General Exalted Discussion Thread XI: Great Job, You Broke the Scale.

[Plague of Hats]

I just bought the core rules today. What else should I get? (it's the one printed in 2001)

For First Edition, I would suggest getting Scavenger Sons, The Book of Three Circles and Exalted: the Dragon-Blooded as your "core" set. You can certainly get along with just the core rule book, but I think the aforementioned are pretty indispensable whatever type of game you happen to end up playing. Get comfortable with those, and then you'll probably have a better grasp on what other books you might want. You can get all of the First Edition books as PDFs on DriveThruRPG, but I believe the bulk of them are scans.

You might instead give Second Edition a try. I'd recommend against it, as it suffered a greater amount of "misses." Even so, you may want to pick up some Second Edition books regardless of the edition you go with, such as Masters of Jade (highly recommended), or if you get into Alchemicals Compass of Celestial Directions, Vol. VI—Autochthonia.

As mentioned, Third Edition is around the corner, but unless you're really super-tight on money I wouldn't wait to actually get into the game with the latest edition. Strike while the iron is hot.