I really like Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri.  I love the game play, I love the alien environment, it's basically the first of the Civ series I ever really got into, until Civ4 anyhow.  

What I'm curious about though, is the GURPS sourcebook about it.  The setting is really cool, but I'm not sure it really comes across as gameable in an RPG context.  

Anyone have it, read it, played it, etc.?  How well does it come across as an RPG book?  Is it as overdependent on previous GURPS sourcebooks as some of the others tend to be?

The book is really thin and I remember it getting a pretty bad rap for being not much more than the info in the instruction booklet plus some GURPS stats.

Quote from: J ArcaneI really like Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri.  I love the game play, I love the alien environment, it's basically the first of the Civ series I ever really got into, until Civ4 anyhow.  

What I'm curious about though, is the GURPS sourcebook about it.  The setting is really cool, but I'm not sure it really comes across as gameable in an RPG context.  

Anyone have it, read it, played it, etc.?  How well does it come across as an RPG book?  Is it as overdependent on previous GURPS sourcebooks as some of the others tend to be?

Now that is one of my favorite GURPS book/RPG of all time! Five Stars! Ten out of ten! I own more copies of this than any other game in my den.

The setting is awesome to host games in. You can get a fistful of new games just by firing up Alpha Centauri, picking six factions at random, and letting the computer make all the moves for all the factions for fifty or a hundred turns. (This only takes like ten minutes) Then pick a faction, and an interesting conflict, and build your AC session around that.

I have run games at home, games at conventions, and would host a game online if there were enough interest.

You need the GURPS Basic Set to run this, but that's it. As a setting book for the game of the same name it rocks, and has just about everything for all that wonderful tech already built in.

Quote from: Caesar SlaadThe book is really thin and I remember it getting a pretty bad rap for being not much more than the info in the instruction booklet plus some GURPS stats.

That was my impression, I read through it and it was very thin and seemed to contain little I hadn't got from the game manual and playing the game.

Most fan reaction was negative, though obviously GameDaddy liked it.

I wouldn't personally recommend it though.  IMO it adds little to the party that a copy of Gurps and a knowledge of the game wouldn't get you on their own.

I once thought about this game, which I utterly love despite the occasional annoying micromanagement issues with terraforming.

You can run this with PCs from the same faction or (my personal favourite) from different ones. In the latter case, what you do is have the leaders hold a Planetary Council every year to address a particular issue (which gives the PCs an opportunity to gather and intrigue), and then have subplots for each faction that the PCs address individually or in small groups (if they are allied with another faction).

You could actually run the Alpha Centauri original plot with that.

EDIT: Personally, I'd use Shadowrun for this campaign, though I've been told that Transhuman Space could be used.