Pyramid Review
Aberrant: Teragen
Published by White Wolf Game Studio
Written by Lucien Soulban, Philippe Boulle, Josh Asheim
144 pages, $17.95
I like Aberrant in pretty much every fashion. I like how the system takes the basic Storyteller system and helps it to handle a super hero game. I like the setting, which reminds me of Wild Cards in its treatment of supers as paragons of the cult of personality.
The Teragen sourcebook for Aberrant details the main "villain" group of the Aberrant world. Of course, in a White Wolf game (hell, most games from the past decade) you can't really call people villains. The Teragen are Nova Supremacists, who believe that Novas should rule over the baseline (i.e. Human) masses.
Wait, that's pretty villainous! Cool. . . bad guys!
The Teragen book is a great example of the right way to do an organization sourcebook. It's got its flaws, but overall it's quite sublime.
The Teragen is a cute little super-villain group; they are more like a philosophical organization, except that a few of their members tend to go around killing people. Aberrant: Teragen is split into two parts; the first is the in character bit, with transcripts of Teragen meetings, news releases, and talk show discussions, all framed as part of a brainwashing sequence on a Utopian Nova.
It's an interesting look at the birth and structure of the Teragen organization. It also describes how the Teragen are dealing with Taint, the Quantum contamination that drives . . .
This article originally appeared in the second volume of Pyramid. See the current Pyramid website for more information.
Article publication date: July 28, 2000
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