Exalted?

[Dendread]

Though I haven’t played it yet I picked up the core book due to the great anime-style artwork. It’s presently waiting its turn on my gaming shelf but overall every I’ve heard has been good. Goodluck!
As Always,
~F. Wesley Schneider

 

[Barastrondo]

The world seems fnatasy like but really doesn't capture the feel as well as D&D, War Hammer, or even Palladium. All of this is of course my opinion, hopefully someone with more knowledge of it all can answer these better.

I think there's an important point to be made about "the feel." D&D draws much of its notes on what "the feel" is from Tolkien, Robert E. Howard, Jack Vance and the like, and by now has pretty much started defining its own feel. Warhammer's take on "the feel" is very European, in some cases very influenced by history, in others by Tolkien and Moorcock.

Exalted is derived from Norse sagas, Grecian heroic tragedy, wuxia, Dunsany's Pegana, and other sources that aren't tapped as frequently in the modern fantasy market. The assumptions about cultural morality are closer to what you see in the Iliad or Romance of the Three Kingdoms than 20th century ideals. The major culture has more to do with the bureaucratic dynasties of ancient China than the feudal system of Western Europe. Heroes tend to be tragically flawed like Heracles (the one who kills his wife and children in a rage, not Kevin Sorbo in leather pants).

Exalted is different. Not to everyone's taste, to be sure. But I think that it should be said that it's different because it's inspired by a very different set of source material, not because it's trying for the same thing as D&D (or, for that matter, the World of Darkness*) and not doing as well at it. It's kind of like comparing Barry Hughart's Bridge of Birds to Leiber's Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories.


*Exalted is to the World of Darkness as Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying is to Warhammer 40K — very similar elements are deliberately used, and if you dig through the fluff you can find connections to place them in the same universe, but generally the one doesn't interact with the other.

 

[Wil]

Wil, ever run people through the Tombs of NExus?(I'm writing up stuff for them after dinner tonite).

No, not quite yet. I'm torn between setting a campaign in Nexus and throwing in a really big dose of Thief: The Dark Project and porting a whole bunch of stuff from my systemless, half-completed homebrew fantasy setting. If I do port stuff from my setting in, I'm going to want to take a look at the Lunars sourcebook beforehand because my setting had a number of anthropomorphs that will do well as Wyld barbarians. The focus of that game, should it happen, would be that these "barbarians" have carved out a little area of stability in the Wyld despite their own Wyld natures.

 

[Dr. Strangemonkey]

Nostalgia

I ran an Exalted campaign for close to a year, out of Nexus for those in the know, and I am still very impressed with the system and the setting.

System wise it is a storyteller game. The engineers fudged it just enough to prevent me from trying to adapt Feng Shui mechanics to it, and you get to roll so many dice it feels like Shadowrun.

The setting does have the potential to become an X-men vs. the Sentinels style, "I'm a hyper-powerful fugitive?" game. But that is really the lesser of all the options involved. Unless the opposing forces can get the PCs in the first couple of sessions or the PCs manage to get taken down by the human population of a city, the villains are going to have to be much more devious than any role-player is used to.

The mechanic that really surprised me is how much being the most powerful type in the world without being all-powerful or the most powerful characters really lent itself to role-playing. Lex Luthor style villains were everywhere and one of the PCs mothers turned out to be the villain the players could never discover a means of defeating.

Magic was very very very cool.

I also thought that while the first book was a little too wordy, the books overall were very well written. They have a bibliography at the begining of every book which is not only a nice touch but added a lot of great works to my reading list.

Character creation takes a while for how simple the system is, which is frustrating.

If you are thinking of GMing you must acquire the FAQ and Erratta, explains more than it corrects. Essential.

 

[reutbing0]

It's a -possible- pre-history... sort of... basicly, if things had worked out differently in exalted, you might have had the normal WoD, eventualy. I think. It's kinda hard to understand. There are very clear "roots" in Exalted, yes. Some clearer than others... Fair Folk = Changelings, Lunar Exalted = Werewolves, Solar Exalted = Hunters (I think), Sidreal Exalted = Mages, etc. But it's a lot different too... those are just a rough fit, not an exact one.

You know, while I'm not an Exalted meta-plot expert, it always made dramatic sense to me that the solars became the vampires in the WOD. They are the chosen of the sun but become Anathema again and will never be able to face the sun, which they betrayed, anymore. This is just guessing though..

Anyway, Exalted is a wonderful game with lots of interesting influences and a very much streamlined version of the storyteller system.

 

[Tsyr]

You know, while I'm not an Exalted meta-plot expert, it always made dramatic sense to me that the solars became the vampires in the WOD. They are the chosen of the sun but become Anathema again and will never be able to face the sun, which they betrayed, anymore. This is just guessing though..

Anyway, Exalted is a wonderful game with lots of interesting influences and a very much streamlined version of the storyteller system.

No, Abyssyal become the western cainite vampires, and it's strongly suggested that the Dragon-Blooded become the eastern Kui-Jin "vampires".

 

[Rich34]

I meant to post this back in when folks were talking about coming up with a Black Company d20, but you know, Exalted could be a good system for such a campaign. It handles the order of magnitude differences in power of some of the characters - the Lady and the Taken would be Solar Exalted types, Goblin and One-Eye would be more on the level of Dragonblooded sorcerors, etc.

Richard

 

[Dr. Strangemonkey]

Yeah,
The Black-Company books are listed as good source material for Exalted. The Lady is supposed to be a perfect example of a first age Solar. I thought about running it, but I felt I would have to add some rules to make playing mortals cooler and to approximate the low level magic of the company.

I feel like there is a lot of room for cooler mortals in Exalted, but I'm worried that WW won't develop them until after I'm dead.

I thought about creating a mortal version of charms called knacks that would simply be ineffecient for Solars to use given that they could learn charms instead, but decided not to put enough thought into it to work out the mechanics. Thought that it might work to reduce the difficulty of certain actions or stunts your character had practiced many times before. Also thought heroic characters might be able to stack some specialities or something similar.

Could never figure out what to do about mortal magic. The big book says it's there and that it's mostly stuff like curses and talking to spirits, but doesn't say much else.

Still, I love the idea of using it for a Black Company game. Please share any successes you might have had with it.

 

[Wil]

It would be possible to handle "hedge magic" for mortals similar to the way that Tribe 8 handles it (the difference between Synthesis, Aspects, and ritual magic is similar to that between Charms, Sorcery and "knacks"). Make the mortal knacks much more ritualistic and more difficult to perform. Break out some of the Charms into individual effects that are highly inefficient for Exalted to use, but feasible for a mortal to attempt. Considering that mortals have only 1 or 2 Essence, it makes sense to sacrifice personal energy for sacrifice, ritual, etc. to get a magical effect.

 

[Shadow of Bukrai]

Freakin' awesome game! Love it. And this is coming from one of them gamers who wouldn't have ordinarily touched a World of Dankness game with a 10 foot pole. Currently my favorite game. We ditched both our D&D and Hârn games to play Exalted.