It Began at the Water

It danced there, on the sand, on the water. The wind howled and sang a melody for it, and it kept time by naming the beats of the two-headed drum: dhinak dhinak dhin dhin dha, dhinak dhin...Was it a woman? Was it a man? Now yes, now no, now, perhaps. It was white. It flickered.

It was a god.

They could tell by the way it moved, or didn't move: the way its scarves hung stiff as paper in the thrashing sea airs until it turned its eyes to them; the way it would strike a pose and then suddenly be uncoiling from a different one; they saw it in the pale flash of its eyes and the lazy extension of its limbs. It flickered. They stood behind the dunes and the trees and watched.

Most of all, they could tell it because it was more a performance than a performer; a painting of a dancer. It flickered, and it smudged.

The hush of admiration for a god's unleashed beauty became a hush of impatient preparation, as the god ascended to heaven on the crest of a silver hill. They had noticed, at last, that as its feet touched the sand as it danced, as it threw shells from its hands, all these things were glazed with a layer of whiteness. Everything the god touched was turning into pearls.

Árichesja Raven-Swallows-the-Sun later said of the theophany, "That was when the war began."

Refining UCS

Some refinements and clarifications from the RPGnet thread:

Damage:

• A simple damage success generates a -1 dot wound.
• A difficult success generates a -2 dot wound.
• A legendary success causes a -3 dot wound.

You may perform a "called shot" at a difficulty of the defender's Essence. A simple success causes a -1 dot wound; a difficult success causes a -1 dot wound to the Accuracy or Defence Attribute.

This makes it a little easier for high-end Exalted to wear down their inferiors to helplessness.

No, I Die!

When you suffer the consequences of defeat, you may choose to die. Describe the way you do so. Your consequences of victory occur, if this is possible (as when your goal is something like save Yuanyin's life or obtain the Green Destiny, and they do so in the most permanent fashion reasonable; if you obtained an item by dying, then twists of fate will keep that item in obscurity until your spark's next incarnation remembers your epic death and seeks it out.

Extras:

For each damage success against an extra group, defeat one extra. This is just a cinematic thing; I think extras are a little too annoying to deal with in the default.

Ox-Body Technique & Healing

Radical changes ahoy! Since I don't have HLs, I can't use OBT to add those; instead, they'll have to be repaired some other way. Haven't figured out the details of this.

Anytime you would regain Willpower outside a conflict, you may recover your Essence in Ability dots, or one Attribute dot. I award stunts a lot, so this will probably work for me.

Stakes

Clarification: An effect you obtain by stake-setting and winning a conflict can only be negated by defeating you in another conflict.

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Other comments and questions are of course welcome.