The Hitch Hikers Guide to Alternity

Individual science fiction stories may seem as trivial as ever to the blinder critics and philosophers of today - but the core of science fiction, its essence has become crucial to our salvation if we are to be saved at all.
                                                                                 -Isaac Asimov

I managed to get a good bit of reading done over the Easter weekend. During that time I had this strange compulsion to take a fresh look at some of the older gaming books in my library. I guess that makes me some sort of RPG antiquarian.

So as you can probably figure out already this post is about the Alternity game line. TSR's now defunct generic modern/science fiction RPG came out in 1998 about the same year I got into gaming. I remember seeing the ads for it in Dragon Magazine and thinking it was a pretty neat looking game. There was a handful of reasons I never played this game.

Primarily I think this was because despite Star*Drive and Dark*Matter settings it seemed to try and push it's generic nature as its primary asset. Personally I had never read/watched a lot of sci-fi to figure out what to do with all that freedom. For some reason that I still don’t quite understand theres just something about fantasy and D&D that is just intuitive. Modern/Sci-fi gaming seems to suffer from this inherent weakness of expectations of how to satisfactorily play shit out. This is probably the reason why fantasy rpgs have always, and will continue to always dominant over modern/science fiction ones.

Secondly the rules seemed fairly intimidating to me at the time. In fact D&D 2e was already pushing my comfort level as far as rules went. Which is to say I had very little to none. If it had not been for people who already new how to play, I never would have figured this shit out. Not to mention fantasy was the bread and butter of my gaming group at the time. Meaning that if we were ever going to play Alternity it would be incumbent upon me to learn the rules and run a game.

Then in 2000 the d20 system and D&D 3e took the world by storm and swept me along with it. Strike three your out Alternity. For a long time my interest in almost any other rpg with the exception of maybe Heavy Gear or Call of Cthulhu was next to nil. In fact it was really only the arrival of D&D 4e that snapped me out of my misguided and stubborn love for all things d20.

At roughly the same period in time that Wizards of the Coasts acquired TSR they also picked up the license for Star Wars. This was pretty much the death knell for the Alternity game system and Star*Drive. As for Dar*Matter I'm sure the d20 version of Call of Cthulhu had a hand in making sure that line got the axe as well. Essentially the philosophy was that if it didn’t help sell the core d20 books it wasn’t sold by WotC. Additionally WotC didn’t want another space opera setting competing with Star Wars sales. I mean its just good business sense.

So 15 years later I've gone back to these books. Mostly I was looking for material I might be able to steal or adapt for the mythical Digital Dark Age campaign I hope to run one day. Part of it was as I said previously this strange nostalgic urge to revisit something from my gamer past. A chance to visit fleeting memories of that time in my life when things were just a little more simple than they are now.

The end result was that I came away inspired by much of what I read. No longer did I see an overly complicated game system. Though perhaps not as streamlined or as intuitive as d20, there are some innovative and interesting mechanics none the less. A Skill based system, degrees of success, and a neat way of going about handling modifiers. I'm sort of amazed that this game hasnt had a retro clone based off of it.

The Star*Drive campaign setting was also pretty interesting to read. Where as before I saw a boring generic space opera setting I could now instantly see a the possibilities for a campaigns that could be set there. Now I find myself wishing that I had collected all the books for this campaign setting a little bit at a time while I had the opportunity and spare cash to do so. Alas, hind sight, as they say is 20/20.

My prediction is after D&D 5e is finally released, combined with the lack of attention that d20 Modern got during the 4e era and the dumping of the Star Wars rpg license we may just see a new version of Alternity down the pipeline. Or at the very least a repackaging of Star*Drive and/or Dark*Matter.

It's A Trap Tuesday

Never Unprepared: The Complete Game Master's Guide to Session Prep

Written by: Phil Vecchione, blogger from gnomestew.com 

Published by: Engine Publishing

Format: 132 Digest sized black and white pages

Verdict: Totally Fucking Awesome!

How is it in the in the history of roleplaying we only now have a book about how to go about the process of prepping to run a game? I mean we a have a shit load of books that cover important advice that you should consider as a GM, but almost nothing on how to take all that raw material and process it into something useful during a gaming session.

This is a book that should be read at least by every GM at least once. It doesn’t pretend to be pretentious and tell us how exactly to prep for a game, but offers system neutral guidelines and tools to become a better game master. Its a short read, but jam packed with useful information. It identifies the stages of prep, why their important, and how you can adapt them to your preferred gaming style.

I found myself really identifying with the author. He answered questions I've long struggled with about what I need to work on and how in order to maximize the limited prep time I have available. Really thats what this all comes down to, time management and prepping what you need in order to feel comfortable at the game table. What that is varies from person to person but this book really helps you be introspective and figure that out.

For example when I ran my Arkham Heat campaign, despite having a rules light game engine I still suffered burn out from trying to keep one session ahead of my players. I felt like a failure and that perhaps I just wasn’t cut out to GM. In retrospect I think the problem was that I was focusing my time and energy in poor and wasteful ways. In addition with so much of my time consumed by my real life responsibilities I felt like I was never going to have time to actually run a pre-written campaign, never mind prep something from scratch. But this book shows you how to go about managing your time as well.

So to wrap this up, amazing book. Insightful and utile. Defiantly something I will be incorporating and experimenting with in my future game prep endeavours. I don’t care what game system or genre you prefer “Never Unprepared: The Complete Game Master's Guide to Session Prep” should be mandatory reading for every GM worthy of the title. If I ever meet it's author Phil Vecchione in real life one day I will totally buy him a beer. In the mean time, thanks Phil for giving me the tools and insight to become a better GM!   

Its A Trap Tuesday

If you're receiving this transmission, make no attempt to come to its point of origin...

There is only death here now...

Over the past few days I've been catching up on a bunch of movies I've wanted to see for a while. Theses days I'm not much for one going out to the theatre and since I got Netflix I don’t really rent DVD's all that often either. All this is a round about way of saying I finally watched Prometheus.

I'm not sure how I feel about this movie. On the one had the visuals were pretty amazing. It also hit a lot of the same notes as in previous instalments in the Alien/Predator franchise. But I don't know, some how it just fell flat.

Warning if you haven’t seen this film then what I'm going to talk about next will probably spoil things for you. You've been warned.

What I did find interesting was the concept of God and the creation of life. So the basic idea here is that the Engineer alien race created humans. Then for some reason they decided that us humans needed to be terminated by some kind of bio-engineered virus. Or maybe the idea was that humans were just stage one of the Engineers plan. Phase two was the introduction of the mutating alien virus. Which begs the question of why they would want to either kill us all or turn us into some kind of new mutant species.

Now were talking about something interesting. Maybe were dealing with a sort of reverse terminator scenario. Maybe the Engineer's were afraid of what humanity might one day do to them. That we had become to violent to control. Maybe Earth was the failure. Like lab rats that served their purpose it was time to put them out of their misery. Maybe there were other Earth like planets that served their purpose better than we could. Maybe we were the cain to this alternate Earths Able.

Or was it that the Engineer race was divided on what to do with us. Maybe this was a rogue group who was out to do some kind of terrorist act versus it's own species. Turn us humans into a bio-weapon to be used against a more powerful political entity in the Engineer's home world.

Or were humans being used as bio-weapons against some far greater enemy. Another alien species even more hell bent on destruction than we humans ever imagined possible.

I guess it also changed my view on what a Creator-God might really mean. Someone who creates just because they can. Some kind of artistic drive for no other purpose then it seemed like a good idea at the time. That maybe, like an abusive parent this God might not be so nurturing and benign to it's creation. If anything it makes me less inclined to believe or have any sort of loyalty to any God/Creator if one did exist.

Ultimately from a gaming perspective it really breaths new life into aliens for me. I've had this idea for some time about having a intergalactic war between a species of aliens and humanity in my Digital Dark Age campaign. The idea of an alien race who has left archaeological traces of existence for mankind to uncover, and whom mankind believes to be extinct, only to return with a vengeance is one that really appeals to me. Prometheus has if anything really sparked my imagination in terms of why and what this war with this returned alien race might mean and be about.

So in the end I guess in some way Prometheus was a success. At least from the point of view that it entertained me, and then let my my reflect on hidden deeper meanings within the film. It sparked my imagination in a way that I had never anticipated. New interesting possibilities lie ahead...           

The Escape From Innsmouth Campaign Outline

So I've been sketching out and searching for some scenarios to round out my Escape From Innsmouth campaign. These would be scenarios that reinforce the monster/investigation of the week slot I have planned. In between these I and the main scenarios from the Escape book I would fit in the more personal level scenarios that feature my individual investigators. Heres my thoughts right now. This is still all up in the air.

The Introduction Scenario

My plan as it stands now is to use the Miskatonic University as a home base. I want to introduce Dr. Armitage as the investigators patron/quest giver. I'm wondering if maybe theres a way via the Dunwich Horror or some other scenario that I could neatly intertwine their fate. The main idea is to provide the springboard that slowly introduces the investigators to the Mythos and thus draws them in to further investigations .

Coming Full Circle (Pagan Publishing)

This is a mini campaign with four non-mythos horror scenarios. It's something I've always wanted to run. It's meant to take place over a decade between 1929-1939. I'm thinking I would change this time period to 1918-1928 in order to fit everything in and wrap it up just before the Raid on Innsmouth scenario which is supposed to take place nominally in February 1928.

More Adventures in Arkham Country (Miskatonic River Press)

In my search for ideas/scenarios I found this collection of scenarios. I've heard good things about this company and their work. In particular there are two scenarios in this book which might be fun to run. The first is “The Hopeful” by Oscar Rios, and the second is “Spare the Rod” by Adam Gauntlett. “The Hopeful” in particular is reputedly a great replacement for the “Crawford Inheritance” in the Escape campaign. Perhaps I can mash the two, or take bits from one or the other.

The Outline

So if we put it all together we have a pretty epic campaign framework. I could see this lasting a good long while. Not sure if thats a good thing or not. It could be a case of me biting off more than I can chew. Or it could lead to the magnum opus that I've always dreamed of running. Heres what we get:

1. Introduction Scenario (1918)
2. “Cold Spot”, Coming Full Circle (1918)
3. In-term Period / “Spare the Rod” (1920-1921)
4. “Remains To Be Seen” , Coming Full Circle (1922)
5. In-term Period / “Crawford Inheritance/The Hopeful” (1923-1924)
6. “The Whitewood Horror” , Coming Full Circle (1925)
7. In-term Period / “Escape From Innsmouth” (1926-1927)
8. “Full Circle” , Coming Full Circle (1928)
9. “The Raid on Innsmouth” , (Feburary 1928)
10. Campaign Conclusion   

Now With More Pac-Man

I just added a new Pac-Man widget to the bottom of the blog. I know how could I deny my readership such a valuable widget for so long ? What kind of self respecting game blog is worthy of the name with out it ! So read the blog, stay for the Pac-Man.Oh Zombiecowboy you crazy!