The Inside Scoop on Gaming

I was leery of the limited edition of Aeon. It's got a flexible spiral binding in a wrap-around plastic cover, and some rather thin color pages up front. How long can this last, given the rigors I put my books through? The plastic cover hasn't cracked yet, but because the hooked ends of the spiral binding are inside the cover, against the flimsy color pages, I've already noticed some damage to those pages, after only three days of moderate use.

The book starts off with a story by George Alec Effinger. It's nice to see the fiction in a game book being written by someone other than game designers (who, with a few exceptions, have no business writing fiction). It serves as an introduction to some game concepts, and manages to avoid the whole "Psions vs. Aberrants" conflict that was so played up in the advertising.

The rest of the color pages (which make up nearly half the book) are world background. In brief: In the 21st Century, the Aberrants appeared. These people, due to a growth in their brains, had the power to bend reality and they became virtual superheros. But something happened and they went insane. The earth was almost destroyed in the Aberrant War until China (who was the premiere space power of the time) threatened to nuke the entire planet from orbit unless the Aberrants left. They left, vowing to return.

The Psions appeared, and were organized into eight psi orders (and the overreaching Aeon Trinity organization which was organized before WWII. Each order is led by a super-powerful "proxy", who got his or her powers from an unknown source. They speak of "benefactors", but no-one knows who those benefactors might be. The Psions helped to create a new golden age for humanity out of the ashes of the Aberrant War. Deep space colonies were made possible by the teleporters and clairsentients, the healers advanced medical science, the telepaths policed the other orders.

The Aberrants returned, changed by their time in deep space, and declared war on humanity. In the fighting, the teleporters just disappeared after a space station was dropped on France. And another order, able to manipulate matter on a quantum level, was exterminated for being in league with the Aberrants. With the loss of the teleporters, humanity lost contact with a mining colony that had been attacked by hostile aliens known as the Chromatics, other deep space colonies were lost, and the human embassy on the alien world of Qinshui was stranded, as were the alien Qin diplomats on earth. Only recently have the electrokinetics, the clairsentients, and the Qin been able to create jumpship technology to re-establish contact.

Some aspects of the game world are odd, though. The Norca, the order of shapeshifters, controls the South American drug trade. Why? Just to point out that the orders aren't all "good guys"? Seems odd that no-one else seems to care, then. With the loss of French rationality, Europe is turning increasingly to religion and superstition--huh? Apparently the Enlightenment of the 1700s was France's major export all these years--when France disappeared, the ideas of the Enlightenment did, too.

The game is more than just beating up the evil Aberrants. It could be deep space exploration, diplomacy between nations, metacorporations, psionic orders, and planets. Finding out what happened to the Karroo mining colony as it battled the Chromatics, or re-establishing contact with the earth embassy on Qinshui are high priorities for the Aeon Trinity.

The background, for all that it's not the World of Darkness, is typical White Wolf: you're a superhuman, but there are plenty of people out there tougher than you. You get your powers based on which faction you're aligned with. The Aberrants (Sabbat/Black Spiral Dancers, etc) are pure evil, not to be reasoned with--so I expect a book allowing people to play Aberrants to be released eventually.

The rules were the big draw for me. Most of the things that have kept me from even thinking about running Storyteller games have been fixed. Botches no longer increase in frequency as you become more skilled. There's a difference between lethal and non-lethal damage. Skills are associated with attributes (although if you have a good reason, you can use a different attribute)--gone are the worries about whether or not leadership is a talent or a skill. There are even optional rules for just putting all your points for attributes into a pool and not worrying about the artificial Physical/Mental/Social divisions and rankings.

Aeon is more than the ad copy makes it out to be. The new Storyteller system seems to work well (and hopefully White Wolf will figure out how to cheaply put their old games into the new system for people who don't want to buy Aeon--a one book update, perhaps?). While the background is new, the underlying concepts aren't unfamiliar to players of other White Wolf games.

And that may be my biggest complaint. I was willing to buy that vampires of different breeds would have different powers, or that certain tribes of werewolves would know different spirit gifts. The system of orders and proxies seems artificial, though. Sure, it's mentioned that orders will sometimes recruit psions with different powers than the norm, but it would make more sense to me for a group like the Legion--the front line in the war against the Aberrants--to want psions from all the orders, as they're all very useful and can support each other better than a group of all psychokinetics. (Sure, they're good fighters, but so are the shapeshifting Norca, and wouldn't the intelligence gathering and support capabilities of electrokinetics, telepaths, clairsentients, and healers be useful?) In addition, when playing Vampire or Mage, or even Changeling, it was always possible to tinker to some degree with the different groups to create an atypical character--an Akashic B! rother who studied Matter magick, a Gangrel who learned Obfuscate, a Troll with little interest in fighting. In Aeon, once you've decided what order you're part of or what power group you want, that's that. You'll never learn more than the rudiments of any other powers, what group you're part of is linked intimately to your powers (after all, the proxies of the orders are the ones who give you your powers), and that's pretty much that. Finally, one of my favorite parts of the World of Darkness series of games was that even among a single race, there were rivalries and enmities. Put a Sidhe and a Recap in a locked room, and only one of them will come out most of the time. In Aeon, though, the orders all get along pretty much. They have to because, like in my Legion example above, each order is so specialized that they really couldn't function without all the others.

Aeon isn't as dark as I've come to expect from White Wolf. Even in the twinkiest games of Vampire and Werewolf, there's a rather dark element--even if it's just the appalling lack of conscience of the players. Aeon, despite the threat of the once-human Aberrants, has a "gee-whiz the future is neat" feel. It's somewhere between the sanitary lack of judgement about the future found in old games like "Star Frontiers" and the semi-darkness of "Cyberpunk 2020". There are a few bad guys in Aeon, but not many. "Fading Suns" by HDI is a much darker game, and has more depth--and is probably more like what White Wolf fans would want from a science fiction game--but HDI sadly doesn't have the advertising clout of White Wolf.

Style: 4 (Classy and well done)
Substance: 4 (Meaty)

Aeon Limited Edition
Author: White Wolf staff Category: game Company/Publisher: White Wolf Games Studio Cost: $30.00 US Page count: 320 ISBN: 1-56504-757-5 Capsule Review by Kevin Mowery on 11/05/97. Genre tags: none	I was leery of the limited edition of Aeon. It's got a flexible spiral binding in a wrap-around plastic cover, and some rather thin color pages up front. How long can this last, given the rigors I put my books through? The plastic cover hasn't cracked yet, but because the hooked ends of the spiral binding are inside the cover, against the flimsy color pages, I've already noticed some damage to those pages, after only three days of moderate use. The book starts off with a story by George Alec Effinger. It's nice to see the fiction in a game book being written by someone other than game designers (who, with a few exceptions, have no business writing fiction). It serves as an introduction to some game concepts, and manages to avoid the whole "Psions vs. Aberrants" conflict that was so played up in the advertising. The rest of the color pages (which make up nearly half the book) are world background. In brief: In the 21st Century, the Aberrants appeared. These people, due to a growth in their brains, had the power to bend reality and they became virtual superheros. But something happened and they went insane. The earth was almost destroyed in the Aberrant War until China (who was the premiere space power of the time) threatened to nuke the entire planet from orbit unless the Aberrants left. They left, vowing to return. The Psions appeared, and were organized into eight psi orders (and the overreaching Aeon Trinity organization which was organized before WWII. Each order is led by a super-powerful "proxy", who got his or her powers from an unknown source. They speak of "benefactors", but no-one knows who those benefactors might be. The Psions helped to create a new golden age for humanity out of the ashes of the Aberrant War. Deep space colonies were made possible by the teleporters and clairsentients, the healers advanced medical science, the telepaths policed the other orders. The Aberrants returned, changed by their time in deep space, and declared war on humanity. In the fighting, the teleporters just disappeared after a space station was dropped on France. And another order, able to manipulate matter on a quantum level, was exterminated for being in league with the Aberrants. With the loss of the teleporters, humanity lost contact with a mining colony that had been attacked by hostile aliens known as the Chromatics, other deep space colonies were lost, and the human embassy on the alien world of Qinshui was stranded, as were the alien Qin diplomats on earth. Only recently have the electrokinetics, the clairsentients, and the Qin been able to create jumpship technology to re-establish contact. Some aspects of the game world are odd, though. The Norca, the order of shapeshifters, controls the South American drug trade. Why? Just to point out that the orders aren't all "good guys"? Seems odd that no-one else seems to care, then. With the loss of French rationality, Europe is turning increasingly to religion and superstition--huh? Apparently the Enlightenment of the 1700s was France's major export all these years--when France disappeared, the ideas of the Enlightenment did, too. The game is more than just beating up the evil Aberrants. It could be deep space exploration, diplomacy between nations, metacorporations, psionic orders, and planets. Finding out what happened to the Karroo mining colony as it battled the Chromatics, or re-establishing contact with the earth embassy on Qinshui are high priorities for the Aeon Trinity. The background, for all that it's not the World of Darkness, is typical White Wolf: you're a superhuman, but there are plenty of people out there tougher than you. You get your powers based on which faction you're aligned with. The Aberrants (Sabbat/Black Spiral Dancers, etc) are pure evil, not to be reasoned with--so I expect a book allowing people to play Aberrants to be released eventually. The rules were the big draw for me. Most of the things that have kept me from even thinking about running Storyteller games have been fixed. Botches no longer increase in frequency as you become more skilled. There's a difference between lethal and non-lethal damage. Skills are associated with attributes (although if you have a good reason, you can use a different attribute)--gone are the worries about whether or not leadership is a talent or a skill. There are even optional rules for just putting all your points for attributes into a pool and not worrying about the artificial Physical/Mental/Social divisions and rankings. Aeon is more than the ad copy makes it out to be. The new Storyteller system seems to work well (and hopefully White Wolf will figure out how to cheaply put their old games into the new system for people who don't want to buy Aeon--a one book update, perhaps?). While the background is new, the underlying concepts aren't unfamiliar to players of other White Wolf games. And that may be my biggest complaint. I was willing to buy that vampires of different breeds would have different powers, or that certain tribes of werewolves would know different spirit gifts. The system of orders and proxies seems artificial, though. Sure, it's mentioned that orders will sometimes recruit psions with different powers than the norm, but it would make more sense to me for a group like the Legion--the front line in the war against the Aberrants--to want psions from all the orders, as they're all very useful and can support each other better than a group of all psychokinetics. (Sure, they're good fighters, but so are the shapeshifting Norca, and wouldn't the intelligence gathering and support capabilities of electrokinetics, telepaths, clairsentients, and healers be useful?) In addition, when playing Vampire or Mage, or even Changeling, it was always possible to tinker to some degree with the different groups to create an atypical character--an Akashic B! rother who studied Matter magick, a Gangrel who learned Obfuscate, a Troll with little interest in fighting. In Aeon, once you've decided what order you're part of or what power group you want, that's that. You'll never learn more than the rudiments of any other powers, what group you're part of is linked intimately to your powers (after all, the proxies of the orders are the ones who give you your powers), and that's pretty much that. Finally, one of my favorite parts of the World of Darkness series of games was that even among a single race, there were rivalries and enmities. Put a Sidhe and a Recap in a locked room, and only one of them will come out most of the time. In Aeon, though, the orders all get along pretty much. They have to because, like in my Legion example above, each order is so specialized that they really couldn't function without all the others. Aeon isn't as dark as I've come to expect from White Wolf. Even in the twinkiest games of Vampire and Werewolf, there's a rather dark element--even if it's just the appalling lack of conscience of the players. Aeon, despite the threat of the once-human Aberrants, has a "gee-whiz the future is neat" feel. It's somewhere between the sanitary lack of judgement about the future found in old games like "Star Frontiers" and the semi-darkness of "Cyberpunk 2020". There are a few bad guys in Aeon, but not many. "Fading Suns" by HDI is a much darker game, and has more depth--and is probably more like what White Wolf fans would want from a science fiction game--but HDI sadly doesn't have the advertising clout of White Wolf. Style: 4 (Classy and well done) Substance: 4 (Meaty)

Aeon Limited Edition