Starships (Alternity)

Rating:
Summary: A Time-Saving Addition To Any Alternity Campaign
Review: Starships is an accessory to the popular Alternity sci-fi gaming system, a refreshingly clean and to-the-point book of ideas and optional rules in an industry of bloated add-ons. This supplement is designed to please both the casual gamemaster and the rabid spacecraft aficionado.

Alternity being a game with emphasis on "design your own worlds" campaigns, the first section of this book is largely about options and possibilities for combat, damage and tactics, space travel and its "history" in your campaign, star drives and other methods of star hopping (such as gates and wormholes), spaceports, and spaceship skills for heroes. Author David Eckelberry includes three styles of space combat system: "narrative combat" being the easiest, "visual combat" allowing more maneuvering detail, and "3-D vector combat" being for ruler-and-calculator fans. Ship design and systems are the topic for the second portion of the book; much of this information is handily stacked in table form and compact sidebars. The book's final section, easily the largest at 35 pages long, contains 18 predesigned ships with deck plans and descriptions, ranging from planet hopping two-seaters to freighters and cryogenic colony ships to military vessels. Optional features are suggested for most of the ships, making customization on the fly a snap, and the deck plans are detailed enough for quick creation of shipboard battle scenes.

Quite a timesaver; an excellent addition to an Alternity game.

--Sharon Daugherty for Skirmisher Online Gaming Magazine

Rating:
Summary: Interesting addition and worth it for the new starship rules
Review: The first section of the book is an expansion of the existing Starship rules are presented in the GM's Guide. Lots of new starship accessories and plenty of sample ships (a few good ones, most are not really exciting to players). Alternity gamers who enjoy creating their own ship designs (like yours truly) will love the expanded options available. In addition, a more detailed ship-to-ship combat system is also included, though maths-haters should probably steer wide of it. One exclusion I would have liked was rules for capital ships, but I guess this will be in a future book. While the ship diagrams are clean and well done, the other interior artwork is amatuerish and detracts from the otherwise well written book. Old-time Traveller players who bought and loved the High Guard book should defintely get this one.

Rating:
Summary: Some expanded possibilities but a little bland
Review: This book includes lots of new accessories for the budding starship captain as well as a selection of sample starships. The new stuff is useful to have but the starships are a little bland. While i understand that the writers wanted to get a good selection of different starship designs, they should have focused more on the ships likely to interest players like tramp freighters. I wouldn't call short range one-man fighters 'starships' and a fuel tanker and a minelayer! I'm sorry to say that I've seen designs of better utility free on fan webpages. While the ship diagrams are excellent, the other interior art is truly disgraceful for a product from a major gaming company. The bottom line: this book is nice but you probably won't miss having it.

Rating:
Summary: A great add-on to StarDrive... but only GOOD otherwise.
Review: This was one of the better game supplements created by TSR in the past few years. There's a lot of added material that should have been put into the Gamemaster Guide in Starships, as well as the generally good quality that's Alternity's trademark. My only gripe is that this is really a supplement for StarDrive; there are a bunch of things that only work if you're using stardrives, which this book makes a beginner's toy. If it had a few less specialized ship systems and a few more ships to demonstrate them on, this would be a better book... but, even with my complaints, I can't recommend it to Alternity GMs enough.

Rating:
Summary: A good, solid supplement for Alternity.
Review: TSR continues to produce quality supplements for its SF RPG Alternity. The rules add to the game nicely, particularly if your characters spend a lot of time between the stars. My problem with this product lies in the fact that there just aren't enough STARSHIPS in the book. Fewer rules and more ships would have made this a sharper, much more interesting product. As it is, it's well worth adding to your game shelf; it just won't become indispensable.