White Wolf's Exalted
It goes without saying, we love Exalted. It is a lovely, over-the-top game that breaks free of many of the common styles of fantasy gaming and really gives a story-based mechanic for just having fun. However, like all games, we occasionally have a desire to change a few things in Exalted, to fit with the Storyteller's idea of the game. In addition, we've created a few things that we think are interesting enough to actually show out to the rest of the Internet.
White Wolf
White Wolf owns the copyright to Exalted, including its mechanics and the world settings. Because of this, everything based on Exalted is technically considered a derived work of art and White Wolf also owns the copyright to that. If they so choose, they could demand we pull every little bit of Exalted work from our site. And, we wouldn't stop them.
We just hope they don't do that.
Rules and Guidelines
No game system covers every single rule or situation. Likewise, not every game system handles things in the perfect way for all players. What might work for one, might not work for the other, but one of the joys of a well-designed game system is the ability to made changes or expansions to fit the game style of the person running or those playing it.
We try to document our changes, in some cases, writing it in a manner that tries to mimic the style of White Wolf itself. The following are the house rules we use for our various games.
- Scroll of the Lands: This is a reworking of the Mandate of Heaven rules in an attempt to bring it more in line with the rest of the second edition game system and increase the flexiblity of a Dominion in the game.
Map of Creation
Inspired by the wonderful creation of stephenls's maps, we created our own. They are for a different purpose, less artistic and more designed after the practial maps that include information about height and water depths. Also, we set up the map to use Google's Map API, to give a flexiable online map of Creation.
Software
Finally, computers are used in all of our games. Ranging from the excellent Anathema to a simple spreadsheet or word document for characters. Theseare the computer-related projects we have for Exalted:
- Exalted XML Schema: This project is an attempt to create a common language for Exalted programs, such as those used to make PDF charm cards and, maybe someday, Anathema.
- Exalted Jabber Bot: At one point, we needed a bot to do dice rolls for Exalted in a Jabber chat room. This is a small perl script that joins a conference room and responds to dice requests, much in the same way an IRC bot does.
- Exalted Combat Trackers: With the tick-based combat system, sometimes it gets difficult to keep track of groups of ten or more all moving at different rates. There are many combat trackers out there, but these are the ones we use.