Hey Game Fans, today we’re going to take a stab at making a character for Exalted 3rd Edition. This is after 3 solid reads of the relevant chapters and digging into the nuts and bolts of everything but charms (that’s a big chapter). We’re going to do a bit more than we usually do because Exalted has such a mythic feel, you can tell stories that are larger than life, and that means we’re going to be doing things slightly out of order. We promise to double check our math and hopefully get everything right, but we make goofs once in awhile too. So let’s dig into this article and get things started. If you’re curious what we’re talking about and don’t know what Exalted is, check out our First Looks article Here.
Step 1: Caste and Concept
So we started with an idea of a character that would fit with this setting, and in an easy sentence, that character is “A wandering martial arts master who’s trying to find some way to reunite with his family.” This puts together the basic concept of what the character is and what his goal for life is. We’re going to be putting in a lot more work on the backstory for this character than we typically would for a D & D character because the setting for Exalted is big enough to tell Mythic stories with big ideas and ambitions. Expect a longer backstory and character bio for this character because of the setting and it’s depths.
The Capsule bio for this character is “Originally from Yu Shan, Rey was a mortal soldier in the employ of one of the Dynasts of House Vaneef. Serving loyally, he moved up the ranks until he was an adjutant to one of the Dragonblooded leaders of the Dynast, and was often seen in the field in a variety of campaigns. He secretly fathered several children with one of the members of the Dynast. During a mission, he was thought killed in battle with the forces of one of the Death Knights in the service of Mask of Winter. He exalted during that conflict and escaped deep into the south, finally landing in An Teng. He sells his services as a teacher of martial arts while he tries to find a way to regain contact with his children.”
Some notes:
Rey is Dawn Caste, with a concept of Wandering Master
Step 2: Attributes
Like all the storyteller system games, there are 3 categories of attributes, each with three entries. Physical attributes govern your character’s physical characteristics including Strength, Dexterity and Stamina. Social attributes govern your character’s interaction characteristics, including Charisma, Appearance, and Manipulation. Mental attributes govern your character’s mental characteristics, including Perception, Wits, and Intelligence. When you start putting your character together, you pick which one of these categories is your character’s primary, secondary, and tertiary foci. The higher you prioritize a category, the more points you have to spend on the character’s attributes in that category. Primary Category gets 8 points, Secondary Category gets 6 points, and Tertiary category gets 4 points. Also, you get 1 free point in each attribute.
Notes:
Rey is a character defined in large part by his physicality, so we’re going to assign Physical as his primary category. He’s more scholarly than sociable, so his Mental attributes are Secondary, and his Social attributes are tertiary. That means we have 8 points to spend on Physical, 4 to spend on Social, and 6 to spend on Mental.
We think the best way to run Physical is to assign 3 dots to Strength, 3 dots to Dexterity, and 2 dots to Stamina. This gives us 4 Strength, 4 Dexterity, and 3 Stamina (remember we get a free point in each attribute). Social attributes are pretty straightforward. Rey isn’t superhuman in his social attributes, so he get’s a dot in Charisma and Manipulation, and we put two dots in Appearance. This gives him 2 Charisma, 3 Appearance, and 2 Manipulation. Mental attributes are pretty even across the board, and we assign 2 dots to Perception, Wits and Intelligence. This puts him at 3s in every category.
Step 3 Abilities
Now Abilities represent specific skills and aptitudes that a character can improve beyond their basic ability (represented by the attribute). Each Caste has a group of abilities that are specifically favored by that Caste, and those are listed on page 121 of the Exalted Core book. These are also called Caste Abilities, and your character gets to pick 5 of them to be favored abilities.
In addition, you get to pick any 5 abilities that your character can choose to favor. These represent additional areas of importance to your character and are things that don’t necessarily fall into the umbra of the character’s Caste favored abilities.
Every character also gets to take one ability as a Supernal ability, which is basically the defining ability of the character. Mechanically, this let’s a character treat his or her Essence rating (more on that later) as a 5 for the purpose of picking up charms. This lets the character access some ridiculously powerful charms at points where they shouldn’t be accessible.
Some Notes:
Rey has selected Awareness, Brawl, Dodge, Melee, and Resistance as his Caste Abilities. In addition, he picks up Athletics, Integrity,War, Presence, and Lore as his other favored abilities. This gives us a host of martial based skills and some useful other abilities. Integrity feels right for this character, and he uses Presence as a tool for teaching students. His lore is focused on the philosophy that binds the martial arts together.
Rey chooses Martial Arts as his Supernal Ability (which he can because he’s a Dawn Caste).
Step 3 Continued
Now that we’ve identified our favored abilities and Supernal ability, it’s time to start spending some points. We can’t add more than 3 dots to any ability at this point without spending bonus points (more on those in a minute) to raise them above 3. Just like with attributes, we can’t raise anything above 5. We’ve got a whopping 28 dots to spend on abilities at this stage with some restrictions. Anything that we marked as a favored ability has to have at least one dot assigned to it.
We also need to assign specialties to four of our abilities. Specialties are basically refinements of the base concept, and represent further teaching in a specific style or use of that ability.
Notes:
So we’ve got 28 dots to spend. We’re going to assign 3 dots to Martial Arts (Single Shining Point in the Void Style) and 3 dots to Martial Arts (Snake Style). We further assign 2 dots to Athletics, 2 dots to Awareness, 3 dots to Dodge, 2 dots to Integrity, 1 dot to Melee, 3 dots to Resistance, 2 dots to War, 2 dots to Presence, and 2 Dots to Lore. That leaves us at 25 dots, so we assign an additional dot to Athletics, Presence, and assign a dot to Brawl.
For Specialties, we select Teaching for Presence, Martial Arts Philosophy for Lore, Tactics for War, and Ranged Attacks for Dodge.
Step 4: Merits
Now that we’ve established our attributes and our abilities, we move on to step 4, which covers Merits. Merits represent additional background details and options that your character has access to. Perhaps you have contacts in distant lands, or the backing of a cult that worships your divine Exaltation. Ancient artifacts and other positive benefits flourish through this step, and there are a host of options you can choose from for your character. You have 10 points to assign to Merits at this step. There are 3 kinds of Merits, and the type is generally indicative of when you can pick up the Merit. Innate Merits can only be purchased at character creation, Standard ones can be picked up through the use of experience points, and Story ones can only be gained or improved as the story dictates, and usually require some role-playing and some of those quest things.
Notes:
Rey is going to have to spend 4 of his Merit dots to pick up the Martial Artist Merit (we planned for this along the way, and those 4 points were effectively spent when we decided on the concept. Now with 6 points left, we have some fun ideas about what else seems like an idea. I am personally torn between 2 3 dot artifacts, and picking up the Giant Merit and a 2 point artifact (which may get juiced up with some bonus points. I find the idea of the hulking Martial Arts Master, so i opt for Giant. At this point we’ve spent 8 dots (4 on Martial Artist, and 4 on Giant). The last 2 dots we’re going to allocate towards some sort of artifact (probably a sword of some kind to go with one of our Martial Arts Styles). So our Merits look like: Martial Artist, Giant, Artifact (2).
Now we’re closing in on four solid pages of character background and creation, and this looks like a logical place to stop for today. We’re going to post a link to take a look at the character sheet for Rey Here. We used a Form Fillable Exalted 3e character sheet that we think we found on Reddit. We’re also going to provide a link to that Here, but claim no ownership or creation of it. That’s it for today on this little project, we’ll be back next week to hopefully dig through the next few steps and have a shiny fun character that’s ready to play. Game On, Game Fans.
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