Exalted Interest

[Japan]

I'm looking to start up a web based Exalted RP in the near future. I'm open to suggestion on the form, whether it be chat based or forum based or what have you. I'm also open to suggestions on what sort of campaign the players would like to run and the general direction of the story.

I'd like to use this thread to gauge any interest and to discuss ideas. It will be second edition based because those are the books I have access to at the moment. I'm also a fan of the more balanced systems in second edition.

You will have to have some way to obtain the pertinent information for playing and creating a character of course.

I'm kind of thinking about running it in a modern setting. This would present a few challenges but mechanically I could probably borrow a fair bit from the world of darkness rules and sort of incorporate those into Exalted. Here's a little free form writing on that idea.

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We sit atop four some odd billion years of progress, strife and upheaval. We are the lords of creation for lack of a better alternative. We are humanity, a teeming mass of squandered brilliance and brutal internecine conflicts awash in the thinnest veneer of civility. We are the dreamers who know the dream to be a lie, and yet refuse to wake up.

What if science, religion and history were a mere fabrication though? What if the underpinnings of our world were as flimsy as you always supposed? What if this grand expanse of possibility were not set in motion by the cold practicality of physics?

What if there were gods?

A pleasant enough fiction for most, but the gods I speak of have no bibles, no traditions passed down through the ages. For once, in the long epochs of time before time, these gods were many and varied, and even they feared tread where mortal man had ascended. These gods, in their desperation to be free of even greater things, sought man for the very things which made him beneath the notice of superior beings. They sought man for his weakness and made him mighty. They sought man for his fear and gave him power such that he never need know fear again. They sought man for his mortality and gave unto him that which could unmake the immortal.

Few were chosen by these traitorous gods, but those few proved sufficient to the task of usurping the world from the primordial god beasts who had wrought it from the pliable fabric of eternal chaos. A handful of these exalted champions brought low the makers of their world and elevated humanity from the depths of servitude and misery into the heights of mortal providence. Their reign was long and magnificent, but their own power and trans-human excess paved the way for successive usurpations and, in time, they too fell to the blades of their lessers.

Had it not been for a singular entity then perhaps the world would have continued on forever in these cycles of betrayal and usurpation with mere men cowering in the darkness beneath the baleful glory of things divine and uncaring. The age of titans did end however, brought low by a man made something more who broke free from the chains of destiny. A man who became a titan, a titan who became a world, a world which reflected a vision of itself without the need for divinity. This world would become the egg of a new universe and, in the fullness of time, would supplant the imperfect realization of the defeated primordials with its own coldly calculated systems and logic.

The birth spasms of a new cosmos are still felt today. The cleverest men peel back the layers of time to reveal sublime secrets of creation, all startlingly absent the apparent hand of the divine. We peer into the abyss and see nothing but endless blackness, the few points of light scattered throughout constituting only balls of superheated gas.

We are wrong. The world is a masterwork of primordial genius, its apparent self sufficiency the greatest con ever pulled. For millenia we have toiled in the belief that we create our own gods, that what powers we give to the divine are far removed and esoteric. We have lived in the relative peace of constant warfare, mortal brutality and the slow turning of human ages. We have not known the terror of true gods.

We have not known the power.

Even the power of a newly birthed titan has its limits however. When the last primordial committed its suicide-birth it could only forestall the reemergence of the immortal exaltations it had banished; each one an incandescent furnace of imperishable power, each one ancient beyond the reckoning of our stars. These deific fates have traveled through the ages in search of mortal men and women to empower. They have wrestled against the tides at the shore of the breaking of the world, and finally they have found purchase in the souls of heroes.

The passage of a million million years has left these shards of divinity with precious little potency. They exist now as the faintest potential for the deeds of legend. An embattled soldier in some far flung corner of the world finds himself suddenly able to wade through a storm of enemy bullets unscathed. A youth facing the horror of a school shooting is all at once surmounted by a golden corona of light as he convinces the assailants to lay down their arms and surrender. A scientist comes to the startling and complex conclusion his research has struggled with for a decade. For the past few years extraordinary people have suddenly become something more, quietly at first, a slow enough trickle that the accounts could be written off as exaggeration or pure fiction. Soon the reality will cement itself, as the divine quintessence within the souls of these heroes becomes fully aware and awakens these chosen few to their true destinies, as saviors of men.

As true lords of creation.