Posted 08 July 2009 - 02:55 PM
I distinctly remember the first Aberrant game I played. My friend Dan, who played here a few times as Lucious "Metropolis" Clay introduced me to it after I had bought the core rules for him as gift. Kelly, known to many of you as Apep, had been playing it with him during his initial feeling out of the system and seemed to enjoy it.
As I listened to the world he was describing to me, I knew that my first character was going to be a Terat. Not because I wanted to be an antagonist, but because I wanted her to be an agent of change. I envisioned her as a cross between Jodie Foster's Eleanor Arroway in CONTACT and Jennifer Jason Leigh's Allegra Geller in EXISTENZ: a visionary with Arroway's dreams coupled with Geller's understanding of how technology and biology might interface. She was going to be a benign spokesman for transhumanity, with the resolute fragility that Arroway possessed at the very end of CONTACT and the Mega-Socials to be that kind of savior-figure.
I named her Allegra Ramsey, and thus I stepped into the world of Aberrant. Of course, first-runs being what they are, the story did not turn out in any way how I thought it would and Ramsey ended up becoming something else entirely, as noted in 1,001 Aberrant Nights where she is known more as Machina. Not to be confused with the man's man Machina that everyone loved to hate and hated to love.
Dan and Kelly took an extended hiatus from Missouri, and when they returned, Dan had his storyteller's fire back. Some RPG storytellers are like that; give them time away from the game and they will return with an epic adventure. And what an adventure it was. It tied in characters and elements from plots long idle, and he was going to create a core group of about seven player characters from seven different players.
Before all of this started, he took me aside and asked if I would play the interloper. I would be the one sent to watch the others. This was a bit of a challenge, considering it was Aberrant after all and PC's tend to latch onto abilities like Lie Detector but I was honored that I was asked to do it. Only Kelly, who would be playing the assassin and co-consipirator, would know who I was.
As the game passed, the intrigue became almost suffocating, and it came to a head when my character learned that Kelly's character, Viper, was her daughter. This was a masterful moment of storytelling that left me as a player and a character utterly devastated. Everyone will say that I should have seen it coming, but I was completely blindsided. No twist could have been so simple and yet so transformative, and even at the pinnacle of his storytelling genius do I think Dan could have imagined what he just unleashed upon our circle.
This was the moment that Ashnod came into being.
Aberrant was never the same fore me. And for the next few months, I was living and breathing the Teragen in a way I could not possibly have as Allegra Ramsey. It was not anger that motivated Ashnod, though I'm suppose one might make arguments to the contrary. No, it was the understanding of what was necessary to ensure her species, her children, would emerge as free and unshackled beings.
Ashnod consumed me for a little while, and it was during this little while that I came across N!Prime.
I've waxed poetic on this many times, probably to the boredom of many of the newer players, but when I came across N!Prime there wasn't even a forum. Just a few posted articles, some info here and there, and a single thread called Opposing Views that allowed contributors to add their weight to the current topic.
And did we ever.
The current topic when I arrived was simply "The Null Manifesto vs The Zurich Accord." But as I read through the responses, it became clear that this was far more than a discussion. Fully-formed personalities were sharing their lives, and yes, some of them were completely off-the-wall. At the core of all of this were two dominant voices: Jager, who was easily the linchpin amongst the cast and the one who went out of his way to make the newcomers feel welcome; and Hazzard, an unrepetentant sociopath whose boasts of combat prowess were tempered by his outlandish wit. Ashnod fit in well amongst the colorful personalities; she was a Terat who preached separatism over supremecy, all the while listening to the tales of the mini-warp-drive ships and proclamations of love for Shrapnel.
It's amazing how much time you can spend refreshing a web-browser for updates on a single thread. I don't know how many hours of Microsoft Certification study were lost to N!Prime back then, but it was certainly engrossing.
Eventually the topic switched to "Divis Mal: Visionary or Madman?" The conversation didn't slow down, however, and the lives of these characters superceded the topic at hand. Chosen, recognizing that the characters had begun dominating the site, eventually transformed N!Prime completely into a full, proper forum to give them room to breath and grow.
Almost immediately, we had "On Wizard's Watch," the first full-length collaborative fiction between the novas of N!Prime. And then things really began to pick up.
I had to revise Ashnod to make her more properly fit into the N!Prime universe, which was a difficult task considering her table-top was still going on and some of those events kept bleeding into how I played her. But as I kept stripping more and more of her table-top life out of N!Prime, and streamlining how she would have developed without those influences, the character became more than just another terat and evolved into something larger. The writers of N!Prime all but demanded that she take that evolution. Not in any request to me, but in the way their characters challenged her and forced her to hone every last facet of her philosophy until it was a razor. The very same thing would happen to Salamander, whom I intended originally to be little more than a young, female homage to Hazzard and eventually became the unapologetic voice of the self-erupted community.
Because, above all, that's what rpg-post demands of you and gives back to you. The original cast of N!Prime has slowly filtered out and been replaced, but the heart of the site remains a dedicated group of writers that crave a fully-realized world with breathing characters to inhabit it. Challenging your peers to do better and be better than they are is a time-honored tradition here, as much as the conflicts and the in-fighting that are bound to happen in any environment where the creators have so much invested in the world.
Some of the best writing I have ever done has been for this site, and I'm exceedingly proud of the body of work I've contributed here, both in terms of OpNet posts and Fiction posts. But much of that would never have been possible without the interaction of everyone here; this place has inspired me, given me joy, and created lasting real-life friendships. Despite my inactivity, this place still calls to me and I continue to find myself popping in to see what is happening, longing for the thrill of a story and the interplay of the personalities that we use to drive that story forward.
It gets in your blood, this place does.
It is not our fault if you are terrified of what we represent. We make no apologies for what we are.
0
Top
