Guilty Pleasures: Alien Sea of Sorrows

One of my guilty pleasures right now is the Alien audiobooks produced by Dirk Maggs and available on Audible. I've just finished Alien: Sea of Sorrows, which is very enjoyable listen, even if I was a bit confused at times with all the interchangeable mercenaries.

Alien

I've got a soft spot for Alien. I wasn't old enough to see Alien at the cinema first time around, but I read everything I could about it. I had books and magazines. I loved everything about it - the graphic design (both Rob Cobb's Nostromo and HR Geiger's alien and derelict), the story - and especially the alien itself.

When I did finally see it, it was on TV in the middle of a thunderstorm. I've watched it many times since.

Aliens

I thought Aliens was a brilliant follow up. I liked the fact that James Cameron didn't simply make a second Alien - he made an exciting action film instead.

It wasn't perfect though. The aliens themselves (I've never liked calling them xenomorphs) were subtly different. The eggs didn't look the same. The chest-burster had arms. And the queen was impressive, but felt like it had gone slightly off script. (The facehuggers, though, they were great.)

While I loved the film, my slight disappointment with how the aliens were treated stems from the fact that I had come to my own conclusion about them. I'd been reading Greg Bear's The Forge of God and I had decided that the aliens were a mega-weapon, a virus on a planetary scale - with the derelict a syringe (that had gone wrong).

So the introduction of a queen (and the idea that the creatures might be natural) didn't really fit into my worldview at the time.

Don't get me wrong - I love Aliens as well. But it's not Alien. It's fanfic.

Fanfic

What I hadn't realised then (but I realise now) is that everything after Alien is basically fanfic. Everything. Even Aliens.

There hasn't been a guiding mind behind the Alien franchise - just some people with their own ideas. That's fine, but it doesn't make it canon.

(I even tried my own hand at fanfic, but the less said about that the better.)

Alien 3 and Alien 4

I was really disappointed by Alien 3, and I don't remember too much about Alien 4.

One of the things I didn't like was that the series became all about Ripley. For me, I wanted to explore other things - the aliens themselves, the derelict, the space jockey. I wasn't that bothered about Ripley's story.

The alien part of the story also seemed to be a bit repetitive - they hatch, they kill.

Aliens vs Predator

I really liked Aliens vs Predator. I liked the Dark Horse comic book, and I liked the movie. I liked that it didn't take itself too seriously, and I liked that it was written by Dan O'Bannon (one of the original Alien screenwriters).

I also liked that this did something slightly different. While the humans are (mostly) helpless victims, the aliens and predators are equally matched.

(I haven't seen AvP: Requiem though. I started watching, but got bored very quickly.)

Prometheus

Even though it was directed by Sir Ridley Scott, Prometheus is still fanfic.

My favourite scene is the autodoc scene, which I thought was genuinely tense and gruesome.

I thought the engineers were a bit of a disappointment. I loved the enigmatic space jockey - sometimes questions are best left unanswered.

Covenant

I love the look of Covenant - it feels closer to Alien in visual tone than any of the others. I don't really hold with David creating the aliens though.

My favourite bit of Covenant is the line "Perfect organism" that (I think) David says. It's a repeat of the line that Ash says in Alien, and it added some depth that I'd not thought about before: Ash admires the alien because he's an android and is unaffected by it. (That also makes me wonder if there's some kind of android-slave underground revolt going on - the alien would be an awesome weapon for androids seeking to overthrow their human masters. There we go, fanfic again.)

Alien: Out of the Shadows

Audible's Alien dramatizations are produced by Dirk Maggs, who has also produced Neverwhere, Anansi Boys and the recent The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy shows. So he knows what he's doing, and they are all a very pleasant listen.

Alien: Out of the Shadows is, amazingly, set between Alien and Aliens and involves Ripley battling the aliens once more. The actress who plays Ripley does a great Sigourney Weaver impression, but the best thing about it is Rutger Hauer playing the Ash personality (now downloaded into a computer).

Alien: River of Pain dramatises the fall of Hadley's Hope (on LV-426) immediately prior to the marines and Ripley arriving. There's the usual mix of colonial marines, evil company guys, and aliens (but it isn't really bringing anything new to the table).

Alien: Sea of Sorrows is set a few hundred years after Out of the Shadows and is more of the same. As enjoyable as listening to it is, it's more of the same: marines (well, mercenaries), a derelict spaceship, malevolent company-guys, and aliens.

It would be nice if they mixed it up a bit. What would a story look like if the protagonists knew how the aliens worked, instead of having to go through the old "what's with the spider-crab thing clinging to your face" routine?

Unanswered questions

Despite all these movies and audioplays (and comics and games), there are still some unanswered questions:

• Who issued Special Order 937, and how much did they know? And what do they do when the Nostromo was destroyed?
• Why divert the Nostromo to LV-426 instead of a proper investigation team?
• Who switched off the derelict's warning beacon?
• What happened to the derelict after the end of Aliens?

And yes, I have my own theories...

#1H1S Fail

I’ve been inspired by Guy Milner’s One Hour One Shot (#1H1S) posts on his Burn After Running blog, and I thought I’d give it a try.

Tl;dr: I failed

Inspired by Bite of the Crocodile God, Guy’s three-scene adventure for D101 Games (and available for free), I thought I’d create a short, three-scene adventure for Other London, my Fate Accelerated occasional Urban Fantasy game. So I created The Fallen, where the players first identify a suspect, then follow him back to his home (where they find further clues), and then deal with the nest.

Easy, right?

Well, I ran it for my regular gaming group and it took us a little over four hours. It really didn’t matter that it took four hours - everyone had a great time. But as far as #1H1S goes, it was a dismal failure.

Here’s where I think I went wrong.

Campaign group

So my first mistake was to have the players use characters from a previous game. That was great in that the players knew their characters and what was going on, but was bad in that they already had a pile of existing background baggage that they brought with them.

So I think a #1H1S needs to be completely standalone to get it done in an hour.

Fiddly pre-gens

I created pre-gens with a standard 4 hour convention slot in mind, so there are choices to be made. I think for #1H1S the pre-gens need to have fewer choices so we can simply start playing.

(While two of the players were reusing old characters, we had a new player who needed a character.)

Modern day

I love games set in the modern day. I don’t have to think about background detail, I don’t have to worry about explaining what technology is or what people wear. I can just concentrate on the game.

But it has its downsides, particularly if you are pushed for time.

The granularity of a modern day setting means that the detail is never-ending. Players can go into something simple (such as a surveillance job) in ridiculous detail - much more than the scene really needed.

Online distractions

I would much rather play face-to-face, but I usually play online (with players that I first started gaming with thirty years ago!). Online is fine - we use Googledocs and Hangouts, but the main problem is that it’s too easy to get distracted.

So the scenario opened with a surveillance job at the Burger King at Victoria Station - and we were able to find a recent photo of the exact location online. That was nice, but meant that everyone wanted to study the photo to figure out how where their characters were going to be, and that took time.

And later, I had originally set the third scene under a multistory car park in Lambourne End (because I thought that the name sounded appropriately sinister). However, when we checked Google Maps we found that Lambourne End was in the country, so we spent fifteen minutes or so relocating the car park to somewhere more suitable.

Scene 2b

I messed up when I prepared the scenario and I didn’t think about how the PCs could get into the bunker itself for the finale. We worked out how to do that during the game, but it resulted in a small scene between scenes 2 and 3 where they made contact with the 24 hour caretakers.

It didn’t matter in the context of what we were doing, but it obviously wouldn’t have helped me keep to a strict timetable. (But that’s one of the benefits of playtesting.)

Opponents

Player characters in Fate Accelerated are tough, so I made the Fallen themselves a bit tougher than I normally would to give the PCs a bit of a challenge. I think I over did that - with the result the fights ran on a bit long.

Despite increasing their toughness, the PCs were never in any real danger - although one of them did end the scenario in a very bad way.

Too much fighting

I probably had too many combats - there were two combat scenes, and I suspect that’s one too many.

Thinking about it, my perfect #1H1S probably involves:

• one scene with an investigation
• one scene roleplaying with an NPC
• one scene with a fight (a climactic battle).

(And if I could avoid the battle I would. But a battle is an easy way to round off a scenario in an exciting way.)

And then I added the SAS

We normally play in two hour sessions, and at the end of the second session (our fourth hour) we were in the middle of the climactic fight when we had to stop.

So that meant starting a new session knowing that we only had another few minutes of gaming time. So what do to?

So I did what everyone does - I added the SAS. So our version of the scenario ended up with the SAS storming the bunker and taking possession of it for the military. That ended on a slightly ominous cliffhanger (which is just ideal for the setting), but it made the made the scenario even longer.

Pacing

I guess the biggest obstacle to completing the adventure in one hour was me. I wasn’t in a rush, so I didn’t push the pacing at all. I could have pushed harder, but I didn’t. I was happy to let the players pontificate and play with the detail.

So it’s my own fault.

Be Slicker #1H1S

So none of this actually matters. We had fun with the adventure, and it didn’t matter that I magnificently failed to run a one hour one shot.

But I like the #1H1S concept, so at some point I’ll give it another go. But maybe not with The Fallen.