I highly recommend this book to anyone thinking of running Exalted. While a lot of these sorta of things should have been in the corebook, what is here is of high quality. It finally adds actual mechanics for the Project system, as well as offering good advice on safety tools, which are highly important for a game like Exalted, which delves heavily into complex and often traumatic topics like slavery or colonialism.
For general storytelling advice, the book's good, focusing on three different styles of campaigns, which is a good way to help groups new to Exalted get on board and have fun, and are useful to think about even for veterans. The three styles the game talks about are: Creation as stage, which is all about celebrating the player characters and giving the players plenty of opportunities to relish in the awesome powers of the Exalted and their intense passions and ambitions clashing with other heroes and villains. Creation as threat, which focuses on how dangerous Creation is even for the Exalted, stressing creative uses of their powers to save those they care about and stressing the importance of their roles in society. Then there is Creation as cost, which stresses the importance of consequences and how even the mightiest Exalted can't avoid them forever, the price of victory and how the Exalted may have powers that make them smarter and stronger, but no power to make them wise. The book covers both the storytelling and mechanical aspects of each style and how the styles can easily feed into each other for more fun. In the later chapters it also covers specific advice for each splat, and how they interact with each of the styles
It also finally adds a system for non increasing xp costs, a thankful upgrade from the overly complicated and minmax heavy Bonus Points vs multiplicative XP cost system in the corebook. It also adds a separate streamlined version of character creation and advancement for those who want such a thing.
The project system is also as mentioned good, it finally adds mechanics for the Bureaucracy skill and merits like Influence, something to actually do. It's engaging and comes alongside good advice on how to use it, such as advice on handling things that could ruin a project all together.
The simplified craft system is for the most part good, the new updated version of the book offers advice for how to transfer Charms, and is definetly way more simple then the corebook version. The only critique is the severe limit on how many points you can get on a crafting roll. You see for major Crafting projects, like building a palace or an Artifact, you need to get a set number of points over multiple rolls, each roll gives crafting points equal to one plus extra successes you get on the roll. You are restricted to only getting five points per roll, unless you use magic. However the system explicitly notes that no magic can increase this cap for crafting Artifacts, and the game recommends having the crafting point price for Artifacts(the primary thing people will be trying to craft) at 50. While again only being able to make at most, five crafting points per roll. It's not the end of the world, and it can be safely ignored. but its still very annoying.
All in all, it has been a blast to read, and I can't wait for further products in Exalted 3e.
|