Sep 22, 2021 9:20 pm
Creation is a world of epic passions, heroism, and betrayal. It is the stage for the legends of the Exalted — mortals raised up and granted phenomenal power as the chosen of the gods. It is a world of miracles, where countless gods, elementals, and other spirits dwell alongside mortals, overseeing the world’s natural order…or using their power to extort wealth, service, and worship. It is a place where mortal kingdoms rise and fall, drawing strength from stolen magic, wealth, labor, and human cunning.
The Exalted stand between the worlds of spirit and mortal. For all their power, the Exalted are undeniably human, subject to all the joys and pains that humanity brings with it. With their heroism and villainy, they may save Creation from its many enemies, or see it utterly destroyed.
Origin of the Exalted
The Exalted are the Chosen of the gods, imbued with a fragment of their divine patron’s own Essence. This power — the gift of Exaltation — magnifies their talents many times over and grants them miraculous abilities to rival and even surpass the gods. Each Exalt is the heir of a grand and terrible legacy left by the Exalted of ages past, but each also has the freedom to write their own legend upon the world.
The Exalted were created in an act of rebellion. The greatest of the gods sought to overthrow their creators, for these ancient titans were cruel, capricious, and dangerous to the very world they had made. Creation was a plaything to them, and the lives of all the creatures in the world were pieces in their games, to be discarded or destroyed on a whim. Because the gods were bound not to harm their titanic creators, they instead gifted their power to mortal heroes who became the first Exalts.
This was the Divine Revolution, wherein the Exalted and their armies overthrew the titans. In battles that leveled mountains and drained seas, the Exalted managed the unthinkable by slaying their otherwise-immortal foes. For fear of death and the Exalted who brought it, the surviving titans were sealed away in an unbreakable prison for all eternity. At the end of the revolution, the gods took their masters’ place in Heaven and rewarded their Exalted champions with dominion over all Creation.
The First Age
Though created for war, the Exalted are not just warriors. They are priests and god-kings, whose words can inspire and uplift millions or calm the fiercest battle. They are sages and sorcerers, capable of building palaces of living glass and raising entire cities into the sky. They are spies and saboteurs, thieves and tricksters — the living embodiments of cunning and secrecy. They are emissaries between the world of mortal and spirit, peacemakers and lawgivers whose light can guide empires to greatness or ruin.
With these seemingly infinite talents, the Exalted built an era of splendor known as the First Age. It was a time of beauty and bounty as the Exalted tamed the wild land of Creation and brought all mortalkind under their protection. For thousands of years, the Exalted ruled over the world from their paradise-city of Meru, showering those in their domains with the gifts of long life, security, and comfort. This was an age for poets and dreamers, savants and sorcerers; from their palaces, the Exalted created breathtaking art and impossible artifice to enrich and transform Creation.
Beneath the shimmer of the First Age, however, a ravening darkness crept slowly into the hearts of the Exalted. The time of wonders was also a time of deceit and pride, vanity and bravado, excess and abandon.
The Great Curse
In the last days of the Divine Revolution, the ancients planted the seeds of their revenge. With their dying breaths, those who were slain in the rebellion levied a powerful curse upon the gods — one that rebounded on their Exalted instead. This Great Curse exists in every Exalt, tempting them to give into wickedness and indulge their vices, to conquer and corrupt, to vent their rage on the world and its people. In the halcyon days of the First Age, the Great Curse stoked paranoia and mistrust, fueled an unquenchable thirst for conquest, and made the Exalted callous to the needs of mere mortals.
As the god-kings of the First Age, the curse took its heaviest toll on the Solar Exalted. It drove them to feats of rage, domination, and pride as they imposed their burning will upon a world that had no defense against them. In the throes of the Great Curse, the Solars of the First Age might smite their enemies with merciless sorcery, cast aside those they loved and trusted, or strike desperate bargains for power and knowledge with Creation’s deadliest enemies.
The cruel truth of the Great Curse is that despite its power and impact, it remains a secret. Although its effects are still felt to this day in the hubris of the Exalted, none know that the agonies so common to Exalted of every kind are anything more than human frailty.
The Second Age
For fear of Solar cruelty and excess, the Dragon-Blooded — guided in secret by the Sidereals — rose up against their lieges in a massacre known as the Usurpation. Before the Solar Exaltations could empower their next incarnations, they were sealed away, lost to the world for millennia. A handful of Solars escaped this binding only to find themselves Creation’s greatest fugitives, hunted across centuries and incarnations by the Dragon-Blooded and Sidereals. The First Age ended as it began, with betrayal and bloodshed.
In the wake of the Usurpation, the Dragon-Blooded claimed dominion over the world. The Lunar Exalted withdrew to the four directions of Creation and built empires of their own, drawing a line in the sand which the Dragon-Blooded could not cross. The Sidereals retreated to Heaven, using a forbidden magic to conceal their involvement in the Usurpation. Thus began the Second Age.
It was a time of conquest and consolidation. The Lunars made war on the Dragon-Blooded from without; internal strife haunted them from within. The great wonders of the First Age fell to sabotage or disrepair. Without their Solar creators to tend to them, Creation’s defenses began to falter. Into this dark and bloody time came the Great Contagion, a plague so deadly that it killed nine in every ten. People and animals died by the millions and entire cities were transformed into open graves.
Invasion followed the Great Contagion. The princes of chaos rode into Creation from their Wyld strongholds, preying on the disease’s survivors without mercy. Creation survived only by the iron will of a humble Dragon-Blooded officer. She seized control of ancient weapons laid down in the First Age and, with their terrible power, banished the invaders back to the Wyld. In the wake of her victory, she crowned herself the Scarlet Empress and founded her Realm.
The Realm and Its Reach
Thousands of kingdoms, tribes, and city-states make their home throughout Creation, but none is so vast or so powerful as the Realm. It spans the length and breadth of the Blessed Isle, a land of unmatched bounty and security. From there, its reach extends throughout the four directions of Creation through satrapies and vassal-states that pay tribute to the Realm for the privilege of their continued existence. Even those kingdoms beyond its rule are not beyond its influence, for the Realm holds massive military and economic might which it uses to crush rivals, upstarts, and rebels.
For more than seven hundred years, the Realm has been governed by its Empress and her Great Houses, the powerful clans descended from her consorts and favored children. The word of the Empress is law throughout her empire, giving her the power to topple nations and shape the fortunes of millions to suit her will. She has ruled her Realm for centuries, pitting its many powers against one another for her favor to ensure that none could amass the strength needed to challenge her authority.
But now the Scarlet Empress has disappeared.
None know where she has gone, or if she still lives. A tenuous peace has existed between the Great Houses as they size one another up, ready to seize the throne if the opportunity arises. The Realm, long the greatest power of Creation, now stands at the edge of a civil war — one that threatens the strength and stability of the Dragon-Blooded empire.
The Return of the Solars
With Creation at the brink of disaster, a new age of heroes has begun. For the first time since the Usurpation, an eclipse darkened the midday sky. The Solar Exalted have begun to incarnate en masse, freed from whatever prison kept them locked away. This new generation of Solar Exalted carry the light of hope into Creation, bringing with them the promise of a First Age reborn.
But the Solars did not return to Creation alone. In the dark heart of the Underworld, ancient ghost-kings known as the Deathlords have lifted up mortal champions as the Abyssal Exalted. In the prison-city of Malfeas, the demon princes have anointed their own Infernal Exalted, filled with the fury of hell itself. Both were crafted from the stolen Solar Exaltations, corrupted to serve their new, sinister purposes.
Creation will not welcome the return of the Solars and the rise of their wicked cousins. For millennia, the Immaculate Faith of the Dragon-Blooded have demonized all other Exalted as Anathema — heretics who steal power from the gods. Bands of Dragon-Blooded warriors, wise Immaculate monks, and seasoned soldiers track down and slay Anathema in a tradition known as the Wyld Hunt. Even in its current state, the Realm and its nobles hold fast to this tradition, for they know a single rogue Exalt can alter the destiny of entire nations.
The Time of Tumult
The Realm’s instability has created countless opportunities for enterprising merchant-princes and warlords to extend their influence. Rogue gods once cowed into submission by the Dragon-Blooded now rule openly over mortals or extort worship from them in defiance of the laws of heaven and the Realm alike. Exalted heroes of every stripe are seizing the opportunity to build power and prestige: Lunar heroes ready their nations for war, Sidereal powerbrokers work to mend the world’s increasingly snarled fate, and newly Exalted Solars take their first steps into a world that will shake at their passing.
This is Creation as it stands today: a land where ancient wonders slumber, calling out to their long-lost masters from secret caches and dusty tombs. It is a place where the greatest empire in the world, one built on betrayal and slaughter, teeters at the edge of a bloody war between kin. It is an age of sorrow and struggle, where the return of the Solar Exalted may rekindle the light of hope in Exalted heroes across the world or doom all life to an era of unending tragedy
The Exalted stand between the worlds of spirit and mortal. For all their power, the Exalted are undeniably human, subject to all the joys and pains that humanity brings with it. With their heroism and villainy, they may save Creation from its many enemies, or see it utterly destroyed.
Origin of the Exalted
The Exalted are the Chosen of the gods, imbued with a fragment of their divine patron’s own Essence. This power — the gift of Exaltation — magnifies their talents many times over and grants them miraculous abilities to rival and even surpass the gods. Each Exalt is the heir of a grand and terrible legacy left by the Exalted of ages past, but each also has the freedom to write their own legend upon the world.
The Exalted were created in an act of rebellion. The greatest of the gods sought to overthrow their creators, for these ancient titans were cruel, capricious, and dangerous to the very world they had made. Creation was a plaything to them, and the lives of all the creatures in the world were pieces in their games, to be discarded or destroyed on a whim. Because the gods were bound not to harm their titanic creators, they instead gifted their power to mortal heroes who became the first Exalts.
This was the Divine Revolution, wherein the Exalted and their armies overthrew the titans. In battles that leveled mountains and drained seas, the Exalted managed the unthinkable by slaying their otherwise-immortal foes. For fear of death and the Exalted who brought it, the surviving titans were sealed away in an unbreakable prison for all eternity. At the end of the revolution, the gods took their masters’ place in Heaven and rewarded their Exalted champions with dominion over all Creation.
The First Age
Though created for war, the Exalted are not just warriors. They are priests and god-kings, whose words can inspire and uplift millions or calm the fiercest battle. They are sages and sorcerers, capable of building palaces of living glass and raising entire cities into the sky. They are spies and saboteurs, thieves and tricksters — the living embodiments of cunning and secrecy. They are emissaries between the world of mortal and spirit, peacemakers and lawgivers whose light can guide empires to greatness or ruin.
With these seemingly infinite talents, the Exalted built an era of splendor known as the First Age. It was a time of beauty and bounty as the Exalted tamed the wild land of Creation and brought all mortalkind under their protection. For thousands of years, the Exalted ruled over the world from their paradise-city of Meru, showering those in their domains with the gifts of long life, security, and comfort. This was an age for poets and dreamers, savants and sorcerers; from their palaces, the Exalted created breathtaking art and impossible artifice to enrich and transform Creation.
Beneath the shimmer of the First Age, however, a ravening darkness crept slowly into the hearts of the Exalted. The time of wonders was also a time of deceit and pride, vanity and bravado, excess and abandon.
The Great Curse
In the last days of the Divine Revolution, the ancients planted the seeds of their revenge. With their dying breaths, those who were slain in the rebellion levied a powerful curse upon the gods — one that rebounded on their Exalted instead. This Great Curse exists in every Exalt, tempting them to give into wickedness and indulge their vices, to conquer and corrupt, to vent their rage on the world and its people. In the halcyon days of the First Age, the Great Curse stoked paranoia and mistrust, fueled an unquenchable thirst for conquest, and made the Exalted callous to the needs of mere mortals.
As the god-kings of the First Age, the curse took its heaviest toll on the Solar Exalted. It drove them to feats of rage, domination, and pride as they imposed their burning will upon a world that had no defense against them. In the throes of the Great Curse, the Solars of the First Age might smite their enemies with merciless sorcery, cast aside those they loved and trusted, or strike desperate bargains for power and knowledge with Creation’s deadliest enemies.
The cruel truth of the Great Curse is that despite its power and impact, it remains a secret. Although its effects are still felt to this day in the hubris of the Exalted, none know that the agonies so common to Exalted of every kind are anything more than human frailty.
The Second Age
For fear of Solar cruelty and excess, the Dragon-Blooded — guided in secret by the Sidereals — rose up against their lieges in a massacre known as the Usurpation. Before the Solar Exaltations could empower their next incarnations, they were sealed away, lost to the world for millennia. A handful of Solars escaped this binding only to find themselves Creation’s greatest fugitives, hunted across centuries and incarnations by the Dragon-Blooded and Sidereals. The First Age ended as it began, with betrayal and bloodshed.
In the wake of the Usurpation, the Dragon-Blooded claimed dominion over the world. The Lunar Exalted withdrew to the four directions of Creation and built empires of their own, drawing a line in the sand which the Dragon-Blooded could not cross. The Sidereals retreated to Heaven, using a forbidden magic to conceal their involvement in the Usurpation. Thus began the Second Age.
It was a time of conquest and consolidation. The Lunars made war on the Dragon-Blooded from without; internal strife haunted them from within. The great wonders of the First Age fell to sabotage or disrepair. Without their Solar creators to tend to them, Creation’s defenses began to falter. Into this dark and bloody time came the Great Contagion, a plague so deadly that it killed nine in every ten. People and animals died by the millions and entire cities were transformed into open graves.
Invasion followed the Great Contagion. The princes of chaos rode into Creation from their Wyld strongholds, preying on the disease’s survivors without mercy. Creation survived only by the iron will of a humble Dragon-Blooded officer. She seized control of ancient weapons laid down in the First Age and, with their terrible power, banished the invaders back to the Wyld. In the wake of her victory, she crowned herself the Scarlet Empress and founded her Realm.
The Realm and Its Reach
Thousands of kingdoms, tribes, and city-states make their home throughout Creation, but none is so vast or so powerful as the Realm. It spans the length and breadth of the Blessed Isle, a land of unmatched bounty and security. From there, its reach extends throughout the four directions of Creation through satrapies and vassal-states that pay tribute to the Realm for the privilege of their continued existence. Even those kingdoms beyond its rule are not beyond its influence, for the Realm holds massive military and economic might which it uses to crush rivals, upstarts, and rebels.
For more than seven hundred years, the Realm has been governed by its Empress and her Great Houses, the powerful clans descended from her consorts and favored children. The word of the Empress is law throughout her empire, giving her the power to topple nations and shape the fortunes of millions to suit her will. She has ruled her Realm for centuries, pitting its many powers against one another for her favor to ensure that none could amass the strength needed to challenge her authority.
But now the Scarlet Empress has disappeared.
None know where she has gone, or if she still lives. A tenuous peace has existed between the Great Houses as they size one another up, ready to seize the throne if the opportunity arises. The Realm, long the greatest power of Creation, now stands at the edge of a civil war — one that threatens the strength and stability of the Dragon-Blooded empire.
The Return of the Solars
With Creation at the brink of disaster, a new age of heroes has begun. For the first time since the Usurpation, an eclipse darkened the midday sky. The Solar Exalted have begun to incarnate en masse, freed from whatever prison kept them locked away. This new generation of Solar Exalted carry the light of hope into Creation, bringing with them the promise of a First Age reborn.
But the Solars did not return to Creation alone. In the dark heart of the Underworld, ancient ghost-kings known as the Deathlords have lifted up mortal champions as the Abyssal Exalted. In the prison-city of Malfeas, the demon princes have anointed their own Infernal Exalted, filled with the fury of hell itself. Both were crafted from the stolen Solar Exaltations, corrupted to serve their new, sinister purposes.
Creation will not welcome the return of the Solars and the rise of their wicked cousins. For millennia, the Immaculate Faith of the Dragon-Blooded have demonized all other Exalted as Anathema — heretics who steal power from the gods. Bands of Dragon-Blooded warriors, wise Immaculate monks, and seasoned soldiers track down and slay Anathema in a tradition known as the Wyld Hunt. Even in its current state, the Realm and its nobles hold fast to this tradition, for they know a single rogue Exalt can alter the destiny of entire nations.
The Time of Tumult
The Realm’s instability has created countless opportunities for enterprising merchant-princes and warlords to extend their influence. Rogue gods once cowed into submission by the Dragon-Blooded now rule openly over mortals or extort worship from them in defiance of the laws of heaven and the Realm alike. Exalted heroes of every stripe are seizing the opportunity to build power and prestige: Lunar heroes ready their nations for war, Sidereal powerbrokers work to mend the world’s increasingly snarled fate, and newly Exalted Solars take their first steps into a world that will shake at their passing.
This is Creation as it stands today: a land where ancient wonders slumber, calling out to their long-lost masters from secret caches and dusty tombs. It is a place where the greatest empire in the world, one built on betrayal and slaughter, teeters at the edge of a bloody war between kin. It is an age of sorrow and struggle, where the return of the Solar Exalted may rekindle the light of hope in Exalted heroes across the world or doom all life to an era of unending tragedy
OOC:
I've added links below to podcast episodes that go in to more detail on the areas of the setting.