Exalted/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Accidental Innuendo -- Anys Syn is named after real-world author Anais Nin; her name is not intended to be a joke about sex or headache medicine.
  • And the Fandom Rejoiced -- Infernals. Hey, why do we need another bunch of tainted Solars, aren't the Abyssals enough, what should they be like anyway... HOLY CRAP they've got Michael Goodwin to design the Charms?
  • Broken Base -- Some books are infamous for horribly designed mechanics or poorly written setting details. There's fuel enough for countless internet flamewars.
    • The Ink Monkeys are also a source of broken base. While the official forums seem to adore them (seriously, it's not safe to bash them there), the larger fanbase is markedly split.
    • And then, of course, are the deliberately ambiguous bits. Vision of Bronze, anyone?
    • Too many things to list! The Daystar, The Shining Answer, Samsara, Legends of the Titans, Lumina, Shrikes, Halta & Linowan, etc.
    • The former Ink Monkeys removing the Primordials-are-Raksha possibility has caused a very broken base.
    • Michael Goodwin leaving caused more than a few fans to rage (and fueled speculation as to why).
    • Lunars are perhaps the ultimate case of this. Not because people don't like them, but because no two fans can agree why they like them, and get into huge Internet knife fights over which traits should be emphasised. On any given day, if you go to the Exalted forums on the White Wolf site, you will most likely find at least one Lunar-related Flame War, possibly several.
  • Canon Sue -- Arianna, the mascot for the Twilight Solars, would be this, were it not for the fact that most writers realize how much of an ice queen she is and enjoy putting her through hell.
    • Voice of the Magnus has been described as this multiple times.
  • Cargo Ship -- The Scroll of Swallowed Darkness mentions an artifact invented to allow a Solar to seduce a mountain. Not the spirit of the mountain, the actual mountain. Thousands died in the eruption at the, er ...climax.
  • Complete Monster -- Desus, a legendary historical NPC of the First Age. During his lifetime, also perhaps the setting's single biggest Villain with Good Publicity. The worst part? He might still be out there; it is entirely likely that the Silver Prince of Skullstone is Desus' ghost as a Deathlord, given suspicious similarities in their stats. And his policy of encouraging his mortal subjects to deliberately sacrifice their lives to become ghosts, under the impression that they will ascend to superior positions in his empire of the undead when their actual fate is to be forged into soulsteel and made into techno-necromantic war machines stockpiled for the eventual destruction of the world, is sufficiently sadistic enough to qualify.
    • Read that again. The Silver Prince, a Deathlord, is almost sadistic enough to be Desus, a First Age Solar Exalt. And now you know why the Usurpation happened.
      • Further fuel to this fire is added by Return of the Scarlet Empress, with a comic showing Djukantha of the demon-worshipping Lintha pirates taking control of an ancient being who wants nothing more than to stomp Desus or whoever bears his Exaltation into a pulp (the behemoth Oliphem, who Desus blinded), and mentioning that they'll be "visit[ing] the ghost of an old friend of yours." In the Return of the Scarlet Empress plotline, the Lintha attack the Silver Prince's fastness of Skullstone.
    • And, apparently, the Lover Clad in Raiment of Tears scares even the Silver Prince for something she did in her Solar incarnation.
    • The Ebon Dragon, full stop. The setting has lots of Complete Monsters, but the Ebon Dragon is literally the incarnation of corruption, vice, cruelty and cheating.
      • And he's awesome at it.
      • Word of God is that the Dragon is meant to be a sort of "Anti-Exalted." The Exalted are all meant to be Awesomesauce on two legs, striving for awesome goals. Even the Abyssals, with charms that can drain dice from others' pools, are still the embodiment of awesomeness. They have personal "win conditions" to strive for. Not the Ebon Dragon. His purpose is to deny others their victories. Even his quest for freedom can be seen in this light - he's denying the Gods their original victory, and his brothers their freedom. Put simply, he is the embodiment of denying people their dreams and their hope - which is sometimes the only thing people have left in this world.
  • Crazy Awesome -- The premise of the game.
    • And, in a specific character, Adorjan. Yes, she's axe crazy, and a Yandere, but it's also important to note that she loves running so much that she does it instead of sleeping. And the Infernals she powers can do so too. Really, the Infernals in general can become this, since most of their charms involve doing fairly mundane things in insane and alien ways. For example, what does an Infernal of the Ebon Dragon do when he wants to hurt someone? He warps the core of his being in such a way that his entire life becomes devoted to hurting that person, until such time as that person is dead. At higher essence, he can become the target's Evil Twin, as well.
  • Crowning Moment of Awesome -- The game rewards players for creative and over-the-top descriptive. The highest level of reward is reserved for Crowning Moments.
    • On the part of the Ink Monkeys: they've done a series of articles on the Daystar, following up on the successes of Glories of the Most High. For parts of the fandom, it was sheer concentrated awesome.
  • Decon Recon Switch: Originally, in first edition, Exalted was written as a deconstruction of many fantasy tropes; some of that still flavors it today, but many modern writers disagreed with that goal or took a more nuanced view, so it tends to shift between the two unexpectedly.
  • Depending on the Writer: The game's books are written by freelancers, who vary wildly both in quality and in their vision of the setting. Since writers are assigned work by chapter, this can even result in contradictions within the same book: something that's most obvious in Infernals, where the first two chapters portray a rather different vision of the Yozis and the Green Sun Princes compared to the rest of the book.
  • Designated Hero -- Due to the Great Curse, most of the Solar Exalted will eventually become this, becoming so jaded and perverse that their "heroic" designation comes largely from what they fight against: Undead Omnicidal Maniacs, Demon Lords, and Eldritch Abominations from beyond Creation. This is largely why the Dragon-Blooded Took A Third Option and deposed them, although they now have kind of a Deadly Decadent Court thing going on, too.
    • Emphasis on most...
  • Fan Disservice: Everyone really wanted to see Sulumor topless while undergoing the end stage of self-induced skin cancer...except that also happens to be her peeling off said cancers, revealing her normal body underneath.
  • Doing It for the Art: The 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 are now the line developers--and now have a production schedule of paying work for the line--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 consensus, is that they succeeded.
      • Though there are a couple of more balanced reviews that disagree with the general consensus.
  • Dork Age/Eight Deadly Words/Darkness-Induced Audience Apathy: Exalted's had a lot of writers, and different writers have different opinions on where exactly Exalted should be on the Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism, with individual chapters often reflecting the desired tone of individual writers, sometimes in the same book.
    • First Edition started--with the first paragraph of the first chapter--with the idea that the world was, in fact, doomed in the default setting, in the manner of a Greek tragedy.
    • Hoping to counter the trend, the developer's last outline at the beginning of Second Edition, he urged that Saving the World is neither hopeless nor pointless. This was not necessarily taken to heart by the writers.
    • However, some of the more recent publications have worked hard to drive home alternative perspectives: the Incarnae are interesting and not just distant divine losers, Infernals are capable of one hell of a rebellion, and Autochthonia presents a fascinating world in which the mortals clearly matter as more than just scenery. The newer vision has set off more than one debate, and writers with strong opinions on exactly where Exalted belong on the scale have nicknamed the darker trends "shitdark".
    • Many of the more recent publications, in an attempt to diversify opinion on the Incarnae and other topics, accidentally created one true way of interpreting these facts. For many people, this was the trigger of Eight Deadly Words. One especially glaring example is the Daystar: while many loved it, many others hated it so much they swore off Exalted.
  • Evil Is Sexy / Evil Makes You Ugly -- Both in one package: while they can start out looking normal, as the Abyssal Exalted grow in power they must choose whether to spend experience to raise their Appearance to as high as it can go, becoming this trope incarnate, or allow their bodies to decay hideously.
  • Fanon Discontinuity -- Void Avatar Prana and some of the Solar Charms in Dreams of the First Age. Mention them on the White Wolf forum and people will claim they were never written. This was fixed with errata.
    • Lunars were always social engineers and manipulators trying to create an alternate system of government after the fall of the Solar Deliberative. They were never rampaging barbarian anarchists that were ported wholesale over from Werewolf: The Apocalypse. No sir.
      • No, no, no; the Lunars have always been scorched earth opposition to the Sidereal/Terrestrial hegemony that followed the Usurpation, chiseling away at the Shogunate and then the Scarlet Dynasty as quickly and quietly as they could given their circumstances. Some of them hang out with barbarians, some of them make societies, but neither of them are really more than meants to the end of wearing down a civilization that can't make more of its limited supply of superweapons.
      • Scroll of Heroes was not ported to 2E purely at the behest of one particular freelancer who is completely ignorant of how Exaltation is implied to work in previous books, and the Merits and Flaws are not completely broken.
      • Scroll of the Monk for 2E is an example of what happens when a writer isn't experienced with the rules. There's some disagreement as to what extent, though; some regard the entire book as Fanon Discontinuity, while others find that the Terrestrial Martial Arts and some of the Celestial Martial Arts are perfectly playable. It is all but universally agreed that the Sidereal Martial Arts cannot be used as written, however.
    • Some fans treat the Ink Monkeys Articles as non-canon, despite numerous affirmations that they are.
    • Dreams of the First Age triggered an explosion so bad that several people were calling for the line developer and his Number Two to be lynched. The damage was eventually contained, but this was one of the main reasons Errata Team Prime was formed.
    • The setting and storytelling chapters of Infernals has this in spades! People hated certain passages and felt they tainted the entire chapter.
    • Errata Team Prime gets this treatment every now and again, especially with more sweeping changes like the Fair Folk Charms.
  • Fan Wank -- Since the Exalted developers specifically avoid any sort of metaplot, any discussion of setting on Message Boards at least toes this line, if not devolving into circle jerks, often with opposing sides.
  • Fridge Horror: The Scarlet Empress and Ebon Dragon are responsible for giving the Wan Xian/Wan Kuei a second chance and for imbuing the Hunters in the Old World of Darkness. It's implied that they are, effectively, the "good guys" in a Black and Gray Morality Crapsack World. That's right, going on the old idea that Exalted is the World of Darkness in the past, the embodiment of vice and his bride, who has the same powers HE does, are the GOOD guys. That also makes you wonder how bad something has to be for them to undergo a Face Heel Turn...
  • Game Breaker -- Some authors don't seem to even try maintaining some mechanical balance when they write cool powers for Exalted. Some authors don't possess the necessary skill for it, but soldier on anyway. Some authors deliberately do not try, stating that the demigod status of the Exalted gives them carte blanche to wield unbalanced divine power. However, Exalted was created as a TCG-like roleplaying game - thus necessitating a careful and intricate balance for powers and effects - and the latter two attitudes can and have lead to a Broken Base.
    • There are various examples, but the most extreme and infamous is probably The Mirror Does Not Lie from the Obsidian Shards of Infinity Form. This technique, in exchange for a low one-time cost per scene, will allow a martial artist to automatically redirect any attacks against their person to any other target (and have it look like the attacker was attacking that target all along) as long as anyone (not just the martial artist, but anyone at all) can see the attack coming. On top of that, the technique (like all Sidereal martial arts) is massively secret, so the chances of anyone knowing even that extremely narrow limitation is essentially nil.
      • Black Mirror Shintai, an Ebon Dragon Charm in the Infernals hardback, has a Take That at Obsidian Shards of Infinity Style, calling it the closest any mortal has ever come to duplicating the Ebon Dragon's "principle of antagonistic cheating." Many have noted the irony that one of the Obsidian Shards charms is named Shattering the Balance.
    • Zeal from Dreams of the First Age, which was an attempt to break the game by breaking perfect defenses. It didn't succeed (and the errata clarified this for all to see) but it still caused a legendary degree of Internet Backdraft. Nearly all STs banned it before the errata came out, replacing it with a very different Charm.
    • Ebon Lightning Prana. Because it's a great idea to have an auto-initiative, auto-surprise, and damage multiplier in the same Charm.
    • Certain Charms, Martial Arts Styles, and concepts from the Ink Monkeys.
      • Stocked reflexive attacks (or shrikes), which can utterly demolish the balance of the combat system of the game.
      • Lightspeed Body Dynamics, which can make characters invincible by letting them regain resources whenever someone attacks them and misses, unless you're up against an opponent who never misses...which would be just as broken. In fact, it was so bad, the writes removed it altogether!
      • The Martial Keyword, whose purpose was to make multiple combat styles less of an XP-sink can easily become a game breaker and remove a layer of choice for the sake of convenience (which has its merits).
      • Ivory Pestle Style and Cobra Styles, which are just much stronger than Martial Arts of their levels should be. Their Charms compare favorably to Charms that are supposed to be much much stronger than them. Both of those were removed.
    • The Twilight Caste ability was widely noted to be far and away the best caste power around in second edition, since it granted heavy Damage Reduction for pretty much free. In comparison, the caste actually meant to be warriors, Dawn, received a far weaker defense boost that only worked on relatively weak creatures. It was nerfed.
      • And of 2.5, removed completely. Whether or not the new See-Thru Specs version is a bit too weak...
  • Internet Backdraft -- Oh My Gods, yes. The most popular and enduring subject is the Bronze vs. Gold debate (whether Chejop Kejak was right in eliminating the Solar Exalted instead of trying to redeem them), but just about any book, mechanics tweak, bit of errata, or bit of Fan Wank will set off another wildfire.
  • Jerkass Sue -- Arianna, again, would be this... were it not for her Butt Monkey status.
  • Jerkass Woobie -- Whether serial killer in the making or undeserving victim, you can't argue with the fact that Autochthon both made some dick moves (creation of the Exalted, leading to the death or imprisonment of his siblings), and had very good reasons for making dick moves (the previous act was his response to what was essentially the murder of his firstborn son).
  • Magnificent Bastard -- Szoreny, the Yozi of Mirrors, has this as the ideal he hopes to achieve. As of Return Of The Scarlet Empress, it turns out he's not just talking the talk-he's literally running a game of Xanatos Speed Chess on all the other Yozis since he realized he and his Heterosexual Life Partner Isidoros are the only ones to remain halfway sane. Bonus humor points for being a glorified prison snitch.
    • The Ink Monkeys have recently revealed Prince Laashe, a raksha who, through the clever usage of Exact Words, a (not-really) Thanatos Gambit, and sheer chutzpah, managed to play the Unconquered Sun himself for a sucker and become a pseudo-Incarna. Were it not for the timely intervention of Luna, he probably would have gone on to become the Exalted Lucifer. It's implied that even the Ebon Dragon was impressed.
      • ...Exalted already has a Lucifer (and it's not the Ebon Dragon). Technically, it's the Sun himself-he rebelled against his omnipotent Creator because he wanted to do what he wanted.
        • And if you go with the Exalted-as-oWoD prehistory, this is consistent with Hunter, which says the Solars are the old version of Hunters and Demon's statement that Lucifer created the Hunters. So the Sun is actually Lucifer in a very literal sense.
  • Mary Sue -- If your character isn't a borderline case, you're playing the game horribly wrong.
  • Memetic Mutation -- Is the Exaltation of the Dragons, or from the Dragons?
  • Money, Dear Boy: Revealed to be the reason why the Ink Monkeys stopped making new material - they got green lit to actually be paid for things.
  • Nerf: The main point of the periodically updated Scroll of Errata is to cripple the broken stuff. Since Exalted's game balance is held together with string, this isn't exactly an easy task. Most notably, the very powerful Twilight anima power was drastically reduced in strength. The really broken stuff, in Dreams of the First Age, wasn't so much nerfed as nuked: several Charms weren't fixed, but instead had their existence utterly revoked.
    • Goddamn Pattern Spiders
    • Most recently, most of the corebook weapons were nerfed repeatedly in the head with a sledgehammer, mote regain was kicked around quite a bit, stunts were normalised to one per action, and lethality was reduced across the board. This is known as 2.5.
      • While those may sound like serious mistakes in other RPGs, in Exalted this was almost a case of And the Fandom Rejoiced as this pretty much removed the phenomena of Paranoia Combat.
  • Nightmare Fuel:
    • The villainous factions (the Yozis and Infernals, the Neverborn and Abyssals, and the Fair Folk) are positively dripping with this. It's a natural consequence of having such massively epic heroes; anything that can make them nervous is going to be terrifying beyond all reason by our standards.
    • The Organ of Agonies, from the Compass of Celestial Directions: Malfeas, deserves special mention. What is it, you ask? It's a musical instrument that you strap innocent victims into before playing...which it will then torture to death, making paradoxically beautiful music out of their agonized screams.
    • The phylactery-womb, the storage entity for the Infernal Exaltations. Everything about... it... will torment your mind on the threshold of your sanity. For just a few of the horrifying facts: She was a little girl named Lillun, who was basically raped, physically and spiritually, by the Ebon Dragon. This process warped her body into a malformed monstrosity that is mostly a semi-transparent flesh bubble with her child-like head, arms and legs dangling futilely outward. And though she is mostly mindless, alternating between staying silent or raving in mad tongues, sometimes, sometimes, she has enough sanity to try and call out to her mother and father for help. Oh yes, and there are pictures.
    • Special mention goes to the fate of the author of the Broken Winged Crane, as detailed in Return of the Scarlet Empress. The Empress herself penned the original, which was actually a portal straight to the Ebon Dragon's prison. The book describes him basically skinning her in slow motion as a hello. It only gets worse from there.
  • Retcon: Far, far too many. Some good, some bad, and never shall the fans agree on which are good and which are bad. A few:
    • The Sun being a battleship that is separate from the Unconquered Sun.
    • The Locust Crusade / War.
  • Ron the Death Eater: An interesting case with the Solar Exalted-while everyone agrees that what many of them did during the First Age was bad, that tends to be the only thing people see about the First Age, with the "good" Lawgivers being reckless at best. This is understandable (particularly given a line that states that if you lived on the Blessed Isle didn't know someone who had been abused by the Solars, you were that person), except many people seem to believe that the Second Age Solars will pick up right where their previous selves left off, despite repeated emphasis this is not the case.
  • Running the Asylum -- In a case of Tropes Are Not Bad, the addition of the Ink Monkeys and Errata Team Prime has lead to a general increase in the quality of the rules and has been very well received on the White Wolf forum (seriously, saying you dislike them is Fandom Heresy there now)- but see also Broken Base. They have their detractors, some of whom get as vehement as the fans.
  • Squick -- Lillun. No, not Lilith, this is someone else. The Yozis realized that the Sidereals had locked up Solar Exaltations in the Jade Prison, and that the Deathlords were using the Monstrances of Celestial Portion to create Abyssal Exaltations, so they needed something to run the 50 Solar shards they got through the spin cycle. So they made their own storage device. Out of a little girl, whose body has been horribly twisted and tortured to provide a living cage for the Infernal Exaltations. That's right; the Yozis took a mortal girl, stuck her in Hell, and tortured her so that they could further their plans. Although the Scarlet Empress deserves her own share of the monstrousness here: Lillun was her youngest daughter, and it was the Empress who sold her to the Yozis in the first place.
    • "In her calmer lucid moments, Lillun seems to appreciate these simple pleasures and the company of the innocent. To date, the feeling has not proven mutual. I bet it hasn't.
    • There's also an artifact made of the corpses of dead children. And it sings. This one's in the 2e Abyssals book.
      • In fact, all of the Abyssals' necro-tech in Abyssals 2nd Edition.
    • In Dreams of the First Age, volume 1, the artwork immediately before the appendix shows a (presumed) Fair Folk noble lady holding a dinner party. Only the guests are chained to the chairs. And when you look closely, you notice that the main course is a human baby served on a salad platter.
      • She's wearing a dress made of severed hands. HANDS.
    • How the Beastmen are created...
  • Thirty-Sue Pileup -- One of the more common complaints is that every game of Exalted results in this (or can become this), simply by virtue of the Character Creation rules. Perhaps subverted in that, although every Exalted gains Sue levels of power, they don't necessarily lose any of their personality quirks (in fact, the Exaltation tends to make it worse).
  • Unfortunate Implications: It's a Crapsack World full of fantasy counterpart cultures and Deliberate Values Dissonance. But the writers try to be equal opportunity offenders.
  • Villain Sue: The Deathlords, according to many of the fans, with significant evidence to back them up. They're all Essence 8 to 10, with the highest potential Essence pool of a non-Primordial. They have every Solar and/or Abyssal Charm that doesn't require an Exaltation to function, as well as just about every Arcanoi AND mastery of Necromancy (plus two functional circles of Sorcery with Third Circle demon summoning to boot). And that doesn't take into account their mundane advantages - a massive cult following, an army of the dead in a Crapsack World, and skills and abilities to make the Exalts weep. If they weren't too busy worrying about stabbing each other in the back, Creation would've been history long ago.
    • It's gotten to the point where even the authors are annoyed by their overpoweredness. They plan to errata their stats into Oblivion someday.
  • What an Idiot! -- The Yozis. Not only do they choose their Infernal servants from failures and cowards, they actually punish them for resisting the Mind Control powers of their enemies, because they want them to follow orders no matter what. And how do they make the Infernals atone for their mistakes? By putting their enemies in Death Traps, playing Criminal Mind Games, and giving Just Between You and Me speeches. No wonder the chances of the Yozis actually winning are rated as slim to none by Word of God itself.
    • To top it off, they're on at least some level trusting the Ebon Dragon to handle the Reclamation. Yes, they're trusting a being composed entirely of treachery and vice -- but, then again, the Ebon Dragon controls the Scarlet Empress and without here there is no Reclamation. Not much choice in the matter.
    • Autochthon's idea to trap himself in an infinite void without the resources his sickly body needs to survive is... interesting.
      • Perhaps not so idiotic. The alternative to going into deep Elsewhere was remaining in a world occupied by several hundred ultra-powerful, highly unstable (and moreso by the minute) beings, all of whom were designed (by Autochthon himself, no less) to be capable of slaying the very type of entities that Autochthon happened to be one of. The Exalts had already shown that their gratitude and trust in Autochthon had grown thin in the wake of a ugly incident, when his crafted children, the Mountain Folk, simply wishing to concentrate their resources for the betterment of their own race, offered very polite and understandable refusal of service to the Solar Deliberative. The S.D., in response, ordered that Autochthon himself had to lay a great geas upon his own children, breaking them in power and forcing subservience to the celestial Exalted, or else the Exalts would simply annihilate all the Mountain Folk. After that painful incident, Autochthon knew that things could only get uglier from there and knew that he had to get away from the Exalt's reach while he still had the capability to do so. So he grabbed what people and resources he could on short notice and fled before he could be missed or contained. Faced with two bad options, he took the slightly better one.
      • What he did afterwards though...Let's just say there's a reason ghosts are kept around after he eats the po soul for fuel, but the Divine Ministers quarantine them because they don't know what a ghost is.
  • Win Back the Crowd: Part of the reason the Ink Monkeys were hired, and why they browse the official boards. As with all things, whether or not they succeed depends on the viewer. Or even the individual book or article.
  • The Woobie -- Been said before, on this page even, but poor Lilith...
    • Actually, many, many, sympathetic characters could be up here in varying amounts. Most of them are Jerkass Woobies, such as Chejop Kejack or many gods, but hell, it's implied that even the Unconquered Sun has had a nervous breakdown due to a combination of stress and betrayal, and fallen into a depression which he alleviates by submerging himself in the Games of Divinity.
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