Thus Spake Zargrabowski/ConditionOfCreation
>Niles> The destruction of civilization would entaill eliminating 90% of the population of Creation. which would cause the same results as the last time 90% percent of the people in Creation died, the Great Contagion. the Fair Folk would pour in en mass intent on killing and soul devourment, Creation would shrink it frontiers consumed by the Wyld, to say nothing of the shadowland all this slaughter would create. And even if creaton were saved unless Civilization was restored the diminished Creation would be unable to suport enough people to keep this from happening again and again until nothing was left.
...You assert. Many people in the setting feel that is exactly the case. Most of them are in the employ of the Scarlet Dynasty, and then launch into an elaborate sales pitch for giving the Empress all your money so the Dragon-Blooded can have new mansions... and if you don't do it voluntarily, they'll just murder you and take your people's wealth from a more willing donor. It's nice to be an advocate of civilization and all, and the Dragon-Blooded sure do have lights and running water, but the Realm is a jackjob and the world groans under the weight of its excise.
I hate to break it to you, but it isn't the Dragon-Blooded Host holding back the Fair Folk hordes, it's the arrays of Essence weapons and the Thousand Forged Dragons the Solars built several thousand years ago. If 3,000 Terrestrials in Gundam suits with energy weapons were chaff before the Fair Folk host 750 years ago, how are 11,000 Terrestrials in steel armor with imperishable ka-bars going to stand up to the next big horde?
In addition, the destruction of Creation via forgetfulness was caused by the /total/ depopulation of large swaths of the area. The Contagion killed pretty much every living thing. I don't think that the Lunars are going to run along making the little birdies' hearts burst. Is it enough to just kills lots of the people? If so, how did the world exist in the days before Man?
Also. you are assuming Creation was answerable to one set of physical laws and rules, when large portions of Creation were also artificial. Just because it's real in Elric doesn't mean that stuff the Solars carved out of the Wyld in Exalted is as fundamentally sound as the natural material of the world. We know that the edges of the world were at one time propped up with runes and patterned financial transactions. Why is that? Will tribal ritual dances work to maintain the borders of Creation? Will ritual dances work /better/? Will the stuff that's left collapse at all, or was the material that fell away just all of the cliffside additions to the roots of the Imperial Mountain?
Think on this -- how old are the elder Lunars? What do their stats look like? They know all about the Defense Grid of the Realm, because not only did they live for a minimum of several hundred years in the late First Age, they've got 8 dice in both Intelligence and Lore, and probably had 6s in them when the -- went down back in the day *and* there were other high-stat Lunars alive at the time to pass along anything these guys didn't know.
The Silver Pact is the deliberate plan and creation of these beings. Have you noticed the fact that they found ways to mess around with the fundamental nature of their Exaltations? Have you noticed the funny little ritual they undergo during initiation that lets them mumble a chant that contains oh, every piece of wisdom /ever/? Have you noticed that some Exalt went and encoded magical intiation into /the very fabric of the world/? Do you think someone just /might/ have had a real agenda? Just because they would punch you in the mouth does not make them dumb. They are the deliberate creation of shapechanging alien man-gods from the dawn of time; not a legacy to discount lightly.
You say they are going to sit on their thumbs and go raaar 'til the lights go out. I say they get to buy Attributes at a steep discount, that Intelligence is an Attribute, and that you started with them going raaar mindlessly and then drew the line back.
Fundamentally, all the factions are inept; they're all dependent on the Solars' legacy to defend Creation. However, within the confines of the Great Curse and the dramatic necessity that they not have all done the "sensible" thing centuries ago, there are a bunch of people with Ints in the 6-8 range at the top of every faction, and there really always have been. The history of Exalted is littered with proof that really smart people can do incredibly stupid things, but they're stupid things done with supreme competence. It's okay to say something wouldn't work for the sake of your game's plot, but there is no reason anyone's plan is too dumb to work.
The canonical conclusion to the Age of Sorrows is that the different factions all point fingers and jockey for position until the sky caves in. It's established in the first paragraph of chapter one of the main rule book (Really! Go look if you don't believe me!). Obviously, you will probably want to change that for your game, unless you like epic tragedy as much as I do, but what direction you pick is all about person taste, not about discerning the secret truths of the setting.
Geoffrey C. Grabowski\\ Exalted Developer, WWGS\\ raindog@white-wolf.com
