Been a while since I've done one of these, and I've been meaning to do this one for a little while now. Just been getting distracted working on other projects and getting my group's
new Exalted series started. But I'm feeling like I need a bit of a palate cleanser, so let's get into it.
Trinity Continuum: Anima is interesting and a little experimental for a few reasons. To start, it's the first new time period introduced to the Trinity series after the initial three, taking place in 2084, between the end of the Aberrant War and the start of
TC: Æon (and, in the default Æon timeline, a couple of years before the Shanghai Accords banned true AI and certain brain-computer interfaces).
(Speaking of which, assuming I get this up in time, there's a campaign still up to crowdfund a fresh printing of the core books.) Second, it's very focused setting-wise -- while there's enough info to run a game elsewhere in the setting, by default the focus is on the city of
Cascade, in the Federated States of America (the fascist military junta that the US turned into during the Aberrant War). Implied to be on the site of a war-destroyed Vancouver, Cascade is a newly-built city where the FSA is encouraging people to emigrate to start new lives. Third, it's got a pretty focused premise, which I'll get to after explaining the genre for context.
Where the other Trinity Continuum games present different genres, TC: Anima covers cyberpunk and a little something else (keep reading). See, as incentive to get people to move to Cascade, they're offering free implantation of the 'Glass' brain augmentation. Invented by a company called FulgurTech, Glass allows for the sort of mind-machine interface and virtual reality shenanigans long-promised by cyberpunk fiction. It also offers tools for better cyberware interfacing, managing a number of neurological or hormonal issues, and therapeutic functions like editing sensory input or one's own memories.
And yes, you can run Doom on it.
Which is where I'm getting into the 'little something else' genre-wise -- I don't want to get too deep into the weeds explaining if you don't know it, but TC: Anima is also a
LitRPG game with the addition of Terra Surge into the setup.
Terra Surge is a free-to-play MMO taking place in the fantasy realm of Synestia, in which players have adventures in a virtual world that's run by a number of powerful AIs called 'Narrators,' who are capable of greatly customizing the game experience to individual players' tastes. The Narrators can create custom quests and NPCs for players on the fly, all woven into a larger narrative being crafted by the game's developers. The MMO is actually playable in-game, with a proper ruleset and a fleshed-out setting of its own.
In a world still recovering from the Aberrant War and the Crash (the total destruction of the OpNet), Glass and Terra Surge offer much-needed options for coping with the fallout and trauma of the last couple of decades. (Incidentally, this game was pretty much entirely written in the early years of the Covid pandemic, and it shows in a lot of ways that make the game stronger for it.)
The game's premise, by default, revolves around a mystery surrounding Terra Surge and Glass itself:
Popular players are going missing (sometimes with their game streams abruptly ending after the game's built-in spoiler warning system blanks the feed), and the ones who've turned back up have been behaving... differently. Conspiracy theorists link the phenomenon to the recent introduction of the Jahat, a mysterious new antagonist faction in Terra Surge. Some think it's all a planned marketing stunt, but others insist there's something
wrong with the Jahat and the missing players learned something they shouldn't have. And then, of course, there are all manner of
conspiracy theories in general about Glass itself and FulgurTech's relationship with the FSA, even before you factor in the possibility that there's a connection between this and the mystery of the Jahat.
So yeah, this is a lot of new territory for Trinity.
It's technically possible to play a psiad (a naturally-occurring psi-user) or even a low-power nova with the right supplements and a permissive Storyguide, but by default TC: Anima player characters are Talents, and I'm going to build one of those. Because there's a two-part character creation setup here -- one for the actual character in Cascade and one for their Terra Surge avatar (no, really) -- I'm going to split this up between two different blog posts for length and readability.
Before I get into it, in case it needs to be said, this write-up assumes you know the basic Trinity Continuum character creation structure, as seen in
my first Trinity character build. I can't imagine it being indecipherable without having read that, but I'm not going to stop and explain every step as much as I do there (for better or worse).
