Review: Exalted, Second Edition

Imagine for a moment that you're in the frigid north, the coniferous forest drear with the pallor of winter. In a clearing, you see a circle of fire. Inside that circle of fire a one-eyed sorceress glowing like the noontide sun and wielding a golden seven-section staff fights a losing battle against an imposing man in heavy armor wielding a massive sword forged of jade. Then, looking beyond them, you find two massive armies clashing in all-out pitched battle, blade to blade. On the left are the forces of humanity, the military might of a small frozen kingdom, and on the right are the terrible and beautiful armies of the Fair Folk, resplendent in armor of gossamer spidersilk, some mounted on shrieking birds, others on griffins screaming as they swoop through the air, and others still shepherding six fierce, bellowing dragons with jeweled scales.

Then the ground erupts beneath the faerie army as a twenty-foot clockwork suit of power armor piloted by a demigod martial artist bursts from an age-old hidden chamber below, uproots a tree to use as a club, and attacks the dragons single-handedly.

Sound insane? Sound awesome? Sound both? That was a selection from the climax of the only Exalted campaign I've ever played in, and it was insane over-the-top magical kung-fu fun. So when I went to read Exalted, Second Edition, there was a lot of good will for it to draw upon. Happily, it didn't disappoint.

For the uninitiated, Exalted is a game in which players take on the role of Exalts--the chosen of the gods patterned after great heroes of old like Heracles, Perseus, and Gilgamesh--and go forth to save Creation and bring the awesome. Bringing the awesome comes easily to Exalts, and is even mechanically supported by the game. It's the part about saving Creation that's going to be tricky.

The world of Exalted, or Creation as it's known, is beset on all sides by terrible foes. You have the Fair Folk, who are fairies and elves rendered old-school style as dream-devouring glamorous terrors that hail from the unshaped Wyld outside of Creation. Then you have the various fallen Primordials, the original shapers of Creation usurped by lesser gods with the help of the original Exalts, who are divided among the Neverborn, those Primordials killed and eternally imprisoned in the Underworld, forever seeking to bring the rest of the world to the same oblivion they have found, and the Yozis, those banished to the demon-world of Malfeas and perpetual torment. The Yozis don't tend to set foot in Creation often, but their cousins the Neverborn have powerful ghost-lieutenants called Deathlords that enter the world of mortals and do their bidding, spreading death and decay wherever they walk.

On the more mortal end of things, the largest organized government in Creation is on the brink of collapse due to the sudden disappearance of its head of state, the Scarlet Empress. Their once-powerful defenses now useless without a powerful potentate to operate them, thieves and brigands are growing bolder, as are the darker things beyond Creation's veil.

And the gods who exalt mortals in the first place? They're not going to do anything about any of this because they're hopelessly addicted to the Games of Divinity, which they play at all times in their Jade Pleasure Dome in the celestial continent-city of Yu-Shan. So it all comes down to the Exalted to set things to right in Creation, which will obviously be no easy feat.

So obviously the setting is one of the most notable aspects of Exalted, presenting a broad array of locales and potential conflicts for the players to get involved in. The chapter that covers Creation is basically candy for any GM who likes to have fluff and pretty visuals to use, which certainly includes me.

Mechanically, the game seems to be constructed pretty smoothly. Exalted uses White Wolf's Storyteller System, in which a player attempting an action rolls a number of ten-sided dice equal to the character's appropriate attribute score plus their appropriate ability score, counting those that come up seven or greater as successes. If enough successes are rolled to meet or exceed the difficulty number set by the GM, the action succeeds. It worked perfectly well for its previous edition, and I'm sure it will continue to serve elegantly.

Second Edition's combat resolution works differently from most games I have played in, however, as it doesn't operate on an initiative system. Instead, battle is measured in ticks of time, and each action has a speed in ticks. A character takes an action, and then must wait that number of ticks before they can act again. It seems in some ways to be much more fluid than an initiative system, and perhaps more realistic, but I don't see that it is in any way superior to rolling initiative. Just different. It does fit the high-speed kung-fu style of Exalted, though, and that is very important.

Stunt dice, mentioned earlier as the mechanic that encourages players and characters to bring the awesome, are extra dice awarded to rolls with particularly impressive descriptions to back them up. So instead of saying, "I hit him", the player is mechanically encouraged to say, "I slam my gauntleted fist across his face with such force that nearby trees shake from the shock" because they'll gain an advantage. Interestingly enough, this makes doing awesome things easier than doing mundane things, which seems to work perfectly with the flavor of the setting.

Something else that sets Exalted apart mechanically is its charms, magical techniques only available to Exalts and other supernatural beings that allow them to perform extraordinary feats. Each charm is linked to an ability, meaning there are melee charms, dodge charms, athletics charms, etc. These form the core of the Exalted's power, and creative use of charms can be helpful or even vital to a character's survival. Second Edition adds Excellencies to the mix, three basic charms expressly used for improving dice pools related to the ability they're taken for. Their flexibility is welcome, particularly the Melee Excellencies, which can be used to improve attacks and parries both.

The most significant improvement over its previous edition is in the way dodging and parrying are handled. In Exalted, First Edition, a player had two basic choices when their turn came around. They could defend, holding a dodge or parry in reserve and not acting, or they could attack. A sketchy third option was to split the dice pool between defense and attack, but in my experience that effectively crippled both. Both pools would be reduced to somewhere in the neighborhood of three to four dice, and for several enemies that wasn't even enough to get past the opposition's armor. Which meant that players either defended perpetually and never damaged foes or attacked, leaving themselves wide open to a counter unless they invested heavily in dodge charms, which in turn caused a constant drain on a character's essence (magical power used to activate charms). In short, it didn't work very well.

In Second Edition, a character's defense is determined by static values based on their attributes and abilities that an enemy's attack must meet to land. So there is no longer a defense action that a character must take to avoid getting their ass kicked. Instead, attacks and other actions incur a minor defense penalty that temporarily lowers the DV until the character's next action, modeling to what degree the action leaves the character open to attack. Which means that the player doesn't have to decide whether to defend or not, but how much to compromise that defense by how they act. This seems significantly easier to deal with to me.

There were only a few things that I didn't care for in this new rendition of Exalted, and those were layout-based. As always, any company professionally publishing textbook-sized RPG rulesets ought to hire a proofreader. Aside from the handful of simple typos, there was the significant strangeness of the description of cudgels and clubs in the equipment listing being precisely the same as that of slashing swords. The stat block was still appropriate to the weapon, so this seems an anomaly at absolute worst. The index was not a great help to me, though it does have a complete listing of all the charms in alphabetical order. I could see that coming in handy. There were one or two pieces of artwork that didn't quite live up to the standards of the rest, which tended to oscillate between serviceable and bloody awesome. My particular favorite is the full-body illustration of Arianna, the book's canon example of a Twilight caste Solar. But then again, I've always had a weakness for female spellcasters.

There are a number of other new and interesting things that I haven't the time or inclination to go into (like the social and mass combat rules--both of which are interesting, but I don't see myself using either very often anytime soon). I haven't even mentioned that the setting fluff that segues between chapters assumes the form of well-illustrated full-color comics. It's a full 396 pages without the index and the character sheet in the back, so covering all of it in detail would be damn near impossible. Suffice to say that I am immensely impressed by the setting in particular and the fashion in which the mechanics support it.

Now if you'll excuse me, I've a Creation to save.

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"Would you rather times were better, or simply more boring?"

Review: Shadow of the Colossus

Shadow of the Colossus was one of the primary reasons I actually put down the money for a PlayStation 2, so I was hoping for one helluva gaming experience when I finally popped it into the disc tray. Fortunately for me, I wasn't disappointed.

Colossus is like if Princess Zelda and the Prince of Persia, as representatives of their respective franchises, were to get utterly shitfaced at some shinding for the video game elite and wind up having incredibly hot, totally unprotected sex on the couch in the back room. Then, in the morning, they find they're both incredibly embarrassed, vow never to speak of that night again, and return promptly home.

Then six weeks later, Zelda discovers she's pregnant, and Link flips out and leaves her because he's been off questing for the past eight months. So, in grand romantic comedy style, Zelda and the Prince wind up together because of twue wuv, and when the little tyke is born they give the Cloverfield monster a call and ask him to be the godfather, which twists the kid's development in a serious way*.

The baby, if you follow the extended and painful metaphor, is Shadow of the Colossus.

In Colossus, you play as Wander, a seemingly archetypal young male heroic sort, who has come to the cursed, unpeopled land that serves as the game's setting in an effort to bring back to life a young woman named Mono. Wander's relationship to Mono is never made clear in-game. Is she his wife? Girlfriend? Sister? Mother, by dint of time-traveling weirdness? Does she owe him money? You never bloody find out. All you know is that she was sacrificed because she had a cursed destiny, and the story (for the sake of simplicity) seems to leave it at that.

Anyway, Wander arrives with Mono's body in a shrine, and there is given instructions by a voice from above calling itself Domin to slay the sixteen great colossi in this cursed land to complete the spell that will resurrect Mono.

So Wander sets out, astride his very talented stair-climbing horse Agro, to kill the terrible beasties and bring his girlfriend/sister/debtor back to life**.

As implied by the anecdote at the beginning of this review, the game plays like a cross between The Legend of Zelda and The Prince of Persia. Wander has a decidedly Link-like arsenal (a bow and a very European sword) but has some very Prince-like moves (the ability to grab hold of ledges and shimmy along them, for instance). His animations are very fluid, transitioning easily from one to the next.

Fluidity, however, does not imply grace. Wander has a tendency to stumble as he runs--a purely aesthetic addition, as it doesn't actually affect the distance he traverses, but it makes considerable sense. If you were hauling ass away from a sixty-foot titan that uses chunks of buildings for armor, you'd probably stumble a bit, too. Also, he freely flails about in grand ragdoll style as the colossi try to shrug off the deathgrip he uses to scale their furry hides.

The controls that make Wander do all these things--jump, shimmy, climb, and stab--are fairly intuitive. I'd hardly any experience at all with the PS2 controller when I began to play, but had little trouble in picking it up. There's even a button specifically used for targeting the colossi, which is really bloody sensible if you think about it, seeing how there are no other enemies in the entire game. I will warn you, however, that your right index finger will feel like it's about to break off from holding down R1, which is used for climbing. Also, it would've been nice if the jump button had not been the same as the mount button. There were a number of spare controls left, so I don't see why that wasn't possible, but having the same button do both leads to tedious moments when you're trying to mount Agro but instead wind up hopping beside him like an imbecile.

Riding Agro is something else to be considered. Agro is very much a character on his own terms, and acts considerably realistically as regards general horsiness. What this means is that any and all commands you issue Agro are more or less suggestions, which Agro may or may not take. He tends to be fairly agreeable, but he certainly isn't Epona. It takes him some time to respond to kicks that prompt speed and to tugs on the reins, which is frustrating initially but actually turns out to be incredibly useful as that same horsey intelligence means that you don't have to control Agro directly to keep him from running smack into walls--a definite bonus in one colossus battle where you have to ride him backwards in order to shoot the massive sandworm chasing after you.

This game pretty much redefined "epic" for the entire industry, I'd have to say.

Unlike Zelda and Prince of Persia, Wander gets no equipment upgrades and learns no special moves during the course of the game. He has everything he's ever going to have at the start of the game, and it's up to the player to make the best use of the lot of it. This basically means that each colossus battle is a puzzle resolved by divining how to make use of the tools and tactics at Wander's disposal to bring down the beast. You'd think that would get old fairly quickly, but let me assure you that it doesn't. Each colossus brings something new and entertaining to the table, keeping the game's central conceit from getting stale.

The game is short, clocking in at around nine hours, but that seems to be a good length for it. It manages to finish out the story (albeit in an anime-ambiguous sort of way) and make its exit before it wears out its welcome. Those nine hours, unfortunately, don't have a great deal of replay value. Once you've figured out the schtick that'll take down each of the sixteen colossi, there's not much left to do. There's not really anything left to do. The game is composed wholly of pretty landscapes, epic boss fights, and dark, bittersweet storytelling.

To sum up, I enjoyed this game immensely, even if its resolution left me as emotionally confused as a budding bisexual schoolgirl. The attention to detail is extraordinary, and everything from the colossi's models to the voice acting is excellently executed. Certainly worth the purchase if you're a freak like me who is only just now getting around to playing games released in 2005.

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* Sadly, it would not surprise me if there was a fanfic somewhere whose plot unfolds in precisely this fashion. The internet is a scary, sad place.
** If you're more the thoughtful sort (i.e. not Wander) you'd be asking serious questions at this point. Questions like "Why am I doing what a voice in a skylight tells me to?", "Why are there no people around here?", and "You want me to kill fucking what?"

Review: Dwarf Fortress

So a few days ago I downloaded a freeware game called Dwarf Fortress. I had heard interesting things about it, so I decided to give it a shot, not expecting altogether much. What I discovered was an incredibly and strangely addictive game that is an ingenious exercise in real-time strategy and low-level artificial intelligence.

The game starts out by naming and fractally rendering a world. This isn't just the little swatch you're going to build your soon-to-be village, on, however. This is the entire. Bloody. World. It simulates corrosion by running water, raises a few mountains, busts out some greenery, and suddenly there's landscaping. Then it goes through and names each individual location (I believe in the world belonging to the screenshot above there is a Swamp of Despair or some such) and determines where the civilizations of this new world make their homes. It then (evidently) generates legends and folklore for the world. The whole process takes around ten minutes.

Now would be a good point to mention the graphics involved, or the lack thereof. As you can tell in the screenshot above, everything is rendered in colored ASCII characters. The whole business was baffling as hell to start out with--I could barely tell plants and trees from grass--but after a while you get used to it, and the interface begins to make more sense. And the time that would've been spent on graphics has apparently been rerouted into the gameplay itself.

After the world is generated, you choose a place to plop down your group of intrepid pioneers, and then you're off. You have a handful of dwarves (represented by smiley faces of various colors, depending on their profession) and some limited supplies, and the name of the game is civilization...that is, the forging thereof.

I set my first fortress by and in a sandstone mountain. This may not have been the brightest thing, but it certainly made digging by my miner (who has officially reached "legendary" as his mining skill) easier. Unfortunately, it also meant that there was almost no proper stone to build things with, so I had to make do with wood for a good long while as supplied by my woodcutter and shaped by my carpenter.

Here's the thing, though: each dwarf isn't defined merely by their profession and randomly-generated name. Each one has an array of skills (which may or may not be related to their profession) and a collection of likes, dislikes, and thoughts that can be accessed by selecting them. Their thoughts in particular can serve as a guide for improvements to the settlement. And it's always amusing to take someone as useless as a jeweler and turn them into the campus cook.

Speaking of such, each dwarf must be fed, clothed, and otherwise taken care of lest they become grumpy, fall ill, or even die. This is easier than it sounds, however. My hamlet (that's its official title) has a little over thirty dwarves, and there have been no complaints about hunger. Early on there were problems with food rotting in the stores, but that was taken care of by setting aside an area for trash outside the mountain.

After the first year of game-time, traders begin stopping by the village from other civilizations. Most of the traders that have come by Diamondcastles (that's the name of my hamlet translated from dwarfish--kind of poncy, I know, but what can you do?) have been elves, who are literally tree-hugging hippies. They refuse to take any goods manufactured from wood. Since I only recently struck upon a vein of workable stone, there hasn't been much actual trade, so I can't really speak to that aspect of the game.

Similarly, I can't speak to the combat/military aspect, as I only today set up a group of individuals whose collective profession was literally "peasant" as recruits, and they're a ridiculous little lot. There's four of them, and their job is (or would be, if the dwarves actually spoke) to stroll around outside the mountain and shout, "Four o'clock and all's well!" Also, the late game in which the village becomes a true bastion of short, bearded culture protected by siege engines, and the--well, intergame, for lack of a better word--in which a lone dwarf strikes out from the fallen ruins of said bastion of culture to set up another somewhere else in the world are equally mysterious to me.

To say the absolute least, there is a shit-tonne of content in this game, and the dwarves behave in surprising and sometimes very human ways. One threw a party yesterday around the statue in the main hall (represented by the white omega symbol above).

I have only two problems with this little gem: its interface, which is not the most intuitive thing in the world, and the complete micromanagement clusterfuck gameplay must become once the fortress becomes large enough. The interface is a series of menus accessed by keypresses (as seen above), which wouldn't be so bad if all the menus behaved more or less the same. Most of them seem to want to be off in the corner playing by themselves instead of joining the rest of the class, however, so it's a bit of a crapshoot as to whether any given menu will operate with ease. Unless there's some mechanic to take the "micro" out of "micromanagement", which happens to be a major part of the early game, the late game has to get indescribably complex. I have yet to get there, however, so it's hard to tell.

In any case, I would heartily recommend this game, as it is by and far worth the download. But only play it if you happen to have several hours to spare. You wouldn't think that watching smiley faces scooting around would be that engaging, but the second time I sat down to it I lost two and a half hours. After all, those smiley faces have gotta eat.

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I'll build a well when I get to it, dammit!