We're Fantastic at hitting Stretch Goals!
almost 5 years ago – Sat, Jul 13, 2019 at 01:46:42 AM

Hello Continuum Community,

Yeah, that's a lame Reed Richards joke in the title (quite a stretch, I know...), but I hadn't planned on sending this update until tomorrow! We're just so good at hitting Stretch Goal targets that I've got to get it out early otherwise I'll miss a whole cycle.

But first...

PODCAST TIME

The folks at the Polyhedron podcast sit down with Ian Watson and Steven Kenson and talk about the Trinity Continuum: Aberrant Kickstarter, discussing the changes from first edition to the new edition. 

Polyhedron Podcast #89:  https://www.patreon.com/posts/polyhedron-ep-89-28261603 

THE GENTLEMAN GAMER WONDERING ABOUT ABERRANT

Onyx Path's Matthew Dawkins, the Gentleman Gamer himself, is on a walk-and-talk, wondering about the Trinity Continuum and the Aberrant spot on the timeline. Give it a look, and feel free to leave a comment under this Youtube clip. The power is in your hands!

Meanwhile, at the Hall of Justice...

In terms of our current Stretch Goal targets, here's what we're looking at:

At $84,000 in funding - Reignofevil.com will have the original book scanned and be made available as a PDF on DrivethruRPG.com. A copy will be added to the Aberrant 1E Mini Sourcebook PDF Bundle. 

Reignofevil.com is the final of the first edition titles that people have been looking for on PDF for a long time, and something I wanted to include in the PDF bundle Add On rewards for this campaign. Unfortunately, the original files for this project are long gone, lost to the ages. However, DrivethruRPG does offer a service where they'll do high resolution scans of an original hardcopy of the book to create a new digital file, essentially re-mastering the book. The quality won't be quite as sharp as if the PDF had been output from the original digital layout files (sort of like making a clone of Michael Keaton), but it will bring a PDF version into existence and allow us to add it to our old edition bundle (as well as just making it available for general purchase, for those missing this one title!). 

 At $87,000 in funding - PROTEUS NOVA COMPENDIUM 3 – The project will be further expanded to include short bios for any characters on the master list that weren’t included in the Trinity Continuum: Aberrant book. 

Now that we know what's in front of us, let's see how far we've come. 

TEN STRETCH GOALS ACHIEVED SO FAR!!!

 Achieved! - NEW ADD ON - Creation of an Aberrant-themed Storyguide Screen, offered as a +$20 ADD ON to any reward tier that includes the hardcover version of Trinity Continuum: Aberrant. This three panel screen will feature action-packed Aberrant art on the outer side and a selection of charts and other info on the inside to make the Storyguide's job a little bit easier.  

 Achieved! - ABERRANT COMIC COMPILATION - "You Are Not Alone" by Paul Jenkins & Doug Stambaugh - the Trinity Continuum: Aberrant webcomic will be compiled into a single PDF and automatically added to all reward tiers.  

 Achieved! - N!WE N!TERNATIONAL WRESTLING ENTERTAINMENT - A new PDF product discussing the N!WE, the performers and industry personnel, and various elements of professional wrestling in the world of Aberrant. All backers receiving the PDF version of Trinity Continuum: Aberrant will have this automatically added to their rewards list.  

 Achieved! -  KICKSTARTER BACKER T-SHIRT – Hosted on the redbubble store for a limited time, a Trinity Continuum: Aberrant-themed shirt will be priced at a steep discount. All backers will be notified when the shirt becomes available.  

 Achieved! - Aberrant Worldwide: Phase I will have the original book scanned and be made available as a PDF on DrivethruRPG.com. A copy will be added to the Aberrant 1E Systems & Setting PDF Bundle. 

 Achieved! -  PROTEUS NOVA COMPENDIUM – A new PDF product, with stat blocks for many characters featured in bio write-ups in the Trinity Continuum: Aberrant book. All backers receiving the PDF version of Trinity Continuum: Aberrant will have this automatically added to their rewards list.  

 Achieved! - DIGITAL WALLPAPER – An awesome digital wallpaper for your computer desktop featuring art from Trinity Continuum: Aberrant. All backers will have this automatically added to their rewards list.  

 Achieved! - Project Utopia will have the original book scanned and be made available as a PDF on DrivethruRPG.com. A copy will be added to the Aberrant 1E Factions & Organizations PDF Bundle. 

 Achieved! - PROTEUS NOVA COMPENDIUM 2 – The project will be expanded to include a master list of all known novas from first edition that have been carried over to this new edition. 

 Achieved! - DIGITAL DICE - A Trinity Continuum: Aberrant D10 will be created for the Onyx Path dice-rolling app (iOs/Android). All backers receiving the Trinity Continuum: Aberrant PDF will be able to unlock this die for free on the app. 

I'm excited about the digital dice, because I've been rolling my Trinity Continuum and Trinity Continuum: Æon dice, and I'm hoping I'll start having more suceesses with some quantum powers mixed in!

HOPE-SACRIFICE-UNITY

So, as we head into the second weekend of our campaign, keep up the great work! Remember to let your friends know about this campaign, and share in your social circles and on your social media! And let's see if we can ERUPT another few Stretch Goals before next Friday!

#TCAberrant

#TrinityContinuum

#QuantumPowers

Genre and Tone
almost 5 years ago – Sat, Jul 13, 2019 at 12:49:58 AM

Hey there, Continuum Community,

On Tuesday, we'll be sharing the New Rules and Quantum Powers chapter as part of our Backers Only previews. Yesterday, I had a sneak peek at the Scale rules. Today, we're going to share a snippet from the rules about Genre and Tone. Later today, I'll have another update with some cool artwork and some info on Stretch Goals, which we seem to be smashing at a Mega-speed!

Genre

Aberrant is a game of superhuman power, a genre that spans myriad sub-genres. Superhero comics runs the gamut from Siegel and Shuster’s high-idealism Superman to Alan Moore’s cynical take  on Miracleman and back again, and even when one comic draws on the ideas and cultural baggage of another, they’re often very different animals. No one would ever mistake The Authority for the Justice League of America, even though both are ostensibly about superhero teams who confront existential threats to Earth (also, multiple Authority characters are deliberate homages to JLA mainstays), because for all their similarities their methodologies and their themes are completely different. The Justice League imprisons supervillains, whereas the Authority lives in a world where the only reasonable solution to a superpowered villain is frequently to kill them before they kill millions. When Bizarro turns up to threaten Metropolis, Superman handles the problem without loss of life — when things go bad in Miracleman, cities burn and hundreds of thousands die.

Similarly, an Aberrant campaign can have many different themes and many different styles, echoing those of superheroic storytelling at large. Some campaigns will be closer to the Golden and Silver Age ideal of a superhero, where heroes are good and villains are bad; others will turn the realism dial to the maximum in pursuit of Iron Age grittiness.

It’s not just a question of modifying the setting, though — it’s the Storyguide’s responsibility to ensure that the world as the players experience it through their characters reflects the themes, mood, and style the campaign evokes. To aid this, we’ve divided superheroic storytelling into three broad tones and provided a list of Subgenres to further define the nature of the campaign. Each includes rules that will change the experience of play to suit that Subgenre.

Tones

Tones represent the broad strokes of storytelling, the most basic assumptions about the setting, theme, and mood of the campaign. Four-Color campaigns hearken back to the Silver and Bronze Ages; good guys are good, bad guys are bad, and moral choices are generally obvious and clear. Cinematic campaigns come straight from the Modern Age, with high action and complex motives and themes that make the world just as much a character as the heroes. Finally, Deconstruction campaigns take every assumption about superheroes and subverts or inverts them, echoing the anti-heroic vigilantism of the Iron Age, where no one could be entire trusted and the world was a dark and dirty place.

The following rules represent those basic setting and theme assumptions, giving a mechanical handle for the Storyguide to make the world of Aberrant come alive.

Four-Color

Four-Color stories are about good vs. evil, drawn in clearly defined lines. There are heroes and villains and precious little between them save the masses of humanity whose best and worst traits they exemplify, and for whose hearts they continually do battle. Every Four-Color game, even those not based upon conflict between heroes and villains, is defined by that dichotomy of good and evil. As such, players and the Storyguide should decide during character creation whether they wish to play heroes or villains — the campaign will take a very different tack depending on that choice!

• All novas are either heroes or villains. Optionally, some novas may be neutral, but even they should lean one way or the other even if they don’t put on a costume.

Flux, Transcendence, and Transformation

Heroes and villains are both larger than life, yet many have ordinary lives apart from their career in the cape. Partially, this is a defense mechanism — a secret identity protects one’s friends and loved ones from reprisal by nefarious villains — but it’s also a way for heroes to keep themselves grounded in humanity despite their tremendous power. 

The following two optional systems for handling Flux and Transcendence represent two different ways for heroes (or villains!) to maintain control of themselves and their lives.

The Anchor System enlists ordinary interactions with baseline humanity to keep a nova firmly grounded. Her day job is the equivalent of humanity whispering, “remember you are mortal” in her ear even as she does the impossible on a routine basis — even if she isn’t mortal after all.

• Every scene of interaction with a baseline or baselines while hiding one’s nova nature allows the player to subtract one point of Flux. If a hero must dart away mid-conversation to attend to her heroic duties or employs her nova abilities in any way during that scene, it doesn’t count — she must engage with baselines as a baseline and on their own terms.

The Determination System relies on a hero’s own vision of what she represents and what she fights for (or a villain’s ambitions and plots!). Determination resembles Chrysalis, in that the nova guides her own development and transformation. A hero does not necessarily have to maintain a human countenance — some heroes cannot and have never been able to.

• The nova selects a virtue or ambition (truth, justice, etc.) and ties it to a Favored Approach (Force, Finesse, or Resistance). Replace any Flux she gains while upholding that virtue or ambition with a Condition, representing the struggle to contain herself within her chosen boundaries.

• When a nova’s Flux rating reaches 10, she does not immediately gain Transcendence and reset her Flux. Instead, she’s confronted with a dramatic and dangerous situation that tests her chosen virtue or ambition. If she falters or otherwise betrays that cause, she resets Flux and gains Transcendence normally. If she perseveres, however, she experiences a significant change — it may be a quantum healing trance, a sudden burst of heretofore-unknown reserves of power, or the like — which is, mechanically, a Chrysalis. Unlike Chrysalis, it does not require downtime unless dramatically appropriate.

#TCAberrant

#Hope-Sacrifice-Unity

Scale
almost 5 years ago – Thu, Jul 11, 2019 at 10:02:56 PM

Hello Continuum Community,

Today, we've got a snippet from our upcoming New Rules chapter dealing with one of the key components of the Storypath system and how it handles characters with a wide range of abilities: Scale.

Scale 

Novas are larger than life — literally, in a mechanical sense. They extend themselves far beyond where anything human ought to be, violating physics wholesale as they go. When novas exert themselves, they are capable of transcending baseline notions of size and scale. Consequently, the Scale system needs to be extended to take this into account. 

Types of Scale 

Trinity Continuum Core specifies on a case-by-case basis what kind of Scale something is. Since we use Scale a lot in Aberrant, we’ve quantified all Scale into seven categories: Durability, Leadership, Might, Mental, Power, Size, and Speed. 

Extreme Scale 

The following listing extends Scale beyond the 1-6 Range. 

• 7 Supreme. Examples include a metroplex spanning multiple cities (such as the Boston-Washington Corridor in the United States), software that thinks on a human level, or novatech versions of mundane weapons of mass destruction with vastly increased effects. 

• 8 Bewildering. This scale is the limit of baseline understanding of the world. Examples include major landmasses, a self-aware AI capable of out-thinking any human, or exotic weapons that tamper with the fundamental forces of physics as we know them. 

• 9 Inconceivable. This scale represents the beginnings of true Transcendence, where baseline comprehension begins to fail. Examples include entire continents or worlds, AI as far beyond humans as humans are beyond fungus, or technology that not only violates physics as we know it but contaminates it with entirely new and alien paradigms. 

• 10 Transcendent. Baseline minds may be able to approximate understanding of effects at this level, but any real comprehension is completely impossible. Examples include solar systems and the distances between them, a post-singularity AI that is actively hacking the substrate of reality, or weapons that simply erase space-time. A nova operating at this level is barely constrained by the universe itself, let alone small ideas like “mass” or “causality.” 

Negative Size 

Novas (and things of the nova age) can also be extremely small, smaller than our current understanding of physics really allows for. Negative Size represents the progression of Scale below the human norm (Size 1) rather than above it, and is as follows: 

• 0 Medium. This Size represents anything roughly one-half to one-quarter the size of an average adult human. This might include pets, drones, children, little people, and so on. Apart from accessibility issues or difficulty handling equipment designed for full-size adults, however, adjustments between Size 0 and Size 1 are unnecessary. (It is the same as Scale 0 in Trinity Continuum: Æon) 

• -1 Small. This describes anything between about two feet and six inches in size. 

• -2 Tiny. This describes anything between six and one inches. 

• -3 Miniature. This describes anything under an inch. 

• -4 Miniscule. This describes anything under a millimeter. 

• -5 Microscopic. As the name implies you’d need a microscope to resolve anything at this size. Amoebas and large microscopic critters. 

• -6 Cellular. This describes anything cell-sized or smaller. 

• -7 Molecular. Able to squirm inside a cell without destroying it. Virus-sized. Can manipulate molecular bonds with bare hands. 

• -8 Atomic. Literally small enough to touch atoms, pull them apart (dangerous!). 

• -9 Vanishing. This is the limit to which novas can descend — beyond the Quantum Barrier lies, as far as they can see, nothingness, just the yawning gulf between protons and electrons, between gluons and quarks. Novas are creatures of the Quantum, and the Sub-quantum is forever beyond them. 

The Microverse 

We conceive of atoms as a nucleus of protons and neutrons surrounded by orbiting electrons — it’s more complicated than that, of course, but it’s a handy mental model that doesn’t require pages of math. Writers in comics have taken that mental model and mapped it to its origin — planets orbiting suns, moons orbiting planets, and so on — and in the process created one of the most enduring ideas in super-science: microscopic universes underlying the atomic scale. 

Storytellers who wish to include microverses in their campaigns should allow novas to shrink beyond -9 Size — at Size -10, the nova is effectively at Size 10 for the purposes of microverses, and may continue to shrink to reduce their effective local Scale. This isn’t intruding into the sub-quantum realm of psions, though — instead of shrinking down, it’s more like shrinking sideways. 

Characters at a given Negative Size may freely manipulate objects at their current Size (molecular bonds, electron orbits, etc) and objects one step removed from them in either direction on the Negative Size scale at +2 Difficulty. As Negative Size represents size differences orders of magnitude apart, characters at any given Negative Size cannot meaningfully manipulate objects or characters at further removes on the Negative Size scale. Two exceptions exist: novas with Mega-Might adjust their Might Scale for the purposes of feats of strength proportionately, and novas with Mega-Dexterity or powers focused on manipulating small objects may interact with smaller Negative Size Scales, suffering a +2 Difficulty for each successive level of Negative Size. 

Characters at Negative Scale receive 2 Enhancement to any attacks directed at weak points that are either negligible or inaccessible to a normal-sized individual. For example, a nova could shrink herself, enter a target’s bloodstream, ride it to the brain, and begin damaging neurons directly. This Enhancement does not scale, as at smaller Negative Sizes the weak points are increasingly small and therefore have less effect on the target. 

Characters with Negative Scale receive 2 Enhancement per level for anything that might be aided by being very small, including stealth. This Enhancement does not apply to anything designed to track or detect anything at that Size, or anything that tracks quantum energies.

#TCAberrant

#Microverse

Backers Only – MANUSCRIPT PREVIEW #2
almost 5 years ago – Wed, Jul 10, 2019 at 12:59:04 AM

This post is for backers only. Please visit Kickstarter.com and log in to read.

Backers Only Bonus - Trinity Continuum Foundations
almost 5 years ago – Tue, Jul 09, 2019 at 01:46:17 PM

This post is for backers only. Please visit Kickstarter.com and log in to read.