Aberrant RPG - How did you fill the world?

[Hugin]

Okay, I want to hear about some of your accomplishments as either STs or Players when it came to filling the Aberrant world with your own creations.

What did you make to fill those gaps left by canon? What companies, what organizations, what technology? I'm not talking about NPCs. Everyone has their own favorite NPC (Ed is mine.) I'm talking about socially relevent events. I'm talking about solid additions to the world. Was there a new NovaSports league? A new Terat offshoot? A new company that specialized in helping baselines even the odds with Novas?

C'mon. I'm inviting you to brag.

[Eddie Cyclone]

Not an NPC, but a new take on an old situation...

Under the stress of his life and work Caestus Pax developed an uncontrolled version of the clone power manifesting alter egos. One of his most often manifested alter egos was Chiraben. Originally a playful prankster, if sometimes a little cruel, Chiraben reacted to Pax's mental state and needs. Eventually this drove Chiraben to murder Slider and he found pain and suffering to be an interesting preoccupation.

The nova Chiraben has died many times - once at the hands of Pax himself - but always seems to come back. Over the years Pax has come to suspect a connection of some sort but would never believe the truth.

It made for great loads of fun.

[Sphere]

In the game I'm running my Players have had similar troubles with Chiraben's inability to stay in the ground.

They captured him once and have discovered him to be infected with some kind of metachinery. The wife of one of the Player's tried to heal the stuff out of him only to be contaminated with a mutated version of the tiny machines which began converting her into Chiraben! That version of Chiraben melted into biological sludge, but another one was observed soon after inspecting the ruin of the Protector's stronghold in the Artic.

But as they've yet to discover the truth of his origins, I'll have to keep quiet about it.

As you may have gathered the Protectors have been wiped out. Some kind of orbital weapon was used on the site. The Players were on location at the time and only managed to get out in the last seconds.

[Titan]

heh...I'll get to Chiraben in a second...

First, you should know that every game I run uses all the other games I have run as canon. That way I usually have a built in storyline.

Funny that you should mention a "company that specialized in helping baselines even the odds with Novas"...my first game was based at Scott Robotics Industries. SRI was in Missouri, and there were 3 novas working for the company. Gee, a gravity controlling teenager; Brett Scott, CEO and son of the company President; and 'The Real Thing', a mega-int engineer who erupted with the same powers(and taint) of his favorite orange rock covered comic character. They were into lots of things: Asteroid mining, using remote controlled rocket/robotic miners; Custom designed vehicles for tainted novas; and their best $ maker (Govt. contract), the LPF armor series (LPF= Level Playing Field). It started as a small contract for National Guard Units, but in a later series it became much more.

In another series, which took place in the nineteen fifties, a middle-aged Max Mercer used his erupted son Michael to find other "naturally" erupted novas. That one was a lot of fun, because we did it Adventure! style, before Adventure! even existed. I gave everyone 5 nova points, and gave out NP instead of XP for a long time. The novas he found were: Jack Alexander, a silver medallist swimmer from the US; Jose Montega, a Cuban tobacco farmer; Dr. Han Kevnoh, a Russian M.D.; and Katherine Ryan, a British university student.

The group had a great dynamic, and after they discovered a way to give the evolutionary advancements they had gained to the world at large, they decided to create a world much like the Aberrant continuum without much nudging at all. I took the group through a series of adventures for each decade leading up to 1998, then asked them what they wanted for themselves after the Galatea "accident". My NPC, Michael Mercer split with the group after a terrible argument...he later became Divis Mal. Jack, a Superman comics fan, became Caestus Pax. Dr. Kevnoh became the Director of Proteus. Katherine, after her divorce from Jack in 1984, left the group with Jose and went underground. Their whereabouts are currently unknown.

Another game was a Terat offshoot game. This was before the Teragen book came out, I swear, but SOOO much fit in with the book. Their mentor was a guy they knew as 'Rebel' and they met in a cave in northwest Arkansas that was once used as a Confederate HQ. They called themselves the Legion of Doom. I know, I know. Not my idea. These guys were henius, but brilliantly so. I cannot even begin to tell you all that they did, and mostly got away with, but the game ended when one of the players was elected Vice President of the US (under the nova-hating guy, can't think of his name and don't want to look it up) and then arranged the murder of the President. They got a law passed (before the election, but not much) that banned T2M from operating in the US and forced full disclosure from P.U. of their registered novas. Then they outfitted the entire US army with LPF armor.

My next to most recent game took place in the months before Slider was murdered, and Jennifer was the mentor to the group of novas as they went through the Pembroke Rashoud Facility in L.A. Following their stay there, the group was pulled into Proteus, where they were slowly given darker and darker missions. One of the players (a Copycat Quantum Imprint guy with Aberrant eyes) couldn't come up with a codename, so I had his "handler" at Proteus give him the name "Chiraben". All of the players were unfamiliar with Aberrant, so they had no idea. Much later, when the group was given the Slider assignment, they balked. Instead, they helped Jennifer fake her own death and set up the fake identity "Sophia Rousseau"...

My new game is the traditional one: There's a conspiracy within Utopia, somebody murdered Slider, etc. I can't wait till they realize that she ain't dead.

Sorry so long, but I could go on forever...

[Nightfall]

I'm currently working on a non-canon offshoot game set in Aberrant's future that is heavily influenced by 'Days Of Future Past' and the X-Men/WildC.A.T.s crossover 'Dark Age.' Novas are detained in the First World because of a series of events - Divis Mal leaving Earth with some of the Teragen, Caestus Pax becoming a manic-depressive after being crippled by Mal and trashing part of the T2M Central headquarters in one of his energetic fits and the Aeon Society talking the UN into passing resolutuons against 'free aberrants'. Novas are stripped of their human identities and turned into literal slaves by doses of addictive ultra-mox and ultra-adrenocilin.

The biggest difference apart from the future is that it's Andre Corbin who discovers Proteus, not Slider - she's born much later and becomes one of the nova slaves. Corbin ends up detained, but some of the Aberrants and the remaining Terats form the Nova Resistance, causing merry hell for the Aeon Society. I plan to be able to play this campaign from one of three angles - Aeon 'Trustees' - enslaved novas; the Resistance; or the Terats who are returning to see how the world has gone since they left...

Serious non-canon in many ways, but making the Aeon Society bad guys can be sooooo cool.

[BlackStar]

Well, by the way W.W. portray them THEY are the real bad guys, even with Mercer having good intentions, but, you know the saying, "the way to Hell..."

[Vixen]

An idea I had was ripped off slightly from Grant Morrison's work on The Invisibles and JLA: Earth 2, and postulate that the Earth of Aberrant is really two Earths touching on a multiversal axis - the 'real' world and the idealized world of superheroes.

The novas were an attempt to bring about a better world by propagation of a memetically engineered super-sigil implanted in the collective consciousness of humanity, giving us a template to grow into when superhumanity kicked in. This sigil was given to two guys, one from Cleveland and one from Toronto, back in the 1930's and came to eventually adorn the world's most recognized fictional character due to the power of the super-sigil.

However, something delayed the date of eruption when mankind would take its next step upwards, delayed to a time when the super-sigil's power had faded and the superhumans that resulted failed to inspire, or lead, or save the world, instead falling into decadence and corruption and destroying all that was in endless battles. The after-effects of this strain on space-time could be felt in the idealized world of superheroes as things got a little grimmer, and in our own world as superheroes emerged into the fictional archives of its world.

Key players include Mercer, Divis, and the self-aware fictional construct of the man who bore the super-sigil, made real by the collective belief of mankind. And of course, the PCs - who have counterparts in the dull, mundane reality of our Earth as well as the bright, primary realm of the fantastic where the superheroes live.

Maybe I'll run it one day. I have other plans for the one I am running, but I'm certainly not sharing them in public.

[Cody]

Sweet!

I loved the Invisibles. Hard as hell to wrap your mind around in spots but worth it every single time.

[Ashnod]

I liked the Invisibles until the final book, which I really didn't care for. I think it was called The Invisible Kingdom, but I'm not certain. It was the 3rd series, I know that much.

Anyway, didn't like it. I didn't think it ended the series well. And the art wasn't up to the standards set in the first two series, which was distracting.