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Aberrant RPG - Campaign Idea: The Final Aeons


Chuckg

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I have several campaign ideas I am never going to use. This is one of them.

 

Campaign: The Final Aeons

 

You remember so many things.

 

You remember the old days, when the Aeon Society met in a brownhouse and invited everyone to come look through the filing cabinets for free. You remember Maxwell before he came obsessed with his ideas of the 'ideal' future, and Michael before he was overtaken by his inner demons.

 

You remember Annabelle before she left the Society to fight at Michael's side. And you remember her shooting Whitley through the spine on the day the Second Hammersmith Event was to happen, and her being laid low by Tallon's enraged punch.

 

And you remember how she screamed as she died, with Mercer unhesitatingly throwing her helpless body headfirst into Donighal's telluric engine to jam it with the handiest thing available within reach one second before it would have started a posthuman age in 1943.

 

You remember old Safari Jack mysteriously disappearing in 1955, almost a year before Liberty Cross Medical started producing 'experimental' anti-aging remedies reserved for favored Aeon board members only.

 

You remember Whitley Styles being unable to look you in the eye while explaining to you that the reason the anti-aging remedies weren't being distributed more generally is because 'the field test' of himself, Margaret, and several others wasn't showing consistent results. This while his hair stayed dark, and yours went gray. This after he was finally out of the wheelchair he'd spent the past decade in.

 

You remember the Babel Dossier being moved to a secure undisclosed location.

 

You remember openness being traded for secrecy, help giving way to manipulation, adventures being phased out in favor of black-bag jobs and wetworks.

 

You remember seeing the handwriting on the wall and running for your life.

 

You remember hiding out in the cracks of the world, reading between the lines of newspaper articles and knowing that the ideals of the old Aeon Society were vanishing further and further into the night and fog.

 

But despite your own Inspiration, despite all the impossible adventures you had survived when you were younger, you knew that there would be no happy ending and upraised glasses in the old brownstone this time.

 

It was a new world, a darker world, a world more firmly in the grip of the new Aeon than it had ever been gripped by the King of the World or the Ubiquitous Dragon or the Czar. Your choices lay stark before you; a heroic death vs. impossible odds, or an unremarkable death as you crawled off into obscurity to rot. Because several adventurers, even Inspired ones, could not hope to overcome an entire society of their peers.

 

But people who were more than adventurers? That would be something else entirely.

 

Although you had not seen or heard any signs of Donighal since 1943, you knew he was still out there. You knew that he would never rest. That sooner or later he would recover enough power for another attempt, as his "terrible angel" only waxed further and further. Sooner or later he would progress beyond the power of even the most modern weapons to kill him, if he had not already. And that while they had to succeed in stopping him every time, he only had to succeed once.

 

So you fled to the long-lost golden pyramid of Aton, whose exact location had remained a secret even to the Babel dossier. And amidst the dust-covered ancient secrets that had once been used to empower a maddened, victimized child, you added the products of more modern labors -- the Dixon telluric-ionic power cells, lenses carved from telluric energy crystals gathered in half a dozen nameless lands, even the Mechanitrix's old z-ray projector rifle that had once brought down an artificial moon. And you set up your  suspension capsules, with the power-focusing array precipitated above it. And so you slept the decades away, waiting.

 

Waiting for the year when Michael would finally succeed in bringing fire to the sky, and creating an entire new culture of superhumans that you could vanish into, "merely" several more wonders in a world newly full of wonders.

 

The last unfallen members of the original Aeon, to save the world from the unspeakable evil that their old friends and their heirs had become.

 

 

The idea of the campaign is that the party are powerful novas with Cipher 5 (as they've been in hibernation for decades), that are effectively True 2nd Generation Taint-immune due to their unusual origin (while they obviously didn't know everything about novas, they knew enough about telluric energy to effectively guarantee their eruptions on N-Day by creating a quantum-focusing grid that would, on the day of the next Hammersmith-type Event, make sure to affect them as if they were at ground zero -- and of course they were already all Inspired)... who are 'in the know' re: the existence of the Aeon conspiracy, and devoted to wrecking its shit.   Disadvantages are that they're men and women out of time, and about to buck one hugely stacked deck, as they expected to be Dr. Primoris-level super-stalwarts (i.e, novas) going up against a bunch of daredevils and their organization, and didn't expect them to have a Project Utopia-sized nova army.

 

But hey, why not?

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Second Gens, perfectly stable... with the right set of players and character concepts they would kick the meta in the balls with unobtanium boots on. :D They would have to play serious catch-up with society and tech though to match up with the current situation. Thought Cap had it bad? Oh boy.

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Steal away, folks.  I posted it to share it, because I knew I was never going to get around to it.  (My tabletop group was not interested.)

 

Oh, a point of clarification; while the novas erupted from the N-Day surge, they didn't awaken on that date.  They stayed in suspension a while longer because this was imprecisely-understood science.  (And, natch, a dormant period of not using quantum powers at all for a few years after eruption is also a big part of why they're Taint-free.)

 

This is why there's a Proteus and etc. for them to struggle against.  If they were mature Taint-free novas in 1998, they'd just steamroller the opposition in a month.

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Because my tabletop group is going to start another Aberrant campaign soon (a more standard 'Worldwide Phase I' era campaign, nothing special) and I prefer to run only one thing at a time.

 

Also, I've generally had bad luck in the past with pbp -- and that's from the player's side. From the DM's side, my pbp experience is zilch.

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Because my tabletop group is going to start another Aberrant campaign soon (a more standard 'Worldwide Phase I' era campaign, nothing special) and I prefer to run only one thing at a time.

 

Also, I've generally had bad luck in the past with pbp -- and that's from the player's side. From the DM's side, my pbp experience is zilch.

 

Damn. As you can see, you'd easily get willing players here. :P

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Anyone wants to nab this idea and do it themselves, feel free.  That's why I shared it, and why I may share future campaign seeds I have lying around the ol' hard drive.  If I can't get any use from them, maybe someone else can.

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