Set it anywhere, about anything. I'll adapt to your theme and mood, create assets for your use, and do my best to give you the opportunity to tell the kind of stories you're excited about. If you're a potential player, feel welcome to post, but anyone looking to run Exalted should know there are many more interested players than you can probably realistically even accept for a game, unless it's one of those sprawling multiple-ST multiple-Direction affairs. There is no lack of interest. This is just official.
If you've been thinking about taking a shot at running Exalted but aren't sure where to start in such a vast and diversity-rich setting, here's a handful of ideas!
- The Wyld Frontier: The Primordial War has just ended. The world is scarred and ruined, full of monsters and the shattered architecture of precursors to the human race. Yu-Shan is empty as its gods chase after unfinished business of one kind or another, and what petty divinities walk Creation are as more scavenger than celestial nobility. There are few veterans, many new Exalts, no great empires, no guidance - it's a lawless world, points of light in a sea of darkness. The Circle have been sent forth with some fledgling tribes to secure a boundary of Creation and begin rebuilding the world. Unslain behemoths, hordes of raksha - friend, foe, both, neither - and the spreading horror of the world's first Shadowlands won't make it easy. To start, a local raksha artist has decreed no human may settle the region without submitting to its creativity, and offers those who do its protection - for someday soon, it proclaims, it will wash over the land with its infinite army and cut out the souls of any Exalted it finds.
- The Second Coming: It's finally done. The Empress has vanished, the gyre has widened, and the center cannot hold. Civil war has come to the Realm, and from the Threshold to the Blessed Isle, there is fire and panic, the poison-fruit of intrigues and treasons, opportunity and all its terrible costs. As the Great Houses turn against each other, duty gives way before ambition; even loyalists find themselves at odds as old wounds and hidden agendas come bursting into view. In such a world, what place is there for faith? One House has committed the ultimate heresy: it has sought out the Solar Exalted and offered them - well, whatever they wanted, up to a point. Sweeping vassalages, enough wealth to buy a satrapy or a Peach of Immortality, the forbidden lore kept by the Immaculates, ancient weapons, the facilitation of vengeance or reconciliation, even the very Dynasts themselves as consorts. All they ask is stability, order, and of course, the Imperial Throne. Of course, the unchecked might of the other Houses is as deadly individually as any Abyssal Circle or enraged dragon, and more than one Great House has turned to...unconventional alliances.
- Once and Future Kings: Five Exalts, one Exaltation - that of the great sorcerer known only as the Magnus, who tore himself apart and scattered his fragments through time and possibility. Each remembers different timelines, different ways the world unfolded, and these ancient recollections are no casual curiosity - for alliances, secrets, and unholy threats now exhumed from tombs sealed at the Shogunate's dawn mean finding what holds true in this Creation is the difference between life and screaming death. The No-Mind Witch wants the Magnus' spark caged and crucified, and the chance to do it five times over has seen her assassin-priesthood mobilized through half of all Creation. Four groups of sorcerers - an academy, a cult, a mercenary outfit, and a small, strange kingdom - have pledged allegiance to the teacher they claim as intellectual ancestry. At least one is sincere. The mad chimera rumored to have killed a city-state stalks the Circle, but for what purpose? And just who or what brought the Magnus' fivefold sparks together into one Creation, and why?
- Nightfall: The Circle was there, at Thorns - residents, wandering adventurers, seekers after some treasure or lost lover, perhaps even corrupted agents of the Mask of Winters - when Juggernaut rose from the darkness to devour a city whole. They stopped it, somehow. Juggernaut died, and the Mask of Winters is said to have been crushed beneath its bulk...but when the horror fell it did not stop at earth, and with a soundless howl that echoed from the Imperial City to Rathess, from Sijan to Chiaroscuro, its corpse - and all of Thorns - collapsed into the Underworld, tearing down every Shadowland for a hundred miles in the process. This metaphysical deepness offers no return crossing; night or shadowed day, Creation is out of reach. The Underworld of Creation is a place of infinite rivers of blood and brine and torrid darkness, islands and archipelagos haunted by yawning pits down into the Labyrinth, undead palatinates, and all the detritus of ages given over to the care of ghosts and worse things. And with the Mask of Winters presumed dead, the landing-place of Thorns is no safe haven; his many forces are undirected, his experiments turned loose from their prison-tombs, and his allies and rivals move swiftly to see what can be made of his great failing.
