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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 9051064" data-attributes="member: 27780">Polyhedron UK Issue 7: May 2000part 2/5Alternity Star Generator: Here’s a type of article I haven’t seen in a while. Space is really really big, so you’ll often find yourself in need of randomly generating star systems & their contents if players wander off the beaten track. Looking at it, it doesn’t engage with the Alternity systems at all either, making it a generic one suitable for any sci-fi game.  Unfortunately, the sci part isn’t that accurate, particularly in light of the many new discoveries of planets over the past couple of decades. They think that red dwarves won’t have anything worth settling when there are multiple planets in the habitable zones of our nearby neighbours (although the year length will be shorter than an earthly month, which might take a bit of getting used to, and if they’re tidally locked, that’s an even larger change in day-to-day life. ) The table also makes the majority of star systems single ones, when in reality 85% of them are binary or even more. It’s still not useless, but If you actually want hard science in your gaming you’ll have to do a lot of revising the numbers to get it to fit. I’m pretty sure there’s a better variant to be found now, particularly once you start zooming in and generating the details of individual planets. A Walk in the Forest: Our first adventure takes real world UK events and gives them a blatantly supernatural explanation for the Delta Green variant of Call of Cthulhu. A UFO sighted in 1980 was captured by your basic secret government agency. Unfortunately, it was promptly suborned by a Karotechian adept in trying to exploit the aliens, a parasitic hive mind adapted from D&D yellow musk creepers. Of course, his pursuit of obscure arcane lore attracts the attention of your DG superiors, who send you on a mission to investigate the base. Once there, you’ll find everyone is suspiciously flat of affect and slow of reaction except the guy in charge and one conspiracy kook who only eats his own food & drinks bottled water, who is uninfected but obviously getting suspicious about what’s up with his co-workers. If you can get away from the guided tour trying to keep a lid on things you’ll soon encounter the secret labs filled with yellow musk zombies and worse experimental creations. Then the adept will turn up for a dramatic battle, before teleporting away when it looks like he’s losing. This uses up the last of his magic, which causes containment to fail dramatically and the base to self-destruct to prevent the creepers from escaping & spreading. Hopefully you’ll be able to escape for the second part next issue. It’s very much a D&D dungeoncrawl transplanted to another system, complete with “new” spells that are direct D&D conversions. It’s interesting, but currently unrunnable without the maps, so I can’t give a proper assessment on whether it’s a linear sequence of events or one that actually allows for a decent amount of exploration before reaching that dramatic railroaded climax. It does irritate me that the UK branch has done this three times now while the USA one always made sure each part of it’s multiparters had all the information to play it, even if you then had to wait a couple of months for the next instalment. That’s a completely unforced and very baffling editing mistake that they keep on making.</blockquote>

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