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Aside from the little-remembered WWF roleplaying game, there hasn't been a roleplaying game about professional fighting since White Wolf's Streetfighter RPG, in which shootfighting was made fun for the whole family. Now White Wolf has released the XWF sourcebook for Aberrant.

In retrospect, I'm surprised that more games don't include "sports entertainment" in their settings. If you think about it, pro wrestling makes for a great campaign background. If you want a reason for everyone to go to a certain city or country, they've been traded to a wrestling federation in Europe or Japan or they're doing house shows in East Nowhere, Kansas. Characters will all know each other from the locker room, and odds are they aren't really blood enemies. It gives an excuse for everyone to have ridiculous combat skills. The meddling of organized crime in sporting events can always be brought into play. If you want to have pro wrestling be "real" (that is, have shootfighting instead of pro wrestling) then you can have winning the belt as the campaign goal and make the current champion a real villain.

And really, it's a given that if anyone was going to do a book about pro wrestling in an RPG it would be White Wolf. They've already got ties to the World Wrestling Federation--at least once I've watched WWF programming and seen a little disclaimer at the end of the show that "Gangrel"--a vampire-themed wrestler's name--is a trademark of White Wolf. The original Aberrant book was thick with characters obviously based off of WWF wrestlers. And, as I said, they did Streetfighter.

All of which brings us to XWF (the Xtreme Warfare Federation). At only 24 pages, this is a tiny book. Personally, I was hoping to spend $15 or more on a thicker book like Project: Utopia, but the low price meant I could justify to myself also buying the new Fading Suns supplement. In the 24 pages of XWF there's one page of credits (at the end), and about half a page of rules describing three new combat maneuvers. The rest is setting information and a fair, though not intrusive, amount of artwork.

The book starts off with a few pages media pieces about the XWF. There's a magazine article about attending a match, a couple of locker room discussions (one with a low-level jobber complaining about the new gimmick he's been given: the Polyp, another with superstars Duke "Core" Baron and Superbeast planning out a backstage "ambush" to generate some heat for their upcoming PPV match), a "man on the street" poll about the XWF, and an interview with Lance "Stone Badass" Stryker which thankfully removes him from the XWF entirely (keeping an obvious "Stone Cold" Steve Austin clone out of the XWF is good, in my opinion, as is the book's total non-mention of "The Face," an equally obvious clone of "The Rock" who was in the main rulebook).

In fact, XWF does a lot of things right. There's a glossary of wrestling industry terms, a history of the XWF that doesn't devolve into the parody I was worried it was going to, a rather WWF-heavy history of the explosion of popularity of pro wrestling in the 1980s and 1990s (and the problems with the WWF in the late '80s), stats for the major title holders and some contenders, no metaplot or secret that will be revealed later, and a fairly good look at different ways the appearance of superpowered people might change sports entertainment. You probably want some more specifics about the organization, so here you go:

The XWF rose from the ashes of the WWF after the appearance of novas made the public less enthusiastic about seeing mere baseline humans wrestle each other. Here were real superheroes who could really deliver damage to each other and keep coming back for more! One of the WWF's stockholders knew an opportunity when he saw it and bought out the McMahon family to create the XWF. In another link to our world, real-world wrestling legend Ric Flair is the acting president of the XWF. (This means primarily that I get to go "Woooo!" and try to look like my head is about to explode from pressure when I GM an XWF game.) The big matches are for real (especially title matches), but there are plenty of low-powered novas and mitoids (people addicted to "Mite," the Aberrant version of steroids) who are willing to throw matches to generate heat for the more able nova wrestlers, and even superstars might stage a fake match to make sure they don't get really hurt before a big Pay-Per-View event. The angles--you know, those "Wrestler X kicked Wrestler Y's dog" storylines--could be fake or real, but usually they're fake. The XWF loves to have novas from other areas--mercenaries, TV stars, city defenders, whatever--settle their differences in the ring, because it's great ratings. There are three circles in the XWF, which are like divisions in real-world wrestling, the Silver, Red, and Black Circles, and which Circle you fight in depends on how much damage you can absorb and deliver. These circles, and a lot of the rules of the XWF are there to minimize injuries, even though the XWF realizes that their people will get hurt and occasionally get killed--especially the mitoids, who might survive their matches then expire of heart failure.

As for the book's flaws, there aren't many. I would have liked to have seen more. Between this book, some internet wrestling websites, and that show that NBC aired a couple of years ago about the secrets of professional wrestling, I get a pretty good sense of how the industry operates. Without those outside sources, though, I'd feel like I was missing something. I would have liked a section on possible themes for XWF campaigns. If you're going to do an XWF campaign, I'd recommend going to a wrestling news site to get the skinny on how wrestling works in our world (personally, I recommend iwrestling).

Still, for just under five dollars it's hard to go wrong.

Style: 3 (Average)
Substance: 3 (Average)

Aberrant XWF
Author: Robert Hatch Category: game Company/Publisher: White Wolf Game Studio Line: Aberrant Cost: $4.95 US Page count: 24 ISBN: 1-56504-688-9 SKU: WW8540 Capsule Review by Kevin Mowery on 03/07/00. Genre tags: Science_fiction Modern_day Superhero	Aside from the little-remembered WWF roleplaying game, there hasn't been a roleplaying game about professional fighting since White Wolf's Streetfighter RPG, in which shootfighting was made fun for the whole family. Now White Wolf has released the XWF sourcebook for Aberrant. In retrospect, I'm surprised that more games don't include "sports entertainment" in their settings. If you think about it, pro wrestling makes for a great campaign background. If you want a reason for everyone to go to a certain city or country, they've been traded to a wrestling federation in Europe or Japan or they're doing house shows in East Nowhere, Kansas. Characters will all know each other from the locker room, and odds are they aren't really blood enemies. It gives an excuse for everyone to have ridiculous combat skills. The meddling of organized crime in sporting events can always be brought into play. If you want to have pro wrestling be "real" (that is, have shootfighting instead of pro wrestling) then you can have winning the belt as the campaign goal and make the current champion a real villain. And really, it's a given that if anyone was going to do a book about pro wrestling in an RPG it would be White Wolf. They've already got ties to the World Wrestling Federation--at least once I've watched WWF programming and seen a little disclaimer at the end of the show that "Gangrel"--a vampire-themed wrestler's name--is a trademark of White Wolf. The original Aberrant book was thick with characters obviously based off of WWF wrestlers. And, as I said, they did Streetfighter. All of which brings us to XWF (the Xtreme Warfare Federation). At only 24 pages, this is a tiny book. Personally, I was hoping to spend $15 or more on a thicker book like Project: Utopia, but the low price meant I could justify to myself also buying the new Fading Suns supplement. In the 24 pages of XWF there's one page of credits (at the end), and about half a page of rules describing three new combat maneuvers. The rest is setting information and a fair, though not intrusive, amount of artwork. The book starts off with a few pages media pieces about the XWF. There's a magazine article about attending a match, a couple of locker room discussions (one with a low-level jobber complaining about the new gimmick he's been given: the Polyp, another with superstars Duke "Core" Baron and Superbeast planning out a backstage "ambush" to generate some heat for their upcoming PPV match), a "man on the street" poll about the XWF, and an interview with Lance "Stone Badass" Stryker which thankfully removes him from the XWF entirely (keeping an obvious "Stone Cold" Steve Austin clone out of the XWF is good, in my opinion, as is the book's total non-mention of "The Face," an equally obvious clone of "The Rock" who was in the main rulebook). In fact, XWF does a lot of things right. There's a glossary of wrestling industry terms, a history of the XWF that doesn't devolve into the parody I was worried it was going to, a rather WWF-heavy history of the explosion of popularity of pro wrestling in the 1980s and 1990s (and the problems with the WWF in the late '80s), stats for the major title holders and some contenders, no metaplot or secret that will be revealed later, and a fairly good look at different ways the appearance of superpowered people might change sports entertainment. You probably want some more specifics about the organization, so here you go: The XWF rose from the ashes of the WWF after the appearance of novas made the public less enthusiastic about seeing mere baseline humans wrestle each other. Here were real superheroes who could really deliver damage to each other and keep coming back for more! One of the WWF's stockholders knew an opportunity when he saw it and bought out the McMahon family to create the XWF. In another link to our world, real-world wrestling legend Ric Flair is the acting president of the XWF. (This means primarily that I get to go "Woooo!" and try to look like my head is about to explode from pressure when I GM an XWF game.) The big matches are for real (especially title matches), but there are plenty of low-powered novas and mitoids (people addicted to "Mite," the Aberrant version of steroids) who are willing to throw matches to generate heat for the more able nova wrestlers, and even superstars might stage a fake match to make sure they don't get really hurt before a big Pay-Per-View event. The angles--you know, those "Wrestler X kicked Wrestler Y's dog" storylines--could be fake or real, but usually they're fake. The XWF loves to have novas from other areas--mercenaries, TV stars, city defenders, whatever--settle their differences in the ring, because it's great ratings. There are three circles in the XWF, which are like divisions in real-world wrestling, the Silver, Red, and Black Circles, and which Circle you fight in depends on how much damage you can absorb and deliver. These circles, and a lot of the rules of the XWF are there to minimize injuries, even though the XWF realizes that their people will get hurt and occasionally get killed--especially the mitoids, who might survive their matches then expire of heart failure. As for the book's flaws, there aren't many. I would have liked to have seen more. Between this book, some internet wrestling websites, and that show that NBC aired a couple of years ago about the secrets of professional wrestling, I get a pretty good sense of how the industry operates. Without those outside sources, though, I'd feel like I was missing something. I would have liked a section on possible themes for XWF campaigns. If you're going to do an XWF campaign, I'd recommend going to a wrestling news site to get the skinny on how wrestling works in our world (personally, I recommend iwrestling). Still, for just under five dollars it's hard to go wrong. Style: 3 (Average) Substance: 3 (Average)

Aberrant XWF