ALIEN roleplaying

ALIEN is Free League’s tabletop roleplaying game set in the Alien universe (including Alien, Aliens, Alien 3, Prometheus and Alien: Covenant). It looks and feels gorgeous, but is it any good?

I dismissed the ALIEN RPG when it first came out. After all, I was an Alien fan before I became a roleplayer, and over the years I can’t imagine how many different ways Alien and Aliens have influenced my games. So I wasn’t sure I needed an ALIEN RPG.

And to be honest, I couldn’t see the point in ALIEN  for several reasons:

• I didn’t need background info when I knew I could take all I needed from the movies, books and comics.
• I couldn’t imagine playing an ALIEN campaign – I couldn’t see how that would work? Wouldn’t it all be a bit samey?
• I’m not excited by learning new RPG systems (as I’ve mentioned before).
• And finally, I don’t buy many roleplaying games. Space here is limited, and I don’t get any joy from hoarding games.

So what happened?

A few things lined up in 2020 that changed my mind.

• I became interested in running other people’s adventures and set myself a goal to run some. Unfortunately, that meant that I needed some, as only one or two of the ones I already had inspired me to run them.
• I played in a game of ALIEN on Roll20, and I enjoyed what I saw. I liked the three-act structure, agendas, and the stress mechanic.
• I learned more about ALIEN RPG – the difference between cinematic and campaign play, the great layout and art, and I heard Chariot of the Gods was a great scenario.
• The starter set and Destroyer of Worlds became available as a deal, and I couldn’t resist.

So I bought the starter set and Destroyer of Worlds, specifically for cinematic games.

I wasn’t interested in the background or creating my own adventures, so I didn’t buy the core book. At least not at first. However, as I was short on Xmas present ideas this year, I bought a copy and gave it to Mrs H to give to me on Xmas day.

I’m in the middle of running Hope’s Last Day (from the core book—I’ll talk more about the scenario itself in a separate post), and I plan to run Chariot of the Gods and Destroyer of Worlds soon.

Core rulebook or Starter Set?

So which to pick? The core rulebook or the starter set?

The core rulebook is 298 pages of hardback rules and background. It contains rules for character creation, background, spaceships and the various monsters. It also includes a short scenario, Hope’s Last Day, set on LV-426. The core rulebook is gorgeous and contains everything you need to run both cinematic and campaign games. (If you’re mainly interested in running published cinematic games, it has more material than you need. Or at least, more than I will need.)

The starter set is a boxed set containing the rules (softback, 104 pages), Chariot of the Gods, large maps, cards, counters and ALIEN dice (10 each of regular and stress dice). It contains none of the background material nor anything about starships or the creatures. Instead, it’s everything you need to run Chariot of the Gods and other cinematic scenarios. The double-sided map has a star map on one side, and starship deck plans on the other.

There are reasons to get both, which is why I have both.

Rules

ALIEN  uses Free League’s Year Zero Engine, which means that to do anything means rolling a pool of six-sided dice equal to your attribute plus skill (and maybe a modifier) and hoping you roll a 6. It’s okay as a system, although I haven’t internalised the probability yet (although the probability table tells me that four dice is just over 50%).

Your attributes are Strength, Agility, Wits and Empathy. The skills are Heavy Machinery, Stamina, Close Combat, Mobility, Piloting, Ranged Combat, Observation (ie perception), Comtech (ie computers), Survival, Manipulation (a sinisterly-worded persuade), Medical Aid, and Command.

Everyone has the same skills, which does lead to the slightly odd situation that everyone can pilot a dropship. Some will do it better than others, but everyone has some ability. I’m not sure that’s strictly canon, but it probably makes for a better game.

I found a couple of the skills interesting, particularly Command and Manipulation.

“Shoot it!” The Command skill encourages officers to bark orders at their underlings (and having those underlings follow them) by giving bonuses for following orders. Often being in command is just a narrative device with no mechanical backup, and Command nicely supports the fiction. (It’s inspired me to create a similar stunt for Fate: Chain of Command: +2 to Cleverly create a “following orders” advantage to anyone under your command.)

“Don’t let them into the ship, Ash.” I haven’t quite got my head around Manipulation. If you successfully manipulate someone, they must either attack you or do what you want. I’m not sure if this makes sense — an example would have helped here.

Stress

The key mechanic, though, is stress. Stress happens when you push a roll (re-roll a failed die roll) or when something terrible happens (lots of examples in the rules). When you become stressed, you add more dice to your die pool, but if any of these stress dice roll a 1 (or the facehugger symbol on the official Alien dice), you need to make a panic roll. A panic roll means rolling 1d6 and adding your stress level—so that you may drop something, freeze, scream or even go catatonic.

This creates a lovely tension. Your chances of succeeding are greater when stressed, but you also risk panicking. Having played ALIEN , the stress mechanic is certainly very effective and helps to increase the tension as almost every die roll can cause panic and chaos.

Along with these, there are detailed combat rules and rules for things like vehicle combat and lots of different hazards (there are lots of things that can kill you in space).

Actual play

As I write this, I have run Hope’s Last Day, the cinematic scenario contained in the rulebook. While it went well, I found the rules surprisingly fiddly and sometimes struggled to find the rule I needed amongst all the text.

I guess that’s an advantage of having a GM screen (not something I usually use), so I found a summary of the rules online for the second session. (This is still six sides of A4, so it’s not the kind of system-light game I usually prefer.)

Unfortunately, my players hadn’t played ALIEN before, so they couldn’t help.

So there were unfortunate pauses for things like the power consumable rules for the motion tracker (which I only hazily remembered from playing ALIEN last summer) and checking whether rolling a facehugger in ranged combat means the shot misses. (The shot still hits, but you panic and empty the clip—I found that surprisingly hard to check.)

So while Alien looks gorgeous, it hasn’t overcome the challenge of making games both readable and easy to use at the table. For the latter, get the rules summary above.

Character creation

Character creation starts with choosing a career before personalising it to suit. The careers are Colonial Marine, Colonial Marshal, Company Agent (Burke), Kid (Newt), Medic, Officer (ie Dallas, Kane, Ripley), Pilot, Roughneck (Brett and Parker) and Scientist (Ash).

So this is mostly like the movies, although I’m not sure how you’d create Lambert (yet another officer?).

The limited skill list creates some oddities—for example, the Scientist doesn’t have a science skill. On the other hand, I’m not sure you’d want a longer list—Lambert probably has a “navigation” skill, but it wouldn’t ever be used in a typical game of ALIEN .

The skill list is augmented by talents, which for the Scientist are Analyst (insight into strange artefacts and creatures), Breakthrough (auto-success on Observation) and Inquisitive (allows additional push on Wits rolls).

Buddies and rivals

I was pleased to see that ALIEN creates bonds between some players by having rivals and buddies. Each character has a rival (someone they don’t trust) and a buddy (someone they trust). Unfortunately, it drops the ball here by doing nothing to build on that. I would have liked to see part of character creation ask the players to explain why that person is a rival/buddy. (Session Zero is discussed for campaign play, but I would like to see the buddy and rival relationship deepened for all games.)

I will do this for my cinematic scenarios. Once characters have been selected, I will ask my players questions along these lines:

• Why do you trust your buddy? Describe a recent situation where you put your trust in them.
• Why do you distrust your rival? Describe a recent situation where they acted against your interests.

(There’s some psychology behind this. Robert Cialdini’s Influence explains that getting people to commit to something by saying it aloud makes it much more likely that they will follow through. The same goes here—getting the players to say why they trust their buddy and don’t trust their rival makes it more likely to carry through into the game. And saying it aloud means that everyone else at the table can act on it as well.)

Starships

And then ALIEN goes all Traveller on us.

The section on starships includes several ships, including prices for buying your own. Plus starship combat rules, despite that not being a part of the movies. (Maybe there are starship battles in the novels or comics, I don’t know.)

Anyway, I only skimmed this section as it’s not something I can see using.

Your job as Game Mother (GM advice)

While much of this focuses on creating your own scenarios and campaigns, there’s good stuff about the game principles: creating dread, terror and horror. I guess it’s expected that the published cinematic scenarios will bring out the key principles anyway, but the section on Stress and Horror is good, and it seems a shame that the starter set couldn’t find room for it.

Game background

As I said above, I don’t enjoy reading RPG backgrounds. That’s doubly true of a licenced property as I’d rather watch the movies or read the books instead. So I’ve only skimmed the sections on governments, corporations and worlds.

I don’t know how much of the background is taken from the “Alien extended universe” (as I haven’t read many of the novels or comics), but the Alien universe consists of four governments (the Three Worlds Empire, the United Americas, the Union of Progressive Peoples, and the Independent Core System Colonies), the Interstellar Commerce Commission (last seen grilling Ripley over losing the Nostromo in Aliens), and three major corporations (Wayland Yutani, Lasalle Bionational, and Seegson). Plus, there are a dozen smaller companies.

Then follows sectors and worlds, including summaries of key worlds in the canon LV-426 (Alien, Aliens), LV-422 (Prometheus), Fiorina 161 (Alien 3) and their current state.

Although I’m unlikely to make much use of it, the background does contain a good mix of tensions (corporate and national), rumours and hooks to create a campaign game.

I enjoy reading equipment lists even less than other parts of the backgrounds, but I was disappointed to see that the motion trackers operate on ultrasonics rather than “micro-changes in air density”.

Alien critters

The alien critters (the Engineers, the Neomorph, the original Xenomorph, and a few new creatures) are only described in the core book. They’re not described in the starter set, as any cinematic scenario will contain the creature stats and descriptions it needs.

As with the movies, the creatures are unpredictable. Instead of making a normal attack during combat, the GM rolls 1d6 on that creature’s attack table. They may pause and hiss, or they may go for the kill. When they do go for the kill, they’re deadly.

This randomness makes them very unpredictable—not your normal RPG monster.

Alien does a good job of wrapping up the inconsistencies around the movies (and presumably the books and comics). It stresses that the creatures are new to science and that new species or varieties may be encountered (which nicely leaves things open to both the GM and allows for other movies).

Alien canon, myths and legends

As I’ve said before, everything after the first movie is basically fanfic. So someone needs to figure out what’s canon and what isn’t. And while the ALIEN RPG doesn’t explicitly state what is and isn’t canon, author Andrew EC Gaska has explained his rationale on his blog, treating the less-canon stories as myths, legends and tall tales.

But it’s your game, and if you want to change things, you can.

Campaign games

My main problem with a campaign game is that if I’m playing a game called ALIEN, I want the alien to feature in it. Wisely, the GM advice for campaign games is to use the creatures sparingly. But from my perspective, that turns ALIEN into a fairly standard SF background.

So as I’ve said, I don’t plan to run an ALIEN campaign. I will run cinematic adventures instead. Having said that, the campaign advice isn’t bad, with three campaign frameworks presented:

Space Truckers: This is where you play being the crew of a ship like the Nostromo, seeking jobs and hauling cargo. It gets a bit Traveller again, with tables for jobs and cargo.

Colonial Marines: Aliens-inspired bug hunts and more. There’s an upcoming campaign sourcebook devoted to the Colonial Marines, but I haven’t decided if that’s my thing or not.

Frontier Colonists: This oddly-named framework is about exploring new planets to extract raw materials or salvage abandoned technology.

So the campaign section is full of tables – tables for missions, complications, encounters and more. That’s not my cup of tea, but I can see they would help if you were running a sandbox campaign or needed some inspiration.

Cinematic games

Cinematic games, or one-shots, as they are often known, do things differently. The key differences are acts and agendas.

Acts: Each cinematic game is broken down into three acts (like the movies): the setup (Act 1), the tilt (Act 2), and the showdown (act 3). (There can be a prologue and epilogue as well.) Ironically, the example scenario, Hope’s Last Day, doesn’t have any acts (it’s all act 3), although Chariot of the Gods and Destroyer of Worlds do.

Agendas: Pre-generated characters are provided for cinematic games, usually with a mix of agendas that create PvP conflict. So you can expect slimy company types (hoping to secure a specimen), ordinary joes (just trying to do a good job), union reps (looking out for their people), troopers (follow orders), and more. Agendas also change during the acts – as events escalate, agendas may change from “find out what’s going on” to “get the hell out of here!”

I’m a fan of character agendas (or goals or objectives or whatever you want to call them). They work well in a one-shot (cinematic) scenario by giving the players character reasons to continue through the adventure. Conflicting agendas also make for excellent dramatic choices. If things escalate too far, then the rules suggest that the players resolve the current situation and then the character who “turned traitor” becomes an NPC, and their player takes an NPC.

I’ve not seen a three-act structure applied to a roleplaying adventure so explicitly before, and I’ve played in quite a few convention games. And while I often use agendas for my one-shots, I’ve never thought about them in terms of acts. Perhaps I should.

I suspect for ALIEN, based on a cinematic property familiar to many players, three-act agendas are a great way of keeping the players focussed on playing their characters rather than just running away and nuking the site from orbit.

Too many words?

Often I find that RPGs have too many words (I’ve said this before). I don’t enjoy reading backgrounds, I don’t enjoy reading complicated rules, and I don’t enjoy reading equipment lists. Much of that is just padding: my head is filled with invisible rulebooks, I’ll get background material from the movies, and I don’t care that much about the difference between this gun or that gun, or this autodoc or that medpod).

Worse, most RPG layouts present you with vast blocks of text (sometimes in tiny font) broken up with variable artwork. So not only are there words I don’t enjoy reading, but they are presented as an intimidating wall that I can’t get through.

In a 398 page rulebook, ALIEN still has a lot of words—but it’s laid out in such a way that it never feels overwhelming. (And equally importantly, it’s easy for me to see the bits that I need not read.) So I had no problem reading it—although there was plenty I didn’t read (such as equipment, weapon and starship descriptions and the space combat rules).

As I said above, 398 pages are still too many without a rules summary.

So, a lot of words, and more than I will read, but maybe not too many. (As long as I have a rules summary.)

Overall summary

ALIEN is 398 pages of SF horror roleplaying, set in the iconic Alien universe. The book is beautiful and well laid out, and the rules, especially the stress mechanic, help ratchet up the tension. The creatures are terrifying and powerful, the corporations evil and manipulative—just as they should be.

It’s a more complicated system than I’m used to, but I’m having a great time running it.