Recently I ran a political intrigue / investigation adventure called The Storms of Yizhao for a few groups. It has a few neat approaches to doing a political intrigue game that you might want to borrow for your campaign. So let's go over them!
(If you want to run the adventure yourself, I strongly recommend using The Yang Version of the module since it addresses a few problems the original adventure had. We've also done a conversion for Fellowship and Exalted Demake if you prefer those systems)
The adventure sees the demigod PCs investigate the titular storms of Yizhao - a supernatural curse that is ravaging the city. They are tasked to solve the problem by the local governor that will give them a sizeable reward for stopping the storms. The players quickly learn the storms are caused by an Altar of Heaven, an ancient artefact created by a diety that imposes its morality onto the people and punishes them for its transgressions. So that means someone in the city is doing something really bad to upset the local customs, and getting to the bottom of who caused it is the PCs' ultimate goal.
During their investigations the players will interact with a couple of big name NPCs, from the governor, through a philosopher sage, down to a merchant matriarch. And here the crux of the mystery and political intrigue comes in.
Each of the big NPCs the players meet will gladly tell the PCs what they want out of them and what their take on the situation is. The merchant matriarch wants the governor deposed, dead, or both. The local royal caretaker of the Altar wants to just blow it up and go be a movie star. The philosopher sage wants to brainwash the entire town into being perfectly loyal citizens. Many of the motives are extreme and in a normal game might be a reason to send some constables after the NPCs to get them arested, but this isn't a normal situation. The NPCs aren't hiding their motives because each one of them lacks something that they need the PCs to do for them to complete their plan. A censor needs some documents stolen. The philosopher sage needs the PCs to tresspass by the Altar where they are not allowed to go. The merchant matriarch needs the PCs to steal a shipment of taxes.
So the NPCs will gladly let the PCs know exactly what they want to accomplish and what needs to be done to fulfil their goals. This lets the players know exactly what is going on, who hates who, and what their chemes are so they can make a somewhat informed decisions on what to do without having to do a roundabout song and dance to figure the basics out. It gets them right in the action and making decisions within minutes of meeting a new NPC.
Of course, there are layers to the situation. Every NPC has a goal and a plan, but sometimes their motives are hidden. Each of the NPCs also has a lead on what is really going on in Yizhao that is at the root of the problem that they will disclose if the PCs complete their quest or find some other way of leveraging them. They also each have a bias to what truth they see.
The merchant matriarch hates the governor because of his high taxes. She wants the PCs to steal the tax shipment so she can return it to the people. This is a lie. She wants to pass the shipment onto the censor to frame the governor of trying to steal his own silver to get him executed. She will tell any kind of sob story to the PCs to get them to get the governor deposed, she will lie that he's embezzling the taxes, spending it on his vices and latch onto anything the PCs bring to her to pin it on the governor. The truth she knows though is that there are people going missing from all walks of life in the city, which is really strange...
The philosopher sage believes the lax morals of the common people are the reasons the Altar of Heaven is punishing everyone. She is biased and wrong in that regard, but she doesn't know it. She wants it to be true, so she believes in it wholeheartedly. She is convinced that by empowering it to turn all the commoners of Yizhao into brainwashed Upright citizens the truth will be inevitably unveiled because it cannot take root in such a moral society that will be created. In that regard she is right, at least if you lean into "ends justify the means" kind of thinking...
Of course, some NPCs are simpler and some are more complex. The royal caretaker will let the players know he wants to just be a movie star straight away and what he needs from them to help himself escape. He is also quite eager to talk about what he thinks about the Altar and what insight he has. There is no second layer to him. Meanwhile the merchant matriarch will gladly lie about everything just to get what she wants. She will gladly ommit that she's extorting the people for money, that she's in cahoots with the censor, that she will use the stolen taxes as means for getting the governor executed, that she doesn't know if the governor is doing anything unsavory and what have you. Some variety like that means players don't expect everyone to have exactly one fake mask on they need to get through.
The garnish to the adventure are the various lesser NPCs and situations the PCs can interact with. People that have small immediate problems that show the players what the more ordinary life is like in the adventure. You have some young man that is being publicly humiliated for disobeying his mother, a merchant that can't pay the new taxes and will be fined for complaining about it too loudly, some courtesan that tries to hex the demigod PCs to give her a singing voice, etc. I tend to pace the adventure so that inbetween meeting any big name NPCs the players run into one minor situation to have something simple to solve in five to ten minutes.
Having a good number of such encounters also lets you tailor them to what the players are thinking. If they think the governor is up to no good and you want to double up on that, show them how people are treated by the government. If you want to expose the merchant matriarch for being corrupt, give them some merchant that can't afford guild dues. If they have done most of the adventure but can't connect the dots, give them an encounter that steers them in the right direction.
Finally, this adventure has multiple off-ramps for the players to end it how they see fit. They don't need to solve the mystery to solve the problem of the storms. Based on character skills, they can destroy the Altar, modify it, empower it, get to the bottom of the problem and punish those responsible, or even just leave because this place is just misery. All of those are valid end points for the adventure, some can be achieved within an hour or two of playing it.
Conclusions
The Storms of Yizhao showcases a few interesting tricks to running a compelling political introgue game.
First of all, all the NPCs share exactly what they want out of the PCs and why they want it quickly and readily. They will gladly share what they think of other NPCs. This lets the PCs understand the political landscape of the adventure fairly quickly without having to pry information out of the NPCs.
Secondly, some NPCs operate on multiple layers of truth. What they tell the PCs might be a lie, it might be a biased view of things, or it might actually be true. The PCs have the means to figure out what is really going on with some effort, but no NPC holds the whole picture.
Thirdly, minor NPCs and encounters help flesh out the world and can shape how the players view the situation. There are more such encounters than the party will encounter in an adventure, and which one gets presented depends on what the GM needs at the time.
Finally, there are multiple off-ramps for the players to complete the adventure before seeing the entire picture that feel like a satisfying end. Those ends are always triggered by the players consciously going for them rather than something the NPCs do in the background.
While it might not be the only way to run political intrigue games, I do think the scenario is an interesting case study. The recordings of multiple groups going through it should eventually be uploaded to this playlist in case you want to see how it plays out in practice.
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.
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:
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.
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.
I’ve spent the last few months 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.
Since I have been a part of this podcast on top of my usual review, I will also be diving a bit deeper into reflecting on the game from the perspective of the player and using this opportunity to also analyse the game a bit more deeply than I usually do.
I’m sorry for the length of this article, but the game was long and had a lot of interesting things going for it…
1) Disclaimers
There are a few important disclaimers to get out of the way before we start.
First of all, I’m one of the players in this game. While I intend to go into this review as objectively as I can, you should be aware of the potential bias at play. Here is your disclaimer, take whatever I say with a healthy pinch of salt.
Secondly, 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.
Thirdly, 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.
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
Princes of the Universe is an Exalted actual play hosted by @Tavelgorge and part of the Sponsored By Nobody podcast. The game is a story of an (eventually) perfect Circle of Solars on their misadventures from establishing their city of Wan Mei in the South, up to fighting the Realm for the control of Creation.
The series takes the form of an audio-only podcast with 1-6 hour episodes with minor editing, recorded in person. The cast consists of casual RPG fans (so no voice actors or improv artists this time).
Killer Queen (f) / Queen of a Thousand Conquests - Zenith Caste Solar, a former Yozi worshipper from Lookshy, likes to fuck with people.
Longhorn Seawolf (m) - Eclipse Caste Solar, an outdoor adventurer from the North, likes to make deals, sometimes too hastily.
Majestic (m) / Skyward Effulgent Majesty - Twilight Caste Solar, a former slave, an expert crafter and scholar.
The Royal (m) - Night Caste Solar, a Guild merchant-prince and a sneaky bureaucrat from the South, sneaky and scheming.
Traveller of the Unspoken Roads (m) - Eclipse Caste Solar from the East, a beastmaster.
Wanderer (m) - Dawn Caste Solar, hero and protector of Home, from the South, a brawler with a big heart, but sometimes easily fooled.
4) General Plot
The plot of Princes of the Universe is a bit harder to give an overview of than in the other Exalted games I’ve reviewed because it’s very character-driven. It features a lot of smaller adventures with the overall plot being that the players are a Circle of Solars out to take over Creation. To that end, they start by establishing a city of Wan Mei in the South of Creation and dealing with the problems of running an underpopulated nation.
Over time they establish political ties with Lookshy, befriend a number of diverse Exalted, including Alchemicals, Infernals and Abyssals. Eventually they take over the South by conquering the Lap and using the Penitent. From there, they start dealing with bigger picture issues, like handling Autochthonia reconnecting with Creation, Infernals that want to ruin their plans, and eventually facing off against the Realm itself, assaulting the Blessed Isle and fighting the Scarlet Empress for the control of the Realm Defense Grid (as is tradition).
5) Highlights
5.1) Spot-on theming
The biggest draw of the podcast for me was its spot-on theming. It was Exalted through and through. Everything felt right, from the the small things like using Exalted-appropriate wordings (“animated intelligence”, “hologlyphic display”, “speed of prayer”) to the high concepts like the fetitch-death of titans, discussing Autochthon reformatting into the Predator, nature of the Wyld, how to kill the Unconquered Sun, etc. Every Exalt type and their associated concepts felt distinct and were fully realised as characters (the Circle had allies and foes in all kinds of Exalts, none of them were “the evil ones” as some people like to paint them).
5.2) Fully realised Creation
Princes of the Universe had a global scope to it, and for the most part it managed to explore a large chunk of it. While most of the game took place in the city of Wan Mei in the South, the Circle did visit Gethsemane, The Lap, Lookshy, Nexus, Rathess, Thorns, Shakenzar, Denendsor, Yu-Shan, Malfeas, The Underworld, The Wyld, Autochthonia and even Zen Mu. Each of those places felt distinct, giving you a sense for what they are in Exalted and what “content” they hold.
Adding to that, the group did visit a number of other locations for a shorter amount of time - Diamondhearth, Mother’s Hearth, the Imperial City, The Nameless Lair of Ma-Ha-Suchi, Tushipal, Chiaroscuro, Vanileth’s Domain, The Thousand, The Cold House, Stygia, Sijan, Dijak, Urvar, Palanquin, Meru, the list goes on.
Between all of these, you get to experience a large chunk of the Exalted world and enjoy the variety of things the setting has to offer.
5.3) Fun banter
The cast of the podcast worked really well off one another, engaging in a lot of fun and organic banter both in character and out. It had a more casual approach to the game than Swallows of the South (who would edit most non-IC things) or ExalTwitch (who mostly bookended the show with some OOC conversations). While on a few occasions the conversations veer into some somewhat unconnected chat about pop culture, most of the time things remain relevant or at least on-tone. You might hear digressions about some obscure lore the characters wouldn’t be able to encounter but it is still neat, occasional rants about some discussions about the characters (“what’s her doom?”), etc.
While this style might not be for everyone and it certainly can pad some episodes up a bit, while listening to Season 5 Episode 16 that’s at the final stretch of the game and the players just have fun shooting the shit while assaulting the Heptagram I couldn’t help but to just have a grin across my face for the entire episode. The show has its specific sense of humour that if you let it will have you smiling a lot.
5.4) Solars at their worst
Now we’re starting to get to the more nuanced bits about the show. As I understand, one of the main themes of Princes of the Universe was to depict good Solars at their worst, to show that absolute power changes you. The Circle is not evil for the sake of being evil, quite the opposite - they have good goals, but by the dint of their absolute power and nobody to tell them otherwise, they can go about them in extremes.
The Circle built a magnificent city of gold where everyone’s needs were catered for, but then to fill it they began buying up and freeing slaves by the bulk load, hiring raiders to scour the entirety of the South for more people, etc. Then because the people have all their needs taken care of they are bombarded with heavy indoctrination to join the various cults of the Circle to fill their hollow lives with meaning. The cults include such things as a hedonism cult, a cult where your worth is purely determined by how much wealth you accrue, and the cult that promotes excellence in learning and rewards it with the privilege of sacrificing one’s own heart Aztec-style.
On top of that the Circle itself forms a codependent, dysfunctional family. They may at times hate each other, not be able to stand one another, but are also doomed to be stuck with each other through the cycle of re-exaltation and not be able to live without one another for long. Backstory-wise, their Circle has always been an odd one, mostly keeping to themselves on the fringes, scheming their big schemes. Now by the OOC dint of being the player characters and the powers they wield, they are stuck with one another, even if at times they’d rather scatter to the five Directions of Creation and not see each other for centuries.
It’s an interesting take on what the Solars could be like, and a reflection of what might’ve caused the Usurpation. Wielding unlimited power, with the only thing that could challenge you being your peers with the same amount of power. The Circle goes from being something akin to golden rock stars to full on Dethklok (complete with a poor Sidereal lawyer or two having to deal with their shit).
This could be a bit of a contentious take, but if you do accept it as a premise, it’s where a good deal of enjoyment can come from. Similarly, it deflects a good deal of criticism of the characters and what they do - “the characters are awful people”, “human sacrifice is bad”, “they are hypocrites”, etc. boils down to an answer of “yes, that’s the point and the mission statement”.
This review will try to keep this mission statement in mind while discussing the various aspects of the game.
5.5) Big scale from the start
It’s unfortunate the first bit of the show wasn’t recorded, it could’ve given us a glimpse at the characters before they start dealing with larger scales of things.
That being said, the game does get going with a bigger scale of things quite fast. By Season 2 the Circle is dealing with a large-scale city (albeit with a small population), traversing across Directions from mid Season 2, conquering the South by Season 4 and dealing with Creation-spanning politics from early on as well.
The game is big in scope, geographically and thematically. It deals with conquering entire Directions, making deals that influence politics of the world, as well as putting the fate of Yu-Shan, Autochthonia and many city-nations in the hands of the players.
There aren’t that many actual plays out there that I have seen that have as wide of a scope as Princes of the Universe, and while at some points the execution could’ve been more interesting (late-game a lot of things are just handwaved for the sake of brevity), it’s still an impressive feat to have a game work at a world-scale.
5.6) Fully realised characters
To go along with the large scale of the world, you also had some well developed characters to go along with it. They were not only allowed to explore the entire world and alter its fate, but also to explore their own concepts to the fullest.
Killer Queen went the whole Zenith gambit from essentially being a one-person dance battle rock machine, a delightfully petty person when crossed, up to exploring the concept of motherhood in her own way (involving a lot of Celestial Wine, Neomahs (fleshcrafting demons) and tissue samples from a lot of people) as well as realising she might be smothering her offsprings with her love.
Majestic not only fully explored the limits of being a Twilight crafter, building the entire golden metropolis of Wan Mei, restoring multiple Directional Titans and pushing the esoteric boundaries of what is possible in the Exalted setting, but also restoring the Dragon King civilisation, bringing universal literacy to his people, and being at the head of an Aztec-esque cult where the voluntary human sacrifices never run dry.
The Royal pushed the idea of being a shrewd money- and dealmaker to its fullest, not to mention his sneaky exploits of a Night Caste. He ended up outgrowing and absorbing the Guild, uniting Yu-Shan and fixing its broken bureaucracy, uniting the Elemental Courts and dividing the world between them, completing not one but two Immortality Schemes (see further down) and even taking over as the ruler of the Celestial Bureaucracy as Sol Imperator in the Unconquered Sun’s stead.
While the Wanderer might not have had such giant ambitions as the first three, he was still an unmatched Dawn warrior nobody could best. Even having to stand against the rest of the Circle, he never compromised his morals (which might’ve been the hardest challenge of all ;) ).
Seawolf similarly had fun with his concept of a world traveller, dealmaker and a friend to many things. His wanderlust did lead the Circle onto many interesting things.
Nothing held the characters back, which made the story driven by their actions. They didn’t have a higher authority to answer to, nothing that wasn’t setting-breaking wasn’t off the table, and the game was all the more interesting for it.
5.6.1) Unconventional Night Caste
Not to toot my own horn too much, I enjoyed the concept of the Royal as an Unconventional Night Caste Solar. While looking at the various character concepts of the Night Castes I could find, they all revolved around being an assassin-thief and not much else. It was nice having a social-focused, deal-making politician of a Night just to keep things interesting and varied.
5.6.2) Perfect Circle
Another thing you don’t see very often in Exalted actual plays is an actual, full, perfect Circle of Solars as the main cast. While the Zenith and the Night might be a bit unconventional, it’s still nice to see all of the Castes represented. It almost didn’t happen either - I initially wanted to play an Eclipse rather than a Night, but Devon asked me to switch it up to complete the Circle ;).
5.7) A diverse cast of NPCs
To go along with the interesting PCs, the NPC cast was also very varied. It featured over 50 named NPC Exalts alone. You had your Solars, Lunars, Sidereals, Abyssals, Infernals, Alchemicals, Dragonblooded, Exigents and Liminals. I think the only Exalted type that was missing were the Getimians.
On top of that you had some killer takes on a few Deathlords (more on that later), and a host of other gods, demons, elementals, dragon kings, mortals, fair folk and so on to encounter.
While the sheer numbers of NPCs meant that not all of them could get enough spotlight to highlight them, you at least got to see every kind of them have their moment in the spotlight to highlight what they are about.
5.8) Fun incompetence
While it’s fun watching characters succeed, a number of times Princes of the Universe have proven it’s just as fun if not more so to watch characters flub, bumble their way through things and be a little incompetent from time to time. Some of the greatest plotlines from the entire game were a result of such fun mishaps.
5.8.1) The Trials of Seawolf
Longhorn Seawolf had the honour of standing not one but two trials throughout the game, both as a result of his gaffes.
The first one was the Yu-Shan trial in Season 3. The Circle’s holdings in the South have been harassed as a result of the activities of Won Bongerok, the corrupt Censor of the South. He took bribes from the Realm to give the Circle a hard time while they prepare for war. To confront and deal with him, the Solars decided to go to his office in Yu-Shan. Since none of them were trained bureaucrats, they got to have an adventure of bumbling around the Celestial City. It was hilarious in its own right, going through the various Bureaus trying to find their one celestial god ally to help them find the office of the Censor of the South.
When the Circle finally got to the office of Won Bongerok, they were a bit frustrated with the whole endeavour and Seawolf decided to start insulting him to his face because he technically was the Assistant to the lost Censor of the South, etc. This of course didn’t go well and the Circle got into a fight with him.
The next scene involved the Circle getting detained by the Celestial Lions, and the next session was focused on them getting interrogated and working with their Sidereal lawyers to avoid what a corrupt Censor might use the corrupt court of Yu-Shan to do to them. All of that was a really fun listen and it was only possible because the party lacked the skills to avoid the challenges of Yu-Shan and the players didn’t know enough of that part of the setting either.
The second time Seawolf was put on trial was a result of a demon he once summoned and abandoned going a bit crazy over the decades. Seawolf confronted it, only for it to use weird magic to curse his bloodline, resulting in a lot of his descendants dying on the spot. Some of those were also descendants of other Circlemates. Two of them didn’t take it well. Majestic tried to kill him in a hilariously protracted battle scene (more on that later), and Killer Queen put him on an impromptu trial with all other Exalted NPCs serving as the jury in hopes of getting him executed. It was a great show to listen to.
All of that however was only possible because of a few hilarious flubs. First, the reason the demon came about in the first place was because Seawolf lost a lung during a fight with Octavian (discussed later). The demon was summoned to replace his lung, but the player balked at having a demon lung, so it was promptly tossed away and forgotten. Then, the only reason some of the children died that Majestic cared about was because he decided to take the lungs from one of the NPCs the GM deemed compatible, Conna, which was Majestic’s assistant slash almost adopted child. He got both of her lungs and gave her his remaining lung, so their fates got intermingled. Then, the issue of the rogue demon lung crawling away was never dealt with. Finally, during the battle with that Lunghorn, the player opted not to counterspell the Sever the Line spell to save some Essence. While the battle wasn’t to the death, if Seawolf lost he would be put in the bellows of Lunghorn, and due to his claustrophobia the player decided that was a fate the character wasn’t willing to accept.
All of that resulted in a really good buildup of poor choices, snubbing responsibilities and so on that culminated in a number of great scenes both before, during and after the trial itself. Just top notch.
5.8.2) Wanderer getting duped
Multiple times throughout the series Wanderer gets duped by various characters. I wouldn’t want to spoil these since they are very short yet very enjoyable moments. What I can say is that some of these seemed like they only barely got pulled off in the heat of the moment, and then Wanderer’s player reactions when he realised he got duped are really priceless and fun to listen to. A happy reaction to being played that is genuine and holds no grudge to the GM for doing that to his character. A delight.
5.8.3) An emotional moment of forgetfulness drives the point
During Season 3 Episode 1 Killer Queen, the Wanderer and Void Within Without (a long-term Abyssal companion of the Circle, in a body of a young boy) were flying to Thorns. The Queen decided to have a talk with Void about his past, which because he is an Abyssal is a big no-no. He got defensive and steered the conversation towards the meaninglessness of the past to Exalts. How nobody remembers the people that were, that could’ve been, that only the Exalts matter. Nobody will remember who Killer Queen was, other than “the person that would become the Killer Queen”.
To further drive the point home, Void mentioned Wanderer’s home village, how nobody remembers its name anymore, how it will ever be known as “the Wanderer’s village”. Same with anyone from that village that isn’t the Wanderer - nobody would ever remember their names.
The Wanderer tried to rebuke him, trying to remember the name of one named NPC from his village, but since nobody was keeping notes, nobody at the table remembered her name. It was such a great moment for this little bit of information to slip people’s mind, it was perfect.
5.8.4) Tutors by Claw being adorkable
A fun NPC that appeared in the game for a while was Tutors by Claw, the god of Dragon King enlightenment. She fit right into the theme of fun incompetence with being bad at her job, getting frustrated by the state of how dumb Dragon Kings are these days, plus talking to the players like a teacher at a kindergarten, not condescending, but talking people through concepts with simple words and giving them gold stars. It was really fun listening to the players visiting her in Yu-Shan…
5.9) Limit Breaks
One aspect of Exalted I personally like seeing, along with the stories it creates, is the Limit Breaks. Princes of the Universe didn’t shy away from this mechanic, and you often were reminded how close the characters are to breaking. During a few key moments of the game the Limit Breaks did swing the story and the relationships between characters into disarray, making for a more interesting story to listen to.
That being said, the Limit Breaks became less of a thing during the second half of the series when the system switched from Exalted to Godbound, which was a pity.
5.10) Deathlords and Thorns
One of the bigger recurring themes of the game turned out to be Deathlords. Because one of the Circle’s main allies was an Abyssal, it was rather unavoidable one of them would show up in the long term. The way two of them were portrayed was really interesting and serving as a really good foil to the characters.
During Season 3 Episode 01 the party decided to organise a fighting tournament to draw in more immigrants to their city. On a whim, they decided it would be a great idea to visit the master of their close Abyssal friend, Void Within Without - The Mask of Winters. Killer Queen and the Wanderer gleefully went to Thorns without any preparation and they got their asses handed to them on a silver platter.
See, all of the Solars in the party cared about such things as human suffering, freedom, not being tortured for the enjoyment of a Deathlord. Thorns had none of that to offer them. Instead it resulted in not one but two PCs going into Limit Break and staging an impromptu peasant revolt before storming the Juggernaut and demanding to see the Mask of Winters. Of course, they were granted the honour.
For you see, in Princes of the Universe, Mask of Winters was a scheming version of the Emperor Palpatine that took joy in messing with people. He set up Thorns to make people suffer, letting a little rebellion brew to give people hope before snuffing it out as soon as it rises up and punishing people for ever having hope. What he was doing was wholly antithetical to the Circle, and it was perfect. He later doubled down on this by creating an elaborate display mocking everything the Circle has accomplished. All in all, he was a villain you love to hate.
Even the way he confronted his visitors that were out to demand justice from him was very on-point, but again I shouldn’t spoil what happened there. Sufficient to say, the Circle ran with a tail between their legs and learned a valuable lesson as to being too big for their britches.
The second notable Deathlord the Circle had to contend with was Eyes and Seven Despair. In this game, he was an intellectual nihilist through and through. Cold, calculating, logical and uncaring. While he frustrated some of the players with his nihilism (“everything will reach Oblivion, it is an inevitability, what happens between now and then is irrelevant”), they also had problems finding reason to confront him. For the most part he could be reasoned with as long as you understood his philosophy.
While he only got a few scenes in Princes of the Universe due to only appearing in Season 5, he still made a good impression and was an interesting take on the character.
5.11) Some really great fights
As much as I’m not a fan of listening to RPG combat in a podcast form, I can’t deny a few of the fights in Princes of the Universe were really great. Their fight with Octavian at the end of Season 2 was pretty solid, same with the Siege of the Lap. The final fight with the Scarlet Empress was of course pretty good, but the one that really takes the cake was the protracted fight at the end of lets call it Lunghorn arc in Season 5 Episode 5 and 7.
The Circle has learned that Seawolf’s Lung has set up a cult and was plotting something bad along with Wanderer’s newfound nemesis wielding the Devastator Axe, the weapon of his greatest nemesis, Ceaselessly Falling Devastation. Wanting to put an end to both of them, Seawolf, Wanderer, Majestic and all the Dawns and Dawn-equivalents they could muster travelled to their secret location in the South.
There, they found Lunghorn, the wielder of the Devastator, as well as a number of other nemesi that have decided to join them. What would follow was a prolonged battle spanning about 5-6 hours, two episodes, multiple locations and multiple shifts in the ebb and flow of combat going from a superhero posing and honourable combat, through trying to save a dying Circlemate from being offed, to bare knuckles fighting with the last remaining bits of strength both sides of the combat could muster.
The genius of that fight was that it was just a one, long scene, and that meant in Godbound terms nobody could get their health or Effort back, which turned that very long encounter into a battle of attrition.
On top of that the story was a culmination of multiple story threads coming together and multiple long-standing enemies of the group coming together, each with a different history and grudge they held. Really top-notch!
5.12) Post scarcity mortals and religion
The city the characters build in the game is a post-scarcity utopia for mortals living there. Every need of theirs is met, they are clothed, fed, given everything they could ever want in life.
It is interesting for the GM to highlight during one of the episodes that due to all of that the mortals in Wan Mei fill their lives with religion and following the cults of the various PCs to give their life meaning. I guess that’s an interesting twist on the paradox of plenty - if people are not needed to generate wealth for the country - what do you do with them? In Princes of the Universe the answer apparently is - give them religion.
And thus you have an interesting highlight of the various cults in Season 4 Episode 9. Royal’s worshippers focusing on making money so when they die they have the highest score. Killer Queen’s people packing the opium dens and houses of carnal and cultural pleasure. Majestic’s followers becoming the best at their craft to be the best willing human sacrifice out there one can be.
A highlight like that really compliments the Solar PCs and their cults of their own personalities.
5.13) Fun little things
Between the fun big things, the show also had its share of fun little things that deserve a mention but perhaps not their individual sections.
First of all, Princes of the Universe wore its references on its sleeve. Things weren’t left ambiguous as to what inspired a character design and so on. Sometimes those things were rather cheesy (like the game opening in the Wyld, in the Kingdom of Nokey which was just Super Mario), but most of the time they fit right in (Alchemicals being based off Transformers, Mask of Winters just being Emperor Palpatine, etc.).
Speaking of references, the main Sidereal antagonists of the series using Osseous Hour of Misfortune Style and Gilded Blossoms of Determination Style (fan made martial art styles based on Undertale) was similarly fun to witness. Killer Queen having to face off against someone using her feelings against her was a really cool duel. Too bad we didn’t this sort of thing used against every other player character - I’d love to see what the Sidereal would pull out of the Majestic ;)…
The dynamic between the characters after they retrieved the Eye of Autochton was also really neat. They needed to take it back to Autochthon, but they couldn’t trust one another not to be tempted to use it a little bit to maybe get a bit of help for an upcoming war with the Realm. So they had a standoff to make sure nobody else steals it. It was a really fun scene, and a taste of what’s to come in the final episode…
As seems to be tradition in the various Exalted Actual Plays I’ve reviewed, Princes of the Universe had its own interesting meetings with the Unconquered Sun. First time he paid the group a visit when they decided throwing stuff at the Sun was a way to solve their problems, and second time was when the Royal wanted to take over the Celestial Bureaucracy. The latter one challenged the player with an interesting moral conundrum that could stump a good number of Solars wanting to aim high. Overall, it was a light touch that didn’t overstay its welcome.
Finally, the character of Four Hundred Rabbits, the god of wine, was just such a perfect horror of a character to behold whenever he’d appear. Basically, the name was a reference to an Aztec expression about being drunk, which the GM embodied literally as a rabbit person suit stuffed with four hundred riving rabbits approximating human movement, also being a creepy cross between an Easter Bunny, a playboy bunny and just an all around sleazeball. It’s worth listening to episodes where he appeared just for the sheer uncomfortableness it puts the players in.
5.14) The perfect ending
While the game had its ups and downs, ebbs and flows, things got wrapped up before they outstayed their welcome and they ended with a bang.
It’s no secret the final fight was going to be over the control of the Realm Defense Grid, it’s basically a cliche for any world-domination Exalted game. With the Scarlet Empress returning last Season you also knew it was going to be a showdown with her, and the game delivered.
Getting to the final fight involved overcoming a series of challenges, that while they were interesting at times, could use to be more of a personal challenge akin to Swallows of the South’s Mars Temple. When the final fight started rocking though, it was pretty neat. Both sides being on top of their game and pulling some cool stunts to spice things up. It was tense to the very end and ended better than anyone could’ve anticipated.
After that, however, came the question about who’s going to be in charge of the Realm Defense Grid. It’s always been a running gag that the game would end in a PvP and it was a perfect, petty excuse to devolve into that. The cherry on top of the cake.
After all was said and done though, the group had a chance to talk about what their characters accomplish after they become the rulers of Creation. One final time to accomplish big projects, and it was nice to hear what everyone has been up to. It was a really good way to end the series.
Pretty much all the way through, the ending to the series was great.
5.15) Standing up to OPP, switching systems
During the run of the game some shady things from OPP came to light, and to Devon’s credit he didn’t stay quiet about them, instead addressing them head on in a lengthy, separate episode. It was a commendable thing to do to stand up against a company publishing the game you’re doing an Actual Play of and risking losing a part of the fan audience over it.
Similarly, the group did not shy away from highlighting what they didn’t like about the system they were playing and that they switched from Exalted into Godbound once the final version of the game was released. It’s good to let your audience know if the system you’re playing has some problems, rather than pretending everything’s okay.
6) Criticism
No show is perfect and you can’t just gush about everything, so lets turn to some more flawed or nuanced parts of Princes of the Universe. Not as an attack on the show or its creators, but as a learning experience on how everyone could improve…
6.1) A start without a beginning
Probably the most unfortunate part of the series is that it misses a beginning. The first Season and a bit weren’t ever committed to recording, and from various recaps and references one can put together that a number of them were some really interesting events, like the story of how Wanderer Exalted, his fights with his nemesis the Devastator, etc.
Similarly, a number of times we hear glimpses of a “beta” version of Princes of the Universe - a game the gang played before with similar characters and so on. It’s also something that some people would find interesting to listen to and learn the stories of why Killer Queen’s entire family seems to be all different kinds of Exalted.
Finally, even when we get to the first recorded episode, Season 2 Episode 03, that starts with just some table banter for about 20 minutes before jumping into the middle of a story arc of the Circle exploring the Wyld. It’s definitely a rough start to the game that can turn some people off.
6.2) Audio quality
The audio of the show is for the most part adequate, although it could use some improvements. It doesn’t suffer from the poor recording quality of Congenials, but neither is it on par with Swallows of the South. What mostly drags down the enjoyment of the game are random noises during the recording, like interference from some cell phones, crinkling chip bags, stirring glass, etc. Things that could’ve been avoided in a more professional recording.
Princes of the Universe is an actual play that has about 70 episodes totalling some 246 hours of content. That’s 3.5 hours on average, with some sessions lasting as long as 6.5 hours. That’s a heck of a lot of content and a heck of a big commitment if someone wants to listen to everything (I should know, I’ve binged the series over the last few months). Even the bullet point synopsis of what happened in each episode is 180 pages long.
While most episodes don’t feel like padding, some of them could use some better pacing, and some plotlines have a good deal of buildup but end up not going anywhere. Of course, when you are a hobby actual play podcast, that can happen.
So if you want a lot of Exalted content, you might be in for a treat, but if you want a story to get to the point, this podcast might not be for you.
6.4) Fast travel and the tiny world
Probably one of my favourite pet peeves when it comes to Exalted games - fast travel made an appearance. Because the characters were using an airship early on and some people took travel Charms or the like, the world felt really tiny. The characters would routinely travel across Creation in but a day or two, which took away from the gravitas of having to go to the North to deal with things for example. It would be interesting for such an undertaking to take, say, half a year, with maybe some extra stops along the way, but nope, now it took a weekend.
6.5) Small scale doesn’t exist, mortals don’t matter
One downside of the podcast focusing on the larger scale game and lacking the first Season is that the small scale didn’t really exist in this game. By early Season 2 Wan Mei becomes a category NA Artefact metropolis, complete with automated factories, food dispensers, animated intelligence, etc., the Circle starts dealing with politics of city nations like Lookshy, and they routinely travel across Directions in skyships without having to worry about the logistics of travel, etc.
Similarly, by this time mortals exist mostly as statistics. The Circle has to contend with filling the city because it’s so empty, they start caring about how many people get sacrificed and where those people are coming from, but everything’s so impersonal.
By the start of Season 3 the last mortal-level connection, the Small Council, appears for the last time and since then there are only a few mortal things that matter - the Circle’s cults (in the sense of them being an aggregate that gives them worship and embodies their ways), the Circle’s few named children (mostly from Killer Queen, although Wanderer eventually gets one), and one lonely mortal, the only mortal from the Wanderer’s village to ever have a name in the game - Conna.
It’s unfortunately inevitable that with scope that spans Creation and multiple other realities and dealing with fates of nations the things like individual mortals don’t matter, but it’s still a shame that the small scale stories don’t get the spotlight and aren’t told. Swallows on the other hand managed to mix the big and the small a bit better during its run.
6.6) Wan Mei, the empty city
In a similar vein to how the mortals didn’t play an integral role in the game, Wan Mei, the capital of the Circle’s empire, also felt rather empty.
Don’t get me wrong, I know there are people that live in the city, and Devon did describe it in vivid details on multiple occasions, but yet still it all feels hollow.
First of all, the city doesn’t have that much of history in the setting. It was the Circle’s city before the Usurpation, but was then left abandoned and only restored during Season 1 and 2 and populated by whatever refugees, immigrants and slaves they could find. It was basically created whole-cloth by the characters, so they never had to contend with an existing structure, history, diplomatic relationships and inheriting some thorny problems that might come with places like Lookshy, Nexus, Chiaroscuro or any other place that is at least a little bigger than a new Circle of Solars.
Secondly, because the mortal things didn’t matter all that much to the game, you didn’t get some local flavour you could find in other places. What you got was one Calibration festival in Season 2 Episode 06, about two scenes of the Small Council in Season 2 Episode 04 and Season 3 Episode 02, one discussion about criminals, re-education and the larder in Season 2 Episode 04 and the recurring reminders of the endless human sacrifice throughout the series. Those were interesting, but they didn’t make Wan Mei that vibrant. Soon the place was only an extension of the Circle’s cults (Wan Mei has human sacrifices, because that’s what the cult of the Majestic is doing, etc.).
Thirdly, most of the scenes in Wan Mei would devolve down to the Magic Meeting Room, sometimes stopping by Void Within Without’s workshop when they wanted something from him, and then occasional shots of the outdoors, the airship docks or people’s bedrooms.
Understandably, it can be a challenge to give a place a character when dealing with characters that can overpower it in a second, and any city-scale problems can also be resolved meaning the drama of a place disappears. It’s a problem we’ve ran into many times in demigod games. It’s still a pity you could replace the grand city with the five PCs sitting in a cave having Magic Meeting Room discussions while Countess is outside throwing sticks at a pyre and you would have a good facsimile of what’s going on in Wan Mei…
6.7) Lack of loss
While listening to Season 3 Episode 03, the players made an interesting remark - the Zenith has a really cool and very thematic power that lets them commit bodies and take on their intimacies to pass onto people. Series like Swallows of the South and ExalTwitch have used it extensively throughout the series to give closure to various PCs and NPCs dying and it always felt special.
Unfortunately, in Princes of the Universe, that power just gathered dust because nobody notable would ever die. I’ve kept count - out of all notable characters (as in, they had a name and actually appeared in an episode), only about 30 of them died. Majority of those only died in the last Season, almost all of them were just introduced to die (Bronze Faction Sidereals, gremlinised people, etc.), and a good chunk of them died by cutscene. Out of all of those deaths perhaps one could be an emotional moment, if it didn’t happen as a recap of what happened while the Circle was away and the character wasn’t mothballed and largely irrelevant by then. Spoiler alert, Slum Mongrel, one of the party’s allies from Season 1 died that way. Unfortunately before then he was mostly relegated to being their chauffeur and then forgotten when other people from the Circle were able to operate airships.
With a bit more hindsight, you could add a few good deaths that could improve the story. Personally, I would capitalise on the perfect setup for Nightman’s death in Thorns, where the characters were in over their heads thinking they were hot stuff. Secondly, I would keep Righteous Optimal Solution dead not to detract from the gravitas of what lead to his death. Since both of them were Alchemicals, they could be re-minted into something similar to what they were after all, so it wouldn’t be that great of a loss but would definitely sting.
Secondly, it would’ve been interesting to see Seawolf or the Royal die. If I had to choose a perfect moment for them, Seawolf could’ve died after his second trial, while Royal had a perfect opportunity for a sacrifice in Nexus - if he died saving his Circlemate there not to mention other people, it would be a great moment of self-sacrifice (unfortunately, the attitude in the game didn’t encourage that). The final cherry on top would be if they re-Exalted according to Killer Queen’s immortality scheme in Medrohno, the child of the entire Circle. That would be a perfect setup for exploring some complex feelings. At these moments Majestic hated Seawolf and distrusted the Royal and Killer Queen wanted vengeance on Seawolf and would’ve felt guilty for Royal. Because they were both very parental towards Medrohno, they would have to reconcile the feelings they had towards their dead Circlemates with the feelings towards their child now becoming them. Those could’ve been perfect moments.
In a similar vein, Prelude to Domination ought to have died in Nexus to have at least one named casualty in that event.
Finally, it would’ve been interesting to see a named NPC like Conna face the possibility of becoming human sacrifice. After all, Majestic’s cult only accepted willing sacrifices from the best of the best, so having a personal connection to someone who would die every now and then would add weight to it. Understandably though a scenario like that was avoided not to have Steve the Pencil situation, plus it would make both Majestic not want to engage in his defining cult practice, and make Wanderer really annoyed at Majestic and his cult if they went along with it (he already couldn’t live down Seawolf having her lungs). So while that would be something I’d like to see, I doubt it’s something the players involved would wish to explore…
So when it’s all said and done, we got the game we got. It is understandable that sometimes players would rather not have their beloved NPCs die, and that is one choice to make when playing any game. It’s not wrong, just something I’d personally like to see explored in Exalted, one of the few fantasy settings where a death carries weight.
6.8) Bleed
After listening to Swallows of the South I started keeping an eye out for bleed, the phenomena where players get so invested in a game they carry emotions from the game into real life and vice versa. In Swallows, I was worried about the portrayal of Godwin and him bullying other player characters. Because that game lacked OOC banter, it was hard to figure out if that behaviour carried out of the game or not, which could’ve been worrisome. Similarly, in ExalTwitch I wasn’t sure how much of the obsession of She-Who-Knows-Ten-Thousand-Things for Three Fates Shadow was that character and how much it was from the player being the fan of the show.
Unfortunately, Princes of the Universe also couldn’t escape bleed entirely. On occasion, you would have the characters get frustrated with what happened in the game, which would carry over to the players getting frustrated and that feeding back into the game.
On another occasion towards the end of the game the players were encouraged to have their characters make peace with one another not to have the game turn to PvP implosion. One character chose not to bend the knee to another in a hilarious scene, but the group applied a little bit too much pressure the player wasn’t happy with and the session had to be stopped for the night.
Such mistakes and mishaps do happen unfortunately, although from what I can say from gaming with the same people for years, the group has become more sensitive to such things.
On the flip side, on a few occasions thanks to the OOC banter you could know the players were okay with some things happening their characters were not fine with. When Killer Queen made her first child out of the entire Circle without asking anyone for permission, the players were cheering her on, meanwhile their characters were screaming at betraying them, all in good fun. Similarly, when a few people from the Circle decided to take matters into their own hands and plot to assassinate one of the PCs, you could tell the player was okay with that happening (could be more explicitly stated, but things were fine in the end).
6.9) High stakes, high pressure
Probably one of the factors that contributed to the above mentioned bleed was the high stakes of the game. One of the core concepts of the game was that all of the Circle’s Exaltations were once scheming on various immortality projects (more on those later). This encouraged players to play overly cautiously at times and made the concept of death before those could be in play feel a little extra punishing. Similarly, because the game had such a large scope so fast, the Circle was often fighting against the possibility of everything they built up to be destroyed if they failed. By the end of Season 4 the Circle was also dealing with a few credible threats that could destroy Autochthonia, which is something they desperately wanted to avoid. This is besides dealing with things like various assassins out to kill them, putting out fires that sprung up all over the place and the inevitable conquering of the world, etc.
In general, you could feel the high pressure to get more and more done, accomplish bigger and bigger goals, all the while feeling like you have little room for error and mistakes.
Suffice it to say, the game was a high stakes game which had a negative impact on the players from time to time.
6.10) Entitlement to the Circle’s Exaltations
Since the group was playing as a perfect Circle of Solars and a Circle that is destined to be a codependent family, one of the themes that kept coming up every now and then was that of “rerolling” a Circlemate. Basically, if the Solars thought they couldn’t stand their Circlemates they could try killing them and hoping to intercept their next Exaltation early in hopes of influencing them to be more like what they wanted.
On one hand, that’s a logical conclusion of the game’s premise of having Solars at their worst. It is definitely something you could see a crazed Exalt considering. At the same time, the idea can give players the case of goblin brain - if you expect a player to make a new character with the same Exaltation to come back the next session after getting killed, you may consider solving your character’s differences with another Circlemate with the crude way of just killing them.
The entitlement also appeared when talking about tossing one of the Circlemates into the Void, or them exploring one of the Immortality Schemes and becoming something different from a Solar. In both cases the argument came up that it would break the Circle, or to put it in another way, hurt others by removing an asset they would have in this and future Exaltations. It was interesting to hear this sort of loss aversion come up.
This entitlement to the Circle’s Exaltations could’ve led the game down some rather bad territory if it was ever used. The intrusive thought probably contributed a bit to the extra pressure of the game and the bleed. Luckily, it didn’t derail the game since it never became a factor.
6.11) Immortality Projects
As mentioned before, one of the game’s core ideas was that each member of the Circle had an “immortality project”, a way for them to cheat death. At their core, those were some really interesting ideas that could serve as an interesting foundation to a game and a reflection of the Solars’ past paranoid selves.
The Dawn had his martial art training. If perfected, everyone that mastered that martial art would have to think like him, therefore whoever would Exalt to become his next Exaltation would already be him. The Zenith planned to create a lineage with such a strong pedigree it would make sure all of them would re-Exalt within their family and would already be groomed to be who they need to be. The Twilight planned to put itself in a perfect safety device and become a constant of the laws of Creation so whenever they would die they would reappear somewhere else, and even if their old age would wither them, they had a perfect copy of all of their past Exaltations in a memory palace to work with. The Night planned to steal the fire of Exigence and create an Illuminati-esque organisation that would seek them out whenever they would die to re-establish them at their rightful place. The Eclipse seeked to become something greater than Primordials and avoid mortality altogether.
Those would all be very interesting story arcs to pursue over seasons of gameplay, but unfortunately, the ball was a bit dropped on it.
While from what I can tell those projects were sort of known from the outset hardly anyone remembered to pursue them. One of these projects was stumbled upon twice, one player tried finding their old tombs to get a lead but didn’t manage to find any, the Zenith lineage project wouldn’t work too well with the limited timeline of the game too well (from start to finish the game had less than 20 years of time pass by), and later player additions to the game didn’t even know about these projects until it was too late. I should know, I was in that situation ;). If you notice how Royal only started scrambling for these in Season 5, that’s why.
But that’s sometimes the nature of RPGs - sometimes it’s hard to pursue a large goal like that and similarly it’s hard to make sure everyone has the time to do their little quests without making everyone else at the table twiddle their thumbs. The solo sessions definitely did help but sometimes not every idea can make it into the game.
6.12) Plot being thrusted onto players
Playing any RPG can be a balancing act between what the players want to accomplish and what the GM wants to have happen. At times it felt like the players didn’t have much of a direction to go by (their second trip to the North, in late Season 3 for example felt like “what are we even doing here” the arc), while at others while they would be juggling a few balls in the air they would suddenly get a few more balls thrown at them to deal with.
The Infernal enemies arc from Season 4 was a good example of this. After returning from a long trip to the Wyld the Circle found that they made themselves four new enemies. One of their oldest enemies was an Infernal called Admiral Sand that tried raiding their town in Season 1. Now, his Circlemates were out to no good in the other four Directions, plotting against the players.
This would’ve been a decent setup for a set of enemies the Circle would have to face off, if it wasn’t for the fact they were already thinking about gearing up for a war with the Realm and considering fighting Thorns, meaning any such plans would have to be put on hold. It also didn’t help that while the Infernal arc was going on, one of the Circle’s allies has become a bit gremlinised and disappeared into Autochthonia, so they had to put the Infernal arc on hold while they went into the Land of Brass and Shadow for 3 episodes to rescue them and stop some big calamity from wrecking that place. Then when they finally came back and were ready to deal with their old problems suddenly the final Season kicked in and the players had to deal with fighting the Realm and everything being on fire while the Infernals were swept aside.
Then if that wasn’t enough one of their other allies decided to complete his arc by going to Yu-Shan to wreck the place, meaning the Circle had to take another detour to Autochtonia to find a fix for it, then because of stuff they did there they had to go on another quest to find the Eye of Autochthon to fix it and so on.
Sure, sometimes you need to speed things along and things need to wrap up before the game does, but at times it really felt like the infamous thousand calamities that befall Exalted were just coming one after the other.
6.13) Too many NPCs
For the most part, Princes of the Universe didn’t shy away from introducing new NPCs and Exalts as needed to populate the various areas the PCs were going to, etc. Those worked pretty well, you could meet new people and still have a breathing room to meet with people you previously encountered to explore them further. However, things started going a bit worse by Season 4 when NPCs would get introduced in clusters.
Seawolf went to meet with the Bull of the North and stay in Mother’s Hearth for a while, which meant getting a set of new Exalts introduced in one session. Killer Queen assembled a team of new Exalts for an undercover mission, which created a new cluster of fresh Exalts. Royal had a big party and you suddenly had about 20 new Exalts being introduced. While a lot of them were really interesting in the end (Godhand for example was introduced during one of those NPC dumps), most of them would never get any characterisation (“oh look, it’s Crimson Shogun of the Seas, she’s a crab Lunar, and that’s the only thing you will ever remember of her if you remember her at all”). By the time Seawolf was put on his second trial, Wan Mei had a menagerie of almost 50 named Exalts living in it.
Usually when the PCs went on a mission they would bring some NPCs, but rarely was it anyone else than Nightman, Slum Mongrel or Void, pretty much the three first NPCs the Circle met. If other NPCs were introduced more regularly and the players couldn’t just keep bringing the same three NPCs with them all of the time, maybe you could learn more about the others, but that wasn’t the case.
So yeah, the game definitely had a bit of an NPC bloat that was a little unnecessary. I guess it comes with the territory of doing a large-scale game where the players establish their own Deliberative - you get more Exalts joining you, and since you want to know what an Exalt is about, you need to introduce them.
6.13.1) Not name-dropping NPC that well
One thing we try to be more conscious of these days in our games is to name-drop players and NPCs early and often. Unfortunately, this game has been a bit bad when it comes to that. Multiple Sidereals remain unnamed throughout the series, one NPC is just referred to as “Peepants” more than his actual name being used (even out of character, and especially when the GM talks about him!), and then Peepant’s Lunar Mate goes through a few names because nobody can remember her name or bothers to write it down (human name Anna, then Hound’s Tooth, Ivory Hunter and even “Who’s-That-Crush-Foes-Into-Paste-Marrow-Or-Something”).
The Sidereal stuff especially becomes hard to keep track of since you are talking about a recurring assassin and then her sifu stepping in, meanwhile also dealing with some other Sidereals that eventually get named. It gets hard to keep track of these at times.
6.14) A number of boring fights
While earlier I praised a few fights for being pretty great, unfortunately like in a lot of RPGs, a lot of other fights were a bit boring.
The embodiment of a bad fight was probably Season 2 Episode 11, where the Circle was travelling in the North and they encountered a Wyld Hunt. It was a fight between four Solars, their ghost army, vs five Immaculate Monks, two other armies and a Sidereal. That slog took three hours out of the four hour session and the only notable thing that happened was an interesting way the final opponent was taken down.
You would have a lot of smaller fights happen on multiple occasions, but those would often be a stomp thanks to the Wanderer, as well as Killer Queen and Seawolf being pretty combat-focused.
Unfortunately, that comes with the territory of a lot of RPGs - it’s hard to make combat balanced and entertaining to listen to.
6.15) Unnecessary lore stuff
This one is unfortunately on me. This game was my first time playing Exalted, so I did a lot of reading through various books to learn more about the lore of the setting. That unfortunately comes with the territory of finding both some interesting lore titbits, as well as stuff that are problems to solve or lore some people don’t consider canon. Some of that did influence the game, adding some unnecessary plot stuff to the game.
Most of it was luckily quickly brushed off as something non-cannon or not important to solve, like talking about resurrecting people with the Well of Souls, or trying to do something about the Pattern Spiders being cranky and not having breaks since Autochthon left. One bigger thing that did make it though was dealing with the Elemental Courts. That plotline did take up a large chunk of a session, involved introducing a lot of unnecessary NPCs by name, solving a problem that was introduced in the books rather than coming up in the game, as well as quoting some boring speech about how Elements interact with one another. Luckily that session did also include a few other things that moved the plot along and the resolution of that plot did earn the Royal the sobriquet “Man Who Sold the World”, so it wasn’t a total loss.
6.16) Plot that sometimes meandered
Every RPG lies on a spectrum between being player-driven and being GM-driven. Princes of the Universe did have some GM-introduced plot elements, usually in a form of big threads the Circle would have to deal with this season like Realm mustering its forces or some Infernal meddlers being crossed with the Circle. However, a lot of the game’s runtime was focused on player-driven stories. Sometimes those can go great (like the visit to Thorns, or bumbling about Yu-Shan), other times they can meander and amount to hours if not sessions of not much.
Probably the biggest offender here is the Circle’s second trip to the North in Season 3 Episode 9. The group has just finished their stint of getting in trouble in Yu-Shan wrapping up a multi-episode storyline. After that, a new player was introduced playing the Royal, and then it was up to the players to figure out what to do. Unfortunately, the character with probably the most goals at the time, Majestic, was missing from that session and nobody else has made any plans, so the group went with the only idea they could come up with - Seawolf’s suggestion of going North to kill the Bull of the North, because he promised that to Roseblack.
Now, it would be all well and good if they had a plan and the motivation to follow-through with that, but that’s not what happened. In the three sessions they spent there they mustered an army, went gambling to Malfeas for another army, explored Gethamane, broke the Bull’s siege there, decided to have a duel with the Bull instead and made a fatal mistake of letting Wanderer talk with the Bull first, which dismayed him from fighting the Bull.
Sure, the ending was fitting for what the Circle always does and some interesting stuff was established during that stint, but you could skip all three of those episodes and not miss much unfortunately.
There were some smaller plots like that in other places that similarly didn’t change much. Royal’s first solo session where he establishes trade relationships with two Autochthonian outposts and Mother’s Heart didn’t accomplish much either. Seawolf visiting Mountainfolk on multiple occasions similarly happened without leaving much impact. Everyone had some stories like that that felt a bit “eh”.
Probably the thing with the most buildup but the least payoff was probably the Circle getting a vision of a possible future timeline where the world was about to end. It was tied to a mystery of an artefact that was introduced at a culmination of an adventure, avoided for awhile because the PCs were afraid of what it could do, and then amounted to “things are bad in the future, don’t do bad things not to end up like us”, which didn’t really affect what the characters were planning to do anyway.
This is of course unavoidable with pretty much any player-driven RPG, and the GM and me are brainstorming on how to streamline such games, so at least those rougher adventures did highlight the importance of some good planning to us.
6.17) Do it and nobody will care enough afterwards
Because the players played some very petty Solars, the characters would on occasion run into group decision paralysis - ideas people would put forward would be shot down for various reasons, making it really hard to convince the group on a course of action at times. Eventually though the group sort of settled on a way around this issue - just going ahead and doing whatever they wanted without asking for permission, since once they were done nobody would care enough to do more than complain a bit.
While this approach functioned in giving players more agency on what to do, it perhaps wasn’t the best group dynamic out there. The, for the lack of a better word for it, apathy contributed to some weaker moments of the series. Shooting ideas down meant Wanderer didn’t get to push on his desire to liberate Thorns more than once, lack of follow-through meant the first time the group tried killing the Bull of the North they just fizzled out, lack of consequences meant the Traveller crossing the Circle hard never landed him in any hot water, etc.
I suppose this is a broader problem of games with heavy player agency where you have to make some group decisions and everyone has something they want to do that others don’t want to be a part of. It doesn’t ruin the experience of the show, but it’s definitely an interesting point to ponder…
6.18) Countess
Countess was an interesting NPC in the series. She was the Pterok Dragon King sycophant of the Majestic and the person that ran Wan Mei for the Circle. She was big into the way things used to be done back in the day, complete with regular human sacrifices multiple times a day. There is a lot to this NPC to unpack.
She was portrayed as an intensive character, often laying things on thick. She was a good accessory to Majestic’s narcissism, being a servile toady that reinforced various character beliefs he held. On one hand that’s a good way for the GM to prop up a player wanting to engage in the practice of human sacrifices despite other characters objecting, on another hand no other NPC seemed to be taking anyone else’s side as firmly, which could skew the balance of arguments.
6.18.1) Everything in its place
Dragon Kings have some narrative weight in Exalted. They remember how things were in the past, how the world used to run under the Primordials, under Solars and without them. Due to their perfect reincarnations, they can have long relationships with any given Exalt spanning thousands of years. Countess is precisely one of such Dragon Kings, basically being the Enkidu to Majestic’s Gilgamesh.
In that sense, she is basically another part of the dysfunctional family that is the Circle. On occasion she’d get a bit abused (Killer Queen wasn’t keen on sycophants, especially those that took beating with a stick with a smile), often spoiled by the Majestic, and put in charge of a lot of things by default.
Her themes were very much that of She Who Lives In Her Name, the Principle of Hierarchy - as the immortal Dragon King, she knew where she fit in the hierarchy, who was on top, and how things should run. This on one hand would prop up Majestic’s character concept, but on the other present an extra obstacle for the other players that might not agree with some old ways. Some players tried forbidding human sacrifices, but she would just find a way around them, and without engaging her Intimacies, she would just use her schemes to get around any such restrictions (resonating with the problems in some RPGs where unless you kill someone you can’t stop them from doing something, although in this case players didn’t try to change her ways, so it’s on them).
On a narrative level, she could just bide her time, knowing that the “growing tantrums of young Solars” would eventually have to pass and she’d get her way. This can be really frustrating for anyone who wants things to be different than how they were - she would be a constant force pushing things back to its place.
6.18.2) Programming
There was also a lot more to the Countess that the players did not catch on during the game (I’ve asked). Her backstory was that she was found in a Yassal Crystal, frozen since a bit after the Usurpation. Majestic’s previous Exaltations (or some weird memory reflection of them) have used her loyalty to ensure she would find their Exaltation when it comes back and resume their Immortality Project. It was implied they did something to her to make her better fit for the job, essentially saying that the past Exaltations manipulated her so she would in turn manipulate the Majestic to fall in line and get the job done.
This resonates nicely with one of the themes that came up for another player during the game - the Kimberian idea that love is slavery. Since all the Solars in the past were assholes towards the end, the idea of using Dragon King’s perfect reincarnation and loyal servitude as a way to take care of one’s future Exaltation was interesting if insidious. Since we were dealing with Solars, it was similarly impossible to tell for certain if the Countess’ loyalty was genuine, or a result of Social Charms applied in the distant past (how can one be sure of anything if Solars can reweave people’s Intimacies with enough time and effort…). When we discussed it more recently the GM told me it was genuine, so there’s that for what it’s worth.
One way or another this kind of manipulation and programming was an interesting idea, but unfortunately it was a blink-and-you-miss-it moment in the podcast.
6.18.3) Lizard that runs the government
While the Circle ended up being in charge of a growing city and eventually an entire Direction, the minutiae of running the government have pretty much taken care of themselves. The day-to-day runnings were handled by the Small Council of worshippers / representatives of the five Circlemates (although it pretty much disappeared come Season 3), with the Countess being the step above that. This however, could raise some issues.
First of all, it detached the players from the goings on of their city since things pretty much never escalated to them. It might’ve been more interesting for them to have to weigh in on some issues and so on to make it actually feel like they were running the place. But understandably, not everyone would be interested in such things (it would probably be a thing for the Traveller of the Unspoken Roads, who left the series early, and the Royal, who came in late).
Secondly, since the Countess is in charge of the Small Council, it of course meant she had the power to skew everything for the city to function the Majestic’s way even if others opposed it, which could be more insidious. While it wasn’t recorded, the players did mention at some point the Countess started doing human sacrifices straight away after they met and only had to restrain herself once the Wanderer noticed almost everyone from his village was sacrificed. From what I gathered human sacrifice was outlawed then, but then the Countess twisted the logic by making it so criminals count as cattle and you could sacrifice them instead, to which the group didn’t seem to object as much (although “cattle slavery” would probably be still illegal, just showing the doublethink of the whole situation…). But since the Countess fancied willing human sacrifices, there was also a lot of forced re-education going on in prisons for people to repent before they get sacrificed. I wouldn’t be surprised if the only reason Wan Mei had a steady supply of criminals for the sacrifices was because the Countess, being the lizard that runs the government, twisted things more to arrest more people. As much as the Circle was boasting about educating everyone, providing for everyone and being heroes, the problem of people going to prison for hard crimes was never solved…
So anyway, despite multiple players not wanting human sacrifices and other questionable practices, things never changed with the Countess running the show.
6.18.4) Propaganda machine
The Countess was not only a high priest, she was also a very persuasive propaganda machine. While this coloured the aggressive preaching of the Wan Mei Deliberative rather nicely, it also meant that the players never had to deal with any backlash to their actions, even less than a typical Exalt would.
Whether it was raiding villages to kidnap people to populate the city, the endless human sacrifices, the Circle having a very big and aggressive hissy fit during the Baby Reveal Party that got hundreds of people killed, letting thousands of people explode, fighting a crazed Exalt with hundreds of thousands of onlooker casualties, blowing up an entire city as a prank and so on, all was glossed over and painted in favourable light, a “Solar washing” if you will. Whether it was enemies of the state attacking the peaceful city, or actions justified by their outcomes, the Circle was never to blame thanks to the propaganda machine of the Countess and Wan Mei.
This meant there were rarely any consequences to player actions beyond going “whops”. Even if that is the direction you want to take the game, it might’ve perhaps been interesting to have the players have to do the bold faced lies and deal with people that might’ve been upset. It would be interesting to see if Wanderer could lie to the face of his followers this way…
6.19) Majestic
I would like to once again reiterate that a critique of characters and their actions is not meant to reflect on the players portraying these characters. There are a lot of things that go into how a character is portrayed, the actions they take and what motivates them. On top of that how the character is viewed by a listener might not match how they were planned to act. Also, as mentioned before, the game did have a good deal of pressure, which did affect how characters acted. So whatever was and will be discussed in this review is not meant to be a critique of any of the players or GM of Princes of the Universe, with all of whom we had years of fun since.
Every player character in Princes of the Universe has their strengths and flaws. You can cheer them on, enjoy their antics, or not agree with their actions. After all, one of the core focuses of the game is how Solars can be bad people, even if they have good intentions. While it would be wrong to single out Majestic in this regard, he perhaps has the most interesting things going for him which are worth examining in his context.
While a character like Godwin from Swallows of the South is someone most people can agree didn’t work out, Majestic is much more of an interesting character you can write entire blog posts about and stand on either side of the debate for many things.
6.19.1) Narcissism, paranoia and thought conformity
One of the more prominent characteristics of Majestic is his narcissism. It plays wonderfully into the player-focused story of the game and it’s not something that’s shied away from. Just like the Solars of old, if you’d spell out the “Ego” it would tower over mountains ;).
That can be an entertaining thing to enjoy about the character, or something that makes you dislike the character. Understandably, in real life you might not enjoy being around or listening to a narcissist, and if you have a low tolerance for such things you might not enjoy how the Majestic is portrayed.
Another quality that might not appeal to everyone is the paranoia the character develops over the course of the game. It can eat away at the enjoyment of the game, similarly to how Mocking White Wind from Congenials operating at a lower level of trust detracted from that game.
Majestic starts off rather trusting in the game, but through various things that happen to him things go south. After one bad party, he nopes out of another one entirely. After Limit Breaking and making an enemy of one of the Circlemates for a bit he learns not to trust them, etc. It’s an understandable character direction to go for, but in an RPG where people will be doing shady stuff behind one another’s back all the time, being overly paranoid can make the game feel antagonistic.
Finally, there is the issue of thought-conformity. Being the narcissist he is, Majestic believes his is the correct way to view the world. So if anyone has an opinion different to his, they are misguided at best. So when the Seawolf’s second trial doesn’t go his way, obviously everyone else was wrong. Similarly, even when someone does the right thing but for the wrong reason, that is also wrong, so even when the Royal freed a lot of slaves because the Wan Mei Deliberative was anti-slavery, but because he did it out of being a Contractarianist that wasn’t good enough.
Those would probably be the biggest deal breakers when it comes to enjoying the portrayal of the Majestic. These of course change over time, I would say that they are less intensive early in the series but get more pronounced as the series goes on, so you get to know the character at their more mild state. I personally do enjoy the earlier portrayals when he was a bit more of the underdog of the show.
6.19.2) Insidious past Exaltations
During one of the early Season 2 episodes, Majestic got to have a chat with his past Exaltations after discovering a part of his Immortality Project. Now, because a lot of Solars before the Usurpation were assholes of one form or another and the game’s premise was to portray Solars at their worst, these past Exaltations were understandably assholes as well.
They wanted Majestic to stop fooling around and start getting back to work on the Immortality Project, saying that whichever of the Circle gets to it first will be the winner, because you can only stop them until they are immortal (again tying back to the theme of entitlement to the Circlemates’ Exaltations). They even mentioned how they had a plan to overthrow the entire Solar Deliberative just to be in charge of everyone.
They also called back to one of Exalted’s core themes - the principle of hierarchy, saying that if Majestic is not ruling the Circle, he will be their slave. Either a slave with chains, or with more subtle things like friendship and such. They never want to be used by anyone ever again - to not be just everyone’s crafting slave.
That last one seems to have resonated through the game, as Majestic would either be reminded of it or bring it up himself every now and then whenever someone would ask for some crafting to be done. However, as far as RPGs go, that can be an insidious thought to give to the players.
In RPGs, perhaps more so than in life, people like to specialise in their niches. Majestic specialised in Crafting and Lore to a very high degree, while Wanderer specialised in punching things. You can’t be self-sufficient because you only have so much XP to spend, and if you double-down on something you can get access to higher-end goodies. Similarly, you don’t want to encroach on someone else’s specialty - firstly, because you will suck at and never use it until you sink a tonne of XP into it just to catch up to their level, and secondly, because that detracts from the other player’s enjoyment of the game. Being the only Crafter is fun because you alone can do so many things, having two means you get in one another’s way and neither can shine as being awesome.
Because of all of that, giving a player a thought that others will only see them as “a specialty slave” and constantly asking them to do the thing for them sets them up to believe it. It’s a confirmation bias - if you think people will constantly ask you to do something you will disproportionately remember when they ask you to do that and you will start feeling used. Now if you are the only person in the party that can do something, of course you will get asked to do that - that’s just RPG dynamics. So what normally would be a way for a character to shine and make people happy can turn to “oh, you only come to me when you need something”. It’s a toxic thought to take root.
On the other hand it seemed too easy to forget when Majestic needed someone else to do something for him, like wanting the Wanderer to be his “murder slave”, asking him to kill Lothar in Season 5 Episode 02, and later in Season 5 Episode 07 after Majestic failed to kill Seawolf and Wanderer wanted to leave a conversation they were all having he even went as far as saying "You can't leave because you're the ones who are going to have to kill [Seawolf]".
So yeah, it was a bit insidious to tell Majestic that he was going to be everyone’s “crafting slave” while in RPGs people do specialise a lot and if you need something done you can’t do yourself you will turn to the PCs that can.
Beyond that, the meeting with past Exaltations might’ve also given rise to the idea that Majestic should be the first among equals (in that conversation Majestic wanted the Circle to be “friends and equals”). This has similarly led to some frustrations between the players down the line. If you have two people thinking they should be the “first among equals”, you are bound to have a clash. There can be only one holy tyrant after all… Generally this idea created some friction and frustration in the game…
So while the past Exaltations depicted were not off-point, they might have had a negative impact on the game in the long-term…
6.19.3) High pressure to be perfect
One of Majestic’s main driving forces was to be perfect and better than everyone else, especially in his key fields of being a crafter, a scholar, being pretty, etc. Once again, it works for Exalted, and it was a perfect goal for the high-scale game of Princes of the Universe, there is no denying that.
However, with the strive to be the best and to be perfect, there can come a paranoia of someone challenging that position. People can get defensive, and that can lead to some bitterness.
On a few occasions when some crafter would get introduced (like S04E09 and Shadow of the Past), or an institution of learning was mentioned (S05E16 and the Heptagram), or even catering with Peaches of Immortality (S05E12D), you would hear how these are only second best. It got tiring after awhile.
Similarly, since Majestic believed himself to be the first among equals in his Circle and therefore all of the Solar host and another player came around with a similar idea that was basically seen as an attack.
So unfortunately the drive to be the best made the game appear more competitive than it really was.
6.19.4) Arguments about human sacrifices and boundaries
An argument that came up time and time again in Princes of the Universe was that of human sacrifices. Majestic’s character concept was that of a Solar that embraced the old ways of being worshipped - through willing human sacrifices of the best of the best, just like Sol Invictus used to receive from the Dragon Kings back in the day.
Understandably, this practice raised a lot of arguments between the PCs and the players. The practice would be limited or banned for a while, but then it would come back in another form thanks to Countess’ twisting of the definition of words (“prisoners aren’t people, they’re cattle!”).
However, looking back at it after playing a few more years of RPGs now, I don’t think this topic should’ve been on the table for discussion at all.
The game lacked some boundaries, which often seems to be the default way most RPGs are played. Human sacrifices were a defining character concept for the Majestic, and I very much doubt his player wanted to be berated for that concept or discuss the morality of human sacrifices. Because of that, either this concept should’ve been changed before the game started, or it shouldn’t be raised as an issue or an argument in-game. Sure, those arguments might’ve added to the podcast’s appeal, but I don’t think they were too healthy for the group.
In a similar way, another incident pushed some boundaries that probably didn’t need to be pushed - the GM at one point encouraged a player to take the Eye of Autochthon from the group and use it for their own schemes because they had the means to do so. However, that would’ve probably turned the game into 1v4 PvP, imploding the game and players’ trust in one another soon after. It was a good thing it didn’t come to that.
In the end, the human sacrifice debacle was sort of settled not by PCs coming to an agreement, but due to a deal they made with someone else. It was a bit of a meh ending to the argument that wasn’t earned by either of the sides, just sort of tossed in by the GM.
6.19.5) Weaponized helping
Throughout the series it was interesting to see Majestic be able to creatively weaponise being helpful to the PCs. You could say it started with constructing the city of Wan Mei and making it be run by his most devoted sycophant the Countess, as well as a 1984-style Animated Intelligence, both being more loyal to the Majestic than the rest of the Circle.
Then, when Majestic started exploring some teaching Charms, he volunteered to teach other PCs to get them up to speed with things like languages and literacy, but also to give them Intimacies towards himself to make them love him and not want to kill him. Eventually he gave Seawolf and Wanderer so many Intimacies he had it was hard to keep track (and also portray for the characters…). Weaponized learning…
Finally, especially when the system switched to Godbound, Majestic monopolised high-end crafting and repair, meaning pretty much everyone would have to come through him to get their things done. This also let him spy on people through anything he made and take control of those things remotely, which basically meant he had a kill switch on Killer Queen’s mechanical heart and if anyone crossed him it would be really hard for them to use their gear.
Because Majestic controlled all the crafting (both in the party and from NPCs that used his Factory Cathedrals), anyone who would oppose him would find it hard to repair their gear, which happened to Wanderer when he had a different opinion from the Majestic as to what to do with Seawolf when he crossed Majestic. Because he would not bend the knee, his sentient warstrider remained in ruins.
Whenever a superweapon showed up, the character also wanted to be the one in charge of it, whether it was the Soulbreaker Orbs, the Directional Titans (all three of them!), project Uranos, the Penitent, Eye of Autochthon, Realm Defense grid, the modus operandi was “I want to control it so you won’t use it for anything bad”, which isn’t the nicest approach to the other players.
All of these were interesting ways to showcase how powerful a crafter type can be in the right setting and system and also played into the various themes of the character and the game. But since again the theme of the game was to portray Solars at their worst, I wouldn't recommend copying that in other games due to how stressful it might be to be on the receiving end.
It was also interesting to see how Killer Queen purposefully went out of her way to avoid falling into some of these snares. She didn’t let Majestic tutor her, and she made her own demon-filled gundam away from Majestic to have an ace up her sleeve he couldn’t mess with.
So all in all, it was some clever bit of playing a Twilight.
6.19.6) Diverse portfolio and Craft
It was interesting to see how with a few concepts and ideas you could spread out a Twilight to also do the roles of a few other Castes.
If you’d be speaking of strict Caste roles, thanks to the Countess Majestic would be encroaching on the Zenith’s religious priest portfolio, with the Wan Mei panopticon animated intelligence on Night’s spying powers, with warstriders on Dawn’s fighting, and finally being a much more effective diplomat because everyone in the setting wanted Majestic to fix their things (it was surprising how many times NPCs went to him and only him with favours to trade in exchange for “apply your charms and build / fix something for me” because there was no Solar Twilight crafting-focused character anywhere else in the setting).
Similarly, many of the Craft powers were useful at solving a large variety of problems - have problems with people being enslaved to dig the mines of Diamondhearth? How about some automatons instead so everyone can be free. Need to make money for the city? How about some mass-produced equipment being sold to the Guild. Lost a heart and we don’t have anyone with good Healing charms? Here’s one made out of brass! Because the character was so versatile, he didn’t need that much from anyone else, so it limited what others could leverage out of him or having to make difficult choices (“can we afford to bring in new people to the city if our land can’t sustain them?”).
Not sure whether the character would appreciate it if some other characters did similar stuff, like if the Night Caste decided to set up an all-encompassing spy network and a police state. Majestic would probably flip his shit…
It’s good the interest of the various characters didn’t seem to overlap much with what Majestic was doing not to take away from either side.
6.20) Double-standards
It was interesting seeing how the characters over the course of the series started engaging in double-standards. A pity those weren’t brought up and highlighted, but I guess that fits in with the theme of “Solar washing away the consequences”.
Humans were being sacrificed by the hundreds each week in Wan Mei, and yet a player asking one NPC for a lung was brought up repeatedly. Prisoners were cattle so they could be sacrificed, yet slavery of the same people was bad because they were people. The Traveller (the Lunar) and the Countess killed a circlemate each, and yet later the Circle would say that even a death of one blood relative should be punishable by death while they walked out of it scot-free. Countess killed hundreds of people with hellfire once, and yet that also wasn’t held against her. Wanderer and the Majestic failed to stop Lothar from killing hundreds of thousands of Wan Mei citizens, but when Seawolf failed to stop Lunghorn from killing his offspring that warranted a trial. Killer Queen also engaged with some quasi-slave trade and killing Exigents in Wan Mei (she won them in a bet and the best way to hold onto the Flame of Exigence was in a living host, so...), yet that didn’t bother people who hated slavery and were very much against killing anyone in the city but a few episodes prior. Killer Queen blew up a city, but because it didn’t have Wan Mei citizens or blood relatives, that also didn’t warrant a punishment. By the same logic the Realm valuing its citizens and blood relatives was still seen as a good enough reason to paint them as evil (it was also the centre of learning, best in the world up until Wan Mei showed up, yet that virtue was downplayed). The Bull of the North had to go because he raided villages to conquer and unite the tribes under his banner to fight the Realm, but he had to go because one of those tribes belonged to one of the PCs and Roseblack got killed by him, yet Wan Mei raiding the south to kidnap the villagers and unite them under their banner to fight the Realm was somehow a good cause in contrast.
And yet despite all of that, the PCs had the moral high ground. Again, it fits very nicely with the mission statement of the game, but it might’ve been something the players did without realising. It would perhaps be a stronger statement if the PCs were confronted with these and replied that they don’t care about such petty things as being labelled “hypocritical”...
7) Conclusions
Princes of the Universe is a very interesting podcast. It suffers from its massive length, a bit poor pacing and planning in various areas, somewhat mediocre audio quality and so on. Yet on the flip side, I haven’t yet listened to another podcast that explored Exalted setting, themes and so on in such depth as this one.
The series was a nice mix of comedy, action, a lot of interpersonal conflicts, OOC banter and really great theming through. Heck, there were even a good deal of ideas explored over time that I know for certain weren’t planned, like the Kimberian “love is slavery”, or the She Who Lives In Her Name’s principle of hierarchy.
On the other hand, the game became more and more stressful to play as the time went on. It was a rather big undertaking by the time it was done and I don’t think that many people would wish to repeat the process of portraying characters with such big egos, or a game with such a wide scope and large scale. The game was really a big undertaking, in terms of number of episodes, their length, the breadth of content as well as the emotional toil that went into it.
So while flawed and very lengthy, I enjoyed my time listening to this podcast. Of course, take it with a huge grain of salt since I both starred here and am still playing with these peeps years later. If someone were to turn this into some animated storytime retelling the story and cleaning up a few bits that would take less than a few months to go through, it would be perfect.
