:Kill the Wizard First

Alternate Title: Never trust a grand vizier.

Being a review of Manual of Exalted Power: Sidereals, published by White Wolf.

Summery: Sidereals are cheating cheaters, which can make it tremendously difficult to fit them into a game. Their entire strategy revolves around using auto-win powers when they can, and running away when they can’t. They have a brittle Charm set, bizarre and frequently overpriced defenses, a Celestial Bureaucracy that doesn’t like them very much, and a severe lack of numbers. All of that is still true, but they’ve been fleshed out considerably. Overall, there are a few key balance concerns to house-rule over, and some lack of clarity where certain rules are concerned, but the presentation of the Sidereal mandate is top-notch and they get some very nice write-ups.

The Crunch

• Blade of the Battle Maiden: Let’s get right into it. BotBM is a cheap, scene-length dice adder, something that shouldn’t really exist in 2nd Edition, and it warps the entire Sidereal rule-set. It’s a cheap and easy way to get something that is normally strictly impossible (since Infinite Mastery and Essence Flow are explicitly incompatible), and its presence makes Violet Bier of Sorrows Style a completely broken martial art. Oh, sure, they slapped a restriction on teaching it this to non-Siddies this edition; it’s a Celestial-level style, so that’s wholly irrelevant. Yes, it can be handily house-ruled (I happen to like capping it at permanent Essence, reducing the duration to five actions, or both), but that’s no excuse. This Charm should never have made it past playtesting.
• The Sidereal dice cap needs an explicit mention. There needed to be a sidebar with a large header reading “The Sidereal Dice Cap”. There was not, and it’s terribly unclear. One can infer from the text that the dice cap is permanent Essence, as it was in first edition, but that should not be necessary.
• On top of that, it looks like several of the Charms forgot about the hard cap on boosting defense values. Sidereals get several Charms of various flavors that have the effect of doubling a DV with no mention of the hard cap, which is problematic. If there’s anything I learned from the Four Halo Golden Monkey Realignment debacle in my current game, it’s that the cap really needs to apply across the board, even to things that look like they bypass it. Otherwise, de game, she do break. Again, this is house-rule-able (I’d probably let the “excess” DV compensate for penalties, so it’s harder for someone to lower your DV from the cap), but it’s something that should have been caught earlier.
• My final beef: The Sidereal perfect defense still costs a willpower point. No excuse for that in 2nd Ed.
• Okay, those are my four non-trivial complaints about the crunch. The rest of it ranges from decent to great, and the new Astrology write-up redeems much.
• Honestly, you could probably play the whole book as-written in a Sidereals game and not have too many issues. It’s only when you start looking at the Charms in context of the other Exalted types that warning signs go off. This mostly goes to support my growing suspicion that without some serious house-ruling, mixed-Exalt games lead straight to Shittytown.
• Total Crunch Rating: 7/10

The Fluff

• First off: I love all the comics except the one about Ragara Myrrun (the Dragon-Blooded that Ketchup Carjack and his posse are trying to teach Sidereal Martial Arts to). It trips my Sam Height Detector when signature NPCs are allowed to break crucial setting rules like “DBs can’t learn SMAs”. Breaking crucial setting rules is what the PCs are for.
• I’ve never really bought into the serious dislike of Autochthon that a lot of Exalted players have, but if you have Autobot Hate, you can probably rest easy – he’s mentioned once or twice, but not strongly emphasized.
• Some deeply interesting setting hooks involving the Abyssals and the Neverborn. You could very easily run a whole game on any one of them (though for one of them, it would have to be a pretty high-Essence game…).
• I would have preferred slightly more coverage of the signature NPCs, which is a complaint I’ve had about several of the Exalted sourcebooks so far. I don’t want long writeups of them, but I’d like a picture and a name, please. I had to wrack my brain, my other books, and the Internet to remember who some of them were.
• Excellent look at interactions between the Sidereals and the Celestial Bureaucracy, and an equally good look at the factional infighting within the Fellowship itself.
• Total Fluff Rating: 8/10

The Product

• It’s a White Wolf book. Especially, it’s an Exalted book. It looks good.
• I especially like a lot of the interior art – 2nd Edition had had a fantastic run of art, and it’s nice to see it keep the standards up. A few specific illustrations I could live without, but overall, a very high standard.
• There were some editing issues. At least one prayer strip Charm I noticed referenced the wrong scripture in a very obvious way, and there was the usual smattering of typos.
• Other than that, not much to say: Sturdy hardcover, no binding issues, nice cover art. Exalted book, you know what you’re getting.
• Total Production Rating: 9/10

Overall: There’s a lot to like in this book. It’s not the leaps-and-bounds improvement over its 1st Ed counterpart that Lunars was, but then, 1st Ed Sidereals weren’t the sad muppets that Lunars were, so there’s less to improve. The Charm trees are just as entertainingly tangential (I understand some people think of this as a bug; those people lack whimsy), and the new Astrology rules seem pretty solid. Imperfect, but I’d run it anyway.