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Books of Sorcery, Vol. V - The Roll of Glorious Divinity II is, besides a tongue-twister title, a book of demons and ghosts for Exalted. It updates info about demons from the old Games of Divinity book into 2nd edition stats and adds the Abscissic demon summoning method (also updated) from Savant and Sorcerer. The second half of the book contains new rules and stats for ghosts, including rules for “Heroic” ghosts (though, bizarrely, it omits xp costs for those).

It’s a welcome update; I immediately included the new demon summoning rules into my own game (as of yesterday) – now those damn Blood Apes have to be kept entertained or they go…. apeshit. Or something. The writing is quite clear, though as always this 2nd edition lacks some of the fun flavor from the 1st edition books. Some of this may be due to reduced available word count per subject, which (while helping keep things clear) I feel is also one of the main problems with this book: there’s just too much crammed into here. I would much rather have seen the whole book devoted to the care and feeding of demons, since they are such a cornerstone of Exalted sorcery. Ghosts we’ve already had elsewhere, I would have stuck the text now found in this book somewhere else.

So… a good book, with welcome (and long-overdue) updates of 1st edition material to 2nd edition, but marred a bit by cramming a bit too much into one book and by having most of the book be just a repeat of material from older books. I’m hoping to see some more demon stats in other books down the line, now the book just gives the same list of demons that 1st edition had, with updated stats. Would be good to get some actually new stuff.

One new detail liked a lot: the “obscurity” rules for figuring out if a sorcerer has heard (enough) about a given demon type. Handy.

This is a bit more like it. While still staying very far away from high art, at least A Shadow Over Heaven’s Eye is a pretty good read. Set in the horoscope-obsessed Varangian city-states, it has a young girl rebelling against her destiny, Swan as a visiting diplomat, and an interesting Sidereal-fueled main plot. The writing is good enough and the book has some nice details and flavor on this region of Creation. Swan is himself, trying to be the perfect diplomat while dodging assassins and the Wyld Hunt. I’d rank this among the best of the Exalted novels – nothing spectacular, but good entertainment and useful potential world flavor for GMs.

Like all the Exalted novels, it’s a very quick read; large font and not that many pages.

Books based on roleplaying games (and, well, games in general) have a reputation of being crap. This is, sadly, due to most of them actually being crap, so the reputation is well-deserved. However, every now and then you run into a book which ignores that reputation and actually manages to be pretty damn good.

The Carnelian Flame is not one of those. If you want good rpg-related books, read the Delta Green novels and short stories, Greg Stolze’s Godwalker, Robin D. Laws’ Pierced Heart, etc. Avoid this book like the plague. Avoid it even if you’ve sortof liked the other Exalted novels, this is easily the worst of them I’ve read.

The problem isn’t the plot, as such; while not being amazingly innovative, it’s quite ok. There’s an up-and-coming Deathknight with a plan to Kill Lots of People (tm), a newly-exalted bandit, Arianna in the role of the required signature character wandering mage… nothing spectacular, but you can build a decent Exalted book from that. The problem is the writing. It’s klunky, and at times feels like it’s aimed at 10yr olds. The characters apparently have a competition regarding who can say the most spectacularly corny lines, with everybody doing their best to out-corny eat other. The plot develoment is painfully connect-the-dots. The ending reveals no surprises whatsoever.

Waste of time.

Oh, there were a few fun points. I liked the version of Shoat of the Mire presented here, the personality fits pretty well with the…. upbriging that the Shoats receive. I would have preferred a bit more “crazy” in there, but… it was ok. Likewise, the demon tree thingy was a fun idea. Not worth the book, though.

The Underworld provides a 2nd edition update to the Underworld, where Exalted’s dead (and other creatures) “live”. The locale has already been explored to some extent in some 1st edition books and in the 2nd edition Abyssals book, but this book provides a “real” overview of things.

It’s pretty good. Lots of things were familiar to me from the 1st edition books (though having 2nd ed stats for things is always nice), but many things were new and interesting. Far from being just a generic “land of the dead”, the Shadowlands in Exalted have a very specific history and “cosmology”. Like Exalted’s “heaven”, Yu-Shan, the Underworld is far from generic. The place acts as a dark mirror to Creation, in many respects, also mirroring the vast complexity and regional variance.

We get stats for many NPCs, some of which are very high power. You do not want to mess with the Green Lady, in case that wasn’t blindingly obvious. You also do not want to mess with the Deathlords without lots of prep – their stats and capabilities are elevated to a much more suitable level from the joke stats in the 2nd edition core, where Mask of Winters didn’t look too scary. These new stats for the Deathlords make destroying them seriously difficult… which is the whole point, they should never be pushovers, even to a group of experienced Solars. Especially considering what the Deathlords originally were…

Together with the new Abyssals book, you now have the tools to run a Shadowlands game if you wish. You also get lots of great toys and flavor to throw at your Solar players, in the more likely game scenario. Of course, Creation is vast and so are the Shadowlands; one book can’t hope to give anything but a brief overview. In that, this book succeeds well – lots of story hooks, local flavor, and ideas. While not quite as cool a read as the Yu-Shan book (perhaps because much of this material was familiar to me from the 1st edition), this is still an extremely solid supplement.

Dreams of the First Age is the first box set that White Wolf has produced for a roleplaying game (at least as far as I remember). Apparently the production run was beset with all sorts of problems, and the WW guys commented that they’re slowly figuring out why not many companies make boxed sets…

In any case, the end result is very nice. It’s a setting supplement for Exalted, detailing the mythical First Age, when Solars were in charge and everything was great… or not so much. The box contains two books (one on the world, one on the inhabitants and character creation), a pretty full-color cloth map of Creation, a very nice cardboard “battlewheel” with counters, and a fun “Guidebook to Meru” for newly Exalted Solars. A very nice package to my mind, and well worth the money.

The contents are mostly great. The Meru guidebook is written as an “ingame” guidebook and contains lots of fun nuggets and general disdain of the “lower races”. The setting books are interesting – a lot of this stuff we already knew or guessed, but some was quite surprising. Tours into Malfeas to torment the inhabitants some more, floating sky fortresses explicitly named as insults to defeated Primordials… good stuff, and had me smiling more than once. The Solar charms in the character book have received some (deserved) criticism, but I’m not that much of a crunch guy so I can’t get too upset over a few badly written charms; I’d just ignore them, myself. In general the crunch is ok, I think, though as noted the Solar stuff needs a bit of tweaking. I personally found the most interesting bit to be the writeups on the NPCs – we’re given the “past lives” of the Exalted signature characters and lots of other interesting folks. Desus is just as much a wifebeating bastard as we’ve been given to understand, but he’s an interesting bastard. The Dragon-Blooded general Anjei Maruma is given a pretty chilling writeup, in that we know what her personality leads her to do in the future. Ma-Ha-Suchi is hilarious, in that in the First Age he’s an infamous womanizer and seducer, “The Wolf with the Red Roses”. Heh. How things change…

I really liked the thing, mainly because it gave interesting background for a lot of “current” Exalted stuff. If I were to actually run a First Age game, I’d probably go for a “police series” type of thing, with the players as Dragonblood “beat cops” trying to keep their heads above the water while fielding at times insane directives from their Solar superiors. Might be fun.

We finally managed to run a session of Exalted last Sunday, after some scheduling difficulties. The characters, now in the Northern trapper town of Wangler’s Knob, did some expected things (talk with the locals, set out for the even-farther North) and some slightly unexpected ones (ambushed a Dragonblood expedition in the middle of the snowy wilderness). It was a logical (if ruthless) thing to do, and it was great – the fight was the biggest one we’ve had yet, and Khamyn met the limits of his invulnerability for the first time; I was pretty sure he was a goner for a small while there. It was tight, they were facing 9 skilled Wood Aspects plus their retinue. It was also great because of the moral problems it caused and will cause – since they were the ones attacking without warning in the middle of the night, supported by a demon horde (yes, really)… who exactly are the bad guys here? The fact that the target Dragonbloods had actually been quite pleasant to the characters previously adds some fuel to that fire. While it was a bit unexpected (I expected potential violence, but at a different time and place), storywise this was good. The massive fight ate up much of the playtime, but it also gave us a chance to practice the combat mechanics.

Outside that version of Creation, real-life swordplay has involved a lot less flashy gymnastics and a lot more old-fashioned sweat and repetition of basic moves. My heel, which was giving me serious problems last Wednesday and Thursday, has apparently healed; good, since tendon/joint pains are something that I’m extremely wary of. Tuesday’s basic training went well, and yesterday’s rapier also. While tiring and sweaty, rapier didn’t kill my arm too badly this time round. Maybe some little strength is returning, an iota at a time.

After the somewhat shaky “Dragon-Blooded” book, I’ve really liked the new Exalted hardcover “splatbooks”. While some more anal rulesmongers like to whine about lack of playtesting with some specific charms, I don’t care that much – the ideas have been excellent and the writing good. Special mention goes to the “Lunars” book, which totally reinvented the Lunars and switched them from a boring “yarr, we’re barbarians!” role into being a fascinating group of Darwinist society builders.

So now we have Abyssals. While the original (1st ed) Abyssals wasn’t bad at all, this one is wonderful. Somehow, they’ve made the Abyssals both nastier and more understandable, at the same time. The first part of the book pulls together all the details on what happened when the Solars originally kicked Primordial ass, as seen from the other side. While a lot of this info has been available before, there are tons of small new details here and the whole thing is written in a clear fashion; it makes figuring out what makes the Abyssals (and the Deathlords and the Neverborn) tick a lot less headache-inducing. The Deathlords get great writeups, with some much-needed expansion and clarification on motives and abilities. Much weight is placed on how the Abyssals are complete slaves, and how the deck is stacked against them should they try to be anything else except evil death-dealers (Resonance is nasty now). On the other hand, many options for rebellion are presented.

After the initial overview section, we get the standard character creation stuff, then a long section on Abyssal charms (with some very nice innovations, for example the new Mirror Charm concept), then a section on Necrotech. A discussion on gamemastering an Abyssal chronicle finishes up the book.

If you’re running Exalted and want to use the Abyssals / Deathlords in your game, you want this book. No question. I think it’s one of the best new hardcover splatbooks – it paints the Abyssals in shades of grey while keeping those shades firmly on the “black(ish)” side. These aren’t cartoon villains – unless you want them to be. The art and comics are a mixed bag; some great, some not so, but nothing really bad. A few of the comics are very funny, and the one at the end continues the Arianna / Prince of Shadows / The Lover Clad in the Raiment of Tears story begun in earlier comics.

Warmly recommended.

Yu-Shan is the third book in Exalted’s “Compass of Celestial Directions” supplement line, detailing various “extraplanar” locales (using the word “locale” very loosely) for the game. The first book detailed the Blessed Isle – and as such was a somewhat weird start, since the Blessed Isle is a very concrete location in Creation. Maybe it was a reference to the fact that it’s the center, in both the physical and metaphysical sense, dunno. The second book detailed the Wyld (where the Fair Folk exist), and now we have Yu-Shan, the city of the gods.

That’s one of the many things to love in Exalted: where many fantasy games have gods, and the concept of a “heaven” (or “plane”) where they live, those locales are usually left abstract and undetailed; usually for the reason that gods are so far above “mere mortals” that such detail is unnecessary. However, since even beginning Exalted characters have the ability to kick (minor) god ass or at least talk to it as an equal, the game needs to be much more specific with regards to gods and their abode. So… Yu-Shan, the magnificent city where the Celestial gods live.

As an Exalted GM, I love this book. It brings tons of detail to what up to now has been a fairly loosely detailed location, and contains tons of plot hooks all over the place. You’re really forced to to face the fact that it’s a city… not an abstract one, but a very concrete and vast one, with many of the problems you would expect to find in a huge city. Crime, unemployment, traffic problems, you name it (yes, unemployed gods exist in droves, and provide plot hooks galore). We get detail on the (deadly) constant bureaucratic infighting, the personalities involved, and the historical reasons of how things have gotten to the messy state they are in. We also get a lot of background on the limits the Sidereals have to operate under, and of the multitude of still-extant legal loopholes and rights available for Solars; should they ever find out about those rights, things could get very interesting fast. One of the oft-encountered setting questions in Exalted has always been “why don’t the Sidereals just kill all the Solars, they seem to have the power for it?”. Well, we’ve already gotten a lot of the reasons “why not” in previous books, but here we get even more. The Sidereals are constrained (screwed, even) in a multitude of ways, and in ways that make sense given the history of things.

So, lots to love here if you’re running an Exalted game. While a Sidereal campaign set in Yu-Shan would obviously get the most mileage out of this, I can see it being very useful in a more “generic” game, too. Solars will encounter gods now and then, and may find their way to Yu-Shan too… and then there’s always the Carnival of Meeting, which you can use to introduce Heavenly politics into pretty much any type of game.

Scroll of Kings is one of the batch of new Exalted books that arrived recently – due to various delays at White Wolf’s end lots of books got pushed forward in time until now, so now we get a pile of new books in one fell swoop. Fine by me.

This book is about warfare in Creation (Exalted’s game world), and goes to detail about how the various cultures think about warfare and extend that thinking into practice. I wasn’t expecting too much from this book, afraid that if would mostly just consist of army lists and dry “crunch” like that. I was happy to be proved wrong; this book is more of a “military gazeteer” of Creation, and goes into detail of how the various war gods think of war, how this affects mortal nations, and how the environment also affects thinking and practical matters.

The book is divided into sections by geographical direction. We get information about the varied forms of warfare in the East, the fast-moving skirmish mentality of the South, the naval paradigms of the West, the commando raid mentality of the North, and the traditional massive army paradigm of the Realm. While the organization mostly works nicely, it has the downside of spreading the rules crunch over the whole book in a semi-random fashion. Said crunch has to do with extensions to the mass combat rules in Exalted, which I have yet to use in practice. Didn’t bother me, but more crunch-oriented readers may find this type of organization very frustrating, especially combined with White Wolf’s traditional total lack of index and bare-bones table of contents. There is literally no way of searching for anything, other than by leafing through the thing.

Despite small organizatorial niggles, I liked the book quite a bit. While it could not focus on any area for very many pages (Creation is huge), it did add lots of useful information and nice local color all over the place. The writeup on the Linowan managed to not conflict with stuff I had created for that area, amazingly enough (though that’s mostly because the Linowan chapter was very short). Each described location/nation gets one or two sample statted mass combat units, which is probably very useful if you intend to use the mass combat rules – examples always help.

The end of the book lists some new large-scale weapons (steam cannons, yay!), stats for various vehicles, ships and flying thingies, and ends with a list of (mundane) traps that soldiers might create or encounter, with some required skills for creation and other details. Nice.

I’ve been reading some Antarctica-related stuff lately, centering around Chaosium’s massive Beyond the Mountains of Madness campaign book. I’m about halfway through at the moment, and… wow, it’s quite something. Insane amount of detail, and very inspired expansion on the original short stories “At the Mountains of Madness” (Lovecraft) and “The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket” (Poe). I’m still not sure I’ll be up to running this at any point – it would take a lot of time, and a group of players willing to put up with lots of 1930’s period detail and a fairly slow, deliberate pace; not all that much pulp-style heroics here. It’s something I’ll have to think about some more.

In any case, the sheer amount of background detail in the campaign book is mind-boggling, the appendixes themselves take up about 150 pages. It’s also very well written, and shows a deep love for the subject material. As an adventure, it also feels like it should play well – there are some bits I would tweak and some railroady bits, but on the whole it has a nice flow to it, with lots of plot twists. It’s no wonder that this thing is often nominated when talking about the all-time best roleplaying campaigns; it’s right up there with Warhammer’s “The Enemy Within” and other classics of the genre (with the caveat that I haven’t actually read Enemy Within yet, I’m just told that it’s really really good).

In order to get even more background detail, I’m also reading The Lost Men, the real-life story of Shackleton’s ill-fated Ross Sea supply expedition of 1914-1916. Fascinating stuff, and in parts unbelievable; it seems a miracle, and testament to pure human spirit, that there were any survivors considering all the poor planning and supplies. The whole “we don’t need to prepare, we’re British gentlemen!” thing seems quite alien to my modern mindset, especially since I’ve done a bit of traveling in difficult conditions myself. The thought of going into a virtually unknown, utterly deadly locale with piss-poor planning and sad lack of proper supplies seems suicidal. And was, apparently.

Another sort-of game prep book I’m thinking of getting is Mountains of Madness: A Scientist’s Odyssey in Antarctica, an account of a modern-day paleontologist’s journey to the real-world site of Lovecraft’s story. Might be interesting.

It would be nice to visit Antarctica one day. So many other interesting spots to see also, of course, so hard to say if I’ll ever get around to it – but I’ve always had a fascination for the more barren and hostile areas of the world.

In other news… we had another Exalted session, a bit dungeon-crawly but that was by intention, and was fun for a change of pace and as a chance to get more to grips with the combat system. We still didn’t get it quite right, I forgot about minimum “ping” damage and about natural soak values. Duh. Oh well, next time…

This weekend had me in Turku again, at yet another knife technique seminar. This time time around we spent the weekend practicing the care and feeding of the bali-song (butterfly knife). Apparently the damn things feed on blood, judging by the amount of nicks and cuts we accumulated – at one point we joked that we should have a “sponsored by Hansaplast!” sticker somewhere. Had fun, though. As a weapon the butterfly knife is not that hot; it’s sadly lacking in speed and ease of use compared to modern folding knives, and offers no real benefits of any kind technically. Sure, you can use some of the opening techniques as secondary attacks, but that’s pretty borderline. On the other hand, in more primitive times it was a folding knife that you could (with practice) open with one hand, something that’s quite a feat without modern-day mechanical production skills and tolerances. In the modern day, its main point is “it looks really cool”, and it acts as a fun stress toy and finger nimbleness exercise. One that needs focus to play with, of course, unless you actually like the sight of your own blood.

Considering that I had never played with one before, I’m pretty happy with getting some (very basic) proficiency in ten or so of the basic opening styles over the weekend, and with only getting one cut that required bandages during the process.