RPG Archive: Star*Drive for D&D and Traveller

Star*Drive is a science fiction setting from the end of the 90s that TSR put out at the end of its life. Despite the doom approaching TSR, the end of the 90s was filled with new ideas and RPG options in books and in Dragon Magazine. So much of this content is still usable whether you play Dungeons & Dragons, a sci-fi RPG like Traveller, or are looking for a retro sci-fi RPG to try like Alternity. And yes, the cover art for the Alternity Gamemaster Guide connects to the cover art of the Alternity Player’s Handbook!

Planet Alien Space - Free photo on Pixabay​

Alternity and Star*Drive​

Alternity is a set of rules using the Star*Drive setting as a ready example but also with other settings available. Star*Drive is a setting using the Alternity rules with some d20 rules also available in D20 Future and in Dragon Magazine using Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2E.

Star*Drive had a lot of support for PCs venturing out into frontier space in FTL ships to explore alien worlds, combat rogue killer warships, and try to earn money to keep flying. With so much content, this article will concentrate on a brief overview of the setting, two adventures also usable with Traveller, and AD&D and d20 conversions. Used copies of all these RPGs and magazines are easy to find and most are quite affordable with many at or under $30 each.

The main book covers starfaring Earth nations and corporations along with several alien species also found in the Alternity Player’s Handbook. Dragon Magazine (issues #250, #256, #261, and #263) would provide deeper dives into these aliens. Star*Drive - Alien Compendium I provides plenty of new aliens for PCs to interact with or play as a character.

Adventures Usable for Traveller, Mothership, Alternity and Other Sci-fi RPGs​

Star*Drive - The Lighthouse is a moving space station that visits system after system on diplomatic and trade missions. It houses a dark secret (no spoilers) but would be perfect for use with Mothership. If the engines are converted, The Lighthouse would work for Traveller or Spelljammer: Adventures in Space (AD&D 2E) although its secret would need to be altered. PCs could be citizens of the Rock of Bral and travel into Wildspace aboard The Lighthouse. Or play with the original Alternity rules and visit a new star system every game night.

Star*Drive - The Last Warhulk is sprawling space crawl of an adventure. It is epic in size and scope and not well known. I really enjoyed running this one for Star*Drive and would consider it well worth the effort to convert to another RPG.

There are also the Star Frontiers aliens. Converted in Annual #3 Dragon Magazine, one alien race, the dralasites (blob beings able to create a variable number of limbs), are one of my favorite PC alien options and well worth porting over to D&D or Traveller.

AD&D and D20 Future Conversions​

The aliens are converted to AD&D 2E in Dragon Magazine: #251 presents sesheyans (easily the most alien and with their nocturnal nature they would be juxtaposed nicely on The Lighthouse), #253 has the psionic fraal, and #257 covers the lightning fast reptilian t’sa. #244 also has a simple one page Alternity to AD&D idea. The reverse is also possible, with the Alternity Gamemaster Guide having rules to convert AD&D PCs to Alternity and Dragon Magazine #262 has information on converting AD&D monsters to Alternity.

D20 Future also has a short conversion of a small portion of Star*Drive that meshes better with D&D 3.5.

Star*Drive Forward​

Star*Drive has so much to offer: PC aliens, AD&D PC aliens, amazing adventures, awesome aliens, and many ideas that can transported to other RPGs or used with the original Alternity. And the prices for most of these items are less than current RPG prices so there isn’t much to lose to check out the various options.

Over twenty-five years later and I still recommend Star*Drive and Alternity. And Spelljammer: Adventures in Space (AD&D 2E) and the Rock of Bral of course!

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[Ghost2020]

Ryan Dancey had a great letter re: the WotC purchase of TSR. If there were pallets of books, not specifically mentioned, but I would wager Alternity was part of that. TSR was a hot mess.

Also, this is a great read!

Ryan Dancey's letter on the death of TSR

Because not everyone has seen this infamous document and it never fails to spark interesting discussions: Written March 16, 2000 In the winter of 1997, I traveled to Lake Geneva Wisconsin on a secret mission. In the late fall, rumors of TSR's impending bankruptcy had created an opportunity to...

www.rpgpub.com

 

[VelvetViolet]

Regardless of TSR's finances, I think SD is a cool setting with tons of untapped potential. If it was given a chance to shine, then I believe it could have easily found a place alongside classics like Star Trek, Star Wars and Warhammer 40,000.

It's been 25 years since the axe came down, but I haven't found anything else even remotely as detailed and inspiring. I've looked and asked around. People keep suggesting I play Traveler or Stars Without Number. I checked those out and they're just... they don't interest me at all. At that point, forum folks become about as friendly as angry hornets.

I don't like talking to ttrpg gamers anymore.

 

[Ghost2020]

Alternity should have done better.
It's a shame it didn't.

 

[Staffan]

Ryan Dancey had a great letter re: the WotC purchase of TSR. If there were pallets of books, not specifically mentioned, but I would wager Alternity was part of that. TSR was a hot mess.

Not unless they put the books in the warehouse via a TARDIS. Alternity was published after Wizards bought TSR.

 

[Staffan]

I'm not gonna pretend the settings were perfect (e.g. DM uses offensive right-wing conspiracy theories that claims the Inquisition wasn't butchering innocent people by the truckload, SD has a lot of nonsensical scaling like a civilization of militant neo-amish people who can somehow maintain a population of hundreds of billions), but I can't even find any remotely comparable modern offerings. It's not because I'm biased against new games, because I found an amazing game from a couple years ago in another genre.

One of the problems with Dark Matter is that it leans a lot on real-world conspiracy theories and if you scratch the surface of most of them you'll find some pretty nasty stuff. Usually of the antisemitic variety.

 

[Ghost2020]

Not unless they put the books in the warehouse via a TARDIS. Alternity was published after Wizards bought TSR.

It was published in 1997 by TSR. It was branded as a TSR product because that's when it was initially developed.
Wizards of the Coast bought TSR in 1997 as well.
That means all the players handbooks at GM guide, and a handful of products still were made under the TSR tenure.

 

[Staffan]

It was published in 1997 by TSR. It was branded as a TSR product because that's when it was initially developed.
Wizards of the Coast bought TSR in 1997 as well.
That means all the players handbooks at GM guide, and a handful of products still were made under the TSR tenure.

Wizards bought TSR in 1997. After doing so, they published a number of things that had been developed by TSR. Among the products developed by TSR but published by Wizards were the limited editions of the PHB and GMG for Alternity. IIRC, these were primarily for selling at GenCon that year, but I think they had some spares they sold via mail order and/or found their way into retail. I actually found an eBay auction with the PHB and having some pictures of it:

It might be a bit hard to read at that size, but while it only has the TSR logo on it, it has the contact info/address for Wizards of the Coast, and says "TSR, Inc. is a subsidiary of Wizards of the Coast."

The following year, 1998, Alternity got a proper release with "real" covers. There were also some minor rule changes due to feedback from the mailing list – the ones I recall were that character generation choices became upsides instead of penalties* and IIRC something about damage.

So when Ryan Dancey went through TSR's warehouses before Wizards bought TSR, there couldn't have been pallets of Alternity books there, because they were released after the purchase. Alternity was later discontinued in 2000, several years after Wizards bought TSR.

* As I recall, the limited edition gave starting characters 5*Intelligence skill points, and penalized non-humans by 5 skill points (there was also a similar limit to how many skills you could buy but that was never an issue IME). The official release instead lowered the number of skill points by 5 and then gave humans +5 skill points as a special ability – same end result, but expressed as a human bonus instead of a non-human penalty. Similarly, the skills in the limited edition had a +1 cost penalty if you weren't of the right class, while the official release increased all non-open skill costs by 1 and gave classes a -1 cost discount instead.

 

[Twiggly the Gnome]

From what I remember, Alternity had GURPS level sales. That's great for SG Games, but for a company used to D&D level sales, it was deemed too great an opportunity cost.

 

[Ghost2020]

Wizards bought TSR in 1997. After doing so, they published a number of things that had been developed by TSR. Among the products developed by TSR but published by Wizards were the limited editions of the PHB and GMG for Alternity. IIRC, these were primarily for selling at GenCon that year, but I think they had some spares they sold via mail order and/or found their way into retail. I actually found an eBay auction with the PHB and having some pictures of it:
View attachment 403863

View attachment 403864

It might be a bit hard to read at that size, but while it only has the TSR logo on it, it has the contact info/address for Wizards of the Coast, and says "TSR, Inc. is a subsidiary of Wizards of the Coast."

The following year, 1998, Alternity got a proper release with "real" covers. There were also some minor rule changes due to feedback from the mailing list – the ones I recall were that character generation choices became upsides instead of penalties* and IIRC something about damage.

So when Ryan Dancey went through TSR's warehouses before Wizards bought TSR, there couldn't have been pallets of Alternity books there, because they were released after the purchase. Alternity was later discontinued in 2000, several years after Wizards bought TSR.

* As I recall, the limited edition gave starting characters 5*Intelligence skill points, and penalized non-humans by 5 skill points (there was also a similar limit to how many skills you could buy but that was never an issue IME). The official release instead lowered the number of skill points by 5 and then gave humans +5 skill points as a special ability – same end result, but expressed as a human bonus instead of a non-human penalty. Similarly, the skills in the limited edition had a +1 cost penalty if you weren't of the right class, while the official release increased all non-open skill costs by 1 and gave classes a -1 cost discount instead.

Roger that! I'm likely misremembering articles and such.

 

[VelvetViolet]

One of the problems with Dark Matter is that it leans a lot on real-world conspiracy theories and if you scratch the surface of most of them you'll find some pretty nasty stuff. Usually of the antisemitic variety.

The writers had just enough self-awareness to sanitize that part. Indeed, Judaism gets its own monotheistic magic system that is kosher with the angels (or aliens that inspired the stories of angels).

That said, the game still gave us conspiracies like the "Amazons of the Gynarchy" (yes, that's the actual name and they're a game original) who want to develop artificial reproduction to remove men from the process before exterminating all the men. This is straight up anti-feminist nonsense straight out of the televangelist's id. But after reading about how men have viciously tortured women for most of history and still today, it's hard for me to see the Amazons as anywhere near as villainous as they were probably intended to be.

Yeah, the illuminati conspiracies mostly read like televangelist screed and come across in poor taste after the various scandals involving Christian institutions, yadda yadda, but I don't think that the illuminati conspiracies should be scrubbed entirely. I think we need more nuanced portrayals of the kinds of people who form and join conspiracies. To counterbalance the right-wing bias, I think we need more conspiracies drawn from left-wing conspiracy theories, such as the Manosphere, Christofascists, Nazis, techbros, etc. There are real people right now advocating for things like accelerating the destruction of civilization to hasten the singularity or, conversely, for bombing AI data centers to prevent AI from destroying humanity. There's so much material that is ripe for spinning fictional conspiracies.

You could strip it all away and focus entirely on Monster of the Week stuff, tho. The game assumes that PCs are Hoffmann agents and the Institute specializes in studying the social and physical sciences, so how often would they even interact with the illuminati conspiracies anyway? Not to mention the even weirder stuff like the Number 23 "conspiracy" being a real thing in the setting, which crosses into straight up cosmic horror territory, but never actually being explored or explained beyond a paragraph telling the GM to mention it so often.

It would make more sense if the game offered different setups for PCs, such as normal people who get drawn into the conspiracies, X-Files agents, psychic superspies, and so on. For example, you could probably merge the Shadowchasers, Agents of PSI and GeneTech settings into DM without too much additional work. Giving the properties of Shadow to the Dark Tide can help explain why cryptids, aliens, moreaus and so on are able to avoid serious scrutiny by the public and the scientific community, as well as why 500 people can see fighter jets shoot a UFO and buy the spin doctoring that it was all swamp gas reflecting Venus (an actual example given in the d20 Menace Manual) like extras in Invader Zim.

Yeah, DM is one of those settings that could hugely benefit from a new edition to cleanup and refine the ideas. Right now it's underdeveloped and scattered. The d20 edition didn't do anything to fix this, either.

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Likewise, SD is hugely underdeveloped. It tries to do too much and the rulebook simply doesn't have room for everything. The books that were published also display a clear bias for the Verge, with all the systems detailed in the system books being Verge systems. This is a pretty odd choice, considering that the Stellar Ring is much larger and still recovering from the war. There should be just as many if not more plot hooks there too.

The stellar nations are described as nonsensical stereotypes like Star Wars aliens, rather than fully functional civilizations. But we know they all have the industries required for civilization because the rulebook says that AIs scattered throughout the nations run the galactic economy behind the scenes. They need splatbooks or something to explain how they function. Considering that Star Wars is still popular despite making no sense, I think it's probably a small hypocritical quibble. But splatbooks still sound nice.

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There are so many old dead games that I wish the fans could continue to maintain, but dumb old copyright makes that infeasible. Sure, there are always a handful of really passionate fans who will make lots of expensive stuff without asking for compensation, but most people need cash incentive to justify spending all their time on making books. Marketing an IP effectively requires spending money on advertising.

Alternity is just one in a gigantic cemetery.