The Second Worst Scenario Ever Written

The Player Characters

Before we continue, I ought to take some time to briefly outline the various factions that Aberrant PCs can belong to. Aberrant is a game of superpowered people, set in the new future of a world similar to our own. It's not really a superhero game. Instead, it tries to create a world as ours would be, if ordinary people started to develop extraordinary powers.

Most of the supers - called Novas in the gameworld - are affiliated with an organisation called Project Utopia, a benevolent body which aims to harness the powers of Novas to make the world better for all, Nova and non-Nova alike. But a faction of Nova's called the Teragen believe that they are a new superior form of humanity, and as such should not be bound by human laws or society. These are the two major factions, but there are two additional factions still largely unknown to the outside world.

Project Proteus is the secret, black-ops, dirty warfare section of Project Utopia. (Of course, the fact that it exists rather challenges the peaceful, benevolent nature of Project Utopia).

Finally, there is the newest faction, the Aberrants. These Novas were previously affiliated to Utopia, and still strongly reject the racist philosophies of the Terragen. But they've started to learn of the darkness that lies at the heart of Utopia, and are trying to uncover the truth.

Now, from that brief summary, you can hopefully appreciate that the four factions are diametrically opposed both in aims and beliefs. However, this is a fact that appears not to worry the scenario writers at White Wolf, for the blurb on the back of the Superviser's Screen campaign book cheerfully proclaims: "...enables players to jump into the action as Aberrants, Utopians or agents of the sinister Project Proteus."

If that wasn't enough of a challenge, inside the book it adds: "It's not impossible to bring unaffiliated or even Teragen characters into the plot."

Let's think about this for a moment. Imagine you were a professional RPG author being asked to write a scenario to be published for a World War II RPG.

Imagine this was the brief:

"The scenario will be set in occupied France. It should be suitable for player character groups who are from any of the following organisations: British Special Operations Executive, De Gaulle Resistance, Communist Resistance, the Gestapo."

You might say that would be a bit tricky. I'd say it would be damn near impossible. But that's the task that the White Wolf writers had set themselves.

Now I was unsure which faction the PCs should belong to. (They obviously had to belong to the same faction or it would be a very short, violent campaign). So, I thought that perhaps it be best that they be unaffiliated, or perhaps very loosely affiliated with Utopia.

I thought this would give me the best of all worlds, with much future freedom of movement. In fact, it was the worst of all worlds, since I had no hooks to motivate the PCs. In the end, the theme we came up with was that the PCs would be members of a security consultancy called, with stunning originality, "the Consultancy".

So what characters did the players come up with?

Well at this point in time, a year or so later, I can't remember many details, but here goes:

Bog Boy: Bog Boy invariably plays female characters, but I have a ban on this kind of questionable practise, so he instead played a smooth-talking bloke in a suit called Dual. With the power to shapechange. Which meant that he spent most of his time in the guise of a women. Which was fine, because in this case the slightly "urrrgh" feeling this aroused was absolutely what you would feel when you just found out that the cute brunette you just spend fifteen minutes chatting up was - in fact - your boss.

Bubba: I can't remember anything about Bubba's character except for his name, Mr Jones, and the fact that he was supposed (according to his statistics) to be incredibly charismatic, but as he was played, wasn't. (Actually, he has now informed me that the character's main power was to pass as a "nobody" whom no-one noticed, which I guess he succeeded in doing, since no-one did).

Demonic: A nice friendly chap by the name of Ebola, who had two main powers. The first was Disintegrate, an invisible beam which melts and corrodes the victims flesh, and was described in the rulebook as a "terrifying power". The second power was Invisibility. I think you begin to realise just quite what a sick fuck Ebola was.

Mark: Some bloke called Blackout who was largely unremarkable save for his ability to turn into a shadow and hide on the ceilings of rooms.

Evil G: Some ex-army bloke called Brand. Didn't say much. Didn't do much. (Except get ripped off by a Spanish taxi driver, who charged him 500 Euros for a two-hundred metre drive).

And so play began, and I encountered my first problem: the scenario's layout, which consisted of eleven pages, loosely divided into three sections.

The first section served as an introduction to the location, combined with a plot summary. The second section laid out the timeline of the scenario, divided into four parts, one for each of the three days, followed by a conclusion. Finally, there was a section describing each of the major NPCs.

The problem with this layout was with the way it scattered information. For instance, information about one of the major locations, a nightclub, was spread through the introduction, the section on the first day, the section on the second day, and in the writeup of one the characters. I'd end up saying to a player: "Hang on a mo", whilst I desperately flipped through the book looking for an answer to his question, which I was sure I'd read somewhere, but couldn't remember where.

(This is a particular problem if, like me, you're a lazy GM who can't be bothered to memorise the entire scenario in advance, and tries to wing it on the basis of one read-through).

But undaunted, I plunged in.

This first scenario took my dysfunctional group of PCs to the island of Ibiza, which in the Aberrant universe is a typical hangout for Novas. A female Nova, in possession of information potentially revealing the truth about Utopia had been assassinated. They were being employed by an anonymous client, to find her, and get the data.

The basic facts of the case were these:

Charlotte Holden had been staying with her friend Andy "Ironskin" Vance, and his husband, Jake "Dragon" Korelli. (Yes, you did hear that right).

Now, I guess that by putting in a couple of gay Novas as main NPCs, White Wolf were probably trying to achieve two things: a) Emphasise that the world of 2008 had moved on from where we are today; and b) Make a positive statement on behalf of gay rights.

Nice idea, and I expect when you're sitting round a table in a meeting room it plays great. But when you're sitting round a table in someone's living room, and it's ten O'Clock at night, twentysomething blokes quickly revert to sniggering twelve-year olds, and it all goes to hell. If there'd been women present I'm sure they'd have stayed mature, but there weren't, and they didn't.

It wasn't too bad at first. They found out the gay angle pretty quickly when they did a bit of net surfing for info on Vance, and found a transcript of an interview he'd done. (I read a piece out of the scenario book at this point). I say "they found out", but Demonic for one was still pretty confused.

This was despite the fact that the transcript contained the following section (in response to a female phone-in caller enquiring if Andy had ever "given girls a real, you know, try?"):

Andy: "To be honest, I can't say that I have tried them, Amy, but I can't say I have any real inclination to do so, either. My partner, Jake "The Dragon" Korelli and I just celebrated our second anniversary last month, and we're pretty happy together. Thanks for your interest, though."

After I finished reading that, Demonic said: "Is it me, or is that a bloke a bit gay?"

At that point, I and the other guys, pointed out in somewhat blunt terms that, yes, that bloke was "a bit gay". But like I said, it was still okay at this point. I could no longer claim that we were walking the surface of planet serious, but we were in a reasonably, stable orbit.

(I was discussing this whole episode with one of the players just the other day, and he said that he found "Ironskin" to be an unfortunate choice of name, given that "iron" is cockney rhyming for a gay man. I was unaware of this, but it might explain why the others found it difficult to stay serious.)

Now, as I was saying, Charlotte had been staying with Andy and his husband Jake. But, a few days before the scenario's start she'd been killed by a car bomb. Andy, who was in the car with her at the time, escaped unhurt, due to his "iron skin".

[FINAL SPOILER ALERT... stop reading now if you don't want to find out stuff. Seriously, I'm not pissing about here]

SPOILER: There were only two facts to be deduced in the entire scenario.

The first of these was that Charlotte had faked her own death. This wasn't that hard to figure out, given the fact that the blast had apparently been huge enough to vaporise her, leaving no trace, but not so huge that it had killed any of the many bystanders.

The second fact was - of course - where she currently was. The PCs correctly deduced that Andy had helped her fake her death, but then they made a fatal mistake.

They assumed that the scenario contained some "method" by which they could obtain this second fact.

It was a reasonable thing to think, but they were very, very wrong.

This is what the situation was. Charlotte Holden was in possession of information damaging to Project Utopia, which meant that Proteus was after her. To avoid capture, she faked her death and fled. She was helped in this by her friend Andy, and by the leader of the Terragen, a bloke by the name of Orzaiz (who was hanging around in Ibiza at the time... as you do). Meanwhile, a Proteus Nova assassin was in Ibiza on her trail.

There was only one method outlined in the scenario by which the PCs could find out where she had gone. (Actually, there was an emergency backup method which you could use, but I'll get to that later).

This "method" didn't involve clues, deduction, detective work or anything similar. The "method" was as follows:

If Andy Vance:

a) Got sufficiently worried about the Proteus assassin and wanted someone to go after Charlotte to protect her; and

b) Thought that the PCs were generally all around good guys,

he would tell them where she had gone so that they could go and protect her.

That's it. That's the scenario. Except that there is a three-day timeline. So the basic way to do this scenario is:

a) Each night go to the Nova-only nightclub where Andy is Head of Security, and generally suck up to him. (That's "suck up" not "suck off", he's married, remember?)

b) Spend the days on the beach building up your sun-tans and generally trying to avoid getting into any trouble.

c) Whatever you do, don't piss off Andy.

Unfortunately my PCs decided not to spend their days on the beach, and their nights sucking up to Andy. They decided to hunt for items of information they termed "clues" in a effort to "solve" the case.

Right idea. Wrong scenario.

Their first action was to go to the nightclub and walk around in shades, looking suspicious as hell, and pissing Andy off by asking him loads of questions.

Since they were doing nothing, I decided to throw in one of the possible encounters that the scenario offered, which was to have a PC get approached by a recruiter for a Nova security agency, who was hanging around the club looking for Novas to recruit. He approached Ebola (Demonic) and the conversation went something like:

(You should be aware at this point that when the PCs were offered the job, the lawyer who was representing the anonymous client told them that under no circumstances were they to discuss any aspect of the job with anyone else).

Recruiter: "Hi ya, you interested in work?"

Ebola: "No. I'm here working as it happens."

Recruiter: "Really? What are you doing?"

Ebola: "I'm with an organisation called the Consultancy. We're looking for Charlotte Holden. Do you know where she is?"

At which point the recruiter made his excuses and left, to make a phone call to his bosses to spread the gossip.

This was a bit of a problem for me, given that the premise of the scenario (the campaign in fact) was that the Consultancy were a shit-hot investigative outfit, when in fact they were a bunch of muppets. Highly dangerous muppets with an array of extraordinary powers, but muppets nevertheless.

I think I resolved this little encounter by having Dual flown back to the US the next morning for a lunchtime meeting with the lawyer at which he was soundly bollocked for Ebola's fuck-up, and told that if they screwed up again they were sacked.

There then followed a breakfast meeting with Andy where they pissed him off some more.

Oh, and on the way they managed to piss me off by establishing that, not only did they understand the Aberrant rules more than me, they knew more about the setting too. (I'm notoriously lazy when it comes to reading gamebooks, so the minor fact that Novas don't require sleep had somehow passed me by).

So, having made no progress, and still operating under the misapprehension that there were some "clues" they could discover, they decided to do a little snooping around.

They decided to break into Andy's house.

The break in...

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