anyway.

One of the things I always found promised but never really delivered with Exalted was "discovering one's past lives".

Once I figured out of treating past lives like Sorcerer demons, as full on NPCs, and started putting them into the R-maps like any other NPC, then I realized I had this fun place to start drawing conflicts back and forth across present and past.

Somewhere in this process, I realized I was basically using DITV Town Creation methods.

This last session had a player trying desperately to use his 2 Lore to undo the magic curse he laid as an Exalted centuries ago, which was his 9 Power Demon.  He failed, but found a ..."work around" that involved sacrificing an entire town to restore the balance of life there.

We're using the dual definition rules for humanity, so he managed to both avoid losing Humanity for that horrific act, and succeeded on the roll to GAIN a Humanity point for undoing the devastation his past life had left.  (Which, basically tells me this world is even more fucked up than I initially thought...)

Whoa.  Everything about that sounds excellent.

This does sound cool, but... as someone unfamiliar with Exalted, the description is very confusing.

Are "past lives", like, in a reincarnation sense, or are you just talking about events from the past, or what?

I don't get it.

Yes, Exalted's focus is literal reincarnation in an anime-fantasy setting.  Characters are supposed to get more powerful as they learn more about their past lives, though there's no mechanical push in the White Wolf rules and it mostly falls to GM mother-may-I stuff.