Princes of the Universe - an Exalted Podcast Review and Reflection

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.

In today's episode, I will cover Princes of the Universe by Sponsored By Nobody.

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 game’s system started in Exalted 3rd edition before transitioning to GM’s very own homebrew hack of Godbound - Godbound Conversion of Exalted.

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).

Episode synopsis

3) Player Characters

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.

It’s no tambourine-assisted dice rolls and those noises don’t come up that often, so it’s not that big of an issue…

6.3) Episode and series length

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.

Now time to give something shorter a listen…

Problems with character Cults in RPGs

In our group, we enjoy playing a good deal of demigod games with character Cults, ranging from Exalted (1, 2), through Godbound (1, 2), and to a smaller extent even Chronicles of Darkness could fall under this umbrella (in CRMB one of the PCs runs a masonic society which basically is a Cult to their supernatural self). While a demigod Cult is pretty much a staple of the genre and something that can be pretty interesting if done well, they often bring some issues whenever they appear.

Roles of cults in RPGs

As a baseline, Cults in RPGs generally come with some mechanical benefits to the player. In Exalted they give you some free Willpower, in Chronicles of Darkness they give you some free Merits, in the New Gods of Mankind they are key to getting faith to power your miracles, and in Godbound Cults give you more Dominion to change the world and come with some other benefits.

Beyond the mechanical, Cults are an expression of the demigod PC and their beliefs on how people should behave. Swallows of the South's Godwin was a musician, so his cults were his groupies. In Princes of the Universe, the Royal was all about being a merchant prince and trade, so his cult focused on heavy capitalism, paying taxes and accruing as much wealth as you could to get a high score when you die. In the same series the Majestic was a narcissistic scholar and his cult focused on people becoming educated. He was also heavily themed after mesoamerican themes of Exalted, which meant a lot of human sacrifices. But since only the best would do for him, the sacrifices had to be of the best examplars of his cult and willing because Majestic was against slavery.

Similarly, Cults are a way for the players to shape their world - to introduce a new religion into the world and possibly affect a large number of NPCs. Similarly, the Cults are often a resource the PC can tap into to engage the world more broadly - if you have a kingdom that worships you, you can rally troops from it and send that army to conquer other territories for you after all.

There are some problems that appear when you start dealing with the Cults in practice however...

Possession of NPCs

In demigod games we ran we often ran into this situation - a new mortal NPC is introduced, they join our society, and then comes the question of who will "own them" (so to say) by which Cult they will join. After that the PCs can get possessive over the NPCs that are their worshippers, and those NPCs rarely interact with PCs that are not their chosen deity.

For example, in Princes of the Universe a young girl named Conna is one of the last survivors from Wanderer's village. Early in the series the Majestic takes her under his wing to educate her properly and so on, later making her an important figure in his cult. Pretty much from that point she doesn't interact with anyone else anymore, and later Majestic basically refers to her as his adopted child. Similar patterns also appear in The Living Years where various mummified saints are raised from the dead and become worshippers of the Litch King and not interact much with other PCs, despite one of them being a devout of the faith they were the saints of, etc.

It's perhaps a bit subtle at times, since in a lot of situations you will have certain PCs and NPCs gravitate closer together and you may have NPCs that don't interact with anyone but one PC in general, but an NPC becoming someone's worshipper is certainly a strong indication to other players to not mess with them because they "belong" to that player.

On a larger scale, the same principle applies whenever the players visit a new location. Since some systems like Godbound punish you for divvying up a population between characters (Cult scale is exponential, but breakdown is linear. A Scale 1 Cult is 1000 people, a Scale 2 town is 100k people, but you can either get one Scale 2 Cult out of it, or two Scale 1 Cults, and combining two Scale 1 Cults from two places doesn't give you a Scale 2 Cult), meaning you often have to pick who owns what new town you visit or save. It starts to feel very transactional, especially when players start expecting towns to convert to their religion after saving them.

On a similar note...

Transactional worship

Growing your Cult in games like Godbound is generally a reward for completing some major quest. You liberate a town from some evil monster that has been plaguing it, and now the people give you praise. Because having a bigger Cult means you get a mechanical benefit, you sort of expect that as a reward or at least an option when you enter a new location. This makes the whole process feel a bit transactional, since even if you try being selfless you might get worshippers regardless due to them being so grateful, etc. This can feel even worse if you realise your character can be essentially uprooting an existing culture and replacing it with their own in the process.

That was an important character arc for Atrus in The Living Years - he was an outsider to the kingdom of Ancalia and the world of Arcem as a whole and he was really conscious about starting a cult of his own and imposing his ideas on the people that were foreign to him. For similar reasons in Evicting Epistle (a setting where the world was destroyed in the future so people went back to the past to conquer it anew since they didn't have anything left in their time) I couldn't justify playing a character from the future to avoid these kind of themes, and the themes of colonialism. It would be really hard to avoid a hyper-tech future demigod interacting with prehistoric proto-humans without some form of "need to uplift these 'savages'".

Religion defining the NPCs

A character can appear in the story and later join one of the PC Cults, or they can be introduced as someone from the Cult outright. In the second case especially (although not exclusively) the NPC's involvement in the Cult tends to define their personality. Godwin's groupies exist only as his fans with a little bit of individual mannerisms sprinkled on top. In CRMB every member of the masonic Cult tends to act in a similar, scheming way. etc.

Sure, sometimes when you create disposable NPCs, they tend to be one note, but unfortunately it seems with NPCs that are a part of a PC Cult that note tends to gravitate on what religion they subscribe to. This can make them a bit less interesting than if one would build characters first and then figure out if they'd follow any of the Cults.

In a similar vein, it is also rather easy to portray these Cults as a homogeneous group of people, rather than a collection of individuals. They tend to be characterised as a collective, display uniform traits and generally just be that one-note character from the previous paragraph smeared across a larger group.

Of course, this can come down to how much time and effort one wants to devote to fleshing out the characters. There is nothing stopping you from adding more depth and nuance to Cults and its members, but it takes that little bit extra effort over going with the flow of the least resistance and using stereotypes when describing the NPCs.

Mechanics influence characters

As discussed before, the mechanics of a game inform the playstyle of the characters, and the same can be said for Cults. I've noticed this especially with Godbound - in this system the characters can either be a demigod with a cult, or a free divinity that doesn't have worshippers to suit your playstyle. However, mechanically, having a cult more often than not is a better choice - you get more Dominion out of it, you get a neat Faction you can use to do your large-scale bidding, and generally have more stuff to interact with. Mechanically, the game is rewarding you for having a Cult, which means almost every character in the game will end up having a Cult (in our multiple campaigns using the system, totalling to about 15 characters, only one PC didn't have a cult - Adina from The Living Years, and that was only because I ended up insisting she wouldn't get one if it couldn't be a part of the religion she followed herself). This in turn changes the sort of characters you play - you won't want to play someone who is selfless and doesn't accept people worshipping them because that would put you at an advantage, so you make a character that would want the worship.

One solution - make it all cosmetic

One possible solution to a number of the listed problems would be to make the Cults a cosmetic thing to a character, rather than something that has mechanical benefits. A narcissist demigod that demands adulation can still make a Cult because that suits the character, while someone that doesn't feel the need won't feel bad for missing out on the mechanical benefits. Now because Cults stop being such a dominant thing every player has to focus on, the NPCs are under less pressure to pick a side and they can remain their own people. Being praised as "the town's hero" for saving it feels a bit less of a commitment than having the town worship you as their deity of choice.

Conclusions

Character Cults can be a really interesting part of a demigod game. They can serve as an extension or a compliment of any character, a way for them to express themselves on a large scale. However, it is very easy to fall into traps of defining NPCs by the religion they follow, and to get territorial and transactional about individual and group NPCs and which bucket they will fall into. When the system promotes having Cults, you also tend to see characters more skewed in that direction, changing what kind of PCs you see in those games.

Ideally, you would focus on making NPCs defined people first and then putting them in a Cult if they fit, and you would have a system where choosing to have or not to have a Cult would be balanced to encourage making characters that fit what the players want to play, rather than rewarding one kind of characters.

"What are you willing to sacrifice?" A hollow question... - Planning RPG stories

Last year I've watched through Exaltwitch, an Exalted actual play (you can read my review of it here). One of the big plot points of that campaign was the quest to cleanse the party's ancient ally, Three Fates Shadow, from being an Abyssal under the influence of a Deathlord (an ancient spectre that rules the underworld and is generally evil). The culmination of that arc, after it's been built up for the majority of the actual play was the party going to the highest authority in heaven, The Unconquered Sun, and demanding his help. He agreed to do it under one condition - he asked each member of the party "what are you willing to sacrifice?" and then one of them would have to make that sacrifice.

That question, at that moment, rang very hollow. In Exalted, the player characters are capital H Heroes of legends in the vein of Gilgamesh or Sun Wukong. They are the once-kings of the world who can move mountains with their bare hands and who have saved the world from tyrannical titans of old. The question being about some thing they'd have to give up in the future, rather than asking them for what great feats have they already done in pursuit of the goal felt very transactional, rather than heroic.

I understand that it was time to wrap that plot up as the game was beginning to draw to a close. Leaving that plot unresolved because the players didn't put in that much effort to fix things would be anticlimactic. Ideally, it would be communicated between the GM and the players way ahead of time. As it was now, it basically felt like throwing the character at the glory most high and tossing some coins in his face demanding "it's broken, fix it" because the players wanted it really bad.

The GM did state later that if the PCs had not offered enough their ally wouldn't have been redeemed. However, the PCs also did gamble a bit about who would have to make the sacrifice, and to make matters worse it turned out they had to sacrifice nothing since the person that drew the shortest straw was the comatosed ally, who on the count of being in that state did not volunteer to sacrifice anything. So the PCs earned a free Deus Ex Machina resolution to their arc for free.

Now imagine if the resolution was instead tied to the themes of being a tragic hero, someone larger than life, or doing impossible feats. What if Three Fates Saved would have to live the life of virtue, despite the Deathlord influences, and sacrifice her life selflessly in order to achieve redemption in death? What if she had to confront the Deathlord that held her in a binding and make him achieve peace and pass on (which would be a monumental accomplishment), or accomplish a great feat of peace, like reconciling the differences and bringing peace between the Realm and the Solars (while the party that were the Solar by now essentially wanted to conquer the Realm and subjugate them essentially). Any mighty deed that would play on the themes of "redemption", while avoiding things tied to the aspects of death and destruction.

Instead, we had Rey offering to sacrifice ever seeing her home town of Nexus (central location of the series), her father (her central relationship), and any glory she would gain in the future. Jorek offered his chance of revenge at those who have wronged him. Valeria offered giving up what makes her the most happy - her relationship with Speaks-of-Silence. Sure, any of them would be noble sacrifices and an interesting plot to explore, except the series was already drawing to a close with 13 episodes left to go, so you'd barely see any of them play out.

Worst of all, I don't think this was the GM's intended resolution for this arc. A few episodes earlier the characters were also trying to figure out how to redeem Three Fates Shadow, which eventually drove her to the coma. At that time I noticed the GM tried telegraph some solution to her problem, spelling out the clues to her condition, but the player did not pick up on it and the moment was lost.

In situations like this, especially when you're making Actual Plays, it feels important to communicate with everyone about what they want to see accomplished in the game, about how they want the game to progress, etc. This also goes both ways - sometimes the players want to communicate with the GM about what they want to see in the game, and sometimes the GM wants to talk about how some things should play out. Some might balk at that since it's a bit close to railroading, but if your intent is to improve the game, make it more fun for everyone involved and for the people watching, it might be for the best. We've done that on a number of occasions. Heck, one time we played through a module, discussed it at length, workshopped a better version of it and played through it while still having fun.

It's a fine line to thread, but it probably works for the best when everyone's involved in the process and there is a back-and-forth on how things should go down. It might not be for everyone or every game, but it can make some key moments land better.

Conclusions

When you have a long story arc in a game you hope the payoff would be worth the long buildup. The longer and more epic the arc the more satisfying payoff you need for it to feel rewarding. However, if the resolution hinges on what the players do, it might be worth having a chat about it ahead of time so everyone would be onboard with what would produce the most satisfying ending to that story. This is especially important when producing media for other people to consume.

If you don't plan ahead, together between the GM and the players, you might just have to ask your characters "what are you willing to pay in the future for a resolution to this plot in the present?"...

Homunculus characters, stat readjustment and character change in RPGs

My group and I play a lot of games with interesting mechanics. Lately, we've been trying Cortex, a modular RPG system where you can tailor the engine to your game needs. One part of the system you can plug into your game are Trait Statements - some statement that focuses and refines a trait for the character that's meant to be challenged in the course of the game. So for example, you can have a Perception trait at D10 with a Statement "Trust No One" attached to it. This would tell you about the character's worldview. Mechanically more importantly, you are supposed to challenge these Statements to get a bonus to a roll and to change your character. So if say, you decide that you can trust someone, you would roll 3D10 instead of 1D10 for that roll, but then you would have to either change the Statement, or change the die associated with the trait, either turning into "Perception D8 Trust No One (and a bonus to something else)", or "Perception D10 I Can Count On Others".

While this mechanic in itself is all well and good, from playing various games over the years, I'm yet to see anyone embrace such character changes / sideways growth as a part of their gaming experience. Let me elaborate.

Homunculus character

More often than not in my experience, when someone makes a character for an RPG they come out as a homunculus, a small version of what the character will be later in the story. When you make a warrior that's all about being honourable and just, they start out as a honourable and just warrior with weak stats, and over the course of the game, they grow into being a honourable and just warrior with strong stats and minor tweaks here and there. If you want to play a crafter, you build a crafter and invest in them being a crafter, etc. Rarely do you see a shift from one to another, or from one fundamental set of beliefs to the next.

Medieval art and homunculus baby Jesus - "perfectly formed and unchaned"

Sure, you could come into a game with a blank slate of a character and form them as they grow. From what I heard this was especially prevalent in oldschool RPGs where most level 1 characters of a given class were about the same, a lot of them wouldn't survive the meat grinder and you wouldn't care about their backstory if they would just die one session later. This kind of attitude is literally related to the term "grognard" in its original meaning.

Similarly, you could build a character and aim for them to have a character arc where they go from a naive child to a grizzled grognard and then to a quiet farmer, but unless you are playing something like Chuubo's where you can literally create an arc for your character, it might be hard to execute.

From my experience, you generally see homunculus characters - a fully formed idea of what the character will be like, with minor wiggle room for the details. If you want to play someone else, you generally don't shift your character from one thing to another using mechanics like the above, you just make a new character.

Similar mechanics

Cortex is not the only game that has mechanics for such character shifts.

In Star Trek Adventures every character has a set of Values, which basically reflect their moral centre. Things like "The Needs of the Many Outweigh the Needs of the Few, or the One", "Holds Everyone to the Highest Standards", "Duty above all else", etc. Those are used to either challenge the characters and make the situation more complicated because of their beliefs, or to let the character challenge that value and change their worldview based on that experience.

This of course is very much keeping with the themes of Star Trek and character development. However, in the game it can feel like you should make characters that don't believe what they should be believing, and your reward for having that character growth is a simple stat readjustment. I've heard a player be frustrated with the game expecting them not to make a character the way they want them to act and constantly questioning what they believe in, and perhaps giving a mechanic to what otherwise might be organic character growth is having the opposite effect (reminds me of Freakonomics...).

In City of Mist your character is built out of themes. Things like "trained boxer", "man of steel", "diviner", "the guy with a van". These themes accrue "fades and cracks" over the course of the game if they are neglected. If you don't show up to your boxing practice, solve problems with guns or generally make that part of your character not important, you will eventually have to replace that themebook for another to reflect what has taken its place in your character's life. While this can be an interesting flow of a story, especially when replacing your themes can turn you fully superhuman or fully mundane with some serious repercussions for either, if the players are too loss-averse or make their characters just right, they might not engage with this mechanic at all.

Many Powered by the Apocalypse games we came across feature an interesting character option for late-game levelling - "make a new character". This is example from The Veil:

In most games this feels a bit strange, but there is perhaps one game where an option like this works - The Sprawl:

The Sprawl is a Cyberpunk game, which comes with its genre expectations of character life being rather cheap and expendable. Since this character level up option costs additionally a good chunk of money, you can see it as "your character gets to retire", rather than being a given for any character. It's something you work extra hard towards.

How we handle these things

I hope our group is not alone in this, but seeing as True Friend needed to be a merit it might not be universal, but we have a relaxed attitude to character building. If you need to tweak your character, just do it, it's fine. If you want to do a complete rewrite of a character for new mechanics, the GM will usually agree (we've done that once in Heaven for Everyone after a new supplement with a new character splats came out). If you want to make a new character because the old one doesn't play that well, pretty much the same applies (we've done that in a yet unpublished Humblewood game).

Couple that with us generally knowing what kind of characters we want to play (and GM being pretty much always on-board with whatever the players come up with), we rarely engage in any of those mechanics. We have character growth and changes as a part of playing our characters in the world (for example in The Living Years demigod Atrus didn't want to form a religion around himself not to impose his worldview onto foreign people, but since they came to him for guidance and after being reassured by one of the NPCs he trusts it's fine, he changed his character's outlook organically).

So perhaps it would be good to make such kind of attitudes something acceptable in more games without necessarily needing to put in mechanics around retiring an old character and making a new one...

Conclusions

A number of games feature mechanics for tweaking your character's stats and worldview. Often, however, these might not be all that useful to the players if they already made the characters exactly the way they want to play them. It's good to give the players options to tweak their characters to better suit their games as they get some hands-on experience with how they play, but making entire mechanics around it might be a bit much...

Power Inflation in RPGs

For a few years my group had some fun playing a few games of  Godbound, a demigod OSR RPG. It was a game letting you play level 20 D&D characters and beyond pretty much off the bat, but with much streamlined rules. It was pretty fun at first, but since the game is very much focused on combat, you could notice a problem that in other games might've been obscured by complex mechanics - Godbound had a Power Inflation problem.

Basically, in Godbound and probably most RPGs, your character will grow in power as they gain XP, gather loot and so on. Their HP, damage output, etc. will increase and you will feel good because "bigger numbers are more better". However, at the same time, the game has to compensate for the extra power you gained. Now fighting low-level enemies feels too easy, so the GM has to throw bigger and meaner things at you, with more HP and higher damage output to challenge you. If you haven't noticed, nothing has changed with the level up - your numbers have increased, but enemy numbers have also increased, you still take a comparable amount of hits / turns to kill them, but now the numbers are bigger. This is basically Inflation, as you have entered a treadmill where you run in place...

Arms race ruining fun

Another aspect of the Power Inflation that might be even more explicitly worse would be an arms race between the players and the GM. Basically, if you have a rather open-ended character creation system that's vast enough, you can find some really broken combinations of spells, abilities or what have you that would let you punch way above your weight class. In response, the GM would have to throw even more challenging enemies at you, or possibly also resort to using some dirty tricks, broken combos or some other shenanigans to keep up "to challenge the party". This path pretty much leads to frustration if left unchecked:

"Narrated D&D Story:

How I Accidentally Triggered A Cold War

Between The Dungeon Master And The Party"

Basically, RPGs are supposed to be a collaborative storytelling tools that help both the GM and the players tell interesting stories, not a war gaming competition to see who can be the strongest. Sure, if that's the group's jam, go for it, but more often than not it's one or two players powergaming, while others might be left behind the power curve, making balancing combat harder than it would usually be. This is not to mention how much enjoyment players that aren't combat-focused would get out of sessions like these, or being told that they can't even hit the enemies.

One way or the other, it circles back to the same Power Inflation problem - combat gets too easy or too complicated, the other side of the table compensates and we're back to square one - combat taking X amount of hits / turns, except the numbers are bigger and the process is more complex. If one side overcompensates, then you have to get back to balancing things. This can get especially problematic when you have unstable combat systems (ones where it's hard to land the balance where you intend, often resulting in things being too easy or too hard).

Avoiding Power Inflation

Unfortunately, it's a bit hard to avoid Power Inflation in games.

Modules might sidestep the issue by giving you fixed enemies to encounter. This fixes the GM side of things to an extent, meaning it's up to the players to be the balancing factor - either doing some more prepwork if the going gets tough, or taking on a bigger challenge if things get too easy. If someone brings an OP build, they are ruining their own fun, which might not be that big of an issue. That being said, this assumes the module is well-balanced, which is a big problem in itself (although you'd expect some hard balancing work being done by the authors that were paid to make these, but that might be a pipe dream in the industry...).

Shorter games might not suffer from this issue as much, because the Inflation doesn't have time to set in, but this mostly avoids the issue by not engaging in character progression.

Similarly, there are games out there that have really slow progression system, like Star Trek Adventures. In that example you start as a fully capable characters on the level as Picard or Spock and you only get to directly increase your attributes every 6+ sessions. Even those increases are not that big, meaning the Power Inflation from levelling is glacial, and since you're expected to have a roster of secondary characters to use on adventures, the GM can expect the player characters to be competent and play their enemies accordingly.

This sort of approach practically means you don't level your character. You can shift their attributes and other things about them about more, but that's mostly it. Some games like Fellowship or other Powered by the Apocalypse also don't see much in the vein of character's power growth over the course of the game.

What else could be out there?

While the previously mentioned are about the only ways I've seen games avoid Power Inflation, but one could think of a few more that I haven't encountered in the wild.

You could have a game that's about players creating their own encounters in the spirit of Monster Hunter and "lets grind this for resources". This way it's up to the players to pick their own battles, prepare for them, get the rewards they want and so on. Add some time pressure in the vein of Kingdom Death: Monster and you have pressure on players to optimise getting as much from any given encounter as they can, so they are incentivised to push themselves to the limit and battle the meanest set of enemies they can survive. It would probably make the game very focused on that one loop unfortunately, and you're basically reinventing Kingdom Death:Monster...

A different approach would be to move the Power Inflation focus away from stats and onto a "scale factor". So say, a rookie warrior would be fighting with "+2 to hit Scale 1" and fighting "Scale 1 rats", resolve things as normal. Eventually they level up but instead of increasing their to-hit, you bump their Scale up. Eventually you are a veteran warrior with "+2 to hit Scale 10" and fighting "Scale 10 demon". If you want some growth, you could reset the "+x" each time you go up a Scale and then focus on buying it back.

This perhaps makes the Power Inflation very explicit, but allows game designers to laser-focus on refining the engagement at any Scale, because the Scale is only a set dressing. You could perhaps compare this to something like Dragonball - after awhile, the character power level is meaningless, but every arc you find a new villain that's stronger than the heroes, and then you have to train to get strong enough to beat them, etc. Everything is cyclical, you just move the reference power level sliding scale higher and higher to always have the characters in view. Every now and then show the players how weak lower Scale enemies are and introduce a big bad that's a higher Scale than them to show them they have a new challenge to beat and you have something to work with...

Of course, this might get into the criticism I sometimes hear about universal RPGs, where there isn't a difference between two snails fighting and two gods fighting, everything's still the same mechanically. You want those to feel different, but how you do that without over-complicating the mechanics and over-inflating the numbers...

Conclusions

Power Inflation in RPGs is a tricky problem to handle. On one hand, you expect your character to grow over the course of the game and become more capable, but on the other hand, you always want to be challenged on your adventures, so the enemies have to grow alongside you. Even if you over-focus on something to be the best at it, the GM only has to compensate harder to give you the challenge when it's needed.

It's hard to address the issue of Power Inflation without removing character advancement in its entirety, or making it really flat. Ideally, you'd have a system that deals with the issue and gives the GM the tools to balance things for their party, but that might be easier said than done...

Problem of Crafting solving every problem

Technology and the industrial revolution have been an unprecedented boon to the global standard of living. With them, we escaped the Malthusian trap and have achieved things that were inconceivable before. However, what would applying a similar scale of progress do in an RPG?

In our Princes of the Universe Exalted game we explored a high-scale, high-power game that involved a character that hyper-specialised in Crafting. By mid-Season 2, they were able to create basically a post-scarcity utopia city in the middle of the desert, complete with climate control, automatic food dispensers, crafting facilities, Big Brother-style AI, etc. Basically, everyone could live your entire life there in luxury and not have to lift a finger, everything was provided for them. Things only escalated from there.

After awhile a lot of problems could just be hand waved away with Crafting. Resource shortages? Throw automated mining at a mountain. Food problems? Automated farms. Money problems? Start selling perfectly crafted luxury items and dominate each and every market out there. Military problems? Create automated drones, power armour, a fleet of airships, etc.

While in Exalted if you wanted to focus on the minutia of Crafting it would boil down to a lot of rolling, in systems like Godbound (which Princes of Universe eventually adopted) such large-scale changes are ingrained into its Dominion system. Heck, in vanilla Godbound you can even make new worshippers to boost yourself even further...

Solving every problem

But back to the topic at hand. Just like technology has solved basically every problem that plagued our civilisations in the past, so too can high-end Crafting solve pretty much every problem a system might have. This is pretty similar to the Quadratic Wizards Problem (where in games like D&D warriors' powers grow linearly, while wizards' power grows quadratically and inevitably they dominate everything) - if there is no balancing factor, Crafting can make anyone else obsolete. A warrior might train a hundred elite monks, but a Crafter might bring a machine gun to a knife fight.

Moreover, if anything can be solved with Crafting, you can run into the Paradox of Plenty - if you don't need people to extract natural resources, till the fields, make things, etc., what good are they?

Sure, you can have them create art, engage in science and philosophy and do everything else that's not manual labour. That can work if you don't push automation too far, but I'm yet to see an RPG where the art output of a nation would be a factor (sounds like a pretty neat concept).

In the end the only thing that's the limit is the setting. In Exalted, pretty much the only thing you couldn't automate was prayers - you needed actual souls for those to work. This was ultimately the use for humans in our game - to generate worship for the demigod player characters.

It takes something from the man

While in real life having a post-scarcity fully automation powered society would be an undeniable good, in RPGs it can "take something from the man" (or the setting) so to say. It takes away a lot of the strife from the setting - you don't have to choose whether sending people to war would mean your civilisation would starve if they didn't return for the harvest, or whether to farm cash crops to pay for a civic project, or food crops to feed the populous. If a single character can solve any problem with Crafting / technology, characters that are not Crafting-focused feel inferior in comparison, and if Crafting can start making other player characters obsolete, the game can just feel bad to play.

This touches on the idea of hard magic systems, where while magic can be awesome, it also needs to have some limits, and it's those limits that make the magic system interesting.

For example, in Godbound, a lot of the high-end Artefact creation requires the use of Celestial Shards, parts of the Engines that run reality. Obtaining them is always an ordeal, and using them essentially always means you are letting the broken world stay broken rather than try fixing it. Similarly, every player character has access to the same ability to change the world with Dominion even if they are not a Crafter, so you don't feel like you're that lesser at fixing problems with your powers.

Technology as corruption

In most games, especially scifi ones, players will almost never not want to get their hands on some cool gadgets, shiny toys or useful gear. Whether that's through looting places or making their own if they can, they will want to get some tech. However, some settings have introduced a counterbalance to the wonders of technology.

The Fading Suns universe is built on the remains of a post scarcity corporate techno utopia. However, the current setting is a space feudal empire built around the Universal Church, whose central doctrine is that technology makes your soul impure and leads to the stars fading. While PCs will fall under the various factions that are given indulgences to use technology for the good of the people (an inquisitor using a spaceship will save more souls than it they couldn't use a spaceship for example), a lot of the setting will carry a stigma attached to the excessive use of technology. So while you could build be more machine than man and run robotic farms, you will be shunned by the peasants you displaced and the church might extradite you all the while keeping a close eye on what other heresy you might be committing.

This kind of thing would of course require some buy-in from the players and a balanced touch from the GM not to be a party pooper, but it can provide an excuse why you can't just rely on technology to solve all your problems in the setting.

Modern thinking

Another interesting topic relating to Crafting and technology solving a lot of problems is that it is a very modern way of thinking. We know where technological progress leads, so we may want our characters to start pushing the setting towards modernity by inventing / reinventing even such simple concepts as basic sanitation or an assembly line. However, we have to remember that sometimes it took forever for new technologies to be created. The first steam engine was first described in the 1st century AD, but it still took 17 centuries for the Industrial Revolution to start. It's fine to work within what the setting is and not having to push it to modernity.

Conclusions

If taken to extremes, Crafting, innovation and technology in RPGs can be setting-changing. On one hand that can be a pretty awesome feeling of bringing a world from the dark ages to a post-scarcity society as a result of one's character's actions, but on the other hand it can detract from the game if people wanted to engage in the sword and sandal fantasy rather than going into scifi territories. 

You can try addressing the problem by choosing a system that balanced Crafting vs other professions or sets some limits on what is possible. Alternatively, you can actively try avoiding the problem by choosing not to have a focused Crafter in your game (we did that with The Living Years, where it was the more challenging way to play, and our motto almost became "if we only took Artifice...").

Like with anything, it's good to talk about your game's vision before the game starts. If you want to turn the setting from fantasy to scifi and people are onboard, go for it. If a game starts getting exponential and snowballing because of Crafting or something similar and you don't want to do that, you can ask people not to do that, etc.

Winning the game in Session 0 with Learning and Teaching...