Tag Archives: scifi

Fourth Alternity “The Lighthouse” Session Summary Posted

In the fourth installment of our Alternity science fiction campaign, we rescue the ground troops and sesheyan VIPs off the pirate base before the Void*Corpers pummel it into plasma, and get a turncoat spy in the bargain.

Then the space station command staff, in true Star Trek fashion,  heads to Meribel to investigate a murder at a terraforming outpost, which goes all District 9 on us real quick.  A mad doctor in a big ol’ diving suit gives us problems until we run 1.21 gigawatts through him.  Then, the alien plague!!!

Read the full session summary!

Next Campaign: Alternity!

Next campaign, we’re taking a break from D&D.  We always play a variety of games in our gaming group – in fact, we have a loosely afiliated group of quite a few people so there are a number of simultaneous campaigns on differing schedules with different attendees.  I attend the Sunday game slot, which is really two campaigns that alternate weeks.  One game has just concluded, a homebrew called Savage Worlds: Empire of Ashes, and is launching Savage Worlds: Legends of Steel this weekend.  The other, Curse of the Crimson Throne using the Pathfinder RPG rules, will be finishing up soon.

We play other stuff (most recently Mutants & Masterminds, GURPS, Silhouette, Champions…) but usually have one D&D and one non-D&D game running at a time.  We’re taking a D&D break though.  The new Pathfinder final rules won’t be out till August, and our DM’s judgment and word on the street is that the next AP, Second Darkness, kinds sucks.  One group is running the new  Legacy of Fire AP, but we decided to do some Alternity!

Alternity, if you don’t know, is a science fiction game TSR put out at the end of its life.  It was only around a couple years but they put a lot of material out for it, it had its own “Living Verge” RPGA campaign, etc.  Its Wikipedia entry sums up the ruleset.  It was mainly notable for a very in depth skill system.

Paul, our GM, has an idea for a troupe-style game set on the space station called the Lighthouse in the Star*Drive universe.  He envisions it as a Babylon 5/Deep Space Nine kind of deal.  I always liked Alternity and Star*Drive.  We will each play two characters, one member of the space station command staff, and one “other”  from a crowd of diplomats and other power players.

I’m working up my characters now.  One is the Star Force captain who is the military commander of the station (he reports to the Concord Administrator who’s the civilian head of the station,though).  The other is the bartender of The Corner, the liveliest bar/restaurant/casino on the station.  More to come on them and the game!

Hyperion: The Movie

Dan Simmons’ Hyperion and the sequel, Fall of Hyperion, are two highly regarded literary science fiction novels I’ve always enjoyed. Hyperion is written in a format very similar to the Canterbury Tales, except for a common thread, an indestructable monstrous killer called the Shrike. Apparently, there’s a movie in the works! Yay, although smart money’s on them ditching the whole “tales” parts, which is the actually best part of the whole thing.