The Inside Scoop on Gaming

Here's an odd case: Trinity is the only game I've seen where the special abilities that the characters have hamper the game's good points. Plainly put, Trinity is a fantastic science fiction game whose emphasis on psionics jars with the rest of the game's setting.

Initially, I only picked it up because it was fourteen bucks for the new dice-rolling mechanic that White Wolf had created with the system, not figuring that I'd get into the setting. I gave it a quick read through, wasn't terrifically happy about it, put it aside until I got desperate for something to read when I was at Borders. So I picked up the Trinity Technology Manual, against my better instincts, read through it, blinked, and thought something to the effect of Damn. Trinity's a hell of a lot cooler than I thought that it was.

Why the disjunct? Trinity suffers under the burden of having to introduce every element of the game simultaneously, from the psions to the Aberrants to the world goverment to the events of the past twenty years or so, and also lays down a tremendous amount of emphasis on the psionic aspects of the game. Meanwhile, the Technology Manual focuses on a specific part of the game world and offers quite a bit of cool stuff to tempt your players with, like faux-mecha and guns big enough to break your spine if fired. Buying Trinity alone gives you a game that flails around, not knowing what it's doing - but buy Trinity and another supplement, and you understand what the game's about on an almost instinctive level.

Is this a failing of the game? To some small degree, yeah. The book's forced to cover so much ground in a certain amount of space, whereas supplements can afford to flop out all over the place and include details that add to the world's coherency. And if you don't feel like shelling out $20 or so for one of Trinity's fairly excellent supplements, then you can download a pair of dossiers - Corporate Life and Underseas - from White Wolf's website. They're not fancy, but they do give you an idea of what's going on.

So, what is going on? It's the year 2120, and the human race is slowly recovering from a series of catastrophes inflicted by the Aberrant War. Aberrants, although it's not explicitly spelled out within the book, were superheroes, commanding immense amounts of energy and essentially changing the world every day. Unfortunately for the human race, the Aberrants swiftly got out of control, their own colossal energies warping them into madness. The whole story is still being told, especially in Aberrant, but the net result is that the human race was able to force a retreat by threatening to nuke Earth down to the bedrock unless the Aberrants left. After Bahrain got fused into black glass, the Aberrants took the hint and left into space, leaving behind a somewhat cryptic threat, a wiped Internet and information crash, a charbroiled Secretary of the United Nations and a ruined planet. The human race slowly rebuilt itself, with South America, Africa, China, and Australia becoming the new superpowers. The United States, hit with an Aberrant-created "blight", has become a totalitarian government that's waging wars against both Canada and Mexico. Meanwhile, the Aeon Society - whose organizations form the trinity referred to in the game's title - works behind the scenes, slowly trying to rebuild things.

When the Aberrants return, however, the psions step forth - nine Orders, each with their own particular psionic aptitude that can be granted to humans with latent psionic potential. They've been given their power by mysterious benefactors and tasked to prevent the Aberrants from reclaiming the Earth, and since they're the only ones who have a fighting chance against them, they're quickly accepted - and funded - by the nations of the Earth. The Aeon Trinity gets to sponsor the assorted Orders, but two of the Orders fall and/or disappear. There's two known hostile alien races - the Chromatics and the Coalition - as well as a friendly one, the Qin, the Aberrants are waging war on human colonies, everybody's jockeying for politcal advantage, and the net result is a mess of conflicting political motives. And as the metaplot in the back of the book reveals, humanity isn't exactly alone in its fight against the Aberrants. They may not even be in control of their own destiny.

One of the things that I'm not entirely fond of is the fact that the focus is on the psions, and their presentation as the saviors of the human race. One of the things that I like about science fiction is that it allows everybody to get a shot at things that are normally allowed only to the "upper class". Rather than the fate of humanity relying on vampires, or mages, or werewolves, the decision about the future has defaulted to humanity. So it's a little disappointing to pick up another White Wolf game where the players are the only ones who are capable of saving the universe while the rest of humanity gets relegated to supporting player status. And yeah, there's a long tradition of this - from Dune to Jedi - but as David Brin pointed out, it plays directly into the old "only kings may rule", an idea that went out of favor a good long while ago.

Which is why I consider the psions, and the Orders, and points related to be the least useful parts of Trinity. Without the psions as the central focus of the game, it becomes more about humanity and its travails as a whole, rather than the adventures of a few champions whose fates don't reflect humanity's as a whole. To be absolutely sure, psionics are an important part of the game, and there's a lot of stuff that would be missing if they were to be removed, but I find myself really regretting the fact that psions and non-psions alike aren't given equal space. In Trinity, most of humanity is portrayed as in need of saving. They shouldn't be.

Fortunately, the Trinity Player's Guide offers more guidance on playing standard humans within the game, and the basic rulebook allows you to play normal humans - they're described in a sidebar. I'm not happy about the fact that the game emphasizes psions above all else - and, to be honest, I think that my complaints are a touch nitpicky + irrelevant to the game as played - but the hell with it. Keep it in mind when you're reading the review and the game.

Anyways, what's the game itself like? Essentially, players create standard characters - the 7/5/3 mix of attributes will be familiar to longtime players of White Wolf games. However, there's been a bit of a revolution in the distribution of skills. Since Trinity characters are likely to have been trained, rather than thrown into their new lives, the skills are split between occupational and non-occupational skills. Similar to Call of Cthulhu, you pick an order - or work for Aeon Trinity - and take a "skill package" that goes along with that allegiance, spending points that have been specifically designated for that purpose. I wouldn't have minded some skill packages for occupations, rather than allegiance. For example, you can be a Norca infiltrator, but being a hotshot pilot or intrepid journalist has to wait until the Player's Guide. The myopic focus on the Orders once again injures the game.

Choosing an allegiance also helps you decide which psionic powers you happen to wind up with. The Orders have been given Prometheus tanks, each with the ability to trigger a latent to a particular aptitude of psionics - the Ministry owns the Telepathy tank, the Legion owns the Psychokinesis tank and so on. Fortunately for all concerned, the Orders tend to swap around psions, so if you belong to the Ministry, you aren't required to have Telepathy - you aren't even required to be from China, or in the Ministry's ranks.

Within each psionic power, there's three different submodes, each with its own specific specialty. Take Biokinesis - within that single psionic aptitude, there's Adaptation - which lets you survive just about anything at higher levels - to Transmogrify, which lets you sculpt your own body, to Pyschomorphing, which has a broad range of effects. Each dot in a particular submode allows you access to a new power. At lower levels, it's stuff like being able to sense the use of biokinesis, or heal a bit quicker. At higher levels, you can simply assimilate biotechnology into yourself, fall into a coma rather than dying, or survive in hard vacuum. Electrokinesis allows you to stun at lower levels, generate holograms, protect yourself with a static field and literally generate lasers just by using psi.

The only psionic aptitude that doesn't seem to fit is Psychokinesis, mostly because its effects seem a lot more comic-bookish than the others. One of the things that drove the developer nuts is that Trinity was called a "super-hero" game when it was first released; looking at powers like Cryokinesis and Pyrokinesis, where psions literally generate flame bursts and ice storms, I'm not sure that I can say that such an accusation is unfounded. The release of Aberrant put Trinity's powers into perspective, but the Legion definitely seems a touch silly when they're side by side to the other orders. (The mode that I'm not mentioning is Telekinesis, which perfectly fits the game's tone.)

The backgrounds aren't anything really new - there are a few neat ones. Citizenship allows you to have citizenship within different countries, so that movement between different countries is easier. It contributes to the general feel of SF espionage that the game has, but it also could pose a problem for GMs who aren't interested in playing up the conflict between different countries and/or blocking teams at the border because one of them doesn't happen to have citizenship in the country that they'd like to enter. If you are playing with espionage in mind, then that background helps out. The other background that has a lot of potential but not a lot of explanation with in the game is Device, which gives a character a unique item - which can be anything from a specialized rifle to a bulk freighter that's got the manuverability of a cat. It's a useful addition in that you can give characters signature items - like Han Solo and the Millenium Falcon - but it also leaves room for a lot of interpretation, which will lead to negotiation between GM and player whenever somebody takes this background.

There's also changes to the Resources background - suffice to say that there is a possibility of abuse with the way that the rules are set up, or so I've read. Specifically, if you want to buy something really expensive, all that you need to do is roll your Resources dice and hope that you come up with enough successes to match the difference between your current Resources score and the Resource score of the item that you're trying to buy. This means that you can buy a bulk freighter just by getting lucky on a single dice roll, or spending Willpower, or swapping dice when the GM isn't looking. The rules look like they work, and there is some neat stuff about the time interval between attempts to purchase things, but they basically don't work. GMs beware, or at least impose rules for how much players can buy for their starting characters.

The psionic system is fairly simple, and it actually deviates from the White Wolf norm by allowing players to have access to a fair amount of psi. You total up three stats and average them out, which results in a psi score ranging from one to eight; that means that a starting character could hypothetically have eight dots worth of Psi to play around with. Thanks to the limitations of the Prometheus tanks, you can only pick one Aptitude - ranging from the healing of Vitakinesis to the metamorphosing Biokinesis to the incredibly destructive Psychokinesis, and so forth. Within each Aptitude, there's three Modes, with three points that you can distribute among them. You can specialize in a mode - say, Cryokinesis at three points - or get a broad range in all of the modes in your aptitude, giving you more versatility but less power in each mode. It's a nice touch to have characters who are very psionically powerful to begin with, although you won't be able to be really powerful without liberal application of freebie points that you might need somewhere else.

The rules system is actually the start of the new White Wolf system, designed to get rid of a mathematical flaw in the old system that caused you to fail once you rolled more dice. Now, the standard difficulty is seven for all dice rolls, and difficulty is determined by how many successes you get. It seems to work a lot better than the old system, although I have absolutely no way of figuring out how the new dice rolling scheme affects probability. As a matter of fact, figuring out those things tends to give me a nosebleed and a splitting migraine, so I'll simply point out that the new dice-rolling scheme hasn't met with any major opposition. There's also rules for special firing modes for laser weapons, which allows you to hose people down with a steady spray of energy, and for space combat - the rules given are sufficient, but they're fleshed out to a greater degree in the Techology Manual.

The villains are given brief templates in the back - Aberrants are treated something like fomori are treated in Werewolf: The Apocalypse, given a few abilities and sent up against the PCs. One problem is that if you look at Aberrants in the actual game Aberrant, they're able to wield terrifying amounts of power without much difficulty, especially since there's no cap on Taint in the Trinity era. A starting level Aberrant/Nova could probably utterly annhilate a team of psions without trying hard. I'd almost demand that Trinity GMs scale down the power of Aberrant-created Aberrants to managable levels, and leave the standard thirty-point Novas to the upper ranks of the Aberrant hierarchy. The Chromatics, Qin and Aeon agents are also given a standard profiles; the Coalition are left out, although they are greatly detailed in the second Alien Encounter sourcebook.

The equipment is interesting - most of it is standard stuff, but what's especially interesting to me are the bioapps, which are essentially living organisms force-grown to become perfect replicas of equipment, ranging from guns to cockpits to security systems. In game terms, bioapps can be formatted by psions, literally becoming part of the psion's bodily aura; that grants various bonuses to whatever item you're using, whether it's a mecha or a spacecraft's cockpit or a handgun. There's also bioapps that simulate wings, use nanorobots to weld, and boost certain psionic effects - teleportation and clairsentience - a hundrefold. In broader terms, it's what I imagine the Tyranids first started off with - just a few items here and there that happen to be living creatures, with a civilization constructed entirely out of living creatures as the end result.

As a matter of fact, one of my favorite races in the game - the enigmatic Qin - have that as part of their society. Two-meter long slugs with perfect mastery of bioware, the Qin are humanity's only alien allies, and even the humans aren't sure what the Qin are really thinking. Their buildings on the homeworld of Qinshui are perfectly malleable, and to make humans feel at ease, the Qin wear diplomatic "suits" that look like, in the words of a game-world commentator, "Botticelli angels made out of spun sugar." They seem to have the most depth out of all the alien races presented in the game - at least, as presented in the central book - and you're given just enough about them to give a GM a rough idea of how to play them.

What's the most helpful about the new version of Trinity - and what should become the absolute standard in all White Wolf games - is an explanation of the metaplot, all of the little hints and questions that are dropped throughout the main book. Without going into spoilers, the book explains exactly who the Benefactors are, why the psionic effects of the Prometheus tanks are so limited, the motives of the Benefactors, what the Chromatics are up to, the nature of the interplay between Taint and Psi, exactly what the Aberrants are up to and what the overall theme of Trinity is - it's actually about more than just fighting the Aberrants and messing around with various conspiracies on Earth. With this information in hand - and it includes where to get more details about the events that the metaplot mentions - a GM can proceed confidently, without having to guess a half-dozen things that should have been included in the book in the first place.

Is Trinity worth buying? I only really got excited about it after I bought a supplement for it, and then after I thought about running a Star Wars conversion with it. But yeah, for $14, it's a complete SF game; and if you want to hack the setting into something more to your tastes, there's nothing stopping you. And if you buy another supplement with it, you start getting more details about a remarkably strange and interesting setting, which gets clearer with the more you read. Alternity has fallen to the whims of TSR/WoTC; if you're looking for a damned good SF game to play and/or hack into your own setting, this is it.

-Darren MacLennan

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

Trinity
Author: Justin Achilli, Andrew Bates, Ken Cliffe, Jen Clodius and sundry others Category: game Company/Publisher: White Wolf Line: Trinity Cost: $15 Page count: 320 ISBN: 1-56504-622-6 SKU: WW9099 Capsule Review by Darren MacLennan on 03/13/00. Genre tags: Science_fiction Far_Future Space Espionage Post-apocalypse	Here's an odd case: Trinity is the only game I've seen where the special abilities that the characters have hamper the game's good points. Plainly put, Trinity is a fantastic science fiction game whose emphasis on psionics jars with the rest of the game's setting. Initially, I only picked it up because it was fourteen bucks for the new dice-rolling mechanic that White Wolf had created with the system, not figuring that I'd get into the setting. I gave it a quick read through, wasn't terrifically happy about it, put it aside until I got desperate for something to read when I was at Borders. So I picked up the Trinity Technology Manual, against my better instincts, read through it, blinked, and thought something to the effect of Damn. Trinity's a hell of a lot cooler than I thought that it was. Why the disjunct? Trinity suffers under the burden of having to introduce every element of the game simultaneously, from the psions to the Aberrants to the world goverment to the events of the past twenty years or so, and also lays down a tremendous amount of emphasis on the psionic aspects of the game. Meanwhile, the Technology Manual focuses on a specific part of the game world and offers quite a bit of cool stuff to tempt your players with, like faux-mecha and guns big enough to break your spine if fired. Buying Trinity alone gives you a game that flails around, not knowing what it's doing - but buy Trinity and another supplement, and you understand what the game's about on an almost instinctive level. Is this a failing of the game? To some small degree, yeah. The book's forced to cover so much ground in a certain amount of space, whereas supplements can afford to flop out all over the place and include details that add to the world's coherency. And if you don't feel like shelling out $20 or so for one of Trinity's fairly excellent supplements, then you can download a pair of dossiers - Corporate Life and Underseas - from White Wolf's website. They're not fancy, but they do give you an idea of what's going on. So, what is going on? It's the year 2120, and the human race is slowly recovering from a series of catastrophes inflicted by the Aberrant War. Aberrants, although it's not explicitly spelled out within the book, were superheroes, commanding immense amounts of energy and essentially changing the world every day. Unfortunately for the human race, the Aberrants swiftly got out of control, their own colossal energies warping them into madness. The whole story is still being told, especially in Aberrant, but the net result is that the human race was able to force a retreat by threatening to nuke Earth down to the bedrock unless the Aberrants left. After Bahrain got fused into black glass, the Aberrants took the hint and left into space, leaving behind a somewhat cryptic threat, a wiped Internet and information crash, a charbroiled Secretary of the United Nations and a ruined planet. The human race slowly rebuilt itself, with South America, Africa, China, and Australia becoming the new superpowers. The United States, hit with an Aberrant-created "blight", has become a totalitarian government that's waging wars against both Canada and Mexico. Meanwhile, the Aeon Society - whose organizations form the trinity referred to in the game's title - works behind the scenes, slowly trying to rebuild things. When the Aberrants return, however, the psions step forth - nine Orders, each with their own particular psionic aptitude that can be granted to humans with latent psionic potential. They've been given their power by mysterious benefactors and tasked to prevent the Aberrants from reclaiming the Earth, and since they're the only ones who have a fighting chance against them, they're quickly accepted - and funded - by the nations of the Earth. The Aeon Trinity gets to sponsor the assorted Orders, but two of the Orders fall and/or disappear. There's two known hostile alien races - the Chromatics and the Coalition - as well as a friendly one, the Qin, the Aberrants are waging war on human colonies, everybody's jockeying for politcal advantage, and the net result is a mess of conflicting political motives. And as the metaplot in the back of the book reveals, humanity isn't exactly alone in its fight against the Aberrants. They may not even be in control of their own destiny. One of the things that I'm not entirely fond of is the fact that the focus is on the psions, and their presentation as the saviors of the human race. One of the things that I like about science fiction is that it allows everybody to get a shot at things that are normally allowed only to the "upper class". Rather than the fate of humanity relying on vampires, or mages, or werewolves, the decision about the future has defaulted to humanity. So it's a little disappointing to pick up another White Wolf game where the players are the only ones who are capable of saving the universe while the rest of humanity gets relegated to supporting player status. And yeah, there's a long tradition of this - from Dune to Jedi - but as David Brin pointed out, it plays directly into the old "only kings may rule", an idea that went out of favor a good long while ago. Which is why I consider the psions, and the Orders, and points related to be the least useful parts of Trinity. Without the psions as the central focus of the game, it becomes more about humanity and its travails as a whole, rather than the adventures of a few champions whose fates don't reflect humanity's as a whole. To be absolutely sure, psionics are an important part of the game, and there's a lot of stuff that would be missing if they were to be removed, but I find myself really regretting the fact that psions and non-psions alike aren't given equal space. In Trinity, most of humanity is portrayed as in need of saving. They shouldn't be. Fortunately, the Trinity Player's Guide offers more guidance on playing standard humans within the game, and the basic rulebook allows you to play normal humans - they're described in a sidebar. I'm not happy about the fact that the game emphasizes psions above all else - and, to be honest, I think that my complaints are a touch nitpicky + irrelevant to the game as played - but the hell with it. Keep it in mind when you're reading the review and the game. Anyways, what's the game itself like? Essentially, players create standard characters - the 7/5/3 mix of attributes will be familiar to longtime players of White Wolf games. However, there's been a bit of a revolution in the distribution of skills. Since Trinity characters are likely to have been trained, rather than thrown into their new lives, the skills are split between occupational and non-occupational skills. Similar to Call of Cthulhu, you pick an order - or work for Aeon Trinity - and take a "skill package" that goes along with that allegiance, spending points that have been specifically designated for that purpose. I wouldn't have minded some skill packages for occupations, rather than allegiance. For example, you can be a Norca infiltrator, but being a hotshot pilot or intrepid journalist has to wait until the Player's Guide. The myopic focus on the Orders once again injures the game. Choosing an allegiance also helps you decide which psionic powers you happen to wind up with. The Orders have been given Prometheus tanks, each with the ability to trigger a latent to a particular aptitude of psionics - the Ministry owns the Telepathy tank, the Legion owns the Psychokinesis tank and so on. Fortunately for all concerned, the Orders tend to swap around psions, so if you belong to the Ministry, you aren't required to have Telepathy - you aren't even required to be from China, or in the Ministry's ranks. Within each psionic power, there's three different submodes, each with its own specific specialty. Take Biokinesis - within that single psionic aptitude, there's Adaptation - which lets you survive just about anything at higher levels - to Transmogrify, which lets you sculpt your own body, to Pyschomorphing, which has a broad range of effects. Each dot in a particular submode allows you access to a new power. At lower levels, it's stuff like being able to sense the use of biokinesis, or heal a bit quicker. At higher levels, you can simply assimilate biotechnology into yourself, fall into a coma rather than dying, or survive in hard vacuum. Electrokinesis allows you to stun at lower levels, generate holograms, protect yourself with a static field and literally generate lasers just by using psi. The only psionic aptitude that doesn't seem to fit is Psychokinesis, mostly because its effects seem a lot more comic-bookish than the others. One of the things that drove the developer nuts is that Trinity was called a "super-hero" game when it was first released; looking at powers like Cryokinesis and Pyrokinesis, where psions literally generate flame bursts and ice storms, I'm not sure that I can say that such an accusation is unfounded. The release of Aberrant put Trinity's powers into perspective, but the Legion definitely seems a touch silly when they're side by side to the other orders. (The mode that I'm not mentioning is Telekinesis, which perfectly fits the game's tone.) The backgrounds aren't anything really new - there are a few neat ones. Citizenship allows you to have citizenship within different countries, so that movement between different countries is easier. It contributes to the general feel of SF espionage that the game has, but it also could pose a problem for GMs who aren't interested in playing up the conflict between different countries and/or blocking teams at the border because one of them doesn't happen to have citizenship in the country that they'd like to enter. If you are playing with espionage in mind, then that background helps out. The other background that has a lot of potential but not a lot of explanation with in the game is Device, which gives a character a unique item - which can be anything from a specialized rifle to a bulk freighter that's got the manuverability of a cat. It's a useful addition in that you can give characters signature items - like Han Solo and the Millenium Falcon - but it also leaves room for a lot of interpretation, which will lead to negotiation between GM and player whenever somebody takes this background. There's also changes to the Resources background - suffice to say that there is a possibility of abuse with the way that the rules are set up, or so I've read. Specifically, if you want to buy something really expensive, all that you need to do is roll your Resources dice and hope that you come up with enough successes to match the difference between your current Resources score and the Resource score of the item that you're trying to buy. This means that you can buy a bulk freighter just by getting lucky on a single dice roll, or spending Willpower, or swapping dice when the GM isn't looking. The rules look like they work, and there is some neat stuff about the time interval between attempts to purchase things, but they basically don't work. GMs beware, or at least impose rules for how much players can buy for their starting characters. The psionic system is fairly simple, and it actually deviates from the White Wolf norm by allowing players to have access to a fair amount of psi. You total up three stats and average them out, which results in a psi score ranging from one to eight; that means that a starting character could hypothetically have eight dots worth of Psi to play around with. Thanks to the limitations of the Prometheus tanks, you can only pick one Aptitude - ranging from the healing of Vitakinesis to the metamorphosing Biokinesis to the incredibly destructive Psychokinesis, and so forth. Within each Aptitude, there's three Modes, with three points that you can distribute among them. You can specialize in a mode - say, Cryokinesis at three points - or get a broad range in all of the modes in your aptitude, giving you more versatility but less power in each mode. It's a nice touch to have characters who are very psionically powerful to begin with, although you won't be able to be really powerful without liberal application of freebie points that you might need somewhere else. The rules system is actually the start of the new White Wolf system, designed to get rid of a mathematical flaw in the old system that caused you to fail once you rolled more dice. Now, the standard difficulty is seven for all dice rolls, and difficulty is determined by how many successes you get. It seems to work a lot better than the old system, although I have absolutely no way of figuring out how the new dice rolling scheme affects probability. As a matter of fact, figuring out those things tends to give me a nosebleed and a splitting migraine, so I'll simply point out that the new dice-rolling scheme hasn't met with any major opposition. There's also rules for special firing modes for laser weapons, which allows you to hose people down with a steady spray of energy, and for space combat - the rules given are sufficient, but they're fleshed out to a greater degree in the Techology Manual. The villains are given brief templates in the back - Aberrants are treated something like fomori are treated in Werewolf: The Apocalypse, given a few abilities and sent up against the PCs. One problem is that if you look at Aberrants in the actual game Aberrant, they're able to wield terrifying amounts of power without much difficulty, especially since there's no cap on Taint in the Trinity era. A starting level Aberrant/Nova could probably utterly annhilate a team of psions without trying hard. I'd almost demand that Trinity GMs scale down the power of Aberrant-created Aberrants to managable levels, and leave the standard thirty-point Novas to the upper ranks of the Aberrant hierarchy. The Chromatics, Qin and Aeon agents are also given a standard profiles; the Coalition are left out, although they are greatly detailed in the second Alien Encounter sourcebook. The equipment is interesting - most of it is standard stuff, but what's especially interesting to me are the bioapps, which are essentially living organisms force-grown to become perfect replicas of equipment, ranging from guns to cockpits to security systems. In game terms, bioapps can be formatted by psions, literally becoming part of the psion's bodily aura; that grants various bonuses to whatever item you're using, whether it's a mecha or a spacecraft's cockpit or a handgun. There's also bioapps that simulate wings, use nanorobots to weld, and boost certain psionic effects - teleportation and clairsentience - a hundrefold. In broader terms, it's what I imagine the Tyranids first started off with - just a few items here and there that happen to be living creatures, with a civilization constructed entirely out of living creatures as the end result. As a matter of fact, one of my favorite races in the game - the enigmatic Qin - have that as part of their society. Two-meter long slugs with perfect mastery of bioware, the Qin are humanity's only alien allies, and even the humans aren't sure what the Qin are really thinking. Their buildings on the homeworld of Qinshui are perfectly malleable, and to make humans feel at ease, the Qin wear diplomatic "suits" that look like, in the words of a game-world commentator, "Botticelli angels made out of spun sugar." They seem to have the most depth out of all the alien races presented in the game - at least, as presented in the central book - and you're given just enough about them to give a GM a rough idea of how to play them. What's the most helpful about the new version of Trinity - and what should become the absolute standard in all White Wolf games - is an explanation of the metaplot, all of the little hints and questions that are dropped throughout the main book. Without going into spoilers, the book explains exactly who the Benefactors are, why the psionic effects of the Prometheus tanks are so limited, the motives of the Benefactors, what the Chromatics are up to, the nature of the interplay between Taint and Psi, exactly what the Aberrants are up to and what the overall theme of Trinity is - it's actually about more than just fighting the Aberrants and messing around with various conspiracies on Earth. With this information in hand - and it includes where to get more details about the events that the metaplot mentions - a GM can proceed confidently, without having to guess a half-dozen things that should have been included in the book in the first place. Is Trinity worth buying? I only really got excited about it after I bought a supplement for it, and then after I thought about running a Star Wars conversion with it. But yeah, for $14, it's a complete SF game; and if you want to hack the setting into something more to your tastes, there's nothing stopping you. And if you buy another supplement with it, you start getting more details about a remarkably strange and interesting setting, which gets clearer with the more you read. Alternity has fallen to the whims of TSR/WoTC; if you're looking for a damned good SF game to play and/or hack into your own setting, this is it. -Darren MacLennan Style: 4 (Classy and well done) Substance: 4 (Meaty)