Exalted art by Christopher Stevens
The tagline for Exalted is pretty interesting. While most RPGs have you starting out as a powerless neophyte in a big, cruel worl, Exalted let's you begin as a godlike being with a starting roster of impressive powers. Like the PC game Black & White, your interactions with the population of your native land and followers is just as important as taking on quests and enemies. This is a game where you and the other players must ask the difficult question, "Is it better to be feared or revered?"
It's a nice gimmick and good way to set Exalted apart from its other White Wolf brethren. Your typical adventure in Exalted takes place on a whole other scale than most other pencil and paper games, resulting in scenarios you just don't see in Dungeons & Dragons or Vampire: The Masquerade. While the physical process of playing the game is the same as any other, the different scale can help players adjust their perceptions and the game can even act as a palette cleanser of sorts when the usual d20 stuff grows tiresome.
The game's influences are many and varied, but I guess if one wanted to oversimplify it could be described as The Bible crossed with the anime Ninja Scroll. There's an "anime" look to the art, provided by Brian Glass and UDON studio, another thing separating the game from most others on store shelves. I have the Second Edition book myself, and it has tons of comic inserts that, if not for the digital coloring, look like something you'd find in Shonen Jump.
Exalted was designed to be the launching point for a World of Darkness-like setting called the "Age of Sorrows". This is a pre-history setting where the bronze age meets feudal Japan, and certain divine people are gifted the powers of various deities. (Interestingly, the Age of Sorrows was originally intended to be a canon precursor to the World of Darkness, but as time wore on, these connections were made less and less.) The titular Exalted have slain their predecessors, The Primordials, and are in the process of divvying up the world.
There are seven varieties of "Exalts", or character classes, in the core book and several more were introduced in various expansion books. Among them are various godly and demonic archetypes like the Solar Exalted (Apollo) and Infernal Exalted (Japanese Oni). While these groupings simulate the bloodlines from Vampire, the "flaws" that balance characters in d10 games are represented by curses.
(This is something I totally forgot to mention during my multi-part reflection on the World of Darkness; Flaws are a system of defects used at the point of character creation designed to balance out a really strong character. In some games, you have the option to make a more powerful character at the cost of adding extra flaws to your character. Curses operate much the same.)
This game hit at a time when anime and manga were bcoming fairly ubiquitous in the united states and series like Inuyasha were gaining quite a following. Adventures like those seen in Inuyasha (or shows like Dragonball or Saiyuki) were pretty easy to replicate using Exalted's rules. I guess you could look at Exalted as a method of getting your otaku friends into pencil and paper RPGs.
(There's also BESM and the Tri-Stat games, but that's a topic for another post . . .)
Like all White Wolf properties, there was no shortage of expansion materials and original novels based on the lore and setting of Exalted. Each branch of the Exalted and every school of Essence manipulation could be explored to its fullest. But before you go hunting on eBay . . .
2016 sees the release of a Third Edition for the game. Released just this past April, this game borrows bits of new mechanics from the "New" World of Darkness introduced in the mid-2000's. Once I'm out of this Ramen phase I currently exist in, I'll have to give this one a look.
Thanks for reading!
Twitter: @ChrisBComics
E-Mail: backissuechris@gmail.com
More galactic battles: Work/Shoot
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