Sep 11 2008
Homebrew - Seeing Stars
This one’s for the RPG Blog Carnival. They’re homebrewing this month, and while most of my homebrew either isn’t what they’re looking for or would get me in trouble at work if I relayed, there are a few things I’ve done that just about qualify.
The most interesting of these, I think, was the time one of my friends and I decided to subvert the astrology system in Exalted. For those who aren’t familiar with the system, it’s yet another Set of Five Fives (by the time the book in which it was actually explained had come out, they’d gotten themselves attached to the abilities anyway) and seems to mostly affect personality for the average person—or who can be messed with with what effects if you have the right set of powers, otherwise.
Now, I’m not fond of one constellation = one personality systems in general. I understand why they’re so popular; after all, they’re pretty easy. But it seems to me that there’s a lot of ground left unexplored. And for all its advantages, the system in Exalted is rather minimal; next to no useful information for actually making predictions. So when one of my friends and I came up with a race of Northern bear-savants on the way home from a movie, it seemed like a perfect opportunity to attack the system itself, and attack it we did, creating a form that more fully described the personalities, life-methods, and general approaches of the characters to whom it was applied. (And gave us a nifty mechanical basis for our creations, but that’s beside the point.)
We kept the basic personality tendencies by sign; it was ingrained enough in the system that we couldn’t exactly get rid of it. But we couldn’t just leave it alone, so we started trying to figure out compatibility charts, using the inherent five fives nature of the Signs themselves. Each, we decided, was compatible with two at its level—each group with two of the other groups, each sign with two of the other signs in its group—and tended towards conflict with the other two. They diagrammed out on pentagrams pretty well: we figured out which things would by necessity be thematically joined, and which would be opposed, and then slotted the rest in from there, taking full advantage of the situations in which three or four would have defined relations. (The really hilarious part? We actually went through and looked into the heart-signs of the entire group, and the intragroup dynamics were almost perfectly described by the compatibility charts. Go figure!)
Then we decided to do something a little different: instead of people’s stars just determining personality tendencies, we decided to have the stars as indicators of how those born under them went about living their lives and dealing with their problems. Looking at general approaches to life, we found that we could get a decent effect with a set of three threes. (Coincidentally enough, these mapped perfectly onto the Attributes. Yay!) So we had survival in combat by offense, by interposing things between oneself and the incoming weapon, and by evasion; applied knowledge through crafting, history and of course astrology; leadership by inspiration, by delegation and by communication with one’s subordinates. The problem was separating the signs out; the most logical way was nine sets of three, but that meant a couple had to appear twice, and there was the one that just plain couldn’t categorize. But it worked pretty well; three signs to the approach, each sign being a different version of said approach—for instance, combat by evasion split into “Evasion by dodging”, “Evasion by making sure there isn’t a battle”, and “Evasion by just plain not being at the fight.” Three signs appeared twice. Yes, three; we only used twenty-four of the twenty-five in this part. The final decision, partly due to the mechanical applications of this system and partly because it provided a good collection of combinations, was to have each individual have three such signs of aptitude: birth-signs, we called them, as opposed to the personality-determining heart-sign.
And then there was that last sign, the Haywain. Those familiar with the system would know that the whole point of this sign is uncertainty, endings one can’t quite describe. There wasn’t really any way to fit it into the existing patterns, and after trying to shoehorn it into every approach and failing, we decided to try a different tactic. The Haywain, we decided, was for people who were going to do Big Things somehow, but due to its fuzzy nature, nobody could quite tell whether a given Haywain’s Big Thing was going to be the kind of thing that risked destroying the world or the kind of thing that helped save it. As a result, the bears saw having a Haywain among one’s birthsigns as being highly inauspicious, and a Haywain for a heartsign…. well, fortunately it happens very, very rarely.
That wasn’t the end, though; something this complicated deserved a well-detailed civilization. Anyone want to hear more?
