Manual of Exalted Power: The Infernals
No.
Definitely not.
Closer.
There we go.
Frank
The Infernals is a comic made by punk and metal musician (and all around douchebag) Glenn Danzig. This has almost nothing to do with what we are talking about today, which instead will be The Infernals the splat book for Exalted 2nd edition. This is a thing that came out in 2009, so it's ten years old and practically begging for an OSSR. Now the first question you probably have is “Wait, didn't White Wolf go bankrupt before 2009?” and the answer to that question is of course Yes it did. “The Manual of Exalted Power: The Infernals” is a book that was produced by the White Wolf remnant after the IP had been purchased up by an Icelandic videogame company and before they actually shut down the print studio altogether. This is a book whose primary purpose was to keep people employed, which is why five people are listed as the primary author. The creative director is Richard Thomas, who went on to become Onyx Path and spew out even more of this shovelware crap by taking the funding stream directly to Kickstarter. But that's another tale for another day.
We're going to be tackling this as a tag team. I will of course be on “Team Rage,” while I believe K is batting for “Team There's Some Good Stuff Buried In Here and It's Basically Worth Reading.” Neither one of us are under even the slightest illusion that the game system presented in any edition of Exalted is remotely “worth playing” or that the fluff “makes sense” on any metric. So if you were hoping that one of us was going to do some kind of complicated gloss to explain how it all “works” or tie ourselves in knots to create some sort of apologetic framework to excuse this piece of shit, that hope was in vain. Go to Big Purple if you want someone to self-refutingly defend White Wolf branded output from the post-bankruptcy shovelware period. K is going to be calling out turds that can be polished, and I'm going to be calling out deal breakers that should have gotten everyone involved with this project permabanned from the entire industry.
This book is somewhere between 218 and 226 pages long, depending on how you count comics and art spreads. It has an Introduction, seven numbered chapters, and several comic interludes. We're going to try to tackle this in about eight posts.
K:
I think that it's important to remember that this book sits squarely in the spiked cocktail that is the Exalted system: whatever promises it makes are lies and whatever treasures it holds were clearly unintentional. The things that are compelling about it do not override the flaws and there is no point where I have ever even imagined that I was going to convince someone to even play it ironically as a one-shot.
Clearly, this product is the result of a team that had decided that rules frameworks, whether moral or design, were for squares and yes-men, and basically did whatever they felt like. The lack of editorial restraint is the cause of all of the problems, but also makes this one of the more interesting Exalted products. I'll point out places where themes and ideas are straight improvements over the base system of Exalted, and then move on with my life.
Frank
The Infernals did not exist as an independent faction in First Edition Exalted.
K:
I think first edition had the Abyssals who were the baddies whenever the generally asshole Solars were not bad enough, or the government asshole Dragonbloods, or the asshole and crazy Lunars, or the asshole dick Sidereals…well, you get the point. In second edition, the Abyssals are still around as evil nihilists and perverts, but I guess it's hard to twirl a mustache when your face is rotted off, so the Infernals are added into the mix to be pureblooded evil perverts who are double bad.
Heck, maybe someone decided that they wanted to play Inuyasha from Inuyasha or Dante from Devil May Cry, or at least have him to kick around. That would be a laudable goal if the execution had not been so botched.
Frank
There are two kinds of Infernals: the Green Sun Princes and the Akuma. This book is primarily for playing Green Sun Princes, who are further divided into five flavors: Slayers, Malefactors, Defilers, Scourges, and Fiends. Now there are supposed to be fifty of these fuckers total, so remember while we're reading this book that each one of these motherfuckers is the member of a “group” whose members you could count on your fingers with fingers left over. The number of characters so described is in fact so minuscule that this entire book could have dispensed with categories altogether and simply wrote up a backstory and game mechanics for every single fucking Infernal. Had they given themselves four pages for each Infernal for a character bio, full page art, character sheet, and complete explanation of magic powers, the book would be like twenty pages shorter than it actually is.
So rather than bash my head into this point repeatedly for every chapter and every declaration of numbers, we'll just make a standing complaint: The Infernals are even more “The Anime Club at your Highschool” than the other flavors of Exalted are. All of the “categories” and “typing” of the Exalted are stupid and myopic considering how few of these characters are supposed to exist in this setting, but it's legitimately even worse than that for the Infernals. Similarly, the entire Jade Prison event happened like last Thursday and there is zero reason for any of the social dynamics described in this book to have happened.
In a broader sense, there's honestly not really any reason for this book to exist at all. This book is the second edition of a book that literally doesn't exist. In the first edition, there weren't separate Infernals at all, the various fallen Solars were lumped into a single category. But some time after White Wolf went under someone decided that they could get an additional shovelware book out of splitting the villains into two groups that were just that much more unique. The quest for more shovelware topics had by that point become all-consuming: this book's credits page contains teaser blurbs for more shovelware that covers parts of the setting that had also previously been thought completely unnecessary. Seriously: it's a fatsplat book for the fucking robots on the moon, and Celestial Compass Direction Book Five. That last one is not something I made up, despite there obviously not being a fifth direction on the Compass. It's not even the fifth direction book (the fifth direction book was “North”), it's the fifth Celestial Direction book that they made after they ran out of real directions. It's the fucking tenth location book put out in a series about locations whose fucking central metaphor was the four directions.
The Rabbit Hole is very deep.
Despite the fact that five authors is a small enough group that you could get everyone on board with a specific viewpoint, and that the entire cadre of Infernals is so small that all the groups are a rounding error on zero in the amount of world space actually allocated to them, there's absolutely no sense of unified vision anywhere in this book. It's very clear that Richard Thomas didn't even try. A team of five writers is easy enough to manage – you could get them all into a car and drive around talking until major disputes were ironed out. But Infernals did not have a team of five authors, it literally has five different primary authors and it's clear as day that some of them weren't really talking to any of the others.
K:
If I had to guess, I'd say that this book exists as a secret sourcebook for Eclipse charms. Abyssal charms are so close to Solar charms that they count as prerequisites for each other and spirit charms are mostly all worse than Solar charms, so there needed to be a sourcebook for actually useful charms to justify the double cost.
That being said, the fact that Exalted books are wildly shallow is a pretty big deal. It really paints you into a corner when want to have a viable business that involves writing RPG books because it means that any deep dive into any particular part involves a much more skilled setting and game designer, which is this case was not someone they had on staff. It was easier to just do another Exalted than to expand on anything else.
As for the numbers of Green Sun Princes (GSP), I figure that the actual numbers are kind of meaningless. The Yozis mindfuck the Green Sun Princes with heavy memory alternations during Exaltation, so the GSPs can have a new culture installed every time a new set of them Exalt, which I expect is pretty often since they are bound by Infernal Limit to act like caricature villains out of a cartoon. Honestly, I don't see how they live longer than a year in most circumstances. While the number is rated at 50, there might have been hundreds in the five years they are supposed to have been around.
Infernal-as-suicide-bomber would have been a lot more interesting hot take.
I also have a personal theory that all of the fluff can just be considered elaborate stories with little veracity, meaning that the actual number of any kind of Exalted might be vastly higher or lower, but I think this might be a bad case of mind-caulk on my part. Certainly, the fluff would work better if the actual details were not binding at all because there are lots of internal conflicts here.
Frank
The quality of the art in this book varies tremendously. Some of it is quite good, some of it looks like something I could do. A lot of it looks like it was half-assed or phoned in at whatever skill level the artist happened to have. Much of this is presumably because credited artists outnumber credited authors five to one. That is, there are twenty-five people credited as doing the art. And that's not even including the studios credited with doing the art. So like, two of the peoples' names are included in a parenthetical after Imaginary Friends Studios and eight people are credited in parentheticals after Groundbreakers Studios. In addition to large differences in skill between the artists, there is also large differences in give a shit between the artists. Some of these people are subcontractors of subcontractors and really couldn't care less.
The book opens with a comic that is about... vampire airpirates I think. It's not terribly clear. Exalted books tend to open with comics because of branding issues. The amount of actual setting and genre conveyed by this comic is really very little. Sometimes people say that a picture is worth a thousand words, but that's only if you get a good exchange rate. This comic is like the exchange rate you get at the airport, and I feel pretty strongly that you could have gotten across a lot more information in a single paragraph.
Chapters also begin, or perhaps end, with two page comics. They come before the heading saying that the chapter has started, so maybe they are supposed to be attached to the previous chapter? In any case, there's one before the Introduction, which has nothing to really be attached to that's before that, unless it's supposed to be part of the credits. The first comic is a two pager about a vampire infiltrator who has joined some government body and who is about to kill someone who was trying to expose her.
The only thing you really get from the first couple of comics is that these guys are basically vampires.
K:
I thought the air-pirate was an Inuyasha puppy-demon guy.
Claws. Fangs. Funky eyes. Demon Blood. Check, check, check, and check.
Does anyone read the comics? I mean, none of them are even good at relaying the flavor or have a coherent narrative. Maybe just cheap art and bewbs?
That being said, how cool would an air-pirate book have been? Sigh.
Chapter Zero: Introduction
We could get all Jaggery on this, but we won't.
Frank
Considering how much verbage is spilled on this book and how shovelwarey the entire project is, it surprises the hell out of me that this Introduction is only two pages long. I can only assume that whoever wrote the introduction wasn't being paid by the word and did not have a quota to fill. So you get a single paragraph of setup and then it immediately jumps into the “How to Use This Book” section. There is zero explanation of how to use this book in that section, there is in fact zero preamble in that section, and it is in fact 100% composed of a telegraphic description of what is in each chapter. Nothing in that section tells you how to use this book. As will be revealed later on, the various authors were sharply divided about what the actual fuck this book was supposed to be used for, and when someone decided that the book needed a “How to Use This Book” section, no one decided to try to canonize their vision and instead all we ever get is an abbreviated chapter summary. Does it even rate mentioning that the chapter summary gets the name and contents of the first chapter wrong?
This is not a small issue. The introduction contains a sidebar called “This Is Not a Complete Game!” that explains that you can't play this game without the main Exalted book that is itself about creating and playing Solars, who are a different kind of character altogether.
The core issue of course is that if this book doesn't tell us enough to play the game, and the book that does tell us how to play the game makes no allowance at all for these characters, how do we play these characters? This is a fundamental paradox and this book has no answer.Manual of Exalted Power: The Infernals wrote:This supplement just gives in-depth information about the Infernal Exalted, their society, their activities and the rules necessary to create and play Infernal characters. You’ll need to consult the Exalted core book in order to play.
Exalted is just basically unplayable anyway, but the fundamental assumptions of the game, such as they are, pretty much exclude the players actually using any of the material in any of the books about non-Solars. There are rules for making and playing the characters from the other Exalted types, except that there actually aren't because they aren't complete in their own book and the book they want you to defer to writes them off as a possibility. It's a weird uncomfortable halfway point between oWoD where all the splats were stand-alone games and nWoD where all the splats refer to one core book. In Exalted all the splats are unplayable without the core book, but they are still fundamentally different games from the core book and none of them end up being particularly usable.
K:
I feel like an Exalted game is basically supposed to be a game of subjective challenges where you pick things at chargen and the Storyteller gives you a game that fits your choices. It's like Fate, but you need to read a million words of useless mechanics before you figure out that the rules consist of you asking the Storyteller to not make a game of objective challenges for you to face because nothing in the system is built for that.
That being said, there are a lot of objective failure points. Choosing different charms than your peers is bad, but playing something other than a Solar in a game with Solars is also very bad. Solars are the best at anything you want to do as an RPG character.
Green Sun Princes are slightly shittier Solars with more options, so you can almost justify doing that. They certainly have more interesting flavor, so as bad choices go, I'm not going to go too hard on you.
Frank
The Lexicon takes up most of a page, includes twenty five terms, and aptly demonstrates that the authors did not agree on terminology or metaphysics before writing this thing. It's possible for a person to be “Yozi-Kin” and “Demon-Blood” and “Akuma” all at the same time, and you could be a “Hellspawn” instead of a “Yozi-Kin” but also you could be a “Hell-Spawn” and also not be an Akuma. And I already don't care! This terminological inexactitude makes the rage rise up within me.
K:
Yes, they don't know how words work. If it makes you feel better, this problem is in every book.
Frank
Now for the rape-bug elephant in the room: the comic at the end of the Introduction. Or maybe it's supposed to be the prologue comic for Chapter One. I don't fucking care, we're talking about it now. It's two pages long, and I am not going to post it because it violates the terms of service of this message board. Yes. Really.
This comic is pornography. I don't mean that it's erotic, because I certainly don't find it erotic. I mean that it is literally pornography. Despite its short length, it manages to achieve the following “porn tags,” which I will recite in order of increasing squick value:
- BBW, Incest, Rape, Bestiality, Pedo, Guro
If you don't know what some of those tags mean, I strongly suggest that you keep it that way. I mean, you could look them up, but this is not a point in your life where dispelling ignorance is going to make you a happier person. Quite the opposite.
There's no excuse for including this in a book for a mass market book to have this kind of thing at all. It's so Edge Lordy that there is no redemption or forgiveness possible for this or any person who worked on this. It's like if someone included a 2Girls1Cup link in the middle of a reference book. The book literally Goatsees you on page 16.
K:
I really hate to have any defense here, but they call the bloated girl-thing "Mother" and "Sister" as a title and not a description because she is clearly Lillun, the Empress's daughter, who carried the Infernal Exhaltations after… Oh fuck, can I back out of this sentence and wash my eyes with bleach at the same time? No fucking excuses.
So yeh, totally fucked up.
Where most of Exalted is classic anime-themed where a graphic sexual assault might just get tossed in like in Akira or Ninja Scrolls, this book is the hentai one. It’s the worst stuff. The worst.
If it is any consolation, there is nothing here thematically that can be salvaged. It is one thing to grant that the demons are doing fucked-up shit off-screen, but there is no profit in spelling it out and adding drawings of it unless you've decided that cornering the lucrative sex criminal market is your goal.
I skip these parts. You should too.
Frank
On that note... next time we will do Chapter One: Green Sun Princes. Which is erroneously labeled “The Infernal Exalted” in the chapter summary which is itself erroneously labeled “How to Use This Book.”
