Chariot of the Gods #1 - ALIEN

After reflecting on Hope’s Last Day and Lady Blackbird, I’ve started preparing Chariot of the Gods (from the Alien Starter Set). The scenario is a mash-up of Alien, Prometheus and Alien: Covenant. Chariot starts like Alien aboard a Nostromo-class commercial vehicle receiving a distress call, but the call leads to an old starship full of horrors from Prometheus and Alien: Covenant. As with Hope’s Last Day, it’s a matter of survival.

At first glance, the scenario looks good, with the characters set up as rivals and buddies. But in looking at it in more detail, it needs a lot of work before I can run it.

As always, spoilers ahoy!

Aside: I’m not sure how much sense all this will make if you haven’t read it. As with others in my running other people’s scenarios series, I will talk about the published scenario first (including my changes) and then run through how it played. As I write this first section, I’m still in the middle of preparation.

The good

So here are the things I like about Chariot of the Gods:

The scenario: I haven’t had to think about the scenario or prepare characters. The scenario is a haunted house in space, but it looks like it should be good to run with lots of inter-player conflict.

The deckplans: The deckplans are good. The general production design is good and, like all the Alien materials, looks lovely.

The bad

Unfortunately, a few things about Chariot of the Gods don’t work for me—including layout, structure, characters and GM aides.

Layout

As lovely as the Alien layout looks, I find it awful to use in play. The font is awkward and the dense blocks of text make it hard to find critical information in the heat of battle. So I will have to put a fair bit of work in so I can run it. (I had similar issues with Hope’s Last Day.)

Structure

Structurally, Chariot of the Gods is a bit of a mess. The book lacks clarity in places, and critical information isn’t always front and centre.

Three act structure: Acts 1, 2 and 3 consist of a series of events. While an event defines the end of act 1, moving from act 2 to act 3 isn’t so obvious. Act 2 has four mandatory events—is it over as soon as they are over? I guess so.  (This may make more sense in play, we’ll see.)

Synthetic advice: Advice on androids and how the critters react to them is tucked away on page 32. Given that there’s a synthetic in the party, this is important information, and I need to make sure I have it to hand.

Tainted cure: The inoculation against the neomorphic motes is contaminated, but it’s unclear how that works. It’s left up to the GM—is it better to infect players or NPCs? My first instinct is to infect the NPCs first, but I’ll see how that goes.

Clayton’s samples: According to her character sheet, Clayton wants a sample of 26 Draconis Strain to take back with her. But the only way the GM knows where they are is by carefully reading the scenario (samples are in the Med Lab and one of the storage units on C-Deck). Ideally, that information would be repeated on Clayton’s character sheet (as you may give Clayton to a player after their character is, er, retired).

Deadly situations: besides the monsters, there are several situations that, if things go wrong (ie a die roll fails), the characters can die. While that’s appropriate (thinking of the scene in Alien: Covenant when the shuttle explodes), I will keep an eye on that. I’m not that keen on swapping characters during play as a character—I am usually invested in my starting character, who I like to see as one of the heroes in the story. While I will have NPCs ready as backup characters, my preference is to keep the PCs alive until the final reel.

The science module: The Cronus deckplan shows a science module on B-Deck. The module is missing, but there’s no mention of it in the room-by-room deckplan description. Instead, it’s mentioned elsewhere and easily missed (I only caught it by chance, between sessions).

Tell me more than once: This leads me to my biggest frustrations—you need to tell me more than once, and you need to make the game easy to play. If you’re describing the plans, make them complete. If your NPCs have critical knowledge, then include that their background as well.

Characters #1: Game background

Scenario writers seem to forget that the PCs live in this universe: they will know about their colleagues, the ship and the universe. If it’s a one-shot, you need to provide this information as you can’t rely on the players already knowing it. Unfortunately, Chariot of the Gods lacks this information.

So here’s what I’ve created: 

• General Alien background (taken from the rules – pages 11-13, plus a bit about the corporations and a hint of Engineers.)
• A background sheet for the Montero – about the ship, a list of the crew, the deck plan, the next steps (assuming they’re arriving at Sutters world).
• I’ve also used the Nostromo Operations Manual from this excellent site. The players won’t need any of it, but they don’t know that.

I’ll send this out in advance so the players can come to the session prepared. (Links to these are at the end of this post if you want to try them yourself.)

Characters #2: The Science Officer

I decided I wanted a sinister Science Officer aboard the Montero, in the same vein as Ash in Alien. So I’ve added a sixth character. I only plan to have four PCs, so there will be two spares.

Alder’s background: You’re an ambitious Weyland-Yutani scientist looking to further their career. This is your first trip as Science Officer on the Montero, a run-of-mill freighter with an average crew. If you impress the Company, then perhaps you’ll get a better run next time. Your job as Science Officer is to monitor the tritium in the hold. It’s perfectly safe if stored and handled correctly but can be highly volatile.

Alder’s Starting Agenda: Do your job well and get noticed by the Company. The best way to do that is for Wilson to give you a good report, so stay on their good side.

(Character sheet in the files below.)

Character’s #3: NPCs

As ever with Alien, the NPCs are there either as meat shields or as backup PCs. However, if they are backup PCs, they need a handout explaining what they really know (instead of what they may choose to tell.)

(Plus, there’s that PVP rule where players become NPCs when they act against the group. So you need NPCs for them to take over and play.)

So I created a character sheet (with background information explaining what happened to the Cronus) for two NPCs, Clayton and Reid. (With four players, that gives me eight potential characters for them to use. Hopefully that will be enough!)

Characters #4: Character sheets and Session Zero

In my experience, one-shot games live or die on their characters. And something I realise Alien does badly – Session Zero for cinematic games. (It’s not great for campaigns either, but I care less about that.)

While the Alien Starter Set includes character sheets, they aren’t great, and I’d be unhappy if I received them as a player. So here’s what I’ve done:

• Re-created character sheets for all the PCs in Word. I removed genders and added a section with brief details of what they know about the other PCs.
• Put three talents on the sheet to allow players to customise their characters a little.
• Added their agenda (and fleshed that out ).
• Added summary rules for Story Points (more on that below) and regaining Stress to save time at the table.
• Added a section on what they know about Hadley’s Hope and Space Beast (if anything).
• I created a separate sheet for Lucas, including the damage table and general rules for synthetics. (That’s me sharing the burden of learning the rules.)

For Session Zero itself, I’ve included questions for each character’s buddy and rival:

• 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.

With luck, this will make the players feel more embedded in the game.

Finally, to get everyone started, I will use banter, which I found on 1shotadventures.com (itself taken from the Macdeath adventure). While I’ve given everyone the background introduction, this is a handy way to reinforce some critical background points.

GM support

I have also created a few documents to help me when I run Chariot of the Gods.

• I summarised the acts onto a single sheet I can use to check off as they occur.
• The creature details are spread out over several pages, which is a pain in play. I like my monsters to be on a single reference sheet, so I’ve created that for easy reference during play.
• Similarly, I like to see my NPCs at a glance. So I’ve put them into a separate document I can refer to.

Learning from Lady Blackbird

Based on my experience running Lady Blackbird, I want to make a couple of changes to the system to encourage the things I like to see in my games.

So I want to encourage the players to earn Story Points by driving their agendas and roleplaying their buddy/rival relationship. I need to do three things:

• Make it easier to earn Story Points by changing how they are earned
• Raising the number of Story Points that it’s possible to earn
• Making Story Points a little more useful

So I raised the maximum number of Story Points a character can have at any one time to two, and added this to the character sheets.

Story Points: Earn Story Points by:

• taking actions to further your Agenda
• supporting your buddy
• undermining your rival

You can spend Story Points to:

• Change the result of a single die you have thrown
•  Reduce your Stress Level by two

I will admit that I’m slightly nervous about this change. I hope it’s not too drastic.

Bonus rule change: easier armour: I also found rolling for armour for the monsters frustrating in play. It slowed things down and felt unnecessary. So for the monsters, I won’t roll for armour, but instead assume that their tough hide automatically absorbs 0-2 hits, depending on their armour rating.

Armour rating	Damage reduced by
1-3	0
4-8	1
9+	2

(So I’m effectively pre-rolling my armour rolls to save time later.)

I’ll use the usual rules for other situations requiring armour rolls (such as when the PCs are in their suits).

Next time: Getting ready to play

While this sounds like a lot of work, I hope to reap the rewards when I run Chariot of the Gods. I’ve done more work here than I did for Hope’s Last Day, and I’m hoping the game will go better as a result.

I wish I didn’t have to do all this, and that Chariot of the Gods was easier to play straight from the box, but it has given me ownership—and I’m much more familiar with the adventure now.

Resources

You can download the files I created for Chariot of the Gods here. They include:

• Alien background
• CotG Background
• Characters
• Miller
• Rye
• Cham
• Davis
• Alder
• Wilson
• Lucas
• Clayton (backup)
• Reid (backup)

Other resources

Here are other resources I used for Chariot of the Gods from elsewhere on the Internet.

• The Alien RPG Facebook group
• Some great images on Sgt Perry’s Heroes
• A video intro from foxtrot charlie
• Images and deckplans for the Sotillo (here, here and here)