Mister Monster's Workshop

Tag: ttrpg

  • 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 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!

  • 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: The Directive

    Our stalwart progress through the Aberrant canon has now passed the halfway point, and it’s time for the Directive to finally get their time in the sun. So far, what we’ve been told about the Directive has mostly consisted of, “eh, they exist, I guess.” Can their own book elevate them?

    Spoiler: No… no, not really.

    We start out with a piece of fiction that is at least halfway decent. Apparently one of the characters introduced in the Teragen book has taken hostages on the subway. This person is a pretty weird character who goes by “Sloppy Joe,” because he’s got no skin and all his organs are kept in place by an invisible forcefield. See what I mean about the Teragen getting all the memorable NPCs? Anyway, the Directive is on the case, but their operation is complicated because it’s not enough for them to take Joe down, they have to do it in a way that looks good, so they’re doing a very intricate tap-dancing routine with the media, Project Utopia, and local law enforcement, all of which sort of leaves their actual hostage negotiator with his ass hanging out and being forced to improvise wildly.

    We then get a long and boring description of the Directive’s history, which amounts to the governments of Russia, Japan, America, Britain and Germany all having a problem with the way that people keep flying around and punching mountains these days (funnily enough), so they founded the Directive as a semi-secret international agency to keep an eye on novas. There is one notable event in the Directive’s history where some German media mogul was using his nova powers to enact subtle mind control of his viewers so the Directive exposed him and got him arrested. And… ye gods… This is what he apparently looked like:

    Yes. He was a bald German guy with a monocle. I’m only surprised that he wasn’t noted as being a cat person and having a name like Baron von Evilstein or something. I mean, look, I have no problem with cheesiness and cliches in roleplaying games, in fact I kind of prefer them, but Aberrant is so insistent on its po-faced seriousness that these things feel jarring. Like, this book seems to think that it’s doing John Le Carré, all dark and brooding and full of demoralising realism, but it’s taking all its inspirations from Bond movies.

    Anyway, bla bla bla, the Directive is super-secret and different parts of it have no idea what other parts are doing, and each cell operates on its own judgment as much as possible, which at least makes it easier to justify some player agency in a hypothetic Directive campaign. And also create some entertaining clusterfucks where it turns out that the suspicious people the players spent the last three sessions spying on was another Directive cell that was spying on them. Anyway, they are super-skeevy and trying to blackmail, extort, strongarm and generally bully people into serving their ends, preferably without ever revealing that it’s the Directive that’s pulling the strings. They also actively try to portray themselves as a bunch of hapless bumblers so that no one feels threatened by them, which I’m not sure how well it plays with the intro fiction where they were all about polishing their brand until it glowed…

    There is a mention of a new group of novas called the Protectors who have apparently buggered off to Antarctica and may be up to no good there. Okay, I approve of that in theory, this game desperately need more distinct nova “teams,” partly to function as antagonists and partly to provide examples of what a group of players could conceivably get up to and accomplish. Not sure what to do with the Protectors in their current form, though.

    There is a section on spy gear that’s actually pretty good, including things like “quantum-inert” fast-solidifying foam that can’t be affected by nova powers, so if a nova gets stuck in it she’ll probably stay stuck There is a drug that can be injected through a dart and causes a nova’s powers to go completely haywire – not just shut down, but start erupting all over the place. There is gas that causes eufiber (which is the wonder-material that a lot of novas use for their costumes because it adjusts to their powers – it’s basically the Fantastic Four’s “unstable molecules” uniforms) to freeze solid, so a nova can get stuck in his spandex. All of which feels pretty nicely balanced between being useful enough that the Directive can plausibly incapacitate and imprison novas and not being so overpowered that said imprisoned novas can’t conceivably bust free again.

    All in all, though, this book was a chore to get through. It’s got the same problem most of these books have, which is that no one seems to have been enthusiastic about the subject matter. Just like the Project Utopia book made me feel like the writers were apathetic at best about superheroes, this book makes me feel like the writers had no particular interest in secret agents. The Teragen book, as mentioned, is the one that actually got some love, because the writers were absolutely interested in cool, edgy posthuman monsters. And this book gets hit harder than most, because even those superpowers who do make it in have to be kept low-key and unflashy, so you don’t even have the occasional relief of seeing people shoot laserbeams at each other.

    Next up is the book on elites, which I can reveal is a bit better but still suffers from many of the same flaws.

  • 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.

  • A game of real losers

    A game of real losers

    Monstrous Mishaps came about because I felt thoroughly sick of fake losers.

    The X-Men are really the ur-example here. Don’t get me wrong, I love the X-Men. They’re cool and colourful and dramatic and they fight giant robots, what’s not to like? But the idea that people like them would ever be some kind of oppressed minority is insane. They’re sexy and rich and hyper-competent and they have godlike powers. They wouldn’t inspire hate groups, they’d inspire fan clubs.

    Aberrant, for all its faults, is right on the money there. If people started manifesting incredible powers, then they wouldn’t be hunted down like animals. Nor would they start conspiring to take over the world. They wouldn’t need to. Because all the normies would hand them the world, free of charge! Power is attractive.

    No, it’s weakness that gets persecuted, weakness that – perversely enough – makes people hate and fear you. I blame evolution, frankly. We’re not wired to respond negatively to people who are strong, because those people are dangerous to cross but potentially useful to befriend. We’re wired to respond negatively to anyone who seems sickly and weak, because there’s no downside in pelting them with rocks until they go away. They weren’t going to help us anyway – they lack the ability – and who knows, whatever they have might be contageous.

    Knowing this from (ahem) painful personal experience, any sort of Randian “they hate me because I’m better than them!” moaning has always rubbed me the wrong way. And for someone who loves his fantasy, that’s a bit of a handicap, because fantasy is shock full of the sentiment. It seems like every other setting focuses on some group of supernatural beings who are stronger, smarter and wiser than everyone else, and who inexplicably get kicked around for it.

    So with Monstrous Mishaps, my starting position was this: can I create a group of supernatural beings who really would be kicked around, without making them have done something to earn it? Could I create beings with magical powers that were so useless, and whose weaknesses were so obstructive and crippling, that they’d naturally gravitate towards the very bottom of society?

    And that idea paired off nicely with another one that’s always fascinated me, that of essential identity unsupported by fact. I think it came from reading the Emperor Norton issue of Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman back in the day. Here was a guy who decided that he was the Emperor of America, and was completely unbothered by the fact that no one else took him seriously, because why would an Emperor care what a bunch of peasants thought of him? Of course, his regal dignity was also the only thing that sustained him in the face of a life as a failure and a pauper.

    Or, for a less whimsical example, this angsty short story they made us read in Swedish class, about a guy who through mistaken bureaucracy was declared to be a moose. He ended up having to spend hunting season living at the town zoo since otherwise someone might shoot him without breaking any laws. Now that guy, you must admit, was a real hard-luck case!

    So taking that a step further, what if someone decided they were a dragon, albeit a dragon that inexplicably looked and functioned just like a regular ol’ human being in every way? What would that guy be like, as a character? Well, for one thing, he’d be kind of put upon, feeling like a failure for not getting to roost on a pile of looted gold like a dragon like himself ought to be able to. He’d see himself as a massive underachiever, wouldn’t he?

    So from there, I started sketching out my supernatural Real True Losers, the Monsters. I did give them some supernatural powers, because I felt like it’d provide some flavour, but I tried my hardest to make those powers as underwhelming as possible – the sort of abilities characters in most supernatural games could pull off right out of the gate, I placed at the end of a long and painful learning curve. I also added some supernatural weaknesses, the metaphysical equivalent of Mr. Moose Guy’s exile to the zoo, and made them as bothersome as I could manage without making the characters completely unplayable.

    And, like I outlined in a previous post, the setting of Monster World sort of grew up around that concept. It turned out that while the Monsters might be more benighted than most, no one in the setting was particularly successful. In fact, in the end I decided that Monsters weren’t even oppressed, at least not in any systemic way – their failure at living up to their archetypes was so complete that no one even cared, except for the Slayers (and mostly because they were all even more pathetic!).

    So in the end, I guess I didn’t quite achieve my goal of creating a genuine, realistic oppressed supernatural group. But hey, them’s the breaks. If I was used to succeeded at stuff, I wouldn’t have been inspired to make a whole game about failing!

  • So what is Monster World?

    So what is Monster World?

    The setting for Monstrous Mishaps just kind of developed on its own, and along the way turned out to be in a lot of ways more interesting than the actual Monsters it’s named for. When I first started sketching on the Monster Breeds, they inhabited some sort of vaguely gothic-punk reality, since – not to blow your mind or anything – I was mostly working off of a World of Darkness template, only with everything made as pathetic as possible. There were mentions of knives gleaming in dark alleys and Klutzes fleeing from angry mobs after they accidentally killed someone. It was, all in all, both derivative and kind of pretentious.

    But at some point, I started smoothing out the sharp edges. The fights became less deadly. The conflicts became more at the same time more frantic and with lower stakes. Characters stopped moaning in agony and started sighing in aggravation. It all developed more of a cartoony feel, with bright pastels replacing the shades of grey.

    At the same time, I was hard at work coming up with potential plot hooks for the setting. After all, my complaint about a lot of games is that they don’t give you a sense of what you should actually be doing with all those interesting setpieces. And what I ended up going back to were the sort of sitcoms and Disney comics that I grew up watching and reading. That fit nicely with the more upbeat feel of the characters, and in the end it sort of crystallized into a simple concept: Monster World is a place where people care about things in reverse proportion to how much they actually matter.

    Thus, to create a scenario in Monster World, just put the stakes as absurdly low as you can, and then have every GMC act like the fate of the world depends on them. You have a job delivering pizzas, and your annoying in-law is determined to delay you enough that he gets his pizza for free! Your neighbor borrowed your lawnmower and won’t return it, and has put up traps all over his property to keep you from stealing it back! At the same time, the actual risks and concerns should be treated as irrelevant – nothing really bad is going to happen, and things will more or less go back to normal by the next Story.

    This works really surprisingly well for creating silly situations that will make the players feel faintly ridiculous just for having to engage with them. And the rule system – which functions best when trying to do relatively simple things under trying circumstances, and where basic competence is so rare as to be almost a superpower – works really pretty well for it. As one of my play testers put it, take out the Monsters and it’s basically 90s Sitcom: The RPG.

    Which does make me wonder if maybe I would have been better off just ignoring the urban fantasy pastiche altogether… but, well, it’s a little late to revamp the whole thing now. Still, it might be an idea for a supplement somewhere down the line. I could call it Suburban Silliness…

  • Monstrous mojo

    Monstrous mojo

    All right, day two of my let’s-get-this-stupid-quickstart-finished marathon. I’ve read through everything I’d written so far and found it more or less passable, though I should probably put in one of those boring sections in the front that explained just what in tarnation this thing even is. I mean, I don’t know who would download this stuff without already having a pretty good idea, but somehow it just feels incomplete without it. Anyway, for now I’ve written up the combat section (unusually sparse, in this game – in my experience of playtesting it, fights do happen, but they tend to be short and frantic and undignified, so they don’t need a lot of complicated rules) and I’m working on the spellcasting system.

    That spellcasting system is one that I’m quite proud of, though I concede that there is probably some room for improvement. It draws a little on the freeform magic system from Angel, with some Unknown Armies and Mage: the Ascension thrown in for salt, but I’ve also added some additional structure to make it easier for the GM to manage.

    In its simplest form, it really just comes down to everyone in Monster World being able to work ritual spells. There is a single Ability for it called Hocuspocus, and any spell you might find or invent has a Challenge Level to cast, and if you pass the Challenge it goes off. Sounds a little too simple, right?

    Well, there are two things limiting you from just flinging around magic to solve all your problems. The first is it’s all gated by GM approval. You can cast only what spells that GM tells you you can cast at any given time – even if you’ve already cast a certain spell several times, the mystical conditions can have changed and now it won’t work again for another few centuries. Now, the GM is encouraged to provide at least some kind of suggestion for a spell you could attempt when you want to attempt a spell, because just saying “no” is always boring, but you’ll take what you can get.

    The second thing is the Conditions. See, every spell comes with between two and six Conditions: Cost, Blood Sacrifice, Complexity, Side-Effects, Misfire and Retribution. Cost means that you need something that you can get hold of fairly easily but not in unlimited amounts – you’ll have to spend either money or goodwill. Blood Sacrifice means that it’ll cost HP, either your own or someone else’s. Complexity means that there are some sort of finicky requirements that you’ll need to satisfy, requiring you to either go on a mini-adventure or otherwise have to rearrange your plans for them.

    The second half of the Conditions are sneaky, because when they apply, the GM won’t tell you until after the spell has been cast. Side-Effects mean exactly that, when the spell takes effect something else happens in addition to what it said in the recipe. Misfire, on the other hand, means that the spell just plain does something different than what you were told it would do, though it’ll probably still be in the general area – for example, you might cast a spell for being able to leap tall buildings in a single bound, and instead it turns you into a human rubber ball who can bounce over tall buildings (and then keep bouncing all the way down the block, because rubber balls aren’t known for being able to break on a dime). Retribution, finally, means that you get afflicted by a hostile force that keeps making your life miserable for some period of time after the spell is cast.

    Every spell has at least two Conditions, and the ones that have more get their Challenge Level for casting them lowered by one per Condition. That way, even some top-level spells might be available to novice sorcerers, albeit at considerable effort and cost. And again, the GM is the one who decides precisely what spells are and are not available to you at any given time. She might present you with one that can turn your worst enemy into a toad and which still only requires an Advanced Hocuspocus Challenge and no exotic ingredients, and you know that that means it’s got some subset of Side-Effects, Misfire and Retribution baked into it, but it’s tempting, isn’t it? You kind of want to do it just to see what happens, don’t you?

    That’s the idea. The sweet spot is meant to be riiiiiight where magic is probably strictly speaking more trouble than it’s worth, but it’s still sexy enough that the players want to try it anyway. Then the GM can just sit back and cackle maniacally, which is a thing that any true GM loves to do.

  • Introducing Monstrous Mishaps (properly, that is)

    Introducing Monstrous Mishaps (properly, that is)

    This being my third and final week of Christmas vacation, I have resolved to get my rear in gear and actually do some work on the Monstrous Mishaps quickstart. And while I’m at it, and just to keep my mind on track, I should probably post some information about the game here, too. After all, the blog is named after it, and I originally started it so I could have a place to promote it. It’s just that, being scatterbrained, I ended up talking about absolutely everything other than what I meant to. Oh well. Let’s see about making an actual introduction.

    Monstrous Mishaps takes place in a place called Monster World, which is a looser and sillier version of our own world. It is a world right out of a wacky sitcom or sardonic cartoon, where epic feuds are fought over petty disagreements, people turn their character defects into fervently held ideals, everything seems set up to be as annoying and unhelpful as possible, and no one ever solves a problem by common sense if a madcap scheme will do. Everything that can go wrong will go wrong, but rarely in a way that will actually matter in the long run, and hilarity ensues at the drop of a hat.

    It’s also a world where some people are Monsters – Dragons and Goblins and Werewolves and Aliens and all the staples of pulp fantasy. But in keeping with Monster World’s general perversity, Monsters are only nominally Monsters. That is to say, they don’t look like Monsters, they don’t have the power of Monsters, and for the most parts they don’t even act like Monsters, but by some kind of obnoxious cosmic law they just are Monsters. Which kind of sucks for them, to be honest. It’s hard enough being a working schmoe without the world insisting that you are, in some ineffable way, a Giant. Especially when you keep getting fined for accidentally knocking buildings over, even though you shouldn’t reasonably be able to knock buildings over, and certainly can’t seem to do it on purpose.

    In Monstrous Mishaps, you play one of these long-suffering people as they go about their life. Think of it as urban fantasy playing out as a 90s sitcom. Your goal is to go about your life, impress your crush, keep from getting fired from your job, and foil your annoying neighbour’s attempts to mess with you, all of which is made harder by having a persistent and embarrassing metaphysical condition. It’s meant to be light, breezy, and poking fun at absolutely everything within poking range.

    Mechanically, the game uses an innovative diceless system where you have a fixed set of Abilities ranked with a Score of between 1 and 15. The Score translates into a Level: a Score of 1 is a Minimal Level, indicating the sort of thing that just about any bozo can do, a Score of 2-3 is a Limited Level, indicating a hint of talent or an amateur interest, and so on. When you try to do anything, the Game Master sets a Challenge Score for you to reach, sprinkles with situational Modifiers to taste, and checks whether you’re good enough to succeed or not.

    You can also goose your skill by spending Grit Points, which double your Score (after Modifiers) for the purposes of that one Challenge. You regain Grit Points by maintaining good relations to the important people in your life and by living up to the moral Values you’ve picked for yourself. Conversely, acting contrary to those Values makes you lose Grit Points – having the courage of your convictions is very important for a health self-esteem!

    That’s about the short version. I’ll try to add some more later in the week.

  • 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.