Exalted is a high fantasy tabletop role-playing game originally published by White Wolf Publishing in July 2001. The game is in its third edition as of 2016. It was originally created by Robert Hatch, Justin Achilli and Stephan Wieck, and was inspired by world mythologies and anime.
Influences The setting is strongly influenced by Tanith Lee's Tales from the Flat Earth, Michael Moorcock's Hawkmoon, Lord Dunsany's The Gods of Pegana and Yoshiaki Kawajiri's Ninja Scroll. Other influences include Glen Cook's The Black Company; Sean Stewart Resurrection Man, The Night Watch, and Galveston; Homer's Odyssey, the Bible, and Wu Cheng'en's Journey to the West.
System The game uses ten-sided dice and a variation of the Storyteller System to arbitrate the action, and, as with many other RPGs, requires little beyond the rulebooks themselves, dice, pencil, and paper. The Exalted version of the rules were derived from the trilogy of White Wolf Publishing games Trinity (formerly known as Aeon), Aberrant, and Adventure! where the idea of a fixed target number of 7 or higher was first introduced.
Characters may be frequently presented with challenges that normal human beings, even within the context of the game, would find difficult, deadly, or simply impossible. However, as the chosen champions of greater powers, each Exalt possesses Charms, which may either enhance their natural capabilities or manifest as shows of great power. An Exalt with low-level Archery Charms might find her arrows hitting with preternatural accuracy, while greater faculty might allow her to shoot without difficulty to the edge of her vision, or turn a single arrow into a deadly rain of ammunition.
The Exalted frequently power their Charms with accumulated Essence, a universal energy that flows through and comprises Creation and other worlds. While normally their Essence recovered slowly through rest, in the first two editions they could also regain it more quickly by performing stunts, actions given special description and embellishment by the players. Stunts in the third edition no longer regenerate Essence, but combat automatically causes Essence stores to refill quickly. However, stunts continue to exist, and their primary benefit—adding extra dice to the actions they describe, thus enhancing the possibility of success—remains.
History Exalted has mechanical and thematic similarities to White Wolf's previous game series, the old World of Darkness, but exists in its own product line, called the Age of Sorrows. The game has a sales record on par with the company's flagship title, Vampire: The Masquerade, the second edition core rulebook achieved a sales ranking at number 23,558 on Amazon.com with a 4.5-star mean user review rating based on 31 user reviews as of January 2019.
The initial advertisements for Exalted placed the Age of Sorrows as the pre-history of the old World of Darkness. Meanwhile, some oWoD supplements also supported this; the Hunter Apocrypha gave a vision of the past that said that Hunters gained their power from the broken shards of the souls of great heroes of a lost age, which seems to suggest that Hunters carry fragments of Solar Essences. Likewise, the Kindred of the East supplement gave a structure of the Wheel of Ages (mirrored in the first edition books as the Ages of Man) that seemed to accommodate the integration of Exalted and the classic World of Darkness, the former the First and Second Age, and the latter being the Fifth Age.
However, once the game was released such connections rapidly became uncertain: names and themes from the World of Darkness line run throughout the material, but rarely in a way that suggested a direct connection between one and the other. Per the commentary of multiple developers, the connections are deliberately tenuous, allowing players to be free to treat it as a prehistory or as its own world as it may suit their individual game. The similarities between Exalted and the Chronicles of Darkness are even weaker, primarily intersecting only where the Chronicles reused material from its predecessor. The second edition briefly implies that its story is the prehistory of our own world on its back cover, but this idea is not explored in any depth beyond this; while the last book of the second edition would posit a modernized world with the Exalted, it was clearly a technologically advanced version of Creation – the world of Exalted – rather than Earth. In the third edition, most references to the World of Darkness or Chronicles of Darkness are treated more as inspirational material rather than anything important for the history of the setting or needed to understand it.
Shards of the Exalted Dream, the final second edition product, was published in January 2012. Development of the third edition was officially announced in October 2012. The crowdfunding campaign for the third edition from May 9 to June 8, 2013, reached its $60,000 funding goal within 18 minutes, raising a total of $684,755 and breaking Numenera's record for the most funded tabletop RPG Kickstarter. Backers received the PDF in October 2015, POD in April 2016, and the deluxe editions in March 2017.
Since then the game has continued to be produced by Onyx Path Publishing through a license with Paradox Interactive, produced as PDFs with print-on-demand options. In addition, major supplements have received crowdfunding for special print runs of the deluxe editions, which also fund additional material from stretch goals and limited rewards. As of December 2024, the sourcebooks for Dragon-Blooded, Lunar Exalted, Exigents, and Sidereal Exalted have been crowdfunded and now on sale; Abyssal Exalted and Alchemical Exalted have been crowdfunded and are currently as pre-layout manuscripts to backers; and Infernal Exalted is currently in development and planned for a late 2025 or early 2026 crowdfunding campaign.
In December 2019, Onyx Path Publishing announced it would be producing and crowdfunding Exalted: Essence, a streamlined version of the rules to introduce new players to Exalted's setting and mechanics. The Exalted: Essence core rulebook is explicitly not a new full edition, and is compatible with the third edition's setting and supplements, while presenting mechanics to play all ten canonical Exalt types in a simplified manner. It launched its Kickstarter campaign in May 2021, finishing with $349,260 from an initial goal of $35,000. The print on demand and PDF versions went on sale in June 2023 and a crowdfunding campaign is planned for a player's guide in 2025.
Promotions In March 2008, White Wolf Publishing unveiled a promotion that would allow 2,500 Dungeons & Dragons players to exchange their copy of their 3.5 Edition Player's Handbook for a copy of the second edition core rulebook. The promotion was called "Graduate your Game" and received mixed reviews from fans of both games. The success of this promotion was not revealed.
Setting Background The history of the setting begins with the Primordials: vast entities akin to Greek primordial deities or the Outer Gods of H. P. Lovecraft's works, even going so far as to use similar epithets to the latter. They shaped Creation – a flat world of finite extent – from the primordial chaos, and placed the gods to watch over it.
In time, the gods decided to overthrow the Primordials, but were forbidden from taking arms against their makers. Instead, the most powerful of the gods imbued exceptional humans with their power (the titular Exalted) to fight for them; the blessings they bestowed (also known as Exaltations) would pass on to new champions with their death, allowing a new hero to rise when one fell. Upon victory, the gods retreated to the Heavenly city of Yu-Shan to oversee from on high, and left Creation to the Exalted and Humanity.
However, the Exalted suffer from the Great Curse uttered upon the dying breaths of the slain Primordials. The Solar Exalted—those empowered by the Unconquered Sun and mightiest among the Exalted—eventually grew decadent and corrupt from this influence, and were slaughtered in a massive insurrection known as the Usurpation by their servants and advisors. After the Usurpation, the majority of the Exaltations of the Solar Exalted were locked away, and an organization known as the Wyld Hunt was organized to kill all the others, and to drive the Lunar Exalted from the civilized lands of Creation.
During the intervening age, the Terrestrial Exalted became the rulers of the world, ruling in a shogunate. After the Great Contagion (a plague originating from the lands of the dead) and the Balorian Crusade (an invasion by the Fair Folk) wrought devastation across Creation, a young captain of the Dragon-Blooded armies gained access to powerful weapons of the First Age. With these, she saved Creation and then asserted her rulership over much of it, dubbing herself the Scarlet Empress. Nearly eight hundred years later—in the present day of the game—there are eleven Great Houses of the Realm, nearly all of whom claim direct descent from the Empress.
Five years prior to the default starting point of the game, the Empress vanished. By the present of the game it is believed she will not return, and the Realm stands on the brink of civil war. Simultaneously, the Solar Exaltations locked away have returned. With the Great Houses ignoring the threat of the Celestial Exalted to position themselves to take control of the Realm, the number of Solar Exalted in Creation is growing. Thus, the backdrop to the setting sees the newly arisen Solars (among various other heroes and villains) struggling to survive long enough to make their mark upon the fate of Creation, for good or for ill.
The flat world of Creation is the primary setting of Exalted. Creation has two continents, the Blessed Isle and an unnamed super-continent which covers the northern, eastern and southern edges of Creation, populated by many nations and tribes, with the settled regions along the inner coast of this super-continent being known collectively as the threshold. The Blessed Isle is located in the center of Creation. The Realm rules the Blessed Isle and its proximate archipelago directly, and indirectly rules numerous tributary states known as satrapies along the threshold.
Surrounding Creation is the infinite ocean of pure chaos known as the Wyld. The cosmology of Exalted also includes the Underworld, the celestial city of Yu-Shan, the demon realm of Malfeas, and the machine world of Autochthonia.
Types of Exalts At the core of the setting, there are several different types of Exalted, any type of which could play the role of protagonist or antagonist of the game. The Exalted of Creation can be divided into two categories: Terrestrial Exalted and Celestial Exalted. Celestial Exalted, being the chosen of the Celestial Incarnae, are significantly more powerful than Terrestrial Exalted, and can live for millennia, but their numbers are limited by a fixed number of Exaltations passing from mortal life to mortal life at any given time. Terrestrial Exalted are the Chosen of the Elemental Dragons; while less powerful, the Dragon-Blooded inherit Exaltation from their ancestors.
The Abyssal, Alchemical, Getimian, and Infernal Exalted technically fall outside of the two categories, though their power level is comparable to that of Celestial Exalted. Liminal Exalted and Exigents also fall out outside of these categories and are normally on par with Terrestrial Exalted, although some Exigents can manifest power comparable to the Celestial Exalted. A brief synopsis of each type is given here, organized by how these Exalts are often arranged in texts for much of the line's history, followed by Exalts who appeared in later texts in order of appearance.