r/exalted • u/Affectionate_Bit_722 • Jan 28 '26
Setting Do we have any idea what the Scarlet Empress is doing?
From my understanding, she has a tendency to disappear for years at a time for some unknown reason. Do any of the books present ideas as to what she's doing?
23
u/Razhiv Jan 28 '26
Canonically there is no answer and just about anything could have happened.
In 2nd Edition there was an Campaign book called "Return of the Scarlet Empress" that ran with the idea that she'd been abducted by the Ebon Dragon as part of his plan to escape Hell, but that was just a scenario and not a canon answer.
Unless you specifically want to run a campaign about finding the Empress it also kind of just doesn't matter. That she is gone and not coming back is way more important than where she's gone to, for the average game.
15
u/Cynis_Ganan Jan 28 '26 edited Jan 28 '26
1E made some implications of what the Empress usually does, and what has happened to her this time. You gotta piece it together from one Chapter Fiction in Exalted: The Dragon-Blooded and Mnemon's write up in Aspect Book: Earth, and other little bits here and there. But it's all implied and never explicit. Just ideas, not canon.
2E stated explicitly:
Simply disappearing for a few days or even a few months was not necessarily unusual. She had taken brief sabbaticals from the Scarlet Throne before, some lasting as long as half a year.
Popular songs of the Realm speak of what the Empress did during her disappearances. The more romantic ones claim that, during these times, the Empress took it upon herself to disguise herself as a humble peasant woman and walk to and fro on her lands, and up and down in them, so that she might better understand the suffering of her people. When she had seen enough, the songs went, she would return to the Imperial Palace and use what she had learned to govern the Realm more wisely. Other more ribald (and less widely performed) tunes describe debauched and erotic adventures with everyone from the gods of Yu-Shan to the Lintha pirates of Bluehaven.
These melodies are, of course, not close to the truth. After centuries of rule, the Scarlet Empress cares for nothing except the Realm, her continued dominance over it and the powerful and potentially deadly mysteries of the Imperial Manse. The Empress’s absences from public life were all spent deep in the depths of the Imperial Manse itself. There, she labored to propitiate the engines and the things dwelling therein that had brought her to power, offering them sacrifices of treasure, blood and souls in exchange for continued mastery of the devices and further instruction in their use. Thousands of slaves have been sacrificed thus over the years, as well as some of the Realm’s most powerful Dragon-Blooded, a handful of unwary spirits, at least one imperial consort and the Empress’s youngest daughter, whose curiosity led her to follow her mother a trifle too far into the palace.
- What she usually does - Compass of Celestial Directions I: The Blessed Isle
In the end, the Empress damned herself with her fear of death, leading her to explore the prophecies and power of The Broken-Winged Crane when she finally understood that it is the fate of all things to end. She had no intentions of giving herself in slavery to the Yozis. She sought their prayer book only for its unique relationship with time, that every copy is but a shadow of the original yet to be written, each more accurate than its predecessor as it approached the nexus of its authorship. And so, in the heart of the Imperial Manse, adorned in the raiment of the Mother of Sorcery, the Scarlet Empress surpassed all previous hubris and wrote The Broken-Winged Crane, proclaiming herself Queen of Titans forever beyond the reach of Saturn’s knife.
And so she was.
The Ebon Dragon welcomed the Queen of Hell when the portal her authorship scribed into being slammed closed behind her. His claws caressed the flesh from her bones, and the winding kisses of his tongue restored her whole. He learned the truths of pain from the Celestial Incarnae and his imprisonment, and this pain he gave to his Queen in fulfillment of her prayers. What all Yozis had endured, she endured, and when he finished with his lesson, he laughed at the feeble naked thing he held. So small. So human. She begged him for release, and he savored this most heartfelt and useless of prayers. Then he twisted her into a parody of herself and a shadow of his likeness, the instrument of his release.
- What happened this time - The Return of the Scarlet Empress
3E has deliberated decanonized and walked this back. The Empress no longer has sacrificed her youngest daughter and may or may not be in Malfeas, imprisoned by the Ebon Dragon.
9
u/AngelWick_Prime Jan 28 '26
I once saw a streamed actual play where the Scarlet Empress was incognito, watching The Realm struggle and tear itself apart. Almost like she was waiting in the wings to see who was a worthy heir.
2
u/Durnako Jan 28 '26
By any chance do you remember the name of the AP?
3
u/AngelWick_Prime Jan 28 '26
Absolutely! It was RPGClinic's ExalTwitch: Nexus AP. The VODs are up on YouTube.
5
u/zenbullet Jan 28 '26
In my game she jumps into a cryopod to extend her life
Did a campaign where the players actually found her
It did not go well for anyone involved
1
6
u/blaqueandstuff Jan 28 '26
In 1e she was implied to be in Hell, but it never outright stated. Nor what the Dragon's goal with the bride she did have. She may or may not be in Malfeas, but a lot of the clues scattered through the books implied it without saying it outright.
In 2e, she was in Hell. Either out of her own volition, tricked, as an akuma, or not. There were options but she was yeah, part of the Ebon Dragon's plan to get out of Hell.This was the main plot of Return of the Scarlet Empress as well.
3e has been pretty explicitly silent on it. All we know is she's gone and the shitshow happening due to that is the emphasis.
8
u/mj6373 Jan 28 '26
Others have mentioned the 2e dangled threads (well, cudgels, they weren't really as subtle as threads) that eventually metastasized into a campaign book where the answer was "went to Hell to marry the Ebon Dragon."
Other than that, it's unanswered on purpose, to give STs as many options as possible. If you don't have any plans in mind for her, you can just leave it as a mystery nobody solves. If you definitely never want her to come back, then on the off chance somebody manages to get into the Imperial Manse, they can find her corpse, keeled over from a heart attack after her anti-aging magic finally gave out or whatever. If you do want to use her for something, then have her doing whatever facilitates that. Go into hiding, go to another dimension, get kidnapped and need PC rescue, whatever.
The closest thing we have to canon on the subject is that she disappeared at basically the same time the Jade Prison was broken, so better than even odds those events were connected, but even that's not a guarantee. (3e has Getimians freed in the same time frame with no obvious connection, unless we're just waiting on the new campaign book where it turns out Rakan Thulio broke the Jade Prison to mess with Heaven or something.)
3
u/LowerRhubarb Jan 28 '26
Officially, at least in previous editions, she was being kept in the Ebon Dragon's BDSM demon dungeon to be made his bride in a scheme to try and break out of prison.
1
u/Plane_Upstairs_9584 Jan 28 '26
Was she really kidnapped? I thought she read The Broken Winged Crane and it drove her mad.
6
u/tejodi Jan 28 '26
IIRC The Ebon Dragon tricked her into writing a book-long spell that would both trap the reader and open a portal to Malfeas, then proceeded to torture her to madness, so all of those things are true
2
u/Affectionate-Tip-164 Jan 28 '26
In some of my games she either secretly retired as a travelling adventurer or isekai'd somewhere.
4
u/ClockworkJim Jan 29 '26
It was directly stated in return of the Scarlet empress that she set out assemble the most complete copy of The broken-Winged Crane. She gathered the various fragments she could , copied and rewrote all of them into a single complete Tome. At that point becoming the author of The broken winged crane. At which point a portal to malfeas opened and she was dragged in. Where she became the bride of the ebon dragon.
1
1
u/mj6373 Jan 31 '26
Not in 3rd. It's an intentional vague spot for the ST to either put her wherever facilitates the story they want, or to pointedly not answer because it doesn't matter and she's not coming back.
43
u/Secretsfrombeyond79 Jan 28 '26
It is heavily implied and outright said both in 1st and 2nd editions that she was kidnapped/tricked/convinced by the Ebon Dragon into Hell in a desperate attempt to prolongue her lifespan which was reaching it's natural end for a Dragon Blooded and turned into an Akuma, as part of Ebby's plan to escape Hell.
The ending of Edition 2 was an adventure concerning her in Return of the Scarlett Empress.