GM IDEAS: Wormholes & Space Travel

GM IDEAS: Asteroid Mining

After you've watched the short clip above from Ancient Aliens about the wealth of resources in our asteroid belt, check out the infographic below (you'll have to click on it to make it more legible) from space mining start-up Planetary Resources explaining the trillion-dollar potential of industrialised asteroid mining.

click to embiggen

We're In The Pipe, Five By Five

I was already excited for the prospect of an official Alien roleplaying game, but then I read Adam Dickstein's similarly excited - and informative - post on his Barking Alien blog, and now it's all I can think about!

Sure, I'd pretty much, mentally, committed myself to run some form of old school Dungeons & Dragons variant for the Tuesday Knights, had designed my new gamesroom around that concept, and spent a bucket-load of cash on 28mm fantasy miniatures to do combat on my ever-growing collection of battle mats...

And, sure, this new game, from Sweden's Free League Publishing, will use a variant of the Year Zero Engine, as seen in games such as Tales from the Loop and Mutant: Year Zero, which will mean dice pool mechanics and only using d6s, two prospects that would usually stick in my craw.

But this is the world of Aliens, and somehow, as the Free League describe it, it just makes my geek squee.

 And, speaking as someone who actually liked Covenant, it would give me a chance to truly feed my inner Ancient Aliens hunger (beyond shoehorning them into both superhero and fantasy settings).

And, after Monty Python, it's probably the most referenced franchise at the games' table. Strewth, I'm so fickle.

I'm sure if I could have just stuck with one system, or even one genre, from day one, I could be a mega-famous gaming blogger or a writer or a publisher, but I'm always being distracted by the next new shiny thing (or, in this case, grimdark).

I'd also be a lot better off financially, because I wouldn't have pissed so much money away on things I was really into at that moment, then moved on from before I got to properly use them.

Part of the problem is only gaming once a month gives me too much time between sessions to look around the Internets at all the other amazing work being produced, that then lures me in with its seductive siren song.

But, I can't deny the fact that I've always had a short attention span - and my stroke hasn't helped - and so from the moment I discovered RPGs I've been reaching for that elusive Holy Grail, that's always just round the corner, of the "perfect system" and "perfect setting".

Perhaps, Alien will be it.

But then again, just the other day, I was wondering if it would be Dune?

Perhaps it will be neither.

Perhaps it was old school Dungeons & Dragons after all.

Or maybe, Villains & Vigilantes...

Or Red Dwarf... Oy vey!

To quote Michael Corleone:

And to misquote Giorgio Tsoukalos:

Now hand me that bucket of six-siders that I keep handy for close encounters, we're on an express elevator to Hell, going down!

A sampling of the orgasmically-good, atmospheric, artwork from the forthcoming Alien RPG.

GM IDEAS: Was 7,000-Year-Old 'Spaceport' In Iraq The Work Of The Engineers?

Kazem Finjan

For those of us who love the whole Ancient Aliens deal as inspirational material for our roleplaying game campaigns, we have a new font of ideas in the shape of Iraq’s Transport Minister Kazem Finjan.

During a press conference in 2016, he broke the "news" that in 5,000BC the Sumerians had the world's first spaceport, in Dhi Qar, and used it as a launchpad for space exploration and the discovery of Pluto!

See, we don't need to make this stuff up: we have global politicians to do that for us!