| Mar. 5th, 2004 @ 02:52 am [Game Review] Exalted: The Sidereals |
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Current Mood:  disappointed
 This is going to be an extremely awkward review to write, in part because I know all of the credited authors save one on the text of Sidereals, and there's really only word that comes to mind when considering how I'd review it:
Disappointment.
Disappointment reigns here because of a number of issues which impacted my enjoyment of the book as a whole and in particular. I'm well aware of what these authors can produce, which makes me all the more confused and concerned after finishing Sidereals. It had immense potential and wasn't a hugely hyped book, so I felt my expectation was pretty reasonable, and yet -- I feel let down.
Let's start at the beginning, with my particular problems.
The overall "voice" of the text, at least the first 2/3rds, feels extremely wrong compared to the other Exalted books. The general carriage of the text is extremely modern, even down to the use of colloquial constructions in the verses associated with the Maidens. The repeated references to the "interface" of the pattern spiders which work the Loom of Fate, as well as references to the stars as a "status display" for the Loom may be technically accurate, but they jar mightily against the feel of the surrounding text. There are less concrete flows of presentation which erupt through the surface of the book regularly and jar the reader from the immersion in the setting.
Yes, I'm aware that the Sidereals have the advantage of the perspective of much First Age lore and experience -- but the First Age wasn't Chicago 1984, either. The difference compared to previous books in the line is notable.
The editing of Sidereals is atrocious -- to the level of at least one disturbingly visible typo every couple of pages. (Page 222 sports two typos and a significant cut-and-paste error that an editing read-through should have caught.) Again, compared to the previous core-books in the line, Sidereals stands out, but in an unpleasant way. One is forced to wonder if the book hit a severe deadline crunch that aggravated the voice and typo problems by not allowing for significant editing time. While such things are understandable, they're not acceptable.
The presentation of the Heavenly city of Yu-Shan and the Heavenly Bureaucracy left me cold. I already deal with a decadent, self-involved, largely rudderless bureaucracy in a day-to-day basis; you would call it Hewlett-Packard. Immersing a third of the Sidereals' responsibility in Yu-Shan is less than appealing to me. More generally, it makes it difficult to integrate the Sidereals with an already-extant game of Exalted -- and it's not the only thing that does so. More on that in a moment.
The complexity of the added layers of mechanics provided by the Sidereals is more than a little troubling. At least the mechanical systems in Abyssals covered the whole of unlife in the Underworld, as if you'd bought Abyssals and got lucky enough to get Wraith bundled in for the ride. In Sidereals, not only do you have the Charm burden that all the books have (and at at least 3 Charms each for 25 Abilities, that's a lot of Charms), but an entire secondary, complex, highly involved system for Sidereal Astrology (read: proto-Mage magic, including Paradox) that not only is extremely complicated, but worse in my opinion, contains no examples of actually how to use it in any significant degree.
Its bad enough to give me a massive chunk of the book devoted to a single-task system only usable to cover about a hundred entities in all of Creation -- or outside it -- but to make it so abstruse and dependent on soft decision-making, and make it so much worse by including no significant examples? I don't feel insulted, I feel actively abused.
Plus Sidereal Astrology is insanely powerful. If you feel compelled to include a sidebar titled "This Breaks The Game!" in the discussion of how powerful the system is (and that's not hyperbole -- that's a real sidebar), then you clearly recognize there's an issue. An issue which doesn't matter if its the first book of the line, but as the last book, it makes it nearly impossible to integrate it with an already extant game in a sensible manner, and given the line's been out for years, anyone buying the book to actually use likely already has a game going! That bit just feels short-sighted.
Compound all these issues with the fact that the Sidereals, in many ways, seem to pretty much reproduce everything the Solar Exalts can do save in raw, direct, straight-ahead firepower (and that's melee firepower; the Sidereal Martial Arts are the equal of any other Exalt's), except better, and one has to come away wondering if how these characters fit into the setting was given as much thought as they deserved.
This isn't to say the whole book is a bust. The idea of Sidereals as fate's hands and feet in the world, crafting the threads to make sure the Tapestry remains unsnarled, is a damn fine idea. The conflict between the Bronze and Gold factions is handled beautifully, with excellent direction. The underlying idea of Sidereal Astrology is both sound and cool. Arcane Fate (the inability for pretty much anyone to actually remember meeting or knowing a Sidereal) may be the keenest character-type drawback that I've seen in years. But the good bits have trouble outweighing the bad bits in this particular tome. They succeed, but its a near thing.
Sidereals isn't a must-buy book as the other hardbacks in the Exalted line are. Its a "if you have the cash to burn" book. Some do, some don't.
Overall Grade: C+. After much long, hard thinking. |
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