Mister Monster's Workshop

Tag: Aeon Trinity

  • Aberrant readthrough: Worldwide Phase Two

    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!

  • Aberrant readthrough: ReignofEvil.com and Church of Michael Archangel

    So, having decided that I hate this game and want it to perish in quantum fires, I am nonetheless soldiering on. This week we’ll take a look at the last two mini-supplements for the first edition, who most conveniently have a common theme.

    The theme is, People Who The Writers Of Aberrant Had Snooty Contempt For. These two booklets are of course not enough to fully explore that theme, which could probably have provided material for a dozen more if anyone had actually been interested enough in Aberrant to be buying these books, which is perhaps why it further spilled over into Worldwide Phase Two (which we’ll discuss next week). For now, though, let’s start with:

    So it’s about Satanists. Specifically, it’s about something called the Church of Astaroth who worships a nova by the same name. And he’s a loser! And they’re losers! But losers can be dangerous, possibly, in some way, so it’s okay to hate them and it doesn’t make you a bully! But they’re definitely losers! A bunch of man-babies who fail at life and can’t spell! Feh! Feh! We spit at them! Did we mention that they’re losers? Because they’re losers!!!!!

    … yeah, you kind of get the idea after the first page and then it goes on for twenty-five more. The writers of Aberrant really hated Satanists, and gosh-darn it, they were prepared to say so no matter how controversial it was!

    Now, being at the time a maladjusted all-black-wearing young man, I actually sniffed around some Satanist websites and publications at around the time this was written, so I at least understand what it’s attacking and that, while humourlessly mean-spirited in the extreme, it’s not entirely off the mark. And yes, I can vouch for the fact that a lot of self-proclaimed Dark Lords of This World really couldn’t spell particularly well.

    But you know something? Some of it had a sort of morbid beauty to it, too. Hey, Anton LaVey was a maladjusted jerk, but he was a maladjusted jerk with a serious poetic streak – he could make being a maladjusted jerk sound absolutely gorgeous. Honestly, Satanists deserve better than this hatchet job. I say this even though they worship selfishness and depravity and even though (more objectionable by far, to my mind) they are usually libertarians. Seriously. Some people may deserve to be mocked, but no one deserves to be mocked this lazily.

    And what makes it really obnoxious is that the Teragen, who the writers constantly fawn over… are philosophical Satanists. I mean, they just are. They believe in transcending conventional morality! They believe in wielding power unchecked by the sheep-like masses! They revel in monstrosity and deviance! They form a cult of personality around a guy who goes by a pretentious Latin name that means “the wicked god”! They’re Satanists.

    And unless one of the writers was bitten by a metal-head as a child, I can only theorise that that’s precisely why this book was written – as a pre-emptive counter to any accusation that they might be Leading The Youth Astray. Which, I will admit, was probably not baseless concern back at the turn of the millenium, with the Satanic Panic not yet cool in its grave, but still… they got away with glorifying serial killers and terrorists, I think they could have gotten away with having Satanist-coded characters in their silly superhero game without hiding behind this ridiculous fig leaf.

    It’s an especial shame because, again… Satanic imagery is cool. Hey, ask any Warhammer 40,000 nerd and he’ll tell you that the only thing more awesome than a ten-foot-tall space marine with a machine gun is a ten-foot-tall devil-worshipping space marine with a machine gun! This could have been a fun villain faction that explored what thoroughly disenfranchised people might become if they suddenly got the power to make their every maladjusted fantasy come true. But no, instead we got 26 pages of the writers going, “guh guh guh! That’s YOU! That’s how DUMB you sound!”

    In addition to really hating Satanists, the writers of Aberrant really hated fundies. Because, again, it was the aughts, and hating fundies was the style of the times (unless you were a fundy, in which case hating the godless secularists was the style of the times). So of course Aberrant has a whole bunch of them who hate novas and go around killing them, and…

    Wait. Stop. Hold the phone.

    They go around killing novas. Novas. You know, the ones with the superpowers. The godlike creatures who can smash cities to rubble. The ones who can do anything baselines can, only better. A bunch of rednecks with shotguns are going around trying to kill them.

    …

    … howwwwwwwww? I mean, this is a villain faction, right? They’re meant to serve as antagonists in the game. How are they meant to do that? How are they supposed to be relevant? They show up, they get creamed. It’s about that simple.

    And the game doesn’t even bother to hide that. The Michaelites are few in number, low in funding, untrained, clueless, outmatched. They’re irrelevant, an annoyance. But they’re still going to be shoehorned into the game and treated like their very existence is an important part of the setting. Because, I guess, they have the unmitigated nerve to not like novas, and that proves that novas are oppressed woobies who are totally justified in joining the Teragen – who, let’s remember, refer to baselines as “monkeys” and consider them to have no moral significance. Because the absence of universal approval is exactly the same as relentless persecution.

    I hate this game. I hate this game. I hate it, I hate it, why did I start reading it, why do I do this to myself…

    Sorry, sorry, I had to hyperventilate for a moment there… Anyway, the book wraps up with a fiction piece about a Michaelite discovering that one of the leaders of the movement is actually a nova with a split personality, which is a thing that was mentioned aaaaaaall the way back in Year One. They fight and the Michaelite ultimately kills the nova. Well, good riddance to bad rubbish, I guess, but all this did was to remove a plot hook that a previous book had established. Like, by reading this book, you end up with less game than you started with.

    Okay, I’m done here. Stay tuned for next week, when we find out that the writers of Aberrant also hated Catholics. And British people. And possibly bulimics, because why not.

  • Aberrant readthrough: Worldwide Phase One (part two)

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

    No, I didn’t switch out the speech bubble. We’re genuinely supposed to think that he’s being an evil fascist for saying that novas should be treated as human beings instead of as sovereign powers.

    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 whole 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!

  • 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.

  • Aberrant readthrough: Elites

    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.

  • 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.

  • Aberrant readthrough: Teragen

    Our Aberrant – the totally not superhero game that we can of course play as a superhero game if we’re philistines – readthrough have finally arrived at the Teragen, the totally not supervillains who we can of course use as supervillains if we’re philistines. And… oh man. This one stands out.

    In an earlier part of the readthrough, I identified the Teragen as one of the two ideological poles of the game, the other being Project Utopia/Team Tomorrow/The Aeon Society. Where the latter is your basic superhero do-gooders (albeit with shady NGO backers and a massive civilian support structure) who are working selflessly to make the world a better place because with great power comes great responsibility and so on and so forth… the Teragen are the ones who say, no, that’s a sucker’s game. Why should we lift a spandex-clad finger? Fuck you, I’ve got mine!

    Of course, like all spoiled brats, the Terats don’t play particularly nice together, so they have about half a dozen different factions who all think that they’re the ones who really get it, man. Each faction gets its own sympathetic writeup where it gets to explain in its own words why it rules and everyone else drools, and each faction is also not-so-secretly one possible kind of villain you can throw at your players.

    • Nova Vigilance go around killing any baseline who “threatens novas,” which is interpreted precisely as freely as you might assume. Oh, and any nova who supports baselines who threaten novas, including by trying to argue that you shouldn’t go around killing them. So basically, they kill a lot of people and act completely self-righteous about it. Handy if you want a villain who’s terminally straightforward in his evil but has maybe just the tiniest bit of a sympathetic motivation at the bottom.
    • The Harvesters are physical monsters and express their body-positivity by going around acting like moral monsters as well. Including by eating people who offend them by going around having the standard-issue number of arms, legs, eyes and tails. Handy if you want pure creature-feature villains with a hint of “tragic monster” about them.
    • Pandaimonium want sex, drugs and rock’n’roll, and they want no limits to it whatsoever, and they’ll happily make a buck running drug and prostitution rings. Handy if you want to cut down on the angst and have villains who are basically just superpowered gangstas who like living large and sticking it to the man.
    • The Casablancas are subtle schemers who trade in secrets. They don’t do terribly much on their own, but they share information with the other factions and help coordinate them. Handy if you want villains for a more intrigue-based, investigative story.
    • The Cult of Mal worship the Teragen’s Magneto-wannabe, Divis Mal. Like, they literally think he’s a god and everyone should do what he says. Handy if you want villains who are religious fanatics.
    • The Companions are middle-eastern. That’s… pretty much it. Handy if… I don’t know, you want to spite political correctness by reveling in islamophobia? Maybe? Honestly, they’re kind of boring.
    • The Primacy, finally, just basically hate Utopia and baselines and the entire current world order and want to quantum-bolt it to ashes so they can build a new one. Handy if you want some cackling megalomaniacs who are after – WORLD DOMINATION! MUAHAHAHAHA!!! With, again, just the tiniest bit of actual ideological underpinnings for it to make it feel slightly less cringy.

    The book also contains an overview of the “canonical” future of the setting (since it’s the backstory of another game called Trinity). Basically, novas get increasingly crazy with Taint, baselines get increasingly freaked out by novas being crazy, and just generally novas join the Teragen in increasing numbers, and finally there’s a massive war between baselines and novas and the novas lose and leave Earth for greener pastures. The Aberrants and Project Proteus are pretty much completely irrelevant to the whole thing, and Project Utopia as a whole fades into nothing as everyone gets up on the whole nova-baseline-co-existence thing. I guess technically that means that the Directive wins, but they’re still so boring that they don’t even get a mention here.

    Now, I mentioned this book standing out, and it does. Because this book… this book, you see…

    This book is actually kinda-sorta good.

    I mean, it’s not amazing or anything, but there’s some real passion and imagination in it. The Teragen’s inner circle are lavishly described and idiosyncratic – they are actually characters that seem like they’d be fun to portray, and whose schemes and vendettas seem worth getting invested in. Like, there’s one guy called Leviathan who looks like a giant shark on legs and lives in a ruined cathedral in the flooded catacombs beneath Venice but is secretly a screwed-up twenty-something kid who was abused by his mother, and DEAR LORD, you can just FEEL the writers’ relief at finally getting to be gothic-punk again, can’t you?

    And the factions, likewise… Well, this is what White Wolf was always so very, very good at: taking a messed up perspective and arguing persuasively for it, and then taking a different messed up perspective and making an equally compelling case for it. White Wolf, at its finest, was an exercise in extreme empathy, the playing of devil’s advocate turned into an art form. And here, at long last, we finally get a taste of it.

    Of course, this also means very vividly seeing how half-hearted the rest of the setting is in comparison. The writers just didn’t care, at all, about the members of Team Tomorrow. They did care about getting to show off how smart they were by showing how real-world problems could be actually addressed using comic book superpowers, but the actual personalities that would be involved in such things? Nah. Give them a shark-boy with mommy issues any day!

    And that’s fair, we all know that the villains are usually the more interesting characters… but it does raise the question of why they even made this game in the first place, then. Or at least why they didn’t just skip the pretensions and made it all about angsty Teragen revolutionaries from the start. I mean, a game where Killer Croc is the misunderstood antihero fighting against Superman the clueless patsy of a fascist authority would perhaps not be to everyone’s taste, but it would certainly be different, and they would have enjoyed writing it a lot more than I think they enjoyed writing most of this game.

  • Aberrant readthrough: Core

    Aberrant readthrough: Core

    The thought occurred to me that if I’m going to read my way through all of first-edition Aberrant, I might as well post my thoughts here. It’s not going to be a full readthrough, but I’ll go over each supplement in turn.

    So, starting out with the core book. It starts off without preamble with in-universe documents, and get used to that, because that’s going to be most of these books. White Wolf was always fond of that, but I don’t think it works quite as well here as in most of their other lines, for reasons I’ll get into later unless I forget.

    Anyway, to try to summarise a tremendous amount of setting lore, ten years ago (in 1998) the space station Galatea exploded and drowned the world in quantum energies, and as a result about one person in a million “erupted” into a “nova” who can manipulate the quantum forces of the universe in ways that for some reason is completely identical to stock superhero powers. The books even admit that “quantum energies” are just things like gravity and electromagnetics, but novas can still teleport and read minds and change shape and they can do it Because Quantum. Which would be fine, except the book spends long, tiresome sections technobabbling away to try to make it all seem reasonable and sciency.

    Anyway, an NGO called Project Utopia emerged suspiciously quickly to provide guidance for novas and, using a mix of nova powers, technological breakthroughs enabled by nova powers, and public goodwill generated by the above, set about cleaning up the environment, toppling dictatorships, arranging peace treaties, and just generally fixing real-world problems. Not all novas work for Utopia, though, a lot of them have cushy corporate jobs or serve as mercenary “elites” who hire themselves out as superpowered bruisers – indeed, the primary way to wage war has become hiring some novas to fight the novas the other country is hiring.

    There aren’t supervillains per se, but there is a group called the Teragen led by a Magneto-wannabe called Divis Mal who claim that novas aren’t human anymore and therefore they have no obligation to respect “baseline” laws or ethics. Project Utopia considers them a bunch of terrorists, which is not completely true but not completely false either.

    But Teragen aside, there is a loooooot of frankly tiresome in-setting documents outlining how novas have changed fashion, music, the entertainment industry, and how everything is super-great and everyone is happy except maybe a few stupid pootiehead malcontents… and then all of a sudden we learn that ACTUALLY, there is a secret conspiracy inside Utopia called Project Proteus, and it is up to no good and have sterilised every single nova in the world. Yes, all of them. Somehow. And some chick called Slider found out and they killed her, and her layabout bestie Corbin have gone on the run accused of the crime and he’s founded a resistance movement called the Aberrants who wants to put a stop to Proteus.

    And, ugh… this plot hook, man. This freaking plot hook. It’s dead centre in the game, almost everything leads back to it and it’s just – so – STUPID. For one thing, how did Proteus even get to every single nova in the world? And how exactly did they expect this would work out, no one would ever notice that six thousand high-profile people had fertility issues all at once, and none of the super-genius intellects of the setting would ever put two and two together? And thematically, it’s just a mess. Here, have a game about playing a glamourous picture-perfect superhero! Oh, but you’ve been castrated without noticing. Yeah, that doesn’t ruin the power fantasy at all…

    Honestly, it feels a bit like the guy who thought of it was very childfree and he thought it’d actually be kind of neat if all his shiny superheroes could be hot, single, and absolutely untouched by the messy business of reproduction. Because while there is some finger-wagging about how forced mass sterilisation is, like, bad and stuff, there seems to be about zero understanding of just how big a deal it would be in the real world and how hard most people would take it. It does kind of feel like the kind of idea I would have had back in my twenties, in fairness…

    But anyway, even aside from that, it’s not even especially useful as a plot hook. It’s simultaneously too big and too tightly defined. If novas are secretly being subject to genocide by the people who are supposed to direct them in building a better tomorrow, then that makes pretty much everything else they get up in the setting look stupid and pointless… but at the same time, the Aberrants-versus-Proteus conflict is just too straightforward to work as a starting point for your own ideas. Proteus isn’t a nebulous evil organisation doing all manner of inventive bad things that the players can get into – it’s doing one particular bad thing, and it’s pretty well-understood right from the start why and how it’s doing it, so all that’s really left is trying to prove it to the public. And yes, you can build a campaign around that, but that’s just it – you can build one campaign around that. It’s not something you can riff on and take in a ton of different directions.

    So, anyway, that’s the setting, and aside from (sigh) THAT THING, it’s not a bad one – certainly it feels vivid and lived-in, and there is some appeal in playing a character with superpowers in a setting where having superpowers doesn’t necessarily make you a superhero but where powers are being put to all sorts of personal, financial and political tasks. My main problem is actually that the core book spreads itself pretty thin over a ton of different parts of the setting that it wants to point to, and the fact that it insists on presenting everything as in-setting documents just make it worse, because making those informative and not just flavourful is pretty hard, and I don’t feel like the writers here were really up to the challenge. There’s a very strong feeling that this book was meant to give you a taste and nothing more. You want to actually use Project Utopia, buy their book! You want to use the Teragen? They’ll get a book! Oh, and there are these massive criminal syndicates who have adapted to nova crime-fighters by joining together, but if you want to know more about those than that they exist, you’ll need to wait for their book.

    After that, there are the rules, and… well… look, it’s the Storyteller System, okay? The rules aren’t meant to actually be used, they’re meant to sit there and look pretty. Suffice to say, you can put a nova together that is on the general level of, say, Spider-Man pretty easily, and just about any common superpower you can think of is represented somewhere. Which does of course mean that most of them is meant for fighting, in a game which keeps reminding you that it’s totally not about going out and punching bank robbers in the face, but whatever…

    The most interesting thing with the superpowers are actually the Mega-Attributes, which are relatively low-key bonuses to your regular human abilities, and the first dot in each of them comes with a free “Enhancement” that is some minor superpower tied to that Attributes. And that feels really cool, because it means that novas are, first and foremost, hyper-competent at their areas of expertise, in a way that has a lot more real-world applicability than the cheesy comicbook stuff.

    Oh, and there is this thing called Taint that you can take in order to gain new powers faster, or that you might get if you strain yourself, because this is White Wolf and there has to be something that’s gradually consuming your very soul. That said, you don’t have to take Taint (or at least not much of it) if you don’t want to, and it does serve as a handy explanation for why novas end up looking and acting a bit funky.

    Stay tuned for the Storyteller’s Companion.

  • 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…