Page Count:
350 - Hardback
“Before the Great
Flood… Before the Mythic Ages…
Before the Impergium… Before the Sundering…
Before the Shattering… Even before your
mother-in-law was born… Before there
was a World of Darkness… There was something
Else…”
This created a constant
ticking in my head. What would the next White
Wolf game be like? Well, knowing their penchant
for taking up trends that are already there
and turning them into sourcebooks and RPGs,
this one would be surprisingly easy. Hercules:
the Legendary Journeys and Xena: Warrior princess
meet 1001 fantasy animé series/ ovas/
movies. European fantasy, classic myth and
animé. A bizarre mix indeed. And yet,
a profitable one, and more importantly for
us, an interesting one.
Over the last few years,
White Wolf’s World of Darkness has secretly
delivered a message through its books. In
the World of Darkness, time is cyclic. Exalted
is set in another Era of the world, called
Age of Sorrows, which may be before out time…
or after it! And all that cosmology in Mage
is also true in Exalted. The world wasn’t
(or won’t be) round in that Age. And
what sorts of characters will they players
give life to? The original idea was to have
all the Exalted in the core-book, but that
was too extensive, so for now they have focused
on the Solars.
So what are Exalted? They
are beings set apart from their normal brethren.
Beings of immense power, touched by the gods
to set the wrongs to right. There are many
kinds of Exalted. First are the Solars, the
most powerful ones, those touched by the Unconquered
Sun, these are the ones that are dealt with
in the core-book. These are the ones we’ll
play… for now. Then, there are the Lunar
Exalted. These are beings akin to the shapechangers
of the World of Darkness, and they reign supreme
in the wilderness, as barbarians. Then you
have the Sidereal Exalted, those that can
divine the starts and make or unmake fates,
akin, maybe, to the Mages we are familiar
with.
Then, are the Terrestrial
Exalted, or Dragon-Blooded, who betrayed the
Solars and rule the world while hunting down
the last ones of the true Chosen. The Dragon-Blooded
have created a powerful empire called simply
The Realm (they are next in line for Player
Characters, as their book will be released
soon). Finally, we have the Abyssal Exalted,
beings of darkness that are best not be spoken
of. So, for now, I’ll focus on the Solars.
Solar Exalted, as you will
expect from any White Wolf game, are subdivided
into factions. There are five castes, which
the Solars can belong to. Each of them corresponds
to a time of the day and to one character
class. The Dawn Solar Exalted are the generals,
the best among warriors, the mightiest champions.
The Zenith are the warrior-priests, sort of
like the clerics of other systems. The Twilight
are scholars and crafts-persons. The Night
are thieves and assassins, and finally the
Eclipse are diplomats and travellers.
Until very recently, whenever
one of them was discovered they were slain
to prevent them from growing to powerful.
Now, as the Empress of the Realm has disappeared,
the Empire is close to a civil war, and can’t
afford to hunt down every last one of the
evil Solars. That’s right I said evil,
The Realm’s religion teaches that Solars
are infernal beings and refers to them as
Anathema.
The Solars slowly gather
power once again, but they have many foes.
With immense powers, much like an Aberrant
in the game with the same name, they fight
a war to end the Sorrows of the Age.
The Setting is very exciting,
second only, perhaps, to AEG’s 7th Sea.
As the world is ruled by bizarre geographic
principles, almost any environment is available
in this world, as are there other dimensions,
like the Shadowlands or Wyld places, where
the laws of reality bend.
As for the system, the game
uses the Revised Storyteller System (the one
used in the Æon Continuum games) but
it’s even more simplified. In Exalted,
thanks to the system and some nice low-level
powers, it is possible to toss handfuls of
dice for an attack, and translate all those
successes into damage dice, very bloody combat,
and as such, very funny. This means that of
all the games White Wolf makes, this has one
of the most lethal combat systems, of course
it’s pretty un-lethal compared to other
games, like Cyberpunk or L5R.
On the other hand (to last
one hit longer) you can buy health levels
at character creation through a power called
Ox-Body Technique so you can tip it back towards
the near-immortality you get with most White
Wolf games if you like.
I think this will be a hit
for White Wolf, since it has everything that
a game needs to be great. It’s also
possibly the best game White wolf have made
to date, because it’s sort of like all
of the previous games they’ve made rolled
into one. The system is the most simple of
all, the setting encompasses everything. In
short it’s a great game.
My only regret lies with
the artwork, it’s pathetic. It hurts
even more when you look at the “Making
of Exalted” book and see the pictures
that were rejected in favour of these lousy
animé-style drawings. As Denis Leary
would put it: “Sad, sad, sad.”
Everything else though, is spectacular.
Before all of the other
White Wolf games, proudly stands… Exalted.
Reviewed by Matías
Timm |
