Aberrant RPG - Impending One Shot

[Thingmaker]

I'm sticking this in here because

1) it is a request for advice

2) I can technically be considered a newbie to Ab because I've only actually run it once, despite extensive readings, theorizing, and hanging wit' you righteous dudes and dudettes.

Here goes:

In March I'll be running a trio of one-shots at the Game Storm 2002 convention (1 each Trin, Ab, and Adv!)

Each one will be in a four - hour time slot (I would have preferred six, but the ConCom is doing things with the schedule that I can't change.)

I'm good on Adv and Trin (Trimming a previous scenrio by 30% for Adv and having good flow of creative juices for the Trin scenario) but am stuck on Ab and time is running short.

I'm hoping to give folks a nice slice of the game without taking them on such a whirlwind tour that they get lost. I would very much like to pose some kind of quandry that involves personal choices on the part of the (hand-out) PCs. This would, of neccessity, involve posing a gray area delima that the players themselves can sink thier teeth into. Still, it needs to be indicative/reflective of the world as depicted in Aberrant.

Any ideas will be aprreciated. As an initial "brainstorming" it is proper to just spit out ideas with no criticism, as some of the best can follow some of the whackiest fairly closely if the mind is not distracted by critique.

I thank you in advance for your kind asssistance.

-Maker of Things, and of 3/4" thick one-shot booklets   :whatsthat

[Heritage]

Well I'll throw out a couple of ideas and questions.

At what point in the Aberrant timeline do you want to set it? Things would obviously be very differnet if it was set in 1998, 2008 or 2015.

Do you want to have members of different factions present? I guess the Amp Room would be an obvious choice as a place to have lots of wildly different types interact, and social events make for quick story structure. "It's Count Orzaiz' birthday, and everyone's invited, blah blah blah."

The first idea that popped into my head was something involving the XWF, if only 'cause I think it's entertaining. Even just having one current or former XWF shootfighter as a pre-gen PC might be fun.

Aberrant seems to be a game of cities, but you might have fun in a more wilderness setting, or in one of the elite hotspots like Kashmir or Subsaharan Africa. Something forces  several elites, T2Mers or others to work together and ignore their differences, like a natural disaster or a military coup.

And a mixture of high and low taint novas might be an interesting way to explore the "Are we human or not?" issue, with some novas disgusted by taint and others embracing it. In my current game I have one PC who has 'passed' as human, and another who turns into a dragon and thinks he's a reincarnated Aztec god (Hi Painheart! ), and some interesting friction is starting to develop.

That's just me firing off some ideas off the top of my head.

[david richards]

Keep it simple. Something that lets you show off the system while maintaing a recongizably superhero setting.

I would run a JLA-style T2M game wherein the players have to save the day. The only background info you have to provide is about T2M, PU, N-Day . . . the basics. You don't even have to mention the Teragen, the Aberrants, the Directive, etc.

Oh, and make all the characters pre-gen. Aberrant character gen can take forever.

[Senior Mal]

I'd have to agree, T2M provides the ideal ready made team scenario and you can use it to subtley introduce some of the darker aspects (E.G "we're supposed to be heroes, what do you mean its against policy to intefere unless we outnumber them 2 to 1, people are dying down there" etc)

[Thingmaker]

I'm reluctant to go T2M since I would be competing with half a dozen Champions games.

I wanted things in 2008 to offer players a taste of the "mainline" of the game.

I like the idea of multiple viewpoints, and the Amp Room is a good idea for an initial setting.

Pre Gen characters? Always! I've only got a four hour time slot and it would take longer than that to explain to players what all those dots were for... well, maybee not, but you get the idea.

For the sake of wild hairs up the arsenal, how about one or two off duty T2M apprentices, a Terat or two, an Abbie, and an XWF shootfighter.

"So, you all find yourselves in this bar..."

[Senior Mal]

"where there appears to be an old man with a long beard and pointy hat. He appears both sagely and quirky. He is looking at you"  

[Thingmaker]

"I seek adventurers bold to slay a Red Dragon!"

Ahem....

Maybee this can be made to work...

Who takes the roll of the old-man-in-the-pointy-hat?

Pax or another T2M rep seeking temporary allies in an emergency? Mal or another Terat seeking recruits? A DeVris rep shouting "who want's to be a millionaire?"

Getting the players to go along with this old schtick would be a simple matter of writing the appropriate motivation into the character history. Wouldn't be noticable right away to the other players and would make for good RP in the third or fourth hour.

How about a taint-maddened Proteus assassin persuing someone into the bar and wasting them? Or better yet, how about Dr. Worm or Sophia or somebody being so persued and surviving?

Most players would be willing to suspend their disbelief of the old "bar scene opening" for a one shot - as long as a new twist could be put on it.

Hell, William Shakespear stole the plots for every play he wrote. :cool

[Aeon]

One thing - please do not make it purely T2M becasue then there experience of the game will be of another generic superheroes game rather than the high IQ RPG that it is.  I would go with something along the lines of what Heritage suggested, if you think you can fit it into 4 hours.  Iwould give handout background as well as characters in advance to players if possible.

Hope all goes well.  

[Thingmaker]

Okay, so far, It should work as follows: players first show up at table to find my nifty background handouts.

Then they get to pick from some pregenerated PCs.

I've got a diverse group of Novas. Young Terat(s), T2M Trainee(s), Aberrant(s), Elite(s), XWF Shootfigher(s), and maybee a Directive operative. Some of them know one another. Some of them have heard of one another.

For various and sundry reasons they find themselves in either StarLords, The Amp Room, or The Benson Hotel Ballroom.

They've read their sheets, they know where they are and why they are there. I say, with a creul grin "So, you find yourselves in this bar..."

We then go to what the English Lit folks call "en media res." A fight between a pair of Novas finds it's way rather dramatically into the bar. After laying waste to "the victim," (who is recognized and admired by some of the PCs) the "assailant" (who is recognized by at least one PC) begins attacking everybody else (assailant has ovbiously lost all sense of scope.)

The brawl should be over fairly quickly, since there are at least two hard combat types among the hand-out PCs. The "assailant" should shout something like "your next, X! You're on the list" to one of the PCs.

Would this be sufficient to pull the individuals into a temporary group?

Obviously, I'll have to fudge around some problems. IE: the Terat and T2Mers don't recognize each other. T2Mer needs reason not to call for reinforcement. Stuff like that.

Criticism? Ideas?

[Heritage]

Sounds like your off to a good start, Thingmaker. Have fun writing up the pre-gens and building in pre-made conflicts that have to be overcome.

[FredrikSvanberg]

Terat doesn't recognize the T2M'er trainee because of new policy of T2M to not go out with members' identities before they have passed a certain point in their training - for their own protection, and to protect T2M if some rookie screws up publically.

T2M:er can't call for backup because they want to prove themselves in the eyes of their superiors so they decide to deal with this themselves and get the full credit for the deed. Make the teamsters into gloryhounds and point it out to them if they want to call for backup.

[Soltares]

>T2M:er can't call for backup because they want to prove >themselves in the eyes of their superiors so they decide to >deal with this themselves and get the full credit for the deed.

Or T2M'r was recently reviewed for potential to graduate up to one of the mainline teams, but was passed over and sent back to the reserves for more training.  One of the chief factors that limited his/her 'graduation' was a lack of follow-through and a tendency to expect everyone else to make the hard calls.  As a result, he/she now feels that they have to do it themselves, with the resources at hand (the other Novas present being those 'resources' and not call home for help and leaving the job unfinished...).

[Black Hammer]

Here's a couple sloppy ideas:

1) Four hours is really short- you probably know that. Simple intros, like "You're a bunch of elite mercs" or "Someone Warped all your cars into this old quarry and now they want you to fight " (N! stupid-idea-for-ratings) - or each has their own motivation and there's a McGuffin. I was sorta thinking that everyone should have a better reason for being on the team than "Gee, someone tried to kill both of us at the same time."

2) One McGuffin that worked well in my game is Goo [tm]- works like Paste from the game "Underground", or Green Slime from D&D. It does one Agg level a round, every round, to living tissue. It puts 90% of novas on a fairly level field with baselines- if either gets Goo on them, they're Effed Up.

Goo is then like a suitcase nuke [another good McGuffin for one-shots, but not one I'd put into a real game]- it's dangerous and everyone wants it. Forming the "Let's get the Goo" team is not guaranteed, but it's a good schtick. In my game, Goo was being manufactured in Nigeria- Geryon's boys had wiped out the factory and cleared out most copies of the Ph.D thesis used to create it, but they didn't have anyone who could find and follow the scientist who invented it, who was running for his life. They hired my group because, basically, they didn't have tentacles.

3) The Municipal Defender's Union has a crisis team (the PC's). You show up to a Situation (think Sloppy Joe and a subway car full of hostages), T2M is there, the Directive is there, some loose-cannon nova who thinks he's Clint Eastwood is there. . . the Teragen has a "negotiator" there protecting the badguy's interests. You get to show a good cross-section of the main groups at their best and worst.

4) Give them a starting situation where they discover [hopefully in a safe way] how powerful they really are- let them beat some Mitoids, stop a bus from plunging off a cliff, whatnot. Novas really are high enough power that they make most problems trivial. Let 'em see that they can just grab the bus and put it back on the road.  

5) When you have a fight- chew the scenery. Don't have a fight in an alley when you can have a fight on the roof of a church. In the rain. And let 'em break stuff and do big things. If a nova stomps the bumper of a SUV and pops it up into his hand like a skateboard: that's cool. Slamming through plaster walls, ceilings and floor in a slum tenement in Brazil, hundreds of people trying to escape, when they smell gas: that's cool. Looking through walls with X-ray vision and seeing people as skeletons, with guns- that's cool [and then seeing a nova's force field as impenetrable- that's cool.] F/X are free in roleplaying games- don't skimp on them.

6) I always like to throw in something that they can fix, just to let 'em know that they really are the good guys. [if they want to be.] A small child to reunite with its mother, whatever. Remember the gunfight in the end of the Untouchables, with the baby carriage? Like that.

[Thingmaker]

Many thanks to all! The game went off well. Best quote of the weekend in all the games played in or run by me was in the Aberrant game by a Teragen Chinese girl speaking to an XWF wrestler: "Of course I know what a bomb is, you monkey-loving gwaicho..."

Again, thanks!