Building a Character: Trinity Continuum: Æon

Welp, nobody told me to stop after the last one, so I'm back with another Trinity Continuum character. This time for Trinity Continuum: Æon!

This shouldn't be as long as my Trinity core post, though like the Trinity Continuum game line as a whole it does assume some familiarity with the process as presented in that post. Not that I'm gonna skip important stuff, but I'm not going to explain as much.

As I mentioned in that prior post, Trinity Continuum: Æon (which I'm gonna abbreviate as either TC: Æon or just Æon depending on how the mood takes me) is a sci-fi setting that encompasses many genres. The book picks up in the year 2123, and Earth is staring down multiple threats from the stars. First there are the Aberrants, quantum-powered metahumans who first ushered in a golden age and then turned on humanity over the course of a few decades. (This is extremely reductive, but I'm trying to keep the elevator pitch short here.) They were driven away but have since returned with a vengeance, menacing Earth and a few of Earth's colonies elsewhere in space. Next are the Chromatics, an alien species that came out of nowhere with light-bending powers and declared war on humanity. And then there's the Coalition, extraterrestrial conquerors coming for Earth with dark designs.

But fortunately humanity has psions, humans whose natural psychic potential has been activated by tanks of biotech goo called the Prometheus Chambers, and with the help of the Psi Orders and organizations such as the Æon Trinity are the first line of defense against all of these threats.

But I mentioned before a broad range of genres, and that's because different corners of the setting lend themselves to different styles of science-fiction. You can take to the stars in the Leviathan jumpships for Star Trek-style exploration and diplomacy, you can do cyberpunk dystopia in the Federated States of America or Nippon. You can do military sci-fi in the style of Starship Troopers fighting Aberrants or the Chromatics, or even get into some kinda-sorta post-apocalyptic wasteland stuff dealing with the damage the Aberrants' return has done to central Europe. Or you can delve into the more secretive threats and mysteries of the setting a little more in the style of Babylon 5. There's others but you get the point.

The first edition leaned a lot more on the mysteries and conspiracies stuff. As good as the game was, it's easy enough to look back and see just how very... 90's White Wolf it was. While a much more positive setting than, say, the World of Darkness, it was laden with a lot of morally-gray conspiracy material typical of the era. Pretty much every faction had (or was implied to have) a sinister 'doing evil for the greater good' element to it. The closest thing to an exception was ISRA, the Clairsentient Order, who were led by someone whose plans were so circuitous and inscrutable (due to a complicated relationship with linear time) that it was difficult to trust them.

The modern edition, TC: Æon, does a 180º on this element, making it clear that even the sneakier good guys are still good guys. I mean, it's not all space rainbows and cyber-daisies, but by default a player character from the main allegiances isn't going to suddenly discover that they're the baddies.

Also, before I get into it, I've got a bit of a personal history with Æon. The original edition was the first non-D&D RPG I got into back in high school (yeah, that's right, I was familiar with Trinity years before I'd ever heard of the World of Darkness), and the first RPG I played where the group actually got past the character creation session and played a story. Not only do I still have my original core book, I still have the free quickstart I picked up at Waldenbooks that led me to it. Which made it all the more meaningful when I was fortunate enough to get to work on several TC: Æon books, including the core. In fact, that story we played back in high school was a major inspiration for the opening fiction I wrote for Prometheus Unbound.

And with that, I think I'll get into it. Again, if you have any questions, comments, so on and so forth, feel free to comment here or anyplace else I'm active online. (For example I wouldn't be averse to writing up a different type of character for TC: Æon, like a Talent, psiad, alien, etc., if there's any interest.) As with my previous character, I'm probably going to stick with material from just the TC core and Æon core, but we'll see.

Building a Character: Trinity Continuum

So as much as I enjoy running and writing about my Exalted game, I've been wanting to do more broad gaming content. I've got ideas I might blog about, but there's a lot of "I'm not sure I've got anything worth saying or anyone interested in hearing it" going on in my head, and while I sort that out I'm gonna toss out a couple more character building posts when I've got the time/inclination. In theory there's other stuff I could/should be working on, but these posts are easy enough to pick up and put back down as I work on them in chunks, and in the absence of any feedback or suggestions, I'm just gonna do whatever.

So with that in mind, I think I'm gonna write up some Trinity Continuum characters. Just one now, I mean, but there'll be more in the future.

Some quick-ish background: Trinity started with a game called ÆON in 1997, from original recipe White Wolf. It was put together at record speed after Mark Rein-dot-Hagen started work on a sci-fi RPG, and somewhere between the announcement and intended release he left White Wolf and took the game with him. So now White Wolf had a gap in their publishing schedule that was intended for some sort of sci-fi RPG and by some miracle produced a complete game, from conception to printed books, in about 10 months. To be clear, the miracle isn't that the game happened at all but in the fact that it was actually really good even before accounting for the production timeline. It used a version of the Storyteller system and kicked off a series of games known as the Trinity Universe. 

ÆON is a kind of a kitchen sink setting that allows for a lot of different sci-fi subgenres, from Star Trek-style space opera to Starship Troopers-style military science fiction to dystopian cyberpunk and more. Somehow, Viacom decided this infringed on Æon Flux and pitched a fit, but only after the books had been physically printed. Which is why, if you've seen a limited edition copy of ÆON, the infamous spiral-bound one with the plastic binder cover, it likely had a sticker on the cover renaming it 'Trinity.' (I know mine sure did) I'll get a little more into ÆON/Trinity when I write up a character for the modern edition, Trinity Continuum: Æon. 

(Yes, I plan on doing all of the Trinity Continuum games eventually, or at least all of the ones that are properly available. I'm waffling over whether to do posts for games where we only have the crowdfunding preview versions. Also, I haven't decided if I'm going to do Trinity Continuum: Assassins, but if I do I'll probably save it for after I've knocked out the games we have full books for. Any thoughts on the subject would be appreciated.)

But, moving on, ÆON/Trinity led to Aberrant (taking place about a century earlier and being about superheroes of a sort) and Adventure! (taking place about a century before that, and was a pulp adventure setting), and then some d20 versions, and all of this was called the Trinity Universe. Then, a little over a decade ago, Onyx Path Publishing acquired the Trinity IP from White Wolf (CCP edition), and they asked Ian A.A. Watson to blow the dust off an old pitch for a Trinity reboot. Spoiler alert, the game line was rebooted as the Trinity Continuum and has been taken farther than the original Trinity Universe ever got to go.

(By the way, there's some debate as to whether the d20 versions constitute an 'edition' in their own right, and by extension whether the Trinity Continuum should be considered the second or third edition. I personally count the d20 games as an edition, but I just refer to Trinity Continuum as the 'modern' edition for simplicity's sake.)

And that meandering road I've drawn leads us back to here, where I'm going to make a character for the Trinity Continuum core book. Trinity Continuum has a kinda-vague default setting (that I'm gonna call 'Trinity Core' or 'TC Core' for simplicity's sake) that takes place in a version of our world that runs on what I call 'narrative physics.' (I apologize if I'm subconsciously/unintentionally ripping off someone else's term, but doing a quick search on the phrase doesn't turn up any obvious sources I could have gotten it from.) In other words, the setting plays by the rules of action-adventure media where physics seem to conveniently ensure main/major characters can be back in fighting action in time for next week's episode. Think Leverage, The A-Team, Ocean's Eleven, Global Frequency, and the Fast and the Furious films. If it could be described as 'modern day pulp,' it falls under Trinity Core's umbrella.

But the Trinity Continuum as a whole does this in kind of a sci-fi way, and while the dial on that is set pretty low for Trinity Core it means that you'll get scientific breakthroughs and high-energy physics accidents and the like creating the sort of weirdness seen in media like Fringe, Agents of SHIELD, Atomic Robo, Eureka, or even Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension. I'll get more into the source of this sci-fi weirdness as we go, but as I've rambled more than enough on the basics without even a single character stat mentioned, let's get into it!

(And of course, if it needs to be said, if you have any questions or comments feel free to leave them here or wherever you got the link to this post.)

An Interlude (Exalted Fiction)

Greetings, everyone. This is a little something I threw together sort of on a whim, depicting some events that happened off-camera while the characters were tracking down that puzzle box. It sort of takes place between the last two sessions, technically after the events of the first but largely during the montage at the beginning of the second. It will probably make little sense unless you've been following the current story (at least, you should read the linked post if you haven't already), but it's something I felt like getting down somewhere.

Enjoy!

Tales of the Moonlight Maiden: Retrieval (Exalted)

Hey there, folks, back again with some more Exalted.

If I come up with anything interesting to add here, I'll do so. Until and unless I do that, let's get into it!

Tales of the Moonlight Maiden: Time Passes (Exalted)

Something something Exalted post.

No, that's not a placeholder I came up with and then decided not to clear out, just the best thing I could think of as I start this post. (Though I guess technically anything's a placeholder until I post it. Anyhow.)

Before we kick off our next story, a quick reminder that a while back I posted the final chapter of my furry cyberpunk novel over on my FurAffinity page, where you can read the whole thing for free. Hop on over here, where I link to it and go over one or two little things I don't feel like repeating here.

On a related note, I've also recently made some of my published works freely available on my FurAffinity page, all of them in the aforementioned furry cyberpunk setting, and you can find those here.

And finally, segueing us back into Exalted, I've also done a couple of posts where I build Exalted: Essence characters for the heck of it. One's a Getimian, and the other's a Dragon-Blood. Note that the first one goes into a lot more detail on the character creation process than the second, if that's an issue for you.

And now, segue complete...

Building a Character: Exalted Essence (again)

Welp, here we are again, with me getting ready to write up another Exalted: Essence (aka ExEss) character, something a little more straightforward this time. I've got a vague idea for a Dragon-Blood that'll slightly back to Branek, the Getimian I wrote up last time. I'll try to write this such that you don't need to have read the other post before this one, but I am going to go into less detail on character creation's fiddly bits this time around.

And, again, if you find these interesting, let me know! I'd be up for doing characters for other games I own (which is many), and I'm more than willing to take requests. Just leave a comment here or on whatever social media post led you to my blog.

Anyhow, with no further babbling-on...

Building a Character: Exalted Essence

This is something I've been considering doing for a while, thought it'd be easy to throw together, and now it's way too long. Ah well. Anyhow, I think this sort of thing is more common on streams or YouTube nowadays, so I'm only slightly behind the times, but some gamers/writers/game writers write up characters for different games, walk through the character creation process with this sample character, talk about the game in the process, that sort of thing. I don't do podcasts or streams (streaming is more my roommate's bailiwick), but I've thought about writing up an Exalted: Essence character for the heck of it and figured I may as well do it for the blog.

For a quick primer on Exalted, pop over here for this post I threw together as an intro (and have tweaked a couple of times since) for my regular weekly game's write-ups.

And before I forget to say so, if you like this post and want to see more like it, leave a comment either here or one of my various social media accounts. I think I wanna do another Exalted character, but beyond that I'm up for suggestions on games to cover.

Tales of the Moonlight Maiden: The Puppet Show (Exalted)

Happy Exalted Posting Day, for those of you who celebrate!

Before I get into it, a quick note/reminder that over at my FurAffinity page I recently posted some of my furry cyberpunk fiction, including the final chapter of the novel I've been working on for a decade, and a couple of stories that got published a few years back.