The Inside Scoop on Gaming

The real bitch of writing a review like this is communicating just how impressed I am with the entire product. Aberrant is one of the most exciting role-playing games that I've seen in a long while, just because of how incredibly flexible it seems.

Here's what specifically impressed the hell out of me: I've become a fan of The Authority, by Warren Ellis, which has analogues of the Justice League of America - Apollo is somewhat like Superman, the Midnighter is a little like Batman, and so forth. But their organization is less like a Boy Scout troop and more like a military special operations team, and one of the members - Hawksmoor - is shown punching through some poor fool's head every time there's a fight. They're doing everything that the DC Universe's stultifying continuity can't, including killing off an entire team (Stormwatch) due to attrition. It's a fantastic comic by every standard, putting yet another face on the superheroic genre.

Here's what impresses me: I can simulate most of the characters within. Midnighter? Dots of Mega-Strenght, Mega-Dexterity and the Tactical Genius facet of Mega-Intelligence, plus healthy dots in Melee and Brawl. Hawksmoor? 5 dots in Teleportation and Mega-Strength, plus some other abilities I'm not aware of. Jenny Sparks? Quantum Bolt and Bodymorph. The translation is close to being exact - and there's not even any fudging. You don't know these superheroes unless you've read the book, of course, but I was amazed to see that even non-conventional powers like the Midnighter's tactical genius were covered. That's pretty impressive, at least in my book.

Now, I'm sure that some of this is due to the fact that I haven't played the granddaddy of all superhero role-playing games, Champions, which has a similar laundry list of powers. Champions also has the advantage of being sure of what it is, as opposed to Aberrant, with its skeletal background information and nondescript setting. But the other part is sheer wonder as to how they pulled the whole deal off. The White Wolf system gets up and does a dance in this system, providing access to dozens of powers and allowing a player to do just about anything with them. Usually unimportant facets of the game, like soaking damage and initiative, become that much more important - Novas can literally shrug off hits from anti-aircraft missiles and move faster than any resident of the World of Darkness could. (Without Celerity 9, I suppose.)

To boot, there's no cosmetic limitations on most powers, so Superman's heat vision and Cyclops' optic blast would both be differently powered versions of Quantum Blast. That adds immense flexibility to character creation. And if you don't want to play an X-Man, then you can spend Nova creation points on a few dots of Mega-attributes and use the rest to pump up attributes, abilities and skills. You can be Batman just as easily as you can Superman.

Here's the bad part: The setting is awful. No other role-playing game that I've seen, including Changeling: 1st ed has been this skimpy on the setting. Essentially, the world of Aberrant is as follows: Everything is cool except for various hot spots around the world. Novas have changed everything, including reforesting Ethiopia and improving the quality of just about everybody's life. Project Utopia, under the aegis or in cooperation with the Aeon society, is acting as a control source for Novas - except that Project Utopia may not be quite as benevolent as it seems, and a Nova who was trying to blow the whistle was murdered. Splinter novas move away from Project Utopia, calling themselves Aberrants, while Divis Mal has created his own Nova group that strongly dislikes human oppression of Novas. And that's the setting, in a nutshell.

I don't know how to react to the above, except to say that it seems incredibly spare. Superhero comics - and games, by extension - typically run the gauntlet, with superheroes fighting aliens, supervillains, mystical threats, demons, angels, invasions from other dimensions, and other superhero teams when misunderstandings occur. In their spare time, they also deal with their regular lives, which include grumpy editors, elderly aunts, the rest of the team and so forth. In Aberrant, your opposition is going to take the form of other Novas - and that's about it. It's an internal struggle for...well, nothing. If the rumors about Project Utopia are true, then it's going down; only the most fanatical Nova is going to work for them if said rumor is true. Once that's done with, there's Divis Mal's little band of novas to take care of. Then what?

You go and buy White Wolf's Aberrant supplements, which is rather an annoying way to learn what the game is supposed to be about. All of the core White Wolf games, especially the Big Three - Mage, Werewolf and Vampire - have very strong details about what their particular world is like. Mage can be played without a single supplement, although the Book of Worlds helps immensely. Aberrant, on the other hand, focuses on a single storyline and tosses off a few references to other settings, like military campaigns, or Nova rock bands, or even Novas engaged in the analogue of professional wrestling.

And you know what? I don't mind at all. Specifically because there's an entire _world_ of comics out there waiting to be mined for source material. The Authority alone suggests a high-powered, high-casualty cynical superhero campaign, with the team answerable to no-one; meanwhile, the X-Men suggests...well, I don't know what it suggests anymore, except perhaps the idea that a dead horse can only be beaten so far. But the early Claremont days were human beings as well as superheroes, and had their own personal soap operas going. Rob Liefield's comics disprove the existence of God. You get the idea. The fundemental base of the game is solid enough to accomodate you in just about every form. I fully expect homebrew versions of the X-Men and so forth to be popping up on the web on a steady basis after this game is out long enough. With a world as rich, varied and unpredictable as the comics industry, I'm not really feeling that despondent about lack of adequate source material.

The problem that I do have with the setting material is that it's all over the place, trying to squeeze way too much information into one spot while throwing vast amounts of space around elsewhere. Space is wasted on useless material like pseudoscientific explanation of how Nova cells work, a full page worth of Nova wrestlers talking faux-smack, and two pages of a comic strip which is essentially two guys kicking each other around a sports arena in a gladitorial combat. (Werewolf did the same thing, but it was in the combat section and caught the atmopshere of the game nicely.) The world is detailed by Dr. Duke Rollo, giving somebody at White Wolf a chance to write like Hunter S. Thompson - specifically, to do a pastiche of "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas". Much space wasted on how outlaw "Rollo' is - and the whole thing stopped being funny, or even relevant about twenty years ago - and not enough on the world. London doesn't like novas and is decaying as a result, but practical results are in scarce supply.

And the comic books are examples of everything that you don't want to do within a comic book. One of them is an Aberrant going onto a talk show. Sound effects are crammed into speech panels, which makes it sound like they're saying whatever happens to be occurring. There's no sense of movement, no sense of character; Kikjak seems to interrupt at random to finish people's sentences, but I'm not sure if this is a character quirk or if Kikjak just happens to be socially retarded. The worst part is the sheer amount of text packed into each panel; I'm reminded of a parody in "What The!?", Marvel's parody magazine, where the Black Panther had a gigantic caption break free and fall on his head. It's a text piece designed to look like a comic, and it doesn't succeed. Elsewhere, we get to see two unflatteringly lit Novas discussing the reproductive difficulties that Novas have had - the art is okay, but the text balloons are much too long, and it's obviously meant to be a text piece. It advances the plot somewhat, but it's just not that necessary. There's even man-on-the-street interviews, with various idiots spouting off on certain issues ("Why do Novas wear masks?" "They are so beautiful, it would destroy out minds to look at them without masks."). It's like an issue of People crossed with USA Today, two magazines which aren't exactly high up there on the informational spectrum. It's vapid. It's goofy. It's lacking in a lot of useful information, including the immediate agendas of the various factions, and it contains one wrestling reference too many. (Pick one out of the four and that's the one.) Cutting the entire section out and replacing it with a forty-page tight summary of what's going on - black and white, no color, just text and fiction - would have been a lot better.

But I can understand it when I look at the powers section. Almost all of the work that wasn't put into the setting went into the powers section instead - and like I said, there's a HUGE amount of material that you can deal with. There's Mega-Attributes, which essentially let your character bring an attribute to the logical extreme - and extras let you put that little boost into a particular Mega-attribute. Mega-intelligent characters can find the weakest spot in a structure, or have an eidetic memory, or speak languages without effort, or be geniuses in any number of fields. Mega-Dexterity lets you dodge bullets, even pluck them out of the air. Super-Manipulation turns you into a master hypnotist, or the smoothest seller of snake oil there ever was. Mega-Appearance characters, besides having huge breasts (as judged by the Mega-Appearance illustration) can inspire awe or subtly manipulate their appearance to suit whatever somebody else wants to see.

Speaking of which, it's difficult to write about this game without feeling like you're overusing the word "mega". Darn it.

The other powers range from the relatively uninspired, like Armor - useful, but somewhat pedestrian - to the fancy stuff, like Quantum Imprint, which lets you steal another Nova's power and use it as your own. They're rated in three levels, rising in power as they increase; level three powers can be truly terrifying, like Magnetic Mastery, or Matter Chameleon. (Touch a diamond, and your body has the consistency of same - including massive soak rolls. Touch water, same deal - except now you can flow through cracks and such, simulating other powers.) If you want your power to have an extra sting to it - say, the ability to affect an area, or to split up and hit multiple targets, or home in, then you can buy an extra power with Nova creation points. The powers themselves are fueled by Quantum points, which means that you have to budget your power expenditures - you can't just wail away all day without risking death.

It's damned near addictive to make characters, speaking in the same line. With most White Wolf games, characters start off at the bottom of the feeding chain - they're low-powered, have access to few special abilities and have to work for a while before they can get access to the high-end stuff. With Aberrant, characters can literally start off with enough power to destroy a city if left unchallenged. It's about as high-powered as you can get. Instead of being content with a few dots worth of magick, or a few Gifts, or your starting Disciplines, you can be throwing around Quantum Bolts from the very beginning of the game. The rush of power that you get making a character is nigh-well dizzying.

It's a two-tiered system - you create your basic character in the time-honored White Wolf fashion. Thanks to the innovations of Trinity, you don't need to pick out which skills are primary, secondary and so forth - you just spend 23 points in whatever fashion you desire. Once you're done with that, you get thirty Nova points to spend - and here's the fun part. Nova points can be spent buying powers, or you can cash them in for a variable number of ability/attribute/background points. One Nova point buys you five background, for example, which is a pretty nice switch from the harsh budgeting that you have to do with regular freebie points. Want to be Doc Savage? Blow your Nova points on all of your Mega-Attributes, the rest on skills and walk the earth without really being noticed. The freedom granted by Nova points is fantastic.

But there's the classic balancer, as in all White Wolf games. The more powerful you get, the more Taint you earn, which in turns mutates your body in various ways. At first, the mutations are fairly benign - a weird skin color, an unearthly glow - but as you gain more Taint, the mutations become more severe. Get enough Taint, and you wind up as a walking plague vector, or with one of your powers set permanently to "on", or your skin looking as if it melted and then re-set badly. The Aberrants in Trinity are just extreme examples, the natural result of going crazy with power. You have lots of power, but it isn't unlimited. In addition, you can take extra dots of Taint in order to buy powers at a much-reduced rate, with the result that you'll be treading the edge that much sooner.

The drama section doesn't have a lot to say. There's some nice references to boot, including Watchmen, Astro City and the Wild Cards series, and some details about the nature of superheroes as demigods. There's a minor misstep in suggesting that Spiderman is a demi-god; he may have powers, but the whole idea of most Marvel comics is that superheroes aren't gods, but just average people who have tremendous powers. The characterization is accurate for DC and Wildstorm, but less so for Marvel. Mega-nitpicking, but still, I wonder how much research they've done into the entire superhero mythos - or even how much they'd wanted to. Ennh. Not that big a deal, really.

The remainder of the book is the usual stuff that I've come to expect from White Wolf systems - there's some new combat manuvers, and details of how to resolve Mega-Strength vs. Mega-Strength contests and so forth, (Nicely handled - there's still an avenue for comptetition, and Mega-Strength is handled quite well.) Nothing out of the ordinary if you own another White Wolf rulebook, though.

Overall, it's a lopsided product. The setting is weak, but the rules - and the powers - are fantastic, as well as the sheer possibilities for adventure that it offers. For the first time in a long while, I was excited to make a character, as opposed to being a GM. It's got a lot of possibilities, and any comic book will provide ideas for an adventure. If you want a truly great super-hero role-playing game, I would choose Champions, even with its armfuls of six-sided dice; but if you want to see what can be done with a much simpler system, check out Aberrant. It's not yet a competitor with the more serious games, thanks to its fragmentary setting and lack of a coherent focus, but the rules setting alone is flexible to handle just about anything. I'd recommend it highly.

-Darren MacLennan

Style: 3 (Average)
Substance: 4 (Meaty)

Aberrant
Author: Justin R. Achilli, Andrew Bates and others... Category: game Company/Publisher: White Wolf Publishing Line: Aberrant/Trinity Cost: $24.95 Page count: 290 ISBN: 1-56504-626-9 SKU: WW8500 Capsule Review by Darren MacLennan on 07/03/99. Genre tags: Science_fiction Modern_day Space Anime Post-apocalypse	The real bitch of writing a review like this is communicating just how impressed I am with the entire product. Aberrant is one of the most exciting role-playing games that I've seen in a long while, just because of how incredibly flexible it seems. Here's what specifically impressed the hell out of me: I've become a fan of The Authority, by Warren Ellis, which has analogues of the Justice League of America - Apollo is somewhat like Superman, the Midnighter is a little like Batman, and so forth. But their organization is less like a Boy Scout troop and more like a military special operations team, and one of the members - Hawksmoor - is shown punching through some poor fool's head every time there's a fight. They're doing everything that the DC Universe's stultifying continuity can't, including killing off an entire team (Stormwatch) due to attrition. It's a fantastic comic by every standard, putting yet another face on the superheroic genre. Here's what impresses me: I can simulate most of the characters within. Midnighter? Dots of Mega-Strenght, Mega-Dexterity and the Tactical Genius facet of Mega-Intelligence, plus healthy dots in Melee and Brawl. Hawksmoor? 5 dots in Teleportation and Mega-Strength, plus some other abilities I'm not aware of. Jenny Sparks? Quantum Bolt and Bodymorph. The translation is close to being exact - and there's not even any fudging. You don't know these superheroes unless you've read the book, of course, but I was amazed to see that even non-conventional powers like the Midnighter's tactical genius were covered. That's pretty impressive, at least in my book. Now, I'm sure that some of this is due to the fact that I haven't played the granddaddy of all superhero role-playing games, Champions, which has a similar laundry list of powers. Champions also has the advantage of being sure of what it is, as opposed to Aberrant, with its skeletal background information and nondescript setting. But the other part is sheer wonder as to how they pulled the whole deal off. The White Wolf system gets up and does a dance in this system, providing access to dozens of powers and allowing a player to do just about anything with them. Usually unimportant facets of the game, like soaking damage and initiative, become that much more important - Novas can literally shrug off hits from anti-aircraft missiles and move faster than any resident of the World of Darkness could. (Without Celerity 9, I suppose.) To boot, there's no cosmetic limitations on most powers, so Superman's heat vision and Cyclops' optic blast would both be differently powered versions of Quantum Blast. That adds immense flexibility to character creation. And if you don't want to play an X-Man, then you can spend Nova creation points on a few dots of Mega-attributes and use the rest to pump up attributes, abilities and skills. You can be Batman just as easily as you can Superman. Here's the bad part: The setting is awful. No other role-playing game that I've seen, including Changeling: 1st ed has been this skimpy on the setting. Essentially, the world of Aberrant is as follows: Everything is cool except for various hot spots around the world. Novas have changed everything, including reforesting Ethiopia and improving the quality of just about everybody's life. Project Utopia, under the aegis or in cooperation with the Aeon society, is acting as a control source for Novas - except that Project Utopia may not be quite as benevolent as it seems, and a Nova who was trying to blow the whistle was murdered. Splinter novas move away from Project Utopia, calling themselves Aberrants, while Divis Mal has created his own Nova group that strongly dislikes human oppression of Novas. And that's the setting, in a nutshell. I don't know how to react to the above, except to say that it seems incredibly spare. Superhero comics - and games, by extension - typically run the gauntlet, with superheroes fighting aliens, supervillains, mystical threats, demons, angels, invasions from other dimensions, and other superhero teams when misunderstandings occur. In their spare time, they also deal with their regular lives, which include grumpy editors, elderly aunts, the rest of the team and so forth. In Aberrant, your opposition is going to take the form of other Novas - and that's about it. It's an internal struggle for...well, nothing. If the rumors about Project Utopia are true, then it's going down; only the most fanatical Nova is going to work for them if said rumor is true. Once that's done with, there's Divis Mal's little band of novas to take care of. Then what? You go and buy White Wolf's Aberrant supplements, which is rather an annoying way to learn what the game is supposed to be about. All of the core White Wolf games, especially the Big Three - Mage, Werewolf and Vampire - have very strong details about what their particular world is like. Mage can be played without a single supplement, although the Book of Worlds helps immensely. Aberrant, on the other hand, focuses on a single storyline and tosses off a few references to other settings, like military campaigns, or Nova rock bands, or even Novas engaged in the analogue of professional wrestling. And you know what? I don't mind at all. Specifically because there's an entire _world_ of comics out there waiting to be mined for source material. The Authority alone suggests a high-powered, high-casualty cynical superhero campaign, with the team answerable to no-one; meanwhile, the X-Men suggests...well, I don't know what it suggests anymore, except perhaps the idea that a dead horse can only be beaten so far. But the early Claremont days were human beings as well as superheroes, and had their own personal soap operas going. Rob Liefield's comics disprove the existence of God. You get the idea. The fundemental base of the game is solid enough to accomodate you in just about every form. I fully expect homebrew versions of the X-Men and so forth to be popping up on the web on a steady basis after this game is out long enough. With a world as rich, varied and unpredictable as the comics industry, I'm not really feeling that despondent about lack of adequate source material. The problem that I do have with the setting material is that it's all over the place, trying to squeeze way too much information into one spot while throwing vast amounts of space around elsewhere. Space is wasted on useless material like pseudoscientific explanation of how Nova cells work, a full page worth of Nova wrestlers talking faux-smack, and two pages of a comic strip which is essentially two guys kicking each other around a sports arena in a gladitorial combat. (Werewolf did the same thing, but it was in the combat section and caught the atmopshere of the game nicely.) The world is detailed by Dr. Duke Rollo, giving somebody at White Wolf a chance to write like Hunter S. Thompson - specifically, to do a pastiche of "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas". Much space wasted on how outlaw "Rollo' is - and the whole thing stopped being funny, or even relevant about twenty years ago - and not enough on the world. London doesn't like novas and is decaying as a result, but practical results are in scarce supply. And the comic books are examples of everything that you don't want to do within a comic book. One of them is an Aberrant going onto a talk show. Sound effects are crammed into speech panels, which makes it sound like they're saying whatever happens to be occurring. There's no sense of movement, no sense of character; Kikjak seems to interrupt at random to finish people's sentences, but I'm not sure if this is a character quirk or if Kikjak just happens to be socially retarded. The worst part is the sheer amount of text packed into each panel; I'm reminded of a parody in "What The!?", Marvel's parody magazine, where the Black Panther had a gigantic caption break free and fall on his head. It's a text piece designed to look like a comic, and it doesn't succeed. Elsewhere, we get to see two unflatteringly lit Novas discussing the reproductive difficulties that Novas have had - the art is okay, but the text balloons are much too long, and it's obviously meant to be a text piece. It advances the plot somewhat, but it's just not that necessary. There's even man-on-the-street interviews, with various idiots spouting off on certain issues ("Why do Novas wear masks?" "They are so beautiful, it would destroy out minds to look at them without masks."). It's like an issue of People crossed with USA Today, two magazines which aren't exactly high up there on the informational spectrum. It's vapid. It's goofy. It's lacking in a lot of useful information, including the immediate agendas of the various factions, and it contains one wrestling reference too many. (Pick one out of the four and that's the one.) Cutting the entire section out and replacing it with a forty-page tight summary of what's going on - black and white, no color, just text and fiction - would have been a lot better. But I can understand it when I look at the powers section. Almost all of the work that wasn't put into the setting went into the powers section instead - and like I said, there's a HUGE amount of material that you can deal with. There's Mega-Attributes, which essentially let your character bring an attribute to the logical extreme - and extras let you put that little boost into a particular Mega-attribute. Mega-intelligent characters can find the weakest spot in a structure, or have an eidetic memory, or speak languages without effort, or be geniuses in any number of fields. Mega-Dexterity lets you dodge bullets, even pluck them out of the air. Super-Manipulation turns you into a master hypnotist, or the smoothest seller of snake oil there ever was. Mega-Appearance characters, besides having huge breasts (as judged by the Mega-Appearance illustration) can inspire awe or subtly manipulate their appearance to suit whatever somebody else wants to see. Speaking of which, it's difficult to write about this game without feeling like you're overusing the word "mega". Darn it. The other powers range from the relatively uninspired, like Armor - useful, but somewhat pedestrian - to the fancy stuff, like Quantum Imprint, which lets you steal another Nova's power and use it as your own. They're rated in three levels, rising in power as they increase; level three powers can be truly terrifying, like Magnetic Mastery, or Matter Chameleon. (Touch a diamond, and your body has the consistency of same - including massive soak rolls. Touch water, same deal - except now you can flow through cracks and such, simulating other powers.) If you want your power to have an extra sting to it - say, the ability to affect an area, or to split up and hit multiple targets, or home in, then you can buy an extra power with Nova creation points. The powers themselves are fueled by Quantum points, which means that you have to budget your power expenditures - you can't just wail away all day without risking death. It's damned near addictive to make characters, speaking in the same line. With most White Wolf games, characters start off at the bottom of the feeding chain - they're low-powered, have access to few special abilities and have to work for a while before they can get access to the high-end stuff. With Aberrant, characters can literally start off with enough power to destroy a city if left unchallenged. It's about as high-powered as you can get. Instead of being content with a few dots worth of magick, or a few Gifts, or your starting Disciplines, you can be throwing around Quantum Bolts from the very beginning of the game. The rush of power that you get making a character is nigh-well dizzying. It's a two-tiered system - you create your basic character in the time-honored White Wolf fashion. Thanks to the innovations of Trinity, you don't need to pick out which skills are primary, secondary and so forth - you just spend 23 points in whatever fashion you desire. Once you're done with that, you get thirty Nova points to spend - and here's the fun part. Nova points can be spent buying powers, or you can cash them in for a variable number of ability/attribute/background points. One Nova point buys you five background, for example, which is a pretty nice switch from the harsh budgeting that you have to do with regular freebie points. Want to be Doc Savage? Blow your Nova points on all of your Mega-Attributes, the rest on skills and walk the earth without really being noticed. The freedom granted by Nova points is fantastic. But there's the classic balancer, as in all White Wolf games. The more powerful you get, the more Taint you earn, which in turns mutates your body in various ways. At first, the mutations are fairly benign - a weird skin color, an unearthly glow - but as you gain more Taint, the mutations become more severe. Get enough Taint, and you wind up as a walking plague vector, or with one of your powers set permanently to "on", or your skin looking as if it melted and then re-set badly. The Aberrants in Trinity are just extreme examples, the natural result of going crazy with power. You have lots of power, but it isn't unlimited. In addition, you can take extra dots of Taint in order to buy powers at a much-reduced rate, with the result that you'll be treading the edge that much sooner. The drama section doesn't have a lot to say. There's some nice references to boot, including Watchmen, Astro City and the Wild Cards series, and some details about the nature of superheroes as demigods. There's a minor misstep in suggesting that Spiderman is a demi-god; he may have powers, but the whole idea of most Marvel comics is that superheroes aren't gods, but just average people who have tremendous powers. The characterization is accurate for DC and Wildstorm, but less so for Marvel. Mega-nitpicking, but still, I wonder how much research they've done into the entire superhero mythos - or even how much they'd wanted to. Ennh. Not that big a deal, really. The remainder of the book is the usual stuff that I've come to expect from White Wolf systems - there's some new combat manuvers, and details of how to resolve Mega-Strength vs. Mega-Strength contests and so forth, (Nicely handled - there's still an avenue for comptetition, and Mega-Strength is handled quite well.) Nothing out of the ordinary if you own another White Wolf rulebook, though. Overall, it's a lopsided product. The setting is weak, but the rules - and the powers - are fantastic, as well as the sheer possibilities for adventure that it offers. For the first time in a long while, I was excited to make a character, as opposed to being a GM. It's got a lot of possibilities, and any comic book will provide ideas for an adventure. If you want a truly great super-hero role-playing game, I would choose Champions, even with its armfuls of six-sided dice; but if you want to see what can be done with a much simpler system, check out Aberrant. It's not yet a competitor with the more serious games, thanks to its fragmentary setting and lack of a coherent focus, but the rules setting alone is flexible to handle just about anything. I'd recommend it highly. -Darren MacLennan Style: 3 (Average) Substance: 4 (Meaty)