Editing Exalted (section)

====Sidereal Martial Arts====

Its been mentioned earlier that there's a SMA that lets you turn people in ducks. This is true, and its not even the most impressive thing you can do in that particular style. Dragonblooded can, RAW, not learn SMAs at all, and outside of Sidereals only Solars (and Getimians in 3e) can do it, and they need to find someone (A sidereal usually) who'll train them - this isn't something a character is supposed to develop on their own.

SMAs are best characterized when compared to CMAs. CMAs tend to deal with great might and power, while SMAs deal with more abstract concepts. Border of Kaleidoscopic Logic Style lets you punch people in their sanity, driving them mad and then fighting them inside their mind as abstract concepts. Charcoal March of the Spider style emulates the pattern spiders that run reality, meaning that you punch people in their reality. This is the "punch people into ducks" style. Citrine Poxes of Contagion Style punches you in the health, making your targets magically sick. Obsidian Shards of Infinity Style is... well...

The game describes Obsidian Shards of Infinity Style by saying "[the style] holds a mirror to Creation and breaks it" - and that putting it really mildly. Mirror clones, mirror dimensions, and being able to gleam possible different futures... this style is just weird.  It also, appropriately, has a charm literally called "Shattering the Balance," and is generally seen as genuinely broken in a game where everything being fucking broken is a selling point.  Several later sourcebooks took digs at it.

Of course, when it comes to weirdness few things can beat Quicksilver Hand of Dreams Style, which lets you punch people in their dreams, punch dreams out of people, and ultimately punch reality to turn it into a dream... or a nightmare. There's also Scarlet-patterened Battlefield Style, which gets really abstract since the martial artist 'punches' with units of soldiers. Yes, really. Another fun SMA is Prismatic Arrangement of Creation Style, which is almost entirely made up of form charms, but lets the martial artist punch people in their essence for various fun effects, like catching and redirecting other people's charms, or punching your way into other people people's essence to temporarily posses their bodies. This also works on inanimate objects... like [https://1d4chan.org/wiki/Mecha Warstriders!]

Basically SMAs let you punch concepts, such as love, to achieve really weird and specific effects - but they're none the less absolute nightmares to fight against. It should be noted that most SMAs are locked behind really high stat requirements, such as essence 6+, meaning that most players will NEVER get access to them. Considering how utterly devastating these martial arts are, this is not necessarily a bad thing. SMAs do make for really fun boss fights though.


All in all, magical martial arts are a cornerstone of what makes combat in Exalted fun and exciting. It turns a plain dragonblooded monk with a sword into a far more interesting and flavorful opponent, it turns a dread deathknight into a truly terrifying opponent, and it gives added flavor to player characters as they internalize the wisdom and tactics that their style informs.