Tales of the Moonlight Maiden: Preparation (Exalted)

Welp, here we are again. This is going to be a relatively short one, as it's mostly prep work for the impending attack.

Cleverness escapes me at the moment, and I don't really have much else to add, so first I'll remind folks that the Indiegogo campaign for Abyssals: Sworn to the Grave is still going for the moment, and the book is still being previewed piece by piece. And, as near as I can tell, because of how Indiegogo works, the manuscript previews are available for free (just be warned that IGG has been putting an automatic but removable tip on pledges).

And now, we'll get into it!

Building a Character: Trinity Continuum: Adventure!

Here we are again, building a character that'll finish out the 1e Trinity timelines. I plan to do more after this, just marking the milestone.

Much like how Aberrant took place about a century before Æon, Adventure! turns the clock back another century-ish to delve into the 'pulp action' genre. The first edition book's 'day zero' was in 1924, a couple of years after Dr. Sir Calvin Hammersmith arranged for a scientific demonstration in which he was to activate his new 'telluric engine' for the first time, ushering in a new era powered by the theoretically limitless power it could harness. At least, in theory.

It exploded spectacularly, vaporizing Hammersmith (as far as anyone knows), and unleashing a wave of strange energies into the world. The people in the building (and beyond) were Inspired, infused with telluric energy, and given amazing abilities that could change the world. Premier among them were multi-millionaire philanthropist Maxwell Anderson Mercer, a brilliant young physicist by the name of Michael Donighal, and Hammersmith's lab assistant Sara Kaur, who got the most direct exposure to the energy (aside from the late Hammersmith) and were granted abilities far beyond their contemporaries. In time, Mercer, Donighal and others founded the Æon Society, to study and catalogue (and occasionally save the world from) Inspired people and phenomena that had been empowered by the energies thrown out into the world by the Hammersmith Incident.

The first edition of Adventure! is noteworthy in part because at the time it was being written and produced, the folks at White Wolf knew that it would be the only book in this era they'd get to release, and possibly the last Trinity Universe book entirely. And it was in fact the last that actually saw print until the d20 versions in 2004, though the time between included White Wolf's earliest dabblings in ebooks in the form of Terra Verde for Æon and Aberrant: Underworld for, um, Aberrant.

Anyhow, they wrote Adventure! with the intention that it function entirely standalone, making it as complete as possible (so in other words, no mechanics or setting info held back for supplements) with refinements to the system that came from lessons learned on Æon and Aberrant, and in the process created what is considered one of the best (if not the best) pulp RPGs ever printed. It's known to have been a big inspiration on Spirit of the Century, which lead to the full-blown Fate system, so that's quite the indirect legacy there. (Also, some of Fate's mechanics inspired elements of the Storypath system used for the Trinity Continuum games, bringing things full-circle.)

The Trinity Continuum edition of Adventure!, like the other two 'updated' eras, tweaks the timeline a bit. But unlike TC: Æon and TC: Aberrant, which reworked events and adjusted some of the dates, TC: Adventure! almost entirely adds to the earlier edition. Its 'day zero' is in 1934, and barring a couple of specific elements (notably the presence of Sara Kaur) all it does is advance the timeline. Events and characters described in the first edition still happened in TC: Adventure!'s history and the earlier book serves perfectly well as an 'early days of the Æon Society' sourcebook.

And with that little overview out of the way, let's get into making a Trinity Continuum: Adventure! character. As with my other TC posts, this one assumes you've at least skimmed my Trinity Continuum core character post for the basic structure. And as always, if there are any questions, comments, suggestions, so on and so forth, you know the drill.

Tales of the Moonlight Maiden: Choices (Exalted)

Hey there again, folks. It's me, back with another Exalted session write-up after having to skip a session last week due to RL interference.

But first, the crowdfunding campaign for the next Exalted expansion, Abyssals: Sworn to the Grave, is live on IndieGoGo! I didn't work on it or anything, but as I like to promote stuff related to the game line I wanted to share the campaign link here. If you'd like to hear more, The Story Told has an interview with the book's developer Chazz Kellner (storyteller for the Fall of Jiara AP, one of the hosts of Systematic Understanding of Everything, and generally a cool dude). You can hear that here.

Also, on a note unrelated to Exalted but possibly of interest to anyone reading the blog, between the last session and this one I did another one of my 'build a character' posts, this time for Trinity Continuum: Aberrant. I've got another one in the works for Trinity Continuum: Adventure!, and after that I'll probably switch gears and do something else for a post or two since any other TC games are either still in crowdfunding manuscript format, or pre-errata backer PDFs. I might do a Trinity Continuum: Assassins character, but we'll see. Either way, if you have any suggestions or requests (including a request to do Anima, Aether, or Aegis characters even though the full books aren't out), let me know.

And now, we get into the Exalted session. This is one of my 'talkier' ones, so usual disclaimers apply about me possibly misremembering details of dialgoue. I mean, I can tell you now that any of my NPC-on-NPC dialogue was made up on the spot at the time and I didn't stop to write down everything I said as I said it so I'm just winging it in the recounting. At some point I'll ask my group about possibly recording sessions so I can better get this stuff down for my own notes, but this feels like an awkward time to learn how to do that, mostly because we're coming up on a major showdown and potentially a story break.

So for those of you who haven't fallen asleep or wandered off...

Uncluttering My Thoughts

So this is gonna be a little different than my other blog posts, because it's just gonna be me digging through the cluttered attic that is my brain and trying to arrange the boxes with 'Writing shit' crookedly written on the side. I've had some version of this post in the works for a while, and just finally decided to just get it down and put it out there. (And then I spent another couple of days rewriting it in chunks, which I assure you has neither improved nor degraded its coherence.)

This is part of me trying to get to a better place with my writing, and on that journey I'm three or four off-ramps past the point of caring how much junk I toss out the car window. So this post is longer than it needs to be, probably more honest than it needs to be, and there's going to be a lot of whining and venting. It's not intended to be a call-out post, and if you think I'm referring to you, please try not to take it personally -- by and large, I'm trying to focus on my feelings about situations I don't have a lot of control over, I'm trying not to be hurtful about it, and if you see yourself in a broad-strokes comment I make consider that I'm trying to address a larger problem that's not about you specifically. I'm not vagueposting about particular people -- when I mean specific individuals, I say so even if I don't call them out by name.

Anyhow, now that I've probably made sure nobody will ever read this...

Building a Character: Trinity Continuum: Aberrant

Hey there, welcome back to the third in... well, I think calling it a 'series' implies that it's planned out, when I'm just kinda doing these when I happen to have the time and energy. Regardless, this is my third Trinity Continuum character, this time for \Trinity Continuum: Aberrant. As with my Æon character, this isn't going to linger as much on the character creation process as my core character post (aside from the Aberrant-specific stuff, of course).

Now comes the part where I describe the game itself in more detail than is needed for context, so if you want to skip ahead to the character I'm gonna build, feel free to scroll down to the jump cut.

Aberrant was the second game in the original Trinity series, and thus came second in the post-core 'tentpole' Trinity Continuum eras in the current edition. Æon was about humanity in the early 22nd century dealing with, among other challenges, delayed repercussions of the Aberrant War. But how did we get to the Aberrant War? We start with novas in the early 21st century.

While the 'core' Trinity Continuum book presents a world very much like our own as filtered through action-adventure media, Aberrant is kind of an alternate timeline because in Aberrant's version of 2018 (1998, in first edition) saw the tragic explosion of the space station Galatea, bathing the world in then-unknown, difficult-to-quantify energies that cause people around the world to manifest superhuman powers based on manipulating fundamental quantum forces. 

The book's 'day zero' picks up a decade later, in 2028 (2008 in 1e), after a decade in which these superhumans, commonly called novas (from Homo sapiens novus), have already begun changing the world. Over the course of that decade, the Æon Society set up an organization called Project Utopia to study novas (not just their powers but physical transformations that often accompany said power) and find ways to use their powers for the good of mankind. This has led to drastic reversals of climate change, cures for diseases, and massive technological advancements. A group of novas called the Daedalus League now lead efforts to explore beyond the Solar System with their powers and super-science.

But it's not all Arc Reactors and unstable molecules -- for some people, great power means great opportunity. Naturally, some novas use their powers for personal profit, leading to a class of independent superhuman freelancers called Elites -- the most prominent example being superhuman mercenaries who are drastically reshaping visions of warfare. And then there are those who argue humanity's acceptance of novas is based on a faulty premise -- the Teragen, who believe that novas should not be considered human but a separate sovereign species on their own journey to transcendence and should not be bound by human laws or morality. But keeping track of the various factions, regardless of their feelings about or allegiance to humanity at large, is the Directive: a secretive agency empowered by the UN to oversee nova activities and (in theory) protect humanity from nova-related threats.

Some decades after this point, as recorded in the history of TC: Æon, the novas were gradually corrupted by their powers, grew apart from humanity, and eventually a war broke out between the billions of humans and several thousand people with godlike powers. As more and more crises related to the Aberrant War stacked up and humanity's future was at its bleakest, China revealed it's trump card: A network of satellites capable of orbital bombardment, powerful enough to potentially wipe the planet's surface clean. With these satellites they presented an ultimatum insisting the Aberrants (as they were now regarded) leave or everyone goes down together. The novas/Aberrants backed down, and the mightiest of them -- Divis Mal -- immolated the UN Secretary-General, proclaimed "Your legacy is our future," and led the Aberrants to the stars. 

(This sounds bleak, I know, but bear with me.)

All of these elements appear in the old and new editions, with one major difference -- the tone. The original Aberrant, like 1e Æon before it, is very 90's White Wolf. It's not a superhero game as such (Exhibit A: the intro for the Aberrant Player's Guide, infamously titled "This Is Not The Super-Friends") but a deconstruction in the style of Watchmen, Dark Knight Returns, or The Authority. I haven't read it or seen the series, but I'm told The Boys (which Aberrant pre-dates) is a pretty perfect match for its tone. At its best, the deconstruction is nigh-brilliant (though lots of it haven't aged well), but every now and again it's like a pizza cutter -- all edge, no point. 

It's a game about power and its corruption, heavily steeped in dark conspiracies that mean very few people can be counted among the 'good guys.' Said good guys are the titular Aberrants: a small resistance group trying to uncover and reveal the corruption and darkness within Project Utopia. The pre-eminent 'superhero'-type of the setting, Caestus Pax, is arguably the 'light beer' version of Homelander, the Teragen could be described as 'What if you combined the Brotherhood of Mutants with the Sabbat from Vampire: The Masquerade,' and the Aberrant War is all but inevitable.

Trinity Continuum: Aberrant, by contrast, actually is a superhero game. Again, it's not all quantum rainbows and quantum daisies, and there are guidelines for fine-tuning a given chronicle's sensibilities regarding the genre, but by default it's much more reminiscent of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. There are people with powers across all political and moral spectra, but by and large there are more people doing good than not regardless of their motivations. 

It's still a game about power and consequences, but it's a setting where the good guys can win. Project Utopia, while not perfect, is a force for good and Cestus Pax (spelling change between editions, not a typo), the leader of Team Tomorrow, is a moral man with power beyond his reckoning still getting used to leadership. The Teragen's core beliefs are largely the same, but they are much more about exploring transhumanism than trying to speedrun their ascendance to quantum-powered godhood -- though in this edition the titular Aberrants are a militaristic extremist faction of the Teragen, arguably outliers in the opposite direction from their 1e counterparts. And while it's possible to see the rumblings of the Aberrant War on the horizon, this edition emphasizes that the War (and Æon beyond it) are possible (perhaps likely) outcomes, but it encourages you more to avert that future in your own games -- part of Trinity being a continuum, and explicitly a multiverse.

Incidentally, one thing both editions have in common is good LGBT+ rep (with a 'good for its time' qualifier for 1e, to be fair) -- there are several prominent novas in the quiltbag, mostly taken beyond simple stereotypes. When the first edition Teragen book came out and revealed that their leader Divis Mal is openly gay and in a relationship with another man in the setting, someone on the White Wolf forums flipped their shit with a post titled "Divis Mal is GAY?!? WTF!!!!" This was responded to, famously, with a thread entitled "Divis Mal has ARMS?!? WTF!!!!" that created a meme that persists to this day. As someone who was there for (and posted in) the Arms thread, it gave me the warm and fuzzies when Onyx Path announced early on that they were rebooting the Trinity games and literally one of the first things that came up was official reassurance that Divis Mal 'would still have arms.'

I played and ran a lot of 1e Aberrant with my friends back in late high school and early college, and it's a game pretty close to my heart. I still have all of those old books, some of which are worn to the point I need to be careful handling them, including the two copies of the Aberrant Player's Guide I wound up with because enough time passed between the book's announcement and its release I accidentally pre-ordered it twice from two different stores. (Technically I don't have my original hardcover core book any more, having loaned it to someone who vanished with it about the time the game line was cancelled, but a few years ago I found another copy at Half-Price Books, probably in slightly better shape than mine had been when I lost it.)

I could probably go on, but I've already gone on far beyond what's necessary or even interesting to read. So whether you're still with me or just jumped ahead to the actual character write-up, thanks. And of course, if you have any questions, comments, requests, etc., let me know either here in the comments or any of the social media outlets in my profile.

Tales of the Moonlight Maiden: Welp, Time To Go (Exalted)

Greetings, programs!

It's been a little quiet on the Exalted front, I'm aware, but there've been meatspace issues that meant we wound up having to skip a week. Though during that gap, I did throw together an interlude mini-fic that takes place alongside/during the montage at the beginning of the last session.

On a mostly-unrelated note, recently I've also been building characters on the blog, if you haven't noticed. I've got a couple of Exalted: Essence characters (a Getimian and a Dragon-Blood), and I've also got a couple of Trinity Continuum characters in the mix: a Talent from the core book, and a psion from Æon. And I definitely plan to do more, in time.

But anyhow, with that bit of business out of the way, let's get on to the show as we wrap up one story and begin the next. There's gonna be a lot of footnotes and links to other posts in this one, because we're coming into the first part of what I envision as a two-part season finale and a lot of stuff that's been set up is starting to pay off.