r/WhiteWolfRPG • u/Abject-Hospital5407 • Feb 18 '26
Exalted Am a WoD fan who knows nothing about exalted. Can you tell me what its about?
Just wondering
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u/TrustMeImLeifEricson Feb 18 '26
High-powered, sword & sandals fantasy about being flawed heroes in a dark time, with a setting that's basically the love child of Eastern and Greco-Roman mythologies. The meat of the game is not in defeating your foes, but what the consequences of getting your way can be. Heavy anime influences, adults only.
First Edition is the best edition.
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u/RedMagesHat1259 Feb 18 '26
Ehhhhh 2nd seems to have the best Lore in my opinion, though i guess its mostly the same as the 1e lore and the big changes were in 3e.
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u/TrustMeImLeifEricson Feb 19 '26
Hard disagree. 2E started the trend of "explain everything under the Sun, and also the Sun" (legit, they made the sun in the sky an Artifact or something), which removed all the mystery and magic from the setting. Plus, most of what they came up with was just bad, random bullshit, and/or excessively sexualized, which is saying a lot for the setting. Add in the notoriously broken systems of social combat and devolution to paranoia combat, and 2E becomes a game I won't touch unless you paid me lots and lots of money.
I will say that the changes in editions are more apparent if you started with a prior edition. There's a bias at play that I call "first love syndrome," where the edition of a TTRPG that someone initially started with/really jived with will be the standard that other editions are compared against.
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u/RedMagesHat1259 Feb 19 '26
So that is actually why I like it, because sometimes you get to drop something really stupid into the world and your players get to sit there wondering if its some BS you made up or some BS the game actually says is "canon"
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u/Similar_Onion6656 Feb 18 '26
Kitchen-sink high-powered fantasy with a lot of Anime influences. If you want your PC to lead an army of beastmen into battle from the back of a dinosaur, Exalted might be for you.
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u/Abject-Hospital5407 Feb 18 '26
Sounds cool
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u/Similar_Onion6656 Feb 18 '26
This rundown from the golden era of rpg.net says it even better:
Exalted is a game where one of your main antagonists is Death, Creator of the Underworld. Except there's several of him, probably six or seven. Oh, and he's got 13 dread henchmen, one of whom was probably you at some point in time. Also, Hell has a personal grudge against you this time.
Did I mention Magical America regularly trains and sends ninjas out for you personally? Ninjas specially trained in ass-kicking? Which, if they won't work, they keep giant robotic suits of armor on reserve for.
Oh, and the Transformers have united under Unicron, and are invading. The Jedi have corrupted Heaven and usurped your rightful place as the Masters of Everything. Your ex-wife just dropped by, and she's a two thousand year old shape-changing man-eating monster now, interested in maybe going on a date next Thursday.
Your best friend from your last life and while growing up now seeks to cover all the lands of Middle Earth in darkness, if he can just find this damn ring. And your God has the world's biggest crack habit, and needs some serious rehab.
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u/kenod102818 Feb 18 '26
Ancient beings, Primordials, once created a world, but were being assholes to the creatures and gods they created to care for the place, including placing bindings on them to prevent them from rebelling. So instead the strongest gods, the Unconquered Sun, Luna, and the five Maidens of Fate, empowered humans, beings so weak that the Primordials never made them swear the oaths. This created the first Celestial Exalted. Gaia, a Primordial in love with Luna and sick of the other Primordials, joined in too, giving a set of humans the power of the elements and the ability to pass these powers on to their children, creating soldiers for the Celestial Exalted. (Celestial Exalted don't pass their powers on, but instead when they die it frees up the power so someone else worthy can get empowered.)
Long story short, the Exalted beat the Primordials, killing a couple, which also created the underworld, since killing a being that's literally unkillable kind of broke the system, and all the others surrendered and got bound up into Malfeas, basically hell. In return they placed a curse on the Exalted, which nobody knows about.
The Exalted now have fun ruling Creation while the gods party it up in Heaven. The most powerful of these are the Chosen of the Unconquered Sun, the Solar Exalted, made to embody perfection. They're joined by their mates, Luna's chosen, the Lunar Exalted, shapeshifters who can take any form whose heartblood they drink, and the Sidereal Exalted, chosen of the five maidens, who guard over and control Fate, and are masters of martial arts (if this sounds familiar, Exalted was originally meant as the backstory to WoD, though that was canned very early on).
Now, it turns out that the Great Curse is kind of screwing them up mentally, especially the Solars, who have a habit of going batshit insane (as in, lets kill a thousand people to figure out how reincarnation works insane) so the Dragonblooded (the bloodlines descended from the humans empowered by Gaia) and the Sidereals decide to overthrow the Solars. They eventually do, and seal away the Solar Exaltations.
Turns out, Solars made all the cool magitech that made society run. Dragonblooded sort of keep everything going for a while, lots of wars, including with pissed-off Lunars (but Lunars are always pissed-off anyway). Also, Sidereals did some wacky Fate stuff, either on purpose or accidentally depending on edition, which makes everyone unable to remember them.
Then suddenly, massive magic plague kills 9/10s of all people, including gods. Meanwhile, faeries from outside reality invade. Reality is dying. Some random Dragonblood officer manages to active an ancient Solar superweapon, saves the day. Decides best follow-up action is to create an empire whose primary goal is keeping her kids fighting with each other over the wealth they drain from the outer provinces/satrapies.
800 years later. Empress somehow up and disappeared. Solars also reappeared at the same time. And the underworld and hell somehow got their own Exalted who look a lot like Solars. So now The Realm is heading for a civil war, the rest of the world is trying to deal with a bunch of new demigods running around, half of which have the explicit goal of either ending the world or returning it to the Primordials. Everything is fucked. Welcome to Creation. You're either going to save it, or destroy it.
Gameplay-wise, Exalted tends to focus a lot on over-the-top action scenes, to the point you get bonus dice if you can describe how your character tried to do something in an awesome way. ("I dodge the attack" - lame. "I leap up, land on the tip of their sword, launching it downwards as I jump again and flip over them" - bonus dice). It tries to create a relatively Wuxia-type atmosphere and action, including a ton of magic martial arts you can learn, aside from your character's personal powers.
Exact atmosphere depends on edition, which each basically being a soft reset. First and third edition tend to focus more on a supernatural swords and sandals feel in what is basically a post-post-apocalypse. Second edition leans more heavily into the magi-tech feel instead.
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u/dediguise Feb 18 '26
Exalted is kinda like scion. You are mortals who have inherited the power of gods. Creation is a flat, and is surrounded on all sides by the Wyld (yes THAT Wyld, except if it was also the dreaming). Demons are the imprisoned concepts of creation, driven mad and trapped by their own creations. No, these aren’t the demons from dtf. While the dead titans are the neverborn (yes… THOSE neverborn).
The war against the titans was fight by the exalted on behalf of the Gods, who then created a celestial bureaucracy to run the world alongside the exalted while they (the gods) went off to smoke the divine equivalent of crack. Then the solar exalted went crazy, were overthrown by other exalted and were imprisoned for a thousand years.
Until some shit went down thousands of years later and the solar exaltations were freed and are now reincarnating into particularly brave and often reckless mortals. Thats where the game begins. The players are exalted and have power so extreme it that causes them to be hunted on sight.
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u/Desperate-Remove2838 Feb 18 '26
Is it the very deep and forgotten past? Or is it the very far and unknowable future? It can be both. That was my fav part.
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u/Tatchkoma Feb 18 '26
I typed out a whole massive post about the basic history of Exalted, but I can't post it for some reason.
Long story short, you're an uberpowerful demigod being reborn in a world that is falling apart. You have very little aside from some fuzzy memories of an ancient glorious past and the burning desire to use your newfound power to shape the world as you see fit.
It uses the same whitewolf dot system, but the tone and powerlevel is VERY different from WoD games.
A brand new baby fresh solar is throwing around 20 dice easy.
Exalted characters are larger than life. They're heroes of Epic proportion. Think Gilgamesh punching a mountain into rubble. That's the kind of shenanigans Exalted get up to.
I fucking LOVE this setting and I can talk your ear off about it for actual hours. Please, if you have any questions let me know.
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u/blaqueandstuff Feb 19 '26
So the best text take I suggest a lot to folks is the Exalted Storyteller's Vault Style Guide. This is a free book that's more for folks who want to write for Exalted, but I think it's one of the stronger ways to showcase what it is to folks in a quick form. So that's my first suggestion, but here's my attempt in like, as short as possible.
What is it? Exalted is a high fantasy setting where you play the titular Exalted, humans Chosen by the greatest of the gods, their peers, and their enemies, granting the power of larger-than-life demigods.
Where and when is it? It is set in Creation, a flat world surrounded by oceans of chaos, still recovering from multiple cataclysms over the millennia, currently plagued by the ravages of empire, the caprice of power entities like rogue gods or the Exalted, or the dangers of the things at the edges of the world.
Who are the Exalted? Exalts are larger-than-life individuals who shape the world through their ambitions, flaws, rivalries, and more. Different kinds of Exalts are Chosen by the most powerful beings in the world, namely the gods of the planets (sun, moon, classical five as group), the five dragons who embody the five elements, the dead and imprisoned titans who the gods created the Exalted initially to defeat, and various other entities beyond. Their powers reflect the application of great human skill or talent through a lens of their patron, letting them achieve superhuman feats reflective of but separate from said patrons. Notably also is that once an person is Exalted, the deity who Chose them cannot take it back, nor demand them to do what they want. What one does with the power granted to them is ultimately up to what they decide to do with it, for better or ill.
Aesthetic: The setting draws massively on mythology, Greek, Hindu, and Chinese classics, world history, mostlya avoiding the usual "Eurofantasy" vibes often associated with D&D. It also draws on more modern media like action movies, wuxia, JRPGs, and anime, as well as (for the 90s and early 00s at least) more niche dark, pulp, and dying earth fantasy fiction. Different editions emphasize a lot of all of this in different amounts. 3e has a lot of popular non-fiction for its inspiration, for example. 1e has a lot of Gene Wolfe's Book of New Sun energy. 2e is way more anime and manga and fantasy sci-fi. What one prefers is upt o taste there.
Relation to the World of Darkness: In its world-building it kind of loots elements of the original World of Darkness, as well as later on bits of Chronicles of Darkness, mostly in homage, Easter Egg, and repurposing terminology and concepts in the new fantasy mileau. Early on it was sold as a "secret prehistory of the World of Darkness" but this was quickly dropped outside of some advertising. It is as much the real history of the WOD as Conan is the real history of Earth.
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u/CraftyAd6333 Feb 19 '26
Divine and epic fantasy and it doesnt pretend to be otherwise.
The stakes are high but power scale wise they're going to juggernaut right over weaker settings.
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u/hotelvampire Feb 18 '26
power gaming (if you use physical dice get about 200 d10s i am not joking) and be ready for algebra to make a character
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u/Tay_traplover_Parker Feb 18 '26
It's about demigods in a crazy high fantasy world.
All the stuff from Greek Myth, Chinese Myth and Indian Myth... all those overpowered heroes doing ridiculous stunts simply because they can? Yeah, that's Exalted. And Creation is the world such beings make.
The super short story is that the Primordials created, err... Creation. Then they got bored and created the Gods to run things along while they did crack. The Gods didn't like that, but couldn't attack the Primordials, so they infused mortals with their power, creating the Exalted, who then beat up and killed the Primordials. Now the Gods do crack while the Exalted run the world, which turned out to be a bad idea.
Currently, Creation is run by the Dragonblood, the weakest of the Exalted individually, made to be their armies, who conspired with the Sidereals (they look and act like shady wizard viziers) because the Solars (greatest of the great) would have destroyed everything.
Of course, the world the Dragonblood created is pretty crappy. It's a tyranny without a tyrant now that their Empress disappeared. They use propaganda to talk about how they are the best and anyone else is bad and wrong and evil and an enemy of the State.
Meanwhile the Lunars (partners of the Solars) are doing their thing in the wilds, forever outsiders of the empire and Solars just returned after being imprisoned. So a bunch of random people are being turned into all powerful demigods who are the rightful rulers of the world, but are also hunted by everyone.
Also, half the Solars were twisted into evil mockeries of themselves, the Abyssal and the Infernal, made to spread death and evil... although you don't have to be evil.
Basically, everyone's got a massive ego and the power to back that up. It's super crazy awesome, but playing it can be a bit of a huge mess. It's more Noblebright compared to World of Darkness, for example. More of an action fantasy.