Even though I am not actively running any games at the moment, I am still excited in the hobby and regularly check out new games (at least to me) or revisit games I have been known for many years. The first game on my current reading list is Alternity by TSR. Yes, the TSR of D&D fame. If I am not mistaken, Alternity was actually the last game line published by TSR before it was completely integrated into Wizards of the Coast and vanished as an entity.
Alternity is a TTRPG ruleset for contemporary or science-fiction roleplaying campaigns using an original system. It has some Dungeons & Dragons DNA but feels very much like its own system. There are classes but they mostly provide a framework for your character and some special abilities. The skill system allows pretty much to build any kind of character. The core mechanic is quite interesting. You roll with a d20 and a situational dice which is either added or substracted depending on whether the task is harder or easier than what one would consider routine. The target number which you must meet or roll-under is directly tied to your character’s skill. There’s also a simple system for determining the scale of success. Going into much more detail would probably go way beyond the scope of this post but you should find more information about Alternity online easily.
Like D&D Alternity has a Player’s Handbook and a separate Game Master’s Guide. Over the few years Alternity was in print, they released several sourcebooks and two major settings: Star*Drive and DarkMatter. The latter was eventually revived for d20 Modern while some elements of Star*Drive showed up in d20 Future. There was also a Gamma World game based on the Alternity rules and a rather peculiar (and quite rare nowadays) Starcraft boxed set which had very limited rules and usability. I guess it was some kind of attempt to get people interested in a proper Starcraft TTRPG using the Alternity system. Personally I really like the system and it’s a shame Wizards of the Coast pretty quickly cancelled the line in favor of the d20 System.
Unfortunately the Alternity books are not available online (aside from a few which can be found under the d20 Modern section on DriveThruRPG). You pretty much have to rely on second-hand books. But last time I checked the core rulebooks are still available for reasonable prices if you want to check it out for yourself.
The core books make the assumption that the GM creates their own campaign. That’s also what I’d love to use it for. One of my big dreams has always benn writing my own kick-ass space opera game and Alternity seems like a perfect fit – much better than the more pedestrian Traveller or Cepheus System.
Another TSR property which didn’t get much fanfare back in the day but which I like a lot is their Buck Rogers in the XXVth Century RPG. The rules are based on AD&D 2nd Edition and don’t work really well but I love the hard-SF meets pulp action approach they took with the setting. Perhaps converting the game to Alternity rules might be a cool project. At this moment I haven’t committed to anything yet, but the idea of running anything with this venerable system could scratch an itch I had for quite some time now.
There’s still one thing I should mention related to Alternity before moving on: there is a new game called Alternity which was created by one of the creators of the original game. Personally I don’t think it’s a worthy successor since they threw out the core mechanics an added stuff I did not like at all. Your mileage may vary.
The other game I have been excited about for a while is even more obscure than Alternity since it hasn’t been available in the West yet. I am talking of course about Sword World from Japan. The anime fans among you might have heard of “Record of Lodoss War”. The series is based on a light novel which itself is based on a “replay” of a AD&D campaign. A replay is pretty much an “Actual Play” but in text form.
Back in these days a group of Japanese gamers wanted to release their campaign as an official AD&D product but TSR didn’t grant them a license. So they decided to write their own game. The end result was Sword World. Since polyhedral dice were extremely rare in Japan – even rarer than in the US at the time – they chose to use a 2d6 system. But even with different mechanics it still feels a bit like a D&D heartbreaker. But I’d consider it to be one of the better ones. SW has classes like D&D but they work more like skillsets. In a sense multi-classing is the expectation in this game. The original Sword World has classic D&D classes and the world it is set in is the same as in Record of Lodoss War. But I am pretty sure you’d be able to run a Greyhawk game using these rules.
The new edition, Sword World 2.5, is quite different. While the core mechanics are pretty close, the AD&D connections are replaced by a JRPG influence. Where SW 1.0 had pretty much the standard D&D races, SW 2.5 offers options like Tabbits (anthropomorphized rabbits) and Lykants (think of werewolves). The new setting called Raxia is also more of a science-fantasy setting like in the Final Fantasy games.
We now have to adress the huge elephant in the room. There’s no official English translation of Sword World. In order to learn more about the game you have basically two choices (or three if you are more patient than me): First you can learn Japanese and import the books from Japan. Since Japanese is not very easy to learn this is probably not the preferred option even though importing the books is no big deal nor very expensive. I got the three core rulebooks from Amazon.co.jp and paid less than 40 € for everything including shipping. The original books remind me a lot of manga books and they are in a very cute A6 format. The second option is to rely on the fan-translated books you can find online for free. There’s a dedicated subreddit to the translation of Sword World where you can find links to all translated books. The third option is to wait for the official translation which has been announced a while ago. Mugen Gaming which is a small US publisher has gotten their hands on the SW license and will run a crowdfunding campaign on Backerkit in the near future. While I will definitively will back this project I already started reading the fan translations.
From what I’ve seen so far, Sword World might be a viable D&D alternative for me. The rules are pretty light-weight, it easily supports both classic Western fantasy (in the case of SW 1.0 easily so) and a more JRPG-influenced version of the genre. I like the 2d6 mechanics and the character creation which pretty much allows for a very wide range of character builds. It easily supports all the fantasy concepts I ever came up with and especially the ones which weren’t almost impossible to replicate in D&D. I also enjoy the whole Anime/Manga aesthetic and some if not most of the tropes the game and settings support like an Adventurer Guild which hands out jobs to the characters, magitech, ancient but lost civilizations and so on. One part of the appeal is probably the fact that’s a game not well known over here. Finding out more about SW and its settings feels a bit like being an explorer unearthing long lost secrets.
So even though I am still struggling a bit with GM burnout, the hobby itself still has a lot of appeal to me. I still love reading TTRPG books and there’s always the hope that I overcome my issues and get to bear the mantle of GM once more. What are your thoughts on both Alternity and Sword World? What are the games you’re excited about right now? Please share your thoughts below!
