Mister Monster's Workshop

Category: Aberrant

  • Aberrant readthrough: postscript

    Aberrant readthrough: postscript

    So, some three months ago I got it into my head that I was going to tackle Aberrant as my next porting project, and since then, I have been manfully working my way through the 16-book first edition. My original estimate was that it started pretty bad, but got slightly better. Then I found that after it got slightly better, it got a whole lot worse.

    So does that mean I’m giving up on porting it? NEVER!!! I will hammer this stupid thing into something playable, just you watch me. It just might take me, er… a little longer than anticipated.

    Still, let’s start with sketching out a few things that need to be emphasised, de-emphasised, or completely changed to make use of the potential that is actually there.

    NERF ALL THE UBER-NPCS

    This is a great idea for any White Wolf game, frankly, DIvis Mal, Caestus Pax, Antaeus, and all the other monstrosities need to be brought down to a level where they can at least be affected by things that the PCs do. Essentially, everything that calls for Quantum 6+ needs to be cut.

    This is not to say that some NPCs shouldn’t be a lot more powerful than starting PCs. Divis Mal really is the world’s most powerful nova. He’s just not an untouchable god. And he really can whup Caestus Pax’s butt, which is something that should make everyone not 100% aligned with his values very concerned, he just has to break a sweat doing it and will have a few bruises of his own by the end. No unstoppable forces, no immovable objects.

    And while I’m at the subject:

    NO MORE KISSING OF DIVIS MAL’S ASS

    No matter how perfectly toned it no doubt is! Divis Mal doesn’t get to be 100% right and perfect, because no one gets to be 100% right and perfect. He needs to be presented as a larger-than-life character with larger-than-life flaws. Specifically, his assumption that novas will naturally gravitate to agreeing with him about everything (except for maybe a few details to spice up the late-night philosophical discussions, ho ho) is going to be founded on nothing but his egomania. Mal feels lonely, and he assumes it’s because no one is as smart and powerful as him, because he’s the kind of narcissist who naturally assumes that. The real reason he’s lonely is because he is unable to accept that someone might disagree with him without being an idiot.

    So no, Novas don’t evolve into a One Race of enlightened beings who will leave those filthy, filthy baselines behind to create a better, brighter, and more fabulous world. They evolve into a thousand different single-individual species, each one exaggerated into a caricature of his or her original biases and values. Mal hasn’t created companions for himself. He’s just created thousands of beings who will all be both as supremely powerful and as emotionally isolated as himself.

    And guess what? That’s not going to end well for anyone.

    NO MORE STUPID STERILISATION PLOT

    Because it’s dumb. It makes no sense in or out of universe.

    But fine, let’s not throw out the baby with the bathwater. Let’s just say that eruption naturally causes fertility problems, precisely because it does start revamping your entire biology to better suit your idea of how it’s meant to work. Again, a nova is essentially a species of one – and the definition of a species is something that can’t reproduce with another species. That’s why everyone is hot and single, not because of some nefarious plot.

    Then let’s add the qualification that there are ways to allow novas to breed, but it takes either special medical procedures (that must be unique for each nova) or rare quantum powers. That’s in keeping with the setting, where those are ways that Utopia’s stupid sterility plague can be cured, but it turns nova infertility into a realistic-feeling consequence of personal evolution, not some skeevy conspiracy. We can even make it so that Utopia is supposed to be working on a cure but are notoriously dragging their feet about it and designating some of the more promising procedures as “black-tech” since they’re secretly worried that it might lead to a nova population explosion that might just rip the world asunder.

    Still a little too lurid and demoralising for my taste, but fine – we’re looking to make the least active changes to the setting here.

    UTOPIA’S FAILINGS NEED TO BE MORE REALISTIC

    Having gotten rid of the sterility plague, we need to come up with some better shady elements of Project Utopia. And the books actually do fumble in the direction of some on occasion, they just invariably fall back on inept Proteus schemes.

    So: Utopia really is trying to fix the world’s problems. The problem is, the world’s problems are complicated, and fixing one tends to either worsen another or create a brand new one. Brilliant experimental fixes for the environment turn out to have long-term consequences that no one foresaw. Ending poverty requires erasing local culture. Vigorous crime-fighting tramples all over the civil liberties of innocent people caught in the drag net. Not everyone agrees with Project Utopia’s solutions, because those solutions have actual downsides to them.

    Enter Project Proteus. Their job is to cover up all that nasty moral ambiguity and create the illusion that this is a bright, shiny superhero setting where the caped supermen are completely trustworthy and absolutely capable of fixing everything with a smile and a wink. Anyone complains? Discredit them. Anyone refuses to cooperate? Blackmail them. A T2M-er marketed as a wholesome role model gets drunk and makes an ass of himself? Bribe everyone into staying quiet about it.

    If someone starts to notice too many things they’re not supposed to and can’t be gently deterred, then of course more drastic measures need to be taken. Sometimes people really do disappear into black sites or have unfortunate accidents. The really dark stuff is still there, it’s just there at the end of a long trail of logic that starts with precisely the kind of brand-management and message-polishing that’s considered just common sense for anyone in the business.

    Divis Mal is sure that he’s right, and that the only reason people disagree with him is because they’re stupid – so he tries to make them smarter. Project Utopia is sure that it’s right, and that the only reason people disagree with it is that they’re stupid – so it tries to present them with a simpler, brighter picture that no one could possibly disagree with. Neither of them ever considers the possibility that people might disagree with them because they’re wrong. They’re each other’s reflection, and between the two of them they’ll wreck the world by trying to fix it.

    PUT TAINT FRONT AND CENTRE

    Taint should be the main event. It’s what makes the setting fundamentally unstable – and thus dynamic and interesting. Taint is, if not the only reason why Project Utopia can’t create a real-world Justice League of moral paragons, then at least one major reason. By the time someone has the power of Superman, he no longer has the inclination to be Superman, insofar as he ever had it. Why protect a human race that you can no longer relate to, either physically or mentally or both? It’s not that Taint turns you evil, necessarily. It’s that it makes you something other than human – and it’s hard to empathise with anything that is too different from yourself.

    Taint is also the reason why Divis Mal’s plan for the One Race is doomed. Again, he assumes that there is only a single line of evolution leading away from humanity, and that it leads to become something very much like him, since he is clearly perfection incarnate! In fact, every nova’s Taint will send him or her off in a different direction – each one an infinitely long branch of an increasingly bizarre and disjointed tree.

    And of course, sometimes a nova’s initial self-image is so warped that Taint really does turn them evil, because “evil” is the only way to describe the thing they most long to be. The Church of Astaroth should function as a sobering example, not a contemptible strawman. What happens when someone gets offered the chance to become whatever he want to be, and what he thinks he wants to be is cartoonishly evil? Then cartoonish evil becomes a real thing, and that’s not silly or pathetic. It’s terrifying.

    THE DIRECTIVE NEEDS SOMETHING TO DO

    The Directive may just be the most underserved part of the setting, to the point where I’m not exactly sure why the writers even put it in there, since they were so uninterested in doing anything with it. It’s presented as a cynical, scheming organisation of manipulators and secret agents, but there already is one of those, it’s called Project Proteus. The Directive can’t be the paranoia-inducing hidden hand behind the scenes, because Project Proteus already fills that role with more gusto.

    But fine – it’s there. And it needs something to do. I think that something should be this:

    The Directive is there to oppose attempts to change the world.

    Changing the world is meant to be a thing you can do in Aberrant, but since that’s so hard to turn into something gameable, it’s a theme that’s mostly paid lip service to. You want to revitalise the economy of the Philippines? Okay, then we can either have you make a single roll to see if you succeed at that lengthy project, or we can play out a long, boring series of meetings and late-night policy-writing sessions. Either way, it sounds kind of boring.

    So let the Directive stand in for the inertia of the setting. You want to revitalise the economy? Sure, you can do that, because gosh-darn-it, you’re a nova, you can do anything! But the Directive doesn’t want you to do it. It probably has some kind of reasons – it’ll disrupt things elsewhere, it’ll empower radical elements, or maybe the crooks who benefit from the Philippines being underdeveloped offered them something they want. Either way, this thing you want to do? The Directive doesn’t want it done.

    So now we an antagonist with some agency, not just boring procedures. Now you’ll have to fight off attacks by high-tech assassins. Figure out who’s blackmailing people into dropping their support for your plans. Prevent attempts at sabotaging your infrastructure. You know. Roleplaying stuff.

    And of course, sometimes the Directive will be right. Sometimes the thing you’re doing really is going to have nasty consequences that you’re blithely ignoring – just like Project Utopia is prone to.

    All right. That’ll do for a start. We still haven’t gotten into the actual rules aspect yet, but first I have to figure out how to actually run the game. But I think I can do this. I thiiiiink I can do this.

  • Indecesive superheroics

    Indecesive superheroics

    I am happy to report that I am over my Warhammer 40,000 obsession for now. So instead I am geting obsessive about Aberrant instead. Hey, I got to get my OCD on somehow.

    For those who don’t know, and that may be a not insignificant number of people, Aberrant is one of the lesser known White Wolf games from the 90s, one of the ones that weren’t World of Darkness or Exalted. It’s a superhero game where one person in a million has “erupted” into a “nova” who can subconsciously manipulate the quantum energies of the universe, which in practice means that they develop superpowers like flight and nigh-invulnerability and we’re going to pretend that it makes sense Because Quantum. Oh, and though no one knows it yet, all novas are slowly mutating into mad, godlike mutants called aberrants who humanity will fight in a horrible cataclysmic war, because it’s just not White Wolf if your soul isn’t being slowly devoured by something.

    Otherwise, the big schtick of Aberrant is that it tries to be semi-realistic with the existence of superpowers. Most people don’t in fact put on colourful costumes and run around fighting crime – some do, but they’re mostly employed by the government or the UN, and far more novas are out there getting cushy corporate jobs, hiring themselves out as mercenaries in Third World proxy wars, or using their super-charisma to become world-famous celebrities.

    It’s all kind of interesting in theory, but the execution is a little half-hearted. For one thing, it has that problem White Wolf games frequently had whereby it wasn’t exactly clear what you were meant to do. In a regular superhero game you stop bank robberies, but this game is all about avoiding that kind of cliches, and that just raises the question of what you’re meant to do instead. There are all sorts of things you could conceivably do, but since they’re all presented as completely optional, they’re not especially well-supported. Which is a little like writing D&D but just describing the monsters and magic in general terms while mentioning in the passing that some people go looking for treasures in old ruins, but you totally don’t have to be among those if you don’t want to. It leaves the whole thing with a great deal of assembling required.

    It’s also got a major case of the White Wolf metaplot problem. Now, for most of these games, I don’t think the metaplot was ever as much of a problem as people made it out to be – it provided you with some texture and ambience, but the scope of the game would likely be about intrigue within a single city or region anyway, so it was easy enough to stay away from it. Not so with Aberrant. Here, the metaplot is in your face all the time, with the fundamental unimportance of single characters (yes, even the incredibly overpowered ones!) constantly stressed. Oh, this nova is really into Quebec secessionism? Yeah, that’s a ridiculous non-issue that doesn’t even matter now, so I am honestly perplexed as to how I’m supposed to care about it in a setting where physics have been turned on their head.

    And to add to the problem, the metaplot is really kind of… well… bad. Like the rest of the game, it seems to not know what to do with itself. Like, it revolves around the shiny happy UN agency Project Utopia using novas to turn the world into a shiny happy paradise. But it has also managed (somehow! Don’t get me started on how stupid that plot hook is…) to sterilise 100% of all novas without anyone noticing. But it also wants to create a peaceful, enlightened one world government. But it also imprisons unruly novas and vivisects them. But it has also all but eliminated crime and pollution. But it also keeps isolated wars brewing to get novas killed off at a steady rate. But…

    I am getting whiplash just from thinking about it. Like, I think it’s meant to be a case of a shiny happy facade hiding a terrible secret, but the facade is so shiny and happy and the secret is so terrible that it’s impossible to take either one seriously. It doesn’t give you that nice White Wolf feeling of a flawed ideal that it is possible to champion or oppose – it gives you the feeling that the pro-Project Utopia parts were written by a raving Project Utopia fanboy and the anti-Project Utopia parts were written by a foaming-at-the-mouth Project Utopia hater. The one thing that stays the same between them is that anyone who disagrees is clearly some sort of idiot or reprobate. That’s not shades of grey, it’s black and white constantly switching places!

    To make it work, I think you’d need to actually bone down in Project Utopia’s methods and figure out how, realistically, they would be flawed. Crime has been eliminated? Okay, whose civil liberties were trampled to make that happen? A unified world government? Yeah, because stripping away the national sovereignty of poorer places surely won’t lead to them getting exploited even harder by the richer ones! You could make it into a study of why superhero morality (which was, after all, originally intended for small boys, no matter how much latter-day geeks tried to graft mature sensibilities onto it) simply doesn’t work in the real world, why we have tradeoffs and compromises, That’d be really interesting.

    But no, instead we get one character screaming “what’s your sperm count?!” at another.

    All of which means that this is a game that needs some tender loving care. Which is, as it happens, my stock in trade…