I will be buying this posthaste and sharing my impressions as soon as I have time to make them.
Mmmkay, only had a bit of time to read the new stuff, just plowed through the first chapter while I was killing time at work. Here's my initial thoughts:
The cover art is nice, but the weapon designs all look pretty generic. The pic is obviously supposed to be someone stumbling on a treasure trove of ancient artifacts but they just look like mastercraft normal weapons. Eh, too nitpicky to dock points for it.
Tessaiga gets a namedrop in the obligatory inspirations blurb three paragraphs into the introduction. The recommended media section includes a snarky jab at Tite Kubo's shit writing in the same sentence that it recommends Bleach on the basis of Zanpakuto designs. Fate/Zero gets a mention for noble phantasms but then surprisingly they mention
Sailor Moon as an inspiration too, I guess for non-weapon artifacts. And of course there's Vision of Escaflowne for warstrider stuff.
Chapter 1 gets my attention almost immediately with a mention of artifacts made by the primordials,
"Many are of such bizarre configuration that only Lunars, by dint of shapeshifting prowess, might wield them unmodified." Suck it Solars! /s The rest is mostly just history stuff, lots of sample tales of Exalted legends and the artifacts they wielded and lots more namedrops of new/old stuff mentioned in passing, like an atlas owned by Brigid. Then there's a brief recap of the rules for magical materials, what they're good at, who has good and bad synergy with what, etc. I think the only new thing here is that un-Exalted creatures are either dissonant or neutrally-aligned with most artifacts save for storyteller-specific exceptions.
The Craft errata deals specifically with two charms: Design Beyond Limit now lets you spend a few hours to reforge an artifact in order to unlock an evocation you qualify for beyond the usual limit of evocations per artifact without spending EXP, but can only be done once per story per artifact. Celestial Reforging Technique now lets you respec your purchased evocations on an artifact, but again only once per story per artifact.
Chapter 2 is just a big list of weapon artifacts and evocations and I'm still plowing through this section. Items of note include:
Courante and Galliard, twin swords meant to be wielded by best friends or lovers, whose evocations encourage combo attacks and defend other actions aimed at each other and whose capstone charm lets them do the fusion dance and become a ten foot asura thing.
Gnomon, a starmetal wrackstaff, grants the user the power to slow and stop time and a bunch of tricks to do while time is stopped. Its capstone charm causes the staff to sprout a peach of immortality once a decade but you can speed it up by committing a legendary heist or crime. Its creator also had balls of
pure titanium.
There's some neat weapon ideas in here: a dragon sigh wand with fire element evocations ("Fire that Burns Flame" sums this up nicely), a siege crossbow, Shipbreaker, meant to be used as an aquatic weapon, and of course Stormcaller, the sword that conjures a hurricane as you fight with it.
's creation functionally unplayable for two and a half years.
