Exalted Vales Interview | Arcane Eye

Published on June 9, 2020, last updated on February 5, 2021

About Exalted Vales

Exalted Vales is an all-new region and campaign guide for D&D 5e and the first project from Montreal-based company InkPlot. Exploring the intriguing theme of mysticism, the 250-page illustrated hardcover book (also available in PDF format) provides D&D fans with new races, classes, locations, characters, complete campaigns for characters levels 1 to 16, and more. You’ll also receive a digital pack with 75+ full-color battlemaps (created in collaboration with 2-Minute Tabletop) and 50+ tokens for online play, as well as a custom Exalted Vales card deck so you don’t have to flip through the rulebook.

Led by a team of experts with over 10 years of experience in the video games industry (including delivering projects for some of the biggest names in the industry like Namco Bandai), Exalted Vales is definitely a game worth keeping an eye on.

Thanks William for answering our questions! Exalted Vales is scheduled for release in December 2020. If you’d like to learn more about or support Exalted Vales, you can head over to the Kickstarter or check out the InkPlot website. If you’d like to give it a try, both the Kickstarter and the website offer a free introductory scenario and some battle maps.

Now, let’s move on to the interview!

Interview

Tell us about InkPlot and Exalted Vales – how did it start?

It started as a campaign between friends. We played every Saturday for a year. And then we decided we couldn’t let it go to waste.

When and how did you discover Dungeons & Dragons?

You have to go back a long way! But it was around the same time that the Berlin Wall came down, and it’s very likely that the two events are unrelated.

Did you expect your Kickstarter goal to be reached so quickly? How have you responded to the incredible support from the D&D community?

We were surprised on both fronts, and to give ourselves some breathing room, we set ourselves very optimistic goals, and now we’re planning some new stretch goals just to be on the safe side.

The support from the community is really heartwarming. As you all know, we are French and Canadian. Before we got the funding, of course it was not easy to get good translation services. Luckily, we got great support.

What makes Exalted Vales different from other 5e adventures and sourcebooks?

We explore subjects that are rarely explored. The starting point was the stories our parents read to us as children. We added mysticism and a veil of mystery to them. The result is a region full of strange phenomena to discover.

We consider from an adult perspective, “what if?”. A good example is the Great Lions. In her region, females become pregnant of their own volition on the first night of summer. As a result, the center of the family is the mother, and all wealth and titles are inherited from her. How does this affect society? What else can the Great Lions do? Are the rules really so simple? What is it that only women can see in the sky on the first night of summer, that men cannot see? Because if women dare go outside that night, they will be transformed into animals. Exalted Vales raises many questions and a real change of scenery.

Building a new campaign setting from scratch is a difficult task. What approach do you take to worldbuilding? Are there any books, movies, games that inspire you?

Author Renaud Bartens is the lead game designer and writer. He applies his writing and video game training to worldbuilding and campaign design. The two disciplines are closely related. Our design philosophy is to start with a simple question: How can the player have fun? Then from there we develop a new class or create the plot for the campaign.

There are so many sources of inspiration, but if I had to pick just two it would be Dune and The Curse of the Kings.

What’s your personal favorite new feature added in Exalted Vales (rules, races, classes, etc.)?

There are so many!

First, a new playable race: the Faceborn. I won’t explain everything about them here, but I’m very happy to have been able to design them, especially for veteran players. Faceborns are not born, they only come into existence as a result of a sincere and strong desire. So when you write your backstory, you don’t have to answer the usual questions like who your parents were and where you were born, because when you appeared in this world, you were already an adult. The question is, who wanted you to exist, why, and how did you meet them? From a game design perspective, it may not be a big deal, but from a roleplay perspective, it’s a new way to enjoy playing.

And a new class, the Mechanist. There’s a lot to discover, but there’s one ability that makes the game very fun: one of the archetypes lets you shrink objects and later restore them to their original size. This doesn’t always work, so we left this in.

On Kickstarter you say the campaign was tested for two years – was this done by anyone at the company? Do you have any funny or interesting stories from playtesting?

The campaign was first playtested by members of the team, and then sent out to several playtesters.

During one of our playtests, a player was playing our new class, Bound Spirit, and they were leaping into a mirror and getting mocked by our gnomes because they couldn’t say who was the prettiest, so we added that ability to the class.

Were there any rules or mechanics you playtested that didn’t make it into the final product? Why?

Due to our work process, it’s hard to answer this question easily: we do a lot of experiments to explore as much of the design space as possible, so we’ve already discontinued or reabsorbed many designs.

Have you tried anything and it turned out better or more enjoyable than you originally thought it would?

I mentioned the Mechanist’s ability to shrink and restore objects. This was meant to be a slow, ritualistic action. We then tried to speed up both the shrinking and the restoration, but that didn’t work very well. We then tested making the object shrink slow but restore almost instantaneous, and that ended up being the perfect tweak. It was also a lot more fun than we expected, since this is a tool that doesn’t fit the situation at hand most of the time.

We know Exalted Vales isn’t out yet, but we’re super excited about it and have to ask what’s next… will there be a sequel or even a whole new campaign setting at some point?

It’s too early to tell yet. Really, we just want to complete this project to the best of our ability, and then we’ll make further plans depending on the feedback from the community.

Conclusion

Thanks again to William for providing us with some behind the scenes information on what goes on at InkPlot.

We hope you enjoyed this interview. If you have any questions or would like to see more interviews and news about upcoming products in the D&D universe, please post a comment below. If you like our content, please subscribe to Arcane Eye.

Roland Drewes

Roland Drews is a content creator and editor at Arcane Eye. When he’s not watching basketball or playing guitar, he enjoys reading, writing, and playing Dungeons & Dragons. He currently lives in Bonn, Germany with his girlfriend, Jess.