Aberrant readthrough: Worldwide Phase One (part one)

I have good news and bad news. The good news is, this one is at least not boring. Well, not all the time, at least. Bad news is, where the boredom ends… the SEARING LOATHING BEGINS!!!

But let’s take it from the start.

This book is technically a collection of ready-made adventures to run for your group, but it’s actually something a bit more interesting than that. See, like I’ve said before, the core Aberrant book is really more like a big book of foreshadowing than something that can be used on its own, each chapter teasing some part of the game or setting that only gets spelled out to a useful degree in a later supplement. The core tells you that Project Utopia exists and is super-important, and if you actually want to do anything with it, you have to get the book for it. The core tells you the Directive exists and… exists, and if you want to find out what it actually does and how you might make any sort of use of it, you have to get the book for it. You get the idea.

In the case of Worldwide Phase One, the promise it fulfils is actually that of the world being about to change (probably for the worse). The core book swore up and down that shit was about to hit the fan, and then spent the next ten supplements outlining a setting where people mostly sat around talking about maybe possibly doing something at some point, if only they could figure out what, but honestly they weren’t too excited about it. Well, here’s where that changes. This book shakes things up, and in doing so gives you a sense of how and why things might go from the saccharine sweetness of the core book to the complete mess that will lead to the Trinity timeline.

We start out with a pompous introduction explaining that unlike other, inferior games, the setting of Aberrant is going to move. Yeah, you and everyone else’s, dude, metaplot bloat was the style of the time. Anyway, there is a bitchy little aside in there somewhere about how “novas are getting tired of fixing world problems they didn’t cause.” Remember that odd little suggestion that novas have been washed clean of the ancestral sins of humanity, because it’s going to come up later.

SCENARIO ONE: STRANGE BEDFELLOWS

The first scenario details the 2008 US election, where for the first time a nova is on the Democratic ticket. The players are there to either help him win, help one of his opponents win, or replace him and run for the presidency themselves. It’s pretty decent stuff; it’s open-ended, without a rigid storyline but with each candidate being given a bunch of tactics and schemes that they may resort to to win the race, and a few sneaky manipulators trying to interfere from the sidelines. It does suggest crudely jury-rigging the combat system to function as “social combat” in order to represent the political mudslinging, and that’s the worst idea ever, but still, it’s easy enough to ignore.

The problem is that we’re dealing with politics now, and that means that we’re going to be dealing with White Wolf’s politics, and White Wolf’s politics were always the most obnoxious one possible, as delusional as they were blithely convinced of their own self-evidence. For all the books up to this point, they have been easy to ignore, because the books have been so uninspired and by-the-numbers that none of the writers felt like getting on their soap box, but here… Well, let’s take a look at the candidates, shall we?

• For the Democrats, we have Randel “the Fireman” Portman, who’s the world’s first recorded nova. The Democratic Party has put him on the ticket in a desperate bid to win, because everyone is so disappointed in them after Bill Clinton that they are otherwise screwed. Yes, really, that’s the state of things in this setting. Anyway, Randel is a nice, boring guy who wants nice, boring things and is really nice, but boring. Oh, and he’s pro-Utopia, because they seem nicely boring to him.
• For the Libertarians, we have the incumbent President, Lauren Pendleton. Yes, really. Because see, after Bill Clinton’s sex scandal destroyed all credibility for the Democrats, the next Republican President also had a sex scandal that destroyed all credibility for the Republicans, so clearly it was time for a Libertarian girlboss. The wish-fulfilment was strong here, I feel… Anyway, her thing is that while her official platform of Make the Government Small Enough to Drown in the Sink is objectively correct and perfect, she has disappointed everyone by not being sufficiently true to it – she’s even signed some acts of (gasp!) big government! So her position is a bit shaky because of that.
• For the Republicans, we have Bernard Morrison, who is a twinkly grandpa type who’s a born-again Christian and genuinely a pretty cool guy. See, it’s ironic, because Pendleton has all the objectively correct politics but is personally flawed, while Morrison has all the objectively incorrect politics but is personally decent!
• For the newly formed American Eagle Party (think MAGA. No, really, they’re… they’re just MAGA, imagined twenty years before MAGA were a thing. Like, America first, throw out all the scary immigrants, get rid of all those nasty civil liberties, all that stuff. Yeah, I’ll give the game credit for being prescient here, as depressing as that is…), we have Mark Anthony Green, who is a horrible sociopath and the worst person ever. Like… that’s his whole deal. He sucks.

So even getting past the improbability of the Democrats having messed up so badly that they need to resort to gimmicks like a nova candidate when the conservatives have obligingly split their vote three ways… This was really written by a bunch of DINOs, isn’t it? You get the distinct feeling that this was how the White Wolf writers felt every election season: they wanted so badly to vote for a cool libertarian or a folksy compassionate conservative, but ewwwww, those were too close to the icky, beer-bellied, pickup-driving, baseball-watching rednecks, so there was no choice but to hold your nose and vote for one of those spineless stand-for-nothing liberals because at least they were a little urbane about it.

Which, I feel, is about the most obnoxiously self-flattering political philosophy you could possibly take. Like, no matter where you stand, the writers manage to be looking down their noses at you. So of course they’ve written it into the game as if it was the most obvious, common-sensical perspective you could imagine.

But let’s move on, because it gets worse, oh God, it gets so much worse…

SCENARIO TWO: THE APOSTASY

The second scenario concerns one of Team Tomorrow’s most powerful novas, Antaeus, getting fed up and leaving. See, Project Utopia is catching some flak over the whole “sterility plague” thing (which still is and always will be stupid) so they want to repeat their crowning achievement of terraforming Ethiopia’s deserts, this time with the Sahara, hoping that that will buy them back some goodwill. But they’re in such a hurry to do it that they overrule Antaeus when he brings up environmental concerns, and Antaeus has at this point evolved so far away from the baseline that he’s less of a person and more of a living embodiment of science-driven environmentalism. Accordingly, he doesn’t take it well, and realising that he doesn’t actually need Utopia for anything, he just walks straight out of Team Tomorrow Central’s headquarters and disappears to parts unknown.

This gets all the various factions in a tizzy, either because they just lost a major asset or because they’re hoping to gain one by talking Antaeus into joining their side. In the meantime, though, Utopia goes on with the terraforming process, pushing their novas so hard that at least one gets overcome with Taint, goes crazy and has to be put down like a rabid animal. Antaeus eventually turns out to be hanging around the area being terraformed and invites a bunch of representatives of different factions to talk to him, including the players (standing in for whatever faction they are part of). Once he has a chat with all of them, he decides… not to decide anything, but just sort of continues hanging around while Utopia claims that he’s on a leave of absence.

Now, the setup for this is actually really good. Firstly, we have Project Utopia showing flaws in precisely the way they should be showing flaws – not by indulging in melodramatically evil conspiracies, but in cutting corners, being slaves to PR, and making moral compromises to clean up their messes that just end up causing more messes and even larger compromises. Secondly, it shows a powerful nova going… strange. Not bad, just strange. Taint hasn’t turned Antaeus evil, but it’s turned him inhuman – into something that’s more like a pagan god than a man, obsessed with his personal areas of interest to the exclusion of all else. Those are the two things that I feel should be the ones that push the setting further and further towards an apocalyptic conflict.

But I have a problem with the ending, because it’s such a letdown. The players get to argue the righteousness of their cause to Antaeus, in competition with the most silver-tongued members of their rival factions, and Antaeus… just shrugs and chooses none of the above? This should be the point where, just like in the first scenario, the players got to actually decide a major part of how the story would evolve going forward. And yet, that doesn’t happen. The big payoff for the players seems to be that they get the honour of interacting with a lot of super-cool, super-powerful NPCs! Remember that too, because that’ll come back with a vengeance.

But here, I think I’ll wrap up for the week. The worst is yet to come and I’ve run out of ranting energy. Stay tuned for next week, when we get the best scenario and the worst one.