Hope's Last Day - for ALIEN

Hope’s Last Day is the Alien introductory cinematic scenario in the core rulebook. It features a mechanic team returning to Hadley’s Hope (the doomed colony in Aliens) shortly after the alien infestation has occurred (but a while before Ripley and the marines arrive). It’s a short scenario where the characters will do well to survive—but that’s the nature of cinematic Alien adventures.

For a great intro to the scenario, watch this short YouTube video. I wish I’d found this before I’d started playing—I only came across it once we’d played the first session.

Other People’s Adventures: This is another in my series of looking at other people’s adventures. I’ll talk about the adventure, how it played and my thoughts on what could be done better.

Setting it up

Having played in an Alien scenario last summer, I knew I wanted to run Alien using Roll20 as I liked how the character sheet worked for Alien and I wanted to use some background music.

However, that did give me some preparatory work. I had the pdf of the rulebook and starter set, so I made extensive use of the Windows Snipping Tool and grabbed the maps, characters, initiative cards and more and uploaded them to Roll20.

I’m sure I’ve said this before, but it feels like there’s way more preparation for an online game compared to a face-to-face game. For example, I would have printed (and cut out) characters and maps for a tabletop game and put them on the table, which is less work.

I created separate Roll20 screens for each level of Hadley’s Hope (and a landing page with the overall map). I also created handouts for the basic setup (with an overall map), the opening briefing (What’s the Story Mother – when I wish I’d had the video above), and the panic table and fast/slow action table.

For the characters, I copied the text from the pdf and pasted it into the characters. I didn’t populate the character sheets – I did that with the players as part of setup/session zero.

I used the GM layer on Roll20 to help me run it (there’s a great Hadley’s Hope Map in the files sectionof the Alien RPG Facebook group that I wish I’d found first.)

Session 1

I ran Hope’s Last Day with my regular two players. They chose union rep MacWhirr and pilot Singleton (I didn’t let them choose the android). I didn’t worry about buddies and rivals as I’ve found that bonds between characters work better with more players.

To start with, they weren’t terribly focused. Although I read out “What’s the story, Mother,” I think the actual goal (get the shuttle keycards and escape) got lost. (I’m sure the video would have helped.) Plus, I think they wanted to discover what was going on… Curiosity killed the cat, and all that.

They wandered into the basement and found the remnants of the battle (they didn’t search and so didn’t find the extra weapons). Then, in trying to raise survivors on the intercom, they raised Wes in Billy’s Bar. So they headed that way and saw a xenomorph trying to get into Billy’s Bar.

They attracted the xenomorph’s attention and ineffectually shot at it. It killed Hirsch (an NPC), and they stumbled back into C1. They hear a thud behind them as Sigg fell to the ground, facehugger clamped over his face. (I didn’t roll for this—I used dramatic licence.) And as our two hours were up, that’s where we ended episode 1.

Alien menace

One of the selling points of the Alien RPG is that it’s set in the Alien universe. On the other hand, one of the problems with the Alien RPG is that it’s set in the Alien universe. Most gamers have seen the movies, often many times. My two players certainly had.

So the monsters weren’t a surprise. I guess I could have changed things a little, but I didn’t want to do that—if I did that, it wouldn’t be Alien.

As a player, I found the xenomorph quite terrifying. With stress dice mounting up, when it appeared in the scenario I played in, we fled. They’re deadly. Sometimes reputation helps.

As a GM, I found the xenomorph surprisingly random. There was no guarantee what it would do once it was in combat—and it even missed a few rolls, including a head-bite.

(Incidentally, here’s a great story about using the Alien RPG to run the Alien movie, with players who didn’t know (or couldn’t remember) the film.)

Between sessions

Thanks to Real Life getting in the way, we didn’t return to part 2 for a couple of weeks. So between sessions, I made a few amendments.

• I found and shared the intro video (as mentioned above).
• I created a summary of the base layout, but I added an overview of what each area contained—because the characters would have known that because they live there.
• I found a summary of the rules on Reddit and shared them with the players.

Session 2

I started session 2 with the mission video, which clarified the mission objectives: find the shuttle keycards and leave. And in essence, that’s what happened. The PCs tried to find more guns but failed. With stress mounting, the PCs found the keycards and headed back—witnessing a near miss from an adult xenomorph, a close-up encounter with a chestburster (nasty little critters, attacked and took out the android), but the survivors succumbed to the facehuggers in the shuttle.

The players said they enjoyed themselves, but it felt off to me. We rolled a lot of dice at the climax. I rolled for the facehuggers actions and then more dice for their attack. And each time the players rolled dice, they added stress, and with so many stress dice, a panic roll was almost inevitable. And the panic rolls, while in keeping, removed player agency by cancelling actions and forcing them to freeze or scream or whatever.

Eventually, they succumbed to the inevitable, and I drew the session to a close.

So no survivors. That’s entirely in keeping with the genre, but I’m not sure how I feel about that. I would have preferred one survivor, but it’s hard to battle the creatures when you have little weaponry to defend yourself with, and you’re at the mercy of a very unforgiving system.

Hope’s Last Day with two players

I’m not sure how Hope’s Last Day plays with more players, but I had only two. (My regular gaming group is just the three of us.) Some thoughts on the scenario with only two players:

Two players results in lots of NPCs. I’m not great at playing NPCs when they are part of the “adventure party”. I’m happy playing them when they’re people the PCs meet, but not when they’re supposed to be part of the team. They hang around in the back, and I don’t play them properly. In Hope’s Last Day they just became meat shields and showed how the monsters worked.

That also meant the agendas weren’t as crucial as they might be. I like the concept of the agendas, but with only two players, I think I needed to tweak them a little.

With two players, I’d throw out the secret android. I’m not sure that helps, and it wasn’t necessary.

And given the lethality of the creatures, I’d either reduce their number or make extra weaponry easier to find. Or possibly both. My players had a bolt gun and a pistol between them, and that wasn’t enough.

I found it interesting that there’s nothing in the characters to suggest that they have lived in Hadley’s Hope before this adventure. There are no links to other (now dead) characters, and they don’t know who the guy in the bar is or anything else. They’re very typical PCs.

Roll20

And I grew to hate Roll20 this time. I had only my laptop for the last session, and I struggled with swapping between characters and maps and dice and everything. Although there’s a map in Hope’s Last Day, it’s not critical, and I think I would have been better with a Google doc and Discord (or even Trello).

One of my players pointed out that Roll20 makes it hard to learn a system because it does everything for you. You don’t learn anything if all you do is click a button to make a roll. It’s a fair point.

How did I find the Alien RPG system?

Overall, the system was fine. However, I don’t yet have a good sense of the dice pool mechanic. While I have “roll 2d6 and aim for a target number” internalised from decades of boardgames (and Traveller and other rpgs), rolling dice and counting sixes isn’t something I intuitively understand.

I found quite a few rules fiddly—Alien is a crunchier system than I am used to. And I didn’t find the rules well presented. In the heat of the battle, it was hard to find the things I needed—the rules summary I found was a great help.

I like the stress mechanic, although it gets frustrating towards the end as panic rolls trigger more stress and more panic rolls, and it’s only a matter of time before the inevitable happens. At this point the players can lose their agency—which is all in keeping, I guess, but I’m not sure how much I like that.

And sometimes, rolling stress is confusing. For example, one player ordered another to do something (using the Pull Rank talent), and both rolled facehuggers. It was easier to ignore the facehuggers rather than make them roll panic rolls and figure out what that meant.

Hope’s Last Day—changes

I’m not sure I will run Hope’s Last Day again. I ran it as written, and I’d want to make changes if there is to be a next time. (And ultimately, I’m not sure I thought it was good enough to make those changes—not when I can spend my time more productively elsewhere.)

So, in no particular order, I would:

• Tweak the agendas. I’d keep some of the PvP aspects of them (although I’d tone that down for two-player play), but I’d also make them multi-stage to push them into parts of the base they didn’t explore.
• Give the PCs other connections to Hadley’s Hope. Who are their friends? Where are their friends? I would need to be careful about derailing everything, but it would be nice for the PCs to relate more to the colony.
• Tone down the stress, giving more opportunities to reduce stress. (I need to revisit the stress rules to make sure I used them correctly.) Or make sure that the PCs know about the Naproleve drug.
• Remove the android. Or at least, make him not secret.
• Think carefully about replacement characters. They need planning more carefully than simply “here, take this NPC”. Maybe plan to send them off to other parts of the colony on missions.
• Have fewer monsters. The adventure starts with four full-size xenomorphs and one facehugger free in the base (along with one trapped facehugger and a couple of chest-bursters waiting to happen). Plus, a facehugger for each player in the shuttle. Now I’ve typed that out, that seems like way too many.

Final thoughts

Hope’s Last Day is basically a dungeon with underpowered PCs and brutally tough monsters. I’m unlikely to rerun it, but if I do I will make a few changes.