I’ve spent the last few years listening through a few of the Exalted RPG Podcasts / Actual Plays and I figured I’d share my thoughts on them with you. There is a good deal one can learn from them, whether you’re making your own actual plays or just gaming in general.
In today's episode, I will cover A Pair Of Dice Lost’s EvWoD: Friendly Neighbourhood Exalts.
1) Disclaimers
There are a few important disclaimers to get out of the way before we start.
First of all, I understand this was a fan project and should be judged accordingly. I am thankful for the effort the cast has put into entertaining us with their stories, but there will be some criticism of the podcast present.
Secondly, any criticism made against the characters portrayed or how the game played out should not be held as criticism or insults of the game master or the players. Not everyone is perfect and sometimes something doesn’t work out or falls flat in execution. It’s important to keep the art separate from the artist and focus on the former without being disrespectful to the latter.
Thirdly, since I’m also a part of an RPG Actual Play Podcast that features Exalted games, I might be biassed towards one interpretation and way of handling things in Exalted that might not agree with how others view and play the game, that’s to be expected. That and some might see criticising other podcasts a conflict of interest or something, so here is your disclaimer.
Fourthly, we hang out with the game’s GM, Brendon, and have made an Actual Play together and are working on another one. Heck, this very game was kind of inspired by our EvWoD game, Heaven for Everyone. While I aim to be impartial in my reviews, I might have an implicit bias. So take things with a grain of salt.
Finally, there will be some spoilers for the show, it would be rather hard to discuss some things without that...
2) Overview and minor things
Friendly Neighbourhood Exalts is an Exalted vs World of Darkness actual play stream hosted by Brendon from @APairOfDiceLost. The game features a core cast of four PC Exalts of mixed splats, plus some cameos by a few more, being college age kids messing with the New York supernaturals.
The game’s system is the pre-Revised version of Exalted vs World of Darkness with its Companion.
The series takes the form of an audio-only podcast (you can find it on Podbean here, or on many other podcast hosting services), with each recording being edited down to 1 hour episode chunks.
The cast consists of casual RPG fans (so no voice actors or improv artists this time). A good chunk of the cast is new to World of Darkness and Exalted as well.
List of Episodes and their overview.
3) Player Characters
The campaign is mostly played by a core cast of mixed splat Exalts:
Cassandra Roller, aka Cas (f) - a Sidereal Chosen of Secrets curious investigator and gambler
Lenard Van Zant, aka Lenny (m) - a Solar Dawn himbo southern conservative christian
Oliver Jones, aka Liv (m) - a Daybreak Abyssal medical student
Marcy Bartello, aka Marcy (f) - a Solar Zenith fighter
With others making an appearance on occasion:
Roswell “Nova” McArthur, aka Rose (f) - an Infernal pizzeria worker with an attitude
Stargazer (m) - a Starmetal Alchemical getaway driver
Roko’s Basilisk, aka Roko (m) - a Moonshadow Abyssal hacker
4) General Plot
The game starts with the characters being college students in New York, taking various classes together. Then they Exalt and start dealing with the local supernatural weirdness of the area as they try figuring out what they are. Eventually they start dealing with the World of Darkness Gehenna plot as they prepare to face off against an Antediluvian slumbering beneath the city.
5) Highlights
Introduction to Exalted and World of Darkness
To the shock of a few people that have heard of this, this game was apparently an introduction to both the World of Darkness and Exalted for a few of the players. Brendon the GM does bring a well prepared world for the new players to explore and enjoy the weirdness of the mashup. It is always enjoyable seeing people experience this strange setting for the first time.
The Wisconsin Adventure
Towards the end of the game the group decided to go to Wisconsin for various reasons, and a lot of that adventure has been a delight. By then the game has already gone from its early, down-to-earth concept of “Exalts in college” and embraced its wacky and over-the-top shenanigans.
The trip started with Lenard and Liv visiting Liv’s parents. We’ve seen a number of over the top parents already, so it was anyone’s bet what we would find in the home of an Abyssal mortuary student. And what we got were… a pair of very caring and supportive parents with quirky careers and hobbies, and a delightful Wisconsin accent to boot! Not only was the whole situation wholesome as fuck, when Liv asked for some old wax sculptures and animatronics his dad had in his storage (being a wax sculpture artist and so on) for his “project” (putting ghosts in them) and the player selected the “cowabunga” option, well, it was interesting seeing what project Liv’s dad worked on back in his day that was “The Avengers End Game” of their times…
Then the pair went on to try finding a master crafter Alchemical they heard lived around these parts that they met earlier. They were joking that he was Santa Claus and sure enough, they found him in Norway Wisconsin, complete with a giant factory full of robotic elves. They got to get some cool Artefacts for the whole team as a belated Christmass present so they can prepare for the big fight.
If that wasn’t enough, they also encountered a Rhinelander Hodag cryptid during their trip and decided to go all in with a whole side adventure of visiting its home and resolving a war between it and a raiding party of Sasquatches eager to kill the Hodag.
Overall, while it had some slow moments, the Wisconsin adventure had a lot of nice, memorable moments that were pretty fun as long as you don’t take things too seriously and enjoy the flow of where this game has gone to at this point.
The Elysium
During that Wisconsin adventure, the other half of the party, Cas and Marcy, paid a brief visit to the New York Elysium. That entire outing was really neat to behold.
You know how over time in RPGs, shows or the like various characters start having some long stories with one another and you can feel that there is a lot more depth to the situation than someone who just met them might realise? That’s how that visit felt - like the Exalts were stepping into a completely different story, one that has been going on for a while, and one that they won’t understand by just this brief interaction. Neither side knew what to expect from one another, everyone was tense, and in general this is what you hope a lot of vampire Elysium games would be.
The interactions themselves were fairly straightforward, Cas mostly warning the kindred about Tzimisce being about to awaken. Marcy had to avoid being turned into a refreshment after being left alone as a “ghoul” and delivering one poignant line at the Prince, who only allowed her a handful of words to speak. “Scale of Bangladesh” wiped out all the smirks off of the undead faces, since they heart rumours of what happened during The Week of Nightmares when Ravnos woke up.
I have yet to see any other EvWoD game make me wish for Exalts to try gently diving into the shark tank of vampire politics. Heaven for Everyone mostly powered through them in Los Angeles, City of the Bull God was mostly t-posing over the London vampires, asserting dominance, and the few other ongoing games I know of barely interact with them so far. I’m not sure if this feeling Friendly Neighbourhood Exalts evoked was just an illusion, or maybe a result of not sending the heavy hitters to the meeting where they would project their big dick energy and ruin the mood, but what we had here felt really interesting to me at least…
A big boss fight
With how much of heavy hitters Exalted are in the World of Darkness, you’d naturally want to end it with something cool, like a big boss fight. And this series delivered on that, if perhaps overdoing it a bit for its own good.
Since the series takes place in World of Darkness New York, those that know what’s going on in that place could guess the final boss - the antediluvian Tzimisce, one of the most dreadful things in that world.
The Exalts assaulted the Vampire to catch them unaware, fought through a number of their flesh monster minions, and eventually faced off against the perfected form of the creature themselves.
With a lot of legwork done ahead of time the fight was manageable (they managed to evacuate the entire area and bring a large pack of werewolves to help with damage control), but with this being Exalted vs World of Darkness, things eventually became a bit too big for the game format.
Three of the players had some form of protection against getting killed, but that meant the weakest link, Marcy, had to be rescued multiple times and burning through their resources. The battle itself took about 5 recorded hours and required two entire extra sessions to wrap. By the end of it, the crew was also running late and decided to wrap things up cinematically just to actually get to the end of it. The actual enemy stat blocks were eyeballed (since this came out before EvWoD Revised that had some guidelines for big boss fights) and rules had to be adjusted on the fly not to imbalance the whole encounter one way or the other. Some of the episodes as presented ended up being “and then they fought some more” and are kind of skippable (on my first viewing I accidentally missed one of the fight episodes and didn’t even notice).
But in the end, it was a good way to wrap a series like this up, especially since it jumped the shark a long time ago and kept going further off the rails. For basically a first foray into a system that was a bit unbalanced at the time, it was pretty solid.
Pulling at the heartstrings
This game isn’t the first time some of those people played together, and Brendon had a good way of leveraging their shared play experience to tug on players’ heartstrings and make them feel things.
These ranged from rather innocuous things like referencing the other recorded campaigns (such as mentioning Mages making a van, or the Brightness Landing Hotel), but also their Exalted campaign we only got a retelling of. Some Artefacts the group was gifted towards the end of the game were referring to their old characters in a way that made Christina tear up a little. It was a nice touch and a good bit of extra work by the GM to really make things memorable for the players.
Therapeutic and making the world a better place
After you’re done listening to the series, there is a nice outro interview with the various players talking about the series and so on. One of those interviews is with Liv’s player, Tyler. In it, he mentions that playing that character helped him “in a way he didn't know he needed”. Moreover, playing Liv actually made him actually decide to go through with going to a nursing school.
So in the end, when all is said and done, no matter what else you have to say about the series, at least it made the world a slightly better place. It’s nice knowing that games have this kind of positive effect. Hats off to everyone involved!
6) Criticism
No show is without its flaws, and so we should turn to what the Friendly Neighbourhood Exalts has committed. Not as an attack on the show or its creators, but as a learning experience on how everyone could improve…
A casual game of Exalted vs World of Darkness
Honestly, this whole game could be summed up as “casual”, both to its merit as well as detriment. The players aren’t voice actors, there isn’t any production team behind it, the various plots are picked up a bit ad hoc, sometimes the players are strung along a bit, some rules perhaps aren’t 100% there and so on and so on.
Which is fine, but at the same time, the game could’ve been so much better with some more focus, planning and pacing.
Like the game starts with characters being students. That relates to pretty much nothing in the whole plot besides them hanging out with ghosts in a clubhouse. There is a ghost comic book making clubhouse, which doesn’t do much beyond a small role in preparing for the final fight. There is a spirit of the City of New York projecting a giant rotting apple on the Empire States Building to show the corruption of the city as some kind of spiritual problem (implying vampires are somehow making them sick) which gets foreshadowed, a little explored, but not really resolved beyond fighting the big boss fight at the end which would improve the situation. The gang find a biblical seven headed Beast from a sarcophagus that erases itself from your memory that ends up being nothing more than a pet for a few scenes. Multiple families from multiple PCs are more wacky than the next and not all of them get their payoffs after they all get introduced in the same tacked on ending to a museum visit. A doom prepper uncle drags his niece PC into an open sewer manhole as a surprise hello only to die off-screen and be reincarnated as a Demon the Fallen spirit possesses his body and just chills with the PC twice before the game ends. The crew meets a character that is implied to be Santa Clauss that hires them for a museum heist and then just makes them some cool Artefact gifts for the final showdown.
This isn’t Riverdale level of crazy, but it certainly has a lot of ideas that you could fill a few seasons of a campaign with.
And like I should be complaining, we did some of that in our EvWoD Heaven for Everyone game. Sometimes you think you’re setting up something nice but the idea flops and characters latch onto something new. But that’s kind of what I mean by “a casual game” - it has ambition to do a lot, does some of it, and sometimes you just have to follow along a group deciding to hunt cryptids and decide the fate of battle between Sasquatches and Rhinelander Hodags.
Lenard - a southern christian bigot…
While I have nothing against Cody the player, and overall he seems like an okay person from all the games I’ve listened to from A Pair of Dice Lost, I didn’t like his character very much.
Lenard is a bit of a stereotypical southern US christian boy, which unfortunately came with its baggage of being a bigot. Straight up in the first episode during Introduction to Religion class he started with the spiel of “worshipping false idols”, and by episode 3 hearing that some NPC girl was German and speaking with a German accent he instantly called her a nazi. When he Exalted he believed himself to be an angel of god and so on and so on.
In general, I really hate these kinds of characters, the bible thumping holier-than-thou smug jingoist assholes, but sometimes they can serve an interesting part in a story. Like Kristen Applebees from Dimension 20’s Fantasy High had an equivalent similar background (although I don’t think she ever dropped any racism). Over the course of the story, however, it turned out that her family was actually a part of an extremist religious fundamentalist group, and she had to figure out her own path to be a better person than that. We never get anything like that with Lenard.
There isn’t even much pushback to what he’s spouting. The only one I’ve noticed was the german girl he insulted complaining to her friend, another PC, that she was called a nazi.
Take all that stuff away from that character though, and you still have a lot to work with. He is, as I think his player put it, a walking Lynyrd Skynyrd joke (due to his player noticing the name Van Zant in the EvWoD book and wanting to go with it), complete with a dog named Simple Man Freebird and last name Van Zant. He comes from a Dragonblooded family from Australia, has a bunch of sisters that enjoy fighting and loses the ability to read when he cusses, so to compensate he has eidetic memory. He has a giant spirit dog the size of Clifford The Big Red Dog that can talk and always has his back. You don’t need all that problematic stuff…
So many siloed sessions
The pacing of some episodes has been a little bit weird. A number of them would feature characters being siloed into their own scenes and adventures separate from the group. Every now and then that’s good, but sometimes it felt like a bit of a lost opportunity or something that sounded better on paper.
In Episode 18 the group got separated into different spirit rooms while going up the Empire State Building. Then the next episode and a half was them having their own scenes doing kind of random things from Cas having a job review with the Maidens of Fate to Liv operating on his old, dying self. And after spending like two-ish hours setting this up and going through this, those scenes didn’t really matter much and were just some random test by the spirit of the city to determine their worth? It kind of felt inconsequential for the time investment and not to mention like 12 separate cuts between the four vignettes.
Then by episode 24 the group decided to split up to do some prep. Liv and Lenard went to Wisconsin to find a master crafter to forge them some weapons and stop by Liv’s parents, while Cas and Marcy were having meetings with various supernaturals of the region to get them on their side for the upcoming big boss fight. They don’t meet back by mid-episode 29. So that’s 5 hours of content bouncing back and forth between two plots, about 26ish cuts (and mind you, each transition comes with a few second jingle, good for denoting context changes, a bit less so when you hear it 9 times in an hour ;) ). Don’t get me wrong, those episodes have some of the best scenes in the series (Liv’s parents and the Elysium), but one plot has minimal stakes (“travel to Norway, Wisconsin, ask for a favour”) while the other crams dealing with three big power brokers of the World of Darkness (Werewolves, Camarilla, and the Technocracy).
On one hand, I get doing that since basically only one character in the group was good at doing power brokerage (Cas), and bringing in Lenard to Elysium would’ve probably been a liability. On the other hand, things like this probably could’ve been paced as one off diversions during a session in between some group activities.
The siloing wasn’t so bad in the early episodes while we were establishing the various characters and their routines, or giving Marcy a bit of backstory before she joined the gang after Exalting (having individual scenes throughout episodes 4, 5 and 6 from a separately recorded session).
Probably in the end, things come down to pacing. Again, this is a casual game, so it is to be expected.
Marcy was just… there
Sometimes in a group ensemble you will have characters that don’t stand out, and unfortunately this time it was Marcy.
She was a Solar Zenith, although I had to do a double take on that since throughout most of the series she mostly acted as the second Dawn. She was introduced fighting a ghost, in the big split adventure part of the season she mostly played a plus one and bodyguard to a very motivated Cas, and besides that she was friends with Francesca, Cas’ rival.
She was a bit of a tracker, she had a cool uncle, drops one awesome line during the Elysium visit, and ends up being interested in cryptids. On the flip side she turned into a large liability during the final fight when everyone had to save her from being killed burning their “get out of jail free cards”, although at that point things didn’t matter all that much.
It is possible that if the character was a different splat or caste things would’ve worked out differently. An Eclipse would’ve complimented the group quite well and kept a lot of doors open (although Cas seems to have been doing most of the diplomacy, so it might be stepping on her toes), an Infernal or a Lunar would at least make the fights more distinct, etc.
But things like this happen, and I’m sure the group had plenty of fun with Marcy’s player being a part of the group and filling in for someone else that left really early.
Jumping the shark and going off the rails
The series was off to a bit of a slow start with the first ten episodes. The group had some run-ins with the local supernaturals, beat up some vampiric mafia, established a comic book making club with some ghost students and so on. Then things started getting turned up to 11 fairly fast.
The next Arc, Exalted’s Eleven, introduced a strange museum exhibit, featuring ancient plagues, a Daiklave hilt, some Alchemical soul gems and even a mysterious sarcophagus with something ancient inside of it (something about this does sound familiar…). Then the gang was hired to rob the museum along with some guest star Exalts and things continued to amp up. Lenard’s Australian Dragonblooded sisters appeared on the scene, a biblical seven headed serpent got freed, everyone had a trippy vision quest going up the Empire State Building, cryptids appeared, someone’s family member got turned into a Demon the Fallen character, and so on and so on.
Brendon the GM did later say that he went a bit overboard, one-upping himself over and over with each story in the system, and to an extent I have to agree. When you get ancient artefacts from a robot santa living in Norway, Wisconsin to save the Rhinelander Hodag from their mortal enemies, the Sasquatches, you probably start questioning how did you end up here.
It wasn’t an unpleasant journey all things considered, just not something you’d expect starting with the premise of “college age kids Exalting and being Friendly Neighbourhood Exalts”.
Railroading
While a lot of the game was off the rails with how bonkers it got, at the same time it did feature a bit of railroading. It wasn’t the bad kind of railroading where the players have no say in anything, but the kind where players often found themselves with a new situation out of their control and had to get through it.
The Empire State Building vignettes for example, were pretty much “you get dropped into this random scenario, how do you solve it” which didn’t have that much player input. Liv got to operate on his mortal self, with one decision - save them or kill them. Cas had an interview with the Maidens of Destiny that mostly amounted to just chatting, a little bewildered. Lenard got to save his buddy from being killed in some building. Nothing too engaging.
A less egregious situation happened in the Van Zant Manour, where the group got to lay low for a while after their heist. They mostly bounced off Lenard’s sisters a bit, and then got to talk with two more NPCs, pumping one of them for some exposition. This wouldn’t be too bad if it wasn’t two and a half episodes of this.
What followed for one group was similarly a bit on the rails. Lenard and Liv got to go visit Jotun to get some Artefact presents for everyone… For 4ish episodes. The only thing of note that happened was them running into the Hodag, which led to the Sasquatch fight later.
While this kind of play is fine for some groups and the players still had a good amount of input on what they wanted to pursue, it could’ve been a bit better. Then again, player-driven storytelling does require a good deal of inputs from the players and motivated characters, and since this was an introduction to World of Darkness for some people, it may not have worked out as well as you’d hope.
What is a “turn”?
Making mistakes while playing games is kind of expected. Everyone at the table has to juggle a lot of things on top of trying to remember the rules, so something is bound to crop up. However, this game seems to have embraced one crazy reading of the rules that made every late game encounter rather bonkers.
Sidereals have a Charm called Perfection of the Visionary Warrior. It’s a level 5 Battles Charm that is fairly simple, it merely says “Reflexively spend 1 Essence. At the end of every turn for the rest of the scene, the Sidereal may make an extra attack at her full dice pool.”. The key word there being “turn”. What is a turn in Old World of Darkness 20th anniversary editions? Good question, but one that you’ll be hard pressed to get a clear answer on in the various books. V20 doesn’t list it in its glossary. Some of the Storyteller systems use the term to refer to an action of an individual character, while others refer to one turn passing when everyone takes their action.
This game decided to take the first interpretation, meaning that you had the group’s Sidereal, Cas, doing an attack like 10 times a round. Every time anyone attacked, she would attack too, whether they were friend or foe. And all that for 1 Essence, which is barely anything in the system. The fights got a bit ridiculous with that, plus probably took a bit longer since Cas wasn’t the heaviest hitter in the group…
Lenard had a similar Charm, the Peony Blossom Technique, but that only gave him 5 extra attacks at the end of the turn for the cost of 3 Essence each time. Very strong, especially for a Dawn, but burning through your mote pool way way quicker.
Ultimately, would using the Charm as the developer intended change anything? I don’t really think so, the group had a lot of heavy hitters as it was so everyone they faced off against turned to red mist anyway. Was it a cool and over the top use of the Charm? Heck yes. However, the novelty of it didn’t really last too too long, eventually the fights mostly turned to same-y noise of stomping on the group’s enemies no matter who was in the lead, so whether it was Cas 5 times as often as anyone else it didn’t matter too much for the enjoyment of the game…
Imitation and flattery
If you’re like me and are keeping up with the various Exalted vs World of Darkness podcasts (there might be a dozen of us! A dozen!) when listening to this show you could notice some similarities to a certain other EvWoD production. Kids in school exalting together, a himbo of a Dawn, meddling with the local vampires, going on a museum tour only to later rob it, finding an ancient biblical serpent in a sarcophagus, doing callbacks to an older Exalted game, etc. happening twice in two EvWoD games would be a really strange coincidence. Then again, the group was heavily inspired by Princes of the Universe while playing their old Kings of Creation game as recapped under Let the Good Dice Roll.
But yes, as someone who played in Heaven for Everyone it was amusing to hear Friendly Neighbourhood Exalts have similar ideas. And you know what they say, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery ;).
This is of course not to say that the show is entirely derivative, it puts its own spin on a lot of those ideas and the similarities are mainly what you notice in hindsight.
7) Conclusions
Overall, Friendly Neighbourhood Exalts is an okay series, but not my first pick for Exalted vs World of Darkness or Exalted in general. As mentioned before, it’s a fairly casual game, which comes with some issues you’d expect from that - plot points that go nowhere, others that overstay their welcome, a shift in focus midway through, etc. But that’s kind of expected from a casual podcast. All the players seem to have enjoyed the series, and it actually helped Tyler settle on a life direction, which is honestly more than you could’ve ever asked of a game like this.
If you’re looking for a stronger Exalted vs World of Darkness game, you’d probably want to check out City of the Bull God by the same GM (and I’m not only saying this because I got to play in that AP!). It features a cast that are Exalted and World of Darkness veterans, and has a somewhat more cohesive plot, even if it does take a detour to Hollow Earth to fight some nazis with cyber dinosaurs ;).
You might also be interested in these links:
- A Pair Of Dice Lost’s Podbean (can’t find the tags for the game proper…)
- Episode list and summary
