Ah, Exalted.

Exalted is a White Wolf production, of Vampire: The Gothening fame, and my does it show. There’s actually a great deal of interesting meat to their books, it’s just they aren’t very good at the actual game part.

To sum up how this affected Exalted, you need to understand that each major publication thought it was a good idea to go “and here’s how things are completely different than you expected while technically fitting into existing canon! PSYCHE!” which is a wonderful way to write a story and a terrible way to publish supplementary material for people’s ongoing campaigns. This on top of the fact the books themselves usually require a lot of close reading to figure out what’s actually going on because god forbid you actually spell out your allusions, and the official policy being for every book to present itself in a favorable light so you needed to crossreference madly to figure out where things stood in relation to each other. The actual content could be quite good (Sidereals is some lovely, lovely stuff), it’s just it requires a cultlike devotion to the books to get at it. (Recent publications trended away from this, but sadly coincided with the actual content being shit. Exalted requires a certain quota of unworkability to it.)

Anyway, understanding this you should see how the poor soul commissioned to write an Exalted series early on in the game’s release schedule was doomed before he began.

The first trilogy is infamous for being terrible at being set in Exalted, and everyone advises the second series for actual Exalted. But we’re doing the first book of the first series this month, because it’s some readable fantasy and it’s interesting to see the author trying to work with a setting he’s struggling with, and I’m really fucking sick of YA tropes. This is not a strong recommendation, mind you.

The book is chaptered, but very, very badly. The first ten chapters, for example:

Ch1 26 pages
Ch2 14 pages
Ch3 7 pages
Ch4 6 pages
Ch5 10 pages
Ch6 4 pages
Ch7 4 pages
Ch8 8 pages
Ch9 12 pages
Ch10 2 pages

But who cares. It doesn’t have a plot about how the thirteen year old was asking for it (actual Exalted is grimdark and rapey, but as I said, this book isn’t actual Exalted) and, being fantasy, it’s going to ramble about random setting stuff instead. Have I mentioned I love worldbuilding? Because I do.

For those of you who don’t know the setting, this will be a hugely inaccurate but not particularly negative example of it. If anything sounds appealing, you should check out the actual sourcebooks for the background and fluff. Try not to look directly at anything that involves mechanics.

Some basics that won’t be coming up in the book:

Despite appearances, it’s not truly a medieval setting – rather, it’s post-apocalyptic. Thousands of years ago the gods gave humanity superpowers so they could murder the gods’ bosses and stuff the survivors in a box. This had a wide variety of horrible ramifications. Then the people with the really cool, extra-glowy superpowers became enormous dicks which, frankly, everyone should have seen coming, so the others banded together and murdered them and locked them in a box and remurdered anyone who got out, because that went so well the first time. It only broke reality a little, so those involved considered it a huge success. Then later an unstoppable plague appeared and after it wiped out 90% of life chaos fairy monsters that eat your brain decided to invade to eat the 10% left before they died of plague. Then the Scarlet Empress took over Creation with an even more unstoppable superweapon and kept things together for the next seven hundred years by being awesome, and then five years ago she vanished.

Anyway, between the murder and the dying and the giant war with brain eating chaos fairies, a lot of important technology got blown up, with the result that people are back to riding around on horses and farming, but also there’s still really awesome stuff lying around. It’s like if Rome had left behind plasma cannons as well as really good roads, and the plasma cannons were guarded by demons and the really good roads could kill you if you broke the law.

Recently the guys with the extra glowy superpowers have started returning in force so the current system of remurdering them when they appear is badly backlogged and they’re running around being glowy and superpowered (and psychotic). Those are the “Chosen of the Sun” mentioned, Solar Exalted, also known as the main player character group. And there’s a half dozen forces with centuries or millennium long secret plots to destroy the world, all of which come to fruition about next week.

The selling points of the game include having enormous power from the getgo instead of starting off sucking like in D&D, and secondarily, if you’ll use that power to murder your problems and lock them in a box.

So naturally we’ll be dicking around in low level D&D encounters half the time and chasing after a +1 sword. It’s a hard mindset to shake.