Progenitor is a Wild Talents setting sourcebook by Greg Stolze. Clocking in at 376 pages, it includes a host of fascinating characters and a detailed timeline of the world from 1968, the year the Progenitor—Amanda Sykes—first appeared on the public scene, to 1999, when she disappears from it forever.
But more than that, Progenitor includes rules and guidelines that allow you to explore how the player characters—men, women or children who gained superhuman powers after being exposed to the superhuman powers of others—can change the world around them. Progenitor is built for your players to alter history by their own actions, no matter which year you choose for the starting point of your game.
Progenitor isn’t about a fixed history. It’s about giving players the power to change the world.
It all starts with Amanda Sykes, an ordinary American woman who inexplicably gains extraordinary powers. Fittingly, the book itself starts with a story of Amanda, a magazine article that tries to find out what the most powerful woman in the world is really all about. That gives you, the reader, a sense of what the world of Progenitor itself is all about.
Progenitor is available in print and in PDF. If you buy it in print you can get the PDF free. And when you get the PDF, whether you order it on its own or you get it with a print copy, you also get the PDF of the complete Wild Talents rules, Wild Talents Essential Edition, free. That’s everything you need for years of world-changing, action-packed superpowered gaming.
Please enjoy this preview. Progenitor is (c) Greg Stolze. Illustrations are (c) Todd Shearer. Page design is by Jessica Hopkins.
Click on each page to see it at a larger size.
Progenitor is the latest setting out for the popular One-Roll Engine system from Arc Dreams Publishing. It’s an alternate setting where one woman gains super powers and changes the world.
Amanda Sykes is a housewife from middle America that during the Vietnam War reveals she has Dr. Manhattan/Silver Surfer level cosmic powers. She decides to use her abilities to aid the war effort, but there is a catch that she doesn’t realize. Every time she uses her powers around anyone, there is a potential that individual get contaminated with the ability to gain super powers as well, but its a very tight vector in that each generation of carrier gets a little less powerful. A character can create both their nemesis and their teammates, while saving the day! The little girl you save from a burning building can some day change the world! The bank robber you foil can become your worst nightmare!
Progenitor explores the question of what would happen in a world where over three million people over three decades have the potential of developing super powers and does it in a way unlike any other setting for any game has ever done it before. Over thirty years are detailed in a time line that includes a metahuman war, the development of a new species, a new geopolitical environment directly influenced by super powers and a multitude of key events from Vietnam to interplanetary travel. Progenitor also includes a new ORE system for manipulating every year of this time line by measuring the four metrics of global mood, giving you the ability to diverge and have your characters change things for better or worse. If you wish to speed the timeline forward and not leave your characters behind, there is also a One Roll event generator for filling in the details during the glossed over years. Very few game settings in any genre have every featured such a detailed manner and none have given a Game Master such streamlined tools for manipulating them. Progenitor has given you all the tools to make your own metaplot, instead of letting it make you!
Progenitor was written by Greg Stolze, co-author of Wild Talents, Godlike and Unknown Armies and the author of Reign: A Game of Lords and Leaders. He’s been involved in ORE from the beginning and this product is the magnum opus of those labors. He’s included everything from transhumanist memetic engineering to diabolic villains, but also designed a setting that keeps in mind that its humans getting these powers and everything has to start somewhere with a Progenitor.
My group went into Progenitor after having played most of the popular super hero RPGs from Marvel Super Heroes to Aberrant and none of us have been as excited or intrigued by a setting as we have been with Progenitor. Its a world we won’t walk easily away from and a sandbox we can play in for years. It fills in all the blanks and is truly the first humanist super hero setting! Congrats to Greg Stolze and the Arc Dreams crew for releasing what will be my ultimate super hero world!