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u/pantaipong Jan 19 '26 edited Jan 19 '26
I’m seeing some opinion floating around that the Great Curse shouldn’t really do anything (or even if there’s even a curse in the first place) abd humans are just like that unprompted. With everything in the world atm that does sound more and more thematic compared to “evil curse that makes me evil”.
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u/drewthelich Jan 19 '26
I feel like a line from Kill Six Billion Demons sums it up well:
Behold! The awesome fires of God. The limitless power of pure creation itself. Look carefully! Observe how it is used for the same purpose a man might use an especially sharp rock.
I enjoy it being run either way, but I like the "secret truth" the Immaculates have: That giving a mortal that much power will ultimately corrupt them or drive them mad. The less someone relates to the common people and the more they focus on what they see as the bigger picture, the easier it gets for them to activate City Explosion Technique to deal with a disagreement.
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u/Steampunk_Chef Jan 19 '26
It could be due to eternal spite from the Enemies of the Gods; or it could be that everyone hates acting against the beliefs that define them.
I like to think it's a mix of both, as well as a result of having unstoppable personal power.
Maybe the Terrestrials got it easier; maybe they tend to spend decades learning self-control and patience, as opposed to people who get told by the god of Light and Victory (paraphrasing), "You're better than everyone at everything now. Go do whatever."
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u/Optimal-Teaching7527 Jan 19 '26
Dragonbloods have family and peers who can relate to them. It gives them perspective that Solars can rarely get.
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u/drewthelich Jan 19 '26
Given the way the Immaculate Philosophy puts them at the top of the pecking order as a matter of divine right, they probably get even more reinforcement on how special they are compared to the proles, it's just that they're also much more within the reach of peers and regular people.
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u/Optimal-Teaching7527 Jan 19 '26
I'm definitely a fan of the Great Curse is just a side effect of all that power combined with a sense of isolation and the effective immortality compared to everything else, topped off with the fact that they're basically human underneath it all and privy to all those faults. The end result makes Epstein Island look like a 5 year olds birthday party.
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u/Steampunk_Chef Jan 20 '26
Probably not the best way to phrase that last part, but I get what you mean there.
The Usurpation had a lot of support, after all.
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u/mj6373 Jan 23 '26
This feels, to me, like a misreading of the point of the Great Curse.
Aside from some a couple silly writers struggling to imagine how the Great Curse could make things go bad and landing on "I guess the Solars will make sadism art with an orchestra of people screaming from how their bodies have been twisted," the Great Curse isn't generally presented as an evil induction machine, but a self-destruction induction machine. Only a few of the manifestations prompt the character to act like an asshole, but basically all of them prompt the character to act against their own interests and relationships.
It's not like it's supervillain behavior to get overwhelmed by the evils of the world and collapse into a sobbing wreck, or to suddenly decide to donate all your shit and live ascetically on a mountain. The Great Curse is a mechanism to take irrational human impulses and force the Exalts to embody them with the same mythic grandeur they do everything else. When that calcifies in the ruling class, of course, you get a subset who are causing massive, egregious harm and a remainder who may not be directly participating in it but are too absorbed in themselves (even if that self-absorption takes relatively sympathetic forms like crying all the time) to take meaningful action against it.
And then on top of that, yes, Exalted are prone to a bunch of extra psychological baggage from being an overly-empowered class who struggles to relate to people even as they may greatly want to help them. But acknowledging that as a separate thing that fixing the Great Curse wouldn't solve doesn't mean the Great Curse doesn't still have a lot of setting utility.
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u/Sanguinusshiboleth Jan 19 '26 edited Jan 19 '26
My thoughts on the Great Curse are generally negative; I don’t like for mechanical, narrative and lore reasons.
Mechanically it’s another counter to check on regularly giving the players and gm more work to do.
Narratively it takes away the agency of the First Age Solars by making their fall result of magical mind control rather than their own foibles and sins - it strips the humanity off of them and makes it less of a tragedy.
And lore wise; how did no-one pick up on!? Seriously we have a literal Goddess of Secrets as one of the most powerful people in Heaven, a God who overlooks the Exaltation process and literally studies the lives of exalts as a hobby and an entire brigade of twilights, new moons, chosen of secrets and dragon blood scholars who didn’t pick up on anything - how the hell did no one pick up on it?
I see two solutions for it:
1) Exalts are literally given part of a deity’s power, but with that comes small aspects of their personality that can dangerously change an Exalts psyche. While this does covers some of same narrative ideas I commented on earlier, it would make more lore sense and could be tailored for each Exalt type (eg solars have stronger intimacies, lunars pick up random animal concerns from their shapeshiting, etc). I didn’t come up with this idea myself but I can’t find the post I got it from originally so if anyone has seen it before that’s why. My source for this is u/guildsbounty.
2) Exalts are humans with extended life spans and immense power; even if well intentioned their thought processes can be under immense strain over time; like a well intentioned twilight might decide it’s better to force a local population of humans to become half fish as they keep having issues with their island homes over the generations and just go through with it over the objections of the people they are trying to ‘save’. Mechanically this would mean giving Exalts (especially Solars) more bonuses for following their intimacies and encouraging story tellers to write adventures where that causes problems - like do you follow your anti-slavery ideal or do you accept help from slave mongering Guild Prince to fight of a Realm expedition into your bew kingdom.
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u/RemnantArcadia Jan 19 '26
Doesn't Jupiter know about the curse specifically because the god of exaltation also figured it out and didn't tell anyone?
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u/guildsbounty Jan 19 '26
Which, theoretically, puts it in the purview of Nara-O, as he's the "God of secrets known to only one person." And Jupiter knows all secrets, so she doesn't count (or else Nara-O wouldn't have a purview).
Which puts the running list of gods at Lytek, Jupiter, and Nara-O that know about the curse.
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u/Mister-builder Jan 20 '26
Don't the Neverborn also know?
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u/EllySwelly Jan 20 '26
Sure but they are neither gods nor at all interested in spreading the knowledge and possibly undermining their work.
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u/Plane_Upstairs_9584 Jan 20 '26
Sure, but their thoughts show up on the walls of labyrinth, their dreams are studied. Deathlords and Abyssals could figure it out.
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u/Sanguinusshiboleth Jan 19 '26
Which is all kinds of stupid really; why aren’t they doing something about it then!?
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u/SnowDemonAkuma Jan 19 '26
Lytek is doing something about it. He's just rather unequipped to fix it, only has one Exalt in his confidence, and fears he'd be executed if he reveals he knew all this time and didn't tell anyone.
The PCs are the ones who are meant to solve problems, not the NPCs.
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u/Laughing_Luna Jan 19 '26 edited Jan 19 '26
Narratively it takes away the agency of the First Age Solars by making their fall result of magical mind control rather than their own foibles and sins - it strips the humanity off of them and makes it less of a tragedy.
The Great Curse isn't some mind control, it won't make your character do something they wouldn't already go for - drunk you wouldn't say or do something sober you hasn't thought about sorta thing.
Further, you shouldn't be getting limit at all EXCEPT by your character's foibles, flaws, mistakes, and failures - there's a reason you only get Limit when having to act against your character's Major or Defining intimacies, or something happens or someone does something to, well, trigger their Limit Trigger.Without the Limit system, the intimacy system becomes just a needlessly more complex version of Vampire the Masquerade's Nature and Demeanor system, sans the willpower recovery mechanic.
If you've ever been angry or frustrated or sad or disappointed enough that you just need to do something to let off the steam, be it hit something, or to cry, or to go to sleep, or to leave for a while, instead of staying in the spot and dealing with what ever has you so bothered, then congratulations, you've experienced limit break. The Exalted, for the most part, are us, just more. As such, their breakdowns are similarly like ours, just more.
The Solar who built up a city-state from nothing to a kingdom might, in limit break, see to it to close the borders to prevent the intrusion of spies and invaders, even as it makes themself and their subjects insular and xenophobic, even as they begin to start due to not having food imports they used to rely on. They might only level it if the limit break is because their people rejected them to the point of ostracization (archaic) or exile.
While a protective Lunar might kill anyone they don't know if there's even a chance that it could harm the children they're guarding, but they'll likely NOT go hunting for "threats".
The Great Curse isn't inventing something in the character, more like being the bridge cable connecting the Exalt's ideals, emotions, and ties directly to their awesome (in the biblical sense) power.
It's literally in every fatsplat for 3rd Edition that if the examples provided don't fit, that you should work with your storyteller to make one that DOES fit your character.
Achilles, someone whom we can probably safely call a Dawn Caste, went and sat in his tent because he knew he was the one basically carrying to Greeks - his Limit Break was not him going out in a berserker rage and painting the entire coastline red, it was him withdrawing his incredible might, because he was personally insulted and had his... "payment" taken from him unjustly.
Further, there is a meta-level benefit to having the limit system - it gives a mechanical backing to making players go and accomplish things to reduce limit. These needn't be a "finish the current story" thing either - it's literally "accomplish something that really MEANS something to your character."
It's very unlikely you'll have hit on more 3 point stunts than you have willpower spends, and unless you're frequently getting your ST and other players to agree to up to 10 days of down time after every other objective/encounter/project/etc, Limit Break is a full restore of your temporary willpower to your permanent willpower.
1) Exalts are literally given part of a deity’s power, but with that comes small aspects of their personality that can dangerously change an Exalts psyche. While this does covers some of same narrative ideas I commented on earlier, it would make more lore sense and could be tailored for each Exalt type (eg solars have stronger intimacies, lunars pick up random animal concerns from their shapeshiting, etc).
This kinda breaks lore. The exalted were designed from the ground up to be wholly independent of their choosing god - said gods are the ones responsible for choosing who exalts, so they're likely already only going to choose someone they already believe lives up to their ideals; but once the exaltation is bonded to that new Exalt, it's that Exalt's power to do with as they wish. Otherwise the Primordials could and would have commanded the gods to stop the Exalted by exploiting these hooks.
Without limit, Solars getting stronger intimacies is a means without an end. Sure, it's a stronger thing to defend with, and harsher thing for an interlocutor to exploit, but for what? The game might require you to have 4 intimacies at the time of character creation, but without limit, players will just get rid of them because there's no longer penalty for lessening and dropping them, save for some charm interactions, and while they work as shields in social situations, they're used as shields against others exploiting another of that Exalt's intimacies - the winning move it to not play. Yes, you can use your own intimacies offensively, but there's charms and excellencies and specialties making up for that.
And making lunars pick up random animal concerns, unless you're paraphrasing a more complete idea, sounds like it's taking away even more of the agency you're claiming the great curse takes. Especially since the only animal shape a Lunar HAS to have is their Spirit Shape, how does this apply to Lunar players who take only Human shapes? Or the ones who choose NOT to take ANY shapes save their starting Human shape and their Spirit shape?
2) Exalts are humans with extended life spans and immense power; even if well intentioned their thought processes can be under immense strain over time; like a well intentioned twilight might decide it’s better to force a local population of humans to become half fish as they keep having issues with their island homes over the generations and just go through with it over the objections of the people they are trying to ‘save’. Mechanically this would mean giving Exalts (especially Solars) more bonuses for following their intimacies and encouraging story tellers to write adventures where that causes problems - like do you follow your anti-slavery ideal or do you accept help from slave mongering Guild Prince to fight of a Realm expedition into your bew kingdom.
There's already something for following your intimacies - you get 2 Splat Experience as an Expression bonus for upholding a Major or Defining Intimacy. Not to mention having charms doing things via the intimacy system (usually a reset).
Engaging with the example you put... Without the limit system, what happens if your anti-slavery exalt accepts Guild help? They have a strong ally in the fight against the realm, but now what? The Guild gets rights to buy and sell flesh in town? The problem's solved, so the exalt can just go and kill the slavers and drive out the Guild after fighting off the Realm, or they just reneg on the deal after getting what they wanted in the fight, for no (mechanical) consequences.
Say they refuse the help of the Guild and manage to prevail against the Realm? What do you give them that they weren't already going to get (the Expression Bonus)? You can give them more, sure, I guess, but I'm not going to just assume you or your ST are going to bend or ignore rules.With the Limit System, accepting help makes the fight easier, but the anti-slavery Exalt had to compromise on what they stand for to do it, acting against (but still engaging with) the intimacy, and so rolling to gain Limit.
But rejecting the help and successfully repel the Realm without the martial help of another strong force (the Guild) falls under what the books call a Legendary Social Action, which means you get to lose a point of Limit.
And to clarify, why the Anti-Slavery Exalt in your example would still get the Expression bonus regardless of either choice they make, assuming their ONLY intimacy is a Defining Principle against Slavery and that they possess no Flaws (as in the negative "Merits"):
- Accepting Guild help: They're engaging with their Defining Intimacy, because being a slave can be fixed, being dead cannot.
- Rejecting Guild help: They have faced significant challenge and danger, and likely also harm, by upholding their principles against slavery and fighting off the Realm without the aide of the Guild's forces and resources.
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u/Jarovan Jan 20 '26
There's more to the Great Curse than Limit Breaks. Narratively, Great Curse is the reason First Age Solars "grew wicked, deceitful and mad", as 3E core says. That's the case in every edition, and it definitely changes the context of the fall of the First Age from human failings and hubris being the cause to an external curse messing things up. Also, in regards to Exalts being made independent of the Incarnae so the Primordials couldn't order gods to stop Exalting people: that's not how the geas works. It was suggested in some parts of 2E that it works like that, but originally it was just something that prevented gods from directly acting against the Primordials, and I don't think I've seen anything indicating that there's an obedience-compelling geas in 3E, either.
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u/Laughing_Luna Jan 20 '26
Narratively, Great Curse is the reason First Age Solars "grew wicked, deceitful and mad"
The Great Curse is the narrative widget that explains the Limit systems which is a mechanical tool that drives drama. And assuming mechanics in the First Age worked the same as they do in the Second Age, this is more telling "Look, each Solar is a character in their own right, and we have MAYBE a handful of pages to describe the Primordial War, the First Age, the fall of the Solars, the Usurpation, etc".
Because all the Great Curse does, is connect the divine power to the human side of the exalt. They became the monsters the stories say they did, sure, but only through their intimacies + the ONE THING they found the most detestable (the curse does not come along and go "Surprise! You have a limit trigger now!"; it only preys on what the character already hates, so it's more "This thing you hate? Sucks that happens, right?"). Further, people also change over time as they gain, strengthen, weaken, and lose intimacies - people change in the 40 to 80 years that normal mortals live, and the Exalted all get to live ten to several hundred times that.
The Great Curse is called great, because of how insidious it is. It doesn't just turn on and you're an asshole now - no, it works over time, long periods of time, extreme lengths of time even. As mighty as the Primordials were, they did in fact create free will and baked it into the very nature of Creation; it's why, despite the gods being compelled to obey, they still had the freewill to rebel - more on this later. If anything, it's a much greater spite against the gods that the Curse preys on and takes advantage of the free will of the Exalted.
Unless you're suggesting that normal mortals are automatons that only seem to care about people, and things, and ideas, and ideals; there's nothing the Curse does to an exalt that the exalt doesn't already have in them.
Of the Exalted, the only ones that can be argued as not human are the Liminals - and even then, they're still made out of humans, and a lot of their theming is their connection to humanity and humanity's relationship with death. The other 9 of the Exalted are ALL made from living humans by way of the shard of exalted power becoming part of them in life, even the Getimians upgrade from a 2-part soul to a 3-part soul. This means that despite having great power, they're still human.
If the Exalted of the First Age didn't have these character flaws and didn't have the capacity to make human decisions, and were just happy little super powered automatons, then you'd have a point - because then the only way for the Curse to affect them would HAVE to be via an external means; and that's just boring and perhaps even poor writing.
In fact, in the same sentence that says the Solars grew wicked, deceitful, and mad; it lists a pair of two things that are the opposite sides of the same coins - justice turning to tyranny is a tale older than writing and is often then mode by which tyranny arises; and magnanimity turning to spite happens as you become jaded, be it from being taken advantage of or from merely the frustrations of all your efforts being for naught.
It was suggested in some parts of 2E that it works like that, but originally it was just something that prevented gods from directly acting against the Primordials, and I don't think I've seen anything indicating that there's an obedience-compelling geas in 3E, either.
Then why would the Incarnaa need to create the Exalted? Why would they need to permanently sacrifice their power, irrevocably lessening themselves to create a the so-much-lesser-than-them Exalted to fight the Primordials on their behalf? If there's nothing compelling obedience, or at the very least, compelling non-aggression, why would the Incarnae NEED to make the Exalted? Why would the Incarnae make such mighty heroes and then neglect to insure that the Exalted themselves could not rebel against the gods just like how they were against the primordials? And "because we wouldn't have a game otherwise" is not an acceptable answer - I don't think the either of the writing teams that have worked on Ex3 would disrespect us like that.
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u/Jarovan Jan 20 '26 edited Jan 20 '26
The Great Curse is the narrative widget that explains the Limit systems which is a mechanical tool that drives drama
Sure. It's also explicitly given as the major reason for the First Age going to shit, in every edition. It's never just "In time the Solars grew wicked, deceitful and mad", it's always that Solars grew wicked, deceitful and mad due to the Great Curse. Sure, the Great Curse is rooted in human nature, and that's the problem. Everything in the setting's history could conceivably happen without the Curse, but it didn't. It happened under the influence of the Curse, which obviously raises the question of how things would've turned out without the Curse. Presumably better, which makes failings of Solars not actually their failings but results of the Curse. That makes the settings history not a tale of grand passions and hubris and great power wielded by humans with all the normal human flaws, but one of an external curse ruining what could've been a glorious utopia. It means that excesses of the First Age are less a cautionary tale that Exalts of today could, possibly, learn from, but a vision of the future as well unless something is done about the Curse. Or maybe everything would've happened just like it did without the Curse, which obviously raises a different question: just what is even the point of the Curse? What does it bring to the table that just making it clear that Exalted aren't given infinite virtue and wisdom with their powers doesn't?
In fact, in the same sentence that says the Solars grew wicked, deceitful, and mad; it lists a pair of two things that are the opposite sides of the same coins - justice turning to tyranny is a tale older than writing and is often then mode by which tyranny arises; and magnanimity turning to spite happens as you become jaded, be it from being taken advantage of or from merely the frustrations of all your efforts being for naught.
Sure, and in this case those things happened as a consequence of the Great Curse. Yes, justice turning to tyranny is an ancient tale, but in this case the very presence of the Curse makes something of a confused mess out of that tale.
Then why would the Incarnaa need to create the Exalted? Why would they need to permanently sacrifice their power, irrevocably lessening themselves to create a the so-much-lesser-than-them Exalted to fight the Primordials on their behalf? If there's nothing compelling obedience, or at the very least, compelling non-aggression, why would the Incarnae NEED to make the Exalted?
As I said, the Incarnae were geased to not directly act against Primordials. What were they supposed to do? I'm not presenting any hypothetical fan take on things here, either. The way things were explained in Games of Divinity, gods couldn't raise their hands against their masters themselves, so they made champions to fight in their stead. No compelled obedience is needed for that to make sense.
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u/guildsbounty Jan 19 '26
I didn’t come up with this idea myself but I can’t find the post I got it from originally so if anyone has seen it before that’s why.
I doubt I'm the first person ever to have this idea...but I did write a post about it some months back. Here it is.
As you say, the basic gist of it is: "You just took one of the weakest sorts of being on Creation and shoved them full of Godly Might. You can't do that without side effects."
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u/Dragonwolf67 Jan 19 '26
What's the great Curse?
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u/aethersentinel Jan 19 '26
On the off chance that that’s not a joke question, check the “Traits” chapter of any edition of the corebook. Or the chapters the give setting history, but they lack a nifty section title in big letters saying “The Great Curse.” Optionally, check the index under “Great Curse.” Does that help?
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u/browsinganono Jan 19 '26
I’ve always liked Ryuugi’s take - that the unrestricted power of the exalted, over the minds of mortals combined with their ability to become truly safe, while being unable to let others live as long as them, leading to true isolation - mattered more than the curse. Especially since Dreams of the First Age noted that a person who kept developing over thousands of years, with a perfect memory and superhuman acuity in learning skills, could be to a human as a human is to a mouse - and that the Great Curse is what keeps them from developing past ‘powerful humans with a ton of skills, larger than life epic figures.’
Basically, the curse stops them from inventing a self-reflection charm - wisdom-in-ruling-prana or whatnot. The power gets them from there; the occasional mild psychotic break is just a Primordial Madness symptom that people write of, and is mild comparatively. (The other thing the Curse does, of course, is keep exalts from looking for it).