# Day 28: Exalted 3e - Ledaal Caton, Seven Ledgers of Silence, Arcane Bureaucrat tags: #articles/CharacterCreationChallenge/2026 #game/rpg/exalted > [!quote] [[Character Creation Challenge 2026]] > > ![[Character Creation Challenge Image.png]] ## Game of Choice Sometimes it's just the way that things fall out. In particular, [[27 - Wushu for Exalted|we just did]] *Exalted* yesterday, though it was *Wushu for Exalted*. Today we're leaning into my own suffering, which is going to be hilarious since by the time I finish this, I'll have had a crown put on, and I'm sure I will definitely feel like wrestling with the mechanics. What's on the hopper? ![[Exalted 3e (cover).jpg|400]] *Exalted 3rd Edition* If you read yesterday's post, you know I actually really like *[[Exalted]]* as a setting. It's over the top. It's crazy. It's intense. There's a whole bunch of factions who have good reasons to cooperate and subvert each other on a regular basis. It's groovy. The problem is not *Exalted*. The problem is third edition. And to explain that, I'm going to put the cover of second edition up here just for comparison. ![[Exalted 2e (cover).jpg|400]] Let's contemplate what we're seeing here. Second edition has a cover which is literally covered with interesting characters who have an art style reminiscent of anime and manga, which was a major inspiration for the setting in general. It's a group shot with clearly different and diverse (in the good way) character builds, types, and groups, and in the background are even more who are engaged in a bit of posing, but it's not a completely static shot. There's some kinematics. Now, look at the third edition cover. It can't even be bothered to have the entirety of the title on it. It shifts to a really strange watercolor style, which isn't really reminiscent of the inspirational styles of the media which led to the setting, but instead, I suppose at a stretch, it's an Asian watercolor style which you might find on the cover of girls' visual novels. Not only that, we've thrown out the whole idea of showing an ensemble that there are multiple kinds of characters that you can have for the typical warrior girlboss. I hate it in just about every way that you can hate it. It's both bad from a cover compositional point of view and from the perspective of reflecting what should be foremost in the mind of someone picking this up for the first time. This is not a book about a group of people coordinating to deal with a wider world. This is going to be a bit of a lecture. You know what? It kind of is. Now, *Exalted* was always an enormous tome with enormous splatbooks. Believe me, I have multiple feet of my shelves taken up by *Exalted* books, and the covers of the second edition ones are all gorgeous. If you've never seen them, you really should look. It was always a game with a ridiculous number of rules, many of them fiddly. That didn't change between second and third edition.[^1] You might get the feeling that I am delaying opening the book and beginning to wrestle with that pile of mechanics. You would be correct. I'm not looking forward to this, but we do what we do. I guess we better get stuck in. ## Acts of Creation This is literally a 686-page, 8.5 by 11 small print book. While it does have a fair amount of art, not enough to make this less than a painful experience for someone who prefers their RPGs 6x9 and at least 14-point fonts. But I guess we ought to get into this. A lot of the mechanics touch on the setting, and going into all of the overhead of the world at this point would be a lot. So let's just say that we're building a character for a GM who is intending to run heroes dealing with stabilizing the realm behind the scenes, even though the realm is run by the Dragon-blooded, and they actually would quite like to wipe out all of the Solars. That is simultaneously fairly subversive for the underlying setting and plays to my inclinations. ### Concept and Caste Again, we're told to come up with our concept and figure out our caste up front, which is a little bit bizarre in part because it really assumes that a new player will have read a good chunk of setting information given in the first couple of chapters (and I'll point out that character creation doesn't start until page 120), as well as have a solid grasp of what the castes can do. *Exalted* was probably never a game I wanted to drop a new player in without some tutelage, but third edition really rubs it in. I think I'm going to lean on what we did yesterday and go with a Twilight caste sorcerer, someone who is good with dealing with bureaucracy, whether it be of the heavenly or earthly sort.[^2] ### Attributes Right, so here is where things start to be a bit of a pain in the ass because we have to distribute our dots in attributes. There are three categories: physical, social, and mental, which should feel familiar. We essentially have to figure out which one is our primary, secondary, and tertiary. That's going to be mental, social, and physical in that order. Then, here's where the fun begins—everything starts with one free dot, but we get to put eight dots into our primary attributes, six dots into our secondary, and four dots into our tertiary. Yes, that's a lot of dots. It's probably just easier to show you the list that we're working from and throw things around without discussing it too much. You'll understand why here shortly. ![[28 - Exalted 3e - Attributes.webp]] - **Attributes** - **Physical** - **Strength:** 2 - **Dexterity:** 3 - **Stamina:** 2 - **Social** - **Charisma:** 3 - **Manipulation:** 4 - **Appearance:** 2 - **Mental** - **Perception:** 3 - **Intelligence:** 4 - **Wits:** 4 Now, you'll notice that the attributes aren't actually marked with whether they are physical, social, or mental, and don't actually give you a place to mark whether they are your primary, secondary, or tertiary. Several of the attributes basically overlap for no good reason. Don't worry, you're not hallucinating. This is a problem that's gone back to the origin of *Storyteller*, the house system for White Wolf. It's about as painful as you think, but I've laid things out here relatively quickly—just barely above average in physical traits, good at manipulation, and definitely doesn't stand out as anything in particular when it comes to appearance. Generally just brilliant as fuck. Though I restrained myself from putting five dots into any particular mental attribute because that seemed excessive. Plus, it was a trade-off I wasn't willing to make. ### Abilities Look, it's a skill list. That's what it is. It's just a skill list. We get five abilities from our caste. And then five favorite abilities, which may or may not be the caste abilities. The way this is phrased in the books is borderline schizophrenic, but what it means is that we pick five caste abilities and then five abilities not far from that list of the ones that you selected. There are eight listed under each caste, so you could pick one of the additional abilities as a favorite ability, basically. Your caste abilities and favored abilities give you a cost break on buying dots in them. Is this overly complicated and fiddly? Oh yeah, absolutely. We also get to pick a supernal ability, which is just what we are the very best at and which we buy charms at the highest level for. Essentially, we're just supernaturally good at it. ![[28 - Exalted 3e - Abilities.webp|200]] I mean, at least the list isn't ridiculously long, though it is awkwardly long. There's also a further column for abilities which aren't on the list, which is always a bad sign, plus a column for specialties. I'm just going to work out the basics before we get too deep here. - **Caste Abilities:** Bureaucracy, Integrity, Investigation, Occult, Lore - **Favored Abilities:** Linguistics, Awareness, Melee, Presence, Larceny - **Supernal Ability:** Occult Now, here's where the fun comes in. I mean fun as in the pain, because we get to distribute 28 dots among our abilities. They all start at zero, and nothing can be raised above three without spending bonus points. It doesn't mention what bonus points are, but are those the points you get at the end of character generation to buy more stuff? All of our favored abilities must have a rating of at least one dot. It doesn't say anything about your caste abilities, despite having established that they're the skills that were part of why you were chosen for exaltation. Does that make sense? No. But here we are. We also get to pick four specialties for our abilities. Once we nail down the list, I'll put them in parentheses after the particular ability name because it'll just be easier that way.[^3][^4] | Ability | Dots | | -------------------- | ---: | | Awareness | +++ | | *Bureaucracy* | +++ | | Dodge (Close Combat) | ++ | | *Integrity* | + | | *Investigation* | ++ | | Larceny | ++ | | Linguistics | + | | *Lore* | +++ | | Melee | + | | *Occult* (The Dead) | +++ | | Performance (Poetry) | ++ | | Presence (Fast-Talk) | ++ | | Resistance | ++ | | War | + | You probably don't know how fiddly that was, and nor should you have to. I figured the smart move was to dump points into the stuff we would need for being simultaneously an investigator, an occultist with a fixation on the dead, and enough of a fast talker to get out of trouble in the inevitable situations it comes up. While we're at it, we'll make a slight concession to dealing with combat, going with boosting Dodge when we're dealing with someone trying to punch us or stab us, which comes up more often than we might like. ### Merits Merits, quirks—generally things referred to in other systems as advantages or backgrounds. We get to drop up to ten dots in merits. I find that phrasing interesting in that you might want to drop less than ten dots? Madness.[^5] | Merit | Dots | | ------------------------------------------------------ | ---: | | Contacts (Sorcerers of the Reach) | +++ | | Eidetic Memory | ++ | | Familliar (Wrath Spirit) | +++ | | Language (*Native: High Realm*, Low Realm, Old Realm) | ++ | There we go. All 10 points allocated, and I can see why you might not allocate all 10, given your particular choices. You might not be able to figure out something to spend it on. There are surprisingly few merits that you can take at one dot. ### Charms This is where the complexity starts going sideways, and the dread really sets in. We have to pick 15 suitable charms. Thank God we didn't actually pick an artifact because we would have to pick its charms too. Now, it's worth pointing something out here. Charms all have a minimum essence rating for your character in order to be able to use them. They are one of the two main prerequisites for the character's charms. You would think that setting the essence rating would be something that we'd already done before we started figuring out the charms, right? Absolutely not. That makes way too much sense. We can't have that. So what is our starting essence rating? Well, good luck with that because figuring that out isn't actually given until step eight of character creation. Yes, charms is step five. Figuring out what your essence is, is in step eight. More accurately, all Solars start play with a default essence rating of one dot (except for charms associated with your supernal ability, which is treated as if you have five essence). Couldn't that have been given in that first step with all the other stuff that you're just filling out and which doesn't change? Of course it could, but that would make sense, wouldn't it? Anyway, I'm going to go dig in the ridiculously long set of charms, the majority of which I won't have access to because I only have Essence 1 outside of my occult. - **Charms** - Spirit-Detecting Glance - Uncanny Perception Technique - Keen Unnatural Eye - Spirit-Cutting Attack - Spirit-Draining Stance - Ghost-Eating Technique - Uncanny Shroud Defense - Ancient Tongue Understanding - Spirit Repelling Diagram - Frugal Merchant Method - Deft Official's Way - Measuring Glance - Enlightened Discourse Method - Sensory Acuity Prana - Surprise Anticipation Method You have no idea how annoying it was to put together that list of 15, since each of these has prerequisites and stat minimums, plus each section is not properly noted as separate from the others. It's like the book completely missed the last 20 years of innovation in layout and design. Oh. Right. Yeah. Basically, however, we have taken almost every charm that we could take in occultism, though the ones that really kick in for binding don't jump at you until Occult 4, which we literally can't have yet. Having run out of everything I could grab there, I went over to bureaucracy and started taking the stuff which looked interesting and I could have for Essence 1, which is a bunch of curious bits that give you a real set of techniques for screwing around with bureaucracies and understanding exactly who is in the right place to do things for you. Having exploited that for all I could and then having points left, it was over to awareness and making sure that I just can't really be taken by surprise because we have a passive that kicks in no matter what, including when we're asleep or unconscious. I'm just imagining curling up to take a nap, getting all tucked in, and then sitting bolt upright, saying, **"The accounting department has screwed up again!"** ### Intimacies and Limit Trigger Intimacies are relatively straightforward. They're basically the things you care about in the world—long-held beliefs, feelings toward loved ones, or mortal enemies. There's no real limit on how many you can have, except that you have to have at least four intimacies to start: one must be defining, one must be major, one must be in some way negative, and one must be positive. - **Intimacies** - **Defining:** All of Creation can be understood and controlled with Sorcery, and *should* be. - **Major:** The dead have passed beyond and, as such, are the province of being tools, not people. - **Negative:** Hatred of the Immaculate Order - **Positive:** Guild Contact, Harlann Brightcoin I'm certainly not opening myself to having all sorts of fun shenanigans going on here. Arrogance, manipulation, hatred of the maintainers of the social status quo, and a literal contact with the most aggressive and largest trading organization in the world. How could this possibly go wrong? Now that we've got the intimacies taken care of, we can talk about our limit trigger, which is an aspect of the Great Curse. And that's a much longer story. Basically, we can pick one from the list or design a new one. I'm just going to pick one, and we'll roll with it like sensible people. - **Limit Trigger:** The Solar is hindered or defeated by the self-indulgent and intemperate behavior of those around him. This seems like a pretty good choice for a man arrogant enough to believe that he can conquer death through his own will, especially if he could actually do so given enough time and effort.[^6] Most likely Virtue Flaw? Oh, honey. - **Contempt of the Virtuous:** The Solar becomes unfalteringly sure in his own moral righteousness, and strives to correct the failings of those around him. If he sees another person engaging in immoderacy, indulgence, or dishonesty, he will strive to correct them, lecturing them on their failings. If his instruction is mocked or rejected, he may even turn to force in preventing them from sin. Also good for a Solar who might as well be volunteering for Abyssal duty … - **Heart of Flint:** The Solar’s heart is hardened against all emotion, becoming distant and utterly lacking in empathy or feeling. While in Limit Break, he is treated as having no Intimacies whatsoever, making his decisions based purely on what is most efficient. His lack of empathy imposes a -2 penalty on all social rolls. ### Bonus Points We've got 15 bonus points to play with and an entire table of different costs depending on what we want. Now you know immediately that two points are going into Occult because I've got to have that at 5. | Bonus | Cost | Result | | --------------------------------: | ---: | ------------------: | | Caste Ability: Occult +2 | 2 | Occult +++++ | | Tertiary Attribute: Dexterity +1 | 3 | Dexterity ++++ | | Charm: Terrestrial Circle Sorcery | 3 | Terrestrial Sorcery | | Charm: Celestial Circle Sorcery | 3 | Celestial Sorcery | | Caste Ability: Bureaucracy | 1 | Bureaucracy ++++ | | Willpower +1 | 2 | Willpower: 6 | | Favored Ability: Larceny +1 | 1 | Larceny +++ | There's not a particularly good shaping ritual given by example in the text for what we do, which is kind of annoying. Given the number of sheer crunchy rules here, you would think the systems for your attunement would be a little more generalized. I'm just going to spitball a little and roll with it. - **Terrestrial Shaping Ritual:** - **Deal With the Neverborn Garool:** Even before we experienced exaltation, we were contacted by the Neverborn nightmare Garool, who was seeking a mortal cat's paw. Our sheer determination to say no and still get something out of the bargain pleased him in a perverse way, and so a relationship was struck.[^7] - **Terrestrial Spell:** Demon of the First Circle[^8] - **Celestial Shaping Ritual:** Scarred By Nightmares - **Celestial Spell:** Shadows of the Ancient Past Contact with the Neverborn and Nightmares, both as ways to gather sorcerous motes, perfectly reasonable. Summoning demons, perfectly sensible. The ability to evoke perfect reconstructions of things that have happened in the past, perfectly acceptable for this character, and that spins all of our points. I would have liked to pick up a few more spells. But we do what we do. ### Finishing Touches Now it's just a matter of the calculated stats and the like. - **Essence:** 1 - **Willpower:** 6 - **Personal Essence:** 13 - **Peripheral Essence:** 35 I suppose we actually need a name too, which we haven't been prompted to create. I suppose normal people would have done that during the concept phase, but we've been trained differently, apparently. Or at least I have, since it's just been kicking around in the back of my head, but I hadn't materialized it until I got to the end here. - **Name:** Ledaal Caton, Seven Ledgers of Silence ## Exunt There we go. I think we're in good order here, such as it is. Now to spend 45 minutes or so actually creating a proper character sheet, or at least filling in the character sheet we have. ![[28 - Exalted 3e - Ledaal Caton, Seven Ledgers of Silence, Arcane Bureaucrat.webp]] You'll probably notice something about that character sheet. There is a whole bunch of calculated combat stuff at the bottom that we're just not going to get into because we're never going to run combat in this system. Look at all that crunch at the bottom. Now, you would think that filling out that stuff would be part of the character process as given in character creation, wouldn't you? Nope, not even mentioned. You know what else was not mentioned? Gear. Actually, picking up gear is not part of character creation.[^9] Notice how the section on charms is bloody immense and actually wants you to put the page number of the charm down because it knows that you are going to have to consult it every time you go to combat, and probably a lot of other times, and there's definitely not enough room to put the effect down. By the way, if you're a sorcerer, fuck you, man, because there's no room to put spells down unless you cram it under inventory. Speaking of things there's no discussion of, if nothing else, doing this character generation reminded me how much I really hate doing Storyteller chargen. And I say that as someone who's actually co-written a book for a Storyteller system. Especially with *Exalted*, there's so much emphasis put on the minutia of combat that it swamps out so much of the rest. I'll be honest, that's true as far back as first edition *Vampire*. Now you know why I was so excited to do the *Wushu* for *Exalted* yesterday. Tomorrow we'll do something a lot less crunchy and immensely more surreal. Stay frosty. [^1]: Don't even get me started on the fact that third edition hasn't even got out all the splat books for the major factions over the last decade. Yes, that's judgment you see in my eyes. I have a long list of grievances. [^2]: No points for suggesting that I should play a Sidereal if that's what I want to do because you can't create Sidereals with the core book. [^3]: Caste abilities are going to be in italic. [^4]: Man, I miss the nested specialization from *Ars Magica* for a demon which ran "Craft(Sex Toys(Painful))". [^5]: As an aside of the nature I've been making this whole time, does it actually tell you what page to look up a detailed list of the abilities or merits in the character creation chapter? Absolutely not. Why make it easy on the player by actually telling them what page to turn to for more detail? [^6]: No points for figuring out if I actually suffer this one myself. [^7]: If you know Garool from the Sixth Age, you know this can't be anything good. [^8]: What I'd really like here is something that directly interacts with Shadowlands or the dead. But there is literally nothing on the terrestrial circle that does that, so we'll take the next best thing. [^9]: Unless you're talking about picking up a mystical artifact, which every other Solar seems to have. Then you'll end up doing multiple levels of generation of what it's capable of. Poor Daiclaves. Magic swords are a dime a dozen after the First Age.