Our Alternity Campaign Is Still Rockin’

Let’s hear it for science fiction gaming.  Our group has been running a campaign using the venerable TSR game Alternity for, goodness, nearly two years now!  The campaign is called The Lighthouse, as it is mostly set aboard the eponymous Galactic Concord space station in the Star*Drive universe. Paul is our faithful GM, who is using pretty much all the extant Alternity sources as part of one huge megacampaign.

It’s an interesting game that has a good bit of Babylon 5/Star Trek flavor.  Each player has two characters, in fact.  One is part of what we have taken to calling the “A Team” which is mostly command staff aboard the Lighthouse.  I play Captain Ken Takashi (since promoted to Admiral), the commanding officer. Patrick plays the faithful station pilot Commander Martin St. John, Bruce plays the eccentric mechalus engineer Taveer, Tim plays Haggernak, the weren station Concord Administrator (police chief). Chris was playing a CIB spy who died, and now it’s arguable which of his characters is “A team” – we’ll call it Drest, the Pict warchief who has come aboard with a task force of Picts from Lucullus who are flinging their bodies into the interstellar fray. You can check out our character sheets here.

Our second characters come from the seedy underbelly of the station. Disaffected diplomats, criminals, and other miscreants.  I play Markus the retired warlion shock trooper (who is bartender of the station bar/casino The Corner, and deals arms on the side), Patrick plays Lenny the T’sa “diplomat” (a semiretired master thief), Bruce plays Lambert Fulson the demented illegal merchant, Tim plays Ambassador Peppin (a dissolute professor who spent most of his career preying on coeds), and Chris plays Ten-zil Kem (apparently a VoidCorp diplomat but really a sleeper agent for an opposing faction).

The Lighthouse is a space station with a stardrive, and it wanders the Verge, a poorly populated part of space cut off from the main galactic civilization by a galactic war some time ago, spreading the law of the new Galactic Concord. We have been caught up in a holy war spearheaded by a variety of demented alien races who seek humanity’s death and/or enslavement. Unfortunately, they did not count on our resourcefulness, tenacity, or enormous capacity for violence.

We write up each of our adventures in some detail; you can read each session’s delightful mix of adventure and in-jokes on our session summary page.

This week will be Alternity Week here on Geek Related; we’ll celebrate the the game with some in depth looks at the system, characters, and campaign. Chime in with your experiences if you’ve played it too!