Describe Exalted here.
Hoo-boy.
- Well, we should always start with the joke on the first page: As for what they do with that power... well, one of the running themes of Exalted is, "Welcome to Creation, here's your shovel". It either means "There's a lot of crap to be shoveled in Creation, and it's your job to clean it up, one way or the other." or "You're digging Creation's deep, dark, grave. Get to work."
- There are dinosaurs that eat opium and piss out heroin. They are called The Beasts of Resplendent Liquids.
- Several versions of the Beasts of Resplendent Liquids existed in the First Age, each being biological constructs designed to do the first stage of medicinal processing while requiring minimal effort. Brown ones eat opium and piss heroin, blue ones (the only other ones known to have survived to the present day) eat more exotic plants and piss the main ingredient of anti-aging medicines.
- There is a country in the East of Creation called the Republic of Chaya, where each and every single person is infested with magical nanites. And do you want to know what is even weirder than that? The fact that it's a real democracy, not a place where the Exalted rule from behind the scenes and let them mortals think that they have, but a real Republic... with the exception of the gods of those magical nanites, who are the ones who set up the country's Constitution.
- Doing It for the Art:
- The (former) Ink Monkeys have a lot of enthusiasm for the game. And all the Ink Monkey material was written up for free. Although it has been discontinued as the writers went onto paying work for the line as developers and writers, it did a good job of keeping interest and enthusiasm, both positive and negative, up.
- Many of the authors for "Masters of Jade" went well over the wordcount limit, without being paid for the additional words, just to make the product as awesome as possible. The general—albeit not universal—consensus is that they succeeded.
- Troubled Production: 3rd Edition, very much so.
- To start with, the massive runaway success of the Kickstarter immediately led to the book's expected length doubling, and pushed back the expected release by quite a lot, which annoyed quite a lot of fans. (Subsequent Exalted Kickstarters learned from this, instead putting added material in a companion book.) One of the stretch goals was helping the developers of Anathema, a character creator/manager for second edition, to develop a version for the new edition. Absolutely none of the money went towards supporting the Anathema developers. After a post by the main developer in 2016 about not having time to work on it, the project fell silent.
- The actual development also suffered severe setbacks. For starters, one of the leading devs was plagued by persistent health issues and another quit outright. This was absolutely not helped by the... abrasive attitude they seemed to hold toward the fans; immediate examples include their initial position on the Abyssal "rape charms" ("It's not 'hold her down and stick it in' rape," later somewhat revised and apologized-for) and the return of the much-reviled Bonus Points system for character generation ("We have a policy to not give people bad rules just because they think they want them"), persistent issues over writers leaving or claiming they weren't getting paid for their work, plagiarized art, and several areas that generally reflected their attitudes to the game that the fans weren't happy with.
- This only intensified when the backer PDF was released, only to reveal that almost nothing had changed from a leaked work-in-progress copy that had found its way onto the Internet most of a year earlier. Said backer PDF also contained a great many basic errors that should have been caught by something as basic as a spell checker, strange issues with the formatting, and fostered a general dissatisfaction with a number of mechanics that the devs adamantly refused to change. note
- The backer PDF also spotlighted why having Protection from Editors is not always the best thing, as the Charms chapter is commonly considered to be overly-long, bloated with unnecessary 'dice trick' charms that do little but make the players and Storyteller do more work (one obvious example is the Melee Charm Rising Sun Slash, which does nothing unless the player rolls a straight), after having made a point of removing the majority of 2nd Edition's additional 'dice tricks' in the Infinite Masteries and Second/Third Excellencies. Craft, Brawl, Lore, and Socialize all have 48+ Charms, which basically everyone agrees is far more than is really necessarynote and are often the first targets of anyone homebrewing different systems. Ultimately, it's considered to be a very good example of what happens when a very wordy writer becomes immune to being very firmly told "No".
- This culminated in April of 2017, a year after the release of 3rd Edition, when both Holden Shearer and John Mørke, the remaining lead developers, were summarily replaced by Eric Minton and Robert Vance. Almost immediately after being instated, the pair almost incidentally revealed gaping holes in material that was assumed to be nearing completion - while the exact situation remains ambiguous, it can probably be safely assumed that Mørke and Shearer's project development talents are not necessarily equal to their writing skills.
- What Could Have Been:
- The strange mechanical world of Autochthonia was originally going to be in the core, but was cut for space. We did eventually get to the world of Brass and Shadow, but it's been an optional addition for the entire run of the game. (Exalted Essence is slated to have the Alchemical Exalted playable from the get-go, albeit with ways to have them in Creation before full contact with Authochthonia.)
- In the game's very earliest planning stages, there was only one type of Exalted, the Dragon-Blooded, with powers based on the kinds of magic they used. Said magic changed the Exalted physically in different ways depending on the type used.
- At one point in development, The Fair Folk were supposed to be Lunars gone wrong, driven insane by prolonged exposure to the Wyld; the Fair Folk went on to become their own thing, while the chimera filled the slot of Lunars gone wrong. Eventually, 3E dropped the idea of Lunars going wrong altogether.
- When it came time to do the Fair Folk as a playable group, they were supposed to use European faerie tropes laid over a new and unique portrayal, rather than played straight, but the original drafts simply played the tropes straight, so as damage control they were quickly rewritten to draw on Hindu Mythology instead.
- Scroll of the Monk Volume 2: Scattered Lotus Petals was announced at GenCon 2011, with a target release date of November 2012, but Exalted Third Edition was announced in July 2012 so this book was cancelled.
- Dreams of the First Age: Lands Of Creation introduced the ancient Lintha, who had their own charms, but before this happened third edition was announced.
- For Third Edition, one proposed new Exalt type was the Devianics, demon-created Exalted with a level of power comparable to the Dragon-Blooded. They didn't make the cut due to the difficulty of making them something different from "the Infernal Exalted, but weaker".
- Another proposed Exalt type for 3E was the Chosen of the Depths, who were intended to be a conceptual take on the undersea. When the writers started discussing the Chosen, they found they were pretty much Exalted pelagothropes (human mutants adapted to saltwater life), so they provisionally decided to go with that, moving the Chosen from being a new Exalt type to being a collective term for the Exalted pelagothropes who'd fought as part of the undersea Niobraran League against the other Exalted in the distant past.
- 3E also had three Exalted types conceived as foils for the Lunars and Sidereals, bringing some of their themes into relief; the Hearteaters and Umbral Exalted were to be Lunar foils, while the Dream-Souled were to be Sidereal foils alongside the Getimians. However, introducing new Exalted types incurs a certain trade-off, both in that time and effort needs to go into writing their books rather than the previously established Exalted, and in their needing to have a place in the setting and potentially complicating things through interactions with the established Exalted. When Vance and Minton took over, they came to the conclusion that Lunars didn't need foils given their dynamics with most of the established Exalted (one-time seconds of the Solars unwilling to return to that position, with the Lunar bond with the Solars also carrying over to the Abyssals and Infernals as corrupted Solars, and long-standing adversaries of the Dragon-Blooded and Sidereals), and Sidereals didn't need another one on top of the opportunities raised by the introduction of the Getimians and Exigents. So they decided to have them be optional canon, included in an appendix to the Exigents book (it doubling as the make-your-own-splat book), laying out their themes, concepts and backstories, and describing their Charmsets in sufficient detail to homebrew them, with an option of getting upgraded to their own splatbook depending on reception. For the curious, all three are featured on pages 54-55 of the 3E core; the woman with the aurora is a Hearteater, the man tormented by a shadow-monster is an Umbral Exalt, and the man in a toga is a Dream-Souled.
- After the new Exalted were revealed and discussed, further developer Holden Shearer released brief summaries of the intended directions for them. Heart-eaters carried across in broad strokes, but the other two were radically different.
- The Exalted that became the Umbrals were originally going to be the Nightmares, forged by Oramus from the tattered spiritual essence the Lunar Exalted tore from themselves as they remade their Exaltations after the Usurpation; their Exaltations and limit break would have manifested as "Dr. Jekyll and Mister Hulk"
- The Revelers (whose depiction would become the Dream-souled) had Exaltations made out of a Yozi: when presented with the secret of Exaltation, Isidoros poured everything of himself into it until he ceased to exist as an individual, and then the shattered shards of him fled free into Creation. Those empowered by him became powerful and charming, but their own limit break would manifest as a debauched celebration that could sweep more and more people into it, eventually breaking laws of causality. Their Exaltations could theoretically be permanently destroyed, but if the Revel of their limit break became intense enough, it could also create a new one.
- Getimians were originally conceived as being Chosen of Sacheverell alone, but the writing team had a conversation where someone misremembered their patron as being Oramus, and the combination of the two made sense for the Getimians - among other things, being the Primordials who represent what Is and what Is Not - so they decided to go with it.
- The theme for the Getimian Caste marks also changed in development; initially, they were trigrams, in keeping with their Taoist inspirations, then the alchemical symbols for the seasons, before their final and official theme, the astrological symbols for the asteroids Ceres, Juno, Pallas and Vesta.
- The entire game was originally planned to be a lost prehistory of the Old World of Darkness and the earliest publicity advertised it as such. The game worlds were later decoupled from each other but a lot of similarities remain, such as the same or similar names and sometimes entire concepts (the Underworld of Creation works in most respects identically to Wraith: The Oblivion including the presence of the Neverborn beneath it, although what the Neverborn actually are is kept a mystery in the earlier game).
- Word of God:
- One of each of the sample characters in the First Edition Castebooks is deliberately a depiction of what the Immaculate Order claims the Solar Exalted to be. Most of the time, it's fairly obvious, as they're either obviously evil (Havesh for Night, Fehim for Twilight), insane (Mirror Flag for Eclipse), or both (looking at you, Dawn Caste Lyta.) The Blasphemous Zenith, on the other hand, is Wind, who is easily one of the kinder, more level-headed NPCs we've been shown... and he's also a former Immaculate Monk-turned-devout-sun-priest.
- Vance and Minton (and before them Shearer and Mørke) are active on the Onyx Path forums, answering fan queries and dropping teases for upcoming books.
