Timewalking Archive Trap: The End of Aberrant

Like anyone whose desire to say something is matched only by their desire to waste time saying it on the internet, I've been blogging for a while. Timewalking Archive Trap is presents select treasures (for very liberal definitions of "treasures") from yesteryear for the sole enjoyment of my readers. This one is dated 2006:

So it's over. The plot twists, the character development. The plot holes and character deconstruction. The puerile secrets, the highs, the lows, the intricately detailed non-player extras who were both the recipients of a great destiny and one of so many nameless bodies thrown on an indifferent pyre, the other non-player characters with hastily-hatched names and concepts to match ideas that were quickly constructed, vaguely defined, and much loved.

The best parts of life are the ones we do not plan for. We hope in those irregular occasions and events that we anticipate, but somewhere between the honest satisfaction and honest disappointment we lie at the end of a rainbow, under a continued hype that keeps us believing things were as good as expected--or at least better than they were--if not out of the simple need of hope for a varied, exciting, and worthwhile life, then out of a plain refusal to believe in failure.

In boredom.

In a daily regularity not worth sharing.

Not worth remembering.

Not worth telling.

Not worth living.

Not worthy.

It is the irregularities that make life more or less than this. It is the unusual which makes one's life special or miserable. It was the unexpected that found us in Aberrant. My controlled chaos, my friends' chaos and control. I have, at times, seen myself as a Disney villain. It fits the toothless acrimony of my villains and make them particularly suitable for portraying comic-action villains. I monologue, I underestimate my players, build superweapons that disable the heroes' superpowers and forget that Warlock carries a shotgun and a flack jacket.

In fact, I don't think Warlock's done much non-dramatic warlocking in a while...

We had characters that were complicated, and some that were simple. A bravo driven to overcome any opponent; one of the most powerful beings on Earth, who when he hears that an experimental compound has exploded in Nebraska calls his parents in Denver to see if they were safe, then flies out to cauterize a giant's knees off.

A redeemable Irish kid who made Spiderman look about as lucky as a millionaire playboy Bruce Wayne. He gives up, but when history gives him the opportunity--the hope--to change things for the better, he steps up like a hero.

It wasn't perfect--nothing is--but it was good fun. The adventures were too big sometimes, the tasks too easy, the separation between honest roleplaying and self-insertion was thin at times (on both sides of the storyteller's screen), but we had fun. That's what we were there for, and that's what we left with most days.


"Death is not the end of a character, it is the final piece of character development."