CHAPTER ONE: These Changing Times
New
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Watchmen is one of the seminal works of art in the graphic novel medium. It's not just outstandingly written, but also ingeniously designed - the artists (Moore and Gibbons) used the form and function of comic books to create evocative scenes and induce sensations as diverse as nearly cosmic horror to a transcendent feelings of connection with humanity. Also, there's a squid!
But the frustrating thing about Watchmen adaptations - all of them - is that they try and adapt the specific branding and elements of plot and characterization. They put Dr. Manhattan's tastefully rendered CGI dick on screen and think that means they've gotten us to watch some mans. And from a certain perspective, this is true (even though I think Zack Snyder's take on Watchmen is so wildly contrary to every single thing that Alan Moore wrote and Dave Gibbons drew that it can be studied in a film class purely to show how framing and direction can completely alter everything about a pretty closely adapted story) but from another perspective, it's still wanting.
Because, at the end of the day, none of the adaptations have adapted the format cleverness. Because you can't! They're different mediums!
...or...
Can you?
ENTER!
Thanks Greg!
Wild Talents: Progenitor is my favorite superhero setting. Not my most beloved (Aberrant is still there, because my girlfriend gave a copy of Aberrant 1st edition to me in the earliest days of our relationship, so, I have a huge soft spot for it), nor the one I've played the most (sadly, actually organizing TTRPGs pales in comparison too the ease of just booting up Freedom Force vs the Third Reich) - but it is my favorite. It's my favorite for a lot of reasons - cast of compelling characters, evocative setting, rad premise, Greg Stolze's trademark pitch perfect blending of humor, tragedy and absurd weirdness - but it is also my favorite because it's to TTRPGs what Watchmen is to comic books.
It uses mechanics to do stuff that only tabletop games can do in the field of superheroes and alt history.
So, lets take a trip trip through Progenitor (or as me and my girlfriend call it, Proggers) and see what makes this sucker tick.
But first, a warning: This book is huge and it is dense and it is also sometimes EXTREMELY FUCKING DARK. There will be content warnings on the worst bits, but some heads up for violence against children, sexual violence, mind control, mass death, racism, sexism, all the range of our bloody 20th century. There will be laughs, but there will also be moments where you will put your hands over your face and wince.
However, take heart.
Progenitor, as written, is a sourcebook for tabletop roleplaying games. This means that, unlike Watchmen, you are not bound by Dr. Manhattan's perfect foresight and implacable, clockwork universe. In fact, the precise opposite is the case. Think of this not as the "canon" Progenitor - but rather...a Progenitor setting without the most important character.
A setting without you.
Also, I ran a quest where I crossed this over with Worm, you can read that too.
Okay, before we get into the book itself, I just want to call out how fucking good Greg Stolze is as prose? His writing is breezy, easy to read, personable, clear, with a deft hand at characterization - he manages to hold the voice of several different people throughout the book and does so quite well. Still, we're tossed feet first into this setting and if you've only seen the front, you can guess this is a superhero setting, and we're meeting The Superhero: Amanda Sykes.
Our viewpoint writer, Owen Creed, has been teleported from New York to somewhere in North America - farm country is all he can narrow it down too. And they set out the first stipulation of the interview: we're not talking about the war.
What war? Well, we get to narrow that down pretty fucking fast because, even ignoring the cover which clearly shows Vietnamese troops and a 1960s American helicopter, the first thing Amanda does talk about is the famous Days of Rage protest in 1969 - and the Weathermen are there. Thanks to watching way too much Quantum Leap growing up, I have a faint sense that there were student protest organizations, but to be clear, the Weathermen were one of the more extreme branches of the SDS (Students for Democratic Society) - and their extremism here goes so far as to blowing up a statue in protest of the police, society, the 1960s, they had a lot of things to be mad about.
God, I am going to need to watch myself. With Zir'an (my other Let's Read), it was easy to know when to cut off because, by and large, the text is not as good as the mechanics, and with Fitzpatrick's War (my first Let's Read) I had to type it all in, but Progenitor is both real good and also, easy to copy and paste. So, we've got some additional information: There's more than one superman, this referenced Abe (good thing too - while some players may want to be a The Boys in a game with just one Dr. Manhattan, not many will) but also, we have an immediate picture of what the person with the ability to do anything is like. And unlike Dr. Manhattan, who is utterly trapped by his awareness that he's in a comic book (which is my personal take on his future/past vision), Amanda is simply...herself.
For good and for ill.
The big running throughline of Progenitor, you're going to see, is what i will flippantly call Amanda Skye's Evil Meter - which is less flippantly called a tragic story about a woman who kinda only made one gigantic mistake that then led on to every single other mistake she made. And, like many things in Progenitor, it's actually SHOCKINGLY variable based on not just the GM's whims but player actions. I'll get into it more later, so, keep her Evil Meter in mind. I'd put her at a solid 30% right now - the average amount for an American at any time.
The conversation continues - Amanda doesn't at any point hurt the protestors, but she definitely protects public property by inhibiting movement and using telekinesis. When asked how she did so, she is a bit at a loss to explain, but does demonstrate by sucking all the kinetic energy out of a cloud of smoke (it's the 1960s, of course she and Owen are smoking like chimneys) and it falls onto the ground in a little bit of...like...normalized magic, a bit of the surreal creeping into this normal room and normal seeming woman doing a normal conversation.
The next question is about Japan Air 351 Hijacking - a bit of world history I'd never heard of until I read the book. A faction of communists in Japan hijacked a plane to fly to Cuba and join revolutionary militias there. They had a katana?
In the real world, no one died.
In the Progenitor timeline?
She goes on to explain how a future hijacking had her be more careful and bring "Abe" with her to help, using his power of molecular reinforcement. SHe explains that she can do anything she can think of.
But she can't do everything and that's the rub.
(This is also, mechanically, one of the features of Wild Talents, the game, that makes it so very exciting in play and I will be talking about the mechanics later. But just know that everything that Amanda describes is also modeled precisely in the mechanics. In fact...)
She talks a bit about Abe now - and it's clear that they're husband and wife. Though, uh...the relationship is a bit rocky, since Amanda says: "Abe couldn't be with me all the time. We were starting to… ah, I don't know. When John Cross got kidnapped that October, Abe said he could handle it himself." And Abe does go and handle it himself. He can not just reinforce molecular structures, but he can also see through time. Owen, at this point, asks if she means James Cross, and Amanda's like, oh right, yeah. Amanda is clearly not too happy with her husband going in and essentially defusing a hostage situation by just being impossible to kill and yanking guns out of people's hands. No one died, but it was...chaotic.
Amanda has a cute side!
The next story is a bit happier: Amanda talks about how she rescued the Apollo 13 astronauts. In it, she mentions flying to NASA when she gets word, and Owen asks her why she didn't teleport, and she's like, "Uh...it's actually easier to...to fly..." And hilariously, THAT'S ACTUALLY TRUE mechanically speaking. For a character with Amanda's powers (or with a similar powerset), it is actually mechanically easier for her to fly there than it is to set up a point to point teleport, and I find that deeply pleasing. It makes the game designer brain inside of me go all tingly and giddy. Love it.
Amanda does mention that she was worried Apollo 13's exploded oxygen tank had been due to someone named "Sét" but it was "too small" for him - which is alarming to think about. Also, most of her time in space rescuing the Apollo 13 crew was not the rescue, it was finding them which makes sense for someone who can fly around but has no HUD or guidance systems.
At the end, there's this.
I know you're all going to get sick of me saying this, but I just find this book extremely well written. By now, Amanda's powers have begun to be...kind of rote feeling, like you're getting used to the idea she can just do things - and she explains them so simply. "Oh I turned invisible, then scanned through the walls, then teleported here" - she talks like she's doing chores. Then Greg Stolze reminds you what is actually going on here is there is a seemingly normal woman who seems to contain an infinite source of raw, unknowable energy that can pour out of her in moments of inattention. The shifting of comfort here really does feel like what it'd be like to talk to a superhuman in a normal conversation - you think: Oh, this is just a normal conversation and then the floor shifts out from under you.
It's great!
Then...we move onto another real disaster: Ancash.
This is one of the worst disasters in Peru. I think it might actually be THE worst, by pure numbers of killed and buildings damaged. Amanda, of course, rushed there immediately.
...gonna slap a CW on this quote: Descriptions of mass death.
This is where the world got the first image of Amanda Sykes' face. While trying her best to save as many lives as possible, glowing with radiant green energy, her powers...stopped and she dropped out of the air, her normal shroud of metal and fire that protected her identity gone. Apparently, the photographer who snapped the pictures of her falling and landing got the Pulitzer. It's a wrenching scene, and another great depiction of how Amanda can do anything - but not everything.
(it's also mechanically what would happen - which I'll describe later.)
Amanda talks about how she took so long to recover that she couldn't go to Cambodia - and some people blame the Khmer Rouge on her (though, gonna say, I'm shocked that the Khmer Rouge even made it to the 1970s in this timeline for reasons you'll learn later.) She does recover her powers, eventually, but...what she doesn't recover is her secret identity. Hence this interview. She talks about what hurt about losing her privacy.
This here is one big old dial the GM has available: Exactly how many people Amanda killed in the Vietnam War is up to you. This passage implies it's "as few as possible" - and if you want to play a more sad, tragic Amanda, you can have that number be quite low. Like, if you're a good person, killing one person can fuck you up for a while, let alone...say...twelve. But if you want Amanda to always be a somewhat sinister figure - an unthinking tool of American imperialism and hegemony (which is, by the way, an ABSOLUTELY fair interpretation of her character) you can have that number be quite a bit higher.
But either way you turn the dial, I...still think this is a better characterization than John Osterman gets, at least Amanda has an emotional reason to get involved, John just does it cause Nixon asks him too, the prick.
By the way, my girlfriend and I talk about Proggers a lot, and sometimes, she says big brained wise words, which I can quote!
Very good point, Luci! The interview has come to an end, and Owen writes about him preparing to leave.
Fuck this rules! Sorry, just, I fucking love this book, man. What an pitch perfect reminder of the uncanny and the spectacular. I think I find this single moment more electrifying and exciting lifting a dozen cars - a single moment of application of power that is made all the more impressive and shocking by the sheer mundanity of it. Also...holy shit I wish I had magic remember everything powers.
Then, while you're absorbing that, Greg, smiling old Greg Stolze, just steps up and sticks a knife into your kidney.
MAXIMUM OOF.
With that, we've got the introduction down and while we both know a LOT about the game - that there's a very powerful superhero named Amanda Sykes, and its set in an alternate 1960s with an eye towards big fucking huge changes to the world - we also know ALMOST NOTHING. How did she get her powers? What are the player characters gonna do? Well, good news, we move on to-
CHAPTER ONE: THIS CHANGING WORLD
The first part of this chapter lays out the big idea in plain words, using the mechanics of Wild Talents to do so. One of Wild Talent's big brained ideas is the concept of the Four Colors for Superheroic Settings. The four colors are Red, Gold, Blue and Black.
Red is the color of communism, and materialist analysis - great men, no matter how great, don't make or break history. Instead, history is decided by the large mechanics of the world and society and mass action. So, a high red setting has history go along the same route even if you have people dropkicking battleships and flying into orbit on magic carpets. Meanwhile, a low red setting has these great beings wildly change things through their actions. Most settings are pretty high red because it is, to be honest, WAY LESS WORK.
Progenitor starts as a low red setting with the advent of the Progenitor, Amanda Sykes.
The goal is to give the player characters the tools to spike that red down into the negative numbers.
The other colors, by the way, are Gold: Gold is a non-reactive element. So, a high gold setting has characters that, by and large, do not change. They stay as they are, in the mode that is expected of them. In a high gold setting, the Joker and the Batman will always be circling one another, forever. Low Gold, they're more human - Batman and the Joker can just give it up after a bad string of run ins. Why not?
Progenitor is a solid two: Metahumans are expected to be larger than life but they're still people, they change and can do whatever they want, they're not locked into being superheroes forever. Or at all.
Blue: Out of the blue! The "wild and strange randomness" of comics. High blue settings can bring in anything at any time - alien invasions, time travel, other dimensions. Low Blue settings stay confined to fairly mundane save for the 'one weird thing.'
Progenitor starts at Blue 1, then jumps to Blue 3 by 1970 thanks to the creation of Atlantis (yes, really) and other knock-on effects from metahuman actions. It stays around there from here on out...but player characters can change that, if you decide to make a REALLY WEIRD fucking superbeing, you can easily punt that up to Blue 4 by your own lonesome, and a party working together can absolutely haul Progenitor to Blue 5 through sheer force of will. THis isn't Greg saying this, by the way, this is me, Dragon Cobolt, telling you you can do this. Make a character that imparts sentience to dogs and create an entire new species. Build artificial intelligences and implant them into self replicating nanoswarms. Get a power that opens portals to fictional universes and haul the Fantastic Four to new york and get sued by Jack Kirby and Stan Lee! Do it! Do you fucking coward! I made Skizm B. Johnghost, the self replicating ghost hive mind of LBJ, you can do it too!
And, the final color: Black, the color of moral relativism. High black settings are black and white (GET IT!?) with obvious villains and obvious heroes and neither the twain shall meet. To the shock of exactly zero people, Progenitor is a 2-3 setting.
With this established, we move onto Intersections, which covers the next BIG HOOK of Progenitor. The thing that I immediately tell people to sell them on the game.
Here it is.
The powers...are infectious.
GREG YOU FLIPPING GENIUS. This is what I mean when I say this is the Watchmen of TTRPGs because player choice and character creation are DIRECTLY and MECHANICALLY tied together to the comic book conceit that keeps the setting interesting, using the mechanics of the game. Skipping forward to the infection mechanics, it's pretty simple: If you use your power on someone and they survive, then there's a percentile chance that you infect them and they get powers one step less potent than yours.
So, Amanda has 500 power points and a 100% to infect 10 people. Those people have 450 power points and have a 90% chance to infect 9 people. Those people have 400 power points and have a 80% to infect 8 people. This goes on until you hit Tier 10, where people have 50 power points and have a 10% chance to infect one person - that person becoming a "mark", which is basically a character with the metahuman archetype but no powers, which actually is a lot more life changing than you think because of how the Wild Talents mechanics works.
Greg wraps up the infection idea with this wonderful bit of GMing advice.
With that, we move onto character creation!
It's possible to just make someone with a different archetype than metahuman in Progenitor - like, say, someone with nothing but normal abilities and lots of money and a cool animal themed suit. But, counterpoint, fuck you, engage with the game's most interesting concepts, you fucking coward. You get about 100 points to make your human stats and skills, and then get X number of points based on your tier and the Metahuman Archetype. So, in Wild Talents, an Archetype is made up of a Source (where the powers come from), a Permission (what kind of powers you can buy) and a variable number of Intrinsic (a range of special features that aren't powers and are often flaws.)
The Metahuman Archetype has the source of Unknown for -5 points, and the Intrinsics of Immutable and Infectious for -5 points each, for a total of -15 points. The permission is "Super", which means you can get any power you want of any kind in any amount, which is 15 points. Every single time I make a proggers character, I am faintly shocked that this all maths out to 0, meaning I have the total power point pool for building character powers. Every single time.
"But Dragon, you said you almost never get to play Progenitor?"
Yes, I said make characters, not PLAY characters, don't be silly.
So, you already know about Infectious! But what does Immutable mean? Simple: In normal play, in Wild Talents, you can improve your powers by spending in game resources - Base Will (representing your innermost passions) can be burnt off permanently to then spend Willpower (your momentary reserves of mental energy and focus) as if it were power points to improve a power. This is a great Shonen Anime vibe because you can ONLY do it when under direct life or death moment. It's when you go, "Hhnrr...they're...COUNTING...ON MEEEE!" and then spend a base will and 24 willpower to add +4 boosters to your hyperstrength so you can lift 1,000 times as much weight and save the day.
Well, you don't get that in Progenitor. In Progenitor, characters get what they get and they STAY there. This doesn't mean you don't get to Shonen Anime things, though. Because while you cannot permanently improve powers, you can burn base will for incredibly powerful effects that no one in a normal Wild Talents game EVER USES because you want to spend that base will on upping your powers permanently, not for a one time dice roll. Well, in Progenitor, once you get used to the idea that your character is as is forever, and you begin to tap into the headspace that isn't interested in raw advancement in a dice/mechanics perspective, you realize that this...actually DOES NOT remove advancement.
It just changes it.
See, Base Will is invested into Passions and Loyalties. If you have 4 Base Will, you might have Passion: Heroism (3) and Loyalty: The United States (1). Well, now, your character advancement shifts from "I've burned a base will to get +1 dice to my power" to "Reflecting my in character journey, I have bought Loyalty: Communism (1)...and when I'm ordered to fire on these student protestors, I will burn my Loyalty: United States to resist the command!" The advancement is personal and narrative.
This is, as they like to say, sickrad.
However, it does have the weakness that...if you didn't build your character good, it can feel real shitty. However, there are some diegetic methods in universe to fix that - ranging from asking a hypergenius to build you a jetpack to just finding the guy who can CHANGE PEOPLE'S POWERS as his power and ask him to juice you. So, you're not SOL. But, as a veteran Wild Talents player, my suggestion is to 100% ask more skilled people for advice! Seriously!
Now, we do get some additional wrinkles for Infectious: You can be a Strong Vector, Stable Vector, Weak Vector or Closed Vector. A strong vector automatically infects anyone every single time, automatically - Amanda Skyes is one, but others can be too at GM's whims. Stable Vector is the most common and rules as written. Weak Vector has a pathetically tiny 1% to 10% chance. Closed Vector, meanwhile, is something you, as the player, have a lot of choice in...because if your powers don't influence other people, then you can't infect people.
Lets say you wanna be Toph from Avatar's The Last Korrabender (wait, that was just Asami Sato, wasn't it?) and you want to get earth throwing/manipulating powers. Well, with 350 points for being a Tier 4, you can throw the fuck out of rocks! But since the rocks are being what is influenced, you don't give anyone powers - not even if you, say, squish them! With rocks!
Cool!
We next have a quick breakdown of Hypermind in Progenitor. So, hyperstats are a pretty common superheroic idea, and in wild talents they're modeled by having stats go from 1-5 for humans, and superhumans can bump those up to 6-10. The core book has examples of what various dice levels have, but in general, hitting 6d is when the stats start becoming really superhuman. For example, 6d in coordination means you can dodge gunfire without needing to dive into cover - something normal humans simply cannot do. 10d in Charm means you can convince anyone of anything in a few rounds of conversation. 7d in Sense means you can perceive everything in a quarter mile radius., that kind of thing.
Well, Greg Stolze decides to throw us EVEN MORE mechanical support for hypercharm, hypercommand and hypermind. The first two will be covered...much...much...much later in chapter 4, but for hypermind, we have a quick rundown of what the superhuman dice levels getcha.
6d is just as written in the core book: You have a photographic memory for all senses and can recall anything with a successful roll.
But at 7d, Progenitor gives us have Casual Riches: A hypermind is just assumed to be so fucking good at brains - stocks, optimizing production, management, investment, that they're assumed to be lower upper class within 12 months of starting from 0. Normally, pulling yourself up by your bootstraps is impossible, but normally, lifting a car is impossible and someone with 7d in body can fucking do that.
At 8d, Progenitor goes Sicko Mode.
Fuck OFF Greg, how dare you come up with something so fucking cool and weird and inventive and...fucking terrifying??? What's fun is, this isn't even a GM dick move tool, YOU CAN BE THE HYPERMIND! There are NPC telepaths who might be reading your mind - like J. Edgar Hoover (I'm sorry to have to inform you of this, but...J. Edgar Hoover has telepathy and shapeshifting, I...I'm sorry, I'm so sorry) - so, like, you can absolutely have this work for you OR against you. It rules. The mechanics are elaborated on but they're not too necessary to go into, just trust me that they work great.
At 9d, you understand all languages in a few hours of listening to them. It's neat, and extremely useful, and...honestly really cool, but it's also pretty simple.
At 10d? You can, once per week, ask the GM a question about the STEW metrics (more on that later), or about a hypothetical, and the GM has to answer honestly and truthfully. Like, "What are the consequences for me invading North Carolina with my army of mole men" or "what happens if we blew up that space elevator and framed the Soviet Union?" that kind of thing. This is amazing for people who want to be the big bad master manipulators - though there's a wrench in their predictions, one that we will talk about later. BUt...what could it be!?
(It's Amanda)
Next, we have some simple breakdowns for pre-made powers and, uh, I'm going to skip them. Not because it's bad to have a chart for "how to make a superman using 350 points" but, like, because you're not BORING, you're going to make an ACTUAL character, right?
RIGHT!?
Next, we have a description of how the powers spread and get a handy chart of power lineage that I showed to a friend once and they cackled and said, "WOD VAMPIRE SUPERHEROES!" which is...true, yes, actually, that is exactly how it works, they're World of Darkness vampire style superheroes, you got me. We also have this sidebar.
I just shared this because 1) the line "immunity to laser eyebolts, which one presumes they ardently desires" makes me cackle like a loon and 2) it leads into the idea that there's "backwash" - if the GM wants to keep people on their toes, they can rule that when a hero dies, their power ancestor is "recharged" and is no longer at equilibrium. Which I personally like because the idea of killing all your supervillains is just...it's so boring, man. So, having a good in universe reason for 'why do you not just kill this guy' and the answer is 'i know what he does and what he can do, meanwhile, who knows what happens if this power backwashes and i infect someone worse?' - like, you can still kill someone whose REALLY bad, but if they're just annoying? Nah.
We also get some descriptions of Marks, which I mentioned earlier, and here I want to explain why they're actually really interesting.
So!
A Mark is a metahuman with no powers. But what this means is they DO have Willpower. Baseline humans have Base Will and no willpower, but marks DO have willpower. And what can willpower do? Well, you gain it by fulfilling your passions or loyalties, and you lose it when you fail to uphold those. If your willpower ever hits 0, then your powers crash out: The dice pools are halved and any super-dice become normal dice. This is what happened to Amanda in Peru, you remember? She hit 0 Willpower (most likely due to a combination of failing her passion to help people, already being deeply depressed due to her troubled marriage, and the simple expedient of being hit with a willpower sapping trauma check for seeing so much horror.)
But, if you have willpower you can also SPEND IT. You can get some bonus dice. Or, you can use it to negate damage! So, 1 willpower blocks 1 shock damage, or turns 1 killing into 1 shock damage. 2 willpower negates the killing damage, flat out. And most importantly, you can use it to gobble dice for any non-attack power that is used on you.
Say you're a mark with 11 WP and some fuckhead teleporter tries to teleport you to the Sahara with their powers. So, they get a 2x8 and you spend 1 willpower to eat their dice down to a fail (you need a set, so one 8 is nothing.) He blinks in confusion as you walk up and bean him with a baseball bat.
For a certain kind of player, this concept is probably one of the most satisfying ideas you've ever heard and, hey, playing Progenitor as a Mark with gadgets and gizmos, working as a The Boys? That's perfectly cromulent.
But it's also great for the GM - nothing like having a seemingly normal baseline nosell your hypercharm, eh?
Greg Stozle then throws the keys at the GM and players by letting them decide how many NPCs are strong, average or weak vectors. If there's a lot of strong vectors, then there's way more metahumans. Weak? Fewer and you're more special. I prefer the former cause I like being surrounded by weirdoes! but with that, we move onto the final...and most impressive part of this chapter.
CHANGING THE WORLD.
This mechanic? This one mechanic is about 25% of why I wanted to do this entire lets play. So, here's how it works. There are four metrics: Suspicion, Technology, Economy and Warfare. STEW, for short! As the players and NPCs act, they raise or lower those metrics! Fail to stop a supervillain and he uses mind control to conquer New York for a week? Suspicion is probably going up. Invent an antigravity engine? Raise the technology! Stop the Vietnam War in 1969 with a world changing peace conference? Warfare's going WAY down!
The two highest metrics combine to form the "global mood" - which breaks down to
Authoritarianism (S+T)
Espionage (S+E)
Tribalism (S+W)
Globalism (T+E)
Conflict (T+W)
Imperialism (E+W)
One you have a mood, once per year, as the GM, you total all the dice up and ROLL them. The sets are compared to one chart, the spare dice are compared to another. These random events are then combined with the PC's actions and the canonical events of Progenitor, and thus, will create a continual bubbling crockpot of SHIT HAPPENING.
...let me talk about Aberrant for a bit. Aberrant is also a superhero game ostensibly about big people and big decisions and big choices and politics. So, in Aberrant, if you invented a new gadget that revolutionizes computing technology, you know what I, as the gamemaster, had to mechanically support this?
FUCKING NOTHINNNNNNNNNNNNNNG.
NOTHHHHHHHHHHHHHHIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIINNNNNNNNNNNG.
Do you know how mind-paralyzingly terrifying, how completely enervating it is to sit there with an entire imaginary planet of 9 billion monkeys and try and come up with something, ANYTHING, to reflect the decisions made? Without a framework, without a guide, it's worse than a blank piece of paper. Well, Progenitor comes swinging in and just throws ideas at you like they're candy.
Say, we're at a Suspicion of 2, Technology of 3, Economy of 1 and Warfare of 3. Mood: Conflict! So, we roll 9d and get 7 6 6 5 5 4 4 3 3!
That's 2x6, 2x5, 2x4, 2x3 and a 7!
2x6: An ethnic enclave claims kinship with a rival neighbor, thereby justifying a 'limited' war of 'liberation.'
2x5: A nation uses chemical warfare on a minority group.
2x4: There's a flareup on a border that has been tense and built-up for a long time.
2x3: A nation sponsors a major act of terrorism, or several lesser ones, while consistently denying its involvement.
7: Some local mastermind is seeking WMD. His plan is to rig them to release or explode when his heart stops. (Yeah, he read Snow Crash.)
Now, you take what the PCs have done, look at the countries they're involved with, and start stitching together ideas. The 7 idea could be a fun short session, building up to something more dramatic - maybe combine the 2x4 and 2x5, and have the minority group that got hit by the chemical weapon be on that boarder. The PCs have been doing a lot in the Philiphines, maybe something there?
It's...so good, for the GM.
And with that, we have the final pages: A short run down of the main characters and major events. But, honestly, I think it will be more fun to read those in detail.
The next chapter, we jump right into history in the year 1968.
We will see Amanda's ever shifting evil meter! We will groan at bad decisions, wince at horrible events, and forever ask...
What would I do if I was there?
Because, at the end of the day: The world of Progenitor needs you.
It needs you bad.
But the frustrating thing about Watchmen adaptations - all of them - is that they try and adapt the specific branding and elements of plot and characterization. They put Dr. Manhattan's tastefully rendered CGI dick on screen and think that means they've gotten us to watch some mans. And from a certain perspective, this is true (even though I think Zack Snyder's take on Watchmen is so wildly contrary to every single thing that Alan Moore wrote and Dave Gibbons drew that it can be studied in a film class purely to show how framing and direction can completely alter everything about a pretty closely adapted story) but from another perspective, it's still wanting.
Because, at the end of the day, none of the adaptations have adapted the format cleverness. Because you can't! They're different mediums!
...or...
Can you?
ENTER!
Thanks Greg!
It uses mechanics to do stuff that only tabletop games can do in the field of superheroes and alt history.
So, lets take a trip trip through Progenitor (or as me and my girlfriend call it, Proggers) and see what makes this sucker tick.
But first, a warning: This book is huge and it is dense and it is also sometimes EXTREMELY FUCKING DARK. There will be content warnings on the worst bits, but some heads up for violence against children, sexual violence, mind control, mass death, racism, sexism, all the range of our bloody 20th century. There will be laughs, but there will also be moments where you will put your hands over your face and wince.
However, take heart.
Progenitor, as written, is a sourcebook for tabletop roleplaying games. This means that, unlike Watchmen, you are not bound by Dr. Manhattan's perfect foresight and implacable, clockwork universe. In fact, the precise opposite is the case. Think of this not as the "canon" Progenitor - but rather...a Progenitor setting without the most important character.
A setting without you.
Also, I ran a quest where I crossed this over with Worm, you can read that too.
***
Proggers said:
Okay, before we get into the book itself, I just want to call out how fucking good Greg Stolze is as prose? His writing is breezy, easy to read, personable, clear, with a deft hand at characterization - he manages to hold the voice of several different people throughout the book and does so quite well. Still, we're tossed feet first into this setting and if you've only seen the front, you can guess this is a superhero setting, and we're meeting The Superhero: Amanda Sykes.
Our viewpoint writer, Owen Creed, has been teleported from New York to somewhere in North America - farm country is all he can narrow it down too. And they set out the first stipulation of the interview: we're not talking about the war.
What war? Well, we get to narrow that down pretty fucking fast because, even ignoring the cover which clearly shows Vietnamese troops and a 1960s American helicopter, the first thing Amanda does talk about is the famous Days of Rage protest in 1969 - and the Weathermen are there. Thanks to watching way too much Quantum Leap growing up, I have a faint sense that there were student protest organizations, but to be clear, the Weathermen were one of the more extreme branches of the SDS (Students for Democratic Society) - and their extremism here goes so far as to blowing up a statue in protest of the police, society, the 1960s, they had a lot of things to be mad about.
Proggers said:
God, I am going to need to watch myself. With Zir'an (my other Let's Read), it was easy to know when to cut off because, by and large, the text is not as good as the mechanics, and with Fitzpatrick's War (my first Let's Read) I had to type it all in, but Progenitor is both real good and also, easy to copy and paste. So, we've got some additional information: There's more than one superman, this referenced Abe (good thing too - while some players may want to be a The Boys in a game with just one Dr. Manhattan, not many will) but also, we have an immediate picture of what the person with the ability to do anything is like. And unlike Dr. Manhattan, who is utterly trapped by his awareness that he's in a comic book (which is my personal take on his future/past vision), Amanda is simply...herself.
For good and for ill.
The big running throughline of Progenitor, you're going to see, is what i will flippantly call Amanda Skye's Evil Meter - which is less flippantly called a tragic story about a woman who kinda only made one gigantic mistake that then led on to every single other mistake she made. And, like many things in Progenitor, it's actually SHOCKINGLY variable based on not just the GM's whims but player actions. I'll get into it more later, so, keep her Evil Meter in mind. I'd put her at a solid 30% right now - the average amount for an American at any time.
The conversation continues - Amanda doesn't at any point hurt the protestors, but she definitely protects public property by inhibiting movement and using telekinesis. When asked how she did so, she is a bit at a loss to explain, but does demonstrate by sucking all the kinetic energy out of a cloud of smoke (it's the 1960s, of course she and Owen are smoking like chimneys) and it falls onto the ground in a little bit of...like...normalized magic, a bit of the surreal creeping into this normal room and normal seeming woman doing a normal conversation.
The next question is about Japan Air 351 Hijacking - a bit of world history I'd never heard of until I read the book. A faction of communists in Japan hijacked a plane to fly to Cuba and join revolutionary militias there. They had a katana?
In the real world, no one died.
In the Progenitor timeline?
Proggers said:
She goes on to explain how a future hijacking had her be more careful and bring "Abe" with her to help, using his power of molecular reinforcement. SHe explains that she can do anything she can think of.
But she can't do everything and that's the rub.
(This is also, mechanically, one of the features of Wild Talents, the game, that makes it so very exciting in play and I will be talking about the mechanics later. But just know that everything that Amanda describes is also modeled precisely in the mechanics. In fact...)
She talks a bit about Abe now - and it's clear that they're husband and wife. Though, uh...the relationship is a bit rocky, since Amanda says: "Abe couldn't be with me all the time. We were starting to… ah, I don't know. When John Cross got kidnapped that October, Abe said he could handle it himself." And Abe does go and handle it himself. He can not just reinforce molecular structures, but he can also see through time. Owen, at this point, asks if she means James Cross, and Amanda's like, oh right, yeah. Amanda is clearly not too happy with her husband going in and essentially defusing a hostage situation by just being impossible to kill and yanking guns out of people's hands. No one died, but it was...chaotic.
Proggers said:
Amanda has a cute side!
The next story is a bit happier: Amanda talks about how she rescued the Apollo 13 astronauts. In it, she mentions flying to NASA when she gets word, and Owen asks her why she didn't teleport, and she's like, "Uh...it's actually easier to...to fly..." And hilariously, THAT'S ACTUALLY TRUE mechanically speaking. For a character with Amanda's powers (or with a similar powerset), it is actually mechanically easier for her to fly there than it is to set up a point to point teleport, and I find that deeply pleasing. It makes the game designer brain inside of me go all tingly and giddy. Love it.
Amanda does mention that she was worried Apollo 13's exploded oxygen tank had been due to someone named "Sét" but it was "too small" for him - which is alarming to think about. Also, most of her time in space rescuing the Apollo 13 crew was not the rescue, it was finding them which makes sense for someone who can fly around but has no HUD or guidance systems.
At the end, there's this.
Proggers said:
I know you're all going to get sick of me saying this, but I just find this book extremely well written. By now, Amanda's powers have begun to be...kind of rote feeling, like you're getting used to the idea she can just do things - and she explains them so simply. "Oh I turned invisible, then scanned through the walls, then teleported here" - she talks like she's doing chores. Then Greg Stolze reminds you what is actually going on here is there is a seemingly normal woman who seems to contain an infinite source of raw, unknowable energy that can pour out of her in moments of inattention. The shifting of comfort here really does feel like what it'd be like to talk to a superhuman in a normal conversation - you think: Oh, this is just a normal conversation and then the floor shifts out from under you.
It's great!
Then...we move onto another real disaster: Ancash.
This is one of the worst disasters in Peru. I think it might actually be THE worst, by pure numbers of killed and buildings damaged. Amanda, of course, rushed there immediately.
...gonna slap a CW on this quote: Descriptions of mass death.
"Twenty-four seconds," she says and there's a bitter tone there. She's looking out the window now and lightning flashes in the distance. "They say the quake under the sea took twenty-four seconds, and then Mount Huascarán just fell on them. Two towns, buried under snow and ice and rock before they had a chance to know what happened. Luckily, I was in the States when it happened, Abe and I were… taking a little breather, you know? But we heard about it and we went, as soon as we could. But it was too late before we even got there."
"Some reports say you healed… thousands."
"Yeah."
"I mean, the pictures, that glowing sphere a thousand feet across and everyone in it…"
"I remember, I was there." Amanda Sykes barks it at me, her delicate nostrils flaring, face grim. This is not a woman remembering a success.
"People called it a miracle," I say quietly.
"Some miracle. You want to know what I remember about the Ancash disaster? The bodies. Just bodies everywhere, bodies stacked up like firewood, broken, some of them in pieces and you had to look twice to realize that was an arm, a foot, part of a head! It's like that, that French artwork, the surrealism, where things are where they don't belong. I saw some horrible things in Vietnam, just… just terrors, and I thought I'd seen it all, but Peru, my God!"
She puts a hand to her face, pinching her eyes shut and collecting herself
"Some reports say you healed… thousands."
"Yeah."
"I mean, the pictures, that glowing sphere a thousand feet across and everyone in it…"
"I remember, I was there." Amanda Sykes barks it at me, her delicate nostrils flaring, face grim. This is not a woman remembering a success.
"People called it a miracle," I say quietly.
"Some miracle. You want to know what I remember about the Ancash disaster? The bodies. Just bodies everywhere, bodies stacked up like firewood, broken, some of them in pieces and you had to look twice to realize that was an arm, a foot, part of a head! It's like that, that French artwork, the surrealism, where things are where they don't belong. I saw some horrible things in Vietnam, just… just terrors, and I thought I'd seen it all, but Peru, my God!"
She puts a hand to her face, pinching her eyes shut and collecting herself
This is where the world got the first image of Amanda Sykes' face. While trying her best to save as many lives as possible, glowing with radiant green energy, her powers...stopped and she dropped out of the air, her normal shroud of metal and fire that protected her identity gone. Apparently, the photographer who snapped the pictures of her falling and landing got the Pulitzer. It's a wrenching scene, and another great depiction of how Amanda can do anything - but not everything.
(it's also mechanically what would happen - which I'll describe later.)
Amanda talks about how she took so long to recover that she couldn't go to Cambodia - and some people blame the Khmer Rouge on her (though, gonna say, I'm shocked that the Khmer Rouge even made it to the 1970s in this timeline for reasons you'll learn later.) She does recover her powers, eventually, but...what she doesn't recover is her secret identity. Hence this interview. She talks about what hurt about losing her privacy.
Proggers said:
This here is one big old dial the GM has available: Exactly how many people Amanda killed in the Vietnam War is up to you. This passage implies it's "as few as possible" - and if you want to play a more sad, tragic Amanda, you can have that number be quite low. Like, if you're a good person, killing one person can fuck you up for a while, let alone...say...twelve. But if you want Amanda to always be a somewhat sinister figure - an unthinking tool of American imperialism and hegemony (which is, by the way, an ABSOLUTELY fair interpretation of her character) you can have that number be quite a bit higher.
But either way you turn the dial, I...still think this is a better characterization than John Osterman gets, at least Amanda has an emotional reason to get involved, John just does it cause Nixon asks him too, the prick.
By the way, my girlfriend and I talk about Proggers a lot, and sometimes, she says big brained wise words, which I can quote!
Dragon's Girlfriend Sez: "Also, like.. I feel like Amanda only killed people because the people around her failed her. Like, she never had to kill anyone if people were willing to like.. help her think about how her powers worked? She could have easily turned all the VC's bullets to bubbles or made forcefields or like.. all sorts of shit, but for SOME reason, a midwestern housewife took a while to master her FUCKING SUPER POWERS!"
Very good point, Luci! The interview has come to an end, and Owen writes about him preparing to leave.
Proggers said:
Fuck this rules! Sorry, just, I fucking love this book, man. What an pitch perfect reminder of the uncanny and the spectacular. I think I find this single moment more electrifying and exciting lifting a dozen cars - a single moment of application of power that is made all the more impressive and shocking by the sheer mundanity of it. Also...holy shit I wish I had magic remember everything powers.
Then, while you're absorbing that, Greg, smiling old Greg Stolze, just steps up and sticks a knife into your kidney.
Proggers said:
MAXIMUM OOF.
With that, we've got the introduction down and while we both know a LOT about the game - that there's a very powerful superhero named Amanda Sykes, and its set in an alternate 1960s with an eye towards big fucking huge changes to the world - we also know ALMOST NOTHING. How did she get her powers? What are the player characters gonna do? Well, good news, we move on to-
CHAPTER ONE: THIS CHANGING WORLD
The first part of this chapter lays out the big idea in plain words, using the mechanics of Wild Talents to do so. One of Wild Talent's big brained ideas is the concept of the Four Colors for Superheroic Settings. The four colors are Red, Gold, Blue and Black.
Red is the color of communism, and materialist analysis - great men, no matter how great, don't make or break history. Instead, history is decided by the large mechanics of the world and society and mass action. So, a high red setting has history go along the same route even if you have people dropkicking battleships and flying into orbit on magic carpets. Meanwhile, a low red setting has these great beings wildly change things through their actions. Most settings are pretty high red because it is, to be honest, WAY LESS WORK.
Progenitor starts as a low red setting with the advent of the Progenitor, Amanda Sykes.
The goal is to give the player characters the tools to spike that red down into the negative numbers.
Proggers said:
The other colors, by the way, are Gold: Gold is a non-reactive element. So, a high gold setting has characters that, by and large, do not change. They stay as they are, in the mode that is expected of them. In a high gold setting, the Joker and the Batman will always be circling one another, forever. Low Gold, they're more human - Batman and the Joker can just give it up after a bad string of run ins. Why not?
Progenitor is a solid two: Metahumans are expected to be larger than life but they're still people, they change and can do whatever they want, they're not locked into being superheroes forever. Or at all.
Blue: Out of the blue! The "wild and strange randomness" of comics. High blue settings can bring in anything at any time - alien invasions, time travel, other dimensions. Low Blue settings stay confined to fairly mundane save for the 'one weird thing.'
Progenitor starts at Blue 1, then jumps to Blue 3 by 1970 thanks to the creation of Atlantis (yes, really) and other knock-on effects from metahuman actions. It stays around there from here on out...but player characters can change that, if you decide to make a REALLY WEIRD fucking superbeing, you can easily punt that up to Blue 4 by your own lonesome, and a party working together can absolutely haul Progenitor to Blue 5 through sheer force of will. THis isn't Greg saying this, by the way, this is me, Dragon Cobolt, telling you you can do this. Make a character that imparts sentience to dogs and create an entire new species. Build artificial intelligences and implant them into self replicating nanoswarms. Get a power that opens portals to fictional universes and haul the Fantastic Four to new york and get sued by Jack Kirby and Stan Lee! Do it! Do you fucking coward! I made Skizm B. Johnghost, the self replicating ghost hive mind of LBJ, you can do it too!
And, the final color: Black, the color of moral relativism. High black settings are black and white (GET IT!?) with obvious villains and obvious heroes and neither the twain shall meet. To the shock of exactly zero people, Progenitor is a 2-3 setting.
With this established, we move onto Intersections, which covers the next BIG HOOK of Progenitor. The thing that I immediately tell people to sell them on the game.
Here it is.
The powers...are infectious.
Proggers said:
GREG YOU FLIPPING GENIUS. This is what I mean when I say this is the Watchmen of TTRPGs because player choice and character creation are DIRECTLY and MECHANICALLY tied together to the comic book conceit that keeps the setting interesting, using the mechanics of the game. Skipping forward to the infection mechanics, it's pretty simple: If you use your power on someone and they survive, then there's a percentile chance that you infect them and they get powers one step less potent than yours.
So, Amanda has 500 power points and a 100% to infect 10 people. Those people have 450 power points and have a 90% chance to infect 9 people. Those people have 400 power points and have a 80% to infect 8 people. This goes on until you hit Tier 10, where people have 50 power points and have a 10% chance to infect one person - that person becoming a "mark", which is basically a character with the metahuman archetype but no powers, which actually is a lot more life changing than you think because of how the Wild Talents mechanics works.
Greg wraps up the infection idea with this wonderful bit of GMing advice.
Proggers said:
With that, we move onto character creation!
It's possible to just make someone with a different archetype than metahuman in Progenitor - like, say, someone with nothing but normal abilities and lots of money and a cool animal themed suit. But, counterpoint, fuck you, engage with the game's most interesting concepts, you fucking coward. You get about 100 points to make your human stats and skills, and then get X number of points based on your tier and the Metahuman Archetype. So, in Wild Talents, an Archetype is made up of a Source (where the powers come from), a Permission (what kind of powers you can buy) and a variable number of Intrinsic (a range of special features that aren't powers and are often flaws.)
The Metahuman Archetype has the source of Unknown for -5 points, and the Intrinsics of Immutable and Infectious for -5 points each, for a total of -15 points. The permission is "Super", which means you can get any power you want of any kind in any amount, which is 15 points. Every single time I make a proggers character, I am faintly shocked that this all maths out to 0, meaning I have the total power point pool for building character powers. Every single time.
"But Dragon, you said you almost never get to play Progenitor?"
Yes, I said make characters, not PLAY characters, don't be silly.
So, you already know about Infectious! But what does Immutable mean? Simple: In normal play, in Wild Talents, you can improve your powers by spending in game resources - Base Will (representing your innermost passions) can be burnt off permanently to then spend Willpower (your momentary reserves of mental energy and focus) as if it were power points to improve a power. This is a great Shonen Anime vibe because you can ONLY do it when under direct life or death moment. It's when you go, "Hhnrr...they're...COUNTING...ON MEEEE!" and then spend a base will and 24 willpower to add +4 boosters to your hyperstrength so you can lift 1,000 times as much weight and save the day.
Well, you don't get that in Progenitor. In Progenitor, characters get what they get and they STAY there. This doesn't mean you don't get to Shonen Anime things, though. Because while you cannot permanently improve powers, you can burn base will for incredibly powerful effects that no one in a normal Wild Talents game EVER USES because you want to spend that base will on upping your powers permanently, not for a one time dice roll. Well, in Progenitor, once you get used to the idea that your character is as is forever, and you begin to tap into the headspace that isn't interested in raw advancement in a dice/mechanics perspective, you realize that this...actually DOES NOT remove advancement.
It just changes it.
See, Base Will is invested into Passions and Loyalties. If you have 4 Base Will, you might have Passion: Heroism (3) and Loyalty: The United States (1). Well, now, your character advancement shifts from "I've burned a base will to get +1 dice to my power" to "Reflecting my in character journey, I have bought Loyalty: Communism (1)...and when I'm ordered to fire on these student protestors, I will burn my Loyalty: United States to resist the command!" The advancement is personal and narrative.
This is, as they like to say, sickrad.
However, it does have the weakness that...if you didn't build your character good, it can feel real shitty. However, there are some diegetic methods in universe to fix that - ranging from asking a hypergenius to build you a jetpack to just finding the guy who can CHANGE PEOPLE'S POWERS as his power and ask him to juice you. So, you're not SOL. But, as a veteran Wild Talents player, my suggestion is to 100% ask more skilled people for advice! Seriously!
Now, we do get some additional wrinkles for Infectious: You can be a Strong Vector, Stable Vector, Weak Vector or Closed Vector. A strong vector automatically infects anyone every single time, automatically - Amanda Skyes is one, but others can be too at GM's whims. Stable Vector is the most common and rules as written. Weak Vector has a pathetically tiny 1% to 10% chance. Closed Vector, meanwhile, is something you, as the player, have a lot of choice in...because if your powers don't influence other people, then you can't infect people.
Lets say you wanna be Toph from Avatar's The Last Korrabender (wait, that was just Asami Sato, wasn't it?) and you want to get earth throwing/manipulating powers. Well, with 350 points for being a Tier 4, you can throw the fuck out of rocks! But since the rocks are being what is influenced, you don't give anyone powers - not even if you, say, squish them! With rocks!
Cool!
We next have a quick breakdown of Hypermind in Progenitor. So, hyperstats are a pretty common superheroic idea, and in wild talents they're modeled by having stats go from 1-5 for humans, and superhumans can bump those up to 6-10. The core book has examples of what various dice levels have, but in general, hitting 6d is when the stats start becoming really superhuman. For example, 6d in coordination means you can dodge gunfire without needing to dive into cover - something normal humans simply cannot do. 10d in Charm means you can convince anyone of anything in a few rounds of conversation. 7d in Sense means you can perceive everything in a quarter mile radius., that kind of thing.
Well, Greg Stolze decides to throw us EVEN MORE mechanical support for hypercharm, hypercommand and hypermind. The first two will be covered...much...much...much later in chapter 4, but for hypermind, we have a quick rundown of what the superhuman dice levels getcha.
6d is just as written in the core book: You have a photographic memory for all senses and can recall anything with a successful roll.
But at 7d, Progenitor gives us have Casual Riches: A hypermind is just assumed to be so fucking good at brains - stocks, optimizing production, management, investment, that they're assumed to be lower upper class within 12 months of starting from 0. Normally, pulling yourself up by your bootstraps is impossible, but normally, lifting a car is impossible and someone with 7d in body can fucking do that.
At 8d, Progenitor goes Sicko Mode.
Proggers said:
Fuck OFF Greg, how dare you come up with something so fucking cool and weird and inventive and...fucking terrifying??? What's fun is, this isn't even a GM dick move tool, YOU CAN BE THE HYPERMIND! There are NPC telepaths who might be reading your mind - like J. Edgar Hoover (I'm sorry to have to inform you of this, but...J. Edgar Hoover has telepathy and shapeshifting, I...I'm sorry, I'm so sorry) - so, like, you can absolutely have this work for you OR against you. It rules. The mechanics are elaborated on but they're not too necessary to go into, just trust me that they work great.
At 9d, you understand all languages in a few hours of listening to them. It's neat, and extremely useful, and...honestly really cool, but it's also pretty simple.
At 10d? You can, once per week, ask the GM a question about the STEW metrics (more on that later), or about a hypothetical, and the GM has to answer honestly and truthfully. Like, "What are the consequences for me invading North Carolina with my army of mole men" or "what happens if we blew up that space elevator and framed the Soviet Union?" that kind of thing. This is amazing for people who want to be the big bad master manipulators - though there's a wrench in their predictions, one that we will talk about later. BUt...what could it be!?
(It's Amanda)
Next, we have some simple breakdowns for pre-made powers and, uh, I'm going to skip them. Not because it's bad to have a chart for "how to make a superman using 350 points" but, like, because you're not BORING, you're going to make an ACTUAL character, right?
RIGHT!?
Next, we have a description of how the powers spread and get a handy chart of power lineage that I showed to a friend once and they cackled and said, "WOD VAMPIRE SUPERHEROES!" which is...true, yes, actually, that is exactly how it works, they're World of Darkness vampire style superheroes, you got me. We also have this sidebar.
Proggers said:
I just shared this because 1) the line "immunity to laser eyebolts, which one presumes they ardently desires" makes me cackle like a loon and 2) it leads into the idea that there's "backwash" - if the GM wants to keep people on their toes, they can rule that when a hero dies, their power ancestor is "recharged" and is no longer at equilibrium. Which I personally like because the idea of killing all your supervillains is just...it's so boring, man. So, having a good in universe reason for 'why do you not just kill this guy' and the answer is 'i know what he does and what he can do, meanwhile, who knows what happens if this power backwashes and i infect someone worse?' - like, you can still kill someone whose REALLY bad, but if they're just annoying? Nah.
We also get some descriptions of Marks, which I mentioned earlier, and here I want to explain why they're actually really interesting.
So!
A Mark is a metahuman with no powers. But what this means is they DO have Willpower. Baseline humans have Base Will and no willpower, but marks DO have willpower. And what can willpower do? Well, you gain it by fulfilling your passions or loyalties, and you lose it when you fail to uphold those. If your willpower ever hits 0, then your powers crash out: The dice pools are halved and any super-dice become normal dice. This is what happened to Amanda in Peru, you remember? She hit 0 Willpower (most likely due to a combination of failing her passion to help people, already being deeply depressed due to her troubled marriage, and the simple expedient of being hit with a willpower sapping trauma check for seeing so much horror.)
But, if you have willpower you can also SPEND IT. You can get some bonus dice. Or, you can use it to negate damage! So, 1 willpower blocks 1 shock damage, or turns 1 killing into 1 shock damage. 2 willpower negates the killing damage, flat out. And most importantly, you can use it to gobble dice for any non-attack power that is used on you.
Say you're a mark with 11 WP and some fuckhead teleporter tries to teleport you to the Sahara with their powers. So, they get a 2x8 and you spend 1 willpower to eat their dice down to a fail (you need a set, so one 8 is nothing.) He blinks in confusion as you walk up and bean him with a baseball bat.
For a certain kind of player, this concept is probably one of the most satisfying ideas you've ever heard and, hey, playing Progenitor as a Mark with gadgets and gizmos, working as a The Boys? That's perfectly cromulent.
But it's also great for the GM - nothing like having a seemingly normal baseline nosell your hypercharm, eh?
Greg Stozle then throws the keys at the GM and players by letting them decide how many NPCs are strong, average or weak vectors. If there's a lot of strong vectors, then there's way more metahumans. Weak? Fewer and you're more special. I prefer the former cause I like being surrounded by weirdoes! but with that, we move onto the final...and most impressive part of this chapter.
CHANGING THE WORLD.
This mechanic? This one mechanic is about 25% of why I wanted to do this entire lets play. So, here's how it works. There are four metrics: Suspicion, Technology, Economy and Warfare. STEW, for short! As the players and NPCs act, they raise or lower those metrics! Fail to stop a supervillain and he uses mind control to conquer New York for a week? Suspicion is probably going up. Invent an antigravity engine? Raise the technology! Stop the Vietnam War in 1969 with a world changing peace conference? Warfare's going WAY down!
The two highest metrics combine to form the "global mood" - which breaks down to
Authoritarianism (S+T)
Espionage (S+E)
Tribalism (S+W)
Globalism (T+E)
Conflict (T+W)
Imperialism (E+W)
One you have a mood, once per year, as the GM, you total all the dice up and ROLL them. The sets are compared to one chart, the spare dice are compared to another. These random events are then combined with the PC's actions and the canonical events of Progenitor, and thus, will create a continual bubbling crockpot of SHIT HAPPENING.
...let me talk about Aberrant for a bit. Aberrant is also a superhero game ostensibly about big people and big decisions and big choices and politics. So, in Aberrant, if you invented a new gadget that revolutionizes computing technology, you know what I, as the gamemaster, had to mechanically support this?
FUCKING NOTHINNNNNNNNNNNNNNG.
NOTHHHHHHHHHHHHHHIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIINNNNNNNNNNNG.
Do you know how mind-paralyzingly terrifying, how completely enervating it is to sit there with an entire imaginary planet of 9 billion monkeys and try and come up with something, ANYTHING, to reflect the decisions made? Without a framework, without a guide, it's worse than a blank piece of paper. Well, Progenitor comes swinging in and just throws ideas at you like they're candy.
Say, we're at a Suspicion of 2, Technology of 3, Economy of 1 and Warfare of 3. Mood: Conflict! So, we roll 9d and get 7 6 6 5 5 4 4 3 3!
That's 2x6, 2x5, 2x4, 2x3 and a 7!
2x6: An ethnic enclave claims kinship with a rival neighbor, thereby justifying a 'limited' war of 'liberation.'
2x5: A nation uses chemical warfare on a minority group.
2x4: There's a flareup on a border that has been tense and built-up for a long time.
2x3: A nation sponsors a major act of terrorism, or several lesser ones, while consistently denying its involvement.
7: Some local mastermind is seeking WMD. His plan is to rig them to release or explode when his heart stops. (Yeah, he read Snow Crash.)
Now, you take what the PCs have done, look at the countries they're involved with, and start stitching together ideas. The 7 idea could be a fun short session, building up to something more dramatic - maybe combine the 2x4 and 2x5, and have the minority group that got hit by the chemical weapon be on that boarder. The PCs have been doing a lot in the Philiphines, maybe something there?
It's...so good, for the GM.
And with that, we have the final pages: A short run down of the main characters and major events. But, honestly, I think it will be more fun to read those in detail.
The next chapter, we jump right into history in the year 1968.
We will see Amanda's ever shifting evil meter! We will groan at bad decisions, wince at horrible events, and forever ask...
What would I do if I was there?
Because, at the end of the day: The world of Progenitor needs you.
It needs you bad.
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