Inspiration/Dissolvegirl

I don't get a chance to run a lot of games, but here's a hodgepodge of what makes me go, "Mmmmm, Exalted." I'm tired, so I'll be adding more tomorrow.

Books

I'm not a big fan of Dragonblooded, but I think the much-referenced and much-lauded Song of Ice and Fire series by George R.R. Martin could make me like them. The intregue is thick, and there's even an outcaste from the South who leads barbarian hordes and gives birth to real dragons and plans to reclaim her rightful throne!

Movies

Hero, duh, for the sheer visuals.

The Wind and the Lion is a lesser-known movie from the 80s starring Sean Connery and Candace Bergen. Connery plays a barbarian priest-guy that strikes me as the only Lunar I could ever love. As a matter of fact, my Zenith in my tabletop game actually has a three-dot ally which is so thinly based off of Connery's character that the name is one letter off.

Shaolin Soccer makes me long for the days of ExaltedBeachVolleyball.

Television

As most people know, I watch too much TV.

The West Wing is the way the Bureaucracy should be, with Martin Sheen as Kejak and Bradley Whitford as, I dunno, Shepherd of the North Star or something.

Smallville is the perfect example of human drama conflicting with superhuman drama. Lex Luthor also helped to inspire my favorite Exalted character to date, Esara Gia. '

Iron Chef is how I imagine First Age cookoffs were.

Music

For some reason, Rilo Kiley really reminds me of Exalted. "Glendora" strikes me as the DBs right before the Usurpation, "Science vs. Romance" is all Alchemicals, "Don't Deconstruct" is the Solars and "The Execution of All Things" is the Abyssals.

REM's "The Great Beyond" is, as I have mentioned before, the quintessential Sidereal makeout song.

People

My husband Mnemosynis has this habit of reading the supplements and saying, "Hey, wouldn't it be cool if..?" and getting my brain going a thousand miles a minute. Any insight into twinkery or game mechanics I may have, I attribute to his influence.

willows' presence in IRC is a definite help to the part of my brain which stretches for wacky ideas. He is perhaps the most "outside the box" of any gamer I have ever known, and his picturesque, intangible ideas may not always make literal sense to me, but sometimes the strings of gossamer lead me somewhere more literal, and I am inspired to the point of total surprise.

Ikselam's Hearthstones have provided me with hours of entertainment, great hooks for characters, and general visualizations of interesting things which can happen in Exalted. His fiction also showed me the life in the Exalted setting, and I attribute my ability to convey this setting accurately to him. Also, I have pirated the entirety of his vision of Great Forks for my own.

Mailanka explained Lunars to me in five minutes, after I spent over a year scratching my head about them, and after many people spent many hours patiently trying to explain the Lunar mindset to me. I still don't like them as written, but at least they are now something I can grok.