Deviant: The Renegades

Deviant: The Renegades
Role-playing game published by White Wolf
Rule System	Storyteller System
Authors	Unknown
First Publication	201?
Essential Books	Deviant: The Renegades

Deviant: The Renegades is the 11th game set in White Wolf's New World of Darkness and the second after the introduction of Chronicles of Darkness. In it you play one of the Remade, a person who has been the subject of a mad (or at least amoral) science experiment, was turned into some kind of weapon or had cultists summon an ancient being into you. The Remade eventually manages to somehow escape into the outside world, becoming a Renegade. Those who created the Remade really want their creation back and send their people to find and recover them. To this purpose Deviants band together to face off against their enemies. One of the side effects of what happened to them Renegades don't have much of a sense of self, instead defining them by their relationships with other people.

As is common in the nWoD games you have X and Y axis splats that determine what you are. Your Origin is whether you volunteered, did it all yourself, were affected in vitro or just got kidnapped. Your rough class of powers is determined by your Clade. Are you a psychic? Cyborg? Something straight outta Cronenberg? Or something else? As part of your change you are given Variations, which is the game's power system. The more potent your Variations are however the more obvious and severe your Scars are: the physical and mental ways the changes have messed you up.

Deviant takes an interesting route in that you don't start off at the lowest level and work your way up with XP. Instead, you determine how powerful your Variations are upon character creation. Having lots of them or a few powerful ones not only makes your Scars more debilitating, but it also changes how powerful the people who made you are. With a few Variations your opponents won't be much more than a few dedicated cultists living in the boonies and your Scars will be subtle enough to let you pass for human, but at high power you're going to have to deal with a black ops division of the US Military, the entire Catholic Church or NGOs with way too much power, and your Scars will leave both your body and mind warped beyond recognition. Not only do the people who made you have their own agents and resources to hunt you down, you might also face off against a loyal Remade that didn't reject its purpose like you did.

Renegades have two scales of Integrity: Conviction and Loyalty. How they will exactly work is unknown, but they work in the opposite way for the Remade as they do for Renegades. For Renegades Conviction is easy to obtain but does not last very long, while Remade have a more difficult time obtaining it yet it will do a lot more good for them. Loyalty meanwhile is difficult to obtain but has a lot of effects for a Renegade, but the Remade can obtain it easily without it doing much for them. If Renegades and Remade go too long without indulging their Conviction and Loyalty, their Scars will get worse and they will get new Variations, which will make their creators fight all the harder to get them back. More importantly, they risk losing control of their powers to the point that their bodies and minds collapse under the strain of their Scars.

Generally a Remade is more powerful than a Hunter, but if needed they can go into overdrive and fuck shit up. This will do a number on their Scars, drive them insane, and possibly even kill them. Sure, you can go and transform into a horrific cathedral of flesh and destroy Neo-Tokyo if you you're really set on it, but don't expect to live through the experience.

So if you ever wanted to play a nWoD game that consisted of a teamup of Jarod from The Pretender, Eleven from Stranger Things, Tetsuo from AKIRA, the titular character of The Fly, Lucy from Elfen Lied, a Tyrant from Resident Evil, and the first Kamen Rider or Kamen Rider Amazons, then this might end up being the game for you.