Mister Monster's Workshop

Aha! Ahahahaha! I did it! I read the whole stupid thing! Half of it I didn’t particularly like and the other half I outright loathed, but I got through it all and now I can despise it while fully informed!

… sometimes I think the Internet has just broken me.

Anyway, here’s the last stretch. First off we have the Player’s Guide, which is usually the title in any game line where they cram in anything and everything they couldn’t find a place for anywhere else. Let’s see if there are some nuggets in there.

We start off badly with the infamous This Is Not The Superfriends essay, where we are berated for being so unimaginative as to play superheroes. Why, if we would only open our minds a little, we could play far more interesting things like… er… hmm… a teleporting courier of some sort! Or a mentally disabled pro wrestler! Don’t you see, the possibilities are endless! But suuuure, you can play a game where you wear tights and have code names and punch villains, if that’s really the level you want to stay on. Like, if you’re a complete philistine you could do that, yes.

Uh-huh. Here’s the problem with that. Well, there are many problems with that, but here’s the main problem with that. The game doesn’t offer any sort of support at all for playing one of those “more creative, more realistic” character types. And I know this for a fact, because I have read through the whole stupid thing so I can have an informed opinion! In the game that is delivered over sixteen books, of which this one is the fifteenth, most character you encounter wear tights. And have code names. And punch, if not villains, then at least people they don’t like. The situations you’re set up to encounter tend to involve international intrigue and looming large-scale disaster, not navel-gazing reveries of how it would really feel to have superpowers, you know, really, I mean really.

And there is a very good reason for that, which is that it’s hard to even imagine what a game about navel-gazing reveries would even look like or how you’d play it. Immersion is all very well, and there should certainly be more to most games than just rolling to hit, but you also need some kind of tangible conflict to interact with. And that was something White Wolf always seemed to acknowledge only reluctantly and with the greatest distaste, because ew, dice-rolling, how uncultured.

Okay, I’m five pages in and already I’m ranting, I’d better move along…

Immediately after the section about how shallow and boring you are for wanting to play a character with a code name… we get a long worldbuilding section about how novas choose their code names. Because this game is immune to irony. Okay, so I understand it’s really because the different chapters were written by different people who didn’t communicate very well, but still, you couldn’t have created a better example of tonal mismatch if you’d tried to…

And following that is a long worldbuilding section about novas acting as vigilantes. Are we sure they weren’t intentionally parodying themselves at this point?

There’s a semi-useful part about how you rise in the ranks as part of different factions, and what Backgrounds you might gain to symbolise your new assets. There’s also a rundown of each Background, later on, that provides a bit more guidance for how it might actually be used. That’s cool. Also, someone realised that the Eufibre Background (which gives you… a spandex suit that won’t get shredded by your powers) was underwhelming, so now there’s also the option to use it to make your suit change shape, have it send out tentacles or form wings and just generally do the whole Venom-symbiote thing. That’s even cooler.

There’s a section of rules for going into space. Which is nice, I guess, very superhero-y… but it’d be even nicer if there was actually anything out there to get excited over. I mean, I’m pretty sure sentient alien life exists in the Aberrant universe, but apparently we’re not going to be using that until Trinity?

The OpNet gets a bit more description and it’s even more hilariously obvious that it’s basically the Internet of today. Like, credit where it’s due, they anticipated a lot of upcoming possibilities and annoyances at a time when dial-up modems were still state of the art. We also get stats for a pair of nova documentary-makers. Okay, I guess that might be useful at some point…

Novas used to exist before N-Day! They were weaker, but they were around, and people only don’t know that because Project Proteus has shushed it up (for… some reason?). So you can play a historical Aberrant game if you want to use these piece-of-crap rules without the piece-of-crap setting. Whatever.

We finally get a look behind the curtain of the Aeon Society (I may not have mentioned them. They’re the vaguely benevolent secret conspiracy of rich people who founded and run Project Utopia), and some general setting information about just what quantum powers actually are. In addition to novas, there is also something called psiads who don’t control quantum energies but “noetic energies,” which are basically magic, as if quantum powers weren’t… Anyway, psiads are weaker than novas and have subtler powers, but they don’t suffer Taint, so that’s nice. The Aeon Society knows about psiads and are discreetly researching them.

There’s also a third kind of super called paramorphs, but you can’t play one of those. There’s only one in existence and he’s super-cool and wonderful and godlike and DEAR LORD, I’m so glad that the game ended before we got to see more of that guy because I’d have ended up hating him more than Divis Mal. He also effectively runs the Aeon Society and thus in extension Project Utopia, but he’s totally not responsible for anything bad Project Utopia does because he’s just too noble to use brute, authoritarian force to get them to stop vivisecting people. Arrrgggghhhhh.

There are new nova powers. They are boring. You know, that bears repeating. The powers in this White Wolf game… are boring. That would be White Wolf, famous for being terrible at power mechanics but great at power flavour. You read a game like Exalted and go over the Charm lists, and you keep going, “oooooh, that’s cool. It’s absolutely, completely useless and I’d be screwing myself over by taking it instead of something that just gave me a flat dice bonus, but it sure is cool.” This game fails at the thing that the writers built their brand on being good at. Let that sink in.

There are overpowered powers that the players are never, ever, in a million years going to be able to buy and that are just there to justify the abilities of uber-NPCs. They are boring too.

There are rules for creating artificial superpower-gizmos like freeze rays and jet packs and stuff. They are delivered with a lot of sniffing and sneering and “well, if you must have them, here they are.” Yeah, you really hate the idea that power might come from something other than inherent speshulness, don’t you?

The book wraps with some “nova affiliations” (superteams. They’re superteams). That’s a thing I have actually asked for, so that’s nice. Nippontai finally gets outlined, and so does a Scandinavian team (except the writers seem to think that the Netherlands are part of Scandinavia…), an Australian team, a doomsday prepper team living in Antarctica (first mentioned back in The Directive, finally described here), a psychic team (that includes some psiads who don’t realise they’re psiads and not novas), an ecoterrorist team (who kill and torture people, and which the writers clearly meant for the players to be able to join. Yeah…), a team that explores space, and a gay team (I haven’t said anything about the game’s strident LGBT activism and I’m not going to start now, but… yeah, that was a cause the writers were clearly very passionate about). Well, that helps, actually I’d kind of have liked to see a similar writeup of the four Team Tomorrow groups, since they’re supposed to be the most high-profile group in existence, but, well…

What we do get is a membership roster of… Teen Tomorrow (ugh. Too cute), the teen superhero team. Which is such a terrible idea in a “realistic” setting that even Caestus Pax, authoritarian strawman that he is, is against it, but here they are anyway. And they have a Teragen counterpoint called the Kabal. Ugh.

Well, that wraps it up. Then all that remains is:

You know those crime syndicates that have hung around in the background for the entire game line? The ones that seem custom-made to provide antagonists but that are so vaguely defined as to give you nothing to work with? Well, here we finally get a closer look at them, and it turns out that they… do criminal-syndicate stuff.

Well, that was sure worth waiting fifteen books for!

Sigh. To be a little more specific, when Project Utopia ended crime as one of its opening moves (which it apparently did by loopholing the use of super-senses and mindreading as not counting as illegal surveillance and therefore being admissible in court, in a move that should definitely have gotten every halfway-sincere human rights activist up in arms but was apparently accepted by any but a few malcontents because “everyone was tired of seeing the mobsters get away with stuff”… I hate this game so much), the crooks who were smart and ruthless enough to not get caught banded together into four super-syndicates that now rule the underworld. Which is… convenient for ease of use, if nothing else; you don’t have to read up on the particulars of Mexican drug cartels when there’s just one big organisation that does all the drug-smuggling from Latin America.

There’s the Camparelli-Zhokov Mega-Syndicate. They’re the Sicilian mafia that’s teamed up with the Russian mafia so that we can have everything called “the mafia” under one umbrella, and never mind that they don’t actually have much to do with each other… There’s the Heaven Thunder Triads, who are Chinese and mystical and insidious and filthy and did I mention that this book has a sidebar berating you for indulging in ethnic stereotypes? There’s the Nakato Gumi, who are the yakuza and hyper-modern and also effectively allied with the Directorate (because the Nakato Gumi owns Kuro-Tek, which is a Japanese company that produces all sorts of interesting weapons that Utopia doesn’t want people to have). And there’s the Medellín Cartel, who are South American drug smugglers and also Nazis for some reason.

Naturally, the book does a lot of humming and hawing and trying to nudge you away from actually using its content. See, Project Utopia doesn’t actually want to fight crime (they want to attack the “root causes,” apparently), and the syndicates don’t actually have a lot of nova operatives for them to fight, so, you know, are you sure you wouldn’t rather play a mentally disabled pro wrestler? But fine, if you absolutely must, you can fight gangsters, or play gangsters, just as long as you keep in mind that it doesn’t actually matter to the setting in any way.

The book closes with a sample character. Who is… Spider-Man. Except a crook. So now we have that.

And that’s it, I’m done. I hope you enjoyed my increasingly deranged ranting, though I can’t really say the same. Next week, I might try to put together some kind of closing thoughts, and then I’ll see about writing about something I don’t actually hate. Now that’ll be a nice change of pace…

We’re in the last quarter of our readthrough of first edition Aberrant, White Wolf’s not-very-successful attempt at a superhero game. So far, the my reaction has been mainly annoyed boredom, with the occasional bout of psychotic rage. ANTI-LIFE JUSTIFIES MY HATE! ANTI-LIFE JUSTIFIES MY HATE! ANTI-LIFE JUSTIFIES MY HATE! ANTI-LIFE JUSTIFIES MY… ahem.

This week’s collection of playable scenarios contain a bit of both.

Like Worldwide Phase One, it contains four scenarios, all of which are meant to be playable for a group of any faction and which revolve around major global situations. In fact, in a lot of ways, I think that this collection is the best example of what you were meant to actually do in Aberrant – the previous one was more about pushing the metaplot (and repeatedly made the players little more than the audience for the same), but here the incidents are contained enough that the setting is pretty much the same at the end as it was at the beginning. So, what does your character do in Aberrant? Have four examples.

SCENARIO ONE: THE POPE OF BABYLON

Ungh. This is the “psychotic rage” portion of the book, right at the start. I mean, it’s not as bad as the Divis Mal ass-kissing in One, but… well, let’s take it from the start.

The scenario is based on a plot hook from The Storyteller Companion, so again with the self-cannibalising… Anyway, it concerns a scheme by the eeeeeeevil Catholic organisation Opus Dei to eeeeeeevilly frame the cool, liberal Pope for crimes he did not commit, so as to politically neuter him. Did we mention that Opus Dei is eeeeeeeevil? Don’t worry if you missed it, the book will remind you. And remind you. And remind you.

And, like… did the writers get that Opus Dei isn’t some fictional supervillain organisation? It’s an actual thing, with actual people in it! I’m sure a lot of those people are ones I wouldn’t particularly get along with, but they are flesh-and-blood human beings trying to live their best lives, and the writers are just straight up calling them brain-washed monsters. This is even worse than what they did last week, because at least the Church Astaroth and the Church of Michael Archangel are fictional organisations even if they are pretty clearly meant to stand in for all Satanists and all evangelicals respectively. Like, there was the fig leaf of them at least theoretically being works of fantasy. But here, it’s not some invented Catholic order that is totally-not-Opus-Dei-wink-wink-nudge-nudge. It’s just Opus Dei.

White Wolf always had this… thing in all their games where they kept being frustrated that their audience kept engaging with the fantastic elements they actually put in their game instead of using it as a starting point for dealing with Real Important Issues. A lot of sidebars of variable bitchiness was spent chewing the reader out for ignoring the regular, non-magical parts of the modern world in favour of having vampires fight werewolves.

With Aberrant, I guess, they were trying the novel approach of actually putting those Real Important Issues into the actual game instead of expecting their customers to do it for them. A lot of page count is genuinely dedicated to explaining how the real world works (or how the White Wolf writers thought it worked, at any rate – they had a tendency to be know-nothing know-it-alls) and how the players can affect it. It is, as far as it goes, a commendable step in the right direction.

It also shows very clearly why it was and always would have been a really bad idea. Because, see, a roleplaying game requires villains, people that it’s okay to beat up. When you create your villains out of thin air, that is perfectly fine, and you should definitely ignore the wet blankets who whine about racism against orcs. But when you insist on your game being about interacting with the actual, as-is, no-names-changed real world… you are effectively taking some real people and saying, “these are villains. These are okay to hurt.”

And that is not cool with me. No matter how little I would get along with those people, I will never agree with dehumanising a person who actually exists.

And just in case you thought I was overreacting, the very last page of the scenario lets you know that that cool, liberal Pope that you’ve spent the scenario fighting to defend? He’s owned by the mafia. What, you thought there was such a thing as a good Catholic? Don’t be silly!

I hate you, Aberrant. I really freaking hate you.

SCENARIO TWO: A GREEN AND PLEASANT LAND

This one is about an evil British aristocrat who’s erupted as a super-genius nova and who’s putting together a sinister scheme to return England to the top of the international food chain. He does so partly by means of a brain-washing cult disguised as a gentleman’s club. It’s… passable. I mean, it’s basically a slightly-more-realistic version of a supervillain plot, and that’s where Aberrant is the most comfortable, for better or worse.

On the other hand, the multiple pages at the start that describe how England has turned into festering pile of decay from refusing to cooperate with Project Utopia… feels excessively mean-spirited. I mean, did we miss the part where Project Utopia is run by a bunch of yahoos whose laughable schemes always fail? You’d think that the writers would have some sympathy with the Brits wanting to keep those yahoos at arm’s length, but of course that’s not how it works. It’s only the glorious novas who shouldn’t let Project Utopia tell them what to do – those filthy baselines should know what’s best for them and bend the knee.

I hate you, Aberrant. Though not, I admit, as much as I did after the first scenario. I mean, let’s face it, the British have a long and proud tradition of putting themselves down in very much the ways this book puts them down. I feel like Terry Pratchett would have been like, “well, they could have said it better, but they have a point…”

SCENARIO THREE: DOMINION

This one is about a megalomaniac trying to conquer the Ukraine. Ehehehehehe, yyyyyyyyeah, that’s a little more uncomfortable in the Year of Our Lord 2026 than it was when it was written, it must be said…

Having that said, this one I don’t have any major problems with. I mean, it’s not great, and there are a couple of things I could pick on – a particular sidebar whining about how players always have to ruin Teh Story by having their characters, like, do stuff, for example – but I’ve already ranted my fill this week. Plus, it’s got novas actually fighting across a major city for military objectives, and that’s sort of hardcore in a good way.

SCENARIO FOUR: WHERE HEAVEN ENDS

This one is actually really good. I mean, the premise is that Project Proteus is trying to do something evil, again, and completely messing it up, again, in a way that causes a ton of trouble for everyone, again. And I’m honestly getting a little tired of Proteus being portrayed as this hyper-secretive group of super-geniuses who walk between the rain drops but are somehow still not capable of tying their own shoes. But the actual content? It’s solid.

Specifically, Proteus is setting up a sting operation in the all-nova club The Amp Room in Ibiza to nab a whole bunch of Teragen and Aberrant members. But amazingly enough, storming into a place with several hundred superhuman beings who are most of them drunk off their asses and bellowing that everyone’s arrested… does not work out too well. In fact, it results in an all-out brawl that spreads across Ibiza and practically lays it in ruins.

Meanwhile, the players are tasked with finding a couple of novas who have (it turns out) been kidnapped by an aspiring elite calling himself the Angel of Bones and who plans to execute them in front of a bunch of journalists to show off what a badass he is. They get a front-row seat to all the human misery of a natural disaster, while also having to dodge flying debris and quantum bolts from the fights that keep going on, and avoid attack helicopters from the militaries that are trying to restore order. It’s pretty intense, and it makes actual good use of the setting.

Oh, and I mentioned last time that Aberrant might hate bulimics? Yeah, apparently the Angel of Bones used to be obese, and he erupted from trying to starve himself thin, so now he’s a walking skeleton who can kill people by causing them to gain several hundred pounds of fat in seconds. I’m… genuinely uncertain whether that is tasteless and offensive or if it’s so tasteless and offensive that it’s actually kind of awesome.

Though the fact that it’s implied that Count “stop maliciously misquoting me, I only said you were like monkeys to me!” Orzaiz spends his captivity as a giant tub of lard to keep him from easily escaping? That I find genuinely hilarious. Welcome to life in the plus sizes, you smarmy bastard!

Okay. Let’s freaking do this. The second half of Worldwide Phase One. This is where it stopped being funny for me.

But first things first. There are two more scenarios in this one, and only one of them is actually bad. The other one, in fact, is quite good.

SCENARIO THREE: GABRIEL

The first scenario concerns a nova named Gabriel “the Miracle” Melchior who runs one of those nova cults we keep hearing about, called the Church of the Immanent Escheaton. It’s another one of those things that was mentioned in the core book with a lot of “ooooh, there’s something going oooooon heeeeere” foreshadowing, and here we actually get to find out what we’re meant to use it for, which is this specific scenario and nothing else. Oh well.

Gabriel Melchior (which is apparently his given name, and that is something that would feel perfectly natural in a cheesy comic book but really looks out of place in Aberrant‘s thinking-man’s-superhero-story ) is incredibly powerful, can generate super-plagues at will, and is also suffers from Taint that has made him go loopy in the head. That being a bad combination, Project Proteus kidnapped him and stuffed him in their main secret prison slash Nazi research lab in Bahrain, where they first tried to cure him and then, when that proved impossible, proceeded to just slice him up and try to figure out what made him tick. Because Proteus.

And then, when the terraforming of the Sahara got rolling (as mentioned in the previous post), someone had the bright idea to bring him out and make him use his powers to speed things up there. Because Proteus. He obviously escaped, about ten times as loopy as he was before, and now he’s holed up in the CotIE’s compound in Nevada and yelling over the OpNet about how the end of days is at hand and he’s going to unleash plagues upon the world that will kill one third of all baselines.

The players, of course, are tasked by whatever faction they work for to get him to… you know… not do that, probably by killing him. The Teragen don’t want him dead, necessarily, but they’d also rather not get to a situation where the remaining two thirds of all baselines have every reason to hate novas, so they want to talk him down and get him to go into hiding with them. Meanwhile, the Directive is setting up a backup plan of erupting a neutron bomb by the compound, which they hope will fry everything in it so completely that even Gabriel’s quantum germs won’t survive.

This, by and large, is actually a scenario I like. Again, it shows Utopia having done something bad, and since this time it’s specifically Proteus it’s extra bad. But just like in the second scenario, you can see why they did it – they want to cure Taint, so they need to examine a heavily Tainted nova, and they had exactly one of those available and no idea when they might get hold of another. And then it all went pear-shaped because someone got it into his head to be ambitious and pull one of those “underhanded means of achieving positive ends” things that Proteus is supposed to be all about. That actually works pretty well.

The other factions, too, get a nuanced portrayal. The Directive’s plan is the antithesis of Proteus’ – Proteus is amoral in that it takes heedless risks for the promise of great rewards, the Directive is amoral that it will make any sacrifice necessary to avoid taking any risks at all. Utopia are well-intentioned but are also clueless about the fact that it was their own leaders who caused this mess. The Teragen are the most “humanitarian” of the bunch, but they are blinded by ideology in their own way – they want to save Gabriel, and never mind that he really is a walking-talking extinction event who is not in command of his faculties. Everyone gets to be themselves, and no one gets to be the hero.

Could this be it? Could Aberrant finally be starting to live up to its promise? Will it be smooth sailing from here?

AHAHAHAHAHAHAHA I crack me up.

SCENARIO FOUR: INTO THE ARMS OF THE ANGEL OF WRATH

First off, dumb title. I know I’m prone to overcomplicated names and sentences, and because of that, I’m always on the lookout for them. And this is one title that tries to pack in far more melodramatic imagery than it can comfortably hold.

Secondly, this scenario finally wraps up the stupid Aberrant (as in the faction) plot, presumably because the writers realised that it wasn’t anywhere near sturdy enough to hold the weight of the game line. Corbin (Slider’s soccer-playing ne’er-do-well bestie, who founded the Aberrants) has decided to turn himself in, only he’s going to do it right outside of the Project Proteus facility in Bahrain and to maximum press coverage. The players are given the chance to investigate Slider’s death (weren’t they supposed to be doing that the whole time? Wasn’t that the premise of the metaplot? Yeah, this is what I mean when I say that that it was a damp noodle of a plot hook…) and either cover it up good and proper or reveal it to the world.

But of course that’s not where the meat of this scenario is. No, this is the point where the Aberrant writers finally show their hand – and entirely too much of their personal issues at the same time. This is where An Incredibly Important Event In The Game’s Story happens. This is… where their self-insert Gary Stu totally PWNs Superman.

By which I of course mean that Divis Mal shows up outside of Bahrain, Caestus Pax (that guy in the picture, the foremost Team Tomorrow dude) tries to fight him, and he gets trounced. Like, absolutely demolished. The narration is very carefully to stress that it’s not even close, Mal is just toying with him, because he’s a ten million gazillion bajillion times cooler than Pax and TAKE THAT, all the macho jocks who bullied me in high school!!!!

Sorry, do you think I’m exaggerating? No, no, trust me, you cannot even imagine just how smug and snide and mean-spirited the whole thing is. Here, have some choice quotes:

Keep in mind that layers of deception cover everything : Caestus Pax appears to be a paragon of nova-dom but is, in truth, little more than a very powerful bully with a huge playground . Divis Mal appears to be a sinister villain but is truly an idealist (though not necessarily a nice idealist).

First off, this game seems to love the idea that being an “idealist” excuses a lot of things. The head of Project Utopia, who signs off on the sterility plagues and vivisections, is described as an “idealist” in the Project Utopia book, too. I guess he’s also “not necessarily a nice idealist.” I feel like the writers just divided the world into unfeeling brutes and deep people like themselves, and while the deep people weren’t perfect they were at least all worthy of sympathy, unlike the brutes.

But most of all… yeah, such a bully, that Caestus Pax. You know what would have made it easier to accept that? If he had done, at any point of the last ten books, any bullying. In fact, it would have helped if he had done anything other than occasionally be mentioned in passing albeit unflattering terms. The core book, for instance, calls him “the authoritative Caestus Pax” at one point but never goes into how or why he’s authoritative. It just seems like he’s the ersatz-Superman, and the writers see Superman as a big, dumb, smug bully, so therefore they consider it too obvious to need pointing out that Caestus Pax is a bad guy who is unfairly seen as a good guy.

I mean, Jesus, even Garth Ennis put more effort into it than this…

Divis Mal makes his appearance at this point , conclusively demonstrating to Caestus Pax just how pointless (and painful) standing against him really is.

Dear Aberrant: please die.

Once it’s over, the glow fades. The fiery aura dies away, Mal’s preternaturally perfect features apparent to all. Divis Mal floats to the ground, gently lays Pax on his back and kisses him on the forehead. If anyone nearby has some form of enhanced hearing or Mega-Perception 2 or higher(and isn’t deafened from the battle), she can hear Mal whisper, “It is a thing most sad to see a god stooping to serve monkeys. As you grow wiser, 1 hope you’ll see the error of your ways. Perhaps next time, you’ll listen.”

Dear Aberrant: please die in a fire.

Characters who attack him or choose to simply offer insult or meaningless argument will be ignored or swatted away as appropriate. Divis Mal is civilized; he is not a bully, but he need not tolerate fools.

Dear Aberrant: please die in a fire surrounded by the smoking ashes of all your hopes and dreams.

Oh, and over the course of the next few weeks, we are helpfully told, people all over the world are squeeing over how cool Mal is and how he, like, totally demolished Pax, who everyone now sees is lame. And never mind that the people of the world (not being privy to all those OOC assurances that Mal is the good guy, really, don’t be so close-minded, he ONLY thinks that novas shouldn’t obey baselines and that’s completely reasonable and don’t you dare say otherwise!!!) just saw the guy they trusted to protect them get bitch-slapped by the guy who refers to them as “monkeys.” No, part of the nerd-boy fantasy is that when you beat up the mean quarterback, the whole school yard cheers, so the world is going to cheer no matter how little sense it makes!

AAAAARRGGGGHHHH.

And what makes it worse is that this whole section is plastered with pious sidenotes about how this is totally the players’ story, they should in no way feel deprotagonised by the fact that they absolutely can’t measure up to Pax and he in turn absolutely can’t measure up to Mal. Because, see, while Mal beats Pax up, they can do some stuff that will totally matter! Except it won’t, because Mal can just undo anything they did with a snap of his fingers and anything that happens in this setting happens by his benign permission.

Again, not exaggerating! He doesn’t even get a stat block. Here’s what he gets instead:

Where Pax can affect cities, Mal can affect continents, where Pax has orbital range, Mal can actually direct his fire around any obstacle (including the planet) to hit anything he desires. Finally, where Pax has vastly reduced quantum costs for his powers, Mal often pays nothing to use his. Additionally, Mal has access to a few powers unlike any ever seen before: He can sense novas (latent and active) over an area the size of Texas with little effort – conversely, he can also conceal his own quantum sig nature with near-total efficacy. With some difficulty, he can distinguish “quantum signatures” to identify individuals. Mal can sense energy production/ usage over a wide area (a city, perhaps larger) and manipulate it if necessary, causing blackouts or surges or interfering with quantum powers over a wide area (several novas at once). This can be applied selectively. Finally, he can focus his power on one nova and effectively shut that nova’s M-R node down for a time – several weeks on the outside. The effect is somewhat similar to Dormancy, only the target can’t voluntarily reactivate his powers. Mal can, conversely, use this power to help one or more latent novas erupt and perhaps guide the form that eruption takes.

So basically, he’s all-powerful, he can do anything you can think of, and he has no meaningful limitations whatsoever. And if you asked the developers – a pox upon their names! – why he doesn’t just magic everything into being precisely the way he wants it, I’m sure they’d say, “oh, because he has such a high regard for individual freedom and he wants everyone to find their own truth!” Barf.

Yeah. I’ve been giving this game a chance, I really have. Most of it hasn’t been great, but most of it hasn’t been terrible either. I knew it had a bad reputation, but I figured it was just the Internet overreacting like usual, because while I could see the things that people were upset about, they weren’t that pronounced.

I stand corrected. I was blind, but now I see. This game is an abomination. I am so, so glad that it failed dismally.

But I’m still going to finish it, damn it, so stay tuned! This readthrough is likely to get a lot saltier from here on out!

Continuing our readthrough of Aberrant, this week we arrive at the elites. Less a faction than a fact of life, elites are mercenary novas who hire themselves out to use their quantum powers for anyone who can pay, whether that is the military dictator of a banana republic or a UN agency that is looking to get something done off the books. Will they turn out to be more interesting than most of the others? We shall see.

The book starts out with what I think is actually the best piece of fiction the line has had so far. It’s about a group of elites fighting in a miserable Third World conflict and dealing with the lousy conditions and the human misery that comes with it. While it’s very 90s in its way of taking real human suffering and using it to make its silly dice-rolling game feel serious and relevant, it also manages to show novas under physical, mental and moral strain, and there has been entirely too little of that so far.

The rest of the book is passable, if not great. It presents the DeVries Agency, which is the leading broker of elites worldwide, and a number of its smaller competitors. It suffers from the same problem that books like Project Utopia does, in that it seems to think that describing bureaucracies and paperwork is the way to make things feel realistic, and never mind that anyone who tried to actually roleplay out a dry legalistic contract negotiation would probably expire from sheer boredom. Still, it does present the world of the elites in a way that makes it feel vivid and like something that you could model at the table. You could absolutely use this to build a campaign where the players were working for a rent-a-nova outfit – in fact, in many ways elites are probably the closest thing you can find in this setting to regular RPG adventurers. They take on quests, they get into trouble trying to carry them out, and then they waste their reward partying so they have to do it again next week. Hey, it’s a classic for a reason.

One thing that constantly bugs me, though, is the way the writers always seemed to be hazy about how they meant the game to actually be played. There are all these endless descriptions of how realistic everything is, and how it’s all very serious, and then from time to time the books just go, “but hey, feel free to play the game like goofy four-colour action if you want!” For example, here you get told that if you want to, you could run a game where the characters were Noir detectives with eufiber trenchcoats and fedoras (yes, really, it says that) working out a ratty office. Never mind that the whole game endlessly stresses how novas can easily make the big bucks, you do you, man!

And, like… White Wolf, my dudes. If someone were to ignore your setting, then they’d be buying the books purely for the rules. And let me guarantee you, no one ever bought your books for the rules! Because they were terrible and everyone hated them. It was the feel and ambience that we liked, and the way you kept nervously hinting here that maybe we should just skip that and go punch some bank robbers makes it really painfully clear that you had no confidence in the setting you’d created.

And I could be mean here and add, “and rightfully so!” but you know what? No. That’s not true. There is something here that I haven’t seen before, even thirty years later, and which could have shone if it had been properly polished. If you’d just thought a little harder on what your themes were supposed to be. If you had just set up the conflicts better. If you had just… cared like obviously cared about your more successful games.

But oh well.

The book presents two specific war zones that players might get into, Kashmir and Congo. The former is a seemingly eternal hot spot where three different world powers (India, Pakistan and China) are glaring at each other over a bombed-out wasteland that neither of them really has any use for in its present state, but after all the misery they’ve gone through for it they absolutely refuse to let anyone else have it. Depressing but believable. Congo has a nova dictator who’s too overcome with Taint to dictate especially well, so a hundred tiny warlords are carving up de facto domains all over it. Both of them feel like decent settings for gritty military superheroics, a cross between an MCU movie and a Vietnam War story.

Much like in The Directive, the best part is really the equipment section, and I say that as someone who usually hate equipment sections. The DeVries Agency have come up with all sorts of cool shit like monomolecular whips and robotic wasp swarms that they’ll let you use if you show that you’re a closer. Works for me.

As with all these books – and yes, I will complain about this to the very end – is the lack of interesting NPCs. A superhero setting runs on its larger-than-life characters, and other than the Teragen, Aberrant suffers from being full of small, dull people with no discernable drives or passions. And this is in spite of the fact that novas in general and elites in particular are meant to be celebrities, people with very distinct images. It’d be one thing if those images were mostly publicity stunts covering rather ordinary, neurotic people, but here, even the images themselves are dull.

The best of the lot is this guy who goes by Totentanz, and apparently his thing is that… he kills people a lot. And then you read his backstory, and it turns out that he kills people a lot because he got so sad when his fuckbuddy made it clear that she had no feelings for him that his quantum powers switched off all his emotions other than psychotic rage. So… his thing is that he’s actually even more boring and one-dimensional than he seems? I mean, at least he’s got a cool name and costume, and that’s more than what most of them have, but there’s just no substance there.

So all in all, this is one of the better books, but that’s not saying much. Next time, we’re going over Worldwide Phase One, and that might need to be a two-parter, because oh yeah, I have things to say about that one! Which does admittedly mean that it’s not boring.