u/mj6373

So, my players are working on developing a place.

They found an ancient broken temple-manse to the Elemental Dragon of Fire in one of the caldera of a snowy volcano range, which had a geomantic explosion during the Shogunate and killed everyone in the surrounding town and farmland that supported it, and a shadowland bled up through the fractured geomancy and has kept the ghosts there all this time. They've been fixing up the place, repairing the geomancy and the temple to make the place livable again. It's chock-full of ash and the manse produced a Gem of Endless Summer, so the god-queen of the party wants to use the unique environment to grow a bunch of tropical crops that they can monopolize trade on in the North, and turn the place into a wealthy holy land of warmth and delicious fruit and all that jazz.

The thing is, the necromancer of the party also wants to preserve the shadowland (and he's both the necromancer and geomancer of the party, so the restoration is certainly his direct business, including attempted integrations), both as a piece of preserved history and for religious reasons that tie directly into the idea of making it into a paradise, tying a reward afterlife for good adherents of their shared faith to this holy land where people will be able to meet the righteous dead. And like, the main *thing* of shadowlands is affiliation with death in substance as well as spirit, tending towards food shortages and illness and gloom and all that stuff.

If I were a more headstrong GM or my players enjoyed butting heads more, I might just tell them to figure out the conflict of interests, but that's not how our group rolls, so I'd really like to find a compromise that doesn't sap the weight and themes from shadowlands as a setting concept while still letting them work towards what they want for the place.

The corebook talks about the colors of shadowlands sometimes becoming "flush and violent in their intensity" and foodstuffs becoming "strangely intoxicating," while Sworn to the Grave suggests "blessings and ritual magic can mitigate the worst of these changes," so I'm thinking about leaning into those angles. Give them some work with workings and stuff to make the place flourish, and let the remaining effects of the shadowland manifest through that sort of intoxicating, hideously vibrant affect. If it's being connected to an afterlife, and there's an integration being done between the fire demesne and shadowland, there could be something of a pyreflame theme, funereal aesthetics developing to go with the place being a meeting ground between living and dead...

I dunno, it's all pretty vague to me. I could use some concrete suggestions if you can think of anything. How should this affect crops, how should this affect the people living here, what sorts of things will make the shadowlandiness of it *pop* without leaning entirely into the sense of desolation and griminess?

Whether in an official 3e sourcebook and I just haven't found it, or some good homebrew for it. I'd like to make them a bigger part of the "heavy battlefield mobility" side of the wealthy warrior classes.

Exalted as-is tends to sorta pay a little lip service to chariots as a thematic thing while still writing the mechanics in a way where stirrups and warhorses large enough for barding are fairly abundant, but I'm interested in adjusting that portrayal for my own setting, shifting things into that 900-300 BCE sweet spot where cavalry and charioteers coexisted on the battlefield, with cavalry tending towards light skirmishers and scouts while chariots are the crushing tanks of the era. So if anybody's seen some good stuff to work off of to get there, I'd appreciate it.

edit: Found the rules on page 379 of the Sidereals book! Thanks all!

Basically the title. The celestial Exalts get a bunch of cool narrative through-lines from being reincarnated heroes, one of my favorite of which is past life memories. It creates a fun blending of identity and gives roleplaying meat to the sense of legacy, which is neat for all of them but especially (to me) the Solars, since their memories in particular are all going to be from incredibly ancient history, a peak into a totally different world where they had a totally different social position.

While the Terrestrial Exalted are obviously different from their Celestial counterparts, I've often thought that they're leaving a lot of equally cool narrative potential on the table by not translating that mechanic into the hereditary Exaltation model. And I feel like 3rd Edition sets a groundwork where it feels a lot more reasonable - the Progenitive Essence concept lends a lot to the idea that you're passing something spiritual to your offspring rather than just genetics, bolstered by the presence of a bunch of example artifacts that have a greater affinity with specific bloodlines of Dragon-Blooded.

I think it would bolster the Dragon-Blooded's own form of legacy within the narrative, and opens up two opportunities that I can think of. First off, it gives those semi-random Threshold Dragon-Blooded outcastes more of a connection to the wider Dragon-Blooded community, and the ability to participate in their own narratives of discovering legacy and family through witnessing the deeds of their ancestors. And secondly, something that would be totally unique to the Dragon-Blooded relative to everyone else in the setting might be the ability to see "ancestor" memories for people who are still alive, and to use that as an alternative path for characterization and information dispensation.

Playing devil's advocate against myself, there are a few counterarguments I can think of. First, Terrestrials are a lot more common than Celestials, so it might risk making the cool uniqueness of past life memories more diluted. Second, the aforementioned idea of seeing ancestral memories for living people might create an unwanted in-setting effect where paranoid Dynasts view offspring as information leaks, though I think that's probably fine if it maintains the same sort of vagueness and symbolic/emotional approach that past life memories do. But lastly, the one that I don't really have an answer for, is I'm unsure how to make it feel as different as it ought to; "remembering" something is sort of first-person in a way that I feel iffy on with the ancestral theme. Which makes me wonder if it might not be better going with like, a much subtler version of the ATLA approach with Aang visiting past Avatars, where it feels less like a memory and more external, like being given visions or advice by a lingering spirit of the past.

What do you guys think?