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enthusiastickAlright, so we are once again playing the Total Request Geek game, this time fulfilling the demands of ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
oberndorf, who has asked that I reminisce about a couple of games I ran in college. Since we seem to be proceeding in roughly chronological order:
In the summer before my sophomore year of college White Wolf decided to put out an entirely new game line called Exalted. At the time they didn't know what a staggering success it was going to be, and so they were terrified of marketing it as the entirely new thing that it was. Their earliest advertisements tied it, conceptually, to the original World of Darkness, explaining it as some sort of secret mythic history. If you accepted the Kindred of the East version of events, then we were currently in the sixth incarnation of the cycle of ages, and Exalted could be seen as either the far past or the far future of that world. In addition to protecting White Wolf's interests this also helped to explain their choice to rape and pillage the thematic elements of the World of Darkness wholesale for use in the Exalted line.
Its interesting to note that, once Exalted took off like a rocket and became their new cash cow, White Wolf finally had the money and the stability to tank the original World of Darkness, a move they claim they had been planning since the very beginning. I don't know if that's true or not, but I do know its interesting to see how these things progress. They went from being fearful of even putting their toe in the Exalted pool for fear of threatening their precious World of Darkness to using it as leverage to totally reinvent the product line that was responsible for their very existence as a game writing company.
Needless to say I bought Exalted. And right away I liked it.
I didn't, however, understand it. I pretty fundamentally didn't get it, probably due to the fact that I perused the book relatively casually. I saw the elements I liked, the kung fu and the allusions to anime and Final Fantasy. But I utterly failed to notice that those elements had been carefully fitted and modified, so that rather than forming a hasty patchwork of cool things they fit into a seamless and integrated whole, a whole cloth cosmology that actually made sense. Similarly I wasn't as crunchy back then as I am now, and while I appreciated the versatility and obvious potential of the Charms I didn't really understand that they formed a truly gestalt power system at least on par with 3rd edition D&D.
And it is out of that lack of understanding that my first ever Exalted game grew. Having learned from my mistakes with the Chicago chronicle I endeavored to give the players what they wanted. Inspired by the starting setting of Chrono Cross I set the game in the islands of the West. I let Gavin play a one-armed pirate, because the notion that Celestial Exaltation was reserved for hale and hearty hosts was implicit in the first edition (a mistake they hastily and thoroughly corrected in the second.) I gaveoberndorf a non-functional Final Fantasy style airship, a relic of the first age powered by hearthstones, so inherently cool and powerful that it should have counted as an Artifact 5 at least, if not an Artifact N/A. I didn't know what I was doing and it showed; rather than having my players struggle through Charm selection I picked their first five Charms for them -- badly -- and endeavored to let them grow from there as we all learned the system together.
As a result it imploded pretty rapidly, which is a good thing, because I had honestly no idea where I was going with it. Its a testament to how cool a system it was that I as well as several of my players remained interested.thablueguy helped me to get a better grasp of what the game was actually about, as did pax_malificus, who would go on to run an a more succesful Exalted campaign, at least briefly, that included attackmonkey, loopygirl and the_matras among its players.
I'm sad I can't say more about the Exalted game I ran, but honestly it was short-lived, a brilliant flash of coolness that far exceeded the amount of work I put into it, and then burned itself out and was gone. Fortunately it was eventually replaced by a new game of Changeling. A post about that should follow soon.
oberndorf, who has asked that I reminisce about a couple of games I ran in college. Since we seem to be proceeding in roughly chronological order:In the summer before my sophomore year of college White Wolf decided to put out an entirely new game line called Exalted. At the time they didn't know what a staggering success it was going to be, and so they were terrified of marketing it as the entirely new thing that it was. Their earliest advertisements tied it, conceptually, to the original World of Darkness, explaining it as some sort of secret mythic history. If you accepted the Kindred of the East version of events, then we were currently in the sixth incarnation of the cycle of ages, and Exalted could be seen as either the far past or the far future of that world. In addition to protecting White Wolf's interests this also helped to explain their choice to rape and pillage the thematic elements of the World of Darkness wholesale for use in the Exalted line.
Its interesting to note that, once Exalted took off like a rocket and became their new cash cow, White Wolf finally had the money and the stability to tank the original World of Darkness, a move they claim they had been planning since the very beginning. I don't know if that's true or not, but I do know its interesting to see how these things progress. They went from being fearful of even putting their toe in the Exalted pool for fear of threatening their precious World of Darkness to using it as leverage to totally reinvent the product line that was responsible for their very existence as a game writing company.
Needless to say I bought Exalted. And right away I liked it.
I didn't, however, understand it. I pretty fundamentally didn't get it, probably due to the fact that I perused the book relatively casually. I saw the elements I liked, the kung fu and the allusions to anime and Final Fantasy. But I utterly failed to notice that those elements had been carefully fitted and modified, so that rather than forming a hasty patchwork of cool things they fit into a seamless and integrated whole, a whole cloth cosmology that actually made sense. Similarly I wasn't as crunchy back then as I am now, and while I appreciated the versatility and obvious potential of the Charms I didn't really understand that they formed a truly gestalt power system at least on par with 3rd edition D&D.
And it is out of that lack of understanding that my first ever Exalted game grew. Having learned from my mistakes with the Chicago chronicle I endeavored to give the players what they wanted. Inspired by the starting setting of Chrono Cross I set the game in the islands of the West. I let Gavin play a one-armed pirate, because the notion that Celestial Exaltation was reserved for hale and hearty hosts was implicit in the first edition (a mistake they hastily and thoroughly corrected in the second.) I gave
oberndorf a non-functional Final Fantasy style airship, a relic of the first age powered by hearthstones, so inherently cool and powerful that it should have counted as an Artifact 5 at least, if not an Artifact N/A. I didn't know what I was doing and it showed; rather than having my players struggle through Charm selection I picked their first five Charms for them -- badly -- and endeavored to let them grow from there as we all learned the system together.As a result it imploded pretty rapidly, which is a good thing, because I had honestly no idea where I was going with it. Its a testament to how cool a system it was that I as well as several of my players remained interested.
thablueguy helped me to get a better grasp of what the game was actually about, as did pax_malificus, who would go on to run an a more succesful Exalted campaign, at least briefly, that included attackmonkey, loopygirl and the_matras among its players.I'm sad I can't say more about the Exalted game I ran, but honestly it was short-lived, a brilliant flash of coolness that far exceeded the amount of work I put into it, and then burned itself out and was gone. Fortunately it was eventually replaced by a new game of Changeling. A post about that should follow soon.
