Talk:Essence-Blasting Hits of the Seventies

Proposed General Idea

- Try to maintain a sense of realism - you don't need to make up a band if the real thing will do. Try to use real bands when you can, adapting them to the Exalted.

Not sure about this, at least for post-WWII stuff. I assume from the 1970s title that we intend a target goal of a larger-than-life 1970s "vanilla" setting. But I am not sure what we intend for the players to be. Will they be meeting up with famous real-life rockstars Exalted beyond proportion, or do we not want to get into picking which celebrities and which bands we particularly think are cool? - JDCorley (at work, not logged in)

That's a damn good question. One of the reasons why I picked the 1970's is that it was host to the birth of a lot of musical styles - Punk, New Wave, Heavy Metal, and the very beginning of Hip-Hop. That makes it easy for player groups to create a band in a modern-day style without having to move the setting thirty years forwards - Emo is basically softer New Wave, grunge is punk, and so forth.

I think that the best solution would be to have the PC's be the forefront bands at the edge of the revolution - in other words, they are David Bowie, they are the Ramones, they are Grandmaster Flash, they are DEVO, they are KISS or Queen or Black Sabbath.

On the other hand, there's nothing to discourage the GM from including David Bowie if he thinks that David Bowie would make an excellent Faerie Lord, or something along those lines. Like Exalted, the story should have the characters at its center, not as spear-carriers and the like for the big boys.

Bands from the Sixties are probably going to be described - the Beatles have been fated, for instance, and I'll probably be doing more as time passes. --Darren MacLennan

I agree with the idea - PCs should be the movers and shakers, this is an Exalted-analogue after all, but this is not an idea I can get behind. It seems totally strange to me that the game could be "you are Dave Matthews" without that meaning anything other than "you are a guy who happens to look like Dave Matthews, plays all of Dave Matthews' songs, and the music is the channel through which enormously powerful magic occurs". There is more to being Dave Matthews than that. Just as there was more to being Robert Johnson than drinking arsenic and selling his soul at the crossroads. Perhaps this is just my reticence to playing historical people multiplied by my suspicions about celebrity-worship culture, raised to the power of not knowing anything about the personal life of most of the 1970s artists I really like. On the other hand, look at all the livejournal games out there where you play your favorite celebrity! Someone will love it. So best of luck with the project, I will bow out. :) -- JDCorley

Corley - why bow out, dude? Come on! I could really use whatever contribution you have to this thing.

And celebrity worship is an integral feature of the game - it's very much about the cult of celebrity, and the deleterious effects that it can have.

-Darren MacLennan