Thus Spake Zargrabowski/DBsArentNice

On 30 Jan 02, at 10:54, Matt Johnson wrote:

I jsut want it to be a viable option, not "Oh yeah, there are like 3 decent people in the realm". I mena, i'll make the game however I like, but I'd still like the game to treat the DBs as if they were individuals.

There are some genuinely great spiritually elevated samurai warriors in the Realm. They care for the poor of the Blessed Isle, protect the helples, keep the gods from enslaving man, and guard the world against the Anathema. Look at Nagezzer. His whole society still pisses on him for being a cripple, and thus inapable of war, and he's still defending the Threshold. How much more decent can you be?

Now, in terms of how personable they are and how much time you'd want to spend locked in a small room with them, V'Neef Mahina is a rare pleasant exception. Most of them are very status conscious, extremely touchy when interacting with those not their peers, and perfectly willing to use violence to solve their problems. From the perspective of someone who isn't one of them, they expect you to STFU and act like the furniture you are.

Would a person from the Sengoku Jiddai look "good" to you? Would you like to spend a lot of time with Odo Nobunaga or an Ikki-cult sohei fanatic? How about another "real" conqueror hero -- el-Hajjaj, Tewfik, Cao Cao or Subotai. How about Harald Fairhair or Atilla the Hun? I would wager most people here to find them thoroughly unpleasant, yet they built cities, nations and empires. By all accounts many of them were geniuses, artists, and visionaries at the same time they put the Khalif of Baghdad in a leather sack and had horses trample him. Are they evil? To me, they just are.

The Realm is a giant machine for raping all the jade out of the world and letting 10,000 people live as god-kings in golden palaces at someone else's expense, and it bends social, poilitical, religious and military force to that end. The Realm also guards the world against the armies of the Fair Folk and the Lunar Anathema and provides some sort of rudimentary check against total anarchy in the Threshold. It uses social, political, military and religious force to do that too. Good and evil don't enter into it.

Geoffrey C. Grabowski\\ Exalted Developer, WWGS\\ raindog@white-wolf.com