Exalted Rnd. 11

"Is there a window there?"
... "There is now."

"Oh, I'm supposed to fall. Ahhhhh." -the ability to walk on air can be useful at times

"Don't mess with me kitty."

So, if there was ever a session I was really winging it on it was this one. The start however was a pickup from last time. We left off with the Zenith taking on hordes o' demons. He is more or less ok once he clears the sky of fliers but that doesn't solve the horde on the ground. Luckily the Dawn gets thrown by a Spirit charm across Creation from one battle with demons to another. He appears in the middle of the demons and proceeds to cut most of them down in an efficient fashion.

Post demon clean which happened much faster then I expected the Zenith and Dawn go and find the somewhat beat up Night and they proceed to find out what's behind the gaurded door. It's the 2nd Circle demon that attacked them early. The Dawn starts talking to the demon when the Zenith rushes in, on fire, and attacks him. Demon loses init and dies in two hits from the Dawn. Big boss bad guy is now dead, with no dialogue spoken so plot is somewhat stopped. The Zenith destroys a Broken Winged Crane (without knowing what it was) and then joins the Dawn and Night in exploring. The Night finds some stuff from the Circle's original (insane) Zenith and steals the obvious item that would identify her presence. She also finds a journal written in Old Realm, which she can't read, and gives that to the Zenith who torches it before she can even hand it to him. Now she's stealing the tarnished oricalchulm that identifies the old Zenith and the new Zenith torches the journal without even thinking (I really shoulda forced a temperance roll but the player is almost absolutely opposed to me make any such rolls to control his actions even though I honestly think noone spontaneously burns something, more on that later). Finally the Zenith notices the presence of the tarnished/tainted orichalcum on the Night and essentially attacks her and she somewhat fights back to make her hand it over. She does and the Dawn correctly identifies it as something the old Zenith had a long ways back (game time that was a decade ago!). The Zenith manages to figure out that this corrupted Zenith will probably show up in the city again so the Circle elects to wait.

After this our Zenith player had to leave so the Dawn and Night opted to wait it out in the city. I had a quasi-dream sequence where the Night got to attempt to take on a 2nd Circle demon but didn't do so well. Rather then have her die I sort of on the fly converted it to a dream sequence. I felt kinda bad about that, it was a cheap maneuver but at this point the plot wasn't really going to be advanced. Instead I played around and let the two players stunt and kill some demons and accidentally demolish the palace/castle at the center of town as a result.

The players proved to be really adept at killing things so I got caught rather flat-footed pretty quick in this scenario. I feel like I kinda let them down. I am also dissapointed because I've realized I run a lot of combat and less actual roleplaying then I had intended. On the flip side I've noticed that the players sometimes do some things that a very rash and usually actually make it harder for me to roleplay events. I've been tempted to force rolls of temperance and conviction and valor but I don't want to bring it to that. It's essentially rail-roading. I dunno. Anyhow, two weeks and we have the finale and I have a couple ideas. Plus some scheming :D