Player's Guide

Ok I am feeling educationally unproductive so I will sit down and review the Exalted: Player's Guide.
The book is split into 5 Chapters plus standard intro and one appendix.
The intro is the standard introduction for an Exalted books. It covers terms and some basic concepts covered in the book. Not much to say.
Chapter 1: Merits and Flaws. Merits and Flaws are new to Exalted. For that matter they are new to me as I have never played in a game with them. The stigma around them leading up to this was generally bad as World of Darkness games apparently had given people a bad taste in their mouth when mentioning them. However from my perspective they are quite good. Some seem a little useless but many I see could help round out a character's past/physical description. Large Size, Heirloom, and Past Lives are some of these for Merits and One Eye, Disfigured, Addiction, and Nightmares are among those Flaws which add flavor to the game and PCs. M & Fs require a lot of Storyteller oversight to control possible abuse of the system. That is perhaps the biggest weakness they have.

Chapter 2: God Blooded. God-Blooded actually encompasses not only God-Blooded, but Demon-Blooded, Ghost-Blooded, Fae-Blooded, and Half Castes (which took Nephilpal quite a while to come up with). It describes how each of these sub-races are created and what the requirements are to create one (ie, what conditions have to be met so the baby is God-Blooded rather then mortal). How to generate a God-Blood is covered. Patron and Inheritance backgrounds are introduced here to describe how powerful the parents were and how much influence their parents exert on their lives. Both are quite powerful backgrounds designed to make the God-Blooded a little more playable in the high powered world of Exalted. A number of specific Merits and Flaws apply to each type of God-Blooded allowing further indivulisation. A new Arconoi path is introduced for Ghost-Blooded. The creation of akuma (aka Demon-Blooded) and Infernal Exalted (also called akuma) is covered including the spirit charm which taints and controls a willing Exalt's Essence. Even if noone ever wants to make PC's from this section it opens up a lot of room for NPCs.

Chapter 3: Mortal Thaumaturgy. This is mortal sorcery. This includes organizations which thaumaturges are in. It also gives archetypes for different types of mortal thaumaturges as well as how to generate them. The new backgrounds of Expierence and Knowledge are introduced which basically give bonus points for previous life and magical expertise. The library background is introduded to cover those characters who keeps books (this essentially is a good thing for researcher PCs). Some more M & Fs are given to round out characters. Investment charms are given for some high essence beings to give mortals extra Essence to work with for a short period of time. Arts and Sciences are also introduced (basically the thaumaturges' rituals of power). I haven't spent much time reading this so I can't say much more.

Chapter 4: Dragon Kings. Covered barely in Ruins of Rathess, Dragon Kings are now fully fleshed out here. All 10 Paths of the Dragon Kings are covered as well as all 4 species of Dragon Kings. DKs are at this point scattered and mostly savage beings but if raised correctly can become probably as powerful as low level Dragon Blooded. Their Paths are somewhat weaker then Charms but more vertasile. DK artifacts are also listed from Ruins of Rathess plus some new ones.

Chapter 5: The Exalted. First introduced is Exalted Power Combat. This changes some rules in combat attempting to fix abuses and in general make combat more interesting. It is fairly complicated. I have read through once or twice and am still pretty overwhelmed. Along with this a number of charms are Errataed or modified. The list is extensive and many many Solar charms were tweaked. Weapons have gained rate which relates to how many attacks/defenses a turn they can make. Next section is Mail and Steel, ie mass combat. An entire new combat rules system is introduced. The basics are that the leader of a unit essentially is the unit with the units strengths and weaknesses just modifying the leader's rolls. Powerful units can act as independant ones however allow Exalts to roam freely. The rules are fairly complex but less so then the Power Combat ones. Overall they give a good way to allow armies to clash. The next section is Martial Arts. A number of new MA forms are given here as well as training mortals and others MA. The new forms aren't particularily exciting to me although certain parts are interesting concepts. The final section is Elder Exalts. This is very short and just covers the rules for covering extremely long amounts of downtime and generally special rules for Elder Exalts.

Appendix: Writing in the Age of Sorrows. This appendix shows us High and Low Realm script. It is very Chinese although Low Realm is quite a bit easier to read (think High Realm = cursive, Low Realm = standard). Appendix also covers education in the Realm to some extent.

At the end of the book is a character sheet for just about any of the characters in this book. That's all!