Weekend Gaming

This weekend was Nick’s birthday, so he ran some games.

He ran his nominally-bi-monthly Mage game (last played in early July, maybe?) and, on his birthday, he ran an Alternity game. Before running the game, he asked us for input. He was planning on making a bunch of pregenerated PCs for us to choose from, but he wanted to know if there was anything we wanted to play. Looking around, I quickly grabbed some toys and put together a mock-up of the PC I wanted:

…an undead warrior armed with a glowing energy-weapon riding a two-headed dinosaur.

He looked at me as if I were crazy.

Apparently, it wasn’t that kind of science fiction. (I knew that, more or less, but a guy has to try, doesn’t he?)

I ended up playing a heretical psychic alien priestess who was the leader of a suicide commando squad. We were assigned to find out why a military research station had lost contact. The reason, obviously, was zombies.

We had fun. We killed space zombies. We ate cake and ice cream, courtesy of Nick’s mom.

This was the first time I’d played Alternity. The system was interesting. It looked fiddly, but it played smoothly enough. I suspect we skimmed over a number of rules, but that’s OK from my perspective. It was skill-based… and there were a lot of skills, but they were more-or-less intelligently arranged with default broad skills. This is one of those games where a well-designed character sheet is essential.