Or: In Soviet Russia, Serenity puts herself inside you!
AT: Craft: Disturbing Mental Image. 5 dots.
This page is a set of brainstorming notes about my character for the new setting. I'm including here to keep it all in one place, but also because I find it useful to read other people's character ideas when I'm trying to come up with one of my own; maybe this will be useful to you. Since we're presumably doing a lot of the character creation and general setting building outside of a formal session, I want to make sure that it doesn't become a game of telephone. If you see something here that doesn't match watch you had it mind or doesn't look like something you'd want to play with in a game, please let me know.
Plot Setting
I really like the idea of the Maidens' having gone missing and somehow connected with the PCs, either as totems we carry around, disembodied entities somehow possessing us, invisible friends, or whatever. It's interesting, it's appropriately epic and Sidereal-flavored, it provides a great opportunity for us to poke at Heaven, and it sounds like fun. The only downside I see is that practically requires us to have a perfect complement of castes. (Not necessarily, though. Presumably there could be some characteristically convoluted reason why, say, the Maiden of Secrets cast her lot with a Journeys Sidereal.)
Ariel and Brian asked me earlier what exactly I want out of the game, and I'm still not exactly sure how to answer that. I'm interested in a game with a high epic level. I don't necessarily mean that we're out to Save the World and Complete Capitalized Missions for Great Justice, just that we're at a high enough level to actually change the world. I want to be able to do so through my own actions and of my own volition, rather than just following the orders of our superiors or reacting to an existing threat (saving the world from the Deathlords, for example).
tmack: I think we've covered this section already.
Character Concept
I'm lazy. I'm happy to keep NamelessCrow around if no one objects (or at least replace with him one of his twin brothers Anonymous Raven, Incognito Jackdaw, etc.) There are two caveats, though. I made some significant mistakes building the character; and, despite what Brian said, you really are screwed if you make substantial errors at character creation. I plan to change around his abilities, charms, etc. a bit. I also want to play up or down various aspects of the character depending on how the plot turns out, what kind of character I decide to want to play, and what kind of character other players want to hang around. Depending on how the game works out, I could emphasize or mute his attitude towards mortals and lesser Exalted, his willingness to get his hands dirty for Heaven, his loyalty towards Heaven, his bureaucratic ambition, his Young Republicanism, his interest in and loyalty to the Bronze faction, etc.
AT: I don't have anything against NamelessCrow, and I think he's a very appropriate Siderial. I think we'll need to discuss how his priorities/goals fit with the rest of the party, though. Your ideas below still suggest a heavy focus on redurinc the power/magic of mortals and Creation in general, which I could see clashing with a number of other possibilities (e.g. Gold Faction).
tmack: Yeah, I'm going to wait to figure out exactly what his motivations are until I have a better idea of what other people are planning. As for the Gold Faction in particular, that sort of clash is inevitable if you have both Bronze and Gold Faction Sidereals in the party; and personally, I don't consider it to be necessarily a bad thing.
Maybe I should mention here that I do have more ideas for this part, but I'm waiting to see what other people come up with so that I can play off their characters.
Experience
New characters start with 50 XP.
It's nice to not have to buy Essence at character creation (i.e., with bonus points). I considered making an Essence 4 character, but there's really not that much of a benefit; the charms that require Essence 4 are unique in each tree, are at the top of that tree and require most of it as prerequisites, and really aren't as useful as some of the lower charms. Essence 4 does raise the cap on dice added through charms, and there are several charms that have directions like, "Add #Essence in automatic successes." Still, it doesn't really seem worth it at this point. It will when more of the charm trees are exhausted. 27 XP + whatever it takes to restore Salary after the extended sabbatical is only about three charms' worth, but it's a sizeable fraction of the initial 50 XP. [If other party members can see him when he's Walking Outside Fate but not vice versa, he's going to take up drinking. :)]
Caste
If we have five PCs representing a perfect complement of castes, I'll have to tweak his abilities a bit. As it stands, Emma and Crow divided secrets roughly down the middle, with Emma taking responsibility for the information-finding aspects of the caste and Crow for the stealth and espionage aspects. The Secrets Sidereal in this game would presuambly have to do both. Crow would fit nicely as a Secrets or Endings Sidereal. In either case, he would probably move away from Performance (except for the obscenely useful Heart-Brightening Presentation Style) and move very quickly up the Presence tree. Impose Motivation, for example, is great.
AT: I think there's room for having some "core schticks" which are outside your caste, and indeed such things can be defining factors since they're the non-obvious things you do. That being said, we should avoid having anyone stepping on each other's toes in ways which make anyone feel overshadowed.
tmack: True, but abilities and charms outside of caste or preferred abilities are expensive. I really like the idea of having us responsible for or representing each of the maidens, but that suggests we have a full complement of castes. Secrets and Endings seem more popular than the others, and I feel sorry for the poor bastard who gets stuck in Journeys being the party's sailboat. To avoid the problem on stepping on each other's toes, we really need to sit down and talk about the characters as a group; but it's going to be a very boring conversation if none of us have thought about what we're planning to do beforehand. This is just a rough draft.
In Secrets: His Motivation would be more about keeping mortals from Secrets Man Was Not Meant to Know and making sure dangerous things like Thaumaturgy are kept in a very safe place (i.e., expunged from Creation). He would have more of an emphasis on the stealth and espionage schtick than the social one, except that he would still be very interested in Bureaucracy.
In Endings: His Motivation would be to bring about the end of the current Age and make Creation a more (ostensibly) mundane place, with the Sidereals directly but secretly guiding mortal affairs without any distractions like the Order, the Empress, Deathlords, and so forth.
I refuse to be the Journeys Sidereal, even if I end up making a completely new character. Besides, having the Maiden of Journeys blessing you and enhancing your soul is like winning a free, all expenses paid trip to Delaware. I'd rather not be the Battles Sidereal because I'd rather not be the combat monster in the party (especially since I'm not confident I can build an effective combat monster). I might be able to manage Serenity if no one else wants it. If you all want to play characters similar to your current ones (and there's no reason why you should or should not), we could probably keep the present caste memberships except with Dragonstar-prime in Battles and Crow-prime in Endings.
AT: I think I'm likely to replace DragonStar (I'll write up my thoughts when I have the time). I'm sure I could build a very powerful Battles, but I'd prefer to avoid it, because I played a Melee+Presence monster in the last Exalted game and don't want to risk falling into old habits. Secrets and Endings are also the most interesting Castes for me, though. They seem to be popular. Stealth is the primary area where my current ideas overlap with NamelessCrow. When I try to move more toward core "Endings" than DragonStar I find myself wanting to be a ninja.
tmack: Those do seem to be the popular castes. Feel free to be a ninja if you'd like; I don't mind.
Update: Nameless Crow is in the Secrets caste again. I think he'll be a talkative ninja: he's interested more in espionage and information gathering than assassinations (being in Secrets, after all), and he prefers to use diplomacy and public speaking rather than violence. Not that he has any qualms about violence; it's just not the first tool he reaches for in his toolbox.
On the Maidens
I'm curious about what aspects the dethroned Maidens would take. It could be like the fairy from one of the Zelda games, or (as Ariel suggested) a snarky animal companion, or a mysterious voice in our heads, or absolutely nothing at all. I think it would be cool if we designed each Maidens' personality (though presumably not the mechanics) ourselves, separately for each character; but I don't know if Brian would want to run a game like that. (Having the Maiden of Secrets lurking in your soul and whispering the secrets of Creation to you sounds great in principle, but she's probably not quite in perfect condition after dying. Instead of intelligence about the Empress' weaknesses and gossip with which to blackmail his superiors, he'd constantly get a bunch of garbage screamed in his head like, "Ones who does not have Triforce can't go in," and, "Congraturation. This story is happy end.")
tmack: I think we've covered this section already.
Related NPCs
[This would be a great place to elaborate on any NPCs involved with the character, but I haven't thought of anything particular clever yet.]
Other Details
Artifact: I ordered a copy of Oadenol's Codex, but it won't arrive for a few days. I noticed an artifact in another book I liked: I can't remember the name of it, but it's a machine that takes in books and basically keeps hyperlinked versions of them in its memory, so that you can ask it for specific information in its stored library. I think that Crow would enjoy having something like that; I can imagine him breaking into libraries (in Heaven or Creation) at night and absorbing their books. It just doesn't seem like something that would be very useful in the game.
Sifu: Kurgan's kindly allowed me to use DragonStar as his Sifu.