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This book is a bargain. While the previous hardcover supplements covered a type of Exalted and the parts of the Exalted world that are most important to them (e.g. Abyssal Exalted & the Underworld; Sidereal Exalted and Yu Shan), the Players Guide covers the Godblooded, Thaumaturgists and Dragon Kings as player characters. These characters are one step up from Heroic mortals and one step down from most Dragon-blooded characters and shoudl cater very well to players and storytellers looking for grittier games with lower key powers.
In addition, the book contains merits and flaws for all characters, an alternate combat system, rules for mass combat, an overall structure for the martial arts and a brief look at the script used in the Exalted world. While Exalted can obviously be played perfectly well without this book, every storyteller should at least look through it and consider whether it has anything they would like to use.
Presentation
The Players Guide has the same general format as the other sourcebooks. The cover is a textured cream colour much like the core rulebook with a broad illustrated band of images. White Wolf held a competition for what character would appear on the cover - the winner was a sai wielding Lunar Exalted lass who dominates the front cover, but all the finalists appear in black and white sketches on the inside cover and most are in the cover's background.
There is the usual flavor fiction to open the book, written from the perspective of a minor thaumaturgist in nexus. It's nothing special but there's nothing particular wrong with it either. Most of the chapter fiction is quite good though and with one exception the facing art tallies extremely well. My particular favorite is the Chapter Two opening fiction featuring a conflict of interests between a Small God and her godblood daughter, the mother wanting a tale of her daugher's travel and the daughter wanting nothing more than a chamber pot. It's a little earthy but sets the tone of Godblood's place in the world very well I think.
The introduction explains the purpose of the book, to focus upon heroic mortals and variants thereof. It recaps the basic rules for heroic mortals and summarises the chapters of the book.
Chapter One: Merits & Flaws
No prizes for guessing what this chapter is about. After a couple of pages with suggestiosn for Storytellers on how to handle changes to merits and flaws during play (something that has been lacking in previous White Wolf books IMHO) there are twenty-four pages of merits and flaws. Not all are suitable for every character and most have varibale costs. This tends to mean that descriptions are quite long so there aren't as many merits and flaws as you might think but there are enough to give quite a range.
As far as game balance goes, characters can usually take up to 10 points of flaws - more than in most previous games - and in a few cases characters can take more flaws than this. Flaws however are FLAWs - one or two points won't be so bad but four or five are a problem. Anyone with more than this is asking for the Storyteller to do nasty things to them. Storytellers should oblige. Merits are nifty but not game balance destroying - point for point a lot of merits are not as good as a similar number of flaws are bad. This is about right as far as I can see.
The one thing I would point out is that even one extra bonus point can have a considerable effect on character creation. For example, several of the most powerful Solar charms require 5 points in a skill and an Essence of 4. It would require one more bonus point than starting characters get to meet the prerequisites of this charm. If a character picks even one point of flaw, this is no longer the case. The trade off for this would be that characters who do this are specialising to a considerable degree. This isn't a major problem of course, but Storytellers should watch for it and require justification for why a character has high level charms if they are supposedly relatively inexperienced Exalts.
Chapter Two: Godbloods
The mark of a good splat book is that reading it should have the reader salivating to play a character of that type. Chapter two gets the drool - Godbloods (the offspring of high essence beings) are extremely characterful. Depending on the nature of their parentage they can in theory do almost anything. In many cases they could actualy make a passable effort at mimicking a the powers of their parents or be quite different.
The relationship between parent and offspring is vry important and there are two new backgrounds: Inheritance to determine the potence of the godblood's ancestry; and Patron to determine how much influence the parent has over the godblood. The first gives extra bonus points which cannot be spent on backgrounds, the latter gives extra background points (like Liege in Abyssal Exalted) but the tradeoff is that Patron carries with it obligations. Seventeen background points is a lot, but is it worth having no life outside what your parents want? It is strongly suggested that Inheritance be determined by the Storyteller rather than letting players simply buy it as a background.
The chapter includes a number of merits and flaws suitable for Godblooded (particularly important for Fair Folk's offspring) and discusses a few notable Godblooded, Demonic influence on Godblooded and how godblooded can fit into campaigns.
Chapter Three: Mortal Thaumaturgy
Thaumaturgy, or mortal sorcery, covers the small magics of mortal humans, far less potent than Sorcery but useful and utilitarian in the same manner to many Charms. Unfortunately this is the weakest chapter in the book. Thaumaturgists are covered as a new type of character and the Arts and Sciences themselves suffer for it. The archetypes are worthwhile but since more or less anyone can use Thaumaturgy, I think it would have made more sense to use the 10 pages of archetypes and 4 pages on character creation to simply describe how Thaumaurgy can be bought for other characters and use the rest of the space to expand on the Thaumaturgy itself. As it is, the rules are unclear and aspects such as rituals do not receive the attention they should. Should Sciences be bought in the same way as Arts? I think so but no mention is made of Sciences in the costs of buying the arts.
Thaumaturgy is divided into four Arts (Summoning, Wards, Exorcism and Astrology) and four Sciences (Alchemy, Enchantment, Geomancy and Weatherworking), the distinction seems artifical. All are quite useful and make perfect sense for a mortal hero to know a few tricks rather than great powers. Merits and flaws specific to the practise are also included in this chapter.
Chapter Four: The Dragon Kings
Introduced in previous supplements, the Dragon Kings are finally fleshed out as playable characters. As the remenants of a Creation spanning civilisation, they are far more than a few lizards in the jungles of the south-east and this chapter describes several small settlements around the Threshold.
In contrast to the previous chapter, this is an extremely strong chapter and Storytellers will be able to find plenty of information to use the Dragon Kings in other campaigns even if no one wants to play one as a character.
Chapter Five: The Exalted
This chapter covers three topics: Exalted Power Combat, a slightly modified combat system that I recommend whole-heartedly; Mail and Steel, a system of abstract rules for coverning mass combat; and a section on supernatural martial arts that makes it clear how the various martial arts are structured.
Power Combat explains how certain charms effect specific situations. It also codifies piercing damage and hard armour. have to say, this makes Exalts even more devestating in combat and should encourage some exceptional cinematic stunts.
The latter is something that handles very well a couple of issues that have arisen based on the martial arts information in the Dragon-blooded and Siderea sourcebooks. There's also a very amusing sidebar explaining the distinction between Tantra, Mantra and Sutra - which any storyteller should keep in mind if a character is studying the martial arts. Four new martial arts styles are detailed.
At the end of the chapter is a quick system of handling experience gathered by characters during years of downtime. It's a little simplistic but it doesn't really need to be complicated.
Chapter Six: Writing in the Age of Sorrows
The last chapter is a short description of the written language of the Realm and a four page spread of the two predominant alphabets. This is a perfectly serviceable chapter and I'm sure someone can make use of it. While it does make sense to include in the Player's Guide rather than another supplement however, it's really more of an appendice.
Conclusion
The book is good but not brilliant in appearance and layout. The material in is is also good but could have been improved upon in a couple of places.
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