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Merits Preview 2

Note:This is a working draft and subject to change before publication.

In Exalted Third Edition, knowledge of languages is no longer the province of the Linguistics Ability. Instead, it has been rendered as a Merit, making it much more affordable to play a polyglot.

Language (•)—Purchased This Merit may be purchased as many times as desired. Each purchase grants the character fluency in one language in addition to his native tongue. If the character possesses Linguistics 1+, then they are also literate in any written forms of the language.

The ‘civilized’ inhabitants of each of the outer Directions speak a different language (actually a number of closely-related regional dialects), while the Scavenger Lands has its own particular language and the mighty Realm has two official languages. There are also countless local languages that are only spoken by tribal or ethnic groups spread around Creation’s rim.

The major languages of Creation are:
• High Realm: The formal language of Dynasts and patricians of the Blessed Isle, as well as their servants. All official business of the Realm is conducted in High Realm.
• Low Realm: The tongue of the Realm’s commoners, generally constituting local bastardizations of High Realm drifted into near-incomprehensibility to outsiders.
• Old Realm: The native language of the gods and those that created them, as well as of the Fair Folk. It was widely spoken in the First Age, especially by savants and sorcerer-engineers, and used for most official documents. Characters must have Lore 1+ or Occult 1+ to learn this language.
• Riverspeak: The language of the Scavenger Lands. The Guild has promoted this loan word-filled tongue as the unofficial “trade language” of the Threshold; it is probably the most widely-understood language in Creation.
• Skytongue: A language family spoken in the North. Its written form employs a simple runic alphabet.
• Flametongue: A language family spoken in the South. Its written form employs a sophisticated alphabet of flowing lines and curves; meaning can be greatly influenced by the manner in which characters connect to one another.
• Forest-tongue: A language family spoken in the East, beyond the bounds of the Scavenger Lands. Its written form consists of a wide array of branching ideograms, connected vertically and diagonally.
• Seatongue: A language family spoken in the West. Its written form consists of a simple alphabet of lines and dots whose connection to one another can be exceedingly complex.
• Guild Cant: A secret language spoken only by members of the Guild.
• Local Tongues: Languages spoken by “barbarian” tribes, insular ethnic enclaves, isolated island-dwellers, and various other small groups. Four such languages may be learned with a single Merit purchase.

New Location

Note: This is a working draft and subject to change before publication.

In addition to retaining the classic locations of previous editions, Exalted Third Edition has expanded and revised the map of Creation, introducing a number of new locales not detailed in previous editions. One of these locations, positioned in the unforgiving North, is shown below.

Throughout Medo’s long wet winters, rain lashes the brooding towers of the fortress-city of Karasch at the eastern terminus of the great Hasancea Wall. In the overcast gloom of the day, sentinels clad in oiled hats and fur cloaks look out over tree-speckled hills, meadows, and valleys to row after row of distant mountains. But in the lightning-slashed blackness of the Medoan night, Karasch’s ancestor-ghosts hold the wall in their phantom lamellar, the cold troubling them not at all, the rain passing through them like fog.

For centuries, the nomadic Medoan tribes roved the lands around the Almaj Mountains, in the shadows of three cyclopean walls—each hundreds of miles long—raised ages ago by the fallen Shogunate. There they raided one another’s flocks and the settlements of neighboring peoples, engaged in vicious blood feuds, and propitiated their ancestral spirits. Various short-lived tribal alliances savaged the lands around them. Then the Touman Prince arose and united all Medo under his banner. In a single generation, his armies forced all the lands within a thousand miles—from Nariun and the Saltspire Cities to Damask and Laud—to submit to his rule. But when the Touman Empire met the Northern legions of the Realm, even Medo’s elite troops could not overcome the supernatural might of the Dragon-Blooded.

Today, the finest young Medoan warriors submit to conscription as janissaries in the Realm’s legions. Upon their return, they are honored for their service and respected for their experience, but distrusted for their absorption of foreign notions and cosmopolitan attitudes. Only upon death are they truly Medoan once more; the blaze from a warrior’s funeral lights up the hills as her clan feeds sacrifices to the pyre and sings her praises.

Karasch is far from the center of Medo and the eye of the satrap. Even so, a small Realm contingent remains garrisoned in a barbican at the city’s edge. Tomaj, voivod of the Karaschin clan, fears that he will be shamed into calling upon the Realm for aid, as the Karaschin ancestors—who have always guarded the city from the horrors of Medo’s shadowlands—now prove unequal to the task, with new monsters creeping out of the Underworld each night to bedevil his people.

John Mørke escribió:Sample of Evocations: The daiklave called Stormcaller sleeps in its sheathe. When drawn, a hurricane begins to form overhead. Its Evocations both draw from the storm's ferocity, and add to it. The character must carefully draw down and disperse the storm before sheathing Stormcaller. Apex Evocation involves sheathing the weapon early to disperse the storm in a massive directional stormblast capable of flooring a behemoth.

John Mørke escribió:Getimians: I can't say much more about them than this: They are human, but they are created. Not by Rakan, though he is the most influential figure in a Getimian's life--at the beginning, at least. Each has an internal Loom of Fate, complete with pattern spiders shuttling Essence between their chakras. They use Getimian Alchemy to control their personal fate, but also to unleash the fates they have fashioned into the weave of destiny, disrupting the pattern. Many of their Charms are disruptive to the order of the Maidens' manifest. Unlike other Exalted, their Essence is broken up into two pools of yin and yang. Charms often have two completely different functions depending on which pool they are paid from. Some interesting effects begin when the Getimian has an imbalance in his pools and there will be mechanics that make it possible for him to shift his motes from pool to pool.