At some point I really should finish my Night's Black Agents writeup, but fuck if there's not a ton of dry, fiddly rules stuff to work through before I get to the cool stuff. So in the meantime, let's take a look at a pretty neat and not very well known game from A game about weird Forteana, mysterious abilities, and all the ayahuasca tea you can drink.
If Walter Bishop ran the Planetary Foundation, the results might look a little bit like I'm not Daredevil! Where do we come from? Where are we going? The title is a Greek word that variously translates as "unconcealedness," "disclosure," or "truth," so you know we're about to get all existential up in here. Still, despite having a pitch rife with potential for sinking into pseudo-philosophical wankery, Aletheia by and large manages to sidestep the pitfalls of games like The Everlasting and Immortal: The Invisible war and present a pretty neat, pretty coherent world of modern "weird fiction" that unabashedly wears the influence of authors like Warren Ellis, Grant Morrison, and Arthur C.
Clarke on its sleeve. Married to a solid if not hugely ground-breaking rules-lite engine that has shades of GUMSHOE and Over the Edge, it's easy to get into and does a great job of easing you from typical X-Files fare like alien abductions and spontaneous human combustion into full-on territory.
It's also a very tightly-focused game: while you could use it to run a completely procedural "weird event of the week" type game with no overarching story, the entire setting is really built around telling one specific story of discovery and enlightenment All right, let's get this started. I'm going to try to cover two chapters per post for at least the first 3 or 4 chapters, but might end up going down to one per post when we get into the meatier setting stuff.
The wife's at rehearsal all evening and I've got nothing better to do than write some more about I didn't see that. You see, Aletheia commits that layout sin so common to RPGs: telling you how to make a character before it tells you how to play the game. Since that's annoying as hell, we're going to take a minute to talk about the basic task resolution mechanic first. Aletheia uses a straightforward d6-based dice pool system for task resolution: The GM sets a target number from 1 "For actions routinely done with ease by mildly trained individuals.
