Our Next Campaign: Alternity
4 March 2010 in News by Iain M NormanFor 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.
Since the dark days of the late '70s, Iain has been playing and running RPGs of one type or another. When not with his wife and children or working as a software engineer/Photoshop monkey he spends spare time either shooting pointy sticks at pointless paper targets or spending time enjoying the varied worlds of role playing.6 Comments to Our Next Campaign: Alternity
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I loved Alternity, and the Star*Drive campaign as well. There was a lot of really good material produced for it, and I hope with the end of Star Wars that WotC goes back to it.
Back to Star*Drive or back to Alternity? I can’t see any kind of return to Alternity rules at all, they wouldn’t fit with the current 4e direction.
There’s no reason why WotC couldn’t do 4e Modern and 4e Future though. D20 Future borrowed lots various Alternity sourcebooks and settings.
I was thinking the name “Alternity” for the 4e mechanics, and the Star*Drive setting as the default “points of starlight”
Return of the Alternity name would be cool.
The first sci-fi outing for 4e of course will be the new Gamma World game.
I really liked Alternity and almost ran a campaign using it . . . I cannot remember what came up that derailed that plan now. Good to know that it is still being played somewhere.
I’d highly recommend running it if you get the chance.
The way that rolls can have one of five results really helps encourage a bit more description for peoples actions.
Critical failures and Excellent successes can have lots of colourful description applied to them. Even Good successes can be a little more special than just a normal Success or Failure.
Especially in combat where the degree of success has a direct effect on what damage dice are rolled and what type of damage is done.