Sunday, January 3, 2021

(Trinity 1e)Trinity Players Guide

What, exactly, is the Aeon Trinity? It's a question that's been floating around in my brain for almost 20 years now, and I couldn't give you a solid answer until Aeon 2nd edition came around. If only I'd read the Trinity Players Guide sooner, I would have . . . still been pretty confused, but maybe I'd have been able to make peace with that.

See, the thing about Aeon is that they are the sort of organization that doesn't exist in real life - they're an NGO with an espionage wing. There are so many contradictory and implausible things about them that it can be hard to pin down how they actually work. There's a pair of sidebars where an Aeon administrator wants to extract a dissident scientist and tries to requisition special forces and VARGs (mechs), and then his supervisor chews him out because the proposed course of action would start a war with China . . . implying that Aeon did, in fact, have all this hard-hitting military capability, able to match a full battalion of the setting's most modern military, but that the suits in charge are cautious about deploying it.

Who has that kind of power? And who, amongst the setting's various governments was asleep at the wheel long enough for them to acquire it? Second edition cleared things up for me by leaning farther into the superhero angle ("oh, they're like SHIELD, but liberal and internationalist"), but it was kind of fun trying to see if I could reach that conclusion just by reading 1st edition sources.

The answer is . . . sort of. Like, the only way any of it works is if you allow for this comics-style break from reality, but the text itself never quite gives you enough of a genre vibe to make it feel natural. Aeon's headquarters take up most of an arcology! It's got chapter-houses in every major city and human colony! They have mechs! But also, they have no official status anywhere. They work behind the scenes, wielding influence and gathering information. They are widely known as a humanitarian and philanthropic organization, but people also expect them to fight Aberrants (so much so that they feel betrayed when Aeon doesn't show up to fight any particular Aberrant).

I think I just have to accept that the people of the Trinity universe have grown accustomed to living in a world where something like Aeon exists, and if they are at all confused by it, they just assume that confusion is their own fault. I'm sure, if anything, I would have a hard time explaining our world to them ("What do you mean, your world has nothing like the Aeon Trinity in it? Who do the governments offload all the weird, expensive shit onto while complaining endlessly about threats to their sovereignty?")

The best explanation I've seen for the organization as a whole is that there was a complete breakdown in the international order during the Aberrant War, humanity was in genuine danger of extinction, and this mysterious group with more money than God came out of the shadows and propped up various institutions until they could become self-sufficient again. The main difference between our world and the Trinity Universe is that in theirs, gratitude in politics lasts longer than a week. It works better in second edition, because Aeon is also an organization that recruits Talents (ie "normal" people who are so implausibly skilled that they fit right into a comic book reality), but I'm not sure first edition had even come up with the concept yet.

It's hard to say. The advantage to reading Trinity completely out of order is that I can see the little hints that the books drop for future metaplot. There's a throwaway line here about how Maxwell Anderson Mercer is "'unstuck' in time and able to appear through force of will" and it's tossed in among enough other implausible-sounding rumors that it would be easy to overlook, but it gets me wondering. How much was worked out in advance, and how far in advance? I wouldn't be surprised if the time-travel connections were intended from the original core, but I don't think Daredevils (the Adventure! splat that led to 2e's Talents) were a worked-out idea yet, if only because this would have been the perfect place to hint at them.

They would have improved the "Normal Characters" section immensely. The Trinity Players Guide presents rules for non-psionic characters, but never quite gets past feeling like those characters are a second choice. They are "supporting cast, experts, and sidekicks." The idea that maybe people will want to play futuristic people in a futuristic sci-fi world without the inducement of psychic powers is only tentatively broached.

Which is a shame, because Trinity is such a richly realized world that there's plenty to do - mech pilot, interplanetary explorer, anti-corporate rebel, post-apocalyptic scavenger. More mechanical differentiation between "normal" characters would have given the game a lot more versatility (one of the reasons 2e is such an improvement). Not that this was necessarily a task for a Players' Guide, it's just that if Daredevils were already in the works, this would have been the perfect place to mention them (the Aberrant Players Guide does mention them, but in a very obscure way).

And I've very nearly forgotten my point. Which is merely that the "normal characters" section needed more confidence. I suspect it's probably an artifact of being a White Wolf game - nobody plays Vampire: the Masquerade to just be some guy, so it's possible that they might have thought of psions as the game's signature supernatural group. I personally think the game doesn't need to rely on them, but maybe White Wolf wasn't there as a company yet.

Speaking of normal people, I liked the section about contemporary society, but it needed to be about 5 times as long. It was a little vague about the effects of automation. It's good enough to eliminate "most housework, service work, and office-work," but nobody has yet built a robot that works well outdoors, so that pretty much leaves knowledge work, resource extraction, and construction as the only remaining jobs. It seems like kind of an arbitrary line, but even so, it would have been nice to get a deep dive into what society would have been like. Same with micro-settlements and increased population mobility two social trends created by cheap fusion power and the depopulation of the Aberrant War. There are ideas here that could have very credibly anchored some serious social science fiction, but it's too short a section to really get into them.

The last notable thing about this book is the freeform psionics system. The way it works is that instead of having fixed powers at each of your Mode levels, you construct effects from a menu of power factors that give you things like effect potency, range and duration in exchange for successes on an activation roll. It dramatically increases a character's versatility in exchange for giving players a lot more rules to navigate. Maybe I've been burned one too many times by being the only one at the table to know the game's rules, but my impression of the system was that you'd never find a group committed enough to learn it. Then again, it's simpler than Exalted, so it's probably just a matter of sticking with the game long of enough to trigger an obsession.

Overall, I like the Trinity Player's Guide. It was a bit of a workhorse book, but that's no great fault. It's main flaw was including Flaws (a dubious mechanic at the best of times, moreso when you have to include a sidebar explaining why physical ailments that give you extra character creation points also happen to defy the setting's advanced medical techniques). Aside from that, I could have done with less of the trademark White Wolf mystery. Why only give the first dot of Quantakinesis? Why not tell me what's really going on with the Aeon Council? Do you not trust me? What are you holding back for?

When it comes to Trinity 1st edition as a whole, my opinion is that White Wolf did its best work in the mid 2000s. The New World of Darkness was slick, genre-savvy, and smart without being unnecessarily pretentious. Trinity was like a foreshadowing of that era. It's held back from standing alongside Vampire: the Requiem or Changeling: the Lost by some unfortunate legacy White-Wolf-isms (specifically, the reliance on metaplot and the need to dilute its genre with 90s cynicism), but it was also showing a growing creative maturity and the potential the company had to make something new when they weren't tied to the existing canon of their own juvenilia. Honestly one of my favorite game lines and one that somehow, inexplicably, gets even better in its second edition.

Ukss Contribution: One of the advantages of being a neutral character is that the tabloids will hound psions mercilessly. That's a concept that's not used often enough in fantasy - an adversarial relationship between supernatural creatures and the press. So Ukss will have sleazy newspapers that harass magicians, sorcerers, and Yokai.

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