How To Run Trinity
By Craig Oxbrow
Hope. Sacrifice. Unity.
Trinity, originally titled Æon, is an “epic science fiction roleplaying” game from White Wolf Games Studios set in the early 22nd Century, as the human race begins to colonize space and meet other intelligent species. Humanity, lead by the Æon Trinity, a United Nations independent think tank and taskforce, and the Orders of human psychics, are reclaiming the Earth, which has been scarred from years of warfare and pollution, and spreading into the solar system, looking beyond it to contact with alien civilizations and even stranger mysteries in the depths of space. It is a vast and complex setting, but one in which human heroes are important. It presents an optimistic view of the future without being unbelievably utopian, where our better traits — hope, sacrifice and unity — are valued.
Trinity has been created to incorporate a wide variety of science fiction styles in a single coherent setting. The published adventure series Darkness Revealed and Alien Encounter indicate the standard game type as SF thrillers mixing intrigue and action, with space travel as scenery, but the setting also includes opportunities for grand space opera adventures, gritty cyberpunk, future war and horror stories, post-apocalyptic survival and futuristic satire. It is a single universe where games can resemble Star Wars, Star Trek, Aliens, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Blade Runner, Babylon 5, Farscape, Transmetropolitan, Akira, Neuromancer, Judge Dredd and more. In this diversity it resembles White Wolf’s flagship RPG Vampire: The Masquerade, which was designed to fit Dracula, Interview with the Vampire, Nosferatu and Near Dark into one background.
Note that Trinity is not the future of the World of Darkness, the setting of Vampire and its family of games such as Werewolf: The Apocalypse. It is based on science fiction rather than mythology. More importantly, the characters are not objects of fear, cursed or forced to hide their powers. The Orders and the Æon Trinity are generally well regarded, some hailed as heroes, and psychics’ failings are human rather than superhuman. Of course there are intrigues, secrets, conspiracies and other plotlines, but the characters are basically human. Indeed, unlike most World of Darkness games, Trinity includes complete rules for playing a non-powered human in the core rulebook.
The standard player characters are psions, human beings with psychic powers ‘triggered’ by mysterious biotechnological devices, named Prometheus Chambers after the Greek god who gave humanity the knowledge of fire. The six Prometheus Chambers each activate a different Aptitude, or group of psychic powers. Each Aptitude is further divided into three Modes, or specific forms of that power. No psion has more than the most basic capability in any Aptitude other their primary focus.
Six Orders of psions use the Chambers. Gamers familiar with other White Wolf systems will recognize the Orders as in-game character types nicknamed ‘splats’, like the clans of Vampire, an extension of the basic character class concept that has been in use since Dungeons and Dragons. The six Orders active as the game commences are the Æsculapians or vitakinetics (healers); ISRA or clairsentients (ESP); Legions of psychokinetics; The Ministry of telepaths; Norça or biokinetics (shapeshifters); and Orgotek or electrokinetics (technology manipulators). Two more Orders have disappeared, leaving plot hooks dangling for the storyteller’s use.
The Orders add character background and conflict as well as defining powers. For example, the Legions are organized as a modern military unit, complete with callsigns, squad indicia, and rivalries between different division. Their Aptitude, Psychokinesis, divides into Cryokinesis, Pyrokinesis and Telekinesis, enabling a Legion character to begin the game with the ability to affect temperatures positively or negatively and move small objects, or concentrate on one Mode and throw construction equipment with a thought or become a walking flamethrower. The Legions are generally suspicious of the Ministry, a Chinese government agency capable of reading and altering thoughts and emotions, and get on well with the Æsculapian. To further complicate matters, the Legions also include non-psionic humans known as neutrals and psions with the Aptitudes of other Orders, such as clairsentient scouts and electrokinetic saboteurs. There is even a single Legionnaire from the Qin, an alien race with its own powers, technologies, factions, conflicts and secrets.
The Æon Trinity recruit and organize from all Orders and all walks of life, making them the standard in-character reason for a team of mixed Aptitudes, i.e., a player character group. As noted above, neutrals are viable characters in a mixed (or all-neutral) group in Trinity, as the Aptitudes are relatively low in power at starting levels. With 22nd Century technology and a little ingenuity, a neutral character or team are easily on a par with the psions.
Technology in Trinity is largely extrapolated from modern science, with the addition of exotic biotechnology made possible by psionic abilities. An average player character has access to a laser pistol capable of knocking out most people in one shot, as well as a computer the size of a cigarette packet that can search all unlocked data files in the solar system in seconds and allow voice satellite communication (holographic imagery costs extra), and can flag down a flying cab on any street corner in the developed world. Biotech adds telepathic links and devices capable of doing their jobs without guidance.
Trinity is the first game of the Æonverse series, with Aberrant and Adventure! being set in its ‘history’. Adventure! concerns the Æon Society, which will become the Trinity, forming in the 1920s as a loose grouping of adventurers and super-scientists, while Aberrant is set in the early 21st century, the golden age of the novas, super-powerful human mutants who will become some of the villains and mysteries of Trinity, responsible for the warfare and horror that humanity is finally recovering from as the Trinity saga begins. Adding to this ironic foreshadowing is the fact that Proteus Division, the active task force of the Trinity (and therefore the most likely PC group) are the successors of Project Proteus, the murderous ‘black ops’ unit from the Aberrant era. The heroes of one game are villains in the other. That said, each is a separate and complete game. Psions do not exist (apart from some naturally occurring examples) in Aberrant, and the Aberrants of the 22nd century are a background detail, one threat among many.
Trinity’s rules are a streamlined version of the Storyteller System, based on ten-sided dice and multiple successes from a set difficulty number. Nine Attributes (Strength, Perception, etc.), thirty-three related Abilities (Firearms, Drive etc.) and the psionic Aptitudes are each rated 1-5, giving a pool of one to ten dice. Most rolls succeed on seven or higher, with multiple rolls determining degree of success and deciding the outcome of opposed tests such as combat or racing. Willpower, a ‘hero point’ system for adding successes to vital roles, and Psi, the trait for using Aptitudes, are rated 1-10.
Character creation is based on points, with Orders, the Æon Trinity and other organizations teaching different ability packages. For example, a Legions character has ten points to spread between Athletics, Brawl or Martial Arts, Command, Firearms, Melee and Survival, and thirteen points to devote to the other twenty-seven standard Abilities. His player can also use bonus points to buy more Abilities. Bonus points can also buy additional Attributes, Willpower, Psi, Aptitude skill and Backgrounds such as financial Resources, Influence and fame in the mass media, and unusual Devices such as a spaceship modified for smuggling.
Players familiar with the World of Darkness version of the Storyteller system can pick up Trinity’s variant easily. It shares features with the Revised editions of World of Darkness games, such as Initiative being based on a single die roll and botches (disastrous failures based on unlucky dice rolls) being less common than in pre-Revised Storyteller games. The system, therefore, is straightforward. Trinity-specific rules, such as psionics and space combat, are explained clearly, and Aptitudes such as shapechanging, which are usable in a variety of imaginative ways rather than having a single defined effect per level, are always given several examples to gauge power levels.
Potential problems with Trinity include the setting’s unfamiliarity and sheer scale. While grounded in a variety of modern science fiction, films and other media, the Æonverse is original, and presented in a background section which runs over 152 pages of the 320 page rulebook, including a short story by George Alec Effinger, author of the When Gravity Fails novels. While it is clearly written and often entertaining, presented in color with photographs and CGI imagery as well as art to add realism, it can take half an hour just to read the file on a single Order. This can be daunting to new players. Furthermore, while they may know Star Wars and Aliens inside out, Darth Vader is not an Aberrant and there are no psychokinetics among the Colonial Marines. A battle of wits with a psychic assassin could resemble Blade Runner or X-Men depending on tone, and both versions would fit the setting. It can appear that Trinity is trying to cover too much SF territory.
One possibility is simply to focus on a specific area of the setting that interests the players and storyteller. For example, a Proteus team working out of an Orgotek software facility in New York (now part of a cyberpunk arcology sprawling across the east coast of the ‘Federated States of America’) and dealing with scrutiny from the anti-psychic American military-corporate government, corporate espionage and intrigue, need never leave the planet or even the city throughout a series. You could follow the example of a TV series and focus on the characters and their location, with adventures resulting from the situation, or base the series on a specific conflict, with locations as backdrops, a method more common to films.
Alternatively, use the vastness of the universe to create an epic. Vast spacecraft warping across the galaxy in an eyeblink, entire planets of bizarre and hostile aliens, massive battles with incredible powers, all centering on the adventures of your small team of human heroes.
The Storyteller section in the rulebook notes and offers advice on this problem as well. The best solution for introducing an audience to a new world is the classic piece of writer’s advice, “Show, not tell.” For example, in Hidden Agendas, the first published adventure for the game, the PCs arrive at Olympus, a city on the moon, to investigate a series of murders. In a single session, the PCs will see regular space travel, psychic powers, combat with 22nd Century technology, political intrigue and more.
Trinity’s epic quality is one of its main attractions for me. The background is rich enough that there is always something new to discover. It was designed with a ‘metaplot’, or ongoing storyline, in mind, but this is only important if the player characters are at the center of it, as they are in the published adventures. If not, the evolving background can remain just that. There are more than enough plotlines in the rulebook to keep players busy for a long series anyway.
The ‘classic’ Trinity series concerns an Æon Trinity mission team drawn from various Orders moving from adventure to adventure, seeing the universe one story at a time. Because the characters are generally members of a large organization, Trinity can be a straightforward mission based RPG. That said, Star Wars and Star Trek also feature heroes from such an organization, and both of those series are essentially character based, so Trinity series can be as personal to the PCs as any game.
As an example of a generic Trinity game, I created a series based on a central conflict, intended to show a large area of the setting to first-time players. The characters discovered, and had to stop, a cell of psions dedicated to bringing down the anti-psychic Federated States of America by any means necessary, which risked the lives of millions of human beings. Locations extended across the FSA itself, from its massive cities to its Aberrant-blighted deserts, and into American holdings in space, such as the FSA quarter of the Olympus moon base and a corporate terraforming facility on Mars. This variety of environments demonstrated the breadth of the Trinity setting. The conflict was further complicated by additional groups of enemies and allies with their own agendas for the characters and the cell. A team of FSA agents with anti-psion technology and weapons were also hunting the rogues, and willing to intimidate or even torture the Trinity group, while Orgotek also sent its own investigators, who did not work in perfect harmony with the characters either. I also played on the antagonism between the team and the cell. After all, the rogues sought to destroy a corrupt government which violently opposed the Orders and the Trinity due to their bigotry against psions, so the players and characters could sympathize with their cause if not their methods. Subplots drew on the characters’ backgrounds once they had been established, as when the team’s clairsentient visited her former mentor at ISRA during the Olympus adventure and received a warning of danger ahead. In short, I focussed on one long storyline but occasionally pulled back to the big picture.
All in all, Trinity manages to combine vast scope with human stories, an optimistic tone with a background full of dangers and horrors, and a variety of playable influences with an original vision. Like all RPGs, you only get out of it what you put in, but the setting is rich in detail and should spark ideas in player and Storyteller alike.
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