Moving on in my first-edition Aberrant readthrough, this week I will talk about the first two supplements released: the Storyteller Companion and Expose: Aberrants.
The Storyteller Companion is divided into two halves, one that provides further worldbuilding and one that is a three-act adventure. The worldbuilding is, as always with Aberrant, composed of a number of in-world documents (and a comic or two), but it can be roughly broken down into two parts: business and religion.
The business part is mostly forgettable, but it does establish that industrial espionage, and security against the same, are two things that novas are frequently employed for. That’s good, it means that you can run any number of “steal the McGuffin” or “find out who stole the McGuffin” type scenarios.
The religion part is a little more varied. The Pope has formally declared novas to be human (which maybe kinda totally had less to do with theology and more to do with Mega-Charismatic nova celebrity Alejandra meeting with him just before), and the crustier elements of the clergy are plotting to have him assassinated by hired novas. The Unitarians are super-optimistic and friendly to novas, because of course they are, and American fundamentalists (because remember that we’re back in the 90s, so fundies are of course the epitome of all earthly evil) are bigoted and ignorant and hate novas. Israel is claiming that God hasn’t erupted a single nova in Israel because Jews are too awesome to need them, but they are totally lying and all Israeli novas have just been quietly recruited into the armed forces. Shiite Muslims think novas are the work of the devil (and the fact that a nova set to be executed freaked out and blew up a small town hasn’t made anyone on either side feel better about it), while Sunni Muslims are cautiously open to the idea that maybe novas are blessed by Allah… though there are heretical Sunni sects who think that they can get nova powers by killing novas and eating their “blessed” bodies. Okay, as far as geopolitical tensions that might involve the players go, a lot of those are at least decent.
Nova cults are also a thing, especially in India, where rural novas are frequently worshipped as avatars of the gods, and in America, because skeevy cults are a hit there. One particular nova makes a habit of eating her cultists and then using Mega-Charisma to get juries to bend over backwards to excuse it as a voluntary religious practice. Ick, but kind of cool. Japan also has a growing Buddhist sect that considers novas to be divine, and some of whom have started bombing subways for no particular reason. Again, this is fairly decent and provides some information for both outright villains and for non-obvious moral questions that the players might weigh in on.
The adventure in the second half of the book is kind of lousy, to be honest. It does provide some description of Ibiza (and perhaps more importantly its premier nova night club, the Amp Room, which was mentioned in the core book and will become relevant again later), Marrakesh and Monaco in the Nova Age, which might be handy, but the story itself is a bland railroad where the players should preferably do as little as possible because the NPCs will just fix everything on their own if the players don’t do anything as rude as trying to roleplay.
Briefly, the players are agents of either the Aberrants, Project Utopia, or Project Proteus, and they’ve been sent to find this nova lady who maybe knows some stuff she shouldn’t. Project Proteus has also sent a one-dimensional psychopath named Chiraben after her. Like, I cannot possibly stress enough how flat this character is, he’s basically just some moronic nutcase who enjoys killing people (especially women, because of course especially women) and for some reason he keeps being given Project Proteus’ most delicate assassination jobs.
The only other significant character is Count Orzaiz, the signature Teragen. He’s just as boring in the other direction – the text just can’t shut up about how dark and lordly and charismatic he is, and how everyone loves him (except Chiraben, because he’s dumb and smells bad). Even his freaking dad is perfect (though I will grant you that I thought it was a little bit funny that his take on Orzaiz’s wholesale adoption of Teragen philosophy amounts to, “oh, he’s acting out for attention with that whole ‘I have evolved beyond base humanity’ thing. Ah, well, boys will be boys, he’ll get over it eventually”). Orzaiz is the one who keeps fixing everything, by the way – the supposed climax of the story is basically just him going up to Chiraben and paying him some money to go away and stop bugging him, whereafter he proceeds to bang the nova the players were sent to capture into joining the Teragen. Yes, really.
Expose: Aberrant is the splatbook (or as close to this game comes) for, well, the Aberrant faction, but since there is very little to be said about it, it’s just this little 26-page thing. It’s a splatpamphlet, basically. Most of the pagecount is taken up by a lot information about how the inept assassination (by Chiraben, naturally) that set off the metaplot was very unconvincingly covered up, which, since we already know what happened there, it’s terribly uninteresting.
That said, there is some guidance for how to portray the Aberrants. There are basically three mini-factions among them, the quiet supporters who are trying to infiltrate Utopia to find out the truth, the fugitives who have gone on the run and try to uncover the truth along the way, and the I-Can’t-Believe-It’s-Not-The-Teragen who think they already know as much of the truth as they care to and are just flat out attacking Utopia’s operations.
Interesting characters, effectively just one named Dr. Worm who’s a hyper-Nietzschean who would be perfect for the Teragen except he thinks even they aren’t hyper-individualistic enough (in fairness, he’s got a point; whether it was intentional or not, Divis Mal comes across as very much the sort of demagogue who preaches radical freedom but has very strong feelings about what people ought to do with their radical freedom once they have it). Interesting plot hooks, about one and a half – there is an example of something Utopia was doing (sponsoring the building of a dam that would drown the property of some people who didn’t want to move) that exemplifies the “serving the greater good, and brushing the cost under the carpet” thing that would actually make Utopia an interestingly grey faction. On the opposite side of things, apparently Project Proteus has secret facilities where they run horrific experiments on captive novas, which… well, it’s something concrete that we’ve been told about them doing, at least.
What both these books mostly bring home for me is just how… completely uninterested the writers were in the Aberrant movement and Project Proteus, despite those being supposedly their main heroic faction and their main villainous faction, respectively. Even in their own book, the Aberrants get nothing in particular to do except retread points from the core. And Proteus, supposedly the overarching villain of the setting? Well, they are over there doing… like… evil stuff. Or something.
What do the writers want to talk about? Two things, mostly. Firstly, the moral perfection of Project Utopia, and all the wonderful things they do, and how wonderful they are for doing so many wonderful things, and how wonderful it is that they are so wonderful as to do so many wonderful things. And secondly, the amoral perfection of the Teragen and how they are cool and edgy and totally don’t subscribe to your, like, slave morality, man. Notably, the Teragen are the only people allowed to criticise Utopia without being portrayed as inbred rednecks or unwashed conspiracy theorists who should keep their mouth shut about their betters – the Teragen, in contrast, are allowed to make actual arguments, and instead it’s Utopia who can never muster an argument about them that doesn’t amount to, “duhhhhh, they terrorists, terrorists baaaaad.”
So no matter what the writers initially intended, what the game actually shaped up to be seems to be a conflict between the people who think that novas can and should make the world perfect, and the people who think that the novas certainly could do that, but why should they demean themselves to do anything for those filthy baselines? And I feel like what’s missing from that duality is any sort of moral agency for the baselines, and any sense that the novas might not have the capacity to “save the world,” to say nothing of whether they have the right. There is a faction called the Directive that’s supposed to be a mostly-baseline organisation that tries to champion baseline nation states against unchecked nova power, but there is a reason why this is the first time I’ve mentioned them, and it’s that they’re just that boring and underdeveloped.
Honestly, that’s very in character for White Wolf. Everything is always ultimately about the shiny magical people, with everyone else being reduced to either fawning admirers, easily dispatched mooks, or faceless grey masses. It’s kind of especially blatant here, though – I recall at one point, the narration (which is not in character, in this case, but part of the GM instructions) snidely asks you why, if novas aren’t in fact superior to common mortals, you are playing as one. Yeah…
Ah well. Next up is Year One and Project Utopia. And there, by Jove, I think I actually figured out how to play this game. I’ll warn you, though, the answer a little bit of a anticlimax.
Mister Monster's Workshop 
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