Some time ago my group was discussing running an Exalted game in Autochthonia, a setting you could describe as heroic fantasy by the way of Transformers crossed with the aesthetics of Blame! and Metopolis. The players would take the role of Alchemical Exalts - heroes of the people, serving their communistic nation working towards saving their dying god that is a machine world akin to Cybertron or Unicron. The vibes can be just summed up as:
But the problem is, that setting was kind of written during "The Thousand Dooms" era of Exalted writing and there are some problems and narrative choices you ought to address before running the campaign that doesn't care about those issues and wants to do its own thing. So partially to collect my thoughts and partially to give inspiration to a friend that might be writing a setting overhaul for Autochthonia, let's go over some of these and try tweaking it into something interesting.
(I'm basing the discussion on Exalted 2e's books Manual of Exalted Power: The Alchemicals and Compass of Celestial Directions, Vol. 6: Autochthonia)
The core question
Autochthonia is a very specific setting. It's not an open ended Earth-like world that exists just to exist. It's specifically the machine god Autochthon escaping the world into the nothingness void of Elsewhere and bringing people in with him because he needs them. So herein lies the core question of the whole setting - can entropy be reversed? what is the purpose of humanity in Autochthonia? Without having a decent answer to this we can't build the rest of the setting up.
We know Autochthon fled Creation because he needed to wait out the Great Curse that has befallen the Exalts at the end of the Primordial War. We know Autochthon is dying since that is one of his defining traits, so he can't just idle by until eternity passes. So we have our first assumption - humanity's purpose is to worship Autochthon to give him power to sustain himself.
But that can't be the only thing. If Autochthon just needed people to pray, Autochthonia would exist to sustain people in cages like cattle and let them worship him all throughout the day while some machine spirits tend to them like cattle. There needs to be something more that necessitates people living their lives and doing their own thing independently.
One answer is that Autochthon's worship is more complicated. He loves tools for example, so maybe tool making and tool use can be a form of worship, but tools require a problem to be solved and the ingenuity to come up with something that would help you solve the problem. So strife is at the core of this prayer, and thus humanity needs to struggle in order to give proper worship.
The second answer is that Autochthon has a problem he can't solve himself - his sickness. Because he is axiomatically dying, he himself cannot stop himself from dying. But if there was an external force not of him that could tackle that problem it could be better managed. Given the right tutolage in how Autochthonia works, the motivation of a shared doom if everything fails and the freedom to solve the problem on their own term humanity could be the key needed to tackle Autochthon's long-term death. They can be here to upkeep his body while he slumbers.
Maybe also Autochthon is using humanity as a source of inspiration to try tackling his issues. He could be consuming the memories of the dead souls and using those ideas in formulating new ways to handle his sickness and other problems. Autochthon can't think outside of his paradigm, but others that are not of him can do it for him. Maybe the Alchemical Cities also tap into those thoughts and add additional processing?
These are good enough answers to justify the setting and give the players some big big problem to frame their actions around even if they never solve it. It's not about the destination of saving Autochthon, it's about the journey of helping his recovery.
The impending doom
Moreso than pretty much anywhere else in Exalted Autochthonia feels like an optimistic setting. Your characters aren't perpetuating an empire that exploits others, you're not waging a war that will consume millions of people on both sides, you're not on your way to overthrow the current tyrant and become the next tyrant in a repeating cycle. You are working on making your nation prosper, pushing new frontier and weeding out corruption that isn't systemic. Probably the only other part of the setting that would be similarly optimistic would be Prasad - the growing new empire around the Dreaming Sea.
But there is one niggle to all of this - the impending doom that is at your doorstep. Autochthon is consuming the souls of his people and you have already ran out. He is dying and you don't have the means to stop it without breaching the Seal of Eight Divinities. The days you have to play in Autochthonia by itself are numbered one way or the other.
A lot of the page count of the 2e Autochthonia book was spent on talking about Project Razor and dealing with that doom. And sure, it is a neat and big story hook if you want to play the Locust Crusade or do some mixed Exalted group in Creation, but that's not what I'm here for. I'd like to play in the Autochthonian setting and focus my game on that. So what are the options?
Simplest one would be to wave away the problem. A slightly more creative solution would be to embrace the long history Autochthonia has and either move the game's starting date like 1000 years back, or maybe say the impending crisis is still in its early stages and you won't notice it for another millenium. The setting itself is self-contained and you don't have to deal with a thousand moving parts that align themselves specifically at Realm Year 768 to boil over.
But alright, let's say we don't want to completely ignore the issue, but we do want it to be focused inward as something you can tackle without breaching into Creation.
Limited souls
Let's say a big part of the issue is a limited number of souls around, or at least a limited number of good souls - ones that have been a part of the Autochthonian nations for many generations that you are cultivating to make more Alchemicals (as opposed to say, souls on their first incarnation from the Ewer of Souls).
With this theme we can focus on more than just Autochthon eating the souls. Perhaps this makes retrieving soulgems a crucial operation whenever people go missing. Without retrieving the soulgem the souls are either trapped in it, or perhaps they get lost in Autochthonia trying to reincarnate. This gives the Alchemicals a neat motivation to go on any kind of mission into dangerous territory - to rescue the soulgems of their brethren, the pilgrims and similar to not let them waste away. Optimistic and heroic!
Another issue could be gremlins hogging those souls - corrupting perfectly normal Autochthonians into becoming abominations that don't reincarnate right, instead festering like cancer and taking up the souls and other resources. This gives the characters a big motivation to be dealing with gremlins and blight zones - to free up the souls trapped in there and purify everything. Put them back into the cycle of reincarnation and let Autochthon breate a sigh of relief.
Perhaps an alternative to Autochthon just eating the souls would be him feeding more on how the soul lived - consuming its memories as a part of purification. That would focus Autochthonia on making sure each and every person was living a righteous life according to the orthodoxy. Maybe then even Alchemicals dying and being reincarnated would be a way to better satisfy Autochthon. Or maybe some souls do get consumed in the process and the catch is it is the most virtuous ones that do because that satisfies Autochthon more, which means you are constantly struggling with bleeding your best "talent" when they die and have to keep churning new exemplars.
In general, it feels like there should be more to this story than just the number of souls going down and hitting its limit, otherwise the setting would soon turn into genocide town where nations go on and exterminate one another to have more souls to go around, or go systematically hunting down all the tunnel folk and tossing them into the meat grinder since they are just hogging the resources. That just turns the setting "ick" in a way you don't want to play in it, especially given that PCs would be tasked by the state to carry out this holocaust...
Machinery failing
Another existential problem in Autochthonia is the slow death of Autochthon manifesting itself with failing machinery, blight zones and eventually the Gremlin Syndrome. The thing about this problem is that it can scale quite easily based on what the game requires. On the low end of the problem spectrum it is the fluff of the setting - you go into the reaches and see some rusted up parts of the Reaches you need to disassemble to let Autochthon heal over. Medium problems mean dealing with resource crisis - conduits running low, metal and fluids being blighted and unusable, running into some small groups of gremlins. Then on the high end you are dealing with Nurad's problem of heading straight towards a massive blight zone and the game's soundtrack turns to Doom (and you having to protect a million squishy people from something with bigger guts...)...
Regardless, dealing with localised symptoms of Autochthon's sickness are very much thematic to what Autochthonia is about - you have to work hard to maintain your homeland and take care of your god for the greater good of everyone in this world and to save yourself in the long-term. It's a goal you always work towards and can see visible progress, but not something you can ever solve.
This problem is also a very good reason to have humans in Autochthonia. Sure, a fix beetle or many other machine gods might be able to fix everything better than a person, but at the end of the day they are of Autochthon and thus can't (or thematically at least shouldn't be able to) fix his sickness. Humanity lives outside of that paradigm and are not bound by such limitations, so if anyone that could tackle this systemic issue given enough time and strength. Again, optimistic setting - the problems are not unsolvable, and the heroes can achieve these great feats!
How does the machine function?
If we are talking about Autochthonia failing, I guess another question to ask would be how does it function? The land is both alive, but not in an organic way but more of a spiritual way, and also a machine. So if we start tending to it, we ought to have some kind of understanding of how it operates.
Like, if you come across a rusted up gearbox that is grinding and sparks are flying, in our regular world you'd have to take it apart, remove the rust, possibly replace some parts, grease it up and put it back into its place so everything would operate as it should.
But this is assuming we are dealing with a machine that has a fixed function that it does and we can understand. If we approach it from a more biological level, if you see an infected cell you destroy it and let other cells grow over it and replace it. Things are always in flux and they keep re-routing - if you lose one capillary, blood might find some other way to get to where it needs to, or some part of the body might die off and leave room for different kind of growth.
Those two mechanisms of how things function produce diametrically different approaches to how one should be maintaining Autochthonia...
And we're not even talking about what is the purpose of the machinery / organs. Either of these take some kind of inputs in the form of raw resources and energy and produce some kind of other output and waste. But Autochthonia is a closed loop system - you're not getting new resources in. So everything is focused on recycling old parts via the Pole of Smoke and lowering wear and tear to extend how long Autochthon can stay away from Creation.
So we have oil pumping to lubricate the machinery, essence conduits moving "power" around, air and nutrient slurry being dispensed so humans can live in Autochthonia, and everything not needed being dumped into chutes and going to be recycled. Meanwhile Godhead is doing its calculations in the Pole of Crystal and everyone else just skims materials off the top to build new things.
While we do see Fix Beetles fixing things a bit crudely, I'm not really aware of anything that is making new parts for Autochthonia. Sure, you can say the Divine Ministers might be planning on how things operate on a high level, but doubt they are acting as engineers retrofitting individual parts of the Pole of Metal.
So in my understanding at least, it would make a bit more sense if Autochthonia grew semi-organically. Metal plates scab over open gaps, new gears grow naturally and start spinning being animated with passing essence and lightning. Conduits expand themselves like capillaries and permeate their contents throughout the divine flesh. But more importantly - mining shafts humans create in the Pole of Metal eventually fill in and close up, ready to be harvested in the future. It might take decades or centuries, but "nature" heals itself.
But of course just because the divine body will heal over, humans don't want to take it for granted. Drilling in a straight line with no regard for the holy flesh is a sure-fire way to cause some cave ins, pierce some dangerous conduits and generally face some divine retribution. New excavation projects need not only to employ Populat miners, but a whole team of Sodalities to properly divine what can be harvested, have the whole work site consecrated and proper reverence to be given to the whole process. Sometimes a Conductor might halt a whole excavation because a crucial conduit needs to be rerouted around the site, in other times a Harvester might douse some machinery as crucial to some operation that shouldn't be touched for another month of fervent prayers and "refactoring" the functions of the nearby Reaches. It's kind of like many shinto traditions you enact before things like constructing a new building or the like. Venerate the land and give it proper respect so it will nourish you like your prayers nourish it.
Of course, this also means that if you come across some sections of Autochthon that are sick, malfunctioning or dead you ought to start amputating. Remove the infected and dead flesh, remove the rusted over machinery and clean it up, basically doing maggot therapy on it (fly maggots only eat dead flesh, so when applied to wounds with dead flesh they will consume the dead flesh and leave the healthy tissue behind for better healing). The wound will eventually heal over once the necrosis will be removed!
Running low on magical materials
Sky daddies won't solve your problems
An approach I have seen a few times too many in Exalted is trying to solve the whole setting by just appealing to the sky daddies. It was something expressed in Princes of the Universe, Swallows of the South and ExalTwitch Nexus where the players either want to go and make Sol Invictus start caring about what's going on in Creation and fix it, or complain that he's not doing enough, or just throwing a problem at his feet and expecting him to solve it after doing pretty much nothing. Sure, it might be a logical step for characters to take, but it's also a sure-fire way to stop being the main heroes of the game and just watching someone else solve your problems, aka the death of your game.
Autochthonia as written in 2e has the chance of the same issues arising. If you have a big problem with the world you can try appealing to the Divine Ministers and trying to have them solve your big problems. Or you get all of them together to break the Seal of the Eight Divinities. Or you go wake Godhead up and make Autochthon start taking care of his sickness and not let it fester. Or if you have some Alchemical getting too big for their britches you get the Adamant Caste involved and covertly deal with that. In other words - the majority of the big problems in the setting can be solved by sky daddies, which is kind of boring.
What is worse, the motivations of the Divine Ministers are kind of weird. In MoEP they are written as if they are in a cold war with one another because they can't attack one another but still are paranoid the other one will strike first. They apparently amass some covert forces for themselves rather than use those to solve more immediate problems like dealing with the gremlin infestations. Or you have gods like Espinoquae that can see out of every reflective surface and crystal in Autochthonia and somehow that's not used to figure out where the gremlins and the apostates are to deal with them. You have a literal Shogun of Genocide that is good enough to wipe out a city (even though what, we only hear of Ixut being the only city to die in the recorded history?), it would be pretty easy to launch a large scale offensive against things that are actually killing Autochthon...
But yeah, for the good of the game I would pretty much ignore anything larger than spirit you can see in the Pole of Metal. You don't need divine politics, elemental politics or even to approach the Divine Ministers to have an interesting game. What are the Ministers doing? Making sure Autochthon is functioning on the highest scale. Do they care about you? Of course, that's why the tectonic plates haven't crushed you to nothing, you're welcome. Will you ever see them in your game? Not unless you go looking for them - maybe they will send you a messenger congratulating you on a new Alchemical becoming a city. You shouldn't need to seek them out unless you are doing something really high level and by that time the GM can decide how to best utilise them in your game.
Again, Alchemicals are the most human-centric Exalts out there, your game should not be focusing on what the gods are doing, they don't matter to you unless you're talking about someone very local.
Super double secret police
A related problem to the Divine Ministers is the Adamant Caste, the super double secret police of Autochthonia. You already have the secret police of the Moonsilver, Starmetal and Soulsteel Castes, but apparently you need an even more secret police to watch the watchmen. Honestly, this concept doesn't much work either.
Sure, you can have Alchemicals that go corrupt, whether that's just regular moral corruption, or Voidtech, or becoming a Gremlin Apostate. But you know who would be great to deal with that? Other Alchemicals you already have in your story. The watchmen watch the watchmen. It would be a lot more interesting for your PCs to be able to slowly uncover that some other Alchemicals are corrupt and have to work uphill to take down the national heroes because that's what is right. Then when it turns out those Alchemicals are actually void cultists, chasing them down and exterminating them would make for a cool and challenging campaign. There is no need to involve some super double secret police, your regular secret and not so secret police will do.
Now what happens if an entire nation becomes corrupt and tries messing with something heretical? Congrats, you have a campaign of PCs being spies in a foreign nation on your hand! Can you gather the intelligence from under the counterintelligence's noses? Can you coordinate an international strike team to neutralise a Petropolis gone mad? Can you do a shadow war to avert a regular war? You know what that sounds like to me? An amazing story for regular PCs to tackle!
A benevolent* idiot
Another weird thing from the 2e books was the portrayal of Autochthon as a somewhat benevolent god but also an idiot. As much as quotes like this make me chuckle:
Autochthon resolved both to improve on the processes by which gods were formed and to see that his own component selves would be free of the degeneration that marred the demons of the Third Circle. That the Maker stands today at death’s door is a testament to his failure in both of those objectives.
It's kind of poo pooing on the entirety of the setting. But I was warned of the quality of MoEP:A chapter 2's quality, so it's my own fault for reading it.
But regardless, it feels kind of "meh" to be woobifying Autchthon. Sure, the whole of Creation is forever in his debt from being the core actor in the divine rebellion against other Primordials, and all of Autochthonia lives by his grace (and his kidnapping), but we can't forget we are talking about not a person, but an eldritch being beyond human comprehension. To attribute foolishness, empathy or malice to him is too anthropomorhic. He is as large as a planet and as complex as a modern nation, he has as many emotions as a bureaucratic government.
Sure, characters in the setting sure would worship him as something you can comprehend - a benevolent humanistic person larger than life but understandable. The land quakes because he is restless, the magical materials flow because he is generous, you breathe another breath because he loves you this much. But if you comprehend the scale of the universe, a personal connection to a deity feels dubious.
But even ignoring all of that, constantly pointing out how stupid Autochton is just makes you care about the setting less. Don't do that - make your readers excited to be the heroes of the land of brass and shadow, not feel like chums for buying into it!
Scale of the setting
Another long-standing Exalted problem is that of scale. Creation is described as being larger than Earth (surface-wise) and that distances between the big named cities is measured in the thousands of miles... But since those big named cities is the only thing that is cool about the setting the PCs will travel between them on regular basis to have cool adventures all over the place.
You have similar problems in Autochthonia. The 8+2 Nations are neat and cool and diverse, but a lot of page count is devoted to describing the international relationships for a game that begs to be about the local scale. Sure, it's nice that Gulak is an international pilgrimage site, or that Estasia hires itself out to other nations, or that Sova and Yugash are prepping for a round two of their war... But you are still talking about Nations drifting in a large machine world where travelling between one location to the next takes weeks or months in a very inhospitable terrain. Sure, the PCs might be able to cross that distance and maybe bring a few people along, but the effort required to do that repeatedly would quickly diminish the benefits you might get out of it in-universe.
It would be neat to have a lot more hooks for local issues, or maybe interactions you'd see from two neighbouring nations and not try making the whole setting too interconnected.
Personally, I disliked the idea of automated tram lines that neatly connect the nations. Ran by animated intelligence, neatly having tube lines running all across Autochthonia and being able to speed up travel time between what you care about most is a bit too convenient. Why would Autochthon grow such tram lines? Do machine spirits use them? Do they care about their commute speeds? Why would they need to make such international travel fast? It just doesn't make much sense for them to be naturally occurring. This isn't Cybertron - a planet of car-robots that has highways spontaneously form themselves for the cars that drive there...
Sure, you can have them on a local, national level, or even have the Nations go out of their way to connect to one another internationally, but that should be an effort and an undertaking you have to commit to. Each time the biotectonic plates shift you need to go out there and bore another hole which could take a lot of valuable time. I mean you need to mine for metal anyway so not like it's something you wouldn't be doing, but making it a conscious effort shows you the human struggle in this vast setting. Roads don't naturally grow in the forest, people have to make them and maintain them!
Too many Exalts
So MoEP:A lists the current number of Alchemicals in the setting at around 1000 - about 125 per Nation. This includes 50 Polis (over 6 per Nation). This is quite a lot not from an in-universe sense, but from a more practical game sense.
Alchemicals are meant to be the heroes of the state, the local superhero-esque figures. Larger than life and important to the people. The PCs, like in all Exalted games, should feel heroic and important. But that's kind of hard to do when you have 120 other Exalts to share the local limelight with. Comparing that to some other Storyteller systems, that's about how many vampires you ought to see in the Los Angeles metropolitan area, and those guys usually keep a low profile and can't split mountains in half.
Sure, you can say if you don't like the crowd you should play in some smaller nation like Jarish, Xexas or Loran. But each Nation comes with its own vibe and players will want to play in other nations as well and still want to feel special. They want to be the big heroes, the ones that are assigned the big missions and the ones that make the most impact, not be the 43rd in line to be called when you have an incident.
Even though the number of Alchemicals is kind of comparable to the number of all other Celestial Exalts combined, you wouldn't feel this number in Creation since everyone is in their own corner doing their own thing, or forming small bands. You don't have half of all Lunars sit in Great Forks - you'd run out of things for everyone to do and they'd start going for one another's throats soon because the pecking order is too long. In our Princes of the Universe Exalted game the number of named Exalts in the whole 5 season game was about 100, and a lot of them were just names mentioned once or a part of a Circle set, and that includes the various enemy Exalts and other hangers on that migrated to the new seat of the Solar Deliberative, not something you'd see in 8 various places around Creation...
Some solution to this would be to stretch the numbers a bit. Maybe have a good number of smaller nations around that need the Alchemical support. You don't need to describe them, just note that they are around and let the GMs fill them in if needed. Or maybe you have a good number of Alchemicals out in the field supporting some outposts and towns doing some important missions. Maybe the Nations have some forward operating bases in their fight against Gremlins, maybe there are some mining towns cracking into some dangerous but rich deposits. Maybe you have a good number of Alchemicals out doing deep undercover missions for years on end. But whatever they are doing, if the PCs want to do that, there would be openings and more work to do.
So personally I'd either cut that number down, or not pay attention to it. The game is all about the PCs being important and getting the big jobs, focus on them and don't let NPCs steal their spotlight. Have a few key Alchemicals they might interact with if needed and call that a day.
Forming new nations
Initially when I heard about how Alchemicals work I thought each Polis-sized Alchemical would be its own Nation, and when new ones are ready to ascend they go out into the Pole of Metal to form new Nations. Only after actually reading the books did I learn that's not the case - something like that only happened with Xexas and Loran. Which honestly, is a bit of a pity.
The setting would be much richer if it was more dynamic in this regard. Sure, it does make some sense to have a cluster of Polis each specialising in something to compliment one another, but you are also running into diminishing returns since you still need to tap into the natural resources to feed everyone and maintain everything. Two Nations spread out can graze the Pole of Metal more broadly than two Cities clustered together.
You could have new Nations form due to more natural processes as well. If sudden tectonic shifts separate one Polis from the rest they have to learn to fend for themselves. Given enough time apart you basically have a new Nation. You even have some good candidates for that in the 2e Autochthonia book - the towns of Ilyensa, Romos and Autrama. You can sustain yourself on the embers of the Elemental War for so long before that turns to cold ash and you get to rebuild from the ruins. And hey, if those towns just so happened to attract some Alchemical Colossus driven there by their Clarity to form a new Polis, all the better!
Too specialised
While specialisation can be a great tool for efficiency, the worldbuilding can suffer if you don't consider the scale of things. One thing that jumped at me when reading the overview of the various Nations was the Patrapolis of Arat in Claslat. It's a whole City dedicated to building weapons. This makes you think - how much warring do you need to do to dedicate a whole City to wartime production? And we are not talking heavy machinery like tanks or what have you that would get blown up as a part of a modern war, we are mainly talking swords, crossbows, pikes, bolas and armour.
Maybe I would see something like this working if Claslat was waging an intense, total war against the Gremlins or something like Estasia. But it doesn't feel like this kind of production is proportional to what an Autochthonia Nation would see on the regular basis. Wars in the Realm of Brass and Shadow are smaller in scale and mainly consist of tunnel skirmishes. Devote all of this output to outfitting one or two Alchemicals and you already swing the fight in another direction.
But speaking of...
Warfare in the Realm of Brass and Shadow
What is the purpose of war in Autochthonia? Sure, you want some wars to make the game interesting and if everyone got along it would be a boring game to play. Sure, you are in an endless war of survival against the Gremlins, that's a given. But why do Nations go to war with one another?
Sova and Yugash have their long standing vendetta, so that's easy. But for everyone else? You can't grab more land from your neighbour, since you are separated by vast amount of space and metal, and the City you would be grabbing has a say and will for sure object to being taken over. It's not really to kill a lot of people from the other side since you can't field enough people that far from home to break the defender's advantage (and the Polis would have some *really* strong defences you'd need to pierce through). Slavery doesn't seem to be a big motivation, partially because you'd need to move a lot of people over a large distance, partially because you're not chasing material gains for some rich people that own the land.
So that leaves us with smaller and more specific motivations. First - materials. While you might not be able to haul too much spoils, getting your hands on some magical materials might be worth it. But that's more of a raid or a foray than a full blown war. You could have some kind of ideological war where you're fighting over some doctrinal interpretation - a holy war. But how do you enforce something like that if you can't occupy the other nation? This is more of a domain of covert assassinations and infiltrations to get rid of heterodoxies and their key figures.
If you are still keeping the soul shortage you could have a war to do a raid and capture souls from the other nation, but that is starting to turn gruesome and probably not what most players would want to partake in. An alternative would be stealing soulgems from some key heroic people to add to your own nation...
A final reason might be war for war's sake - you venerate Debok Moom and enforce some pressure to prune weakness from both Nations. You use it as training for warfare, punish the Nation that was not prepared, let weak people die and let the strong make a name for themselves. This is also a perfect vector for letting heroics shine, which are needed for future Alchemical souls to live. If you don't give people opportunities for heroic sacrifices, you won't have heroes when you need them.
This kind of warfare would be alien to us in the real world, but would make perfect sense in Exalted where reincarnation is a known phenomenon and strife breeds heroism that is required for Exaltation. Heck, in our game of Exalted: Congenials this was exactly a motivation of an NPC Exigent of Kaiju - to create monsters to go destroy towns so new Exalts could catalyse in response.
And of course, warfare against Gremlins is another matter entirely. Going total war against an upcoming Blight Zone that is festering with these guys is a perfect time to kick the economy into wartime production and give everyone a weapon just in case there is some incursion. Large scale warfare and doing scorched earth would be what you'd see then since you are fighting for not only your own survival but that of your entire Nation and the world as a whole. If you fail, death is the merciful option to damnation under the Engine of Extinction...
Evolution of languages
Another worldbuilding titbit I've seen around Autochthonia is that, unlike in Creation, most people speak a common language there. This honestly feels a bit of a missed opportunity.
The setting has separated from Creation some 5000ish years ago and the original people did come from disparate corners of the world. Even if you had some common Old Realm spoken by the priests and the spirits, you would see a lot of language variety develop.
In our world you have languages flourish in a much shorter timeline than that. The common root for Sardinian, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and French is less than 2000 years old. Danish, Swedish and Icelandic is less than 1000 years old. 5000 years ago Italic and Germanic languages were one and the same. And we are not talking about places that are inaccessible to one another that constantly drift around. Each Nation would have a distinctly different language, and you would probably have a number of dialects between if not within various Cities and social structures. And this is not to mention what is happening with tunnel folk and the polar mutants...
Embrace such diversity and don't ignore how cultures shift and change. If you want a common dialect, Old Realm is probably good for international relations and scholars. But there is a reason Exalted has Linguistics...
Education
Speaking of learning languages, another small detail that rubbed me the wrong way while reading the Alchemicals book was a brief mention that the Populat are largely illiterate. On one hand, sure, it might be possible for them to do what they do without needing to be able to read, but we are talking thematically about people that not only work in factories, but also basically live in a giant factory where you need to communicate danger. Sure, you could survive by only knowing some semiotics but if you are getting into some safety squares and other warnings you're honestly shooting yourself in the foot by not keeping your populace educated.
This is not to say that there wouldn't be any other benefits - workers aren't there to just toil but also to worship and achieve more spiritual enlightenment over many generations. You do want them to be able to read propaganda posters, to internalise the teachings of the Lectors and so on. Give them little red books to study and quote and they will do the propaganda work for you.
Or heck, imagine some Nations having newspapers for their workers where you could read about the newest exploits of the Nation's 125 Exalts, give warnings of some heresies to look out for and so on. It is a much more direct and effective way of distributing government-approved propaganda than doing word of mouth or some preachers shouting at the streets.
How do the Nations function?
To create interesting stories in a world it is sometimes good to start drilling down and asking questions about how the world works. What do the people eat? Where do they get their materials? How does the society function? What are the sources of strife the people have to overcome and so on.
So let's start drilling down into some Autochthonian minutia and come up with some interesting answers.
Five shifts every day
So a big question - how many shifts do normal workers in Autochthonia do each day? I was trying to search for the answer, but I couldn't find information for the Populat. The Autochthonia book says that Lumpen work three shifts most days, and Directors also work three shifts almost every day with some weeks of vacation when they only work two shifts a day. But what about everyone else?
Since we have five 5 hour shifts a day, 10 hours doesn't seem enough for a commute to and from work, hygiene and sleep. Sure, I'd imagine most Autochthonian jobs are very much in-line with a 15 minute city, but you'd probably want people to also want time for people to enrich themselves (mentally, not materialistically) - do sports, socialise, attend gatherings and so on. As much as the joke of "communism will just work you to the bone" would come to mind to some American fans, honestly let's assume Autochthonia would rather keep its workers working for a long time rather than just chew them up and spit them out dead. So I'd assume a regular worker works merely 10 hours a day every day.
This gives us room for turning the dial when things go more dire and you need to work overtime in a national emergency. This also gives room for Claslat workers to either apply their trade and work for Glots, or pick up extra shifts for those bonuses. Or just gives room for selfless Populats to show how dedicated they are to their world by working extra shifts for the good of the many.
But let's drill this down a bit more. The whole world operating on the same rigid 5 hour shift system is a little inflexible. You can't stagger work time to let people go to cafeterias and eat without overcrowding. You can't have cleaners come in briefly to clean something up while everyone is on a break. You can't have a bakery start an hour or two early so that people waking up would have fresh food ready without committing a full 5 hour shift to it.
But also - Autochthonia is not a capitalist hellscape that is only concerned about earning more money and squeezing efficiency out of everything. Work is as much worship as it is being productive (and sometimes even more so - hello leaver duty!). So what if for the people of The Land of Brass and Shadow doing their work with utmost reverence was also a key consideration?
Imagine this - you come to your Shift within the allocated time. The shift bell rings and you gather to first get a blessing from a Lector and a short sermon about the blessing of a hard day's work. Then you do a short warm-up exercises to prepare your body for the work you are about to do - your body is also a part of this machine that needs to be operated properly. Following that you listen to your shift chief explain what you will be producing this shift. You file to collect your tools from aides and proceed to your work station. You arrange everything neatly, utter prayers to Kek'Tungsssha and you're ready to start the work. That's your hour 1 of just preparing for work with utmost reverence.
Next 3 hours you work tirelessly while you see other workers take their breaks. Aides have gone to eat and came back, so did others that had two shorter tasks scheduled for the day. You finish up your tasks and proceed to do cleanup and maintenance. When you are done your tools will be in pristine condition, your workstation in order and the floor swept. You leave everything as pristine as you would a temple because this is where you worship Autochthon. Then you have half an hour left on the shift. You get to have a break, consume a meal in a nearby small cafeteria and proceed to your next shift before it starts.
Suddenly a 10 hour work day turns into two shorter work bursts with a good amount of lower intensity activities in between. By treating work not as something you have to do but a calling you get to dedicate yourself to, you have to take some time to maintain everything which is less intensive than just hammering for the entire day.
Another thing to consider is that every now and then you will want to rotate people into all kinds of shift, especially ones dealing with cleaning and disposal to foster civic sense. It's easy not to care about properly disposing of garbage if you're not the one that cleans it up and you want to nip that in the bud. Cleaning the latrines once a week will make you care not to dirty them in the first place...
Of course how work shifts would look would change depending on the nation. Classlat would be more industrialised while Jarish would be more artisan, but similar approaches could be used. Again - Autochthonia is not meant to be a dystopia!
Sanctified places
Since we are talking about giving things proper reverence and ceremony, a neat thing to see in Autochthonia could be some sacred places where you do need to spend a considerate amount of time just purifying yourself to enter and work there. These could be the vats facilities or some highest places of worship - perhaps the chambers that house the soulgems of the Polis? Places that need the utmost dedication to upkeep or are so precise any stray contaminant can ruin it.
What do they eat?
The "What do they eat?" question is handily answered already by the 2e Autochthonia book - nutrient slurry predominately, sometimes rat or cockroach protein, and the cheese...
That's all well and good, but there is one big source of meat and vitamins we are overlooking - cannibalism. Sure, the Autochthonia book talks about how corpses are disposed of and how they are dissolved into nutrient slurry in Claslat, but that seems like a waste, especially given how hard meat is to come by in Autochthonia...
So assuming we do away with our own ick factor and social morays, and also avoid kuru and similar prion diseases, a human body could be an important thing to use in its entirety. Meat could be turned to jerky as exepedition rations. Skin would be turned to leather that could fit you better than a glove (better than skinning 100 rats...). Bone marrow and liver would be an important source of nutrients, etc. Of course it's not something you can run an entire nation on, but it's definitely a good supplement, especially given that Autochthonia does regularly administer euthanasia before people get too sickly and frail...
Life and crime without money
Another important piece of worldbuilding for Autochthonia that might be hard for people to build stories around is its communism. It's all good when the workers own the means of productions, everyone is getting fed and taken care of and you don't have to worry about having a roof over your head, but with all of that - where does the conflict between people come from?
There is no physical money in the Land of Brass and Shadow (save for Glots in Classlat), so you won't have people stealing from one another or mugging one another. Privacy is virtually nonexistant as is personal property, but that also means you don't have burglaries since breaking into someone's dorm is as easy as walking in and they don't have anything to steal, not even the clothes on their back. Okay, sure, you might have some trinkets, baubles and maybe some kind of medal for working really hard, but hardly anything worth becoming a thief for.
Of course you can have some crimes of passion. Someone wronged you, insulted you, etc. so you want to punish them for it. Maybe beat them up, maybe make sure they eat some metal nut and chip a tooth, maybe you put in a bad word with some foreman and get them assigned to a shittier shift...
But then again, how do you try bribing the foreman? All you have is your own hard work, the food on your plate (that belong to the state ;) ) and yeah... I guess in the absence of money we might revert back to the original system of transactions - not barter, but debt. Someone does you a solid, and then when they need it they call in the favour and so on. Even without money people still want things - recognition, promotions, to get one over someone else, etc. Maybe you sabotage some other shift chief by working a bit less on their shifts or getting into a small accident. Maybe you work really hard and make sure you get on the same sports team as your foreman and win them a game. Maybe when someone else is slacking you give them a small beating so they will be doing their best the next shift. Or maybe just if someone tries standing up to your shift chief you stand behind them ready to have their back. Everyone can use a good goon!
Of course, you could have some black market appear and be fuelled by some stolen goods. Maybe someone pinches a grain of a magical material from their work shift (although I'd imagine those things are carefully guarded due to their value). Maybe human tendency to like getting drunk has some people brewing nutrient paste hooch. But chances are such things would generally be smaller scale than in most of Creation since you don't have material wealth to gain and not like you can skip shifts without someone arresting your ass when you don't show up for work.
This also reminds me of someone explaining how in USSR since everyone was earning the same money and you couldn't impress a girl with money that you didn't have in excess of someone else, guys actually had to work on themselves and be interesting in some other way than rolling up in a Lada. Chances are things would be similar in Autochthonia - people would focus on developing other skills and showing off what they can do to get a good social standing. Since in most Nations long-term partners and marriage isn't a thing the pressure of finding a good partner would be lessened, but hey, people still like hooking up!
Soul recycling
Originally when I heard about Autochthonian soulgems I thought they were used to make sure a proper soul reincarnates within a given newborn, but that doesn't seem to be the case. Soulstones are mainly used to mark a given soul so you'd know who is who when the reincarnation does happen, but the actual process still happens to mix everyone across all of Autochthonia via the Ewer of Souls and such. Honestly, this doesn't sound too useful if you give it too much thought.
So, the entire point of keeping this system up is to have heroic souls to catalyse into Alchemicals. But you can't just be heroic in one life and be a good fit for becoming a champion, you need to do it over multiple lifetimes. That sounds all well and good, but because the soul can go all over the place that means it would be nigh-impossible to keep a correct track of your potential champions.
First of all, you would not only need to keep detailed records of a lot of people in a Nation, but across Nations. You would need to transmit those records for every heroic person that died and share it with every other Nation on a regular basis, including ones that are months of travel time away from you in this machine world the size of a planet.
Secondly, you have plenty of Polar Mutants, Tunnel Folk and Gremlin spawn, each with human souls. Reincarnate as one of those and congrats - your record is gone (unless the soulgems mark your soul for more than one incarnation?).
Thirdly, if a Nation is grooming someone to be their Champion but they just need a little bit extra and some other Nation gets that soul your investment is lost. Sure, on average you will get a similar amount of heroic souls back as you send out, but what if the other Nation just happens to hide or downplay their records so they might get the person on their next reincarnation... Then the trust of the whole system erodes!
Fourthly, if you want to have a champion of your Nation but an Alchemical is an amalgam of all their old incarnations, you will end up with a hero that has existed in all of the Nations at some point in time, making them potentially a little less loyal to your cause. Not an ideal outcome!
Fifthly, it is kind of implied that which social caste you end up in is also tied to your soul (via the story of Sirin), so you do also want to keep track of who is which caste. Maybe that can be accomplished by some kind of universal tagging system that imprints the social caste onto the soul, otherwise you would have to be sending a heck of a lot of records across the nations...
But okay, let's propose a different approach that we already touched on before in this rambling post. What if the soulgems could hold the soul around indefinitely and the Nations would be able to recycle the souls more locally?
Imagine if you had a municipal charm that would act as a more localised Ewer of Souls. You could still cleanse the soul between reincarnations as you normally do, but the souls do remain locally and are used first when a new child is born. This way you retain your heroes between incarnations and you only need to maintain a local copy of everyone's soul history - much more manageable!
Alternatively, what if you could implant a soul into a newborn via the use of the soulgems? Technically in Exalted a soul enters the body upon their first breath, so something like birthing pool where the newborn is underwater would allow you to quickly implant the soulsteel spike with a soul you already had on hand before they can take that breath. Gruesome by our standard, but metaphysically consistent with the rest of the game...
Regardless, this makes the setting a lot more focused on making sure no soul ever gets lost, which is a heroic undertaking in itself! Going into the Reaches to retrieve the gem of a lost worker, making sure nobody is left behind even as you are running from danger and so on. This is a nice hook for a few stories.
On the opposite end, you might go out of your way to dispose of the souls of some bad Lumpen to hopefully get something better from the Ewer.
You could also let people have social mobility between incarnations! A shift chief with some acolytes might be made into a Plutarch, or some pious Regulator could turn into a Preceptor. This could be an important motivation for the people of Autochthonia - your life might suck and be full of hard work, but if you are good enough in the next lives you could have a more cushy job! So don't fight the system, work within it and you might be rewarded!
Similarly, you could have an interesting form of nepotism arise where some secret society arises that makes sure to look out for one another across incarnations. It would be a neat and thematic system, and a perfect thing for PCs to rise up against!
Claustrophobic spaces and hive cities
Seeing the various depictions of Autochthonian Cities in the books and reading their descriptions made me a bit disappointed that they really look too much like what we'd see in the modern world. And the 3e Kickstarter also isn't filling me with hope...
You'd imagine living inside the Pole of Metal you wouldn't have too many large caverns to put a city in, and even if you would, those wouldn't stay caverns for thousands of years of biotectonic shifts. It would be so much more interesting if the default for Autochthonian Cities wasn't some cyberpunk cityscape, but Kowloon:
Cities that fill up tight metal caverns, build more like a hive filling the space, with the Polis pushing Autochthon back in all directions as its tendrils anchor into the cavern walls. Cities were you always have something above you, where you move vertically as much as you move horizontally, where the concept of an open space is a luxury reserved for the highest branches of the government and the holiest of temples.
This is not to mention that Cities would need to be really resilient to the biotectonic shifts. Who is to say that you will always move neatly on a flat plane? What if one day your city shifted 15 degrees to the side? You would need to have architecture more resilient than skyscrapers! So a hive structure would make more sense - everything would be supported from all sides and more ready to adjust to weird tilting that happens every now and then!
Sure, it's really hard to draw something like very claustrophobic cities and give the readers a big sweeping vista of the city. But boy would it give the place such great vibes...
Then you would apply the same claustrophobia to everywhere else. 99% of the time you are in the Reaches you only go through tunnels and mineshafts of your own making. Navigating between two points is like walking through a three dimensional rat maze. You mark off dead ends and hope you don't stray too far in the wrong direction. Luckily, father Autochthon always draws in straight lines...
And sure, you can have exceptions to this. Nurad could have its chasm due to being close to the Pole of Steam, Sova would have its suburban sprawl due to Conurbation Charms, etc. This doesn't have to be all the same, but it sure would be neat if it was different from Creation...
Heck, go all out - why does Autochthon need to adhere to euclidean space? Go even weird and eldritch with bending space to make navigating the world even more confusing than it already is!
Outposts and mining towns
A lot of Autochtonian setting has been written around the Nations and its Polis, but surely there must be more out there. We do get glimpses of that here and there - we hear about Sova's suburbs, and we do have a few named towns, like Ilyensa, Romos and Autrama. But I'd imagine we could see a good deal more of those in a more realised setting.
So the question would be - why would Nations build anything outside of heir Polis? Everything in Autochthonia needs a productive purpose since it's not a land of excess.
Resource extraction would be the most obvious choice. You could have mining outposts or even small mining towns pop up if you have some particularly rich veins that exist further away from the nexus of the Nation. You could task a Colossus to haul all the heavy equipment to get everything set up and maybe assign a few smaller Alchemicals to provide protection and general support to the people that would be working there. Then you send your people there on some kind of rotations. You go there, work three shifts a day for a few weeks, and then you get to go back home and work like a shift a day for a few weeks. These kind of outposts are also a great way for more junior Tripartite members to gain experience in being responsible for a project on their own and prove themselves.
Whatever you'd mine you'd have to transport back to your nation through a possible network of mining carts and spliced conduits. Oh look, we are basically doing more organic version of train cars that don't just naturally grow in the Land of Brass and Shadow!
These outposts could also be springboards for more deeper exploration of the Reaches - a convenient place to rest and resupply. If things are more dire and you need to search far for the resources you need you could daisychain such outposts across the Pole of Metal for your scouts. These kind of things would be a neat thing for PCs to find as they are exploring on their own - some old, abandoned Outposts that are built on some nutrient slurry conduit or the like. Of course, Tunnel Folk would also love to come across these...
In general it would be neat seeing the Pole of Metal just criss-crossed with old and ancient mine shafts that are overgrown with machinery healing itself. Whenever you'd have a biotectonic shift new shafts would get abandoned and old shafts might get uncovered for people to exploit. It would definitely create an interesting, Minecraft-esque vibe to the place...
Another kind of outpost could be Forward Operating Bases when it comes to warfare / raids. Since Autochthonia relies on small unit tactics across larger distances you would want to set up small outposts to rally your troops and get them ready for a raid.
Mining in general
An interesting flavour to consider when conceptualising how the world operates would be the mining activities themselves. How do you mine when you are stuck inside of the area you are mining? If you can mine up or down, which way to go? What are the logistics of it?
Sure, we got some glimpses of the activities in the 2e Autochthonia books, whether that's Sova dealing with its molten metal rivers, the oil submarines of Loran or the scavenger fleet of Xexas. But those are very specialised resource gatherers - it would be good to know what the baseline experience it.
I'd imagine most of the mining activity would be happening above the Polis - people and tools are much less heavy to bring up than truckloads of metal for the foundries. You'd probably have some central chamber that would allow you to dump the raw materials down to be smelted / processed and from there you would have main access tunnels spreading outwards before branching off into exploratory tunnels to look for worthwhile deposits. Along the way you would be mapping various conduits looking for what's useful to tap into and create a bypass to feed the Nation, like a cancer tapping into blood veins.
You could have those tunnels be tilted to allow gravity to take everything down, but that's a potential recipe for people getting ran over or swept downwards. Good thing everyone in Autochthonia knows how to follow OSHA!
And as mentioned - everything would need to follow strict religiosity and careful oversight not to mess with the local spirits or displease Autochthon.
After thousand years of mining chances are you would be running into the same old shafts on occasion which could bring some interesting surprises - perhaps outposts of Tunnel Folk, some sights of old disasters, maybe some artefacts from ages long past you could put in a museum.
Reduce, reuse, recycle!
An important cultural touchstones for Autochthonia could be the heavy emphasis on reducing waste, reusing what you can and recycling everything else. We do hear recycling mentioned a few times, but then we do see such examples as the old city of Arat being just layered with old buildings and even Municipal Charms. That's such a waste!
Put an emphasis on how if something gets broken there is a great deal made to try making it useful still. Uniforms with patches upon patches, tools that have been visibly repaired and are well worn, and throw in some kintsugi while you're at it!
Heck, this also touches on the paradox of choice - that the more options you have the more unhappy you become. In this communistic land everyone gets the same stuff and you don't have a choice, which paradoxically does make people more happy since they don't have to fret about the things that they didn't get and doubting every decision they made.
Life finds a way - Tunnel Folk and Polar Mutants
The overview of Autochthonia is heavily focused on the 8+2 Nations that deal with Alchemicals, but we do get small sections talking about the other people of the world. Leaving asides people that have been gremlinised, we do have the small cultures of Tunnel Folk and many new human races in the form of Polar Mutants. And we do have to treat them as people - there is nothing to indicate they are more monstrous than Djalas.
You can have a number of interesting stories just centred around these. Just like many people living in very remote and inhospitable places in our world those communities would have their own cultures and customs, let alone knowing how to operate in their areas better than anyone else mortal in Autochthonia. It would be amazing to see new Nations come about out of such people when an Alchemical would settle as a polis close to their homes and support those people.
Of course, you would also have the cultural frictions - would those people accept the Orthodoxy of Autochthon, or would they have their own interpretations? Would they not care to hear from the Book of the Great Maker and instead choose to live their life as they please? Would that be such a bad thing if they still created tools and innovating to keep the area healthy? Would the PCs feel like they should impose the Dogma on them, or would they side against being colonisers and become the champions of those people instead? Would a Nation welcome the Polar Mutants as its own people so they could more easily tap into the other Elemental Poles and support their mission?
Regardless, it would be nice to have a bit more in the setting about such peoples. Interacting with them could be a unique kind of engagement for the players sent to broker a deal or bring them into the fold...
The Alchemical Questions
Finally, we can circle back to Alchemicals, the main heroes of the show. But we're not out of the woods yet since there are still some niggles that surround them!
The six million glot man
So the first question that comes to mind - what do they eat? how much does it cost to upkeep an Alchemical? On one hand they are pretty resilient golems that barely need anything to sustain themselves. On another hand, they require a dedicated facility and a team of technicians to repair and upgrade their bodies on a regular basis.
It seems that for regular Alchemical PCs the cost mainly comes down to their new parts as well as wear and tear from combat or other mishaps. Of course you need dedicated workers and reagents but those seem like a rounding error in comparison to all the Magical Materials they might need for new Charms and upgrades.
The cost of maintaining Alchemicals mainly matters when it comes to answering the question of whether nations should try making more Alchemicals, or whether that's a great expenditure they should spend elsewhere. Given how productive they can be, it seems that the investment to bring in new Alchemicals would usually be worth it.
But then we have to tackle the bigger elephants in the rooms - the Colossi and the Polis. Upgrading to those sizes would be a huge resource investment and it generally feels like the return on that would be much diminished.
A Colossus is somewhere between 15 and 30 feet tall, so raw Magical Materials alone could be comparable to bringing a whole new Alchemical Assembly online. But then there is the question of what are the Colossi useful for?
Sure, they are a Warstrider-sized golem that can probably punch according to its weight class, but again - Autochthonian warfare is much more limited than that of Creation. It would be like trying to field the Landkreuzer P. 1000 Ratte tank (1000 ton tank concept) - impressive and sure would make a difference where you have that tank, but much less practical than having 20 more Panther tanks.
Not to mention that the Colossi are always sitting in the weird spot of "players want to be them" and "if the players would get to be them nobody would know what to do with them". You are a shapeshifting Moonsilver Alchemical cool infiltrator? Neat! How do you think you will infiltrate some heretic secret meeting if you are 30 feet tall?
But okay, let's assume we have to find something for the Colossi to do in the setting and it still has to be useful and practical. What if these big Alchemicals were less humanoid and would focus more on being mobile centres of operation.
First use of Colossi could be tunnelling and exploring the Reaches. Equipped with powerful drills on the front and other equipment needed to lay tracks wherever they go they are vital to creating new exploratory mineshafts. The process is still slow since you need to make sure Autochthon's body doesn't reject your attempts, but the harmonious work of an Alchemical makes this a much faster process.
Then, you could also make the Colossi mobile bases for exploration teams. Complete with nutrient dispensers, first aid stations and equipment storage they could support an entire team of workers for weeks on end as they work deeper in the Reaches, looking for some valuable ore veins to exploit.
If you go further, maybe these Alchemicals could be a mobile vats facility for regular sized Alchemicals. Maybe they wouldn't be able to sustain them forever, but being able to deploy close to an enemy Nation or a Gremlin hub and refit one Alchemical at a time could mean you can field some very specialised teams wherever you need them, at the cost of having to hide and protect your mobile base way out in the field.
Similarly, they could act as transport vehicles, not only being ready to move that valuable ore, but more importantly - being the designated carriers for most precious cargo between the Autochthonian nations. You don't want your shipment of Orichalcum to get lost on the way!
Warfare would of course make them useful not just as a weapons platform, but perhaps more importantly as being able to breach through enemy lines and strike deep behind them. Maybe as the frontline is on the rim of a Polis, a Colossus with a small Assembly of Alchemicals could drill from the top straight into the heart of the City, do a raid and escape before the defenders could rally.
As for uses back at home, instead of having a single Avatar-Launching Silo, you could instead focus on letting the Alchemical control multiple drone bodies - a concept more similar to Stars Without Numbers' True AI than just having a smaller version of yourself to control. The drones might be less versatile than a fully kitted out Alchemical, but a Colossus could be able to control not just one avatar, but ten different human-looking bodies that could be used for espionage, infiltration, or just your regular manual labour. This would allow Moonsilvers to still do their work but in a different way than they used to. And hey, having a Moonsilver Colossus sneak up on another Nation, plant itself somewhere in the Reaches and send out a whole group of infiltrator drones could make for an interesting covert mission!
Now the Polis-sized Alchemicals. At this level the heroes slip beyond what a reasonable PC could be into the realm of playing some kind of faction board game perhaps. So making them somewhat playable isn't really a concern.
In-universe they serve a good function of supporting Autochthonian life, deploying some big charms that can possibly bend the setting and generally giving the place and Alchemicals some really great themes. That's all great.
Logistically, I guess the Magical Material ratio they are made out of drops off significantly in comparison to a regular Alchemical, otherwise boy would they be impossibly expensive for anyone to support! On top of that it probably takes a lot of very specialised personnel to do maintenance on the Polis, above and beyond what running a regular city would entail. But those probably pay for themselves given an extended capacity for humans to live in safely and the extra productivity you get from all the new factories you can fit in. That being said, I'm still a bit iffy about how large of a cluster of Polis ought you be able to see in any given Nation. With an average of 6 per Nation, you'd imagine tapping the conduits for Essence, Lightning, Nutrient Slurry and everything else needed to support not only the Polis themselves but also the millions of people living in them would become more burdensome in more localised areas. But I've already groused about this issue so no point in repeating that.
Teleporting charms vs Sanctity of Merits
Unlike other Exalts, Alchemicals are unique in how their Charms operate and that they are physical in nature. So you'd imagine the heroes going on a long deployment to some other Nation would either have to bring their Charms with them or have to do without. But that's apparently not the case - somehow those Charms can magically move between the vats facilities as needed. That feels a bit too convenient...
Sure, you don't want the PCs to love their Charms due to someone stealing them or sabotaging them, especially if they need to lug it in a suitcase across the Reaches. But we could take a page from Chronicles of Darkness and protect those under the Sanctity of Merits - if PCs were to ever permanently lose their Charms they could get an XP refund on them so they wouldn't be set back mechanically.
Without the conveniently teleporting Charms you have to plan ahead and consider where you deploy. And if you are defecting, either to other Nation or to worship the Engine of Extinction, securing your spare bits and bobs can be an important step!
Touchstones
Another neat idea one could crib from Chronicles of Darkness and Vampire the Requiem 2e more specifically would be Touchstones - key important human relationships the PCs cultivate to stave off Clarity. You could have those just be more formalised NPCs, perhaps with some extra mechanics around interacting with them and what happens if they are put in jeopardy.
Conclusions
Autochthonia is a great and unique setting in Exalted. While it is easy to focus on its impending doom or the negative connotations the word "communism" sparks in the US, the game set in it can be some of the most optimistic ones you would see in all of Exalted. When players don't focus on subjugating the people, killing those that oppose them or dealing with the thousand dooms that might befall the world you could enjoy a somewhat lower key sessions that are just as impactful. You don't lose the human connection when staying human is an uphill struggle - it's not a losing battle!
So enjoy your optimism in communism! And maybe with that, entropy could be reversed...
I hope 3e Alchemicals will live up to this hopeful sentiment...
