Book of Bone and Ebony

EXALTED • BOOK OF BONE AND EBONY
SOULSTEEL MESH
The finest soulforgers in the Underworld can
fashion long threads from the corpus of other ghosts.
When these threads are woven together, they create
a fine black metal mesh that is all but unbreakable.
A net of soulsteel mesh, for example, could hold a
creature with a Strength of up to 20. Certain behemoths
and warstriders may be able to break soulsteel
mesh, but even the Exalted are hard pressed to
escape such a net with only brute strength. Soulsteel
mesh is very fluid and drapes like silk, but it possesses
a bashing soak of 30 and a lethal soak of 15.
The Deathlords have nets of soulsteel mesh
attached in the center to a cord of woven soulsteel
threads (these nets count as Artifact •••• items)
that they fire from large bone tubes. Capturing
targets in these nets is tricky, requiring a Dexterity
+ Archery roll, difficulty 3, and the net captures all
those in a five-foot radius (enough space to capture
up to five people if they’re standing close together).
Characters caught in such a net lose 1 mote of
Essence per turn. Escaping one of these nets involves
doing five health levels of damage to the net,
which is difficult, as the net has a lethal soak of 15
and a bashing soak of 30.
It’s possible to make chain swathing of soulsteel
mesh, but the weight is such that only Essence
channelers who attune themselves to the armor can
wear it (and avoid its Essence-draining effects). In
addition to the standard benefits of wearing soulsteel,
soulsteel swathing imparts a hardness of 4, a soak of
13L/16B and requires Resources (or Artifact) •••••
to purchase.
at all through the black winds of Oblivion). It’s a sight that
no one in the Underworld ever wants to see.
While underway, maelstrom barges (or, more accurately,
the storms that drive them) cause strange fluctuations
in the entropy levels in the countryside beneath them.
These fluctuations strongly resemble the black miracles
visited by the Malfeans upon those in disfavor. Light
payloads are unlikely to trigger this effect, but a fully laden
maelstrom barge will, without a doubt, trigger events that
mimic 2-4 point Resonance effects (see Exalted: The
Abyssals, p. 149) in a quarter-mile radius out from the
barge’s flight path.
Maelstrom barges aren’t combat capable, but they
don’t especially need to be given the nature of their
propulsion system. The raging winds around a maelstrom
barge add 4 to the difficulty of all Archery and Thrown
attacks made against those in the maelstrom barge (assum-
114
OBLIVION’S TERRIBLE WAKE
The violent tempests generated by the maelstrom
barge are not storms as an inhabitant of
Creation would think of them, nor are they even
the tainted storms of blood and plasm more familiar
to those residing in the Underworld (see
Exalted: The Abyssals, pp. 18-19). A maelstrom
empowered by the forces of pure Oblivion is
nothing less than the fist of the Abyss, a gift from
the Malfeans, a titanic storm of destruction and a
tidal wave of madness and disaster inhabited by
shrieking hungry ghosts who ride the storm winds
like frenzied steeds.
Anyone caught in a storm generated by a
maelstrom barge takes damage akin to that of a
supernatural ice storm (see Exalted, p. 244). On
land, players of denizens of the Underworld can
make a difficulty 3 Intelligence + Survival roll for
their characters to avoid taking damage, but those
on the Sea of Shadows are almost certainly doomed,
as the difficulty increases to 5.
Over land, the stability of the Underworld
itself keeps the worst of a maelstrom high above
land, and the storm subsides soon after the passing
of a maelstrom barge, but over water, these catastrophic
storms can last for days after the maelstrom
barge has passed overhead.
A number of ghostly scholars have noted
one particular aspect of maelstrom occurrences
that concerns them most: As the Deathlords
gain power, so do the maelstroms summoned by
their necromancy.
ing it’s even in range and not hundreds of yards above the
ground). Storm-running boots and storm-warding parasols
(see p. 62) will both protect their users from the storm
effects generated by a maelstrom barge but do not negate
Archery or Thrown penalties, nor do they grant protection
of any sort from the black miracles generated by a maelstrom
barge’s passing.
Final Maelstrom
The First and Forsaken Lion remembers the great
aerial fleets of the Solar Deliberative with perfect clarity.
He remembers commanding armies from the deck of
colossal vessels that shaded whole acres in their passing. In
death, he has watched the steady decline of such artifice
with frustration and contempt. The Terrestrial usurpers
squandered the fleets of their betters in petty squabbling,
and even the best engineers among them could only barely
maintain the least of these wonders. The Great Contagion