Talk:Aberrant: Exile

Interest List

• Claude: 412, coalition, texas
• Marisa: Facepunching the Coalition, Bahrain, Chromatics
• Starlance: Burning the South, Coalition, Britain, Bahrain
• Quasar: Coalition, Britain, Bahrain
• Scarlet: Coalition, Bahrain, 412, Texas, Chromatics, Meet the Norca
• Raz: Britain, Coalition, Texas
• Vicky: 412, Chromatics, Texas
• Isis: 412, Coalition, Britain

Coalition Options

• White Lies, Black Ops: The good thing about the Coalition being told everything one of the ambassadors on the second mission knew was that she didn't know everything. She didn't know that the Leviathan had managed to launch a FTL message pod back to Earth, and they don't know the human race knows it's got a deadline. For now, it serves their purposes to not act like anything's amiss until Earth gets invaded. Of course, that's an advantage if you're going around doing black bag ops on their outposts and arkships...

Probable Emphasis: Investigation + Stealth (if you get into a fight, they have literally a million Spinals they can throw at you until you die)

Interested Parties: Quasar (Secondary), Vicky (Secondary), Scarlet, Claude (1), Starlance, Isis(1).

Likely Final Party Makeup: Isis, Scarlet, Claude, Finn, Zach

• The Ballad of the (Edenite) Green Berets: Welcome to sunny Mintaka III, where the average temperature is a nice 380 degrees Kelvin in the summer and the only reason the oceans don't boil is that the atmosphere is literally as thick as molasses. Of course, the extremophilic alien race there doesn't mind too much, which is probably why the Coalition is busy assimilating them and their genetics for hostile environment resistant Spinal breeds. And Coalition tech still works more or less fine in such extreme environs. For the inhabitants of Mintaka III, who have barely managed to hit the Industrial Revolution, being attacked by the Coalition is definitely not something they were prepared for. Of course, if you can give them the tools to fight back...

Probable Emphasis: Nova Powers (very little human designed is going to work on fucking Venus), Instruction

Interested Parties: Vicky, Quasar, Starlance (2), Raz, Scarlet (Second), Marisa, Claude (3)

Likely Final Party Makeup: Vicky, Quasar, Marisa, Starlance, and Raz

• Kidnappings: Oh no! Coalition ninjas have kidnapped your/your friend's ally/mentor/followers! Are you a bad enough eximorph to stop the Coalition?

Probable Emphasis: Combat?

Interested Parties: Claude (2), Quasar (Third), Raz (second), MArisa (second), Vicky, Isis(2)

Likely Final Party Makeup: Finn, some others.

Hanging Hooks

• The Coalition are coming to rape and/or kill everyone.

• Assist the Aeon coalition mission
• Save the crippled Leviathan
• Doyen are manipulating the Chromatics.
• Investigate possible cyberkinetic novas in China.
  • +Japan rep
  • China is a surveillance state full of telepaths
• Investigate Bahrain
  • Taint Hazard
• Push over Norsefire
• Investigate Process 412
• Burn the South
  • +Norca rep
  • Taint Hazard
• Loot H-M stuff in Texas

Other Objectives

• Rehabilitate novas on Earth - Aeon may plan for this already, but rape aliens.
• Build up France
• Salvage the Qin
• Some characters want to get formal educations (to keep up with the M-Ints in the party who seem to be driving the plot forward on their own).
• Find out what causes Eufibre rejection, and do it to the Colony - need a nova/aberrant with it for purposes of study.
  • Alternatively, cause that Eufiber to become Vampiric to severely lower its ability to use Quantum effectively.
• Build Whaleship Magetherion. Starship made from various gadgets and a gadget whale (initially modified with Form Manipulation).
  • Find the creator of the Sundogs and ask for research notes. We'll save time.
  • Use samples from the Leviathan (if we rescue it).

Coalition Brainstorming

• A quantum-powered blight to destroy their hardtech (magic bullets not likely to work)
• A quantum-powered plague to destroy their wettech (ditto)
• A giant bomb (known to fail)
• Sic aliens on them
  • Chromatics will be willing but aren't up to the task
  • Qin will probably not be willing
• Fighting them normally (lol)
• All of the above
• Give them what they want but not how they want it.

National Management

Screwball's Ramblings

Each nation or polity consists of a number of sites (the party has a single site under their control in the form of Sanctuaire). Each site provides one background point that can be spend on national scale versions of the Resources, Followers, Contacts (representing intelligence services) and Influence (diplomacy) backgrounds.

Each point of National Resources counts as five dots of the character scale background in terms of how much cash it produces.
Each point of Followers allows the nation to raise and equip a battalion of soldiers (armour and aircraft are bought as units using cash).
Dunno how to do Contacts and Influence yet.

Need to work out a way to allocate sites to nations, unless MJ is just going to declare that China has however many sites he feels it should have, for example. Numbers are, obviously, not final.

Rather than doing anything complex, why not simply scale off of China as a reference? Five stats: Resources, Army, Diplomacy, Intelligence and Power. China has all of these at five. Resources is how wealthy a nation is, and is relevant to space power mostly, but also trade and so forth. Army is, in general, planet based military, to include aircraft and ships as well as ground troops. Diplomacy and intelligence are self explanatory. Power is 'national quantum'; it represents how powerful overall your nation is - a nation with a large military and an anaemic economy would not be a top tier power. It should be noted that a high stat doesn't just mean how large an army a state has, for example, but also how good they are at using it. Modern North Korea would have only a middling to low army stat, for example, because despite having a lot of kit, it's generally not very good, and they'd probably be pretty ineffective on the battlefield.

The power stat is pre set; China, as the pre-eminent human nation has power five (and also maxed stats, because they're the strongest and excellent at everything). The FSA and whatever Africa calls itself, as second tier powers, have power four. The Norca and Japan would be power three (Norca may be four, I dunno), and tier two would be smaller powers like Britain and Germany, but Eden without novas would probably slot in here as well. Tier one represents microstates or organisations like the Knights in France, who actually have the capability to muster some military force and can legitimately aspire to being some sort of government, but lack recognition or the sort of broad power base they need to be self-evidently an actual nation.

To do: actual nation stats!

Peel

Observations & Thoughts:

• A state provides: Resources, Followers, Contacts, Sanctum(s), obviously Citizenship, and other things. However, a character cannot muster the full power of his state at any one time, and the proportion he can decreases with increasing state size.
• Resources already expands to the national scale; Followers do not. Maybe they should above 5?
• There is a difference between prosperity due to a singular good ruler and prosperity due to good institutions. The former needs constant investment from the ruler (the PC), the latter does not (or not as much). However, the former is much easier to create and to enhance to 'nova levels'.
• The rules should primarily govern what a state provides for the character, with maybe some simple rules for interorganisational conflict. Aberrant is a game about singular heroes, not armies.
• A state has ratings for Size, Prosperity and (Morale and/or Coherency).
• The scale should peak at several billions (for world governments) and bottom out at a few thousand (for towns in the post-apocalyptic wasteland created by letting PCs run a world government). Obviously, it is not linear.

BM's Thoughts and other Garbage

• Easiest way to handle armies with Aberrant is to go the RoTK route - military forces are built around an individual character, and that character's stats are used for resolution, with minor modifications due to the nature, size, and training of troops. This is easy to implement, as simple to resolve as character combat, but requires a bit of SoD.
• For states, focus on the basics; population, economy, technology base, military. WW systems thrive on the basics - this isn't a nation game, it's a character game with nations as an auxiliary. 1 to 5 scales are all we need.
• Equate nation stats to attribute categories (physical, mental, social), with Abilities to govern more specific details like technology, national skill focus, etc.

An example scale:

Population: The number of warm bodies a nation has. 1 represents a town or two, or a highly decentralized population, while 5 represents a city state of extreme density. deals with workforce, and military pool. Can be scaled easily depending on what is acceptable (I assume small states for the purpose of ease). Nation equivalent of Physical stats.

Abilities: Medical, Labour, Military, Hunting, Agriculture

Infrastructure: The nation's general buildup of facilities, reflects on technology and learned skills as well as cultural buildup. 1 means unwashed, illiterate masses squatting in hovels and yurts; 5 means post-modern levels of buildings, bright/dark future, etc. The equivalent of Mental stats.

Abilities: Architecture, Technology (subsections?), Education, Arts, Sciences

Stability: The centralization and solidity of government within the nation; how much people see themselves as a single body and how easily they respond to central authority, whatever it may be. 1 means disconnected and somewhat warring villages, 5 means a strong well-policed nation. The equivalent of Social stats.

Abilities: Democracy, Police, Propaganda, Media, Diplomacy, Trade

M-stats for these three are tricky - they'd represent superscience modification, cloning, transgene therapies, or non-human populations. Bioroids and such. They require nova science to create. Probably better to handle them as seperate 'power' stats.

Nation XP might be a Thing (though it may not be gained just through play - perhaps only through use of Instruction or the Super-science rules?)