Have you ever had your group spend an entire session in the starting tavern rather than begin the adventure you want to run? Have you had to throw out entire detailed outline of NPC backstory because the party didn't care "about a sob story" and just wanted to get their reward and leave? Are you frustrated with people hogging the spotlight doing something really boring while you just want to move on "to the good stuff"? Well, you might need to check where your group lies on the "vibing vs tasking" spectrum and maybe adjust your expectations accordingly!
Recently I was watching some Hymn of the Unconquered Sun Exalted Actual Play stream by Devil's Luck Gaming. The characters were pretty chatty, they talked up a few NPCs, got into some fights, etc. While watching the second half of the third episode, hearing the characters banter for the better part of an hour, talk about wanting to go to sleep and taking half an hour to do so, playing some music, singing, writing a haiku and so on and so on I started tuning out. This wasn't the first time I had such a feeling - "why won't they just move past this and get to the part where they get to cleave armies with grimscythes bigger than themselves or making the mountains weep to flood valleys? Surely they have better things to do?" and I realised my expectations weren't in the correct place - the group has been "vibing", and that's fine too.
Exalted, you can be this cool as a starting character
By "vibing", I mean the players were enjoying their time talking to one another, doing small things and generally having fun without engaging the system, the story or any task at hand. They just finished resolving a transe situation of negotiating with an evil spirit turned fighting that spirit, so this was their decompression and so on. Not to mention that the group seems to be more focused on getting into their performances (being pretty good at playing their roles, doing voices, being in full make-up and getup and so on, generally giving off "theatre person" energy ;) ), so this can be their preferred mode of play.
I'm personally a more introverted person. When I play RPGs I focus more on engaging with the mechanics, progressing the goal we set out to do forward, and in general dealing with the bigger picture stuff. I would call this kind of engagement "tasking" since it's focused on the task at hand. I do roleplay of course, but I find roleplay for roleplay's sake less engaging.
Of course, one mode of engaging with the game isn't inherently better or worse - they are different and complimentary. It helps, however, to understand what you like engaging with and what kind of engagement you expect from the Actual Plays you watch.
While watching ExalTwitch Academy I had similar frustrations as with the Hymn of the Unconquered Sun - the player characters would often focus on fooling around and hanging out with NPCs, meanwhile the bigger plot of the game of figuring out who the hidden traitor in the academy is would fall by the wayside. That felt a bit frustrating for me to watch and I often found myself not engaging with what was being shown. But then when Season 2 Episode 1 and 2 rolled around and the characters were dead-focused on infiltrating a ballroom gala and stealing some important documents all the while distracting the host, those episodes felt invigorating! Clear goals, everyone working towards moving them forward, every interaction could be the one to break the heist, it was a great listen for me! Again, vibing vs tasking.
Of course, just because you're talking and rolaplaying with an NPC doesn't mean you have to be just vibing - it could be a crucial part of moving a plot along. Like in our game City of the Bull God S01E07 - the player characters go with some local London Mages on a pub crawl and get progressively more hammered. Meanwhile they try figuring out if time travel is possible and then decide to test their theory in practice. All of it is low stakes banter between the two players and the GM, meanwhile they are also doing a groundwork for what later in the series will be a full blown time heist to save someone that has already been dead and burried for a year. Tasking and vibing at the same time!
Of course, even getting the right kind of engagement doesn't guarantee you'll like the end result. As task-oriented RPG Blender's Exalted Campaign can be, the player characters tend to go down the weeds of chasing down the tasks and end up spending 30 something episodes brokering peace in a town after a "beach episode, quick in and out" has gone awry. That was followed by basically racing against the clock to try stopping some doomsday monster from being unleashed meaning the characters have no time to do side activities (or even spend their XP by training). Understandably, vibing and tasking is just one part of enjoying a game.
So yeah, all in all, it's fine if the party wants to spend hours in the starting tavern and talk with every NPC, but that probably needs to be communicated clearly. Same with wanting to go light on the story or interactions with the NPC in favour of accomplishing other things - it's a different engagement that is just as valid. It's best to make sure everyone is on the same page about what to expect from the game ahead of time and so on so that people aren't disappointed with mismanaged expectations.
Heck, if you get good at time management, you can have a bit of both. Give every player a "time slot" where they can pursue their things, be that interacting with an NPC or getting some project done, and then as long as players are patient with one another everyone can get the engagement they want without one or the other bloating into taking up the entire session...
I’ve spent the last few years listening through a few of the Exalted RPG Podcasts / Actual Plays and I figured I’d share my thoughts on them with you. There is a good deal one can learn from them, whether you’re making your own actual plays or just gaming in general.
There are a few important disclaimers to get out of the way before we start.
First of all, I understand this was a fan project and should be judged accordingly. I am thankful for the effort the cast has put into entertaining us with their stories, but there will be some criticism of the podcast present.
Secondly, any criticism made against the characters portrayed or how the game played out should not be held as criticism or insults of the game master or the players. Not everyone is perfect and sometimes something doesn’t work out or falls flat in execution. It’s important to keep the art separate from the artist and focus on the former without being disrespectful to the latter.
Thirdly, since I’m also a part of an RPG Actual Play Podcast that features Exalted games, I might be biassed towards one interpretation and way of handling things in Exalted that might not agree with how others view and play the game, that’s to be expected. That and some might see criticising other podcasts a conflict of interest or something, so here is your disclaimer.
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
ExalTwitch is an Exalted actual play hosted by @JonVerrall. The game features a set cast of three PC Exalts and can be generally divided into two phases - the first season focused on the group’s life in the House of Bells, and the second season where they travel across the Blessed Isle.
The series takes the form of Twitch streams (VODs are available here), each about 3 hours in length.
The cast consists of professional actors, streamers, etc. which lends itself to some solid voice work.
The campaign features a mostly fixed cast of player Dragonblooded characters:
Cathak Oresta (f) - a stoic Earth Aspect martial artist. An avid reader and an Earth Dragon Form practitioner.
Cathak Pyres (m) - a passionate Fire Aspect orator. Living in the shadow of his sister Maral, out to prove himself.
Ledaal Gale Whispered (f) - a calculating Water Aspect strategist. An vvid Gateway player and planner.
You can find a more detailed overview of them and other characters from the series here.
4) General Plot
The plot is largely split amongst the seasonal divide.
During the first season the player characters are studying at the House of Bells, the prestige military academy of the Realm. During their fifth year at the academy their lives are turned upside down with the arrival of Games Master Vieren who seeks to find rumoured Anathema that have infiltrated the institution. Students are pitted against one another in a series of war games (I’m going to use this term because “games” is a bit too confusing when you’re talking about ExalTwitch Academy the game played in a game of Exalted and PCs taking part in games in that game…). They have to figure out who they can trust and how to survive as they are pushed to the brink.
In the second season the player characters pursue the plots they uncovered at the House of Bells across the Blessed Isle. They aim to stop forces that would see the Realm brought to their knees and unearth their secrets as they are hunted down.
The game might be getting a third season at some point in the future, but the GM stated outright that the same player characters won’t be returning.
5) Highlights
Exalted Harry Potter
I don’t think ExalTwitch Academy ever explicitly aimed to emulate Harry Potter, but given that it’s a game in a magical world about school students, eventually you start seeing similar patterns emerge. The first Season of the game is the closest to book 4, the Goblet of Fire, with its war games the main characters participate in against their wills and the paranoia of sinister forces working in the shadows. Season 2 meanwhile reminds me more of book 7, the Deathly Hallows, where the protagonists have to leave the familiar setting of their school and have to deal with bigger threats in the wider world and stop secretitive enemies from accomplishing their goals.
In general, it is neat to see this kind of a story and setting structure in this game. The protagonists being students up to no good, having to fight against schemes bigger than themselves and the school they inhabit, having to quickly learn that now all faculty are on their side, and not everyone you didn’t get along with at school is an enemy for life.
While it perhaps might’ve been a bit more interesting to explore how the House of Bells is a military academy and how those can operate way differently than your regular school, what we got was still interesting enough.
Safety cards
A prominent part of every episode of the Academy was the overview of the safety cards used by the crew. They are an interesting tool developed by the group to indicate to everyone whether everyone is good to continue playing or if there is some issue that needs to be brought up.
As I understand, the game’s cast are theatre professionals so they can get into situations that on surface look distressing (such as passionately arguing with one another) and on many occasions they did check in with one another to make sure everyone is in a comfortable space roleplay-wise.
Exalted is a game where players can encounter or create tense situations and having such safety cards would’ve come in handy in a few games I have listened to or experienced in the past. I know we ran into a few situations in Princes of the Universe where we should’ve been more aware of one anothers’ feelings, and Swallows of the South also ran into some problematic behaviour that maybe would have benefitted from them.
It is really awesome to see the RPG Clinic crew feature these safety tools so prominently and promote their use. Kudos to them for making the RPG space that much better!
Sex-positivity
The show doesn’t shy away from character relationships and sex. The PCs form various relationships within their Sworn Kinship and outside of it. The matters are handled pretty tastefully and more often than not - playfully.
While I personally enjoyed the more cosy relationship between Ariston and Hearth Eternal from Swallows of the South and the love triangle between Peleps Meara, V'neef Kai and Cathak Shao Dun from Fall of Jiara had more weight behind its narrative, it’s still nice seeing an actual play that is open to building character relationships and being sex-positive. Not much to add there!
Good podcasting quality
From a technical standpoint, this actual play was fairly good! It was a noticeable improvement from their early episodes of ExalTwitch Nexus. Sure, you had occasional hiccups of some microphones not working for a few seconds as you’d expect from a live RPG stream, but they were always quickly rectified.
The voice and acting quality of the group is also pretty good. The GM can pull off some delightful character voices from time to time (like Bodun), and the players have a consistent delivery of their characters even if it is pretty straightforward. It’s no Swallows of the South when it comes to really out there voices but it’s still fun enough.
By the dint of being streamed live you don’t have the high production value of shows like Swallows of the South or Fall of Jiara, but it’s still nice listening to a podcast that is well audio balanced and uses good quality microphones!
Gateway as a storytelling tool
Gateway has been a staple in-universe game in Exalted, but no other actual play has featured it as prominently as this one. Ledaal Gale Whispered was a really avid player of the game and as the group’s strategist she was able to use it in a number of creative ways. From building a relationship with a fellow Gateway enthusiast Cynis Bracken, the Librarian at the House of Bells, through talking strategy and using it as a metaphor for a number of complicated topics, up to using it as a tool for large scale social manipulation propaganda tool, the game took on a lot of depth.
That last one was especially interesting. Since this is Exalted, characters can accomplish some really interesting feats using the unlikeliest of tools - win a war with a poem, topple a mountain with a song, or in this case - turn everyone against a false narrative by a Gateway opening and its counterplay. It was a pretty enjoyable idea to see carried out in the game and a good use of Exalted Essence venture system!
Seru’s Ballroom Blitz
While the first season of ExalTwitch Academy wasn’t all that interesting for me, the first two episodes of Season 2 were a banger!
The players had to infiltrate a very exclusive gala hosted by Peleps Seru and steal a few key items in order to be able to leave the city of Arjuf. The characters would have to keep pushing their luck and creativity to achieve all of their objectives, run distractions, but also survive a duel and stage a prison break. Like any good heist you never knew when the whole situation would go belly up.
The characters from the gala were also amusing. Seru was a delightfully off putting sleazeball that started hitting on the party’s face Pyres, the keeper of the archives made you feel bad for stealing from him, and even a Gateway grandmaster seeing right through Gale’s disguise had some interesting banter.
All around a great two parter and a pretty good place to jump into the series if you just watch the Season 1 recap.
Dynastic family dynamics
While to date there have been several Dragonblooded actual plays released (Like a Dragonblooded by A Pair of Dice Lost, Fall of Jiara by The Story Told) none have captured how weird and messed up the relationships within a Dragonblooded family could be like Academy has.
In Session Zero we got a glimpse of Pyre’s relationship with his sister Maral, being only a silver child to her status as a prodigy in the House of Bells. The relationship evolves a bit over the course of the campaign as they meet one another in various situations.
In Season 2 Episode 4 we explore Pyre’s house run by his controlling Exalted mother Qiri and his laid back mortal father Dawan. The opulence of having servants waiting on him on hands and feet coupled with the pressure to live up to the greatness of even his older sister was really interesting to listen to. Having everything but your parent’s approval and affection did seem to bother Pyres a great deal coming back home.
Meanwhile we also have a contrast from that to Oresta’s home from Season 2 Episode 6 onward. She grew up in a much smaller house with mortal dynastic parents that gave her much more personal attention growing up and are proud of her even being a Dragonblooded.
It was a pleasure watching these Dynastic family dynamics being on full display in the series.
Solar-level powers on Dragonblooded are scary
This one isn’t as much a critique of ExalTwitch Academy as it was something their game highlighted about Exalted Essence - giving Dragonblooded Solar-level powers was scary. Even if they were “just” Flawlessly Impenetrable Disguise and Judge's Ear Technique when they showed up their implications would basically upend the setting.
The first one was used by Brevin impersonating Games Master Vieren after his demise at the end of Season 1. He managed to go undercover so well the PCs were almost ready to kill him during their confrontation in S02E05.
The second was used by Oresta the PC as a really strong lie detector. Was it part of Season 1 the characters could’ve well found that Anathema they were looking for and uncover a lot more secret plots. Even during the final showdown of the penultimate episode the Charm allowed Oresta to pinpoint exactly when the NPCs were lying to them. It would certainly be interesting to see how the various enemies the group encountered could’ve used this kind of power against them, but I guess we’ll never know unless we get another season of the show…
6) Criticism
No show is without its flaws, and so we should turn to what ExalTwitch Academy has committed. Not as an attack on the show or its creators, but as a learning experience on how everyone could improve...
School’s cancelled and fast pacing
When you present a premise, viewers have the expectations the game will deliver on it. Academy was pitched as “PCs are students at the House of Bells, and there is a mystery to solve”.
With such a premise, it was really jarring listening to Season 1 of the game and realising the whole school game was over in two in-game weeks. And here I was thinking ExalTwitch Nexus was being hasty wrapping a Creation-conquering game in an in-game year.
The pace of that season was a bit relentless. Not as bad as RPG Blender spending 20+ episodes in Nechara spanning a few days, but still rather neck-breaking. The characters were living their lives day by day really for no reason other than keeping the pressure up, barely having time to recover Willpower (since on a few occasions the PCs would stay up to do some night shenanigans) and heal up. Perhaps it would’ve been better to stretch the game into being a whole school year to make it less hectic. That would make it fall more neatly into a Harry Potter-shaped formula for the better or worse.
Regardless, it was also strange that the ending of Season 1 decided to go scorched earth on the whole House of Bells premise and destroy the school. I know that the GM mentioned in I think their FroYo episode that he did that because the game wasn’t entirely jiving with the premise.
So if you are hoping for a game that focuses on the premise of being a House of Bells game, ExalTwitch Academy will be mostly a disappointment. It does feature some neat school-focused character interactions (such as Pyres being disciplined by the quartermaster), but even that is a bit on the lighter side.
The first season feels skippable
While the first season of the game had its fair share of interesting moments and was important for establishing dynamics between the various characters, it felt like you could skip it with just some overview of the plot and you wouldn’t miss much. It certainly didn’t feel like a worthwhile investment of over 60 hours to me.
A good deal of Season 1 was the repetitive nature of the war games. First players get anxious about who will be picked next and hope they won’t get picked, then they receive the official confirmation that they are in fact involved, then they try to prepare for the war games, then the war games are an okay fight, and then there is a brief recovery from what happened and the cycle repeats. This happens 4 times over, which eats up a good deal of the season’s runtime.
When they are not focused on the war games, unfortunately the characters don’t have excellent investigation skills so they attempt to figure out what’s going on but a lot of their endeavours are fruitless. The Games Master is a very elusive figure so they can’t confront him too easily, they don’t manage to apprehend the person that is meddling with the war game invites, they don’t uncover the key secret Anathema, and they don’t manage to stop the Games Master before it’s too late.
In contrast, a lot of plot in Season 2 is driven by the players and they get to accomplish a good deal more, wrapping a loose thread every few episodes.
So it’s unfortunate that the first Season was like this, while at the same time being a good foundation for interpersonal relationships for the characters. It was nice watching them form their rapport with the Games Master Vieren, Bracken the Librarian, Juwinn the Quartermaster, a naval officer Seven-Fingers, medic Garavel, not to mention the key relationships between the PCs, each other and their fellow students. But you have to get through a good deal of relatively boring things to get to the emotional core there that pays off in a number of ways in Season 2…
The war games were uninteresting
A lot of season 1 is spent focused on the war games, worrying about them, preparing for them, seeing the characters being traumatised by them and living in fear of being disbanded as a result of them, but the war games themselves really weren’t an interesting spotlight to the season nor something you couldn’t just wing it.
I’d bring up the comparison to Goblet of Fire again. In that story the tournament had trials you could puzzle out and prepare for to some degree, and you had significant downtime in between them for decompression. The challenges were also rather memorable and varied, not to mention the stakes for losing them weren’t too severe.
In ExalTwitch Academy the war games happened every few days, they were always a variant of “beat your opponent into submission”, and the PCs never managed to get more of a heads up about what they were about than where they would be held or who would be involved.
As something that was pretty much the main focus for half of Season 1, they ended up feeling less of an interesting story hook and more like Dimension 20’s even episodes - “tick tock, it’s fight o’clock!”.
War game one was a quick brawl, war game two was a brawl with some creative use of crafting, war game three the characters managed to avoid with their wits but it also ended up in a quick brawl, and war game four was back to a short combat the PCs overcomplicated trying to make a statement about how much they hate the war games.
So all in all, I wish there was more to these war games, but I guess if you’re dealing with powerful demigods in a military academy a big assault will solve most competitions, so why bother with anything elaborate…
The secret plots in Season 1 weren’t that satisfying
Season 1 of the game was focused on a few key mysteries. Things started off strange with the player characters having their original fangs (military groups of five cadets) disbanded and expelled, with them surviving that fallout for no discernable reason. You had the outside stranger Games Master Vieren coming in from the failed Tepet campaign in the North to throw the school year into chaos with his war games and disbanding those fangs that lose them. There were rumours of a secret Anathema infiltrating the House of Bells, tales of some sunken ship involved in smuggling Orichalcum into the school, mysterious people messing with the war game invites, a lot of faculty not wanting students to pry into their private lives and not to mention Iselsi scheming their vendetta amids all of these.
These could’ve been tense mysteries to parse out. Heck, come Episode 11 and the Anathema being revealed turned out to be a Night Caste and the group losing them amidst a forest fire, that could’ve been something that turned the game into a survival horror setting. You had a secret master infiltrator that could’ve been anyone out for revenge on the people that have wronged them. Players can’t trust anyone but their Sworn Kin, never being sure whether the person they are interacting with is who they appear to be or not.
So let me set the stage. During Episodes 11 and 12 Games Master Vieren went scorched earth and set the player characters to come out as heroes by defeating the Anathema, or be martyrs clearly killed by it. After that war game, everyone turned on him, his room got searched and he disappeared. His plan has gone terribly wrong, the PCs almost killed themselves with a forest fire of their own making and the Anathema escaped.
At the end of Episode 12, Pyres is recovering in the Infirmary. Then out of nowhere, Games Master Vieren is there, imploring Pyres to join him in hunting yet another Anathema, not the Night Caste they have faced off against. The episode ends on a cliffhanger. At that moment, what could’ve been the most interesting place to take the plot?
My money was on this setup - Vieren is a Bronze Faction Sidereal hunting the Solar Anathema. Some Gold Faction is running interference. Now that the Night Caste has been ousted, they want to hunt Vieren down and take their revenge. Whether at the end of Episode 12 Pyres is visited by Sidereal Vieren or Night Caste pretending to be Vieren, either recruiting him to go after the other one, it doesn’t matter, the players are now being roped into spy games that will mess with them. As Fall of Jiara has shown us, a competent infiltrator Anathema playing on PCs’ Intimacies can really start messing with them, and a Sidereal vs Night Caste both manipulating people while pretending to be someone they are not is a perfect shitstorm of mindfuckery for the players.
Of course, that’s not what happens. Vieren is just Dragonblooded Vieren, the Anathema has been planted at the House of Bells by Iselsi who also gave Vieren the information to pit them against one another and the Night Caste actually liked the Realm and the school and I don’t think they even killed anyone in the entire game. Why Vieren was organising the war games, I’m not sure, but he did want to martyr the PCs against the Night Caste which he poisoned prior to their fight but decided to leave for the players to finish off for some reason. He never comments on someone changing who the fangs playing in the war games are, even though that side story apparently involves a Sidereal messenger taking forged invites from an expelled Dragonblooded student, who takes orders from the Night Caste themselves somehow.
A lot of people’s motivations seem to be muddled, and the PCs rarely get clear information about why people are doing what they are doing. Games Master Vieren basically disappears in between most of the war games, so you can’t get a solid answer out of him. It feels like his plan has the cohesion of Star Wars prequel plot - it works if you view it from one specific angle, but fails when viewed from any other side (“I will fund two galactic armies, start with a trade dispute to get nominated Supreme Chancellor, get a Gungan to grant me emergency powers, and then declare myself Emperor after an assassination attemp! There is no simpler way to do this!”).
But it wasn’t all that bad. You had a taste of interesting mystery and secret identities with a plot that came in the later part of the season. The players found a Getimian that was a reflection of another important character from the House of Bells that wanted to kill and replace their counterpart because obviously they deserve to live that life that was stolen from them. Once or twice it wasn’t clear which character was which and the players had to get clever to figure things out, that was nice! Unfortunately, that was more like a B-plot at best…
Pick your team blindly
After a brief introduction, the player characters started the game in disarray. Their former fangs have been disbanded, their fangmates have been all expelled, and they have been put together as a new fang. But since there were only three of them, one of their first goals was to fill their ranks by recruiting two more people. This felt like an odd choice that worked better on paper than in game.
The characters have been in the House of Bells for years already, but the players were freshly introduced to the game, so they barely knew any NPCs when they realised they should be filling their ranks. Moreover, recruiting people wouldn’t be that much of a straightforward task - everyone else would have been a part of a fang for years already so they wouldn’t really want to break those up. So there were two options really, either you quickly learn about all the students in your year and poach the two best ones to fill your ranks and make enemies of the other fangs you’ve disturbed, or you grab the first people that fit your bill and wing it. Of course, the second option was the path of least resistance so that’s what happened.
Conveniently, the PCs faced off against another fang in the first war game in Season 1 Episode 2, and after the players won the other fang got disbanded for some reason. So that not only introduced players to a few other students from their year but also gave them a good guilt-free recruitment pool, so of course they went with those people.
Overall, the situation could’ve probably been handled better if the players were given some overview of all the NPCs the GM prepared for their year so they would know who to approach and befriend. Heck, we did something similar in our game of Persona Summer Away Camp where the GM handed us a whole list of NPCs for us to pick and choose from so we’d know who we can interact with right off the bat. Relying on the few NPCs you could meet during the first two sessions really limited the pool and made the selection a bit awkward.
Anathemas and Anathema sympathisers
A big crux of the show was dealing with the Anathema and the danger they pose to the Realm. Games Master Vieren, the Season 1 antagonist, wanted to expose their corrupting influence on the House of Bells, and Season 2 did have others following in his wake. But there is one big problem - their threat was underwhelming and various characters were too quick to accept them as misunderstood victims.
First of all, ExalTwitch Academy decided to go with a much broader definition of an Anathema from the one presented in Exalted 3e:
In Academy, every Exalted that wasn’t a Dragonblooded was an Anathema. In practice that meant we were dealing with a Night Caste Solar, a Sidereal Chosen of Secrets, an Exigent of Games, and a Getimian.
Of course, the Storyteller can change the setting to their liking, but it’s useful to understand why the cannon Anathema are treated the way they are. The best explanation I got was from a former Exalted 3e developer, which basically boiled down to Anathema being existential threats to the Realm. Lunars have a vendetta against the Scarlet Dynasty and are master infiltrators that will wear the face of your loved ones to fool you. Solars are burgeoning tyrants that will take over or conquer the Realm and position themselves as the new golden emperors. Abyssals and Infernals bear the power of the enemies of Creation and who knows what evil they will unleash upon the world to serve their dark masters. On the flip side, an Exigent of Games might… be a really good Gateway player and be happy with that.
ExalTwitch Academy never gave the players the motivation or good reasoning to hate the Anathema. So despite being dynasts training in a military academy where you’d think the one lesson they would drill into your skull would be “never trust the Anathema, kill them or die trying”, the first time they encounter one of course the characters feel bad for them and start sympathising with them. They had one job and they failed it.
It was even worse when for the finale of the series the group had to confront the Solar as a part of a public execution in the middle of the Imperial City. Surely, this would be one place where a Solar blazing their anima would bring about dozens of Immaculate Monks, a good deal of the legions and dragons know how many All-Seeing Eye agents ready to uphold the one big rule the Realm can rally under. But no, after a speech by one of the PCs apparently everyone was cool with letting the Anathema live and not branding each and every PC as a heretic that needs to be lynched on the spot.
This kind of reminds me how ExalTwitch Nexus handled one of its big pieces of plot - the redemption of Three Fates Shadow. The players wanted that to happen, but they haven’t done much work to further that plot. But because it was something they wanted a whole awful lot, the world bent itself to them and delivered.
Sure, you can handwave all of that away by citing GM fiat, but if you’re listening to an Exalted actual play to see characters dealing with the world as it’s presented in the books you know, you can be left unsatisfied by the resolutions to such situations that would’ve been really big deals otherwise.
Of course, if we get another game in the same continuity as this one (as the Storyteller mentioned in the Season 2 wrap up episode - it’s a possibility, but not with the same PCs), it would be interesting to see some other characters trying to address this kind of behaviours by hunting the old PCs as heretics and traitors to the Realm. I know chances of that happening are slim to nil since it would be directly taking a dump at the previous two seasons and so on, but it would be an interesting take…
Anathema-detecting poison
Early on in the campaign you could feel the tension rising once shenanigans were afoot and PCs started being convinced there was a secret Anathema in the school. Anyone was suspect, and worse yet - you couldn’t ever be sure the person you’re speaking to truly is who they are or if they perhaps are some crafty Night Caste or a Sidereal impersonating them. Heck, in Episode 13 where Games Master Vieren approached Pyres in the infirmary he acted so suspicious I was ready to believe it wasn’t Vieren but someone impersonating him. It was an interesting paranoia… but that didn’t last.
In that episode Vieren introduced a lie-detecting colour-changing sorcerous water and I was ready to call that bullshit. Luckily that turned out to be a lie… But then we got the Anathema-detecting poison and later Judge’s Ear Technique and suddenly part of that bullshit was real.
As we learned in Season 2, house Iselsi, secretly working for the Scarlet Empress, have created a poison that was very useful in uncovering secret Exalts. The poison would do nothing to mortals, could potentially kill Dragonblooded, but would cause all other Exalted to flare their anima. Sure, you could only make the poison during Calibration, but you’d think if the Scarlet Empress got her hands on something like that it would be in the kit of every Immaculate Monk and All-Seeing Eye agent. Heck, it was even convenient enough you could slip it into food or drink to activate it.
Being able to confirm any possible Anathema is a powerful tool. It’s not as egregious as Fall of Jiara’s raccoon god Curry who was able to detect Anathema by licking letters, but still…
The plot fell into PC’s hands
Coming back to the premise of “PCs are students at the House of Bells, and there is a mystery to solve” - probably my biggest gripe with the game was the expectation that it would focus on solving mystery and intrigue seeded early into Season 1. The early game did put a strong emphasis on trying to figure out why Games Master Vieren was targeting the group with his relentless war games, figuring if there is a secret Anathema at the House of Bells and who might that be, and why the whole plot was put in motion in the first place.
While the answers themselves were pretty alright, the way they got answered was pretty unsatisfying. More often than not, the big answers would just fall into PC’s hands. The big reveal about who the Anathema was was the PCs stumbling on them, already glowing. Why were they glowing? Because another NPC set them up using the Anathema-detecting poison that forced them into a glowing Anima. It was really handy…
Worst yet, as far as I remember, the only clue to their real identity were some strips of Orichalcum that could’ve been easily planted in their room, especially since in the same scene the players discovered broken wards there. Moreover, the person in question didn’t have a need for the metal, so the audience couldn’t even predict who the Anathema was beyond a dubious guess.
The contrivances continued into the second Season as well. While the Games Master Vieren was killed during the attack on the House of Bells, the news about it haven’t spread too far. The players didn’t want to make a martyr out of him, so they devised a plan to poison his reputation and control the narrative before the truth reached the wider Blessed Isle. Their main tactic for doing so was creatively spreading openings for Gateway that illustrate Vieren’s tactics during the attack and then show their weaknesses. That part of the plan was a clever and creative use of Gale Whispered’s love of the game. But that wouldn’t be the only step.
Someone decided to start impersonating Games Master Vieren, and that someone just happened to turn out to be the PCs’ frenemy student Brevin. Using Flawlessly Impenetrable Disguise (as mentioned before, it’s a weird power scale in Exalted Essence to let Dragonblooded use these kinds of Solar charms…) he perfectly imitated Vieren and thanks to that the PCs would be able to give him a disgraceful death. So with this convenient ally in tow, they conspired to make a public show that Vieren was a disgrace and a traitor.
So how would they go about proving Games Master Vieren is a scumbag? Well, they had the Gateway propaganda of his failed tactics going around which somehow are a proof of something (but since it was a player’s successful Venture, sure, let’s give them that). Then Pyres presented evidence that he changed his will from giving money to his house and Pyres specifically to giving it to the Regent Fokuf, which apparently is a faux pas? Coming from that character it mostly came off that Pyres had a personal grudge against him. And the final piece of “evidence” was the two non-PC fangmates talking about Vieren, how he’s a coward and how he turned the students against one another.
Meanwhile Brevin as Vieren brought up the fact that the Games Master did have an order from Regent Fokuf, that the Anathema did infiltrate the House of Bells and accuse Pyres of being corrupted by them.
So how does this situation get resolved? An Immaculate Monk, former teacher of Oresta, was arbitrating the accusations. He used his artefact tetsubo against Oresta (the only person that knew what it did - made lying against it extremely unlikely if not outright impossible) and had this in-depth exchange about the statements made by Flevienne and Sientelle: “Lies?”, “No.”.
And that’s it. That’s all it took for him to grab Vieren and get him executed (except not really since the PCs didn’t want Brevin to die so they planted Vieren's actual head and so on). You’d think that beheadings in the Realm would take a bit more hard evidence, especially when you’re dealing with someone on the orders of the Regent himself…
But these kinds of convenient political machinations didn’t end there. In the penultimate episode the player characters were not only facing off against the Anathema from the House of Bells in a mock battle before they were supposed to be executed, but also the players wanted to use this attention to let people in the Imperial City know the Iselsi have been plotting a downfall of the Great Houses. Because they were friends with the Solar, the fight ended up being mostly staged. When they got to convincing the crowd about the Iselsi being the real danger (next to the blazing anathema banner mind you), Pyres failed his roll and got into a back and forth argument with the head Iselsi - Jalal. Their arguments were pretty flimsy, and even someone from the crowd literally shouted "You have anathema on your side right now, how are we supposed to trust you?". Then Roseblack appeared and started championing their side against her uncle Regent Fokuf because she played a game of Gateway prepared by Gale Whispered that exposed the Iselsi plan. In the end, the players achieve at least a token victory there and nobody seems to remember wanting to execute the Anathema in the public square, glowing like the noonday Sun, after not an hour ago Pyres have been hyping the crowd up how they cannot escape. I guess when PCs like an NPC a whole awful lot the Realm forgets the one lesson that was key to the survival of their entire culture…
There were some other conveniences through the story, like how one of their Hearthmates turned out to be Iselsi so that entire plot can kick off, or how an Iselsi assassin just happened to come on by to their house, give a big exposition about a lot of things and only then decide to try killing someone right next room from all the PCs that soon enough managed to whoop their ass. But I think this section has gone on long enough. Suffice to say, too much of the plot just ended up landing at the PC’s lap for my liking.
Not enough pushback from the world
Exalted is a game where the PCs are meant to be able to accomplish anything they set their mind to. However, it’s also a game with a somewhat strongly defined setting - a flawed world where the strong oppress the weak, a lot of bad things happen, and justice is not a given. It’s a bit disappointing when player characters can just ignore a good deal of their society’s expectations and not feeling a pushback against it.
The players befriended a good deal of Anathema at the drop of the hat because they weren’t bad people. While barely anyone knew about that, I don’t remember their Hearthmates baulking at them for it.
Beyond that towards the end of the game the player characters start talking about reforming the Realm by throwing various ideas at the wall to see what sticks. They want to oppose Fokuf because he was in-league with Games Master Vieren, Pyres mentions making some kind of democratic council of Great Houses to make the Realm a better place, and I think someone suggests Pyres should be some political figurehead. Like sure, democracy is great and all, but let’s remember Rules for Rulers - you are asking the people in power to give up their power for nothing, it won’t happen without a strong opposing force to force them.
Why won’t the Realm just become a democracy, it will be better for everyone!
Luckily most of this ended up being largely idle chatter because the follow-through hasn’t been the strongest aspect of the game. We didn’t have the ending like in ExalTwitch Nexus where the PCs won therefore the whole Realm bowed down to them.
It would be nice to see a season or even an entire game about the player characters fighting politically to reform the Realm in the light of what happened in the game so far, but I’m not holding much hope for that.
Scarlet Empress and her Cache Egg
Another interesting creative liberty the GM took with the setting was how Cache Eggs operated. According to Aspect Book: Earth and Wonders of the Lost Age, they are useful storage devices you can banish into Elsewhere and recall back as desired. They are especially useful for Celestial Exalts since the Artefact’s connection persists throughout Exaltations, so they can be a useful tool for the GM to gift the PCs with some useful things.
In ExalTwitch Academy however, there is an important difference - once sealed the Eggs can only be opened by the person attuned to them, but they lose that protection in the event of their death.
In Season 2 the characters are guided by an NPC to steal one such Egg from Seru’s mansion during his gala. The egg allegedly belonged to the Scarlet Empress, and the PCs deduce its content somehow relates to opening the Imperial Manse.
So that’s a cool hook for a story, but here is the catch - the Egg won’t open, and since the GM stated it cannot be opened unless the Empress is dead, that makes it at the same time a useful tool to know that the Empress is alive (a very valuable piece of knowledge), but also makes the Egg entirely useless. The PCs cannot use it, the Empress is nowhere to be seen, and even if the PCs claim the Egg proves the Empress is alive, it might be really hard to convince people that yes, this random Egg was indeed owned by the Empress. It’s a really weird thing to have around that never gets a good payoff…
Plot-wise, it does become a thing that gets brought up at the final arc of the game where the PCs are at the Imperial city. Apparently some group is able to track its approximate location somehow AND they claim the Empress is around and needs it to make her return. However as the PCs are pretty adept at hiding it, that big plot point of Scarlet Empress returning also never gets a resolution since apparently people wouldn’t believe it’s her without the Egg? It’s a bit contrived.
So yeah, the players managed to get their hands on an artefact that apparently is very valuable and at the same time useless because they can’t use it and the only person that can is a setting-defining plot elephant. I would be curious to know what the original intention for including this Egg was…
7) Conclusions
ExalTwitch Academy is a pretty good Actual Play stream. It’s competently produced, technically sound, and the cast enjoys their time together. Their focus on safety tools is commendable, and experimenting with Exalted Essence hot off the preview presses was interesting to witness. It had a number of genuinely interesting situations happen, especially during Season 2. However, the plot leaves a few things to be desired.
The premise largely feels unfulfilled, the plot progresses at its own pace without the players to push it forward in the first Season, resolution to some big challenges feel a bit unsatisfying.
It seems a lot of the problems this series faced were due to the setup of the game. The frenetic pace of the war games didn’t let the player characters breathe. The players didn’t appear to have a strong buy-in into the war academy setting of the House of Bells. The mysteries of Season 1 couldn’t be well explored because the player characters weren’t built as investigators. The pivot in Season 2 did revitalise the game, but the series as a whole will now sit in this awkward spot where its identity is a bit muddled.
If you’re on the fence, I would recommend watching Season 1 recap followed by Season 2 Episode 1 and 2 to get the show at its best in a self-contained story. If you want inspiration for how a Dynastic family might work, I recommend checking out Season 2 Episode 4. In general I’d recommend Season 2 over Season 1.
ExalTwitch Academy wasn’t a bad show, but it wasn’t great either. It’s competently produced and does a few things right, but could do better in others. Being near average made it rather hard to review - you can only gush about so many things that excited you, and a good deal of criticism feels like nit-picking. So this is where it landed to me - on the positive side of the middle of what I’d expect from an Actual Play.
