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For quite a while I had been looking for a science-fiction roleplaying game that was more like Dungeons and Dragons than a roleplaying game that involved either this:

R2D2

or this:

USS Enterprise

and while I might think these are pretty cool:

Star Destroyer – Star Wars

as well as these:

Light Saber

this really annoys me:

C3PO

as does this:

Spock

(he's not that bad) and while talking about science-fiction characters that tend to rub me up the wrong way, I simply cannot forget him:

Jar Jar Binks

Anyway, enough of all these pictures and more on this particular book. Most of the science-fiction roleplaying games tended to all be single setting games, based around (usually) Star Wars (and while there may have been a Star Trek game around, I am not sure whether it was all that popular). What I was looking for is something more generic, much like Dungeons and Dragons. Dungeons and Dragons did have their own specific worlds, what I really liked about it was that you could, and were encouraged to, create your own. This meant that if you wanted a world without elves you could create one (and while I did create some worlds, I generally included elves, though in one of them the elves were arrogant and stuck up creatures that believed themselves to be superior to everybody else; so while players could play elves, they tended to be treated with hatred and contempt).
Science-fiction poses a different problem because the scope is much larger. You could create a space opera, much like Star Wars (or Star Trek), or you could create a near future dystopia (such a Nueromancer) or even a modern setting where you are investigating alien sightings (much like the X-files). You could even create a amalgamation of all three (though that would be quite difficult).
What I wanted was a system that was generic and I could add and remove what I wanted to create a world (or universe) that I liked. I tried it with Traveller, but the rules were so complicated that I ended up ditching it. Shadowrun was cool, but once again, it was a single system setting, and to turn it into a space opera with magic was simply too difficult to do (since you have to create rules for space ship combat, which can be very difficult if it does not exist in the system).
Alternity actually provided everything for that, but the only problem with this was that it appeared and then pretty much disappeared quite quickly after that. It has since been replaced with the much more generic d20 Modern and d20 future, which I have played recently (though not since I left Adelaide). Also, while the rules were similar to Dungeons and Dragons, it was somewhat difficult to amalgamate the two systems since there were enough differences to end up making them incompatable. Further, when it comes to magic I prefer the Shadowrun system where spell casting tends to exhaust you; and while you can theoretically cast any number of spells that you like, the more you cast the more dangerous it becomes to your health. Such a system, unfortunately, does not exist in Dungeons and Dragons and I also suspect that it does not necessarily exist in Alternity either because when you come to science-fiction roleplaying you tend to discard magic in favourite of mind powers. ( )