2209 - This Week in Hobby
Getting classy in Anathema, Games Workshop names my garage band, and yelling orc dakka magic.
Castes and Classes
The original Exalted core book had a lot of work to do. It introduced the world, the history, and the mechanics of a game unlike any other I knew at the time. I still don't know of anything that did as much conceptual heavy lifting. Most TTRPGs have a clear conceptual lineage. They, too, stood on the shoulders of giants. Sometimes, it's possible to catch a glimpse of which giants.
Exalted feels like it sprang fully-formed from the head of Zeus. I'm sure the people who wrote it would disagree. They know what it sprang from. My guess is a lot of anime.
Over the course of the first edition they introduced eight distinct player classes. I hesitate to call them classes. It's the easiest way to think about them, but that's not what they are. The Solar Exalted, presented in the core rule book, further divide into five castes. The castes are the true classes. A dawn-caste solar maps on to the template of a warrior or paladin. A night-caste solar is the rogue-inspired option.
Then it starts to get a little more complicated. After the solars came the lunars, their consorts. The sidereals, the abyssals, the dragon-blooded, the autochthonians. Each flavor of exalt provided a new lens of the world, had its own caste-equivalents. Sometimes they overlapped each other, but most of them were distinct.
Each type of exalt tells a different kind of story. The solars tell stories of underdogs striving against overwhelming odds. Hunted, harried, but with the potential to do great and terrible things if given a chance. The lunars tell stories of the disenfranchised and dispossessed. The lost beyond the edges of society. Dark things in the wild snapping at the heels of a fallen empire. Sidereals tell stories of political intrigue. Dragon-blooded tell stories of family.
I'm still fascinated by this feature of Exalted. It supports any kind of game you want to run with glee. There's even a book for running heroic mortals, which sounds better out of context than it would be in the mythos. In a world of Kakkarots and Vegetas, who wants to be a Krillin? But the option's there. It's even one of the hard-bound books, so you know it means business.
While developing Anathema I've tried to capture some of this flavor. The current rendition is an early-alpha play-test, and it's based around D&D 5E. I'm uncertain that's where it will stay forever. I could write an entire essay talking about the pros and cons of releasing it as its own system or as a setting. Dark Sun was a setting for D&D, and it managed to do some pretty heavy editing to the way the game played.
As with Dark Sun, I've made the Priest class off-limits to players. I've mapped it to the dragon-blooded. Priests are the boots-on-the-ground functionaries of the setting's bad guys. They would never ally themselves with the "playable classes." They're bad guys. Every single time.
For each of the classes in the 5E core book I've done a similar mapping. Both to the various castes of the various Exalts, and to concepts from Dark Sun where appropriate.
It might seem weird to develop a custom world and then pin so many of its concepts to other games. I'd counter this is how the early steps of building a new thing often go. "It's like this other thing, but different."
Mapping 5E classes to exalt castes hasn't changed anything about the game mechanics. It changes my thought processes about who they are in the world. It's a tool for guiding my creative spark, not an attempt to copy wholesale the work of others.
Now I'm the one standing on the shoulders of giants. Some day, if I'm incredibly lucky, I'll be the inspiration for a new generation that'll follow.
Hey, Check This Out!
Games Workshop
The path of the preview finally comes to a close with the launch of the updated Aeldari. Codex, dice, and datacards are all as usual. New sculpts for "Maugan Ra and the Dark Reapers", somehow not the name of my high-school garage band. Warlocks, Guardians, Ynnari. It's a space elf fire sale.
Dice
I've only seen liquid-filled dice a few times at conventions. From what vendors have said, they're difficult to manufacture. That hasn't stopped MDG from trying. They're offering some very cool-looking Elixir V2 dice over on 'yon starter of kicks.
TTRPGs
Solo journaling RPGs have a weird place in the pantheon of my interests. I aspire to play them far more often than I manage in practice. Colostle: The Roomlands is the latest such system to catch my eye. An infinite world inside a castle, with smaller, meaner castles as enemies.
ORC BORG. Yell-powered orc prayers. Wait. Where's my bold and italics keys. Yell-powered orc prayers. Because louder guns hurt more. They've managed to channel the sauce that makes Warhammer's greenskins delightful.
What happens to a dungeon after the Big Bad's Been Beaten? The adventurers have left with all the loot? Who's going to clean up the mess and reset the traps? Enter Dungeon Local 001, a "reverse-dungeon crawl", about taking back your home. If your home were the kind of dungeon that kept being taken over by a lich.