"I'm going to throw you out now!" the castle guardian said. "Please don't take it personally!"

With that, the fortress abruptly tipped, leaning to the vertical as the controller skillfully manipulated its webs to hurl the Exalts out the far window. Each sought helplessly to maintain their footing; each grabbed blindly for any handhold they thought they could reach. All to no avail; gravity spat them out of the fortress like so many watermelon seeds.

Sabath, the Twilight, spun in midair and shot another rope-laden arrow into the citadel's stonework. Golm, the Dawn, seized said rope and charged up it, with the Night, Sangrin, balanced lithely on his shoulders. Vhidia, the Lunar.... changed into a bird and flew off. Good for her.

Thus, she was the first to see the fallen Dragon-Blooded -- all eight of them, impaled on their own daiklaves, while in the center of the ring stood a figure armored in soulsteel.

I was amused that, of all the player characters, the Lunar ended up in mortal combat with the Abyssal and mostly won, in a flurry of Direlance vs. Daiklaive.

With a powerful leap, Golm hewed apart the master of the fortress, blood sparkling in bright sprays that defined the arc of his grimcleaver. Almost instantly the fortress lurched -- then fell, plummeting towards the ground, its animating force destroyed. Flaring bright-gold with Essence, Golm swung his greataxe four times in the space it takes a man to blink -- then neatly pushed out the perfect square of wall he'd carved, surfing it to the ground almost as an afterthought.

And yet he was still a hundred yards from the fray. After a moment's consideration, the mighty smith stomped the ground, the force of his blow powerful enough to rebound the stone slab into the air. He dealt it a mighty blow with the grimcleaver -- then released the haft to grip the stone just as it rocketed into the air, Golm trailing it like a comet's tail.

The volcano erupted.

With the gratuitous enemies defeated, the Exalts sought to leave the forbidding depths of the tunnel and return to the surface -- only to discover the tunnel rumbling every time they tried to climb up it. Fully aware that it was a trap, they went down the other tunnel instead, deeper into the heart of the volcano -- and there they met Pyroclasm, god of that particular volcano, who looked favorably on the return of the Solars, and offered them a staircase exit out through the actual cone of the extinct mountain.

Where they were properly captured by Dragon-Blooded and half-forced, half-encouraged to take up arms against the necrocitadel advancing from the desert. Pleasant. Eight of the Dragon-Blooded accompanied them; two more ventured into the depths of the mountain from whence they'd come.

The Dragon-Blooded shot forward into combat against the hundreds of swarming zombies, eight jade daiklaives shimmering with elemental Essence as they spun in intricate designs through the onrushing hordes. Behind them, a hundred pikes wavered in feeble bare-unison as the hastily-recruited militia marched forwards to their dooms. The zombies fell upon them, cutting them down without mercy.

"We have to stop the citadel," the Dawn said to himself, his grimcleaver still safely on his back as he held himself from the lines. But that citadel towered above the battlefield, several hundred feet away and no small distance up, supported on its four corners by thick, elephantine legs that marched it relentlessly forward.

Then the pattern spiders of the Loom gave him a break; he saw his moment and acted upon it even before the thought could reach his forebrain. Racing forward, the massive figure ducked one arm to the ground, scooping up fallen lances into one oversized hand. The citadel trembled as it adjusted its guidance, but the Exalt's hand held firm as he cast the lances into the air, one at a time. Then, before they could fall, he threw himself into the air, landing on the hurled lance. Before its momentum could dissipate, in that breath of a moment when the pattern spiders flexed the laws of physics enough to suspend the equal and opposite reaction he should have invoked, the Dawn sprang lightly off its haft, bounding to the next, and the next, until his feet landed firmly on the solid, swaying stone of the citadel's great staircase.

Not to be outdone, the others followed. The Lunar, spry and feline, followed in the Dawn's thoughts like a shadow; the Night simply sank into Graceful Crane Stance, freeing the pattern spiders of their obligations as he raced along the spears that were, to him, as solid and stable as a column of stone. The Twilight, coming last, came also least; too slow or too lacking in favor, he found himself stranded in midair, the pike he bestrode descending without safety nearby. Calmly he drew his bow, calmly he impaled rope with an arrow, and calmly he fired that jury-rigged grappler into the stone arch above the staircase.

I forgive them borrowing this stunt from a character of mine, ages ago, because it's awesome.

The Exalts smash through a window and hurry down the great hall to the double doors that lead to the control room of the castle. Bursting in, they discover an immense six-armed creature in constant motion, its hands continually reaching for and adjusting hundreds of webs surrounding the column on which it sits. One player promptly bursts into scathing profanity about webs. Meanwhile, I reach into the depths of my brain for instant character traits, and in an absolutely inexplicable and frankly alarming twist, come up with "voice of Yakov Smirnoff with hints of the Swedish Chef".

Yeaaaah. The players were alternately amused and horrified.

The spider-controller finally convinced them to enter into the "safety circle", which they all enter despite openly recognizing it's a trap. It was. The floor opened, revealing giant blades which fail to kill them as they all blithely balance on the very edge of the pit. The Twilight bitchslaps the barrier ward with Sorcery countermagic, which I allow because it's cool. Then they attack...

Our gaming group's laptop computer crapped out, and while we're waiting to be able to fix it, our normal sessions are on hold for lack of our telecommuting player. This being the case, I elected to run a random game of Exalted till we could get things back together.

Half the players have never dabbled in Exalted before, so character creation was something of a haphazard "try it and run with it" thing. We ended up with a rather interesting group:

One Lunar Exalted: despite not being of the warrior caste, said Lunar had a Dire Beastman Form Charm and a badass direlance. The only person with any level of Compassion whatsoever.

One Twilight-caste Solar: A budding sorcerer with a magic question-answering book Artifact; the player describes his inspiration for Archery-based combat entirely as "Legolas".

One Dawn-caste Solar: I actually helped with this one, inasmuch as the player was having a brief mind jam getting a good background. Said character was a masterful blacksmith who was well-renowned for his skill and ability with tools. A fellow blacksmith became jealous and had the future-Exalt roughed up by goons and dumped into the desert. Hammered by the merciless rays of the Sun, the Dawn dragged himself back from the desert through sheer force of willpower, returning in weary vengeance to challenge his duplicitous rival. Weakened as he was by his ordeal, however, his strength was inadequate to the task -- until the Unconquered Sun bestowed his favor upon him and empowered him with the might of a demigod. Smashy smashy!

One Night-caste Solar: The player dropped three dots into Cult the second he heard it meant people would worship him as a god. Doing a quick check of the level of the Background, his Compassion (1), his skill sets (Stealth and Melee) and his own words ("If you didn't want me to be a dick you shouldn't have told me I was a demigod!"), I extemporized:

"You're renowned throughout the South as a boogeyman. People are terrified at the thought of you. Parents threaten to leave their children out for you to take if they're bad."
"They don't need to leave them out," he responded, "just make a mark on the door!"

The other players promptly started looking for points they could drop to take the Cult background as well...

And I got to open like this: Everyone give me a Dexterity+Athletics roll.

Sometimes it's good to be the ST.

The four of you run furiously down the long tunnel, attempting to reach safety. Behind you the necromantic guardians of the Solar tomb you sought run after you -- maybe chasing you, maybe just also trying to outrun the collapsing tunnel as it chases you.

The Lunar and the Twilight had teamed up, as both were seekers of ancient knowledge; the Dawn accompanied them as a trustworthy (and Exalted) bodyguard. The Night, meanwhile, had insisted on accompanying them -- he had certain duties as a boogeyman and local god to uphold, and one of them included breaking and entering.

The Twilight jabbed a finger at the Night. "I bet he sprung the trap!"

"No," I said, "actually it was the ghost that had been haunting the tomb. You thought you'd beaten it, but it rematerialized and tripped the trap you'd avoided. Now give me another roll."

You reach the cavern at the end of the tunnel, and safety. A massive wall of dust and stone chips billows out of the tunnel as it finishes collapsing, though the rumbling of the earth at last seems to stop. You pause for a second in relief before remembering the tomb guardians are there as well. On the left -- a massive skeletal tyrant lizard hisses and roars in fury. In the center, a writhing mass of torsos all interconnected with ligaments, arms flailing furiously. To the right, a skeleton made of other skeletons.

The Twilight stared. "VOLTRON?" And the skeleton made of other skeletons suddenly became one of the most popular monsters the group had faced in months.

The Dawn leapt into motion, Essence flowing through his body as he leapt forward in a vicious Iron Whirlwind Attack. With his great grimcleaver, a massive axe almost the size of his own hard-muscled body, lifted, he lept forward in a spinning descent. The massive axe sheared through the multiple skeletons of his foremost foe with great ease, then slammed into the ground, cutting a massive furrow in the ground. Clawing skeletal hands reach out from the figures that form the legs, but the Dawn lands behind his blade almost as a matter of course, and the fingerbones skitter harmlessly off the orichalcum weapon as he launches into the air once more. A brilliant stroke splits the air as the ball of torsos keens and parts in a golden wash of Essence. Ribs explode outwards into shrapnel and fragments as he smashes them with the blade in passing. With a small grunt of effort the Dawn reverses in midair, springing lithely off the near wall to land back in his initial position. The tyrant lizard skeleton quivers just a moment before collapsing, its animate force utterly broken by the final slash, too quick to see.

"I saved one for you guys," the Dawn says casually, as the final death throes of the skeleton subside.

The Lunar and the Night brutally disable the multi-skellie-skeleton while the Dawn puts an arrow into it. However, the tyrant lizard skeleton rose up again in a frenzy of ghostly-silver Essence!

The Dawn leapt at the lizard, greataxe swinging in a blinding overhead smash to cleave the reanimated creature from skull to pelvis; in its moment of distraction, the Night raced lithely up its vertebrate tail, twin short-daiklaives drawn to cripple it again.

The tyrant lizard's feeble, tiny forearm, too short and stubby to even be a threat, burst free from its joints like a launched rocket, trailing a corona of silver Essence as it caught the haft of the grimcleaver and puts its force against the swing. As the Night struck for its skull, his blades were blindsided by the other detached arm, which thrust one sword into the next, skewing them both from true. Both artifact weapons struck home, but neither with the strength to cripple the beast.

Roaring a horrible peal of undeath, the tyrant lizard struck. Both arms released the weapons they held, seizing instead the collars of the stymied Solars. With a strength far belying their size, the claws heaved their antagonists into the air, slamming the pair into each other with a rough thud before arcing them into the floor.

The creature might have laughed, but its jaw and skull shattered in a spray of teeth and bone as the Twilight put an arrow through it with deadly accuracy.

The characters eventually discovered that the vengeful ghost who had first unleashed the guardians on them was possessing them and reanimating them; the Twilight bitchslapped its mass-animating Aracanoi with full-on Sorcery, negating its power and leaving it too drained to manifest.

And that was just the first scene...