Exalted Scroll of Fallen Races Dragon Kings Anklok Art
Brian'southward Reviews > Curlicue of Fallen Races: The Mountain Folk
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Scroll of the Fallen Races is divided into two parts, one for the Mountain Folk and one for the Dragon Kings. Both of these sections pretty much just recapitulate the information in start edition products--Exalted: The Fair Folk and The Exalted Players Guide, respectively--but update the mechanics for 2d edition and expand a bit on the things we already knew in the way that most of the 2d edition books exercise. For the Mountain Folk, this mostly involves making their social club fifty-fifty more than cutthroat and backstabbing and giving fifty-fifty more of the credit to Autochthon for inventing everything everywhere ever. Life for the Artisans is a seething pit of vipers with constantly shifting alliances and power plays and life for the Workers and Warriors is a nightmare dystopia, but it'southward "okay" considering they're virtually living machines anyhow, so who cares what happens to them? The Artisans certainly don't.
The rule of stupid distances is however is result--Lutar, a Mountain Folk city-state between Mount Metagalpa and Great Forks, is described as conducting trade with and sending troops to assistance the Haltans, thousands of miles away--but for intra-Mount Folk relations information technology actually makes sense because they accept functional long-altitude communications and travel technologies. The Mountain Folk are probably the only civilization in Creation where this kind of scale makes sense, and I wish that I could think information technology was planned instead of simply being a result of non wanting to fill in the empty places in the map.
Most of the section is devoted to artifacts, character creation, and Charms after the first xx pages, and while the artifacts include plenty of obvious modernistic technology with the serial numbers filed off similar magical grenades, that doesn't carp me hither. The Mountain Folk were put in equally Exalted's version of dwarves--explicitly, see The Making of Exalted--and so having them exist meridian-just-mechanistic crafters fits in only fine. My trouble with Wonders of the Lost Age is that it tried to make this everyone'due south prototype, to the overall detriment of the setting, not with anyone at all using magitech. And if anyone's going to use it, dwarves are a good candidate.
The Charms are mostly utilitarian, equally befits the somewhat focused nature of the Mountain Folk, though the Charms that replicate some aspects of sorcery (summoning elementals and countermagic) are conceptually the nigh interesting. Otherwise Worker Charms are boring, Warrior Charms are great for killing people only literally nothing else, and Artisan Charms are mostly manipulating Essence with a side order of crafting. Only the Enlightened Charms really have annihilation beyond a somewhat narrow focus, because that's where all the social and interaction stuff goes. Fortunately, these are attainable to everyone, since in a Mountain Folk game the PCs are all likely to be Enlightened. I doubt many people want to play "Boring nine-5 manual labor: the RPG."
There is one huge oversight I have to mention. For all the talk most the Endless War and how the struggle against hostile hush-hush monsters and civilizations defines Mountain Folk civilization, the book doesn't give you whatsoever stats for anything to fight. That'due south a pretty big oversight and i that makes it hard to run whatsoever kind of Mountain Folk game involving their greatest threat without a lot of work on the storyteller'southward part.
While I'thou a fan of the offset edition corebook'southward explanation that the Mountain Folk are just Fair Folk who entered Creation at the Elemental Pole of Earth and took on some of its stability thereby, that ship has long since sailed. What's hither is a serviceable if boring portrayal, but there's not much that actually makes me want to play a Mountain Folk or run a Mountain Folk game.
The Dragon Male monarch department is better, and is helped by spending slightly more fourth dimension on Dragon King culture and psychology and by profoundly expanding the scope of Dragon Male monarch locations. Originally they were all in Rathess until the Exalted Players Guide added the Pterok, Mosok, and Anklok breeds, just even there it was implied that Rathess had almost all the surviving Dragon Kings and the other iii breeds were mostly afterthoughts. Scroll of the Fallen Races expands on these locations, like Oral cavity Eledath in the southwest, where the Dragon Kings have avant-garde far enough to brainstorm trade with the Mountain Folk (in 1e they had only attained sapience within the last decade), or Scale Crest Island, where intelligent Mosok rule over homo barbarian tribes on the coast and intelligent Anklok do the same from the island'southward interior. This is cracking and it'due south an important add-on to the game, since it provides plenty of possibility to interact with Dragon Kings as more than monstrous transmission entries.
As with the Mount Folk department, most of the chapter is taken up with superpowers, simply unlike the Mount Folk the Dragon Kings don't derive their powers from Charms. They get them from stratified progressions of techniques called the X Paths of Prehuman Mastery. Each Path is themed to an element and has some particular focus; for example, the Clear Air Path is about perception and the Flickering Fire Path is nigh speed and motion. Unique to the 2e presentation of the Dragon Kings, in that location are also 5 Dark Paths themed around the five elements of the Underworld.
This is also a holdover from first edition, but I like it because it reveals that Charms are not the universal mode to organize supernatural powers. It makes me wonder if the other Primordial-created races like the alaun or the scathach had their own non-Charm-based powersets and how they were organized. This is somewhat tarnished by the Fair Folk using Charms even through they come from the madness exterior Creation, just it still makes me curious.
The storyteller advice correctly points out that the Dragon Kings have very similar themes to Solars--devotees of the Unconquered Dominicus who take been gone from the world for ages and who most of Creation thinks are monsters, who are driven past aboriginal memories--merely points out that Dragon Kings take a much harder fourth dimension proving their expert intentions than Solars because they do await like monsters and there's no way around that other than disguising themselves. Dragon Kings have to contend with a world that they in one case ruled that has now grown strange and nearly forgotten them, when it doesn't remember them equally horrible monsters. Okay, maybe it'south closer than "very like." But the Dragon Kings accept no gamble of e'er regaining their ability due to diminished numbers, so games about them are focused more on what they tin practice with their diminished capabilities in the Age of Sorrows.
Overall, the second section is much more interesting than the get-go, because even though the Dragon Kings are thematically similar to the Solars, they have enough latitude of concept and location that there are many more stories to tell most them than virtually the Mountain Folk. Plus, dwarves are absurd, simply they're merely not as absurd as magic dinosaur people. The prize goes to the 2d half of the book, merely I even so like the whole thing for showing 2 of Creation's nonhuman cultures in (some) depth. I only wish there were more interesting nonhuman races to bear witness.
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