Ladies and gents, Aberrant: Forceful Personalities is now available for your downloading pleasure.

Have at it, folks!

Woohoo!

Of course, it had to come out when I'm too busy to read it.

Hmmm...not much in the way of reaction by the crowd here to the first significant item for Aberrant in the past few years.

Well I liked it!

It's been a long time since I've been on WW's web site, are you posted over there?

I would if I could, but their fracking new board coughs, sputters and chokes every time that I try to post there. It's a technical problem that they've had for a year now, and show no inclination to fix. I'd just re-register...except that registration is based on your e-mail address, and it won't let you do so if a registration already exists for your address. Fun, eh?

EDIT: In a desperation move, I've re-registered there with my back-up, never-use-this-for-anything e-mail address. It works.

Still reading.

They did some new things beyond simply penning a fan ebook. Its takes a little while to sink in.

Same here. I love the idea of adversarial backgrounds and I bet the original developers eventually read that and go, "d'OH!"

Downloaded it and will read it when I get the chance. Looks nice, and you are right. I should have offered up thanks to you and your crew the moment you posted this.

Thanks!!!

Oh, make no mistake, it wasn't "my" crew that did this. I was strictly at the low end; I handled layout, typesetting, and a little bit of editing (I'm a punctuation Nazi). Trust me: my "creative writing" skills are roughly on-par with those folks that come up with incomprehensible instructions for programming your VCR.

One, you are not a nazi. Two you are either way more creative than those VCR demon, or not nearly as evil. It depends on if they try to write that way or not.

Wow, thanks for mentioning this Timeslip.

Downloaded last night and from what I've read so far, this is great stuff, I'm really impressed. Definitely as good as the Brainwaves book, gets full marks from me

The adversarial backgrounds idea is great, from a storyteller point of view I will definitely be using it to keep track of my TT players.

I loved the chapter on the different mega-social attributes. There's an absolute ton of roleplaying ideas in there, the different enhancements and aberrations provide interesting food for thought about the way that mega-socials work. I'll be showing this bit to all my players with mega-socials.

Same goes for the symbolic combat idea, another good thing to show my players to give them inspiration and also very useful for storytellers thinking about NPC actions.

Yep, I like this a lot.

Timeslip, pass the word then to the powers that be; Great Book. Thanks for whatever level of work you did and especially for the post here...

Bravo!!!! Timeslip; your and your team should be given a statue in the hall of gamers. Great book, (there are some sinister intentions that i would love to explore presented in here)

With this Masterminds like Lex Luthor or the Puppetman (A la Wildcards) can come into their own.

I officially apologize for doubting you and EON.

Though as an encore i suggest you use a printed out copy of your book to beat certain gothic corporate leaders to death....

I have tried to down load this a couple times and cannot do it.

I liked the way that four colour tweak and dark tweak varients were in there as well. Thus encouraging what I consider one of the main strengths of the Aberrant game - it can be both four colour over the top and/or gritty realistic conspiracy stuff.

The official stuff favours one over the other to the point of ramming it down your throat.

Interesting.

Skimming through it.

I like the MegaUgliness concept but the Aberrations involved seem less like Aberrations and more like requirements to explain MegaUgly.

Some of the MegaManip enhancements seem too powerful, having durations of days or having no listed range and some of the aberrations, especially the lower level ones seem too punishing.

The background adjustments are interesting, as is the looking into Followers and their permutations.


I'll have to print it out to really give it a going over.


And Grandfather Monkey? Uhm...yeah.

I'm not sure why, but there's some sort of problem with EonOnline's site right now. For the meantime, you can get Forceful Personalities from my site, here:

http://www.peladine.com/FP-Final.pdf

TimeSlip, elsewhere in this section, we are discussing FF and I would like your viewpoints.

What is the deal with the Monkey?

Why didn't they go more into established religions? The Media?

Not that I don't think they did a bang-up job, but it seems to me that they pulled up short, or ran off on some tangents.

All I can say is that I did not author the product; I provided some small amount of editing in the way of grammatical issues and the like, and did the layout and typesetting.

My personal opinion? It's an e-book, a completely free item, and people should take what they want from it for their games. Some may want a link to the Adventure! setting, and those folks may find things such as Grandfather Monkey to help effect said link (don't forget that sentient simians were canon in Adventure!). Others who run Aberrant as a purely standalone setting may not like the idea...and if so, there's nothing stopping them from simply ignoring it.

I'm not at all certain why exposition on Mega-Socials and the Media would be needed. The media connections would seem to be obvious, and thus relatively easy for Storytellers to implement as they wish.

As for religions, that has a number of pitfalls. It would be incredibly easy to offend one heck of a lot of people if one or more of the world's major religions were to be explained as a Mega-Social led cult. It would also be one heck of a thing to try to shoehorn into cannon; what would Project Utopia, for example, have done differently if someone was manipulating, say, the Anglican Church in such a fashion? This is something that is really, really best left up to individual gaming groups...and the cult examples in the book provide a variety of hints on how such things could be done.

I found it interesting that even though previous source material brought up the existance of novas in the Catholic Church, and the largest single group of novas work "within the system" (Project Utopia), but they focuses instead on the "out of the box" interpretation of things.

The book beats up, over and over again, the sinister aspects of M-Socials. I would have liked to see more things about ...
-a nova priest in the Catholic Church, rising in the heiarchy.
-An "Oprah"-esque nova creating a multi-billion dollar empire.
-A mega-social investigative reporter.
... mainstream stuff.

One of the core aspects of Aberrant is that novas live "among" mankind, with them, sharing their lives, and whatever.

Yeah, I know I'm being picky. I felt that alot of their Plot Ideas belonged in a campaign book of ideas, not a sourcebook on Mega-Socials. I would thunk that the whole Acadamy thing would have been better placed in an Aberrant: Far East sourcebook.
Anyone else?

Those are some pretty darn good ideas. Muy cool.

In a game I played in early on there was a anti-mega social investigative reporter. Totally immune to megasocials and mental probes/manipulation, what have. Dude was fucking brutal. He'd do an interview with Alejandra and end up making her cry her eyes out because he wasn't lobbing softballs, he was going after her hardcore to get the real dirt. People were afraid of him and didn't want to speak to him, but if you're a celebrity what do you do? Ignore one of the most popular reporters out there?

hardcore prodigy... hardcore

Sorry, that was less supposed to be some "look at me! look at me!" and more agreement with CJR. Now, I'm ALL for digging the dark and stinky side of nova existence. But even I'll admit that is not the only side. And I'm not talking four color bullshit here. I'm talking just like CJR. What about the really honest, well meaning guy who erupts while giving his first sermon at the Sourwood Church of Christ? What happens when little Stewie Schmelnick erupts when he's standing in line for Star Wars: episode IX, A Return To Suck because he's being ripped by Triumph The Insult Dog and he ends up inspiring geeks across the world to unite as a single economic force? What about the a happy shit that gives the evil its meaty darkness?

I skimmed through chapter one on my first reading of the book, but having read that section properly...

I don't have Adventure so I really don't know what to make of Grandfather Monkey, even in one of my TT campaigns this would be far too OTT (this is from someone that allowed a telekinetic quantum bolt to manifest as a giant pink boxing glove). For a start there was a long tailed macaque nova instead of human nova being described as a three point flaw. Then there was the crystal idol which seemed to completely obviate any point/need for having taint. The other organisations were OK. De Leon foundation was a good idea with a chrysalis gone wrong leaking youthfullness. The NPC's seem to be overly powerful, do they really need all those powers and enhancements? The two cults provided the most interesting ideas for me. Church of the Immaculate Form was good even though Morbed seemed to be some sort of Tzimisce clone. The Temple of the Inner Light had a good twist and was the real gem of the organisations presented as far as I'm concerned.

I also would have liked to see more canon oriented ideas but if you want cross-over ideas then the first chapter is brilliant.

Re-reading the other chapters I still like them a lot. I can't find anything wrong with chapters two and three. I wouldn't actually get my players to convert their mega-social enhancements into mega-physical enhancements for a symbolic contest because that's what the role-playing is for, but I would suggest they look at that idea to encourage the roleplaying.

In chapter four some of the enhancements seem to be copies of other powers and enhancements and more along the lines of general roleplaying hints but they might fit a particular character. Some of the aberrations are very good but once again some seem more like roleplaying tips than actual aberrations, though they might fit a particular character.

Me, I'm really glad this book has been realised. I have only begun reading it, but I think I will have a lot of fun using it, both for rules and numbers and for inspiration.

So thanks!

This is good stuff.
I like new aberrations.
But I think new NPC rare somehow unbalanced (too powerful I'm afraid).

I agree... why is everyone so jacked? I understand where one or two people might have a few 5s in powers... but some of those characters have more or less ONLY 5s in a great deal of powers

Dont get me wrong, however... a great deal of good material. Its the critic in me that wants it to be perfect and I find it somewhat inflated

That would be the Monkey Dude's crew. He has a quantum power equivalent of the skill that increases other people's skills.

5s in skills arent the problem... thats pretty common place in Aberrant. Its the assload of 5s in powers that makes me wonder "was this necessecary" (sp... I know)

I do like the tie ins to adventure but, considering that they are different genres even if the same universe, it might not be appropriate. They are a different tone and feeling and lack consistency.

I was able to download FP-Final, but everytime I try to open it there is a error message saying that the viewer cannot decrypt the document.

Ammonites: what version of the Adobe Acrobat viewer are you using?

I'm sorry Timeslip, i'm a complete bonehead sometimes. I forgot to get an updated version of Adobe Acrobat viewer. It's working fine now.

Ah, good deal. I figured it was probably an out-of-date viewer, as Acrobat 6.0 was used to create the document. Glad that you've got it straightened out!

Thanks Timeslip & Co.

I have been waiting for this release for a while now. Hadn't time to check Eon's downloads for months. FP is great! The chapter(s) dealing with the megas and impact are my favorite. Thanks again!

bump for my convenience....