I failed to resist the temptation to go back and read Hunter S Thompson's article about the Kentucky Dirby. This post was originally going to start the other way - "I decided against going back and reading Hunter S Thompson . . ." but as I was writing, I thought "wait, is that even available on the internet?"
Turns out it is, though I misremembered the title. I thought it was "Fear and Loathing at the Kentucky Derby," but it turns out that was just a confabulation on my part. He used the phrase in two of his titles and it somehow got indelibly linked to his writing in general (hence the title of this very Aberrant book, which I swear to you I haven't forgotten about). Luckily, google knew what I was talking about.
My original plan was to avoid reading any Thompson, because I felt like any comparison to Duke Rollo, the Aberrant universe's Hunter S Thompson homage, would not be fair to the book. And I was right. There is absolutely no comparison between Justin Achilli's impression and the genuine article. I'd read one line of "The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved" and I was instantly hooked. Fifteen pages about a 50 (good, god!)-year old horse race gripped me harder than 24 about superheroes.
Like I said, not fair. But to Mr Achilli's credit, Duke Rollo's voice does sound a lot like what you remember Hunter S Thompson sounding like. It's a caricature, but it's an apt caricature. The result is about 95% fun to read and about 5% "that simile is grossly inappropriate and you should be ashamed of yourself."
Where Aberrant: Fear and Loathing stumbles is in grasping the point of gonzo journalism. Hunter S Thompson made himself part of the story and had a habit of fixating on the grotesque, but the result was to bring an immediacy to the writing and to highlight the corruption and surreality of things we take for granted. It's a style that's wasted on superheroes. Cestus Pax may be an asshole, but none of us are in the sort of self-satisfied dream world of complacency that lets us forget that he's weird.
In the end, this book is occasionally amusing and intermittently useful for getting a ground's-eye view of the Aberrant universe, but I question the utility of the Duke Rollo character. Is there really much point in being a curmudgeon about something you invented?
Ukss Contribution: There was one line in this book that I thought was a genuinely sublime piece of writing. It describes Ibiza as a "land where all languages are spoken, but none are understood."
That, more than cities "opening their legs like a whore," captures the sort of degenerate mayhem that is at the heart of great gonzo. It's not something I can use, per se, but I did like the runner, later on, that compared Ibiza to an island of demons, a "Hell in the Mediterranean."
I may just take that a little more literally than it was intended, because Ukss has demons, but not taint-maddened novas, but when I make my version of the lawless demon party island, I'll be sure to remember to steal the book's best line.
Tuesday, May 12, 2020
(M: tAS) The Bitter Road
The Bitter Road has the distinction of being both a keystone book for Mage Revised and also kind of useless. If I were to sum it up, I'd say that its central message is "yes, we smashed the setting via metaplot, now here's how you can cope."
I wouldn't say it was bad. It's actually a pretty fascinating read. It's just a lot more specific than it seems to think it is. My proposed alternate title would be "Tales of Magic: Suburban Gothic." There's a character in this book who complains that his job at a high profile architectural firm is unsatisfying, and that's so emblematic of the book's prejudices and priorities. This guy has a job that in real life you pretty much have to be a mage to get, and he hates it because it's tv-sitcom shorthand for "vaguely creative man who makes compromises with capitalism." Hey, Ozymandius Cody, when your college classmates nicknamed you "Rourke" it wasn't a compliment.
But it does highlight my own awkward position in our generational reckoning. I'm Gen X enough to remember reading this book in its original context and thinking it was pretty cool, but Millennial enough to scream, "what the hell is wrong with you, I'd kill for professional work in my chosen field." Revised is kind of like that sometimes, a snapshot of the six months where we all thought the 90s were going to last forever. I don't know whether to count that as a weakness or a strength.
The Bitter Road's has two agendas that often work at cross purposes from each other. The first is an attempt to scale back the focus on the Ascension War and talk about games that deal with the problem of navigating the mundane world. That's where the book is at its most achingly 90s. When it discusses lifestyles that might serve as the anchor for a mage campaign, the examples are: college student/professor, world traveler, business mogul, and medicine.
There's nothing wrong with any of those things. The out-of-character sidebars make some fairly persuasive arguments for these campaign models. It's just that they're all so middle-class aspirational. The business section even suggests basing a game around the PCs founding a start-up. That's one that didn't age well even between the writing and the publication.
That misstep aside, half the book is like that, telling you with varying degrees of defensiveness that there's more to playing a mage than just magic.
The other thing the book is trying to do is chart the fallout from "The Year of the Reckoning." The spirit world is inaccessible, the Masters are either dead or missing, and former middle managers of the Traditions, characters with a Sphere rating of 3, have to step up and fill the power vacuum.
It's a good idea for a campaign, but it's so intimately tied to a particular time and place and cultural body of knowledge. Theoretically, you could run a Bitter Road-style game with starting core book characters, so it's got a certain accessibility to it, but if someone was just getting into the game with the Revised core, would this even be something that interests them? It's a high concept that leans heavily on established metaplot, but it's also the edition's first full-sized supplement. Was The Bitter Road intended for existing White Wolf fans, to help them manage their expectations as they transitioned into a new edition?
It's a shame, because there's some solid stuff here. One of the consequences of the "death of the Masters" is that mages now have to deal with their abandoned projects, "cursed Wonders, berserk automatons, wards and time-space anomalies." That's something that you could build a setting off of - magic is dying, but it doesn't always die gracefully. It's a problem that only mages are qualified to deal with, and one that's sure to get them tangled up in interesting fantasy dilemmas. That's why you probably shouldn't tie it to a particular cosmic event. If that were just part of the background of mage life, ancient enchantments with unpredictable rates of decay, it would both have greater longevity and do more to really hit the themes of loss and alienation that the book is trying to go for.
Same with the section about finding a Master to mentor you in the advanced magical arts. Good general storytelling advice, but tied inexplicably to a specific set of conditions.
Ultimately, if I had one criticism of Mage Revised so far it's that it needs to step up its fantasy elements. The Bitter Road spends a lot of time talking about the problems facing modern mages, but it mostly boils down to "other mages." It makes the factions of the Ascension war feel a lot like rival gangs. There are immensely consequential feuds, but only if you get involved in the subculture.
That impression was probably not accidental, though. There's a sense of weariness with the Ascension War that runs through The Bitter Road. It feels on one hand that it's merely a greater focus on a more psychological style of storytelling, but on the other I kind of pick up on an implicit mission statement - Revised is going to be a low-key gothic punk game of occult horror even if it has to war with two editions of Mage: the Ascension legacy to do it. As the book itself says, "the Ascension War gives way to the Age of the Individual."
The Bitter Road is a book that pulls in a lot of directions at once, and that can seem like a weakness, but I actually admire its ambition. Because I don't think its contradictions are necessarily a sign of inconsistency so much as a desire to make its theme one of tension. It's ostensibly "Disciples of the Art," companion volume to the late 2e's Initiates . . . and Masters . . . and what it's about is people caught in the middle. Between temporal power and spiritual enlightenment, between leadership and duty, between the magical and the mundane. It's supposed to be the, um, bitter road - a high-wire walk where the slightest misstep will send you tumbling into oblivion.
I can't say that it's entirely successful. Sometimes its competing impulses just click and it feels like it's going to pull it off, but most of the time it just feels like a grab-bag of overly narrow setting material.
And with that said, I realize I got most of the way through a post and barely used my notes.
At one point, one of the narrators says, "The Technocracy is necessary . . . [it] serves a purpose, a noble one . . . they're not the evil empire we've been led to believe." And that's a whole post just by itself, and then an internet argument afterwards.
Or later, "[The Progenitors] consider 'degenerate homeopathy' a threat to health" from a different narrator. That's a whole other fevered post and subsequent flame war.
Or perhaps we can talk about the Sons of Ether, who help Sleepers "realize the lie of 'hard facts'" and the Virtual Adepts who "instill the seeds of conspiracy into the minds of the public." The book said it best, " use the Net more to stir shit than anything else." Quit inadvertently predicting 2020, guys!
Which is my way of saying, that for all its controversial decisions about the direction of the game-line, The Bitter Road is in many ways the platonic Mage: the Ascension book. Nearly everything there is to love or hate about this game is in here somewhere.
Ukss Contribution: The section about mages in the business world is narrated by this Verbena lady who really puts on a classic "overcompensate finance-bro" attitude (and I could write a whole post on that - "I hear that woman Lee Ann spends some time volunteering in a soup kitchen. Well I contributed over six hundred thousand dollars to various charities last year through my business, and I still have time to promote Tradition idealism through business advertising and financial choices.")
I'm not really interested in Ms Maria, per se, but she is involved in a concept that interests me - the relationship between capitalism and magic. Ukss has a continent that's heavily tied up with capitalist themes, so I think I'm going to have to pick something from this section. I'm going to go with "Euthanatoi make excellent stockbrokers."
Because Mage puts both death magic and chaos magic in the Entropy Sphere, we aren't necessarily meant to read this as the Euthanatos being good with stocks because of their necromancy, but I'm going to be excessively literal. In Ukss necromancers are going to be the quants of the Lowlands stock market. Everybody uses them, but nobody likes to talk about them.
I wouldn't say it was bad. It's actually a pretty fascinating read. It's just a lot more specific than it seems to think it is. My proposed alternate title would be "Tales of Magic: Suburban Gothic." There's a character in this book who complains that his job at a high profile architectural firm is unsatisfying, and that's so emblematic of the book's prejudices and priorities. This guy has a job that in real life you pretty much have to be a mage to get, and he hates it because it's tv-sitcom shorthand for "vaguely creative man who makes compromises with capitalism." Hey, Ozymandius Cody, when your college classmates nicknamed you "Rourke" it wasn't a compliment.
But it does highlight my own awkward position in our generational reckoning. I'm Gen X enough to remember reading this book in its original context and thinking it was pretty cool, but Millennial enough to scream, "what the hell is wrong with you, I'd kill for professional work in my chosen field." Revised is kind of like that sometimes, a snapshot of the six months where we all thought the 90s were going to last forever. I don't know whether to count that as a weakness or a strength.
The Bitter Road's has two agendas that often work at cross purposes from each other. The first is an attempt to scale back the focus on the Ascension War and talk about games that deal with the problem of navigating the mundane world. That's where the book is at its most achingly 90s. When it discusses lifestyles that might serve as the anchor for a mage campaign, the examples are: college student/professor, world traveler, business mogul, and medicine.
There's nothing wrong with any of those things. The out-of-character sidebars make some fairly persuasive arguments for these campaign models. It's just that they're all so middle-class aspirational. The business section even suggests basing a game around the PCs founding a start-up. That's one that didn't age well even between the writing and the publication.
That misstep aside, half the book is like that, telling you with varying degrees of defensiveness that there's more to playing a mage than just magic.
The other thing the book is trying to do is chart the fallout from "The Year of the Reckoning." The spirit world is inaccessible, the Masters are either dead or missing, and former middle managers of the Traditions, characters with a Sphere rating of 3, have to step up and fill the power vacuum.
It's a good idea for a campaign, but it's so intimately tied to a particular time and place and cultural body of knowledge. Theoretically, you could run a Bitter Road-style game with starting core book characters, so it's got a certain accessibility to it, but if someone was just getting into the game with the Revised core, would this even be something that interests them? It's a high concept that leans heavily on established metaplot, but it's also the edition's first full-sized supplement. Was The Bitter Road intended for existing White Wolf fans, to help them manage their expectations as they transitioned into a new edition?
It's a shame, because there's some solid stuff here. One of the consequences of the "death of the Masters" is that mages now have to deal with their abandoned projects, "cursed Wonders, berserk automatons, wards and time-space anomalies." That's something that you could build a setting off of - magic is dying, but it doesn't always die gracefully. It's a problem that only mages are qualified to deal with, and one that's sure to get them tangled up in interesting fantasy dilemmas. That's why you probably shouldn't tie it to a particular cosmic event. If that were just part of the background of mage life, ancient enchantments with unpredictable rates of decay, it would both have greater longevity and do more to really hit the themes of loss and alienation that the book is trying to go for.
Same with the section about finding a Master to mentor you in the advanced magical arts. Good general storytelling advice, but tied inexplicably to a specific set of conditions.
Ultimately, if I had one criticism of Mage Revised so far it's that it needs to step up its fantasy elements. The Bitter Road spends a lot of time talking about the problems facing modern mages, but it mostly boils down to "other mages." It makes the factions of the Ascension war feel a lot like rival gangs. There are immensely consequential feuds, but only if you get involved in the subculture.
That impression was probably not accidental, though. There's a sense of weariness with the Ascension War that runs through The Bitter Road. It feels on one hand that it's merely a greater focus on a more psychological style of storytelling, but on the other I kind of pick up on an implicit mission statement - Revised is going to be a low-key gothic punk game of occult horror even if it has to war with two editions of Mage: the Ascension legacy to do it. As the book itself says, "the Ascension War gives way to the Age of the Individual."
The Bitter Road is a book that pulls in a lot of directions at once, and that can seem like a weakness, but I actually admire its ambition. Because I don't think its contradictions are necessarily a sign of inconsistency so much as a desire to make its theme one of tension. It's ostensibly "Disciples of the Art," companion volume to the late 2e's Initiates . . . and Masters . . . and what it's about is people caught in the middle. Between temporal power and spiritual enlightenment, between leadership and duty, between the magical and the mundane. It's supposed to be the, um, bitter road - a high-wire walk where the slightest misstep will send you tumbling into oblivion.
I can't say that it's entirely successful. Sometimes its competing impulses just click and it feels like it's going to pull it off, but most of the time it just feels like a grab-bag of overly narrow setting material.
And with that said, I realize I got most of the way through a post and barely used my notes.
At one point, one of the narrators says, "The Technocracy is necessary . . . [it] serves a purpose, a noble one . . . they're not the evil empire we've been led to believe." And that's a whole post just by itself, and then an internet argument afterwards.
Or later, "[The Progenitors] consider 'degenerate homeopathy' a threat to health" from a different narrator. That's a whole other fevered post and subsequent flame war.
Or perhaps we can talk about the Sons of Ether, who help Sleepers "realize the lie of 'hard facts'" and the Virtual Adepts who "instill the seeds of conspiracy into the minds of the public." The book said it best, " use the Net more to stir shit than anything else." Quit inadvertently predicting 2020, guys!
Which is my way of saying, that for all its controversial decisions about the direction of the game-line, The Bitter Road is in many ways the platonic Mage: the Ascension book. Nearly everything there is to love or hate about this game is in here somewhere.
Ukss Contribution: The section about mages in the business world is narrated by this Verbena lady who really puts on a classic "overcompensate finance-bro" attitude (and I could write a whole post on that - "I hear that woman Lee Ann spends some time volunteering in a soup kitchen. Well I contributed over six hundred thousand dollars to various charities last year through my business, and I still have time to promote Tradition idealism through business advertising and financial choices.")
I'm not really interested in Ms Maria, per se, but she is involved in a concept that interests me - the relationship between capitalism and magic. Ukss has a continent that's heavily tied up with capitalist themes, so I think I'm going to have to pick something from this section. I'm going to go with "Euthanatoi make excellent stockbrokers."
Because Mage puts both death magic and chaos magic in the Entropy Sphere, we aren't necessarily meant to read this as the Euthanatos being good with stocks because of their necromancy, but I'm going to be excessively literal. In Ukss necromancers are going to be the quants of the Lowlands stock market. Everybody uses them, but nobody likes to talk about them.
Sunday, May 10, 2020
(Aeon) Distant Worlds
OMG, I love this book! It was just pure fun from cover to cover. It's got that special Aeon (nee Trinity) mix - two parts soft sci-fi nonsense mixed with one part superhero nonsense, blending together to form a heightened space opera reality. It couldn't appeal to me more if it were designed for me personally.
The original Trinity was probably White Wolf's most daring game, and the second edition is a fitting follow-up, introducing new elements that fit seamlessly into the established setting. The interesting thing to me, though, is how some of the old stuff get reinterpreted through the new edition's less cynical attitude. For example, there's a Norça research facility on Averiguas and the book took special pains to remind us that it's "adhering to strict ethical and safety practices." I'm pretty sure that 1st edition wouldn't have bothered (I actually went back and checked - it mentions "[no] human or psion test subjects" which is hardly the same thing).
This repeats often enough to be a noticeable pattern - hierarchies are flatter, the novas of Eden teleported a would-be cult leader into the sun, the criminal gang in the Karoo mining colony is a little less vicious (and also called "The Tigers" instead of "The Leopards" for some reason). I'd say that the softening of the setting is overall an improvement. It definitely feels like it's fulfilling the original game's promise of a diverse, tolerant future.
I also appreciated the book's consistent approach to non-humanoid aliens. I'm not sure nine-legged creatures would ever evolve into megafauna, but at least it's taking the idea of alien evolutionary processes seriously. There are probably at least one too many communal organisms, given that the myriasoma from first edition still exist, but I do admit that the pelagic megamedusoza are suitably spooky and the pre-sapient puppeteers are an intriguing problem waiting to happen. I guess, with the existence of psychic powers in the Trinity Continuum, "colony of creatures that coordinates through the psychic medium" is just a common ecological niche.
Still, it's not all human beings making friends with prophetic crabs and telepathic slugs. The game's traditional villains are still here, despite the more optimistic tone. The Chromatics are treated so sympathetically that they had to have new antagonists invented for them (the darkness-loving cousin species known as Howlers who can only think coherently after they've eaten Chromatic flesh), but the Doyen are still as shitty as ever. We see a couple more planets they've royally screwed over. And, of course, there are still monstrous Aberrants, though the context feels different when we see them mixed in with novas who are trying to be helpful (whether successfully, as those in Eden or with gross, possibly taint-driven incompetence like those on Marfisa or Scream). The new top-tier Aberrant is a great horror antagonist, though - a glowing octopus creature where if you look at him (even through video) the language centers of your brain rot away and you're struck with permanent aphasia. Project Rewrite really justified its existence when they destroyed all the tapes of this guy, that's for sure.
But you know what, this post could be nothing but me quoting things I liked and it would be almost as long as Distant Worlds itself. So let's talk about theme. Distant Worlds corrects a subtle flaw in the original Trinity. It's something I brought up in my post about 1st edition's Stellar Frontier - there used to be a feeling of finitude in the Trinity Universe. Finding planets was difficult, so there were six of them out there and there would probably be more eventually, but the scope was pretty well set. You could read 2nd edition the same way, but 18 planets feels qualitatively different. There's much less of a feeling that I could keep them all in my head at once.
Beyond that, though, there was also a shift in how the planets are talked about. First edition, the planets they gave you had been discovered. Second edition, at least half of them are being discovered. The intro to the second chapter even gets explicit about it - the new planets are meant to be ones that the PCs are first to discover, at least potentially. It's a little less than convincing when the robo-apocalyse world has resident researchers and the psychic crab world has an embassy, but the message is clear. Space exploration is an intended mode of play. (This was technically true in 1st edition as well, but between the disappearance of the teleporters, the near uniqueness of jump ships, and the lack of explicit support, it all seemed very theoretical).
The other great thing about Distant Worlds' setting additions is a sci-fi theme that is much more fashionable now than it was in 1997 - deep time. A lot of the setting's mysteries have answers that go back thousands or millions of years. The main antagonists are themselves an elder species who transcended their physical forms 4 million years ago. I love it. It really gives a galaxy that lived-in feel. It also means that on those rare occasions you stumble across a recent event (the planet with the murder bots went to shit only one year before humans arrived!), it has a stunning sense of urgency.
My only real disappointment with Distant Worlds is how it once again fails to explain why Brazil gets to claim a whole planet. But at least, this time, it feels like a much smaller portion of the universe.
Ukss Contribution: Oh, so much good stuff here. I could probably do an Ukss contribution from every individual world. I'm going to stay pretty modest though. Mgitu, the gas giant, has an improbable native ecology, including airwhales. They're a bit more sci-fi than Mongo's air whales, but I took it as a sign. I'm going to enrich the life of Aetheria by picking another aerial species - the beanstalk. It's a plant that grows in a cloud, and then extends roots down to other, more nutritious clouds miles below. Just a neat fairy tale image in the middle of our sci-fi, why not.
The original Trinity was probably White Wolf's most daring game, and the second edition is a fitting follow-up, introducing new elements that fit seamlessly into the established setting. The interesting thing to me, though, is how some of the old stuff get reinterpreted through the new edition's less cynical attitude. For example, there's a Norça research facility on Averiguas and the book took special pains to remind us that it's "adhering to strict ethical and safety practices." I'm pretty sure that 1st edition wouldn't have bothered (I actually went back and checked - it mentions "[no] human or psion test subjects" which is hardly the same thing).
This repeats often enough to be a noticeable pattern - hierarchies are flatter, the novas of Eden teleported a would-be cult leader into the sun, the criminal gang in the Karoo mining colony is a little less vicious (and also called "The Tigers" instead of "The Leopards" for some reason). I'd say that the softening of the setting is overall an improvement. It definitely feels like it's fulfilling the original game's promise of a diverse, tolerant future.
I also appreciated the book's consistent approach to non-humanoid aliens. I'm not sure nine-legged creatures would ever evolve into megafauna, but at least it's taking the idea of alien evolutionary processes seriously. There are probably at least one too many communal organisms, given that the myriasoma from first edition still exist, but I do admit that the pelagic megamedusoza are suitably spooky and the pre-sapient puppeteers are an intriguing problem waiting to happen. I guess, with the existence of psychic powers in the Trinity Continuum, "colony of creatures that coordinates through the psychic medium" is just a common ecological niche.
Still, it's not all human beings making friends with prophetic crabs and telepathic slugs. The game's traditional villains are still here, despite the more optimistic tone. The Chromatics are treated so sympathetically that they had to have new antagonists invented for them (the darkness-loving cousin species known as Howlers who can only think coherently after they've eaten Chromatic flesh), but the Doyen are still as shitty as ever. We see a couple more planets they've royally screwed over. And, of course, there are still monstrous Aberrants, though the context feels different when we see them mixed in with novas who are trying to be helpful (whether successfully, as those in Eden or with gross, possibly taint-driven incompetence like those on Marfisa or Scream). The new top-tier Aberrant is a great horror antagonist, though - a glowing octopus creature where if you look at him (even through video) the language centers of your brain rot away and you're struck with permanent aphasia. Project Rewrite really justified its existence when they destroyed all the tapes of this guy, that's for sure.
But you know what, this post could be nothing but me quoting things I liked and it would be almost as long as Distant Worlds itself. So let's talk about theme. Distant Worlds corrects a subtle flaw in the original Trinity. It's something I brought up in my post about 1st edition's Stellar Frontier - there used to be a feeling of finitude in the Trinity Universe. Finding planets was difficult, so there were six of them out there and there would probably be more eventually, but the scope was pretty well set. You could read 2nd edition the same way, but 18 planets feels qualitatively different. There's much less of a feeling that I could keep them all in my head at once.
Beyond that, though, there was also a shift in how the planets are talked about. First edition, the planets they gave you had been discovered. Second edition, at least half of them are being discovered. The intro to the second chapter even gets explicit about it - the new planets are meant to be ones that the PCs are first to discover, at least potentially. It's a little less than convincing when the robo-apocalyse world has resident researchers and the psychic crab world has an embassy, but the message is clear. Space exploration is an intended mode of play. (This was technically true in 1st edition as well, but between the disappearance of the teleporters, the near uniqueness of jump ships, and the lack of explicit support, it all seemed very theoretical).
The other great thing about Distant Worlds' setting additions is a sci-fi theme that is much more fashionable now than it was in 1997 - deep time. A lot of the setting's mysteries have answers that go back thousands or millions of years. The main antagonists are themselves an elder species who transcended their physical forms 4 million years ago. I love it. It really gives a galaxy that lived-in feel. It also means that on those rare occasions you stumble across a recent event (the planet with the murder bots went to shit only one year before humans arrived!), it has a stunning sense of urgency.
My only real disappointment with Distant Worlds is how it once again fails to explain why Brazil gets to claim a whole planet. But at least, this time, it feels like a much smaller portion of the universe.
Ukss Contribution: Oh, so much good stuff here. I could probably do an Ukss contribution from every individual world. I'm going to stay pretty modest though. Mgitu, the gas giant, has an improbable native ecology, including airwhales. They're a bit more sci-fi than Mongo's air whales, but I took it as a sign. I'm going to enrich the life of Aetheria by picking another aerial species - the beanstalk. It's a plant that grows in a cloud, and then extends roots down to other, more nutritious clouds miles below. Just a neat fairy tale image in the middle of our sci-fi, why not.
Friday, May 8, 2020
Mage Storyteller's Companion
The big question of this book is "exactly how much of it should have gone directly into the core?" At least two of the four chapters, certainly. You've got a group of people in the setting that mostly deal with spirits? They're going to need the spirit rules to do that. You've got a magic item background? People are going to want to know the benchmarks for using it (plus, you know, it's a little weird that this game about mages doesn't cover magical crafting by default.) When I look and see that the relevant sections are 26 pages total, I have to wonder - was Mage, Revised really so tightly packed, and if so, was it somehow impossible to add another chapter?
That's one of those economic and publishing industry questions that likely has a complex technical answer that is nonetheless completely unsatisfying.
The other half of the book is expanded setting information that's nice to have, would have improved the core were it included, but is fairly safely removable without noticeably hurting the core-only experience. It starts with a chapter about the history of the Awakened that mostly sums up the metaplot so far. It doesn't explain all the old canon (how the hell could it), but more or less gets you up to speed, assuming you don't care about all the weird legacy stuff that lurked in 2e's corners. The neater and tidier approach is, however, satisfying in its own way, allowing for a more distilled Mage experience.
The only really interesting thing is that canon is still playing it coy about whether Copernicus actually moved the entire Earth with the heliocentric theory. "It remains a hotly debated axis of metaphysical study." I like this particular bit of worldbuilding because it's so weird and so unnecessary, but it also sort of defines Mage by indicating that almost anything about reality is up for grabs.
We also see the Technocracy at its most realistically villainous in the second chapter. It's a recap and update of the Crafts from Book of Crafts, and since most of them are based off of non-European cultures, almost all of them have some version of "The Technocracy killed our members under the guise of European colonialism coming in and taking over our lands." It's not necessarily the most grotesquely brutal the Technocracy's been so far, but it is a repeated reminder that these guys are coming in and murdering people for what amounts to some pretty flimsy motives.
The ultimate (as in "last," but also the most affecting) example comes in the Wonders section, where it describes an item made by hippy mage, Poppy Jenkins. She had a magical string of love beads and it just blandly states that the beads were scattered when the Technocracy killed her. Just a callous little detail. They murdered her and they didn't even care about her prized possession. It feels real to me, in a way that the sci-fi horror rarely did.
But moving away from the villains of the Crafts chapter, I have to say that this is yet another case of White Wolf attempting to do through metaplot something they should have done with a retcon. In Revised edition, the Crafts are on the ropes. They're either hunted to near extinction or they've taken shelter with one of the larger Traditions.
The motives for this are completely transparent - a desire to change the fundamental design philosophy behind the Traditions. They are no longer vague rpg-class archetypes, but actually coalitions of specific cultural beliefs about the supernatural that happen to work well enough together to be a political bloc. I,e. Traditions are now supposed to be associations of Crafts. So you can't exactly have the old Crafts just floating around out there being all miscellaneous and out-traditioning the Traditions. Since Traditions are now supposed to be marriages of convenience, you can now just slot the Crafts into the most convenient Traditions.
It would have worked if the setting had been designed from the ground up with that in mind, but to make it a metaplot event is just weird. The Wu Lung are part of the Akashic Brotherhood now? Despite the fact that they are quite famously and emblematically enemies? Kind of sounds like you want a generic East Asian Tradition. With a bit more thought and the freedom to act, they could have been slotted into a more compatible Tradition from the very start.
Still, it was nice to see the old gang again, even if they're in much reduced circumstances. It's probably not a coincidence, though, that the best part of the chapter is the newcomers, the Taftani. I'm not going to go too much into them, because they get half a book later, but they're pagan Arabic fairy tale sorcerers who bind genies and give approximately zero shits about keeping a low profile, and they would be Mage: the Ascension's greatest invention were it not for the fact that the books like to pretend the World of Darkness keeps looking vaguely like Earth.
In the end, though, what I most wish had made it from the Storyteller's Companion to the Core is the clearer expression of Mage's fantasy genre. You can meet an abominable snowman. There's a goddess walking the Earth who was shattered into eight avatars and they're sending their minions to create identical temples so that her divided senses can feel whole. There are mysterious magical heirlooms and a healing wand that's powered by the imprisoned soul of a demon. I'm on the record as liking (maybe even preferring) Revised's more grounded tone, but it absolutely needs some of that fantasy whimsy to make it Mage.
Ukss Contribution:I'm going to have to go with poor Poppy's love beads. When you pick one up, fate conspires to have another fall into the hands of your true love. Then, as the beads call to each other, you two will meet and instantly have something to talk about. A dead hippy matchmaking from beyond the grave, using good vibes to reassemble her signature magical wonder. It's pretty cool.
That's one of those economic and publishing industry questions that likely has a complex technical answer that is nonetheless completely unsatisfying.
The other half of the book is expanded setting information that's nice to have, would have improved the core were it included, but is fairly safely removable without noticeably hurting the core-only experience. It starts with a chapter about the history of the Awakened that mostly sums up the metaplot so far. It doesn't explain all the old canon (how the hell could it), but more or less gets you up to speed, assuming you don't care about all the weird legacy stuff that lurked in 2e's corners. The neater and tidier approach is, however, satisfying in its own way, allowing for a more distilled Mage experience.
The only really interesting thing is that canon is still playing it coy about whether Copernicus actually moved the entire Earth with the heliocentric theory. "It remains a hotly debated axis of metaphysical study." I like this particular bit of worldbuilding because it's so weird and so unnecessary, but it also sort of defines Mage by indicating that almost anything about reality is up for grabs.
We also see the Technocracy at its most realistically villainous in the second chapter. It's a recap and update of the Crafts from Book of Crafts, and since most of them are based off of non-European cultures, almost all of them have some version of "The Technocracy killed our members under the guise of European colonialism coming in and taking over our lands." It's not necessarily the most grotesquely brutal the Technocracy's been so far, but it is a repeated reminder that these guys are coming in and murdering people for what amounts to some pretty flimsy motives.
The ultimate (as in "last," but also the most affecting) example comes in the Wonders section, where it describes an item made by hippy mage, Poppy Jenkins. She had a magical string of love beads and it just blandly states that the beads were scattered when the Technocracy killed her. Just a callous little detail. They murdered her and they didn't even care about her prized possession. It feels real to me, in a way that the sci-fi horror rarely did.
But moving away from the villains of the Crafts chapter, I have to say that this is yet another case of White Wolf attempting to do through metaplot something they should have done with a retcon. In Revised edition, the Crafts are on the ropes. They're either hunted to near extinction or they've taken shelter with one of the larger Traditions.
The motives for this are completely transparent - a desire to change the fundamental design philosophy behind the Traditions. They are no longer vague rpg-class archetypes, but actually coalitions of specific cultural beliefs about the supernatural that happen to work well enough together to be a political bloc. I,e. Traditions are now supposed to be associations of Crafts. So you can't exactly have the old Crafts just floating around out there being all miscellaneous and out-traditioning the Traditions. Since Traditions are now supposed to be marriages of convenience, you can now just slot the Crafts into the most convenient Traditions.
It would have worked if the setting had been designed from the ground up with that in mind, but to make it a metaplot event is just weird. The Wu Lung are part of the Akashic Brotherhood now? Despite the fact that they are quite famously and emblematically enemies? Kind of sounds like you want a generic East Asian Tradition. With a bit more thought and the freedom to act, they could have been slotted into a more compatible Tradition from the very start.
Still, it was nice to see the old gang again, even if they're in much reduced circumstances. It's probably not a coincidence, though, that the best part of the chapter is the newcomers, the Taftani. I'm not going to go too much into them, because they get half a book later, but they're pagan Arabic fairy tale sorcerers who bind genies and give approximately zero shits about keeping a low profile, and they would be Mage: the Ascension's greatest invention were it not for the fact that the books like to pretend the World of Darkness keeps looking vaguely like Earth.
In the end, though, what I most wish had made it from the Storyteller's Companion to the Core is the clearer expression of Mage's fantasy genre. You can meet an abominable snowman. There's a goddess walking the Earth who was shattered into eight avatars and they're sending their minions to create identical temples so that her divided senses can feel whole. There are mysterious magical heirlooms and a healing wand that's powered by the imprisoned soul of a demon. I'm on the record as liking (maybe even preferring) Revised's more grounded tone, but it absolutely needs some of that fantasy whimsy to make it Mage.
Ukss Contribution:I'm going to have to go with poor Poppy's love beads. When you pick one up, fate conspires to have another fall into the hands of your true love. Then, as the beads call to each other, you two will meet and instantly have something to talk about. A dead hippy matchmaking from beyond the grave, using good vibes to reassemble her signature magical wonder. It's pretty cool.
Wednesday, May 6, 2020
Mage: the Ascension, Revised Core
I absolutely love this book, though I'm forced to admit that this feeling is probably not based entirely on its merits. It is, in many ways, a flawed book. Some of that is old Storyteller system crumminess that I was too mathematically naive to pick up on (for example, if you use the rules suggested for "simplifying stealth," it is nearly impossible for the stealthy character to be detected). Some of it is omissions that border on the unforgivable - no spirits stats whatsoever, sparse information on the Technocracy, and no example wonders or devices.
This was something I noticed way back when. The book would drop casual mentions of Tradition mages having to dodge HIT Marks, but then nowhere did it provide stats or descriptions of said devices. I gathered from context that they were some kind of robot, but it wasn't until I read some of the supplements that I learned they were supposed to blend in with humanity, like the Terminator.
Even so, the Revised core's flaws don't detract from the warm glow I get just handling this book. This was my first Mage book, my first World of Darkness book, and quite possibly my first non-D&D book, period. It opened up my imagination in ways that I never expected. And there are just hours and hours of happy memories associated with this specific physical object (unlike Aberrant, I never had to replace my Mage core due to having a soda spilled on it). It was a joy to be able to read it again.
So I know that I'm not going to be able to be complete objective here. However, with that grain of salt in mind, I actually do think the Revised Core has a lot going for it. Due to the aforementioned oversights, it's not as good a core qua core as 2nd edition, but it's got a more confident voice. The world is portrayed with more conviction, and the various Traditions feel like fuller, more complex organizations than they have in the past.
The trickiest part of judging Mage Revised, however, is that the core is also a soft reboot of the setting, and . . . Look, new Mage is good, but it's not the same. Personally, if you came to me and first described Mage, Revised and then described Mage, 2nd edition, well, I'd probably be in awe that you could describe Mage, 2nd edition, but after I got over my shock, I'd agree that Revised sounded more like a World of Darkness game.
What Revised is trying to do is to dial in on a purer strain of gothic-punk fantasy. Magic is dying, and it's taking the world with it. You're small and alone, but you're also keeping the faith. A mage is a candle in the dark, seemingly helpless against the forces that would snuff it out. And yet even that is better than ignorance. The Sleepers face all the same dangers, but without the defense of knowing what's really going on. You get to choose whether you want to help them.
It's a good premise for a game. And there are aspects of the Revised system that are effective at selling it. The addition of Resonance mechanics is my favorite bit. Mages now have a magical aura that surrounds them at all times. At low levels, it's detectable only by the specially sensitive, but as time goes on, it becomes overpowering. The fiction indicates that Sleepers can pick up on Resonance subconsciously. As a mage gets drawn into the Awakened world, their relationships start to suffer. They become alienated from friends and loved ones who sense their strangeness and begin to pull away, from self-preservation, if nothing else. There's no mechanic associated with this, but it's a recurring theme.
I really like Revised Mage's new claustrophobic feel. There's a magic world. It contains wonders, but it's weird. It exists alongside the mundane world, on unlabled streets and in the creaky old houses all the schoolchildren fear. If you had the eyes to see it, it would be everywhere, but only very weird people have those sorts of eyes.
In fact, it's such a good niche that it feels almost churlish of me to point out that both Unknown Armies and Changeling: the Lost fill it better. Which isn't to say either of those games is a replacement for Mage, Revised, but just that "desperate times in the occult underground" isn't Mage's only interest. It also still really wants to be the "world tour of occultism" game, and sometimes those impulses dovetail nicely and sometimes they work at cross purposes.
I think White Wolf did Mage, Revised a great disservice by placing it in the older Mages' continuity. Crossing into the spirit world is dangerous, even deadly. The old masters are all dead or vanished. These are ideas that fit right into a melancholy world of dying magic, where the players are the last embers of an extinguished flame. But to make those fit with the old Mage, they blew up the spirit world and they killed off the masters. People cared about those things. They're going to miss them now that they're gone, maybe even feel a little betrayed that the stories they've been telling are no longer supported.
Plus, it's inelegant worldbuilding. Not necessarily unrealistic - big sudden events that shake up the status quo do happen, especially at the beginning of stories - but one that puts too much emphasis on concrete cause and effect. The world is broken, but it didn't break overnight . . . the Technocracy's Code Ragnarok notwithstanding.
The biggest flaw with Mage, Revised (aside from the magic system, which I'm going to have to go into detail about sooner or later) is that its central conflict didn't age well, at all. Like, I'm talking about 18 months after release it's going to feel like it was written in an entirely different universe.
See, Mage Revised contends that the Ascension War is pointless. It's called, at one point, a "deluded attempt to remake the world in their image." The Traditions lost thanks to the Technocracy's strength of arms, but then the Technocracy lost when it turned out that Sleepers were too apathetic to embrace their sci-fi Utopia. It's an idea that sort of works, thematically, with the rest of the game, but is also weirdly elitist and weirdly sheltered, a kind of naiveté that masks itself as cynicism (i.e. peak White Wolf). Ultimately, it feels a lot like someone really bought into those 90s "end of history" and "the parties are both the same" narratives.
That's why it's been my opinion for awhile that Mage: the Ascension couldn't really adapt to a post-9/11 world. Revised pictured a world in stasis, where the experts were firmly in control . . . and that obviously didn't work out, but even from the beginning, Mage has drawn the wrong battle-lines. You want to talk about the national security apparatus? You want to talk about the highest levels of capitalism? Okay, we can talk about how they're authoritarian institutions that strive to embed hierarchies into every aspect of human life, but what we can't say is that their defining traits are "reason" or "science." The closest they ever get is a sort of tunnel vision efficiency at optimizing their quantifiable short-term goals (procurement budgets and shareholder value, respectively), and even those are frequently undermined by a devotion to "conventional wisdom," that seems to have come from nowhere in particular. Even order is a secondary concern to "never admitting a mistake."
But at the same time, it would be a mistake to thoughtlessly attribute all opposition to these forces to a desire for tolerance, diversity, and individual freedom. Sometimes a reactionary is just a reactionary, and while in some sense you might declare that Al Qaeda and the Bush Administration had the same goal, it would be ludicrous (not to mention at least three kinds of offensive) to theorize that they were controlled by the same conspiracy.
But Mage can't let go of conspiracies. They're baked right into the game at a fundamental level. It also can't let go of the idea of civilizational conflict. That's kind of central to the whole "Ascension War" concept. Revised tried. It inherited a premise of "the West is under attack by a coalition of ancient superstitions - as it deserves to be" and tried to segue that into "the West won the clash of civilizations - and that's bad," but it never quite roots out the false dichotomy.
There are no "sides." There are no conspiracies. There's just the simple truth that power has a million ugly ways of expressing itself. Sometimes your neighbors are the worst of your oppressors.
Although that's a bit headier a level of conversation than we really need to be having. Point is that Mage: the Ascension, Revised was a period piece almost as soon as it was written. If you want old-school paranoia in a magic-noir universe, then it's frickin' great, but it's something that needs to be treated a lot less seriously than it takes itself.
Ukss Contribution: I kind of like Avatars. Their presentation here is not the strongest. "The shard of Prime that allows the use of magic is the birthright of a very select few." But the implication that they are distributed randomly and are not related to one's degree of spiritual attainment is not necessarily one that will endure. If you boil them down to their most basic concept "reincarnating personal godform that goads its chosen towards enlightenment" is a pretty interesting idea for a religion.
This was something I noticed way back when. The book would drop casual mentions of Tradition mages having to dodge HIT Marks, but then nowhere did it provide stats or descriptions of said devices. I gathered from context that they were some kind of robot, but it wasn't until I read some of the supplements that I learned they were supposed to blend in with humanity, like the Terminator.
Even so, the Revised core's flaws don't detract from the warm glow I get just handling this book. This was my first Mage book, my first World of Darkness book, and quite possibly my first non-D&D book, period. It opened up my imagination in ways that I never expected. And there are just hours and hours of happy memories associated with this specific physical object (unlike Aberrant, I never had to replace my Mage core due to having a soda spilled on it). It was a joy to be able to read it again.
So I know that I'm not going to be able to be complete objective here. However, with that grain of salt in mind, I actually do think the Revised Core has a lot going for it. Due to the aforementioned oversights, it's not as good a core qua core as 2nd edition, but it's got a more confident voice. The world is portrayed with more conviction, and the various Traditions feel like fuller, more complex organizations than they have in the past.
The trickiest part of judging Mage Revised, however, is that the core is also a soft reboot of the setting, and . . . Look, new Mage is good, but it's not the same. Personally, if you came to me and first described Mage, Revised and then described Mage, 2nd edition, well, I'd probably be in awe that you could describe Mage, 2nd edition, but after I got over my shock, I'd agree that Revised sounded more like a World of Darkness game.
What Revised is trying to do is to dial in on a purer strain of gothic-punk fantasy. Magic is dying, and it's taking the world with it. You're small and alone, but you're also keeping the faith. A mage is a candle in the dark, seemingly helpless against the forces that would snuff it out. And yet even that is better than ignorance. The Sleepers face all the same dangers, but without the defense of knowing what's really going on. You get to choose whether you want to help them.
It's a good premise for a game. And there are aspects of the Revised system that are effective at selling it. The addition of Resonance mechanics is my favorite bit. Mages now have a magical aura that surrounds them at all times. At low levels, it's detectable only by the specially sensitive, but as time goes on, it becomes overpowering. The fiction indicates that Sleepers can pick up on Resonance subconsciously. As a mage gets drawn into the Awakened world, their relationships start to suffer. They become alienated from friends and loved ones who sense their strangeness and begin to pull away, from self-preservation, if nothing else. There's no mechanic associated with this, but it's a recurring theme.
I really like Revised Mage's new claustrophobic feel. There's a magic world. It contains wonders, but it's weird. It exists alongside the mundane world, on unlabled streets and in the creaky old houses all the schoolchildren fear. If you had the eyes to see it, it would be everywhere, but only very weird people have those sorts of eyes.
In fact, it's such a good niche that it feels almost churlish of me to point out that both Unknown Armies and Changeling: the Lost fill it better. Which isn't to say either of those games is a replacement for Mage, Revised, but just that "desperate times in the occult underground" isn't Mage's only interest. It also still really wants to be the "world tour of occultism" game, and sometimes those impulses dovetail nicely and sometimes they work at cross purposes.
I think White Wolf did Mage, Revised a great disservice by placing it in the older Mages' continuity. Crossing into the spirit world is dangerous, even deadly. The old masters are all dead or vanished. These are ideas that fit right into a melancholy world of dying magic, where the players are the last embers of an extinguished flame. But to make those fit with the old Mage, they blew up the spirit world and they killed off the masters. People cared about those things. They're going to miss them now that they're gone, maybe even feel a little betrayed that the stories they've been telling are no longer supported.
Plus, it's inelegant worldbuilding. Not necessarily unrealistic - big sudden events that shake up the status quo do happen, especially at the beginning of stories - but one that puts too much emphasis on concrete cause and effect. The world is broken, but it didn't break overnight . . . the Technocracy's Code Ragnarok notwithstanding.
The biggest flaw with Mage, Revised (aside from the magic system, which I'm going to have to go into detail about sooner or later) is that its central conflict didn't age well, at all. Like, I'm talking about 18 months after release it's going to feel like it was written in an entirely different universe.
See, Mage Revised contends that the Ascension War is pointless. It's called, at one point, a "deluded attempt to remake the world in their image." The Traditions lost thanks to the Technocracy's strength of arms, but then the Technocracy lost when it turned out that Sleepers were too apathetic to embrace their sci-fi Utopia. It's an idea that sort of works, thematically, with the rest of the game, but is also weirdly elitist and weirdly sheltered, a kind of naiveté that masks itself as cynicism (i.e. peak White Wolf). Ultimately, it feels a lot like someone really bought into those 90s "end of history" and "the parties are both the same" narratives.
That's why it's been my opinion for awhile that Mage: the Ascension couldn't really adapt to a post-9/11 world. Revised pictured a world in stasis, where the experts were firmly in control . . . and that obviously didn't work out, but even from the beginning, Mage has drawn the wrong battle-lines. You want to talk about the national security apparatus? You want to talk about the highest levels of capitalism? Okay, we can talk about how they're authoritarian institutions that strive to embed hierarchies into every aspect of human life, but what we can't say is that their defining traits are "reason" or "science." The closest they ever get is a sort of tunnel vision efficiency at optimizing their quantifiable short-term goals (procurement budgets and shareholder value, respectively), and even those are frequently undermined by a devotion to "conventional wisdom," that seems to have come from nowhere in particular. Even order is a secondary concern to "never admitting a mistake."
But at the same time, it would be a mistake to thoughtlessly attribute all opposition to these forces to a desire for tolerance, diversity, and individual freedom. Sometimes a reactionary is just a reactionary, and while in some sense you might declare that Al Qaeda and the Bush Administration had the same goal, it would be ludicrous (not to mention at least three kinds of offensive) to theorize that they were controlled by the same conspiracy.
But Mage can't let go of conspiracies. They're baked right into the game at a fundamental level. It also can't let go of the idea of civilizational conflict. That's kind of central to the whole "Ascension War" concept. Revised tried. It inherited a premise of "the West is under attack by a coalition of ancient superstitions - as it deserves to be" and tried to segue that into "the West won the clash of civilizations - and that's bad," but it never quite roots out the false dichotomy.
There are no "sides." There are no conspiracies. There's just the simple truth that power has a million ugly ways of expressing itself. Sometimes your neighbors are the worst of your oppressors.
Although that's a bit headier a level of conversation than we really need to be having. Point is that Mage: the Ascension, Revised was a period piece almost as soon as it was written. If you want old-school paranoia in a magic-noir universe, then it's frickin' great, but it's something that needs to be treated a lot less seriously than it takes itself.
Ukss Contribution: I kind of like Avatars. Their presentation here is not the strongest. "The shard of Prime that allows the use of magic is the birthright of a very select few." But the implication that they are distributed randomly and are not related to one's degree of spiritual attainment is not necessarily one that will endure. If you boil them down to their most basic concept "reincarnating personal godform that goads its chosen towards enlightenment" is a pretty interesting idea for a religion.
Sunday, May 3, 2020
Aberrant: XWF
This is another one of those incidental pamphlets, only 24 pages long, so I'm going to try and make this short. Aberrant: XWF is a supplement about professional wrestling in the Aberrant universe. It borrows a lot from real-world professional wrestling (so much so that Ric Flair is league CEO, though sadly, he doesn't get stats), and, well . . .
Professional wrestling is kind of ridiculous . . . so this is kind of ridiculous. But also, professional wrestling is kind of awesome . . . so this is kind of awesome. It does that thing where it uses a lot of the wrestling lingo like "work," "shoot," "heel," etc and I'm guessing that for the year 2000, it felt really clued-in and niche, but for 2020, it just reads like an ordinary internet conversation.
Nonetheless, the sheer depth of its pop-cultural nerdery makes it feel contemporary in a way that old rpg supplements often don't. It was dorky in its original context and it's dorky now. I kind of like it.
What doesn't feel contemporary and what I didn't like about this book was its casual homophobia. I get that it was meant to depict a macho subculture, but two separate characters dropping the f-word in the space of a couple of pages . . . it annoyed me. One of them did get a dressing-down from the boss for it, but it was in that insincere corporate speak ("The XWF does not tolerate slurs directed at ethnicity, creed, or sexual orientation, and as a representative of this company, you will damn well remember that") that makes me think that it was more about covering the XWF's ass than an actual desire for tolerance.
Minor black mark aside, this book is mostly pretty great. There's a sly Spider Man shout-out with La Araña being the champion of the Silver League, and Lance "Stone Badass" Stryker makes an appearance, though mostly to indicate that he is not involved in pro wrestling. The characters who aren't blatant pop culture references are pretty decent. I mean, I'm not normally into blood sport, but I might be tempted to watch a guy named Superbeast.
Overall, a decent enough pitch for a campaign, though like Expose Aberrants before it, it's not quite meaty enough to work as a full-on campaign guide. And while some decent thought was given to things like tiered leagues and the consequences of running a superhero fighting ring with real fights (unlike wrestling, only the storylines are scripted), Aberrant's system isn't nearly robust enough for that to translate to the table. But then, I could say that about nearly any potential Aberrant campaign.
So, um, good luck.
Ukss Contribution: This all boils down to who is my favorite wrestler. Tempted to pick Ric Flair, because that would be the truest homage to what this book is trying to do, but I would be at a complete loss as to how that would even work, and Aberrant XWF is too small a book to break the world over.
My personal favorite was a guy who called himself Raja Ravana, mostly because I liked how the name rolled off the tongue, but I'm wary of using Hindu iconography I don't understand.
Third choice it is, then. Melinda Guzman, the only person to win the XWF's "Triple Crown" (there are three leagues of increasing lethality, when you win the championship in one, you gain the right to challenge the next highest champion to a single match - if you win, you become the champion, if you lose, you're bumped back down to the bottom of the ladder). She is known as "The Upset Queen" and if her suggested stats are anything to go by, it was her maxed-out Luck power that made it happen. That might be an interesting idea for a minor goddess.
Professional wrestling is kind of ridiculous . . . so this is kind of ridiculous. But also, professional wrestling is kind of awesome . . . so this is kind of awesome. It does that thing where it uses a lot of the wrestling lingo like "work," "shoot," "heel," etc and I'm guessing that for the year 2000, it felt really clued-in and niche, but for 2020, it just reads like an ordinary internet conversation.
Nonetheless, the sheer depth of its pop-cultural nerdery makes it feel contemporary in a way that old rpg supplements often don't. It was dorky in its original context and it's dorky now. I kind of like it.
What doesn't feel contemporary and what I didn't like about this book was its casual homophobia. I get that it was meant to depict a macho subculture, but two separate characters dropping the f-word in the space of a couple of pages . . . it annoyed me. One of them did get a dressing-down from the boss for it, but it was in that insincere corporate speak ("The XWF does not tolerate slurs directed at ethnicity, creed, or sexual orientation, and as a representative of this company, you will damn well remember that") that makes me think that it was more about covering the XWF's ass than an actual desire for tolerance.
Minor black mark aside, this book is mostly pretty great. There's a sly Spider Man shout-out with La Araña being the champion of the Silver League, and Lance "Stone Badass" Stryker makes an appearance, though mostly to indicate that he is not involved in pro wrestling. The characters who aren't blatant pop culture references are pretty decent. I mean, I'm not normally into blood sport, but I might be tempted to watch a guy named Superbeast.
Overall, a decent enough pitch for a campaign, though like Expose Aberrants before it, it's not quite meaty enough to work as a full-on campaign guide. And while some decent thought was given to things like tiered leagues and the consequences of running a superhero fighting ring with real fights (unlike wrestling, only the storylines are scripted), Aberrant's system isn't nearly robust enough for that to translate to the table. But then, I could say that about nearly any potential Aberrant campaign.
So, um, good luck.
Ukss Contribution: This all boils down to who is my favorite wrestler. Tempted to pick Ric Flair, because that would be the truest homage to what this book is trying to do, but I would be at a complete loss as to how that would even work, and Aberrant XWF is too small a book to break the world over.
My personal favorite was a guy who called himself Raja Ravana, mostly because I liked how the name rolled off the tongue, but I'm wary of using Hindu iconography I don't understand.
Third choice it is, then. Melinda Guzman, the only person to win the XWF's "Triple Crown" (there are three leagues of increasing lethality, when you win the championship in one, you gain the right to challenge the next highest champion to a single match - if you win, you become the champion, if you lose, you're bumped back down to the bottom of the ladder). She is known as "The Upset Queen" and if her suggested stats are anything to go by, it was her maxed-out Luck power that made it happen. That might be an interesting idea for a minor goddess.
Aberrant: Teragen
Is it possible to be racist against superheroes? That's the riddle we must solve if we're to untangle Aberrant: Teragen. They say racism is about power, but that's what superheroes have, almost by definition. And yet, the ability to obliterate mountains is distinct from institutional power. Superheroes may be able to defeat armies, but they don't command armies.
The lack of institutional power means they can be targeted for exclusion and harassment and their only recourse is superpower-fueled vigilantism. Yet the threat of that vigilantism is so effective that it must be factored into public policy. And there's no guarantee that the threat will be deployed with precision. A tantrum in defiance of a just law is as likely to succeed as principled resistance to an unjust one. That, to me, says that superheroes do have power.
But maybe that's just the dormant power of people who labor under oppression. Yes, if the masses rise up, they could throw off their chains, but systems of control are largely arranged on the assumption that they won't. If society's institutions are biased against superheroes, but the superheroes themselves feel beholden to those institutions, such that resistance is nearly unthinkable, maybe they don't have the power after all.
I don't know. I've thought about this for all of a half a day, and it's a much more complicated subject than that. What I do know is that Aberrant: Teragen is not going to bring any clarity to the debate.
The titular Teragen are an organization that quite creepily calls novas "The One Race," and refers to humans as "monkeys." The worst thing any nova can be, in their opinion, is "assimilationist," and they believe that any nova has unlimited rights to do whatever they want (up to and including rape and murder) to baseline humans.
But also, their paranoia about Project Utopia is completely justified. There is, indeed, a genocidal plot to prevent novas from reproducing and the head of Utopia is knowingly sending novas into armed conflicts with the express intent of getting them killed.
What we wind up with in this book is an organization whose impetus to act is a genuine threat to their safety and essential dignity, but whose rallying cry is that they should not be subject to human law.
So much of it reads like, "hey, maybe these Nazis have a point." And I'm not just doing the thing where I label the group "Nazis" just because they espouse an ideal of racial superiority. Divis Mal's plan to purge the Teragen of all voices who are not sufficiently loyal to him personally is called, in the text, "The Night of Long Knives." Comparisons to Hitler were completely intended.
Although, embarrassingly, the last time I read this book, maybe 15-16 years ago, I didn't know enough about history to pick up on the reference. All I knew at the time was that there was a lot in this book that made me shake my head and go, "these fuckin' guys."
There's one of those interview sections that Aberrant liked to do, where Count Orzaiz is making the case against Project Utopia, and he says, "The Utopian program to use us to fix the world's problems is nothing short of slavery." Which, I don't know, does it really count as slavery if they pay you a wage and allow you to quit? Also, isn't one of the more prominent signature characters someone who was famously fired from Project Utopia? Is that something that ever happened? Someone was so bad at being a slave that their captors were like, "I'm sorry, but I just don't think you're a good fit for our organization. The best of luck in your future endeavors."
Luckily, Ozaiz elaborates, "Anyone who doesn't join Project Utopia is treated like a pariah." Oh. You mean the sort of pariah who lives in a fabulous Valencia estate, vacations in Monte Carlo, and is invited on talk shows to politely discuss their views with sycophantic interviewers who barely push back when they say some incredibly stupid shit?
Which is to say that the Count in particular, and the Teragen in general are well-observed characters, but also. . . these fuckin' guys.
"The Confederate is opinionated and has the courage of his convictions. Few know, however, that he is not only a nova supremacist, but a white supremacist as well."
Wow, not The Confederate. Who could have ever seen that coming? But that's the Teragen for you. Their one and only unifying trait is that they don't want people telling them what they do, and thus they have no ideological vocabulary for those times when the people telling you not do something are 100% justified.
Like, Orzaiz can go on the Parker Stevenson show and claim that novas allowing themselves to be governed by human laws is like humans submitting themselves to the rules of ape society (a metaphor that the radical, Shrapnel, seems to think is "diplomatic"), but that doesn't change the fact that anyone with even a modestly developed sense of morality will side with the ape over the poacher.
The Teragen seem to believe themselves severable from the great natural continuities. Orzaiz often refers to baseline humans as novas' "genetic ancestors," and claims that this releases them for any responsibilities for things human beings have done, but that's not how it works. Count Orzaiz is, as near as I can tell, 4-6 years older than me, which means that we have almost all the same genetic ancestors. If novas shouldn't have to clean up the environment because it was baselines who ruined it, well I've got news for him - he and I are separated from the perpetrators by the exact same number of generations (i.e somewhere between "1" and "0"), and in any event only one of has inherited an enormous fortune made by reaping the benefits of an environmentally destructive economic system.
But that is how racial supremacists misuse the concept of evolution. They're taking 180 degrees the wrong lesson from it. There are no "higher forms of life" and everything is connected to everything else. Although, even if you subscribe to the notion of purely atomic species that owe nothing to each other, "I kicked a beehive and got stung by the swarm" is the purest form of natural justice there is.
So, you know, the Teragen are just completely ridiculous human beings, even if there is a glimmer of a point buried in their self-serving ideology. The emergence of novas really does raise difficult questions of political legitimacy, especially in a democracy. FAA regulations exist to keep airplanes from crashing into each other, and that's a job that doesn't become any less important when some of those "airplanes" are actually just dudes floating around up there. It would be unfair, though, if the agency came up with a policy without even consulting the people directly affected by it. Yet novas are a vanishingly small minority, so how does a government ensure that it respects the voices of the few without giving them a peremptory privilege over the many?
Um . . . don't mind me over here, just casually tossing out fundamental ethical dilemmas while analyzing a silly 90s superhero game. Anyway, if you do come up with a persuasive answer to this question, just skip me entirely and send it directly to the US Senate.
Ironically, the group in the Aberrant universe most likely to tackle these issues head-on is the Teragen's old rivals, Project Utopia, which has a whole legal department that works with governments to ensure the fair treatment of novas. Unfortunately, most of the conspiracy theories about Utopia are true.
Aberrant: Terragen reveals that the Teragen know about Project Proteus' sterilization scheme and they have a member capable of neutralizing the effects. There are several children already born and the Teragen are convinced that if Utopia knew of their existence, they'd be killed. I wish I could say this fear was unjustified, but, well, this very book contains a note from a Utopia doctor that talks about doing repeated exploratory surgery without anesthetic on a captured member of the Teragen. Killing children does not seem beyond Proteus' established behavior.
It would have been so easy to pigeonhole the Teragen as typical right-wing yahoos. They're obsessed with their theory of racial hierarchy and tolerate open talk of genocide (even if most of them agree that it's "too far.") Yet, it would be unreasonable to expect them to cooperate with a group they quite reasonably suspect will kill their children. Under those circumstances, resistance is noble.
I get an uneasy feeling at those times when it feels too much like the game trying to launder right-wing conspiracy theories ("hey, guys, here's a pitch: what if in our next game world, white genocide was real"), but I'm sure that what's really going on is 90s White Wolf's enthusiasm for "everyone's a villain" narratives.
Anyway, with all that said, I actually thought Aberrant: Terragen was a pretty fun take on the Legion of Doom as a fractious family of bickering cliques (the setting chapter contains a rather remarkable drawing of the Teragen leaders as a parody of "The Last Supper"), even if they're much less ambiguous as villains than the storytelling chapter seems to think.
Oh, and I would be totally remiss if I didn't say at least something about the Chrysalis system. You can ding it for being unbalanced, offering experience point discounts in exchange for basically nothing, but honestly I don't think that matters so much in a game as chaotically designed as Aberrant. Its real flaw is that it assumes a mode of play that would be reckless if it were actually enforced. Chrysalis points give you mutations, just like Taint points do, but the difference is that players pick what mutations they get from Chrysalis, but the storyteller picks the mutations from Taint.
When I read that I was like, "wait, what?" The previous rules mandated that the GM violate the players' ownership of their characters by imposing behavioral restrictions in how they roleplay? I was supposed to be giving players the cannibalism flaw without their permission? Needless to say, that's never how I played it, and players already had final veto on Taint mutations, so Chrysalis was never much more than a source of bonus xp in my games. A shame. It's a great setting idea, but poor execution here.
Ukss Contribution: A lot of great characters here. The writers went all out in designing fun new supervillains with interesting motivations and visually arresting designs, the weirdest of which was Sloppy Joe, a nova whose skin and bones dissolved and who stays alive by means of a transparent forcefield holding all his organs inside.
Joe's kind of a great character, but he's not my pick. For obvious reasons, I'm going with The Mathematician, a super-intelligent nova whose statistical models are detailed enough to serve as a form of precognition. He has phantom numbers floating around him at all times and he's so worried about his own actions changing the future that he hides away from the world, futilely warning the Teragen that their actions will hasten the global apocalypse.
The lack of institutional power means they can be targeted for exclusion and harassment and their only recourse is superpower-fueled vigilantism. Yet the threat of that vigilantism is so effective that it must be factored into public policy. And there's no guarantee that the threat will be deployed with precision. A tantrum in defiance of a just law is as likely to succeed as principled resistance to an unjust one. That, to me, says that superheroes do have power.
But maybe that's just the dormant power of people who labor under oppression. Yes, if the masses rise up, they could throw off their chains, but systems of control are largely arranged on the assumption that they won't. If society's institutions are biased against superheroes, but the superheroes themselves feel beholden to those institutions, such that resistance is nearly unthinkable, maybe they don't have the power after all.
I don't know. I've thought about this for all of a half a day, and it's a much more complicated subject than that. What I do know is that Aberrant: Teragen is not going to bring any clarity to the debate.
The titular Teragen are an organization that quite creepily calls novas "The One Race," and refers to humans as "monkeys." The worst thing any nova can be, in their opinion, is "assimilationist," and they believe that any nova has unlimited rights to do whatever they want (up to and including rape and murder) to baseline humans.
But also, their paranoia about Project Utopia is completely justified. There is, indeed, a genocidal plot to prevent novas from reproducing and the head of Utopia is knowingly sending novas into armed conflicts with the express intent of getting them killed.
What we wind up with in this book is an organization whose impetus to act is a genuine threat to their safety and essential dignity, but whose rallying cry is that they should not be subject to human law.
So much of it reads like, "hey, maybe these Nazis have a point." And I'm not just doing the thing where I label the group "Nazis" just because they espouse an ideal of racial superiority. Divis Mal's plan to purge the Teragen of all voices who are not sufficiently loyal to him personally is called, in the text, "The Night of Long Knives." Comparisons to Hitler were completely intended.
Although, embarrassingly, the last time I read this book, maybe 15-16 years ago, I didn't know enough about history to pick up on the reference. All I knew at the time was that there was a lot in this book that made me shake my head and go, "these fuckin' guys."
There's one of those interview sections that Aberrant liked to do, where Count Orzaiz is making the case against Project Utopia, and he says, "The Utopian program to use us to fix the world's problems is nothing short of slavery." Which, I don't know, does it really count as slavery if they pay you a wage and allow you to quit? Also, isn't one of the more prominent signature characters someone who was famously fired from Project Utopia? Is that something that ever happened? Someone was so bad at being a slave that their captors were like, "I'm sorry, but I just don't think you're a good fit for our organization. The best of luck in your future endeavors."
Luckily, Ozaiz elaborates, "Anyone who doesn't join Project Utopia is treated like a pariah." Oh. You mean the sort of pariah who lives in a fabulous Valencia estate, vacations in Monte Carlo, and is invited on talk shows to politely discuss their views with sycophantic interviewers who barely push back when they say some incredibly stupid shit?
Which is to say that the Count in particular, and the Teragen in general are well-observed characters, but also. . . these fuckin' guys.
"The Confederate is opinionated and has the courage of his convictions. Few know, however, that he is not only a nova supremacist, but a white supremacist as well."
Wow, not The Confederate. Who could have ever seen that coming? But that's the Teragen for you. Their one and only unifying trait is that they don't want people telling them what they do, and thus they have no ideological vocabulary for those times when the people telling you not do something are 100% justified.
Like, Orzaiz can go on the Parker Stevenson show and claim that novas allowing themselves to be governed by human laws is like humans submitting themselves to the rules of ape society (a metaphor that the radical, Shrapnel, seems to think is "diplomatic"), but that doesn't change the fact that anyone with even a modestly developed sense of morality will side with the ape over the poacher.
The Teragen seem to believe themselves severable from the great natural continuities. Orzaiz often refers to baseline humans as novas' "genetic ancestors," and claims that this releases them for any responsibilities for things human beings have done, but that's not how it works. Count Orzaiz is, as near as I can tell, 4-6 years older than me, which means that we have almost all the same genetic ancestors. If novas shouldn't have to clean up the environment because it was baselines who ruined it, well I've got news for him - he and I are separated from the perpetrators by the exact same number of generations (i.e somewhere between "1" and "0"), and in any event only one of has inherited an enormous fortune made by reaping the benefits of an environmentally destructive economic system.
But that is how racial supremacists misuse the concept of evolution. They're taking 180 degrees the wrong lesson from it. There are no "higher forms of life" and everything is connected to everything else. Although, even if you subscribe to the notion of purely atomic species that owe nothing to each other, "I kicked a beehive and got stung by the swarm" is the purest form of natural justice there is.
So, you know, the Teragen are just completely ridiculous human beings, even if there is a glimmer of a point buried in their self-serving ideology. The emergence of novas really does raise difficult questions of political legitimacy, especially in a democracy. FAA regulations exist to keep airplanes from crashing into each other, and that's a job that doesn't become any less important when some of those "airplanes" are actually just dudes floating around up there. It would be unfair, though, if the agency came up with a policy without even consulting the people directly affected by it. Yet novas are a vanishingly small minority, so how does a government ensure that it respects the voices of the few without giving them a peremptory privilege over the many?
Um . . . don't mind me over here, just casually tossing out fundamental ethical dilemmas while analyzing a silly 90s superhero game. Anyway, if you do come up with a persuasive answer to this question, just skip me entirely and send it directly to the US Senate.
Ironically, the group in the Aberrant universe most likely to tackle these issues head-on is the Teragen's old rivals, Project Utopia, which has a whole legal department that works with governments to ensure the fair treatment of novas. Unfortunately, most of the conspiracy theories about Utopia are true.
Aberrant: Terragen reveals that the Teragen know about Project Proteus' sterilization scheme and they have a member capable of neutralizing the effects. There are several children already born and the Teragen are convinced that if Utopia knew of their existence, they'd be killed. I wish I could say this fear was unjustified, but, well, this very book contains a note from a Utopia doctor that talks about doing repeated exploratory surgery without anesthetic on a captured member of the Teragen. Killing children does not seem beyond Proteus' established behavior.
It would have been so easy to pigeonhole the Teragen as typical right-wing yahoos. They're obsessed with their theory of racial hierarchy and tolerate open talk of genocide (even if most of them agree that it's "too far.") Yet, it would be unreasonable to expect them to cooperate with a group they quite reasonably suspect will kill their children. Under those circumstances, resistance is noble.
I get an uneasy feeling at those times when it feels too much like the game trying to launder right-wing conspiracy theories ("hey, guys, here's a pitch: what if in our next game world, white genocide was real"), but I'm sure that what's really going on is 90s White Wolf's enthusiasm for "everyone's a villain" narratives.
Anyway, with all that said, I actually thought Aberrant: Terragen was a pretty fun take on the Legion of Doom as a fractious family of bickering cliques (the setting chapter contains a rather remarkable drawing of the Teragen leaders as a parody of "The Last Supper"), even if they're much less ambiguous as villains than the storytelling chapter seems to think.
Oh, and I would be totally remiss if I didn't say at least something about the Chrysalis system. You can ding it for being unbalanced, offering experience point discounts in exchange for basically nothing, but honestly I don't think that matters so much in a game as chaotically designed as Aberrant. Its real flaw is that it assumes a mode of play that would be reckless if it were actually enforced. Chrysalis points give you mutations, just like Taint points do, but the difference is that players pick what mutations they get from Chrysalis, but the storyteller picks the mutations from Taint.
When I read that I was like, "wait, what?" The previous rules mandated that the GM violate the players' ownership of their characters by imposing behavioral restrictions in how they roleplay? I was supposed to be giving players the cannibalism flaw without their permission? Needless to say, that's never how I played it, and players already had final veto on Taint mutations, so Chrysalis was never much more than a source of bonus xp in my games. A shame. It's a great setting idea, but poor execution here.
Ukss Contribution: A lot of great characters here. The writers went all out in designing fun new supervillains with interesting motivations and visually arresting designs, the weirdest of which was Sloppy Joe, a nova whose skin and bones dissolved and who stays alive by means of a transparent forcefield holding all his organs inside.
Joe's kind of a great character, but he's not my pick. For obvious reasons, I'm going with The Mathematician, a super-intelligent nova whose statistical models are detailed enough to serve as a form of precognition. He has phantom numbers floating around him at all times and he's so worried about his own actions changing the future that he hides away from the world, futilely warning the Teragen that their actions will hasten the global apocalypse.
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