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| White Wolf's Exalted - Epic
fantasy roleplaying Generally, I like to be creative. I produce pictures (either computer based or on plain old paper, with pencils or sometimes acrylics). I also write, and occasionally get paid for it. But the other thing I do in generous quantities with my free time is play games. Lots and lots of games. Computer games are great, as are card games and board games, but what I really like most are role playing games. With an RPG I'm exercising my not inconsiderable imagination as well as having fun. I've been an RPG player for a long, long time. So long that I'm embarrassed to count the years, so I'll gloss right over the calculation of my gaming pedigree and just state that I own more games than most games shops and certainly more than I could possibly play in the limited free time the rest of my life allows me. This page is about my favorite one. |
What is Exalted? Once upon a time, fantasy role playing involved creating your characters and taking them down into a dungeon that was divided into neat 10"x10" sections, where they merrily hacked and slashed their way through the traditional Orcs and Goblins and kept track of how well they were doing with experience points and gold. Eventually they'd meet something like a Dragon (normally living in an enclosed room with a door too small for it to leave by) and it would eat them. Or maybe they'd get lucky and kill the thing, and then they'd get lots more experience points and gold. At the end of the dungeon they'd leave, spend their gold... and then find another dungeon and do it all over again next week. This kind of thing gets boring pretty quickly, so fortunately things have moved on a bit. Nowadays, decent role playing games encourage interesting plots, strong characterisation and exciting, innovative game worlds. This last is what always does it for me. I'm a game world junkie. My favorite games are the ones where the world is detailed and full, imaginatively thought through with lots and lots to learn about. All my favorite games have had that element, from Runequests "Glorantha", through Traveller's "Imperium" and out to Call of Cthulhu's... well, 1920's Earth. Can't get more elaborate and detailed than the real thing, after all. I also own almost every GURPS book ever published. But that's for another time, and is beside the point. Obviously, I also develop my own game worlds, which is largely what I'd done for the "generic" fantasy role playing game (using the GURPS system) I was running when I was first introduced to Exalted. One of the guys bought it around and insisted I had a look at it, describing a game he'd played recently while I did. There was much arm waving and raised voices involved in that description I believe, but I was largely unaware of it as I was captivated by reading through a new game book. That few minutes of flicking through the core rulebook got me hooked. The damn thing had a completely new flavour, utterly different in scope and aims from the other games I'd played. Within a few weeks I was busily buying up everything I could find, and am now the proud owner of every official book and suppliment for both the first edition and the new second edition. Exalted is now my game of choice (though I don't neglect my old favorites - at the time of writing I'm refereeing a GURPS Traveller game). Why's it so special? In Exalted, you don't play a lowly adventurer who slowly gains skill and influence. Instead, a god chooses you to help change the world and gives you a small portion of its power so you may be up to the task. The dangers facing creation are greater than any mortal could hope to overcome, so you are made more than mortal. You are feared and mistrusted by many, and must hide your new nature from the majority of the world as you work to save it. Awesome power is yours from the very beginning, and you use it in the performance of epic feats and legendry stories. And yet.. you may still fail. It may be that the world will still end, because the threat against it is so huge even bands of demigods like yourselves cannot hope to resist it. But you try anyway. This, I think is the core concept. Think epic, think huge - and then double it. Someone said on the Exalted Forum : "It's like Moses spent 50 years in the desert learning Jehovah Fist Kung-Fu and then teamed up with Conan, Hercules and Kenshin to fight the Pharoah's jackal-headed ninja armies." The game isn't about collecting gold and magical weapons. You treasure your character for the moments of pure "Wow!" you have participated in. Suppliment this with a rich, fascinating world full of exotic flavour and a game system which simulates the sort of action inspired by "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" and you have a winner. White Wolf's official blurb is here. Different editions, different flavours Exalted is published by White-Wolf, a company most famous for it's Vampire role playing game and the associated products. At the time of writing Exalted is on it's second edition - the rules were revamped, some of the background revised and the core books are being reprinted. Fortunately White Wolf are also producing new material, so it's not just rehashed first edition stuff. The old first edition background still works with the newer second edition game, so I haven't needed to retire my old books yet. Some of the older ones are more or less redundant though - the old suppliments for the magic system are largely gathering dust now. I was quite happy with the game system of the first edition. Being an experienced gamer, I knew when to adapt the rules I wasn't comfortable with, and how to fudge things to get the results I wanted. Spirit of the game always matters to me more than the letter of the rules, and while there were ways to exploit the rules, I didn't find powergaming a major problem. To some extent it is almost a requirement in Exalted anyway. Other people didn't seem to feel that way, and White Wolf apparently agreed with them. Hence the second edition. The second edition rules are, I think, for the most part an improvement. There's now some extra features of the system, allowing you to more easily integrate your character into huge battles, or to guide the destiny of whole states. The combat system is, for me however, a problem. It all makes perfect sense, all meshes together to give something abstract enough that you can use your imagination, but detailed enough to allow you to model just about any situation that may come up, from crossing swords to grappling your opponent and throwing you both off a mountain and then fighting him all the way down (which happens more often in Exalted than in most other games). But it's hard work. The combat system has so many steps to it that combat sessions slow to a crawl and even experienced gamers (my regular group consists of six players and myself, each with years of gaming under their belts) have trouble remembering it from week to week. It needs streamlining, and we've adopted a lot of house rules to do just that. It feels like a bit of a shame to do this, but we feel the current system makes the game less accessable (and it effectively turned some of my players off the game to my great sorrow). Nevertheless, it's worth the effort to learn this game, and you can skip over the bits you don't quite get. The Exalted wiki has a wonderful and entertaining sample combat that starts small and grows to epic dimensions here. It gives a great feel for the system. White Wolf have also made the game easier to try before you buy by providing a self contained scenario with the rules you need to play it... for free! It's a damn shame the free scenario is effectively an old fashioned dungeon crawl... which is about the last thing I'd want to use to recommend the game. >.< The free Tomb of Five Corners scenario is here. My campaign As stated earlier, I've been playing this game a long time. My campaign has gone through the following published material from the first edition and as any good game does, it's developed it's own momentum and gone off in a direction of it's own. We've played through:
Whitewall and the North The cream of Exalted links (the stuff that floats to the top)
As stated above, Voidstate does possibly the best character sheets in the world (not to mention having written a fantastic Exalted name generation programme). At the time of writing, he hasn't produced second edition character sheets for all the types of Exalted however. I liked his character sheet designs so much that when I just couldn't wait any longer, I blatently ripped off his designs and did versions of my own for other Exalted types. I hope he doesn't mind.
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