Toptomcat's page

Your game is such a deeply, fundamentally hacked version of 3.5 that I'm having a great deal of difficulty absorbing it from the point of view of '3.5 with the following adjustments...' The whole 3d6-plus-dramatically-more-incremental-advancement thing, plus combat ability being moved to skills and there being defense skills, plus magic being strongly tied to a fatigue mechanic, reminds me very strongly of GURPS to the extent that I wonder whether you might just want to run a GURPS Dungeon Fantasy game and not know it yet.

Do you have a version of your Player's Guide that has some of the more heavily hacked rules rewritten with your version from the ground up, maybe with some examples- like an instance of a full character sheet of a legal starting character?

How do 3.5 feats and PrCs with level, CL, skill-rank, or other prerequisites interact with your new system?

How does multiclassing work?

Is it your intent that all 3.5 material, like Incarnum and Binders and Swordsages and stuff, is open to PCs, subject to your adjustments? Or are you envisioning it more along the lines of '3.5 SRD plus my stuff'?

When you say that 'Circumstance modifiers will usually be advantage rather than flat +/- 2.', are you just talking about stuff that grants core-rules circumstance bonii, or are you taking a 5e approach where most sources of static modifiers will be Advantage/Disadvantage instead?

Do kinds of magic that don't work on a Vancian spell-slot system, like shadowcasting or psionics or invocations, still cost fatigue points?

Does the party's Wizard have a particular specialty, or are they a general spellslinger? I have a Sorcerer concept I've been chewing on, but Sorcerers' limited spell selection means you've gotta be careful picking a niche.

I wouldn't call myself a 'reformed powergamer' so much as an optimizer who has the good sense to optimize for things other than campaign-obliterating levels of RAW POWER. I like exploring odd little mechanical niches that enable novel character concepts, or let me express character concepts in ways that have interestingly different strengths and weaknesses than their 'default' ways of doing so in 3.5/PF.

Of the options presented, my own preference order would be Strange Aeons > Reign of Winter > Mummy's Mask: exploring sanity and the contrast between PF's heroic-fantasy themes and the Mythos' cosmic-horror ones strikes me as a grand old time.

I've got a few questions on the nature of your setting and houserules to help guide character concepts.

- Are characters from alternate Prime Materials which are industrial or space-opera workable? Are they common?

- Is it Planescape-like in that philosophy is a significant part of organizations, factions and play, and a character who's a bit philosophically out-there would be right at home?

- If I had a character who was physiologically aberrant and strange and obviously the product of mad science/mad wizardry, is there a particular individual or organization in your setting who might be expected to be blamed for it?

- Can you give a capsule summary of the current apocalypse the Organization seeks to avert, as well as a few notable instances of their past successes? Someone grateful to have had their orphanage/kingdom/universe saved is a possibility.

- When you say that monstrous characters are permitted, would you be open to something like the Dreamscarred Press monster classes, the 3.5 LA/RHD rules, extensive use of the Spheres of Origin system's rule that monster PCs can trade combat or casting talents for extra Origin talents, or Olescamo's Improved Monster Classes? I have a certain fondness for true dragons, which don't fit nicely into the 'your race is a sideshow compared to the capabilities from your class levels' paradigm of most Pathfinder races.

- When you say that 3rd party material would be permitted to the extent that it doesn't duplicate other Paizo stuff, would that be extended to stuff Paizo material doesn't do well? Trapper-archetype ranger sort of does 'PC combat trapsmith', but not nearly as well as the Trap sphere. Eldritch Poisoner or Toxicant alchemist sort of does 'PC poisoner', but not nearly as well as the Steel Serpent Path of War discipline or the Alchemy sphere. And even though things like specialist wizards and very few Pathfinder casters can do "I'm not a general-purpose, well-rounded spellcaster, I have a magic superpower with a bunch of abilities tightly fitting around a particular theme" nearly as well as well as a Spheres of Power caster tightly focused on one or two Spheres.

- You describe the game as a 'spy' game a few times. Is being genuinely, groundedly sneaky a job requirement, in the la Carre/Bourne spy tradition albiet with fantasy elements, or are we decidedly in the tradition of the more out-there Bond films, Wild Wild West, etc. with glamor, magic gadgets, death traps and explosions, etc.?

Rajah is basically tailor-made for that.

I've got an idea brewing for a Japanese immigrant- an immediate relation of Saigo Takamori, gone overseas to duck the consequences of losing the Satsuma Rebellion. The time is right for a general surge in interest in Japanese culture- this is the period of The Mikado and Japnonisme. Powerwise, her Othersoul would be a Jorogumo and she would be an Incanter | Hedgewitch (Martial Hedgewitch, Charlatanism)/Hive with the magical end of things heavily focused on a subtle, flexible and dangerous Conjuration-sphere Swarm Companion, with a side order of being a social skill monkey and a Fencing-sphere swordswoman.

Given that the pool of possibles already includes an Arab and a Pole, though, I'm a little worried that you'll be reluctant to consider more than one or two world travelers in sleepy Waldenshire. Are you OK with the Ainsworths being super-cosmopolitan types with a circle of friends which would probably see them shunned in even a pretty damn tolerant 1870s English hamlet?

Here's my fish-waaaay-out-of-water Lunar Exalt. I'll understand if it's too spicy/weird, particularly the custom feat request to make Brain Consumption work more like consuming a target's Hearts' Blood in Exalted. 'I eat you and take your shape' is pretty core to the Lunar fantasy, and Brain Consumption was tantalizingly close but not-quite-there.

Manosque Zhu, the Viper- N human Shifter (Apex, Martial, Forceful) 8 | Psion (Psychometabolism, Transmogrifist) 8

...your chargen rules and setting are sufficiently permissive that you've awakened my playful penchant for building characters from non-D&D genres and campaign settings by hacking Spheres stuff. That kind of thing tends to be very dependent on GM buy-in, though, so rather than put forward a single idea to get shot down, here's a pitch for four different concepts. Tell me which one(s) you think would be the best fit here.

'Blitz', Mato Nakamura (Mage from Shadowrun's Seattle circa 2065: Incanter 8 | Technologist 8 with the Incanter side's stuff hacked to resemble Shadowrun magic and the Technologist abilities reflective of the modern and sci-fi gear he's managed to take with him past the grave. Wily, cynical paranoid, criminal, distrustful of institutions and authorities. Can't make up his mind whether he's relieved to be out of his dystopian cyberpunk future or annoyed because no one around here can make a decent soyburger and fries for any amount of money.)

Lita Frontera (Mage from Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha: Thaumaturge 5/Sphere Arcanist 3 | Martial Elementalist 8. Flashy, wide-area Destruction sphere stuff, barriers from Protection, great flight including some Athletics sphere stuff for really fancy flying, and the ability to boost any of it up to over-the-top levels with resource investment...but with the Extended Casting drawback and significant penalties to Concentration checks that make defensive casting tough, she *needs* to get space with flight in order to cast safely. Outwardly bright, cheerful girl who prefers nonlethal solutions to problems: troubled past as the product of a biological weapons development program to develop artificial sorcerors: casts with the help of a talking magitech staff.)

Taylor Hebert (Super from Worm/Parahumans web serial. The only character on this list lifted outright rather than being an homage or general representative of another RPG setting, just because the series' fandom puts the character into everything in fanfiction and it seems amusingly appropriate. The canon version has the seemingly-lame power of insect control- in actuality, total control of insects over a scale of city blocks, along with secondary powers that permit perfect multitasking and sense sharing across the entire swarm.

Incanter 8 | Warlord 8- the Incanter side focused on Conjuration with a really mean couple of Swarm Companions, with a side of Divination for seeing/hearing through insect spies, a few Cognition talents, and a smatteirng of other things, the Warlord side with significant Gladiator investment because a crawling carpet of Biblical plague is terrifying and she tends to play that to the hilt.

Resourceful, serious, altruistic but pragmatic, authority issues, determined beyond reason to the point where she can kind of psych herself into conflict with things far out of her weight class without ever consciously realizing that backing down was an option.

Over the course of three years, starting at fifteen, led one supervillain team, one superhero team, and one desperate involuntary coalition of everyone through at least seven mass casualty events followed by the end of the world, in which she sacrificed her own sanity as well as roughly a third of the thousands of superhumans present to kill an eldritch God. That more than half the human race was alive afterwards was considered a rousing success.

Then an ally shot her in the head- not unreasonably, she concedes- and she died shortly after turning eighteen.)

Zu the Viper (Full Moon Lunar from Exalted. Shifter (Spheres of Power) 8 | ??? 8. The right side of the gestalt will be something poison-related: Warlord (Steelfist Commando) with a Steel Serpent focus if you'll let me, maybe Alchemist (Toxicant, Mortal Chemist) if you won't.

Used to a very hierarchical social dynamic where small handfuls of nearly unchallengeable superhumans rule the world, of whom he was a very junior example: fascinated with the social structures of a place where just anyone can learn supernatural powers in any number of ways. A martial artist keen on respecting the bond between master and student, bound by honor to accept challenges to duels and honor surrender. Further-adrift even than most of the others here: more than merely ignorant of how D&D-like universes work, he's reasonably knowledgeable about a place with radically different metaphysics in a way that will make for both interesting RP fodder and a fair bit of comedy.)

HP: 1d4 + 7 ⇒ (1) + 7 = 81d4 + 7 ⇒ (4) + 7 = 111d4 + 7 ⇒ (1) + 7 = 8

Would Eldritch Poisoner Alchemist, Enlightened Paladin or Gun Chemist Alchemist count as archetypes too radical and transformative to get for free? My gut feeling is probably not for the first, probably for the second, and a toss-up for the third, but I'd like to know before I settle between a few of the concepts I've been considering.

...and, come to think of it, Voltaic/Prodigy gestalt, combining two of the options I presented in 'Flexibility!', would be my single most preferred choice if you permit me to stretch a bit more.

Well my first question would be what ability do you want? Most of those sound very interesting.

The first mad-science-and-guns option, or ther fifth crazy-flexibility option, would be my personally preferred pick.

Interesting. Scratch the last one, and the Polymath request, then- unless maybe I can spend a Wish on a 'world edit' wherein everyone's ignorant of a given martial discipline. (Sue me: I want to be a special snowflake, it's part of the isekai power fantasy.)

Voltaic isn't DSP, though, it's a publishing house that shares staff with them, and it occupies some interesting and unorthodox design space. I'd still take that.

Mainly I was phrasing it in such broad terms because I'd like my ability to be something third-party or homebrew, but I knew different people are familiar and comfortable with different kinds of homebrew to different degrees, and wanted to sound you out to see which broad categories of thing you'd be most comfortable with before I settled on something that you knew you definitely wouldn't grant. Some more specific options:

Special Ability/Class Focus: 'Engineering knowledge from the world I left behind.' Mechanical outcome: Access to the Blacksmith or Technician Spheres of Might classes, focused on smithing improved 'conventional' weapons, explosives and chemicals via the Alchemy sphere if you're not terribly comfortable with guns in your fantasy.
Wish powerup of the above: 'The spark of genius- perhaps madness- that makes a technician into a legendary inventor.' Full gestalt with either of the above.

Special Ability/Class Focus: 'Esoteric knowledge of substances and materials in this strange place.' Mechanical outcome: Access to the Polymath or Occult Chymist third-party Alchemist archetype, granting access to poison-themed Tome of Battle-style martial maneuvers or an equivalent to 3.5 Binder powers.
Wish powerup of above '...and let me change 'em around as easily as breathing: take grape juice, shake, heat, cool, pour out fine wine. Take dragon's blood, dry and boil, concentrate to a crystal with all that power in it...' Full gestalt with a Path of War martial manifester class or Pactmaker class, taking fuller advantage of the mechanics those archetypes dip into.

Special Ability/Class Focus: 'Weather magic!' Outcome: Permit me a Spherecasting archetype, possibly Sphere Alchemist, or class, and give me access to the Weather sphere.
Wish powerup: full gestalt with a spherecasting

Special Ability/Class Focus: 'Secrets of life and death!' Outcome: permits investment into the Death sphere, or access to 3.5 Dread Necromancer.
Wish powerup: Gestalt with the above

Special Ability/Class Focus: 'Flexibility!' Outcome: Access to the Prodigy Spheres class, permitting shallow-but-very-versatile dips into bits of the Spheres of Might and Power subsystem- or Voltaic, permitting the same with Path of War disciplines, or 3.5 Spell to Power Erudite, permitting the same with 3.5 psionics/DSP psionics/Vancian spellcasting
Wish powerup: 'I'm going to be like a kid in a candy store seeing ninjas and knights and wizards and dragons- I want to be able to pick up a profession on a dime!' (Full gestalt with any of the above)

Special Ability/Class Focus: 'Freaky biology magic!' Outcome: permits access to the Alteration sphere, or the Xenoalchemist class, or a Psychometabolism-focused DSP-style Psion.

Special Ability/Class Focus: 'Supernatural martial arts!' Outcome: access to a Path of War martial-initiating class or archetype with access to Elemental Flux, Riven Hourglass, Shattered Mirror, Sleeping Goddess or Veiled Moon...

Can you give me some hot-or-cold on that so I can get a feeling for which of those options you'd be most enthusiastic about?

Whoops- the archetype-stacking checker I was using was counting 'Bomb' and 'Bombs' as a separate class feature, but of course Vivisectionist and Gun Chemist can't stack. Probably just one or the other, then.

Okay, I've got a concept for you- but I'd like to get some feedback on a Special Ability/Wish idea that would impact a lot of other decisions of what to do with the character mechanically.

"This...thing... we've been shanghai'd into is fascinating. I don't only mean the obvious and incredibly disturbing stuff, like the agent that brought us here being able to read the minds of people from different universes and seamlessly transfer them after death into utterly different bodies with added skills and supernatural powers. I mean the fine details of exactly what we've been made into, the specific nature of the abilities we've been given. I was almost starting to entertain the 'spontaneous travel to a parallel universe' idea, but on second examination it's a ludicrous explanation for this place in particular. Proper, naturally-occurring many-worlds-interpretation-of-quantum-mechanics parallel universes don't look like this. Most of them are going to be, uh. Boring? No, that's not the world. They'll be...natural consequences of their point of divergence. Lots of dull, sterile parallels where the initial conditions of the Big Bang resulted in a starless, planetless Universe fundamentally inhospitable to life. Parallels where Dewey beat Truman. Parallels where the Chicxulub impact never happened and dinosaurs rule the Earth. Buffy's World Without Shrimp.

But there's no conceivable point of divergence for this. Pop-culturally recognizable dwarves and elves, right next to each other and cohabiting with a wide array of other fantastical creatures, are a post-Tolkien thing. Really, a post-Gygax thing. Good luck finding a route from 1950 to what we're looking at, let alone 1970. Nothing that couldn't just as well explain any observation.

I suppose it's an enormous point in favor of Zhuangzi and Descartes' bigger, meaner, more modern, disturbingly plausible older brother: the simulation hypothesis. I'm a high-resolution computer simulation of a human being, being run by some future civilization that has read Tolkien.

Either that, or...what? What's left? Heinleinian pantheistic multiple solipsism? All Stories Are True, and Lazarus Long gallivants about the multiverse visiting the Land of Oz and John Carter of Mars and the First Lensman of Earth? At this point, I wouldn't rule it out.

What's worse, we're not just fantasy characters. We are, recognizably, adventurers. Healing potions, alignments...studded leather armor, for God's sake, the same misinterpretation of period illustrations of brigandine that people mocked Gygax for thirty years ago.

...I mean, none of this is set in stone. It's not as if I'm working with some kind of manual for literary criticism of the laws of physics of a different universe. But there are things that I can say with certainty. This is an artificial system, a made thing. Though its power is incomprehensible and inhuman, the mind or minds that designed it are *not.* Its maker or makers are, in important ways, human, not aliens or mind-shattering Lovecraftian deities. I would even be willing to lay money on them being culturally Western humans with strong influence from a history of fantasy fiction and RPG design similar to ours up until the 1980s, though there's a possibility that they did extensive research on our world's nerd culture and generated the entire edifice procedurally.

What does all this mean, in practical terms? Hell if I know, but it's certainly going to keep me up at night.

One thing it definitely does not mean is that this place is fake, we're fake, therefore nothing matters and it's time to descend into nihilism. If I'm a sufficiently high-resolution simulation of a human being to worry about all this shinola, then I have the moral status of a human being.

...I'll also bleed like a human being, and need food and shelter like a human being. Right! Back to practical problems."

Daniel Landvik

Special Ability/Wish/Class:

"...okay, here's a curveball for you: Make me an Outside Context Problem I want an ability that's not necessarily the most powerful, the most flexible, the most dangerous or the sexiest or the flashiest: give me something that breaks rules, that people wherever I'm going will be caught flat-footed by because they've never seen or heard anything like it."

(Class left undetermined because the way you grant the request may give me something unusual as far as class goes, either gestalted with my standard class or standalone. Common 3rd party would work just fine, so long as I was the only one in that world- a Spherecaster, a DSP-style martial initiator or psionics user, a Radiance House Pactmaker- or out-there homebrew like a Mythos class, something from oslecamo's Touhou Battle Grimoire or a Xenoalchemist or something.

In the absence of something class-changing in my Special Ability/Wish, I'm probably going to go Alchemist (Vivisectionist, Toxicant, Gun Chemist).

I’m definitely down, actually. Between an outspokenly evangelistic Gondian heretic who doesn’t feel that keeping all the good stuff on an island in the middle of nowhere is proper behavior for the clergy of a god of innovation and invention and a hardened victim of the slave trade empowered by Ilmater to endure and regenerate from just about anything in the service of a crusade to fight the slave trade on Toril, which do you think you’d rather see?

I've had a character concept in mind for a game broadly like this for a while. They're less 'evil' in the classic black-and-white D&D alignment sense and more 'hero of their own story and with goals that are kind of sympathetic when seen in a twisted light, but still ethically monstrous', though: I plan on beelining for Beyond Morality the moment I get to mythic tier 3. I know it's rather late in the game for a new entry, but let me know if the snippet below speaks to you and I can whip up the crunch nice and quickly.

The tall, trim man smiled. It was not a nice smile.

"'Why?', you ask?"

A horned titan lay bleeding on the ground: the murderous rage on his face and the fallen axe inches from his nerveless fingers plainly showed that he had spent his last ounce of strength.

"I suppose I might as well indulge you. I've got nothing but time, after all. 

Somewhere out there, paragons and monsters duel for the fate of the world. Tremble, you mortals, for the victory of the forces of Evil would give you an eternity of torment: all that stands between you and this terrible fate are the crusading forces of Good.

That's the party line, anyway, the vision of the world they try to sell us. There's something to it, even! Iomedae, Sarenrae, Cayden Cailean- they and their followers are generally more pleasant to be around than Asmodeus, Norgober, and Lamashtu. I readily concede this."

"You filthy traitor-"

A small, puzzled frown.

"-Point-missing aside, it's funny how you're still talking. I could've sworn I hit a lung..." 

"-I'll see you- hak  kaaahk-"

"-Oh, there it is. At any rate: in a larger sense. That worldview? It's a con. A scam. Those who made the world sold it, and we bought it. Have for millennia. 

Here's the truth. The Mwangi have a saying: 'When elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers.' Those titans who stand astride Creation enlist us all in their grand conflicts. Anyone who's willing to sign up and bleed for the grand gods of Good in their eternal struggle against Evil? They get a few scraps of power, and they march off to war like good soldiers, and they die in droves. The rare few who succeed get a few more scraps, then they get thrown back into the fray...rinse and repeat until they finally bite it, or win the lottery and cash out on a retirement package as the Demigod of Benevolence Towards Hedgehogs or something equally irrelevant. And don't delude yourself into thinking our type's any different: we get exactly the same deal, except we wear black and put a few more skulls on the uniform. In the grand scheme of things, paladin and antipaladin are exactly the same kind of rube."

A wet cough, a convulsive shudder.

"...so, you're just a nihilist taking out their frustrations on a 'rube?' Pharasma will toss your soul to Groetus like the trash it is and that will be the end of it."

The smiling man grinned wider, and a mad gleam danced in his eyes.

"What? No, obviously not. There's a way out. The universal way out. The one thing in history that has settled more issues in history than has any other factor:

Violence! Naked force. I will gain the power to kill them all. Dupes both horned and haloed. Every demon and angel, every protean and inevitable, all the demon and empyreal lords, all the menagerie of the Outer Planes. And then, finally, when I have slain every one of those exalted parasites who presume to treat us as cannon fodder and necessary sacrifices for their Great Cause- every single one of the gods- we will finally be free to choose our own destiny."

The fallen tiefling lay unmoving, face frozen in a final rictus of rage and shock. 

"As for why you in particular?

That, I will keep to myself."

The smiling man bent down to retrieve an amulet- a finger bone ancient beyond reckoning, with the name KALIM ONAKU etched on each link of the chain that held it- and strode off, paying no further mind to the cooling corpse behind him.

(Eventual plans to backstab the demons and demon cultists we're working with aside, I promise not to be backstabby towards the party in the short to medium term (probably a timeframe outside the median lifespan of a PbP game): IC this fellow is clever enough to understand that any plan of this ludicrous scope needs to be really long-term, and OOC I know that PVP can be rough.)

Can there be a population of nu mou in Sarlona, or Xen'Drik, or somewhere planar? I love the lop-eared little guys.

Or maybe as a one-off creation of some mad Cannith arcanist tampering with the building blocks of life, or a relic of the giants/dragons/rakshasa dug up and unleashed during the Last War...the wandering, amnesiac, mostly depowered bio-weapon who, unbeknownst to them, was the cause of the Mourning? Eberron meets FF meets Guilty Gear.

They are Charms, arguably the most important ones, because they're so general in their effect. Where the typical Charm is 'here is a specific magic power with very particular effects tied to this particular Ability', an Excellency is simply 'you are much, much better at rolls tied to this Ability.' Despite your Resistance Charms, you're little better at an endurance race, or enduring heatstroke, or throwing off disease, than a mortal: despite knowing three martial-arts Charms you're no more accurate or better at defense than a mortal, etc. Excellencies change all that.

No Excellencies, halp? I would ensure you have at least a few. I only felt comfortable going without because Meditation on the Heart and Secret of Bright-Burning Passion can act as kind of a terribly inefficient omni-Ability Excellency.

How are you two doing, havoc and scorch?

'Patrician' only has a really formal in-setting definition within the Realm, where it's either 'any *un*Exalted member of the eleven Great Houses that rule the roost and contain all the Dragon-Bloods or a member of a house of lesser nobility that's not allowed to contain Exalts. (If a member of a patrician house Exalts, they are sold to a Great House for a hefty sum and adopted.)

Outside the Realm- and Nexus is well outside it- it's a more or less generic term for 'minor noble.' The term being used for the son of a merchant prince who was not themselves a merchant prince is perfectly plausible.

It is true that outside the Realm, more or less any Exalt defaults to either 'nobility' or 'deity' in terms of social heirarchy- at least, where the Immaculates haven't gotten their grubby little paws on things and twisted the latter to 'extremely dangerous demon. (For this reason, you probably don't want to be publicly known as an Exalt, at least outside your unarmored 'henshin' identity, until you've had a chance to gather a substantial power base.)

For 3.5 and Pathfinder, first and third party products, what are all the ways you can think of to trade AC for some kind of offensive benefit- attack, damage, rider effects to attacks, other stuff?

In both, barbarian rage and Enlarge Person fit the bill. 3.5's Reckless Rage from Races of Stone turns it up another notch.

The Pathfinder rage power Reckless Abandon works.

Drop Dead Studios' Berserker sphere in conjunction with the Executioner and Flaming Riastrad talents is an interesting one.

The 3.5 Book of 9 Swords has Punishing Stance, and there's an analogue in the DSP Primal Fury discipline's Stance of Aggression.

In 3.5, Shock Trooper is well-known bordering on infamous.

3.5's Karmic Strike and Robilar's Gambit are also well-known and unusual in that they grant bonus attacks, making them the cornerstone of some 'masochist' builds.

3.5's Enemies and Allies/Races of Faerun feat Reckless Offensive works, as does Dreamscarred Press' nearly-identical Reckless Offense.

No such thing as 'Artifact 3 with 2 extra points'- that's just Artifact 5. And I think what we're discussing is fairly solidly Artifact 4- it's basically Celestial Battle Armor with no air supply, poison protection, Essence sight, or stealth protection from Essence sight, as well as 3L/3B worse soak, 3L/3B worse Hardness, 3 worse Mobility, and 2 worse fatigue. Even lacking the need for a 3-dot Hearthstone to power it and the addition of the Integrated Targeting Subsystem, Resistance boost, and minor regen doesn't knock it up to a 5: it seems pretty well in line with Armor of the Immaculate Dragons or Deadly Transformation Armor to me. If you'd prefer, you can bump it up to 5 to eliminate the Repair requirement entirely, but I'd be fine with rebuilding Simon to serve as your sorcerer-engineer. Either way, the Ally is unneccesary.

Gunshoza-Q Custom Commando Armor (Artifact ••••)

Repair: 2

The hero-kings of the First Age were powerful- but they could not be omnipresent, and when threats to Creation attacked in their absence, it fell to their subjects to defend themselves. When the gunshoza warrior Fallen Star Exalted while leading a last stand in a fierce and hopeless battle against a titanic reptilian weapon of malevolent and evil Fair Folk from beyond Creation, it would prove to be the beginning of a heroic legacy that would be more than the equal of those in that or any Age. Strange and marvelous tales of his dominion, the Land of Light, and his endeavors to defend it and Creation at large, tell of his courage, benevolence and strength.

Unlike many of his peers, Fallen Star never forgot his roots as one mortal among many, struggling alongside his comrades. Rather than commission a gaudy suit of Celestial Battle Armor, as was the fashion in the High First Age, he chose to honor his partners among those who patrolled Creation's borders by wearing the Gunshoza armor that was their uniform and standard-issue equipment, customizing and upgrading it throughout the centuries.

The Gunshoza-Q armor has the following features:

Sensory Augmentation Visor*: +2 bonus to Awareness, negates all penalties from darkness less than pitch black.
Integrated Targeting Subsystem*: +2 bonus to all attacks; +4 to the Defense of any wielded weapon inclusive of unarmed attacks
Adaptive Camouflage Subsystem*: +4 bonus to Stealth.
Exomuscular Fibers*: Doubles wearer's ground speed; +2 bonus to Strength for feats of strength and inflicting damage with attacks.
Vitality-Boosting Subsystems*: Wearer regenerates either one level of bashing damage with every action taken during combat or all bashing levels per minute outside combat.
Resiliency Augmentation*: +2 bonus to Resistance.
Essence Gauntlets: Each of the user's gauntlets have enchantments built into them that allow them to be used as power maces. The character can use these gauntlets to both make hand-to-hand attacks and fire Essence bolts, identical to those delivered by a power mace.
Essence Wings: If the wearer spends five motes, this armor produces a pair of glowing golden wings made from solid Essence. The wings have a wingspan of 2 feet. After activating the wings, the user can fly at a speed of 20 yards per tick for one scene. For six motes, the user can fly at up to 100 miles per hour for a number of hours equal to the wearer's permanent Essence, but maneuverability is limited. Roll (Dexterity + Athletics), difficulty 1, for the Exalt to make any sudden change in course.
Energy Shield Bracers*: By clenching fists in a specific gesture, the wearer can cause shimmering disks of force to manifest across the back of one or both hands. These shields have the statistics of a mundane tower shield with no Mobility penalty. Alternatively, the wearer can bring the arms together and forcefully present both palms, spending one Willpower (or three motes) as a miscellaneous action to create a larger, unmoving energy barrier. This wall may be up to 10 square feet large and appears within a yard of the wearer. It has soak 9L/12B and six health levels and is considered an inanimate object for the purposes of taking damage (but not for the purposes of Charms). If the wall is destroyed, it fades away, though the wearer may create a new one. Otherwise, the barrier lasts as long as the wearer stands in place and holds her hands up to project it, and only one wall can be created.

Upkeep: Maintenance required every 100 hours of use; every 10 missed hours randomly disables one of the powers marked with an asterisk.

Base Statistics: Soak +11L/+11B, Hardness 6L/6B, Mobility -3, Fatigue 2, Attune 10m. Includes Orichalcum magical material bonus.

Feel free to rename or reflavor as you see fit: 'Gunshoza-Q' is a reference to Ultraman's genesis in Ultra Q, and 'Falling Star' is one possible translation of Moroboshi, the surname of Ultraseven's civilian identity.

For the last choices for that last customization, is the Energy Shield more of a wielded type, like the one Marvel's Comics US Agent used to use [a hand-held energy disc activate from a wristband] or more like a full-height barrier-type of shield that isn't carried but materialized instead?

It's a personal-scale energy shield by default, but lifting the version from the the Sentinel Defense Force Armor rather than the one from the Celestial Battle Armor, which can do both if you spend motes but isn't as effective as a personal-scale shield, would probably not be out of line.

I've got a manse, it just isn't a *habitable* one. I've got mundane quarters in halp's place a quarter-mile away. If you like, I could tweak the Blazing Heart to have living quarters after all, but halp's Resources 4 or 5 will make for ownership of a pretty swanky place as it is.

@Today is a good day to... halp: There's no need to buy a separate artifact smashfist if we get three picks from the Celestial Battle Armor customization list. One of them gives your punches and kicks the statline of a Power Mace, which should be plenty.

Hmmm. The Power Mace never got a rebalance to be in line with the changes to the 2.5 core weapons, which lowered damage across the board, removed the P tag from everything but clinch weapons, adamant weapons, or polearms used in thrusting mode, and made the O tag universal for artifact weapons.

Melee: Speed 5, Accuracy +2, Damage +8L/2 or +9B/2, Defense +1, Rate 2, Tag O
Ranged: Speed 5, Accuracy +2, Damage 9L or 13B, Rate 2, Cost 2 motes/attack, Tag O

That seems in-line with the rest of the 2e artifact weapons. We can flavor the ranged version of the attack to be a Slugger-type blade that comes from the helmet. That's one of your three customizations. Flight would make an obvious choice for the second.

What would you like for the third, halp? To remind you:

[Options include] regeneration, heavier protection, [...] an energy shield, an expensive and temporary but really fast movement-booster, an area explosion attack centered around you, energy whips, an enhancement to the gauntlets that lets them attack immaterial beings, [or] a magical loudspeaker that improves your ability to make inspiring or persuasive speeches.

The Least God definitely isn't necessary if you're bumping your Resources so I can afford to dump it and buy Craft (Fire) and be the one to maintain your armor.

I want to talk about these [Backgrounds].

Again, Eltonj, would you be fine with the four dot version of Gunshoza armor I've been discussing with halp that allows for a magical material bonus and some of the customization options offered by Celestial Battle Armor?

Okay, then, on to the second half of stuff Havocprince ought to know: Nexus in a nutshell.

Five centuries ago, a robed, masked being calling itself the Emissary, claiming to speak for a group called the 'Council of Entities', proclaimed a set of six inviolable laws from which deviation would not be tolerated, collectively called the Dogma:

No taxes shall be raised, save by the Council.
None shall obstruct trade.
None shall bring an army into Nexus.
No one shall commit wanton violence.
None may falsely claim the Council’s name or sanction.
None shall harbor a fugitive from the Council’s wrath.

Those who violate the Dogma almost invariably meet gruesome and very obviously supernatural ends. The same happens to anyone who attacks the Emissary.

The Council of Entities is, apparently, not mysterious: they are a collection of Nexus' eight most powerful, wealthiest and influential citizens, motivated principally by the desire to keep Nexus prosperous and stay on top of the heap. The Emissary is: no one's ever seen their face, or seen them wounded. It isn't even particularly clear if the current Emissary is the same being from half a millennia ago who kicked the whole thing off, or if it's an identity shared by a succession of beings. Similarly unclear is whether the Emissary is merely an instrument of the Council's will, its unquestioned leader, or something in between.

Other than the Dogma, there is a second, lesser kind of law within Nexus: the Civilities. In theory, any Counselor may issue a Civility and it will have the full force of law. And Counselors are definitely bribeable, and this is often employed to unfairly benefit powerful individuals or groups. In practice, because more recently-issued Civilities always override older ones, Civilities that grossly disadvantage one power group over the other tend to be swiftly countermanded by a second Civility issued by another Counselor, and only Civilities which suit the interests of all or most of the major power groups of Nexus tend to last for long. Most of them are prosaic and sensible- ”No one shall interfere with the workmen building the new library,” or “Corpses shall not be flung into the canal system." Some enduring Civilities, though, are seemingly frivolous and yet endure, creating strange customs seen nowhere else in Creation- no single person may eat alone after dark, for instance, so teahouses must seat at least a pair of strangers with each other before beginning to serve them. (Many of the strange Civilities, both permanent and temporary, eventually end up making sense, if only in hindsight, suggesting that there's some method to the madness.)

Civilities are not, generally speaking, enforced by the Emissary, but by mercenary companies in the pay of the Council. There are, officially, only two penalties under law- exile or death- but in practice what frequently ends up happening is that you get the tar beaten out of you until you've coughed up enough to pay for your crime- or, if you haven't got much to give, the mercs then tie you up and give your victims a chance to bid on getting to beat the hell out of you a second time. In such cases there is a very great deal of latitude concerning how much violence is 'wanton' and what kinds of informal attempts to get criminals to make their victims whole count as 'trade'.

The overall effect is that of a brutal and bizarre, but on the whole rational and functional plutarchy. Taxes are low and business is booming, but few travel the city without both arms and armed friends.

One enduring and curious set of Civilities are those dealing with slavery. Technically, slavery is illegal within the city itself, yet the slave trade is one of Nexus' biggest industries. They square that circle through the legal fiction of 'hiring' each slave as a three-day contract worker and ensuring that the process of entering city limits, selling them, and having the buyer leave never takes more than three days. On the very rare occasion that it does, the slave is manumitted.

I don't mind doing so but is there anything I could do on my end to help you keep your additional point costs down by me purchasing some points in something that can help out?

The easy way would be for you to buy Resources 4 or 5 and me to drop to 1. You're minor/serious nobility, or the only son of a very successful merchant/merchant prince, or you just dug a collection of art objects/a fortune in jade out of the same First Age tomb you found the armor in, or something similar: I'm an eccentric so indifferent to material wealth that I own practically nothing of my own despite the huge variety of valuable skills I have, and I depend on your or your family's patronage for much of my lifestyle and the vast majority of the equipment on my sheet.

There are two things you should specifically know about Exalted lore, given your character concept and the game's location.

The first is the nature of the Guild. The Guild is a multinational institution and trade organization: its caravans are the lifeblood of trade throughout Creation and especially the East, the single most powerful force connecting the world's economies, they're meritocratic in a world of kings and fiefdoms, they promote standardization of weights and measures, they promulgated the currency standard of silver coinage that we're likely to be using. In all likelihood, the IC Rivertongue word that we translate to 'capitalism' OOC when playing Exalted comes from the writings of the Eastern merchant-philosophers who inspired its founder.

They are also utterly amoral traders of drugs and slaves. Large, powerful, stable states with laws against the same see them grudgingly respected, but everyone else gets leaned on hard to permit it- and they have deeply impressive amounts of leverage because, among many other things, they are also the single largest trader of medicine in the setting, including working anti-aging drugs that absolutely everyone in the upper class wants to be on. (Incidentally, slavery is treated as a fundamental and unchangeable fact of life by almost everyone in the setting- not like the racialized European institution of the 16th through 19th centuries, the classical-world kind of slavery where slaves are war captives, criminals, and debtors.

One of the exceptions is important, though, and I'm getting to it shortly...)

So the Guild is a mixture of very positive and very negative things about capitalism, and given your character's Motivation, they probably ought to have an opinion on them. Possibly also Plans for them, though they will be complicated by the fact that they try pretty hard to keep interactions with Exalts and gods at arm's length and keep it a mortal-controlled organization as much as is (heh) humanly possible.

The other thing you ought to know about is Nexus, the economic heart of the East, the largest trade city in Creation, the love child of 1400s Venice, 1800s London, early 1900s Shanghai and Ankh-Morpork, and the site of Simon's manse and martial-arts school, and...

Er.

It occurs to me that I may be getting a little ahead of myself. Eltonj, when you said the game was set in the East, I assumed you meant the near East, i.e. the Scavenger Lands, probably the most common setting for Exalted games- Nexus, Lookshy, Great Forks, Thorns, Greyfalls and all that. But it occurs to me that 'the East' is more often used to refer to the farther East, to the extent that there are five Compass of Terrestrial Directions books- North, East, South, West, and Scavenger Lands. Is this a game set in the East proper- Halta, Linowan, Raness, Chaya, Metagalpa, the Hundred Kingdoms, Raksi and her little baby-eating wonderland, all that? If so, I probably ought to change my background's location so I don't have intimate ties to somewhere 2,000 miles and half a year's journey away from where all the action is going to be.

If we are in the Scavenger Lands and Nexus is a sensible place to be, then I'll give Havoc the Nexus-in-a-nutshell I was going to make the second half of this post.

I don't think it's typical for PCs to buy each other on each others' sheet as Allies, otherwise every group would spend most of its Background dots buying each other as allies.

Another thought that occurs to me is that *Simon* could serve as the fellow who does your maintenance, with only a bit of rejiggering things. I've got the Occult and Lore, as well as the Resources to buy an incomplete and janky set of First Age tools: picking up only three dots in Craft (Fire) would get me into the territory where I could use tricksy Charm and Thaumaturgy stuff to get the job done. Want to take that route?

Heh, and it's also good to know that splitting focuses are both as bad in Exalted and PF. ;p

Not quite as bad. Basically everyone eventually wants Integrity to deal with mind control and weird stuff like hostile shapechanging magic, some ability in both social and physical combat, a smattering of Occult for its See Invisibility equivalent, etc. But yes, the central truth that depth beats breadth is still there.

As for the melee/martials arts/and thrown, EltonJ, it was mainly due to the fact that many Ultramen were depicted using all three types of combat style. ;p

Here's where you use some system jank: Martial Arts, as written, actually lets you use a lot of weapons: gauntlets, iron boots, punch daggers, shields, deer-horn knives, strap-on Wolverine claws, sai, multi-section staffs, rope darts or weighted chains...

And if you take a single Charm in a martial-arts style that involves a particular weapon you're not ordinarily permitted to use with MA, it thereafter lets you use Martial Arts to wield that weapon.

Just out of curiosity, would taking a point in occult necessitate in having to know spells?

Absolutely not, and in fact knowing Occult but not knowing anything that could reasonably be described as a 'spell' is the default state of 95-99% of people in Creation who have dots in Occult. Occult is the 'theoretical knowledge about spirits and supernatural powers' skill, the 'I live in a place with a lot of Exalted/spirits/ghosts/Fair Folk and have an idea of their powers and nature' skill: something recognizable as 'spellcasting' requires either thaumaturgy (like one-in-a-hundred rare among people who know Occult in the first place) or sorcery (like one-in-a-thousand rare for people who know Occult.) Though multiply both of those rates by perhaps ten and fifty respectively for Exalts with dots in Occult, since they tend to be exceptional people.

(There are really simple thaumaturgical things you can do without a thaumaturgical Degree, like using a line of salt to keep ghosts out, performing a ritual that allows a door to act as if stoutly barred, foretell the weather a short distance into the future, etc. Anything listed here as a canonical 0th-degree thaumaturgical procedure. The format- (2, Intelligence, 1, one action)- is dots of Occult required to even make the attempt, attribute the Attribute + Occult roll is based on, number of successes required for the ritual to work, how long the ritual takes to perform.)

PS. Toptomcat, I've decided on the artifact power armors; specifically the 3 dotted Gunshoza Commando Armor or Sentinel Defense Force Armor; possibly might bump up 1 extra dot for "non-maintenance" if needed. Mebbe drop stealth mode or wide shielding/huge barrier for the Skycutter integration? How much lore minimum would be needed for maintaining such powered armor?

Celestial Battle Armor has customization options because they're one-off, custom works of art. While they're still rare, precious and powerful relics of a bygone past, Gunshoza or Sentinel armor don't tend to have customizations by default, because when they were in common use, they were mass-produced to a standard pattern. At Eltonj's discretion, maybe you could have a four-dot version of Gunshoza armor that was owned by a mortal who later Exalted and, rather than move on to another kind of armor entirely, chose to customize the suit of armor that he knew and loved, one that gets one or two of the customization options of Celestial Battle Armor.

Gunshoza Armor is Repair 2, requiring Lore 4, Occult 3, and Craft (Magitech) 3, which also requires two dots each in Craft (Air) and Craft (Fire) and one in Craft (any other). You can get away with just Craft (Fire) with use of a Craft Excellency: it just increases the difficulty of the roll rather than making it impossible. Also either the Charm Craftsman Needs no Tools, or light use of a Craft Excellency and a set of tools requiring Resources 5, or heavy use of a Craft Excellency and a set of tools requiring Resources 4.

Given that Past Lives 2-3 gives a one-die boost to rolls with the relevant Lore, Occult, and Craft, 4 gives a 3-die, and 5 gives a 5-die, and bumping an Ability by one also bumps the roll you're making by one, it would be a reasonable house rule to decrease the required skill mininimums by the equivilent in Past Life bonuses. It's one my past two Storytellers used, and something I previously assumed was actually official, but reading over the rules as written I was mistaken. Eltonj, your input?

(Another option would be just spending one bonus point on a one-dot Ally who's a sorcerer-engineer, or the least god of that particular suit of armor*, to do the maintenance for you.)

*Exalted is an animistic setting. Everything has its own god, right down to (non-sentient) gods of individual grains of rice. For the god of an artifact to be powerful enough to manifest into the material realm and do the maintenance of its own item would require it to be somewhat unusually powerful, which would necessitate some kind of background reason for it: perhaps some past Exalted owner of the armor bribed the Celestial Bureaucracy to grant its god rank and authority beyond its typical station. They will probably want the occasional prayer and sacrifice to help you.

Come to think of it, with the Past Life stuff and flaws, how much is the cost for those?

One dot of Past Life costs one bonus point, one dot of Throwback grants one. Five is the max in both cases.

The mechanics of Throwback: when you find yourself in a situation that would tend to evoke your past life's Motivation or Intimacies, you roll your Willpower against a difficulty of your Essence. If you fail, you're overwhelmed by your past life and must act in accordance with their motivation and Intimacies for a number of scenes equal to the rank of the Flaw, from 1-5. You can ignore this compulsion for a scene by spending one Willpower, and throw it off entirely by spending a number of points of Willpower equal to the value of the Flaw. And the Past Life has to be sufficiently opposed to, or alien to, your present set of goals that this would be a serious inconvenience.

Can I ask why you went for Melee and Martial Arts? Generally, picking one of the two and investing strongly in it beats splitting your attention.

Also, keep in mind that the bit in the core book about needing to spend bonus points to get an Ability above 3 has been errata'd away.

The Dragon-Blooded aren't equal to the challenge of preserving Creation against the incoming multi-freight-train collision of terrors cruising towards it, but 'destroying' is a mite strong. That's more a political/philosophical conversation to have IC than OOC, though.

Definitely digging the improvements made: it reads a lot more like an Exalted character and I think they can definitely fit in to the developing Circle.

How familiar are you with the setting, Havocprince?

Also, I might consider dropping Thrown for Archery- firewands are the setting's gun-equivalents and have the appropriate 'yarrr, matey' vibe, as well as using the spare BP you have (another errata change is that Solars start with 18 BP, not 15) to pick up a melee or ranged Excellency. Even if you *are* mostly socially-focused, having four defensive Charms, no artifacts, and no offensive Charms will make you basically a difficult-to-tag mortal in combat, which is a rough place for an Exalt to be.

And yeah, 'deeply flawed' works just fine- is in fact an excellent driver of the kind of stories Exalted works well for. David works fine as a Solar. It's just that 'reluctant hero' who has yet to firmly decide on goals of a heroic scope does not. 'I was a humble shepherd boy anointed by God for greatness in battle and to lead His Chosen People' is your backstory.

This character reads to me like they might work as a decadent Dragon-blooded, but there are setting issues with them being a Solar as written. Solar Exaltations are attracted to grand, epic heroism: the core book on p. 88 goes into a fair amount of detail about appropriate Motivations for the kind of people who get Exalted.

Also, your Virtue Flaw is kind of odd given that it's triggered by frustration at witnessing those choosing the easy, wrong path, but they don't seem like all that much like the disciplined, driven fellow who would have strong opinions on what the 'right path' for others is. Their favored lifestyle would get labeled as 'the easy, wrong path' by many of those around them.

There's a lot that can work here- the ship and loyal crew, the emphasis on luck and gambling, the appreciation for the finer things in life, the generally roguish vibe you have going- but they need ambition. 'Wine, women and song' and 'gambling' work better as Intimacies than a motivation.

Also, the errata gives every starting character four free Specialties that it looks like you don't have, and decouples Willpower from Virtues: rather than (sum of two highest) it just starts at 5 and takes 1 BP to boost, up to 10.

I didn't mean that the Eclipses themselves were a hot mess so much as their Caste Abilities. They have easily the most character-defining suite of Anima powers: the oath thing, the 'diplomatic immunity' vs. huge classes of enemies, and especially the Mega Man schtick are both strongly themed and each individually about as powerful and interesting as the anima powers the other Castes get, which more than mitigates their Caste-Ability-potpourri issue.

No problem. Let me know which of the armors you're most interested in and I'll PM you the exact stats.

Re: the wilderness-survival stuff in the Zenith charmset: it is kind of odd, yes. I think the idea is the historical association of holy men as hermits in the wilderness. Still, plenty of Exalts have kind of an odd match between Caste Abilities and concept: Nights, the 'stealthy ninja' Exalt, has almost everything in their Charmset necessary to be Superman. Twilights are omnidisciplinary mad scientists and Sherlock Holmes. And Eclipses are kind of a hot mess: the diplomat is also the horseman and sailor, but they *don't* get arguably the most rolled-against social skill because Presence is a priest thing?

The jank is a byproduct of collapsing every human skill ever into 25 categories and giving five of them to each kind. Just don't think about it too hard, and remember that Favored Abilities are exactly as defining as Caste Abilities and you get just as many of them. And also that everyone can buy Charms even from Abilities that *aren't* Caste or Favored: Exalted is really not a character-classed system like Pathfinder.

The past-life stuff sounds intriguing with the more recent inclusion of Ultraman X's, Taiga's, or Z's respective bantering between the Ultra energy-aliens and their hapless/bemused but helpful Human users. I'm not sure if I got enough background information to pull it off or it would have to be the Storyteller "speaking thru" an appropriate NPC?

Well, firstly, it doesn't necessarily have to be a whole NPC, just fragmentary memories and urges that come to you. The first level of the Merit has no mechanical effect, and just serves as a player-GM contract that you'll occasionally get hazy hints and clues relevant to your current situation. The second level grants a one-die bonus on all rolls to use First Age technology, the third extends the bonus to roll pertaining to First Age society, customs and history.

Anything past the first level also grants a one-die bonus to a single Ability roll once per 'session'- whatever that means in PbP, you'll have to work it out with the GM- as you get a flash of insight from your past lives about how to handle the current situation.

The fourth and fifth levels are the 'I have entire past incarnation(s) living in my head in a more-or-less-intact state' levels of the Merit. They increase the die bonuses you get for First Age stuff to +3 and +5 respectively. This would actually be very useful to you, for reasons I'll get into when I mention armor.

Similarly, Throwback is mechanically a second Motivation and set of Intimacies inconveniently opposed to your own that can threaten to force you to act in accordance with them at inconvenient times...not necessarily a full-fledged alternate personality with complete memories of their prior life, it can be flavored as a 'pull' your past life exerts on your own actions and motivations without a full understanding of why.

And the First Age is both fairly sparsely detailed and pretty multifaceted, and Creation was a huge place: current Creation has about twice the livable land area of Earth, and this is after great catastrophes at the very tail end of the First Age chopped it down from something on the order of eight times the size of Earth.

This means you could plausibly fit someone with memories of growing up, living and dying in a lot of different settings. There's the very early First Age, the Primordial War in which all of the Exalted were engaged in a desperate rebellion against the great, terrible and alien architects of reality. There's the early High First Age, in which the veterans of the Primordial War started to sort out how they were to be the rulers of Creation in the Solar Deliberative, with other Celestial-tier Exalts like Lunars and Sidereals kind of in a theoretically separate-but-equal status. There's the middle High First Age, where you start seeing some pretty crazy magitech schenanigans, with power shifting away from the central Deliberative and towards an equilibrium of each Solar or small group of Solars getting their own personal pocket of Creation to rule, with Sidereals and Lunars getting increasingly politically marginalized. Some serious abuses due to Great Curse-related madness and regular old power-corrupts stuff going on, but also a lot of shining-golden-age stuff with spectacular standards of living and economic prosperity and what have you, and plenty of Solars doing stuff like 'hey, I want to create a society of aeronauts on a floating continent' and making it happen. Then there's the late High First Age with rather a lot of decadence, power-madness and other psychological strangeness on the part of Solars, Great Curse-related or no, eventually leading to the Usurpation in which the Sidereals conspire with the Solars' Dragon-Blooded lieutenants to overthrow them and entrap the Exaltations of all but a handful so they can't reincarnate. Then there's the Low First Age or Shogunate, in which the Dragon-Blooded tried and failed to maintain the infrastructure and living standards of the High First Age, presiding over a slow decline punctuated by periods of quick decline when they decided civil war was more important than governance. The scant few Solar Exaltations with memories of this era will mainly be memories of constant flight and getting swiftly and efficiently offed, to repeatedly reincarnate and get killed again with only rare periods of respite and temporary success.

So, basically, so long as your Past Life identity broadly fit the Solar pattern of being a hero-king of legend processed of incredible power and all that, they could be any one of a number of very different people. Want them largely ignorant of broader First Age political and historical trends so you don't have to be a lore expert? Maybe they died shortly after the Primordial War, maybe they were a hermit-king of the middle or late First Age who chose to bugger off to their own little corner of Creation and do as they saw fit without interacting much with other Exalts, maybe they were a hunted target of the Shogunate who Exalted in their mid-teens and spent much of their short Exaltation on the run, maybe they simply decided to spend most of their time protecting Creation from Story-Beings from Beyond Reality or engaging in artistic or religious pursuits rather than reading the contemporary equivalent of the CIA World Factbook.

And, of course, Eltonj could help fill in the gaps where there's something your Past Life would reasonably know and you would not.

I'd say that I'm more going for the broad, general strokes of the Ultraman mythos rather than a faithful one-to-one recreation of Ultraman's powers.

One example being the artifact weapon, Skycutter- that definitely maps well to Ultraseven's Eye-Slugger power [wouldn't be surprised if Skycutter took inspiration from that particular power]; for those unfamiliar with Ultraseven, he has this headcrest that he could remove from the top of his head to either use a cqc weapon or a boomerang style thrown weapon. Guess it'd have to be orihalculm to be usable with a Solar [mebbe using it in conjunction with an artifact armor as it's housing sheath?]

[...]

Same with the transforming aspect with artifact armor although if it helps with disguising oneself, it might be okay to look into [probably will be rated much higher than the size-changing aspect for my own tastes].

Okay, so let's talk about armor. The core book's artifact armor is very basic does-one-job-and-does-it-well stuff. (It's worth noting that the Exalted 2.5 errata compressed the cost of core artifact armor from 1-5 dot artifacts to 1-3 dots, such that artifact Superheavy Plate is only Artifact 3.) This will do a bang-up job of protecting you and will serve well enough as a means of concealing your identity.

Then there's powered armor. These have all kinds of interesting gimcracks, at the cost of two drawbacks. Firstly, they tend to be not quite as good at just plain dealing with damage as plain artifact armor of equivalent cost in Background dots. Secondly, they are intricate magitech, and by default they require maintenance of a sort that very few people in modern Creation are equipped to provide: the technologies and infrastructure that was used to create them is long lost. This is where high levels of the Past Lives background can really come in handy: the five-dot version of Past Lives can more or less make you capable of maintaining First Age powered armor even if the current you doesn't have the first clue of how to hammer out a breastplate. (You can get around this by purchasing High First Age versions of a suit of powered armor that require an additional dot in Artifact to purchase.)

Options include:

Artifact ••:

Ashigaru Skirmish Armor: Designed for mortals aiding Exalted armies. Night vision, gas mask, stealth system.
Tiger Shark armor: Lighter Ashigaru armor, permits movement and breathing without penalty underwater.

Artifact •••:

Gunshoza Commando Armor: The extreme high end of military power armor built for mortals. Night vision and vision boosting, strength and ground-speed boosts, targeting and combat boosts, stealth system, enhances Resistance.

Sentinel Defense Force Armor: The extreme high end of law-enforcement power armor built for mortals. Not as tough as Gunshoza, but can create energy shields on both a personal and a 'create huge barrier' scale.

Yoroi Rapid-Response Armor: Night vision and vision boosting, strength and ground-speed boosts, stealth system. Not as feature-heavy as others, but naturally doesn't require upkeep rather than needing to bump the Artifact rating by a dot.

Artifact ••••:

Armor of Elemental Inurement: Comes in five variations that grant powers over or defenses against the elements of Air, Earth, Fire, Water and Wood. All share night vision and vision boosting as well as a SCUBA equivilent. The Air version permits 'airbending' stuff with somewhat difficult Wits+Lore rolls. The Earth version lets you be selectively intangible to soil, rock, sand, metal, etc: notably, this constitutes total immunity to all nonmagic metal weapons. The Fire version grants total immunity to environmental energy hazards and huge bonuses to defense vs. fire or energy attack. The Water version is super-Tiger Shark Armor. The Wood version makes you utterly immune to poison and nearly as resistant to disease, and able to nullify poison in a wide area.

Armor of the Immaculate Dragons: Optimized for Terrestrial Exalts of a particular type and only available in jade (but there's a separate Artifact • that lets you ignore that). All share night vision, vision boosting, strength and movement-speed boosts, reinforced gauntlets and boots that enhance Martial Arts attacks, gas masks, advanced cloaking systems that work against both vision and magic that seeks to learn stuff about you, and a system that enhances any Charms that fire energy beams.
The Air version has lightning blasters and flight.
The Earth version has a scanner that points out flaws in inanimate objects, making it easier to damage them, and can quickly make changes to the landscape to make pits, trenches, etc. or even toss boulders in the environment around as missiles. It also has the highest Strength boost.
The Fire version can project white-hot fire claws around the gauntlets and has rockets that make your ground speed amazing, as well as enhance the speed of other actions in and out of combat.
The Water version can let you percieve immaterial/spiritual objects and beings and interact with them as if they were solid, as well as create a spiritual disruption barrier that hinders ghosts, spirits, etc.
The Wood version can project a field that interferes with almost all supernatural powers within its radius.

In addition to not requiring maintenance, the Artifact ••••• version includes a 30-mote Essence battery to fuel its powers with. (A lot of the powers I've been mentioning both here and with other items aren't free, requiring motes of Essence to activate.)

Deadly Transformation Armor: Feature-light and not terrifically protective compared to artifact armors of a similar level. No sensor enhancements, gas mask/breathing apparatus, or built-in ranged weaponry. But its strength enhancement is the single highest offered by any artifact armor, and it comes with a built-in pair of artifact razor claws. This is the 'I am a close-combat terror' option. Also, unlike most other powered armors, its bonus to movement speed also applies to jumping distance.

Artifact ••••• (Can't be upgraded to the maintenance-free version without permission from Eltonj!)

Armor of the Unseen Assasin: Modest protection, strength enhancement, vision enhancement- and really, really good stealth systems against visual and magical detection. Be Predator.

Celestial Battle Armor: The top-of-the-line, custom-made option. All of them offer significant protection, bonuses against poison and disease, 1 hour of fresh air, vision enhancements including the ability to see flows of magic and immaterial spirits, strength and movement enhancement, stealth systems, and gauntlets and boots that enhance kicks and punches. All of them also get a choice of three options from a menu that RAW includes regeneration, heavier protection, drastically improving the statlines of the gauntlets and letting them fire energy bolts, an energy shield, an expensive and temporary but really fast movement-booster, an area explosion attack centered around you, energy whips, an enhancement to the gauntlets that lets them attack immaterial beings, a magical loudspeaker that improves your ability to make inspiring or persuasive speeches, or flight. If you spend another background dot on the item that lets you attune to artifacts of a non-orichalcum magical material without penalty, more options open up: illusionary disguises, the ability to dematerialize yourself and any allies you touch, total immunity to magical information-gathering, vampiric regeneration when you damage an enemy in melee, or (as two customization options, and requiring a highly unusual backstory involving having somehow yoinked it from the dread lords of Death who scheme endlessly to bring oblivion to all that lives) a cold aura that drains Dexterity from those who hit you in close combat, a life-draining aura that drains motes from Essence-users you hit in close combat, and a simply ridiculous amount of extra protection from physical attack.

Almost surely, one of these customization options could be replaced with an integrated Skycutter. It's actually slightly beneath the power level of the other customization options that offer integral weapons.

Hmmm. Okay, that's a valid inspiration. What about the Ultraman mythos attracts you?

A 'transformation sequence' is best accomplished with Whirlwind Armor-Donning Prana+Hauberk-Lightening Gesture, possibly in conjunction with a b!+!!in' set of artifact armor. The best of those for doing an 'anime' feel come from Oadenol's Codex, and if you don't have the book I'd be happy to work with you to work out which one would be best, perhaps on Discord.

Firing energy beams is a little tricky within Solar thematics, which are usually more 'my powers are supernatural extensions of mundane competencies: where others lift a heavy stone I lift a struggling elephant, where others' sword strokes are swift and sure mine can cut through my enemy's very soul, where others' archery can hit a man at five hundred paces I can take the wings off a fly at the same distance' than they are about more direct D&D mage expressions of power by tossing off energy bolts. That's more of a Dragonblood schtick. Still, Blazing Solar Bolt from melee could do it, so long as you don't mind on the power depending on a weapon in-hand: it's the 'send out an energy wave from swinging my sword' Charm more than 'firing a beam' Charm by default, but Stunts can change that. It also has the unusual virtue of allowing you some ranged combat ability based on the Melee skill, reducing the number of Charms you need to be effective both up-close and at range, though it *is* kind of short-ranged and actual archers will still be able to outrange you. It could either be an unusual way to flavor Immmaculate Golden Bow from Archery or Spirit Weapons from Thrown. If EltonJ is feeling really generous, he might let you take and reflavor Crypt Bolt Attack from the Abyssal Charmset, which is a more straightforward 'energy blast' Charm. Or you could retool your concept to an Eclipse and pick up Crypt Bolt directly, since they can Mega Man other Exalts' Charms, but that'd be...difficult from a number of perspectives.

Superhuman strength is very easy: that's Increasing Strength Exercise from Athletics. And fisticuffs of the unrefined, brute-strength sort favored by Ultraman would be Solar Hero Style- though keep in mind that Solar Hero and the investment in Thrown, Archery, or Melee for your beams will leave you few resources to do anything else.

Size-changing is also tricky within Solar thematics, because size-changing and physical transformation is solidly within the Lunar theme. The closest I can think of would be using the Celestial Circle Sorcery spell God-Forged Champion to summon a warstrider/giant mecha out of thin air or using Invincible Armor Invocation to be able to do the Whirlwind Armor-Donning Prana with a warstrider, but the former is only barely in reach for a starting character if you sink most of your starting resources into it, and the latter is the next thing to flat-out impossible. If you're really sold on size-changing being a central part of your mythos, I would consider playing a Lunar instead.

If you're interested in the 'I'm an unassuming mortal by day but gain lots of cool powers and channel a distant, benevolant alien being when I go through my power-up sequence, the Past Lives merit (representing an unusual connection to past bearers of your Solar Exaltation that allows you access to their memories and occasionally a full-on 'voice in your head', possibly in conjunction with the Throwback Flaw (which occasionally gets you 'overwhelmed' by a past life and forces you to carry out their plans and priorities for a scene) might be nice. Tie it to your 'transformation sequence' such that the Merit and Flaw are only effective when wearing your cool power armor (perhaps a past life had an unusual connection to that armor)- I'd say a single-point discount for the value of both the Merit and the Flaw for that would work fine.

Lastly, it's worth noting that a 'masked hero' concept is a very sensible one within the campaign setting, given that there are many NPC organizations with a mad-on for Solars and stuff that makes it harder to connect Ultrasolar with Shin Hayata is almost always a good thing.

You almost certainly will not be able to pack all these things into a single starting character, but if you're inclined to try, I can see if I can help you pack ten pounds of Ultraman into a five-pound bag.

And yes, artifacts are each purchased individually with separate Background dots, unless you have somehow managed to convince a powerful Dragon-blooded member of the houses of the Realm that you're one of their own and can finagle access to the Arsenal background from MOEP: Dragon-Blooded, normally locked to them. (There's a Hearthstone that lets you emulate a Fire Aspect pretty damned well, so that's not as difficult as it seems, but it will put you on a pretty precarious tightrope of constantly interacting with supernaturally perceptive family members who will, as a rule, be religious fanatics who want you dead for being a Solar.)

I'd say settle on a concept and suitably heroic, epic Motivation for your character and let Caste go from there. A general, pitfighter, warlord, etc. might be Dawn, a priest, demagogue, or Determinator might be Zenith... the corebook p. 91-100 has, as its last entry for every Caste, a list of suggested concepts that might fit.

(Though as the others have said, the fact that you get to pick five Favored Abilities in addition to the five Caste Abilities means that a sneaky Zenith, diplomatic Night, subtle and manipulative Dawn, or a musclebound smashy Eclipse will all work just fine. Caste is secondary for a lot of concepts: the only really irreplaceable thing is the Anima power, and they're strong and useful but not character-definingly so in the vast majority of cases.)

Nauru Simon/Manosque Simon, the Polymath of Nexus

Concept: Solar *really* committed to disguising himself as an enlightened mortal and using every trick in the book to function at an Exalted level despite almost wholly using means at least theoretically within the reach of mortals- eventually aiming to become the greatest teacher in Creation

Motivation: Find a way for humans to stand as equals with Exalts

Caste: Twilight

Anima: Almost always, the faint anima of white light processed by an enlightened mortal, due to being disguised as one with Disguise of the New Face.

On the rare occasions when this *isn't* true, strong, clear sunlight that elevates the humble things it illuminates: a muddy peasant looks attractively disheveled, a pebble shines like a gem.

Intimacies:
Other PCs #1-n (Contextually unreasonable instant trust for purposes of keeping the game running smoothly)
Sorcery and thaumaturgy (respect and care)
Martial arts (enthusiasm)
Institutions, nations, authority figures, hierarchies, and Big Ideas (skepticism)
Self-improvement (Obsessive devotion)
His students (loyalty)
My own Exaltation (Ambivalence)

ABILITIES
Caste: Craft, Investigation, Lore, Medicine, Occult
Favored: Martial Arts, Presence, War, Integrity, Resistance

Occult ••••• (Magic that Mortals can Use •) (Master Degree in the Arts of Geomancy and Alchemy, Initiate Degree in the Arts of Astrology and Warding/Exorcism) [0.5 bp]
Martial Arts ••••• (Numbing Force/vs. Opponents with higher Parry DV than Dodge DV •••) [1.5 bp]
Lore ••••
Presence ••••
War •••
Integrity •
Athletics •
Resistance •
Larceny •
Medicine ••• [2 bp]
Craft (Water) ••• [3 bp]

BACKGROUNDS
Manse ••••

Resources •••• [2 bp]
Face •
Followers • (Students) [1 bp]
Henchmen • (Mehela Kai, senior student and vice-master of the Blazing Heart. Enlightened, knows Path of the Arbiter through Meditation of the Heart, Initiate-level Geomancy and the Blessing procedure, and the Reactive Planning procedure from the Art of Astrology) [1 bp]

BACKGROUND/PERSONALITY

"The Exalted are the chosen champions of the greatest of gods. Essence courses through their veins, ennobling them, making them stronger, faster, smarter, better than their fellow man. They hold the Mandate of Heaven: their natural place is to rule over weak, unvirtuous mortals and keep the gods in check as god-kings posessed of infinite, glorious excellence.

Screw that.

I wasn't the youngest son of my family, but I was the least: one of the unfortunate children of Manosque Nenya to fail to receive the blessing of the Dragons that was in her blood. The others were content to coast, to have their martial education conclude when it became clear that they had rendered it a waste of time by failing to Exalt. Some of them taught the mortal disciples: some of them drank themselves to death. Either way, no one cared: they weren't the important ones.

They accepted defeat by their betters as a foregone conclusion. I never could. There's only so much training that mortal muscles and tendons can take: past a certain point, they begin to break down rather than strengthen. So I learned alchemy and medicine to heal myself fast enough to keep up with my own training regimen. The prime of a martial artist is mayfly short compared with the seemingly eternal lives of the Exalted: they have centuries to refine their art, we have decades. So every day, I worked twice as hard and twice as long as any child of the Dragons, and I made elixirs and potions to stave off the inevitable and keep my body intact. Where we are fragile, they are resilient: injury is an inevitability when mortals fight the Exalted. So I deliberately fought sparring matches with broken bones, torn muscles and frayed tendons, and I learned to dull the pain. Finally, when all this was not enough, I sought the secrets of geomancy as well, and ripped enlightenment from the Wyld in a precarious but ultimately successful Essential River Channeling.

My first victory over a Dragonblood was sweet. Chungwa made excuses- said she was hung over, not fighting seriously. After my *second* victory, things turned ugly 'accidents' started to happen in training, and it became clear to me that my family would never accept an un-Exalted student as an inner disciple, enlightened Essence or no. I left, then, to seek the deeper secrets of magic- of Sorcery*. I returned ten years later wearing a different face, defeated every senior student who had ever ground me beneath their heel, revealed myself to my mother and issued my challenge.

With all my effort, all my sorcery, every alchemical drug I was doped to the gills with- even with all that, she broke more or less every bone in my body before I stood victorious over her, dripping with blood and scarcely able to see. And then, in one glorious moment, I took my Second Breath, felt an Exaltation that dwarfed any child of the Dragons...and instantly invalidated every scrap of torturous effort I'd ever put into proving that I didn't have to have a divine handout to be better than them.

That shook me up. It took me a while to figure out what to do with myself after that...but I kept learning, and I kept training, because it's who I am. And something I came across in a musty old tome got me thinking. I don't think it's just my family that's twisted up in knots about hierarchies. I think it's the whole world. A world organized on a principle of hierarchy- the powerful ruling over the powerless. That phrase ought to ring a bell to anyone familiar with the infernal. The Principle of Hierarchy isn't just an abstract idea: it's a person, a person of monumental power. A Yozi, to be exact. And just like all the rest of them, this person is completely deranged: horrible, alien, coldly unfeeling. If you've ever had to deal with a government or an enormous company, a really big church or cult, you know what I'm talking about- you've had a taste of her madness, a meticulous and careful and calculating madness which simply does...not...care.

I think this needs some shaking up. Now, I'm not the first one to come up with this idea: there are countless revolutionaries who've tried to abolish the rule of the powerful over the powerless by destroying the powerful. By making war against the princes, sorcerers, the priests and the hero-Chosen. If they fail, they are destroyed by the powerful. If they succeed, then they still fail, because the only way to win that war is to become powerful. They rule or they die, but they can't change the game.

I have a different idea. I want to destroy hierarchy by erasing the distinction between the powerful and the powerless, by making everyone strong and fast and smart and noble. What's Exaltation, after all? Might, talent, longevity, vitality. Through medicine and education, money and hard training, artifice and willpower, a mortal can have all that. Just give them the opportunity to do so, and every human being can forge a kind of Exaltation for themselves through their own effort.

Damned if I know how, though. I don't have a Big Crazy Plan. I'm not looking to found Herolandia from the ashes of the Realm, or steal and reforge the souls of the gods themselves to grant their power to mortals, or turn the Five-Metal Shrike into the Ultimate Education Machine. For now, I'm just out to find decent people, point them at the world's problems, and do my best to equip them to deal with them.

Some would call it a small, petty dream- but I think it can shake the pillars of Creation. Won't you join me?"

*Humility he already had, from getting his face beaten in by Dragon-Blooded multiple times per day for years. Tutelage he had from the same mysterious old man he learned Geomancy from, a scarred retiree from the geomancer-archetects of the Seventh Legion with striking violet eyes. For the Journey, he left his family and ceased to rely on them for support as he traveled in search of sorcerous knowledge: the Fear he confronted was the thought that he might never be accepted by his family no matter how strong he became, and to overcome it he Sacrificed any hope that they would ever do so.

Description: Simon is a grizzled warrior with the reddish-brown skin and straight green hair of an ethnic Haltan and more than a few scars. He has an athletic, lean physique, packed with lean muscle, and at five-foot-nine and an apparent hundred and seventy pounds, there are those who'd write him off as a lightweight. But he moves with the grace and alert readiness of a big cat, and speaks with intelligence and some measure of charm.

If you're sharp, and observe him for any length of time, you can probably tell that he's using magic to conceal a casting of Invulnerable Skin of Bronze, since his true weight is just under three hundred pounds, and even though this doesn't directly show in his movements, it does show in how he interacts with his environment: floors creak, shoes sink into loose earth, burly strangers run into him and react like they've just hit a wall.

Practically nothing short of a strip search followed by sorcerous countermagic will reveal that he's really a shade darker, an inch taller, with wider-set eyes, a nose with a different shape, and a firmer chin. There's no sense in making it easier on the Wyld Hunt to identify Nauru Simon, master of the Blazing Heart Dojo, with the dark tales of the Anathema who stole the soul of Manosque Simon and ruthlessly attacked the matriarch of some flyspeck Scavenger Kingdom.

Meta Notes: Our beginners should probably not look to this build for an example of How To Do It. It's a baroquely complex thing utilizing many optional subsystems (Merits and Flaws, custom Specialties and Virtue Flaws, thaumaturgical stuff from Oadenol's Codex, even the manse construction ruleset), breaks a lot of rules about how to make a starting character (heavy investment in four things generally held to be tough to make work for Solars- sorcery, Terrestrial martial arts, thaumaturgy, Merits- practically no Excellencies, combat-oriented character with no Perfect Defense). Its use of the Flaws system, in particular, is something that would represent irredeemable munchkinry if I had not been forced to it by a concept so ordinarily unviable. It is the rough equivalent of a 3.5 Truenamer that mercilessly abuses Item Familiar- a feat powerful enough that no GM in their right mind would allow under any other circumstances, coupled with a class that centrally depends on a mechanic so fundamentally broken that Item Familiar is the only way to salvage it.

A note on party roles: Most of my current Charm investment is in martial arts and sorcery. The sorcery, though, is mostly there in support of other character objectives- martial arts and disguise. I'm not planning on taking the role of the demon-summoning, countermagicking, Death of Obsidian Butterflies-ing capital-S Sorcerer if that's something someone else wants to do. My medium-term advancement goals include picking up Soul-Enlightening Beneficence, You Can Be More, Tiger Warrior Training Technique and Harmonious Academic Methodology.

I think so. We'll try it out.

All right!

For the benefit of Dragoncat, Mr. Halp, and any other newcomers to Exalted that this game may attract: Exalted is not like 3.5 or Pathfinder where most key system details are available for free at some online repository: it is a system that requires the core book in order to do chargen and play. You will have to obtain that yourselves: make sure not to accidentally get the older 1e core book or the newer 3e one.

It also received a really substantial set of errata near the end of its lifespan in 2012, collectively referred to as 'Exalted 2.5'. This will be essential reading for everyone, since among its changes were revamps to the basic process of character generation. That is freely available online in a number of places, among them here.

Also, this isn't a bad introduction to the system's mechanics and the setting's 'feel'. This is also a useful tool- yeah, I know it's a sketchy Google Drive download, but the site of the original developer seems semi-down and the file scans clear of viruses with an up-to-date version of Microsoft Defender.

My concept would work best with Twilight, Zenith, or Eclipse, if that helps guide everyone else's choices.

Dreams of the First Age has a Charm accessible to all Celestial Exalts that halves BP and XP costs for Terrestrial Martial Arts Charms, since they're a 'tier' below the power of Celestial Martial Arts, but ordinarily cost just as much to take.

Similarly, thaumaturgy is kind of 'magic for schmucks' in the setting, being accessible to mortals and reasonably fairly priced for them...but a comically inefficient use of resources for a Solar to take. But I have a character concept that involves being a thaumaturge, and I'd like not to be tremendously gimped.

So I request the following custom Charm:

Root of the Ink Lotus

Cost: --; Mins: Occult 5, Essence 2
Type: Permanent
Keywords: None
Duration: Permament
Prerequisite Charms: None
The Lawgivers' mastery of the occult is such that mortal magics are no great challenge for them. The experience cost of thaumaturgical Degrees is reduced to 4xp, or 5xp if Occult is not a Caste or Favored Ability (or if the character has no Favored Abilities, as in the case of Alchemicals), and their training time is halved. During character creation, Terrestrial Martial Arts Charms cost half as much as normal, meaning that each starting Degree (or Degree purchased with bonus points) allocated to a thaumaturgical Art provides two Degrees instead. As a final benefit, the character may spend two motes of Essence while performing a thaumaturgical Procedure to reduce the Resources cost of the occult ingredients required by 1. In the case of Procedures with Resource costs of 0 to 1, this permits the Exalt to perform the Procedure with no ritual ingredients whatsoever- although Arts which require non-consumable laboratories or workshops are not released from that requirement. Should a character who already knows thaumaturgy learn this Charm, the experience cost of those Degrees is retroactively lowered and the character is refunded the difference.

This is a universal Occult Charm, which may be learned by any Celestial Exalt as well as akuma. Alchemical Exalted achieve an identical effect through the use of a Man-Machine Weaving Engine submodule called Theological Analysis Engrams (Essence 2; 6xp).

Does that look like something that'd work?

Spheres, gestalt, mythic, Dreamscarred, 3.5, Dragon, and other nonsense? The crazier and more Byzantine the better as far as I'm concerned.

Some more information about what the game is going to be would be nice.

•Where in Creation is it set?

•Are you just looking for a Perfect Circle of Solars, or would you be willing to permit one exception in the party, or would you be happy with a party consisting of a Full Moon, a Twilight, a Malefactor, a Xia, a Starmetal, a Chosen of Journeys, a Dragon King and the world's strongest mortal?

•Is it going to be a 'sandbox' style game where we start in a given area and pursue our own agendas from there, or will there be a focus on thwarting the plans of some particular antagonist, or what?

•Are we assumed to start the game having met each other already and earned each others' trust, or is the first adventure our 'origin story'?

•Are we starting as pretty much standard freshly-Exalted straight-from-the-rulebook characters, or do we have a bit of history behind us and extra BP or XP?

•Any house rules?

Yeah, I agree that five isn't a necessity- especially because someone always wants to play a Lunar or an Infernal or a Legendary-Breeding Dragonblood or something.