A few months ago I picked up a copy of Aeon Trinity's orignial rule book, the one with The Honored Dead story as an introduction. The main reason why I picked it up was for historical interest. You see, this is a game line from White Wolf that goes Adventure, Aberrant, Aeon originally. The three A's trinity. However, they got into a legal dispute with Peter Chung over the idea that the game was a ripoff of Aeon Flux, as it used the name Aeon and was cyberpunk. Thus they changed the name to "Trinity" for future printings, and I have a bunch of old RPG magazines where they have ads bitching about this and informing readers of the new name. Thus a book that is still called "Aeon" is a bit of a rarity. That's not to say I'm going to get rich off the purchase; it goes on ebay for $10-$25 dollars and while I would get a profit from my $4 purchase, it's hardly anything to write home about. Still, an interesting tidbit.
Since I don't just buy books to keep them on my shelf, even in cases like this when it's more about the oddity of the book than the book itself, I've been steadily reading through it. If I had done that ten years ago I would have been pretty damned impresseed by the RPG. Mechanically it makes some nice overhauls to the old World of Darkness system (for example, abilities now are sorted with a default attribute rather than being awkwardly put into "talents", "skills" and "knowledges" and difficulties are standardized at 7 with number of successes mattering for tricky things rather than having a convoulted combination of difficulty numbers and success being key; Urban Jungle did something similar.) The worldbuilding is quite deep. This is the future sequel to the Adventure and Aberrant game lines, so a war with super powered mutants is just part of the backstory, leading into a collapse and rebirth of society (lead by Japan, China, Brazil and Africa) with heavy cyberpunk themes and with psionics being the key new advancement. Throw in three different types of aliens on top of that and you have a very complicated setting to work with that clearly had a lot of care put into it.
But the difference between ten years ago and now is that I've done a lot more research into the history of RPGs, and I've done some "unconvential" RPG type stuff, i.e. I've done things beyond just having the GM make a story that the party must diligently follow. This has put my mindset much more into a "how does this game work" mindest as opposed to a "does this sound cool" mindest. With Aeon my first thought is, suppose that I want to start a game. How do I do that? What do I say to my players? If I want to keep with the game as written, I have to start by giving them a really complicated history lesson which will take something like two hours to get through. Or I have to require that they read the book, which is going to be a pain to do since there's just the one copy that I would have to lend around, meaning that we'd need like a week of the players getting ready before we even get to a "session zero."
You can contrast this with other RPGs. Dungeons and Dragons works great, since all you need to do is play into fantasy cliches. If your players have read fantasy literature, especially along the lines of that by Vance, Leiber and Howard, then you're pretty much good to go. They know what fighters, wizards and thieves are, and they are raring to go into a dungeon to get some treasure. You can develop the world that they play in as you go. The only set up that the DM really needs is the classic town and dungeon, and the only set up that the players really need is the old "you meet in a bar and hear about a dungeon with fantastic treasure." Maybe 30 minutes of setup and then you're dungeon delving, and within a few weeks you can have players wandering around a realized world. The game is classic for a reason.
Let's take the West End Star Wars RPG. If your players have never seen Star Wars, then you will need a history lesson on what the Empire is, what the Rebellion is, what Jedis and the force are, etc. But the fact is that if you're playing that game, your players have at least seen the original trilogy so they know all that stuff. Certainly you'll come across weird factions and aliens and whatnot that weren't in the movies, but since you have the basic setting down there's no problem. In this one you will need an adventure prepared, but your players can quickly make characters from templates, so again maybe half an hour of setup.
Something very similar is Teenagers from Outer Space. This is a very wacky game, probably too wacky for most people, with an off the wall premise: alien high school students are attending a high school on Earth and the game is about high school slice of life shenanigans. But to get the mood all you really have to do is be familiar with Urusei Yatsura or Project A-Ko, and at the time the game was made every anime fan would be familiar with those shows. Since the unexpectged is such a big part of that game, it doesn't really matter if the specific aliens are complete weirdos from unknown planets, you'll just roll with it in game, and characters are quick to setup.
If we look at White Wolf, the World of Darkness definitely is more inaccessible. You can understand what vampires are without understanding key aspects of a Vampire: The Masquerade game, such as what the Camirilla, Anarchs and Sabbat are, or the ins and outs of the various clans. Similarly you can understand werewolves without understanding stuff like the umbra or the war between the wyld, weaver and wyrm in Werewolf: The Apocalypse. However, even here I'd give the game a bit of a pass because White Wolf was very successful in making a culture out of the World of Darkness. I knew people who were familiar with what Malkavians or Glass Walkers were, despite never playing the games. And if you get a situation where 80% of your players know what is going on, it's not hard to get the last player involved. These days you can get people up to speed with what to expect in V:TM by just having them play Bloodlines. There's certainly going to be more preparation in Vampire: The Masquerade, and the "prelude" system basically forces you to have a multi-hour "session zero" before you start playing for real, but at least there IS a way to start.
Returning to Aeon, there is no such avenue. The game never achieved the cultural relevance it would need to allow people to understand the world by osmosis. You can't easily point to a fictional equivalent like you can with D&D. You could say "It's kind of like Blade Runner, except there's also psychics and there's no replicants, and also hacking is important like in Neuromancer but actually the hacking doesn't work much like Neuromancer, and also there are evil mutants who are former super heroes so it's kind of like a dark take on super heroes like The Boys or Watchmen except super heroes work in completely different ways and are almost more like worshippers of Chaos in Warhammer 40k, and also there's three different alien races but only one of them has direct contact with Earth because of an event where the teleporting specialist psions mysteriously disappeared, and..." There's just nothing to latch on to to make people easily understand it. In fact, even the type of explanation I'm giving here is bad because it makes the game sound like Rifts, i.e. a catch-all science fiction world where every sci-fi concept appears somewhere, but that's not at all what Aeon is. It uses a lot of influences, but it also takes care to make sure that they make sense in its universe. For example, you can't have any crazy alien show up. It has to be the Vorlon-esque Qin, the mysterious and savage Chromatics, or an alien in the strange Coalition.
Oh, and due to how the rules work, you're basically forced into being a psion, which means that you also must be human, AND that you are almost certainly part of the Aeon Trinity organization AND that you are also probably working for one of six subfactions depending on your psychic aptitude. For example, if you want to use psionics to alter your body, then you are probably working for a Brazilian crime family with seemingly benevolent but also mysterious goals. Generally when games have a huge amount of required world building they are liked by narrativist players who want to make a quirky character with a huge backstory. These characters don't really work in Aeon because the setting is so restrictive for psions.
On the side of the Storyteller (i.e. GM), you have trouble in that a lot is laid down but then a lot is left mysterious. For example, take the Coalition. What does the book say about them? They are the third type of alien encountered, and are an alliance between many different alien species where each species tends to specialize for the good of the Coalition. They were encountered once, and first contact went horribly. (Side panels hint that the aliens in the Coalition apparently think that rape, even raping to death, is a normal social interaction.) However, at that time humanity explored the stars with the assistance of psions who could teleport, and they all mysteriously disappeared after an attack from the aberrants (i.e. the evil mutant super heroes.) Humanity is now building FTL starships with the help of the alien Qin (who are much more friendly) so the Coalition might be encountered again. And... that's it. There isn't even a stat block for any of the members of the coalition. How strong are they? How smart are they? What kind of technology do they have? Do they use psionics? If not, do they use another power, like the bizarre superpowers of Aberrants? Who knows? The book certainly doesn't tell you. So what do you do with them? There's a lot of mystery about them, but at the same time they've already ahd too much development to easily fit into any arbitrary campaign. Basically you are forced to accept them, but not given enough to actually use them. I have a feeling that these issues were probably answered in a supplement. That was the way of doing things in RPGs since the late 80's after all: whenever you get stuck the answer is to buy another book. But here it feels like it would be better if they were never mentioned at all, and instead the game gave you advice for creating new aliens of your own.
Of course you can make up your own aliens, since you can change anything. In fact Aeon's explicit golden rule is "If you don't like it, change it" (and we've seen why that isn't helpful) so you aren't even violating the rules by doing this. But the problem is that once you start swapping out setting elements, where do you stop? Suppose I'm also unsastified with the default psion factions. Maybe I don't want my biokinetics to work for a Brazilian crime factory, or for my electrokinetics to work for an American mega-corp that grows biological machinery, or for my clarisentients to be part of a weird "actually we shouldn't have nations" organization. Of course I can change these things, but in doing so I make it much harder for my players to figure out what the hell is going on. If we stick with the defaults they can at least read the books, but if I make it all up they have to constantly ask me, and makes it even less of a world that they can interact with and more of a story that I am telling.
Something that this sourcebook makes me appreciate is the sample adventure. Frankly, I'm not sure what an Aeon campaign is supposed to look like. The storytelling section really only has two subsections that give any suggestions. The first is one giving a very abstract description of a campaign. For example, the game begins properly when we reach "the body" of the campaign where "the storyteller introduces plot elements at a ace that matches the story's developemnts and the characters' investigative skills." It's stressed that the game shouldn't be a series of scenarios fully planned by the storyteller, nor should the players be allowed to do absolutely anything they want, but it should be some sort of middle ground. Okay, but what does that look like effectively? The advice says that the players going on "tangents" from the main plot adds to everyone's enjoyments, but these should always go back towards "your intended resolution." That is, unless you change your mind and go with the players. So we have advice basically saying that you can completely plot out everything with the players making no real changes to the established plot, or you can throw out everything and have the players do their own thing. What does that actually mean? For example, am I supposed to have a complete story before the first session? And if so, what do I do if the players ignore it? This wishy washy type of advice is not helpful on a practical level. When you pair it with rule zero, i.e. that the storyteller can change anything at any time, it feels like the designers are throwing the burden of making a workable game on the play group. Techically they never told you to do anything definitively, so if you mess up it's on YOU.
This attitude also lets them throw in suggestions for cool ideas which are too half baked to work properly, since maybe the play group will fix it. For example, it is stressed that villains should act independently of the players, and that if the players waste time this should allow the villains to further their own plans. This is brought up as a punishment for having players go on tangents (even though the paragraph before said you can roll with the tangents, and rule zero means that you can throw out the advice anyway.) That is, if players mess around too much the villain wins, game over. Alright, let's put aside that this amounts to punishing your players for not acting out pre-determined roles in a novel that you wrote. What are the mechanics behind this piece of advice. Time is important, so are we tracking time? Maybe! The very first page of the rules lists a section on time divided into turns, scenes, episodes, series and downtime. Downtime is particularly intriguing, since this is what characters use their time for when not in the middle of an adventure, and thus implies that the game world runs by some independent clock (i.e. things don't "run at the speed of plot.") But a closer look shows that the measures of time are meaningless. A turn is used for one action, but it can take anywhere from three seconds to three minutes. A scene has no explicit length of time, but rather is basically however long the characters are in the same location. An episode is what is done in a session, with downtime occuring betweeen episodes. There is no indication of how long an episode should be; maybe it's a few hours, maybe it's weeks, who knows. A series is a collection of episodes leading to some conclusion, implying narrative time and not actual time.
Now let's think about things practically. How much time can players waste before off screen villains take advantage of it? Clearly turns are too short of time for it to matter, but what about scenes? If the characters waste time for two scenes, will that affect things in an significant way? Does it have to be a whole episode? It seems more like what would matter is how much in-game time takes place, i.e. days, weeks, etc. But at no point is the storyteller advised to keep track of the passage of this time. References to time in general are rare, appearing only in places like the speed it takes to travel from one planet to another, or times to heal. Training times and times for other "downtime" actions, like gathering information or buying new equipment, is not mentione. Thus unless the play group cooks up a system themeselves (either out of whole cloth or by stealing ideas from another system) the answer is going to default to "there is enough time if the storyteller says there is enough time." Far from "increasing realism" as the book suggests, this only highlights to the players that they are in a story where all the variables are controlled by the storyteller, not a living universe.
Now it could be that I am misinterpreting the intentions of the Aeon authors, but in that case they shoudln't have made things so vague and abstract. Having a sample adventure could do a lot to illustrate how long things are supposed to take in practice, how downtime can be used, how villain plans can change based on player actions, etc.
The second piece of actual campaign advice comes from a series of adventure hooks. For example, they could encoutner a mining station overrun by Aberrants who have taken hostages and thus have to not only save the day but figure out why the aberrants bothered to take hostages rather than slaughtering everyone as normal. (Note that for this to work, players have to know all about aberrant history and their usual attitudes.) The "themes" given are suspense, intrigue and horror. This at least gives us some idea of what an adventure might look like, though obviously a lot has to be filled in. It's also not clear what's supposed to happen if the players just decide to rush in and kill all aberrant scum. Clearly we won't have intrigue and suspense then, but is that okay? Or is this a case where the storyteller needs to push things back to the "intended resolution?" The sad thing is, this is the most usable hook. Take another hook: the "Corporate Shuffle." This involves the characters signing on to work with Orgotek, a large company based on organic technology and which also is the "home" organization for technopaths. They then find that Orgotek has unsavory business practices. That's it. That's the hook. What makes this one so bad is not only is there so little detail to work with (what're the horrible business practices? How do the characters find out about them?) but that it's framed like this is some shocking revelation. In a cyberpunk setting like Aeon, a company getting into some shady shit should be the default assumption, especially when we consider that this is a company whose public face is all setting up vast farms where artificial body parts are grown and mutated to serve as organic equipment. None of these are going to allow a newbie to make an effective adventure. Of course there's a solution to that: there is a prominent advertisement for a module series. From how barebones the storytelling section is, and from experience with actual role players, I'm guessing that the majority of Aeon groups just coughed up the money and played those. This isn't even like black box basic D&D where you are only equipped to make dungeon crawls, but at least you can make dungeon crawls.
In any case, Aeon strikes me as a game that has lots of clever worldbuilding and many fiddly stats on weapons and skills and stuff, but ultimately to no purpose since too much of the actual game is missing, and too much of the worldbuilding is left to the storyteller (even though his hands will be tied by the complicated worldbuilding already in place.) Not a game for casuals, it isn't a tie in to anything, and it's too restrictive for people who just want to make up their own stories (and they never liked the sort of grim non-glamour cyberpunk that Aeon espouses anyway.) This is a game for no one, and I wonder if the designers even really played through it. (I don't know how White Wolf worked, but I know at this time at TSR there was no playtesting of most products.) It's a product meant to sit on your shelf, and that's probably what it's done for most people who bought it. Of course, I don't want to single out Aeon for this. Lots of other RPG supplements have had the same fate. It's just particularly apparent to me with Aeon, since I came to it with basically no knowledge of its world or of people playing it. I had hoped to have an experience like BECMI, where I was pleasantly surprised by what was there even if there were some major fumbles, or at least 2nd edition AD&D which I obviously don't care for but which has a good game buried within, provided you ignore the advice it gives. Aeon is more something that feels like it could be something great, but gives no clear way to actually make good on that promise.
June 17, 2024