My Favourite Ever Roleplaying Game | Alternity Dark Matter
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 8 ก.ย. 2024
- Dark*Matter is my favourite RPG of all time - a conspiracy laden, cryptid infested, 1990s pop culture classic. At the time Inquest Gamer described it as the "best game TSR/Wizards ever produced", and they might be right!
Taking inspiration from The X-Files the game was built on the short-lived Alternity system developed at TSR as they were taken over by Wizards of the Coast
The rules system formed the basis of D20 and Dungeons and Dragons 3rd edition, and Dark*Matter won awards for its incredible design, but despite all that it has largely been lost to time and internet decay.
I track the origins and influences on the game, its release history, and narrative tie-ins; and gain insights through interviews with the design team who actually made the game in the first place.
Join me as I uncover the truth behind the best roleplaying game Wizards of the Coast ever produced. All that you see is not all that there is.
PATREON: / jordansorcery
INSTAGRAM: / jordansorcery
TWITTER: / jordansorcery
WEBSITE: jordansorcery....
#DarkMatter #XFiles #DeltaGreen #TSR #WizardsoftheCoast #Alternity #TwinPeaks #Dungeon #Dragon #RPG #Roleplaying
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Links & Sources:
[Jordan Sorcery Interviews with JD Wiker, Philip Athans, and Bruce R. Cordell] jordansorcery....
[Philip Athans Blog] fantasyhandboo...
[Original Dark Matter Website via Wayback Machine] web.archive.or...
[Alternity.Net Official Fan Site] www.alternityr...
[Dark Matter Movie Reference List] boxd.it/l81SY
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Art, Music, and Copyright:
Images used belong to their respective copyright owners
Jordan Sorcery Theme by Joylin Music
Jordan Sorcery Heraldry by Becka Moor
Jordan Sorcery Heraldry and Theme copyright @jordansorcery
What this legend didn’t say - every year he would do a dark matter one shot story around Xmas - every year we would meet Santa and every year my heart would melt 🥰
Thank you for shining a light on this forgotten masterpiece--it was both wonderful and sad to see it all again! (this is G.W. Tirpa, by the way--cheers!)
Now G.W. Tirpa is everywhere!
Seriously though, thanks for your work at the time and contributions to the video, Phil. Your writing legit changed my life!
Quick add that your contribution to the hobby also significantly influenced me. Your addition to Salvatore's War of the Spider Queen was immaculate and in my opinion the work you and your colleges did on Alternity is the best RPG material I've ever read. It was really cool to see your comment on a video I just stumbled across. Can you be starstruck from a TH-cam comment? 😂
@@JudgeKrod Hey, thank you!
Alternity in general is a forgotten gem. I had many of the books, lost them and reacquired many of them, including the startcraft boxed game for Alternity.
I absolutely love this game I was given an original copy of the core set and the starship book by my nerd uncle who wasn't able to play it
Great video on this gem of a game. It caught the 90s feeling of conspiracy and the internet perfectly. A real time capsule.
Thank you! Agreed, it's basically a time travel device - open that cover and it's 1999 again!
I can feel your passion for this game thank you for sharing.
Thank you! Glad it shined through, I love this game!
Amazing! I have been looking for more videos about Dark*Matter then suddenly my newest must follow tabletop history channels posts this! Keep up the great work
All of my D20 books have come and gone out of my collection since the 90s, but my Dark Matter campaign book still sits on my shelf. It still looks and reads amazing. I employ the info in it to tons of other games to this day.
We never got into "Dark*Matter" as we were deep into "Dark Conspiracy" from GDW. At that time we had played a lot of "Twilight 2000" in our own Scandinavian setting, and the familiarity of the rules as well as the fact that the T2K campaign had gotten a bit 'cryptid', we jumped on "Dark Conspiracy".
In lots of ways it seems to have been the same theme and overarching atmosphere that inspired the two games, and as you mention, it was very much part of the zeitgeist at the time.
I hear Dark Conspiracy was great, but it totally passed me by at the time!
Was waiting for you to release this! Sent it to my brother already and it might just be time to read the novels again. Time to return to the Hoffmann Institute
The Institute is always in need of capable agents, get to it!
last time i looked you had a little over 2k subs and now already over 10k we are going to the moon. mostly just the quality of your backlog and the passion of the things you talk about
I just recalled this RPG and didn’t expect a 6 month old vid! 😮 Cheers! ✌🏼🤣👍🏼
Ah Dark * Matter ! That game took me by surprise when it was released. I was familiar with a lot of the previous conspiracy games like Conspiracy X and Delta Green but the Dark * Matter transcended them all. I was a subscriber to Dungeon and Dragons Magazines until they ceased publication and enjoyed whatever small snippets were released in there, however since I do live in France I never had the chance to get access to that sweet RPGA stuff. Thanks for bringing back those memories !
My pleasure, any excuse to talk about this forgotten gem!
That Eerie, Indiana mention caught me off guard lol. Loved that show
It seems to be a somewhat forgotten show these days, despite being dynamite!
My friends and I loved playing 'Alternity' and we had a great campaign going; That is until one of the players decided to start pushing his luck and made his character start breaking too many laws (including murder) on a space station that we were on. He was promptly arrested and, despite a hurried rescue attempt by the rest of us, executed. He complained that the GM killed his character for no reason, but he had straight up shot someone in the face for fun. I don't think we played a game of Alternity after that...Real shame, I had a T'sa character who upgraded our ship with some cool stuff. I don't normally play the tech characters in sci-fi games and was enjoying playing something different
I don't play RPGs and have zero interest in doing so, but even so I enjoyed this video thoroughly. Jordan is a superb communicator.
I have never played the game but it always a pleasure to hear you talk about games. Cheers
Thank you, it was a lot of fun to spend some time with this one. It's a real lifer for me
I'm so glad you made this video and enjoyed it so much! The amount of passion you have for Dark Matter and Alternity shows and the amount of investigation and research you did pays wonderful homage to the game at hand.
I don't comment on videos often at all, so I hope you don't mind but I'm going to make a pretty long comment about my experience with Alternity and how your video has just influenced it, hopefully igniting that spark to start playing again. I first played Alternity when I was in high school in the early 2000's after it was already out of publication and only had the two Core books and the star drive arms and equipment guide. My first experience was in a homebrew space opera set in PL7 as a practically unkillable mutant sniper/spaceship pilot that always had to wear goggles and earplugs because of his severe light and sound sensitivity (mildly modeled after Riddick from Pitch Black). I then played a brilliant but cowardly and combat ineffective research scientist in a PL5 Aliens vs Predators meat grinder campaign where the GM had all four players play two pre generated characters because of how frequent character death was. Any time a character died we would get to choose a new pregenerated character to join the group when it made sense in the story. (Predators decided to use Earth as their hunting grounds and released Xenos in large numbers everywhere.) My scientist was the only character to survive the whole campaign that lasted probably 15-20 session or so from the start and he never got a single combat skill beyond the Ranged Weapons broad skill, only got one kill by hiding under a truck then running over an injured and distracted Predator, and eventually studied alien tech long enough to figure out how it worked and the campaign ended with an epic scene where those still alive in the end flew off planet in a stolen alien ship that I piloted. I fell in love with the system and it's versatility and went on to GM campaigns like a late PL6 Firefly/Star Trek space explorer/bounty hunters game, an early PL6 Fallout/Mad Max apocalypse with magic (FX) game, a PL4 1920's gangsters game that had no sci-fi or fantasy at all and saw my players start as street thugs and grow a powerful and influential organized crime operation, and a PL5 Walking Dead/State of Decay zombie apocalypse campaign.
Well now it's been over 10 years since I've played Alternity. Life has changed a lot. 5E had dominated the landscape for me and my group for many years and now scheduling complications have prevented my group from gaming for a long time. But just the other day I was thinking a lot about Alternity and mentioned it to my friends and there was a lot of interest in trying to find the time to get a game going again.
I randomly decided to search TH-cam to see if anyone had any actual play campaigns or discussion videos to get back in the mood of Alternity and see if I could get some ideas or inspiration. I'd never heard of Dark Matter before and never really tried too hard to find material for Alternity since I was always able to come up with ideas with the input from my group about what kind of game they wanted. Well I'm older now with a family with much less time to create homebrew settings and come up with plot devices and NPCs and everything. Your video (the top video in my results when I searched Alternity RPG, congratulations) along with the amazing resources online that I checked out while watching that you shared have given me the ability to bring something fresh and new to my group if we can ever get together again without me having to come up with everything. Now if only I could find The Final Church...
TL:DR Your video was awesome. Alternity is awesome for it's flexibility. Dark Matter looks awesome and I hope I'm able to play it.
Mate, this sounds like an awesome Alternity career! It was such a fun & versatile system, it really lent itself to great homebrew settings.
I hope you do get the chance to try Dark*Matter, and that you enjoy it! It’s retro now of course, but I still love it.
Thank you very much for the comment, the super thanks, and your support! Cheers mate!
Goodness, I have my Alternity corebooks buried somewhere, got it after the "AD&D to Alternity" conversion preview at the back of the Tale of the Comet 2E AD&D adventure.
Had a weird thought the otherday that using the Proficiency Dice optional rule for 5E ends up looking superficially quite similar to Alternity.
I'm willing to bet that there's still some lines of Alternity code in the modern game, so to speak! The ramp up to Alternity was awesome, the marketing team did some great work I think
I have the d20 modern version in my collection. It was clear even when I first read them how much of the Alternity setting existed within d20 modern's dna. Never read the original books though, they were out of print by the time I got into it.
I honestly had no idea this game existed, sounds brilliant fun, really wish I’d played more RPGs. Excellent video as always Jordan.
Thanks Stu! Well worth a look if you’re wanting a hit if 90s paranoid nostalgia!
RPGs were an early love of mine - so much fun with just a book, some dice, and great friends!
Nice to see this rarely talked about game get a deep dive; bonus points for mention of Prey and Eerie Indiana, Holy Blood, etc. 🙂I was almost expecting a mention of Round the Twist 😉
For me and my multiple gaming groups, whilst we got Alternity, we mostly played World of Darkness (older Hunter's Hunter and later Hunter, Shadowrun, Cyberpunk, L5R (shadow conspiracy in particular), and in particular Aberrant (supers conspiracy focused plots) and C.J. Carella's Witchcraft dominated our games before 3rd ed D&D. Other games of note for us were Unknown Armies, Feng Shui, and GURPS (everything). So, sadly we didn't have any big campaigns of Alternity: Dark Matter.
Continuum and Heaven & Earth were other games of that time on our radar, but we didn't play, but talked about that had a curious small impact, but have gone to be cult classics.
Interestingly Monte Cook's mostly fantastic World of Darkness game in 2007 had more of an X-Files feel to it and a throwback to Alternity: Dark Matter 🙂
*Secret-Squeak* 🐀🌠
You may not believe me, but I cut a bit about Round the Twist as I just want too far off topic! I always meant to check out Cook’s WoD, but never got round to it for no good reason!
@@jordansorcery I believe you, your videos show your wide range of lore and deep dives. Given the scale time and references of the video, probably sensible you cut it 😀 but we know you know 😉
I hope you get a chance to check Cook’s WoD, it is quite different to the WoD, but not alien to it. The result feeling like one foot in WoD and one foot in several '90s conspiracy-worlds' 😁
I got Dark matter D20. I really love that the art on the cover and back glows in the dark.
I forgot about that!
I bought Dark*Matter (those asterisks were always a source of mockery in my gaming group, particularly the one in Star*Drive, which tended to be called StarStarDrive because of it) back when it came out and I remembered having picked up at least one supplement or adventure for it at some point. Checking my shelves I've discovered that not only do I have the Arms and Equipment Guide and Xenoforms, I also have two copies of the Killing Jar! I'm not sure how that happened.
Dark*Matter was definitely a very attractive book and quite interesting to read, but I never actually managed to play or run it myself. I did run a couple of published Star*Drive adventures a while back, I found the Alternity system didn't play as well as I expected it to. I think the D20 +/- DX mechanic was not as smooth as it might have been, but perhaps the balance issues between armour and weapons also played a part. Or it may have been the moderately dysfunctional gaming group. But it was an interesting attempt by TSR/WotC to move beyond the ageing mechanics of AD&D 2nd edition that was their main product at the time.
It’s interesting to look back at the end of TSR now as it’s almost like watching the T-1000 search for a form that can survive molten metal. A lot of really interesting attempts, but nothing that stuck. At least until Wizards reshaped the entire thing
The first TTRPG I ever played was the starter adventure in the Dark Matter core book. I remember my friend's older brother ran it for us at their dad's poker table. It was a great game, shame it didn't catch on.
I think both starter scenarios in the book were really nicely done - lots of interesting ideas, but also easing you into the game/world
Just got back to X-Files by revisiting the phenomenal three-parter that bridges the second and third seasons! This game seems awesome. I actually have d20 Modern and remembering Dark Matter being heavily advertised on the website. Had no idea what it was until today. 😅
The d20 edition cut some of the content unfortunately, but it was still nice to see it back on shelves for a spell!
I have never heard of this game, but it looks like it is right up my alley! I came into the hobby during D20 Modern and D&D 3.5, so it might have been before my time. Great tip!
The D20 Modern version has a few bits cut out, but it was still a strong book if you’re familiar with the system. That said, it’s tricky to get hold of these days!
Thank you for giving Dark Matter some love. I still have the book I bought way back in 1999. I also enjoyed your star trek rpg video.
Genuinely my pleasure! Dark Matter has been with me a long time so I’m pleased to have been able to share it with others again!
that was my favourite hardback when i was 13+ back in the late 90s early 00's i can still hear the creak of the spine and the smell of the pages 20 years later. it informed so much of my world view. the hoffman institute!
While I enjoyed Alternity/Dark Matter I have to say that the best horror conspiracy game I ever played was Delta Green. I mainly GM’d the games of it my friends played & had an absolute blast making up those adventures.
I do love a bit of Delta Green, it's a fantastic game. I bounced off the first edition as it just didn't visually appeal to me, especially compared to Dark*Matter, but the latest books are brilliant and there are some great ideas and horrors in them. I'm actually working on a shotgun scenario for this year's competition as I think I have a fun idea!
I used to read science & business publications to come up with story beats. Made the adventures feel a bit more eerily real.
My tabletop group was about to start a playtest of Alternity Darkmatter system tonight, and I checked this out to have a bit of a primer - i may have picked the right game to join
God, we loved Chill as teenagers. Still not sure why they picked old, angry Cyclops for the cover though...
I wanted this game so bad at the time but just didn't have the cash in my teenage account. I eneded up in the world of darkness crowd for the longest time. Was sad to see the game go before I ever got a chance to play it.
Don’t leave out Sliders. You covered my teen tv viewing favs.
Oh boy, Sliders was a legit classic (at least until characters started disappearing!)
Never played but loved the novels. I downloaded the final book transferring through 4 dead computers and now the PDF is on my Play books account
I've been in this hobby for over 20 years and I've found myself to be an everything Monte Cook/Reynolds/Cordell lover. You can't imagine my surprise being today years old when I found out about this setting. Now I need to know everything about it!
Did you check The Magnus Archives? It has the same vibes but it's based on a fictional podcast and it uses de Cypher System.
Wow - thanks for sharing this Jordan. Really great. I loved Alternity and Dark Matter. I still have my book for both. You have prompted to me drag them out and run a session for my gaming group!!
Amazing! Getting some D*M back to the table is the right call!
Another masterpiece, sir. Unlike this comment, which will ramble.
I feel as if most of your videos are showing me the things I missed in my youth and this is no exception. I own the core books for Alternity, I bought them with the hopes that I'd either finally see the D&D system in the future OR a return of the old TSR game Star Frontiers with a modern coat of paint. When neither proved to be the case, Alternity was shelved (but I still have the books, I may finally give them a proper read). Dark Matter itself was missed as, by that time, I was deeply immersed in both Delta Green and the Black Ops setting for GURPS (wherein you play nigh-superhuman agents both protecting the world from cryptid threats AND maintaining the conspiracy that no such things exist), as well as owning Conspiracy X and just didn't have room in my budget or time for another conspiracy game.
Alas it sounds like I missed a truly magnificent one.
On a sidenote, may I direct your attention to Pandemonium, published in 1993 by MIB Productions Inc, a comedic game focused on the tabloid, Elvis Is Bat Boy's Father side of fringe theories? If you can find it cheap somewhere you might get a kick out of it.
And, again, yes, I fully agree that the visual presentation of a game matters so much, and Dark Matter looks to have been a masterclass in visual immersion in their setting. Maybe one day I'll find the books and dig into this game...
If you’ve already got Alternity then it’s well worth the punt, even just to read. I think they did a terrific job with that core book.
Pandemonium sounds super interesting, will definitely check out more about that! (especially as I just revisited the first MIB movie!)
I recall playing a Dark Matter solo adventure in one of the last issues of Dragon Magazine I received before my subscription ran out (this would have been in the 230s/240s). I liked it, though at the time my home town didn't have a game store so I never had a chance to look at the actual setting.
That solo adventure was great fun
Another great video about a thing I wish I'd had as a kid! I love when you weave your storytelling in with the greater tapestry of the company's timeline, like mentioning Dragonlance, it's like "oh I watched that video!" lol. Also I'm slightly disappointed GW Tirpa wasn't Games Workshop, since they seem to be involved in every other video you've done (Maybe the J in Jordan stands for James Workshop???).
G.W. Tirjs doesn’t have the same ring to it!
Great video! I totally missed this era of stuff, after going off to college in the mid 90's and mostly abandoning the RPG world. That said I love this genre of stuff, and like the author miss the era when conspiracy theories were more fringy "fun" and less involved in actual politics. Anyway thanks as always for putting this together and shining some light into a dark corner!
Thanks, it was my pleasure!
Intriguing. 😮
I'm a huge fan of _Hellboy/B.P.R.D.,_ so this is really the game I've been looking for.
One aspect I like about paranormal agency fiction is the more mundane stuff. The office politics, paperwork and staff meetings add this humour and humanity that I feel invests one more in the proceedings.
I'm definitely going to absorb as much of this as I can. 😁
Exit 23 is one of -- if not the -- best introductory adventures ever.
I've read a few introductory adventures and Exit 23 is the best so far.
Some cool links to check up on the Wayback machine
Amazing video Jordan! I love spooky stories and 90s conspiracy stuff!
It's interesting watching your channel grow and develop. You've had impressive research and writing and presentation from the outset. At a glance, I'd expect you to have several hundred thousand subscibers, I wonder how you can improve on this already excellent formula in the future. Keep it up, you've become my go to for long and listenable gaming content on youtube.
My only critique: MYTH-os with an ith 😊
I inexplicably broke my pronunciation of mythos as a mere child and now I cannot fix it (even if it holds me back from TH-cam stardom!)
That sounds like an awesome game! I doubt I'll ever play it, as I can barely get my players to try anything except D&D, but one can always dream.
I'm very glad I found your channel (courtesy of Vincey V) as it seems your content is made for a person just like myself. Keep it up!
Thank you! I know what you mean, it can be tough to get new stuff to the table, especially when it’s this niche!
Good man.. well played. Our group still has ours 😆👍
Love to hear there’s still a few groups out there fighting for the Hoffmann Institute!
@@jordansorceryYou have inspired at least one more GM to try to get a group out into the field.
What background music are you using for this video? It sounds perfect for my Hunter: the Vigil online campaign!
I loved Alternity, the mechanics, the art style. It looked amazing.
Agreed!
Cryptids & Conspiracies. I like that a lot.
14:03 Dark Matter
*The truth is out there* ;)
T A B L E. love your writing.
Wait, hold up, you didn't mention Psi Factor: Chronicles of the paranormal! It was tv series started in 1996, hosted by Dan Akroyd and season 1 had a more documentary style. While Mulder & Scully worked pretty much alone, here you had the OSIR, (Office of Scientific Investigation and Research) a whole organisation dedicated to studying the alien and paranormal.
This was not a show I was familiar with, but now I am going to have to change that!
@@jordansorcery It's a shame it's so obscure. I really like their angle of "this is not a show, it's a re-enactment of real events." Even tough it was all fake. Good of you to mention Eerie Indiana. Imagine living next to Elvis and having Bigfoot eat out of your trash.
Beyond the Supernatural is a good fit for these vibes
Oh I’m not familiar with that one, will give it a look. Thanks!
I did listen to the 90s where there were monstrous corporations government conspiracies and horrible secrets that could end the world. Why would I want to play a game that just reflected everyday real life so perfectly in the 90s?😅
It was actually Games Workshop Turper all along.
How did you leave out 1991's Dark Conspiracy RPG?
It totally passed me by at the time, but looking into it now it seems cool!
I want to believe 👽 ... that WotC's made a game worth checking out! 😉
Trust me, the truth is in here!
Jordan I love your jokes in your videos - or is that just something I want you to believe?
I just wish I could trust this
Cool vid as ever
Thanks!
Thanks!
Thanks so much, Christian!
For me, the 'conspiracy' game of the 90's was Nephilim. I'd picked up a battered old copy from a LGS and had no clue what to do with it, so ran it as some kind of X-files/Indiana Jones/HBHG mashup. The PCs started off as human, with the grand overarching idea of the real mystery being their Nephilim nature... needless to say, the campaign never got anywhere near that far.
Was "welcome, friend" a nod to Garth Merenghi?
Alas, though I wish it were, it was a quote from Monte Cook’s 1999 introduction in the Dark*Matter book.
Of course, the Dream Weaver is not bound by conventional time so perhaps it Cook was quoting Marenghi!
Have you given Monster of the Week a go? Well worth a shoofty if you want to revisit X-Files style gameplay.
I still haven't tried it properly! Definitely a game I want to play at some point!
That background music hurts my brain somehow.
That's just the radio waves
Put on a tinfoil hat and you should be fine.
I am still watching the video, so please forgive me if you address this in it, but does the book contain all the rules needed to play the game? Or do you need to purchase the regular Alternity core books as well?
The Dark Matter book came with a chapter of Alternity fast play rules so you could get started right away. The core books were a lot more expansive and covered loads of optional stuff so they’re good to have, but not essential for some quick games of D*M!
@@jordansorcery I have the D20 Modern version. Have you ever looked at Conspiracy X 2.0 by Eden Studios? That was always my X-Files RPG.
According to the Dark Matter book, the fast play rules are fine for the introductory adventure, but that the rest of the story benefits from the full ruleset. That's just what the book says, so take it as you will.
Sometimes, dead is better.
As long as it’s not undead!
Do you rate delta green as the successor to dark matter?
Definitely! There’s a lot of fantastic storytelling in DG, and these days the books look better than ever. I think they’ve also done good work to bring the conspiracy and horror into a more modern world as well.
Designer Dennis Detwiller’s DG Patreon is also one of the best things on the platform!
Moar contunt!
Please read my other comment for my full thank you and thoughts.
I have seen prey
YES! Now you’re automatically part of my Prey fan club!
Lol
@@jordansorcery th-cam.com/video/pHp8ZUtR2is/w-d-xo.html&ab_channel=sachs2 its not on pirate bay or anywhere but here it is the first and only season all 13 episodes in glorious 240p
I remember the StarCraft box. It was unbelievably cheap looking and unfinished. Obviously to cash in on StarCraft on pc
It was a very odd product. An amazing opportunity, totally squandered in execution for some reason
@@jordansorcery yes I agree. Alter it’s in general though was very interesting especially the way it calculated wounds, where you could fall unconscious with a fatal wound etc