A Brief Look at Exalted

Hey Game Fans, we’re working on several things for the Mystery Box Friday series, but today we’re going to give you a very quick overview of Exalted, a Roleplaying game from Onyx Path Publishing.  Currently in its third edition (funded by a wildly successful kickstarter), Exalted is an age of Myth and Legend, where powerful heroes and demigods can reshape the world with enough belief and through the force of their own wills.  Characters can come from a variety of backgrounds and sources of power, but this is definitely a mythic age of high adventure and epic fantasy.  

The Story of the Game

Originally published by White Wolf Publishing in 2001, Exalted was a marked departure from their signature World of Darkness.  A high fantasy setting with eastern philosophies and setting elements, Exalted is a high flying action adventure where the characters take on the role of Solar Exalted, who’ve been banished from their place atop the celestial hierarchy and are actively being hunted by other Exalted.   The Solar Exalted face a desperate struggle against  the hierarchy they had been apart of.  

The Mechanics of the Game

Exalted uses a version of the Storyteller System that White Wolf (and later Onyx Path) used as their flagship for most of their games.  Rooted in a base D10 system with fixed target numbers, character actions are dynamic and quick to resolve.  In brief, a character performing an action uses the attribute (they come in three categories, Physical, Social, and Mental) and the proficiency, (Talent, Skill and Knowledge) to establish a dice pool.  For every dot the character has in the requisite attribute and proficiency pair, they get to roll a single D10.  This system works heavily with Margins of Success and Failure, and being able to stack multiple successes can produce amazing results.  

The component to this rules set that sets it apart from other Storyteller system games (like most of the World of Darkness) are the charms.  Owing to a variety of sources and powers, the Exalted are mythic heroes and demigods.  Charms represent this mythic power and allow the Exalted to do things that lesser folk can only dream of.

This means that a mundane warrior can have the same statistics (say a Dexterity score of 4 and Archery 4) as an Exalted.  The difference is that the Exalted has charms that empower their abilities to let them do amazing things (like turn a single arrow into an eclipse of arrows, or turn the arrow into a bolt of pure light).  

Where to find Exalted

Now you can find Exalted on the Internet at Onyx Path Publishing here.  They have a link to Drivethru RPG where you can pick up books, comics and source material for the game (also i added the link here).  I have heard that there is going to be an Exalted live game coming to Twitch TV soon, and when that gets closer to a reality, we’ll see if we can’t sweet talk some of the folks into describing their characters and how they interact with the world of Exalted.  

Conclusions

That’s our brief look at Exalted, if you guys are interested in more details and ideas about the game, let us know and we might be able to shift some more coverage of the game and take a look at some more concepts and ideas below the surface of this mythic age of adventure.  Game On, Game Fans.