The Solars are the ancient god-kings of Egypt or China or Mesopotamia, the deific cultural heroes from the dawn of time – Gilgamesh, Utnapishtim, Moses, Horus, Herakles, Akhilleus, the Yellow Emperor, the Sage Emperors. These ancient solar princes have all sat up, and the great beards they grew in their slumber have shattered their respective stone tables, and here they are in the time of the Book of the New Sun, or the Dying Earth, or Zothique – a world at the end of history, without hope or fresh impetus. Wow, what a fucking lot of work they’ll have to do to bring back the glories of the dawn of time; a vast challenge, but not one out of reach for these mighty heroes.

The Premise

Shortly after your Exaltation you were taken in by The Cult of the Illuminated trained for years at one of The Three Schools and indoctrinated by Sidereal handlers. You’ve finally been released to fulfill the Destiny proscribed for you.

However destiny is not so easily thrust on the Exalted; they shape their own destinies and of those around them. The strength of your will can shatter your patron plans; for good or ill.

Now it is your time to choose: follow the plans or your Sidereal patrons for a new golden age or strike out on your own. Forge your own path, or follow the plans given to you.

Pawn or Messiah, Beacon of Hope or Scourge upon the World, Redeemer or Destroyer.

The Choice is yours.

And this, my friends, is what happened to Elder Solar Exalted.

The corruption of the Great Curse, the soul-rot that consumes all of them. The strongest, the brightest, the best and the noblest of them, it matters not. You live long enough, you turn from an exemplar of glorious perfection to one who perfectly embodies virtue corrupted.

Conviction becomes careless cruelty and a cavalier attitude to ever-increasing amounts of collateral damage.

Valor becomes sneering contempt at reason.

Temperance teeters back and forth between mortification of the flesh, one’s own and those of others, for failing to adhere to impossible standards, and to the wildest excesses a thousand screaming souls sing of in their unending nightmares.

Compassion devolves into brutal micromanagement of lives, no matter what these objects – objects! – of affection want, because you know better.

And then you add Limit Breaks, which exaggerate all these titanic flaws to levels previously unseen, unheard and unimagined, for centuries upon centuries.

There is no escape from this fate, for so rot-blighted are these ancient souls that not even death can end their evil. There is only the time your Exaltation gives you before the Great Curse consumes you, and in that time, you can be the hero you were meant to be.

Just pray that you die long before one of your younger cousins stands before you, raging at you, casting words of fiery damnation at you for in your heart you will know that you have become the very monster your kind was made to fight.

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