt to tell me their weight in
stones. Stones are a useless measurement that is 14 pounds. Nothing in your life is “about a stone.” You do not purchase, build, acquire, or dispose of
anything in amounts that are “about a stone”. It's fucking stupid, and people who use
stones as a unit of measure in their everyday lives are wrong to do so.
Cubits are the same thing, except for length instead of weight and also there aren't
any people who collectively use cubits, because cubits are terrible. It's roughly half a yard, but fuck that. Fuck the people who try to use that shit. It doesn't make you sound old timey and full of mythic portents, it makes you sound like someone who looked at a fucking wikipedia page about deprecated archaic measures.
K:
It's almost like this book wasn't edited.
Frank
Many of the items do weirdly poetic things and have really long backstories. One item is a sword that makes one person stop being friends with the person it kills. I don't know why you'd care about doing that, and the mechanics are that there are fucking
more layers of die rolls and accounting in the middle of combat and the whole thing is just more unplayable than Exalted Combat already is – adding more of everything that already makes Exalted Combat terrible.
But the really surprising thing about their terribly designed object that no one will ever use is that its description is over two hundred and fifty words and is itself a three paragraph essay with an introduction, body, and conclusion. This item
alone could be a 6th grade English assignment. Why?
K:
I'm not entirely against the "magic item as story or character". Certainly, it can jazz up the experience since it follows the fantasy novel trope and not video game trope.
Frank
I'm pretty sure that when you add up all the variant types of weapons and armor that there are actually more of these fucking things than there are Green Sun Princes to use them. A lot of blades come in different sizes and could be a dagger or a scythe or something in between.
K:
Any demons might be using them, so it's not a problem. No player character would bother with many of these, but you might see them in the hands of some badguy mini-boss.
Fundamentally, Exalted never had enough magic items, so this list is trying to address that. Even if these items don't get bought by PCs, evil enemies were supposed to be dropping them sometimes and the players were supposed to worry about using them in the fights to come.
Frank
Many items aren't something that you'd ever take as a character prop. Not because they aren't worth the points (although
many of them obviously are not), but because they literally are a story. A compass that points to a specific secret gateway that goes to another world is not something that you're going to want to own unless you're in the adventure where you are going to that place to have an encounter to go on to the next chapter of your story.
It's not a piece of character equipment as such, it's an unfinished story seed. But it has a dot value attached to it, in case you wanted to start with it as a player character. Which obviously, you do not.
K:
You have to remember that the guy with some version of Wyld-Shaping can build Artifacts in a few days and how fast he can do that is based on those ratings. There is literally nothing stopping him from having as many or as few of these things other than committed motes or the requirement for a Hearthstone.
Frank
The Hellstriders are giant robots made out of demon parts. I am unclear as to what narrative or mechanical purpose these are supposed to have. The descriptions and rules drag on for several pages and I am totally at a loss as to why this is happening.
Exalted groans and collapses when you ask it to do
regular combat. Who actually thought that you could do a Battletech minigame inside it?
In a broader sense, nothing in Exalted is ever brought to the “refining” stage. It's all epicycles and brainstorming. Every ability and effect adds more die rolls, more math, more more more. A design isn't complete when there's nothing left to add, it's complete when there's nothing left to take away. Nothing in Exalted has ever got to the part of the design where things are starting to be simplified. Not one person writing on this has ever asked “Wouldn't it be simpler if we....”
Things have been written on the white board, but nothing has been crossed out. We aren't there yet. We will never be there yet. White Wolf has gone bankrupt again, and Exalted 3rd edition was a weird abortion that didn't even appear in game stores. This meeting will never end because it
can never end. It's just an idea cloud scribbled furiously on a whiteboard, the contributors long left for lunch and they are never coming back. And if anyone came back into this office we know with perfect certainty that they would never clean this white board up. They wouldn't even wash the groady coffee cups left on the table – they'd just go back to furiously brainstorming more ideas and scribbling them down until they too had to leave and get on with their lives in the real world outside the meeting that never ends because it never had a purpose in the first place.
K:
In a very real way, this is an early draft, and the most compelling fantasy on display here is the fantasy that the game can be redeemed and redesigned in some science-fiction future. I guess that's yet another reason I've been looking these books over.
Exalted is an interesting game to study because it is so ambitious. It's the first published heartbreaker, and they tried to do everything and be everything rather than going the route of DnD with its combat system with some rules-lite for everything else. That they failed on so many fronts was predictable, but that doesn't mean that this doesn't mean there aren't lessons to be learned here. At the very least, you can learn a lot of things NOT to do.
Frank
The final comic of the chapter is about our Bondage Nun getting shown a cowboy exalted hero who is locked in a crystal in a tomb in the desert. Why is there are cowboy with two six guns? Why fucking not?
;s the
I assume this is a reference to some Exalted plotline or another, and I don't care. The Exalted people can of course make their flavor be whatever they want, but “cowboys” is kind of a heavy lift. If Exalted hadn't jumped the shark before it was even debuted, this might have been its shark jumping moment.
K:
I think it's one of the old-time Solars. In one of the Direction books it drops that not every Solar Exaltation made it into the Jade Prison, so my guess is that one of the homebrew plots involved high-end Solars because the idea of one of the recent Solars being a threat is laughable.
Frank
Next Up: Chapter 7: Storytelling.