Genius The Transgression

"They all laughed at my theories! They called me mad! But now I'll have my revenge!"

If only it were so simple. They laughed because you WERE mad. They laughed because your inventions crumbled when unveiled and your theories turned to gibberish. You wept when you saw your equations riddled with childish errors. But you know what you accomplished: you broke gravity's spell; you programmed a computer to dream; you banished death! These weren't delusions or lies!

Maybe they were right.

Or maybe just one more experiment will show you the truth. You can do everything you said. There's a price to pay, but you can do it. And you're not mad. The things you do...maybe they're not right. Maybe your peers would recoil in horror. But you're not mad. And you'll show them all.

Genius: The Transgression is a fan-made role-playing game for the New World of Darkness. In it, players take on the roles of mad scientists and wonder-workers, driven to the brink of insanity by the secrets they have uncovered. Version 1.1 of the rules is available for free download as a .pdf file:[1]

Table of Contents

Introduction

"Silence. I am not interested in your imbecilic mouthings. All of you have demonstrated your lack of vision by demanding my resignation from the faculty. Well, you have accomplished your purpose. You cast me out. You robbed me of everything that I held most dear in life: position, honor, respect. You framed me as a madman, held me up to ridicule before the whole world. But now I'll have my revenge....Now you'll pay for your folly. There's no escape for any of you. You shall die, one by one, at the hands of the scientific marvel that you scoffed at." -Dr. Lorenzo Cameron, The Mad Monster

Ever since we bent our minds to technology―not with the computer or the automobile, but with fire and language and visions of tomorrow's hunt―we walked away from the path laid out before us. No longer were we to struggle and die like the other animals. No longer would we be allowed lives defined by a blissful eternal now. We opened our eyes, regretted the past, feared the future, and became fully human.

But there were some who wished to know more, and to see farther, no matter the price. Mortals accepted into their midst tricksters who delighted in showing the failure of the powerful, visionaries who dreamed of worlds never before seen, fanatics determined to change the world by changing how we thought. The genius stands outside of society and its narrow bounds, whether hailing from some crude some village where no one knows what lies beyond the forest or gleaming metropoli whose inhabitants are bored with walking on the Moon. They bring us marvels, and we make them pay for their transgressions.

As humanity has always admired and feared its law-givers, it has always admired and feared its law-breakers, its madmen, its geniuses. Every society has stories of those who went too far, who asked too much, and who suffered for it. The mad scientist is new, but the genius is an old dream indeed: the prophet, the trickster-god, the master of techne, the artificer who makes the world, the demiurge who seeks to control, bind, and direct it.

Genius: The Transgression is a game about those men and women and almost-gods, the ones who went too far in their and hope and spite and fear and arrogance. They are doomed to watch their discoveries dissolve into dust and broken lines of code, to see their inventions rampage out of control. But between that first discovery and their last, when they transgress once too often and the universe wipes them away, they can create wonders.

A Game of Forbidden Science:

Break the rules and you get in trouble. Break the law and you go to jail. Mouth off to your boss and lose your job. Jump off a building and...But it doesn't have to be that way, says that little voice in the back of your head, your personal genius. You ignore it, but you can't silence it. But a genius gives in to that voice, becomes that rules-breaking thing, that maker-trickster-savior, and begins a life of pain and glory unimaginable to mere mortals.

The genius sees the truth, but she cannot get there. In her heart she knows, but she cannot explain why. She flouts social convention, ignores the sneering voice of authority and dogma, and casts aside the ethical concerns of her peers. She breaks the rules of the universe we know to glimpse the truth of the universe as it must be. But there's a price. There always is. She is not just isolated from the "common man," but from the very discipline that birthed her. In her heart, she knows that what she does is not science, which is ultimately about systems and about cooperation. Alone, she walks a new path, wearing the trappings of her old life but no longer capable of touching its essence.

Genius: The Transgression takes place in the World of Darkness, a world like ours but with darker nights and deeper stains. People don't connect to one-another as they do in our world. They live in the shadows of ancient conspiracies and the shadows cast by old things, and this infects the geniuses: for every mad scientist working in silicon and plastic, another labors with greasy cogs and steam pumps, while another never left behind the gleaming chrome and atomic dreams of the 1950s. For one of the Inspired, there is no escape from the fetters of superstition and occult dread, the lurking horrors at the edge of consciousness. Though cobbling together elements from our past, the genius ultimately belongs to no place and no time, and walks alone into the future.

Theme: Transgression

A little knowledge is a hideous thing and it will drive you mad.

The genius is a rule-breaker, a trickster, a liar, a thief of wonders, and a maker of false dreams. Tenuous threads bind him to the mortal world, and every wonder is a violation of the rules of the universe. On the one hand, Obligation binds a genius to humanity; on the other hand, Inspiration tells him to do things that no sane person would ever want to do. The genius can be humanity's damned savior, destroying himself to safeguard a society that will never know his name and would hate him if they knew what he had done to preserve them.

A genius is never entirely in control. His inventions are always one step away from freeing themselves and rampaging through his lab, or his city. The ideas and dreams come too fast for him to write down, let alone study and examine. The deadlines are constant, the pressure to find equipment, money, and research time mind-breaking, and humiliation is a constant companion. Mad scientists burn with a passion for their work, and though that passion is glorious and often contagious, the hunger to know and to control consumes them from the inside-out. They cannot obey the rules that normal society has set down for its members. They can only choose what laws they will break, and how they will look at themselves afterward.

Mood: Bitter Disappointment

The hideous freedom of transgression is matched by the choke-chain of necessity. A genius finds herself surrounded by failure and broken dreams. For every wonder that lurches, blasphemously, beautifully, to life, another turns to smoking scrap in the testing phase, or lies forgotten in a corner, half-made, because the genius couldn't pay for the right permits or find the right materials. This juxtaposition of Inspired triumph and mundane failure defines a genius' life.

And even if the genius succeeds more often than he fails, he sees dead dreams all around him. Once-great geniuses, their radiance reduced to cinders from a lifetime of crushing defeat and humiliation, stock the shelves at the electronics store in the mall, too ashamed to take up the wrench again. Those Inspired who provide a genius with the supplies he needs are hollow, miserable people, chewed apart by the failure of their philosophies to gain acceptance. And in the end, rare is the genius who makes a measurable impact on the world: no matter how successful a genius might be, his wonders still crumble when exposed to the light of day, reduced to malfunctioning piles of components. Many of the Inspired, after that initial burst of delight, feel the circle of possibilities shrinking around them, until they are little different from before, except that now people who once respected them now snicker behind their back at the "maniac" who cracked under the stress.

How to Use This Book:

Information on geniuses, what they are, and the world they inhabit is divided into several sections.

The Prologue: Behold, The Secrets of Immortality! shows the wonder and horror of life as a genius.

Chapter One: The Cosmos provides information about the world of mad science, from the laws that control it to the societies and organizations the Inspired have created.

Chapter Two: Character Creation presents rules for creating many types of geniuses, from reclusive librarians to aeronautical adventurers, and descriptions of the wonders that a genius can create.

Chapter Three: Systems and Foundations describes in detail the rules of a mad scientist's world, explaining how to select a foundation, how to build wonders, and what the different Axioms teach a genius.

Chapter Four: Special Rules and Systems includes details on a number of situations relevant to being a genius, such as managing beholden, building capacitors, and the terrifying effects of Havoc.

Chapter Five: Storytelling and Antagonists explains how to run a Storytelling game of forbidden science, focusing on why the Inspired act as they do and what stories you can tell with them. Here are also the enemies of the geniuses: the intelligent cast-offs of abandoned scientific theories called the manes, the orphaned inventions of the geniuses that hunger for power, and the dreaded Clockstoppers, enemies of all Inspiration.

Appendix One: Sample Wonders offers a rich selection of wonders that a genius might build, to serve as inspiration or to be appropriated directly.

Appendix Two: The Fellowships outlines the secret thinktanks and programs that the Inspired have created, and what a genius can gain by participating in one.

Appendix Three: The Seattle of Tomorrow presents the travails and terrors that a genius might find in the West Coast city of Seattle, complete with sample characters and enough story elements to begin a chronicle there.

An Epilogue: The Answer to Everything, concludes the text.

Sources and Inspiration:

Mad scientists are everywhere in literature, but many stories either relegate the scientist to a magician dressed in a lab coat, a modern-day Faust with Bunsen burners instead of black candles, or strip him of his horrific element, reducing him to a bumbling Poindexter fool or an ineffectual sidekick to the traditional, physically-oriented hero. Nonetheless, stories in several media contain vibrant and terrifying examples of genius.

Books:

Doc Savage, originally created by legendary pulp writer Lester Dent, provides a positive example of what a high-Obligation genius might look like. Gifted physically and mentally, the "Man of Bronze" turns his talents to solving crime and keeping the world safe. This untarnished image of the hero-researcher can serve as inspiration for an honorable Paragon, or can be used to cast a pall on the excesses of would-be guardians.

VALIS. Just about anything by Philip K. Dick deserves mention, from the existential ponderings of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? to the broken regret of A Scanner Darkly, but whole-hog techno-Gnostic insanity calls for VALIS, in which an artificial satellite network orbiting the star Sirius uses pink laser beams to trigger mystical revelations. How much of VALIS is simple fiction and how much of it is Dick's own beliefs given a thin gloss of narrative is never entirely clear.

H.G. Wells' The Island of Dr. Moreau. Like Dick, several of Wells' works are relevant to mad science, but this tale of bent science focuses on one man's attempt, not only to raise animals to human-like intelligence, but to give them the laws that truly separate man from the beasts, and the tragedy that results.