RPG Spotlight: Exalted
This week we’re stepping into the adventures and world of your favorite classic mythology when we shine the RPG spotlight on Exalted.
Exalted is a game of myth and legend, where gods exist and people with super human abilities take on heroic tasks. It probably sounds like it’s going to be a game that borrows a lot from mythology, and it very much is. Exalted borrows from just about every mythology you can think of, so if you really enjoy folktales and mythology, this may be the perfect RPG world for you to step into.
In Exalted player characters are chosen by various deities and gifted powers. Different deities will provide different abilities, but the core of Exalted focuses on the Solar Exalted, or the chosen heroes of the Unconquered Sun. If the sun doesn’t appeal, there are also Abyssal Exalted, Celestial Exalted, and Alchemical Exalted, just to name a few. Each of these varieties can break down further (think classes and subclasses or schools), with Solar, for example, having options for Dawn (warriors), Zenith (priest-kings), Twilight (scholars), Night (spies), and Eclipse (diplomats). In other words, you have lots and lots of options. Each of these flavors of Exalted have a ton of individual mythology and history already baked into the core of the game’s setting, so aside from being a fun game to actually play, the lore behind it can be interesting to just sit down and read.
Gameplay utilizes the Storyteller System where a character’s attributes and abilities are represented with a d10. The player will roll a number of d10 equal to their attribute plus their ability, so the more skilled a character is, the more d10 the player rolls and the higher their chances of success. tens can be rerolled, ones are disregarded and anything higher than a seven is a success. It’s a system that rewards and even encourages the player to take on higher stakes as the character becomes more and more skilled.
And that may be what sticks out the most to be about Exalted as a roleplaying game experience; it’s the embodiment of go big or go home. Your backstory needs go to big, after all, regular schmos aren’t being chosen to take on the powers of the Exalted. You need to come up with a character to deserves that power. You can come up with “Combos” allowing you to take your normal abilities and create something specialized to your character. They can be expensive to buy experience points wise, but like I said, go big. And of course as I mentioned above, the Storyteller System is designed to encourage big actions and risks. The rule of thumb I’ve found was to think “What would ____ do?” where you solve for blank with your favorite demi-god from your favorite mythology.
Exalted is a character driven, over the top game of larger than life adventure in a way that feels both a little more alien and a little closer to home than other fantasy games. If you’d like to check out the world of the Exalted for yourself, you can get more information here.
Have you played Exalted? Which kind of Exalted were you? What kind of powers did you get? let us know in the comments!
Happy Adventuring!
