 Goto [ Index ] |
The new Realm hunted down and killed the few Solar Exalted who continued to manifest, while their rule grew crueler and more decadent. Now, the ageless Scarlet Empress has disappeared and the Dragon-Blooded are consumed by intrigue and infighting, as their Great Houses maneuver for the vacant throne. And the Solar Exalted have returned, in great numbers, as the Realm fragments and the Wyld Hunt languishes.
I first bought Exalted when it was released at GenCon in 2001. It looked intriguing, and there was immediate talk in my group of running a game, even though, then as now, I was not a big fan of the anime sources which obviously inspire the game's look and feel. A brief campaign faltered just as I was getting intrigued by the game — which then languished on my shelf, though I continued to pick up the occasional supplement for the line. (So I'm obsessive — sue me.) A couple of attempts at reading the book ended in failure — the opening chapters literally put me to sleep.
I have RPGNet to thank for motivating me to finally read and evaluate (and review) the game. From my perusal of the core book and from a number of Forum threads I was convinced that the game was a good one, though I still hadn't worked my way up to actually managing to read it. A recent thread on crossing Exalted over with the World of Darkness finally got me off my backside and making a real effort to get through what is, if nothing else, an intimidating piece of text.
So now I have another game to keep up with. I hate you all.
Exalted is a fantasy game, which at first might be taken to be mostly in the vein of D&D, with the Storyteller ruleset and anime-styled art. This is only a small corner of the picture, however. Characters in the game are Solar Exalted, chosen by the Unconquered Sun as instruments of destiny, and given commensurate power to use in the name of Light. There are several types of Exalted, each chosen by one (or more) of the Gods, which are astrological in theme. The most powerful type, the Solar Exalted, Chosen of the Unconquered Sun, are the basic PC type in the game. The other Exalted types are discussed, and one sort, the Dragon-Blooded, weakest of the Exalted, are covered in some detail, as they are the rulers of the Realm and among the chief adversaries of the Solar Exalted.
This is the essential difference in approach upon which the game is based, and in which it differs from more pedestrian fantasy games, most of which assume that PCs are "heroes" or in some way more capable than the average guy on the street. (This was true even in AD&D, in which characters began the game woefully incompetent.) The Exalted, however, are very much superior even to very competent normal people, in just about every way. In fact, even right out of the gate, they are impressively formidable, more so than the protagonists in the other Storyteller lines, with the possible exception of Mages.
The core book covers the Solar Exalted, with guidelines for using the other varieties of Exalted as antagonists. Even with just the Solars as they're presented, though, there's a huge array of campaign opportunities with this game. I've seen few games with as many plot hooks and juicy tidbits and hints of secrets and mystery as Exalted.
Each section in the book begins with one page of fiction, which I thought was noteworthy both for its relative restraint (compared to other White Wolf books which, it seems, are almost all fiction,) and because the vignettes are well-written and enjoyable, and do a good job of illustrating the world and setting the tone for the game.
Exalted begins with the standard Storyteller introductory chapter, which gives a very basic overview of the game and setting, covers the ubiquitous "What is a Storytelling Game," and provides the typical glossary of game jargon. Interestingly, I thought the Lexicon was rather abbreviated. There were quite a few terms that I tried to look up during one pass or another through the rulebook that weren't there.
Chapter One covers the game setting, and fills a copious 66 pages with small type and rarer-than-usual illustrations. It was this section that got me bogged down in several attempts at tackling the book — it's pretty heavy going. It also covers the whole world in broad strokes, but contains a lot of great detail.
Chapter Two is an overview of the game mechanics. Basic task resolution follows the Aeon Trinity method — the target number for a task is always seven, and greater difficulty is accounted for by requiring more successes be rolled. Unlike the Aeon rules, however, rolled tens count as two successes, and botches happen only when ones are rolled with no results of seven or higher at all. You don't have to be too astute to realize that this potentially doubles the number of possible successes on any given roll. And it's possible in Exalted to roll some really large dice pools. Thirty dice is not out of the question given the right circumstances and the proper use of Charms. And this is for starting characters. Such a roll will, on average, turn out 15 successes, without taking into account automatic successes from Charms or spent willpower.
Entirely new to new to Storyteller, and central to Exalted, is the stunt mechanic. Essentially, the player describes her character's action in flamboyant detail, and the Gamemaster gives from one to three bonus dice to the character's pool for that action. This modified dice pool can then be added to with Charms. Stunts give the player a measure of director-stance control over the game's flow — which is not, in itself, new; Adventure's dramatic editing takes the same idea further, and various small-press curiosities like Hogshead's The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen develop the idea to the very end (to the point where the participants aren't really in a roleplaying game any more.) Still, as presented here, stunts are quite novel in a game intended to appeal to a wider audience, as Exalted is.
Chapter Three covers character creation, which follows the usual White Wolf model fairly closely. There are splats — called "Castes" in Exalted, which can define a character's personality, abilities or function in Exalted society. In this way they seem looser than the splats in other Storyteller games. Caste ends up getting chosen fairly early in the creation process, since it affects skill choice significantly. Each Caste has five favored skills, and players can choose five more favored skills for each character.
An immediately noticeable difference is the 8/6/4 point breakdown for Attributes. This is a point higher than the usual 7/5/3 progression followed by most Storyteller games. It's worth noting that Exalted Attributes can't typically be raised above 5 dots — but then, there's a lot that compensates for that.
Also unlike the other Storyteller games, Exalted breaks the Abilities (skills) not into three groups (Talents, Skills and Knowledges,) but into five — one for each Caste, as stated above. Twenty-five points are handed out to distribute freely (save for the caveat that at least one dot must go into each favored skill.) The astute will note that this is less than the 27 (13+9+5) points handed out in other Storyteller games — and also that Exalted only has 25 skills to put them in instead of the usual 30. In addition, favored skills (either those from the Caste or the ones that the player selects,) are cheaper to buy up later with bonus points, costing only 1 per dot.
Backgrounds are nothing unusual to those familiar with Storyteller. New ones include Artifacts, ancient devices or magic items; Manse, a personal place of power to which the Exalted is attuned and from which he or she can draw power; and Backing, which represents rank and/or pull with an organization.
Exalted's "central trait" is Essence, which represents the character's innate communion with the mystical energy that abounds in the world. This starts at one, is raised to 2 in the case of Solar Exalted, and can be bought as high as 4 during character creation assuming that one wants to blow most of the pool of bonus points on it. You want Essence high, but it is not as important to crank it up as high as possible as it is with, say, Arete in Mage. All Charms have a minimum Essence rating (sometimes as low as 1,) but this rarely, if ever (at least in the core book,) goes higher than 3.
Essence is used to calculate the character's Essence Pool, from which energy can be drawn to power Charms. Each character has both personal and peripheral Essence, which can be freely intermixed, but use of peripheral essence causes an Anima Banner to rise, a nimbus of power unique to each character, but which is always unmistakable (if not spectacularly obvious, ) potentially giving the character away. (And when your Solar is implacably hunted by the Dragon-Blooded, this is a big deal.)
Chapter Four deals with the traits (Attributes, skills and so on,) used in the game, in a level of detail comparable to other Storyteller games. It's worth reading the skill description, at least if you're more familiar with baseline Storyteller than with the Aeon Trinity ruleset — task difficulty works notably differently and the sample tasks shown reflect that..
Chapter Five covers Charms, the "powers" of Exalted, and Sorcery, which supplement them. Each Charm is tied to a skill, and has a minimum rating in that skill needed to work the Charm. The most powerful Charms require scores of 5. The Charms are magical feats that a character can perform. Examples would be Fire and Stones Strike, which increases damage dealt, or Ten Magistrate Eyes, which lets the character "see" the links between objects. As can be seen from these examples, the names in Exalted are, in general, vary baroque — this extends to character names as well. I'm very fond of names in this style, for which I'd imagine you can thank M. A. R. Barker, who makes an art of it.
Typically, only one Charm can be used per combat turn. However, with practice (i. e. the expenditure of bonus or experience points,) they can be stacked. These are called combos and can be truly formidable, allowing the accumulation of huge dice pools and immense amounts of damage.
Sorcery is bought and used as a Charm, but actually encompasses a whole subset of abilities, grouped into three "Circles" of ascending power. The Solar Circle is the highest of these, and is not available to starting PCs, but the spells are very powerful; Rain of Doom, for example, brings down a storm of corrosive (and lethal) rain upon an entire area. The spell selection is fairly small, with only 9 spells given for the (lowest) Terrestrial Circle, though this is supplemented by The Book of 3 Circles, and is probably more than adequate for a starting campaign, given how powerful the spells are.
Chapter Six is called "Drama" and details the game rules in full with regard to combat, damage and healing, adverse environments, creating items, and so forth. It's very complete, and easily the best job in a Drama chapter I've seem in a White Wolf core book, more comprehensive than the equivalent section of Vampire Revised. It needs to be, because of the changes from baseline Storyteller, and the developers did a good job putting it together.
Coming to Exalted with a solid familiarity with White Wolf's other product lines seems more of a hindrance than an asset. There are many significant rules differences, starting with the core mechanic, which is drawn from the Adventure-Aberrant-Trinity ruleset rather than the baseline storyteller mechanics. Even from this starting point, however, there are significant changes, which are noted throughout this review.
Combat also follows the basic Storyteller mechanics very closely, but the use of Charms changes its flavor completely. There's also a bit less emphasis on aggravated damage than in most Storyteller games. Most damage done by Solars is merely lethal, but a whole lot of it gets dished out.
One Charm, Ox-Body Technique, gives the character additional health levels — and can be taken more than once, so Solar Exalted with 15 or more total health levels are by no means uncommon.
Chapter Seven is the Storytelling chapter, and it, like the previous section, is one of White Wolf's better efforts, though I wish it were longer. It covers campaign styles (all-too-briefly) and experience, and includes guidelines for handling stunts.
Chapter Eight is a traditional Antagonists section. I'd always like these to be longer, myself — though Exalted's iteration of this chapter is more complete than usual. Though rules enough for handling Dragon-Blooded, Sidereal, Lunar and Abyssal adversaries are given, along with templates for various mortals, spirits and fey, I'd have liked to see more strange and wondrous beasties. A fantasy game can never have enough critters.
Chapter Nine ends the book with a section on equipment both mundane and magical. As befits Exalted, some of the magic items are quite powerful.
Exalted's setting is an intriguing blend of anime (with which I'm largely unfamiliar,) Classical antiquity, and Dunsanyesque fantasy. It's very much in the vein of ancient (rather than medieval) myth, with immensely powerful, yet deeply flawed heroes, fighting in the cause of light. I especially appreciate the influence of the ancient world, an era which I myself have a great interest in, but which has barely been touched upon in RPGs. It's also very detailed, and a staggering amount of information is packed into the 66 pages of the Setting chapter.
Where Exalted really shines, though, is in its mythos-building. Both a world and a cosmology, complete with myth and legendry, are presented here, and it's very compellingly done. This is a great world to campaign in and explore, with mysteries and adventure opportunities aplenty, and a huge number of plot hooks and tons of campaign and adventure inspiration. I found myself struck by the parallels with Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time, and how it'd be easily possible to run a campaign with many of the most attractive themes from that work without all the baggage, and remaining completely distinct.
The anime angle is something I (and I suspect others) found initially discouraging about the game. While the inspiration is obvious, and all of the traditional fantasy amine elements are there, Exalted is emphatically not a strictly anime game. Rather, it's a high-powered adventure fantasy with a lot of anime elements and imagery.
The map, presented in full color of the endpieces, I found unsatisfactory. It seems not to convey the scale of the very large world of the game, though it's pretty enough. It also lacks detail, but that's not a negative in itself — there's tons of room for the GM to play, even aside from the copious background given.
Since Exalted's release, it has received excellent support, but not to the point that the market has been flooded with a never-ending stream of supplements of dubious value. Indeed, the support materials for the game have been excellent — the Dragon-Blooded book in particular is nothing short of remarkable. Even the splatbooks, the weak link in many a White Wolf product line, are well-written and valuable, without containing material that's neccessary to play the splat.
Exalted's accomplishments are, for the most part, neither innovative nor revolutionary. But this game is very, very strong. It might be White Wolf's strongest effort to date. It's well worth the time and expense of picking it up and playing it.
Help support RPGnet by purchasing this item through DriveThruRPG.
