I’ve spent the last few years listening through a few of the Exalted RPG Podcasts / Actual Plays and I figured I’d share my thoughts on them with you. There is a good deal one can learn from them, whether you’re making your own actual plays or just gaming in general.
In today's episode, I will cover Devil's Luck Gaming’s Hymns of the Unconquered Sun.
1) Disclaimers
There are a few important disclaimers to get out of the way before we start.
First of all, I understand this was a fan project and should be judged accordingly. I am thankful for the effort the cast has put into entertaining us with their stories, but there will be some criticism of the podcast present.
Secondly, any criticism made against the characters portrayed or how the game played out should not be held as criticism or insults of the game master or the players. Not everyone is perfect and sometimes something doesn’t work out or falls flat in execution. It’s important to keep the art separate from the artist and focus on the former without being disrespectful to the latter.
Thirdly, since I’m also a part of an RPG Actual Play Podcast that features Exalted games, I might be biassed towards one interpretation and way of handling things in Exalted that might not agree with how others view and play the game, that’s to be expected. That and some might see criticising other podcasts a conflict of interest or something, so here is your disclaimer.
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
Hymns of the Unconquered Sun is an Exalted actual play stream hosted by @TheConri. The game features a set cast of three PC Solar Exalts and is about their short adventure around Calibration of running away from the Wyld Hunt and looking for their old panoply.
The game’s system is a mix of Exalted 3E and Exalted Essence, with some combat activation system homebrewed in from Pugmire.
The series takes the form of Twitch streams (VODs are available here), each about 4 hours in length.
The cast consists of professional streamers, etc. which lends itself to some solid voice work. I think the series was paid for by Onyx Path Publishing (AFAIR it was mentioned once), but I couldn’t find a definitive statement on it…
List of Episodes and their overview.
3) Player Characters
The campaign features a fixed cast of Solar Exalted characters:
- Last Heaven’s Fist (m) - a Zenith Immaculate Monk
- Mirror’s Kaleidoscopic Blossom (f) - a Twilight travelling saleswoman and sorcerer
- Sunder Borealis (f) - a Dawn brawler with an attitude
- Weft (they/them) - a Night circus member, thief and a sneak with spider-like ability to stick to walls
4) General Plot
The plot of the first season of the game that’s out now is fairly simple - the Circle find each other by chance and Sidereal confluence at the River Provinces during Calibration when their Solar identity gets exposed. They then flee the town with a Wyld Hunt slowly pursuing them. At the guidance of a Sidereal they go to the city of Ebon Fall to look for their previous Exaltation’s panoply and get tangled in a fight between the local people and an invading army of Fairfolk.
The game is set to receive a second season at some point in the future, featuring the same characters.
5) Highlights
Really great production values
The first thing that jumps out at you when you watch the series is just how much effort the team went through to make the stream feel special. They recorded an intro, complete with an anime-like opening song, all the players are in very elaborate costumes at all times, the backgrounds behind the players are well decorated and even when they are not recording in the same place they take the effort to blend everyone’s videos together into a somewhat seamless whole.
It is really unique in the space of Exalted actual plays. ExalTwitch Academy has them beat in terms of having overlays for the game proper (with combat tracker, anima level indicators and so on) and Swallows of the South as well as Fall of Jiara have more edited down episodes, but nobody comes close to this costuming!
Some really fun characters
A lot of the characters in the game, both PC and NPC, have been really fun to experience.
Sunder is a nice brash individual that gets herself into trouble with her big mouth and taking no shit from anyone, Fist is a carefree monk, Weft is a lovable designated thief and scout that doesn’t want to be mean to anyone (really like in Episode 11 when she steals a book from someone’s safe but puts some jade in there to “pay” for it, so precious!), and Mirror is a high-strung professional that’s trying to keep the group out of trouble.
On the NPC front we have a few standouts as well. Reed is Fist’s temple brother and a small, optimistic monk with ambitions of staying out of trouble and enjoying some good company. He comes complete with Krillin voice to complete the package into someone you love hearing pop up every now and then.
Next standout is Grandmother Toad, a Sidereal Chosen of Endings that is trying to make things right for the returning Solars and have them be the heroes the area needs. She also takes her Resplendent Destiny of a food vendor / restaurant waitress very seriously and it’s a delight seeing her pop up doing some most mundane of things. She truly embodies Kronk embracing his lot in life ;)
Beathersa is another great recurring NPC. A demon snake bound by Mirror and forced to begrudgingly serve her and hating every minute of it. Each time he appears, filled with anger and simmering with rage but forced to go along with whatever she needs him for. It’s fun to behold, especially in Episodes 5 and 6 when he’s recovering from a fight and being a bit helpless.
Penny and Ponder, Mirror’s animated puppets, while not having any speaking roles are still fun to behold as they are being helpful and just a touch creepy.
Beyond that you have a few fine enough NPCs without any real duds in the mix. The NPC cast might not be as colourful as ones you see in Swallows of the South, but most of the people you spend time with are fun.
Infectious excitement
One really nice part of the group I found myself enjoying was how excited they can get at times. Sometimes they get into some really nice spirits and are so happy, it’s great to witness. Like in episode 12 Mirror and Sunder admiring the automatons they found, giggling like schoolgirls in a candy store was really fun, or people losing it in Episode 6 when Reed was wanting to pick up ladies in a teahouse.
Calibration as a strange liminal time
One of the core ideas the plot of the game revolved around was that Calibration was an interesting liminal time. The GM presented the idea that during this time Fate and Destiny stop affecting people, so everyone has complete agency, free from Heaven’s influence. It was thus a good time for a duel to see who really is the best fighter, but also a time where some Sorcerous shenanigans could be afoot. Because this concept was introduced early and time progressed so low for players, I believe it was intended for the Season to completely take part during Calibration, which would’ve been interesting.
It’s nice seeing Calibration being portrayed as an interesting time. I think the only other time I’ve seen it be some central focus for even an episode of a game was in Princes of the Universe.
Raining Limit!
If you’ve read my various Exalted podcast reviews you know I’m a sucker for Limit. It’s such an interesting part of the Exalted setting that I love seeing it depicted. While a good number of players tend to be risk-averse with it, trying to avoid it as much as possible it was nice seeing the cast of the Hymns instead dive head-first into it. They rolled for it 9 times, and the first few rolls were really high (max Limit Trigger rolls in Ep 2 and 4). Heck, Episode 4 and 5 had 5 different rolls for Limit that were pretty high, and I was hoping we were going to get a Limit spiral out of it (where a few characters get high on Limit, then someone breaks, causing others to get more Limit and also break and so on). But then it… just stopped.
So unfortunately, this series we got no Limit breaks. It had a good start, but then the characters didn’t get the opportunity to get that Limit. Alas, this won’t be another Princes of the Universe nor even ExalTwitch Nexus…
Favourite moment of the night
At the end of the first six episodes of the stream the cast used to share their favourite moments from the episode. It was a nice part of the stream to hear people’s excitement about the events that transpired and what stuck out to them. Unfortunately with episode 7 that part of the stream got moved onto Discord to encourage people joining it which was unfortunate…
Actual mass combat in Exalted!
For all the things Exalted system offers I was yet to see its mass combat system being used. AFAIR Fall of Jiara hand waved its final mass combat, Princes of the Universe only got into proper mass combat when they switched to Godbound, and I can’t recall any of the other Exalted games I’ve seen / listened to use the system.
But of course, while it was interesting to see the system in action, the battle itself was a bit of a slow slog like a lot of Exalted combats tend to be, and this being the final battle of the final episode of the season didn’t help things ;).
Unique mix of 3E and Essence
It was interesting learning from this actual play that Exalted Essence can be mixed with Exalted 3E and played as an official homebrew of sorts. Not much more to say there.
6) Criticism
No show is without its flaws, and so we should turn to what the Hymns of the Unconquered Sun has committed. Not as an attack on the show or its creators, but as a learning experience on how everyone could improve…
The game is glacial
For me, the pacing of the game was slow. Of course these things are hard to quantify, but I could see a task-oriented group wrap up the content of the season in 3-4 sessions (with the final big combat taking most of the last episode), while Devil’s Luck Gaming crew took 14 episodes going about everything fairly slowly.
But I suppose “getting things done” is not the focus of the group. In fact watching this show I came up with the notion of “vibing vs tasking”. Basically, you watch Hymns of the Unconquered Sun because you enjoy the characters and their players bouncing off of one another, acting and reacting to what’s going on and progressing through the story at a leisurely pace. If you enjoy characters bantering about nothing for an hour and taking half an hour to just go to sleep (hello episode 3), you might enjoy watching this. I personally did not.
I like watching Exalted actual plays for being Exalted and dealing with Exalted-level issues, which rarely comes off in player banter (unless you are actually chatting about some big shit like you’d sometimes get in Princes of the Universe). Actual plays that are more focused on small character things and banter don’t much benefit from being in Exalted. Like swap the characters into being in D&D and you can still get them to complain about how tired they are and how much they want to go to sleep for half an hour, doing a drinking bet or hitting on random people in a teahouse just the same.
On top of that, understandably, the game being Exalted 3E + Essence made the combats drag a bit, but that’s par for the course…
Really short timeframe
It is interesting to see how time passes in various Exalted games. ExalTwitch Nexus wrapped its game in one in-game year, ExalTwitch Academy spent its first season in about two weeks, and RPG Blender managed to spend 20 something sessions dealing with Nechara over the course of a few days. If it wasn’t for the dint of time acceleration during the final stretch of the game Hymns of the Unconquered Sun would’ve spend its entire season within about maybe a fortnight - five days of Calibration between Episode 1 and 8 and then a few days afterwards in the final town. But the GM skipped time forward while the PCs were in a spirit sanctum because he needed the night of the full moon for Sorcerous reasons.
I think the GM’s initial plan for the game was to make the entire Season take place in the 5 days of Calibration since early in the series you hear about people doing some Sorcerous shenanigans during Calibration, but because the characters dilly dallied too much it had to be shifted forward to the next best thing. If instead the story was not tied to it, maybe the pace would pick up and you could fast forward through some events, healing and so on without grinding against the deadline…
Fortune and Fate - interesting if underused resource
To get creative with the game’s format as a Twitch stream the Hymn’s team have a system of Fortune and Fate. If you tip the stream you can give a point of either of the two things which convert to a floating Willpower the players or the GM can use as they need, respectively. It’s an interesting concept for sure to have some audience participation, although in practice those resources largely went unused. By episode 12 the accumulated points got as high as 9 Fortune and 15 Fate just sitting there, but luckily the final episode was a one giant fight where everything got splurged! But yeah, could be something more exciting or more frequently used throughout the game…
Many small things
There were a number of small things that were a bit off about the game that warrant a mention but maybe not their own big section.
In Episode 7 Grandmother Toad talked about the Great Curse the Solars were under as if it’s a known factor - always a pet peeve of mine that kind of deflates the tragedy of the Solars and instead turns them into “oh you poor thing”s.
A specialty for Awareness for “Hidden People” is probably a bit too broadly applicable. It’s not as game flow stopping specialty like “Ambushes” was in RPG Blender but still something that was a bit off.
Like a few other games this one too treated reincarnation and re-exaltation as if they were the same concept while those aren’t the same in Exalted.
Exploring the various rooms in the Qualat was a similar issue to how exploration in Princes of the Universe suffered from “GM expositions something, player reacts, prompts for more exposition as if they are clicking through a long description in an adventure game”.
7) Conclusions
In general, Hymns of the Unconquered Sun was an okay enough series so far.
For me, its main issue stems from its length in comparison to how much interesting content there is in each episode. If someone took the episodes and edited them down to an hour each it would probably greatly improve how well the series holds up, but as it stands, I wouldn’t watch it again as is because I’m not that interested in characters “vibing”.
The cast of the show has been great, they really put a lot of effort into their intro, costuming and general performance. While I might’ve enjoyed the range of varied voices Swallows of the South put out a bit more, the performance on display is still top notch, a lot better than a number of fan podcasts I’ve listened to (understandably), and a bit better than perhaps ExalTwitch Academy.
The content presented by the first season of the game was again a bit thin. A lot of it was spent by characters getting to know one another, interacting with the world in some very basic fashion and only starting to get into some deeper shenanigans at the very end of the series.
So yeah, unfortunately, I found the series to be boring to watch, which is perhaps worse than being bad. I want to love the series, there are a number of really fun characters I’d love to see more of like Grandmother Toad, but when the series gets a Season 2 chances are I might not watch it until years later if ever.
But again, the strength of the group is in its characters and cast. If you are the type of person that really digs fun people hanging out, having a blast talking about not much, you might enjoy the series a lot more than I do.
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