For our next campaign, we’re going Sci-Fi. We’ll be using the Alternity ruleset. Written by Bill Slavicsek and Richard Baker it was published by TSR in 1998, it had a short but bright life.

The covers of the two core books butted up nicely to create a single piece of artwork.

There’s stuff in Alternity that worked it’s way into d20, although not the central dice mechanic of course, which is a bit different. Heading in the direction of D&D 3e and d20 were things such as:

• Skills instead of non weapon proficiencies
• Skill points and ranks
• Perks were the same as feats
• A unified mechanic for all conflict resolution

I like Alternity because it’s does for sci-fi what D&D does for fantasy, it’s a generic ruleset rather than a ruleset bundled with an implied setting. For setting purposes we have always based our Alternity games upon the Elite series of games by David Braben, most specifically Frontier First Encounters.

This is great for me as GM, I can fire up FFE on my laptop and use all the gorgeous detail on planets and systems without me having to make anything up or remember anything. Also FFE keeps track of the time and date for me handily, as well as the party’s ship details. Here’s some of the handy info I’ll be using.

A tiny section of the enormous 3d starmap

The star map is huge, this is just a small view of only 9 sectors, there are 67 million sectors in the game, covering the whole of our galaxy. Sol is at sector [0,0], the bottom left sector is [-5192, -5412] and the top right is [2279,2779]! The star map is huge indeed. There are in total exactly 513,982,470 star systems. This is more data on a setting than a GM will ever need!

Details on the Sol system

As you can see from the image of Sol above all the human explored systems have details on their planetary bodies, starports and orbital stations. Major story important systems have a bit of blurb as well. Every explored system has orbital paths as shown below.

Orbits in the Sol system

Of particular use to me if the players start to trade goods between systems is the imports and exports that are available at each inhabited system, as well as things that would be illegal to trade in.

Imports and exports

Overall using the computer game in this way gives me as GM access to a very rich resource of detail and setting fluff. Also since some nice Russian chaps have created a DirectX update of this 15 year old game then I can also generate some nice visuals for handouts.

An Asp class 2 man ship

My players have started to write character backgrounds and I can’t wait to start soon! If you’re in our area (West Herts, UK) then we have open slots for players! For more information see http://whrpg.com.

Comments: 6 comments

Tags: Alternity, Campaign, Sci Fi

There’s only one more week left to enter the Players Handbook 3 contest!

All you need to do is design a magical item to complete the Magical Minds series. The best item as chosen by our celebrity judge, WotC’s Greg Bilsland (@gregbilsland), will win a copy of the Players Handbook 3 upon release!

So to complete my daughters list of items, the last item name, along with my her brief notes is as follows:

Necklace of Death (Notes: You put it on and you die)

Rules

1. Stick to Dungeons & Dragons 4e
2. Stay true to the item name, include necklaces and death somewhere.
3. Don’t stay true to my daughter’s notes, make it balanced!
4. Only one entry per person, although feel free to replace a previous entry if you suddenly come up with a better idea.
5. Email entries to blog@buccaneersguild.com.
6. Tell other people about the competition, post on Twitter or Facebook for example.
7. Closing date is March 9th 2010.
8. The winning entry will be announced before March 15th.

Good luck!

Comments: 3 comments

Tags: #DnD, 4e

When we don’t have enough players to play our normal current table-top RPG, we often pickup a card game or two to play.

One of our favourites is Give me the Brain, a simple card game by Cheapass Games.

Our copy of Give me the Brain is one of Cheapass’s orignally seriously cheap games, the cards are simple black and white art on basic card stock. We treat it well and it’s lasted over a decade. Cheapass now do a deluxe version of Give me the Brain, actually it appears to be the only version now.

My tunh is stuh ta da fluh!

The basic premise is that all the players are zombies working in a burger joint. Players are dealt a number of cards and the aim of the game is to be the first person to dispose of all their cards.

There are two main types of cards, numbered bid cards, and job cards. Bid cards are used to help you pickup the brain. The brain is represented by a d6 dice, and there’s just one brain between all the players.

Job cards allow you to do a variety of things, such as drawing more cards, forcing ownership of the brain to move, taking cards from other players hands and all sorts of crazy shenanigans.

Some job cards are marked with a brain, and can only be played if you are currently the owner of the brain, making them much harder to get out of your hand, which means the brain moves around a lot as people fight over it.

A game usually takes 10 to 20 minutes to play out and we rarely stop there, but usually play three or four games before moving onto something different.

For a quick diversion from usual RPG play it’s a great stand in and I recommend it whole heartedly.

What do you do when you haven’t got enough people for your usual game? Let us know below.

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Tags: Review

Don’t forget I’m giving away a copy of PH3. Check here for the competition details. You have until March 9th to enter!

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Tags: 4e, D&D

I’ve got one more item on the list that’s been the inspirational spark behind the Magical Minds series of magic items.

Now it’s your chance to transform a nascent idea into a workable balanced magic item. The best item as chosen by the judge will win a copy of the Players Handbook 3!

The last item name, along with my daughters brief notes is as follows:

Necklace of Death (Notes: You put it on and you die)

Rules

1. Stick to Dungeons & Dragons 4e
2. Stay true to the item name, include necklaces and death somewhere.
3. Don’t stay true to my daughter’s notes, make it balanced!
4. Only one entry per person, although feel free to replace a previous entry if you suddenly come up with a better idea.
5. Email entries to blog@buccaneersguild.com.
6. Tell other people about the compo, post on Twitter or Facebook for example.
7. Closing date is March 9th 2010.
8. The winning entry will be announced on March 15th.

Comments: 9 comments

Tags: #DnD, 4e, D&D

The gaming group I belong to is looking for players and DMs.

We are located in and around Watford, Herts, UK.

We’d love some more people to join us, both experienced and beginner players are welcome. We are open and interested in playing and running any type of RPG.

See the West Herts RPG! site
for more info.

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Over the past few days I’ve been turning my young daughter’s magic item suggestions into usable Dungeons & Dragons items. Earlier we had a Wedding Dress of Resurrection and Earrings of the Sidhe. Today I’ve skipped over the troublesome Necklace of Death, which I’m considering using for a competition, and moved onto the Feather Boa of Beauty.

You know, even though I was at first doubtful what to do with this, I think I like this one the best so far. I’ve got a character that might literally kill for one of these.

I should really do a post on how to make character portraits such as the one above, with no artistic skill required! What do you reckon?

Comments: 1 comment

Tags: #DnD, 4e, Ideas, Resource

As I mentioned in my last post my daughter wanted to help with D&D and so has invented some magic items. It falls to me to interpret her work into usable D&D stat blocks.

So today we present the some magical earrings. When I asked what they did she replied, “They turn you into a tiny fairy, with wings, and you can fly.”

The creator of today's item

After a bit of work, here’s the result.

Is it too weak or too powerful? Let us know in the comments.

Comments: 5 comments

Tags: #DnD, 4e, Resource

Ever since my six year old daughter helped me with 100 post apocalyptic junk items, she’s wanted to do more lists of things with me. So this weekend, as she lay in bed suffering with chickenpox, she decided to create a small list of magic items for Dungeons & Dragons.

It’s from that list that I’m taking inspiration for a short series. She came up with names for items and a brief description of their powers. I’m trying to make balanced game sense of them one by one, and today I’d like to present the first of them.

Wedding Dress of Resurrection

When I asked my daughter why this even existed she said a powerful mage was due to be married to the love of his life, but she died on the morning or their wedding, so he created this powerful arcane item to raise her from the dead. The only problem is she had to wear it for the rest of her life.

This can be worn by either male or female characters. Even if worn under your armour it should still show a little at the cuffs and the long trailing dress. Drawing strange looks should be part and parcel of not being dead!

More from Magical Minds later, if I can work out how to make some of the more mental ideas even close to playable!

Please let us know what you think in the comments and I’ll make sure that I pass them on to the young creator.

Comments: 6 comments

Tags: #DnD, 4e, Ideas, Resource

Thanks to Dustin Synder, who you may know as @WolfStar76 on Twitter, we have a nice summary of all the juicy Dark Sun info released at DDXP.

Whilst sitting in the audience Dustin created a Google Docs document live as the action unfolded.

Google Docs Dark Sun

There’s more info available on @geeksdreamgirl’s latest live blog where you can scroll back and catch up on all the info as it happened, with updates from Critical Hits, Matt James, and the WotC brand team @Wizards_DnD.

From all of us that couldn’t be there, thanks to all those that were and kept us updated!

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Tags: #DnD, 4e, Dark Sun