Theshockmaster’s guide to Worldbuilding in

Exalted
Creation is unbelievably big. Bigger than it was in previous editions. Big to the point that
some of the major settlements just flat-out shouldn’t work as written, and even if you go
trawling through prior editions’ books for the exact canon descriptions of named settlements
there’s still a huge amount of empty space between them you’re expected to fill in with your
own adventure setting, and while I can respect that ethos it doesn’t give you a great deal to
work from when you’re doing it.

As someone only generally familiar with the premise going into 3rd I found it incredibly hard
to parse any usable information out of the writeups in 3e Core, partly because it seems to
assume you already know it from playing 2nd, and because it’s all written in plot hooks. I’d
be reading a section on the area our game takes place in and the text would be desperately
falling over itself to tell me about the region’s armies of elephant ghosts and demon cultists
while I was begging out loud “What do they eat? Who do they trade with? Where on the map
are they?”

So if you’re expected to fill in the blanks yourself, you might as well put some effort into it.

Background
First off, my background. I’m a former Anthropology student, especially focused on religions
in India and East Asia, folklore and the occult. One of my undergrad dissertations involved
poring through hundreds and hundreds of clay seals with identical pictures of a cow on them
to work out what they were for, because no-one’s figured out the language on them yet, so
I’m used to sweating the piddly little details. While I’ve played and run a lot of other systems,
I’ve played Exalted in 1st edition as the only teen in a roleplaying club full of middle-aged
nuclear power plant workers, in 2nd as a depressed university student and am now running
a 3rd edition campaign currently in its third year that I inherited 4 months in. It’s been
challenging, and the combination of confusing rules, encyclopaedias of lore, no real
storyteller guide for this edition and wrangling a circle of 4 mid-high level Solars has pushed
me to my limit a few times1. But one thing my players have consistently enjoyed is my
worldbuilding of locations and NPCs, so I figured I’d post the sort of questions I ask myself
when designing these things - 20 of them, in fact, and another 10 just for Exalted - in the
hopes that they’ll help you add some spice to your own campaigns, Exalted or otherwise.

Using Anthropology to expand your world

With these questions we’re going to be looking at a lot of mundane aspects of day-to-day
life, and on the face of it that might seem dull. “When will this ever come up in-game?” you
might ask, and sure enough it might not explicitly come up, but if your characters are going

1
Limit, geddit? It’s pun on… never mind.
to be in the area your story is set in for any length of time they will meet people who have
grown up and been shaped into who they are by the answers to these questions. That’s
going to affect who they are, what they do around (and with, and to) your players’
characters, and it’ll seem a lot more believable if it’s got a consistent logic and theme
running through it all. It even goes beyond your players’ immediate vicinity; a trinket that
turns up at a market, a visiting cultural event or a story someone tells the characters that
they heard while travelling can all be given extra depth by thinking about the people behind it
in this way.

“The Land of Silly Hats”

Poor worldbuilding leads to what I call the “land of silly hats'' problem - the culture has a very
specific, very distinctive “thing” that defines them, but it’s really poorly thought-out and/or
only chosen for the sake of it, so as soon as someone asks “well why do they all have silly
hats on?” it all falls apart. And that can be fine if you’re only paying a flying visit to a location
- like an episode of early Star Trek where they’re safely back onboard the enterprise before
your mind overheats from trying to work out how a planet entirely made up of ancient
Romans is supposed to work - but when you’re dealing with players you can guarantee
they’re going to ask how stuff works, point out that one bit of canon that completely
contradicts everything you had prepped and spam Plothole Expanding Prana with a full Lore
excellency2.

There’s always stuff from the real world to draw upon, but while I am going to give examples
from real world cultures, try to remember that other cultures aren’t just toy-boxes to help
yourself to. Instead, I’d encourage you to try and work out why that culture has the cool thing
you want in your setting, and apply the same process to what you’re making. For example
some Inuit tribes have carved whalebone visors to help them deal with snow-blindness: how
would your own tundra-dwelling nomad clan deal with the same problem? By comparison
just taking something cool from the real world and transplanting it 1:1 will seem out of place
if your players recognize it, lame if they don’t think it’s as cool as you do, or worst of all
disrespectful & offensive if they’re from the culture you’re swiping stuff from.

How to use these questions

You can start going through these with a culture you’ve already started designing, or
completely from scratch if you’re not sure where to start. If you want, you can even try
running through these questions with a canon part of the setting, and see what the answers
to these questions would be in Wu Jian, Prasad or the Lap. As you go, you’ll find questions
you’ve already answered will inform the answers to others - “they live near a river, so they
probably make clay pottery and have rituals to deal with water spirits” etc. Engage with this
stuff as much or as little as you want, and especially as much as your players want. This is
all about creating ideas for your game, not about homework, and there’s no point doing it if
your players aren’t going to care.

2
As you can see, I’m still working on my Exalted jokes.
And don’t get too attached to this stuff, in case one of your players introduces a fact that
changes something. Make sure there’s something under the silly hat once the loremaster
writes the hat out of existence.

The Questions

General

Why do they live here?

This is one where it’s fundamental to how a culture operates yet if you asked the
average member of it that question they might not necessarily know the answer. In
the real world some cultures cling onto life in incredibly inhospitable places while
others live in comparative comfort, and in your game it can be a rich seam of local
flavour. If they’ve always lived here you can ask yourself why their ancestors came
here - did they do it by choice or necessity? Maybe younger generations don’t accept
that as an answer and are migrating to bigger settlements elsewhere. If it’s because
they won it in a conflict with its previous inhabitants you’ve now got a previous
conflict to expand upon, an enemy faction to fight against and conflict with them or
others over whatever makes this area lucrative enough to fight over. Do they even
stay here long-term at all, or do they migrate?

How do they respond to the local seasons?

Even the smallest changes in weather and temperature can change what happens at
that time, even if only slightly. On the next step up, each season brings different
holidays, leisure activities, what work is done and even the general mood. In places
where the distinction in seasons is even more abrupt it brings monsoons or droughts
where everyone has to change what they’re doing and adapt to it, especially if it
brings the kind of weather that can wash away your house or destroy your crops. The
first Wizard of Earthsea book has a great section on the Thousand Islands region
where the main character settles down, and how their daily routine and industry
change as the tide rises and falls, connecting some places and cutting off others, all
by time of day. You don’t have to go that far, but it’s something to consider.

Creation does have a very specific calendar of seasons, and one of the
Exalted-Specific questions at the end is going to be about the Poles, but for the time
being let’s just think in terms of wet and dry, hot and cold etc. Does the rainy season
bring work to a stop, or are some local crops only ready to harvest during the
monsoon? Do people stockpile grain and build icehouses to keep food for when
there’s a drought or poor harvest? Questions like that are going to affect Bureaucracy
characters, and long periods where everyone’s indoors means the wealthy and
influential will be crying out for a Socialise character to pay a visit to break the
tedium, while sneaky characters can take advantage of all the guards taking shelter
from the rain instead of being on patrol. How are people’s houses and lifestyles
adapted to the different seasons? Here in the UK people complain a lot when the
 weather gets “hot” by our standards, when that’s considered a brisk, even chilly
temperature in America or Australia, but that’s because our houses are built to keep
heat in since it’s so cold and wet the rest of the time3.

What art do they make?

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a culture that didn’t make some kind of art. Even
Neanderthals made jewellery from shells and teeth, and if you give a child a stick and
there’s dirt or sand nearby, they’re going to draw something. It doesn’t even need to
be art as in paintings or sculpture - it can be patterns on clothing, shapes of houses,
even the style of tools or weapons. If the people you’re describing see and/or use it
every day, they’re going to have an opinion about how it looks.

The other thing to bear in mind is that if there’s one thing humans like just as much
as making art, it’s arguing about art. If your culture’s well established, think about
how artistic trends have changed or split over time and why that might have been.
That helps your players get a feel for what’s old and what’s new, so that the ancient
feels more distinct and noteworthy. When my players, one of whom passed an art
history roll, visited the Shogunate-era palace nearby I described it as being from the
middle era of Shogunate architecture, where architects responded to the decline of
manufacturing techniques left over from the First Age by maintaining the scale of
buildings but exploring simpler and bolder minimalist styles. That gave the players a
much better idea of what it feels like to be walking around in these buildings than if I’d
just gone “It looks about 1100 years old”.

What music do they make?

Similarly to the above almost everyone hums, whistles, drums their fingers on the
desk while reading a tediously long forum post like this one and knows a few tunes
off by heart. It’s been estimated that the overwhelming majority of music humanity
has ever made has been lost because it wasn’t written down, the oral tradition died or
the person who absentmindedly came up with it while humming it to themselves
forgot all about it a minute later. In other words, there is a lot of scope to add flavour
to a culture as you see not only what they think and worry about, but what they want
and imagine. It’s also a key part of many religious rituals too. In your story your
players are going to be doing things that could be recorded in song, one or more
players might be a performer themselves who’ll want to take part in the local scene,
and many dramatic scenes can be enhanced if there’s a character singing or playing
in the background. You don’t have to actually make a song or poem - although if you
do you’re possibly the greatest Storyteller I’ve ever met - but a thumbnail explanation
of what it’s about will do a lot to convey the same mood.

For example in my campaign one culture (Mygdons) are a very militaristic set of
cultures, but I wanted to add a bit of nuance to what ended up coming across as a
stereotypically macho culture, so I decided when it comes time to cremate their dead
after a battle they would sing some kind of solemn, stirring song in the vein of Oh

3
Meanwhile our cold, rainy autumns and our cold, rainy springtimes contribute to our
famously sunny and cheerful dispositions year-round.
 Shenandoah or Danny Boy led by their king and comrades. Working that in with the
idea of severing the ties holding a spirit onto the mortal world so they don’t linger as
ghosts, I made it a song from the point of view of a mother saying farewell to her
sons as they leave home for the last time, following the road trod by their forefathers
with the wind at their back and the promise that “you need not look back; we’ll follow
behind you in time”4.

What do they wear?

Bear in mind what we thought about in the art section about people wanting to adorn
things they use or look at every day, and multiply that by a factor of wanting to look
good for your own self esteem and to impress others. Try to picture a colour palette
in your mind for the different kinds of garbs they’d wear. Do they dye them, perhaps
with plants, ochre or ground up shells (crustacean or insect)? Do they colour them to
symbolise anything, to stand out or to blend in? Do they denote status, wealth, caste
etc? Do they take care of it, mending their clothes for years, or shift between different
styles as fashions come and go? And of course, “wearing” doesn’t just mean clothes
- there’s hair to style and dye, jewellery to put on and various ways of piercing,
branding, scarring and tattooing your body itself. One thing I really miss from earlier
editions is Sophie Campbell’s illustrations that really pushed the boat out when it
came to different clothing styles, so I’d always encourage you to really go wild in this
regard. Plus, what a lot of Exalted players (and a lot of the writers and artists…)
forget is that Creation has a lot more skin and hair tones that naturally occur anyway,
so that’ll also affect how they dress. It’s also a good way to flex on your players by
going “Yeah, see? I read the book, says right there - green skin.”

What snacks do they eat?

Yes I’m serious. The reason I specify snacks is because the staples of your culture’s
diet will follow on from what their lifestyle and environment is like; a tribe of forest
hunter-gatherers will live off forage, whereas a plains farming culture will grow and
raise the food they eat and trade for what they can’t get themselves. That said, it’s
still good to think about recipes and seasonings they’d use if you know your way
around food anyway. Your players have got to eat some of the local cuisine
eventually.

What we’re interested in is what they eat & drink for pleasure. Unless living under
extreme duress like starvation, everyone eats things that make them feel happy, and
what they value in flavour and how far they’ll go to get it will tell you a lot about them5.
Think about Kiviak. That’s a delicacy Greenland Inuit peoples make by hollowing out
a dead seal and stuffing it full of seabirds, before sewing it up for three months and
burying it while it ferments. While most people won’t go to that extreme, even the
average goat herder in the mountains will know where the local berries grow and
which mushrooms have a nutty taste to them. This has always been the case as far

4
Not that the players know this - they’ve dodged two separate occasions I’d planned to have a scene
where this happened. Bastards.
5
The only people who don’t eat for pleasure are the people who invented Soylent, which still comes
in flavours, and it just made them poop weird.
 back as humanity goes - excavations of Neolithic peat bog cultures have found
chunks of pine bark that have been chewed into wads and spat into the swamp.
I’ve given some examples that will sound gross if you’re not used to the idea6, but if
you think about it, things like cheese, mushrooms and beer are pretty unintuitive as
food sources. Heck, around 130 different countries around the world eat some form
of insect as part of their diet, and there is so much more weird stuff to eat in Creation
than there is in the real world.

Do they keep livestock or pets?

Speaking of animals, there are going to be animals in the surrounding environment
no matter where you go. This is especially true for Creation, which is surprisingly
fecund for a world where 90% of all life on earth was wiped out less than a thousand
years ago, right down to the grass, but if that’s the canon then roll with it. Humans
are always going to find ways to exploit that wildlife, either by harvesting it, adapting
around it or training it for their own ends. What sort of animals does this culture
interact with in each of these ways? Do they have any higher symbolism in their
culture? Do they anthropomorphize them, like we do with “friendly, dumb dogs” and
“smart, aloof cats”? A lot of places in Creation have exotic kinds of animals to ride on
or keep as pets, and players with a dot or two in Ride or Survival are going to want to
know about them, and probably keep one as a pet. In Zhaojun farmers ride massive
frogs that can pull carts, and one of the most dangerous animals in the setting is just
“A really, REALLY big pig”, so it can be as mundane or exotic as you like if it has a
good reason to be there. One of my players has a “Swamp Strider”, which is literally
just a Silt Strider from Morrowind, and he’s from a tribe of nomads that ride and herd
them. The Dinotopia books contain some really good illustrations of how harnesses,
saddles, carts etc might work on giant unconventional animals, if you’re looking for
inspiration on how this would work practically.

How do they defend themselves?

Nowhere is truly safe, least of all in Creation. Both the core book and Hundred Devils
Night Parade focus on things that’ll keep a party of Exalts busy (well, for the most
part - I don’t know why HDNP wasted 2 pages on tropical birds of all things) which
can give the impression it’s filled entirely with apex-level monstrosities and things
crawling out of the wyld or hell. But there’s a lot of things in Creation, even if they’re
not a worthy fight for players, so how do people deal with them when players aren’t
around? Building a wall, throwing a rock and sharpening a stick into a spear are
things anyone can do, even if they might not be inclined to, and depending on how
much thought you’ve already put into the geography of your region you might already
have some idea of jungles and swamps your inhabitants could skirmish in, cliffside
caves they could retreat to and plains they could draw up regiments on. Don’t be
afraid to give them some unusual local weaponry too, especially if it’s to help them
fight on home turf - your players are going to remember the guys fighting with kukri
and hunga-munga knives a lot better than the ones wielding yet more glaives and
scimitars. And don’t forget, the one thing your people are going to be fighting most of

6
And if you find something you can gross your players out with to put on the menu? Good.
Make them suffer.
 all are other people - neighbours, invaders, raiders etc - and you’ve already got
statblocks for all of them in Core.

This is all defensive stuff, but what about when they go on the offensive? Many
smaller tribal groups in history and the modern day existed in a perpetual state of
frequent, low-level skirmishes over resources or to settle other disputes, whereas you
might decide your culture is more the type to avoid conflict at all cost but when it’s
inevitable they ruthlessly crush their opponents out of existence. Cities might have a
proud martial tradition, or be near a school of martial arts it’s an honour to send your
son to7. Or, going to war could be out of their control - particularly for satrapies,
villagers might be expected to provide a certain number of recruits to larger armies to
fight abroad. Do they integrate into the wider army or form independent units like
Gurkhas and other colonial troops did in World War 2? Do they bring those
techniques home with them and become city guards or take their skills and become
militias or mercenaries (or even bandits)?

If it is stuff that’s too big to handle, how do they deal with that? What if a Tyrant Lizard
comes too close to the village and needs driving off? Either your players are going to
find a settlement of people who’ve learned to lure it into a canyon using livestock
where they can drop rocks on its head… or they’re going to find the ruins of one
where they tried to fight it head-on.

How do they relax after work?

We’ve touched upon eating, making music and art, but let’s talk about how these
come together. Your average Joe Schmoe from this settlement has been working all
day, or is taking a break from work, and wants to pass the time - how’s he going to do
that? Along with the above, playing games is one idea. Across Africa for example
there are dozens of different kinds of board games like Mancala and Dara that are
very old and range in complexity despite being able to be played as easily with
seeds, pebbles or sticks on a table or the floor as easily as with a handcrafted board
and pieces in the family living room. Some are even the precursors of modern games
like Nine Men’s Morris, Draughts and Backgammon. On the simpler end of the scale,
most cultures have some variation of knucklebones or jumping jacks, and Japanese
Cho-Han is literally just “roll 2 dice and bet on whether they’re odd or even” and yet
has been around for centuries. During a session, a game is not only a good venue for
social scenes, but in doing so a way for players to introduce themselves to NPCs
above their social punching weight (“Oh, you play Ten Spears, Governor?”) and for
Larceny characters to make a little money on the side. Exalted does have at least
one setting specific game - Gateway - and to be frank it sounds like some
super-complex 4D Chess B.S. that wouldn’t be that popular outside of a Dynast’s
living room. But maybe your culture does play it? What regional variant do they play?

7
Even though in 3e mortals can’t actually learn any of the martial arts, but that’s an argument for
another time.
 Do they play any sports?
Sport is also a common answer to the above too, and it’s something that can be very
simple and quick or a multi-day affair with complex rules and lucrative prizes. In the
abstract sense most sports boil down to people kicking things, throwing things, and
hitting each other, so it doesn’t have to be super complex (though of course it often
is). Team sports are good for forming kinship bonds between peers and competitive
sports are a good way of blowing off steam and diffusing tensions in the community.
In more labour-intensive societies this might be something done only occasionally,
such as at festivals. If they keep animals they might be involved too, whether it’s polo
or bullfighting. In some cultures this can have a religious purpose; contests to win
favour from the gods, sacrifice of captured animals or ritualised depictions of
mythological events8.

Sport is also a really good way of getting your players into the community to begin
with - if there’s a big tournament going on people might visit from miles around to see
it, or have tournaments where all the different villages of the area compete. A
tournament is a great basis for a plot arc of your story - there’s a reason so many
anime have a tournament arc - though since your players are probably going to cheat
by burning essence and willpower to steamroll the mortal players, maybe just have it
as the backdrop unless there are other Exalts on opposing teams.

How do they handle love, marriage and sex?

Exalted has always pitched itself as a Mature game for Mature players, but that’s often
been a licence to just put lots of blood and boobs in and leave it at that. But if there’s
one upside that you can salvage from the more puerile and gross aspects of the
setting, it’s that whatever you come up with has gotta be better than that, right?

Let’s start in practical terms and work from there. What’s the “usual” family structure
of this culture? Is it a matriarchy like the Realm? Is it a family clan structure, with
intermarrying to cement treaties? What role does love play in whether or not people
get married, and is there pressure to “marry well” for reasons of money or stability
instead? Does it work like it often does in history, where the powerful have a partner
for the sake of producing an heir but otherwise indulge their desires with lovers and
affairs? Or are open relationships more common and accepted? One thing I’d
definitely encourage you to bear in mind is that history is a lot queerer than people
assume, and while Exalted sometimes had some deeply offensive discussions of
LGBT+ identities in the past, if you or your players are LGBT+ yourselves handling
representation right can add a lot to what you all get out of the setting. For example
in my campaign I portrayed the Tya based on their sidebar in 3e Core by drawing
upon real life trans men and groups like the Sworn Virgins of Albania. Then I read
their writeup in second edition, which insists on still calling them women, emphasises
how much they’ve “mutilated” themselves by becoming less attractive to men and

8
There’s also the question of how violent these sports should be. While the Romans famously held
massive gladiatorial contests and the Aztecs supposedly sacrificed players after a ballgame, unless a
culture’s prosperous enough to have professional athletes they probably can’t spare a labourer being
out of work with a broken leg or a severe case of death.
 being unable to have children, consider foreign women “greedy and unnatural” for
wanting equal rights with men, and how the right man with the right charms can still
have children with one if he feels like “doing it out of perverse curiosity”. Fukkin’
yikes.

How do they get high?

We touched upon snacks and treats earlier, but let’s focus specifically on narcotic
ones. Pretty much all cultures have some way of getting high, it just depends if it’s
something they even consider a drug (cocaine) or a regular part of your morning
(coffee). There can be lots of sources, both raw and natural - Khat, Betel Nuts or
Coca leaves are good real-world examples - or processed. What the source of the
drug is could be an interesting local phenomena that might have its own industry built
around it. Some of the ones in Creation can get pretty bizarre - the Guild canonically
owns several giant dinosaurs that piss heroin, for example9 - so your local area could
just as easily be snorting lines of ground-up beetle shells or vaping ghost essence as
it could simply have a tea that makes you slightly tingly. Is it legal or illegal? In either
case, is it a taboo or looked down upon socially like drinking during the day or
smoking marijuana? Is there a cultural cache to doing it, with the rich smoking it in
hookahs while they play chess or is it seen as cheap or low-class? As we’ll touch
upon when we get to the Exalted-Specific questions, there are a lot of powers in
Creation that are going to want a hand in any particularly lucrative goods however, so
bear that in mind.

What local taboos do they have?

Capital-t Taboo was a popular focal point for early anthropologists when talking
about newly discovered cultures or the possible origins of human civilization. But as
you’d expect from people in the 1920s and 40s writing about cultures they only knew
from second-hand accounts, they leaned overly hard on portraying these people as
superstitious, naive and childlike (usually as a pretext for “civilising” them) so I’m only
going to be using the term taboo in the more general sense. Despite Exalted being a
more explicitly magical setting where gods and spirits are real - they have statblocks
and everything - I’d argue your average person in Creation is probably less
superstitious than you’d expect, not more. After all, with the gods being real you can
always just ask them why they don’t want you cutting down poplar trees instead of
relying on hearsay or handed-down stories.

In every culture there’s stuff that you just don’t do but if you were to plot these things
as points on a chart, whether something is legal/illegal and whether it’s considered
abhorrent or just poor form in the eyes of society would be two separate axes on it.
Massive companies still somehow paying zero taxes (or thanks to rebates, gaining
more money) is usually legal but corrupt in the eyes of many, while torrenting Netflix
shows so you don’t have to pay for them is illegal but widely practised. Even if
something’s neither illegal nor a moral outrage it can still be considered taboo on a
more subtle level, like shunning someone who eats with their mouth open or uses
their hands - or the left hand as opposed to the right - when they eat. And if it is

9
I came this close to making Beast of Resplendent Liquids my username on the forum.
 worthy of action being taken against them, what happens to the offender in question?
From a gameplay perspective an exiled member of a group is a good way to get
members of that culture outside of it so the players can meet them and playing with
expectations may make for an interesting story - were they unjustly shunned by a
cruel society, or rightly shunned for some secret vile practice that your players may
uncover (“wait, you sacrifice what to who?”) It’s also going to be a lens through which
your - presumably outsider - players are going to interact with this culture, as
something for social characters to play into and antisocial characters to play off of.
After all, you can’t tell a dirty joke without some concept of what’s “dirty”.

Are there any local legends, and are they true?

As mentioned Exalted is a very supernatural setting, and that obviously leads itself to
tales of monsters and heroes and whatnot. You’ll already have a pretty good idea of
how to use those elements in your games (and what monsters, ghosts and exalts you
can turn into stories like that) so I’ll not dwell on that too much here. Instead let’s
focus on stories in general and what purposes they can serve in gameplay.

As with art and food, what stories people choose to tell are a great window into what
they think and feel about the world around them. As allegories, they can be a means
of subversive resistance, keeping older traditions alive in spite of attempts to crack
down on it (good for situations where Immaculate Order missionaries are trying to
root out native religions). One of my favourite cartoons as a child was The
Storykeepers, about Christians living in the time of Nero telling stories about Jesus -
something like that might be the only way some common folk even know what a
Solar is outside of Immaculate doctrine. As satire they can allow people to punch
above their weight, as a fitting, catchy and accurate satire of someone can not only
ruin them socially but can live on long after they’ve died and become how they’re
remembered in history (which is sure to piss them off in the afterlife). And as means
of articulating how they rationalise the supernatural and the unexplained they can
also be a window onto how they process deeper fears of things like death - which
can be good things for ghosts and Fair Folk in particular to draw upon when
tormenting them.

There’s a number of ways this can enhance your game. Hearing a story can be a
great way to set the mood, especially if it’s sad or spooky, and obviously it’s a great
way to plant seeds. I’d say take care when doing that, though; making every story a
plot seed can be a bit obvious, and while a story that’s weighted like it’s a plot seed
can be disappointing if it’s a red herring, it’s going to seem weird if the topic of
conversation always happens to be the next thing that needs doing in the area10. This
is also going to be important when it comes time for your players to make legends of
their own - are they going to speak to some great truth the people hold dear, evoking
the spirit of a local hero or legend to inspire them to follow your lead? Or are you
going to botch so hard that they’re going to tell stories about it for centuries to come?

10
That said, a village where everyone’s always talking about the same thing and trying to nudge your
players towards it would make for an interesting story if it turns out they’re all the same Fair Folk
illusion…
What cliques do they have?
So far we’ve been talking about individual cultures, but apart from the smaller villages
and clans no settlement is going to be made of just one culture or ethnic group. Even
a country as big as China is home to 56 different ethnic groups (officially) and even
though the largest one - Han - make up over 90% of that they too are broken up into
over 20 subgroups numbering in the tens (or hundreds) of millions. Separate from
race, but often intersecting with it, different classes, age groups, family or clan
affiliations and wealth levels create subgroups in any culture. This means that any
given NPC has a package of customs, backgrounds and attitudes that can be used
as a baseline for when players interact with them, and a particular or named NPC
can have traits that are built upon but deeper than (or noticeably distinct from) that
baseline.

Let’s think of some examples. Dockworkers might well have their own slang and
patois from interacting with people from lots of different places, be relatively poor due
to travelling too much to really save up money or set down roots for long, and be
seen as suspicious or untrustworthy by other sectors of the population due to being
associated (rightly or wrongly) with pirates & raiders. Inland, divisions might be found
between older established city-dwellers and younger generations feeling stifled by
not having the access to power and opportunity their fathers and grandfathers have.
Maybe the city is made up of three different clans forcibly merged together by a past
warlord that could tear apart at the seams if times get tough. Any of these factors
could be venues to explore for plot, factors to bear in mind when approaching social
situations, or for villains - or particularly ruthless players - to exploit.

How have they changed over the last 100 years?

I know that sounds like way too high a number, but bear with me. In that time a river
can form a curve that deepens into a meander, cuts itself off to form an island and
eventually that curve forms an inland lake. In that time a settlement in a stable place
can expand its population, contract due to war or scarcity of resources, then bounce
back. One that migrates could travel across the plains or steppe for miles upon miles,
changing path here and there and encountering other groups they’ll trade, fight or
even integrate with. An entire lifespan and several generations will have taken place
over that time, and that’s just for mortals - Creation is also a world where many
creatures in it live to be hundreds of years old. Remembering the days of the
forefathers is a lot easier when half of them are still walking around today.

To give an example from my own campaign, due to the effects of the mass
depopulation of the Contagion most of the settlements in the southwest are tiny
pockets of very disparate civilizations, but they are down the coast from the
canonically verdant and highly populated region of An Teng. So what I ended up
doing was establishing a demographic shift over the past couple of centuries I called
the “Tengese Migration” as that population expanded down the coast, mingling with
all the much smaller cultures in the Cinder Isles and inland jungle/swamp villages,
with some slight overlap with the cultures on the edge of the desert and the firepeak
 mountains and the cultures that founded Zhaojun coming much later11. That
established at least some cultural baseline across the region while allowing for
enough cultural diversity to keep introducing new things for the players.

How do they deal with sickness and disease?

Sickness is going to be one of the biggest threats to any place in Creation, with the
potential for even outbreaks of mundane diseases to decimate a population and be
very complex to solve. This is before you multiply it by factors such as there being
gods of the people who are afflicted, gods of disease and gods of medicine all vying
to stop or continue the sickness and celestial bureaucrats insisting that it’s vitally
important that the sickness continue. Most of that will be lost on your average person
in Creation however, but while they might not have a working theory of germs12 they
will almost certainly have some concepts of Purity and Pollution - capitalised because
that’s another thing early Anthropologists were very into - that will overlap.
Quarantining, washing tools, and not contaminating food or drinking water are all
things well within most civilizations’ means. It’s just a question of if it works or not,
especially when disease is potentially more potent due to more potent natural (and
unnatural) sources13, and why they think it works. There’s a great podcast running at
the moment called Vaccine: The Human Story about how humanity eliminated
smallpox that goes into great detail about how different cultures in history dealt with
the disease in ways easily available to people in most parts of Creation. This will all
be of most significance to characters with medical training, but if you want a big “oh
shit” point in the plot, you could do a lot worse than a plague, and if the players solve
it - or better yet cure it outright - the population are going to be very grateful and other
interested parties will want to know how they did it. After all, the next time the
Sultan’s wife gets sick, he’s going to want to bring in the experts.

How literate are they?

Literacy’s often thought of purely in terms of being able to read and write, but that’s
not really the whole story. A strong written tradition not only implies people who can
read and write to teach others, but also materials with which to do so and places
where they can be stored, potentially even roles in society dedicated to writing and
preserving texts. So if you don’t have that, what might you have instead? Areas
where there’s not a lot of access to teaching might not have many people who can
read, but that doesn’t mean they don’t talk and think, and there’s a lot of other ways
of communicating or transmitting information other than purely written records. Oral
traditions, for example, can transmit surprisingly lengthy and detailed works for much
longer than you’d expect.The Rigveda for example, one of the oldest religious texts in
Hinduism, was transmitted orally for centuries despite being 1028 hymns long over
the course of 10600 verses. Imagine studying for a combined medicine, philosophy
and physics exam by memorising your entire textbook because you’d be the one
teaching it to your future students. And that’s not the only Veda you’d be memorising.
11
My players don’t believe me when I tell them I’ve got a timeline for this campaign stretching back to
the Primordial War. They’re wrong!
12
And in Exalted it’s never been very clear if they do.
13
and for some reason it’s baked into the rules that non-magical healing won’t actually make you
better any faster
 Even physically recorded languages include a lot of things other than just writing - in
the Andes systems of knotwork on strings called Quipu were used thousands of
years ago, and were eventually suppressed by invading missionaries because they
were used to keep track of offerings to the gods that only they could read.

It may be that a spoken language is difficult to transmit in written form, like click
languages in parts of Africa where symbols like ǂ have to convey clicking your
tongue in certain parts of your mouth and not others for certain sounds14. There’s a
village in Kongthong, India that has its own whistling language they can speak, and
every villager has a unique name in that language that’s never reused even after
death. And both of those examples are real life humans with the same mouthparts as
us - in a fantasy setting like Exalted you might end up talking to creatures with
non-standard mouthparts like Beastmen or Fair Folk eventually, too. Imagine trying to
find your way to an abandoned Lunar manse based on instructions where half of the
directions are in whistles.

How this translates to written languages in-game is up to you. It could be that it uses
the same written language but spoken it has its own unique dialect, like Hoi Toider
dialect from Chesapeake bay or my own native Cumbrian, where it loses some
meaning when written down. Or the writing itself could hold meaning outside of its
written component: Chinese characters are written in Traditional and Simplified
forms, and people in neighbouring countries can often read them even if they don’t
speak Chinese.

What do they do with their dead?

This was always one of my favourite topics growing up, because I was one of those
spooky kids at school (and judging by my large collection of stuff shaped like skulls
around my home I still am). Exalted already has a system of how souls reincarnate,
end up in the underworld or elsewhere, so let’s focus on the physical side of things.
There’s a reason most of what we know about a lot of civilizations comes from how
they treated their dead; all the major factors of a person’s class, wealth, faith and
sect, as well as the way surviving relatives and the state regarded the deceased, are
reflected in their funerary rites. For Creation it divides into two main camps -
reincarnation faiths and ancestor cults.

For cultures that subscribe to the usual method of souls being divested of selfhood
and reincarnated into new bodies, the emphasis is on severing the link between that
soul and the life it just held. Cremation would make a lot of sense in this context, as
the original body is ritually obliterated and any metaphysical tie to it is cut (and also
prevent the body & its components from being misused in necromancy etc). Sky
burial would also be a way of achieving that, especially in the north where the ground
is too hard to dig and the wind too strong to light a pyre15. There’s also the living end

14
For the record, that one’s for clicking from the midpoint behind your top row of teeth… I think, it’s
been a few years since I had to pronounce anything in !Kung.
15
It occurs to me that some cultures in the west might also do something similar with dismemberment
and scattering into the sea - burial at sea in the real world is done whole, but speeding up the process
of being eaten would prevent there being a whole corpse at the bottom of the ocean. Who knows?
 of that connection, and the purpose of ritual would be to help the next of kin healthily
grieve and process that loss, so that the living aren’t holding onto the memory of the
deceased in a way that tethers their spirit to the physical world.

For Ancestor Cults, the attitude is almost completely reversed. Here the goal is to
strengthen that tie specifically so that the link remains and the spirit of the deceased
can be strengthened by the living. Remains might well be preserved in part or whole,
whether this be embalming or mummification for whole bodies, or ossuaries and
physical relics of the deceased for public viewing or even interacted with in a ritual
context. Material goods will be sacrificed so that an equivalent in the underworld will
be delivered to the deceased - typically goods they can use or trade. What would the
people in this culture consider valuable enough to sacrifice?

For both of these approaches there’s the practical matter of how to actually handle
and dispose of the dead. Aside from concerns over attracting disease or vermin, and
the fact that nobody wants to live next door to a crematorium, a lot of cultures
associate handling the dead with being impure on a metaphysical level. This means
people who voluntarily handle the dead are, hypocritically, shunned for being impure
rather than thanked for doing it so no-one else has to, and places where they live and
carry out their duties are relegated to the outskirts of the city, if they’re even allowed
in there at all16.

Then there’s always cannibalism. That’s going to be seen as impure and monstrous
to pretty much every right-minded inhabitant of creation, but there’s a lot of dark
corners in the threshold where that sort of thing might be practised. Would they eat
their loved ones to preserve their spirits, or help them move on like a sky burial? Or
would they eat their enemies to absorb their strength, or ritually prevent them from
moving on to the next life? In the real world, a sect of Hindu Sadhus (ascetics) called
Aghori deliberately try to transcend ideas of pure & impure by living in graveyards,
smearing themselves in cremation ash and in some cases eating parts of the dead.
Would there be groups like that in your culture, or would it be seen as less of a
heresy and more a normal religious practice?

And let's not forget, Exalted is a setting where the dead from any of these
approaches absolutely can and will get back up and let you know if you didn’t do it
right, curse you from beyond the grave, or both17.

What do their neighbours think about them?

Now that we’ve thought about all the above (or just as much of it as you could take; I
promise it’s almost over) what does all this look like to the outside observer?
Because that’s not only what people your players are going to be hearing about this
culture from as they travel to it, but like holding your painting up to a mirror to check if
there’s any flaws it can also give you some insight into how it’s going to come across

16
Though there are some exceptions, like the cremation ghats on the riverfront in Varanasi, India.
While the ghats are still on the furthest edge of the city, Varanasi now stretches far downstream of
them, with concerns now being raised about how the ashes are polluting the water.
17
See? This part was twice the size of some of the other questions! Told you I was still a spooky kid!
 when your players finally go there. If your players are travelling to this culture’s land,
they might have a guide or be guarding a caravan - will they tell you about all the
strange, eerie songs they sing? Tip them off that it’s rude to look someone directly in
the eye there? Or joke with them that “the food’s great, it just smells terrible!”

Is this culture typical or atypical of others in the region? Do they have any of their
particular practises in common with them? If they do, that’s already given you some
starting points for designing their neighbours. If two tribes in the area both worship
Ahlat in different ways, will they consider that common ground or fight over which one
is venerating him correctly18?

Also, remember what I said in the question about cliques and subcultures: cultures
close to one another are going to intermingle as people travel for work, intermarry,
emigrate and immigrate. It’ll seem more natural and less of a plot hook if you frame
neighbours’ opinions through lived experience knowing and interacting with these
people rather than broad stereotypes. Besides, if your players go in with just broad
stereotypes that impression is likely to stick in their mind over any future details you
try to introduce.

Exalted-Specific
Note: these are a lot shorter, because I’m not an expert and as soon as I say something
definitive some grognard’s going to leap out of the woodwork to yell “ACTUALLY page 245 of
the Autocthonians splatbook clearly states that - in light of the sidebar in chapter 3 of Cult of
the Illuminated - those guys serve He Who Went Forth, Realised He Forgot His Keys And
Went Back!” and I ‘aint got time for that.

How does this culture interact with the nearest local powers?
Creation is a big pond with some big, bigger, and even bigger fish in it. Against this
backdrop your setting can be as big or as small as you need it to be as long as you
know how to slot it in-between its neighbours. Is this settlement or culture a satrap, or
a local body answering to one? If so, does it answer to the Realm directly or a proxy
like Prasad? Or is it affiliated with a rival like Lookshy, a Lunar Dominion or a mortal
warlord the way satraps are to the realm? Such a relationship will be a rich seam for
its own storylines about the clash between your setting and the “bigger fish”, and is
going to affect a lot of how its trade works, as well as conscription into its armed
forces and the spread (or erasure) of its culture.

How much influence does the Realm have here?

We just discussed whether or not your culture is a satrap of the Realm, but if it’s not
are they even aware of it? Given the distance most places are from the (literal and
figurative) centre of the world that’s not necessarily a given. Would they remember
the Shogunate more, considering there might have been a Daimyo in the area acting
as proxy to the Shogun more independently than the satraps of the current era?

18
And if they do fight, which one will Ahlat favour?
 If the Realm does have an active part to play in your setting, by how much and is it
by choice? Perhaps they got crushed into submission like An Teng, struck a deal like
Zhaojun or actively resist it like Lookshy? Do they speak High and Low realm, even if
only for business purposes? Does the Immaculate Faith have a presence here, and
does the local culture follow its cultural mores like veneration of Terrestrials or not
depicting dragons in their art? If the Immaculates are interacting with this culture it’s
going to be with a view to replacing it entirely with theirs, as missionaries have done
throughout history, but unless they’ve got the military strength to do so openly it’s
more likely to be slow but steady proselytization - think about how different aspects of
your setting would be most under attack and most likely to change, and how much
the locals are going to resist it.

How far are you from the nearest pole?

When it finally came time for me to work out exactly what time of year it was in my
campaign, and after I spent an infuriating trawl through Core trying to find out what
an elemental pole is as opposed to what’s near it19 I finally hit upon a bit where it
talks about how the night sky in Dajaz is never truly dark because the pole of fire is
so bright on the horizon. If your culture is in the south, is that true there, too? The
game assumes the same calendar of seasons of hot and cold (and one week of spicy
chaos) but that’s sure to change if you’re in a part of the world where it doesn’t ever
get “hot” or rain. Think about the stuff we discussed in the question in the main
section on seasons in light of that. It’s worth bearing in mind that a lot of creation is
technically part of two of the poles in a way the setting doesn’t necessarily touch
upon (at least, until they kickstart Compass of Celestial Directions: Northeast). My
campaign’s set in the far Southwest for example, so I decided that since it would be
both hot AND wet it would eventually become endless boiling-hot jungle as far as
anyone’s been willing or able to explore20.

Which of the game’s languages does their language or dialect

derive from?
Personally, I have a lot of issues with the whole Seatongue, Forest-tongue etc
system, particularly the names; every time one of my players talks about speaking
Firetongue I want to yell “FLAMEO HOTMAN!” like Aang from Avatar the Last
Airbender. But from a gameplay perspective I can see the utility - it would be a pain in
the ass to map out all the different languages and dialects of a region, and High
Realm being the language of the dominant world power enforced on the population
(and Low Realm being a patois based on it) makes sense21. Sadly, in practice the
“tongues” in the book just get used as “the language of the west/south/east” etc in the
same way that Common in Dungeons and Dragons gets used as “the human
language” that everyone speaks. Unfortunately there’s not really a shortcut if you’re

19
Also, I would love to know how “Eventually the elemental effects are so strong that only the
mightiest of the Chosen can survive them” is supposed to work when you’re at the Wood pole.
20
My headcanon is also that each pole is linked with the one on the opposite side: water is wet and
trees need water, and fire is fed by air. I will not be taking questions at this time.
21
Old Realm being used as the language of the First Age across the world in the same way and the
language of spirits across the world too makes less sense.
wanting to include different languages in your corner of Creation - you’ll just have to
work out what (if anything) it’ll have in common with one of these major language
groups at the start of the campaign and present them as options for your players at
character generation, and decide whether or not knowing the broader language
group it’s a part of will mean they’re able to get by or not.

How has the supernatural affected the area?

We’ve talked about physical geography somewhat, but in any part of Creation there’s
a lot more that can be at work in the area. Demesnes occur naturally, even if there’s
never been a Manse or other structure built on them. Hotspots of Wyld presence
occur here and there, and especially so on the edges of Creation. And while the
sorcerous workings of old are an order of magnitude above what’s been possible
since, workings can radically shift the environment in ways completely atypical of the
region they’re part of and potentially last for centuries & outlast their owners. How
would this have shifted the world in this region? How would that affect the resulting
lives of people that live there - do they learn to exploit it, or come to fear it? Who else
in the area would be aware of it and doing the same? Does it have a specific origin,
and most of all - can it be stopped or run out?

How much magic do these people interact with on a daily basis?

On a more personal level to the above, how much “magic” - whether it be from
charms, thaumaturgy, sorcery or something else - would an average person in your
setting encounter? Personally I’m of the mind that while there would be a lot of
strange environments around Creation, the actual levels of magic practised in a lot of
Creation would be fairly low. There’d be plenty of thaumaturgists in some areas and
less in others, but actual sorcery is a hard thing to learn, and charms and artefacts
are either firmly in the hands of the Realm or its equivalent superpowers, or being
wielded by the strange old sorcerers, warbands of Lunars or Rakshasa or despotic
warlords that would haunt their nightmares. Until recently of course, having such
things would also lead to a knock on the door from your nearest Immaculate Order
missionary (and a scale or two of legionnaires at his disposal) across much of
Creation, and the threat of it would exist even further.

Into this setting walk your players, each of whom can bring to bear earth-shattering
and reality warping powers. If they choose to flex them, how will people react? Will
they be driven out as monsters, welcomed as heroes or casually disregarded as
small fish in a big pond because “you should see what the guy in the next town over
can do!”?

What do they think about anathema?

I’m using Anathema as a catch-all term here, because this stuff could just as easily
apply to rogue Outcastes, lunar Exalts or Rakshasa nobles - it’s in town, which
means trouble is probably right on its heels. Solars are too far into the past for most
mortal lore (but they might have heard stories about the monstrous false god-kings
from the Immaculate Faith) but a local folk hero might have been a wandering
Dragonblood, a Lunar might have been - or still be - a monster out in the woods or a
 forest beast-king, or the locals may tell a story of how a Rakshasa almost stole the
mayor’s daughter until a local lad beat it in a riddle contest. How one is treated when
it makes its presence known however is likely to be with suspicion or outright
hostility: given how dangerous creation is most mortals would be very aware that
they wouldn’t stand a chance against any one of the folks we just described. Would
they try to appease such a being in the hopes of staying on its good side, in
exchange for its mercy or protection? Or would they begrudgingly tolerate its
presence, waiting for a way to get rid of it and always on tenterhooks for when it
flexes its caste mark, decimates their army singlehandedly and declares that by the
authority of a sun god they’ve never heard of they are now his slaves?

Are there any First-Age or Shogunate ruins in the area?

Players of all stripes love Stuff™. If your players are sticking around and making
things, they’ll need a power source for their latest doodad or a way to stop the Big
Thing coming towards their new hometown. If on the other hand they’re a bunch of
murderhobos - or as 2nd Edition calls them, “Infernals” - they’ll need a steady diet of
Stuff™ as a breadcrumb trail from adventure to adventure and successively bigger
and stronger gear to fight bigger and stronger enemies22. And to find Stuff™, they’re
going to have to dip into one of the countless ruins and caves and vaults and crypts
and libraries and facilities and [deep breath] manses and armouries and all that
scattered across creation. It’s not optional: your setting has places in it with Stuff™
for the players to find, because they’re going to get all sulky and pout if they go
looking for one and it’s not there.

So while you’re designing your place and the Stuff™ in it, think about how it’s going
to impact the people living near it. It might not be a manse, but if there’s the ruined
infrastructure of some past settlement nearby the locals will possibly have built on top
of it, since the previous occupants probably used the prime building location in the
area on the assumption it would be around forever. If they have, have they learned to
exploit what’s inside, and possibly use it against their neighbours? This will all make
for good conflict as the players try to convince the locals they’re living in the core of a
reactor that’s in danger of going into meltdown, or debate the ethics of swiping that
hearthstone that’s providing the locals their water. Or do they shun the area entirely,
as anyone who trespasses there falls foul of its hazards or other interested parties
occupying the ruins? The way characters in series like Vampire Hunter D or Horizon:
Zero Dawn talk about these ancient places, fear their inhabitants and build ideas
about what they were for are great sources of inspiration in this regard.

● How did the Great Contagion and Balorian crusade impact them?
As mentioned earlier I’m of the mind that either or both of these events just flat-out
can’t have happened as described. If 90% of all life - right down to the plants and
insects - died, and then everything beyond the Blessed Isle was overrun by armies of
fair folk life simply would not have been able to recover, and especially not in that

22
Unless you have a Solar Craft specialist in your party, at which point whatever you come up with will
just get smelted down and reforged into one of the 10 legendary projects they need to make per story
to keep the Crafting XP machine rolling. Maybe just give them a pallet of Orichalcum ingots, eh?
 amount of time. But for the most part the world in the current era is written under the
assumption that it did, so let’s talk about the impact it would have had on the culture
you’re trying to come up with. That many people dying, and large swathes of
Creation being reduced to wasteland will still have had an impact that a suitably old
culture will remember having happened, even if they think the origin of that is a myth.
Much like the Bronze-Age Collapse or the depopulation of Central Asia during the
reign of Genghis Khan, there will be places where history just stopped, or where
remnants of it were found by survivors who came back there and these hazy
impressions get codified into their history books. Plus, those ruins of the previous
culture might have been completely different from the people who migrated back
there. Just think of the Stuff™ they left behind!

● How are the Guild involved?

Notice I didn’t say “Are the Guild involved?” - it’s the guild, they’re going to be
involved, even if it’s only by proxy. All those questions we asked ourselves earlier
about what our people make, do, eat, sell, write etc? The local branch of the Guild
will have made a note of all that, and if their local Factor knows what he or she is
doing they’ll have a detailed roster in their heads of which bits of it they can make a
tidy profit on, how to smooth over the locals who might object to selling it (or better
yet, be recruited to help run the operation for a cut of the profit) and a few ideas of
what these people will be in the market for that the Guild can provide. All those
considerations of how the local power or the Realm will interface with your setting?
Think about the Guild in much the same way as any of these other powers, only
wider-reaching, with less immediate hard power23 but a lot more insidious soft power
and a piercing eye for any weaknesses they can exploit. Your setting might already
be in their thrall; it’s just a matter of whether or not they know it yet.

Lastly…
If you’ve read all the above, I just want to say “Thanks” and “Holy shit, really? This thing’s
longer than either of my undergraduate dissertations!” But seriously, I hope all this helps you
build engaging and memorable settings for your games, whether it be Exalted or some other
system. Please feel free to leave a “Thanks” or a comment on the original forum post -
writing this up has been great for flexing some ideas I’ve not used much since I was in Uni,
and if this goes down well I’ve given thought to expanding it, making completely
setting-agnostic and putting it on itch.io someday, so any feedback would be appreciated.

23
But only slightly less - they might not have legions, but depending on how deeply in debt the local
Khan or Sultan is they might still be able to set up a decent blockade.