Exalted: The Dragon-blooded is the first hardcover supplement to the Exalted roleplaying game by White Wolf Studios. the book is a supplement, and as such the core rulebook is required for play, and for this reason, I will ignore the system when looking at the book, and will assume the reader has at least a cursory knowledge of the core game, for a description of that book, read the sales pitch at
White Wolf's Official Site or you can read my review, or if you prefer one of the other reviews found on this site.
The book is nicely done, and has far fewer grammatical, and spelling errors than the core book did. It definately seems like there was less of a rush job to get this out than there was with the main rulebook, which is quite a good thing. while I was definately impatient for its release, im glad they waited it out.
The title gives full rules for playing Terrestrials of an alignment with any of the dragons, Wood, Fire, Water, Air, and Earth. It includes well over 150 new charms, all of which are significantly less essence draining than their solar equivelants, but are powerful none the same. these new charms excel in one way though, the level at which they can be comboed far exceeds that of the traditional solar charms and, when wielded by an eclipse solar of high essence level, can be downright ungodly, which is good as up to this point, the eclipse haven't been all that popular. as was pointed out in the core book, a dragon-blooded will be far outmatched by a solar of equal training. This, however, does not mean the terrestrials are pushovers. the dragonblooded have access to various martial arts this time around, one dedicated to each of the dragons, as well as some combination formsm the martial arts can also potentially be used by the Solars, or even Lunars, abbysals and Sidereals. When these fighting styles are combined with their training, and more importantly, when the dragon blooded combine their power and work as a team, they can cut even a powerful solar down. the book as presented is quite playable for a game where dragonblooded are used as opposed to solars. In addition to this, a brave player could even field one in a Solar campaign, though it should be understood this character will be rather underpowered from the beginning, and will become a joke at high level.
Aside from giving all the rules needed to play a Terrestrial exalted, the book expands on the Realm, and its surrounding territories. there is a full color map of the realm on the inner cover, and each province, and house is described in full detail. There is a ton of new information on the players in the politics of the realm, as well as its history, and there are a number of new advantages, as well as a few new spells, and artifacts. the overall design of the book is excellent, the stylish crimson cover fits well with the internal artwork which is at the same level if quality as that of the core rulebook, and lends well to the overall theme of the book. about 3/4ths of the artwork is new, with the other 1/4th being reprints from the various other exalted titles. there are about 100 pieces in total, and all of it is superb, though much of it is somewhat risque.
All in all its a beautiful book and makes a nice companion to the core book. the fact that they chose to make it a supplement made me happy, though I can see some being upset at it. rather than having to deal with the rules of the game, they were able to focus on varient rules, and most importantly, story. the quality of this book is what made me decide to purchase every other core supplement to the game, before this book came out, Exalted was just 'another' of my white wolf games, equal in line with Vampire, and Hunter(yes, I play hunter) for which would get my money. afterwords, it is definately on the top of the heap, even reigning above Demon for which one gets my money first.
Review Summary