GURPS Alpha Centauri

[chipjamieson]

Anybody play a campaign of this or run this? I LOVE the computer game, and was wondering if anyone has played the GURPS game...

If so, could we exchange characters/notes/ideas?

Yes - I heard the book is only so-so. I had it once, but sold it to buy RAM (sigh) and now am hooked on the computer game again.


Transcendence to you...

[chipjamieson]

Wow - NOBODY plays this. Wow.

[hjo3]

I have the book and have played the game many times. But neither of these contain enough background/setting information to run an Alpha Centauri game without a ton of work on the GM's end. I suppose if I read the novels, I might have more to work with (i.e. a view of the world from a person's perspective, not an omniscient being who only looks at the "big picture").

When I consider the maps I'd have to draw, the social environments I'd have to make up, the impact of higher technologies on daily life, the minutia of dealing with an alien world with a dramatically alien ecosystem (which is barely documented), the ramifications of controllable psi powers... well, I just figure it's a thousand times easier to use the Transhuman Space setting.

Alpha Centauri's a great setting, but it needs about ten more books to be playable by anyone besides a really devoted fan with huge amounts of free time.

Just my two cents.

[Falco]

Originally Posted by hjo3

Alpha Centauri's a great setting, but it needs about ten more books to be playable by anyone besides a really devoted fan with huge amounts of free time.

Just my two cents.

Unfortunately, I have to agree. I am a tremendous fan of the PC game and it is only one of a very select handful of strategy games I will ever play, as I don't generally go for strategy games unless they have a simple elegance to them, such as Chess, Axis & Allies or the like.

So I was pleased when someone bought the GURPS book for me (can't recall who it was right now), but I can't say I honestly ever considered playing it. It just seemed too obvious that this was a world with a life of its own already (given the number of people familiar with the world setting), but without most of the details of this life to help GMs.

I guess I would say that it is sort of like trying to run one of the massively popular D&D settings (like Dragonlance or Forgotten Realms) with people who know and love the world, by using only the basic books.

[Brent]

I wish the book had had a standard GURPS Space map of Planet.

[Phoenix42]

Hey Guys...

Alpha Centauri's a great setting, but it needs about ten more books to be playable by anyone besides a really devoted fan with huge amounts of free time.

Oh ye of little faith ;) - Let me just say, for one, you're right... for another - I AM YOUR MESSIAH - BOW DOWN TO MY GEEKDOM!!

Well, or something to that end ;)

At any rate, I have been spending (and my head spins at the thought) the last four years GMing Gurps: Alpha Centauri, and I'm just opening up a new group. And yeah, you hate it for the work and you love it for the benefits.

At any rate, since I in no way wish that kind of ordeal on anyone else, I here humbly offer up my documents and files so far, for all those interested. I really don't want to brag, but I have an Alpha Centauri file on my PC, size 678MB and growing. Contact me if you would like some of it, here are some of the more useful snippets:

• An Alpha Centauri Character Sheet with a logo and self-calculating forms in Excel
  
• A document detailing the periods in which Alpha and Hercules provide light on Planet (Alpha is a fixed star, providing sunlight for the first 9 hours of the day, but Hercules orbits Alpha, therefore providing sunlight at changing times of day in an 80 year cycle - I almost went mad doing that). One could have probably made it more easily than I did by using self-calculation, but heck, it's done now ^^. In essence, you can now say, by calling the year you're playing in, when it will be dark (if at all) and when it won't.
  It also provides pre-set data for the distance one can see to from high points on Planet (Planet being larger than Earth by a rate of 2,784, if you use the Huge Map of Planet), and a time reform (proposed by Zakharov in my setting) to make the weird 17hr 32min day on Planet somehow divisible into useful units.
  
• Plus another document with an example daylight distribution for MY 2100
  
• A modified and 4th ed. Progenitor Template
  
• A modified and 4th ed. Mind Worm Template for all boil states
  
• A modified Psi Terror Table for Mind Worm attacks etc., adapted to the Fear attack.
  
  
• Quite a few Planetside pics, both extracted from the game as well as gleaned and modified from other sources.
  
• A ranged weapons document for players using Flame Guns and Shredder Sidearms, with marking points for ammo and energy used.
  
• A Map of Planet made using the SmaX Map Editor; pieced together from screenshots, displaying the starting locations of the factions. Not high quality, but completely viable for political maps etc. 9MB
  
• An Alpha Centauri Trivia Sheet for using the maps provided by SMAC;
  
• The Alpha Centauri Trivia File that can be gleaned from the game itself - it's worth rooting through that game file, people, there's stuff in there you wouldn't believe! That file includes all the planetary raw data on Chiron, Nessus, Pholus, Prime you will ever need, including complete ratio to earth. Gravitation, luminosity, axial tilt, atmospheric pressure, flammability - everything.
  
• A draft for the stats of what I call the SubVerTec, a TL10/11 Hive answer to the Cloudbase Academy, a Submarine Carrier Launching system for Aircraft that needn't surface in order to launch. Not yet tested, but I still like the idea.
  
• A United Nations Calendar with a 500 day period, which is almost exactly the time in Alpha Centauri days in which an Earth year passes, and divides the year into ten months with 5 "weeks" of ten days each. Can be adapted by taste to any campaign or faction you like.
  
• A Believer Calendar, assuming the Believers retained an Earth Calendar of 24 hrs and 7 days for religious purposes, for calculating Sabbath and other religious Holidays, set against the 500 day calendar used by all the other factions (so you can calculate, e.g., that Easter in 2135 is a 24 hr period going from 12.00hrs on day 128 to 00.28 hours on day 130 of the Spartan Calendar, if the Spartans want to pull a Yom Kippur-style surprise attack on the Believers) - one doesn't really need this, of course, but it is really good for making the Believers seem rather conservative and making their religion seem as complex as any real religion.
  
• A collection of Bible passages useful for Members of the Believers Faction.

__________________________________________________ _____________________________________

That was the relatively generic stuff.
If anyone was interested I could also offer:

From my Believer Campaign (subject to preparation, more is coming):

• A calculation of the Believer population progression since Planetfall, including new Bases, until 2135; useful and indeed essential for knowing how many people can be expected to be in one base at any given time. (Never be floored by the "how large was my base when I was born" question again).
  
• A Timeline for the Lords' Believers leading up to 2135.
  
• I am currently working on a list of typical creatures to be found on Alpha Centauri beside the typical Mind Worm, Sealurk, Razorbeak, and Glowmite. It's a bit slow getting started, but it's hard to have really realistic ideas for alien lifeforms if like me, your last biology lesson was 6 years ago.

From my Peacekeeper Campaign (ran for four years, and still running):

Powerpoint-designed introductions with music and flashy stuff, for every adventure session (mainly to give the players a "previously on" effect, but also to set a beginning for each session; every intro ends with a "Welcome to the Holobooks of Alpha Centauri"; I have listed documents of potential interest to GMs or players under their respective adventures.

From Book I ("Unity" Playing the actual Unity departure, the disaster and faction splitup)
Chapters 1 through 4 plus Epilogue

• A Unity Adventure plot summary, with dialogues between the command crew/later faction leaders on the bridge (the dialogues were acted out by the players in interludes.)

From Book II ("Scout Patrol", playing the first exploration attempts around UN Headquarters, and Mind Worm/Spore Launcher confrontations)
Chapters 1 through 4 plus Epilogue

• Adventure Notes for Book II
  
• Name lists for members of the Scout Patrol, with personal backgrounds and military ability ratings for the officers.
  
• An "images of Planet" handout for the players, with a Unity Pod, a Monolith and Fungus landscape as well as some other pics of mindworms etc. to boost the imagination.
  
• The UN Charta as cited and sworn by all members of the faction shortly after landing.
  
• UN Headquarters "Base" descriptions for MY 2100, shortly after planetfall, mainly focussing on the surroundings, including some description of local flora and fauna.

From Book III ("Recon Rover", playing the large-scale exploration with a recovered Rover, and the first contact with the Morganic faction)

• Book III Adventure Notes, including the Character of a "Progenitor Hunter" marooned on the Planet in a stasis field after crashing on Planet and rediscovered by a Morgan mining expedition - loosely based on "Predator", except that this Predator is marooned and has just been woken up by some stupid inferior life-forms. In a mine. In the middle of nowhere. Oh damnit, it's the Predator movie for AC, I admit it, but it was fun :)

From Book IV (Colony, now running, the players have advanced far enough in the hierarchy to be among the governing talents for the first Base to be founded outside UN HQ)

Prologue Intro

Not much as of yet, since the Characters have yet to get past the prologue ^^

• A timeline of "random events" for the period of 2101-2114, to spice things up during adventures.
  
• A population calculation for the estimated growth in UN Headquarters in the years 2101-2114
  
• An assessment of the Production capacity of UN Headquarters, MY 2107; gives relative production of resources and intake/consumption; May be interesting for GMs whose characters have high-ranking positions and have to actually decide this kind of crap - makes for great City Council meetings.

__________________________________________________ _____________________________


Right, that's it for now. I would be thrilled if other AC GMs could come forward with their data for Alpha Centauri, be it generic or specific to their campaign; after all, everything can be useful or, at the least, inspirational, and it can save a hell of a lot of work; even if one has to fit it to one's own campaign, or adjust the rules, it's better than having to write it from scratch. As I said, if you would like to look into any of my stuff, send me a pm, and I will send you everything you like.

I would also like to hear other people's experiences with AC, which campaigns have been attempted, what worked, what didn't. Just get things livened up a bit.

*started uploading; click above links to download the stuff from rapidshare.

[martin_rook]

Originally Posted by chipjamieson

Anybody play a campaign of this or run this? I LOVE the computer game, and was wondering if anyone has played the GURPS game...

If so, could we exchange characters/notes/ideas?

Yes - I heard the book is only so-so. I had it once, but sold it to buy RAM (sigh) and now am hooked on the computer game again.


Transcendence to you...

I ran the beginning of a campaign, just a couple of adventures. The PCs were a scout unit for Morgan just after planetfall. I literally based their adventures off of what my first scouting unit did in one computer game. They had first contact with an alien monolith (i forget what they were called) and first contact with one of the other factions, and salvaged some pods to help establish Morgan's second city (they got in on the ground floor of that franchise).

[Phoenix42]

Welcome!

I'm interested, how did you run the contact with the monolith (which, by the way, were prosaically called "monoliths", I kid ye not)? Specifically, how did you portray the special powers of the monolith?

[Pollux]

I found this thread while searching for background material for a new campaign. I played AC yesterday and came up with the idea to use it as a setting.

Thanks for all the valuable info here, you guys did an amazing job!

The biggest problem i see right now is the huge timescale:
The people I'll play with will most likely NOT know anything about the AC storyline. I love the story and I want to present it completely.

So now, I cant play a campaign for hundreds of years. So I need a way to get players involved in all the key elements, but skip the years in between.

theres basicaly three possible ideas in my heads:
a) Switch characters. Basicaly a set of mini-campaigns. Benefit: Allows the group to be right where the most intresting situation takes place, even at totaly diffrent sides of a war, eg joining the ranks of the enemy with the next set of characters.
b) 'jump over the timegap' now and then. The same persons need to see all the important moment. Even thou the immortality thingys in AC would allow them to do so, my own livespan is limited so I cant play like that. Unimportant times need to be 'jumped over'. For each jump, there needs to be an explanaition. Some alien technology could throw them some years forward in time, they could be frozen in some lab, etc. But thats totaly unrealistic and foreseeable. I fear the moment some player says: "Hey now that the mission is done, I should invest all my cash in the stockmarket. I got a feeling that i wont need any cash for a few decades!"
c) The characters are are very close friends to one of the leaders. They are basicaly the ones he trusts the most. While he can stay active all the time, the immortality sessions are too cost-intense for a whole group. So they get 'conserved' between missions. The leader wakes them whenever he needs a trustworthy group of people to carry out a difficult task. This would be a very easy way to do it. Some guy could get them an update on what happened while they were sleeping and a mission briefing and they are good to go. But it feels very... static. As if the players were not involved in theire own life.

Any better ideas here?
Or maybe a way to make one of these ideas work?

I'd realy appreciate any imput!

And again: Thanks for all the info allready provided :)

[Kelly Pedersen]

Originally Posted by Pollux

So now, I cant play a campaign for hundreds of years. So I need a way to get players involved in all the key elements, but skip the years in between.

b) 'jump over the timegap' now and then. [...] For each jump, there needs to be an explanaition.

Conveniently, such an explanation already exists in AC, no funky alien-tech necessary. :-) Stasis pods from the colony ship were preserved after the crash, and were used by high-ranking faction members. In fact, GURPS Alpha Centauri suggests this as the default reason that the faction leaders were so long-lived - they weren't actually experiencing the whole time, they were put in stasis a lot, and brought out to make important decisions, at least until the higher tech levels when they could simply live longer. You can say that the faction(s) the characters belong to want to preserve their expertise, and offer them access to the stasis pods, then bring them out again at the next crisis point.
In the Alpha Centauri game I played in, we established that the stasis pods actually had anti-aging effects, handwaving something about stasis allowing the body to clean out some of the accumulated toxins and wear and tear that contributes to age. Basically, every two years spent in stasis actually decreased your effective age by one year. That let us justify a bit more uptime for the characters in the pre-longevity time period.

Originally Posted by Pollux

I fear the moment some player says: "Hey now that the mission is done, I should invest all my cash in the stockmarket. I got a feeling that i wont need any cash for a few decades!"

Honestly, unless you're dealing with the Morganites, this probably isn't a big issue. Unless you're seriously fiddling with the factions, only Morgan is likely to have anything close to a market economy in the early days of the colony. All the others will have a more communal approach to money. Energy credits are a means of exchange between colonies, not individuals.

Of course, once you get past a certain point, market economies will start developing, and this does become an issue. My suggestion would simply be to roll with it. After each timeskip, give the characters a good-size pool of points (10 or more), and tell the players that they can spend them on social advantages like Wealth, Rank, Status, etc. The points represent the particular means of social advancement that the characters are pursuing within their faction.

Originally Posted by Pollux

Some guy could get them an update on what happened while they were sleeping and a mission briefing and they are good to go. But it feels very... static. As if the players were not involved in theire own life.

One way to do it would be to start each timeskip with a set mission, but then let the characters stay awake for some time after the immediate mission is finished. After all, if they're the trusted agent of the faction leader, it's in the faction leader's best interests to both keep them happy and loyal to the faction, and giving them some time to relax and enjoy themselves and to renew their ties to the faction does both. During their R&R times, other adventure types can be run - pursuing personal projects, problems for the faction that the characters discover on their own, and so forth.
If the characters are awake for 5 years or so at a time, that gives them time to find out about how the faction has changed since the last time, and build some connections to the new community. An interesting idea, depending on how much your players like roleplaying their daily lives, is to establish NPC relationships, either romantic or platonic, and then have them look in on those people after the next timeskip. Might be a cool idea to have a character in a romantic relationship find out that they have a child they didn't know about!