A not-so-indepth overview of 3 fairly popular Chronicles of Darkness fanbooks, Chapter 2: Invincible Hypermind
So, Genius the Transgression
I’m not 100% aware of the history of the World of Darkness games, but from what I gather, this game was created in response to a very specific beef the creators had with the brand-new version of Mage at the time, which I believe was Mage: The Awakening? I’m not talking about the mainline; I'm not gonna do any research on that. Specifically, the Technocracy (more specifically the Void Engineers) not being playable in the newest edition. So, they created Genius! A game where everyone plays a more… morally neutral version of the traditionally antagonistic hypercapitalist Technocrats. While the Technocrats in the last few years of World of Darkness became much more nuanced and were effectively treated as another tradition of magic, Chronicles erased them from the timeline. Geniuses work on similar rules to the Technocrats; they take the occultism from the World of Darkness setting and leverage it to do stuff that's effectively magic but not really because of the strict definition of “Magic” in the WoD setting.
Enough about Mage, though; let's talk about Genius itself. Scrolling through an incredibly late-2000s Media Inspiration list (Bob the Angry Flower, Girl Genius, calling the Fly a bad movie, and Venture Bros but described in a specific way that makes it very clear that the show was still in the first kinda experimental season). The game gives way to an incredibly long glossary of terms. From this glossary, you can get, in plain English, what Geniuses are, and you can also tell that this game was made by people VERY salty about the state of CofD.
In short: Geniuses are not!Mages who can manipulate space and time in novel, unique ways using Science! With an exclamation point, don’t forget the exclamation point. They’re empowered by an energy source named Inspiration and their own Madness (named Mania), which lets them peer past the veil of traditional science and create great inventions called Wonders with anomalous and occult effects. Does this sound ableist? Yeah, it’s because it kinda is, and there's a lot more ableism throughout the game; just assume it's background radiation whenever I talk about anything else, perhaps background radiation from a failed experiment… Geniuses can have servants that don’t have the spark of inspiration but can still help out in Science! Called Beholden (also known as Igors), they fight against the Lemurians, mad scientists hopelessly stuck in their old, outdated ways and unwilling to move forward to improve the world of Science!. They used to control the world, but after The Revolution™ they’re no longer in control and are kinda just as hopelessly lost as you.
This paints the world of Genius as a world in decay, which is a lot more oWoD than CofD. oWoD held a sort of apocalyptic belief that the world was in decay, and that the players were seeing the latter end of an entire hidden world; meanwhile, CofD is a world almost defined by stasis, everyone’s stuck in their traditional ways and has been forced to be that way by forces beyond their own control. Which one is better? I can’t say really; I like CofD’s actual gameplay a little better, if that helps. Genius is very much in conversation with OWoD in general; it has the whole “every single conspiracy theory ever is true to some extent” vibes the original games did, things that were retconned over time, like the deeply strange and confusing WoD cosmology that includes shit like the Hollow Earth and Aliens on Mars are all back and canon. It also has the oWoD attitude towards… the nazis. Goddamnit, not this again; I thought I got away from Eat the Reich!
This is pretty minor, so I’m not gonna spend a lot of time on it, but in oWoD they had a tendency to never claim Hitler was supernatural but saying everything else around the nazis was. And this doesn’t break from it, as in a list of “Notable historical Geniuses,” they mention Josef Mengele alongside other names like Amelia Earhart, Philip K. Dick, and Nikola Tesla. I’m normally against this kinda thing on principle, but I think saying that Josef Fucking Mengele’s experiments were in fact a form of hidden, misunderstood genius is a level of Nazi Shit that is unforgivable, especially for a game pretty clearly rooted in Obama-Era liberalism and the New Atheist movement.
Oh also, the game references the Time Cube Conspiracy. I’m not gonna get into it, but it was basically a case where a bunch of college students bullied a schizophrenic old man because he had a weird racist and homophobic conspiracy site that went viral; there’s a lot more to it, but I don’t wanna get into it.
Anyways, back to a more fun topic: the different schools of mad science. There are 5 schools and then 5 “Catalysts,” Catalysts being the thing that drove you to mad science. I’ll go over them fairly quickly so we can move on to character creation.
Starting with the schools, we have four schools; 2e adds a few more, but they’re weird and racist, so we’re gonna ignore them: Artificers, Directors, Navigators, Progenitors, and Scholastics. This is actually where the game does pitch something fairly interesting. While the player scientists divide themselves into non-hierarchical scholarly schools of specialization that collaborate to further their fields, the Lemurians instead are all deeply tribalized hierarchical factions that each believe that society “Went wrong” during different periods in time, and believe that they need to return to a specific time period. This, when written by a more competent author, could be a very, very interesting idea! But the game doesn’t really do anything with it, so! The point is moot.
Starting with the Artificers, they’re your most ‘traditional’ mad scientists, studying Mad Engineering, your Dr. Doofenshmirtz and what have you. A lot of WoD books have what I like to call the opposing Capitalist/Communist clans: one clan of the Obnoxious Rich Guys who usually have Social as their highest stat, and then a Communist clan that doesn’t stand in opposition to the former, but does generally have beef with them. Communist Clans usually have stats based on either brute force or stealth. Anyways, the Artificer is the latter, being a group of downtrodden outcasts who focus mostly on Building Shit; they hate the Directors (the capitalist clan). They make your wacky thingamabobs and doohickeys with various switches and gauges and whistles. There’s a little lore tidbit at the end that younger artificers have a trend where they continuously try to one-up each other by making their machines out of increasingly weird and gross shit for shock factor, which is decently funny. Their preferred axioms are Automata or Epikrato; what are axioms? All in due time
Directors are the students of Mad Psychology, your Dr. Jekylls and Mr. Hydes, or Dr. Caligaris, the kinda guy to use a sleepwalker to commit crimes. The game makes it overwhelmingly clear they aren’t a shadow government Illuminati thing, which would honestly just. Add to the giant pile, WoD has at least 8 different shadow governments, and that's being generous. Anyhow, they actually don’t use Wonders that often, instead preferring to use their own natural charisma to get their way. They’re very much the aforementioned Capitalist clan. Their preferred axioms are Katastrofi or Skafoi.
Navigators workinn the field of Mad Physics; they’re your Tony Starks and what have you, Action Scientists with inventions that tend to lean more violent and aggressive, they’re the ones you want if you need a Death ray or a suit of power armour built. They’re wandering daredevils who run around defeating evil and keeping people safe or whatever. Their primary focus is creating fantastical vehicles, be they steampunk flying machines, methods of digital travel, ways of entering and out of the spirit realms, etc. They have a loose military hierarchy that barely matters unless you’re in an area with a LOT of them. They’re a clan of rough and rowdy scientists making wonderful flying contraptions. Their favoured axioms are Automata or Exelix.i
The Progenitors are the masters of Mad Biology; they’re generally disliked by the wider genius community because their experiments lean on being more gross and… well, mad, than others. This leads to them being considered eccentric and more mad with power than most others. They’re… a little rough, they’re very clearly based on 90s-00s transgender and transhumanist internet culture and as such read as pretty damn transphobic nowadays. I will however highlight this short section from their sub-factions because I really like it. “The Trash Girls (a gender-neutral term) deliberately live without money or mundane possessions in the world's worst cities, changing themselves and their surroundings with the polluted icons of a fallen world“, And I just think we all need some of that nowadays, its like a fucking pronoun palace joke. Their favored axioms are Automata or Exelixi
Finally, theres the Scholastics, students of Mad… Philosophy. Yeah i don’t know, I think they just didn’t want to call it Mad Mathematics for some reason because… well, thats what they do. They primarily work in the purely theoretical, math, philosophy, those kinds of subjects. They primarily focus on theory and the gathering of knowledge. Their Preferred Axioms are Apokalypsi or Metaptropi
Ok, now onto the last two parts of making a Genius: their Catalyst (Why they do magic) and their Axioms (Equivalent to Vampire Disciplines or Mage Spheres, basically how your magic manifests), I’ll keep them brief theres not much to talk about here
The catalysts are: Grimm: Angry people who live in mars Hoffnug: Idealists who life in jupiter Klagen: People who lost someone in their life who live in Venus Neid: Exiled people who live in Saturn Staunen: Curious people who live in Mercury
Theres more to this, but most of it really does not matter, all you really need to know is that these are your motives for becoming a mad scientist and they determine some stuff here and there.
And the Axioms are:
Apokalypsi: Info gathering and scanning, here’s where you get scanners, radios, translators, etc Automata: Artificial life and created beings Epikrato: generalized control, mental and physical Exelixi: Medicine and Upgrading Katastrofi: Weapons Metapropti: Transmutation and Modification Prostasia: Protection Skafoi: Movement
Alright, that was a lot, but did you Get all that? Good, let’s get to making a character in this mess
For our concept, I wanna make someone who is trying to evolve humanity via harnessing the metaphysical power of our emotions and personality, and I’ll call her Wendy Deacon Lasher.
For her attributes, I’ll be Primary Mental, Secondary Physical, and Tertiary Social, and do the same for the Skills. I’ll post her Actual Sheet at the end of this, so if you wanna see the nitty gritty numbers of her character you can look there, but she’s a pretty average scientist all things considered. I then get to add 3 skill specializations, I’ll make her good at Surgeries in Medicine, Emotions in Empathy, and Blasters in Firearms. This was just general COFD character building; now for the actual Genius parts: All geniuses have one extra point in any mental stat; we’re applying it to Resolve. NOW we actually get to the fun part, we’re choosing her Foundation, which will be a Progenitor; I think it fits; her Catalyst, which will be Grimm; her Inspiration, which we’ll say she starts with 1; we have better places to spend our merit, and then 3 different Favored Axioms, which we’ll choose Exelixi from her Foundation, Katastrofi from her Catalyst, and Epikrato for her free one. We get 3 dots to spend on disciplines, so we’ll take 1 in each Axiom; this gives her basic healing on the Exelixi side, basic object control from Epikrato, and allows us to make basic weapons with Katastrofi. For merits, let's not do anything too fancy: 2 dots in Resources, 1 in Dumpster Diver, and then 4 in getting a really good beholden for myself. There's a whole process where you need to dole out points, so the breakdown is: 2 in Number (representing 2 Beholden), One in Skill (representing fairly skilled lab techs), and 1 in Prowess (representing basic combat training). For Virtue we’ll go with Calm, and for Vice we’ll go with Prideful Finally, we get to make our first few wonders, yay! I’ll just make one for time and simplicity, a gun called the Lasher Blaster. After some basic rolls, we end up with a fairly basic weapon that deals non-lethal damage.
And that's our character! Here’s her sheet, hopefully it embeds correctly ! Character Sheet
Now then. On to my thoughts on the actual game
…Yeah, no, I really, really hated this. I think the game suffers from 2 primary problems: Problem 1: It's OLD It's incredibly outdated, not only in some of its portrayals of mental illness, but in its overall vibe; it's clearly written during an era of smug liberalism and the Nu Atheist movement’s grassroots; it's very, very of its era Problem 2: there’s no reason for me to play this over Mage. Throughout the whole book, I kept asking myself: why would I play this instead of just playing Mage? There's really no major difference between a Genius and just A Technocratic Mage, so what's the point? Well, the point is that Mage wasn’t exactly to the standards that the dev wanted, so he made this entire ass game as a form of protest. The whole game has this very, very annoying prose. WoD games in general tend to be written in a sort of obnoxiously smug prose, like a narrator in a Grant Morrison comic, but this game specifically really suffers from it. Also, this game is weirdly fixated on Josef Mengele; please stop with this shit! It's not good!
Overall: Genius is not very good, and I would not recommend it. I’d maybe check out 2e, but I saw one thing from it, and it was an insanely racist splat that added a bunch of “Asian” schools of study, and one of them is just overt Japanese nationalists, so I took one look and just went “No thanks”.
Man, I hope this is the low point of these…