Aberrant readthrough: XWF and Fear and Loathing

This week in our Aberrant readthrough, two short booklets that… I mean… I can’t even… WHUT?! I think that this point, they had realised that they couldn’t think of anything interesting to do with the setting so they just sort of started throwing everything at the wall to see what stuck…

The XWF (which in the world of Aberrant stands for Xtreme Warfare Federation) is a professional wrestling circuit for novas, or at least for what it claims are novas. Quite often, the wrestlers are in fact “mitoids,” people who have taken super-steroids to get a single dot of the kind of Mega-Strength that novas can take up to five dots in. They usually end up dying from an overdose and it’s all terribly tawdry and depressing.

I’m honestly not sure if the writers here really loved professional wrestling and wanted to include it in their game, warts and all, or if they really hated professional wrestling and wanted to spend some some page count on telling everyone how terrible it is. Either way, it’s a bit underwhelming if you are entirely apathetic to professional wrestling and don’t think it gets better by adding superpowers to it.

I mean, the XWF is mentioned in the core book, and I guess it works as a nice bit of setting flavour, both as a snarky commentary on how superhero fiction (with its oversized, strutting personalities and grudge matches breaking out at the drop of a hat) greatly resembles professional wrestling, and as a way of highlighting the sleaziest aspects of celebrity culture. As in, getting rich and famous from having superpowers is kind of like getting rich and famous from having stunning good looks, as in both cases you are in some sense selling your body even if you’re getting a really great price for it. There is something a bit interesting in exploring how you can be pampered and elevated in some ways and simultaneously exploited and debased in others.

But there isn’t really any kind of plot hooks here. Again, unless you really think that he whole issue of pro wrestling is fascinating in itself, but even then I’m not sure there is anything in here that’s meaty enough that you couldn’t just come up with it on your own, just working from first principle.

And then there’s… this thing…

Like the XWF (like all the books published for the first edition, really), this supplement builds on something from the core book. Also like the XWF, it’s not entirely clear to me that it deserved further elaboration. See, in the core, there was a section briefly detailing how the major cities of the world had changed in the Nova Age, in a summarised version of what eventually got published as Year One. And it was all presented as an in-universe document, like most of this stuff, in this case as an article by a Hunter S Thompson clone named Dr. Duke Rollo. Here, he gets a full booklet to rant even more about stuff.

Thing is, though, Rollo is written as one of those obnoxious people who consider themselves so clearly, incandescently right, and everyone else so obviously, self-evidently stupid and corrupt, that they don’t feel the need to actually make arguments or explain positions but just sort of keep shouting incoherent insults. And that can make them interestingly to listen to – for a while, at least – but it makes them really unsuitable to describe a setting that you’re supposed to use.

Duke Rollo’s opinions, as near as I can make them out, are:

• Project Utopia is bad and people are over-impressed with novas.
• Everyone but himself is either a soulless capitalist or a braindead capitalist patsy.
• DRUGS DRUGS DRUGS DRUGS DRUGS DRUGS DRUGS!!!!!!

I will say two things for the character. Firstly, he’s actually anti-Utopia without being a either Teragen fanboy or negatively portrayed. It’d be nice if he could articulate why he’s anti-Utopia beyond just “most people like them, most people are idiots, therefore they must suck for some reason that I can’t be bothered of to think of at the moment,” but fine, I’ll take it.

And secondly, he’s a colourful character in a setting that desperately needs them and has far too few of them. I’ve complained about that before. There’s a ton of characters, but other than the Teragen, they are all fairly uninspired and lacking in drive. Rollo, at least, is passionate, even if he can’t quite articulate what it is he’s so passionate about.

All the same, this isn’t great. Next up is the Directive, in which Aberrant will manage to make James Bond boring. Stay tuned.