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TANGENTS
Imagine a world, parallel to ours, where the Roman Empire never fell ... or where intelligent dinosaurs rule continent-spanning empires ... or where a nuclear exchange between superpowers has reduced the population by 90%.Tangents allows "Alternity" game players to imagine all these worlds and more! Also includes full rules for dimensional travel, play tips and adventure hooks to get the Gamemaster started, and information on how to incorporate dimensional travel into any campaign.
96 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1999
About the author
Bruce R. Cordell
166 books124 followersBruce R. Cordell authored books for Dungeons & Dragons over the course of 4 editions (2nd Edition through 5th Edition D&D). These days, he’s a senior designer for Monte Cook Games, LLC designing Numenera , Gods of the Fall, and The Strange. Also a novel author, his credits include several titles set in the Forgotten Realms. Bruce’s tenth novel, Myth of the Maker, is just out from Angry Robot Books:
http://brucecordell.blogspot.com/2017...
http://brucecordell.blogspot.com/2017...
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December 31, 2021Alternity was the last gasp of TSR, their attempt to launch a generic science fiction game to match the generic fantasy of D&D. And back in the day I liked it enough to collect a bit of it and used my pandemic madness time to fill out the few holes in my collection.
This is 1/3 of my Alternity rules, covering just the core books:
* Player’s Handbook
* Gamemaster’s Guide
* Dataware
* Starships
* Tangents
* Mindwalking
* Beyond Science
* Warships (pdf)
The game will be familiar to anyone with some familiarity with D&D from 2e on: there’s stats, races, classes, skills, a d20 mechanic (with a bonus/penalty die to account for the situation rather than flat numbers to add/subtract or a re-roll mechanic).
Of course, sf is a broader genre than fantasy, especially once you consider that D&D isn’t truly all of fantasy and has in fact had a big impact on literary/media fantasy (so, say, easy-ish for D&D to emulate your recent favorite fantasy book since your recent favorite fantasy author played D&D or is otherwise swimming in it). So this game has the unenviable job of trying to emulate everything from Star Wars-esque space opera, to Earth-bound cyberpunk, to modern Fortean weirdness a la The X-Files.
So the Player’s Handbook includes several alien species, but it’s clear that these are really here for the space opera game Star*Drive. (Some of them include a little section on how you could use this in modern games, and it’s just about always “first contact?”) And the Gamemaster’s Guide has a chapter on designing your setting — always one of my favorite chapters — which includes some good questions, like what’s your tone, and includes notes on running technothriller, superhero, or space opera games — and is then followed by a chapter about designing more realistic planetary systems, which is really only necessary for a small slice of sf games.
The Player’s Handbook also has several chapters on different categories of equipment, but each of those has to have sections describing what life is like in different progress levels. (For contrast, the PHB has 5 pages to describe personality.) Likewise, a sf game just about has to include rules for mutants, psionics, cyber-tech — but whether you use those rules will depend heavily on what sort of game you’re playing.
So there are basic rules for all those topics in the core books, but then there are supplements that are meant to be setting-neutral to expand on these topics; so there’s a book on starships, which includes some example ships — but how can you give an example ship without thinking about the setting that the ship is in? That said, I do sort of enjoy the supplement on robots, AI, and computer stuff (Dataware); and the supplement on psionics has some good questions about how people in your world react to psionics and what sort of games you could build around that (Mindwalking); and the special powers book is a little too broad, but has a lot of ideas you could mine for different games. (There’s one premise about superpowers as a virus that your body eventually fights off, leaving you unpowered, and that is candy to me.)
And that’s what I really want from a generic game: if you can’t give me a specific POV/theme (and beyond “advanced science resembles magic; and there are some thing that science can’t (yet) explain,” a generic sf game can’t really give much of a POV), then I want the tools and questions that will help nudge me in the direction of a POV that I might want to explore.
Which is probably why my favorite book in this set is Tangents, the book about slipping between dimensions (including a lot of random tables for what sort of world you might land in). Partly I like this book because it takes the book-as-toolbox and turns that into the text of the game, as your heroes might pop into other worlds to save them or save themselves. This book is half an adventure that doesn’t quite light me on fire, but the fact that I love this book anyway shows how strong that first half is. (Seriously: not only do they talk about how walking between dimensions could work in several other genres and campaigns, but it also has a dozen sidebars with interesting ideas to plunder wholesale, like notes on “persistent people” and “chirality” of chemicals as a problem.)
This is 1/3 of my Alternity rules, covering just the core books:
* Player’s Handbook
* Gamemaster’s Guide
* Dataware
* Starships
* Tangents
* Mindwalking
* Beyond Science
* Warships (pdf)
The game will be familiar to anyone with some familiarity with D&D from 2e on: there’s stats, races, classes, skills, a d20 mechanic (with a bonus/penalty die to account for the situation rather than flat numbers to add/subtract or a re-roll mechanic).
Of course, sf is a broader genre than fantasy, especially once you consider that D&D isn’t truly all of fantasy and has in fact had a big impact on literary/media fantasy (so, say, easy-ish for D&D to emulate your recent favorite fantasy book since your recent favorite fantasy author played D&D or is otherwise swimming in it). So this game has the unenviable job of trying to emulate everything from Star Wars-esque space opera, to Earth-bound cyberpunk, to modern Fortean weirdness a la The X-Files.
So the Player’s Handbook includes several alien species, but it’s clear that these are really here for the space opera game Star*Drive. (Some of them include a little section on how you could use this in modern games, and it’s just about always “first contact?”) And the Gamemaster’s Guide has a chapter on designing your setting — always one of my favorite chapters — which includes some good questions, like what’s your tone, and includes notes on running technothriller, superhero, or space opera games — and is then followed by a chapter about designing more realistic planetary systems, which is really only necessary for a small slice of sf games.
The Player’s Handbook also has several chapters on different categories of equipment, but each of those has to have sections describing what life is like in different progress levels. (For contrast, the PHB has 5 pages to describe personality.) Likewise, a sf game just about has to include rules for mutants, psionics, cyber-tech — but whether you use those rules will depend heavily on what sort of game you’re playing.
So there are basic rules for all those topics in the core books, but then there are supplements that are meant to be setting-neutral to expand on these topics; so there’s a book on starships, which includes some example ships — but how can you give an example ship without thinking about the setting that the ship is in? That said, I do sort of enjoy the supplement on robots, AI, and computer stuff (Dataware); and the supplement on psionics has some good questions about how people in your world react to psionics and what sort of games you could build around that (Mindwalking); and the special powers book is a little too broad, but has a lot of ideas you could mine for different games. (There’s one premise about superpowers as a virus that your body eventually fights off, leaving you unpowered, and that is candy to me.)
And that’s what I really want from a generic game: if you can’t give me a specific POV/theme (and beyond “advanced science resembles magic; and there are some thing that science can’t (yet) explain,” a generic sf game can’t really give much of a POV), then I want the tools and questions that will help nudge me in the direction of a POV that I might want to explore.
Which is probably why my favorite book in this set is Tangents, the book about slipping between dimensions (including a lot of random tables for what sort of world you might land in). Partly I like this book because it takes the book-as-toolbox and turns that into the text of the game, as your heroes might pop into other worlds to save them or save themselves. This book is half an adventure that doesn’t quite light me on fire, but the fact that I love this book anyway shows how strong that first half is. (Seriously: not only do they talk about how walking between dimensions could work in several other genres and campaigns, but it also has a dozen sidebars with interesting ideas to plunder wholesale, like notes on “persistent people” and “chirality” of chemicals as a problem.)
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