A perfect capstone to a Werewolf the Apocalypse collection. I've always been captivated by the story of the White Howlers and their loss. This book was awesome for learning of this ancient tribe.

A very useful tool for storytellers to create SPC's and adding more patron spirits. not absolutely necessary by any means but still useful

i like the updates of all the tribes and changing breeds.

I would give it 5 stars, but I think there is so much promise here that I think can be expanded on in further supplements. For example, anima culture... will a Quantum axis come out for Novies, perhaps when revelations about Eden come out?

Do not consider the star reduction a slight against it, but more because there's so much good here that I hope it inspires the writer to do more!

I feel anima culture is great, but the other sections aren't lacking either, just they didn't catch my fancy the way the first did. All in all, well worth the cost.

The concept is excellent, but the brevity of the product and the numerous grammatical and spelling errors make it not, in my opinion, worth getting. That said, were a revised and expanded version of this to come out, I would likely buy it.

I like to joking call Exalted Essence "Exalted: Playable Edition". To be clear I am not much of a fan of rules lite games and Exalted Essence isn't exactly rules lite. If you are coming to this expecting something along the lines of PbtA or Fate you are setting yourself up for disapointment although it does have elements of that. Rather I am opposed to needless complexity and 3e is the greatest victim of needless complexity I've ever seen in an rpg system. I briefly played in a 3e campaign earlier this year after swearing it off for Essence ( had an advanced kickstarter copy). I had forgotten how much tedious bookkeeping was involved. It took hours for me to create a character, I often forgot what character options I had and everytime I looked at my character sheet trying to find something I got a headache.

A lot of 3e fans were afraid that Essence would replace 3e as the default edition. Alas that has not come to pass but honestly it should have. I hope future editions use Essence as a springboard instead of the hot mess that is 3e.

Essence streamlines a few things too much. Namely attributes which they have made all but redundant. They needed to be reduced from nine but not down to three and really you only have one since players are actually encouraged to narratively justify always rolling their highest stat. They also replaced the awful initiative system with power which somehow manages to be far better but still very bad. It works fine for non-combat focused characters and allows them to be relevant rather than a total liability in combat but for characters that do focus on combat basically attacking, unless you are making a decisive attack, doesn't actually effect your target AT ALL. You are basically just generating power by targeting their defense stat. It's hard to explain until you get in the weeds of the system but it doesn't work and I wish they had just yeeted it.

Exalted 3rd Edition always overwhelmed me...I love this new system...but I see combat is still very complex...I wait anxiously for new resources...like the GM screen and companion books...

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.

I quite enjoyed this romp through alternative Victorian history. Does it have a liberal flavour? Definitely. But, that does not make the situations and individuals cited any less factual. If anything, this book made me delve more deeply into The Victorian Era and want to learn more about British Imperialism. I have discovered many interesting things about those times from this and other actual historical sources that were not covered in school.

The M20 basic mechanics are concisely and usefully presented. The sample characters and story glorify homelessness. If your fantasy is scrounging for food and not showering, have at it! But, it doesn't sound all that enlightened ...

I have a mixed bag review for this one. Let's start in the section where all 10 of the Exalt types are listed. SOME exalts get quick character stat blocks and SOME don't. It feels like this is Onyx Path saying "We've got QCs for this type of exalt in another supplement, go buy THAT one to get that content." When some reports were stating that all 10 exalt types were going to be getting the QC treatment in this book, I'm left feeling a bit short-changed. The QCs we DID get though are great! Next are the expanded naval combat rules. Now, I'll be frank and say that I haven't yet experienced naval combat myself in 3e either as a player or as a storyteller. However, it's clear in the Core book, that naval combat as written isn't intended to blend very well with standard combat. In fact, I've come upon folks stating that the clunkiness of naval combat can make standard combat look quick and simple by comparison. So I was hoping to see an alternate ruleset for naval combat similar to how we get an alternate Crafts ruleset. Instead, we get add-on rules for the clurrent clunky naval system in hopes to make it less clucky. The jury is still out on that one. The alternate Crafts system does look promising though. I do like the alternate character creation/advancement options. I'm hoping these show the potential I think I'm seeing to bring in new players into existing campaigns and still let them feel meaningful and powerful as they advance to catch up to the other characters (in XP if not in power level). I also appreciate the recommended difficulty levels for higher powered characters. As a storyteller, I've always found it challenging to set appropriate difficulties for my players. I'm either setting difficulties too high and my PCs get overwhelmed and nearly die way too easily, or I set it too low and they plow through what I was planning on being a challenging encounter with absolute ease. Mostly a failure on my part, but I guess I never realized I could, or even should, set difficulties as high as 15 in some instances. Final thoughts, some of the content feels more thought out than other stuff. The well-thought out stuff is great. The other stuff is, meh. Exalted shouldn't feel "meh".

same issues as the other storyteller screens, no print, three panels, at least it's cheap

The quick summary is, this felt like a collection of not very well thought through ideas just half-heartedly collected into a book. If this was for free, I would rate this a 4. For a released product, this is an insult.

The first segment of the book covers general mood and tonal advice. Its alright, but for some begginer players could be useful (like how to treat the wonderous but also extremly dangerous setting depending on player). Its specific for Exalted but lacks some of the nicer sort of advice that was found in the D&D 4e player specific advice. It tends to flow into one another and lacks nice separations that other RPGs tend to have for topics but its mostly functional.

Then came safety tools and finger wagging about how you should be playing. For the people that need these sorts of safety tools, Im pretty sure you could still get them elsewhere and for free. I will refrain from commenting on quality as I don't need or care for said tools.

The alternate rules and homebrew advice is barren and shallow. I understand that an alternate crafting system may not have space for converting every craft charm, but this puts basically no thought into the idea besides "Just make it an extended roll", which is only a useful tool for the most absolute novice of a storyteller. This "alternate" craft system is about as in-depth as asking you to not use the core crafting system at all.

Other systems are shallower then it, and again verge on about 3/4ths of a page each. Some topics have short collections of alternate rules, but very few put any thought into how to assist converting them into practice for play or actually assisting balancing for even a Experienced Storyteller. For a novice it would be just a suggestion. In terms of editing the "Systems" or suggestions just flow into one another page by page instead of having nice separated pages of context for ease of reading. But this is endemic of 3e, but some of the worst here.

At the end there are some new Exalt previews and some minor advice for running games specific to Exalt types which is largely already found in their own splats.

Art wise its fine. I don't find it that exciting or really emphasises the uniqueness of Exalted as a setting (possibly due to the developers deep shame about its anime inspirations, which they make sure to share with you in this book), but it wasn't terrible or anything.

In the end, for very novice STs this might have glints of neat ideas you haven't thought of before. For anybody else, the work of individual fans far supersedes the work put into this book in terms of actual in-depth content.

This suffers from a slightly worse problem than many of the other storyteller screens you can find here, as unlike the other OWOD games it damn near needed a fourth section so you can have a quick reference renown chart, it doesn't even attempt a small scale one.

eh, it's useful and it's at least cheap but the fact that its only a three slide screen as opposed to four and the lack of any physical relase at all is aggravating