Creating a Character
The Storyteller's Role in Character Creation
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Common Languages
The civilized people of Creation all speak one of seven different languages, while the barbarian tribes speak many dozens of different languages. When players create their characters, you must make sure those characters will all be capable of understanding each other. The task is not as daunting as it seems. Representatives of the Realm and the Guild both travel widely, so three trade languages are common all over Creation: Old Realm, High Realm and Riverspeak. Many people in every major city speak all three languages, and at least one person in the smallest rural village will haltingly speak at least one. The players should decide ahead of time which trade language their characters all speak. While natives of Nexus and the Realm speak their native language perfectly, most people cannot speak the widely known trade tongues particularly well. One dot of Linguistics allows for perfect understanding, though. The characters can use these languages to ask locals for directions, to transact commerce and to discuss other relatively simple topics. However, talking complex philosophy or planning elaborate military strategies with most locals is difficult or impossible. That’s what taking additional dots in Linguistics is for.
Setting and Characters
Until they took their Second Breath, the characters were ordinary mortals who had to walk, ride or sail everywhere they wanted to go. As a result, most characters should come from the series' starting region. Characters from the immediate setting can better understand the people and places with which they interact. They needn’t be from the same city, however, or even the same nation. If the game starts in the Northern city of Gethamane, then characters from the Northern cities Icehome and Whitewall are perfectly reasonable. If the game is set in the Scavenger Lands' metropolis of Nexus, then characters from Great Forks, Lookshy and Sijan are all appropriate.
Some players might enjoy playing characters from elsewhere, though. Such characters should not normally make up the majority of the circle, but they can fit into the series. Remember, characters from distant lands need a good reason to live where they currently do. One obvious choice is for them to be traders in the Guild, as these merchants often take land or sea journeys covering thousands of miles. Alternately, the character could be from the Realm: perhaps an exile or someone who worked in the Realm's Foreign Office before her Exaltation. The character could also have been sold as a slave by the Guild, or she might simply be a wandering minstrel. The most important thing is for all characters to have reasons for being in their current location.
The circle should have some unity. A circle where each of the members comes from a different quarter of Creation is far less cohesive than one mostly drawn from a few small neighboring countries. Encouraging this also makes characters who are foreigners and outsiders far more interesting and unique.
From Concept to Numbers
Once you have discussed the series with your Storyteller, think about the sort of character you wish to play—where she lives, how she grew up, what she loves and hates... These experiences make each character truly alive and unique. When assigning traits, make sure the numbers reflect the kind of character you're describing. If your character is intelligent and a fast thinker, you should assign sufficient dots to Intelligence and Wits. If she's exceptionally beautiful, make sure her Appearance reflects that. You won't have enough points to make your character the best at everything, but that's okay. Every character in a circle should surpass the others at something. That makes the series fun for all of the players.
Traits have numerical values, rated from one to five dots. The only exceptions are Essence and Willpower, which can both have values up to 10. These ratings represent the character's capability in that trait. A character with no dots in an Ability is unskilled, and a character with no dots in an Attribute is crippled and incapable of actions requiring that Attribute. One dot represents something the character is poor at, while a character with five dots in a trait is among the world's best at whatever the trait defines. The other ratings are somewhere between. In general, a character with three dots in an Ability is a skilled professional, and a character with two dots in any Attribute has a completely average Attribute. These ratings add their number of dice to the character's dice pool when she attempts an action requiring that trait.
Getting Started
See Character Creation Summary for checklist.
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Creating a Character
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Step One: Character Concept
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Caste
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Other Exalted
Exalted focuses primarily on the Solar Exalted, and as such, rules for playing the Dragon-Blooded and the other types of Celestial Exalted are not included here. Guidelines for using Lunar, Sidereal, Terrestrial and Abyssal Exalted are in the Antagonists chapter of this wiki, and further information will be presented in the Exalted Storyteller's Companion. Full details and rules for playing these other Exalted are to be found in their specific sourcebooks.
Motivation
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Step Two: Attributes
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Step Three: Abilities
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Latest errata: Solar Exalted characters may raise any of their character's Abilities to five without spending bonus points.
Specialties
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Latest errata: you receive four specialties to distribute amongst your character's Abilities.
Step Four: Advantages
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Charms
Latest errata: When selecting Charms, players no longer need to choose at least five Charms from Caste or Favored abilities. The (Solar Exalted) character may start with any ten Charms she meets the prerequisites for.
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Virtues
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Step Five: Finishing Touches
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Willpower
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Latest errata: Characters begin with Willpower rated at 5. Willpower may be increased at a cost of 1 bonus point per dot.
Keeping Your Character Alive
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Intimacies
"Intimacies" is a term for things your character cares about enough that it changes how the character acts—though not enough to be a Motivation. Characters may start with a number of Intimacies up to their (Willpower + Compassion) (latest errata).
Intimacies can be anything your character cares about on a meaningful level—a cause, an ideal, a place, a person, a nation. Don't worry if you don't have a good idea for all the Intimacies. Your character can start with less Intimacies than her Compassion if you're not sure what the character cares about. You could just pick some things and try to roleplay them. Intimacies are easy to gain and lose in play, so you'll be able to switch them around easily if you don't like the ones you pick. Sometimes, Intimacies can be very important, such as when they are the targets of magical effects. If this is the case, characters will generally gain an appropriate Intimacy on the spot if they don’t already have one.
Intimacies are governed by Conviction. The higher your character's Conviction, the longer it takes her to gain and lose new Intimacies and the more secure they are against being undermined by social manipulation.
Charm Concept: Intimacies
Some ideas are transient. They drift through the waters of the mind and disappear. Other ideas are stable, providing anchors for self, goals and desires. These ideas are called Intimacies, and they represent the ideas that people cling to over time and use to define themselves on a smaller scale than their Motivation. Characters form Intimacies to beliefs, causes, emotions, intentions, people, tribes, ideas—whatever. Mostly, these Intimacies aren't especially meaningful from a mechanical sense, though they are obviously very important to the character. A character can have as many Intimacies as her (Compassion + Willpower) comfortably and can experience more in a pinch. Yet the Storyteller should start telling the character to remove the older, less important ones at the rate of one per story if the character goes above the maximum. The human heart can only encompass so much.
When Intimacies really matter is when a Charm uses them as the focus of its effects. When Essence is involved, these Intimacies often have magical effects. Magic often allows characters to form an Intimacy on the spot when they need one, so players shouldn't spend too much time exploring the comings and goings of the character's fancies unless it is a deliberate act worthy of roleplaying.
Creating an Intimacy: It takes time to commit one's heart to something. A character can swear to an intention in an instant, but it takes contemplation, consideration and service to work that loyalty down into his bones. Characters can take an action once per scene per idea to help develop their Intimacy to it. Maybe someone persuades them, or maybe they just sit and think. When a character has taken a number of commitment actions equal to his Conviction, he’s built an Intimacy to that idea.
Breaking an Intimacy: Characters can take an action once per scene per idea to reject the idea. When a character has taken a number of rejection actions equal to his Conviction, he breaks any commitment he has to that idea. If he isn't committed to that idea, he becomes committed to an appropriate opposite—bitterness instead of love, patriotism instead of anarchy, or whatnot.
Strategy
Don't spend too much time and effort tracking Intimacies. Instead, focus on the commitments that count—the ones backed up by magic. To defend your character against influence, take a high Willpower and Integrity and use Righteous Lion Defense to bolster the Exalt's most important loyalties. To become a leader of men, your character should use Presence and Performance to convince others to commit themselves to him—to loving him, to taking up his service as a cause or simply to believing in him. Then, use Charms such as Sun King Radiance or Memory-Reweaving Discipline to seal the deal.
Essence
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Essence Pool
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Health Levels
Health levels track your character's physical condition—like how much damage she's just taken from a deathknight's foul necromantic spell—and the penalty imposed on your character's dice pool for each level of injury sustained. Most humans, including Solar Exalted without the Resistance Charm Ox-Body Technique, have seven health levels, ranging from Bruised to Incapacitated. Unless your character has extras, she has one -0 health level, two -1 health levels, two -2 health levels, one -4 health level and one Incapacitated health level. See Attacking for more information.
Bonus Points
As stated previously, you have 15 bonus points (or 21 points, if you're playing a mortal) available to increase your character's traits. Spend them all now, because you can’t keep them past character creation.
Spark of Life
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Appearance
What does your character look like? How do her traits affect that? Aside from her Appearance score, four dots in Strength means obvious muscles. A high Charisma will translate into how she moves and talks. See how you can use her concept and traits as descriptive hooks. Your choices reflect not only your character's Appearance score, but also how she dresses, acts and speaks. Does she move with confidence and have a steady gaze, or is she hunched over, refusing to look anyone in the eye? Does she prefer casual, rugged clothing, or is she swathed in silks and jewels? "My character has a massive scar across the left side of her face, gained battling Wyld barbarians in the Far North," is far more evocative than, "My character has one dot of Appearance."
Social Ties
Characters don't live in a vacuum. Think about the people in your character's life. Are her parents still alive? Does she have a spouse? A lover? Children? What about friends and neighbors? Does she own slaves? Or was she a slave before her Exaltation? How have these relationships changed since she's become one of the Chosen? Do her husband and children now shun and fear her as something no longer human? Do her neighbors now expect protection from child-eating hobgoblins and the Realm's tax collectors? In what sort of social milieu does your character live?
You Look Like Some Sort of Foreigner
When depicting your character's appearance, behavior and personality, keep her homeland in mind. Both the Realm and the Threshold contain vastly diverse peoples and cultures. A character's homeland has an impact on her appearance, her attitudes and her beliefs. The range of diversity is huge in Creation. In addition to the many colors of skin, eyes and hair found in our world, blue hair is common in the West, green is found in the West and the Haltan Republic, and the diminutive, hairless, panda-spotted Djala people live in the South. Creation's cultures are equally diverse. People from different regions have vastly dissimilar opinions about the Dragon-Blooded's proper role, women's place in society and the appropriate uses of slaves and intoxicants. Take a moment to reread the descriptions of each region’s inhabitants and customs.
The Prelude
The moment of Exaltation, the character's transformation into one of the Unconquered Sun's personal champions, is the defining instant in her life. However, it's difficult to understand what that transformation means without experiencing her previous mortal life.
The prelude depicts the character's mortal life, her Exaltation and her reaction to this momentous event. The player and Storyteller establish important moments of the character's history during this one-on-one storytelling session, compressing many years of life into a sequence of short vignettes highlighting pivotal events in the character's life.
Storytelling the Prelude
Keep the player focused during the prelude. Players might want a shared prelude if their characters are siblings or longtime friends, but otherwise, run preludes one person at a time. Try to run the prelude between the character-creation session and the first session of play. If it must take place during a session, make sure to focus solely on the player whose prelude you are running.
You can run one or two detailed vignettes, spending as much as an hour on each one, or you can run half a dozen short scenes lasting 15-20 minutes. You and the player should work out which option sounds better before the prelude begins. You needn't run each prelude the same way. Some players prefer a few in-depth scenes, while others want a broad overview.
In either case, your goal is to make the player respond to a variety of situations typical of the character's existence, giving the player a concentrated sense of what the character's life was like and a feel for roleplaying her. The prelude also allows the player to explore the rules and setting. Give her room to do so, but try to avoid combat. If combat does occur, simply describe the outcome. Don't accidentally kill the character before the game starts!
The player might wish for different traits due to decisions made and actions taken during the prelude. If so, let her change some things to better fit her concept, but don't allow players to simply shift traits around to make invincible characters. Explore the character's traits in the prelude. (How did she acquire her artifact or manse?) If she has allies or followers, run a vignette showing how they met.
Allow the player to interrupt and offer input. This is her character, and she should not have to deal with elements she finds intolerable. Finally, give the character's Exaltation all the detail it needs. Evoke the intensity of the moment as the character's newfound power wells up within her and she harnesses it for the first time. Give the character a chance in the prelude to use her fantastic new powers. Make it clear that the character has irrevocably crossed a line and that her life will never be the same.
Questions and Answers
Keep in mind the following questions before and during the prelude. If you answer any before the prelude, tell your Storyteller the answers so she can work with you. Answering questions about the character's mortal life and about her life after Exaltation are both important in order to fully understanding her.
- How old are you? Almost no Chosen go through their Exaltations before puberty, and most change in their mid-20s. Exaltation rarely happens after 35, but it has been recorded as late as 60. Also, the majority of those who are Exalted are in good health and do not have any crippling injuries or deformities. There are exceptions, but almost all Exalts are suited to serve of the Unconquered Sun both on and off the battlefield.
- What was your family life like? Were you raised by both parents? Did one or both of them die? Do you have brothers or sisters? Are you married? To more than one person? Do you have any children? Is anyone else in your family one of the Chosen?
- Where are you from? Where your character comes from will have an impact on his appearance, his native language, and many customs and attitudes.
- How were you Exalted? Where did it happen? Did others see it? Did you injure—or kill—anyone? Did you find the experience terrifying? Exhilarating? Both? Did the Unconquered Sun appear to you? If so, what did he say?
- When did you meet your companions? Do you get along with your companions? How long have you known them? How did you meet? Did you know any of them before Exaltation? Do you share any goals? Do you all work for the same city or organization? Are there rivalries among you?
- How has power changed you? Your character, born mortal, now commands vast power. How has she reacted? Do you believe your power gives you the right to rule those around you?
- What do you think of mortals? Now that you command great power and might live for over a millennium, what do you think of ordinary mortals? Are they less powerful beings under your protection, are they pawns for you to use to further your epic goals, or are you still adjusting to no longer being one?
- What motivates you to be a hero? Do you seek riches or undying glory? Do you simply enjoy exercising your impressive powers? Is your agenda based on revenge, social justice or ethnic and religious loyalties?
- Who or what do you worship? Has your Exaltation caused you to revere the Unconquered Sun? Do you still hold some previous set of beliefs, or do you believe mortals should worship your godlike power?
- What would drive you to commit murder? Do you casually slay anyone who denies your divinity, or is life precious and yours to protect? Is killing an Exalt or a god any more or less acceptable than killing a mortal?
The Circle
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Creating the Circle
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Character Creation Example
(See Exalted Core Rulebook, p. 80.)