Monthly Archives: September 2016

Alternity Design Blog #6: Musing on Archetypes

We’ve had tremendous interest thus far from fans interested in the upcoming Alternity Playtest, which has exceeded our expectations! We’ll continue collecting email addresses (you can sign up here on our previous blog entry), and we’ll provide more information about the playtest plan in the coming weeks. In the meantime, Rich would like to share some thoughts on player archetypes – take it away, Rich!

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Alternity Design Blog #4: Encounters and Improvisation

This week, Dave gives a glimpse of how our approach to Alternity affects encounter design and enables improvisation. Take it away, Dave!

Your “Alterniteers” (Rich, Bill, Steve, and I) are hard at work on building the first public playtest packet. Look for it soon! As we do that, here are a couple of “hey, that’s kinda neat” moments that emerged from our design work thus far. Continue reading

Alternity Design Blog #3: A Playtest Escape

alternitylogometalbevelonwhiteThis week, we want to give you a glimpse of our ongoing Alternity playtests so you can watch as we hone the rules and explore different SF settings. These early reports won’t be a deep dive into the rules specifics, because when we were playing, the rules were… let’s go with “fragmentary.” Yeah, fragmentary. You should get a sense of how the design is progressing, though and the interesting conflicts and dilemmas that Alternity characters find themselves in. Here’s Dave with this week’s report:  Continue reading

Alternity Design Blog #2: The Core Mechanic

alternitylogowhiteonblackLet’s face it—any discussion of the 1996 Alternity game begins with the distinctive core mechanic of the game, as the original game had a novel take that used a d20 and one or more other dice for resolution, with the possibilities of different levels of success based on the result. In this week’s Design Blog, Rich takes us through our process as we evaluate the core mechanics for Alternity 2017.  Continue reading