EvWoD: Friendly Neighbourhood Exalts Actual Play Review

I’ve spent the last few years listening through a few of the Exalted RPG Podcasts / Actual Plays and I figured I’d share my thoughts on them with you. There is a good deal one can learn from them, whether you’re making your own actual plays or just gaming in general.

In today's episode, I will cover A Pair Of Dice Lost’s EvWoD: Friendly Neighbourhood Exalts.

There are, in fact, two dice that are lost :)

1) Disclaimers

There are a few important disclaimers to get out of the way before we start.

First of all, I understand this was a fan project and should be judged accordingly. I am thankful for the effort the cast has put into entertaining us with their stories, but there will be some criticism of the podcast present.

Secondly, any criticism made against the characters portrayed or how the game played out should not be held as criticism or insults of the game master or the players. Not everyone is perfect and sometimes something doesn’t work out or falls flat in execution. It’s important to keep the art separate from the artist and focus on the former without being disrespectful to the latter.

Thirdly, since I’m also a part of an RPG Actual Play Podcast that features Exalted games, I might be biassed towards one interpretation and way of handling things in Exalted that might not agree with how others view and play the game, that’s to be expected. That and some might see criticising other podcasts a conflict of interest or something, so here is your disclaimer.

Fourthly, we hang out with the game’s GM, Brendon, and have made an Actual Play together and are working on another one. Heck, this very game was kind of inspired by our EvWoD game, Heaven for Everyone. While I aim to be impartial in my reviews, I might have an implicit bias. So take things with a grain of salt.

Finally, there will be some spoilers for the show, it would be rather hard to discuss some things without that...

2) Overview and minor things

Friendly Neighbourhood Exalts is an Exalted vs World of Darkness actual play stream hosted by Brendon from @APairOfDiceLost. The game features a core cast of four PC Exalts of mixed splats, plus some cameos by a few more, being college age kids messing with the New York supernaturals.

The game’s system is the pre-Revised version of Exalted vs World of Darkness with its Companion.

The series takes the form of an audio-only podcast (you can find it on Podbean here, or on many other podcast hosting services), with each recording being edited down to 1 hour episode chunks.

The cast consists of casual RPG fans (so no voice actors or improv artists this time). A good chunk of the cast is new to World of Darkness and Exalted as well.

List of Episodes and their overview.

3) Player Characters

The campaign is mostly played by a core cast of mixed splat Exalts:

Cassandra Roller, aka Cas (f) - a Sidereal Chosen of Secrets curious investigator and gambler
Lenard Van Zant, aka Lenny (m) - a Solar Dawn himbo southern conservative christian
Oliver Jones, aka Liv (m) - a Daybreak Abyssal medical student
Marcy Bartello, aka Marcy (f) - a Solar Zenith fighter

With others making an appearance on occasion:

Roswell “Nova” McArthur, aka Rose (f) - an Infernal pizzeria worker with an attitude
Stargazer (m) - a Starmetal Alchemical getaway driver
Roko’s Basilisk, aka Roko (m) - a Moonshadow Abyssal hacker

4) General Plot

The game starts with the characters being college students in New York, taking various classes together. Then they Exalt and start dealing with the local supernatural weirdness of the area as they try figuring out what they are. Eventually they start dealing with the World of Darkness Gehenna plot as they prepare to face off against an Antediluvian slumbering beneath the city.

5) Highlights

Introduction to Exalted and World of Darkness

To the shock of a few people that have heard of this, this game was apparently an introduction to both the World of Darkness and Exalted for a few of the players. Brendon the GM does bring a well prepared world for the new players to explore and enjoy the weirdness of the mashup. It is always enjoyable seeing people experience this strange setting for the first time.

The Wisconsin Adventure

Towards the end of the game the group decided to go to Wisconsin for various reasons, and a lot of that adventure has been a delight. By then the game has already gone from its early, down-to-earth concept of “Exalts in college” and embraced its wacky and over-the-top shenanigans.

The trip started with Lenard and Liv visiting Liv’s parents. We’ve seen a number of over the top parents already, so it was anyone’s bet what we would find in the home of an Abyssal mortuary student. And what we got were… a pair of very caring and supportive parents with quirky careers and hobbies, and a delightful Wisconsin accent to boot! Not only was the whole situation wholesome as fuck, when Liv asked for some old wax sculptures and animatronics his dad had in his storage (being a wax sculpture artist and so on) for his “project” (putting ghosts in them) and the player selected the “cowabunga” option, well, it was interesting seeing what project Liv’s dad worked on back in his day that was “The Avengers End Game” of their times…

Then the pair went on to try finding a master crafter Alchemical they heard lived around these parts that they met earlier. They were joking that he was Santa Claus and sure enough, they found him in Norway Wisconsin, complete with a giant factory full of robotic elves. They got to get some cool Artefacts for the whole team as a belated Christmass present so they can prepare for the big fight.

If that wasn’t enough, they also encountered a Rhinelander Hodag cryptid during their trip and decided to go all in with a whole side adventure of visiting its home and resolving a war between it and a raiding party of Sasquatches eager to kill the Hodag.

Overall, while it had some slow moments, the Wisconsin adventure had a lot of nice, memorable moments that were pretty fun as long as you don’t take things too seriously and enjoy the flow of where this game has gone to at this point.

The Elysium

During that Wisconsin adventure, the other half of the party, Cas and Marcy, paid a brief visit to the New York Elysium. That entire outing was really neat to behold.

You know how over time in RPGs, shows or the like various characters start having some long stories with one another and you can feel that there is a lot more depth to the situation than someone who just met them might realise? That’s how that visit felt - like the Exalts were stepping into a completely different story, one that has been going on for a while, and one that they won’t understand by just this brief interaction. Neither side knew what to expect from one another, everyone was tense, and in general this is what you hope a lot of vampire Elysium games would be.

The interactions themselves were fairly straightforward, Cas mostly warning the kindred about Tzimisce being about to awaken. Marcy had to avoid being turned into a refreshment after being left alone as a “ghoul” and delivering one poignant line at the Prince, who only allowed her a handful of words to speak. “Scale of Bangladesh” wiped out all the smirks off of the undead faces, since they heart rumours of what happened during The Week of Nightmares when Ravnos woke up.

I have yet to see any other EvWoD game make me wish for Exalts to try gently diving into the shark tank of vampire politics. Heaven for Everyone mostly powered through them in Los Angeles, City of the Bull God was mostly t-posing over the London vampires, asserting dominance, and the few other ongoing games I know of barely interact with them so far. I’m not sure if this feeling Friendly Neighbourhood Exalts evoked was just an illusion, or maybe a result of not sending the heavy hitters to the meeting where they would project their big dick energy and ruin the mood, but what we had here felt really interesting to me at least…

A big boss fight

With how much of heavy hitters Exalted are in the World of Darkness, you’d naturally want to end it with something cool, like a big boss fight. And this series delivered on that, if perhaps overdoing it a bit for its own good.

Since the series takes place in World of Darkness New York, those that know what’s going on in that place could guess the final boss - the antediluvian Tzimisce, one of the most dreadful things in that world.

Big boss time

The Exalts assaulted the Vampire to catch them unaware, fought through a number of their flesh monster minions, and eventually faced off against the perfected form of the creature themselves.

With a lot of legwork done ahead of time the fight was manageable (they managed to evacuate the entire area and bring a large pack of werewolves to help with damage control), but with this being Exalted vs World of Darkness, things eventually became a bit too big for the game format.

Three of the players had some form of protection against getting killed, but that meant the weakest link, Marcy, had to be rescued multiple times and burning through their resources. The battle itself took about 5 recorded hours and required two entire extra sessions to wrap. By the end of it, the crew was also running late and decided to wrap things up cinematically just to actually get to the end of it. The actual enemy stat blocks were eyeballed (since this came out before EvWoD Revised that had some guidelines for big boss fights) and rules had to be adjusted on the fly not to imbalance the whole encounter one way or the other. Some of the episodes as presented ended up being “and then they fought some more” and are kind of skippable (on my first viewing I accidentally missed one of the fight episodes and didn’t even notice).

The other Battle of New York

But in the end, it was a good way to wrap a series like this up, especially since it jumped the shark a long time ago and kept going further off the rails. For basically a first foray into a system that was a bit unbalanced at the time, it was pretty solid.

Pulling at the heartstrings

This game isn’t the first time some of those people played together, and Brendon had a good way of leveraging their shared play experience to tug on players’ heartstrings and make them feel things.

These ranged from rather innocuous things like referencing the other recorded campaigns (such as mentioning Mages making a van, or the Brightness Landing Hotel), but also their Exalted campaign we only got a retelling of. Some Artefacts the group was gifted towards the end of the game were referring to their old characters in a way that made Christina tear up a little. It was a nice touch and a good bit of extra work by the GM to really make things memorable for the players.

Therapeutic and making the world a better place

After you’re done listening to the series, there is a nice outro interview with the various players talking about the series and so on. One of those interviews is with Liv’s player, Tyler. In it, he mentions that playing that character helped him “in a way he didn't know he needed”. Moreover, playing Liv actually made him actually decide to go through with going to a nursing school.

So in the end, when all is said and done, no matter what else you have to say about the series, at least it made the world a slightly better place. It’s nice knowing that games have this kind of positive effect. Hats off to everyone involved!

6) Criticism

No show is without its flaws, and so we should turn to what the Friendly Neighbourhood Exalts has committed. Not as an attack on the show or its creators, but as a learning experience on how everyone could improve…

A casual game of Exalted vs World of Darkness

Honestly, this whole game could be summed up as “casual”, both to its merit as well as detriment. The players aren’t voice actors, there isn’t any production team behind it, the various plots are picked up a bit ad hoc, sometimes the players are strung along a bit, some rules perhaps aren’t 100% there and so on and so on.

Which is fine, but at the same time, the game could’ve been so much better with some more focus, planning and pacing.

Like the game starts with characters being students. That relates to pretty much nothing in the whole plot besides them hanging out with ghosts in a clubhouse. There is a ghost comic book making clubhouse, which doesn’t do much beyond a small role in preparing for the final fight. There is a spirit of the City of New York projecting a giant rotting apple on the Empire States Building to show the corruption of the city as some kind of spiritual problem (implying vampires are somehow making them sick) which gets foreshadowed, a little explored, but not really resolved beyond fighting the big boss fight at the end which would improve the situation. The gang find a biblical seven headed Beast from a sarcophagus that erases itself from your memory that ends up being nothing more than a pet for a few scenes. Multiple families from multiple PCs are more wacky than the next and not all of them get their payoffs after they all get introduced in the same tacked on ending to a museum visit. A doom prepper uncle drags his niece PC into an open sewer manhole as a surprise hello only to die off-screen and be reincarnated as a Demon the Fallen spirit possesses his body and just chills with the PC twice before the game ends. The crew meets a character that is implied to be Santa Clauss that hires them for a museum heist and then just makes them some cool Artefact gifts for the final showdown.

This isn’t Riverdale level of crazy, but it certainly has a lot of ideas that you could fill a few seasons of a campaign with.

A completely normal Archie show, don't worry about it...

And like I should be complaining, we did some of that in our EvWoD Heaven for Everyone game. Sometimes you think you’re setting up something nice but the idea flops and characters latch onto something new. But that’s kind of what I mean by “a casual game” - it has ambition to do a lot, does some of it, and sometimes you just have to follow along a group deciding to hunt cryptids and decide the fate of battle between Sasquatches and Rhinelander Hodags.

Lenard - a southern christian bigot…

While I have nothing against Cody the player, and overall he seems like an okay person from all the games I’ve listened to from A Pair of Dice Lost, I didn’t like his character very much.

Lenard is a bit of a stereotypical southern US christian boy, which unfortunately came with its baggage of being a bigot. Straight up in the first episode during Introduction to Religion class he started with the spiel of “worshipping false idols”, and by episode 3 hearing that some NPC girl was German and speaking with a German accent he instantly called her a nazi. When he Exalted he believed himself to be an angel of god and so on and so on.

In general, I really hate these kinds of characters, the bible thumping holier-than-thou smug jingoist assholes, but sometimes they can serve an interesting part in a story. Like Kristen Applebees from Dimension 20’s Fantasy High had an equivalent similar background (although I don’t think she ever dropped any racism). Over the course of the story, however, it turned out that her family was actually a part of an extremist religious fundamentalist group, and she had to figure out her own path to be a better person than that. We never get anything like that with Lenard.

There isn’t even much pushback to what he’s spouting. The only one I’ve noticed was the german girl he insulted complaining to her friend, another PC, that she was called a nazi.

Take all that stuff away from that character though, and you still have a lot to work with. He is, as I think his player put it, a walking Lynyrd Skynyrd joke (due to his player noticing the name Van Zant in the EvWoD book and wanting to go with it), complete with a dog named Simple Man Freebird and last name Van Zant. He comes from a Dragonblooded family from Australia, has a bunch of sisters that enjoy fighting and loses the ability to read when he cusses, so to compensate he has eidetic memory. He has a giant spirit dog the size of Clifford The Big Red Dog that can talk and always has his back. You don’t need all that problematic stuff…

So many siloed sessions

The pacing of some episodes has been a little bit weird. A number of them would feature characters being siloed into their own scenes and adventures separate from the group. Every now and then that’s good, but sometimes it felt like a bit of a lost opportunity or something that sounded better on paper.

In Episode 18 the group got separated into different spirit rooms while going up the Empire State Building. Then the next episode and a half was them having their own scenes doing kind of random things from Cas having a job review with the Maidens of Fate to Liv operating on his old, dying self. And after spending like two-ish hours setting this up and going through this, those scenes didn’t really matter much and were just some random test by the spirit of the city to determine their worth? It kind of felt inconsequential for the time investment and not to mention like 12 separate cuts between the four vignettes.

Then by episode 24 the group decided to split up to do some prep. Liv and Lenard went to Wisconsin to find a master crafter to forge them some weapons and stop by Liv’s parents, while Cas and Marcy were having meetings with various supernaturals of the region to get them on their side for the upcoming big boss fight. They don’t meet back by mid-episode 29. So that’s 5 hours of content bouncing back and forth between two plots, about 26ish cuts (and mind you, each transition comes with a few second jingle, good for denoting context changes, a bit less so when you hear it 9 times in an hour ;) ). Don’t get me wrong, those episodes have some of the best scenes in the series (Liv’s parents and the Elysium), but one plot has minimal stakes (“travel to Norway, Wisconsin, ask for a favour”) while the other crams dealing with three big power brokers of the World of Darkness (Werewolves, Camarilla, and the Technocracy).

On one hand, I get doing that since basically only one character in the group was good at doing power brokerage (Cas), and bringing in Lenard to Elysium would’ve probably been a liability. On the other hand, things like this probably could’ve been paced as one off diversions during a session in between some group activities.

The siloing wasn’t so bad in the early episodes while we were establishing the various characters and their routines, or giving Marcy a bit of backstory before she joined the gang after Exalting (having individual scenes throughout episodes 4, 5 and 6 from a separately recorded session).

Probably in the end, things come down to pacing. Again, this is a casual game, so it is to be expected.

Marcy was just… there

Sometimes in a group ensemble you will have characters that don’t stand out, and unfortunately this time it was Marcy.

She was a Solar Zenith, although I had to do a double take on that since throughout most of the series she mostly acted as the second Dawn. She was introduced fighting a ghost, in the big split adventure part of the season she mostly played a plus one and bodyguard to a very motivated Cas, and besides that she was friends with Francesca, Cas’ rival.

She was a bit of a tracker, she had a cool uncle, drops one awesome line during the Elysium visit, and ends up being interested in cryptids. On the flip side she turned into a large liability during the final fight when everyone had to save her from being killed burning their “get out of jail free cards”, although at that point things didn’t matter all that much.

It is possible that if the character was a different splat or caste things would’ve worked out differently. An Eclipse would’ve complimented the group quite well and kept a lot of doors open (although Cas seems to have been doing most of the diplomacy, so it might be stepping on her toes), an Infernal or a Lunar would at least make the fights more distinct, etc.

But things like this happen, and I’m sure the group had plenty of fun with Marcy’s player being a part of the group and filling in for someone else that left really early.

Jumping the shark and going off the rails

The series was off to a bit of a slow start with the first ten episodes. The group had some run-ins with the local supernaturals, beat up some vampiric mafia, established a comic book making club with some ghost students and so on. Then things started getting turned up to 11 fairly fast.

The next Arc, Exalted’s Eleven, introduced a strange museum exhibit, featuring ancient plagues, a Daiklave hilt, some Alchemical soul gems and even a mysterious sarcophagus with something ancient inside of it (something about this does sound familiar…). Then the gang was hired to rob the museum along with some guest star Exalts and things continued to amp up. Lenard’s Australian Dragonblooded sisters appeared on the scene, a biblical seven headed serpent got freed, everyone had a trippy vision quest going up the Empire State Building, cryptids appeared, someone’s family member got turned into a Demon the Fallen character, and so on and so on.

Brendon the GM did later say that he went a bit overboard, one-upping himself over and over with each story in the system, and to an extent I have to agree. When you get ancient artefacts from a robot santa living in Norway, Wisconsin to save the Rhinelander Hodag from their mortal enemies, the Sasquatches, you probably start questioning how did you end up here.

It wasn’t an unpleasant journey all things considered, just not something you’d expect starting with the premise of “college age kids Exalting and being Friendly Neighbourhood Exalts”.

Railroading

While a lot of the game was off the rails with how bonkers it got, at the same time it did feature a bit of railroading. It wasn’t the bad kind of railroading where the players have no say in anything, but the kind where players often found themselves with a new situation out of their control and had to get through it.

The Empire State Building vignettes for example, were pretty much “you get dropped into this random scenario, how do you solve it” which didn’t have that much player input. Liv got to operate on his mortal self, with one decision - save them or kill them. Cas had an interview with the Maidens of Destiny that mostly amounted to just chatting, a little bewildered. Lenard got to save his buddy from being killed in some building. Nothing too engaging.

A less egregious situation happened in the Van Zant Manour, where the group got to lay low for a while after their heist. They mostly bounced off Lenard’s sisters a bit, and then got to talk with two more NPCs, pumping one of them for some exposition. This wouldn’t be too bad if it wasn’t two and a half episodes of this.

What followed for one group was similarly a bit on the rails. Lenard and Liv got to go visit Jotun to get some Artefact presents for everyone… For 4ish episodes. The only thing of note that happened was them running into the Hodag, which led to the Sasquatch fight later.

While this kind of play is fine for some groups and the players still had a good amount of input on what they wanted to pursue, it could’ve been a bit better. Then again, player-driven storytelling does require a good deal of inputs from the players and motivated characters, and since this was an introduction to World of Darkness for some people, it may not have worked out as well as you’d hope.

What is a “turn”?

Making mistakes while playing games is kind of expected. Everyone at the table has to juggle a lot of things on top of trying to remember the rules, so something is bound to crop up. However, this game seems to have embraced one crazy reading of the rules that made every late game encounter rather bonkers.

Sidereals have a Charm called Perfection of the Visionary Warrior. It’s a level 5 Battles Charm that is fairly simple, it merely says “Reflexively spend 1 Essence. At the end of every turn for the rest of the scene, the Sidereal may make an extra attack at her full dice pool.”. The key word there being “turn”. What is a turn in Old World of Darkness 20th anniversary editions? Good question, but one that you’ll be hard pressed to get a clear answer on in the various books. V20 doesn’t list it in its glossary. Some of the Storyteller systems use the term to refer to an action of an individual character, while others refer to one turn passing when everyone takes their action.

This game decided to take the first interpretation, meaning that you had the group’s Sidereal, Cas, doing an attack like 10 times a round. Every time anyone attacked, she would attack too, whether they were friend or foe. And all that for 1 Essence, which is barely anything in the system. The fights got a bit ridiculous with that, plus probably took a bit longer since Cas wasn’t the heaviest hitter in the group…

Lenard had a similar Charm, the Peony Blossom Technique, but that only gave him 5 extra attacks at the end of the turn for the cost of 3 Essence each time. Very strong, especially for a Dawn, but burning through your mote pool way way quicker.

Ultimately, would using the Charm as the developer intended change anything? I don’t really think so, the group had a lot of heavy hitters as it was so everyone they faced off against turned to red mist anyway. Was it a cool and over the top use of the Charm? Heck yes. However, the novelty of it didn’t really last too too long, eventually the fights mostly turned to same-y noise of stomping on the group’s enemies no matter who was in the lead, so whether it was Cas 5 times as often as anyone else it didn’t matter too much for the enjoyment of the game…

Imitation and flattery

If you’re like me and are keeping up with the various Exalted vs World of Darkness podcasts (there might be a dozen of us! A dozen!) when listening to this show you could notice some similarities to a certain other EvWoD production. Kids in school exalting together, a himbo of a Dawn, meddling with the local vampires, going on a museum tour only to later rob it, finding an ancient biblical serpent in a sarcophagus, doing callbacks to an older Exalted game, etc. happening twice in two EvWoD games would be a really strange coincidence. Then again, the group was heavily inspired by Princes of the Universe while playing their old Kings of Creation game as recapped under Let the Good Dice Roll.

But yes, as someone who played in Heaven for Everyone it was amusing to hear Friendly Neighbourhood Exalts have similar ideas. And you know what they say, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery ;).

This is of course not to say that the show is entirely derivative, it puts its own spin on a lot of those ideas and the similarities are mainly what you notice in hindsight.

7) Conclusions

Overall, Friendly Neighbourhood Exalts is an okay series, but not my first pick for Exalted vs World of Darkness or Exalted in general. As mentioned before, it’s a fairly casual game, which comes with some issues you’d expect from that - plot points that go nowhere, others that overstay their welcome, a shift in focus midway through, etc. But that’s kind of expected from a casual podcast. All the players seem to have enjoyed the series, and it actually helped Tyler settle on a life direction, which is honestly more than you could’ve ever asked of a game like this.

If you’re looking for a stronger Exalted vs World of Darkness game, you’d probably want to check out City of the Bull God by the same GM (and I’m not only saying this because I got to play in that AP!). It features a cast that are Exalted and World of Darkness veterans, and has a somewhat more cohesive plot, even if it does take a detour to Hollow Earth to fight some nazis with cyber dinosaurs ;).

You might also be interested in these links:

• A Pair Of Dice Lost’s Podbean (can’t find the tags for the game proper…)
• Episode list and summary

Starting backstory bonuses - solving character buy-in

Sometimes RPG groups have a problem with getting the right kind of characters together for an adventure. Whether it's people wanting to play lone wolves that are too cool to care, someone making a chaotic neutral character that will just go goblin mode, or just a PC that doesn't know how to tie their backstory to what's going on, it can be a challenge for the group and the GM to tie everyone together to just go and do what they planned for the adventure to be. But, there is a neat solution to that - starting backstory bonuses!

Recently, our GM started a new EvWoD game with us - To Build a Fyre (which will probably air sometime in 2024, here is the rough game pitch). It was a modern game set in a dome city deep in the antarctic ocean. The game had a lot of moving parts, key NPCs and big mysteries to investigate. But in order to ensure that the PCs were actually invested in the premise and were proactive about looking into those mysteries, everyone had to have hooks and leads to follow out of their own volition. They needed reasons to go on a multi-year contract to the Antarctic, to interact with various NPCs, to care about what's going on. The game didn't have space for lone wolves, wallflowers or some really out there concepts like a benevolent cult leader demon that is building a figurative Noah's Arc to let their followers Heaven's Gate into a peaceful afterlife.

So our GM came up with a clever solution to it - starting backstory bonuses. Basically, the game came with 11 different hooks and plots to choose from that would define some part of the character's backstory, give them a lead to follow, as well as give them a bonus to their starting character based on that backstory. You could for example been invited to Atlantis Zero by the Conspiracy of the Lotus, a shadowy organisation that is trying to exert more control over the city. Your starting bonus would be a minor magical artefact they gifted you, and your first order of business would be to reach out to them and get initiated into the society proper to learn what schemes they expect you to help them with. Or you could have been a part of a PMC group sent by a billionnaire to extract his son from the Atlantis Zero prison, but you got attacked on the ice shelf and are the only survivor of your squad - you have a good deal of military gear, but now you have to figure out how to get that kid out by yourself. Or maybe you were helping a three letter organisation and their alien friend find their missing counterpart that has crash landed in the area. Now you have an alien to help you infiltrate the facility, but you also need to take care of them.

Since everyone needs to take one of those backstories, you will know everyone will have some kind of hook to the place right at the start and by having those backstories inform the characters being made you know you will at least have some kind of PC that fits the setting. Plus, players always like getting a little bit extra, so they will be glad to take the bonuses that come with these!

If you run the same adventure / module / etc. for multiple groups, you can also plan your stories knowing where the players will be coming in from. You might not have every backstory represented, but if every one of them leads into your story proper or to the other stories, you will be able to pick up and play that adventure more easily without having to figure out yet another reason to tie your new PCs into the story.

Just roleplay becoming a millionaire - a problem with Storyteller Backgrounds

Recently our group had a discussion about the progression of earning new dots in Backgrounds in an Old World of Darkness campaign we've been playing. He's been trying to beef up security in his Dragon Nest (magical lair from EvWoD), bolster his Resources by robbing some ATMs and strengthen the bonds with his demonic advisor. But because all of these interactions have been rather subtle, neither the GM nor other players noticed this until it was brought up recently that these things haven't budged on his character sheet. Unlike everything else that can be bought with XP, this one part of the character sheet falls under "just roleplay it out and GM should award you some points", which falls under the unguided realm of "mother may I" which doesn't ever seem to be a good part of an RPG. Let's go over the problem in more detail.

Hey GM, is this enough for Resources 2?

What are Backgrounds?

Backgrounds, also sometimes called Merits, are parts of the character in the Storytelling System that are mostly extrinsic to the character. They are things like income, fame, people that work for you, how influential you are in the region, how powerful of a mentor is guiding you, etc. Unlike D&D, in the Storytelling System your character can start being a rich, influential political figure if you spend your points right, which can be pretty fun.

The problem is that in some of the Storytelling Systems, like Vampire the Masquerade after character creation raising existing or getting new Backgrounds cannot be done with XP, unlike everything else. Instead, they are raised as a consequence of the narrative and roleplaying.

While this isn't universal (Chronicles of Darkness let you buy any Merit with XP and Exalted lets you buy some Merits with XP), it can certainly be annoying.

Just roleplay it out!

I personally dislike any system that tells the players or the GM to just roleplay any broad part of the game out without any guidelines or rules. They always leave things wishy-washy and even if the GM wants to be conductive to the players advancing their things, it often feels arbitrary. How do you gaige of a player has sufficiently roleplayed becoming a millionaire to raise their income? How do you balance one player nagging the GM consistently to get those Backgrounds they want vs a player that is less forward about what they want? Should a player that can make money out of thin air just be given the money Background another player invested a good part of their starting character points into? If a player wants to roleplay getting some powerful artefact as a Background, should they just be allowed to? How do you roleplay learning Mandarin for five years if the in-game sessions happen day-to-day?

This is kind of like when character's social influence is left entirely to roleplay - the option is never as useful as the concrete option of violence. If you have the XP to up your proficiency in a skill like Melee, you as the player are in control of the character getting more competent and that has a tangible application on the session - your numbers go up, you are numerically better. You can't rely on having that same agency if your GM doesn't facilitate you getting the Backgrounds you want (even leaving aside some more hostile GMs that don't want you to get them, even well meaning GMs may forget to set the scene you need or you may fumble meeting a potential Mentor / Contact / Ally, etc.).

Just spend the XP!

Seeing how the New World of Darkness solved this issue in 2004, I'm surprised this approach hasn't been backported to the 20th anniversary edition in 2011. Just letting the players spend XP to buy points in Backgrounds would address this issue and give players the agency to push for their character improving things external to themselves. As always, you'd want to also tie the system into Sanctity of Merits (a system from Chronicles of Darkness where if you lose something you spent XP on, you get refunded that XP) not to make players lose their investments and feel bad about it.

Of course, one can argue whether or not some particular Backgrounds (such as Mentor, money, artefacts, etc.) should cost XP if sometimes players can happen upon them, but that's a bigger topic for another day...

Spend XP to cure cancer and be a good person - expensive fluff charms in EvWoD

Our group tends to play big games like Godbound or Exalted where the players get to shape the world to their whims and even when we're not doing that we enjoy games like Fellowship where you are having a large, positive impact on the world by saving it from an evil Overlord or an Empire. We enjoy being able to improve fictional worlds for the better by more direct actions than "slay some monsters". But then when we find cool powers in various systems that let us cure cancer or the like, they never feel as fun as they ought to. Let's figure out why...

Cure cancer or feed the hungry, decisions decisions...

Cure Cancer Powers

So what do I mean by "Cure Cancer Powers"? Basically, any power the character can have that would have a large impact on the world the game takes place in, but will rarely have any tangible effects on the session-to-session gameplay. Take Wholeness-Restoring Meditation from Exalted vs World of Darkness for example:

Cure anything!

Spend a few hours, cure anyone of any debilitating ailment. You would be hailed as a miracle worker and you could change the lives of hundreds of people each year. But how often this would come up in a game you're playing as something important? Maybe once or twice you save some key NPCs and get some good reputation for being such a good surgeon, but in a normal session of being a vampire hunting hero it probably wouldn't come up all that often in comparison to say, being able to punch holes in vampires on the regular.

You could also expand this category into "powers that are narratively cool but rarely useful". For example, Neighborhood Relocation Scheme lets you magically drag one part of the local geography somewhere else:

Drag one location somewhere else.

The power can be really useful in a very specific situation ("Let's break everyone out of Alcatraz by dragging the island onto the shore so they don't drown!"), isn't as universally, unequivocally good as curing cancer, but it still will only come up so often in a game in comparison to being able to punch holes in vampires.

Some other powers that for us fell into these categories:

• Tiger Warrior Training Technique / Legendary Scholar's Curriculum - supercharged teaching, letting you train people to be world leading experts in science or black belt martial artists in a week. Very useful for supercharging some key NPCs, would only be a background thing otherwise.
• You Can Be More - turn mortals into Mages after a very difficult roll - again, uplifts some key NPCs.
• Faultless Ceremony - bless a ceremony with good fortune - thematic, but very nebulous as to how it would impact a game.
• Ceasing to Exist Approach - turn yourself into someone completely different for a time - very useful, but at the same time it requires a lot of upkeep and you can't really just be someone completely removed from the group without hogging a bit too much spotlight.
• Smooth Transition - give people painless deaths - very thematic, but how often would you do this in a regular game?
• The King and the Kingdom: The Thousand and First Hell - create your own pocket realm of existence - very thematic and can serve as a neat mobile base of operation, but at the same time it's mostly creating a walled-garden for yourself really...

Have a look at them yourself if you'd like to get into more details, Exalted vs World of Darkness is available for free!

Cure Cancer Powers in practical games

These kind of powers came up a few times in our games. Most recently, in our upcoming EvWoD game, City of the Bull God, we had our veteran GM Devon play End of Sadness, an Infernal Exalted (hell-themed hero essentially). The core of his character was built around Latter-Day Devil Implants, a charm that lets him graft helltech implants onto people and turn them into Fomori (demon-possessed people). However, he built his character to be benevolent, so while normally Fomori would be monsters, while they work for him they are immune to all the bad effects of being a monster. Then to further refine them, he took Verdant Emptiness Endowment, which let him grant wishes to people once a year each. This would let him remove any and all inherent problems the Fomori would have (such as mental derangements caused by being possessed by an evil spirit, physical deformities, etc.).

The intended loop for the character was to find disenfranchised people that wanted to heal something they wouldn't be able to otherwise (not in an "exploit the weak" kind of way, nor "throw off the disability" way either, but finding people that would seek out this kind of treatment themselves), then working with them for a few years to stabilise them and then letting them go better than ever. It's probably one of the more benevolent ways an Infernal can interact with a person (who can very easily be cruel tyrants).

After one season of the game and investing about 27 XP into this one loop (about half of the generous XP our GM has given us), these Powers and the loop came up a total of about twice. First time in S01E02 when End of Sadness explicitly wanted to show off his character loop and cured one person of her sickness, and a second time in S01E04 when he brought some Fomori dogs to a fight. Beyond that everything else was fluff about how his followers look and operate.

The worst part was that the player noticed that they essentially built themselves a fancy walled garden out of XP and very situational powers that don't bring them joy. Sure, they and the GM could contrive a way for those powers to come into play but that would be pretty obvious to everyone and not make anyone feel better.

A much simpler example of similar Cure Cancer Power usage was in our Heaven for Everyone game, S01E12, where one player decided to buy Instant Treatment Methodology charm that let them do very fast medical treatments and decided to break into a children's hospital to cure everyone there overnight. Really cool thing to do once, not necessarily worth spending 2-3 session's worth of XP to say you've done it.

Another example from City of the Bull God - I played a superpowered university professor Rigel Star. My initial idea for the character was to take Legendary Scholar's Curriculum to be able to churn through dozens of students per week, condensing their entire university learning into days and even taking in underprivileged youths to give them all that education for free to help lift them into a higher position in society. Ultimately however, I decided not to take it because it would be all fluff and nothing actionable in a game where we explore strange supernatural occurrences in Boleskine House, stop evil vampires from preying on people and go to the hollow earth to go back in time to fight nazi mages and werewolves.

A different take - Godbound's Miracles and Changes

Godbound had a different approach to this problem. While sure, some powers could be seen as Cure Cancer Powers (such as Birth Blessing that can cure infertility and give people really healthy children), most ways you would use to improve the world were universally accessible under Dominion Changes. Every player would gather Dominion over time and they could spend it to change the world for the better based on their divine portfolio. So if you were a Godbound of Health, you could cure cancer in a given kingdom, if you had the power of Knowledge you could make everyone in the world literate, while having the power of Sky you could give everyone angel wings.

The system also solved the problem of "powers that are only sometimes useful" by the use of Miracles. While you could buy some specific powers when levelling up, you had access to your entire divine portfolio in a limited fashion. You would have to pay a little bit extra and deal with some other minor constraints but you could, say, feed an entire town with Cornucopian Blessing to address an ongoing famine in the short term.

Of course these approaches might not be universally applicable, I understand that. You could also argue that spending XP on something makes it an important sacrifice - being generous means a lot more when you spend something you have in short supply than when it doesn't inconvenience you. But at the end of the day we're here to have fun together in an RPG, not play "my character shoots themselves in the foot to show what a selfless person they are".

Solutions attract problems

Of course, sometimes when a player picks a power they are signalling to the GM that they want to be using it regularly. In an ideal world, such solutions would attract problems - if you have the ability to sneak really well, you want to use that to solve problems, so the GM could give you more opportunities to sneak. So if you have invested in the power to cure any ailment suddenly a good deal of NPCs start having such problems the character can fix. It doesn't have to be a wave of magical cancer everywhere, but old scars, small persistent pains and aches, some family member struggling with a chronic condition, etc. Suddenly you have social leverage to use on people (even if you act selflessly, never turn anyone away and don't ask for payment not to be an asshole that prays on people, they can still feel in your debt). Of course sometimes it might be harder to figure out how to work such Cancer Curing Powers into a game - there are only so many situations being able to train black belt martial arts master by the dozen could realistically solve without turning into some kind of wuxia action flick about making a dojo city to fight against another evil dojo army...

Conclusions

While people do want to play good and selfless characters (of course not in every game), making them spend their limited character resources away from things that would be useful regularly and into niche powers that make their characters really good, helpless and selfless people can give players a buyer's remorse. Some of it could be addressed by tailoring what appears in a session to give the players a chance to highlight the cool and expensive powers their character has, but that could feel a bit pandering if done too much.

In general, it might be better for games to be consciously designed with this problem in mind.

Different takes on religions, gods and player characters in RPGs

Recently I watched some Legend of Vox Machina and one of the big plots of the series was focused on a cleric losing her connection to her deity. With the show being rather trope-y, it went the usual route of the deity saying what amounted to "I haven't forsaken you, you have forsaken me" and so on. It felt like such a worn out story beat. Then I started going over the various relationships between religion, spirituality, gods, their chosen and their faithful I've seen in RPGs and the list started getting so long I figured I'd best start writing things down. So if you want an inspiration for a character, setting detail or the like, hope you enjoy!

Morally absolutist religions and lawful stupid

First category of religious interpretations that inform the characters would fall under "moral absolutism". They rely on religious commandments being applied as per letter of the law without question. This seems to be Gygax's interpretation of what "Lawful Good" means:

Sand Creek Massacre as a moral baseline,

kill those orc babies because they are an evil race

With the religious commandments being absolute and unwavering, the role of a cleric or a paladin is to execute them on the behalf of their deity without question. Essentially, they become an extension of their god of choice.

In terms of playing a character like that it tends to veer towards the Lawful Stupid category. The player is discouraged from making their own decision, instead applying the religious law like a blunt instrument. Worse yet is when the GM punishes a player for not playing their paladin according to their interpretation of the religion and takes away their powers for being "bad".

From a narrative perspective, characters like these are rather limiting in a game. If they always act in a certain way with no nuance, the GM basically knows what they will do in any situation they are put and you are not really playing a character as following a script.

5:08 - Lawful Stupid Clop Cop

Absolute decrees, flexible interpretations - Tyranny

A different approach to absolutist religions would be those presented in Tyranny. In that game you are an archon of a tyrannical god-like entity Kyros the Overlord. They send down Edicts for what they will to happen, and yours is the ability to bend them. If Kyros curses a land to burn as long as forbidden knowledge lies in a citadel you can fulfil it by moving the books elsewhere, which fulfils the letter but not the spirit of the Edict.

Noah Caldwell-Gervais' video essay on the game as a whole

This interpretation of religion might be a bit hard to pull off in a casual pen and paper RPG campaign. You would probably have to have characters that in some way are forced to obey a given religion, but at the same time struggle against it for what they believe to be the morally correct outcome. Similarly, the deity sending down the decrees would have to be powerful enough to force the players to act on their behalf, while also accepting players interpretations of its decrees as valid (which could be due to not caring, or being a rules lawyer, or maybe following some alien logic of "I commanded it, it happened, therefore the way it happened must've been the way I commanded it" (sounds like something Malfeas would do honestly) or something).

I think the closest thing to this I've seen in an RPG would be Sidereals from Exalted. They are the troubleshooters of Fate. They go in when something that shouldn't have happened happened and their job is to set history right. However, while Fate might chafe against it, they can exert their will as to some things. Maybe they don't want to kill a child that should've died in a flood and instead decide to Lone Wolf and Cub it.

High autonomy and task delegation - The Immaculate Order

If you want to avoid the pitfalls of Lawful Stupid, you could have a religion that gives its priests a high degree of autonomy while delegating tasks to them. In this scenario a deity or even a religious order could send a cleric or a paladin on a quest or to a specific location and trust they will take care of any problem they will encounter. The PC then is responsible for acting on the behalf of their religion to the best of their ability while still having the autonomy to make their own decisions and interpret the rules and orders as needed.

A good example of this would be Exalted's Immaculate Order, a state religion that focuses on being the intermediary between the myriad gods of the setting and the people, as well as hunting ancient monsters that stalk the land. The Immaculate Monks are send on their missions and expected to get things done, but there isn't much beyond a mortal oversight on them. Their power is their own and nothing will curse them for letting something slide or getting corrupt since first of all, religion in Exalted doesn't work that way, and second of all, the Immaculate Order is a manufactured religion that is used to keep the world behaving in a certain way according to some people in power.

Exalted and "no backsies" on power

Since I already touched on it, might as well expand it here. In the world of Exalted by default you play a demigod hero that is empowered by the gods or the elements. You could be the priest of the god that gave you power, or just someone that was awesome enough to impress them, but at the end of the day, you are marked by their power. You're not a paladin or a cleric per-se, mainly by the dint of this being an eastern fantasy.

At the same time, just because a god gave you some of their power doesn't mean they hold any sway over you. An exaltation is a one and done type of deal, the god can't take away your power or stop you from getting more powerful after they have given you the spark (without killing you of course, but considering you were designed to be a titan-killer, few are stupid enough to try).

This essentially means that a god choosing you as their champion puts a lot of faith in you to be a good long-term investment, and similar to the previous section, you are afforded a lot of autonomy in representing them.

Taboos and caveats of power

Adjacent to the default Exalted's "no backsies" on power are divine or supernatural powers that come with some taboos and caveats. You are still not beholden to a deity to use your divine magic, but you have something else that is limiting you and your behaviour.

This covers your 5e D&D paladins that have to upkeep their Oaths or risk becoming Oathbreakers. They could, say, be questing for glory and have to perform great deeds and avoid cowardice. These pain the character in broad enough strokes that you don't fall into the "lawful stupid" category of the older edition paladins while still directing the character to working in a certain way.

In Fading Suns you have religious priests of The Universal Church of the Celestial Sun that wield power in the setting, both literal and figurative. They tend to the peasant folk to keep them on the right path, they act as advisers and confessors to the nobility, and if needed be, they take flamethrowers to burn the heretics...

A good heretic is a burnt heretic, thanks Avesti

They can also manifest Theurgy, a magic that comes with a small caveat - Hubris. If you do bad things, like murder, steal, or get excommunicated that Hubris will grow until your character becomes a sinful plague on the land.

Some type of Exalts in Exalted have similar taboos. For example, the Abyssals are champions of the dead and are forbidden from taking on a name, acknowledging who they were in the past life, or even creating or saving lives. It doesn't mean they are physically incapable of doing those things, but usually there is a high price to pay associated with those transgressions.

These kind of mechanics work well for when you want to give player characters power they can use for good or ill, while at the same time putting some thematic or gameplay restrictions on what to use them for. As long as they are not too restrictive, they will keep the players in check without ruining the fun. While this limits some murderhobo behaviour in some bad gamers, for a high-level play this could also limit some stories you could tell, ones of unchecked power corrupting people and so on (hello again Exalted).

Religion of shared interests - Sathraism, SWN's Psychics

A different way of expressing religion is through how the practitioners share common interests unique to that religion. An example of this are the members of a minor heretical sect from Fading Suns called the Sathraists.

Fading Suns is a scifi fantasy game where people travel between worlds through stargates floating in space. There is one quirk to that - when you jump, for a moment you become one with the universe in an addictive flash of nirvana. This is what caused psychic powers to get introduced to the human race. However, since people started getting addicted to those jumps, soon Sathra Dampers were developed that shielded the people in the ship from the psychodelic effects and made space travel more mundane.

This didn't stop people chasing the high though and figuring out how to get their next fix by meddling with the ship engines. Eventually, you had a minor religious heretical cult develop around this phenomena of people that help protect one another, help score their next hit and look out for anyone new that might have experienced the phenomenon themselves. The religion comes from the shared experience, needs and interests to support its practitioners.

Stargate, but more extra

A similar phenomena can also be seen in Stars Without Number. It too is a scifi fantasy game that has psychics. One quirk about them though - a new psychic will most likely burn themselves out pretty quickly and become everyone's problem if they don't have a mentor to teach them how to use their powers. They need someone with a specific psionic power to help them get over their initial hump before they learn how to control their powers and so on.

While the setting is a mostly blank and open ended sandbox, you could infer someone would start a psychic order religion that seeks out new psychics and trains them in how to properly use their power as well as teaching them a religion based on those powers. Again, a religion based on shared experience, needs and interests of the practitioners.

Power through conviction - oWoD's True Faith

White Wolf offered us another take on religion with Old World of Darkness' True Faith merit. It was a bit of a weird power that had different interpretations throughout the various game lines and editions. It mostly boiled down to this - if you believed in religion strong enough, you could perform some miracles or generally use it to smite creatures of darkness.

In one of the scenarios of the Gehenna book however, we can infer that True Faith is not tied to doing religiously good deeds or even the approval of Yahweh (oWoD had a very judeo-christian focused backstory, down to Vampires descending from Caine).

In the Wormwood scenario, a group of Vampires hide in a church and await god's judgement after he destroys all of the world's vampires in 40 days and 40 nights. One of those vampires in question is Ferox, a Gargoyle bruiser with True Faith 9 (out of possible 10). He's mostly there to keep peace and is not above hurting or killing people to do his job. He's a zealot through and through.

Too cool for school Ferox

At the end of the scenario, all of the characters are judged by Yahweh directly and can either be purged of their Mark of Cain and become people, or get smitten into dust. Ferox falls into that second camp, probably to the surprise of similar murderhobos that might've been playing oWoD in the 2000s with a similar build and attitude.

It is certainly an interesting take on religions in RPGs, although it might come off as flat in execution. You can't really judge if a player character has enough conviction to continue using their powers, and possibly confronting their conviction in their righteousness with actual religious morality or the will of a deity would have to be a big event that amounts to "you're playing your character wrong, stupid". So there probably is a reason why this kind of powers didn't make the transition to Chronicles of Darkness.

Power through self-improvement - Monks, Elemental Dragons

To contrast with gaining power through religiously-motivated self-conviction, there is a similar concept of gaining power through self-improvement - spiritual purity and all that. D&D's Monks are an example of that - they are a class focused on mastering oneself and using spiritual energy that is divorced from a specific deity. Of course you have spiritual teachings and similar training how to achieve said mastery, so it would tie to a religion or several. Most importantly though, Monks as written can't lose the power they gain, and they are not beholden to some cosmic force, which sets them apart from a number of similar entities like say, the Jedi Order (that on paper at least follow "the will of the Force" and can turn to the dark side).

We see a similar concept to that in Exalted, not only in the form of various heroic mortals with their martial training, or Sorcerers that can achieve great feats without being Exalts, but also in the way how Elementals work. They start off as rather mindless manifestations of the elemental forces that eventually can develop sentience and personhood. Then through spiritual enlightenment they can reach further levels of essence refinement, turning into Lesser Elemental Dragons. If they continue, they can even turn to something comparable to the most powerful beings in the setting - Greater Elemental Dragons that stretch for hundreds of miles and can devastate continents. This happened at least once, and now that Elemental is buried beneath a mountain range, while others are discouraged from becoming that enlightened...

Sometimes you can have religion and spirituality without the need to worship a specific deity, all the while earning some cool powers.

Appeasing your powerdaddy and quid pro quo powers - Warlocks

A different take on the power balance between a deity and their practitioner could come from the relationship a D&D Warlock has with their patron. A common interpretation of this class is that the patron can't take away the power they granted the Warlock, but at the same time if the Warlock wants more power they need to earn them by appeasing their patron. This does give them a good amount of leeway for some back and forth as needed, while still preserving an interesting power dynamic.

I'm not telling you to do something, but... - EvWoD Infernals

This one is a little bit particular. In Exalted vs World of Darkness you have Infernal characters. They wield the power of hells themselves. Their power sets revolve around destruction and bringing about the end of the world so they could rule the reforged world. That being said, unlike their original counterparts from Exalted, there is nothing controlling them. Once they get their power, it is theirs to keep, use and abuse.

What keeps this category different from "no backsies" however, is that the powers themselves shape how the characters act. But when you have the power to turn water into acid, irradiate the landscape, create zombies and graft hellish implants onto people while turning them into fomori, it kind of informs which direction the character will fall towards.

These kind of powers use the carrot rather than the stick approach to moulding the chosen of a given deity: "You don't have to be a cruel tyrant, but if you want to it is so easy". It can only be achieved by very deliberate game design, focusing not only what the powers can do, but what intentionally they cannot do and what kind of character is painted by this positive and negative space.

Deities as avatars of cultures - Godbound's Made Gods

A completely different approach to religion is presented in Godbound in the form of Made Gods. As the lore goes, humanity achieved post-scarcity utopia, solved all science and all that stuff. The last thing they needed to iron out was philosophy and figuring out who was right. Because they couldn't agree on an answer, they turned to the only person that could settle their dispute - the abrahamic god figure of their world, the Creator. They stormed the gates of heaven, broke into its throne room only to find its throne empty. So they thought to themselves - if the Creator is not here to settle their dispute, they will have to wage a final war to prove who is right. So they stripped heaven and reality itself for parts to build great artefacts of power and Made Gods - avatars of their philosophy and civilisations, the most powerful engines of war imagined.

The role of those deities in Godbound is to represent their cultures and wage war on anyone who did not conform to their rigid beliefs. They did require an army of priests and theotechnicians to upkeep, but they did offer their believers a tangible afterlife in a heaven made by that Made God. It was a much better alternative to the hell where everyone else would go to that was hijached by angels out of spite for humanity breaking reality and shattering the world.

Making your own gods - Kuo-toa and YES!

On a similar note but perhaps a smaller scale, sometimes you can create your own gods on a much more personal level.

One example of that from D&D comes in the form of Kuo-toa, an amphibian race that can invent their own deities for protection. While those wouldn't be nearly as powerful as more established Forgotten Realms pantheons, it's certainly interesting.

Something similar also happened during Dimension 20's Fantasy High series. During the game, Kristen Applebees, a cleric, started having doubts about her faith when she realised she was brought up in an extremist cult, and after meeting her deity face to face realised he was basically a frat boy douche. Eventually, she started a new religion, complete with a new god of YES!. A nice capstone to her arc.

Create your god, kind of like this...

Serve the people, embody the ideals - Alchemicals

Going back to Exalted, we have yet another different expression of religion and its relationship to people in the form of Alchemicals and Autochthonians in general. In the setting you have a titan named Autochthon, basically Hephaestus mixed with Primus. One day he decided to peace out, turn his body inside out and create a world out of it called Autochthonia. He raptured a bunch of people to populate this world before disappearing from the main part of the setting.

You are being raptured, stop resisting!

One things settled he gave the people a new religion to follow so they would maintain his body while he slumbered. At the same time, he taught the people how to turn the most devout and accomplished among them into heroes called Alchemicals (basically a cross between a human, golem, transformer and RoboCop, but at the same time a communist hero of the people). They needed those heroes to take care of them and so they would grow over time to become new cities (think Metroplex). It makes a bit more sense in context...

Some Alchemicals are bigger than others...

So here you have a religion with a lot of back and forth. Autochthon needs people to maintain his body and provide him prayers to sustain him. People need Autochthon to provide them with raw resources to sustain themselves and Alchemicals to protect them from the raw elements and other big nasties that lurk in the robotic world. Alchemicals need the people to help maintain themselves (especially when they grow to city size and become immobile). All of this is wrapped in a religion that promotes the good of the community, selflessness, hard work, communism, and duty to Autochthon.

It's a rather rare take on religion, where your god needs you to survive, and you also are expected to serve your community above yourself, being an actual hero of the people.

Polytheistic priests

A large view of clerics, paladins and people of faith in general in RPGs come from a western perspective. You pray to and have relationship with one god, you follow one faith that has a strict set of tenants and so on. But that doesn't need to be the case. Your game could have a pantheon of deities (like Humblewood), or go all out and give everything a god to manage it (like Exalted). So what then are the roles of people of faith?

While you could have some clerics dedicated to worshipping one deity in particular (like Brides of Ahlat in Exalted), you'd more likely have the priests be focused on serving multiple deities. Whether that's through worship, guiding people ("if you have troubles with your fields, this is how you pray to Henwin"), as well as being the intermediaries between the people and the gods.

That last one especially is the focus of the aforementioned Immaculate Order. That set of beliefs postulates that the gods should not interfere with mortals and the Immaculate Monks are the ones that resolve disputes between gods and people. So if a river god cries too much and floods a town, you know who to ask for help.

Now if the setting has gods that form a somewhat cohesive pantheon or can generally co-exist (like Humblewood when you look at it - the deities there form a somewhat cohesive whole and even Kren, the evil fox deity is not a completely evil being) you can have priests representing a lot of gods without an issue. The problem arises when they start becoming incompatible with one another.

In Exalted for example, you have gods and Exalts that are worshipped by mortals on regular basis. The same world also houses Yozis, ancient mad titans that spite the world for being defeated eons ago, and the Neverborn, fossilised dead titans that wish for the whole world to end. Each of those have their own kind of devotees (mortals, demons, nihilistic ghosts) that mostly don't see eye to eye.

So while you could still have priests that represent and handle multiple deities, chances are they wouldn't represent everyone.

Conclusion

While there are probably many more different relationships between religion, spirituality, gods, their chosen and their faithful, I think this should be a good enough start for players or game designers to get some inspiration for their next creations. 

Related articles:

• Problems with character Cults in RPGs

Sidereals, Fate, gods and prophecies - morality of a puppet

Recently, I was playing a character in Exalted vs World of Darkness that was a Sidereal, a troubleshooter of Fate. Basically, his heroic job description was to right the things according to how Fate wills it - uncover secrets that should be revealed, end people that should be ended, bring joy to the people that need it, etc. However, that got me thinking - what decides those things anyway? Unlike in some systems and settings, Exalted's Sidereals are agents of Fate, which is something that exists outside the control of any deities or similar entities. But since it's not controlled by anyone with an agenda, what agenda does it serve? What does Fate really want in the end? What is it's agenda and morality? If that couldn't be established, should my character go along with it and trust in Fate, or should they try imposing their own morality on the world instead?

Sure, in meta terms, Fate is basically "plot" of an RPG - the story wants the characters to get from A to B and kill C, so the Sidereal gets to make leaps of logic to get them there like a Holistic Detective. Even the EvWoD book calls out Sidereals as being GM's best friend because they always have an excuse to get the right people to the right places for the plot to move on. That can be fun if you want to enjoy the ride and don't overthink it, but as writing goes a Sidereal following Fate is like saying people are following the Force to know where to go next - feels a bit like a cop out.

Dirk Gently the holistic detective is basically a Sidereal

If a character leans into following Fate too much, it can also start turning them into a lawful stupid, a puppet, or a Morty on a Death Crystal - basically an automaton that doesn't think much for themselves just follows orders - "this person is supposed to die? Oh boy, here I go killing again!".

Chosen of Endings without remorse

A comparison to D&D paladins and clerics isn't really that far off, although with those at least you know the deity you're following and their view on morality, so you know there is something that dictates that will. That just means you know what you're signing up for though, not that strict adherence to it will make you less of an extremist murderhobo.

Another popular manifestation of the same problem would be prophecies - should a character in a prophecy that they will do something or kill someone, or should they try to defy it? If they are "the chosen one", can they do no wrong because it's their destiny? Do they have a say in the matter, or are they a slave to the whims of Fate?

What all of those have in common is they tend to turn the characters into puppets of whatever they resign their character to. Whether it's a deity, a code of conduct, Fate, philosophy, etc., the characters can become less interesting for it. When you turn yourself into a hammer, you treat everything as nails or something...

Making it interesting - cutting the strings

Now that is all not to say you can't have interesting and thought provoking ideas some from those tropes, but you have to approach them the right way.

A character that follows some morality 100% of the time is a bit dull. Sure, RPGs encourage you to see how many problems you can solve with your hammer of choice ("I want to see how a good and naive person would fare in Ravenloft! That sounds like a fun game!"), but challenging the character's beliefs can lead to some powerful moments. Try focusing on that - start with the character believing one thing and then make them re-examine their stance when confronted with what Fate wants them to do - would they kill baby Hitler if they were Minority Report? Or would they re-evaluate their stance and vow not to kill people that are innocent save for that they might commit future-crime? Make your character have doubts and define their own morality consciously. Similarly, reward your players for doing so and don't punish them for not being lawful stupid. Screw what the gods might want from your paladin, a paladin with a crysis of fate is much more interesting than one that's an automaton! Don't punish them for it!

You could similarly involve the players in defining what is the will of the Fate. Don't hand them a script telling them what to do, whatever they end up doing might be exactly what Fate wants. To borrow a phrase from Fellowship - let them Command Lore about it and tell you what Fate wants of their character (with room for negotiation as with all things of course).

When it comes to prophecies specifically, they are probably best played as mundanely self-fulfilling - characters believing in them and putting stock in them are inevitably causing them to come true with their actions. A person believing themselves to be a hero rises up to the legend and becomes a hero. However, if you reject the prophecy, there is no other shoe that drops - there is no magic here, the prophecy was always just a fable and a guess. As long as both the players and the GM are on-board and aware of this, such prophecies might not take agency away from the characters and the game.

Finally, you could have the character's morality explicitly affect Fate - someone's fated to die not because the unknowable cosmic force willed it, but because the player character wants them dead and therefore they spin that Loom of Fate and make it a reality with their actions. This retains the character's agency and makes their actions and decisions have meaning in the game and the setting. They are no longer only the puppet, but also the puppet master.

Conclusions

Making your character beholden to an external system of morality or something else that dictates their choices can take away agency from the character, the player, and make the game a bit less interesting. On the other side, confronting the character's morality and making them actively engage with it can be more engaging. Embrace it.

Is Exalted with a different system still Exalted?

Our RPG group plays a lot of Exalted. We have recorded over 120 episodes of our podcast on Exalted, many of which were 4+ hours long. That being said, a lot of Exalted we play these days does not use the Exalted system, so is it fair to still call it Exalted? At least that's a question someone brought up in regards to our content.

Exalted is a game started by White Wolf in 2001, at the tail end of the Old World of Darkness. It was a game of mythological-scale hero adventurers in a world that's a mix between sword-and-sandal and wuxia stories. The world is vast and colourful, the mythology of the world is compelling, and the player's heroes themselves are larger than life. Where D&D games would end, whether it is dealing with gods or forming empires, Exalted starts you off.

We have done Exalted using Exalted 2nd and 3rd edition rules (Princes of the Universe), Exalted using Godbound rules (Princes of the Universe, again), Exalted using Broken Worlds (Skeleton Keys and Gangs of New Gloam), Exalted using Exalted vs World of Darkness (Heaven for Everyone), and are planning on doing Exalted using Fellowship. Each of these had a different focus - Broken Worlds focuses on the wuxia genre (where every conflict and conversation is an excuse to start throwing punches), Godbound focuses on exerting your will on large swaths of the world, while Fellowship is focused on saving communities from a big bad overlord. Each game has a different sorts of mechanics, and those mechanics inform a different style of gameplay. What stays the same in our games though is the core of Exalted - you are the mythic heroes of legend, destined to face off against impossible odds and larger-than-life challenges, in a world filled with threats that need a hero like that.

But is it Exalted though? It depends on what metric you're using. To compare, let's talk about Star Wars. The original trilogy definitely is Star Wars. Are Star Wars novels still Star Wars? They aren't theatrically released movies shot on film. Are Star Wars video games, animated shows, tabletop roleplay games, comics, card games, etc. Star Wars? Is the Christmas Special Star Wars? It is easy to debate what is canon and what is not, but you can't really deny that all of these things are Star Wars. They might be on different media, they might tell different stories, they may contradict one another, but they are still facets of the same franchise, telling the stories of the Jedi and Sith, Empire and Rebellion, and the various people of that universe.

So all in all, Exalted in a different system can still be Exalted. It might be quite far from the original game, it might have different themes and mechanics, it might even be so far removed you personally won't enjoy it, but it's still Exalted nonetheless. And hey, if the original Exalted could also be Battlestar Galactica but in fantasy space as Gunstar Autochtonia, you can probably suffer someone using a different rules to make the space combat more fun ;).