After posting my review of The Paxton Gambit, this was the first review I wrote explicitly for RPGNet in 1998.

White Wolf had been trying to get a science fiction game published for awhile. Mark Rein*Hagen had spent a couple of years developing Exile, and when Aeon was first announced there was wide speculation that it was going to be a heavily retooled version of the same. It wasn’t.

Adding to the confusion, the owners of Aeon Flux sent a cease and desist order to White Wolf — apparently claiming a wide ownership of the name “Aeon” when used to describe any science fiction setting. So the game was retitled Trinity, but not before the initial, limited edition of the game had already shipped.

This edition of the game featured a hard shell of black plastic protecting a ring-bound document. This was controversial, but even years later I’m a fan. Unlike normal ring-binding, this was attractive and durable. But like normal ring-binding, it allowed the book to easily lay flat for easy reference during game sessions.

(What isn’t controversial is that the replacement edition — using a cheap cardboard shell and titled Trinity — was dreadful. Several years later, however, a great little softcover edition of the game was issued.)

I picked up the limited edition of the Aeon game (now known as Trinity) for four reasons:

(1) I had been hearing about it and I knew it was going to be a major release. I try to stay on top of major releases so that I have my finger on the pulse of the gaming industry.

(2) Whatever else might be said about White Wolf games, I have always been able to rely on them for fantastic settings.

(3) I heard they had done some fix-up work on their Storyteller system — since I’ve always felt the system to be a good one at heart, despite some serious flaws, I wanted to see if they had finally fixed the problems with it.

(4) That black folder-flap design was just so sexy, you had to buy it.

So how does it stand up after my first read-through?

First, Trinity (the Game Formerly Known As Aeon) is definitely a major release and — with the recent death of the new Traveller game — has every chance of being the science fiction game for the next few years to come. I have no confidence in what I’ve seen of the Alternity game coming from TSR in the near future, and the only other strong contenders in the market right now would be Heavy Gear and Jovian Chronicles from Dream Pod 9 — both games which I feel fit better into the genre of “mecha games” than the genre of “science fiction games”. The graphical lay-out of the piece is the best I’ve seen from White Wolf, which is saying quite a bit given White Wolf’s history of strong graphical releases.

The setting, as is typical for White Wolf games, comes first — before the rules. It is told in the form of a “press release” or “official history” told from the perspective of the Aeon Trinity organization. The Aeon Trinity is a benign conspiracy of sorts which got its start in the early 20th century with a mission statement of helping guide humanity towards Unity (the first of three words which you’ll see on all of the Trinity ads). In the near future humans with bizarre psychic powers appear — these Aberrants get their powers from a tumorous growth in their brains referred to as the Mazarin-Rashoud node (after the scientists who discovered and explored it). Unfortunately this node also had the effect of slowly, over time, driving all of the Aberrants malevolently insane. The Aberrant War which ensued tore the world apart — destroying much of North America and Europe — until China threatened to destroy the planet from orbital nuclear stations unless the Aberrants left. Members of the Aeon Trinity left with them, in a supreme Sacrifice (the second of those three words) to help preserve mankind. China then, for reasons unknown, relinquished the incredible amount of power they had over the world.

The world then proceeded to rebuild itself. A few years ago people known only as Proxies appeared, and through an electrochemical process awakened the latent psi powers of mankind a second time. With the aid of the Aeon Trinity they revealed themselves to the world as benevolent helpers. The in the pseudo-science of the game, psi powers work by the manipulation of a previously undiscovered sub-atomic force particle named a “psion”. Due to the idiocy of the public the name of the force particle was extended to the psychic humans themselves and, along with several other nicknames, psions become the moniker of these new psychics.

With the aid of the psions specializing in teleportation mankind began to reach out into deep space — and made contact with their first alien species, the Qin.

A sidenote here: The treatment of aliens in Trinity is some of the best in RPGs to date. They aren’t just humans in fancy costumes, they think and behave differently than we do.

Then the Aberrants came back — and in a particularly vicious assault on an orbiting Earth station sent it crashing into France, destroying much of that country. Simultaneously with this assault the teleporters disappeared, cutting Earth off from its deep space settlements.

Now, a few years later, the first in a line of jumpships capable of interstellar travel without the aid of the teleporters is coming on-line. It’s time to take the fight back to the Aberrants with the aid of the psions — more limited in their power than the Aberrants, but capable of teamwork. The psions have given mankind Hope (and there’s the last of the three words).

Add to this the Chromatics, an apparently hostile race who appeared on the edges of human explored space just before the teleporters appeared, and the Coalition — a group of aliens who mysteriously attacked an Earth ship just as the game begins — and you’ve got an action packed game. And we haven’t even gotten into all the Earthside conflicts in the setting.

Unfortunately, there are a few problems. First, the book tells us almost nothing about what the Aberrants have been up to since their disappearance. This is all right since we can just have a few periphereal attacks until supplements telling us more come out so that we can take the fight to their own worlds, but far more egregious is the oversight of telling us what happened to the colony worlds in our years of absence. When a major plot of the game is supposedly “taking the fight back out there” it’s a little difficult to do that when we don’t know what it’s like out there — have our colonies all been destroyed? Are only some of them destroyed? Which ones?

Then we come to the Coalition. Literally the only thing we are told about them is that there has been contact between them and one of our ships, our ship was destroyed, and we don’t know anything else about them. Well, I guess I won’t be using them in any games until I’ve spent another $20 on a supplement to find out who the hell they are.

Nor are we told who the Proxies really are — which wouldn’t be so bad, but we aren’t told what their plans are. We are told again and agian of the “great plans” of the Proxies, yet we are never told what they are or given enough information about the Proxies to guess what they might be.

Only the Chromatics are usable as-is, but we don’t know much about them — so don’t use them too much.

Also, the psion “orders” are organized by both function and the predominant type of psion power found in them. This makes little sense — since one of the main things touted over and over again is the way different psions cooperate, the orders should be defined purely as functions, not functions and powers. The function of one order, for example, is to take the fight out to the Aberrants — yet there is only one type of psi power present in the order? This makes little sense.

So the setting is good, there’s just some fairly major holes left in it. Cliffhangers are good in fiction, and they can also be good in RPGs (witness the Heavy Gear game) — however, when everything important to the game is an unexplained cliffhanger I have some problems.

Which brings us to the system. If you’ve never had any problems with the Storyteller system before, this game will pose no problem. The Psi powers are nicely built into the game, although you may find them a little limiting in places due to the fact that you are railroaded along once you’ve selected your development paths.

If you’ve had problems with previous versions of the Storyteller system, this might be a good time to revisit it. In the original Storyteller system the most egregious problem was the fact that, above certain difficulty levels, the chance for you to botch on any given roll began to increase as your skill increased. To changes have been instituted in this new system to eliminate this problem. First, the target number is no longer variable and remains a stationary 7. Second, the “Rule of One” has been altered.

Another significant changes comes in the combat system, where a system of “Lethal damage” has been added — damage which cannot be soaked. This makes guns far more deadly in Trinity than they have been previously.

While both these changes fix a few problems which have been raised about Storyteller systems in the past, they do not fix them all (the probability curve is still more difficult to predict than your more traditional sytems). Nor do they change the basic aesthetic feel of the game. If you have a problem adding an attribute and a stat together based on the situation in question — or with rolling a fistful of d10s and counting successes — then you’re still not going to like the Storyteller system.

And what about that black cover? Well, it’s sexy and it’s cool. I don’t know if that still holds true for the new cover on the regular version of the game though.

So, to sum up:

The setting is great — if you don’t mind buying supplements. Otherwise you’re going to be left creating a lot of stuff from scratch and — worse yet — finding yourself incompatible with future releases when they do come out. About the only serious problem is the dual-definition of orders as both power-type and function — I would suggest GMs just quietly ignore one or the other and move on.

The system — while fixing many problems — is still the Storyteller system. If you’ve played the World of Darkness games you’re learning curve will not be steep, nor do I think you’ll find any of the changes to the rules harmful (although if you like non-deadly combat you might want to take those lethal damage rules back out again). If you simply dislike the idea of rolling many dice and counting successes — or the idea of finding both the most appropriate skill and attribute — you’re going to have to find something else to play the game with, or simply pass it over.

Overall, I would suggest buying this game. It’s a strong product. It does have its weak points however, and you might be advised to hold off for awhile until White Wolf’s supplements fill in some of those gaps.

Style: 5 (Excellent!)
Substance: 4 (Meaty)

Author: Andrew Bates and Ken Cliffe (Developers)
Category: game
Company/Publisher: White Wolf
Cost: $30.00
Page count: 320
ISBN: 1-56504-757-5
Originally Posted: 04/18/98

This review was cited by White Wolf developers as one of the factors that led to them revising the rulebook when it was re-released to include the key setting information necessary to run the game.

On a personal level, it played a major role in shaping my own personal theories on how roleplaying game lines could be effectively structured. I was accused of being “anti-supplement”, but that’s not the case: I just feel that supplements should be supplementary. An RPG’s core gameplay needs to be playable out of the rulebook.

I was also accused of being “anti-creative”, but obviously that’s not true, either. I do, however, feel that the point of buying an RPG product is that you don’t have to do the work for yourself. Saying that leaving out chunks of key information necessary for playing the game is OK because the GM can just “make it up for themselves” is just a variation on the Rule 0 Fallacy. You can make up your own rules, but the point of buying a rulebook is to save you the time, take advantage of someone else’s expertise, to try something new, or all of the above. And the same holds true for game settings and adventures.

As discussed previously, this was the first review I posted to RPGNet. It was originally written for the Heavy Gear Mailing List and then reposted to RPGNet when Dream Pod 9 requested that HGML posters report their reviews at the site.

This, of course, also means that this is some of the earliest writing I ever did for a semi-professional audience. Be gentle in your judgments.

[ Warning: This review will contain spoilers of the adventure series contained in this product. If you are intending to play through the story told in this product you should stop reading now. ]

The Paxton Gambit, unsurprisingly, is another sterling DP9 product for their Heavy Gear line. The first 25 pages expand upon the information given on Peace River previously (in Into the Badlands and the Second Edition Heavy Gear rulebook). The next 32 pages are a campaign supplement, and the remaining 6 are Paxton Gear designs.

Peace River has been covered previously, so what’s there in terms of background is pretty scarce — you get some new info on the political situation as of 1935, details of the Badlands Quarter, some detailed maps, an overview of the POC structure, and a number of new NPCs (all of which are important in the campaign portion of the book).

The Paxton Gear designs are … well, they’re Gears. What do you want?

The campaign supplement is, however, the book’s strength, in my opinion. You get 27 pages of story material stretching over nearly 20 days and nine gaming sessions (your mileage may vary, of course). You also get a page of “Continuing Hooks” which tell you where to go next if you want to continue the campaign, and four pages of handouts for the players.

The main section of the campaign is separated into three acts, each containing three scenarios. Each scenario consists of “Milestones”, which detail each important scene or sequence for the players to engage in. They also contain “Complications and Continuing Hooks” — little extras unessential to the main plot, but which can be thrown in to add complexity to the sessions themselves or cause headaches down the line for the players.

The plot of the campaign is thus (these are the spoilers):

In the wake of the Oxford Agreement (see CoF) Emir Shirow of Basal can no longer rely on the CNCS or NLC to supply him with arms in his rebellion, leaving him with only one serious option: Paxton Arms. He dispatches his lover and ambassador Victorya Hiro to Peace River to negotiate the deal. However, he doesn’t have enough money to fund the project completely. Therefore, Hiro will also be secretly negotiating with the NLC in order to get the money to make the deal with Paxton Arms. Jacques Molay will be dispatching SRID operatives to break up the deal because he doesn’t like the Basal rebellion for personal reasons, but this also means that these operatives have a chance of uncovering the NLC deal, which will break the Oxford Agreement and bring down the SR’s wrath on Shirow. Added to this is the fact that the SRID typically deals with the Forzi in Peace River for this type of low-profile work, but the Forzi in Peace River are actually controlled by the BRF’s local leader Sund! ra Gabriel, and she would like nothing better than to screw this deal up herself and make things tough on Paxton Arms. And, of course, the Patriarch of the ESE has gotten wind of the deal and dispatched agents to eliminate the Basal forces involved in the deal. This is the point where the players enter.

The campaign is designed so that, with a minimal amount of work, the GM can sit down with his players and start playing. Indeed, if you’re particularly effective at off-the-cuff playing you could probably run the thing untouched once you’ve got the material down and copies made of the hand-outs. The scenario is also designed, however, to allow existing campaigns to intersect with the story with a bit more work involved. Clearly you can see with all these different groups coming together over one deal (CNCS and NLC, SRID, BRF, Paxton/Peace River security and executives, Basal Uprising, ESE, etc.) there are a multitude of different ways for a GM to get his players involved in the events of this story. But the campaign is designed around the idea that players will be assuming the roles of Peace Officers.

They are introduced into the action as honor guards to the arrival of the Basalite ambassadors, and are put under the temporary command of Colonel Lenaris. They are also introduced at this point to Helen Luka, a reporter in search of the big scoop. The next day they are put on surveillance of a group arriving on a cargo maglev line — clearly undercover. These are the NLC negotiators arriving.

>From this point on in they are drawn into a dizzying array of political events and placed under the direct command of Lenaris as they become the only agents he can trust in this matter. Early on in the campaign they eliminate the Patriarch’s force in Peace River and think they’re doing pretty well, until the depths of the BRF and SRID involvement is revealed.

By the time the dust clears it is fully possible for the players to have been instrumental in completely destroying the SRID and BRF presence in Basal, Sundra Gabriel will be dead, they will have saved all Peace River from a reactor meltdown, the deal will have gone off perfectly, and they will be trusted agents of both Lenaris and HEO DuBeau-Slovenski.

So are where are the weaknesses? Well, one of them is Helen Luka. She hangs around the players like a faithful dog during the first act, and then abruptly disappears from the campaign entirely. Considering she’s given a full page write-up I would expect her to be of slightly more importance in the campaign. Also odd is the complete lock-down on any communication or travel in or out of Peace River for nearly 24 hours during the course of the adventure. While I have no doubt — PR being an arcology and all — that this would be possible, the repercussions on a major export economy of this happening are never mentioned (not even in the “Continuing Hooks” section) in the book.

The latter is, perhaps, a matter of selective blindness and saying that the resolution “takes place off-stage”. The former is a major plot oversight, in my opinion, and should be resolved by any GM considering running this campaign.

However, despite those reservations I would say that the story is a strong one, and I think all GMs should consider picking the book up if their players would have any chance of intersecting with the events detailed therein, it will be well worth your while. It is also a good example of how to tie players into the larger events of Terra Nova without disrupting the main flow of the primary storyline (if you ignore the complete rout of BRF forces in Peace River, which is clearly a major plot point in the continuing saga of Terra Nova — the adventure could just as easily be completed without this type of major conclusion).

Style: 5 (Excellent!)
Substance: 4 (Meaty)

Author: Michael Butler and Guy-Francis Vella
Category: game
Company/Publisher: Dream Pod 9
Cost: $15.95
Page count: 64
ISBN: 1-896776-33-7
Originally Posted: 04/17/98.

Way back on July 4th, 2005, I launched the Alexandrian with the cleverly titled post “Welcome to the Alexandrian“. In that post, I talked about how I had become a freelance writer. The 100+ reviews I wrote for RPGNet played a major role in that story, but I wrapped up my post by saying: “But if you go to RPGNet today, you won’t find any of my reviews there. What happened? Well, that’s another story for another day.”

Then I didn’t really follow-up on that, largely because there were more interesting things to talk about.

But I’ve had people pinging me for awhile now wanting access to some of the content from my older reviews. And the original (and continuing) purpose of the Alexandrian is to archive my creative work. To that end, I’m going to start posting those old reviews in order to properly archive them away. Which means that “another day” has finally arrived.

THE REVIEWS

I posted my first review to RPGNet in the spring of 1998.

It was a review of The Paxton Gambit, a campaign supplement for the Heavy Gear roleplaying game, and it had originally been written for and posted to the Heavy Gear Mailing List. RPGNet had been around for a couple of years at that point, but the site was just beginning to get noticed by the larger RPG community. One of the people who noticed was Phillippe Boulle, who — at the time — was an editor at Dream Pod 9. He, in turn, posted a message to the Heavy Gear Mailing List asking that fans of the game go to RPGNet and post reviews of their favorite Dream Pod 9 products. When I saw Phillippe’s message, I took the review I had already written, popped over to RPGNet, and posted it.

That was a lot of fun and, to make a long story short, I kept doing it. In fact, over the next four years I would do it 165 times.

In those early days, the RPGNet community was heavily focused on the reviews: There was no general forum, but there was a discussion thread associated with each review. That meant that all of the discussion on the site was focused through whatever reviews had been posted in the last couple of weeks. It meant that the community was radically neophilic and intensely focused on RPGs.

It also meant that, if you were a successful reviewer, you were the genesis point for sprawling discussions that could go on for dozens or even hundreds of posts.

In retrospect, it’s pretty easy to recognize that RPGNet was actually serving as one of the pioneers in the newly-emerging blogosphere: Each review was effectively a blog post and the emergent community was blog-focused. At the time, it was just exciting. I’d been participating in online discussion groups since 1988 or ’89; but here I was actually finding an audience.

From ’98 through ’02, I was one of the top three or four reviewers on RPGNet. During this time period, the site went through several changes of ownership, one of which nearly destroyed the site before it was returned to Sandy Antunes (the founder). In 2001, it was then sold to Skotos Tech.

Throughout this time period I continued writing reviews. In May 2001, in fact, the site ran a “Justin Bacon Review Week” in which all of the reviews posted that week (20+ total) were written by me. That was pretty awesome and I felt very honored. Around this same time, I was asked by Sandy Antunes to help develop content for a D20 Nation website that he wanted to launch as a partner-site with RPGNet. (Unfortunately, those plans never came to fruition.)

The site was also changing, however.

Forum software had been installed at some point. This was almost certainly a good thing (the site would have probably died completely during the period when its owners weren’t updating the content if it hadn’t been for the forum), but it also meant that the character of the site was changing: The community was becoming forum-oriented instead of review-oriented.

(One memory from this time period in particular: The early forum software didn’t have any accounts. You just typed in your name and left your message. There was a period of a couple weeks where somebody was deliberately trolling the forums by posting incendiary posts under my name. It took me awhile to figure out what the heck was going on, and eventually the guy responsible confessed. I suspect this incident contributed significantly to the site updating to new forum software with registered accounts shortly thereafter.)

In mid-2002, I posted what was essentially my last review at RPGNet. (In mid-2004, I posted a review of A Game of Thrones. But it was a fluke.) Partly this was because professional work was chewing up more and more of my time. Partly it was because the RPG review community had completely fetishized the reviewing of typography and binding quality instead of actual content and gameplay. But largely it was because the audience for reviews at RPGNet had severely atrophied.

PARTING OF THE WAYS

I remained an active member of the RPGNet community, however, until 2004.

In October 2003, I was participating in a thread where somebody was voicing incredulity at the idea of someone owning more than a hundred RPGs, claiming that a hundred RPGs didn’t even exist. I pointed out that hundreds of free RPGs were available on the web; so you could own hundreds of RPGs without even spending a dollar. After a couple rounds of this, I compiled and typed up a very lengthy list of the free RPGs I owned and posted it. This took about 2-3 hours worth of effort.

This list prompted several pages worth of interesting discussion. Several days later, however, one of the forum moderators did a drive-by on the thread and deleted the entire post as “threadcrapping”. I was irate at having 2-3 hours of work eradicated and responded with, “Fuck You.”

In retrospect, I probably should have saved a local copy of the post. And I probably could have been more politic in my response to the atrociously poor moderation. But I wasn’t and I got hit with a 90-day ban for mouthing off to the incompetent moderator.

Several months later, after the ban had expired, I came back and found that I couldn’t log into my account. Reconstructing events after the fact, it appears that one of the moderators (probably a fellow operating under the name “Kuma”) had decided to change the password and e-mail address on my account in an effort to secretly turn a temporary ban into a permanent one. E-mails to RPGNet went unanswered, so I created a new account under the name “Justin A. Bacon” and continued posting.

In August or September of 2004, Kuma started trying to IP ban me from the forum. Since I was posting from a dynamic IP, this completely failed. (I wasn’t even aware he was doing it, since he’d posted his intentions in a thread I was no longer reading.) After several weeks of this, another moderator apparently got around to banning the “Justin A. Bacon” account for “avoiding a ban”. (This was, of course, completely untrue. For several years after this it was quite hilarious because the “Justin Bacon” account had still never been banned, although it looks like they finally got around to “fixing” that recently.)

I sent an e-mail to the site and was told to wait a couple of days for the issue to be resolved. After a week or so, it hadn’t been.

At this point I posted to Trouble Tickets asking for an explanation. None was forthcoming. It took several days and many other people posting to both the forum thread and e-mailing RPGNet before they finally got around to posting their explanation: They believed that I had posted at some point during my 90-day ban and were, therefore, permabanning me.

Did they have a link to that post? No.

Could they find a link to that post? No.

Was there any way to fix this issue? Yes. Within 1-2 days, they would confirm the existence or nonexistence of the post Kuma claimed it existed.

… only they didn’t do that. Instead they closed the thread so that no one could post to it.

A month and a half later, somebody else posted a thread asking: “Hey. What’s going on here?” The moderators still had no explanation.

During this time period, I was being contacted by others. Something was deeply, deeply rotten in the moderation team at RPGNet and I wasn’t the only one having problems.

I decided to raise the stakes: I publicly announced that if RPGNet didn’t want me as a member of the community, then I would pull my reviews.

The point was to raise the profile not only of my issues with the moderation team, but the general issues the community was having with the moderation team. I was hoping that it would force the new owners of the site to put their cards of the table and make it clear what sort of site RPGNet was going to be. In this I was successful, although not in the way that I had hoped: Still unable to produce the posts demonstrating that there was any justification whatsoever for my permabanning, the owners of the site instead permabanned me for daring to exercise my IP rights.

I shrugged and walked away. The RPGNet I had once fervently supported was obviously dead and gone.

POSTSCRIPT

I do remember quite vividly, though, my final e-mail exchange with the ownership. They wanted to give me “one last chance” to let them keep my reviews on the site. They wrote: “By removing them from RPGNet, you’re destroying the value of your reviews.”

This taught me an important lesson: When an organization believes that your work has value because they allow it to appear in their venue (rather than the reality, which is that the content is what gives a venue value) then you’re probably better off getting away from that organization as quickly as possible.

In the years since then, the situation at RPGNet has only worsened. The Tangency forums have become the tail wagging the dog. There are members of the moderation team who take great pride in the fact that they’ve never played an RPG. (This fact boggles my mind every time somebody mentions it.)

The site, which once made its name on the participation of major RPG professionals (priding itself as the “Inside Scoop on Gaming”), has become increasingly hostile to them. It’s becomes a popular past time for posters to bait professionals posting to the boards so that the professionals will get banned. At one point, this was coupled with a ludicrous policy of banning discussions of games written by people who had been banned.

A couple years ago a friend of mine told me he was being accused by RPGNet’s mods of being my sock-puppet because he included links to products I had written (and he had helped edit) in his .sig. Last year I had a complete stranger send me an e-mail saying that RPGNet’s mods were making the same accusations towards him.

I’m not sure what to tell either of them. I enjoy discussing and debating RPGs. It improves my games. It improves my writing.

But RPGNet? It’s a cesspool. And, sadly, it’s a cesspool that’s been created by the very mechanism which is supposed to be keeping the water clean.

In any case, that’s the nutshell version of my rollercoaster ride with RPGNet. Hopefully you found it at least mildly entertaining. But mostly it’s my way of introducing the reposting and archiving of the reviews I wrote for RPGNet “back in the day”. I’ll be starting later today and posting them semi-regularly until I’m done.