You're the first I've encountered who liked it for it.
There’s a whole decades old fansite for it. Alternity sold very well, over the moon for any typical rpg company according to one dev, but WotC canceled it because it didn’t sell even more. Then took down the pdfs in 2008 and never put them back.
I’m not going to try defending the system, but the SD setting is the only scifi setting that I find interesting anymore. Nothing else looks remotely appealing. I can’t place my finger on precisely why. It’s just one of those verbose settings created by Bill Slavicsek.
SD is a kitchen sink of tropes. It suffers from typical scifi unrealism like monocultures on lightyear scales. Yet somehow it feels fresh and original to me. SD feels like it rearranges things enough that it could’ve been one of those genre defining franchises like Star Trek or Star Wars for the y2k era. As one person told me, it feels like a dozen different games in one. There’s Babylon 5 style politics, there’s postwar recovery, there’s Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri style civilizations of humans dominating known space, one of these civilizations is a tongue-in-cheek Space Texas, there’s a Space Genosha that models itself after the Roman Empire, there’s a cyberpunk space soviet union, there’s multiple frontier sectors, one of the frontier sectors was isolated for a century and now there’s politics and colonialism in the attempts to reconnect, there’s at least two simultaneous invasions by different alien empires from unknown space, one of the invasions looks like the Scarrans from Farscape, the other invasion looks like the Covenant from Halo mixed with XCOM and Starship Troopers and Yuzhan Vong and Stargate’s Ori, there’s multiple extinct precursor civilizations including one inspired by Lovecraft, there’s Roswell grays, there’s a lot of stuff here.
Are you familiar with any of this?
