Minireview: Graceful Wicked Masques - The Fair Folk (Exalted)

Fun to read Exalted material that I wasn’t too familiar with before. Sure, 1st edition had the Fair Folk, but that’s one of the (few) 1st ed books I haven’t read – so while I cannot compare this new incarnation with the previous one, it was an interesting read with lots of new info (for me, that is).

So, Graceful Wicked Masques updates the “Fair Folk” (or Raksha, at they call themselves) to Exalted 2nd edition. First off, I love that they used the “Graceful Wicked Masques” title; as far as I understand, it was the working title for the 1st ed book but they decided to scrap it for the more mundane “Fair Folk” at some point. Fans objected, and now it’s the main title of the new book. This is a hardbound “exalt” book in the fashion of the previous books, so while the major use for this book will no doubt be in fleshing out NPCs, creating Fair Folk PCs is quite possible… if not exactly easy, due to the alien nature of the Fair Folk. The implications of this are discussed in the book.

To people coming from other games: the “fair folk” of Exalted are far from “elves”/”fae” in most other games. These are alien creatures who don’t really strictly exist as such; in “pure” form they are just matrices of Essence (energy) with one of more “feeding maws”… which can eat things like memories, feelings, and your will to live. In order to come over to Creation they need to create a physical “shell” for themselves, but that (often beautiful) apparition has nothing much to do with the real creature. Or it does, since most Raksha create shells which embody concepts which they are associated with – and concepts & drama is what the Raksha live on. In a way, they are imaginary, brain-sucking LARPers from hell. They wear their virtues as physical objects, and are absolute lords over their domain in the Wyld. In Creation… they are still dangerous, but more limited. As alien as they are to humanity, they are also alien to their original kin, the “unshaped” Raksha dwelling in the chaos of the Deep Wyld. The Unshaped, now, are again something different and bizarre. More intelligent “locations” (to use the word losely) than single creatures, with shattered multiple souls, they bear some similarity to the Yozis… without the malignant history found there.

Exalted “cosmology” is both surprisingly internally consistent (for a high fantasy game) and complicated. The Fair Folk form part of the more complicated section, simply due to what they are. In case your brain doesn’t start to overload from trying to understand the “base” Fair Folk and how they operate, we also have the Shinma. What they are… is anyone’s guess. Some of them form critical junction points “between” the Wyld and Creation, but other than that… hard to say. One Shinma is a gate through which a Raksha can recreate itself in a form suitable for Creation… but it’s not quite that simple. And it’s not a “gate” in a physical sense.

So, like I said, complicated. I’m not complaining, since the convoluted nature of Exalted metaphysics is one of many the reasons I like the game. I’m given to understand that this 2nd edition is easier to understand than the 1st edition, which is famous for RSB’s typical style of graceful but convoluted descriptive text. My brain is still complaining from trying to understand the Forest Witches from the 1st edition description…

This was an interesting book to read, and gave me lots of ideas on how to (better) use the Fair Folk in Exalted. I’ll have to re-read portions if I ever do anything more complicated with them, though, understanding things like Shaping Combat isn’t totally trivial. Or, to be more exact: I get the idea (I think), but would need serious think time to figure out how to run it in a game.

The reaction to this book has been pretty positive among people who have read the 1st edition version, so apparently this is another successful update book. […]