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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[dbolack]

Pretty sure I'm remembering it from the GDW Kafer Sourcebook, but it was long ago and I'm unsure of the source. Might have been some random issue of Challenge instead, or even the brief section on kafer in the core box.

It is indeed the Kafer sourcebook.

 

[Wofano Wotanto]

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.

Nothing at all surprising about focusing on a smaller, relatively isolated pocket of frontier space where all of the major players have some interests and goals. Your own highlighted observation explains it just fine. The designers were already squeezed for room and had to concentrate on something that would be useful, and they were probably pretty clear that they've never get a bunch of splatbooks to cover the the Stellar Ring in a meaningful way.

At least they did include a decent summary of the Ring to provide an explanation of why the Verge is the way it is. Way the heck better than Star Frontiers, where the "Frontier" is just there all by itself, with nary a word about what it's the frontier of, not even a token arrow pointing to "Civilization" - and SF got way more support that SD did.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

A while back I posted about using the Alternity species in LevelUp's Voidrunners Codex, using the Weren as a proof of concept...

Voidrunner Thread 'Kitbashing Voidrunner heritages into Alternity species'

Sep 9, 2024

This one was pretty easy...

Weren Traits

Characters with the Weren heritage share a variety
of traits in common.

Age. Werens mature at about the age of 16,
and typically live about 90 years.

Size. Werens stand over 7 feet in height. Your
size is Medium,

Speed. Your base walking speed is 30 feet.

Powerful Build. You count as size Large
for the purposes of determining carrying
capacities.

Fur Coat. Your thick fur protects you from
cold environments. You have...

• Twiggly the Gnome
• Replies: 1
• Forum: Level Up: Advanced 5th Edition (A5E)

• 
• 

I used Seshayans as an Underdark race in one campaign. They had an empire so long ago that history has largely forgotten it, including the Seshayans themselves. Even among long-lived races like elves, its existence is more of a mocking fairy tale.

But it did exist, and it was so terrible that the other races formed an alliance to wipe it out; successfully defeating it and almost completely erasing it from recorded history.

Then someone found actual evidence of it still remained…

 

[VelvetViolet]

In any case, I’m not gonna let the nasty words of the nasty haters hold me back. I don’t know the first thing about making my own games, but I’m writing my own short stories inspired by the old dead ttrpgs I liked, including Star*Drive and Dark•Matter. It’s taking me forever, but I’m still chugging along.

 

[Staffan]

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).

To be honest, it's been a while since I read Dark Matter – my observation about antisemitism was more a general one. But IRL, you don't just have the overt "Protocols of the Elders of Zion"-style conspiracy theories about Jews. It's also fairly common with conspiracy theories that are one or two steps removed, like David Icke-style ramblings about alien reptilians that's really a veiled reference to Jews.

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.

Focusing on the Verge was a deliberate choice, and I think it was the right one. The Stellar Ring is, as you say, much larger, and focusing on the Verge lets you boil that down to a manageable number of systems while still having the "iceberg" of the Stellar Ring providing some context to those. It also provides a fertile environment for conflict, where many Vergers feel that since the Stellar Nations stayed away for so many years they lost any claim they had to the region, while the Stellar Nations feel the Verge rightly belongs to them seeing as they're the ones who spent resources to colonize it in the first place. Further, it's a place where representatives for the different Stellar Nations are concentrated near one another (for interstellar space values of "near") – you generally wouldn't have people from Austrin-Ontis, Orion League, Rigunmor Star Consortium, and the Thuldan Empire all brushing shoulders with one another in the Stellar Ring, but you will out on the Verge.

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.

Yeah, the Nations were probably stereotyped a little too hard, and in many cases don't seem actually functional.

 

[jacleg05]

Alternity was a great system that came out at a bad time. If TSR had released it earlier, it might have found a wider audience. Though it did get a lot of support material, and there were some good articles in the Dragon/Ares magazine. My favorite ones were how to use Alternity in the Traveller setting and using Dark*Matter for Top Secret.

At least it had a better response than Amazing Engine. Despite having eight setting books, I own Bughunters and Kromosone, it disappeared like a fart in the wind. I remember trying to find any info on the internet and there was hardly anything. The only thing I found was a guy running Bughunters using the CORPS system.

 

[aramis erak]

I picked that up. It is good but incomplete because the starship supplement was never published or most of the other supplements. With some work, that would be a great campaign to run. But the GM would have to figure out starships on his own or swap out the Prime Directive warp drive and weapons for something right out of D20 Future.

There was never a real plan for a starship supplement for PD1... SVC told people asking to "Use SFB."

 

[LuisCarlos17f]

If there is a new version of Dark*Matter I guess it would be in a fictional world like the plane "New Capena" of Magic: the Gathering. Even if WotC said nothing linked to conspirancy theories from the real life some DM could, or somebody publishing in DMGuild. We are in the age of internet and thanks this we can know for example about how Rothschild earned a lot of money after the battle of Waterloo faking selling their war bonds to speculate.

I am not talking about Fox Mulder and Dana Scully hunting the monster of the week, or something style "Roswell Conspirancies: Aliens, Myths and Legends" cartoon but about "urban legends" where evil people do too horrible actions even to be told in horror fiction.

* If a sci-fi TTRPG allows mind-uploading and digital inmortality then the DM had to design special menaces. And we could face troubles caused by abuses of the transhuman technology. For example an innocent could be in prison with the memories by the true criminal, or a clone is used to record this doing a very wrong action and then to blackmail the "original". Or a "clone" becomes rougue. Should the original to be punished by the crimes of the clone?

 

[VelvetViolet]

like David Icke-style ramblings about alien reptilians that's really a veiled reference to Jews.

Dark•Matter made reptilians, the “Kinori”, into good guys.

To be honest, it's been a while since I read Dark Matter

You can find a summary of the problematic conspiracies here and here. Long story short; they’re mostly far right conspiracy theories. So there’s lots of anti-government screed, racism, sexism, and xenophobia. The only bit they don’t have is homophobia or islamophobia, although that’s probably because those didn’t have well known bigoted conspiracy theories at the time(?). The d20 Menace Manual introduces the conspiracy “Al-Jambiya,” composed of muslim terrorists because the book released just a couple years after 9/11. The game is very much informed by politics at the time of writing.

However, there actually is already a Christofascist illuminati in the book: the Order of St. Gregory. The book outright states they’re singlehandedly responsible for the witch hunts, racism against Roma, genocide against Native Americans, the invasion of Tibet, think aliens are demons, and hate women. Despite what one review mentioned, the book doesn’t depict Christianity as a universally positive force that heroically genocides druids and brown people. The book actually says that’s bad. The Inquisition during the Dark Ages actually created Satanism (or rather fake Satanism) as numerous indigenous pagans created secret codes for mutual protection against the genocidal Christian Church. Oddly, real demons were not involved.

Altho the rulebook has issues, it gets blown out of proportion sometimes, particularly with regards to how the setting handles Church history. Although it doesn’t try to spin illuminati out of the abuse scandals because I guess that wasn’t in the news back then(?), it doesn’t portray the Church as a universally positive force. If it was written later, then I imagine that the writers would’ve tried inserting demonic infiltration into the Catholic Church and the upper classes, like the Sister Andrea pov scenes in Evil or the Samara Weaving movie Hide and Seek.

There are numerous scattered stories nowadays that deal with more piecemeal takes on the genre that are able to move past the problematic nature of the original conspiracy theories. Why there are no newer ttrpgs that try tapping into that is beyond me.

 

[LuisCarlos17f]

You should take care when we are talking about the real life, or History, because somebody may arrive to tell a different version. I hope this example to be enoughly soft. Let's remember the old far-west movies where the Northamerican natives are the antagonists. But later other people started to show a different point of view, for example Kevin Costner in "Dancing with Wolves". Do you understand?

Even if WotC said nothing about real facts some 3PPs could create adventures and later to be reported as "hate speech".

Warning, controversial examples
If you tell a story style Umberto Eco's "The name of the Rose" somebody could tell other story according her opposite point of view.

Or you could tell a story about a false flag operation because the goverment wants a war against other country, and the action isn't in USA but in Russia. Or a story style "the tale of the maid" but in a no-Christian nation from other continent. Or a story of pirates where Barbarrosa speaks with Turkish accent (because the historical character was Otoman).

Take care with your words because you could get into troubles, or create bad vibes in your group.

Some tropes should be avoided, or at least limited. For example you could add a femme fatale in your story a couple of times, but the abuse of the trope.... wouldn't be wellcome. Do you understand?

Other reason to use a fictional world is create freedom, for example players can choose a no-human PC.

A reimagination or mash-up version of a sci-fi franchise would be a safer bet, for example a pulp version of Star Wars.