I'd like to take this moment to send out a message to DHL Worldwide: Pull this crap again, and I will personally go on a classical Corsican vendetta against your entire bloodlines. What am I talking about? The fact that I got my copy of Exalted Limited Edition a day late because the delivery guy couldn't find my house. IT'S THE FIRST ONE ON THE FRIGGIN' STREET! HUGE, GREY, TAKES UP 90% OF YOUR VIEW OF THE ENTIRE NEIGHBOURHOOD!
Ah. Sorry about that. Got a little carried away.
Anyway, I'm going to review my impressions of the Big White Book of Exalted Limited Edition, White Wolf's latest foray away from horror stuff, in this case into the field of epic fantasy.
So, what is Exalted? Well, it's partly an historical game for the World of Darkness, taking place in an age that noone remembers anymore. It might also be the distant future of the World of Darkness, after the current gamelines have ended dramatically, and the world has gone from wasteland to high utopian civilization to destruction and wasteland to new civilization again. Or, it's an entirely unconnected fantasy world. Really, it's all up to you guys. While the game contains a lot of fun connections and hints of the World of Darkness, it can equally well be played by anyone who hates the WoD.
In short, it is a fantasy game. It's set in the long distant past of humanity (how far back? Well, there's mammoth in the North, and what is called "tyrant lizards", twolegged killing machines that from the descriptions sound suspiciously like T-Rexes), in which the world has been under the dominion of The Realm, an empire that's reminiscent of a mixture between ancient India, ancient Rome and ancient China.
Just a few years ago, the unaging Empress of the whole shebang up and vanished, causing a huge gaping hole in the power structure (she never named a successor, probably expecting to keep ruling forever), and the entire Empire to begin crumbling, ever so slightly. This has caused all the old enemies to renew their efforts, including the wild, cruel but beautiful fae, the savage barbarian Lunar Exalted and the Deathlords, the latter want to, as a certain Barker villain put it; "murder the world".
But it's also caused a resurgence of a more hopeful kind, the Solar Exalted, ancient saviors of mankind and all-round ass-kickers have returned, being reborn in worthy vessels all over the world, in order to avoid the doom and gloom that might one day be the World of Darkness (the Deathlords are, according to the developer, what eventually becomes the vampires of Vampire: the Masquerade).
Now, that's just a fraction of what's going on in the game, and I'd have to spend the better part of a week trying to put all of this in one single review. I'd rather review the setting and system in more general sweeps, and then one day do a playtest review of it as well.
So, here goes.
The Setting
The setting takes up quite a large part of the book, at least two fiths of it is dedicated solely to what places there are, why things are the way they are, what's going on and what people are like. A thing that struck me immediately is that unlike in the WoD games, the entirety of the setting material is factual, with no "This might be so...or we might be lying!" put in it.
Instead, it reads a lot like a guide book written by someone who knows exactly what's going on, and this is a very good thing when one has grown tired of the constant hemming and hawwing over what's going on in their games. There are a lot of metaplot elements, but the editor has said that the game is designed to toss the metaplot out the window the very second one starts playing it, seeing as the PC's are supposed to be true epic heroes that makes Heracles and Gilgamesh look like bystanders.
All in all, the setting material, while not as in-depth as some might want (we all know who...) is very much enough to begin a campaign in any part of the gameworld.
As for how to describe the gameworld, it could maybe be described best like this: A mixture of Greek, Chinese, Middle-Eastern and South-American mythology and epic hero tales with anime fantasy movies and games like Escaflowne, Record of Lodoss War, the Final Fantasy series (by the way, Limit Breaks in Exalted are not for combat, but rather more like Greek hero flaws), El-Hazard and any other anime or manga fantasy you can think of. Strangely enough, it works.
The Rules
The rules of Exalted are a slightly modified version of the same Storyteller system used in Trinity, Aberrant and the upcoming Adventure!, which was a relief to me, seeing as I can barely stand even the Revised WoD system (which borrowed elements from the previous games, but in my own opinion, not nearly enough).
Basically, all dice rolls are the familiar bunch of d10's, but unlike the WoD system it's always against a set difficulty of 7, raised difficulty means more required successful dice. Also, the "Rule of One" is pretty much gone, 1's simply don't count until you score no successful dice whatsoever (as long as you get even one, I say one 7, it's simply a failure if the difficulty happened to be higher). Also, there is a new "Rule of 10", in which 10's count as two successes, allowing for truly spectacular successes. Also, if a PC decides to continue with a similar action to his previous, successful one (like doing Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon leaps from tree to tree, yep, they're very possible in the game), extra successes carry over to the next action.
The combat rules are fairly simple, although there are occasional cases of Big-Fist-Of-Diceitis, when a Solar uses attacks with 12 dice three times or more in a single attack. Average mortals are cannon fodder, allowing even a beginning Exalted to beat serious amounts of ass, and there is an Extra rule (Extra as in movie Extras, for those wondering) that lets one cut the poor sods down like trees, the Extras don't get any kind of resistance if the PC is successful with his attack. Soak works kind of like in the AEON line of games (Trinity, Aberrant, you know...), and starting PC's begin play with one extra Health level, and can buy a lot more during character creation.
So are there any bad things about the game? Well, there are quite a few grammar errors, as well as at least one "Page XX", which hint at a rushed job to get the game done in time. While I'm glad they got the game out as fast as they did, I would personally have preferred it if they had spent a few extra weeks on correcting these mistakes.
Also, there are a few places in the book where they've inadvertently left small bits of info out, such as the setting chapter on the North, where the bit describing the appearance of Northerners have vanished (The editor put it this way in the forums for the game at their website: "Whups."). Then there is the chapter on Charms, the Exalted's nifty magical powers, which I found to be a tad chaotically structured, and a bit hard to read, but that might just be me.
There's also the case of "I want more!", but that's more of a luxury illness, by "I want more!" I mean that when one has finished reading the Setting chapters, one wants even more info on the world. And naturally, the little thing about wanting rules for the other types of Exalted (Lunar, Sidereal, Abyssal, Dragonblooded), but considering how much space went simply to the Solars, I can understand why they didn't want to put out a 1300-page book...
All in all, an excellent venture into a fairly unexplored part of fantasy, which suffers only a bit from last-minute editing.
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