Alternity

Alternity is owned by TSR, Inc., who is in turn owned by Wizards of the Coast, who is, in turn, owned by Hasbro. Who owns Hasbro?

I Open the Foot Locker

Submitted by klahd84

A while back, I was running my players through a campaign of my own design, using the Alternity rules. The game involved psychic powers and was set in the 20th century. That's all you really need to know about it.

So the four characters were infiltrating a building controlled by the Psiocracy (a powerful psychic organization). The Psiocracy didn't want to give themselves away, so most of the enemies didn't use their psychic abilities, as long as the PCs didn't.

Three of them were sneaking into a barracks (the other was disabling the cameras). As they entered a room, they discovered several sleeping guards. They dealt with the guards.

Afterwards, one of them decided to open the foot locker at the foot of the bed. Now, I was sick of the amount of crap my players were managing to get from this building, so I decreed that instead of being locked, the foot locker would emit sleeping gas if the right passcode wasn't punched in. I figured this would solve things.

Unfortunately, I didn't count on the ingenuity of my players. After running away from the gas, they went on to the next guards' sleeping quarters, and one of them ran in, opened the foot locker, and ran back out.

They dealt with all of my guards that way.

The Joy of Critical Fumbles

Submitted by klahd84

This happened in an Alternity psychic campaign I ran a while back (same campaign as my earlier Dice Tale, for those who pay attention).

My group's characters were exploring an underground series of caves that was the dwelling place of a bunch of "demons" (they were actually psychic beings from another plane of existence, but the characters didn't know the difference). They ended up falling down a dirt ramp about five or six times before they finally got past it, and so they thought their allotment of truly bad luck was over for the session. They were wrong.

The four PC's met up with three "demons" in a small cavern. One of the PC's got cocky, and decided to let loose with his brand-new submachinegun.

Now, in Alternity, a full Autofire attack gives you three rolls, each for a burst, and each burst gets a successive penalty. The way we play, if a roll, with modifiers, gets much above a 20, then it's a critical failure. Now this guy rolled a natural twenty, and then three modifiers that raised it above.

I decided that he had dropped his SMG, and that it fired randomly. To be fair, I rolled randomly to see if any of the bullets would hit anyone. One of the bursts ended up hitting another one of the PC's, who had just started playing.

And so I rolled for the damage. True to the way things had been going, I rolled an Amazing hit, which resulted in d4 Mortal damage. The PC had 4 Mortal damage points, so I wasn't too worried.

Guess what I rolled on the d4?

Needless to say, the player of the newly-created, newly-dead character was unhappy, especially since his last character had also died in a rather grisly manner.

Screw the Rescue...

Submitted by Peitor Murison

I was at GenCon trying a brand new system called Alternity a few years ago...

Our intrepid team of heroes were attempting "Rescue at Mirbak" but things did not go quite as planned. The first problem we encountered was a hostage who had escaped the terrorists and was hiding in a cargo bay. Upon our arrival, he assumed we were the terrorists and began shooting, badly, at us. We, being heroes and experienced gamers, immediately opened fire on the poor shnook and blew his sorry NPC butt away.

We were devastated to learn that he was just a poor victim and not a hardened criminal. So devastated that our captain immediately began looting the body and all the crates in the cargo bay. I asked him what he was doing and he replied, "Screw the rescue, we got salvage!" The parts of the mind of all my companions that controls greed immediately melted into a soft gooey paste and everything that could be carried away was soon safely stowed aboard our ship. Our fearless leader was then reminded that we had terrorists to deal with and was coaxed into continuing the module.

Soon we became trapped in a hallway with several small flying thingies that shot at us with little or no success. The pilot opened fire on them with his submachine gun and, a critical failure later, blasted the captain in the back. The captain, a reasonable man with a well-balanced personality, returned fire. The aliens were quickly forgotten and quick promotions by the termination of superior officers became the order of the day. Finally the captain brought some sanity to the situation.

"New Orders! No one is allowed to shoot anyone who is more than one rank above them!"

To this day I do not know how the module was SUPPOSED to end but I am certain that a firefight in a locked hallway between crew members was not what the author had in mind.