Because the campaign's the thing

THE BEGINNING OF AN IDEA

When last we left off explaining the long strange trip towards the Twilight Sector Campaign Setting Sourcebook, we were still in the 70s.  We’ll jump forward now skipping the stories of other long running campaigns (stories for another day) and my propensity for killing great sets of rules, see Chivalry and Sorcery, not to mention Alternity which we are about to discuss.  The date is 1997, I am at GenCon when I happen upon a black book with a flying belt buckle for a logo.  It is the preview edition of the Alternity rules.  Soon I am sucked in.  I meet David Eckelberry at this very same convention and he offers me the chance to participate in a LARP of the peace conference ending GWII.  I am to be the GM liaison for the VoidCorp delegation.  I still have my little VoidCorp badge and everything.  My conversion to the dark side is complete.

The Alternity rules were excellent; the StarDrive setting when it came out the next year was very good.  In the meantime I’d already started developing The Twilight Sector and Terra/Sol.  I’d decided to place them in Orion and put them right on the edge of settled space.   And well lookey there, the map had this little section over in the corner called the Orion Frontier…that would do! 

Well leaving the convention I had the preview set of the rules, I had a handout for the LARP David Eckelberry ran, and that’s it.  I also had 6 or 7 months on my hands before the final version of the rules hit the stores and even longer before the official StarDrive setting would be released.  Its a bad thing to leave a GM with time on his hands because they start tinkering.  That’s exactly what I did.  I knew I wanted my own setting while using the StarDrive setting as a backdrop.  It would be cool to have a campaign providing all kinds of interesting far away news events.  It’d give my setting depth and background.

During all that down time I fleshed out the Twilight Sector coming up with my main themes and many other dark imaginings.  The duel mysteries of the origins of this Earth clone planet and a virus causing human mutations were the first two themes and they will be the ones that will confront players beginning with our second product: Twilight Sector Campaign: Beyond the Open Door. 

But what became clear after spending time contemplating the intricacies of the setting in the dark recesses of my basement was there were points here and there I wasn’t real happy with.  I didn’t really care for the aliens.  Some of them were designed very well but the way they were introduced made them almost cartoonish.  Except for the Fraal with their bizarre case of amnesia or maybe it was lockjaw, all the aliens were inferior to humanity.  Each was the pet of some stellar nation who controlled their fate and didn’t want to share them with anyone else.  I thought if you’re going to treat them as a sideshow, why not just leave them out entirely and give the players the chance to experience first contact for the setting.  Surely an earth shaking event and one which would be ripe with adventure opportunities.  

Speaking of cartoonish, many of the stellar nations were one trick ponies.  VoidCorp is an excellent villain but what’s with that nation as one corporation?  If the government controls everything doesn’t that really make them fascists, communists or at least statists? How can you have cut throat corporate competition inside a monopoly? Come to think of it, all of those could have been interesting ideas if they had been explored.  Then you have your British intellectuals over there and your rogue traders Italian style over there.  Things just seemed to shallow for me. 

I could be wrong.  Simple is often good when telling a story and we could end up falling on our faces with the Twilight Sector Campaign Setting Sourcebook because we tried to make it too nuanced.  Only time will tell.  I’m making it sound a little bit like I hated the setting and nothing could be farther from the truth.  I loved it.  I left everything in for the sake of continuity and not having to explain why there were no aliens in the setting when they were clearly right there in the rule book.  I could see my own version of “Dorkness Rising” with the players shoving a book in my face saying see it’s right there on page 29.  But in the back of my mind I had this little list like I think most GMs do, of what I would have done if I hadn’t been the lazy toad I am and designed the setting.

In closing this post I’d like to leave you with some drawings of Alternity aliens that I had a very talented artist Dragen do for me for my campaign.  I hope you Alternity fans enjoy them.