[Violet Sorrows of the Perfected Lotus] To be a Sidereal

[Ebon_Arbiter]

I found this a while ago on the internet, and I must say I was quite moved by it. I do not know if you agree, partially or wholly, but I thought it could be quite a preface to this story we aspire to unfold together.


Here it is:


Let me tell you what it means to be Sidereal. There is no life harder than that of a Sidereal. To be Sidereal is to be chosen, from birth, although you neither knew nor asked for it. To be Sidereal is to Exalt and be told that now you must train to be the finest-edged weapon in Creation, that you will spend the rest of your incredibly long life protecting Creation, and that there is no time for weakness, for doubt, or for failure. You will do what is required of you, or you will die and another will be chosen who is of a finer mettle than you. And most every Sidereal you will ever meet was given that choice, nodded their head, and devoted their existence to keeping Creation from the abyss. You may sneer that Sidereals control the world. That is true, but it is nothing to be rejoiced about. Controlling the world is a literal thing for Sidereals, not figurative. They must espy every aspect of it. They must figure out when anything is going wrong. And then they must stop it. Ninety-nine Sidereals, to our knowledge, do this. Ninety-nine men and women work day in and day out for Creation, and their only reward is another assignment and knowing that Creation has gone on another day. They have given up friends. They can love, but will never be loved for themselves. They erased their very existences from Creation to better serve it; if their judgement on how to best serve Creation was wrong, it does not erase the sacrifices they have made in pursuit of the noblest goal there is. They don't have vacations, because there is no time and nobody to take their place. They can amass staggering wealth and power but will never be able to enjoy it.


Some guide the Solars, some guide the Dragonblooded: in either case, they see young heroes who have their whole lives ahead of them and can do whatever they want with it, who have the ability, the sheer luxury of saying on any given day "screw this, I'm going to go do something else". That's the freedom the Sidereal will never have, can never have, but they will do their job nonetheless and try their damndest to help the Solars or Dragonblooded to save Creation. That is their reward - that Creation lives another day. Not adulation. Not even a thank you. Just a satisfactory result. And they die. Oh yes, they die. Sidereals are the longest-lived of all the Exalted. And yet barely any survive from before the Usurpation. Why? Because they are out, every day, doing what they think must be done to save the world. And many times they die doing it. And death might be a relief, except it's an abject failure which has taken out a key piece of the network that keeps Creation safe.


You may not agree with the decisions they make, but only an ingrate or someone suffused with hatred could fail to be in awe at the sacrifices the Sidereals make for what they believe they have to do. Their lives are only the first step. Only a Sidereal could, and does, wield a weapon which is immensely more effective against someone they love. Not pretend to love. Not have convinced that he loves. Not said he loves. Loves. Truly. Deeply. That weapon was built because it would be used. Because to be a Sidereal is to put nothing above your task of defending Creation. Not yourself. Not the one your love. Not your desires. Not anything. You don't matter. You chose not to matter. You chose figuratively (and quite literally in the oldest cases) not to even exist, all in the desire, the drive, the duty to make sure that Creation does exist. The Sidereals are heroes.

 

[Tikor]

I read this back when you posted it and it sounded familiar, then I ran back to Charm editing. Now I've re-read it and I found where I read it from the first time! Do you have the full post? If not, here it is:

I've said before, and I'll say again, the fact that I like the Dragonblooded means I find them interesting, which does not imply morally correct or that I feel they have to "win" (whatever that means). Some people do, but I've never said so.
But here's the thing - I don't think they're bad either. I think they'll FAIL, sure, because that's the canonical end of the Age of Sorrows, but so will everyone else.


But they aren't going to fail because they're not heroic enough. Nor are the Solars. Nor are the Lunars. Nor are the Sidereals. They'll fail because the odds are too high and the time too short and the divisions between the Exalts too deep.


(I'm excluding the Abyssals from this as they're a special case - they're not their own Exalt type, they're corrupted Solars, who one and all chose to be corrupted, albeit under duress. Also they've only just come into existence.)


But I don't see any of them as fools and villains. And I'll explain why.


Now, it's easy to see why Solars are heroes, and I hardly have to convince Nagisawa Takumi of that anyway, but hey, here goes: they're Exalted due to excellence. They were Exalted because they surpassed their fellow man even before they had a hint of divine power. They are left in the world, alone, to forge their own destiny. Some find others like them, but there's so few of them in such a huge world that most work alone. They have no backup, no support, and no cause beyond that which they choose for themselves (although sometimes Zeniths get instruction, they're very vague). They have to forge their own place in a world that, if it perhaps doesn't all fear and hate them, is mostly willing to take advantage of them at the friendliest. And they DO it. Their reappearence: scattered, without support, in a time of tumult, has nonetheless already redefined the world. Every Solar can change the world, singly or jointly. They can descend into the darkest sin or be a paragon of virtue(s). They were instrumental in building the First Age, and could build the Third. The Solars are undeniably heroes.


But they are not the only heroes.


Let me tell you what it means to be Dragonblooded. To be Dragonblooded is to have a responsibility. To be Dragonblooded is to take up the sword to defend Creation. Every Dynast can ride, and shoot, and fight both bare handed and with a weapon, and lead troops into battle. EVERY. SINGLE. ONE. The most fat, jaded, lazy bureaucrat of the Thousand Scales can take up a sword and fight a strong man to a standstill without use of a single Charm, and lead troops into battle with competence. The requirements for Lookshy Dragonblooded are even more strict. If you cannot learn to fight for Creation, Dragonblooded society has no use for you. They believe themselves to be the only force standing between Creation and that which would destroy it, and they act accordingly. That does not just include personal competence. To be Dragonblooded is not a title, or an adornment, but membership in a single nation. Only Dragonblooded, of all the Exalted, have a Charm that allows them to take their most hated Dragonblooded foe and instantly trust and love them like a brother to join together to fight a greater threat. That is their duty: that is their call. You say they have failed Creation in their stewardship. But they have saved it. Saved it once, and twice, and many times over. When they overthrew the Solars, they were dying in scores, in droves, in their hundreds and thousands, but they would not surrender. They would not break. They fought until every last one was gone, because the brotherhood does not retreat. When the Great Contagion broke the armies of the Shogunate and the survivors faced oncoming endless hordes of horrors from beyond reality, they did not lay down and die, or flee screaming and broken. Oh, a few may have, but the records are clear on the whole: they fought. They fought to the end, they forced the Fair Folk to scratch and claw and die for everything they wanted to grasp, and in some places they even won, the broken remnants of reality against an impossibly larger foe! And ever since, whenever anything has threatened Creation, any horror has run loose upon it, the Dragonblooded have marched. They have fought the Fair Folk. They have fought rogue gods. They have fought the armies of the dead. Some have failed, some have died, a few have even turned traitor, but the brotherhood of the Dragons still stands in the defence of Creation. Even now, at the beginning of the setting, the Dragonblooded are the two mightiest forces in Creation. They have a religion that venerates them, yes, but also one that orders them to treat mortals well, which is more than one can say for any other known religion in Creation. And they police themselves. Sometimes it is effective and sometimes not, but even now the realms of the Dragonblooded are the safest and most stable in Creation. Even now, in both the Realm and Lookshy, you can find mortals in position of power. Even now, the peasants eat, the spirits are kept doing their proper jobs, and the foes of Creation dare not yet enter, because that is the peace that the Dragonblooded fought and bled and died for. Everything in Creation, everything that lives, owes its life to the Dragonblooded, because it is they who have been the army that defended Creation since the Solars were overthrown and the Lunars left. Every Solar owes his life to the Dragonblooded, even if he owes his death to them as well. Creation might need a more powerful protector, but it could never ask for a more loyal and dedicated one. The Dragonblooded are heroes.


But they are not the only heroes.


Let me tell you what it means to be Lunar. To be Lunar is to be tougher than any other Exalt ever had to be. Lunars don't Exalt for trying to do something audacious and remarkable, like Solars. They Exalt because they did something audacious and remarkable. A Solar might Exalt for taking up a sword to defend his village against the Fair Folk, but a Lunar only Exalts if he survived doing that. A Lunar has to win, to overcome a trial that seems impossible, before they get any reward. That is the life of a Lunar in a nutshell. They do not have the overwhelming power of the Solars, nor the brotherhood of the Dragonblooded, nor the support of Heavens and certain knowedge of the Sidereals. And yet they survive nonetheless. There is no challenge the Lunars cannot survive. The fury of the Primordials could not destroy them. The Dragonblooded and Sidereals could not stop them from escaping. The Wyld twisted them, broke them at their very core, crippled that which made them Exalted, and the Lunars yet survived. They not only survived, they remade themselves. Without their patron, without the Solars, without anyone else, the Lunars forged themselves new Exaltation and survived still. If they could not inhabit Creation, they inhabited the Wyld, a place absolutely antithetical to life, and survived still. And they did not just simply survive, either, cowering like dogs at the edge of a campfire's light. They grew stronger. They seized places of power. They forged nations. And they forged each other. They found new Lunars and tattooed them as the Lunars now needed to survive. And they did this without Sidereal astrology or any other means of instantly finding out when and where one Exalted. They did this through constant vigilence and looking out for those who needed it most. Nobody, not even the Solars, have faced what the Lunars have. The Solars merely died. But the Lunars were broken down to their very soul. Every Lunar, everywhere, is broken. But they have not died. They have not surrendered and become the lapdogs of the Dragonblooded and received the considerable benefits of their strength. They have not turned their backs on Creation, either. They have not walked out into the Wyld and left everything behind. Despite everything, despite terror and betrayal and death, despite being wounded more than any other Exalt could even imagine, they remain steadfast and true to themselves above all. The Lunars are heroes.


But they are not the only heroes.


Let me tell you what it means to be Sidereal. There is no life harder than that of a Sidereal. To be Sidereal is to be chosen, from birth, although you neither knew nor asked for it. To be Sidereal is to Exalt and be told that now you must train to be the finest-edged weapon in Creation, that you will spend the rest of your incredibly long life protecting Creation, and that there is no time for weakness, for doubt, or for failure. You will do what is required of you, or you will die and another will be chosen who is of a finer mettle than you. And most every Sidereal you will ever meet was given that choice, nodded their head, and devoted their existence to keeping Creation from the abyss. You may sneer that Sidereals control the world. That is true, but it is nothing to be rejoiced about. Controlling the world is a literal thing for Sidereals, not figurative. They must espy every aspect of it. They must figure out when anything is going wrong. And then they must stop it. Ninety-nine Sidereals, to our knowledge, do this. Ninety-nine men and women work day in and day out for Creation, and their only reward is another assignment and knowing that Creation has gone on another day. They have given up friends. They can love, but will never be loved for themselves. They erased their very existences from Creation to better serve it; if their judgement on how to best serve Creation was wrong, it does not erase the sacrifices they have made in pursuit of the noblest goal there is. They don't have vacations, because there is no time and nobody to take their place. They can amass staggering wealth and power but will never be able to enjoy it. Some guide the Solars, some guide the Dragonblooded: in either case, they see young heroes who have their whole lives ahead of them and can do whatever they want with it, who have the ability, the sheer luxury of saying on any given day "screw this, I'm going to go do something else". That's the freedom the Sidereal will never have, can never have, but they will do their job nonetheless and try their damndest to help the Solars or Dragonblooded to save Creation. That is their reward - that Creation lives another day. Not adulation. Not even a thank you. Just a satisfactory result. And they die. Oh yes, they die. Sidereals are the longest-lived of all the Exalted. And yet barely any survive from before the Usurpation. Why? Because they are out, every day, doing what they think must be done to save the world. And many times they die doing it. And death might be a relief, except it's an abject failure which has taken out a key piece of the network that keeps Creation safe. You may not agree with the decisions they make, but only an ingrate or someone suffused with hatred could fail to be in awe at the sacrifices the Sidereals make for what they believe they have to do. Their lives are only the first step. Only a Sidereal could, and does, wield a weapon which is immensely more effective against someone they love. Not pretend to love. Not have convinced that he loves. Not said he loves. Loves. Truly. Deeply. That weapon was built because it would be used. Because to be a Sidereal is to put nothing above your task of defending Creation. Not yourself. Not the one your love. Not your desires. Not anything. You don't matter. You chose not to matter. You chose figuratively (and quite literally in the oldest cases) not to even exist, all in the desire, the drive, the duty to make sure that Creation does exist. The Sidereals are heroes.


But they, too, are not the only heroes.


All of them are heroes. Not individually, of course - there's always individual exceptions. But collectively? Yes. Oh yes. Collectively, they have given more of themselves then anybody should ever be asked to do, and they have done it gamely and with excellence. They have all accomplished feats that border on and in many cases should have been impossible.


They are EXALTED. The name of the game is EXALTED. And the Exalted, all of them, are heroes.


The tragedy of the setting is that being heroic is not enough. Giving of yourself is not enough. Straining yourself to the utmost is not enough. It's too late, too hard, the enemies are at the gates and they cannot be denied. Not by the Solars, or the Dragonblooded, or the Lunars, or the Sidereals or anyone else.


That's where the PCs come in.

 

[Tikor]

And thanks for finding it again, btw! Here's another epic intro post, but I don't seem to have recorded who wrote it (maybe plague of hats?)

First, there was Chaos. Literally, the everything-and-nothing kind of chaos.
Then some titans showed up. They were made out of people and places, and the Chaos was pretty annoying. So they created the World, better known as Creation.


Creation is at the top of an infinitely tall mountain, and the Poles of Air, Fire, Water and Wood mark its outer boundaries. The Pole of Earth is the mountain it's on top of. Each of the cardinal directions are more strongly associated with the nearby element: North is Air, South is Fire, West is Water, East is Wood.


Creation was cool and all, but the Primordials—as these world-building titans were known—decided Heaven would be cooler, so they built that. Then, they built the Games of Divinity, which is so cool it will kill you. Not because it's dangerous, but because it's so awesome you just die from it.


The Primordials also created the gods, because Creation can't manage itself. The gods of Creation are bureaucrats and overseers. They monitor goings-on and make sure the Chaos doesn't mess things up. They enforce Fate, which is what Destiny says is supposed to happen. If something Outside Fate has too much influence, Destiny's predictions get messed up and things get all tangled and disorganized and eventually everything would theoretically snowball into complete causal meltdown.


At the head of the divine bureaucracy they placed the Unconquered Sun. When asked to build a theme deck for a Magic tournament, he put together a bunch of cards that had nothing to do with each other story- or color-wise. It stomped every other deck's ass, and when asked why he didn't make a theme deck he responded: "Winning is a theme."


It was the Unconquered Sun's job to make sure the Chaos didn't encroach on Creation. At the edges, where Chaos and Creation mingled, there was a sort of causality bog known as the Wyld, a place of Chaotic Shape. It was small back then. Fair Folk, evil, beautiful, soul-eating LARPers from beyond time and space, came out of the Chaos and took Shape to play in the Wyld and try to invade Creation. The Unconquered Sun stopped them, because he's better than that.


The Unconquered Sun was helped by Luna, who is sometimes a man, sometimes a woman, and sometimes a man and a woman. Or sometimes animals. Or whatever. He's a shapeshifter. When the Sun takes a rest, Luna is there to pick up the slack, getting more powerful as the Wyld gets more powerful, thus associating the tides of the Wyld with the waxing and waning of the Moon.


Luna and the Sun are what are known as Incarnae. An Incarna is a special kind of god that is better than other gods for some indefinable reason. Apart from the Sun and Luna, there are the five Maidens: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, the Maidens of Journeys, Serenity, Battles, Secrets and Endings respectively. They oversee Fate and know things and see things differently.


The gods saw that the Games of Divinity looked quite awesome, and decided they wanted some. This, of course, is where the Primordial's design flaws really begin to show. They had given the gods free will and passion, the better to carry out their drudgery, which is never a good idea. But they had forced the gods to swear an oath not to harm the Primordials. The gods got around this by creating powerful companions to battle the Primordials for them.


Autochthon was a Primordial rather different from the others. He was the usual, stunted Hephaestus-type craft-genius. He was willing to betray the other Primordials because they picked on him and broke the awesome shit he built. He showed the Incarnae how to Exalt human beings. Humans were one of the weakest, most uninteresting and unenviable races yet devised by the Primordials, which made them very afraid and prone to prayer. Prayer is money in Heaven, so humans were a pretty good deal for the Primordials, until the whole rebellion thing.


The Sun created 300 Solar Exalted, who are each "Winning is a theme" god-kings. The Moon created 300 Lunar Exalted to match, who are "Surviving and adapting is a theme" god-kings. Each of the Five Maidens created 20 Sidereal Exalted, who have themes based on the Maiden who made them. Some might say that for Sidereals, "Cheating is a theme." These are the Celestial Exalted. They can live thousands of years, but once they die that power passes on to an essentially random but worthy host. These Celestial Exaltations are impervious to real harm and ever-lasting and powered by free will; the Incarnae or Primordials couldn't stop them once they were sent out. Since the Incarnae gave up control of them, the Primordials couldn't order them to bring them back or disempower them. Smooth.


Another Primordial willing to betray her fellows was Gaia, one of the original authors of Creation. She wasn't going to do any fighting, or really anything herself, but she loved Luna so there you go. She did have her sub-souls, the Five Elemental Dragons, create the weakest but most numerous type of Exalted: Dragon-Blooded. These Terrestrial Exalted are more mundane heroes of elemental aspect, and unlike the Celestial Exalted their children become Dragon-Blooded too. At first there were only 10,000 of them, but they solved that problem very quickly. They were the soldiers for the Celestial leaders.


The Exalted rose up and made war on the Primordial slave-masters, and they won. They might've killed all of the titans, but Gaia made them be nicer: They mutilated their souls, turned their greatest leader inside out and imprisoned them all inside him. They are now the Yozis, the demons of Hell. The Yozis swore oaths and are destined to always want to escape and never be able to. Their oaths also bind them into service to the Exalted and gods, so that their lesser souls, your relatively common demon, can be summoned back to Creation for service. Sometimes their lesser souls can also slip through the cracks in the prison, which is generally considered bad. One of the Yozis, She Who Lives In Her Name, cracked open a part of herself before being imprisoned and burned away nine-tenths of the world in retribution; no one knows quite what was lost because it ceased to exist so entirely.


Some of the Primordials were killed in the war. Because reality wasn't built for that kind of thing, they couldn't actually die, so instead they became the Neverborn. Their bodies painful tombs filled with crypts for their souls and the whispering dreams of hate they have for the living. They fell towards Oblivion, which is literally what it sounds like, but they got stuck on the way because the universe was broken. The Labyrinth and the Underworld sprung up around them, either from their dreams or as a buffer against Oblivion for the rest of the universe. The Labyrinth is a wormy, endless series of caverns filled with the horrors of fitful dead gods and their dreams; the Underworld that sits atop it is a dark mirror of Creation. Where the Elemental Pole of Earth is a six hundred mile tall mountain in the center of the world, in the Underworld is an enormous pit that leads to Oblivion and the Tombs of the Neverborn. Without the Underworld, ghosts didn't exist, because souls just reincarnated. Now, the world is broken.


With their dying breaths, the Neverborn (or the Neverborn and Yozis...Second Edition has been inconsistent about this part) laid the Great Curse on the Exalted. This Curse doomed them to doom themselves, indulging their character flaws to the point of madness. The Solars got it worst, then the Lunars and Sidereals, and least of all the Dragon-Bloods. No one knew this happened though, except maybe the Maiden of Secrets, but she can't tell anyone because then it wouldn't be a secret.


Before the war, the gods had created the Five Elementals to better regulate Creation. At the beginning of the war, the paranoid Primordials shattered these great beings because they were not bound by the gods' oaths. This only scattered their elemental power, though, and now little elementals pop up all over Creation.


The Unconquered Sun and the other gods whooped it up and took over Heaven and the Games of Divinity. In return, they "gifted" the Exalted with broke-ass Creation. They handed the Solars the Mandate of Heaven, the Creation-Ruling Mandate, and told them to get to work. The Solars did, and over the course of three and a half millennia built a society of idyllic comforts and terrible Solar whimsy. As the Great Curse encouraged worse and worse behavior, the Solars became a more destructive influence. Eventually, their highest priest blasphemed and the Sun turned his face from them. They didn't really care.


The Sidereals were very concerned about this, and cast prophecies. They saw three potentials: 1) try to save the Solars from their madness, succeed, and Win It All; 2) try to save the Solars or do nothing, watching Creation slide into golden, terrible madness; or 3) try to kill the Solars, lessening Creation but keeping it safe in perpetuity. It should be mentioned, at this point, that the Curse of the Sidereal Exalted is one of hubris and poor planning, which is pretty harsh when your job is to be a planner and adviser. They chose option 3, which didn't account for things Outside Fate that could muck up prophecies. Go heroes!


Because it had been 3,000 years, all the Exalted had been fairly steadily growing in power. Of course, they live pretty exciting lives, so few of them actually lived that whole time. In any case, it was quite a job killing 300 of the most powerful beings in existence. To do so, the Sidereals teamed up with the Dragon-Blooded. In a daring move at a yearly banquet, many of the Solars were killed and their Exaltations trapped in the Jade Prison so that they could not reincarnate. The surviving Solars caused much havoc, the capital city of Creation was decimated, and lots of things blew up or were killed or both. The Lunar Exalted were generally loyal to the Solars, or at least viewed as not too trustworthy by the Sidereals, so the Lunars were driven out into the Wyld.


This was all extremely illegal, and Heaven would've pressed charges and fixed things if not for what the Sidereals did to cover up their actions. They occluded their criminal acts by casting Destinies for them with the Constellation of the Mask. They did so with such vigor and so heavily, that the Mask strained under the pressure and broke. They broke part of Fate and Creation and the world to cover up their crime. Now, no one in Creation can remember them properly, they can never form lasting relationships and a lot of gods are kind of miffed at them.


For a few hundred years the Dragon-Blooded bickered amongst themselves, ruling Creation and fighting over it. The gods were kind of uncooperative, because the Terrestrials didn't have the Mandate that the Solars had. Things were still okay, though. The Sidereals went back to doing their job in Heaven, but were even more underappreciated. The Lunars, trapped in the Wyld, were infected by Chaos and had to go through a whole "thing" to try and get that under control. Now Lunars can become chimera, which are insane, ever-mutating beasts. Fun.


Then the Contagion came, a disease that wiped out 90% of all living things in the entire world, and could even make Sidereals sick when they read the Fate of the diseased. This disease came from outside of Fate, and it really would've helped it the Solars had been around. Then, another threat outside Fate came along: Fair Folk. Without the Solars, the Fair Folk stood a chance of destroying Creation and returning everything back to Chaos. They invaded in numberless hordes, and Creation's borders shrank; there were no living things to keep reality whole, dead as they were from disease or war.


Then a heroic young Dragon-Blooded officer and some of her friends broke into the Shrine of the Anathema (which is what the non-Terrestrial Exalted were called to make everyone feel better about themselves). There, this young officer sacrificed her friends or they sacrificed themselves to activate the Sword of Creation. Giant elemental warriors materialized, cold iron needles flew thousands of miles through the sky and decimated the Fair Folk, driving them back and saving Creation. This young officer emerged and named herself the Scarlet Empress, rightful ruler of the world. Some people disagreed, so now there's the Scarlet Empire (better known as the Realm) in the center of the world, it's outlying tributary-states, and a bunch of independent states scattered across the outskirts of Creation.


Just a few years before "present" in the game line, the Scarlet Empress disappeared. No one knows where, and now the Empire she created that relied entirely on her is collapsing. Worse/better, the Jade Prison was found and broken, and the Solars have returned. Definitely worse (or better if you're the Neverborn), the Solars are lesser in number and instead some new Exalted are showing up, calling themselves "Abyssals." There are also rumblings of some wicked new Exalted coming from Hell, as well.


By default, with just the corebook, your players will be making Solar Exalted, come back to save or damn the world with laser kung-fu. You can buy other books to play all the other Exalted, or even gods, demons, ghosts, elementals and more. Primarily, once you get your hands on Creation, your mandate is to go forth and do awesome.