he big question I have is that... with each 'generation' (Greg worked on oWoD, if people weren't aware, so the fact it's Vampire mechanics for superpowers should surprise no-one) there's a hard limit to the number of people who can have powers, right? Each person can only infect X others, if I'm reading right. Do we know what happens when people with powers die? What happens when the only people left with powers are the ones with 'Immortality' as one of theirs?
People figure out the infection and spread REAL fast (remember, there are people with super-intelligence) and the answer "what happens to power when they die" is both left up to the GM with some optional rules for backwashes (which I believe I mentioned in the first chapter read) but also, there's a character whose ability is to harvest dark energy from corpses to redistribute it!
People figure out the infection and spread REAL fast (remember, there are people with super-intelligence) and the answer "what happens to power when they die" is both left up to the GM with some optional rules for backwashes (which I believe I mentioned in the first chapter read) but also, there's a character whose ability is to harvest dark energy from corpses to redistribute it!
Rad. I always like it when the game answers some of the 'huh, what then?' questions that pop up.
And of course the fact that there's a character with the harvest corpses power means it already exists for your PC to take so they can be in that role instead if they want!
This is a setting where a "The Boys" doesn't work. This is a setting where you need the fucking Blackwatch to put a lid on capeshit.
Side Note: hate The Boys. The comic is pure HFY slop and while I have not watched the show, I am perennial surprised that they managed to salvage it into something people seem to really enjoy and that actually tells something good about modern capeshit.
This is a setting where a "The Boys" doesn't work. This is a setting where you need the fucking Blackwatch to put a lid on capeshit.
Side Note: hate The Boys. The comic is pure HFY slop and while I have not watched the show, I am perennial surprised that they managed to salvage it into something people seem to really enjoy and that actually tells something good about modern capeshit.
Also, there are many things I've taken from what of the Boys I've read, but a resounding love of humanity sure isn't. Which does make sense, since HFY is just thinly veneered fascism that replaces, say, Jews or black people with aliens/superhumans/elves
Also, there are many things I've taken from what of the Boys I've read, but a resounding love of humanity sure isn't. Which does make sense, since HFY is just thinly veneered fascism that replaces, say, Jews or black people with aliens/superhumans/elves
Blackwatch is the particularly brutal military group/conspiracy your character fights in the videogame PROTOTYPE.
Blackwatch Creed = "WHEN WE HUNT, WE KILL. NO ONE IS SAFE. NOTHING IS SACRED. WE ARE BLACKWATCH. WE ARE THE LAST LINE OF DEFENSE. WE WILL BURN OUR OWN TO HOLD THE REDLINE. IT IS THE LAST LINE TO EVER HOLD."
I really enjoyed Prototype, and, also, a Alex Mercer is an entirely acceptable character type for Progenitor - but, by and large, Progenitor actually...runs a bit on that kind of thing, where the worst of the worst like Jarvis West gets punked out and killed in a few years while normal people who use their superpowers for normal shit like helping people or making tons of money? They live a WHOLE lot longer, because...it turns out...doing supervillain stuff makes people want to kill you.
man am I glad there wasn't a sequel to Prototype where they completely fucking ruined the art direction AND short-sold a good character arc for both Alex AND the new protag.
man am I glad there wasn't a sequel to Prototype where they completely fucking ruined the art direction AND short-sold a good character arc for both Alex AND the new protag.
It sure would suck if the incredibly cool premise of an inhuman virus becoming human through exposure to human memories and thoughts was completely chucked out the window for nooooo reason!
...god, I should find out if someone got Prototype working again.
Also, again: Mercer is a very Progenitor style character. Probably a Tier 3 or 4.
The next power he has is more interesting because of what is attached to it, and because of it, again, having Permanent: Metal Officers. Metal Officers are formed out of steel, copper, iron, whatever metal is common in the area (he doesn't actually "use up" the metal, they just...step out of it.) They're the Sidekick power from Wild Talents, meaning they use his base mental stats for their own rolls...and, also, they have 5hd in light armor, 5hd in heavy armor, 5hd in extra tough, 2hd in the immunity effect turf warriors have, 20d in hyperskills (which are assigned to various soldierly abilities), and 8d+1wd in hyperbody and 6d+1wd in hypercoordination.
Okay, so I picked up wild talents today, and these guys are probably based on Sidekick, so their actual dice pools for those stats would be their hyperstat + whatever the recruiter's stats are, right? even if he's just an average guy that still gives them a lot more oomph than I thought.
Okay, so I picked up wild talents today, and these guys are probably based on Sidekick, so their actual dice pools for those stats would be their hyperstat + whatever the recruiter's stats are, right? even if he's just an average guy that still gives them a lot more oomph than I thought.
My overall thoughts on Reddy are that if I were writing the book, I would not give him the race reversal ray. But I am also a coward sometimes - and Greg Stolze usually goes for it - whatever it is, and sometimes, that leads him to great shit, but it can also sometimes get him burned with a bad idea. And I'm far, far, far too white to make a definitive call on this beyond 'i wouldn't, because i'm a coward.'
Yeah, Stolze looooves playing with narrative fire (see also: everything about the Freak/Sexual Rebis and the Mythic Hermaphrodite).
My own thoughts are similar to yours on that: if you break down his ideas, trace them with your mind, you can generally see what he was going for. There is, like, an intellectual merit in them.
But whether or not they actually work on any given table is an entirely different matter in large part dependent on the makeup of said table.
(In this case I'm also reminded about a comic - don't remember the name, it's about magic keys - where one of the main characters turned black for an issue in a freak magic accident and got to experience racism and deliver a very special lesson in a closing speech, and it's, like, ok, I get what you're doing and your heart's in the right place, but please stop.)
(In this case I'm also reminded about a comic - don't remember the name, it's about magic keys - where one of the main characters turned black for an issue in a freak magic accident and got to experience racism and deliver a very special lesson in a closing speech, and it's, like, ok, I get what you're doing and your heart's in the right place, but please stop.)
This is the part of the race reversal ray that kinda works for me because, like, imagine meeting someone who was doing that in real life and you were like, "...please stop, man." There's a story there about change and revolution and effective calls to action - what is and what is not going to work in changing hearts and minds, you can do a lot with it.
But, also, I don't know how many tables, myself included, have the brains for managing that when we're already dealing with the extremely touchy subjects of, like, the Vietnam War or the Cold War.
My hot take is I think that the transition of the Freak from it/its (🤮) to it/its (😎), especially its appearance in Godwalker (the tie in novel) is one of the better examples of a guy learning and improving over time. In Godwalker, the Freak's just straight up cool - even when it is also a dangerous and terrifying antagonist coming after the main characters like a shapeshifting genderqueer terminator. This is probably also cause I hang out with like four trans women to whom the Freak is just straight up Goals.
Which goals? Well, that depends on the lady in question, lol.
I really enjoyed Prototype, and, also, a Alex Mercer is an entirely acceptable character type for Progenitor - but, by and large, Progenitor actually...runs a bit on that kind of thing, where the worst of the worst like Jarvis West gets punked out and killed in a few years while normal people who use their superpowers for normal shit like helping people or making tons of money? They live a WHOLE lot longer, because...it turns out...doing supervillain stuff makes people want to kill you.
There's a connection between Prototype and Progenitor, beyond that the both start with "pro".
One of the writers on Prototype is Dennis Detwiller. Dennis and Greg Stolze both write stuff for Arc Dream, the company that publishes Wild Talents. They also publish my favorite TTRPG, Delta Green. If you like Progenitors I can recommend everything that these guys write, whether its an adventure module or a novel.
There's a connection between Prototype and Progenitor, beyond that the both start with "pro".
One of the writers on Prototype is Dennis Detwiller. Dennis and Greg Stolze both write stuff for Arc Dream, the company that publishes Wild Talents. They also publish my favorite TTRPG, Delta Green. If you like Progenitors I can recommend everything that these guys write, whether its an adventure module or a novel.
Huh, I didn't know the connection was that direct. Not super familiar with Wild Talents, but I had Delta Green on the brain from talking about it earlier today.
Back on Progenitor, I'm really enjoying the alternate superhero history of the game and I appreciate that there is at least some mechanical system for PCs altering the timeline.
April begins with a note that MLK gets shot, dies, comes back as a ghost. Next, the US government plays hedgy around the existance of Amanda Sykes and metahuman soldiers - but when blurry photographs of Amanda get printed they have to go, "okay, fine, we're using metahumans, BUT, this is still better than Agent Orange, right?" And the news go, "What's Agent Orange?" and then they went, "This interview is over."
As a note: at no point do they actually stop using Agent Orange.
Early in her fighting, Amanda spares the life of a soldier (whether this is one of the few soldiers she actually runs into in her spree of non-lethal disruptions, or if this is a fleeting moment of compassion from a woman rapidly getting used to murder is, again, up to GM and how evil they want Amanda to be right now) and said soldier becomes known...as Sét.
A NOTE ON VIETNAMESE NAMES: Not only does Greg give us this nice note now that we're finally getting into some of the Vietnamese metahumans!
Proggers said:
Within Vietnam, the family name is often listed first, with a personal name at the end—exactly opposite of how we do it in the US. There, I'd be Stolze Greg. Given the preponderance of Vietnamese characters in Progenitor, there are a lot of these names. They are listed with personal name first, as they would when dealing with westerners. Sorry if this causes any confusion.
I've also tried to provide pronunciation keys for some non-Western names. I take full responsibility for any errors.
Oh man, this DOES cause confusion, I've been calling Cam by her last name this whole time, shit! Damn you, Greg! Damn youuuu!
Anyway, I'm gonna just correct this.
THIENTONG KY (TeeYENtong Kee) - SET (Sheht)
SUM UP
Proggers said:
Thientong Ky was 16 years old when he took part in the Tet offensive. He was fed up with the mismanagement and pushiness of the foreign occupiers, and more fed up with the corruption and incompetence of their Christian Vietnamese stooges. His Buddhist family had been humiliated and despoiled because of their beliefs, leaving Ky angry, with the self-righteousness that's only possible for a teenager who has seen only one side of the fight, but has seen that side painted with blood.
Tet was bad. Sure, they seized a lot of territory. They showed their strength, they showed that nowhere was safe. But it cost them heavily, many Vietcong lives, and Thientong Ky had already been driven back to the Vinh Long countryside when his cadre were tracked and attacked by an American woman who swooped down out of the sky, silent, glowing, masked. Green fire streamed from her hands and rifles exploded in Vietnamese hands. Ky had been sleeping, he was thrown from his bed when their store of grenades went up. He was stunned in the jungle for close to fifteen minutes, and when he came to, it was fearsomely silent. He crept forward and saw her, still glowing, and without a thought in his head he picked up a bayonet from a comrade's melted body and slowly crept closer to her.
Amanda—he learned her name only much later—she never saw him coming. He raised the knife and struck between her shoulder blades as hard as he could.
She stumbled forward and he struck again and again as she turned, but there was no blood, nothing, and then she raised her hand and he was suspended in midair, spreadeagled, the knife wrenched from his grip and she looked at him.
Her helmet had a mask, it was featureless. Slowly, she rose in the air until she was even with him. Then, without a word, he dropped to the ground and she rocketed off into the sky. Ky could only think that she'd found him unworthy of killing.
The fall actually hurt him worse than anything else - but as he recovered, thrashing in bed, he learned he had power. He had it by shooting a glowing white ball out of his chest that flew back to the village that the Americans had just occupied - blowing 47 of them to pieces. They would not be the last.
POWERS
Ky has a really depressing power set, once you put it into perspective. He is one of the vanishingly few Tier Twos in the entire setting. 450 points. A STAGGERING amount of raw power points that you could do anything with. We see what Amanda does with slightly more, and what people like Boris do with slightly less. Now, taking that in mind, look at his powers. Or, should I say...power.
He has one power.
It has 9 hard dice.
And it kills people.
It has a radius of about 640 meters, it has engulf, it has 6 penetration, it has a range boost of 5 (putting the range at approximately 280,000 kilometers), and he doesn't need to see what he's aiming at, though it does help to let him hit things. He can fire as many as four blasts at once, and overlap them as much or as little as possible.
It's extremely powerful, terrifyingly so - it's WAY more powerful than anything Amanda can do without dropping truly staggering amounts of willpower - it'd be something Amanda would need to burn herself nearly out to do just once, let alone do it four times every ten seconds. But it's all Ky can do.
It makes me very. Very. Very. Very sad.
Ky is a character that is a little hard to use as a direct combat threat. His powers are either completely irrelevant to your campaign, or you are a fine spreading pal of white ash surrounded by the smoldering remains of everyone in a, what, five block radius? More, if he's spreading out. Instead, his presence does what nuclear bombs do to international diplomacy, but with superhuman factions. If Set is on a side, then that side has the big red Set button. Save that Set can choose to not fire himself, if he wants too. That's where the interesting stories come in, involving Set. Alternatively, he exists as a pressure - a pro-peace character in America may have a hard time when Set starts blowing up American munition factories from around the world and people freak the fuck out!
However, let us not make mistakes or mince words: Set primarily targets military structures or empty buildings (you'll learn how he does this in a bit.) He's not a bloodthirsty monster, even if his power makes him rack up kill counts in the thousands before 1968 is over. The same cannot be said of a depressingly large number of American troops.
CONTENT WARNING: Discussion of massacre starts here!
In our world, these events happened in March - but in Progenitor, the date has shifted, either due to a historical research mistake by Greg Stolze or because of the changing timelines and alterations due to the actions of Amanda Sykes. In our world, an American task force was sent into a village called My Lai looking for Vietcong soldiers. They found civilians, and they started to kill them, and they didn't stop until between 300 to 500 civilians were dead.
In our world, this was nearly covered up until a veteran (Ronald Ridenhour) a journalist (Seymour Hersh) broke the news.
In Progenitor, Amanda Sykes flew overhead and saw what was happening.
Now, looking at this from the storytelling choice of "how evil do you want Amanda Sykes to be", it must be said, even if you're playing Amanda as a fairly blatant symbol of American Imperialism, it must be noted...she's still a person. And people do things because they believe in them - and so, Amanda believes in America, at some certain level. She believes in the war to varying degrees, and she believes that what she is doing is right. When most human beings run into such stark and clear evidence that what they are doing isn't right at all they need to make a choice.
Well.
Okay, first, usually, they have the emotional reaction.
And when your emotional reaction is tied to the ability to make and unmake matter at will, what happens is Amanda immolates the entire fucking platoon. Oh, sorry, no, I checked, she immolates multiple companies from several platoons (or several battalions? I'm easily confused by Army structures) but a skim of Wikipedia says that the task force that was doing this massacre numbered about 500 people. This does mean that if you are playing Amanda as a more gentle, woobie style character, that is is ENTIRELY possible that Amanda checks out of the Vietnam War having killed more yankees than NVA soldiers.
Kneeling in the aftermath of this event, horrified by what she has seen and what she has done, Amanda...does something else that's fairly human.
Humans are very good at compartmentalizing. They get much, much, much better at compartmentalizing when you can make and unmake reality at will. And so, Amanda rewrites her memory to blank this entire horrifying, traumatic, awful experience out of it. Then she flies away. The "battle" is chalked up to Set and a particularly heavy Vietcong counter attack, and no one is any the wiser.
...except for Cam Nguyet.
CAM NGUYET (Kham Nwyit) - THE GREAT CONDUCTOR
SUM UP
Proggers said:
Cam had a revolver and a head full of stories about American soldiers raping and killing. When the GIs approached on foot, she planned to keep one bullet for herself. As the first soldier, the first black man she'd ever seen, poked open the door of the house, she shrieked and charged and pulled the trigger.
She missed. She heard him swear and saw the rifle butt coming at her, and then she woke to a searing pain in her chest. Somehow, she knew not to scream. She was in a pile of bodies, the bodies of everyone she'd known. The Americans were bayonetting them and then heaping them up. She waited until she thought their backs were turned and she started scrambling out, making her way to the tree line. She collapsed halfway
there and an officer was pointing a pistol at her face when everything stopped.
The thing, the blur, the killing mystery had returned and it was a woman. Floating above them, it was screaming something at them in English and Cam couldn't move, the the man with the gun couldn't move, none of them could. And then the men, the American GIs, their heads exploded one after another, like dropped eggs and still their bodies stood upright for a moment. Then they fell and Nguyet lay still.
As the green monster wept, Cam crept away and stared, mind blank, as Amanda Sykes gestured and the dead soldiers, the dead villagers, they all massed together and then the pile burned as bright as the sun. Still shaking with sobs, the American woman floated into the sky, escaping the scene.
Cam (I note that she's one of the characters that Greg refers to by surname rather than given name - which I think may indicate how the character in question prefers to be called, or alternatively, he forgot that Cam would be her surname and not given name, like I did for ages!) woke up post massacre having been infected by Amanda and, unlike the 500 Americans, did not have her brain exploded and then body immolated. Instead, she managed to pick herself up, and what may be the single coolest depiction of this particular power set ever written gets given to us.
I know I always gush about this, but Greg just is an all timer prose writer.
Proggers said:
Cam was alone and hurt, but she was calm. Her thoughts were clear, clearer than they'd ever been. Before Amanda was even out of sight, Cam had developed enough self-consciousness and willpower to slow the bleeding of her wound. Her consciousness was expanding, swelling with thoughts, and if her mind before had been a leaf, her mind now was a tree, spreading and sucking in the light of observation, information, knowledge. As she trudged towards the next settlement for help, she learned more than she had in her entire life previous. She spun off a tiny piece of her capacity—one leaf on the tree—and used it as a repository for the physical pain. Another leaf was given the burden of processing the emotions, and then more leaves to support it, an entire branch. The rest was analyzing, timing the fall of the blood drops as they hit the ground, as they hit her knee in mid-step, calculating the difference, watching the play of light and shadow, reading the terrain, seeing where plants grew and where they didn't, where the soil built up and where it wore away and by the time she'd gotten help, her observations had equipped her with roughly the equivalent of Masters' Degrees in botany, geology and classical Newtonian mechanics.
She had also realized that this new mental might was surely the result of that American creature, and that if it had been contagious to her, she might be contagious to others. So she spoke to no one, interacted with them as little as possible, but instead spent her time listening, learning, observing. She watched men take apart an engine, looked in the back of a transistor radio, stole and disassembled a pocket watch. She watched flames flicker and timed the breeze and understood fluid dynamics, she listened to husbands and wives and children and understood psychology more thoroughly that Sigmund Freud dreamed possible. She listened to that radio and learned English, learned French, and when she was ready she set out to the north.
By that time, her mind was more than one tree. It was a forest.
Fuck! She's so cool! Furthermore, Cam is a fantastic counterpoint to Jason Weeks in terms of how this game presents superintelligence. Because, well, we've seen what Weeks has extrapolated from his perception and understanding. But what about Cam? she's JUST as smart (literally, both have 10hd in hypermind...spoilers for the power section I am going to write up soon.) BUt where Jason sees a chaotic future that cannot be predicted or controlled, Cam sees something clear and precise.
Proggers said:
For Nguyet felt that the odds of mankind being alone in the cosmos were negligible. She was also certain that when humanity encountered its cosmic neighbors, the differences in synaptic structure and epistemological perspective would allow for no common ground. There would be no negotiation, not even understanding. There could only be the lowest common denominator: Total war.
Nguyet, for all her suffering and anger, still loved humankind. She was not willing to let humanity fall, and if the process of making it strong enough to triumph was a painful one, she could shunt that pain aside. It would be only a leaf.
Millions would have to die, as notes fade to silence, but it would forge a new humanity—a race unhindered by sentiment or cruelty or mercy or regret. A humanity curious and brave and utterly, utterly practical. A humankind like herself.
Yet, deep inside the forest of her mind, one leaf is still that frightened 15-year-old girl from the village of My Lai.
If you are a fan of speculative fiction, you have probably ALSO read The Three Body Problem which Greg Stolze 100% has, because this is just the Dark Forest hypothesis. And...gonna be honest, Greg Stolze and I are 100% in agreement that this kind of predictive modeling about alien life is absolutely more a reflection on the person (or society) that the idea comes from than it is an accurate model for anything. In the 1960s, when our world seemed fated to die in a nuclear fireball, the Drake Equation emerged - and makes "civilization destroys itself with its own technology" one obvious answer to the so called Fermi Paradox. The Dark Forest hypothesis and the novels that popularized it came out of China, a country that has only RELATIVELY recently overcome a century and change of foreign humiliation and meddling by technologically advanced colonial powers...and they just so happen to create an explanation for why there are no aliens based entirely around zero sum colonial paranoia.
Cam's first moments of superhuman intelligence was recovering from being bayonetted.
Like, I don't agree with her - either in the Progenitor AU or in our own universe, because there's just not enough information to base any kind of suppositions like this on...also, like, in Progenitor, you have people who can turn air into glass and can make paintings that have souls, I think we can manage to talk to some aliens. But I absolutely UNDERSTAND her perspective, I get why she thinks this way, and that's SO MUCH MORE INTERESTING!!!!!
POWERS
Cam's powers are fairly simple and precisely what you'd expect: She has 10hd in mind, 10d in charm, 10d in command, 10hd in dodge (reflecting her remarkable ability to predict incoming attacks and model her bodies movements accordingly), 10hd in empathy, 9d in songwriting (Greg claims that her songs lack 'soul', but Greg, you contradict yourself! She's supremely charming AND has a deeply sensual, emotional side!!! I declare this statement to be non-canon, her music 100% has soul, probably more soul than you can even imagine.) And, finally, she has a power I don't remember if...
...did Jason Weeks have this power?
Yes he did! She has gadgeteering too! So, she can also invent stuff.
Also she has 47 bonus points of Base Will.
47.
She has 47 points of base will! Remember, you get 1 base will per charm and command, so if she had normal human levels of charm (2) and command (2) before her powers, that'd be 12 charm, 12 command, and 47 points of base will, for a grand total of 71 motherfucking points of base will! So, willpower, that gainable resource (which is spent, by the way, to make gadgets and survive in impossible situations and so on), has a cap on how much you can gain per session. that cap is in your base will. So, she can gain up to 71 points of willpower PER SESSION if she's leaning into her passions and loyalties. Cam is this little lady, but she can tank being...shot at by a...fucking tank, without using anything by her sheer determination to survive.
Of course, she doesn't need to do that, since she has 10hd of hyperdodge, so, like, she'd stand precisely where none of the shrapnel will be after calculating that precise spread of impact points. Because she's cool.
What's funny is, Greg did a little fuck up here: Her loyalties (Vietnam, Progressive Harmony, the Survival of Humanity) and her passions (Absolute Control and A Long, Serious Screw) math up to 40 points, Greg's missing 7 base will from powers and 24 from her hypercharm, normal charm, hypercommand and normal command. I choose to decide that this is not a fuckup, but rather, a chance for you to fine tune Cam for your game - since what she has more or less passions or loyalty to shapes her character somewhat.
Now, you may ask: "Uh, Dragon, what's Progressive Harmony? It sounds scary from the way Greg was describing it?"
Well, ProgHarm and Cam's motivations and her origin and how her superpowers are written and the psychological connections between her goals and her origin story are all a big part of why she wins the prize of DRAGON COBOLT'S MOST BLORBO!
So, confession time: I kinda started this thread because I am lowkey obsessed with these characters. I love them, I hate them, I love to hate them, and I really want to tell stories with them. They are my blorbos. However, some characters are more blorbo than others (you can probably tell by how I write about them!) and Cam is the most blorbo. I love her so much!
I love the fact that in most games, she'd be a straight up villain but in this game, even when she's doing GENUINELY HORRIBLE THINGS, she does them for REASONS that you can understand, and she doesn't do them if she doesn't genuinely think she has to. Cam exists in a state where, like...with Amanda, you kinda want to try and talk her away from a bad idea, but Cam, you want to talk the world into letting Cam step away from the volcano fortress and suit of power armor that she's like, two bad days away from building. It's not that Cam wants to become Doctor Doom, it's just that she exists in a world where becoming Doctor Doom is the most logical course of action.
But also, I love the fact that she's VIETNAMESE DOCTOR DOOM!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I fucking LOVE Doctor Doom! I love his style, I love the fact he's also a WIZARD, I love that he's like, a genuinely good leader of Latveria (well, depending on the comic author, but I can just ignore the ones I don't like), I love that he would cure cancer and save every puppy orphanage in the world but ONLY if he thought it would somehow infuriate Reed Richards. I love everything about him, so the idea of "What if Doctor Doom was a Vietnamese girl fighting America during Vietnam" (who then goes on to utterly destroy the Khmer Rouge, which...by the way, the Vietnamese did in the real world without any metahuman help, because apparently Vietnam is just BUILT DIFFERENT - these guys took on France, the United States, Cambodia AND China all in a row and WON EVERY TIME, like, goddamn!) just absolutely appeals to me.
And I love that she goes ham and invents Progressive Harmony, which itself is yet another dial that the GM can adjust.
We get some details on ProgHarm and how it works in later chapters, and it is often described as both being creepy and highly effective and quasi-utopian. It also happens to be described in the same chapter that lets you build mind control viruses and songs that make you gay using memetics! So, like, as the GM, you get to decide.
Exactly how evil is ProgHarm, anyway?
If you want to lean into the tragedy of Cam, you have ProgHarm be this outright villainous creation that she sculpts - it's sympathetic, but she is doing a bad thing due to her trauma. I don't like this take, because it's boring and it is Marvel Brained (What if Vietcong...BUT TOO MUCH????) but you can use it if you want too. If you want to have Cam be a more goody two shoes figure, you can have ProgHarm be...genuinely utopian, albeit hard to understand unless you're a member and have accepted the principles it runs on.
Or you can do me and my friend Brad's favorite take which is you both it!
ProgHarm is a genuinely utopian vision of the world whose citizens are healthy, happy, and able to accomplish the goals they wish to, creating a society that is cohesive, artistic, and ever striving towards greater and greater potential! ...it also only works because of constant low level brainwashing to provide social lubrication and without Cam constantly fine tuning it, it'll fall apart.
Very Exalted, now that I think about it, with Cam as the Twilight Caste in the center of it.
But another thing I love about Cam?
I have a pretty big fucking stink eye when it comes to the hoary old trope that intelligence "makes you" an asshole. Like, Dr. House isn't an asshole because he's smart, he's an asshole and he is smart, you know? So, I genuinely appreciate that Cam...loves people. She loves art, and she loves music, and she loves humanity in all our weird messiness, even if she thinks that a lot of us are annoying and should clean our act up. She likes sex and a movie and, presumably laying in bed after the sheets have been dried and they're all warm and fluffy.
So, as we continue in the canon timeline, both Amanda and Cam are gonna start doing bad things - Amanda because of her inherent mistake (of trusting the United States government) and Cam because of her external conditions (ironically, also involving the United States government) but I will still always stan my musically themed Vietcong Doctor Doom.
She is...
The most blobro.
Next month, will we get through an update without a bunch of new characters?
No!
EDIT: oh, and, spoiler, but despite saying "millions would die" in the description of ProgHarm, there's no actual description or depiction of mass death in ProgHarm countries, the only time millions of people die all at once is in WW3, which is an entirely unpredicted out of the blue incident that pissed Cam off something fucking fierce. Not sure what Greg was going for, maybe referencing the soyjack meme?
Vietnamese Doctor Doom is indeed rad as fuck, and I second the notion that depicting her as a generic villain is the boring, coward's way out.
I do also really like that Progenitor puts emphasis on foreign capes right from the get go-sure, the first batch of metahumans are Americans, but the second are Vietnamese soldiers and civilians. What other superhero setting even has multiple Vietnamese supers, let alone them being major characters and world shaking powers unto themselves?
I totally get what you mean about rotating the characters in your head.
A few days ago I had the idea that Cam might try to double their efficiency by brainwashing a few telepaths into getting really curious about her, and that kept me entertained for a while.
(I eventually realized that she wouldn't because "telepaths who knows who you are" is simply too scary to let exist in a world you share with Jason Weeks.)
AFAICT, Cam is supposed to represent how flawed the 'pure rational mind' is when it's, you know, still a human mind; she's still influenced by all her pre-existing biases and neuroses, which inform all the plans she makes. She's also clearly a deliberate contrast to Weeks, the 'dreamer'.
Set is just tragic top to bottom, really; unfortunately I don't think Stolze really uses him much? There's not really much you can do with 'living intercontinental tactical nuke launcher'. It's not exactly a thing you can tell a lot of stories about.
(Cam starts with Command 1 and Charm 2, so she only gets to regen up to a measly 70 willpower per session. I'm sure that 1 point difference will be meaningful.)
EDIT: oh, and, spoiler, but despite saying "millions would die" in the description of ProgHarm, there's no actual description or depiction of mass death in ProgHarm countries, the only time millions of people die all at once is in WW3, which is an entirely unpredicted out of the blue incident that pissed Cam off something fucking fierce. Not sure what Greg was going for, maybe referencing the soyjack meme?
I assume she's just assuming that eventually there would be significant international, possibly nuclear, backlash and/or the need to wage war to unite humanity. Follows from her "if aliens ever find us, total war is inevitable" mindset, yeah?
I like how really perfectly suited for working together to change the world or catastrophically destroying each other Set and Nguyet are, great as both a classic brains and brawn duo and an inversion of it especially if you as GM play an older Set as increasingly strategically using himself as a peacemaker and growing wiser or whatever, compared to the tragedy of a more overtly villainous turn to Nguyet and Progressive Harmony as the world spins more and more out of control.
I like how really perfectly suited for working together to change the world or catastrophically destroying each other Set and Nguyet are, great as both a classic brains and brawn duo and an inversion of it especially if you as GM play an older Set as increasingly strategically using himself as a peacemaker and growing wiser or whatever, compared to the tragedy of a more overtly villainous turn to Nguyet and Progressive Harmony as the world spins more and more out of control.
The excitement of running a Progenitor game is the keys, I think. It's not just that you are given this really cool setting but more than basically ANY setting save, like, the Reign 2nd edition setting, you are just chucked the keys to the Progenitor setting and told to just drive it wherever you want, and I think that's really great.
I know that...there's no law saying that you can't change any setting any time you want - head cannons and in character actions have always been a part of roleplaying games. But there is a difference between being allowed to do something and being encouraged and supported to do something, you know?
A lot of settings feel very much like someone's carefully curated dollhouse that has all the place settings glued to the exact precise spot don't fucking move it you'll ruin my tableau. Progenitor feels like Stolze grabbed a bucket of lego, built this elaborate scene, and then handed you a sledgehammer with a grin.
it's also fortunate with respect to all the big swings they made that didn't work quite as well as Vietnamese doctor doom, if they had maintained a more curated fine-tuned setting approach, then I feel like going back to some of the US racial politics sections would prove a lot more roblox oof.
