Exvwod 2E -Full

Chapter One: The Wheel Turns It’s the world you know: neon shining in puddles, tired-eyed people waiting in laundromats, smog and bad paychecks, student loans that teach you more about Sisyphus than any of the world mythology classes they paid for, apartment buildings huddling in the shadow of the glass- and-steel towers of the mighty. But it’s also not the world you know. Look in the shadows: There’s a vampire looking through the laundromat window, sizing up the potential meals inside. Across the skin of the world, ferocious warrior-wolves throw themselves howling into battle against the corrosive spirit of the smog. In a well-appointed office you can’t find with mundane directions, a magician spins numbers into power, converting your loans into binding chains of control you can never, ever escape. The last faeries huddle and dream in the apartment building, while ghosts and demons drink in the sins of the skyscraper. This is the World of Darkness, a dark reflection of the modern age where monsters and magic hide away in the shadows. But it wasn’t always like this. The Age of Legends The night people tell a hundred stories to explain where they came from, and how the world used to be. The vampires and demons speak of curses hurled by a wrathful God. The werewolves sing of a better age when the elements of the Triat were in harmony. The mages whisper of the paths of the Wyck burning reality into definition out of primal chaos. The last of faerie-kind speak of a world that dreamed itself into being, and an age of heroes and nightmares and great wars that shook the cosmos. Maybe there’s something to that last one. The shen of Asia compare notes more often than most. They speak of a Wheel of Ages, turning ever from paradise to atrocity and then back again. They speak of an age when Heaven’s will was carried out by divinely-empowered heroes, and all was just and glorious. They’re not alone in that, really. The magicians, they remember older times when magic flowed easily and reality was not so dangerous or obdurate in the face of their rituals. The legends of the changelings speak with longing of a time when reality could be molded like clay by those with strong enough dreams. The songs of the shapeshifters recall an age where their ancestors hunted evil with fang and claw, ruled with wisdom and brutality over the teeming masses, and when the world had not yet been bent and despoiled. Even the gospels of vampire and demon agree that the Earth used to be filled with mighty men who lived for hundreds of years, and whose blood sang with vitality and power unknown to the current epoch. Before the Flood. Before the wages of rebellion and generations of sin. None of these stories agree in their details, but they all point back to a common idea: Once upon a time, there was an Age of Legends, an age of gods and monsters and glorious heroes, even if it was sometimes difficult to tell them apart. In this, the stories are correct. There was a lost golden age, and it ended in blood and fire and tragedy, and nearly all traces of it were wiped away, and the world became a smaller and lesser thing. Now, only the barest traceries of it survive in the Mnesis of the Mokolé, the legends of the Wan Kuei, the bedtime histories of the Kithain. But it was real. It was real, and not every last trace of it has vanished. A Hundred Fractured Truths The various World of Darkness game lines each have their own cosmologies and assumptions, which will be addressed at length later in this chapter, but the first thing to understand is that none of them line up with one another perfectly, and furthermore, none of them line up with the prehistory of the world as presented in Exalted , although there are points of similarity. The cosmology and legends of Kindred of the East are probably closer than anyone else, but even then, there are very significant points of disparity. In the World of Darkness as-published, anyone trying to do a crossover game is best-served by picking a single game to be their “primary venue” and assuming that the game they’ve picked is the one that is most correct about the nature of reality. Exalted vs World of Darkness is an unusual game that tries to encompass the entire World of Darkness, though, and so it’s worth taking a moment to examine this book’s base assumptions. In short, and in plain language, this book assumes that Exalted’s setting, or at least something very much like Exalted’s setting – the Age of Sorrows – is something that really happened, and that it took place at some point in the Earth’s prehistory. At least one, and probably several supernatural disasters have happened since then, greatly re-ordering the structure of the cosmos. What exactly happened? How did reality get to be such a damned mess, and why does everyone seem to have different ideas about the cosmos and how it works? We’re not going to answer that clearly, but here are a couple of suggestions. The Fall: A Demonic Perspective Demon: the Fallen posits that in the earliest days of the cosmos, the world was made up of multiple layers of reality which were all interconnected, simultaneously true, and equally valid. In this explanation, the Age of Sorrows was simply one of reality’s many layers, and when God smote the Earth in wrath, it was destroyed and bits of it were shuffled into the other layers. Its rich mythic history is simply one of the many victims of the diminishment of the world. This accounts for why there seems to be no trace of so many elements of the Age of Legends in the Earth as it exists today, and also why the Age of Legends had no awareness of God or the Elohim: those elements were all expressed in oblique and distributed form in that layer of reality. This also accounts for why the shen of Asia seem to have hung onto more scraps of that destroyed layer of mythic history than others: the current, singular world was made of the remnants of many layers of the world-that-was, and the distribution of those remnants was not uniform or universal. The Consensus: A Mystick Perspective Mage: the Ascension posits that reality is shaped by the consensus of those living in it. This is true not only of the modern world, but also of its history, at least to an extent. The consensus doesn’t believe in sorcery, and so historical evidence of historical sorcerers becomes harder and harder to turn up, even though they were both very real and very prominent as little as 800 years ago. For whatever reason, the Age of Legends came to an end, the world was lessened, and the countless generations that followed eventually found the stories of what had come before incredible, unbelievable, unreal. History became legend, and legend faded into fable, and finally even most of that was lost. Over the span of thousands of years, the world became a smaller, more fixed place that did not believe in divinely-empowered heroes, much less world-spanning ages of splendor and glory, and so all traces of those things disappeared. Of course, all traces and evidence of a thing vanishing are not the same as the thing itself never having been real. Nobody believes in vampires, after all, but the vampires are still out there looking for blood night after night. The Wheel of Ages: A Kindred of the East Perspective Kindred of the East posits that it is in Creation’s nature to cycle from a state of perfection to a state of ruin, and then back to perfection again. As the world decays, it becomes in all ways lesser and more despoiled. The hungry dead, in their arrogance, believe they possess accurate recollections and constructions of the nature of the Wheel of Ages and the Ages that have already passed. They are mistaken; what they envision as a mythic version of China filled with stalwart heroes was in fact vastly larger and grander, with its own array of ages marking its decline (and that peak and decline spanned what the Wan Kuei now identify as the Second and Third Ages). The exact nature of Creation’s downfall and decay is probably impossible to reconstruct, but it’s likely that its various great actors somehow withered and fractured into many of the supernatural forces at work in the World of Darkness tonight. The Shattering: A Big-Picture Explanation The Age of Legends existed , but even within its time of glories and splendors, contemporary savants and oracles observed that it was the nature of the world to fragment and decay. The connections of the great forces of Creation and the powers beyond weakened. The divine energy which once suffused all things became a scant resource, and wars were fought over it, further destroying the glories which remained. The great gods and demons who once bestrode reality as colossi became ten thousand lesser things, and dispersed across a world whose borders contracted until what was once a quay jutting out into the vastness of the cosmos was left a mere globe, bounded and inescapable. The sun remains, an ineluctable truth, but what was once singular and Unconquered has become a hundred divine masks: Ra, Helios, Surya, Amaterasu, Huitzilopochtli, Bila, countless others.

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