This day in Trinity Universe history

[aberrantangels]

As luck would have it, this date comes around just in time to honor Monday's release of the d20 version of Adventure!.

1924
[Adventure!] Dr. Primoris reflects on his journal entry of the 1st inst., and elucidates further (presumably for posterity's benefit) the three varieties of Inspiration.

In the Adventure Era (called the Inspiration Era in the d20 version), the three types of Inspiration were called heroic (or daring), dynamic (or superhuman) and psychic. The standard terms for the three types of Inspired were daredevils, stalwarts and mesmerists, but as Donighal rightly complained,

the names [Whitley] Styles picked for them obscure as much as they conceal, if not more. I have met scientists with perfectly sedentary lifestyles who bend probability in ways Styles calls "daredevil-like" and "stalwarts" who were craven weaklings... albeit weaklings with some phenomenal ability no human ever possessed. Nor, naturally, are all mesmerists involved in the manipulation of men's minds.

In later times, Æon would coin a better classification system. A certain Dr. Fenster would refer to the dynamically Inspired as eximorphs, the psychically as psychomorphs and (perhaps) the daring as paramorphs. (Via my work on the fan-produced Trinity Storytellers' Handbook, I've learned that according to some official interpretations, daredevils and paramorphs are supposed to be separate categories.)

In any case, these technical-sounding labels were a way off in 1924, and didn't really suit Primoris' purpose (nor his dawning belief that stalwarts like himself were "the true portents of what the future may hold"). He suggested turning to legend and mythology for categories:

Daredevils are the heroes of myth, the Daedaluses as well as the Jasons. Mesmerists are the wizards, witches and sorcerers who haunt the corners of our past. And stalwarts? Stalwarts are gods. Gods of the dawning age.

But... if we are to be gods, where will mere mortals fit into our world?

All accounts of Michael Daemon Donighal's life depict his struggle with that question. It may not be obvious all the time, but everything he does up through at least 2061 is part of an attempt to answer it.

Comments

[ezrael.livejournal.com]

Well, since he's a self-absorbed prat, he probably would have freaked out if Mercer said "I don't swing that way" or become all stalkery. I don't remember off of the top of my head if they ever said that Mercer doesn't swing that way, actually, but I gotta be honest, gay or not, there's nothing attractive about a narcissist of Donighal's caliber. I'd be turned off hard. Then again, I know the sharpshooter (I forget her name) had feelings for Donighal. So maybe there's something there... all I know is, when I was playing Aberrant, I was very glad we weren't using the metastory. (Our Aberrant game was basically "You're the JLA/Authority/Avengers of your world, and big shit is constantly happening.")

[aberrantangels]

Well, since he's a self-absorbed prat, he probably would have freaked out if Mercer said "I don't swing that way" or become all stalkery.

To a certain extent, he became all stalkery toward Æon (and they became obsessed with him in their own way).

I don't remember off of the top of my head if they ever said that Mercer doesn't swing that way

Not in so many words, but I see signs of tension between him and Sarah Gettel, the daredevil reportress.

Then again, I know the sharpshooter (I forget her name) had feelings for Donighal.

Annabelle Lee "Crackshot" Newfield, and yeah. In fact, it led her to betray Æon (the Continuing the Continuum and EON Online crews have each announced plans to do supplements dealing with that era and the events that turned Primoris into Mal — you heard it here first).

I was very glad we weren't using the metastory. (Our Aberrant game was basically "You're the JLA/Authority/Avengers of your world, and big shit is constantly happening.")

Good way of doing it, and sounds like a damn cool campaign idea. (Got logs, by any chance?) Aberrant works well as a generic superhero game IMO, and in fact, once you've thrown out a certain critical amount of the TU metaplot (though YMMV on where that critical point arises), I'd say it makes a certain amount of sense to throw out the TU itself.

[ezrael.livejournal.com]

Anyway, on to what our Aberrant game was: this was a real life game at AU with rotating DM's from the Writing Department, none of whom I talk to anymore, so I will by necessity be reconstructing it from memory.

The basic idea was that over the past fifty years or so (from about WWII on) things had been getting pretty steadily weirder. The reason that I and Jana came up with which was ultimately revealed about five sessions from the end was that Nemesis, an evil star which destroyed whole solar systems by crashing into their suns and consuming their stores of hydrogen, was on its way to the earth solar system and as a defense mechanism over the past few billion years the earth had been evolving intelligent life, the ultimate goal being superhumans like us. If you've ever seen the Unlikely document I made up, that was an attempt to translate the team into Aberrantverse terms: we were much more badass than that. The main big-guns of the group were:

Mitchell Xander Damon, aka Daimon, a pretty interestingly machiavellian "head" type with high Mega-Intelligence allowing him to predict your thoughts with uncanny accuracy (telepathy, basically);
Teristha Manton, also called Singularity, who could manipulate gravity;
Mia Viernes, who took the superheroic nom du guerre of Slip, who could mess around with spatial perception and eventually actually warp space itself;
Morrison Raney, no alias, who was kind of our Batman... he was an FBI agent who had two dots in every Mega-Attribute and a host of skills;
Tristin Sarris/Serpentis, who was also called "Mister Bad Luck" and who had Entropy powers he used pretty indiscriminately;
Petra Dneiper, who was your classic Matter Chamelon;
and finally Marc Rossmore aka Hyperion, who could convert solar energy into super powers very much like those of a famous comic book character.

I actually have stats for these guys if you're interested in seeing them. There were a lot of people who could only make it sporadically to games: those were the PC's that were there the most often, the core of the group, as it were. The entry's too big, so expect another comment to follow.

[ezrael.livejournal.com]

In additon to the Nemesis star coming to eat the sun, there were two or three other big plots percolating around the same time. One of the biggest was that an exile from the Dreamworld, a svartalvar unseelie noble called The Prelate of Winter, had manipulated the dreams of a writer from Providence, RI into creating a new myth cycle that had the potential to grow powerful enough to challenge Yahweh himself in the Silver City of Heaven constructed out of all the capitals of all the myth cycles that had been conquered and assimilated by Christianity. The Prelate's goal was to capture an ancient artifact called The Silver Key and use it to unlock the Well of Infinity at the center of the world where Lucifer had been cast down millennia earlier, allowing the new god Cthulhu to enter into actual egregore status and challenge Yahweh Himself. While this was going on, we also had to deal with repeated incursions into our universe by The Insatiable, a multiversal entity that was pure hunger... hunger for knowledge, for worlds to consume, for experiences that by definition it could not have...it incarnated itself as a physical entity once, which was the easiest time we fought it: the next time, it created out of a Walter Mitty type a servant who could kick pretty much all our asses and in order to defeat him, we had to deny him any new experiences, which we paradoxically did by allowing him to open the portal to The Insatiable and then using Slip's powers to trick him into entering the portal, thus rendering him adrift in an unvariated anti-universe.

There were also more standard plots. For instance, one of our big villains was The Amalgamate: in the tradition of big superhero teams, he was our Amazo/Super-Adaptoid villain, except his powers were a little different: instead of copying the powers of the whole team or having them all to start with, he instead had the powers of whatever members of the team weren't there to fight him. So he would always arrange for some other villain or villains to attack us, in order to split us up so that he'd at least have the powers of the half of the team that wasn't there (he was always pretty tough, though, because of all those PC's who were sporadically involved in the group... he always have several different powers to fall back on). There was a group of interstellar insects who would commit bizarre robberies for no real understandable reason that we had to stop from time to time... it turned out near the end of the campaign that they were trying to build a device that would prevent Nemesis from being able to home in on our sun.

The last session was a big two parter with everyone who'd ever played in the game, pretty much. While the most powerful members of the team went into space to take on Nemesis directly, Daimon and Raney came up with a plan to thwart the Prelate of Winter and prevent Cthulhu from rising from the Well of Infinity to challenge Yahweh and thus wipe out the entire world. The plan actually involved several of the team deliberately dying in order to be in Hell when the Prelate of Winter arrived at the Well, in addition to Hyperion and Singularity tearing Nemesis apart and feeding his anti-solar energy into Hyperion, who was then fired through a wormhole and onto Earth just as the Seelie Host arrived in an attempt to kill off everyone who believed or enjoyed Lovecraft's work so that Cthulhu couldn't rise.

It was a fun game, and it went out big. Of course we won. But it was close a *lot*.