Howdy all. This is my third review in a growing collection of attempts to get free games. Commentary from this game comes from, of course, reading the book cover to cover many times, as well as a weekend of hard gaming with good players who are fans of both White Wolf and fantasy.
Exalted is the latest White Wolf game line, and is to fantasy what Vampire is to horror, Aberrant is to supers, Aeon is to science fiction, and Mage is to half-finished Masters dissertations on the collected works of Derrida. It is an epic fantasy setting, drawing on sources from the Iliad to Ninja Scroll to the Final Fantasy games. It takes place vaguely within the World of Darkness, but in a time so far removed from the modern setting as to be effectively a different game, and completely playable if you're unfamiliar with White Wolf's horror line.
In Exalted, players take on the role of humans who are raised to demigod status to become the reincarnations of mighty warrior-scholars who ruled in the First Age of Man. Betrayed and destroyed by their brethren, who now rule much of the world, the disappearance of the immortal empress has allowed them to return and set things right.
The game's goals, as far as I can gather, include the following: to create an epic ancient fantasy world in which to create sweeping dramas; to create characters who are both human and more than human with "magic" based on their natural might and powers; to recreate the feel of ancient cultures all over the world; and to both tie into the World of Darkness and distance itself from a need to understand that setting.
The game looks good. The cover features the title and a woman holding an immense bow, on a faded background scene. The cover is done in anime style, as is most art in the book. It's hardcover, and appears well-bound.
Opening it up, we get 350 pages divided into nine chapters, as well as two identical full-color maps of the world. Each chapter opens with a picture (these are mostly good, though not mind-boggling good like the stuff in Guide to the Technocracy) and some introductory fiction (these are also good, focusing on action and style, and one in particular manages to describe in a page how dozens of adventures could run). The art throughout the book is black-and-white, and ranges from the excellent (the picture of the Eclipse Caste member has a nice line-drawn look with a pleasant minimalism and appearance of motion) to the pretty good (the first picture in the book, of a large man looking out over an ancient cityscape, really captures the setting for me) to the comically bad (the guy power-punching the slaver like Mac from Mike Tyson's Punch-out). For those of you familiar with anime, the best art is just a bit below that found in Ninja Scroll and Demon City Shinjuku, while most has a clean-cut anime style reminiscent of Record of Lodoss War, with some stuff looking like goofy tracings of Dragonball Z and Slayers stills.
The pages have a very light sort of speckled line-drawing behind them. I don't know what this is supposed to represent, but it's too light to be distracting and does a nice job of keeping the text interesting. There are the occasional pseudo-Japanese glyphs scribbled on each page, giving the chapter number (which is also given in English, thankfully), and every page has a top border showing parts of faces-this quickly becomes monotonous. There is a rudimentary table of contents, listing each chapter and what page it starts on, and an honest-to-goodness index. Now, I've played White Wolf games for so damn long that I can't even tell if they're well-organized, but I think it is. There are a few instances of concepts being introduced before they're explained, but these don't pose a serious problem.
The book contains an Introduction followed by nine chapters: Setting, Systems, Character Creation, Traits, Charms and Sorcery, Drama, Storytelling, Antagonists, and Wonders and Equipment.
The introduction contains the usual White Wolf stuff about how science has lied to you about the true wonder and beauty of the world (I can only assume that Justin Achilli got his ass kicked and his lunch money stolen by a cohort of unruly science students as a child, and this is the only way he can lash out), followed by an explanation of how a Storytelling game works (for the curious, it works just like a role-playing game).
We then get the setting. Let me summarize. The Solar Exalted (the PCs) were first birthed in the First Age of Man to destroy the enemies of the gods. They did so, but their foes cursed them to be vicious and cruel. They then became the protectors of the world, but they grew wicked, and were slaughtered by their lesser brethren, the prophetic Sidereal and militant Terrestrial Exalted and placed in great tombs by fearful mortals. The Terrestrial, or Dragon-Blooded, set up a new government, while the Sidereal hid themselves.
Then, the Great Contagion came, and nine out of ten people died. When this happened, people forgot the shape of the world, and the Faeries at the edge of Creation came and tried to destroy it. A Dragon-Blooded defeated the Fae by employing First Age technology, and declared herself Empress. Alongside the Sidereal Exalted's artificial cult that venerated the Dragon-Bloodeds, she came to rule much of the world, destroying Solar Exalted as they reincarnated to protect her power base. She ruled for 800 years until *poof!* she disappeared about five years ago, her empire fell into chaos and the Solar Exalteds started to come back.
There's the facts; now the opinions. First, there's no small delight in seeing the proto-forms of the regular World of Darkness critters. As near as I can tell, the Solar Exalted are the Kindred of the East; the Abyssal Exalted are wraiths or vampires; the Lunar Exalted are werewolves; the Fair Folk are changelings; the Sidereal Exalted are mages. The Dragon-Blooded might be Hunters or something, I dunno.
However, I've *seen this before*. A quick flip through the rest of the book confirmed my expectations: Exalted is not just the White Wolf fantasy game; it's the Storyteller World of Darkness fantasy game, with all the rules stylings (splats, nifty powers, personality stats, the Magic Power Trait, creative use of the thesaurus, and so forth) that I've come to expect from Storyteller. Basically: if you like the system and feel of Storyteller, you'll probably like Exalted; if you don't like the stuff inherent in Storyteller, you probably won't like Exalted.
Or, you'll be like me. I enjoy the Storyteller system, and I like the World of Darkness. Mage: The Ascension still stands as my favorite game. But, I don't think that the Storyteller system (and by "system," I include the whole design theory behind Storyteller) is appropriate to this game. That's my thesis, and I'll come back to it throughout the review, but I'll leave it for now.
Chapter 1: Setting
Here's the world: in the middle is an island where the Imperial City is. The island's mountain contains the elemental pole of Earth. There is a continent spreading to the north, east, and south of this island, with smaller islands to the west. To the east is the elemental pole of wood, which has lots of forests. To the north is the pole of wind, which has tundra's and windy plains. To the south is the pole of fire, which contains savannas and deserts. To the west is the pole of water, which has the aforementioned small islands. You go too far in one of these directions, and the element comes to dominant, and nothing can live.
There's a certain mythical elegance to the world, although this elegance comes at the expense of some flexibility. It also, if you'll notice, firmly fixes the setting in an oriental mindset: the elements are the tradition Chinese elements we've seen in many oriental-themed games before this one.
We also get the five castes of Solar Exalted: Dawn (warriors), Zenith (priests), Twilight (wizards/craftsmen), Night (rogues), and Eclipse (diplomats). Those definitions are pretty vague and allow for a great deal of flexibility, but they work, and again, there's a sacrifice of freedom and flexibility for elegance in design.
We also get specifics on the other Exalted. The Lunar Exalted are shapeshifters and tricksters, driven off when the Solars were destroyed and forced to live feral lives in the wilderness. The Sidereal Exalted are astrologers nonpareil with an extraordinary grasp of the flow of fate, each serving one of the five "maidens" (planets-Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, or Saturn). The Terrestrial Exalted are the Dragon-Blooded, the weakest and most numerous Exalted who are associated with one of five dragons (earth, fire, air, water, and wood). The Abyssal Exalted are vampires, necromancers, and warriors of evil and undead.
We then learn how Exaltation happens: Dragon-Bloodeds can pass on their power through reproduction, but the Solars Exalt when a spirit reincarnates into someone who already possesses great power and potential. We also get information on Blood/Quintessence/Gnosis/Pathos/Glamour, in this case called Essence. This is the source of power for Exalted, the energy of creation that Solar Exalted can channel through their abilities and skills.
Most importantly, we learn of the caste marks: bright marks of the sun on the foreheads of each Solar Exalted, which flare up when they employ a great deal of essence, ranging from a faint sun outline on their forehead to a giant glowing spirit totem that can be seen for miles off. Exalted are not subtle, and the caste marks bear the over-the-top charm of certain types of anime; this can be good or bad depending on whether you like that sort of stuff. I'm rather fond of it myself, and I think it's done well here. The other Exalteds also have caste marks, but none are nearly as dramatic.
Next, we get more interesting words from the official White Wolf thesaurus: manses and demesnes. Quickly, a demesne is a place of naturally-concentrated essence, and if you stick an essence-channeling building on a demesne, you get a manse. Finally, we get artifacts, and learn about the five magical metals, each of which is attuned to one type of Exalted. (The Solars get orichalcum, or magical bronze, although it's never made clear how this stuff comes to be.)
We also get a description of the Realm (the big empire), as well as systematic descriptions of each of the four directions and what travelers will encounter there. The actual setting, unfortunately, does not strike me as very imaginative. The names irk me, for one: the city names on the world map possess the pseudo-ancient blandness found in the better class of random name generators: Juche, Rubylak, and Larjyn lead the pack in uninspired, inelegant names that don't have any consistency or imagination. The names are not only boring, they don't really seem to fit well together. We get no feeling for the language of the Realm, and maybe coming off of The Fellowship of the Ring I'm a bit spoiled, but I like to know what a place sounds like. We don't even get the pseudo-English Japanese goofiness of anime like Record of Lodoss War.
There is some good stuff on the Imperial city itself. Other than the unremarkable royal houses (there are the militants and the decadents and the…you know the drill), there's useful information on the Realm's Romanesque Legions (there's plenty of play to be had in the Red Piss Legion, where all the riff-raff are tossed), the Royal bodyguards (a bunch of giant tongueless eunuchs, obviously), the secret police (whose shrinking power base could lead to some good stories) and how the Realm deals with undesirables (you can kill 'em if you want, as long as you don't get their dirty blood on the streets-you thought Giuliani had all the good ideas). We also get some basic information on the Immaculate Philosophy, the Dragon-worshipping state religion. It's sort of like Buddhism, but evil. There are some other heretical cults, including spirit worship and Sun cults. (The Sun was once the primo god when the Solar Exalted were in power.)
This section also touches on the Wyld, which contains the Faeries-terrible and destructive creatures that are more akin to Mage's Nephandi than the Changeling's fae-and the Shadowlands, where the Deathlords inhabit, seeking for the death of all things so that they can live again.
Chapter 2: Systems
Wow, that was long. Let's keep this one shorter.
Exalted uses the Storyteller system. In brief, you have Traits that range from one to five. When you want to do something, you roll one ten-sided die for each dot you have in your Attribute Trait, your ability Trait, and any bonuses you get. If you get a 7 or higher on the die, you get a success. If you get a 0 (ten), you get two successes. If you get one success, you can perform a standard action; three, a remarkable action; five, a phenomenal action. If you roll no successes and one or more 1's, you botch and really screw up.
This system is cleaned up from the old Storyteller system. However, it still takes *forever*, especially when you get around to combat using the Exalted powers. I mean, nothing in Exalted could compare to the world's most spectacular dice pool (72 dice; some Celerity-cranked dex-maxed gun-toting vampire who managed to unload three pairs of Uzis in one round, instantly wiping out the entire Boston police force and vaporizing a Burger King-ah, the good old days), but it can still get pretty unwieldy. No matter how you slice it, it just takes a long time to roll fourteen dice. And Exalted are *powerful*, so fourteen dice isn't that unusual.
Here, we also learn about stunts, which are designed to give the Storyteller system a way to create the wild action of an epic, like when Patroklos did the double somersault kick on the incoming Trojan soldiers before bouncing his shuriken off a rock and having them strike an attacking demon between the eyes. Or was that Xena? Anyway, the idea is that really cool and wild descriptions net 1, 2, or 3 extra dice.
Chapter 3: Character Creation
Time to make your Solar Exalted. First, come up with a concept. Then pick a caste. Then, pick a nature (a core personality-a technique I've always been fond of, as acting within your nature allows you to recover Willpower, although Demeanor seems to have disappeared in Exalted). Next, you select attributes, which range from one to five. There are nine attributes: Strength, Dexterity, Stamina; Charisma, Manipulation, Appearance; Intelligence, Perception, Wits. You then get a bunch of abilities (skills), which are organized by caste. You are able to learn caste abilities and personal abilities (you get five of those) faster than others.
Another important element of the game are the Virtues. Exalted get four of these: Compassion, Conviction, Temperance, and Valor. These can grant you extra reserves of inner strength, but high virtues mean that you tend to be a bit fanatical. Due to the ancient curse, all Exalted have Virtue Flaws (what happens when you build up too much tension in a particularly high virtue). These range from berserk rage to a complete loss of empathy to just total hysteria. The virtues seem good; they do a good job of giving the Exalted that godlike rage/tragic flaw thing that many mythical heroes have.
Characters also have Backgrounds, things like Allies and Contacts that flesh them out a bit more. A White Wolf tradition, Backgrounds allow a character to tie himself into the campaign world and find his place there mechanically, and the absence of advantage/disadvantage rules prevent this from degenerating into what the more vulgar posters here refer to as a "munchkin wankfest."
Like all White Wolf games, there's advice given on running Preludes. Basically, these are one-one-one games that skip through the most important aspects of the characters life, in this case, events before and during his Exaltation, and the events leading up to it. Preludes are great little ideas, and the advice given is sound and useful.
It took me about half an hour to create a character after coming up with a concept; my players took about forty-five minutes, having had no prior exposure to the game. Selecting Charms (nifty powers, described in a different chapter) took the most time, which is understandable, since you get ten of them.
Chapter 4: Traits
Here, we get the different Natures (Caregiver, Hedonist, Rebel, and so forth). We also get descriptions of each of the castes, with their specific powers: Dawn Castes possess a terrifying presence in battle; Zenith Castes can burn the dead (walking or not) to ash with a single touch; Twilight caste can protect themselves against injury (the least interesting caste power, in my opinion); Night caste can mask their caste marks so they don't light up like a roman candle when they use Essence to sneak around; and Eclipse caste can create a binding deal that will call down the wrath of Heaven if broken (my personal favorite power). Since the Dragon-Blooded seek to destroy the Solars, they have made them heretics in their religion, and we get the Immaculate religion's less than flattering names for the different castes.
Next, we get lists of Attributes, Virtues, and Abilities. The Abilities are particularly well done, as they give an example of a Standard, Challenging, and Legendary action with each ability. There are also rules here for Backgrounds: Allies, Contacts, Resources, and so forth.
Chapter 5: Charms and Sorcery
Charms are the Exalteds' magical powers. They use up Essence (the White Wolf thesaurus's new term for Mojo), and are tied to a character's skills. This is neat; it allows a character to possess powers that are superhuman but not flagrantly "magical." Characters can walk on bamboo like Chow-Yun Fat in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, resist terrible blows, create anime-style hails of thrown weapons, and other nifties. Since there are charms to all abilities, there are also powers that enhance one's bargaining abilities, rebuke angry mobs, and make items with your bare hands. This is a good idea, but with poor execution.
First, the names are kinda silly. They are deliberately made to sound like poorly-translated Chinese and Japanese, giving us stuff like Thunderclap Rush Attack, Peony Blossom Attack, Dipping Swallow Defense, Unruly Mob Dispersing Rebuke, and so on. They're not quite Midnight Sunstone Bazooka level of goofy, but they're both difficult to remember and not particularly evocative, unless you want your players to scream them every time they're used. This was, perhaps, the idea: for players to scream them with improperly-stressed Japanese accents, like a rules-heavy version of Jared Sorensen's Happy Lucky Chinese Restaurant Game. Maybe this is only my imagination, but it smacks of the more juvenile sort of anime, although the idea does get funny when you start reading non-combat charms. I have images of over-muscled pseudo-Asian guys screaming things like "INSIGHTFUL BUYER TECHNIQUE!" and "IRRESISTABLE SALESMAN SPIRIT!" like some sick parody of sararimen.
There are also rules for combos, which allow you to perform multiple charms in one round. There are also rules for sorcery, which I must say did not inspire me at all. There are three levels of sorcery, with a bunch of different spells in each. However, the system's pretty typical (basically, spend a couple of rounds concentrating and burn some Essence), and there doesn't seem to be anything unique or thematically resonant in the sorcery section. In other words, it looks like magic in every other fantasy game.
Chapter 6: Drama
Here, we get buckets and buckets of specific rules covering a variety of circumstances, divided by what caste is likely to use them. Here's where we get everything from the damage rules to the drowning rules to the building stuff rules to rules for making friends, all in glorious, fistfulls-of-d10s detail. I can't help but think that many of these rules could be extrapolated from what already exist, and thus the space should have been filled with better things. I don't need to be told to roll Stamina Resistance to avoid getting drunk, although it might have something to do with my familiarity with the system.
Chapter 7: Storytelling
Here's the run-down on how to play and run the game: the sort of moods, themes, and tricks that can be employed. The advice is really unremarkable, and you've read it before in plenty of other games.
Chapter 8: Antagonists
Here's where we get some stats for common folks, including some common foes of the PCs. This chapter is a big problem, as the information, especially for other sorts of Exalted, is sketchy at best and (if this follows White Wolf tradition) possibly misleading at worst. Terrestrial Exalted, for example, seem to be the Solars' "default" enemy; they're even used in one of the short stories. But they don't have the actual rules for them here; instead they have nebulous rules based on the Solars' own abilities, and the exhortation to wing it. Now, when we don't get full rules for changelings in Vampire: The Masquerade, it's not so bad, since changelings don't necessarily play a big role in a game of Vampire. But in Exalted, we've come to expect regular encounters with the Dragon-Blooded, and we're given incomplete rules. It's like Call of Cthulhu stating that a Deep One can be treated kind of like an investigator with an axe.
Now, I didn't expect full detail on all the Exalted: if they did that, how would they make more sourcebooks? But a quick set of rules for actually creating Dragon-Bloodeds would be monumentally better than the *two* examples they have here-and it could be done if they got rid of the descriptions of individual NPCs. Of course, I'm kind of frightened of the real rules: Terrestrials' charms allow them to reroll dice. Reroll. Do I really want to reroll fourteen d10s?
Because of this, the game is simply not complete. We're supposed to be battling against the Dragon-Blooded, folks, but we don't have rules for them. I could excuse the simplified rules for the Sidereals (as much as I love mages and would love to see those rules), since they're not necessarily major figures, but I really need Terrestrial rules. When I was running my game, I had absolutely nothing to fall back on; I just gave the Terrestrials Solar charms and hoped no one noticed.
On the upside, I and the eight or so other people who bought the Kindred of the East Supplement 1,000 Hells get to see the Great Beast of the Hell of Burrowing Maggots in its earlier form. Oh, and there's a list of animals and diseases.
Chapter Nine: Wonders and Equipment
Here it is: da nifties. In Exalted, all goods are rated by how many ranks in Resources it takes to buy something. If you have more Resources than the cost, you can buy the thing as an out-of-pocket expense. If you have as many Resources as the cost, buying the thing reduces your Resources by 1.
Here, we have lists of common items like jewelry and ships, as well as weapons (the usual array of melee and missile weapons), and armor. There are also a handful of wondrous items, requiring a number of ranks in Artifact to own. These range from bonus-granting hearthstones to Final Fantasy-style daiklave swords (gotta have the huge swords). There's another glaring absence in this chapter, even worse than the absence of Dragon-Blooded rules: they tell us that a clean, attractive, disease-free concubine requires 4 resource dots, but there's absolutely nothing about the costs for other sorts of concubines! Dammit man, my players need to know how much the gangrenous harlots they wish to bed cost per night.
Conclusion:
Exalted strives to be a game of epic, ancient fantasy, set in an "age of savage adventure" to quote the back-cover blurb. It does not succeed at these goals. It is, however, a fairly good anime-themed game of over-the-top action set in a stylized mythic world, and if that's what you're looking for, go ahead and pick this up. You'll have a blast.
However, I wasn't expecting a game of goofy super-powered action, nor do I think that this is a very respectable design goal for a company that's done things far more interesting. The best White Wolf games, despite their flaws and occasional pretentiousness, possess a certain grandeur, magnificence, and paradigm-shifting wonder to make you want to both run the game and apply the game's concepts to your other games. For many, the mind-blowing game was Vampire, and its emphasis on personal horror; for myself, it was Mage, and the consensual reality that formed its core concept. Exalted could have been similarly fantastic, a game of godlike yet amoral heroes battling for glory and the will of the gods, sort of Nobilis with a body count. Instead, we get a game burdened, nearly crippled, by the Storyteller system, coupled with an unremarkable world and the decision to favor Dragonball Z-style smackdown over the epic feel of sword-and-sorcery stories and epic poems.
So, if you're looking for epic storytelling in an ancient world, give Exalted a pass. Stick with Paul Elliott's Zenobia or a unique D&D setting, or just build your own game, but don't expect even to be able to scavenge much from Exalted. Trapped under the weight of the Storyteller system, confined by the inappropriate archetypes of the World of Darkness, and lacking the sense of awe and gravity that a White Wolf game should possess, Exalted is a good idea that has been twisted beyond recognition into something that, while perhaps unique, is not the game it wants to be or could have been.
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