A Role Playing Games Blog
Non-RPG
Alternity memories…
7March 10, 2011
The recent post by HyenaSpotz about the Alternity RPG really struck home! I was a big fan of the game when it came out and his terrific review of the game brought back some great memories. When Alternity was announced I was immediately interested; the fact that it would be a “generic” sci-fi system I could use to create my own campaigns was right up my alley. I was an AD&D 2nd ed. fan and was sure this game would do for sci-fi what AD&D did for fantasy. I snatched up the Fast Play Rules and was planning my campaign even before the core books came out.
As I have said before, I am a compulsive home brewer so it should be no surprise I had been tinkering with a sci-fi setting since high school. Many aliens looked like the aliens from Marvel Comics or DC’s Legion of Super Heroes (I had no artistic talent to draw them and back then I had no access to the Internet… Yes there was such a time!), but I had come up with this idea where the human race had begun a Diaspora to the stars and arrived in a galaxy populated by many diverse alien races. I had done some freeform role playing in the setting, tried adapting it to Star Frontiers, but to no avail.
Then along came Alternity! After what seemed like forever the book finally came out. I had already played a brief (and not terribly successful) session using the Fast Play Rules so I dove right in. I loved the book and soon was writing up the statistics for new alien races, the story of the setting and rudimentary star map.
The year Alternity came out was special for many reasons and Alternity is inexorably linked with many wonderful memories. Alternity came out the year I got married and I as reading the books and writing for the game all through the preparations. My campaign featured biogenetically enhanced knights thematically organized around the mythologies of Earth’s ancient past, each order possessing powers based on the mutations chapter. The Tangents books had not come out yet. Puerto Rico was hit by a terrible hurricane that year and we were without power for about a week, I remember sitting by candlelight and flashlight writing up the stats for the different orders. To say the Alternity RPG engrossed me is an understatement. (more…)
Here is to 1,000 more!
5March 8, 2011
Yesterday Stargazer’s World had its 1,000th post. I’m pretty new to the world of blogging, having only joined the team little over a year ago, but I think many endeavors such as this fizzle away after the initial enthusiasm and we (and I use the term because Michael and the other contributors here have made me feel at home from the get go) are very proud to be going strong, growing and improving every day!
There are a lot of people to thank for this. First and foremost you the reader, whether you lurk or post in the comments, whether you are a new arrival (welcome!) or a regular (great to see you again!), you are the lifeblood of the blog, we write hoping others will want to read what we have to say. We also need to thank the greater blogging community, I have been lucky that joining the Stargazer’s World team has put me in contact with so many wonderful people all over the world. The support of so many bloggers who read us, and we read them in return, is crucial. In this time of interconnectivity and virtual communities we learn, grow and improve by example and collaboration.
To all my friends that make up the Stargazer’s World team, guest posters, regular posters, those that have come before me and will come after me, we are all part of the effort that made reaching the 1,000th post milestone possible. But most of all a big THANK YOU to Michael who started all this, our fearless leader, our Captain Kirk (but without the toupee), the Stargazer who showed us the stars, the guy who wrote most of those 1,000 posts! You sir are a gentlemen and a friend thru and thru.
So here is to 1,000 more posts! Glad you were here for the first leg of the journey, buckle up cause we are only getting started…
PS – I promise to stop referring to myself as “new” at blogging. It’s been a year and over a 100 posts (so I’ve written about 10% of the 1,000 posts), the shticks grown old by now, so no more references to being new at this from now on!
Crazy Campaign Chronicles: Defenders of the Earth Redux or a Very Pulpy Future!
12March 2, 2011
Introductory note: As Game Master I constantly get ideas for new campaigns. I take notes and file them away on the hopes of one day retaking them. But since I don’t role-play 24/7 I am pretty sure I will never get to play all these campaigns. I’m sure I am not alone on this! Some ideas are just too weird, too strange or simply not a good fit to my group so these end up on the crazy campaign list. But the fact that I’ll not use these campaigns doesn’t mean other might not find them interesting or inspirational. So in that spirit I’ve decided to share one such idea to see if anybody out there might be interested, think it fun or even decides it might be right for them. I hope you like it… or at least laugh about it!
Background: As a child I was fascinated with characters like Tarzan, Flash Gordon or The Phantom. Mind you I did not get to know these characters in the original media where they appeared. Tarzan and Flash Gordon I came to know mainly through movies, animated series and TV shows and The Phantom through comic books in Spanish. I followed the natural progression and then moved on to comics and their four colored heroes. Much later in life I got to read Tarzan of the Apes, as well as read some reprints of The Phantom or Flash Gordon. Along the way I discovered other pulp characters such as The Shadow, Doc Savage and The Spider.
I would not consider myself a hardcore pulp fan, more of a casual aficionado, but some of those iconic characters have captured my imagination. So it’s no wonder that when the animated series Defenders of the Earth came out I was hooked! The mash-up between Flash Gordon, The Phantom and Mandrake (who I had not heard of until the series) was one of my favorite series at the time. Mind you I was a teen and I have NOT re-watched it since. After having destroyed my childhood memories by revisiting Robotech and rereading the Dragonlance Chronicles I have a strict “Rose Colored Glasses” policy not to revisit the cartoons and books I loved so much as a child. But I digress!
The idea of mixing these popular figures of fiction, all fond memories of my youth, stuck with me. I began playing not long after Defenders of the Earth came out but the idea for this campaign did not come about until years later. The basic concept is a mash-up of popular pulp heroes, pop culture elements from my youth and some inspiration from the Defenders of the Earth cartoon and comic interpretations of many of these characters. I’ve decided to call it Defenders of the Earth Redux, or A Very Pulpy Future (a decidedly tongue in cheek name) as an alternative.
Fighting the good fight…
3February 22, 2011
I’ve written about Puerto Rico Role Players before, many times, and probably will some more. This is one such instance, so humor me if you please (if not there are some excellent posts down the page…)
(Still here? Good, let’s go on…) One of the reasons I became so active in the group was to give back something to the gaming community. Through it I have met innumerable acquaintances, forged lasting friendships both near and far, and enjoyed a hobby where I express my creativity and have fun doing it. I have seen the RPG community shrink and today I thought of us as a graying community. Sure there are younger players coming on board, but the majority of us seem to be at a certain age and precipitously approaching middle age.
Mind you I am not declaring the hobby dead, I think we are changing and have been a niche hobby for a while, but we can certainly continue enjoying what we do; and the new trends in publishing and distribution mean we can do this for a long time. All this doesn’t mean I don’t want to see the hobby grow, one the contrary I want to share the love of role playing with more people and I am a firm believer that when people get to experience an RPG many will like to play again.
The time I almost quit gaming!
3February 21, 2011
I guess we’ve all had it. That time where you get frustrated with gaming, throw your arms up and say forget this, I’m not playing anymore… Especially if you’ve been playing for a long time like me (close to 25 years soon) you might just have had that feeling more than once. Strangely enough I’ve only been about to quit once. So if you’ll indulge me I’ll tell you about that time of yore and reflect on how I dealt with it, there may be some learning involved for all of us…
In my senior year of high school I had already been playing RPGs four years. I had begun playing with my neighbors and the group eventually became too large (a common bane in my campaigns, but I’m getting off track here) and I switched groups and began playing with friends from high school. Those were fun times, we played all sorts of campaigns, tried out all types of games, and the only one that lasted was the Star Frontiers game we played during lunch in school. All others became a series of one shots or infrequently played campaigns.
The players fluctuated between four core players and a floating group of four or five occasional players. For some reason two of the core players, good friends to this day, became really antagonistic. They tried whatever crazy scheme they could come up with to sabotage adventures, and went out of their way to get me to lose my temper. They often succeeded…
I remember a Gamma World Adventure where they massacred the wise old man of a small village they visited. The locals in turn lynched them. A long running, but sporadic, AD&D campaign was derailed when the human ranger decided to pee on the dining table of the elven ambassador they were visiting. That and other misadventures cost the elven member of the party, who was a noble about to become the leader of his people, not only his title, but his family’s honors and lands.
Best of Stargazer’s World
5February 9, 2011
The 1000th post at Stargazer’s World is approaching fast. A couple of months back I had the idea to release something special when this blog hits a thousand posts. The idea is to compile 20 or 30 of the best articles and release them as a PDF, much like a Stargazer’s World-only Open Game Table.
But in order to do this I need the help of my readers. Please select your favorite Stargazer’s World blog posts and fill out this little survey. Your responses will be collected over the coming weeks and analyzed as soon as the 1000th blog post has been published.
Thanks in advance!
Letting go of that NPC
3January 24, 2011
Attention: Slight rambling ahead, with a point to make about RPGs somewhere in there, you have been warned!
I recently finished reading the Millennium Trilogy by Stieg Larsson (that’s the girl with the dragon tattoo, which then played with fire and ended up kicking the hornet’s nest). And in case you are wondering, yes I do read other stuff that is not RPG related. The novels are a satisfying, if little long, suspenseful page turner with an implausible plot. I’ve heard so many people say they were captured by the plot from the very beginning, but I was not. If I had not been reading the book for a book club I probably would have never gotten through the first hundred pages of first novel. After that threshold the book really became engrossing. On the third book I had a similar experience; it did not take off for me after page 113. What about book two? Well let’s just say I only got through it to get to book three!
In all honesty I am being a little facetious, the books are fun an entertaining. Not classics but better than a lot of other stuff out there. After finishing the third book and preparing for the upcoming book club meeting I began reflecting on the novel and realized that one of the reasons I enjoyed the 3rd one so much was because so much of the book had to do with secondary characters. The parts I enjoyed the most had NOTHING to do with the protagonists. In a way that’s a compliment on the author who managed to make secondary characters so memorable, but it’s really sad that by the end of the trilogy I had come to despise the main characters so much.
All this thinking made me ponder the characters we as Game Masters create to populate our games and ended up being a reflection on Non-Player Characters.
Interested? Read on…
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