Gurps Alpha Centauri

by Jon F. Zeigler

GURPS Alpha Centauri is based on the award-winning computer game Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri. It includes everything you need to recreate the history of humanity on Planet, from the desperate days... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1556345208
• ISBN13: 9781556345203
• Release Date: December 2002
• Publisher: Steve Jackson Games
• Length: 128 Pages
• Weight: 1.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 8.7" x 11.2"

Customer Reviews

Gurps, glorious gurps...

Great pictures, lots of info, stats, equipment, possible plots, if you love Alpha take a look at this

Role Playing in a computer game world

GURPS: Alpha Centauri is the best crossover from a computer game to a Role Playing Game available.About the source material: "Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri" is a computer game that lets you build entire civilizations. The most original feature of Alpha Centauri is that it takes place after civilization advances to space flight. In Sid Meier's "Civilization" computer game, one way to win was to be the first to have colonists build a spaceship, leave Earth, and travel into space. Alpha Centauri follows that band of colonists from their start on the new world to their end, centuries later. The expansion, Alien Crossfire, adds more factions to the possible colonists, and also adds two alien races wanting to keep the world for themselves. Although based on his Civilization games, Sid Meier created a fresh way to play colonization computer games with this game.GURPS: Alpha Centauri provides an adaptation of that source material to a role playing game. Both Alpha Centauri game info and Alien Crossfire expansion info were used to create this worldbook. Most of the pictures were taken directly from the computer game, although the selection of pictures and the placement of graphics is one of the major reasons this book did not get a perfect five stars from me.Chapter 1, the Prologue, gives people unfamiliar with the game a starting point. It contains basic info about the world and what happened to the mission.Chapter 2, "Planet", gives a capsule look at the new world, and includes some of the native life forms and the things these creatures do. These creatures give players a hint that all is not well on the planet.Chapter 3, "Factions", provides an in depth look at the various political and social agendas that exist among the colonist's leaders. This section includes profiles of the faction leaders, along with the stats necessary to use them as non-player characters in campaigns. You'll have to hunt for pictures of some of the leaders, as they frequently do not appear on the pages that they should be on. An example: Zakharov's stats are on page 49, but his picture does not appear until page 86. This book would have been much better with a full page of info about each faction leader and making sure the picture of that leader was on that page. One of the better features of this section are the adventure seeds given for each faction.Chapter 4, "The Road to Transcendence", deals with the advances needed to win the computer game translated into gaming terms. This section is further divided into sub-sections dealing with specific periods of time in the mission. This nice feature gives potential GM's the ability to sort out what they need for campaigns quickly and easily. This is the best section to use when deciding when in planet history you want to set your game.Chapter 5, "Colonists", contains the info you will need to create characters. Some of these character types are unique to GURPS Alpha Centauri. In this section are some of the Advantage