Adventure! Tales of the Aeon Society is White Wolf’s Storytelling Game of Pulp Action!, a game of over-the-top heroes and villains of the Roaring Twenties, replete with daring crimefighters, criminal masterminds, lost civilisations, amazing powers and all that jazz.
Adventure is the ‘prequel’ to Trinity and Aberrant. Trinity is a science fiction game with a believable combination of space opera, cyberpunk and post-apocalyptic genres all in one setting, while Aberrant is a supers game where all superhumans have a single origin and society’s reaction is a satire of celebrity culture. Therefore, Adventure being a pure pulp game is rather surprising.
It is almost a generic pulp adventure game. Almost any kind of pulp hero or villain can be made fairly easily. The background attached provides a unified explanation for why certain classic types appear, as well as linking the game to the Trinity universe, but it can be easily discarded. Those who dislike the explanation are plainly invited to ignore it, and those who find it limiting to step beyond it.
There are extensive rules for weird science, suggestions for using true magic, and those who prefer their heroes to be superlative humans rather than proto-novas from Aberrant or proto-psions from Trinity have a fully developed third option, the Daredevil, some of whom are explained in-game as a third superhuman type but it ain’t necessarily so.
The three character types are the Stalwart (proto-novas), a kind of low-level superhuman with various uncanny abilities, the Mesmerist (proto-psions), harnessing the strange power of the mind, and the Daredevil (proto-action heroes), who are remarkable people with a lot of luck, and nothing more.
In rules terms, Adventure uses the Trinity universe’s streamlined Storyteller engine, and will be very familiar to Trinity and Aberrant fans, and fairly clear to World of Darkness gamers. At the nuts and bolts level, it’s a d10-based dice pool and multiple success system. Nine attributes and various linked abilities are rated one to five, with two being a normal human’s attribute. Characters can move beyond the normal 5 maximum through Inspiration. Streamlining for the Trinity model includes having standard success number (7) with more difficult events requiring additional successes, and shuffling the abilities around so that, for example, Brawling and Martial Arts do the same damage but are added to Strength and Dexterity, rather than Martial Arts. The Trinity system also lessens the damage caused by ‘botching’, so that rolling 1 on any die is only bad if you roll no successes at all. This makes heroes in Adventure less likely to screw up due to bad dice rolls than PCs in Vampire or Mage.
As an example, auto mechanic ‘Crash’ Gerritt attempts to throw a wrench at the crazed assassin who just burst in through his window shrieking and wielding twin sabres. That’s Athletics, which is linked to Dexterity. Crash has Dex 3, Athletics 3, and no special skills or Knacks (powers) to help him. He has six dice. His odds of beaning the screaming nutcase are pretty good.
Adventure-specific rules include the various Knacks of the three power types, and Inspiration, a kind of Hero Point system which is significantly more powerful than the also-used Willpower trait. An inspired character starts with one point of Inspiration, and it isn’t very expensive to increase. Inspiration has a permanent rating and a related temporary pool. One point can double your dice pool for a single action (“Great shot, kid, that was one in a million!”), and up to five points can be used, if the game’s Storyteller accepts, on Dramatic Editing.
Dramatic Editing reflects the over-the-top heroism of pulps (and all the genres that follow the tradition, from superheroes to action movies) by letting players spend Inspiration to alter the storyline in their favour, letting them get away with a little more than usual. The better your explanation, the more likely the Storyteller will allow the change, and the less he’ll charge. This encourages fast thinking for both players and Storyteller, and reflects the sudden turns of pulp action stories.
Player ingenuity and creativity is encouraged throughout the rules. For example, the Experience Point guidelines include points for Ambience, rewarding players for crating character sketches, bringing appropriate soundtrack music and so on. The Storyteller is also advised to give bonus dice in combat for a clever and well described stunt, as opposed to a simple declaration of action. I here note that Mr Baugh is a declared fan of Over The Edge and Messrs Baugh and Stolze have written for Feng Shui, which encourage creative fighting by advising GMs to penalise simple declarations in combat. The Adventure system makes colourful description an advantage, rather than the lack of same being a disadvantage.
Various other traits of the rules (largely written by Mr Stolze) encourage this shared story style. For example, if a character has a high Wits attribute and a penchant for snappy one-liners, the player is encouraged to give the Storyteller a few feed lines for pre-prepared remarks. These serve no purpose but to amuse the rest of the party and demonstrate the PC’s wit. Similarly, among the usual backgrounds (access to resources, useful contacts etc.) is Nemesis, which increases a character’s Inspiration pool when dealing with a specific enemy.
The background of Adventure is straightforward compared to those of Aberrant and Trinity. In 1922, a scientific experiment went wrong, releasing ‘Telluric energy’ and artificially stimulating the evolution of certain people, creating Mesmerists and Stalwarts. One of the survivors of the accident, explorer and philanthropist Maxwell Anderson Mercer, formed the Aeon Society for Gentlemen (including a lady among the founding members), dedicated to improving humanity’s condition, solving mysteries and increasing the sum of human knowledge. Some Inspired people share in his ideals, and others, naturally, do not. The Aeon Society, the Inspiration effect, and the power types are both an internally-consistent setting and an in-game excuse for a wide variety of pulp adventures. From two-fisted gangbusters to explorers of the Hollow World (oh yes, the world is hollow, at least for the time being), masters of martial arts to intelligent gorillas, Adventure has an explanation for any kind of pulp storyline. If the explanation is surplus to your requirements, it can be removed to create a generic pulp RPG without significant alterations. The Gadget and Innovation rules would have to be changed to remove Telluric Radiation as a power source and replace it with “Insert Pseudoscientific Explanation Here”, but that’s about it.
The background of Adventure is so extreme that the writers have to point out how to avoid the more incredible events changing the world for Aberrant and Trinity. The world is not hollow in either of those games, after all. A certain amount of vagary has been built in, so less immense alterations from the fairly normal world pre-Aberrant can be overlooked and forgotten. Remember the warehouse at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark?
Adventure is described as “rollicking” and I can certainly see why. In the Roleplaying section explaining how the game should run, there is an excellent piece on what pulp stories are and aren’t, as well as sound advice on planning and running games, generally advising fast-thinking and rewarding player ingenuity. It’s all good advice, comparable to the equivalent section in West End Games’ Star Wars.
The theme of the game is Hope. Heroes should be optimistic, empowered and steadfast. The Aeon Society’s members are dedicated to making the world a better place. This runs counter to one of the classic complaints about White Wolf games, especially the WoD series, that they are unrelentingly grim and cynical. The Aeon Society’s leaders do not have a deadly secret agenda. The King of the World’s global conspiracy of crime can be defeated. The Daredevils counter another frequent complaint, that White Wolf games make humans powerless. Human beings really can make a difference.
Physically, Adventure matches Aberrant and Trinity as a thick softcover with a large component of artwork. Certainly, it lacks the colour of the previous rulebooks, but the off-white paper is similarly atmospheric, and shows off the artwork to good effect. As usual, there are some typos and glitches, but nothing glaring. I have yet to find a Page XX direction, for example. I also appreciated the reference to Britain’s Labour Party in the timeline, rather than the Americanised Labor.
I am a big pulp fan, have been since seeing Raiders of the Lost Ark at age seven. I’ve played pulp games including TSR and West End’s Indiana Jones games. I have been looking forward to Adventure since it was first revealed (then untitled) at the back of the Aberrant rulebook. It has more than matched my hopes. I hope to run Adventure as soon as possible.
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