So I was talking with a friend about my 'Exalted Zero' concept, and his response was pretty good, so I thought I'd lay out what ideas I've had so far.
As I said, the idea of this '0th edition' would be to eliminate extraneous material and hone in on what could make it a great game with unerring, laser-like focus ... as defined by me. I'm not really aiming to create a commercial product, so I'm not really interested so much in the toybox aspect that most successful RPGs rely on. To that end I'm aiming at establishing the core themes of Exalted as I understand them, in an aesthetically unified way. The aim is not so much to create a 'best of' Exalted - as we can often see, everyone has their own idea about what is best in Exalted - but rather an alternative that encapsulates some of Exalted's underlying ideas.
I admit that, even though I think my framework is interesting, it is quite removed from Exalted's (and I use this word non-judgmentally) cruft. I'll leave it to you to judge whether that is beneficial or it renders it in name only.
So in picking out the very core themes of an 'ideal' Exalted, I settled on:
1. Player characters are explicitly powerful, rather than implicitly.
2. Rather than objective morality, the setting should err on the side of consequentialism.
3. The world is animist and thus managed by active spiritual forces.
I find the 'mythic flat earth' aspect of Exalted appealing, and while I don't like the Fae, I do like the 'edge of the world' aspect. I kept this in mind while considering the section in 2E core where the writers lay out appropriate sources of inspiration. It goes without saying that Tanith Lee's 'Tales from the Flat Earth' is the progenitor of the Creation setting. Apart from the fact that they tell you as much, the Flat Earth is an island in the sea of chaos with heaven above, hell below and the land of the dead within. It's basically lifted.
After Lee's seminal series, I will confidently say that the strongest aesthetic element in Exalted is a combination of Wuxia and Chinese mythology. Certainly the modern day Creation that you play in, feels that way. While lensed through works like Conan the Barbarian and Elric of Melnibone, the Realm is clearly patterned to feel like imperial China, the Celestial and Terrestrial Bureaucracies are modeled on Chinese mythology, there's the emphasis on martial arts, the Chinese dragons, the actual Mandate of Heaven and so on.
This provides a really strong aesthetic chain that blends well with the mythic flat earth aspect. Some aspects of Chinese belief - tianxia, tianming - and some aspects of Chinese storytelling - jianghu - naturally supports Exalted's whole 'thing.' As such, I'm relying a lot on that, as it serves as a guiding light to create a strong, unified aesthetic. The trick is to incorporate these aspects without going awkwardly Orientalist.
So my vision of Creation is that of a flat plane of indeterminate size. I wouldn't think of it as being infinite, but more in the sense that no matter how far you travel, there's always more Creation to find. Rather than having geography, All Creation has definitions, and those definitions change as you move further from its centre. Within a certain radius from the centre, Creation is 'under heaven,' which is to say under the administration and management of the Celestial Bureaucracy. This tireless heavenly body acts to keep every aspect of Creation ticking over. When the heavenly paperwork is being filed correctly then Creation acts more or less as our world would: rivers flow, gravity points down, compasses work, grass grows up. When it isn't, those things don't necessarily work as expected.
The areas that are under heaven are subdivided into civilisation and ... I don't have a good name for this yet, but the rivers and lakes and forests. Again, these are intended to be definitional. Civilisation means something different here: in this case it's the patterning of creation to fall into a rigidly established order. Physically it appears as a kind of extended, ordered and peaceful cityscape. Have you seen Zhang Yimou's film Hero? Its vision of the Qin capital was vast, with towering walls and courtyards big enough to lose an army in ... and countless scholar officials and armed soldiers at hand to instantly fill them with serried ranks. Nihei Tsutomu by way of the pagoda. That image of the lonely emperor in an empty throne room large enough for hundreds is a very powerful one.
Civilisation is not physically built but rather comes into existence as the idea of civilisation is reinforced and takes hold. As that idea becomes stronger then civilisation naturally expands, and takes over portions of the rivers and lakes and forests.
This is the natural world. More villages and small towns than anything like cities. Here the touch and control of the ruling empire is lighter, felt only in the form of roving tax collectors, and the occasional prefect or magistrate. The hold of civilisation isn't quite as strong, and so it's more exciting out here, more lawless. Bandits, rebels, wandering martial artists, schools with famous masters, deadly wild animals. It's safe for the most part, but it can be dangerous for the ordinary person. If Exalted Zero existed as a functional game, most adventures would take place here.
Beyond the administration of heaven is the steppe. This is analogous to the Wyld, but isn't that kind of formless chaos. It's still a livable human environment, but it's rough, harsher, maybe a little bit more primordial, where the mountains still seem fresh and jagged. The temperature ranges from below freezing to stinking hot. The people who live there are nomadic. The freeness of the steppe is in direct opposition to the establishment of civilisation, so there's raiding one way and retaliatory expeditions the other.
Rather than think of these three parts of Creation existing on a spectrum of order to chaos, I'd prefer to think of them as being on two axes of potentiality and actuality. Civilisation has the least potentiality, and the most actuality. The steppe as the most potentiality, and the least actuality. The rivers and lakes and forests are somewhere in-between, and it would differ based on your distance from the centre. That's just fluffy nonsense, admittedly.
That's the Creation of my oth edition vision. What about the Exalted? Inherently I wanted to move away from the five splats of five aspect and try to do something that was a little more unified yet retained a level of flexibility in chargen. As I'm not a systems designer the latter part is more an ideal rather than something that can be easily achieved, so please bare with me if it seems like something that couldn't be implemented without a great deal of trouble.
So like, one of my favourite quotes is 'the abuse of greatness is when it disjoins remorse from power.' One of the things which keeps coming up is that people like it when being an Exalted is whatever you make of being Exalted. This is the consequentialist element I described above. Be the change you want to see in the world, those who have the ability to take action have the responsibility to take action, etc. With that in mind, I feet that having Exaltations come with built in affiliations kind of undermines this, a little. Obviously those affiliations don't tend to get in the way if you don't want them too, but there's a sense to me that you sort of get built in to existing organisations (this is just White wolf's style, really. You see it in the WoD). Solars don't get it as bad as other splats - Siderals are literally salaried bureaucrats, Alchemicals are government agents, Dragon-bloods are typically scions of the Realm - but it's still there.
I want to move away from that a little. I'd like to give options for people to define their character, but otherwise have the Exaltation of their character not come with a membership card to Infernals Ltd by default.
So at the basic level, there are Exalted. They're humans that contain a divine spark that give them awesome powers that can be used for good or ill. An Exalt is typically aspected, either to the Sun or the Moon, making you a Solar Exalt or a Lunar Exalt.
This is something of a serious point of divergence, but rather than personify the Sun and Moon as in the actual game (as Sol and Luna) I would just leave them as is. They are great lights in sky, one in the day, one in the night. As Creation is animist by nature, the Sun and Moon of course have great and mighty spirits, but they do not typically appear as anything. They just are, and they exist in a kind of symbiotic duality, representing different thigns while containing a little of each other.
The Sun governs vitality, physicality and growth. Solar Exalted embody this and so are physically powerful and can tend to the physical world.
The Moon governs imagination, form and dreams. Lunar Exalted embody this and so have mastery of illusion and can tend to the mind.
If an Exalt were to be aspected to both the Sun and Moon they would be very powerful indeed. As I am foremost of my empress' servants, I can say that the Scarlet Empress is the kind of person who could become an ... Ultimate Exalt ... whatever you'd call it.
Obviously balancing the sun versus the Moon would be pretty difficult. At it's core there must be a sense of the wuxia origins, so everyone needs to be able to get down into a martial arts battle at the right moment. Given the inherent difficult, the solution is to add more options and make it harder. In this case I'd like to draw from my favourite splat, the Dragon-blooded. Picking an element felt like the most meaningful splat choice I'd ever made, and I think you could do the same here. I had initially wanted to use the bagua for this, but that would be an example getting too Orientalist, and also no one would pick the element of 'marsh.'
In any case, you'd have a selection of elements with different properties. Fire, water, lightning, wind, wood, earth, etc. The ideal would be that, naturally, a Solar Exalt with the element of fire would be different from a Lunar Exalt with the element of fire, with some common ground between them. I'd like it so people would easily construct several meaningfully different kind of Exalts from the same basic rules, allowing affiliation to arise out of the story the player chooses, rather than the splatbook assigns.
So that's what I've developed so far. Obviously there's a lot of gaps, but this is just scene setting, the conceptual stuff.
