The Spirit of Creation? or maybe The Exalted Spirit?

Oh Exalted, how could such a wonderful and delicious setting be attached to a system that I hate so much? I read the fluff and am amazed at the beauty of the setting. It truly is one of the greatest settings I have ever had the pleasure of reading in an Rpg. I even ran a couple of games of 1st edition. And we enjoyed it, but it was unanimous amongst the players and I that the fun was in spite of the system. And when I bought the 2nd edition core, the system immediately screamed "Don't even try!" before I was even a quarter into it. I am sure there are lots of gamers out there that play it and love it, hell I wouldn't even mind trying to play in a game of 2nd edition with some folks who are intimately familiar with it. But for me and my kind, its a horrid atrocity that will never work for us, even houseruled and stripped down, its just a no go.

Enter FATE 3E. Spirit of the Century is one of those games that opened my eyes to different ways a pen and paper Rpg could be played. Sure there have been tons of games that try to make role-playing more narrative or more based on group storytelling than the game side of things, but I usually ended up disliking such systems(or lack there of if you get my meaning). I don't know exactly why I dislike these games, but its usually that it lacks being a game to me. A prime example is Wushu. Wushu to me is more like a "Hey let's sit down and tell a story" type system, and it just seems way to lite for me. If I wanted to simply sit around with people and tell a story, I don't need a "rulebook" for it. Now don't get me wrong, I can see how lots of people would have loads and buckets of fun with Wushu, but I just can't get into it. Same goes for Risus and even PDQ, they just seem to lack "something" to me and I run back to my more traditional games.

Spirit of the Century somehow found the line for me. It truly tries to be one of those "let's tell a story" type games, and succeeds big time, but it also has just the right amount of rules with decisions to make me feel like I am playing a game. Aspects, stunts, manuevers, tagging and compelling all add a lot of fun to the game. Now I know I am being slightly hypocritical here and realize even some of the games I mentioned before have much lighter equivalents or could have with a snap of the finger in their rules. But its not the basis like FATE, so they lost out for me.

Anyways to get to my point. FATE/Spirit of the Century is perfect for Exalted, and doing a little research across the world wide intrawebbies I see I am by no means in a small group who thinks this. The Aspects based storytelling rules system is such a nice fit that its amazing Exalted didn't use it to begin with. Exalted is based on over the top Asian style action and court play with just a pinch of Western thinking to taste. A player being able to say "I fire an arrow at the advancing hoards, fueling my Rain of Terror style with the exalted essence of my spirit to rain hundreds of arrows from my one into their ranks..." is a perfect example of aspect use if I ever heard it. And excites me with the possibilities that could come from this combination of setting and system.

So I plan my next post or two to be my rules for running Exalted using FATE/SotC and maybe take a few things from Starblazer Adventures as well. I have read a lot of peoples' ideas on how to do this online some of it influenced my ideas completely. Check RPGnet for the many threads on this very topic for some of my influences.

.....maybe Spirit of the Exalted?....hmmm.....Spirit of the Exalted Fate?