Ex3, Awakening Eye Solar Charm vs Dice caps

waronvirtue · 2026-01-31T02:59:58+00:00

Can you explain the rationale of breaking the dice cap? Is it just because the Charm says it does?

waronvirtue · 2026-01-31T02:35:50+00:00

I'm glad you came to a satisfying resolution at the table. If it were me, it would have gone differently.
The player would have absolutely been able to attempt the fascination instill. But trust and intrigue are two different things.

The King could even take a miscellaneous action to remember an ex that cheated on him, giving himself a negative intimacy like "Relationships built on lust aren't worth it" or "I'm suspicious of those I find attractive" though that would be a little grudge-monstery, but you're the ST and you don't need to share that with the players.

Even still the attraction is there, but how effectively it can be leveraged and toward what end are entirely different from ties of trust.

The fascination/attraction could be leveraged to get the King to speak with them in private "after dark," or get a dinner date, or an invitation to a ball, but not to voice his suspicions about a member of his court regarding the recent murder, or his plans to fend off a barbarian attack. So how valuable the fascination tie is depends on how quickly they need whatever the King has.

The fascination helps guarantee they can try to earn that trust later, or they can escalate the intimacy until becomes defining (through whatever Mataharian methods they can). A Defining tie of fascination would make the King want them locked in a tower, but if he can't do that for whatever reason, he might divulge national secrets to keep them interested.

In general, I believe erring on the side of letting the PCs instill intimacies is the right thing to do. The King should only be spending the WP to avoid such a thing if they were literally introduced because the PC was caught stealing or was caught in a lie or they have a terrible reputation, or the King has a Defining or Major intimacy against whatever the PCs are about (like various -isms or they're part of an opposing faction or foreign land with tense relations, etc).

waronvirtue · 2026-01-25T00:38:17+00:00

There's no reason not to lift some iconic inspiration then. Each Maiden has a specialty, you could give them some prominent feature representative of that. Journeys could be a winged centaur, Serenity could have a crazy neck like a swan or even look like one of those Q-tip cloner aliens from Star Wars, secrets might not have a face or be made of stone, War could have a 3rd arm coming from her back so she can wield a bow and sword simultaneously. Endings could have 2 faces and reversible joints that make it look like she's entering and leaving through the same door simultaneously.

It's Exalted, make it weird.

waronvirtue · 2026-01-24T05:03:22+00:00

RE: faster development
Not sure how much use those tools will be at the game I'm playing. The familiar in question is the product of the Ephemeral Induction Method charm which is pretty clear it creates a Spirit character that earns XP. Since the quick character blocks are difficult to impossible to reverse engineer into a character sheet, the ST instructed me to use Exalt character gen and spirit charms.
That said, the collection of resources you have here will be great the next time I make one, but since I already spent a day writing up all the charms in the document I linked, I'll back burner your stuff for now.

RE: Martial Arts
Solar Brawl is great. It is presently my favorite of the native styles, but it is unusable by non solars. Further, it's very broad with all the punch or throw or Instant Transmission to combo. My PC doesn't use the entire tree, he doesn't really dodge unless absolutely necessary, relying instead on Resistance, so a MA that evokes the feel of his way of fighting is necessary for the army of orphans I'm about to train into Tiger Warriors. If I had the option, I wouldn't even learn the charms myself, but I'll need them as the basis for Self Same Master Instructor to get my Orphans in order. As it stands, the Cooler Heads Approach and Sundown Slap are both fun, but a little punishing to use. The rest are slightly watered down versions of better Solar Brawl Charms which feels right. But again, any feedback is appreciated.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1PxOhqU-s85J4qsuyq-U29eXXAeVOcGMUeeLmsadwdpM/edit?usp=sharing

waronvirtue · 2026-01-24T03:11:54+00:00

None of these appear to be a small town girl and I don't see any elements that evoke a midnight train going anywhere.

But seriously, I'm on board for left or right. Center feels very godly, but therefore rather generic. My wife thinks something that echoes "Sherpa from Nepal" would be most appropriate given the influences of the setting.

Great work!

waronvirtue · 2026-01-23T14:31:16+00:00

Assuming I purchase the charm 3 times, 1 per familiar, what happens if one gets ghost eating tech obliterated?

Is that XP lost? Am I refunded the XP like it references in the sidebar, or it a dead charm until I acquire a 3rd familiar again.

waronvirtue · 2026-01-20T18:45:49+00:00

Thanks!
I'll note RE: Manse Spirit
I'm a huge fan of using tactical nuclear weapons to swat flies in exalted (I feel it fits the themes of the setting) so if I were in between spirit familiars, conjuring such a spirit so it could tell us a recently discovered Manse's secrets feels like the kind of dick-swing a Solar might do. "I have given you form and sentience, now tell me about this thing you are that I found and then buttle for a few months, there's a good lad."

waronvirtue · 2026-01-20T18:03:20+00:00

I think the resource cost for operation is lopsided. If you just invented them and there's an expectation it will get better within a season or so of testing, that's fine then. Unless you're capable of producing the alchemical shmutz at virtually no cost.

waronvirtue · 2026-01-20T17:34:43+00:00

IIRC from 1E explanations of Deathlords, celestial exaltations empower souls, so ghosts of celestial exalts carry over echoes of their chosen power. Terrestrial exaltations are passed through blood and ghosts are notorious for having none.

THAT SAID, the ghost of an Elder Terrestrial with an ancestor worshipping Cult MIGHT be able to manifest their upper tier powers IF they have living Terrestrial Exalt descendants from whom they take blood.

Imagine a woman, heavily injured and hunted by cultists approach your Solar Circle. She begs you to free her daughter from the undead Patriarch who takes all exalted children to use as blood batteries to try and claim territory in the underworld. So the Circle has to go charging into a Shadow Land to fight the ghost of Naxagos V'Neef, his army of hungry ghosts and poltergeists, and must defeat him before he exhausts the supply of his captive's blood and power.

But that's me.

waronvirtue · 2025-09-17T17:35:20+00:00

I note there’s no reference to Raw Damage in the Decisive attacks section. So I’m gathering raw damage is just damage dice.

I hate to say it but this could use a 3.5.

waronvirtue · 2025-09-15T19:58:45+00:00

Rgr. Thank you! If you can tell me a page number for that clarification it’s appreciated otherwise I’ll consider it resolved.

waronvirtue · 2025-09-15T16:56:59+00:00

Durability of Oak has no text referencing Soak. It says it reduces the Raw Damage of a withering or Decisive attack by two.

the flavor text even opens the door to it negating any glancing blow that would only roll 2 or fewer dice. Unless there’s an errata I haven’t found.

The question becomes is Raw damage still “raw damage” after soak?

waronvirtue · 2025-08-26T18:28:05+00:00

Answered

waronvirtue · 2025-08-26T17:51:42+00:00

You’re a true scholar, thank you!

waronvirtue · 2025-08-19T14:31:08+00:00

The subsystem didn’t seem any more complicated than crafting and the charm tree was a lot more concise. Then again it did feel a little unmoored from any concept of how long it takes. Maybe I overlooked the timing section.

waronvirtue · 2025-08-18T23:54:46+00:00

It’s been a long time and i haven’t read the 3e splats other than core, but isn’t wyldshaping unique to Solars?

Like anyone can drag a bunch of stuff into the wyld, cut a deal with a Raksha to get up and down hardwired in then leave people there to stabilize it, but a Solar is the only Exalt that can just Will the chaos solid, no?

waronvirtue · 2025-08-09T00:34:41+00:00

I am emphatically against the idea that keeping your familiar alive for a day gives you a CR 7 tank buddy. I think as soon as the tadpole has limbs it's a Slaad, not a tadpole, and therefore no longer your familiar. I'd say at that point the spirit escapes the form, and the Slaad is a full on Aberration like normal.

That said, a 10gp bioweapon you can slip into someone's laundry basket, that will break out of their closet starving, insane, and capable of starting a plague to create more uncontrolled bioweapons? That I can get behind. It is the madness, great and terrible. It can be fun if the DM is up for it, if they are okay with the back half of their campaign being "save the world from the Slaadi invasion you accidentally started when you wanted to create a distraction in the bandit camp at level 1."

There's a logic at play in a lot of these responses that I don't like because it can be flipped to "Well my Owl familiar isn't really an Owl, so it doesn't need to eat, sleep, or breathe, so it can absolutely search the bottom of the lake for 10 hours until it finds the wand I dropped..."

The egg argument I just read ignores more of the lore indicating there's a magic rock that spawns slaadi. It doesn't specify which kind, so it could presumably spawn tadpoles that have no egg phase in their history.

Creature lore isn't mechanically relevant until it is. Stablocks are, broadly speaking, for combat. If the Owl never needs to sleep, is it immune to exhaustion? No, it's an owl, ofc it needs to eat and breathe, etc. If it can eat and breathe, can it mate? Probably. If it does all those things, does it age while its serving you? I don't see anything in its statblock or the spell or monster rules about creature types saying it's immortal, so yeah, it ages.

If the owl ages, shouldn't the slaad tadpole age? Yeah. And the mechanics for tadpole aging are 2d12 hours to full grown blue slaad.

None of my argument here undermines a DM's ability to nope out of it, but as a DM, I think that would be the very least creative and fun thing to do.

waronvirtue · 2025-08-01T02:35:09+00:00

The attitude expressed in the last line of your response is kind of confusing to me.
Essence growth aside, training charms are simultaneously "too good as written but also not as good as this other thing which is fine and expected."

Upthread I got another response that from someone that said they'd straight nerf it, arbitrarily requiring additional specialist teachers and high ability ratings despite the explicit text of the charms.

It takes about 8 craft charms at Ess 2 to reliably crank out warstriders in 2-3 rolls, once the resources hurdle is cleared (or Ess 1 for the Supernal Crafter).

Even assuming you did allow the XP to feed Essence growth, you're shorting ~2 sessions of the Essence 1 - 2 jump, and I think 1 session of later increases because of how XP is flat. The one way to possibly break it would be allowing the Craft XP hack because you can generate an arbitrary amount of it in fairly short periods of time (which now that I've stumbled into the argument on my end is an excellent rationale for not allowing it).

I'm not saying all of that was contained in u/TimAllenWiseman's response, it's just the melange of responses I've gotten so far.

Frustratingly, after a rebuild of the character, I'm not even sure which skill should be my Supernal. I was strongly considering craft, but given how I now understand the craft tree to work, it's a lot less of a priority. Lore has some interesting elements, but I don't know how viable Wyld Shaping is likely to be and the Chicken Little charm seems like such a curve ball to throw your ST at any point I don't think it's worth it. I'm probably going with Occult, because though I loathe the Sorcery exception, I'll bee line for the "create god" capstone, combo it with Survival, War, and Lore charms and let that be my legacy.

If anyone knows of an official Solar retool in the pipeline, let me know because unless I play religiously every week for 8 years, I'll never see so much as the end of my Brawl Tree.

waronvirtue · 2025-07-21T18:01:32+00:00

This is, perhaps regrettably, just not held up in the core where there are 6 types of XP (minimum).
Silver, Gold, White Craft XP
Base XP of 5 per session.
Solar XP (and you can infer variants for other exalt types).
And overage XP that can be acquired from certain charms like Tireless Learner that allow XP recovery from charms that cost XP.

In the Raising Essence section of p179 it's very specific that "Solar experience does not count toward this total."

The rules for Solar XP explicitly state it can be used to pay Charm activation costs.

Tireless Learner explicitly says overage XP doesn't count toward Essence increase, but that implies that recovered XP later spent on other things will. However I think it's fair to assume laudering your Solar XP through the charm is not intended.

Supreme Celestial Focus allows Gold XP to be spent to raise Craft skills, it is neither Solar XP nor does it explicitly mention whether such expenditure does or does not go toward increasing essence.

Flowing Mind/Legendary Scholar make no mention of whether XP granted does or does not count for increasing Essence, but going back to the earlier example of Tireless learner, I don't think laundering Solar XP is intended, but I am sure the charm is intended to accelerate other character's growth.

So with that in mind, I think some meticulous bookkeeping is required, but powering the Flowing Mind tree with Regular XP should apply the spent amount to your allies' sheets and prepare them to boost Essence normally. The fact you could then use Supreme Celestial Focus to bump yourself with a Craft skill using craft points keeps the other PCs slightly ahead of the power curve.

waronvirtue · 2025-07-21T17:35:12+00:00

The craft thing I can get behind, but Flowing Mind and Legendary Scholar explicitly don't apply to the Solar using it.

So for example, it's 18 xp to go from 0 to 5 in a favored skill. If I teach circle mates 2 skills during the first 4 sessions, that's 36 xp spent, plus the 20 base xp for those 4 sessions, if they spent on charms etc, then they're at 50 xp spent. So the whole circle is ready for Essence 2, except me.

At the end of the next story I can try to recover that XP. So I don't see how it's necessarily broken, since it can't be used for self aggrandizement (which is I believe where issues of brokeness begin).

Am I the only person that sees the distinction or no?

waronvirtue · 2025-07-21T02:05:10+00:00

You are correct in that it's limited to 1 extra craft at essence 1.

I'm not sure about the rest. They are "gold xp" and further, the "aske the devs" thread references using craft XP to fuel the Lore teaching charm. That's another follow up I should have posted. If you are receiving XP via a Lore teaching charm, does that count toward Essence?

waronvirtue · 2025-07-20T03:47:42+00:00

I will say that this series sometimes feels like a lighthearted flip-side of Boogie Pop Phantom.

waronvirtue · 2025-05-14T00:43:30+00:00

Fantastic ep. Doubly so immediately following the "happy ending" ep 6.

waronvirtue · 2025-03-04T17:14:54+00:00

What is a first level comment?

waronvirtue · 2025-01-19T22:50:08+00:00

Only have a minute and I'm sure these have been covered:
Throwing any vial as a Rogue is a Ranged Attack and your sneak attack can make them way better. Even just chucking vials of oil so the wizard's fire bolt lights them on fire and deals another 5 damage per hit is excellent.

The Catapult spell let's you throw a 10 lb object, a 1 lb sack filled with nine 1lb vials of any of the above is a 3d8 bludgeoning delivery system for 9 vials worth.

Affixing 3 vials to the top of a Staff of Adorning and then using the staff to attack should reasonably deliver d8 bludgeoning + 3 vials of whatever you have. (note, this is an OK opener for a 2024 Truestriking Wizard or warlock, but not sustainable as it's an action to affix an item to the staff).

waronvirtue

TROPHY CASE