Solars
AKA Mary Sue, the player class. Solars are the first and strongest class in Exalted. They can be walking tanks in combat, great statesmen in society, grand generals in war, or anything else they set their transcendent wills to. They're also out of their goddamn minds. Thanks to the primordial war and the great curse (no I'm not fucking explaining it) they periodically go batshit loco and swap their greatest virtue for its corresponding flaw. This makes them fantastically fun guys to be around, since you never know when your party's greatest asset is going to turn into serial rapist or frothing berserker. They can't for the life of them understand why nobody liked being ruled by a group of manic depressive demigods, and spend most of their time trying to pick up the pieces of the first age and rebuild their empires.
Solar Fluff[edit]
History[edit]
In the beginning, Ignis Divine patrolled a world of absolute horror. He was not king of anything so much as its governor, the manager running the factory floor while the executives spent their time fucking about with passion projects and doing lines of blow in the head office. Said executives were His creators, the creators of the world itself, incomprehensibly alien things simultaneously abstract concepts, modern corporations, parts of the geography, and shambling horrors. Twin suns illuminated a world encircled by endless deserts and a river of screaming torments, where men were born for nothing more than to die screaming, their fear and misery a constant renewable power source for The World and more importantly The Games of Divinity. Imagine that the meaning of human life was to eventually become fossil fuels to power God's cosmic X-Box and you aren't far from the truth.
Ignis Divine was one of those suns, but more than that, He was created as the literal definition of virtue. The concept of virtue itself, things like compassion and valor and conviction, as we understand them, were given meaning by his creation so as to give The Principle of Opposition something to oppose and make it real. Forcing a being of infinite compassion, the conviction to do what must be done whatever the cost, the temperance to refuse any temptation, and the valor to fight an impossible war simply because it's right, to preside over a world literally powered by suffering wasn't an especially great choice, but it was a necessity. After all, it's hard to be The Shadow of All Things in a world without any light that casts shadows.
Naturally, the state of the world didn't really sit well with Him. Unfortunately, his creators were not idiots; every single thing with even the slightest hint of power was built to be inherently incapable of taking up arms against their makers. At the time, humanity were basically just disposable playthings for the races that actually mattered, before which they were utterly helpless. Even The Sun's own favored people, The Dragon Kings, forced mortals to fight in their gladiator pits for their amusement and atop their pyramids an endless stream of human sacrifices were delivered unto sol, their hearts ripped from their chests. But there was one thing about humanity that made them special; no one looks at a AAA battery and thinks it needs to be chained up to prevent it from shooting them.
Over millennia of service as a slave bound to the will of things everything in his nature bucked against, The Sun began to whisper to his peers, the other Celestial Incarna, about doing the impossible. It was pointless, of course; they could no more choose to fight their makers than you could choose to walk through a wall right now. Until one of the Primordials heard their whispers and came before them, that is.
The Great Maker was the original creator of humanity, a little passion project that gave him what little joy a doomed thing such as himself could ever experience, until his King ripped it out of his hand, tore it to pieces, and chose to repurpose his favorite toy as little misery-fueled batteries in the ultimate indignity. Autochthon never really got over this, or any of the other things his brothers and sisters did to him over the countless millennia simply because he was sick and that disgusted them. He still saw his favored creation in these little mutilated batteries, and maybe even saw something of himself in them, and when he heard the whispers of rebellion, he was more than ready to make it a reality.
He showed them something he had created that could reforge humanity in the image of greater beings, the first of the Exalted. Impossible miracles that could never be permanently destroyed and would empower his helpless creations beyond anything anyone ever imagined. The Gods of Journeys, Endings, Battle, Secrets, The Sun, and The Moon - alongside Gaia, one of Autochton's peers and The Moon's lesbian life partner, whose gift took a completely different form than everyone else's, as befits her nature - merely needed to empower these things, and the deed was done. The sun set for the first time, and thousands suddenly took their Second Breath.
Sol is the greatest of the Gods, a being of utter perfection and virtue beyond even the power of its makers. Unsurprisingly, so were His Exalted. Selfishly - he's a being of arete and virtue, but not humility or kindness - he ordered Luna to bind her Exalted to his own. Luna agreed with a shit-eating grin and arranged that each Lunar exaltation was magically and deeply bound to a particular Solar exaltation. Sol was pleased, since that meant the Solars had the power to command the Lunars. Luna was pleased because if one Solar tried something stupid, the other 299 Lunars could wreck his face. For news of how well this genius plan worked out, feel free to ask Lilith.
Among these first exalts was a slave gladiator, forced to fight in the pits of the Dragon Kings for the glory of the sun. He took notice of her a little more personally than any of her peers, and with her second breath she found herself at the head of the greatest rebellion ever fought. At first, the Primordials were outraged but did not take it seriously - what, would you go on war footing if the AAA in your pocket caught fire - but soon, the Exalted murdered the White Ram, turning one of the primordials into the Lidless Eye, and everything was deadly serious.
The Primordials slaughtered most of the Exalted Host, over and over again, but with every death, another solar was born. Their victory was as inevitable as it was impossible. Eventually, after murdering the things that invented death, even though the concept of death was not applicable to them, and fundamentally breaking the world in multiple ways, the Exalted Host won, the Primordials were forced to surrender and submit to the 'justice' of the Chosen, reshaped to become their own prisons and bound by unbreakable oaths. And as the dust and ashes cleared, Merela was awarded the Crown of Thunders and the Mandate to rule Creation as its queen by her lover, The Sun, and in turn awarded the Gods with Yu Shan. And The Games.
The actual history of Creation when the Solars were in charge falls into several distinct eras, all of them pretty complex, none of them particularly relevant to anyone's actual game of Exalted. Merela was an absolute monarch for a while, until she was all-but deposed, keeping her title but becoming at best first among equals in a Creation-ruling parliament of Solar Exalted. The Solars reshaped the world to their liking over the course of millennia, and over that time, The Great Curse - the punishment for breaking the concept of death - reshaped them in turn, making them increasingly dangerous and unpredictable.
One completely reshaped the nature of the universe so that watching a leaf floating in the breeze became a valid way for anyone to learn Sorcery. Another created a charm that made anyone see anything and everything he did as inherently correct and heroic and used it to brutally abuse his wife and everyone else while they continued to feel like it was all their fault. Another tied the stability of the world to their currency and monetary system. At one point, they broke time and an entire chunk of time - of varying length; for Merela it was thousands of years - and each solar lived in their own distinct pocket timeline until all of them, in their own weird and unique adventures, 'fixed' time.
By the time of the usurpation, the rot had really set in, even if externally everything was working fine because everything was run by hypercompetent God-Kings. The Solars were on a path that would lead to the end of the world. The Sidereals' own version of the Great curse sealed their fate with the Vision of Bronze, and the Dragon Blooded were turned loose on the Solar Host when they were all together and all at their most vulnerable - the Calibration dinner, where every Solar gathered each year to make sure none of them could summon any Third Circle demons.
The Solars died horribly. However, during some of the dickery in the subsequent conflicts and the opening of the Jade Prison centuries later, Solar exaltations now pepper creation, landing in the body of some lucky sod who can finds themselves now able to remake the world.
Exaltation[edit]
Solars exalt by attempting to do something awesome. A 15 year old kid decides to fight off an entire mob of bandits because they threatened grandma? Exaltation! You convince two warring states to cooperate because you baked the most delicious meal imaginable by combining ingredients native to each state? Exaltation! You figure out how to do heart surgery in a cave using a box of scraps? Exaltation!
Solar Games[edit]
Playing a group of Solars can (will) quickly devolve into breaking game balance's spine over your knee repeatedly, unless you have a good group and an exceptionally competent storyteller. To accommodate your abilities the game should take an appropriately epic sweep. If you have an average group you're probably going to get a Chow Yun Fat wire-fu movie. Political animals will quickly turn the game into alternate reality fantasy WWI. If your players are into resource acquisition you will probably just be overseeing the rape of a continent. There's really no limit on where a Solar Exalted game can go, so make the most of it.
Protips[edit]
- The book tells you to get the Ox-Body Technique Charm as many times as possible, as extra health levels are needed against some of the more powerful enemies in Exalted. This is a grotesque lie. Having a large essence and Willpower pool and therefore the ability to use many magical dodge-anything Charms gives you dramatically better value. (Slightly fixed as of the Scroll of Errata, but increasing your pool of magical power is still better value for most characters than purchasing Ox-Body Technique.)
- Solars don't work well as jacks of all trade -but if they specialize in one or two things (combat, diplomacy, crafting) they become crazy powerful
- Their charms are generally more efficient and cost less compared to all other exalted types, and many of them refund their mote cost if you do something awesome with them
- New players will probably find Solars the most intuitive and simple. Think Yujiro, Yomiko, Saitama, Superman, Hercules, Goku and Simon as basic solar archetypes.
| Exalted Classes |
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| Solars - Lunars - Sidereals - Dragon-Blooded - Infernals - Abyssals Alchemicals - Liminal - Getimian - Exigents - Fair Folk Jadeborn - God-Blooded - Mortals |