It may surprise you to discover that Aber- rant is not a superhero game. Not a superhero game? How can that be? There are people in capes and masks and that living spandex we call eufiber, and they're Flying around zapping each other with power bolts from their fists, and that’s superhero stuff, right? Well, yes and no. | suppose there may be a few of those costume-wearing clichés walking around, but most of them are elites or XWF brawl- ers. Sure, there’s a place for the traditional mask and cape ensemble in the world of Aberrant, but for every grandstanding, mask-wearing quantum ham, there are ten people whose eruption did not awaken in them an unconquerable urge to dress up like a comic-book character. For the record, I'm defining a superhero as someone who wears a mask and a costume, prob- ably has a mild mannered alter ego, and fights for truth, justice and the American way without hav- ing much of a life outside of the costume. Char- acters like this were staples of comic books from the thirties to the present. That's one way to play Aberrant, | suppose, but it hardly uses the full po- tential afforded by the game and the world it takes place in, Only a fraction of those who get quantum powers are inclined to don masks to fight crime, and there are a lot of other ways to play the game Let's look at a few of these powerful folks Jasmine Prezeou, the Haitian woman who erupted when her husband tried to stab her with a kitchen knife, wears a very conservative suit now when she goes to her job at DuPont. Like- wise, Darnell Washington, the attorney from Alabama who erupted when a drunk driver slammed into him at 70 miles per hour, wears eufiber khakis and a golf shirt as he works as Alejandra’s bodyguard No superheroes here. The point is that Aberrant is a game about people — very realistic people like you, your parents, your professors and that guy you don’t like who lives two doors down from you. There is no other unifying factor beyond the ability to control the forces of the universe with a thought. Most of them don’t wear funny eufiber costumes. Only a minority of them fly. They're certainly not uniformly heroic. Beyond having an M-R node, novas have nothing in particular in common. They're black, Asian, gay, straight, white, female, male, noble, petty, Catholic, Jew- ish, Sufi, atheist, dumb, brilliant, redheaded, brunette and blond. They speak Danish, Swahili, Russian, English, Czech, Portuguese, Arabic, German, Chinese and a few hundred other lan- guages. They don't all look like Ken and Barbie in spandex. Some small percentage of novas — like some small percentage of any other group — might have the strength of character to self- lessly serve others or spend the vast portion of their time fighting crime and injustice. But Teragen propaganda aside, most of them are like most of us. They want to enjoy life, hang out with friends, make lots of money, live in a nice house and get laid from time to time. That's no formula for superheroics, that's a formula for living. Sometimes that’s enough to make them happy. Sometimes it's not These are the people you portray when you play Aberrant. Blaine Renaud, the nova chef, prepares meals for the wealthiest and most discriminat- ing connoisseurs on the planet. He owns three estates and is happily married to a stunning Vietnamese woman who thinks he's the great- est man on Earth. What need does he have to dress up in silly costumes and fire quantum bolts at people’s heads? Jasmine Prezeau worked her way through Harvard as a teleporting courier and now uses her nova powers primarily as a means of avoid- ing traffic on her way to the office — which is good, since her commute is around 1,200 miles. Ashley “Boom Box” Winthrop got great pow- ers when she erupted. She can juggle tanks, move faster than the baseline eye can follow and take a bazooka shell in the gut without wincing. Regret- tably for poor Ashley, she was dumb as a box of rocks before erupting and just as stupid after- ward, leaving her with not a lot of options. Her manager (who has carefully arranged things so icentienen|PUT that he takes three quarters of her earnings) has to give her a pep talk every night before she goes out into the XWF ring, otherwise she refuses to put on her mask, cape and tight little spandex out- fit. She cries every night when she goes to bed and wishes she could go back to working at the Godiva boutique at the mall. All these novas have super powers, but there’s not a superhero in the lot. There are plenty of ways to play the “people with powers” without resorting to su- perhero clichés, Look at Village of the Damned (either version) or Stephen King's Firestarter or The Dead Zone. Or try David Cronenberg’s Scanners. Or H.G. Wells’ The Invisible Man. Or Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Or Dark City. Or John Carpenter's Starman. The point here is that Ab- errant has a very flexible and multifaceted world; it doesn’t need to be played as a super- hero game. If your Aberrant series centers around enor- mous quantum battles and you're having @ grand old time playing that way, then by all means, don’t fix what's not broken If, on the other hand, you find the combat growing a little tiresome, then maybe it’s time to inject a dose of realism into your game and go high concept. That's what a lot of this book is about. Yeah, there's the obligatory stuff that sells the book: Merits and Flaws, spectacular new powers, updates on the Aberrant universe circa 2015, etc., but there’s also material in here to let you really get into your character's head. What was it like to erupt? How did it Feel? What triggered the eruption? Was he the target of an attempted gay bashing? Did a spree killer open fire on her office? Did a mugger try to take his wallet? Was she going through OTs after her dealer cut her off for non-payment? And what about after the eruption? Did it make the dull-witted person brilliant? Did it turn the chubby housewife into a luminous supermodel? Maybe it transformed the brainy physics major into a quantum-bolt spewing an- gel of death. Okay, that’s par for the course. The question now becomes: Why? Get inside your character's head, and figure out why she does what she does. What hidden hunger or secret need caused her to erupt with the particular powers she got? Now that she’s erupted, are those needs satisfied, or do they still gnaw at her and push her in certain directions that even she only partly comprehends? Unless you're content to paint your charac- ter with the broad strokes of stereotype, roleplaying requires a modicum of insight. That's one of the things that distinguishes roleplayers from non-roleplayers. Any moron can sit in front of a Playstation, twiddling his joystick, but roleplaying — stepping into the mind of a fic- tional character, assuming his persona for a few hours — takes effort and thought. If you want to use Aberrant to play a four-color superhero, you can do that, but the challenges associated with becoming a fully-realized, three-dimen- sional individual (who happens to have some spectacular powers) deliver a payoff far greater than just destroying the “supervillain” because he had fewer dots on his character sheet than your “superhero.” Ultimately, playing Aberrant is like anything else; the more you put into it, the more you get back. That goes for research as well. Ideas for a good character or an interesting series don't have to — and probably shouldn’t — come from comic books. Whether you're looking for theme ideas for ‘a game or researching how to play a particular character, the mass media provide an almost end- less source of ideas for your Aberrant series. There are many, many books that can give insight into your Aberrant series. Obviously, the Wildcards series is a great source of possibili- ties, although, again, the further afield you go from the supers genre, the more interesting things are likely to get. For Teragen series, anything written by Friedrich Nietzsche, but es- pecially Thus Spoke Zarathustra and Beyond Good and Evil, is a great source of inspiration Also good for understanding the Teragen worldview would be, in no particular order, Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged and Herman Hesse’s Demian. If you're more excited about a Directive series, John Le Carré and lan Fleming have written a few things that might serve to inspire a game (or three). Film is another medium that has a lot to of- fer an Aberrant series. Any number of movies can supply you with ideas for your game. X-Men is high on the list if you're going for a heroic feel (and conversely, Magneto’s Brotherhood may spark a few ideas for Teragen series). IF you want to play a game about a nova losing himself to taint, watch the David Cronenberg version of The Fly. His take on The Fly is a particularly in- sightful look at the toll high levels of taint take ‘on a nova's friends and social life. Nearly any- thing Cronenberg directs is likely to give you ideas for an Aberrant series one way or the other; start with Videodrome and the aforemen- tioned Scanners. Alternatively, for a movie that clearly shows the connection between power and taint, watch Akira, an animé classic in which high levels of INTRODUCTION