Revision as of 09:05, 3 April 2010

The Lost Castes

My attempt to restore the lost Lunar castes.

• up to Sixten's user page
• over to FixTheLunars

Explanation

Yes, I'm one of the annoying people who complains about them without having played them. But the thing that's bugged me most about the Lunars is the implementation of their Caste Attributes. It seems as though the only reason the whole "lost castes" thing was introduced into their background was so that there would only be three groups, which would partition the set of Attributes evenly.

But the implication is that the "broken" state of the current Lunars is somehow more elegant than original Lunar design (unless it wasn't Attribute-based, which seems odd, since we have surviving Lunars from that era), which is hard to believe, given the other Exalted designs. This bugs my computer scientist's design sense. I'm going to try and reconstruct the First Age caste structure, and to do so in a way that the collapse of the three lost castes might result in the structure we see in the Second Age. I also wanted to do so in a way that was not an exact duplication of the way that Alchemical Caste Attributes are structured in Autochthonians.

This is more of a thought exercise than anything, but I'd like for it to be playable, so I welcome comments.

Mechanics

In this system, each Lunar caste has three Caste Attributes, and a player may choose three Secondary Attributes. The number of Attribute dots are the same, but are distributed to Caste/Secondary/Other, rather than the Physical/Social/Mental groups.

Characters still have five Favored Abilities, but each caste has two defaults, rather than Survival being mandatory for all Lunars. (I've been toying with a division of all 25 Abilities by caste, but I sort of like the idea of Lunars having the flexibility to choose. The division also becomes much harder after the first two or three Abilities per caste.)

||Caste||Full||Waxing||Half||Waning||No|| ||Attributes||Str
Dex
Stm||Cha
App
Wit||Stm
Man
Per||Man
App
Dex||Per
Int
Wit|| ||Abilties||Brawl
Resistance||Presence
Socialize||Awareness
Investigation||Larceny
Stealth||Lore
Occult|| ||Other
Abilities?||Melee
Dodge
Endurance||Performance
Medicine
Archery||Bureaucracy
Ride
Sail||Survival
Thrown
Athletics||Craft
Linguistics
Martial Arts||

Notes on Symmetry

Here's an alternate view, showing the distribution of castes across the Attributes:

||||Physical||||Social||||Mental|| ||Str||Full||Cha||Waxing||Per||Half, No|| ||Dex||Full, Waning||Man||Half, Waning||Int||No|| ||Stm||Full, Half||App||Waxing, Waning||Wit||Waxing, No||

The Full Moon and No Moon castes retain the same Caste Attributes that they possess in the Second Age. The Waxing and Waning Moon castes each focus on Social Attributes, but draw from Mental and Physical, respectively. The Half Moons have one Caste Attribute from each category. This has, to me, suggests the moon phases themselves. It also means that, like Alchemicals, no Attribute is used more than twice, and the three Attributes used once each come from each of the three categories.

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