Burning Exalts

Burning up an exalt is mostly the same as burning any other Mannish character in the Burning Wheel (BWG pg 163). The biggest difference is that at some point you take the lifepath that exalts you. For everyone except the terrestrials, this can happen at any time in their life, but the exaltation classically chooses people in the prime of their life. From there, the exalt ages differently from mortals, and their whole being is fundamentally changed, but all of the lifepaths they take after exaltation are still largely Mannish.

## Exalted Lifepaths

Exaltation is best represented as a Lifepath. Any other lifepath in the game can instantaneously lead to exaltation, but exaltation can only ever happen to a character once. So choose wisely. Once you’ve chosen an exaltation you must then leave the setting and never return.

Each exalt-type is further broken into castes, and each has their own spheres of influence which you can choose from. They all have their own special powers too: most are written into their traits, some are just extra uses for Essence, a few require their own sub-systems. These are all described in the sections of the respective exalt-types.

***Notes:***

* δ: Exalts gain skill and resource points according to how many lifepaths they have after exaltation. (See the age table later on for more info).
* a: Must be taken as your 2nd, 3rd, or 4th lifepath.
* b: Excluding leads to Heaven, Hell, or Purgatory.
* c: Excluding leads to The Scarlet Realm, unless you want to go to gaol.

As you can see, there are two traits common the all exalts. One is the `Enlightened Soul` trait, which is described in the Essence section. The other is the `Exalted` trait, described here:

*You are an excellent physical specimen.* Raise your Health and Steel exponent by 1 during character burning; a B1 of natural armour covers your entire body; you will always eventually heal from non-fatal injuries, and; you cannot die from mundane diseases, viruses, or parasites (though you may still contract them).
*Your lifespan is vast and you are nearly ageless.* You may yet die in battle, or become crippled and withered by the excesses of time, but you are otherwise immortal. Upon exaltation your mortal age stops increasing (see the age section below).
*You are changed forever.* The exaltation is imperishable and inseparable until death. You cannot voluntarily lose this trait, and to somehow forcibly remove it would cause instant death.
 ***Restriction:*** Exaltation common trait

### Lifepaths in Creation

The default lifepaths of Burning Wheel mesh pretty well with the world known plainly as Creation, or ‘Lokə’, and in most places in only a few minor changes are needed, if any. A simple name change to a job title can go a long way towards altering the feel of an otherwise identical profession. If that isn’t good enough, consider swapping out one or two skills, or the required trait. Try not to fiddle with the other parts of the lifepath; and certainly don’t fiddle with every lifepath.

If all else fails, try creating an entirely new lifepath. Additionally, you may turn to other supplemental materials, like the lifepaths of other stocks, or the Tribal Barbarian lifepaths (especially if your game is set in one of the `Far` locations).

Every major location in the world should technically be treated as its own setting (even if the contents of those settings are largely the same between locations). For the purpose of rolling Circles in-game, you gain a +1 Ob if you’re looking for someone in a land or culture that’s very similar to your original lifepath, or +2 Ob if it’s similar but otherwise completely foreign. Therefore, when appropriate, mark the location of each lifepath when you add them to your worksheet. (Remember that Circles can be viewed as your ability to make new friends and enemies too, it’s a sort-of charisma, not just for finding people from your past lifepaths).

The Imperial Realm (and the Blessed Isle by extension), the underworld, and all of the extra-dimensional settings (heaven, hell, etc.) all need some extra leg-work to be usable as lifepath settings during character creation. They each have own sections in Catalogue III.

#### Setting Locations

**Terrestrial Locations:** The Blessed Isle, the North, Far North, North-East, the East, the Scavenger Lands (or the River Provinces), Far East, South-East, the South, Far South, South-West, the West, Far West, North-West, and Patala (the chthonic underworld or ‘veins of the earth’).

**Celestial Locations:** Naraka or ‘Purgatory’ (and capital city Diyu), Svarga or ‘Heaven’ (and capital city Yu-Shan), Treta or ‘Hell’ (and capital city Malfeas), and the Wyld.

Mortals are not normally permitted in heaven, and any mortals that end up in hell, the underworld, or the deep wyld are almost certainly going to be enslaved or killed.

##### **Travel Takes Time**

You may take a one year lead to stay within your current setting but move physical location, or two years if the location is more than half-way across Creation. Hence, if you change setting and location at the same time it takes 2-3 years.

## Age

Make a note of your character’s age when they exalted, and use the standard Mannish age table up until that point to determine your starting Stat pools. Thereafter, your age stops increasing, but you still gain stat points from lifepaths until you reach the 10+ LP range.

The table below is used to fill in the variable `deltas` (δ) from an exaltation lifepath, as well as set your starting Essence rank from when you gain the Enlightened Soul trait:

(After 10 lifepaths the benefits stop, and you stop gaining stat points from lifepaths too).

##### **12 Years a Slave**

Generally, if the exalted character spent any of their lifepaths *after exaltation* as a slave or in prison then they should subtract 1 from their starting Essence exponent. Minimum Essence is 1 though, of course.

### Time

There are 425 days in the standard calendar year of Creation, but each day is only about 20 hours long. (This means that the duration of a year is still roughly equal to that of real life). Each season is about 100 days long, and then there’s an extra 5-25 day season known as Calibration. Birthdays aren’t typically tracked, so most people just increase their age by one every time they survive a Calibration.

Four hours of “lost time” per day is not a huge problem to circumnavigate in an RPG—given that time is already relatively abstract—but gaining more days comes with finer granular control during downtime. For the purpose of practise time: consider a month to mean one third of a season; three months means a full season; six months is two seasons, and; a year still means a year. You cannot work or practise during Calibration. (20 hours per day is still the max).

## Stats

All normal human mortal stats are capped at 7. **All exalted stats are capped at 8.** Like mortal men though, their base Stride is 7. Certain mannish sub-stocks (i.e. the beastfolk) have different caps and minimums, so keep an eye out. The usual rules about setting limits and soft-caps at the start of a game should still also apply (BWG pg 104).

### Shades

GMs are encouraged to be less restrictive about players starting with Grey-shade or even White-shaded skills, but lighter shaded stats should still be prohibited unless not shade-shifting would result in surpassing your caps.

Consider the following synonyms and associations within the context of Exalted lore to help GMs and players alike to differentiate between the power-levels at play:

* **Black (Mundane):** First circle beings, Mortals, Exalts, Spirit-bloods, Terrestrial Gods (Minor Deities), Mutants, Mountain Folk, Dragon-Kings, Trolls, Lower fêy, Elementals, and Ghosts
* **Grey (Supernal):** Second circle beings, Elder exalts, Celestial Gods (Deities), Dragons, Nephwracks and Deathlords, Royal fêy, and Behemoths
* **White (Incarnate):** Third circle beings, Incarnate Gods (Chief Deities), the Five Maidens of Fate and the Great Poles of the World, Hekatonkheires, and Primal Chaosites.

(Anything of even lighter shade, if such things even exists, would just play dicelessly).

## Traits

Almost every major civilisation or culture in Creation can be broken into societal classes, which usually follow suit with the types of lifepath available (peasant, noble, outcaste, soldier, etc.). Each location and class has an associated set of cultural Traits. Suggestions are given in Catalogue III.

***Note:*** All exalts and mannish sub-stocks only start with two cultural traits instead of three. This is because these types of people will typically start with a lot of extra traits, and characters can become bloated with traits if you’re not careful. So this helps to limit that.

## Resources

Unless otherwise stated, all exalts and mannish substocks may choose gear and property from the standard mannish list (BWG pg 202). Additionally though, check out the Artefacts section for buying magic items, and remember from the Essence section that you can spend rps to have pre-woven charms.

***Note:*** Guns are typically only available in the South and South-West, but could be bought elsewhere for an extra 5 or 10 rps.

Oh, and don’t forget that the `Exalted` trait gives you 1D of full-body natural armour!

## Beliefs

Exalts are the main movers-and-shakers of the world. Let your concept and beliefs reflect that. Exalts have motivations and intimacies—things and people they care about—but also ideas that they want to change the world with. The setting has a very washed-out-grey morality scale; people are generally just trying to survive in a dangerous and magical world. So exalts are permitted a certain arrogance towards their individual concepts about “The Greater Good”. As such, GMs should award Deeds points when players complete large beliefs that they have worked suitably hard to achieve, and which may affect a whole city, region, or nation.