Exalted Essence is a unique approach to onboarding new players to an established game

Okay, I’m a long time fan of Exalted, the game originally made by White Wolf and now maintained by Onyx Path, which is a roleplaying game about the mythic past where nearly divine beings called Exalted helped shape the destiny of creation. It’s a game that derives a lot of its style from disparate sources, such as fantasy anime and manga stories, fantastic fiction by writers like Andre Norton or Michael Moorcock, and a dollop of inspiration from roleplaying games themselves — if you want a world where magic is everywhere, gods often walk the earth, and heroes can defeat monsters and creatures that beggar understanding, Exalted is the game for you.

However, Exalted is on its Third Edition, and while it is many things — lavishly and lovingly illustrated, detailed, and amazingly broad and deep, it’s also a big, big rulebook. My copy of Exalted Third Edition is some 662 pages, with intricate rules for character creation, the magical Charms that empower each type of Exalted, and a lot more besides. To say that it can be daunting to drop that monolith of a rulebook in front of a group of players unfamiliar with it and ask them to learn the game can be said to be a touch of an understatement. I suspect it’s one of the major reasons Exalted has remained somewhat of a hidden gem, beloved by people who’ve discovered it but not widely known or played. And it seems that the folks at Onyx Path have been thinking about that, too.

Exalted Essence aims to be a more streamlined, easier to pick up and play version of Exalted. The lore and story of the game is exactly the same, and every sourcebook and adventure for Exalted is both canonical to Exalted Essence and also compatible with these new, more new player friendly rules. It’s an interesting approach to getting new players to play the game, and it reminds me of the days when there was both D&D and AD&D, two different rule systems, but this time Exalted Essence is designed from the ground up to preserve everything from its older sibling — the various Exalted, heroes chosen by the gods to defend creation, the Charms they use, the powerful magical Essence that drives their will forward into the world, the sprawling world of Creation conquered long ago by the gods from their Primordial creators, it’s all in Exalted Essence. Based on the Kickstarter talking about it being a story focused RPG, it sounds like it might be taking inspiration from games like Agon or Quest.

I think it’s an interesting approach. It risks splitting the player base to some degree, but if people prefer Exalted Essence they’ll still be able to use all the books for Exalted Third Edition, so ultimately it’s a minimal risk. I do think it will be significantly easier to introduce new players who don’t know the system and are daunted by that simply massive rulebook to a game that really should by rights be more often spoken of than it is. Exalted does things a lot of RPGs don’t bother to do, and I’m hopeful that this Kickstarter — which has already gotten almost ten times as much in pledges than its goal of $35,000 USD — will be successful at introducing the world of this game to new players.