It Is the Tide (Exalted) (Wulin) (Horror)

[Shining Lotus Sage]

First (seventh) thing I did when I made an account here was sign myself up on the roll of storytellers, right? Haven't run one game for you guys. Time to correct that oversight. First, music to set the scene.


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Now that you're properly unsettled, know that there will be blood. Mountains of blood. There's gonna be so much goddamn blood. Some of it will come from injuries, like you'd expect, but probably not most. There will be kung fu. Mountains of kung fu. Some of it will come from injuries, which you're probably not expecting. There will be babies. Bear with me.


This game—there will actually be a game coming; mountains of game—uses Exalted's setting, and a slightly tweaked version of Legends of the Wulin's ruleset. It will begin in the forests of An Teng, but beyond that, well, Wulin puts a lot of narrative control in the hands of players, and that's one of my motivations for cribbing it. Maybe you'll save the world. Maybe you'll prove to be worse monsters than the one welding people together with bioengineered gangrene. Maybe you'll figure out the title of the campaign. Doubt it, personally, but I like happy surprises.


[Teaser text because I haven't yet built a reputation big enough to draw players in on]


There's a small town in the south of An Teng, where the Realm garrison has pulled out completely, just a month ago. No explanation given, and no one thought to ask. Better the imperial dogs leave anyway, right? So of course that's when something awakens in the woods nearby that was supposed to sleep forever. A couple of Evil Dead scenes later, curtain goes up. I don't care if you solve this town's problems or not, but the fate of the world might, so pick your priorities carefully.


I NEED:


One (1) student looking for a famous teacher, to ask an important question;


One (1) brawler who acts just dumb enough that no one asks about where their loyalties lie, which is the point;


One (1) charming leader, who isn't really uplifting at all;


And one (1) loose-cannon secret agent, who knows better than to ask what the point of the missions is.


The last one probably ought to be a Lunar, just given the factional arrangement of power in Exalted, but I'm not going to force anyone's hand beyond requiring those four broad roles. I'll accept a maximum of two Lunars, and all the rest will be Solaroids of one type or another. I'm taking a wet brush on watercolor to the metaphysics of Creation, here, so the lines between splats aren't as clean as in vanilla Exalted. The power gradient across exalt types will be relatively flatter, too, and I'm aggressively reducing crunch. If you reach two loresheets (cf. charm trees) full of magical tricks, you've probably already cultivated your Essence as high as it goes. Simple, streamlined, and creepy are the watchwords. Please inhabit an uncanny valley. At least one.


I only require people who know the Exalted setting moderately well, since again, I am sanding a lot of rough edges off it. Familiarity with Exalted mechanics is useful only for inspiration for custom material. Willingness to brainstorm custom material with me is probably an absolute prerequisite to enjoying the process. I'm happy to teach you everything you need to know about Wulin's mechanics. This will not be a first-come-first-served recruitment.


Any questions?

 

[Shining Lotus Sage]

This will almost certainly be some kind of chat game, with a thread on the forums for necessary bookkeeping. Details pending player availability and needs. I intend to start in very very early February, which should be just enough time to get a group assembled and everyone familiar with the rules that will be in play. I'd post the modifications I made, but to anyone not familiar with LotW, they'd be gibberish.

 

[Random Word]

Assuming I like the rules, a presupposition the veracity of which I will now investigate, this sounds intriguing. I find it curious that any Solaroid will do - if loyalist Abyssals are in this strongly suggests we're working against one another, which is especially interesting.


 
Presupposition verified. This looks awesome. This certainly helped sell me.

 

[Grey]

Argh, if it wasn't chat I'd be in like a shot with an Abyssal or Infernal.


Lemme know if you go full-forum but I'll understand if you don't.


Grey adds video to his Inspirational Music and Easy Listening playlists.

 

[Shining Lotus Sage]

If the party decides to have a bunch of internal conflict, you force me to scale up the adversity to motivate you toward cooperation. It's on the table, but a risky choice to make. A loyalist Abyssal would be a good fit for the Bruiser or Operative character, but everyone is assumed to have secrets of varying degrees of darkness. You're familiar with Wulin, then? Let me begin.


I'll use Essence and Chi interchangeably, here, because they serve the same function: they add resource-management to combat. I'll also use Essence and Rank interchangeably, for the other meaning of Essence. Since that's confusing, I'll probably just use Wulin terms.

• PCs start at Rank 4 which is E2, which is normal.
  
• Extras are Minions, not even groups thereof, and basically set-piece mooks or drama-fodder.
  
• Heroic Mortals, which will absolutely fill the ranks of NPCs, are Lesser Legends.
  
• Terrestrials broadly use the default Wulin rules, but also have a built-in hyperactivity that grants them free training in an Internal Kung Fu style of the appropriate element. This, coupled with the superiority of elemental chi to normal, puts them well above mortal ken. The elements used are Wulin's. If it matters, the pole of metal is on the Blessed Isle, and the pole of earth is in the far north. Bits of Creation's geography are shuffled around to make this intelligible, but they're all so far from An Teng as to be irrelevant.
  
• Celestials each have their own flavor of chi, which counts double for its own techniques and for all unaspected techniques. This isn't a direct parallel of Corrupt or Enlightened, but it gives them a clear superiority to Terrestrials using minimal fiddly rules. I'll also be much more generous when balancing celestial-aspected IKF styles, which are expected to take the place of most charm use. I do restrict IKF to combat, unless stated otherwise in a given technique.
  
• Celestials all have a cultivation hyperactivity for their own essence, and the cap is raised to 5+(Essence) motes.
  
• Every Celestial picks one IKF style of their aspect to claim particular skill with. You may buy every technique in your chosen style, rather than the usual one-per-level, even without a loresheet secret permitting it.
  
• At present, none of the non-elemental styles in the book are given celestial aspects, though many are close enough I'd let you select them as your native style. I am heavily mining http://wulinlegends.pbworks.com for custom kung fu, both internal and external
  
• I'm also importing the full text of http://wulinlegends.pbworks.com/w/page/85631047/Alternate Weapon and Disarming Rules with the proviso that these are stats for mundane weapons. Simple artifacts, like daiklaves and grand goremauls, use the normal LotW weapon stats. Artifacts rated 4+ are generally going to be reskinned as Legendary Weapons, with the accompanying risk of being swallowed by their fate instead of pursuing your own.
  
• Solaroids can spend 1 mote per +5 bonus on any roll at all, to a maximum of (Essence) motes, but also to a maximum bonus of the skill, style, and Laughs At bonuses that apply to the roll. This makes them superlative secret artists, which is a design goal shared with every other wuxialted conversion I've been able to find.
  
• Lunars can inflict a paired condition on themselves that represents shapeshifting, giving them action bonuses to act like the animal in question, penalties to tasks best performed by a human body. In rare cases, you could talk me into a breath or conversion bonus, but I'd probably want you to have specifically gone hunting for such a magical beast. These conditions can be Minor or Major, or even Trivial if you have a reason to want that. In combat time, shifting to true forms is a minor Wave that I can't imagine anyone ever being able to break. Other forms take your action for the round. There's no cost but the setup time or the Wave set, and loresheet secret techniques can take the place of speed-shifting knacks to reduce both.
  
• Moderate thresholds will be very roughly equivalent to to 1 success tasks, and each tier you go up is approximately +3 successes required.
  
• I have spent, I kid you not, about four hours working out the quintile boxplots for these bonuses and difficulties, and I'm very comfortable with the relative power levels this creates.
  
• Castes are orthogonal to archetypes. You can be a Night Warrior as easily as a Midnight Scholar. The names of Infernal castes are a bit more suggestive of a given approach to obstacles, so if you have a better idea than the caste power I offer, I'm happy to hear it out. For a quick example, the Eclipse power lets their Solar Essence act exactly as Enlightened Chi, to model their generalist power. Oathbinding is already well-covered by the secret arts of the courtier, or scholar, and I will work with you to develop an expansion of those arts that fits what you want, if it's something you find interesting. I'm trying to not rewrite things no one is going to use, but I have enough done already to be sure the end result is going to be cohesive.
  

I suppose it's possible that you meant you're going to check out the basic LotW rules. If so, godspeed. The book is terribly edited, and begins from a very different set of game-design assumptions than most popular systems. This is why I'm offering to walk people through the mechanics.


 

This[/URL] certainly helped sell me.

Uh... While I'm not sure how Yoshimitsu relates, I would assume at first glance that he's suffering an Abyssal Essence deviation. Probably has three motes of abyssal essence, since he looks horrifying and inhuman, but in a way you could ignore with effort. Weapon looks like probably a Flexible/Saber, or a Flexible/Sword.

 

[Random Word]

Haha, yeah, that was definitely the wrong link. Corrected. I've read the rulebook (or at least the parts I deemed immediately relevant). It seems straightforward and very elegant. I like it. A Day Caste loose cannon secret agent might be fun if the party is generally insane. If we're doing more typical 'heroes' I'll select something less antithetical to traditional social mores.

 

[Shining Lotus Sage]

I originally developed the campaign with a group of meatspace friends, most of whom are no longer interested for reasons that are unrelated to roleplaying. The initial party featured a wyld-mad Lunar pirate with a Lintha crew, a Daybreak Doctor whose research into curing plagues involved methods no IRB in the world would sign off on, and Daniel Plainview as an Infernal.


I am comfortable with the anti-hero to anti-villain range, as long as the players can remain detached enough to enjoy the horrible things their characters are likely to do to each other. I'd also welcome a pile of spitshine do-gooders. I'm open to what comes, within limits above.