Aberrant: Underworld

Aberrant

by Glenn Fabry (Editor)

Intro - Baptized in quantum fires, reborn as incarnate gods, drunk with fame, sacrificed on the altar of power. We are your heroes, your legends, your icons. Beware. Your legacy is our future.

Genres: Role Playing Games, Gaming, Superheroes, Comics

Paperback

First published July 1, 1999

Reviews

[Jose Vidal · Rating 3 out of 5]

Volvemos hacia atrás en el tiempo, no sólo por ser este un juego de 1999, si no también por haber sido Adventure! uno de los primeros juegos reseñados en el blog. Junto con un tercer juego, Trinity, de ciencia ficción futurista, pretendían crear una linea argumental continua a través de varias generaciones, aunque los lazos entre una y otra resultaban al final algo endebles.

Si el Adventure! era la aproximación a los héroes pulp de White Wolf, casa archifamosa por sus juegos de vampiros, hombres lobo y otros seres de las tinieblas, Aberrant es lo más parecido a un juego de superhéroes. Y digo lo más parecido por que, en realidad, puede calificarse más de un juego sobre conspiraciones y gente con poderes que de superheroico.

http://aventurasextraordinarias.blogs...

[Garrett Henke · Rating 5 out of 5]

Truly one of the greatest RPGs of all time, Aberrant took the superhero genre and completely turned it on its head by placing it in what is essentially the real world. It asks the legit question, “What would the world be like if we suddenly had super powered beings?” The answer is, “Why would someone rob a bank with their powers when he or she could make more money on the talk show circuit?”

Although the mechanics can be wildly unbalanced, in many ways this is a feature, not a bug. After all, in the comics, how often is a team composed of equals? As long as the GM provides spotlight time for each character, those balance issues should actually add to the story.

[Krzysztof · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bardzo fajny system RPG. To trochę tak jakby połączyć mechanikę Świata Mroku ze światem Marvela. I choć autorzy wiele razy zaznaczają, że tu nie chodzi o odgrywanie superbohaterów rodem z komiksów, to jednak sporo podobizn do X-menów jest tu do odnalezienia. Sama konstrukcja podręcznika też jest dość ciekawa. Nie znajdziemy tak jak w systemach Świata Mroku opisanej historii świata. Opis tutaj jest w formie fragmentów programów TV czy wywiadów lub dyskusji między postaciami świata Aberrant. Fani X-menów i podobnych klimatów powinni spróbować. I choć wiem i znam systemy, które bezpośrednio są związane ze światem Marvela to jednak uważam, że warto spróbować i Aberranta.

[Juan · Rating 2 out of 5]

Interesting approach and background, but the play rules makes the character creation a little confusing and the final result very, very unbalanced.

It was a nice try, but now I see why it was never a success despise being super-heroes.

['Nathan Burgoine · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this when it came out, and I liked the setting, enjoyed making characters then... never got to play.

[Patrick · Rating 3 out of 5]

Being familiar with Trinity, to which this is a prequel, reading the 90-odd pages of setting in the beginning of the book was a question of waiting for the other shoe to drop, but it never precisely did, which I found surprising. It's not until you get into the rules that you see that mechanic take form, which is an interesting choice on the designer's part. I can't help wondering if it's just a ploy to sell more books, though, since now I want to read more about the setting. And given White Wolf's publishing practices back in the day, that's certainly possible.

System-wise it's unremarkable; if you've played any Supers game and any oWoD game, there's going to be nothing in this that surprises you.

I will say that I don't think I've seen an RPG book formatting quite this way before. There are no "out of character" notes about the setting--the entirety of the information is in-world material excerpted in a scattershot fashion. Ultimately it's effective, but it got kind of irritating by page 70 to have not yet bumped into a Table of Contents.

In conclusion, I think this would be most interesting to run as a supers game without offering Taint options to players, then allowing them to draw on "emergency reserves" that slowly pervert them ... but I don't know if it's worth it. It would be awesome to do that and then have those Aberrant characters as the villains in a subsequent game of Trinity, though. Hm.

[Francisco Becerra · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was expecting something different for this "historic" setting for the Trinity world. It's superhero, but no so much. Is more like the TV series Heroes, but again has some of the camp in superhero comics. It is very difficult to classify, but let you create very Watcmen-like superhero tales. Overall, very good and the rules were streamlined a lot to make it very playable.

[Cyril]

Never printed. Sold as PDF.

Authors: Cole Bormuth, Steve Kenson.
Publisher: White Wolf Arthaus