The Inside Scoop on Gaming

Aberrant is one of the most exciting games to come out this year. The folks at White Wolf created a mostly believable world where superpowered beings live alongside ordinary people and have changed the world. Aberrant: Year One is the third supplement in the line.

Year One starts off (literally; page one is the start of the New York section) with descriptions of over a dozen cities in the world of 2008. New York, Los Angeles, Mexico City, Havana, and Montreal represent North America. Europe is represented by Moscow and Venice. Africa and Asia also have several cities described. South America is strangely absent, and outside of the cities, there isn't much description of the countries or continents. My favorite cities described are Addis Ababa, Ethiopia (Ethiopia having been speed-terraformed and made into the breadbasket of Africa) and Lagos, Nigeria (Nigeria having been taken over by a morally ambiguous strongman who is fighting like hell to keep his country independent from the ubiquitous Project Utopia). Each city description has a page or two of news clippings about the region suitable for players, followed by another page or two of information more suitable for the GM, although there aren't really any campaign-breaking secrets in here. There's also at least one NPC for each city, with Lagos having the only non-Nova NPC in the book. The Muscovite NPC, Larissa Shonkovich, falls prey to something that seems to creep into White Wolf products from time to time: ignorance of foreign naming conventions. As far as I can tell, Larissa has no last name, being merely Larissa, the son of Shonk (-ovich or -evich is the male ending for a patronymic; the feminine form would be -ovna or -evna, and that still doesn't change that her father's name was apparently Shonk). The whole section lasts only 71 pages, and it should have been longer, in my opinion.

The second part of the book details some of the technological advances of 2008. Most of the ideas are extrapolations from current technology and research. You get tobacco engineered to produce medicine, cloned organs, telepresence tanks and robots, flying cars, and a handful of weapons which still won't do a thing against a starting character who's serious about his defense. There's also a section on player-created technologies. The author says that Aberrant tries to be realistic about the effects of super-intelligent scientists on the world; no miraculous technologies that solve a problem and never make another appearance in the game world. Instead, the stance taken seems to be that player-characters just can't change the world with science. All the reasons given for slapping down ideas for creating an earth-shaking technology are valid, but it seems to fly in the face of the thing that made me fall in love with Aberrant in the first place: you've got the power of a god, the power to change the world. Unless you're a mega-intellect type, anyway, in which case you merely have the power to do a little more than a mortal scientist. Further hurting this section is the suggestion that mega-intellect novas should be given Taint when they create something new, then have the Taint removed when they can successfully explain their concept to the masses. It sounds like someone decided to import the Paradox rules from Mage. Taint comes from channelling too much Quantum energy through your body, not from doing things that stretch consensual reality. This has no place in Aberrant.

Aberrant: Year One is a good book but not great. The lack of any sort of introduction or explanation is a bit disconcerting, but not a fatal flaw (and I know plenty of people are going to love that there's no discussion of what the book is about). There's no table of contents, no index. The layout is mediocre and some of the artwork fails my most lenient test (could I, with virtually no artistic training, do better in ten minutes?). The error in naming the Russian NPC calls other ethnic names into question (I studied Russian in school, but I don't know enough about other languages to know if the character names are equally silly). The page of rules and suggestions for super-science is nearly useless unless you want to penalize characters for being scientists instead of bricks. Despite all that, there's some really neat stuff in here. When the city descriptions are neat, they're really neat. Some of the new tech is pretty cool, even if characters can't do anything on that scale.

After the Storyteller's Screen and Expose: Aberrants, Aberrant: Year One seems like a disappointment. Rationally, I know it's not. There's still a lot in here I can use, and the stuff that for whatever reason I can't use only takes a few pages out of the whole book. But that's a worse ration of hit to miss than I'm used to seeing in the Aberrant line.

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

Aberrant: Year One
Author: Jim Moore, Dean Shomshak, and John R. Snead Category: game Company/Publisher: White Wolf Game Studio Line: Aberrant Cost: $14.95 US Page count: 111 ISBN: 1-56504-629-3 SKU: WW8502 Capsule Review by Kevin Mowery on 11/02/99. Genre tags: Science_fiction Superhero	Aberrant is one of the most exciting games to come out this year. The folks at White Wolf created a mostly believable world where superpowered beings live alongside ordinary people and have changed the world. Aberrant: Year One is the third supplement in the line. Year One starts off (literally; page one is the start of the New York section) with descriptions of over a dozen cities in the world of 2008. New York, Los Angeles, Mexico City, Havana, and Montreal represent North America. Europe is represented by Moscow and Venice. Africa and Asia also have several cities described. South America is strangely absent, and outside of the cities, there isn't much description of the countries or continents. My favorite cities described are Addis Ababa, Ethiopia (Ethiopia having been speed-terraformed and made into the breadbasket of Africa) and Lagos, Nigeria (Nigeria having been taken over by a morally ambiguous strongman who is fighting like hell to keep his country independent from the ubiquitous Project Utopia). Each city description has a page or two of news clippings about the region suitable for players, followed by another page or two of information more suitable for the GM, although there aren't really any campaign-breaking secrets in here. There's also at least one NPC for each city, with Lagos having the only non-Nova NPC in the book. The Muscovite NPC, Larissa Shonkovich, falls prey to something that seems to creep into White Wolf products from time to time: ignorance of foreign naming conventions. As far as I can tell, Larissa has no last name, being merely Larissa, the son of Shonk (-ovich or -evich is the male ending for a patronymic; the feminine form would be -ovna or -evna, and that still doesn't change that her father's name was apparently Shonk). The whole section lasts only 71 pages, and it should have been longer, in my opinion. The second part of the book details some of the technological advances of 2008. Most of the ideas are extrapolations from current technology and research. You get tobacco engineered to produce medicine, cloned organs, telepresence tanks and robots, flying cars, and a handful of weapons which still won't do a thing against a starting character who's serious about his defense. There's also a section on player-created technologies. The author says that Aberrant tries to be realistic about the effects of super-intelligent scientists on the world; no miraculous technologies that solve a problem and never make another appearance in the game world. Instead, the stance taken seems to be that player-characters just can't change the world with science. All the reasons given for slapping down ideas for creating an earth-shaking technology are valid, but it seems to fly in the face of the thing that made me fall in love with Aberrant in the first place: you've got the power of a god, the power to change the world. Unless you're a mega-intellect type, anyway, in which case you merely have the power to do a little more than a mortal scientist. Further hurting this section is the suggestion that mega-intellect novas should be given Taint when they create something new, then have the Taint removed when they can successfully explain their concept to the masses. It sounds like someone decided to import the Paradox rules from Mage. Taint comes from channelling too much Quantum energy through your body, not from doing things that stretch consensual reality. This has no place in Aberrant. Aberrant: Year One is a good book but not great. The lack of any sort of introduction or explanation is a bit disconcerting, but not a fatal flaw (and I know plenty of people are going to love that there's no discussion of what the book is about). There's no table of contents, no index. The layout is mediocre and some of the artwork fails my most lenient test (could I, with virtually no artistic training, do better in ten minutes?). The error in naming the Russian NPC calls other ethnic names into question (I studied Russian in school, but I don't know enough about other languages to know if the character names are equally silly). The page of rules and suggestions for super-science is nearly useless unless you want to penalize characters for being scientists instead of bricks. Despite all that, there's some really neat stuff in here. When the city descriptions are neat, they're really neat. Some of the new tech is pretty cool, even if characters can't do anything on that scale. After the Storyteller's Screen and Expose: Aberrants, Aberrant: Year One seems like a disappointment. Rationally, I know it's not. There's still a lot in here I can use, and the stuff that for whatever reason I can't use only takes a few pages out of the whole book. But that's a worse ration of hit to miss than I'm used to seeing in the Aberrant line. Style: 3 (Average) Substance: 4 (Meaty)